Helmlings & Potlings

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.