Mantheryn

Content note. The Pleasure subsection of the cocoon section describes the cocoon’s use for sexual pleasure. The Venom and birth section describes a venom that paralyses, kills or gives pleasure, and a birth process in which a new body forms around a consenting person inside a cocoon. Everything is written in the same register as the rest of the anatomy, and both parts can be skipped.

Overview

Mantheryn are a people of open space and deep caves. They walk upright, fly on moth-like wings, and carry a mantle of fur at the shoulders that they wear and move like a cloak.

Where they come from is unknown. They have no homeworld, and nobody knows whether they ever had one.

What sets them apart most is the cocoon. Every mantheryn is born inside one, made for them by a parent, and they keep it for the rest of their life.

Where they live

Mantheryn live out in space, or in caves on habitable planets scattered across this plane. The young usually grow up in the caves.

Physical traits

Mantheryn stand upright on plantigrade feet, anywhere between four and a half and eight feet tall depending on the individual. Hands and feet each carry ten digits, with gripping pads like a gecko’s and claws that retract the way a fox’s do.

The face holds four insectoid eyes, set in two pairs one above the other, and both pairs look forward. They glow. Why the species has four is not known. The lower half of the face is a fox’s nose and muzzle, with mandibles alongside it.

A pair of horns rises from the head, sharp at the tips and entirely usable as horns. A matching pair of antennae runs along and around them.

The skin is thick and slightly elastic, with a faintly rough, rubbery texture that is pleasant to the touch. Over the more sensitive areas lies a patina of lizard-like scales, sharing the same texture and adding protection to a frame that is already resilient.

Moth-like wings grow from the back, scaled to the body that carries them.

Behind a mantheryn trail several tails, usually three or more. Each is fully prehensile, with the power of a fox’s tail and the flexibility of a gecko’s. How many any one mantheryn has is individual and means nothing in particular. The tails carry the same fur as the mantle, and it rolls back the same way to bare the skin underneath.

The mantle

Hanging down the back and attached only at the shoulders is a mantle of fur. Light, moth-like fluff lies on top, over thicker fox-like fur beneath, and the whole of it is so thickly woven together that it reads as a cloak more than a coat.

It is sensate. Sensory organs run through it, so a mantheryn feels a touch on the mantle as clearly as a touch anywhere else.

The mantle rolls up smoothly into the shoulders when a mantheryn wants it out of the way, and curls around the body when they want it close, exactly as a cloak would. It is fully prehensile and flexes anywhere along its length and width, which makes it a limb as much as a covering: it grips, it carries, it shapes itself into temporary pockets, and it wraps around another person for warmth or for any other reason.

Senses

Mantheryn have a number of senses beyond the ordinary ones, and the antennae appear to be part of how they work, though exactly what the antennae read is not known.

They can tell when magic is about. They can often tell when life is nearby. And they are very hard to confuse about direction, which suggests something like an inner compass.

Magic

Two things are fixed at the species level: the cocoon, described below, and the magic that carries mantheryn through space.

Every mantheryn survives vacuum unaided. It appears to be the work of wild magic that settled on the species at some point and stayed. They need no ships, either — the magic in their wings carries them through empty space at tremendous speed.

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

The cocoon

Every mantheryn is born in a cocoon, made for them by a parent. Inside it the body is shaped, and only shaped; there is no larval stage to leave behind. The cocoon is neither discarded nor broken once the shaping is done. It stays whole, and it becomes the mantheryn’s own.

A cocoon is both magic and biology. It is not alive in the ordinary sense, and it responds to the needs of whoever is inside: rest, relaxation, safety. It is a place a mantheryn goes to be restored.

It is bound to its owner magically, and that bond is why each mantheryn has exactly one. While a cocoon lasts, its owner cannot make another bound to them. If it is destroyed, the loss hurts them, and in time they can make themselves a new one.

Where it lives is up to the owner. Some hang it or lay it somewhere in their home. Others fold it and carry it with them.

Guests

Any being may enter a mantheryn’s cocoon with the owner’s permission. The permission is the owner’s consent itself, working through the bond, and nothing else opens the cocoon to anyone.

A permitted guest is answered exactly as the owner would be. The cocoon reshapes perfectly around them whatever their size, whether they are far larger or far smaller than its owner, and it can hold and shape itself around more than one being at once.

The owner can withdraw permission at any moment. When they do, the cocoon simply lets go of whoever is inside.

Pleasure

Among the needs a cocoon answers is sexual pleasure. It shapes itself into whatever the moment calls for and acts as an apparatus for it, for its owner and for any guest they have permitted, on exactly the same terms as everything else the cocoon does.

Venom and birth

Mantheryn deliver venom through their mandibles. It is one venom with three effects, and a mantheryn sets which one internally before it is delivered.

The first is paralytic. Depending on dose and placement it paralyses or kills.

The second gives pleasure.

The third is transformative, and it is how a new mantheryn is born.

Birth

A mantheryn delivers the transformative venom to a consenting individual, who can be of any species, and places them inside a new cocoon the same mantheryn has made. Within it, the body of a new mantheryn metamorphoses into being around that individual, who is still inside it.

In the next stage the new mantheryn, helped by the cocoon, releases its hold on them, and they leave the cocoon unchanged. They come out very hungry, and need some time to recover, how much depending on how strong they are. The new mantheryn’s body is then finished in the cocoon’s final stage, and the cocoon becomes theirs.

Both claim parentship of the new mantheryn: the one who made the cocoon and delivered the venom, and the consenting individual the new body first formed around.

The individual’s species can shape the new mantheryn. A humanoid leaves the mantheryn body plan as it is; someone who is not humanoid can give the new mantheryn a different body structure, and most mantheryn avoid that. Beyond body structure, some traits follow bloodline, and just as easily they do not.

Ageing

Mantheryn are ageless. In principle a mantheryn lives forever, and in practice they live until something kills them.

Shared instincts

Mantheryn carry the instincts of a fox as a predator: stillness and patience, a keen ear, and the sudden pounce.

Those belong to the species. Temperament belongs to each mantheryn alone, and no two carry themselves the same way.

Where the name comes from

The name is built from two roots.

Mant comes from the Latin mantellum, a cloak or mantle — the root English mantle descends from. It is there for the fur at the shoulders, the thing a mantheryn wears and moves the way anyone else would wear a cloak.

Ther is the Greek θήρ, thēr, a wild beast, the root inside therian and theriomorphic. It names the creature under the cloak.

The -yn ending carries no meaning of its own. It is there for the sound.

The cloaked beast is the direct reading.

Field notes

Individual height, colouring, the number of tails, the look of the mantle and the cocoon, and whatever magic a mantheryn carries beyond the species’ own belong on each member’s own page.