Worms

New Race Idea: Drifters
A nomadic race. Typically found in at most groups of 15 or 20 at most. Wrapped tight in heavy, coarse black shawls that insulate them from the outside world and blocks their faces, if they have any, from the sun. Some have theorized this to be some religious garment, while others have even gone as far to say it's some form of body hair woven into a protective cover. Whatever it is, the shawl covers them head to toe, draping over the mouths of their towering hoods. The only part that is exposed is their hard, calcified hands, that are jointed and segemented chunks of seemingly roughly carved stone. Intinerants that travel from town to town, setting camp one day and disappearing the next. Make their livings off of the odd things they either scavenge, hunt, or make. It's not uncommon to find the pelts of exotic monsters in their camps.  Typically, these items are traded for more useful items such as bullets and shotgun shells. The few groups that have encountered human civilization have seem to taken a liking to survival rifles and weapons of more simplistic design.
The "shawls" are purely to keep sand out of the inside so as to keep their sniffers working at max capacity
Because the insides of these things are infested by worms. The calcified outside and the shawl is made by the secretions of these things
The worms work in a hivemind unit.
Reproduction is done through the snapping off of a chunk of their hive, planting it into the ground to allow a future hive to grow slowly in years to come.
They smell their prey. The giant shrouded hoods are basically just one big nostril. They also have the worms that feel vibrations in the ground on the "feet" of the hive.
You gotta figure that if they're constantly squirming over each other, they'd know nothing of personal space
The worms vary in size based on age.
The larger ones act like the central nervous system, connecting to the larger swathes of smaller worms
If one of the larger ones dies, chemicals trigger for another to grow rapidly
They fear fire. The ancient races that used to hunt them would literally just bind them and then set their hives in a giant fire pit, feasting on their stewed innards that'd flow from their shells.
The actual worms inside drifters have incredibly porous skin that seems to be covered permanently in a thick layer of viscous mucous. This layer of mucous allows the worms to do a lot of things, inlcuding smelling, communcicating, eating, and even moving the Drifter colony.
The pores of a Drifter worm act as tiny mouths, each mouth producing a long strand of mucous that the tiny mouth can slurp up incredibly quickly. There are an uncountable number of these tiny orfices, and each one has its own strand of drool.
Whenever the strand "catches" a chemical in it, the worm can quickly slurp it up and process said chemical.
For example, say one worm wishes to share nutrients with another. One of the mouths of the sending worm can fill the end of its strand of drool with the nutrient slurry it has and fling the drool strand into the strands of the other worm, quickly transferring the chemical from one to another.
These "flings" happen incredibly fast. Due to the proximity of the worms in the colony, the transfer of chemicals from one worm to another is only a tiny bit slower than the human nervous system.
The most specialized worms, the "mouths" and the "noses" of the colony, are very adept in this regard.
 The "nose worms" recieve and interpret all smell from the environment.
They are incredibly sensitive to minute chemical changes in the area around them, able to track the smell of a long burnt out match within a 100 meters to its almost exact location.
The "mouth worms" serve an equally important purpose. They are responsible for the digestion and spreading of nutrients within the colony.
Infact, they are basically just mouths with stomaches and incredibly strong jaws that use sharp beaks to consume almost any matter with incredible digestive juices.
The sensitivity to chemicals and need to have mouths be open is the reason why Drifters have such thick "shawls", as it filters out unwanted particulates such as sand. Any worm can take the place of another more specialized worm, though it takes a lot of energy to do.
There are also "feeler worms", which exist in the feet of the colony.
These worms use their spittle strands to detect minute vibrations from the ground. They do so by allowing their strands to dangle out of tiny holes in the bottom of the foot.
Minute vibrations then travel through the strand, which the feeler worm interprets as a sort of "sight".
These sense messages are then sent throughout the entire colony for consideration. At first, there might be great deliberation among the worms as what the course of action should be. Young colonies are often incredibly slow to react to stimuli because of this. However, as stimuli and responses become more normalized, these responses quickly become instant.
Communication between colonies in their native "language" is much different.
They are unable to send chemical signals from colony to colony due to simply not having long enough mucous strands to do so.
For those who have little contact with anything other than other Drifters, they communicate via the clacking of the beaks of the mouth worms, and also by the feeler worms vibrating their spittle strands rythmically.
A heated arguement between two colonies can almost sound like an odd orchestral song being faintly played in another room.
The way that colonies speak to other races is very interesting.
Much like feeler worms, other worms can vibrate their spittle strands to. It has been observed that mouth worms have joined spittle strands together into impossibly complex designs, creating psuedo vocal chords.
They can then vibrate these chords and manipulate other strands to recreate typical vocal patterns normal among humanoids.
It isn't so much a sound mimicry ability so much as it is a way to try and communicate.
Most Drifters sound like they ate a bag of gravel for breakfast, and may draw out certain words for too long when they have just obtained command over a lnaguage.
The mucous incredibly viscous, and while it is possible for it to dry out, it would only really happen if a worm was unfortunate enough to be outside the colony's shell.