Nobody knows exactly when Landhog showed up. Just that the ground started going soft in places it never used to.

He's not big for a monster — more fat than fearsome, tusked, low to the ground — but he's patient, and he's greedy, and that's worse. Landhog doesn't smash things. He hollows them. He tunnels in quiet, inch by inch, right underneath the places people call home, until one day the ground just isn't solid anymore. A neighborhood. A backyard. A sense of belonging. All of it, undermined from below, before anyone even knew to look down.

He doesn't do it out of hatred. He does it because he hoards — land, stability, the feeling of place itself — and he doesn't much care who's left standing on nothing when he's done.

That's what Landhog is: placelessness with teeth and a bad attitude.

The first people to notice were the ones who spend their days discovering places for others — DORE (Discover Oregon Real Estate). Good lots gone strange. Homes that should've held value quietly losing their footing. Ground that felt "off" in ways nobody could quite explain. They were the first to say out loud: something is ruining real places, on purpose.

Before anyone had a name for it, a small crew tried to go straight to the source — into the tunnels themselves, to see what was doing this. They didn't get far. A section collapsed right in front of them, and that was the end of anyone going in after him directly. Too dangerous, plain and simple.

But before the collapse, they found something: a patch of coarse, dark hair snagged on the tunnel wall. They sent it off for testing, expecting maybe a large boar, a bear, something explainable. The lab came back with neither. The closest match on record was a giant forest hog — one of the largest, most formidable wild pigs alive today — but the sample also carried distinct traces that lined up with Neanderthal DNA. Nobody could explain that part. Nobody still can.

That's the closest thing to evidence anyone's ever had, and it's what the artwork you see is built from — a best guess, not an eyewitness account. Truth is, nobody's actually seen Landhog and lived to describe him clearly. What you're picturing is a reconstruction, not a photograph.

Word got to Fitzpatrick Painting and Construction, who'd seen it too — concrete that wouldn't cure right, walls that cracked no matter how well the finish coat was applied. It came to a head while they were out repainting the equipment barn at Eola Hills Legacy Estate Vineyard — a plain, out-of-the-way outbuilding nobody thought twice about. So they started testing. Color after color, coat after coat, looking for anything that reacted.

They found it by accident, the way most important things get found: a stray splash of plain white paint landed near one of Landhog's tunnels, right there behind the barn — and the ground shuddered.

Turns out white is the one color Landhog can't stand. Nobody's sure why. Maybe it's too much like daylight. Maybe it looks too much like a place that's been claimed, cared for, chosen — the exact opposite of everything he hollows out. Whatever the reason, white paint doesn't just repel him. It enrages him — enough that he starts smashing his own tunnels from the inside, trying to get away from it.

Knowing the white paint weakness was one thing. Getting it deep enough into Landhog's tunnels was another problem entirely — nobody could see the shape of them, let alone aim into them. Fitzpatrick and DORE spent days trying to figure out how to spread paint through passages they couldn't even map.

That's when Justoneus Bounskee got pulled in. Overhearing the problem, it seemed obvious to him: ping-pong balls are already famous for bouncing exactly where you don't expect — into gutters, under furniture, down places nobody aimed for. So the balls got engineered to break open after a few good bounces, releasing their paint exactly where a straight shot could never reach.

The Battle Bounskee itself was built to help each ball travel further into the tunnels before its first bounce. But there was still one thing nobody could fully plan for: Landhog wasn't going to hold still. A tunnel had already collapsed once without warning — there could easily be earthquakes, or worse, during the imminent showdown. So the whole thing got reinforced into something sturdier: a battle station, built with material donated by The Hardwood Centre.

Justoneus had never built anything like this before, and there wasn't room for a mistake — this needed to work, the first time, in front of everyone. So he brought in Craig of CNC Woodcutters, who had the real experience and more advanced equipment to make sure it held. We couldn't afford to fail.

Nobody's going in after Landhog directly — his tunnels are too unstable, too deep, too much his territory. But he doesn't have to be cornered to be beaten. He just has to be provoked.

So here's what we're doing about it: 10,000 hit points, one white paint-loaded ball at a time tossed into his tunnels.

Every ball that lands is another splash of white, another tunnel Landhog can't stand to be in anymore. He's not being attacked from the outside — he's being driven to wreck his own hoard, tunnel by tunnel, until there's nothing left to hide in.

A whole crowd outside, all chipping away at the same 10,000 hit points, funding the real work of giving people an actual place: kids who need a club to walk into after school, young people who need somewhere safe to land, animals who need someone to notice they don't have a home yet.

Ten shots a turn. Every one that lands whittles him down. Somewhere around 10,000 points, there's nothing left to hide in.