Hypnosphex

Content note. This entry describes hypnosphex venom, including an effect that makes the person stung obedient and one used for pleasure during intimacy. It is written in the same register as the rest of the anatomy. The Venom section is the one to skip.

Overview

Hypnosphex are a tall, winged, wasp-like people from a homeworld of their own. They stand upright with a humanoid face and humanoid hands, and everything below and behind belongs to a wasp: four insectoid legs, a narrow waist, and a rear section that carries a stinger at its tip.

Their buzz is what most defines them. A hypnosphex buzzes with wings and body together, for every ordinary reason anyone makes a sound, and that same buzz can carry magical hypnosis whenever they choose.

Physical traits

A hypnosphex stands between six and nine feet tall. The upper body is a person’s: a humanoid chest and shoulders, with the insect structure showing through in a firm, faintly segmented thorax. Below the ribs the waist pinches in sharply, narrow as a wasp’s, and from the hips come four insectoid legs, on which they stand tall and walk upright. Behind and a little below the hips hangs a wasp’s rear section, tapering to the stinger at its tip.

Their two arms are humanoid in shape and segmented along their length, and the fingers are segmented as well, jointed finely like an insect’s limbs and as capable as any hand.

The skin is a soft, strong hide. Over the whole body lies a thin layer of short fuzz, exceptionally soft to the touch, sharing the skin’s colour a shade deeper.

The face is humanoid, with large compound eyes that catch and reflect the light. Full mandibles rise from the corners of the mouth. They move with expression, and a hypnosphex uses them to eat, to grip and to bite. Flexible antennae rise from the head, highly mobile, and hypnosphex grow hair on their heads as well.

Wings

A single pair of wings grows from the shoulders, coloured and bare of fuzz. Hypnosphex fly fully, and their wings are half of their buzz.

The stinger

The stinger sits at the tip of the rear section and retracts into the body when it is not wanted. When a hypnosphex needs it in front of them, the rear section curls forward and under to bring the stinger round.

Venom

The stinger carries venom, and so do the mandibles.

It is one venom with several effects, and the hypnosphex chooses which before delivering it. In small doses it paralyses, and in larger ones it kills. It can instead make the person stung obedient to the hypnosphex’s will. And it can be used during intimacy, where it gives pleasure.

Whether a hypnosphex seeks consent is individual. Using the controlling or the pleasurable effects without it is frowned upon in their culture.

Magic

One thing is fixed at the species level: every hypnosphex carries magical hypnosis, the same extra force a kitsune puts out as foxfire and a lamia delivers through the gaze. A hypnosphex carries it in the buzz. How strongly runs differently from one hypnosphex to the next.

The buzz travels as sound, so it passes over anyone who cannot hear it. Its hold, once caught, outlasts the buzz itself. It stays in full for as long as the hypnosphex shares a room with whoever they have caught, and once they leave, it wears off slowly. They can let go at any moment, and that ends it at once.

They buzz without the hypnosis just as often. The sound serves expression, communication and mood, and sometimes it is simply the sound of them.

Whatever else a hypnosphex is tied to magically is their own.

Hives

Every hypnosphex carries a hiving instinct, a pull toward living as part of a close, shared home. Whether any of them actually forms or joins a hive is their own choice.

Birth and ageing

Hypnosphex hatch from laid eggs, and intimacy has to come first.

They are very long-lived. A hypnosphex lives for thousands of years, and many live for hundreds of thousands.

Shared instincts

Hypnosphex share a wasp’s protective instinct toward home and those within it, and the hiving instinct alongside it.

Those are shared. Temperament is each hypnosphex’s own.

Where the name comes from

The name is built from two Greek roots.

Hypno is ὕπνος, hypnos, sleep. It is the root inside hypnosis, and it names the hold their buzz carries.

Sphex is σφήξ, sphēx, the Greek word for a wasp.

The sleep-wasp is the direct reading.

Field notes

Individual height, the colour of the skin, fuzz, wings and eyes, the hair, how strongly the hypnosis runs, whether a hypnosphex lives in a hive, and whatever magic they carry beyond the buzz all belong on each member’s own page.