…you half turn to see what it is when suddenly a heavy furry thing lands on you, jaws first. It has huge teeth. Like, the mouth is absurdly enlarged, it has a large tongue. Its front legs and tail are stubby and deformed. The ears on the other hand are large and flop behind, and the back legs are powerful and muscled.

Mariette gets rushed by a Wererabbit during Session 0

At first sight, an aberration is merely the name that Rigasia calls the things from the Zones. Officially they are regular animals mutated by radiation and driven insane and aggressive by pain and hunger.

Aberration is kind of the technical term that the scientists (and official documentation) use for the things. Most people around zones have a bunch of other words, and only half are not obscene; some of the common ones are just “things”, bombchildren, mutants, monsters, demons, spirits, and the list goes on…

Aberrations are not capable of surviving long-term outside the zones, and that's good for you because it means they haven't escaped to populate the rest of the country. they can leave for a while, but if they do so, they will eventually die. Of course a swarm of aberrations that are outside a zone and in pain get extra-aggressive so this is not a good thing to happen.

• Wererabbit
• Mosquito
• Ghost
• Old White
• Cockroach
• Tiny Eel
• White Stink
• Hairy Crab
• Cancerous Lizard
• Floating Water

Aberration hunters don't usually deal with this, but not all animals that exhibit some kind of dependency on the Zones exhibit aberrant traits or look mutated, so at this point things start getting muddy.

And some animals will not die outside the zones, even if they grow increasingly uncomfortable about it.

And officially, no humans have ever become aberrations, and the Rigasian Confederacy will go to quite some lengths to call liar anyone who says otherwise. This doesn't mean that some people don't argue otherwise; they even published an anonymous paper about it.

A paper that got buried so deep you need an oil rig to find it.

As of arc 2, the party seems to have confirmed that there are many humans that exhibit the “aberrant” trait where they require reality to be at least a bit warped to feel themselves. This seems to include most Anagusi because they stopped living in regular timelines a long time ago.

Anagusi call these people eternity touched.