Babel Fish

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, magical beast. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its host a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech canters of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. This does not help you communicate back to the speaker, only understand them.

When the host dies the Bable fish falls from the host's ear and survives for one only minute unless it is placed in water or another host's ear.