ECOLOGY

Environment any temperate
Organization solitary, pair, or colony (4–12)
Treasure incidental

Most oozes are mindless, existing only to consume. Even those rare oozes that do possess intelligence still tend to prefer the consumption of other creatures over their company. Occasionally, however, an ooze in the presence of a powerful psychic spellcaster becomes infused with some measure of both sentience and personhood, and yearns to join the company of civilized beings. When a spellcaster completes a particularly stressful ritual or powerful mental feat in close proximity to the right mixture of primordial slimes that make up a nascent ooze, a piece of the spellcaster's mind breaks off and infuses the ooze, creating a being called an apallie.

A newly formed apallie is typically convinced that it is a member of its creator's race. Its greatest desire is to join the society of its progenitor, and it alters its form to insinuate itself into humanoid settlements.

Such impostors are easily discovered, however, as an apallie's true nature reasserts itself as soon as the sun begins to rise. An ooze discovered in this way often finds itself run out of town, forced to try its luck in the next settlement, though some particularly stubborn apallies simply assume a new form and return the next night under a different guise.

Apallies are nocturnal creatures, for any contact with the rays of the sun forces them to return to their true, amorphous forms. Even when its form is forcibly reverted, an apallie insists it is truly a member of its creator's race, and that it has somehow been subjected to a terrible curse. Despite the ooze's relatively high intelligence, this unreasonable attachment to its self-image persists even in extreme circumstances. If the apallie's creator was a different size from the apallie, the apallie still tries to imitate that creator, attempting to pass as a small elf, human, or member of another race to which its progenitor belonged, and refuses to acknowledge the size difference.

Apallies are more common in large cities that provide sewers and other enclosed venues to hide in during the day and a healthy nightlife scene in which they can pose as humanoids when it's dark. Some apallies find acceptance, and even success, in such environments, though the small oozes never stop trying to prove themselves to be humanoids, and any relationships in which they engage (whether platonic or romantic) nearly always end in a predictable disaster.

In its true form, an apallie weighs about 40 pounds and stands about 3 feet tall.