Overview
The Sonar-Sense Bat Man is the quick, certain eye of Nocturne Caverns, a folded-wing, grey-brown cavern kin who hunts by sonar and keeps the open caverns, the roosts' quick, patient, and most certain eye. It stands a meter and a half tall, watchful and folded, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept hunts rather than years. Where the Echo-Read bat men read the echo, the Sonar-Sense bat men of the caverns hunt by sonar, and they have been hunting by the first sonar in the first open cavern for a very long time.
Habitat
The Sonar-Sense Bat Man keeps to the open caverns of Nocturne Caverns, a range of dark, echo-fed ground where the night is a promise and the dark is a treaty. Its dwellings are coaxed into the faces of the cavern-walls, hollows of laid stone and coaxed shadow that catch the dim cavern-light on their inner face and the shelter of the cavern on their outer. It favors the older open caverns where the sonar runs longest and the hunting is oldest, the places where a hunt can be kept without the cavern's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Sonar-Sense Bat Man stands about 1.52 m tall, folded and watchful, with deep grey-brown to black, bone-white-tipped fur that reads as bright in the dim cavern-light. Its right shoulder bears the echo-knot, a deliberate mark worn as a record of the long art of the hunting, and its eyes are large, pale amber, brighter and more certain than any other bat man's, the color of the cavern-light's own glow at dusk.
Behaviour
The Sonar-Sense Bat Man is quick, patient, and profoundly certain, a creature of long hunts and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It observes before it hunts, often for hours, watching an open cavern or a person or a bargain until it understands the shape of the hunt, and only then does it hunt, and then with an exactness that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Sonar-Sense bat man is a debt the cavern will keep long after the hunter has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Sonar-Sense bat man is no open-ground fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the sonar and the open dark itself, not force. Its primary defense is the open cavern, for it knows every corner of the open caverns and can lead a pursuer through Nocturne Caverns for days until the pursuit loses its nerve and its balance. Should it be forced to act, a Sonar-Sense bat man is low and precise, 9 m/s through the dark and folded, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, cutting a root, dimming a light, or hunting a sonar until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Sonar-Sense bat man is attuned to the long word of the sonar, for the sonar is the hunting and the hunting is the whole of its power, and a bat man that has an open cavern and a hunt and a sonar does not need a spell that is not its own. It is not attuned to any art that is not the sonar, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the hunting, which is not a magic but is a thing that the bat men of the caverns have hunted for a very long time, and the hunting is the sonar, and the sonar is the whole of its power.
Society
The Sonar-Sense Bat Men live in Nocturne Caverns in roosts of twenty to sixty, bound by the hunts they keep together rather than by blood or by place. There is no elder and no ruler, for a bat man that has hunted the most and walked the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a hunting and the hunting is the whole of their society. Decisions are made in the open cavern, by a company of amber-eyed hunters that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a bat man that breaks a hunting is a bat man that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Sonar-Sense Bat Man is a culture of the kept hunt, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is quick and folded is the only honest word in the caverns. They keep no records, for a bat man that has kept a hunt does not need a record, the hunting is the record, and the hunting is quick and folded and does not fade. Their stories are slow and quick, told in the open cavern at the dusk, and they are stories of hunts kept and caverns walked and the quick, folded difference between them, told in a voice that is barked and means every hunting.
Home
Nocturne Caverns is the Sonar-Sense bat man's home and its hunting, a range of dark, echo-fed ground where the night is a promise and the dark is a treaty, where the bat men hunt their sonars and their quick, folded words. It is a strange and quick place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Sonar-Sense bat man has learned to live inside that open dark rather than against it. The dim cavern-light that runs up through the open caverns is the caverns' own, a soft grey glow that the bat men have come to read as the color of a kept hunt.
Relations
The Sonar-Sense Bat Man keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of Nocturne Caverns, a truce of kept hunts that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the caverns. To the dim cavern-light of the open caverns the Sonar-Sense bat man is a quick, folded, and absolutely certain presence, an amber-eyed hunter that is at home in the open caverns and in the sonar, and the light has learned to glow wide and let the huntings pass, for a bat man that has hunted you has decided you are a keeping and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the caverns, the Sonar-Sense Bat Man is the quick, folded edge of the tale, the place where the hunts are kept and an open cavern is walked and a hunting is read. It is the figure that hunts a new sonar in the dusk and holds the open dark very quick and very certain, and the figure that, when the truce with the echo-reading bat men grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old hunt quick and folded and absolutely certain.