#sapients

[world-of-sunit]

Cheskel Basics

Cheskel are the most populous and influential of the sapient races on Sunit. They also took to the Crystal symbiote the best, fully integrating with it and allowing them to become highly adaptable-- to the point where the Crystal can manipulate their DNA, and Cheskel can minorly manipulate the environment around them through magic.

Basic body details under the cut!

All Cheskel have the same basic body structure, but come in a variety of body types and sizes. Nearly all Cheskel will be between 3 and 5 feet tall. Cheskel will always have ear crests of crystalline feathers, and will almost always have slit eyes, rabbit-like noses, rat-like hands and feet, and long tails unless they absorbed a different trait. Eyes and claws will usually match the feathers, but not always.

Cheskel are ambipedal, switching between two-legged and four-legged motion with ease. When upright, most walk flat-footed and will only stand on their toes for more height when needed.

Their hands and feet do not have rough pads and are highly dexterous. Their hands are symmetrical, with their outer fingers both being able to act as thumbs. Their feet do not have quite the same level of manipulation, but the toes can spread out to wrap around things for a better grip.

All Cheskel have crystal ear-feathers, but may have many more feathers located on specific places of their body. The feathers absorb energy from the environment, augmenting their health and longevity as well as giving them the ability to manipulate their environment through very minor magic. The more/larger feathers a Cheskel has, the longer it is likely for them to live and be in good health. This also directly correlates to their magic strength. Most Cheskel have between 8 and 20 feathers; having more than 25 is exceptionally rare. Most feathers are connected to muscles and nerves and are incredibly painful to remove, if not utterly detrimental to one's health.

Cheskel lay eggs, whose shells are made of a brittle compound of the Crystal microbes and calcium. These shells allow the growing embryo to absorb traits from the living beings near it and to adapt to the environment it will be born into. Cheskel will naturally lay a clutch of 1 to 6 eggs a year, but if mated (a huge social taboo) they will lay a clutch in about a week. Naturally laid eggs are inert and unfertilized, and won't hatch unless kept close to a living being for 3-4 weeks, absorbing genetic material through the shell and developing traits based on that. Fertilized eggs will hatch on their own after the same period of time.

Since Cheskel absorb traits from both beings and the environment, they can be any color or pattern, but most are fairly natural-looking.

Most Cheskel will only grow longer fur or crystal feathers in a few common places of their body.

The most common traits for Cheskel to have are manes, longer fur tufts, and crystalline feathers. Other accents like scales, horns, and normal feathers have been found; it all depends on who and where a Cheskel was raised around.

Most Cheskel have long prehensile tails, but they can have any type or number of tails.

[elmurid]

not sure how into this kind of thing you guys are but it’s honestly mind-expanding. if you find this interesting this guy has a few other talks on youtube that are 20-30 minutes. but he’s convinced me that sperm whales are the most intelligent beings in the animal kingdom on the planet (including humans).

Not that I would take a lot of convincing, as I’ve read a lot about this kind of subject and I’ve always been a huge non-human intelligence enthusiast, and I’ve believed dolphins to be at least as intelligent as us for years now, but I’ve never read that much about sperm whales. The fact that they can communicate with each other across thousands of miles, and in some cases from literal opposite faces of the planet, seems to me like they have some kind of built-in physiological internet.

And the fact that their language is exponentially more complex than ours, coupled with the fact that their brains seem to be more capable at processing things like intuition, emotion, love, and empathy leads me to believe that their understanding of nature, themselves, and therefore the universe itself must be many times deeper than our own. And to top it all off they’ve had these incredibly massive, dense, well connected, sophisticated brains for 30 million years. We’ve had our brains for only 200,000 years at the most.

[ivantheinedible]

Earthlings Are Weird

Been browsing through the “humans are weird/space-orcs/space-Australians” tag as per the usual, when I realized something. Out of all the references to us, our planet, and even the animals on it, there’s pretty little stuff about other intelligent animals besides us.

Think about it. Aside from humans, Earth has: non-human great apes, elephants, dolphins, corvids, parrots, and octopuses. Lumping together humans and their close relatives, that’s still six whole clades a sapient earthling could come from. Take this to its logical conclusion and suddenly you have a planet that, in addition to it already being a deathworld, is also so ripe for intelligence that it produced it six times at once. Imagine an alien trying to wrap its cephalon around that.

“I can certainly see the resemblance,” mused Rk’sksr at the sight of the large creatures his friend Angeline and a convenient informational-sign had called ‘gorillas.’ He had worked with Bonobos before and after mentions of theirs and the Humans’ of other ‘great apes,’ he had seen fit to have Angeline take him to a zoo to go see some.

“Yeah, they’re pretty smart. It’s a shame we can’t uplift them, thanks to that crackpot a few centuries ago,” came his friend’s reply.

“So I assume this is it for our little excursion?”

“What? Hell no, I paid a lot for this trip and I’m getting the money’s worth out of this. Besides, we’re not done with this tour.”

“But I thought this was all there was, aside from the other chimpanzee species.”

“Nope. I’m not an expert on this but I’m pretty sure we’ve got about a half-dozen more species than this.”

“And all of them are ‘great apes?’”

“Yep.”

After going past a few more exhibits -Rk’sksr counted less than a half-dozen to his confusion-, he asked Angeline if they had seen all the intelligent species the zoo had to offer.

An incredulous Angeline could only reply with “You’re asking that, despite having worked with Greys too?”

“But I thought they were a simple side-experiment when they were created.”

“Welp, looks like I’ve got things to show you.”

Angeline proceeded to take Rk’sksr past an impressive array of birds that caught even his own four eyes, until they reached a singularly unattractive one of pure white, a sort of pale contrast to an average Grey.

“So what is it supposed to be?”

“It’s another parrot species,“ came the obvious reply.

“I can tell that from the sign, but why did you show me this one of all the other bird species?“

“Parrots in general are smart, and this was the only species they had here. Some Greys started making a fuss about the uncanny valley or something.“

“Wait, I can understand the diversity with your ‘great apes,’ ancestors, I even knew an uplifted analogue to them. But to claim that sort of diversity among sapient-producing groups is sort of absurd, isn’t it?“

“Uhh... I think you might wanna strap in, ‘cause this might be a bit of a culture shock for you.“

What came next was a journey across the zoo through a veritable menagerie of creatures with the marks intelligence. Enormous lumbering beasts busy with a paintbrush, sleek aquatic creatures performing complex tricks, even some vagrant wild animals devising clever means of stealing a child’s meal. It was utterly baffling to see such diversity of minds; only the Heralds of the Old Ones came from a planet with more diversity, and even they had bolstered their count with supreme genetic engineering. It was just something that didn’t happen!

An exasperated Rk’sksr finally stopped Angeline halfway through their trek inside the aquarium. 

“Please just stop Angeline, this absurdity needs to be laid to rest! There simply cannot be anymore species like this! “ 

“Wait, now before you actually start whining over me, I’m telling you now that we have one last thing to look at, and it’s right around the corner.” 

With an exaggerated hiss from  Rk’sksr the two of them approached the final tank, one surrounded by a gaggle of Human children and a lone Grey. In the tank was a variety of colorful rock formations, aquatic photosynthesizers, and a plethora of assorted... toys?

The singular question running through Rk’sksr’s head was ‘What sort of aquatic organism would need toys in its enclosure?’ 

Not a moment later, a bright red, eight-limbed creature slinked its way out from under a crevice and shuffled towards the glass. The delight in the children’s eyes was obvious, and the creature seemed to know it. It busied itself sliding through the toys set out for it, before a hand from above seemed to drop a jar filled with a lone shrimp inside. As a sort of final act to its show, the creature went about skillfully twisting open the jar and retrieving the morsel of food. Many of the younger ones were clapping, and after reading the sign, Rk’sksr realized that this ‘octopus’ was most definitely the one he would have picked to have made a sapient. They certainly would have had the luck to live on a respectable planet, with only one smart clade. 

To this day Rk’sksr still has no ancestors-damned idea how anyone thought it would be a good idea to let one planet have some many intelligent organisms. Especially after a crow stole one of his snack bars and dumped the rest in a koi pond. 

[skaskahaich]

Draeden

(art by Larry Elmore)

Draeden are creatures of great size (ranging from about 30 to 60 kilometers) and obscure origin. If one were to overcome their psionic cloaking, they would appear as a wrinkled mass with two defined halves and a number of tubes emerging from both ends. With capabilities that rival, if not exceed those of most deities, one can be glad that these entities make themselves hard to come across. They despise all elemental matter and therefore make their homes in the empty outer reaches of the material or the quasielemental plane of vacuum. Chant has it that they might be related to the elder brains.

[skaskahaich]

Ocean Strider

(art by Matt Cavotta)

Ocean striders are giant (20′) orca-like humanoids that roam the seas. Related to elfkind, they too tend towards protecting their environment from outside forces, be it through diplomatic or violent methods. They often have a symbiotic relationship with pods of darfellan, employing them as enforcers within their oceanic domain, in exchange for protection and mithral equipment.

[skaskahaich]

Darfellan

Darfellans are a species of orca-like humanoids often at odds with the sahuagin. In Stormwrack, they are essentially depicted as humans with black/white skin, but I decided to take a slightly more animalistic approach. Another change I’m making is that they do not descend from were-orcas, but rather a common ancestor shared with ocean striders.

I also think they should have more animals at their disposal besides the expected orcas. It’d be fun to have them ride around on creatures such as the vortices from After Man.

[hyperbanal]

There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.