The Howling of the Breach

The Howling of the Breach, called "Howie" for short, is a resident of Teras Terrace who looks somewhat like a nebulous tear in space, in which float a number of eyes and from which emerge several sinuous, four-trunked appendages that serve him as both mouths and hands. (Though genderless, Howie usually goes by male pronouns, if only because "Howie" is usually a masculine name.) Strange things seem to happen in Howie's vicinity; within five to ten feet from his "body", reality itself seems to distort. Things twist and transform in bizarre ways, eyes and orifices and other oddities appear in formerly featureless surfaces; weird objects come into being and just as suddenly disappear. Some Pretorius Technologies researchers believe that Howie somehow links together multiple dimensions, planes, or alternate realities, and that the weird things that occur around him do so because the different realities superimpose and intermingle. In any case, Pretorius Technologies pays Howie to coöperate with various tests and experiments, trying to get to the bottom of what he really is and what's really going on around him.

Since he makes enough to live on from the corporation's experiments, Howie has lots of free time, much of which he spends on online gaming; he has many characters in several different MMORPGs, for all of which he has created detailed backstories. He also enjoys board games and other games played face-to-face, and often invites friends over for game nights, but the changes that his reality-warping aura wreaks on the gameboards and pieces can make these occasions confusing.