[ ]
Description: varies.
Powers: varies.
Goals: varies.
[ ] is whatever you don’t want it to be.
Most people assume that [ ] primarily works through fear, and [ ] certainly does use fear quite a lot. But it also uses shame, revulsion, hate, envy, lust if the person it’s targeting has a problem with that, and pretty much any other negative emotion. [ ] doesn’t care why its victims are reacting negatively, just as long as they are. It’s that revulsion that fuels [ ]’s unnatural life cycle.
In its larval form, [ ] is a fairly free-form negative energy spirit that drifts around until it finds a human being that is both capable of strong, obsessive emotional reactions, and unlikely to physically defend him- or herself. Once a victim is found, [ ] then starts crafting itself a new body and persona designed to provoke a negative reaction from that victim. One of [ ]’s few stable powers is the ability to insinuate itself into mundane society for just long enough for the reproductive cycle to finish.
At first, [ ]’s new persona appears fully human; but as [ ] interacts more with its victim, it begins to take on uniquely horrific attributes and powers. These will always be linked to the victim’s own hangups. For example: if [ ] targets someone afraid of bees, it might start having bees always around it, at all times (even indoors). Perhaps [ ]’s voice will develop a buzz, or its eyes turn compound when nobody except the victim can notice. Or maybe [ ] will just extrude vicious stingers from the palms of its hands and sting the victim to death with them; actually, that almost certainly will happen eventually, but first [ ] will put its victim through an emotional and spiritual wringer.
As the above suggests, eventually [ ] will kill its victim, in a nightmarish fashion. When that happens, if [ ] has done everything right, it will then become a full-fledged monster and go off to commit as much mayhem as it can before the appropriate authorities put it down*. Unfortunately, [ ] also leaves a little bit of its larval form behind to start things up again later on. The entire life cycle can take anywhere from a year to ten; there’s no hard and fast rule.
How to stop [ ]? Well, there are two tactics. The first is to get the victim to fight back; they’re the only ones who can really damage [ ]. Which is why [ ] looks for victims who are physically weak, or constitutionally incapable of fighting. [ ] is nasty, but it’s not stupid.
Unfortunately, the only other way to stop [ ] is to kill the victim before [ ] can. That stops the cycle cold. There are few counter-supernatural organizations out there that are willing to do anything that drastic right from the start; but fighting monsters does not encourage people to be sentimental. Doing the ethical calculus on this sort of problem is extremely brutal, but some groups insist on at least planning for the contingency anyway. Monster spawnings among the general population are no joke.
*Which in this modern age happens mercifully quickly, although perhaps not mercifully quickly enough.