There are definitely doppelgangers in Tepest, and the VRF:D builds upon the GazV monster-list by saying that they've infiltrated the ranks of the goblins. (Partly, that's because the Tepestani humans are too poor and paranoid for them to bother with, and partly it's for variety.cure wrote:The attack is Tepest is generally and perhaps wrongly attributed arround here, and perhaps in the Guides to Dopplegangers itself, to a doppleganger.
) I didn't actually lock it down that the "gray-skinned creature" was one of them, however; like S, Rookhausen never actually saw it, and deduced its nature secondhand from descriptions of its appearance.FWIW, while dread doppelgangers aren't man-eaters by nature, they're far from the most mentally stable of creatures. If a human being can turn into a baby-sacrificing cannibal out of insanity, so can an individual doppelganger. But if the creature was a doppelganger, then it can't be one of the Thirteen, as dread doppelgangers can't have both a Vistani parent and an incubus parent.
Hmmm... maybe the gray-skinned creature was a doppelganger that the GC tried to impregnate, while it was disguised as a female Vistani? It could have played along with the Caller's seduction-attempt in order to sustain its deception, only to go insane from reading the incubus's mind. That could explain its subsequant fiendish behavior, if the thoughts of a demon had overwhelmed its own psyche. The GC might've just assumed that the creature mentioned in S's notes was his half-fiend offspring, when in fact his effort to sire a child failed (dopps being sterile unless they choose otherwise), and the slain "monster" was his GazV lover, not his child. How sick would that be?
If so, then one of the Thirteen never actually existed, and the GC's plan -- and Azalin's too, perhaps -- has a hole in it that neither one suspects.
