“Now don’t be going insane on me, Jonno,” Pete said good-naturedly.

John gaped at the refrigerator-sized thing standing (or sitting) in the corner of the garage. The dull green, semi-translucent blob sported dozens of temporary mouths and eyes that slowly wandered about its surface.

“Jonno’s my mate. He’s good,” Pete said, to the creature. It peered at John, and at Pete, and the ceiling and floor and everything else, all at once. It was unnerving. “Ya they understand us. It’s wild.”

John stepped back. “What is… what-“

“It’s a shoggoth, mate. Good to have one round the house. Especially since we started excavating that city.”

The ancient city, where John would be doing some paleontology work for a few months, and staying with Pete in the human town that had been quickly constructed about a kilo to the south. The department head had given John as little information as possible about what he might find.

“Okay. Okay.” John cleared his throat. “Why, exactly, is one of those blobs… good to have around the house?”

“Oh, a shoggo’s not just a blob. They’re hunters. And they keep after nasty critters that aren’t quite so friendly to us.”

The wind was starting to kick up outside. Suddenly, all of the shoggoth’s eyes pointed in the same direction, outside.

“Ho ho ho,” Pete said. “I think we’re about to see one right now. Step aside then.”

The shoggoth started to flow outside, as if someone had tilted the garage that direction. John hopped back and let it go past. “Come, come,” Pete said, and they followed it out.

It looked like another shoggoth, hovering above the street, but Pete assured him it was not. Bigger than a man, a bruised fleshy shape, like a sentient tumor, with its own assortment of eyes and mouths. It seemed to fly but also walk, and it disturbingly flickered in and out of view, like a flaky hologram.

It had a personality, too. Where the shoggoth had been calm (though terrifying to look at), this thing looked pissed off, and uttered a polyphonic roar. Among clear skies, it created its own windstorm, like a personal dust devil.

“Oi, look at him go!” The shoggoth oozed over, scarily fast, and leaped into the air to surround and smother the other creature. Both flickered in and out of sight as they fought. After a short time, the wind disappeared and the shoggoth dropped back to the ground.

“There might be still thousands of those things underground,” Pete explained. “Good not to have them running around free, right? So every house here has a shoggo to keep an eye on things.”

“Are those things reproducing?”

“We don’t think so. Eventually they should run out.”

“What are the shoggoths going to do when their primary food source runs out?”

Pete looked and sounded like an outback bumpkin, but he was a smart guy. He frowned and considered this. “Ya, that might become a problem.”