Extremophiles, the Old Chaos

Loch asked me a while ago about what he named The Old Chaos - the time before the world was divided into its proper orders via the radical separateness of language. 

I've written before about how Chaos is not an ideal cosmic force or a corrupting power in Barony - Chaos is what things look like without layerings of abstraction. The world as it is, denuded of attempts at comprehension and categorisation. 

There actually were horrible things that lived at the dawn of creation though. The fact that they were (or are) not symbolically or spiritually opposed to something called Law or God doesn't mean that they weren't terrible and awesome. 

Down, down at the core, where fire and iron and earth and water and air are as one burning tumult. 

Thing Operant

A being of muscle and sinew and indestructible flesh-like-stone. Its entire mass is organised into four thick, radially arranged tentacles that meet in a 'knot' of material at the centre. The tentacles can subdivide (and re-cohere, once they have split) into thinner and more dextrous tendrils, and can do this infinitely, into fractally finer strands of sinuous muscle. It takes time and energy to do this, and the Thing will only split to the size required for whatever task it is currently focused on - its entire focus is on energy: how to get more, how to conserve what it has. There is no apparent upper limit to the subdivision - given time, a Thing Operant will be able to slice through flesh, bone, and adamant with a writhing forest of invisibly fine mono-filaments.

The nervous system and sense organs are distributed through the limbs - they can touch, smell, taste, hear (vibrations), sense heat at a range of 50ft, and perceive souls at a range of 1000ft. 

A Thing Operant, when stretched out, is about 15ft x 15ft, and weighs about 30 tons. If you get hit by one that's trying kill you, or grasped by a manipulator and flensed by its smaller feeler tendrils, you take 5d12 manipulator damage. 

If you are giving it trouble, it will grapple you (you can't win a STR check against one), and spend about an hour subdividing its manipulators to the requisite fineness before taking you apart at a cellular or molecular level: annihilation with no save. 

There's a good chance it will pick you up and taste/look at you with its tentacles, and then place you back where you were without harming you. The precision of its subdividing manipulators is literally indescribable to humans. The tentacles could write poetry onto motes of dust if it wished to.

A Thing Operant is not really intelligent, but it is biologically immortal, almost impossible to kill (they live in molten metal close to the core), and has a good facility with pattern recognition. You could probably teach one to speak if it came to the conclusion that speaking might get it more abundant energy. They are also curious creatures, and like taking things apart and putting them back together. 

PCs probably can't kill one, but if you need stats give it 40HD and an AC somewhere around 30.

Hoping that this will be the first of several horrible extremophiles. However would one fight them?!