[rar] A quartet of races

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madd0ct0r
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[rar] A quartet of races

Post by madd0ct0r »

to a seranade played on cosmic strings, earth blips as four alternate timelines are folded through each other. When it passes, Earth is left with 4 new intelligent species. As far as anyone can remember, they've always been there, although no one can quite recall ever seeing one before...

In non-deciduous woodland, one in one hundred trees have been turned into a Dryad. Looking similar to the trees around them, they are tall, up to the full height of a tree in size and weight. Except when roused or in mhast in the spring, they are relatively static. Oils drip from their branches in tiny amounts. Any sapling growing under a steady rain of this oil will become a dryad and waken once the sapling is 3m tall. As might be expected, they are very territorial over this area they protect/nurture. Larger animals, even bear or deer may find a wooden fist suddenly plunging from the sky. Dead bodies are broken up and dumped at the drayad's root/crawling mass and composted for nutrients. The oil drips will cause ivy like tumours on humans if it lands on bare skin.
Every few years, normally about five, a dryad will enter a mhast state. Their body chemistry is normally quite volatile and flammable. But a mhast dryad's skin thickens and oils stop flowing. They become nomadic and will, if they can detect other dryads at the edge of their territory, abandon it and walk until they can smell no other dryad. There they will tramp in a spiral, uprooting weeds, crops ect and stimulating growth of larger ligin based tree seeds. If another dryad partially claims their abandoned territory, any saplings that later convert to Dryads will have genetic material of both parents as well as the original tree species.
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In deciduous woodlands, one in a thousand trees now host a Faerie Hive. Faerie are less than 6" tall, roughly human shaped, but with nasty teeth and insectile wings. They secrete resins and glue together whatever they can find to form a hive in a similar matter to wasps. There is a single queen producing eggs until the hive is large enough to split in a swarm. Hives vary in size, from as small as a large water barrel to merged hives that are as large as a lorry, and almost as loud. Like wasps, they are voracious predators, drawing comparisons to schools of piranhas as much as anything. They are heavily allergic to iron, and, except for specialist, hive bound, brain castes, remember nothing about the previous day on waking. They are communicative and will speak any language clearly, chatty even, but they are, at core, amoralistic and always hungry. They can survive anywhere wasps do, which is pretty much everywhere bar Antartica. They do struggle in winter though.
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In Urban areas, one building in one hundred has a gargoyle sitting on it. They approximately the size of a human, with thin, strong limbs and no hair. They cannnot fly in the strict sense, but have a membrane connecting all limbs, and can glide like a flying squirrel. They have infrared pits in their mouth, and can trace the thermals in the air, allowing them to gain height when flying in a hot city. This sense is overwhelmed by the sun during the day, and so they tend to prefer to be being active at night. Their biochemistry is novel, and they are largely powered by destructive, energy emitting magics. As such, they eat stone, not meat, to rebuild their constantly decaying bodies. They are structurally quite lightweight, with a skeleton a little like foamed granite. Their blood is highly acidic, and they will drag raw and bloody fingers around stones to carve them off the building in bite sized chunks. They start the scenario spread out, but are intelligent, social creatures and will tend to form flocks of 12 individuals. Only the alpha pair mate in a flock, designated by the height of their roost.
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Finally, in the seas, one million mature giant whelks have been spread evenly across the deep water areas. These things are enormous and intelligent (although sign language would probably be the best way to try and communicate, using really big signs). They have a surprisingly good control over their own biology, adapting with things like a buoyant shell and jet propulsion to cross distances faster, or thickening their shell and hardening the edges to allow themselves to bury themselves into the sea floor. They can digest mostly anything that can be burnt, and will chew through the pipes of an oilrig to suck on the incredible black energy drink located within. They spawn seasonally, producing a clutch of a dozen eggs that are buried in the tidal zone on a beach. The mother whelk will lurk off shore for two months until the eggs hatch and the young swim into the sea and latch onto her back, then she will go on a ravenous feeding frenzy to make up for two months starvation. Even other whelks will avoid her in case they are torn apart and swallowed in her hunger. The young will double in size every year for the first twenty years, going from a kilogram to over a thousand tonnes. After this spurt, they are approximately 10m wide and high and 15m long. For then on they will grow linearly, adding fifteen tonnes to their bulk with each year. There is no upper known size or age limit. They have an acute sense of smell in water, and are capable of seeing and moving around on land, but more than two days without seawater full immersion would probably kill it, even with the whelk adapting itself.
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As everyone is not surprised by the creatures, but everyone is not sure why there has not been work done on this before, you have been appointed UN Commissar and Ambassador to other races, with a mandate to minimise problems and maximise the potential for all intelligent creatures to thrive. What are your first actions in office?
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
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Sea Skimmer
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Re: [rar] A quartet of races

Post by Sea Skimmer »

How do you expect is to consider this without the proper capitalization?
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
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madd0ct0r
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Re: [rar] A quartet of races

Post by madd0ct0r »

Sea Skimmer wrote:How do you expect is to consider this without the proper capitalization?
Muse of typos, thy name us irony :)

I think I wrote this on my phone across a couple of days. The automatic speller was dodgy already, and i frequently use science fiction terms as well as German and Vietnamese. I'd turn it off if I knew how.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
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