#i love my weird beanpole huntress lady i love her so mauch

[ntls-24722]

An ancestor to the Zebrapeople!

Partial stripes, mostly brown, and kind of sapient! I don't know how to explain their level of intelligence, but like... they have stone tools, but they currently can't create language, so imagine the setbacks from there. They're also mostly octopodal, and are only hexapodal for short bursts.

Zebrapeople actually have the facial problem that we have with the rest of their genus, where smiling is actually seen as a threat for everyone else. Or at least, the way they smile. The teeth being out bothers them, but not compared to how much the gums being exposed do.

Zebraelves evolved slightly tighter lips to have their teeth slightly out gives them a background sense of order since the baring of teeth, like in our primates, is a threat, and it also made the baring of gums a lot more dramatic. But as the species began to coagulate into one giant supercolony, the baring gums was recontextualized into the basis for most of their facial expressions.

Also; the origin of their spinnerets.

Hagfish method, baby! It's gross and works! Quagga-elves originate from a much wetter environment, so they could afford the water loss when making gross protein threads inundated with the stuff. But as they moved to more arid environments, the slime got drier and eventually was repurposed as silk... in the females.

Originally, male zebraelves were supposed to have venomous spurs, but I thought it'd be better for them to still have this basal trait. Partially because they need it more!

Fraternities are a treacherous journey and male zebraelves aren't maintaining nor with their subcolony for most of the time, so it's more useful to have a gross-out factor that keeps from from being food to literally everything than to have a durable building tool/textile.

And speaking of how treacherous the journeys of fraternities are;

This queen's boytoy is no longer a boy, she's become a worker after losing her hearing due to getting an ear infection because disabilty accommodations in fraternities are, no hyperbole, nonexistant, for a combination of the unfriendly job environment and fucked up eugenics reasons! I really did try to avoid the kind of real life problems they have, partially because I didn't want to give fictional little guys the same societal burdens we go through, but also because if I talk about shit like music man eugenics i sound 10x more insane than I already do. unfortunately it becomes a reoccurring thing when making fictional societies.

Her relationship with the queen is looked rather down upon - neither of them care very much, especially the queen, who finally has someone she can talk to who gets it, to put it plainly. The two reproductive sexes in zebraelves are very policed, which is a rather large problem in zebraelf society.

Also; Bipedal bugs! The best predator against Debu.

Their method is to use those two arms to latch on and just rake their sickle toe-claws against the skin as hard and fast as they can which is very effective against Debu, who, despite their brute strength, have very sensitive, weak skin! They're small, but fast, and they do a lot of damage really quickly, which is the problem, since they'll tear through already open wounds and deepen them, even leading to infection.

Sindeer often has to deal with them, since she's a large target as a lone huntress.

i forgot her back fur. dont look

Also: today was my last day of class! Which, paradoxically, means my account is actually going to slow down? All of the almost daily music man posts are actually class doodles, and now there's going to be no more class for me to get bored in and make music man. But that means more digital artwork, which is generally higher quality, soooo???? double edged sword