we are out of oat milk

Thanks for the recs! Love both insects a ton. The Eulopha actually aren't, though that species of Parasitoid wasps are so cool (look them up seriously). I was going to pick them, but I would love to explain why I didn’t:

The Eulopha are specifically Wasps of the Tribe Spathius

I chose them because I needed to find a Parasitoid that actually used beetles for their eggs and thus justifying why they would have taken over a town with Darkling Beetles (though technically this species usually targets other beetles, its just the closest I have), and they also had be found in China, because Oilik is inspired buy Dandan Oilik in the Taklamakan Desert. Thus I settled on this tribe of wasps.

I picked Dandan-Oilik as the inspiration because its an ancient ruin town that was once on the Silk Road but faded when its oasis dried up. Seemed like the type of place Silk Moths would rule while also being a really neat bit of Chinese history.

Thus I also selected the Darkling Beetles as belonging to the Genus Tenebrionidae and the Locusts Oedaleus decorus asiaticus

because both could have been native to the oasis when it was at its height. These days this part of the desert is entirely uninhabitable even to many invertebrates, so I'm doing a lot of guess work as to what would have been there at the time. But I wanted to pick bugs that would make sense in the region.

I would love to be more specific on the wasp and beetle species, but the world hates funding invertebrate research, so I'm doing my best!

indian striped hyena (hyaena hyaena) in blackbuck national park, velavadar, gujarat, india

Cellulose nitrate was used to make dice from the late 1860s until the middle of the twentieth century, and the material remains stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode.