I realize as I write that there is something missing. Pets. Now, I don't mind the occasional pet from Earth, but really, I wish to Lucasize Trithofar (in the sense where George Lucas has been creative) and make many domesticated animals that are not from Earth.
This is a first list. I will update later.
Domesticated Animals that are Earthlike (they bare a strong enough resemblance to be called the same thing, even though they are not the same thing as what we have on earth. Effectively, the differences are mostly cosmetic, however).
· Birds: The birds of Trithofar are as varied as the birds of Earth, though some might be a little different, as in magical or mutant due to the effects of Mystroskus, purified magical power. For instance, imp-birds fail to be classified by Earth standards. Some of them are domesticated, for example:
o Sedgels: Fishing birds, trained to go out over lakes and streams and catch fish and bring them back to their masters.
o Struks: Large, crane-like birds domesticated and used for eggs and poultry meat.
· Canines: Trithofar has creatures like dogs, but in many places they are not necessarily pets, and the breeds are not the same. Some of them are magically altered as well. The canines of Trithofar have been driven out of Frosomia almost entirely by gremlins and other such creatures. But they are common to Terrilia, Morrigar (particularly Eastern Morrigar) and Allorinia. The Gincha and Caeborians are believed to both be races deriving from canine creatures in Trithofar. Many debate about whether or not either race have souls.
· Felines: Raigs (see below) have been domesticated into creatures very like cats with a little difference, which ends up having them called cats. Raigs will kill these creatures if they get them alone, so alley cats are not really all that common.
· Horses: Again, horses are pretty much the same, except for maybe a few cosmetic differences, perhaps in color, perhaps in speed and ability to travel, etc.
· Raigs: These are a combination of large rodent and cat. They can be quite pesky and annoying, though some people keep them as pets.
"Original" sorts of pets and domesticated animals:
· Driggits: Effectively, an alien species of cricket. They are used to feed some smaller species of pets, can be eaten for snacks, or kept in cages for enjoyment. Driggits have a very pleasant sound, which varies according to the weather. They are, actually, rather reliable prognosticators of weather, changing their tune according to precipitation, heat, or cold.
· Fligs: A portalian creature, which live in the wild in the Forever Mountains. They work in packs and use portals to trap their prey. With their claws, they hastily, and instinctively, carve portals into rocks, or even in the ground. Through using a network of these interconnected portals, a group of fligs can appear out of nowhere and just as easily disappear into nowhere again. They can cause unwary victims, who are trying to make their way through the Forever Mountains, hopelessly lost, until either they end up in a place where they cannot escape, give up, fall down and die, or accidentally get killed by some hazard of a mountainous environment.
Whether or not fligs are sapient is not really debated in Trithofar. It seems they have an instinct for using only one particular spell, a limited range, limited duration portal. They seem to be a hive mind, usually following the lead of an alpha male, which has particular markings to show his rank.
They appear as a cross between an insect and a wolf. Patches of fur stick out between plates of chitin armor plates over their bodies. Their heads possess four antennae, with which they seem to sense their work at making portals. They have compound eyes, but an elongated wolfish snout. They have six legs, two large legs up front and two, slightly smaller legs in the back. Tucked close to their underside are two more legs which are not used for locomotion, but with which the flig carves the portals it uses to attack and secure its food. The claws on this extra set of ‘hands’ are said to be nearly unbreakable.
The flig is said to have mystroskus in their blood and their saliva. This makes them a highly prized creature. Many hunt them in the wild for this very reason.
Wizards in the Forever Mountains, particularly the wizards of the Natomist Monastary, have domesticated a few of these creatures, but not to the effectiveness of much more than seeing-eye-dogs through portals, or as hunters and retrievers. They are not cuddly pets, or really companions, but when found and raised, can be slightly tame and rather loyal to a stable food source. Of course, the hive mindedness of them seems to not work as well with creatures which cannot communicate telepathically, though with wizards there are tools.
Fligs are mostly inedible. The high content of mystroskus in them can have unintended and adverse reactions to such things as digestive fluids and fire/heat. However, they are killed for other reasons and through other means to prevent overpopulation. For one, a flig must be very precise to make its portals. A miscalculation in the slightest can be absolutely lethal, leading to fligs being half absorbed in rocks, lunging headfirst into a portal and falling from a cliff, breaking arms, legs, etc. on missteps. Sometimes, their portals can end up going nowhere, or split the flig into pieces. Some have said a flig actually teleported itself into itself, and exploded; in fact, one of Willeonis Treborrin’s disciples made this happen by altering a flig portal he found with one of his writing tools. The flig literally inverted, meaning its head came out its own rear end and exploded the flig from the inside out. He did this to destroy the animal and rid his path of it.
· Flusses: Flusses are wild creatures, a combination of a bat and a locust. They eat grass seeds, as well as various species of plant, and can be quite pesky. However, they are edible, and many people harvest them and eat them for food. They have compound eyes, big ears, expanding insect wings, and large legs for jumping. They don’t really fly, but jump up into the air and glide.
· Gremlins: Gremlins in Trithofar are a combination of a cat, dog, chimp/monkey, and a rabbit. They have heightened night sense, they travel in packs, they have sharp teeth and claws, but their ears can lay flat along their back (much like Jar-Jar Binks' ears, except actually able to move up and down, and this being the only similarity there), or they can stand up above the grass so the Gremlin can hear without necessarily exposing himself. Though kunjels have a few similar features (particularly their ears can move forward and backwards, the gremlin ear is mostly floppy, which the exception of earbones.
Gremlins have been domesticated by kunjels to a large degree for all manner of purposes, and many other cultures have adapted them and integrated them into their own cultures. Some of them are tiny and cute and basically lap animals. Some are huge, nearly the size of an adult human, and used for defending and serving the knights as pack animals and trackers.
Types of Gremlins:
Big Gray: These are large sight tracking gremlins, and are among the larger gremlin species domesticated. They are sight and sound hunters, so they stand more.
Browngrasses: These are not, usually, kept as pets. Instead, they are hunted for food or raised in cages. Just about every part of a gremlin, once it’s collected, is butchered and used. Kunjels put up signs all over their kingdom to designate where it is illegal to hunt browngrass gremlins by anyone other than a kunjel. They consider such an act poaching and will not allow non-kunjels without a license to hunt. It is not a capital offense, but dangerous.
Ridgeback Road Gremlin: A large and highly aggressive type of gremlin characterized by a ridge along their backside. Unlike many species of gremlin, these are bred for speed and strength, so they primarily stay on four-legs. They primarily hunt by nose and ears. Kunjels have been known to sharpen their teeth for the purposes of making their bites more dangerous.
Wolcher: A very small gremlin, about the size of a Browngrass, maybe smaller, which becomes everyone in the wolch’s pet. Usually, they are trained to howl or make some kind of noise when a stranger arrives.
· Guurdra: A peculiar ‘bird’ native to the Swamps of Ish-Berea. Not really a bird, so much as a small, feathered dragon. This bird, depending on what it ingests, does different things. If it eats certain types of meat, it can imitate the sound of the animal it ate, which allows it to call to them. If it eats certain berries or leaves, it can breathe poison. If it drinks a person’s blood, it can actually imitate their voices. People have worked to domesticate these creatures for years and years, but can only tame them after they hatch out of an egg. Usually, the first couple people they see are the ones they will bond with. They do not respond to other people calling them, unless they can see who it is calling them. There has never been, nor will ever be, a Guurdra bird that looks exactly like another. They are different sizes, ranging from the size of a canary to the size of a vulture, and not just because they are old or young (their size can also vary based on the kind of food they are getting). Their feathers are completely different from one another. No Guurdra has been born like another (and this sometimes is true of personality).
· Japals: Japals are large, domesticated creatures used for hauling and riding. They have very thick hide and coarse hair, sometimes used to make shelters or doorways, etc. Mostly, they are beasts of burden for the kunjels, who are best at taming them. They have bony protrusions on the fronts of their legs, and very thick pads on the bottoms of their feets, and are made absolutely for travel in prairie lands. They are not as fast as horses on the short run, but they can outlast a horse on long distance without killing themselves. They are not to be toyed with either. They’ll fight back against any creature they consider a threat or they consider able to be dominated. They are very strong. One might say they are a combination of a camel and a horse. Most of their water can come from the grasses they eat. Unlike horses, japals can go through itch grass and other poisonous or dangerous grasses without consequences.
· Korriks: See the article about Korriks earlier posted.
· Lems: Lems are not really able to be domesticated, but sometimes, they are harvested, or can be fenced in and controlled, which is called ‘fencering.’ Kunjels have developed what are called lem fences, which amount to poles erected with very coarse ropes with or without pieces of glass or metal woven into them. Very often, these fences are made such that there are three levels of these ropes. Lems have very little preference in most things, but they dislike dragging their 14 foot long tentacles over thorns or exceedingly rough surfaces. Lem fences serve two purposes. The first is they keep lems away from homes, wolches, towns, and cities. The second is they serve to make lem traps. A series of these fences can cause a lem to accidentally drift into a holding area from which they cannot escape, and out of which they are selected for different purposes.
Lems are extremely useful creatures. Their tentacles, when ground and mixed, can be used for certain medicines, particularly anesthesia. Other parts of their body are also useful for other forms of magic. Their gas bladders can be removed from them and used as balloons. These balloons can lift, when used in combination, nearly twenty pounds; aside from amusement, these have been used to elevate wounded limbs comfortably, as well as to hold objects. The muscles along the interior wall of their bell-head, is edible and a delicacy among the kunjels. The bell-shaped head is made of some very lightweight, flexible, and incredibly durable hide which can be made into very rubbery leather. Their hides can be used to make gloves, armor, and other clothing. Left whole, their hides can be used as a very flexible bag.
· Lubgunts: A portalian creature designed by wizards which have since gone feral since the Qwadro wars. Lubgunts are creatures living off a perpetual portal in their bodies that transports objects they swallow...somewhere else. To fuel this portal and to prevent it from swallowing themselves, a lubgunt must find and eat mystroskus, or enchanted objects. The creature absorbs a bit of the magic off the object as it passes through them to the other place. Lubgunts will strip objects off a person bearing them, swallowing people whole like a giant serpent. They look, however, like something out of the Cthuhlu mythos, a monstrous squid-snake, with tentacles and a gaping maw. Their back end is merely an opening that deposits in a sticky mess things they do not ‘eat.’ A few lubgunts basically became robbers or terrible monsters. Some of them were designed to transport living creatures (through the same process described above) into abandoned oubliettes. The wizards who still employ Chirugans and skincrafters to create these monsters use them for guard creatures for important areas, etc.
· Maiden-may-scream: This is a type of Trithofarian spider known for its obnoxious habit of jumping at people. The fact that the spider is the size of a human fist doesn’t help. This spider produces silk that is used in fabrics and clothing, etc. It jumps down to deliberately frighten people away from its nest. This makes it a little bit easier to harvest their silk, when they jump down. Of course, sometimes, they jump down also merely to escape. They are not terribly poisonous, except in that they kill rats. Quite a few people who are up to no good will deliberately try and get one of them to establish themselves above a doorway or window, etc. They are large, bulbous, and ugly critters, with shiny black carapaces. Quite a few other spider species in Trithofar reach the giant levels, but only a few of them are not dangerous enough to use as silk spiders.
· Mefs: Mefs are like a combination of rabbits and cows. Humans who have come to keep mefs have called them quiet cows, jumping cows, etc. Mefs are not necessarily bovines, however. They are, instead, a peculiar and unique sort of creature, more like giant mammalian aphids than cows. Mefs mate once, and reproduce once a year for seven to ten years. Each time they reproduce, they produce milk, which they not only offer to their own young, but to other young among them. The males do not have horns, but are very aggressive. They will literally use their weight to jump into the air and land on an enemy, and will use their powerful back legs to claw the victim usually to death (imagine a big cat kicking with its back legs against something. They jump from place to place like a rabbit, and look much like a rabbit, except their four teats are closer to the front of the animal (between their fore legs rather than on their bellies) for ease of access by their offspring. They produce milk, which is made into cheese, creams, etc. Kunjels, in a role very similar to that of a cowboy, go and attempt to capture female mefs after they have mated and capture them. Traditionally, a kunjel mef wrangler will release the mother after she has calved three times, and will release the oldest calf, to honor the Protector and to make sure they do not completely domesticate the species and remove them from the wild population. Typically, a released calf or mother will have the tip of her ears cut off to mark it so no one else catches it. It is considered a crime to capture a mef with tipped ears.
Mefs are herbivores, and they are part of the reason the Sea of Grass doesn’t conquer all of Frosomia. They can sit up and reach fruits and lower leaves of trees, and will eat just about every type of grass, even itch grass (which their bodies isolate and excrete completely from their bodies). They also eat fool’s food and just about any type of grass, for which they seem completely adapted.
The males are very large, and are eaten typically both by kunjels and by predators. The males will attack enemies aggressively (as stated above), but they will also sacrifice themselves for the good of a female nearby, satisfying larger predators like vors and raids of gremlins.
Lems will come after the occasional mef, but again the males will attack them, raising up on hind legs to bat them down where possible and squash them, or will allow themselves to be stung for the better of another mef.
· Nerns: Nerns have been farmed and captured for many years in Frosomia particularly. They are a type of creature that require very little maintenance. Merely, they require only patches of poisonous itch grass and a fence to keep them from going anywhere. Very few creatures, aside from hials, are able to kill them and eat them, because they actually eat poisonous grasses and excrete from their skin the poison of the grasses they eat. They are smart enough not to eat fool’s food or some of the other types of grass that will not nourish them.
If properly handled and cleaned thoroughly, nern meat is a delicacy in Trithofar (largely because of the difficulty in preparing the meat. Their skin is used for parchment, again when cleaned and detoxified. The poison in their skin can be used for mejen purposes.
· Siig’ls: These creatures are four-legged, fur-covered creatures the size of cats, but with bat-wings. They see through the same structures as the elf-eyes of the l’wii, and they arrived in Trithofar along with the elves. They have no normal eyes, large noses, and big ears. They are very like cats, and elves enjoy them largely because of the fact that they are not as easy to control as elflings.
· Varshawks: Hawk like creatures which can hover in the wind. They are used for hunting, and sometimes capturing smaller animals. Their wings are rather large, and made such that these creatures can float like a kite, which makes them very quiet and able to hold larger weight in flight.
· Wums: Very large bees which pollinate darch, knotapple, other trees. Frosomia was the first to domesticate and use the jelly the wums create (not really honey, but very like).
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