You want me to knit what?

A yith, R says. For a promotion. There must be a pattern online somewhere…

I’m not even entirely certain what a yith is. (Conical, R says.) Squamous and rugose aren’t generally my wheelhouse, except what anybody in this field would have picked up from cultural osmosis, but somebody must have written up a pattern for this, surely?

There are no patterns for yith on Ravelry, and you would think. Perhaps Bob was worried about that SAN roll liability.

Well, okay, then, I’ve knit enough odd things in my day to have become That Knitter in my circle of acquaintances (the cat-toy-sized facehugger being a personal favorite); I can roll up my mental sleeves and break down the question into shapes that I do know how to make. According to Wikipedia,

“In the bodies that the Great Race of Yith inhabited on the Earth, they were tall and cone-shaped, rising to a point with four strange appendages, all of which can extend and recede at will to any distance up to about ten feet. Two terminate in claws… a third in four red “trumpets,” and the fourth, a yellowish globe featuring three eyes around the central circumference, flower-like ears on top and tentacles on the underside… Movement is achieved via expansion and contraction of a grey, rubbery layer at the base of the conical body.“

It’s going to have to be whatever colors of yarn I’ve got handy, but tentacles are easy enough, and a cone is basically a hat gone a bit wrong, then you seal up the bottom with something like the undercarriage from all those damn daleks…

And pipecleaners. Because pipecleaners.

The rest of the tale is known to you from these fragments of image and text and wool, tortured shapes rising from the depths to sing paeans of ancient warning. May this be the year that the stars come right for

(carrier lost)

(reloading)

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