Someday I need to do up a full post about rules of hospitality for the species I work on, but here's a few tidbits just for now.
Most Erinaen cultures hold that a colony should have housing set aside for visitors to the area, though what that looks like varies. For instance in some locations there are specific trees that can only be used for and are all that can be used for housing travelers. In others this housing is kept to the outskirts of the colony, which makes for some interesting urban restructuring as the colony expands and these places become open to use different purposes.
As a general Osmosian den systems will have 'guest dens' dug out specifically to house visitors to the territory. Osmos V is a rough planet, nomadic merchants are pretty common, and the species as a whole has had a rough history, so it's expected in the vast majority of Osmosian cultures that other Osmosians will be welcome in the pack dens so long as they behave with the proper decorum.
There's no cultural expectation of hospitality towards non-Osmosians, it doesn't harpoon the standing of a pack or clan, but it is generally in good form to extend it. The rules of hospitality on the guest side are more strict in those situations though.
Among Kwarrel's culture hospitality is... wibbly. Settled Herds aren't considered to have any obligation to show hospitality to traveling women, but any lone herd or collection of them will have an area marked out for Bachelor Herds to stay and they are entitled to certain standards of behavior for as long as they're on one's turf. Religious institutions and hospitals typical have housing for travelers, and are expected to put up anybody who woman needs the bed. Bachelor Herds even when gathered together will keep a respectful distance between their caravans, but if they cross paths with men traveling without a herd are expected to take him in and treat him as one of theirs for as long as he stays.
Among Lenopan hospitality rules vary wildly, but the most commonplace is that households from upriver communities are expected to show hospitality and give sanctuary to travelers from downriver. Because the fuckers downriver are more likely to be flooded out and need somewhere to go until they can get resettled.
Which gets really interesting when you remember that a well-used Lenopan act of war is to fabricate a flood to wipe through your downriver neighbors. So, since these rules, as is common in most cultures, hold that hosts and guests have standards of treatment and behavior that must be met, there have been so many cases of upriver communities flooding downriver ones, only to then end up with strong downriver influence in their cultures as a result of survivors of the assault heading upriver as refugees and ending up members of the community.
It's actually thought that might be part of why the rules were put in place in the first place, was to try to discourage active flooding by making taking care of any survivors, in their own homes, the aggressors' active duty.
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What do you headcanon as the limit to osmosian and lenopan shapeshifting abilities, and do you headcanon any abilities for Perisons?
Okay, to start us off, no, Perison have nothing going on. They, like the vast majority of species including humans and Revonnahganders, don't have any special abilities going on. They just Are.
Lenopan can shift into anything, technically. They're restricted by size. Fuckers change shape, they change color, they change texture, but they can't change their overall mass. The end result is they can shrink themselves down to about a sixth their normal size, and can expand themselves out to about three times, but the weight will always be the same. Hitting any of the Lenopan at that wedding when they were human-shaped? Would have been like hitting a brick. If Lucy made herself bigger? She'd be less sturdy and solid than normal. The former is generally used as a defensive act, and the latter as an intimidation tactic.
Osmosians get fun. Part of the powerset is matter manipulation, which is what Kevin is using when he gets and armor and starts turning hands into shit. This means that after absorbing a material, Osmosians can manipulate that material into whatever form they so choose. They can't do shit like change color, but shape is easy-peasy. They're also capable of minor shapeshifting of their own bodies- not to the point of gaining extra limbs and such but enough to make some changes to form and function. You may have seen in my own stuff I have them able to swap from bipedal to quadrupedal as needs demand. Everything is about at that level.
They can change their mass as well, though that's more relevant to the next section. Their powers allow them to take in energy to convert into mass, or to expel mass as energy, allowing them more versatility in that category. In fact I've mentioned in other places, so far as my shit, Kevin tends to consume his own clothing for mass when he does chimera shifting, reforming whatever he needs either at the time or when he turns back. You can actually tell items he's formed himself because they'll be missing things like seams or proper connection points for things like buttons, items will all be just one big piece.
And then, sometimes, there's other DNA involved. Osmosians get weird when other species' DNA is involved. If you've absorbed DNA from another species then you can shift bits and bobs from them. As we see with Aggregor. Kevin is weird in that he straight hybridizes with shit directly, and that he can shift entirely to species/combinations he's used before. These complete shifts aren't normal for somebody who didn't inherit species.
And for that we have to go into reproduction- long story short DNA Osmosians have absorbed can be used in the reproductive process, fuckers have no control over it, yes that means Devlin might be part tree, we don't know. I don't intend for that to be why he grows like two-odd foot during puberty in my shit but you do you. The point is, an Osmosian can- with effort- shift between their own species. It's in there, it's all set. I have it as why Alan can do that shit, there's Ossy in there.
For Kevin to be able shift between species and to and from his chimeric forms? Is Not. Normal. It means Kevin essentially has had more fucking species grafted onto his genetics, rather than just having DNA stored to call on again or pass onto offspring. Whether this is something he was always able to do or something the Omnitrix caused is unknown, though if it was caused by the Omnitrix then it's a change it made to him specifically because K11k had fucking Null Guardian in there.
Again, this kid is Not Fucking Normal, even by Ossy standards.
So, uh, yeah. Aggregor is the standard, Kevin is weird, and Ossys in general are a bigger mess than Lenopan, while the Perison are just hoping to stay out of the way.
[Image Description: A map of the fictional world Ha'n, featuring seven major landmasses and a plethora of island clusters and chains of various sizes. The oceans are a pale blue. The landmasses have a base color of light brown denoting desert areas, with areas of darker and light brown mottling denoting mountain ranges and white patches marking snowy areas- primarily high mountain ranges. The planet has no ice caps. The majority of the landmass is marked with large patches of deep grey-blue denoting differing levels of plant cover. From a medium tone denoting grasslands and other low vegetation areas, a slightly darker tone denoting forested areas, and the darkest denoting dense forests. /End description]
After exactly 439 days, this map is done!
Kwarrel's homeworld everybody!
Welcome to Ha'n, first planet in the Fai'r system and home of the Perison. With a global average temperature of a balmy 71 degrees Fahrenheit and a plethora of plants in shades of deep blue, it makes for a fine place to visit and lovely home for its native life.
A planet of easy winters and plentiful growth have proved a perfect starting point for the herbivorous Perison, nearly half of which live a nomadic life in small herds traversing the planet.
[Image Description: Another map of the fictional planet Ha'n. This one features the same water and landmasses and the one prior, though here the colors denoting plant density have been exchanged for around eighteen patches of six bright colors (yellow, red, green, purple, blue, and orange) used to demote political divisions on the planet. On the large continent in the southwest a small bronze colored star can be seen near a political border and a small inland sea. /End description]
Ha'n, since becoming a unified planet, has divided itself into several regions for the sake of better governance. The greatest of these regions- each of which is divided further internally, can be seen on the map above.
Also visible is the location of Kwarrel's hometown, roughly. It's hard to get exact when you're working at this scale. Set at the base of a mountain range and not especially far from both a large body of water and a political border. Raised in a family of farmers, beadmakers, and prospective miners, he stayed in the area until his mid-teens, when he began an nomadic life that took him in a circuit of the region and up the western coast before he finally left the planet in his early twenties.
[Image Description: Another map of the fictional planet Ha'n. Again the landmasses and water haven't changed, but the solid patches of color have been replaced with a rainbow of colors fading into and out of each other, covering all of the planet's landmasses. /End description]
And here you can get a glimpse at the major cultural areas (not, of course, accounting for more specific cultures within each greater collection of related cultures) across the planet.
While there are some traits that are common across even unrelated cultures (there's only a small few ways marriage is handled and it's based more on resources than anything else, for example), the wide variety of inhabited regions have led to a plethora of cultural differences in everything from food to religion. Though, on this blog the focus is primarily on the southwestern continent for obvious reasons.
Ya know, I've mentioned before that tattoos are common in Kwarrel's home culture, so let's hit on that a bit, huh?
For instance, men get tattooed more often and often have more tattoos than women. (Folks outside the binary of course do things their own ways, but that's it's own thing with less consistent trends than the highly binary gendered dealies of the general culture.) It's a thing that was more heavily gendered in the past, once upon a time you would pretty much never see a woman with a tattoo. Tattooing was in large part brought into the culture by foreign bachelors and so there was a strong tie to men from the start, that then got associated with specifically the male deities because of their history as foreign travelers, and the end result was tattoos becoming commonplace and very very much the purview of men. This has been changing relatively recently, women have started getting into it, but it's still mostly men.
Women also are more likely to have very meaningful tattoos. A lot of women's tattoos are a reworking of other cultural things. For instance, traditionally a woman would immortalize each of her children with a specific type of snowflake decoration that varies from area to area. An old tradition. But in the modern day, some women will instead get a snowflake tattooed for each of their children. Which has lead to a decline in tattoos depicting the sky, as- as mentioned in other posts- stars are depicted as snowflakes in Kwarrel's religion and the growing association of snowflakes in tattoos as representing children has scattered marbles with the whole thing.
In another instance, it used to be that when women left their herds to start a new one they would take something of home with them. Again, that still happens, but now it's becoming more common for women to instead get a tattoo representative of their birth herd.
On men, tattoos tend to be less meaningful. Not to say they don't have meaning, tattoos tend to do that and every person is different, but that while women more often get tattoos to commemorate important things, men have been getting tattoos long enough that the cultural expectation for import has worn further away. Men will get tattoos to commemorate herds they've been part of, places they've been, jobs they've held, gods they relate to, spouses and children (hardly if ever with snowflakes, there, more often with gems, mosses, and other small, masculine things), but also you'll see a lot more 'just because' tattoos. Interesting scenes, loved animals, all sorts of stuff.
Basically a woman will more often get a tattoo because something big happened. A man will more often get one because he was bored with an image in his head and money to burn.
Either way the commonality of script varies heavily. The regions around the alpine steppe? More heavy into script in tattoos, and then that fades off until you won't find shit for script well before you hit the southern coast.
Overall about 81% of men in Kwarrel's culture have at least one tattoo, as do about 53% of women. The majority of women with tattoos have fewer than five, while the majority of men with tattoos have more than seven. Kwarrel had gotten 16 over his life, though he lost his favorite alongside his tail.
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Okay, imagine I just slammed a parlor door open because I am here with some vision and color vision things!
We're gonna start with our most boring bastards and work our way down, kk?
Perison
Yes, Perison are the boring ones. They're just, chill. Perison are primarily visual and very diurnal- in fact thanks to them we're also starting with the worst low light vision in our little group, about on par with humans, maybe a touch worse. But leaving that aside, they're trichromatic, like humans are. On average their visual spectrum ranges from 400 nm to about 750 nm, which is just a touch narrower than the human range. They can't see as far into the violets as we can, but can see as far into the reds. As a result of this, when it comes to color and working with it Perison are very similar to humans, can see mostly the same colors excepting very violet tones.
Where they fall off, however, is in their visual acuity. Perison tend to be nearsighted by human standards. Not to the point where a human could be considered to need glasses, but closer than not.
~~
Erinaens
Yes, they are actually only number two on this list. We've mentioned Erinaens before- excellent low-light color vision, high movement sensitivity, low visual acuity just in general that's worsened in bright light, mildly photophobic, best low-light vision out of the lot. It's almost like they're a nocturnal species from a long line of nocturnal species. What we haven't touched on, is color vision in general.
Erinaens are tetrachromatic. They've got one more set of cells grabbing for color than we do. Specifically Erinaens can see a little ways into the ultraviolet spectrum. They can generally see between 350 nm and 715 nm. This means they can see into ultraviolet at about the level of blacklights (which range down to 315 nm), but can't see nearly as deep into the reds as humans and Perison can. They don't really need to, most things they care about at that point also give off uv color, so, evolution was like 'what? some of you fuckers lost that? eh whatever'.
A key facet of this, that we should probably cover here, is that this has a strong effect on how they see color compared to humans. Color vision, as we know it, is additive, and a benefit of things like having a whole other category to work with is that there's more interplay to take into account. This means that while Erinaens and humans have a similar visual range, they see those colors very differently. And this can lead to some weird shit when it comes to categorizing colors- they have a whole other circle on the venn diagram that we're missing.
Another interesting fact is that Erinaens do have uv markings. Specifically, the tip of Erinaen quills have color in uv. Nobody is quite sure why, but is it known that most of their near genetic relatives share the trait. Current theories are that it contributes to camouflage, that it helps make one look more intimidating when they raise their quills, and that it's a warning to predators that this fucker is venomous. The latter has people hemming because it's not just the venomous ones among their relatives that have these markings, but the possibility of Batesian mimicry has not been discounted.
~~
Lenopan
Lenopan have a male/female visual divide. Yes, I am just starting with that.
Male Lenopan are dichromatic- they have two sets of cells that contribute to color vision. Specifically they range from 380 nm to 575 nm, with a solid dip into the purples and a mosey into the yellows but mostly hanging out in the blues and greens. Mostly though their visual focus in on contrast sensitivity and movement sensitivity. Fuckers may not know what color you are, but if you're breathing they probably see you. They also have quite good visual acuity, but while their low light vision is better than humans and Perison? It's still not great by the standards of the group.
Female Lenopan, on the other hand, have the second best low light vision out of the lot. Not on par with Erinaens, but pretty fucking good. This is in part because, wait for it, they're trichromatic. Wait again- and they see uv. Specifically their low end is 320 nm compared to the males' 380 nm. This would actually put them ahead of Erinaens were it not for the fact that while Erinaens maintain full color vision in low light, Lenopan can only manage uv once the lights go down. They share in the great contrast and movement sensitivity, but the males have better visual acuity overall.
~~
Osmosians
Yeeeep.
So, the Osmosian color vision range is actually very similar to that of Erinaens. They're also tetrachromatic, they also see into uv, in fact their range is a little lower. Ossys can generally only go from 355 nm to 715 nm. So they see about as far into the reds and not quite as far into uv as Erinaens do. Their visual acuity also isn't great, despite their having the third best low light vision of the lot.
Osmosians are a very tactile species whose vision isn't fantastic. Their sense of touch is very precise, and they can sense both heat and electrical signatures. Fuck, they can sense magnetism and use it to navigate. But if you're asking them for great visual precision you're not getting it. In fact Osmosians are generally very nearsighted by human reckoning, to the point a human would definitely be required to wear glasses before doing something like driving.
(Why yes, Kevin is very tired of hearing about how odd it is to see a farsighted Osmosian, nobody has been hurt yet, don't push it)
But what puts them here at the bottom, as the top weirdos, is their color vision. They have a very similar visual range to Erinaens, not a lot of reds, a chunk of uv, it's all well and good, they can make out the fewest colors of anybody on this list.
By a landslide.
To explain, a human with really good color vision is going to be able to differentiate colors that are 1 nm apart. Most of the fuckers on this list are the same or, in the case of Perison, nearly that level, barely off. An Osmosian with really good color vision is going to need about 15 nm difference to tell colors apart.
In the same space an Erinaen might be able to make out 30 different shades? An Osmosian at their same level will make out 3.
And it's looking like Osmosians are actually evolving away from precision color differentiation. They aren't losing range, presumably because color is tied so strongly to seasonality on Osmos V that being able to tell your basic colors apart remains important, but tests done on their nearest evolutionary relatives have proven that while things like the sense of touch and their electromagnetism are better, color precision is worse. Moreso, their visual acuity is lower as well. Current theory is that this is the result of their becoming more fossorial, vision and color vision being less important underground than their other senses.
Okay, who wants a quick worldbuilding thing regarding how various species carry fat?
Starting with Erinaens, because why the fuck not and also they're already a little fat by human standards. Your average weight for an Erinaen leaves them with a round, what would be called a pear body shape in fashion, with weight skewing higher towards the poles. As far as additional fat on top of what is considered the average, most commonly it's seen to accumulate first around the belly, the lower back and the base of the tail, then around the thighs and calves, and moving up from there. In most Erinaens the lower arms and face seem to put on fat last, though of course as with humans and all species mentioned here every body is different and can go about things its own way.
Perison are another species humans would likely immediately think of as fat. The average for males leans toward high muscle mass completely covered by a healthy fat layer- think what you see with competitive weightlifters- while females tend to have a higher ratio of fat and more fat, leading to greater girth especially around the torso per their height. Additional fat most commonly seems to accumulate on the back, before working it's way around the belly and chest and down to the tail. From there it seems about even whether it accumulates in the neck and face or the thighs next, finishing with the arms.
Tetramand, meanwhile, will often come across as quite lean to humans. Unlike the other species mentioned so far, Tetramand aren't especially predisposed to subcutaneous fat aside from that of breast tissue, leaning more towards intramuscular fat. In non-scientific terms, these fuckers have some wagyu-style marbling. When you do get build-ups of subcutaneous fat, it most often starts and focuses at the chest, then spreading to the belly, back, and rear. It's uncommon for Tetramand to build up noteworthy fat deposits elsewhere.
For Kineceleran most standard body fat is carried around the back of the base of the tail, going up the back of the hips. Otherwise they tend to be quite a lean species as a general rule. When it comes to extra fat, there's actually two main locations that fat build-up starts after those two, which has been tied to specific genes. For some individuals, especially those whose ancestry hails from more flat and open environs, excess fat past the back-hips and back-tail base tend to accumulate around the torso. For others, especially from more mountainous or twisty areas, fat accumulation tends to focus on the tail more. Either way the last places fat tends to gather are the arms and the legs, and once you get notable fat deposits in the thigh that's considered 'morbid obesity' levels- Kineceleran bodies will do everything short of have you cough up your liver to avoid putting fat on the thighs. Even slow members of the species move fast enough that a lack of a gap there risks serious injury.
Now with all of these there's a general level of weight that is the average across the population. You get areas where people weigh more, you get areas where people weigh less, but in general there is a singular or dual 'average' that you can point at. Osmosian weights can vary more widely, by location, by lifestyle, by time of year, by time of day (though that one is a smaller difference most of the time), by sex, by breeding intentions- Fuckers' averages can have a variance in the vicinity of 50 pounds, mostly made up of fat, depending on these factors. Individuals living on the coast tend to be notably leaner than elsewhere, nomadic packs have higher fat reserves, as do eggbearers, individuals tend to develop small fat reserves after sunning and so will weigh more in the afternoons and these reserves will be bigger during the summer, eggbearers put on weight when they intend to nest, especially those in non-nomadic packs. As a general rule Osmosians carry fat primarily in their tails and slightly less so in the torso. The neck and face most commonly put on fat before the limbs, and the development of fatty jowls is common. In fact it's seen as a goal among non-nomadic eggbearers intending to nest- when you're going to be underground acting as a living food source for your children for, hopefully, nearly a year Earth time? you want some fat reserves, even if your Nesting is going to come around and feed you.
Okay, so I hit on Erinaens in a different post, but who wants a bit on tables and seating and such for Perison, Ossys, and Lenopan?
Lenopan
Tables and such on Hasiel tend to be a little low by western human reckoning, just about two foot high. Hasiel is a high gravity planet, so pretty much everything is lower to the ground there. Desks and tables are traditionally made of wicker, wood, or baxy carapace, though in the modern era metals and plastics have become more common. The most common builds are a surface (not necessarily flat, it really depends) help up by an I-shaped panel framing.
Seating, meanwhile, in even lower than that. While again in the modern era the material used are more varied, as a rule Lenopan seating consists of three or four inch thick wood platforms wrapped in leather. Nowadays though, for the right price, you can find a variety of styles of similar size, even with cushions for added comfort. Most seating is for singular use, as Lenopan do generally enjoy their personal space, but platforms can be found in a range of sizes and shapes to accommodate piling behavior.
Osmosian
Osmosian tables and the like vary depending on what you're looking at. A worktable is going to be taller than a dining table, or instance. The former you can expect to be a little more than three foot, crafted normally from metal or bone, coming in various shapes and styles depending on the individual and what they're doing, often with the four legged build humans are accustomed to. Dining tables are only really found in communal eating areas or being used as banquets for providing water and snacks in the working dens, and as such tend to be large and very long to accommodate more individuals. They also tend to be lower, as low as two foot in some territories. Construction is generally solid, formed of blocks of stone or metal with an indent on either side to allow for people to stick their feet if they so choose.
Seating is even more a thing. At dining tables you generally get long bench seating, a little shorter than you would see in the west, often with I-shaped supports, but also in some areas it's more common to see a little higher-set platform seats to more comfortably allow for non-bipedal shapes, and in others you'll see a combination of the two. In work spaces the seats are higher and individual, little under two and a half foot, often again four-legged designs. These come in various styles, but the most common are a basic rounded stool and a slightly wider version vaguely similar to the world's narrowest lounge, with a piece attached off the side back for one to relax against without getting in the way of the tail. Construction of these seats is overall from metal normally, but the seats themselves and any other areas mean to come into direct contact with the sitter are often made from bone, and sometimes even cushioned. Outside of these settings, however, in social, domestic, and rest areas Osmosian seating consists of bone or leather mats upon the floor, which are individual outside of personal dens.
Perison
Perison tables and seating come in two varieties- high and low. Because Perison are fucking huge. Seriously, the best shot we've got for size comparison has Kevin coming to Kwarrel's hip at best, that fucker is at least ten foot tall.
As a result of this most tables and such on Ha'n are actually pretty low by the standards of the species. Mind when you're like ten foot tall 'low' is relative, it's still like two foot off the ground, but still. High tables, as the name suggests, are taller, at about four and even up to five. Homes will most often have both varieties. They tend to be made of wood and metal, for a mixture of appearance and durability- the wood will be thick and the metal base built like it expects artillery fire. Typically the base itself will be built with reinforced legs or in some sort of box style.
"But Achi, you have not explained why their tables are low if Perison are so damn big?" Have you ever built a chair for, say, a rhinoceros?
The majority of Perison sit on mats and cushions on the floor or ground. Hence the low tables- if you're ten foot tall and sitting on the ground two foot isn't that a bad height for a table. Little low, but not horribly so. High tables are reserved for the disabled, the elderly, and those of high social status (which for a lot of Perison is the elderly, who are more likely to be disabled, and it all just sorta swings back around), because they get actual chairs. Normally stools made of cushioned blocks of metal or stone, whether they'll be solid or have a hollow center depends on the area and preferences of the owners, as will whether whether there will be openings in the base and in what manner. In most households these will be used primarily by the oldest generation living there. There's many options across the planet for adding backing to these chairs, either via the use of secondary furniture akin to sturdier and more cushioned varieties of the Erinaen backrests described here, or by having spaces on the seat where a detachable back can be slotted in after having comfortably sat down.
Group seating is similar to general seating, just at larger scale, and with the change that high couches pretty much always come with a separate piece of backing furniture rather than anything detachable or coming with nothign at all.
