#pillyki | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theveryworstthing · 7 years

Photo

well they don’t eat bird eggs. at least not the insides most of the time, their stomachs can’t handle much of it. they eat insect eggs though!

Pillykis are a species of omnivorous domesticated insect present in most warrens on the island. though they’ve lost the ability to really thrive on their own, these foot and a half tall bugs are reasonably clever pets who produce single clutches of 20 to 70 eggs every month. the eggs are a pale blue-green with clear shells and creme colored yolks and rabbits use them for all sorts of recipes, including just boiling and eating them covered in sauces and seasonings. Pillykis make their nests in shallow pools lined with pebbles. the parents leave the nest open, letting the sun evaporate the water and jump start the growing larvae. if eggs are kept somewhere wet and dark they don’t develop or hatch, and they keep fresh for long periods of time.

Pillykis don’t really seem to care if theirs eggs are harvested as long as they have proper care from their owners, other Pillykis to socialize with, and get to keep a larvae every once in a while.

other food facts:

adult rabbits can handle a little dairy but all of the ‘milk’ on the island is either almond or coconut milk. it really depends on the region.

they have a large variety of fragrant plant based oils for cooking. some are infused with fruits or spices while others are mixed with crushed flowers and fungi.

rabbits fucking love spices and colors. if they’re eating something bland and beige its either a side to some rainbow veggie mess or they’re sick. food is one of the Big Pleasures as far as they’re concerned. they don’t want it to be boring.

rabbit bread is rarely in big fluffy loaves. a lot of it is baked or fried flatbreads. they really like crunchy things like pretzels and biscotti.

rabbits prefer wraps, dumplings, riceballs, anything you can eat on the go with minimal mess. these can be tedious to make for big families or warrens though so there’s usually a bowl full of Stuff at mealtimes that everyone makes their own portion from.

they love sweets like honey, jams, and jellies. bee keepers and fruit farmers make bank.

rabbit fruit juices both fermented and un-fermented are usually served with actual chunks of fruit in the bottom of the cup

warren stoves are huge flat topped things that multiple people can use at a time. its not unusual to see rabbits up on step stools just to stir or ladle the contents out of huge pots. staples like plain rice and porridge are made for everyone in large batches by kitchen staff. they also keep a large kettle of boiling water around for soups and beverages.

the kitchen staff is mostly there to cook for those who can’t or don’t feel like it, make sure no one burns the place down and keep track of the main and personal larders. they also make food deliveries and some chefs sell their own brand of hot dishes or pastries for extra income.

the refrigerated goods are kept in a room adjacent to the kitchen. this room is usually the only room in a warren that makes use of electricity (other areas can exist just fine with bioluminescent lanterns ect.).

rabbits do have restaurants and bakeries, usually on busy roads or in areas with lots of big warrens. more secluded or traveling restaurants are a thing though.

rabbits utilize tables in meetings and restaurants but sit on mats on the floor to eat if they’re in a comfortably homey space. sitting on the floor is casual and implies that everyone is on equal footing. tables are more formal and indicate that you don’t know the people around you very well. sitting on the floor also saves a lot of much needed space. most families don’t even own a table or chairs.

#rabbits of downtrodden #worldbuilding for days ya'll #long post #food #cooking #insects #pillyki

854 notes · View notes

theveryworstthing · 5 years

Photo

hello everyone, here are some very rough sketches of hare Messenger/caravan friends. i wanna draw more of these because i’ve finally settled on a general design and now i’m ready to get wacky with them.

but first.

it is time for lore.

this isn’t everything i want to say about hares and caravans and their relationship with rabbits and the above ground world but i figure it’s a start. so welcome to Hare Caravans: a short history intertwined with landscaping and postal work.

The beginnings of a journey: staying above ground where all the things that want to kill you are is good actually.

The first hare leveret was born at about the same time as the first rabbit kit. Some say that the two litters were only a nest apart, or that they were even reared together. No one is quite sure of the exact times and distances though because the only people there were the Mothers, who are all gone now, and a few couple minute old gods, who while gods, were just dumb babies who had no idea that any of this would ever matter in the future.

The main thing of importance is that in the beginning there were rabbits and hares in the same general area dealing with the same general existence bullshit and for some reason instead of wising up and going underground like the rabbits, the hares decided (in what had to be a blinding species-wide wave of spite and wanderlust because let’s be real they are EVEN TWITCHIER than rabbits) to stay above ground,learn to do sick stunts, and make the world Deal With Them.

Both rabbits and hares are naturally very quick on their feet but hares are faster and ridiculously acrobatic. They were able to live above ground on the island for so long because even though they still got got every now and then, they were able to juke their way to survival most of the time. But this made hares very solitary. They’re a little more resistant to fear death but it’s still a thing that happens and stress took less hares than you’d think but more hares than you’d hope. They didn’t have the guaranteed safety of the rabbits’ warrens to relax in and it’s hard to build a stable community when a group = a delicious easy target for predators. That’s where the Messengers came in.

The Messengers At first they were merely a small guild of traveling hares that worked as sort of builders/landscapers/proto-postalworkers. Everything about them was kept pretty hush hush and their founder, a tall albino hare who even then everyone suspected had been doing this job way before this job had a name, wasn’t much into discussing the business to those they didn’t deem prospective hires. This made them one of, if not the first, secret society on the island.

The Messengers would collect and deliver letters, small items, and general news from different parts of the island, packing their cargo on quick beetle steads and leading them through the night to distant territories. When they got to a new area they set up cryptic signs and elaborately camouflaged tents that served as pop-up meeting places for whoever was passing through. They were hardworking, crafty, sleep deprived, respectful of their clients’ privacy, and their slogan: ‘I might only be stopped by death and then I only might be’ has persisted as an empowering and slightly threatening mantra for the hares, rabbits, and now vultures who continue in their stead. Truly strong roots for modern island derived postal work.

The Outposts Now when I said those first Messenger-built tents were camouflaged I mean that they were functionally, borderline rage inducingly, invisible. Messengers would arrange entire false landscapes around their tents and the tents themselves were made of thick woven mats covered in layers of cultivated moss, fungus, and various bits of predator-offensive local vegetation for an optimal ‘this is totally a normal danger bush please piss off’ vibe. Some of their later outposts(where modern ‘postal’ work gets its name)included hidden doorways on seemingly regular boulders, clusters of reeds hiding entrances to submerged airtight rooms, and that one open grove near the Center that looked like nothing until you inevitably walked smack into an expertly painted wall like a dang cartoon character. That was the Head Messenger’s favorite outpost (and the most entertaining to watch from afar).

Most of these places got wrecked by time but some people say that the grove outpost still exists, much to the irritation of local postal workers. This is just an urban legend. Their official stance is that the place was destroyed in a storm shortly after the hares all left the island, and a search of the grove certainly supports their exasperated claims that nothing is there anymore. But there are also no ruins of any sort in the grove and to this day the rare rabbit or vulture will come back from their travels with stories about face planting into air and discovering a weird old building that contained nothing but a single black envelope. Again, the island postal service says these are all just urban legends and nothing more.

But also, maybe just keep away from the area and if you see any black envelopes please contact your nearest postal worker asap.

The Signs Since the outposts were so hidden, if you weren’t lucky enough to stumble into one or you didn’t notice the appearance of a New Bush, then you had to look for the signs. A stack of flat stones or a single hare antler tipped with black were signals that a Messenger was visiting. These items would always be at the base of a tree or some other large immovable object where the Messenger would use paint made with Medic’s Eye fungi spores to draw directional symbols that would light up momentarily when the surface was tapped. Before they left the Messenger would always recollect and scrub away their sign materials. Just leaving up signs was irresponsible, as future Messengers might set up in a different spot and conflicting signs would be confusing. Also, bandits might use abandoned signs to lure victims into ambushes. Very few bandits ever had the chance to do this since Messengers were diligent about erasing their signs and very few of them escaped the Messengers if they found out which hooligans had betrayed the people’s trust in mail, but still.

The birth of caravans and getting creative At the outposts, hares would collect their mail, talk amongst themselves, and generally spend leisure time with their brethren without the threat of danger. The outposts were (purposefully) hard to find, only stayed open for a day or two at most, and the messengers had a serious lack of chill due to their busy schedules, but people really loved them. As interest in these meeting spots grew trade increased, people grew closer(within reason, hares were still real solitary at that point), and eventually caravans were created to make setting up these pop-up marketplaces/communities easier.

Of course by this point the safest spots had small permanent outposts with a rotating staff of guard hares (and a few adventurous rabbits). But hares were too twitchy to leave whole towns just…there. Out in the open. Permanently. A house can’t run. Or at least most houses can’t run. Who in their right mind would want long term shelter you can’t pick up and take with you? But a vehicle? Strap a streamlined wagon to a strong beetle, or better yet get a walking worm that can really sprint, and now you’re in business(some of the most beloved hare fables are about a witch who lived in a walking worm that ran around on pillyki legs). And so these hidden outposts became the center of constantly fluctuating camouflaged towns made of caravans.

The wagons and worms that inhabited these towns were really…a sight. Of course they were all the equivalent of speedwalking shrubbery, but the variation! The ingenuity! The application of literally whatever they found while rambling around! Closer looks revealed dead branch coverings held up by years of interlocking shed antlers and tied together with cast off scraps of green fabric that were coated with wax and artfully styled into very convincing leaves. Plants with woven roots for floors and branches for roofs were kept on shallow platforms of soil and molded into tiny but ever growing shacks. Walking worms resembling rotted logs filled fine garden lounges and stages and libraries and laundry rooms tiled with smooth bits of broken pottery. In a small tent that from the outside looks like three sticks and an unfortunate amount of wolf poop, a midwife helps deliver three healthy leverets. A wonderland made of pure natural beauty, art, and a little teeny tiny bit of collected travel garbage. Magnificent.

It really is too bad that most of the more fragile ones didn’t survive the trip to the mainland. Being successfully converted into boats was just not in the cards for them. Silver lining? They got to re-design them all over again with mainland materials. So even though true Island Vehicles are rare now they’re all just as funky.

The Connections Caravan communities really changed hare society. They had always had culture and stories and art, but it was hard to enjoy any of that with frickin’ wolves and owls on their heels 24/7. While families with younger children or disabled members traveled together, it was just so much safer to stay in small distant groups if you stayed in a group at all. This meant very little non trade or procreation mingling. The relative safety of the caravan towns gave birth to a wave of new art and culture exploration since people now had time, space, and input from so many new friends with similar interests in the same place. It’s amazing what you can do when you aren’t constantly running on survival mode and even though they had had access to friendly rabbit spaces before, it just wasn’t the same. Soon entire droves of hares started moving together in very loose communities. Wagons or worms never really right next to each other but all heading in the same direction on their own paths and coming back together at the end of their journeys. Close enough to run to a neighbor if need be but never clumped up. As these droves solidified, they each developed distinct new customs and skills, and the connections between members became as strong as any warren.

These connections are especially apparent in an old practice called Path Merging. Originally only done to seal peace treaties after the rare violent cross-caravan spat but now a common practice, if a single leveret is born (a rarity) they are paired with a single leveret of a similar age from a neighboring ally caravan and raised together. The pair travels back and forth all of their young lives, first with their mothers and then alone, living in their home caravans for different parts of the year. A few of these pairs stay together forever and some only part ways when they start their own families but ideally they at least make it to twenty years before calling for a separating ritual for the whole deal to be Solid. Similar to a diplomatic betrothal but based more on creating lifelong partners of any relationship type over setting up a marriage, this fostering of an intense bond from being the only true constants in each other’s lives is a show of good will and connection between their people. In a way they come to embody the essence of their community and as single litters are seen as a sign of pure hare independence and the old ways of their lost island home, these children are very powerful symbols.

It also means surefire preferential trading and aid from what are pretty much blood-contract bound allies.

These leverets are supposed to be raised like any other, but may receive a little special treatment in times of hardship to prove one caravans’ dependability to the other. A pair being returned in bad condition or with tales of abuse can start or further irritate conflicts. A falling out between the bonded pair can also be disastrous but it happens. You usually have no idea if babies will just super hate each other once they learn what hate is! Or what life in general will throw at you! If everything else is fine but they’re just not compatible people then after a while the caravan elders from both sides will come together and amicably agree to separate them. Although if one deeply wrongs or injures the other there can be some…dire consequences for the offending party that can splash back on their community depending on the situation. Hares almost always avoid war, but they’re real big on justice.

Despite this intense ritual, hares are still hares. They travel together now but they’re still kind of solitary creatures. Caravans are still pretty spaced out affairs, relying on radios and slime mold compasses to keep in touch when someone needs to wander away from the group for a bit. Outside of the usual life threatening issues, they’re not really worried about wandering the untamed mainland alone.

It’s not really a big deal when you have somewhere to come back to.

#rabbits of downtrodden #long post #hares #walking worm #bugs

1K notes · View notes