#fellow tetrapod

[danbensen]

A sound rolled into the lobby of the United Nations Embassy to the Convention of Sapient Species, part scream, part rumble, part didgeridoo.

“Let me immediately go away from this very small coffin, otherwise I will put you monkeys in a hole and cover you with a pile of manure!”

Eight years ago, I wrote a scene that made it largely intact into Fellow Tetrapod: Save us From the Whale

Read the rest at https://www.danielmbensen.com/blog/save-us-from-the-whale

Picture by Tim Morris

[yee-qi]

The council is meeting An exploration of some of the sapient species designs based on various phyla I came up with last year, loosely inspired by Daniel Bensen's Fellow Tetrapod and Dimetrodone's Phyla Challenge. Countercockwise starting from the center, they are: - a giant, predatory flatworm - a swarm of nanomachines - a bipedal rotifer - a small colony of bryozoans in a metal tank - a loriciferan in a protective suit I'd imagine they're meeting on the bryozoan homeworld.

[dungeons-and-tetrapods]

Fixers - Lore

On a Earth, somewhere in the universes of space-time, an ancestral dog learnt to climb. Running was useful, yes, and prey scatters freely - but what about forests? The trees? The places where the feathered-things roam? Prey does not only flee on land.

The agile, curious ones could reach those protein-rich eggs of these feathered-things (commonly known as birds), but eggs are fragile and all to easy to break.

So, these ancestral dogs learnt how to throw, and how to catch.

Throwing is usually seen as an ape trait, something requiring long, flexible bony digits on a thing called a "hand", but these dogs had gravity and height on their side. Mated pairs would set out, with one of the pair climbing up to the nest and dropping an egg below it.

Of course, the first few attempts weren't successful. The eggs splattered across the ground as sticky spoils, which made it useless. The ground needed to be soft, gentle - a cache of food for the future pups and lean winters!

How does a dog soften a blow?

By climbing more, obviously. Those ancestral dogs would curl face-down the tree and toss the egg sideways into a waiting mates' soft mouth. This was a success. Flesh is gentle! It weans and fixes! No more cracks in the shell!

Pups were brought up with the knowledge that the mouth fixes things. It creates. Creation - enough to form family-lines of tossing, factories of oldest to youngest carrying eggs. It was inconvient only carrying one, so flesh-pouches were made. More food, more healing, better life.

It was a while before the ancestral dogs hit sophoncy. Their life simply didn't need it for a long, long time, until disease struck the eggs. Those who couldn't identify sick from healthy were struck down, leaving the remaining dogs to categorise.

If everything is gone, what do you do?

You learn. You adapt. You become smarter, or you starve.

It took a long time for the Fixers of Flesh to join, but they are curious, and the mouth craves. They have been hungry.

[danbensen]

I have finished writing Fellow Tetrapod! In celebration of this and other things, I welcome you to the presentation I made for #Specposium. Enjoy the pretty pictures, of alternate-earth sophonts, made by me, @simon-roy and Tim Morris.

[danbensen]

Alright, here we go! 

My speculative-evolution serial novel Fellow Tetrapod is finally live on Royal Road.

Go check it out. If it looks like your sort of thing, follow the story. It updates every weekday. 

(if you want to know more...)

Koenraad Robbert Ruis used to be a paleontologist, but now he's a cook at the United Nations embassy to the Convention of Sophonts. His bosses must negotiate with intelligent species from countless alternate earths, and Koen must make them breakfast. It turns out, though, that Koen is rather better at inter-species communication than any other human in this world (all nine of them). Everyone loves to eat (certain autotrophs excepted).

Fellow Tetrapod is an speculative-evolution office comedy about food preparation, diplomacy, and what it’s like to be a talking animal.​

Serialized every weekday on Royal Road (https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/59198/fellow-tetrapod) and (one week earlier) Patreon(https://www.patreon.com/danielmbensen)

​Cover art by @simon-roy. Illustrations by Tim Morris.

[danbensen]

I've been thinking about making a fanfic of Fellow Tetrapods to explore the environment (the worldbuilding is fascinating! I love it) so i come with a strange request - are there any sophont species you didn't manage to fit in the current draft?

In fact, Tim Morris has made a spreadsheet of the various sophonts of Fellow Tetrapod, including those who haven't made it into the story (or were only mentioned in passing). You'll find them at the bottom of the list, after the numbered species.

Or you can follow my process for making a sophont:

Pick a bizarre, unlikely clade from somewhere back in the fossil record. Bonus points if nobody has ever heard of it.

Define a series of unlikely steps that result in the evolution of sapience. Bonus points if you also have branches of the family tree that did not lead to sapience.

Figure out the quirks of evolutionary psychology that will make your new sophont a major aggravation to the human characters.

I'm honored. Have fun with the fanfic. Please link your readers back to Fellow Tetrapod.

[danbensen]

A Multiplex from Fellow Tetrapod.

Pictured is a wrinkly blob with irregular coils and tendrils. It has extruded four legs for jogging.

[yee-qi]

Even more phyla of sophonts

The Augments over Those Before, sapient AI that overtook their creators due to their extra senses (that is, being able to detect light, sound and heat, unlike their purely tactile creators). As AI, they're free to take whatever form they want, but as their minds were modelled after priapulid worms (in a world where the Ediacarian "wormworld" ended up securing burrower dominance for years to come), they tend to be fine with a body roughly resembling one (with some abstraction). They have little idea of aesthetic or music and are not much for self-expression, so these days they're sparsely distributed outside of their homeworld, where vast quantities of Augments gather and communicate.

The Pillars of God, sophont loricifera caught in the midst of a microbial war. In their world, the great oxygenation event only happened halfway. Archaea and bacteria clashed, with worldwide effects as the bacteria tried spewing O2 into the air and the archaea kept pumping out sulfuric compounds. Only those not relying on high oxygen concentrations could survive, and out of all of those, the loricifera made the jump to a full dual-respiration setup: Breathing both oxygen and sulfur. The world burned several times, the microbial war grew evermore. Forests of differing physiology waxed and waned. And out of the ashes came the Pillars. Their language is nearly indecipherable and so is their thought-process. As indicated by their chosen name, they're evidently capable of being religious, though.

Sand Dragons are kinorhynchans that evolved sapience in order to better find and memorize food in vast tracts of desert. Extreme omnivores, they will devour almost anything. Like their ancestors, they go through several molts; each one having a different niche and slowly-but-surely becoming more intelligent. They can live two hundred years at most and have incredible memories, although they're a bit less creative than other species and are generally averse to change. To discover the particle accelerator, their civilization could have existed for millions of years! Juveniles are not schooled, but many end up quite educated anyways simply by choosing to commit to a task and spending significant amounts of time around people doing them. They are not welcomed in academic spaces, but are also not rejected, and this tends to apply to most Sand Dragons. They're generally apathetic towards other sophonts, including of their own kind.