Editing Autia (section)

====Caridia====

In the dense, clouded jungles to the south of the Jade empire lives a most unique race of creatures, dubbed Caridians. Best described as large flying shrimp like creatures, they live in loose knit, interconnected clans that build their settlements on top of the many large table top mountains that break through the choking canopy below. Their cities shrouded in clouds reputedly contain extortionary amounts of precious metals, gems and exotic woods, spices and and perfumes.

Caridians are extraordinarily sociable, flourishing and taking delight in meeting new peoples and making new friends. This is hampered somewhat by the fact Caridian language is entirely magical with subtle changes like temperature, pressure, moisture and electrical charge conveying words and concepts. They have an auxiliary language used alongside there main language, utilizing there ability to change colour. This can be used stand alone on in conjunction with their magical language to convey more complex and esoteric concepts. Communication with other races can by done via writing or mages who can "speak" the language. Caridians on their part do their best to mimic vocal speech with magic to varying degrees of success.

Much to the Caridians dissapintment, there homeland is practically inaccessible by most races, but that that does not stop the Caridians from occasionally visiting The Jewelled Road to trade, with anecdotes of one particularly large trading party selling so much precious metals that the price along the road dropped so much that many economies relient on it floundered for decades afterward.

Caridians, despite being friendly to the point of naivety, are more than capable of defending themselves, sometimes quite viciously. Their style warfare is utterly unique, befitting their bizarre form. It consists entirly of arial combat almost entirly using magic, often strafing ground targets at incredible speeds with gouts of flame or dive bombing them with premade explosive and incendiary devices. In air to air combat they use tiny chunks of base metal and obsidian which they magically project and targets not unlike a rapid firearm. Compounding this they have an extreamly hard and robust exoseleton which is all but immune to arrowfire. Caridians naturally wear little armour, usually clooth with varius metal scales woven on and sharp blades on their lobes as last ditch attacks usually consist of swooping down and either attepting to slash the opponent or flip on its back and use its momentum and robusnuss to simply ram into the target often with the foce to shatter bones.

*exerpt from the encyclopaedia Zooalogica*

On the subject of the Caridians.

The Caridians are reputed to live in the dense jungles to the south of The Empire of the Jade Pyramids. Primarily inhabiting the many, large
flat topped mountains. Where they supposedly build their settlements.
They are in appearance like little else alive, described as looking like a mix of a shrimp and a flatfish. With a flat body that tapers toward the rear and a mouth set in a small head with two large eyes set on protuberances not unlike a snail, though they are incapable of retracting them. On the bottom of the head next to the mouth are two limbs that are said to aid in eating and manipulation of tools.
They also said to posses a most uncanny ability to fly despite no discernible means of flight, as multiple Gnomish eyewitnesses attest.
The Greenscales, due west of the area they are said to inhabit have numerous myths about them. Claiming that they(the Caridians) are a thinking race much on par with any race and that they possess a great affinity for magic, and have the ability to turn invisible. Additionally the Greenscales provide accounts of them attacking in a most astounding way, apparently they fly in close formation steeply upwards before descending at great speed whist casting spells at the target now directly below them.

In my opinion they are little but myth and fable misidentified dragons and other flying beasts, and the notion that such a strange beast is cognitively on par with the races is ludicrous.

Biology: Aside from essentially being flying anomalocarids they have a few other abilities, they possess a cuttlefish like ability to change their colour at will and besides using this for obvious camouflage they also use this as a form of auxiliary communication. with different colours signalling different moods and emotions. They also posses an innate and instinctual ability to use magic with their own novel "Schools" they are evolutionarily adapted to using. Their main mode of communication is though a magic 'language', mainly consisting of magical pulses, toroidal vortices of magic and subtitle uses of matter manipulation such as heating or cooling air, raising or lowering local pressure and moisture and charging the air with electricity/magnetism. This makes communicating with them difficult for all but experienced magicians

Society: Caridian society is loosely centralized but organized with broad 'Clans' united by blood relations with clans being united into larger political entities via a network of intermarriages and distant relations. Their settlements are typically built on top of large table top mountains inaccessible from the ground where they fashion magic hewn dwellings out of the rocks, around the many springs that flow out of the mountains.

Technology: Caridian technology is almost entirely magitech in nature due to their biology limiting their ability to craft tools, using magic hewn tools from obsidian and base metals like copper tin bronze and iron and greatly value the gemstones occasionally found in there rainforest homeland for there ability to store complex spells and magical scripting which they utilize in small automata they use to mine ore deeper in the earth where there biology becomes a handicap.

Culture: Caridian culture is surprisingly simple but strange, and probably best described as pragmatic. With a simple extended family model where rank is derived from blood relations to other powerful families where age is respected but the young have as much say as the elderly with deference usually given to elders. They generally adorn their bodies with complex ornaments that look like armour but in most cases are purely ornamental with the more ornate decorations signalling wealth status and rank where the younger where the most precious and ostentatious outfits generally of silver and gold along with brightly coloured bird feathers, usually as a way of signalling suitability as a partner, with the larger and more wealthy ones family the more outlandish and extravagant the decoration, once a pair has been married its considered vulgar and bigamous to wear such Adornments. the 'pragmatic' aspect of their culture is their ability to abandon their social norms if a situation calls for it, in times of war the most martial will take precedence, in times of famine and drought those with the magical knowhow and ability are the ones who manage the distribution of limited supplies. Rulers of their the villages and towns will willingly give up power or delegate it if the situation demands leading to a very decentralised power structure where each aspect of soceity from farmers to rulers work nigh autonomous of each other. This Tendency toward an almost utopian societal structure with no strife derives from their status as fairly close relatives of insects, giving them a stage soft eusociality, where each individual of society is an independent being with free will but with a tendency for tight social cohesion.

Religion:Caridean religion is a decentralized ancestor worship, where the spirits of the ancestors re-join an all encompassing life force that permeates everything in existence. It is believed that whilst the dead re-join life they retain conscious and can be invoked to bring good fortune from beyond the grave

Warfare:Caridians have a completely unique way of warfare due to their biology and lifestyle . They participate in a form of aerial combat where they perform various acrobatic feats whilst firing spells at one another, this combat has ritualistic significance and is used to settle quarrels between family groups with a single male from each family picked to fight. outside this context this form of combat is comparably rare as few, if any challenge the skies of their homelands. Caridians have no form of ground combat preferring to strafe over ground based enemies peppering them with offensive magic or dive bomb from great Hight in more coordinated formations. Caridian warriors wear fairly light metal armor made of thin metal plates attached to cloth worn on top of the carapace. Occasionally they will attach metal and obsidian blades to their lateral fins and dive in low and attempt to slash enemies. In rare occasions they will dive at enemies flip onto their backs and use the great hardness of their carapaces in addition to their armour to barge into foes at high speed often causing great damage. Caridians are particularly hard to fight because their combination of natural armour, swift flight and magic make them generally resistant to most ranged attacks arrows will mostly bounce off, bullets often lack the power to inflict substantial damage when they eventually hit and spells have to be fired with exacting precision to hit one mid flight. add the fact the jungle they live in is dense and the ground is uneven landscape for now at least there is little worth besides the abundant mineral welth and in the lands they control for most other races