Ancestry Outline: Gemite

 So I’ve been conceptualizing a campaign setting/world/novel setting for a bit, and I think I’m gonna try to spend my writing time here fleshing it out, starting today. Well, starting a while ago, because the first one was the short story about the olm boy who bonded with a baby dragon, but this is gonna be somewhat drier: I’m just gonna be writing lore, as it were, although I will eventually start writing stories too once I get the world fleshed out enough I know what I want to happen. I already have an idea for the next story but I think I want to think through the lore first so it’ll be easier to write.

Gemite

Gemites on first blush might seem to be a society of sentient constructs, and indeed, their bodies are engineering marvels, usually being constructed out of a iridescent, translucent crystalline material complete with tiny gears, joints, pulleys, and sometimes even hydraulics or other more advanced systems. These bodies, however, are actually less than they seem - they are merely the hive that houses the hivemind, thousands or even millions of tiny, ultra intelligent termites, who use their ability to chew and break down wood and stone to synthesize building materials for their mobile hives that function like mobile fortresses, mech suits, and just regular humanoid bodies when they interact with more conventional species.

Appearance

Gemites vary greatly in appearance, since their bodies can technically be built into any shape they can dream of. Individual members of a hivemind, known as mites, look much like any other termite, although their chitin can be any number of hues depending on genetics and where the gemite hails from and has a distinct iridescent sheen to it somewhat like a jewel beetle. Most gemites - when used as such, gemite refers to an individual hive and hivemind together - in their homeland are shaped like giant mites, but those who leave the homeland often reshape their bodies to incorporate at least some more humanoid features to allow them to relate to and blend in with others more easily, most commonly by creating centaur-like bodies with the back end of a mite and the top end of a beautiful, carved automaton torso of a human or other local humanoid. Some gemites decide they wish to look like other things, building fantastical creatures, other animals, moving obelisks, or even wheeled vehicles or flying machines, since their physical form is only limited by their skill and imagination. Although these bodies are not truly biological, they do provide functions - mites create giant camera lenses that function as eyes and project images of the surrounding world for viewing by the mite hivemind, mites construct resonating chambers to more easily hear and process sounds from the outside world, and they even often have processing chambers stomachs for breaking down material which has been masticated by carefully carved and maintained jaws. Gemites function as a complete superorganism comprised of their component mites and their constructed hive. Although from a distance gemites might appear to be construct, because of the translucent nature of their building materials, and he fact their bodies are riddled with tunnels to allow the individual mites to move around the body, close inspection will reveal the thousands of mites moving under their “skin”, an odd wriggling that some fine beautiful and others unsettling.

Biology

Gemites are psionic termites who live in a hivemind. Every gemite has a queen, a king, and some numbers of workers, who often specialize into multiple other functions depending on what form they have chosen their body to take, their needs, and their skills. Specialized workers will literally change their body to be more suitable to their task, undergoing partial metamorphosis into various types and tiers of workers, such as muscle stringers who weave silk cord for use in pulleys moving legs, or crystal masticaters who specialize in processing materials into the paste that hardens into the translucent, iridescent crystal their bodies are made of. Once a gemite goes through flighting, their equivalent of puberty, around the age of twenty years, their queen can give birth to clone queens and kings to replace the original king and queen when they die - although individual queens and kings can live for approximately a hundred years, the clones allow them to live far longer, as well as survive drastic injuries which kill existing kings or queens. Gemites can also survive the complete destruction of their hive, as long as at least one clone queen and king survives to repopulate and rebuild the hive. Gemites can also mate sexually to produce new gemite hives - this involves producing winged alates, who then mate with winged alates from another gemite and begin building their own hives. Much like humanoids who pair bond, gemites usually only do this with others they love and trust and find sexually attractive, raise their kids to flighting together, and often live in close association thereafter, but gemites will often do so in numbers more than one - its not uncommon for a group of three of five or even twenty gemites who all enjoy ones another's company to join in a mating swarm and then raise their children in a creche together, essentially creating a small married village.

Gemites primarily get their nutrition from digesting plant material, including wood, as they possess the rare ability to digest lignin and cellulose. This allows them to subsist in many areas other species would have difficulty and on food sources others cannot take advantage of. They do, however, also require a significant amount of other minerals to construct their crystalline hives. Although they are versatile crafters and can make use of whatever is available, places with sparse minerals can be difficult for them to thrive in due to this requirement, and may force them to grow their hives slowly. It also means they can often be found snacking on things others might not consider food, from rocks to metallic objects to ceramics.

Most individual mites are blind and navigate primarily through pheromone trails left by others of their kind. The only exceptions are sight workers who operate the vision for the hives as a whole. Mites rarely leave the hives, although some gemites do learn to develop scout workers who can leave the body and explore on a miniature scale, or even specialized soldier workers who can bite and inject toxins in swarms, often thrown onto enemies in small “grenades” made of their crystal plaster. Since individual mites are part of the hive mind, these mites willingly risk their lives in doing so. 

Individual gemite hiveminds function through a mix of psionic and biochemical signatures. Thus things which interfere with psionics or smells can confuse or incapacitate gemites more easily than other creatures. In such situation, individual mites will usually keep doing whatever task they were trying to do before, which can allow for continued functioning, but if the situation changes they will be unable to respond because of lack of coordination and communication between mites.

I think thats enough for today. I might expand on this tomorrow with disposition and society entries.