Leandre's research notes #INK-002:

"The Inkish Empire unifies a wide variety of different animalistic species under it's banner, most of them against their will. Undeniably one of the most omnipresent and iconic species would be the lynvarian clubtail, who even as far as minor flunkeys go is considered to be the most minorestest of minor flunkeys.
Not quite intelligent enough to be able to understand speech, but smart enough to follow simple commands, they are easy to train and keep as worker-animals. Physically sturdy and durable, but usually very shy and kind-hearted, they are much better suited as manual laborers rather than fighters, and they pretty much are the backbone of the empires work-force. Naturally adept at digging they are most commonly used as miners, but they also find use as carriers of heavy loads, road-workers, demolition-workers and ammunition. Some are also kept as pets by non-unfree citizens of the empire, but since they tend to ruin gardens and floor-boards alike with their digging, they aren't immensely popular.

Clubtails are very much seen as an expendable ressource within the empire, much like traitors, failures, war captives and books with long words in them. A common rule of caution in the empire is that asmart person will never approach or touch anything unknown and potentially dangerous before throwing a clubtail at it. If the clubtail gets fried, frozen, dissolved, disintegrated, transformed, zapped out of existence, tied into a knot or turned magenta, it's usually best not to approach.

Fun trivia:
-A lot of sayings and metaphors in the empire revolve around clubtails. Like a "clubtail-task" being a job so dirt-simple and unprestigious that nobody would want to do it, or the popular emotional punk-ballad "Feeling like a clubtail" by Abyss-Staring Sorrowhorse.
-In some parts of the empire, clubtails are used as currency.
-A traitor of the empire is usually estimated to be worth about 5-6 clubtails."


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