The Beast Fears Fire - Pudding Cloud

Pudding Cloud [Disaster 4]
Impulse - Ruin your picnic plans.

As far as anyone in Crickton knows, there is only one of these things that ever comes around, floating in the uplands of the northwest at an altitude of 1000-2000 meters; there might be others on the Surlycrow, perhaps even others that come down from the plateau, taking turns. It's difficult to tell.

The Pudding Cloud isn't easy to mistake for anything else. It's a little cloud, about the same shade of black as a traditional Crick blood pudding (and similar shape, being kind of round and regular as clouds go), moving against the wind, sparking orangy-red lightning in all conditions. Sometimes, it will take on the shape of a thinner, diffuse cloud with the unmistakable cloudy shape of a man's head, arms and torso - rippling muscles and wispy hair and beard - coming out the top. This is the form "he" usually takes for throwing lighting around, but lighting and rain are dangers in any form.

Harm - 2/Peril [Chill] The Pudding Cloud presents a serious difficulty for most people who want to fight it. Thing is just too far away, and can't really change altitude if he wanted to, which is alright, since he usually doesn't. Mostly, he wants to get over you and rain. Pudding rain is black and gritty, and when it comes in contact with skin, it is incredibly cold. Also, it causes blood to evaporate out of your skin and rise back into the cloud. Takes about 2 minutes of full contact to incapacitate a person and about 6 to totally exsanguinate someone. Naturally, this is exactly what the Pudding Cloud wants.

Get your Gun and Bring the Cat in
When the Pudding Cloud is trying to rain on you, face Disaster
On a Hit, you stay out of the rain, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move to tell you where you ended up in order to stay dry.
On a Hard Hit, you get to say where you go an how you stay out of the rain.
On a Miss, take Harm as stated, and, as a Soft Move, the Moderator can make you face this again or hit you with lighting and up the Harm to 5. Not both.

If a wind witch, a corbin, or someone else with the means to fly or reach an altitude where they can fight the thing, the Pudding cloud will shoot lightning at them.

Ride the Lightning
When you are facing the Pudding Cloud in air-to-air combat, face Disaster.
On a Hit, you can avoid the lightning and deal Harm as stated.
On a Hard Hit, you can avoid the lightning and deal great harm, most likely driving the Pudding Cloud off.
On a Miss, suffer 5 Harm and the Peril Falling. Recovering from this Peril is probably your first priority.

This place is so quiet, sensing that storm.
Someone in Crickton has the formula for becoming a pudding cloud, and yet, for all of Crick history, there's just been the one. It's not a difficult ritual to accomplish, though it does require you be a wind witch, and it does kill you in the process, your body torn apart by the black wind and vaporized by lightning. The Pudding Cloud is technically also an evil spirit, most similar to a vampire and a lich, but he, it, retains a lot less of whatever will and volition drove it in the first place. Now, the thing is content to trace a centuries-old circuit, raining out of hunger on anything that passes below.

People who are killed by the Pudding cloud occasionally raise up as vampires, but this is a lot less common than people victimized by vampires, and it could be a false correlation. A lot more people have been victimized by a vampire than killed by the Cloud.