[x]

Browse More Like This

More from ~Snowpuddles

View Gallery

Featured in Groups:

#Species-Directory
DArwinism

#Mind-Shade
What shade does your mind take?

#dABestiary

#original-worlds
Original worlds for your OC

#OriginalSpecies

#Imaginary-Menagerie
Creatures from the imagination

#creature-concepts

#specieshaven

Show all (11)

Details

Submitted: December 12, 2010
Image Size: 1.4 MB
Resolution: 1063×842

Link

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 164
Favourites: 212 [who?]
Views: 2,339 (3 today)
Downloads: 13 (0 today)

[x]

Maunoshby ~Snowpuddles

Digital Art / Drawings / Animals

_{Pronunciation: More-Nosh

Plural: Maunosh

Markings: Always completely covered in soft, slightly wavy black fibre. Eyes are all colours but red and pink. Legs are usually of a very pale, anemic flesh colour. Melanistic maunosh have black legs.

Size: 9 foot at top of head.

Diet: Nectarivorous. There is a long curled proboscis that vanishes completely within the skull. Maunosh do not have a jaw, and make no sound whatsoever.

Range: Any high-up land where industrial creatures, such as humans, aren't.

Maunosh were one of the 'original' creatures, and therefore perfect- They did not evolve, but were created by Xyzai for Espere at the end of what is usually called the Eden period. The Maunosh are as quiet and beautiful in their movements As Espere, the so called 'goddess' of fertility (of course, if Xyzai had the will to make a creature for her now, it would probably be a very large constantly lactating mammalian slug, but Xyzai and Espere are millenia-old personifications of abstract concepts, and relationships change, alright?).

Long past the Eden period, after humans settled Kalaed, the Maunosh became somewhat a desirable companion animal. They are, by nature, very delicate in behavior and and mind so this was not an ideal kind of interest to attract, that and they are also rather stupid beyond the whole one-of-the-perfect-lifeforms-never-changes thing, and tend to run around crashing into things when spooked. They are often spooked. The solution to this was for an individual by the name of Aheken Teetor who, according to the assistant of Kastella's major Maunosh dealer who was going fast out of business, 'knows about things'. Teetor, who had always been on pretty good wraps with Xyzai (Espere long since dumped our poor chaos god and no longer cares), stopping kids from vandalizing the statues and such, was a little wary about making a restraint for a creature of his.
Money is the answer to all of life's problems.

He designed a contraption that basically rooted its captive to the floor if the lifeforce flickered in such a way that predicted a bolt. This worked more or less by keeping the Maunosh in a 5x5 metre pen with rails crisscrossing along the top, shackles on all four feet and weights that are supported by wires so long as the maunosh remains calm. If it is spooked the wires go slack and the weights on the shackles drop to the ground, preventing it from doing its mad-running-around thing that it does for no apparent reason. And no, the Kastellan government does not have an animal welfare committee, just a burning desire to keep everything as a pet.
These anti-spook rigs are incredibly expensive. Teetor gets 75% of profit, thanks to very clever royalties bargaining.

Now you know how a middle-aged ex demon hunter got very, very rich but little about the Maunosh itself.

They live in breeding pairs and communicate through high pitched dolphinesque squeaks that are out of the hearing range of humans. They stay with one partner their entire life, and live for 200-230 years wild. In comparison, a Maunosh kitlet taken from its parents directly after birth will rarely pass 20 years in captivity.

A single pair will raise one kitlet per decade. This kitlet will stay with its parents for between five and seven years before leaving to find a mate of its own. A male maunosh is called a bull, and a female a doe.

Maunosh are nocturnal. They have excellent night vision and suck nectar from nocturnal flowers (flowers that open their blooms at night), which they also are responsible for pollinating. As Maunosh DNA is 'perfect' and will not mutate, falter or otherwise change during meiosis in a way that differs them from their gifted ancestors, these flowers have evolved around them, and the exact species of nightblooms that they feed from change over time due to environmental factors.

They prefer more humid, jungle-like areas simply because this is where their food grows. They have the ability to control their body temperature, as more or less all purely native Kalaedan creatures must, for the orbit around a binary star system is very complex and results in widely varying climates from decade to decade.}

I finished this a little while ago. Still can't remember why it wasn't uploaded before.

This description may be a little hard to follow because you don't know who Xyzai or Espere or Teetor is or what Kastella is or how Kalaed orbits its suns or anything like that. I hope you enjoy the image anyway.

Again, the second script beneath the Roman one is Kastellan. My handwriting is crap in all languages, it appears.

Do you guys want a translation key so you can actually read the kastellan to make sure it doesn't just say 'table' or something?

_{Background tex: [link]§ion=&q=texture#/dk2isd}