Tiny Steps Mosquitoes, Beetles, Flies, Spiders, Butterflies

Mosquitoes:
Mosquitoes are a fascinating instance of a bug society that has taken on an entirely new structure based on a difficult-to-achieve old bug urge. See, mosquitoes lack the ability to fly (even with wings), and in most circumstances lack the proboscis that they used before becoming people… but they still maintained the urge to feed from animals, which were still much, much larger than they were. In order to achieve the daunting task of hunting these animals, during the first years of their existence mosquitoes tried tactic after tactic to hunt and slay creatures like raccoons and cats and dogs, and they usually failed and failed and failed… until they didn’t. What came out from this were roving bands of hunters, using practiced techniques and the terrain around them in order to defeat massive creatures, which fed them for days – and, once the Scholars’ University discovered how to salt meat, for several weeks. Thanks to this, mosquitoes are probably the singularly most successful rural bug species – they’re almost always found in nomadic groups, but they’re extremely well fed and they can often present a serious military force, which has given several different mosquito bands seats in the Council in the Redoubt.

Mosquitoes are named typically after playing a key role in a hunt (at which point they are named after their prey and what they did), before which they usually just have weapons as temporary names.

Example Bee Names: Dog Leap, Raccoon Charge, Bird Ride, Spear, Bow


Beetles:
Beetles are the most common of the many bugs that are *not* hive bugs, and they can be found in a wide variety of roles. They’re typically urban bugs, but they’re found anywhere from small villages to making up the population of entire large cities, they put out many skilled scavengers… and it’s very difficult to name a concrete trend beyond that, as there is in fact a dizzying array of varieties of beetles, to the point that even beetles themselves are often unable to really name what type of beetle they are, unless they’re either very well-educated on the subject or part of a sub-group of beetles with a distinct identity, such as ladybugs, who often pride themselves on their beauty. Because of the somewhat amorphous nature of the beetle identity, beetle cities, towns (distinguished from cities by not being in houses, even when populous), and villages have rather amorphous makeup in terms of their societies – some simply work on informal agreements, especially smaller towns and villages, some have monarchies made in the mold of the hive bugs (even if beetles usually find that sort of hierarchy difficult to maintain), and a great many are various kinds of republics or military cities. Beetles are usually seen as the “commoners” of the Scholars’ Redoubt and indeed of the known world; you can usually find quite a few beetles in any non-hive city, and their presence is seen as unremarkable and taken for granted. They don’t see the dismissal that aphids do, and perhaps this is simply because there are so many of them, and so many primarily-beetle communities, that they naturally will take up space in both the Scholars’ University and the Redoubt, though the relative lack of military organization among most beetle municipalities sees that presence lesser in the latter.

With the stunning physical variety in beetles, beetles in particular are often named after some physical feature of theirs.

Example Beetle Names: Orangestripes, Leafshell, Eyeback, Greeneyes, Longhorn


Flies:
Flies are another one of the many bugs that are more often found in roving bands rather than in settled societies, though unlike mosquitoes they are also very often found traveling completely alone or in individual family units... or even in companies. Flies inherited urges to scavenge from their old bug forms, and to this day they’re some of the most skilled scavengers in the known world, rivaling the scavenging efforts of ants. Some flies prefer to subsist on their own and not really engage with others, but a lot of them are capable of scavenging more food than they can really eat on their own, and this excess combined with the tendency to travel rather than centralize has lent a mercantile bent to many flies – flies often take the roles of traders, traveling between cities in order to trade food for various other goods and then to trade both those goods and other scavenged food in turn. Flies often provide cushioning for cities experiencing trouble and are often well-liked by those who don’t have some sort of disdain for merchants, as they’ve saved cities before and they conduct a large portion of the inter-region trade with the Bees’ Fields and Tin City that allows the Scholars’ Redoubt to remain fed. Flies aren’t really *usually* known for their military might, but individual fly warriors and mercenary companies aren’t unknown either – a couple of seats on the Council of Leaders are devoted to the largest fly mercenary companies in the Scholars’ Redoubt.

Flies vary in their names – the less mercantile-inclined flies will name themselves after the routes that they choose to ply, but the members of fly companies can often choose to name themselves after something that increases sales.

Example Fly Names: West to Southwest, To Fields and Back, On the Roads, Glitter and Shine, Mighty Mercenary Leader


Spiders:
Second in variance only to the beetles are the spiders… but there is one thing that brings together spiders in a way that the beetles don’t quite match, and that is the extremely unfortunate fact that spiders are driven by an urge they genuinely cannot possibly satisfy. Spiders are driven primarily to eat other bugs, with a system of capturing based entirely and specifically on eating them – but they lack the biology spiders had to make webs, and though kidnappings by spiders sometimes do happen, as spiders *also* lack the biology to eat the way that they did, and as they *also* now have more human instincts against cannibalism, when these things happen spiders will often just release whoever they caught out of simply not knowing what to do with them. Spider societies differ in how they’re setup – sometimes, spiders will blend into cities with mixed populations of urban bugs, sometimes they will have towns or villages (and there is one spider-dominant city), but sometimes they will also be travelers, either in bands like mosquitos or flies, or solitary, creating little camps for themselves and staying there until they have to leave. Though spiders were often distrusted in the earliest years of bug-people, these days that’s lessened significantly, as it’s really settled into everyone involved that spiders simply don’t provide the danger they used to.

Spider names run the gamut even more than beetle names – the blocks spiders face may affect their behavior, but they’re a terrible thing to base names off of. Nobody is going to name anyone “Can’t Kill And Eat People”. In the Scholars’ Redoubt, however, as a convention, spiders are often named after some aspect of the lifestyle they lead.

Example Spider Names:
Lake-Sailor, Far-Camper, Fly-Company-Man, Friend-of-Beetles, Lake-Town-Mayor


Butterflies:
Butterflies are one of the groups of the many bugs that are primarily based in towns – it’s not rare to see butterflies in cities, either, but quirks of the lifestyle that butterflies have chosen for themselves (much like their brethren the moths) have ensured that a nomadic lifestyle is extremely difficult for them, and towns are the easiest arrangement. This is because butterflies have transformed the prominence of their caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly life cycle into an *extremely* specific cycle of adolescence. Butterfly children mostly dress in drably colored clothing, and though they aren’t secluded they are actively raised and cared for and expected not to strike off on their own. During the most major changes of puberty, they instead enter their “cocoon” stage… which in this case just means becoming very reclusive, being cared for while mostly isolating themselves inside their residence for years at a time. Then, at adulthood they enter the “butterfly” stage, dressing in vibrant and often eclectic combinations of colors (as the majority of butterfly people won’t have the wings) and becoming extremely active, particularly in the caretaking of younger butterflies, with both family and collective aid in care being quite emphasized among butterflies. Adult butterflies are also encouraged to be extremely energetic and flamboyant.

Butterflies are named after the colors that they wear – this can lead to some similarity with beetle names, but these are chosen colors and don’t actually involve physical features except for the cases where butterfly people actually have wings. These colors are drab during childhood, dark during adolescence, and bright and vivid during adulthood. It’s common for them to be usually referred to by just one of these, though.

Example Butterfly Names:
Brown-Grey-Tan, Beige-and-Sienna, Black-and-Marengo, Vermillion-Chartreuse-Forest, Turquoise-Mandarin-Heliotrope