Huzzahh, It's Species Number 3! (There's A Total Of 6, Including Humans. 7 If You Count Artificial Intelligences,

Huzzahh, it's species number 3! (There's a total of 6, including humans. 7 if you count artificial intelligences, 8 if you count the uhh other intelligences).

An official up to date visual for everyone's favorite communist amphibians, the Kixeli.

Kixeli are a small sentient species hailing from a planet covered mostly in ocean. They are amphibious, and originally evolved to switch between swimming and climbing using their webbed hands and powerful arms.

Their skin is permeable, allowing them to extend their time underwater to hunt and gather as well as reproduce, but due to their larger body and brain size/oxygen needs this isn’t sustainable and they must return to the surface.

Alongside their frequent trips outside the water, they also have a mucus layer and several specialized glands (including in their face by their eyes) to help remove excess salt and change levels of urea in their body to help make sure they dont lose resources when in the ocean.

Kixeli are omnivorous, with a focus on fruits and sealife. many cultures have a preference against eating anything that lives above water, including birds and the like, because they see themselves as spiritual equals to those animals as fellow air breathers.

They are oviparous, and have a specific mating season.

Most Kixeli have multiple variable spawn partners and see it as strange to be nailed down to one. Anyone who participated lays their eggs in a communal tide pool carved out in their communities.

Hatchlings are entirely aquatic wirh gills until later months of age, where they will begin to poke their head above water for air and start interacting more with the adults around them, who feed them a nutritive crop milk as they have already absorbed most of their tail by now.

This period is also the beginning of their understanding of language.

Once they lose their tail and grow in their limbs, they are still mostly helpless until those fully develop and myst cling to a caretaker adult in the community (blood parents don’t necessarily always raise their own children, but as someone who laid eggs they are responsible for children as a caretaker so anyone who didn’t want eggs gets left alone).

During their puberty, they will develop adult skin markings, and some can even end up changing sexes (much for the same reason some of them grow gliding membranes, as the result of population and resources balance in their surroundings).

Speakijg of that, there are two categories of Kixeli in their communities: Kel (swimmer) and Arasit (flier).

Arasit are just a rare continuation of their life cycle, since most Kixeli kids end up growing into Kel adults.

Sometimes, though, an Arasit will develop in case the community strongly needs to seek out new territory over long distance (triggered by close proximity to many other Kixeli and a variety of other unknown gactors, like grasshoppers turnkng into locusts.) They can’t truly fly, but they can use the powerful ocean winds and even some launching technology to glide very far to scout new resources and other communities).

Arasit are highly celebrated as voyagers, but Kel are also valued as providers for their existing community and even accompany voyages on ships to help their Arasit stay alive.

Some Arasit will cut and cauterize their membranes to make it easier for them to swim to symbolize they are staying in the community, though usually, they just poke small holes in there so they can wear clothes and be sanitary.

Their blood uses the hemocyanin molecule to carry oxygen, making their blood a bright blue when oxygenated and a thin blue/clear when unoxygenated (so you can see the other warmish colored pigments in there when it’s inside them, that yellowish stuff)

Their ancestors dwelled in deeper, cooler water where this blood type was most advantageous, but a global warming period brought them up to warm waters and eventually above the surface to capitalize on resources.

During this process, they developed some ways to improve the molecule’s lower efficiency in the heat. For one, they kept a small body size so there’s less to deal with. Another thing is that they get oxygen (albeit a small amount) from all over their body constantly through their skin, also somewhat making up for it.

The main mechanism, though, is their metabolism/temperature. They can quickly adjust their metabolism depending on the oxygen conditions in their surroundings to prevent immediate failure if they don’t have access to the right conditions to otherwise cope (this, and along with hemocyanin’s natural ability to handle low oxygen and their skin breathing, means they can tolerate very low oxygen areas that would cause a human to faint, though they’ll typically be pretty out of commission too, and this can have longer lasting effects on their health from the whiplash.)

they use their surroundings for heat when they aren’t doing anything too strenuous, and because they aren’t really producing much of their own they can tolerate even higher temperatures that would normally put them out of commission (and they actually heavily rely on that heat for ease in a lot of other processes), to do anything that has bigger oxygen needs, they can dip into cooler water/shade for periods of higher activity (but can’t stay too cold for too long or else aforementioned other processes will shut down, though it does increase the effectiveness to the point where they can do a whole lot and allows them to swim/navigate cooler areas where their early competitors couldn’t return to, it only as long as they got back quickly and warmed up)

they basically swing between these two extremes but tend to stay at a warmish middle-ground, wearing heating pads on part of their body while still letting larger areas cool off, if that makes sense.

Hemocyanin’s other properties don’t automatically give them a longer life, in fact theirs is very short compared to other species, but it does make them resistant to cancers (a common threat on their sunny planet) and the spread of diseases in their dense communities

Being cold-blooded wasn’t a problem on their mostly tropical planet. It is a considerable problem once they left it, though, hence the heating pads most wear to warm up.

many also live in areas without a large body of water nearby (or an easy way to access said body of water) but still need to stay damp to maintain their music layer and trap oxygen, so many also carry spray bottles or wet rags with them to always stay damp.

Kixeli are highly social (with their name even roughly translating to "belonging together"). they rarely live in groups of less than 5.

They experience severe negative side effects from isolation. Their naturally intense empathy also makes it extremely damaging for them to see other Kixeli injured or dead, sometimes leading to their own death from shock if they were the one that did it (though this has not stopped wars over their scarce resources in the past, typically because that intense sense of kinship was naturally strongest towards those among their own community, and if Their community was suffering then they had to get rid of the source of it by any means. )

This period nearly drove them to extinction, and led to a Global Community movement that argued for intercommunity cooperation and the end of 'us and them thinking'.

Due to their sliminess, Kixeli normally keep clothing to a minimum and overall don’t have a need for it beyond temperature control and ornamentation.

They have none of their own social taboos about nakedness, having no external genitalia, but still often clothe themselves to the standards of others due to the pressure/need to be polite from other species.

They also have few class divides within their own communities, with everyone working for the good of the whole, and no sex/gender roles beyond squirter and egg layer since everyone cares for the eggs.

To humans, their language sounds like birdsong, with lots of repetitive noises and subtle shifts in pattern and tone.

Their unique vocalization makes their languages hard to learn and even harder to speak, but they themselves are incredible mimics (only surpassed in some ways by humans because lips and teeth).

The fin on their forehead is similar to eyebrows in communicating emotion or tone. They can see a similar color spectrum to humans and love bright contrasting colors similar to their own skin patterns.

They favor “fast food”, or anything that can be carried easily as you swing around in a tree or on a boat.

Payment/restaurants doesn’t really exist for them, they just have areas where food brought in by providers is available to the community (or people just eat what they catch and then bring extra to the community.)

They also don’t chew their food, though some dishes are meant to be squished to the roof of the mouth with the tongue to experience the flavor

Their clothing is often “readable” in that many individuals wear clothing that represents a certain story, event in their life, event in their community, or mythical hero that can be derived from looking at their clothing from the head down.

In the two guys up there, the Arasit is wearing the equivalent of booty shorts cut scantily close to their Hole depicting one version about the founding of the first community (though a simplified one, so it’s actually more like the equivalent of wearing a crop top tee with a little monochrome dog on it or something).

This kind of imagery is common among Arasit, even modern ones, because founding/birth/life are their associations in religious cultures.

The Kel alongside them is wearing a more complex getup meant to show the inciting incident of one of the nomadic communities mythic hero’s journey, when he was cast from the star sea by the wicked Long Arms into the deep sea.

This would be seen as all most goth since this part of the story is seen as eerie and it depicts their underworld along the hem and bracelets.

By wearing clothing associated with a specific figure//story, they can also show gender identity based on whether that figure or hod was male, female, neuther, etc(helping people draw the right conclusions despite the visible evidence of their sex written on all their skin. The clothing and any makeup done on the fin is usually their main reference point for judging how to address someone. )

I love fics where everyone (but mostly Arthur) realizes how important Merlin is to Camelot.

Like I’m not only talking about Magic reveal fics where they find out how badass he is and how many times he’s saved their asses (though I love those) but specifically about the times they realize he basically Runs the Castle.

I’m fairly sure I read a fic or a head canon somewhere that Merlin leaves to visit his mother for a week and Camelot falls apart because this boy was doing everything to keep that Castle in order. And Arthur kept firing servants cuz “they weren’t up to standard” (aka they weren’t Merlin)

And these fics could be gen or Merthur (though I do love the latter ngl)

But yeah I just love it when my boy gets the recognition and respect he deserves.

(Bonus if Leon is losing his mind the entire time. He’s done with their bullshit. He’s seen too much. He’s tired. #LetLeonRest2024)

Leon and Merlin watching their husbands doing something stupid, sharing a look of solidarity before going to stop their idiots from getting themselves killed

Arthur: I have a great idea!

Merlin: No, you don't. History has proven that.

Some time ago I made a post of Merlin being ill but I can’t find it anymore, so here we go again:

Merlin gets ill with a cold but it starts slowly with sneezing and stuffed nose but keeps getting worse until fever and he has to retreat to bed rest as Gaius orders.

However, with him being ill his magic is acting up whenever he sneezes or has to cough.

Arthur and his knights think the castle is under magic attack or haunted. Things move and fly across the room whenever Merlin sneezes or coughs or blows his nose.

Lancelot is the only one noticing the correlation between Merlin being ill and magic happening. He tries his best to cover for Merlin but the other knights and Arthur still don’t understand the most obvious things.

Arthur goes magic hunting with Merlin but his conditions are getting worse and once he’s bedridden Arthur visits him to discuss the next steps to capture the culprit because he can’t solve this without Merlin for sure!

But Merlin’s brain gets all mushy and sleepy and grumpy until he basically tells Arthur that he’s the sorcerer doing all this weird stuff. He sneezes at the end and all his books fly off the shelf but that doesn’t stop Arthur from reassuring Merlin that he knows that Merlin is not the wizard and that it’s just the illness talking.

Merlin just stares at him wondering if Arthur will ever see what’s right in front of him.

Another series of coughing makes Arthur leaving Merlin alone.

A week later Merlin is no longer ill (thanks to Gaius) and the Magic ceases but no one except Merlin, Gaius and Lancelot understand why.

arthur: merlin is such an idiot! i can’t believe im going to marry him someday.

gwen: you don’t have to (?!)

arthur: no i’m gonna.