#space moth

The raptorslug homeworld has no moon, a sunlike star and weak tides. Only one creature ever crawled out of the water, which had a mobile gametophyte phase and a photosynthetic sporophyte phase. Every macroscopic land organism is evolved from this source and about 70% of species have retained the two stage lifecycle.

Raptorslugs evolved from a cursorial pack hunter, much like wolves. Their governmental systems have even more diversity than human governments, and countries are usually smaller than on earth. The pack structure rarely plays into government, but frequently into social events and workplace culture. A raptor has a couple packs: their sport friends, their job, whatever other hobbies. A pack always does something together. Your mate is usually not part of your pack, unless you're also on some team together. Raptorslugs genuinely appreciate the corporate pizza party.

Raptorslug culture centers dances, sport and architecture.

The males with their attractive blue dance much like birds of paradise (I'm thinking of the Greater lophorina). There are many styles of dance, but they all involve the wings and usually involve bouncing or shaking. One of the more common interspecies relationships is female raptorslugs (or gay males) with a human in bright clothing who knows how to use a fan. Human with fan is just as attractive as a natural male raptorslug. They would date drakes or herder kaledevids too, but those species have such different conceptions of romance that it rarely works out.

Sports are often derived from hunting in some way. They're one of the few times when it's polite to unsheathe your mandibles. Most sports are meant to evoke a pack taking down a foe, and are rarely two teams on equal ground competing to get a ball into a goal. They prefer to try to get a certain score, with no opponent team. One sport is basically soccer, except there's only one team, and everyone is blindfolded and the field is full of various obstacles. Another popular sport just involves releasing a xenogazelle into a large fenced in area and ten guys work together to kill it with their teeth, or various more 'civilized' variations. The few competitive sports they have are thievery based. Get 'meat' flags from a 'carcass' while the other team tries to chase you away and get the flags for themselves.

Their architecture often evokes bird nests. Round, winding, spiraling, woven. They think bricks look cheap and low effort. Particularly impressive buildings look like gnarled trees, bulging and intertwining as they ascend.

Raptorslugs' sporophyte phase has atrophied into something resembling a placenta. The egg is fertilized, grows into a flat thin sporophyte within the womb, and develops two baby raptorslugs within it from spores.

Moths are more complicated, with a culture and psychology so alien that it's generally just too much work to understand. There are over 100 species of moth, all intelligent, all different levels of intelligence. These species act like and sometimes include breeds, selectively bred for specific purposes. If raptorslugs didn't exist, moths would be capable of building a spaceship on their own (the empire's standard definition for intelligence) but they wouldn't have wanted to. Moths simply don't have the ambition to leave their planet or invent fire or agriculture. They'll gladly run your datacentre but they would never bother inventing it on their own. They just want their sporophyte trees safe. The occasional species has now been bred for ambition but these are still rare.

Moths are easy to work with however, as they think in contracts. They'll do what you ask, and in exchange, usually they ask for their trees to be protected. Sometimes they'll ask for something more complex, like that one time a colony wanted import laws to be relaxed

Moths clearly have some sort of culture. They work differently, want their habitats differently depending on the colony, and experiments show it isn't genetic. But they don't do anything for fun. They don't make art or watch shows. They read, but they strongly prefer nonfiction. They enjoy maps. It's hard to befriend a moth and impossible to date one.

Fuzzy alien moth AU version of Noir. Because Spaaaaceeee fantasy is fun.

Behold… my Child (and the glowy thing they’re holding too) ((and the Erebid moth I used as reference))