#onierosphere

Also called the common or white clown, the whiteface clown is a popular species of domestic clown. They’re more relaxed in temperament than the average red clown, but tend to be less suited for young children and thus have fewer breeds.

The Peepratle is a small (the thickest portion of its body not exceding the diameter of a pop can) animal that spends its life in gardens, which it feircely defends as it’s territory. If the garden of it’s selection has a border, it will take that up as the edge of its domain. Peepratle inhabiting unpartitioned gardens wilk wander them in broad, circular paths, drifting slowly through the area in this roundabout way. When it encounters what it feels to be a threat, it thrusts forward its tail and flares the tendtils to appear as voluminous as possible, with the brigtly colored ‘heads’ it bears like fruit peeping furiously all the while. Every head has its own pitch and none of them sound in sync, making their racket extra disorienting.

The only eyes the peepratle has are on its true head; the spots that mark its tail-faces are just that. It’s true mouth cannot make any sound other than a frantic, breathy hissing, and only if put under extreme stress. It is also the only head with teeth, jaw muscles, or a throat, which it puts to best use on suitably small garden fauna. Despite this, the tailheads nip (mean but ultimately harmless) at every opportunity, sometimes they capture and dissolve small flies in their nectarine saliva, but this is largely incidental and cannot sustain the peepratle.

In winter they vanish to wherever it is lizards go when it freezes. In spring when they first reappear they enter a reproductive phase where the largest of their tailheads turn a nearly artificial shade of pink and begin exuding an even more potently floral-scented saliva. Insects that have visited two different peepratle are trapped by the second one, which seals, hardens, then falls off, eventually hatching into a tiny new peepratle with a single tailhead. The parent very rarely is aware of this happening, thinking only of patrolling it’s garden and snapping up nearby grasshoppers. When it encounters another peepratle it viciously attacks to drive them out, having no tolerence for any of its own kind, which is just as well, since these individuals are usually it’s own offspring or other vagabond hatchlings looking for their own territories to settle.