#ct mub

LANGUAGE DOC: N/A. Mubs speak across the species barrier and digitally mostly with various complicated soundboard codes and amongst themselves with an interlocking system of basically purring and strilidulary sounds made using their hands. Not Speakable By Humans.

Herbivorous with the express exception of their haploid ‘grub’ larval stage, as a holdover from how genetic recombination works. Similar to cows in that they have an extremely long digestive system and can ‘chew cud’, as their diet consists mostly of various grasses. Sleep schedule completely irrespective from time of day. Fun fact, their eyelids completely block out light! Not quite herd animals, just like ground sloths in that they Got Real Big and being able to stomp on things was enough to be safe as an animal

Hexopodal tundra animals. The very front legs are skinny and lightly fuzzy, the middle pair function as hands, the very back pair are big fluffy bunny-like legs. Mubs CAN hop about but since they’re approximately the size of cows it’s more energy than it’s worth. Their faces are flat and have huge eyes and big fluffy ears, and their mouths sort of open up along where you’d ASSUME their jawline is.

(See the above diagram)

The mub homeplanet is typically called some variation of ‘Iceball.’ It’s a cold, icy, tidally locked place, with almost all cities built around the outer ring of warmer terrain, since that’s the environment that mubs are most equipped to handle. Major cities include Sunspot, Singing Wind, and Sheertower. The inner ring of the warm zone has the most species of grass but since the tempuratures are so much higher they’re difficult to obtain and thus considered delicacies. Mub cuisine is almost entirely grasses :)

Mubs have three sexes only loosely tied to societal perception of gender because of how reproduction works for them: some mub languages have pronoun distinctions for said sexes, some don’t. Naturally, the groups that speak the ones that do tend to care more about it. Maybe half of the population of mubs born on the mub homeplanet, Iceball, can be assed enough to actually consider themselves part of any of those groups enough to have it even qualify as a gender identity.

Said sexes are Englishly named ‘barn’, ‘halt’, and ‘nest’, with the corresponding neopronouns (most spacefaring mubs don’t really care either way for them, as on average they’re from Sunspot and speak a language that doesn’t make the distinction) ‘ze’, ‘xe’ and ‘zi’, which are all pronounced identically.

Barn mubs have distinct grub-carrying capacity in that their overcoat layer is more stretchy. 

Halt mubs can enter light hibernation, assumedly for the purposes of guarding nests. 

Nest mubs have spinnerette glands in their very front legs, for the purposes of weaving nests.

Actual mub reproduction is interesting only in that the process is that, seasonally, mubs produce ‘grubs’, which are haploid larval mubs that can either be cooked and eaten as a delicacy (different cultures of mub from all across the planet argue loudly against each other on whether this is moral or not) or let into an enclosed space for two to three weeks, where they will kill and eat each other to recombine their genes and pupate into a form actually resembling a child, the imago. Traditionally, a union of a barn, nest, and halt will all ceremonially throw their grubs in a cave, but basically nobody cares about that kind of thing these days, you just need at least two individuals to make some babies, and in any case they get communally raised unless the parents REALLY care.

Mub government is mostly in gigantic committees, all huge councils and stuff that are secretly more councils wearing a council-shaped trench coat. For the most part, organizations are left to their own devices except to report to the stage above them, and by the time you get to the ‘top’ you’ve reached Council + Committee Hell where news travels slowly, except for the Undivided Task Force. Those guys have so many failsafe plans and contingency plans. Doooon’t even worry about it

examples of the four sophont species in clawtact, with a human for scale.