#posthuman

VS

These are oc All Tomorrows posthumans made for a contest! Long All Tomorrows style biography of these creatures and their world, plus a bonus posthuman, under the cut.

They go as follows:

* Gardeners, titan descendants that evolved fur and split their trunk in two for better manipulation.

For their lore, I imagine them taking shelter in caves where they would find and begin farming fungi like some ants do since the droughts that accompany ice ages destroyed their crops. Gardening and farming would become important parts of their culture and their funeral rites would include the dead being used as fertilizer

* Merfolk, hand flapper descendants that became aquatic, seal-like posthumans

The only lore I have for them is that they became aquatic as a result of the aridification of their environment forcing them to spend more time in the water.

They are among the least fleshed out species

* Hivers, temptor descendants that survived the comet strike by scavenging and learning to ration food which helped them evolve sapience and become fully eusocial.

Hiver society is comprised of:

A queen, responsible for passing laws and producing more workers, soldiers and the like

several younger females that serve as advisors before becoming queens themselves once they reach a certain age and become sessile

drones aka reproductive males

workers and soldiers, sterile males tasked with gathering resources and defending the colony respectively

* Sprinters, strider descendants that survived by initially using their color changing abilities as a threat display, rappidly shifting between different colors to confuse and dissorient the killer chickens. As a response, the chickens evolved better camouflage to more easily ambush the striders, starting a predator-prey armsrace that resulted in both the chickens and the striders diversifying into many different lineages. The sprinters belong to a lineage that avoided predation by being too fast to catch, that evolved sapience thanks to their dexterous hands and social behaviour which allowed them to use tools and eventually drive their predators to extinction.

* Survivors (special thanks to u/AskGoverntale on reddit for the name and parts of their lore), prey descendants that became arborial, orangutang-like posthumans on the level of stone age humans. Their numbers would start dropping when the killerfolk migrated to their teritories since both species competed for the same resources and the killerfolk had the advantage of better social structures. Despite that, they manged to survive in some isolated pockets of forest and become cryptids in killerfolk society

Next up are the blindfolk and mantelope descendants, which I have made 2 descendants for each

* Molemen, blindfolk descendants that evolved burrowing adaptations (Before anyone says anything, I have already been informed that their claws are too long and thin to be good for digging), allowing them to escape being crushed by digging their own caves. For their culture, since they're completely blind, I imagine things like social status being determined by sound with bells being a common piece of jewlery.

They would eventually discover the surface which, to them, was like discovering an entirely new world, one that they would be hesitant to explore at first, with it being common practice for convicts to be exiled there with the hopes of them dying, which they not only survived but thrived and formed their own civilizations there

* Spidermen, same as the previous idea except they became way more adapted for burrowing before starting to spend more time on the surface and evolving into spider-like creatures with legs derived from fingers

* Atavists, mantelope descendants that reevolved semidexterous hands due to an atavistic mutation that allowed them to keep their sapience and become the fastest advancing posthuman civilization thanks to all the knowledge they obtained from the qu

* Atavists (couldn't come up with a new name but the previous one works for this one too), mantelope descendants that lost their sapience like in the book before reevolving it later on

You might notice that I didn't make a bone crusher descendant and that is for several reasons.

The first is that their extinction makes no sense. It's not revealed why exactly they died out, just that they did while implying that it was caused by their scavenging lifestyle which makes no sense, nothing was stopping them from hunting or even domesticating and leaving the meat to ferment.

Huarva beloved ---

Daybreak at the Ancestor Bough