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It's hard to explain the distortle. At first glance, a red-carapaced creature appears to carry a yellow hive. It meanders aimlessly through its environment. Tiny flying critters enter and exit the hive at all hours. A thick, pinkish-yellowish substance oozes from within.
Watch for long enough, and strange details start to stick out. When the bugs leave the hive, where do they go? Did one just disappear? Two more just appeared out of nowhere! The red creature hasn't eaten anything in a while... or has it ever? Have you just been staring for too long, or do its surroundings wobble strangely wherever it goes? Where is it going?!
Distortle is neither an elaborate symbiotic arrangement, nor a case of some terrible parasitic infection. It's a quantum distributed intelligence!
What would appear to be host and symbiote are in fact one creature. A humble four-legged body is piloted by a literal hive mind. Each little insectoid is quantum-entangled with this body. This allows them to pop in and out of dimensions across all of time-space, harvesting strange particles to make quantonium jelly. The presence of the jelly itself creates dimensional stability. This keeps the hive-end of the distortle firmly anchored in one dimension, giving its flighty-bits a consistent home base to return to.
Due to quantum variance, a distortle could come in an infinite range of sizes. They are rarely hunted with any success. Proximitous distortion of the quantum field is enough to dissuade most predators by causing unexpected and inexplicable changes to their position, orientation and probability matrices. Unbothered, it simply wanders, churning the hive-full of quantonium jelly to perfection with its swaying gait.
Its natural defenses make it very difficult to obtain the jelly, but that's probably for the best. When consumed, the jelly removes time and space from your perception. Your consciousness collapses into a singular, eternal self - past, present and future all in one. There's probably wisdom to be found in this experience, if you can untangle it.