The Grand OC! [CONTEST XXX: HALLOWEEEEEEEEEEN]

Username: Schazer
Name: Seric Anech
Species: Hibiqui, sometimes called Voxivora
Gender: Female
Color: Boom boom boom

Description: A very big (about five and a half feet tall), very fluffy white-and-grey moth-humanoid, the overall build resembling Bombyx mandarina. She’s got four furry arms, two very furry legs, and claws designed for delicate work. Seric, like other Hibiqui, cannot speak. Her wings are capable of lifting her, but not designed for sustained flight. She’s approaching the end of her lifespan, with all the accumulated wear and tear, so her wings and fur are a bit ragged in places, she’s missing a finger and a tip off her antenna, but on the whole has aged reasonably well.

At the time of abduction, she was wearing her travelling garb - a sturdy, helm-like hood with gauze sealing the opening at the front, with two flaps at the back for her antennae (they’re fully prehensile and used for hearing; in extreme conditions she’ll roll them up and keep them in the hood). With no functioning mouthparts, it’s the easiest way to protect her large, delicate eyes. Carefully knotted into her body fur are silk cocoons ranging from the size of a golf ball to a small melon. On each hip is a bag to store harvested silk, plus various tools. Most armor doesn’t fit her and boots mean she can’t move silently, but at her partner Rhea’s request, she’s got enchanted vambraces on all four arms, rerebraces on her upper pair, and a staff (ok it’s a long wand) pre-packaged with a few useful survival spells. They could afford it, so Rhea saw no reason why Seric shouldn’t head off on her excursions unprepared.

Seric can be nervous around large groups when Rhea’s not around, but a single stranger isn’t a real threat. She’ll mostly be worried sick about Rhea, but is a peaceful individual who’d only strike out in self-defence.

Weapons/Abilities: Hibiqui are an all-female species who produce predominantly-infertile offspring via parthenogenesis. They’ll produce roughly one egg per year for about half of their natural lifespan (about a century). The larvae are strepitovores (noise-eaters), producing Singing Silk when properly fed. Each is “keyed” to a particular range of noise, so Seric’s got one for laughter, one for birdsong, one for music, footsteps, the ocean, the crackling of fire, screams, clashing blades, and so on. When exposed to their preferred sound (Seric needs to cut a little flap in the cocoon), the larva eats it straight out of the air. This can make harvesting man-made noises like music difficult, as if your instrument falls silent mid-song, your instinct is rarely to continue playing.

Singing Silk “stores” the sound eaten by the grub which made it. Exposure to a single strand produces an auditory hallucination until contact is broken. When a fibre is broken, the sound is released. Seric can spin fibres into threads or cords to magnify these effects for defensive purposes, or mix Singing Silk with mundane fibres to produce cloth. Cloth made from pleasant noises, like birdsong or the ocean, is a luxury good and Seric’s main source of income. Silk made from song-eating or music-eating grubs is even more difficult to weave into an acoustically-pleasant whole, giving it even more outrageous value.

The last egg a Hibiqui produces will be the Voxivora - a grub whose diet consists solely of speech. The Voxivora is the only larva capable of pupation into an adult - evolutionarily, the sisters are there for their silk, which the mother uses to disorient predators which might approach the Voxivora during its vulnerable moult. Seric shares a psychic link with this one grub, commanding it to produce strings of words which allow her to communicate. She’s mute, otherwise.

A Hibiqui adult’s capacity for complex thought depends entirely on the ideas behind the words it absorbs as a pupa. As such, there’s a tradeoff for Seric between using her daughter’s silk to communicate with others, and depriving it of its optimum intelligence as an adult. This seems a countermeasure to stop others stealing and cultivating Hibiqui cocoons, as the adults don’t have words to explain the delicate rearing process (which almost certainly requires innate magics on the adult Voxivora’s part).

Biography: Seric entered adulthood like all other Voxivora - crawling out of the withered remains of her mother’s thorax, surrounded by a net of disjointed noise that extended out into the wastelands for several miles. Her first eggs were the howling of wind and predatory beasts, but subsequent eggs needed the sound of forests or mountains or seas. Like all Hibiqui, she instinctively knew what noise her new children needed, and travelled to ensure they wouldn’t starve.

She journeyed the Praeterwater for decades, having a few run-ins with civilisation but, where possible, avoiding it. The Hibiqui were, for the most part, a solitary species, rarely crossing paths with one another. Cursed with a life cycle that meant they had to steal voices before they had one of their own, their presence all-too-often became unfairly maligned, and the species was hunted down in many parts of Praeterwater. Seric lost a few eggs out of an unwillingness to venture into a city where they might feed, until she birthed the Voxivora and had to take the risk. She met an apprentice luthier called Rhea Anech, who quickly figured out why her instruments (and, you know, her vocal chords) stopped making noise around Seric, and Seric repaid her with Singing Silk, a single ream of which sold for enough to land the two some really nice apartments in the coastal Seakin city of Mon Sango.

Rhea was a fantastic mother, who spent lots of time just reading (if not quite aloud) to Seric and her daughter. The two had a happy cohabitation for close to fifty years, though Seric still travelled a lot to keep her “vegan” kids well-fed. The two were coming up with possible plans to train apprentices, stash silk, find a way that Seric could complete her life cycle without running off into the wilderness (maybe even teach Rhea how to tend to the cocoons), but these were interrupted by the battle.