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+<blockquote>From the corner of his eye he can see only a slab of darkness as the source of all of this, disconcertingly sharp-edged, politely suggesting that perhaps the darkness was all there was to the creature, there was no further texture - and teeth, white, in his fleeting impression of them undecided whether they arranged to form a vaguely canine or shark-like maw. But the eyes are the worst part. With the light off, the only light comes from those eyes, those swerving incandescent pinpricks.</blockquote>
+**Cheshires** have earned their moniker from the semblance their phantom forms frequently remind of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_Cat|Cheshire Cat]] from Alice in Wonderland.
+They are an extra-terrestrial, acorporeal species that have spent many aeons travelling through the universe and having it for lunch. Cheshires exist on Earth, Mars, Venus and the asteroid belt, though most of them are currently on Earth. It's conceivable there are some independent clusters of them elsewhere, but if so, it's not relevant to the story in any way.
+They came to Earth to feed and are prolonging their stay to play. There's nothing special about why Earth was initially chosen - it just happened to be their next destination. They're not eating because they need it so much as that they just really enjoy it - while they may need some to survive, they're connoisseurs of the varied tastes of planets. Much like humans, they simply differentiate between //'being hungry'// and //'having an appetite'//. Almost all of their canonical interactions with humans are bound to involve latter sensation.
+===== Biology =====
+Their actual form is nothing like a cat. Natively, they are a non-baryonic colonial organism (i.e. the same sort of organism that a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war|Portugese man o' war]] is) that largely let gravity guide them through the universe, hibernating for long stretches. They convert baryonic matter to energy or to more of the dark matter they're made of.
+Their sapience is dependent on the size of the colony, and how much of it is dedicated toward their 'neurology'. The individual components of the colony themselves are quite stupid and can do little more than feed on dark matter. The more complex the structure becomes, the more it approaches sentience, then sapience. Somewhere between the sentience-sapience transition, a colony begins to have enough lucidity to twist itself through space to selectively form its 'phantom' appearance - a baryonic avatar.
+Macroscopic reproduction involves carving a piece of the colony out of a parent organism. The Earth Cheshires lay semi-corporeal eggs, usually into solid corporeal objects such as boulders, rocks, walls, et cetera. If you break open the matter they're encased in, they'll continue to stick to each other in the shape of the now-absent matter, though if they lost their foundation, they would slowly fall. They are very, very light-weight, and look like softly glowing translucent, sticky spheres that contain kitty-spiders.
+In theory, two separate colonies could merge, both parties willing, but they usually don't do his.
+Much of their attention is done through different senses than the ones that humans are accustomed to. Just because a Cheshire appears to be looking in some direction does not mean it is aware of the things it is looking at in the same way a human would. In fact, a human can use this trait of the Cheshires to 'hide from sight', by taking advantage of the detail that Cheshires sense when visual attention is on them and //just not looking at them//. That's a fairly good way to disappear - although only if you're not the individual subject of hunt already.
+===== Abilities =====
+  * **Dematerialisation**; their 'feeding' process, which essentially converts matter into the sort of energy they need to survive. It looks a bit as if they were inhaling the world. (Okay, it looks a //lot// like they're inhaling the world, if we're perfectly honest.)
+    * For victims of the process, it tickles in the first instant and then burns -- mostly because you have an open wound, that sort of thing has that effect.
+  * Since they have no physical form, they can **pass through solid objects** when they want to.
+  * With some effort, **spacetime warping** (e.g. teleportation, or 'opening' up an organism without actually killing it, or whatever...).
+    * This includes 'singularity sheets' / 'spacetime fault lines', which are semi-permeable space-time membranes. Their permeability depends on the angle of approach you have to them (and with "you" I mean "any matter at all, including photons") - if you look at them along their normal, they are completely transparent, but they show up at the edge of your vision as a dark sheet. As you pass through (and you should endeavour to pass through quickly, otherwise your blood will disappear as it hits the sheet at a shallow angle), it looks like darkness creeps in on your position, since the angle you're seeing the rest of the sheet at becomes increasingly sharp.
+  * Less of an ability than a manifestation of their other abilities that crops up occasionally, **"Shadow play"** is a trick where they extend into their shadow and apply an impossible-seeming force to whatever ends up caught in the shadow to keep it still, e.g. you wouldn't want to get your ankle caught in the shadow of a Cheshire that's engaging in this. They don't do this often, but it's safer to assume they're always doing it.
+===== Weaknesses =====
+The most striking weakness of the Cheshires is **water** in all forms, though the effectiveness of it against them as a deterrent or weapon is entirely dependent on the water's relative purity - meaning not whether it was filtered, but whether or not you would call the resulting object //a body of water//. The oceans are completely toxic to Cheshires, whereas a human being (consisting to 60%(!) of water), is not toxic to them at all (though the contents of their mouth or stomach might be).
+Cheshires can't pass through pure water -- at least certainly not without badly damaging themselves in the process (and if it's ice, they cannot pass through it at all). Some safety can thus be found in //bases under the ocean//, but only in reducing the attack surface. //Submarines//, on the other hand, are essentially impregnable fortresses.
+That said, water touching their avatars is only a minor problem. Contact...
+  * ...is intensely uncomfortable (but not painful).
+  * ...interacts with their avatars in a way that destablises them, requiring constant diligence from the Cheshire as not to lose their shape.
+  * ...additionally slowly erodes the avatar on prolonged exposure, much as if acid were stripping it away (but without the associated pyrotechnics, melting or smearing effects - they just gradually //diminish//, until they are purely acorporeal). This process is not painful, either, just inconvenient.
+Unsurprisingly, they hate rain and avoid it.
+Pure water is a poison to Cheshires if ingested, but as with all things, the dosage is important. A roughly human-sized body of pure water would kill a Cheshire. Smaller amounts (starting from roughly a mouthful of it) might make the Cheshire rather ill. A poisoned Cheshire's immune system equivalent is disabled, leaving them open to infections.
+===== Society =====
+Cheshire society, inasmuch as it can be said to exist at all, is anarchic and individualistic. The reason they travel together is a matter of convenience. Should they encounter resistance, a whole horde of Cheshires is far more likely to be able to take down the opposition than just a single Cheshire, who might be run off and starve. In interest of selfish self-preservation, this makes Cheshires 'band together'.
+They feel zero empathy for each other, much of which has to do with that they don't feel human emotions at all. They do have equivalents to //joy// and //rage//, however - joy as a simple reward mechanism for when they do something that benefits them, which occasionally 'misfires' for other 'pleasant' acts such as torturing sapients rather than eating them; rage as a simple economic incentive amongst each other not to scavenge from each other.
+The best equivalent to how Cheshires feel about each other is to assume they respect each other. Their territorial claims follow logically from that they try to keep roughly equidistant to each other.
+Despite their individuality, Cheshires do not differentiate each other with names. They generally don't communicate much in a way humans would consider verbal - and if they do, it's on a level humans can't hear.
+Notably, Cheshires don't have a social hierarchy of any sort, either - no Cheshire is particularly in charge of anything. In consequence, they also don't have titles. (You'd be hard pressed getting as much as a job description out of one of them, given their skillsets are practically identical and their knowledge is shared.)