The Fetches

Every Zoner has seen the Fetches at work, silently searching junk heaps or digging tunnels or nudging asteroids into decaying orbits. Their natures, motives, and powers are the most talked-about mysteries in the Zone, but at least everyone can agree what they look like: little glowing humanoid figures, featureless, seemingly shaped out of pure light.

When a Fetch needs to communicate with a non-Fetch, and hand signs won't suffice, it reaches out to touch the other---and immediately assumes the exact shape and form of the one touched. If this form has a mouth, the Fetch can speak (Fetches in their natural forms don't have mouths).

Activities

Greenhorns sometimes recognize the Fetches as sanitation workers or (in barbarous cultures) "alien abductors" from their home universes. They make all the contracts for Garbage Zone waste management services, and at least one Fetch accompanies every mission Outside and upon return guides the load of refuse to its appointed place in the Jam.

Within the Zone, Fetches are known to spend considerable time sorting and arranging things and digging and collapsing tunnels. No one knows why. A Fetch might expose a new vein of silver spoons under a Dwarven mining settlement one day, then cut off access to the town's water source the next, but more often the Fetch-holes lead nowhere at all. Fetches never use tools; they either work with their hands or employ some sort of potent psionic power, staring at massive obstacles in utter silence until the obstacles simply move.

Those who interfere with a Fetch's work suffer terribly bad luck. Those foolish enough to harm or kill a Fetch are either made into horrifying examples or never seen again at all.

Fetches and Adventurers

Adventurers have been known to trade with the Fetches for secrets or for powerful artifacts. The Fetches will often accept any cheap shiny trinket in payment---they seem as delighted as magpies by anything that glitters---but will sometimes demand bizarre services instead. One group of heroes was asked to arrange for everyone in a small nearby city to get married on the following Tuesday, then divorced precisely one month later.

Origins and Motivations

Ask ten people what the Fetches really are, and you'll get 12 different answers and start a fistfight.

One popular theory is that they are holographic projections controlled by an Artificial Intelligence somewhere deep in the Jam, desperate for a way to save itself. Some claim that the machine is using its servants to enact the somatic components of an unthinkably complex spell.

Others hold that the Fetches are the native inhabitants of the Garbage Zone; that long ago in their home universe, the pangalactic bureaucracy ruled that arcano-active waste must not be disposed of in live stars, but must instead be dumped into black holes. As one local government made arrangements to comply, its explorers found that the comet clouds orbiting several nearby black holes were inhabited by small glowing people who loved to collect trinkets, and the rest is history (or rather, mythology).