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On most planets, among most civilizations, cannibalism is a standard taboo. But when it’s one of the adaptations a species needed to reach the point of civilization, it’s a party!

The friend-eaters on Rat-Teemo manage a sustainable global civilization and have a history which is relatively low on the Kuru Military Assistance Program’s War Index (lucky for them). When their genus was young, evolution tossed them a strange boon; flesh with naturally antibacterial properties.

Cannibalism had developed prior to this, but the meat of individuals with higher resistance to bacterial pathogens meant greater resistance to disease, and also to rot. In times of hardship, dead relatives provided a crucial source of food, with religious rituals and customs building up around these times of sadness and survival.

This could’ve led to a history full of war, sustaining the food needs of armies as they cut through their enemies twice, once on the battle field and once on the dinner plate. But the cannibalistic customs stayed within families or other close social units; the meat of foreigners seen as suspect until ideas of racism disappeared from their societies.

Eggs, being an externalization of the primordial soup from which we all emerge, are an excellent source of nutrients. Eggs, being a still-developing organism encased in a fairly pregnable shell, are an extremely vulnerable source of nutrients.

If you’re foraging wild eggs on the planet Owo-Luwo you might find a dug-out den in the middle of the woods with a bounty of eggs. This could an external chamber of a nest of root-keepers; you need to stay away from those eggs.

Stay for a while and you might see some local fauna come upon the same dug-out and start gulping down the eggs whole. Those that survive will later spit up the eggs to share with their own nests. As you watch the feeding frenzies you’ll see some of the predators start to choke. To be fair, you and I might also choke after swallowing an egg whole. But what you would be witnessing, as the beast falls to the ground, gargling and wheezing, is a different act of predation.

Root-keepers lay two types of eggs, male and female. Male eggs are plain, smooth, nutritious. Female eggs appear the same. More male eggs are laid than female eggs so the predators have a reliable food source, because without the egg-eaters the female eggs would have nothing to eat. The difference with female eggs is moisture, or lack thereof. A female egg is laid inert, and only activated when moisture, such as the saliva of a would-be predator, seeps into the egg’s pores. The sudden drying of the mouth is what keeps the female egg from smoothly sliding down any throats and causes the choking and suffocation of its prey.

Squeezing through the underbrush to find the just-right piece of wood, the lone oily carpenter, a medium-sized furry beast of the rivers and banks, is closely pursued by a line of fire starters, tiny arthropods who find themselves magnetically attracted to the carpenters when the underbrush gets too thick.

The carpenter aims to complete a raft hut, a fairly advanced structure for a creature only scratching the surface of their ability to craft components. The technique of rock-scratching to sculpt pieces of wood through abrasion became instinct hundreds of thousands of years ago, but some have recently discovered rock-cutting; in which a larger piece of wood may be split upon a sharp rock, decreasing the needed number of wood-collecting trips. For this reason, the over-eager beaver struggles to pull a not-just-right piece of wood through the brush.

This is a great opportunity for the fire starters. They climb onto the carpenter’s fur and bite, not to envenomate or consume, but to spark. Fire starters and oily carpenters have performed this dance for millions of years; as the underbrush grows too thick, the carpenter’s pace slows, and the fire starters attack. Carpenters have oily fur which repels water, allowing them to swim more swiftly, but over time the more volatile oils have become dominant.

A blazing carpenter dashes as quickly as possible through the underbrush, spreading a small controlled blaze throughout the forest, quickly burning up excess leafage and scrubs. This co-evolution between the carpenters and fire starters is mutually beneficial, and beneficial to the rest of the forest ecosystem, creating rich soil and clearing forestways for larger animals. Carpenters like the easy trails for picking up wood, which is how this adaptation came to be; the ancestors of the carpenters with more flammable secretions had more success, so they had more offspring. While the fire starters benefit from new low growth and the release of seeds, which is why they are so attracted to the carpenter.

Life scales from the single unit of a species, the self, through to the family, the community, and anything beyond that depends on the particulars of the species. But just as the self dies, so does the family, the community, and the species. And some species leave more behind than others, transforming the physical ecosystem to the point where surviving species are forced to adapt to the built environment.

Meta-City Zero was the prototype ecumenopolic settlement of the now post-sapient civilization of the Kuru. As the galactic scale of the Kuru expanded, even small landmarks could occupy entire planets.

The meta-cities were prebuilt global settlements, leaving no exposed surface on the entire planet. Most natural life stands no chance, but total annihilation of life on a planet where life has placed its stranglehold is like getting all the adhesive off a surface where you pulled off a sticker; only possible if there is a concerted effort to do so. The Kuru didn’t have interest in annihilating species, they were ultimately just borrowing the space.

So when they finally leave, those bits of life which held on will be left to evolve in a gray environment composed entirely of rooms, hallways, and right angles; all rarities in the natural world. And if we’re talking about Meta-City Zero, we mean to talk about the total embrace of the unnatural by the natural.

One class of beast, which don’t make sense in the context of any other beasts, are given their own mantle, “roomies”. Roomies, enormous empty sacks of flesh, adhere themselves to the walls of an empty room, spreading its wrinkled skin, expanding into the angles of the room, until another meta-city beast walks in and is collapsed upon.

Mounds of loose trash conceal smaller organisms, or the other way around. False garbage is another class of life in Meta-City Zero, indistinguishable by the untrained eye or nose from true garbage. Any given pile may contain none, or be solely composed of them.

Research into the gigafauna of Lorathel shows evidence of genetic tampering and possible genetic fabrication. One theory, no better than a guess, supposes they were created to keep the planet itself from freezing to death. The atlas tortoise was covered in a previous edition of Local Guidebooks, Abridged:

The tortoises appear to walk primarily along the planet’s continental plate boundaries, kneading the crust and exciting volcanic activity. The sun, Gont, is relatively cold and the additional energy provided by volcanic activity seems integral to not only ecosystemic health, but planetary life as a whole.

Another variety of gigafauna seems to be the cause of the planet’s deserts. Most healthy planets will sustain some deserts as a quirk of the interplay between geography and the atmosphere, and this is mostly the case for Lorathel. Only mostly, because geography does not appear to play a role in its deserts.

The vine tyrants are a species of gigafauna which live only in Lorathel’s deserts. Though far smaller than the continent shaking atlas tortoise, the vine tyrant’s height and length are more than a match. This body form combined with the tyrant’s namesake vines form a semipermeable wall, thousands of miles long and tall enough to brush the bottoms of some clouds.

The vines, hairy tendrils which hang from the beast’s belly, form their own ecosystem. Swinging from the vines are a variety of reasonably-sized animals, scarcely aware that the vine tyrant is anything other than a feature of the landscape. This is the most habitable region of Lorathel’s deserts. While the vines serve several purposes, a primary role is drying the surrounding air.

It’s unclear whether the tyrants created the desert, or merely sustain it; but regardless of the preconditions, the most livable spaces in the desert are among the tyrant’s vines.

Finding love is hard. Fortunately for the animal world, they don’t have to worry about emotional connections and long-term commitment. The evolutionary imperative to reproduce compels us in both known and unknowable ways, and each species will go exactly as far as it needs to to pass on genetic material.

A post-coital snack is common for many species. The female will need additional energy to start forming offspring. A coital gift is sometimes presented before or after sex, but the greatest gift any of us can give is ourselves.

Consumption of the male isn’t uncommon, sometimes it’s the standard price to pay for continuing the family line. But most guys at least get out before going back in.

The female miniature vine rat of Wog-Ani gives birth to a mature vine rat. They have a very long incubation time relative to their size, giving birth to a child over half the size of the mother. This requires a lot of energy, which is where their venomous false vagina comes into play.

Within the reproductive canal of the vine rat, there’s a fork in the road where one path leads to normal reproductive success, and the other leads to certain death at the tip of venomous spur in the depths of the false vagina. Since the female could not normally take down a male on their own, this trick allows them to take out potentials suitors without a fight and provides them with plenty of food to provide to their incubating young.

Earlier in the evolutionary history of the vine rat, the evolution of the false vagina led to the preeminence of females within the vine rats’ niche, growing larger from easy access to food. But over time the males evolved a solution to their problem; certain death.

In those days, some vine rat males survived sex, their one-headed penis being directed down the true vagina, while the vast majority of males were envenomated and consumed. Over time, the males evolved double-headed penises, capable of going both routes at once. This method did lead to certain death, but since these double-headed males had a much higher reproductive success rate than the single-headed males, their genetic material won out.

The atmosphere of Derom is thick with war. Not the smell of blood, or rot, but actual physical war. The not-quite-microscopic species held aloft by air currents and Brownian motion live their lives in constant combat, attempting to gain an edge in their near invisible war. What little control they have over their motion is used to push opposing species towards the ravenous larva that covers the ground in mats. The larva, doing their part in the war effort, either consume the enemy or propel their parents back into the air by expelling air or flapping external body parts (depending on the species).

Hatching season is the most treacherous part of their year. Balloon-like eggs, floating high above the battlefields, start to deflate and fall slowly to the ground past the tiny combatants. Not only do the adults need to ensure their eggs land in their proper larval mats, but they need to avoid the mouths of the enemy larvae peaking from their eggs while pushing them towards their own larvae’s hungry mouths.