Not to double-post, but I'm rethinking exactly what Horrors and the Nox are.

Nox can take many forms, but mostly they're flickering shadows or skittering insect-ish things on the ceiling with no definite form. They're ghosts, spirits, poltergeists. As long as they exist without a host, their energy decays rapidly. If you catch a Nox and contain it overnight, it will starve and dissipate into nothing.

The Nox, therefore, need a host. They beeline for the first warm body and possess it, and feed off that person's (or animal's) life force until there's nothing left, which sometimes takes a week or more. In the meantime, the possessed body slowly turns into a Horror.

You know those parasites that latch onto ants and control the zombie bodies? That's kind of what's happening here. The original mind takes a backseat to the Nox, who becomes the new owner of the body. What happens next really depends on the individual Nox: most of the time the person goes mad. Other times they're catching and eating rats in the sewer. Sometimes they're inexplicably bloodthirsty and dangerous.

You can tell a Horror by the gray film over their eyes; they don't really focus on anything, like there's a lost connection. If a host is possessed long enough, a dark oil starts to film their skin. Horrors that have gone untreated for weeks could end up looking like the monster from the black lagoon: a disgusting oily creature that attacks anything in sight.

Unless the ZE capture the host and safely extract the Nox, the host eventually dies. The original Nox flees to find another host, and another Nox is born out of the dead person's soul.

Even when the Nox is extracted, the host is rarely the same. There's probably a safe harbor in Rig exclusively dedicated to the care of people who were hosts, who have lost their minds or developed peculiar instabilities. The oil stains their skin a bruised color, and their eyes are permanently gray, among other less common features.

When someone mentions "hunting horrors" they usually mean possessed animals, which are considered monsters and are killed on the spot. To call a possessed human a "Horror" is considered derogatory though it is technically true.