Someday I need to do up a full post about rules of hospitality for the species I work on, but here's a few tidbits just for now.
Most Erinaen cultures hold that a colony should have housing set aside for visitors to the area, though what that looks like varies. For instance in some locations there are specific trees that can only be used for and are all that can be used for housing travelers. In others this housing is kept to the outskirts of the colony, which makes for some interesting urban restructuring as the colony expands and these places become open to use different purposes.
As a general Osmosian den systems will have 'guest dens' dug out specifically to house visitors to the territory. Osmos V is a rough planet, nomadic merchants are pretty common, and the species as a whole has had a rough history, so it's expected in the vast majority of Osmosian cultures that other Osmosians will be welcome in the pack dens so long as they behave with the proper decorum.
There's no cultural expectation of hospitality towards non-Osmosians, it doesn't harpoon the standing of a pack or clan, but it is generally in good form to extend it. The rules of hospitality on the guest side are more strict in those situations though.
Among Kwarrel's culture hospitality is... wibbly. Settled Herds aren't considered to have any obligation to show hospitality to traveling women, but any lone herd or collection of them will have an area marked out for Bachelor Herds to stay and they are entitled to certain standards of behavior for as long as they're on one's turf. Religious institutions and hospitals typical have housing for travelers, and are expected to put up anybody who woman needs the bed. Bachelor Herds even when gathered together will keep a respectful distance between their caravans, but if they cross paths with men traveling without a herd are expected to take him in and treat him as one of theirs for as long as he stays.
Among Lenopan hospitality rules vary wildly, but the most commonplace is that households from upriver communities are expected to show hospitality and give sanctuary to travelers from downriver. Because the fuckers downriver are more likely to be flooded out and need somewhere to go until they can get resettled.
Which gets really interesting when you remember that a well-used Lenopan act of war is to fabricate a flood to wipe through your downriver neighbors. So, since these rules, as is common in most cultures, hold that hosts and guests have standards of treatment and behavior that must be met, there have been so many cases of upriver communities flooding downriver ones, only to then end up with strong downriver influence in their cultures as a result of survivors of the assault heading upriver as refugees and ending up members of the community.
It's actually thought that might be part of why the rules were put in place in the first place, was to try to discourage active flooding by making taking care of any survivors, in their own homes, the aggressors' active duty.
Okay, imagine I just slammed a parlor door open because I am here with some vision and color vision things!
We're gonna start with our most boring bastards and work our way down, kk?
Perison
Yes, Perison are the boring ones. They're just, chill. Perison are primarily visual and very diurnal- in fact thanks to them we're also starting with the worst low light vision in our little group, about on par with humans, maybe a touch worse. But leaving that aside, they're trichromatic, like humans are. On average their visual spectrum ranges from 400 nm to about 750 nm, which is just a touch narrower than the human range. They can't see as far into the violets as we can, but can see as far into the reds. As a result of this, when it comes to color and working with it Perison are very similar to humans, can see mostly the same colors excepting very violet tones.
Where they fall off, however, is in their visual acuity. Perison tend to be nearsighted by human standards. Not to the point where a human could be considered to need glasses, but closer than not.
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Erinaens
Yes, they are actually only number two on this list. We've mentioned Erinaens before- excellent low-light color vision, high movement sensitivity, low visual acuity just in general that's worsened in bright light, mildly photophobic, best low-light vision out of the lot. It's almost like they're a nocturnal species from a long line of nocturnal species. What we haven't touched on, is color vision in general.
Erinaens are tetrachromatic. They've got one more set of cells grabbing for color than we do. Specifically Erinaens can see a little ways into the ultraviolet spectrum. They can generally see between 350 nm and 715 nm. This means they can see into ultraviolet at about the level of blacklights (which range down to 315 nm), but can't see nearly as deep into the reds as humans and Perison can. They don't really need to, most things they care about at that point also give off uv color, so, evolution was like 'what? some of you fuckers lost that? eh whatever'.
A key facet of this, that we should probably cover here, is that this has a strong effect on how they see color compared to humans. Color vision, as we know it, is additive, and a benefit of things like having a whole other category to work with is that there's more interplay to take into account. This means that while Erinaens and humans have a similar visual range, they see those colors very differently. And this can lead to some weird shit when it comes to categorizing colors- they have a whole other circle on the venn diagram that we're missing.
Another interesting fact is that Erinaens do have uv markings. Specifically, the tip of Erinaen quills have color in uv. Nobody is quite sure why, but is it known that most of their near genetic relatives share the trait. Current theories are that it contributes to camouflage, that it helps make one look more intimidating when they raise their quills, and that it's a warning to predators that this fucker is venomous. The latter has people hemming because it's not just the venomous ones among their relatives that have these markings, but the possibility of Batesian mimicry has not been discounted.
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Lenopan
Lenopan have a male/female visual divide. Yes, I am just starting with that.
Male Lenopan are dichromatic- they have two sets of cells that contribute to color vision. Specifically they range from 380 nm to 575 nm, with a solid dip into the purples and a mosey into the yellows but mostly hanging out in the blues and greens. Mostly though their visual focus in on contrast sensitivity and movement sensitivity. Fuckers may not know what color you are, but if you're breathing they probably see you. They also have quite good visual acuity, but while their low light vision is better than humans and Perison? It's still not great by the standards of the group.
Female Lenopan, on the other hand, have the second best low light vision out of the lot. Not on par with Erinaens, but pretty fucking good. This is in part because, wait for it, they're trichromatic. Wait again- and they see uv. Specifically their low end is 320 nm compared to the males' 380 nm. This would actually put them ahead of Erinaens were it not for the fact that while Erinaens maintain full color vision in low light, Lenopan can only manage uv once the lights go down. They share in the great contrast and movement sensitivity, but the males have better visual acuity overall.
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Osmosians
Yeeeep.
So, the Osmosian color vision range is actually very similar to that of Erinaens. They're also tetrachromatic, they also see into uv, in fact their range is a little lower. Ossys can generally only go from 355 nm to 715 nm. So they see about as far into the reds and not quite as far into uv as Erinaens do. Their visual acuity also isn't great, despite their having the third best low light vision of the lot.
Osmosians are a very tactile species whose vision isn't fantastic. Their sense of touch is very precise, and they can sense both heat and electrical signatures. Fuck, they can sense magnetism and use it to navigate. But if you're asking them for great visual precision you're not getting it. In fact Osmosians are generally very nearsighted by human reckoning, to the point a human would definitely be required to wear glasses before doing something like driving.
(Why yes, Kevin is very tired of hearing about how odd it is to see a farsighted Osmosian, nobody has been hurt yet, don't push it)
But what puts them here at the bottom, as the top weirdos, is their color vision. They have a very similar visual range to Erinaens, not a lot of reds, a chunk of uv, it's all well and good, they can make out the fewest colors of anybody on this list.
By a landslide.
To explain, a human with really good color vision is going to be able to differentiate colors that are 1 nm apart. Most of the fuckers on this list are the same or, in the case of Perison, nearly that level, barely off. An Osmosian with really good color vision is going to need about 15 nm difference to tell colors apart.
In the same space an Erinaen might be able to make out 30 different shades? An Osmosian at their same level will make out 3.
And it's looking like Osmosians are actually evolving away from precision color differentiation. They aren't losing range, presumably because color is tied so strongly to seasonality on Osmos V that being able to tell your basic colors apart remains important, but tests done on their nearest evolutionary relatives have proven that while things like the sense of touch and their electromagnetism are better, color precision is worse. Moreso, their visual acuity is lower as well. Current theory is that this is the result of their becoming more fossorial, vision and color vision being less important underground than their other senses.
[Image Description: Two maps depicting the landmasses of the fictional planet Eri. These landmasses consist of four rough-edged, awkward continents- one massive one to the west that resembles nothing so much as the results of letting a cat attack an origami crane, and three moderately sized ones clustered to the east that resemble more reasonable continents- and an array of islands of various sizes. The maps are overlayed with a rainbow of colors denoting the average temperatures in midsummer and midwinter- with warmer colors towards the equator and cooler colors towards the poles and at high elevations. The colors range from red to purple. /End description]
Who wants an Eri update?
Have some temperature maps! To the left is northern hemisphere summer, to the right northern hemisphere winter. The closer to red the hotter the area, the closer to purple the colder. The hottest regions reach up to and over 35 Celsius, while the coldest reach -57 Celsius and below.
Okay, who wants a quick worldbuilding thing regarding how various species carry fat?
Starting with Erinaens, because why the fuck not and also they're already a little fat by human standards. Your average weight for an Erinaen leaves them with a round, what would be called a pear body shape in fashion, with weight skewing higher towards the poles. As far as additional fat on top of what is considered the average, most commonly it's seen to accumulate first around the belly, the lower back and the base of the tail, then around the thighs and calves, and moving up from there. In most Erinaens the lower arms and face seem to put on fat last, though of course as with humans and all species mentioned here every body is different and can go about things its own way.
Perison are another species humans would likely immediately think of as fat. The average for males leans toward high muscle mass completely covered by a healthy fat layer- think what you see with competitive weightlifters- while females tend to have a higher ratio of fat and more fat, leading to greater girth especially around the torso per their height. Additional fat most commonly seems to accumulate on the back, before working it's way around the belly and chest and down to the tail. From there it seems about even whether it accumulates in the neck and face or the thighs next, finishing with the arms.
Tetramand, meanwhile, will often come across as quite lean to humans. Unlike the other species mentioned so far, Tetramand aren't especially predisposed to subcutaneous fat aside from that of breast tissue, leaning more towards intramuscular fat. In non-scientific terms, these fuckers have some wagyu-style marbling. When you do get build-ups of subcutaneous fat, it most often starts and focuses at the chest, then spreading to the belly, back, and rear. It's uncommon for Tetramand to build up noteworthy fat deposits elsewhere.
For Kineceleran most standard body fat is carried around the back of the base of the tail, going up the back of the hips. Otherwise they tend to be quite a lean species as a general rule. When it comes to extra fat, there's actually two main locations that fat build-up starts after those two, which has been tied to specific genes. For some individuals, especially those whose ancestry hails from more flat and open environs, excess fat past the back-hips and back-tail base tend to accumulate around the torso. For others, especially from more mountainous or twisty areas, fat accumulation tends to focus on the tail more. Either way the last places fat tends to gather are the arms and the legs, and once you get notable fat deposits in the thigh that's considered 'morbid obesity' levels- Kineceleran bodies will do everything short of have you cough up your liver to avoid putting fat on the thighs. Even slow members of the species move fast enough that a lack of a gap there risks serious injury.
Now with all of these there's a general level of weight that is the average across the population. You get areas where people weigh more, you get areas where people weigh less, but in general there is a singular or dual 'average' that you can point at. Osmosian weights can vary more widely, by location, by lifestyle, by time of year, by time of day (though that one is a smaller difference most of the time), by sex, by breeding intentions- Fuckers' averages can have a variance in the vicinity of 50 pounds, mostly made up of fat, depending on these factors. Individuals living on the coast tend to be notably leaner than elsewhere, nomadic packs have higher fat reserves, as do eggbearers, individuals tend to develop small fat reserves after sunning and so will weigh more in the afternoons and these reserves will be bigger during the summer, eggbearers put on weight when they intend to nest, especially those in non-nomadic packs. As a general rule Osmosians carry fat primarily in their tails and slightly less so in the torso. The neck and face most commonly put on fat before the limbs, and the development of fatty jowls is common. In fact it's seen as a goal among non-nomadic eggbearers intending to nest- when you're going to be underground acting as a living food source for your children for, hopefully, nearly a year Earth time? you want some fat reserves, even if your Nesting is going to come around and feed you.
Random: While there are plenty of words in Imperial Erinaen that, as long as you speak some Erinaen language, you're probably going to be able to figure out, just due to how the language was originally developed, there's two that are damn near identical in every Erinaen language.
'Qhoq', a generic term for non-aerial predators, and 'Qgiq', a generic term for aerial predators.
This is because no matter where you're from, these words always come from the same instinctive alarm calls that have kept Erinaens for time immemorial. You might get changes in tone or emphasis, but the sound combination itself doesn't change. Even Erinaens who didn't grow up speaking Erinaen languages, while not knowing exactly what these calls mean, have been shown to experience heightened levels of stress and anxiety upon hearing them at volume when compared to other non-understood words uttered with the same tone and volume.
Alarm calls are common among Erinaens' evolutionary relatives. Among Erinaens themselves different areas vary in whether individuals have the specific job of keeping watch or whether there's a social expectation that upon seeing something you sound the alarm, but however it's done once an alarm call goes out one learns from an early age to sound it yourself, making sure that it makes its way around the colony. This is part of why Erinaens don't historically worry much about keeping other Erinaens out of their homes- alongside some very loose property laws- when an alarm call goes off it's generally expected that people are going to beeline for the nearest safe location. Whether that's a business, a bathroom, a home, doesn't really matter when you're trying not to die. In fact refusing to allow individuals to take shelter in your home when you can safely do so is one of the things most likely to get you chased out of a colony.
Any colony of a decent size has people whose entire profession involves keeping track of local predators and attempting to keep them from entering the colony proper. Common methods are setting and maintaining a border of items, scents, etc that discourage them from approaching (think an equivalent to farmers using bees to keep elephants from their crops, or stringing up prices of metal to spook birds), but may also include mobbing a predator nesting or otherwise keeping territory too close for comfort. Only rarely are predators actually killed, as it tends to be more effective to just keep a predator to the outskirts than to keep having to go out hunting predators each time one tries to fill a void. Especially when as many things hunt you as Erinaens deal with.
Still, alarm calls aren't unusual to hear in colonies- you can never guarantee things will work, or that you'll catch every predator before it finds the colony proper- and play a vital role in maintaining the health and safety of the community. Truthfully the most at risk one is of predation is on the outskirts of and outside the colony itself, and when outside during daylight hours. In all these cases it's a matter of having fewer individuals around to notice a predator before it strikes, meaning your less likely to get an alarm sounded. Adding to this, when out of the main portion of the colony one is less likely to have a safe spot to hide available, and more likely to have to rely on their quills for protection. They're handy, but not all of the Erinaen's predators are affected by them, the more specialized having long since evolved resistances. And in daylight most individuals out and about will be those who woke up to use the bathroom, making them more vulnerable as they may still be groggy.
In the end, even with all attempts at security, predation is one of the major causes of death among Erinaens, with those most commonly taken- to the surprise of nobody with a sense for ecology- being children, the ill, and the disabled, plus individuals who work outside of the colony itself. They have a real rate of predation deaths.
Predation is estimated to be the cause of up to 15% of lasting deaths among Erinaens on their homeworld. This is second only to falling, estimated to cause upwards of 23%, as far as specific causes of death go. The numbers in these cases skew heavily towards children and teens, alongside, as mentioned above, the ill and disabled. The majority of deaths otherwise can be attributed to foul play, chronic illness, and injury.
Okay, so, I've mentioned before that Erinaens don't really have large-scale conflict such as war amongst themselves- and even when dealing with other species are much more on the 'finish fights' than 'start fights' end of the scale. There's multiple reasons for this but one of the very big ones is a very weak concept of the 'in-group' across the species.
They've existed within small family groups since before they were Erinaens, but those family groups have always consisted of rarely more than two generations at a time with a sort of dispersal upon reaching adulthood. Siblings and/or cousins will stick together for life, but otherwise the family group doesn't really continue on. What has been a more important part of their social development as a species has been their functioning within large colonies of most unrelated individuals and family groups.
"Okay, Achi, but how does that lower their tendency towards 'in-group' behavior?" A key part of that is why this social behavior began. There's multiple reasons social behavior develops on this sort of scale, with three of the big ones being improved reproductive success, improved success at acquiring food, and increased security versus predators. The family groupings handle the reproductive side, but-
Eri is a very fertile planet and Erinaens, historically and in the modern day, don't generally have to worry about food. This is a planet that harbors absolutely massive life, with even the trees having 4-5 ton animals living in them. Tool use has long allowed Erinaens to take advantage of foodstuffs that evolved to be eaten by creatures up to a hundred times their size. As a result, securing food sources from outsiders wasn't really a concern during evolution and their early development as a species.
Instead, their large social groups evolved as a means of protection from the assload of things that eat them. Not only does having a load of other Erinaens around increase the odds that somebody will notice and alert to a predator, but also means higher odds that if one does attack it'll eat someone that isn't you, or a kitten that isn't yours, etc.
When, during your evolution, you don't have to worry about food scarcity, and inborn magics lead to better health, and having more fuckers around correlates to being safer from the plethora of predators that abound, you're not as likely to develop things like high levels of territoriality and intergroup conflict. There still is conflict, but it's not typically on the scale of whole colonies or larger.
What you will see from Eriaens, as a result of their being very firmly prey species, is that individuals tend to be wary at first of new creatures larger than themselves. Whether sapient or not, instinct says 'might try to eat me' and so it can take a little while for Erinaens to warm up under these circumstances. It generally takes less time in situations where there are other Erinaens already comfortable with the species in question present, or if the Erinaen is in a familiar location or situation, but still. Very much a known tendency in not just Erinaens but many sapient prey species, taking longer to warm up to new species, locations, and situations. After an evolutionary history of 'will it eat me', it takes a while to lose the anxious and wary tendencies that come with it.
How about a few more words for Imperial Erinaen/Traveler Talk? Real needed shit.
Ec-gi: a formal greeting, used when speaking to locals of a new area, speaking to individuals of higher social status (elders and spirits mostly), meeting someone for the first time, when in formal settings, and answering calls
Esi: a casual greeting, used in all situations excepting the prior listed
Lechat/Lenat: a singular and a plural farewell, best translated as 'be safe'
Also have added redoubling for emphasis to the language, so all of the above can be repeated so as to be, kinda more. 'Ec-gi-ec-gi' to show you really respect somebody (so, spirits and shit more than anything), 'esi-esi' to show you are very happy to see someone, 'lechat-lechat/lenat-lenat' as a 'for the love of fuck please be safe'.
