Helmlings, and their cousins, potlings,
are tiny humanoid creatures that you often only see the legs of,
coming out of the helmet they live in. They abund, of course, in
dungeons and other places where you can find discarded helmets and
other pieces of armour, as the hat has to be unattended for quite
some time before a helmling choses it as its home ; they very
rarely happen to elect a helmet kept in an exposition room, but
sometimes do, and are akin to pest for the servants made to maintain
those rooms, who then have to chase them to get the helm back as it
is carried away by two small but fast and steady legs.
Potlings are more of a nuisance, as
they will take any contenant left alone as their new dwelling ;
you truly can't leave a cauldron or an empty jar outside for more
than two days before it starts scooting away with its newly acquired
legs. You then have to fight the potling to get it back, or get
ambushed on your way to the well a few days later.
Helmlings are tiny, but fierce and
brave, oftentimes seen wielding daggers as swords when they show
their arms. and will act as a tiny knight would when encountered ;
with displays of courage and chivalry. More likely, the helmling has
not found a weapon, and will just headbutt you with force to defend
itself, if made to. If not armed, it will probably try to scutter
away on its tiny legs.
When the creature is sleeping, the hat
simply rests upright, and a faint snoring sound can be heard if you
have good enough ears.
They dont speak any known or
intelligible language, and no attempt to communicate has been met
with succes so far ; when they are heard talking to one another,
or arguing, it is through some echo-ridden child-like gibberish that
they seem to understand fine, but that is so far removed from any
dialect, even the most obscure ones, that linguist try their best to
evade the subject when it is brought up.
For centuries, wizards and scholars
alike have been puzzled by these tiny creatures, as its spawning has
never been observed by anyone. You can find a helmling, you can even
sometimes capture it, you can even keep it in captivity in a vivarium
for years, but no one truly has seen one get inside of a helmet ;
they always seem to chose the perfect moment, when nobody is looking,
to get inside the hat. Their true nature is still shrouded in
mystery and subject to heated debates in the academies, and multiple
schools of thougts are conflicting over what they really are and how
they reproduce. Teratozoologists are convinced they are, of course,
magical creatures, spontaneously appearing when a helm is available,
Elficologists insist that they are in fact from the fairy people,
while necromancers suppose that they come from the souls of the dead
warriors that were originally wearing the armour.
Spontaneous generation hypothesis
It is believed that they just pop out
of thin air right inside of the helmet, as maggots would spawn on a
chunk of rotting meat. If we can't see it outside of the armour
piece, perhaps its because it does not exist outside of the helmet ?
Their biology is very misunderstood, as attempts to remove them from
their shell without destroying both has always been met with failure.
Savants basically know that they do eat, in small quantities from
time to time, by bringing the food inside their helmet and making a
chewing sound, but it is not known if they do need sustenance, or if
they just mimic other living beings. The fact that they are found in
dungeons without a regular acces to food might indicate that they are
indeed able to survive for a long time without a meal, or more
grimly, that adventurer or monster carrion can sustain them quite
fine.
The hermit crab idea
Another popular theory among zoologists
is that they are akin to hermit crabs, and shed their shell for a
bigger one once they are grown enough and don't fit anymore, but,
while popular, it is more of a joke that teachers tell their young
students as a fact while discussing the weird biology of the
helmling.
Faery hypothesis
Those that spent their whole lives
studing the litlle folk will tell you with assurance that helmlings
and potlings are in fact, fays, a sub-class of the gnome family, to be
precise, and that if you cannot encounter a helmling without a helm,
it is because they remain invisible until they inhabit it. They would
be some kind of trikster folk, as would explain their sometimes
playful nature, and their child-like (to our eyes at least) display
of chivalry would be a mocking mimicry of the previous users of the
helm, instead of a genuine show of honor and culture. Of course, none
of that would explain why they would not be burned by the iron, but
if the fae folk was an easy subject to study, elficologists would not
have chosen it, as they often are people who like to overcomplicate
everything, and refuse simple explainations.
Souls of warriors hypothesis
The last and grimmest hypothesis is
held by necromancers, mostly younger ones, because the older ones
have started looking for a way to turn themselves into liches anyway,
and dont really care about things so tiny anymore, is that the
helmlings are spirits of the dead warriors, returning to their gear
after being slain. They are not affected by attemps to turn the dead,
nor have ever been summoned by a necromancer, despite some attempts
years ago, so it is more of a musing than a solid theory.
