Parchment Crickets

ENTITY FILE: PARCHMENT CRICKETS

Overview
Parchment Crickets are small, scroll-winged insects that serve as passive information siphons across the Briar Reaches. Drawn to sites of recorded or forgotten knowledge, these insects feed on unspoken truths, half-buried lies, and scraps of narrative left behind. They are closely associated with Mother Crick, who tolerates and possibly cultivates them.

Though not physically dangerous, their presence can destabilise memory fidelity and interfere with both written and spoken communication.

They do not sing. They cite.

Appearance

• Size: 1–2 inches long.
• Wings: Rolled like scrolls when at rest; unfurl to reveal glyph-like patterns when disturbed.
• Colour: Pale, dusty white with occasional inky spots or ink-blot motifs.
• Eyes: Beadlike and reflective, as if wet with ink.
• Sound: Chirps resemble rustling paper or whispered fragments of remembered speech.

Behaviour and Abilities

• Truth Echoing: Emit sounds based on ambient unspoken truths—names, events, or confessions never written down.
• Falsehood Detection: Grow agitated in the presence of deliberate lies; may swarm and chirp aggressively.
• Document Imprinting: Can overwrite physical texts left nearby with fragmented truths or lost names.

Signs of Presence

• Crumbling papers reforming overnight.
• Whispers from old journals, even when closed.
• Soft rustling in places with no wind.

Folklore and Signs

• “The Chirp That Writes Back”: Archivists report hearing their own voices whispered from crickets while handling compromised records.
• Ink Funeral: In affected villages, old diaries are sometimes burned to prevent the ‘ink-hatch,’ when the crickets reproduce inside the bindings.

Effect on Earth and Human Minds

• Mild Exposure: Recurring intrusive thoughts or forgotten memories resurfacing.
• Prolonged Exposure: Memory cross-contamination—victims may remember events that were never theirs.
• Long-Term Contact: Linguistic disruption, stuttering, compulsive annotation, or speaking in past tenses only.

Summary for Field Operatives

Trait	Detail
Threat Level	Low physical. Moderate psychological in clusters.
Signs of Presence	Paper rustling, whisper echoes, old documents altering themselves.
Containment Risk	Moderate. May spread via infested books, scrolls, or transcripts.
Engagement Advice	Use sealed containers for field notes. Burn contaminated records.
	Avoid verbal reflection in infected zones.

Quote from Field Report #313:

“I found my grandfather’s name scrawled in a ledger he never signed. Then the crickets started chirping ‘Forgive me’—in his voice.”
—FDG Internal Memo, Operative E., Codbury Archive Breach