Gray

Source: Alien Archive

CR: 4 XP: 1,200

NE Small humanoid (gray)

Init.: +1 Senses: darkvision 30 ft. Perception: +10

Defense

HP: 43

EAC: 15 KAC: 15

Fort: +3 Ref: +3 Will: +9

Offense

Speed: 30 ft.

Melee: touch +6 (probe)

Ranged: needler pistol +8 (1d4+4 P plus blue whinnis)

Offensive Abilities: sleep paralysis

Statistics

Str: -1 Dex: +1 Con: +0 Wis: +0 Int: +5 Cha: +3

Skills: Life Science +15, Medicine +10, Sense Motive +15

Languages: Aklo (can’t speak); telepathy 100 ft.

Gear: gray skinsuit (functions as basic lashunta tempweave), needler pistol with 25 darts, 5 doses of blue whinnis

Ecology

Environment: any

Organization: solitary, pair, or invasion (6–12)

Special Abilities

<p><b>Phase (Su)</b> Grays exist slightly out of phase with the Material Plane. A gray can pass through walls or material objects (but not corporeal creatures) as long as it begins and ends its turn outside of any wall or obstacle. In addition, a gray always benefits from a 20% miss chance against attacks and effects targeting it directly and takes only half damage from area effects. Force effects, however, function normally against a gray.<br/><br/> <b>Probe (Su)</b> A gray creates powerful psychic connections to creatures it touches, transferring information and sensations at terrifying speeds. A creature struck by a gray’s touch (a melee attack targeting KAC) is staggered by sensory overload for 1d4 rounds unless it succeeds at a DC 15 Will save.<br/><br/> Alternatively, if the creature it touches is conscious, intelligent, and paralyzed, a gray can instead use a standard action to probe the creature’s mind. It can search for the answer to a simple question (such as, “What is your starship’s point of origin?”) or seek information on one general topic known to the subject. The target can resist this probing with a successful DC 15 Will save. The gray can probe a single creature in this way only once per minute, but if it remains in contact with the subject for at least 1 minute, it can choose one Intelligence-based skill the subject has at least 1 rank in and attempt checks using the subject’s skill modifier instead of its own for the next 24 hours.<br/><br/> A gray can’t employ this ability in both ways simultaneously, and using this ability to overload a target’s senses interrupts its efforts to probe for information.<br/><br/> <b>Sleep Paralysis (Su)</b> As a standard action, a gray can paralyze a sleeping creature within 30 feet that it can see. A target that succeeds at a DC 15 Will save remains asleep and is immune to the same gray’s sleep paralysis ability for 24 hours. A creature that fails the save awakens but is paralyzed for 1d6 minutes. Any attack or hostile action other than a gray’s ability to probe for information ends this paralysis. If the paralysis is not interrupted and its duration ends, the victim falls back asleep and has no memory of the event, as if its memory were eliminated by <i>modify memory</i>. The victim can attempt a DC 15 Will save against the memory erasure; if it succeeds, it remembers the paralysis and probing but with imperfect clarity.</p>

Description

No one knows what planet or even galaxy the grays call home, but reports of their unnerving abductions, nightmarish paralysis, and mysterious experiments have been collected from countless worlds for as long as starships have sailed in the dark spaces of the universe. Such reports are fragmentary and unreliable, offered by victims recounting hazy memories of enduring various procedures under clinically bright lights or waking in cramped and lightless confinement, and do little to explain the methodology or goals of their captors. Those captors, though, have much in common no matter the specific circumstances or the species of the victim: an otherworldly presence, condescending interactions, and a sinister disregard for the agency and dignity of those they take as subjects for their experiments.

Grays communicate only telepathically, even among their own kind. Their faces and glassy black eyes show little emotion or reaction, and while graceful, they usually move with deliberate intention, often spending several moments in thought before committing to an action or movement. This inscrutability renders them enigmatic and disturbing to most other races.

Little is known about the grays’ motivations, and to date no efforts have been successful at establishing diplomatic relationships with them. However, their goals appear to center around the search for information, rather than conquest. Victims of their paralytic abductions are almost always returned mostly unharmed, though the sudden appearance of a series of scars or an inexplicable implant undermines the effects of the grays’ ability to erase memories of the experience. Researchers wonder at the end goals of this accumulation of knowledge and what purposes the information gleaned may serve in the meantime. Some fringe scientists believe grays are preparing for an eventual all-out invasion, while others posit they are simply curious about us, but their alien mindsets lead them to sate this inquisitiveness in disturbing ways.

Once rare enough that reports of their abductions were written off as conspiracy and delusion, encounters with grays have become disturbingly more common with the advent of Drift travel. Their sleek, disk-shaped starships lurk in the dark corners of the Drift, appearing seemingly out of nowhere to confront vessels with inattentive or unwary crews. Much like the grays themselves, their ships are designed less for offense and more for evading and subduing their targets, employing tractor beams and EMP weapons to disable and control a vessel, preserving its crew as test subjects. Such captives find themselves unable to move, held under brilliant lights, their captors mere silhouettes as their thoughts and memories are sifted under the gray’s psychic touch.