Even more Bug OCs!

This one is Baroness Charis Phytaea Daktylis, directly associated with my previous OC. She’s a ‘Low Queen’, a landed lady with authority over her brood, but otherwise the next-to-lowest rung in Torix feudal society baring the landless.

Life is competitive for a noble Torix with many rival siblings. Only a few will inherit estates and thus become capable of (legitimately) starting a brood of their own, and those that don’t still squabble among themselves for influential leadership positions. This was especially true of Charis, who had nearly twenty other noble sisters and brothers all gunning for power. The odds were stacked against her, but young Charis was ambitious and bright. Through intrigue, bullying and some other underhanded actions she has admitted to very few even years after the fact, she eventually secured herself two good husbands and a small but fertile uninhabited demense near the edge of Daktylis territory.

As she underwent preparations to establish her colony, a serious complication revealed itself: her pheromones were critically weak. All Torix have pheromone glands to aid in subtler forms of communication (usually indications of emotion or the general state of a colony), and the pheromones of breeding queens and fertile princesses are strong enough to be detected by their antennae for miles. While it is not actually mind control as many other races mistakenly believe, these pheromones do allow queens to keep colonies of even thousands of worker daughters well organized and informed. Worker Torix do not need to hold any leadership positions so long as the queen and the other ruling nobility have pheromones to communicate with them. Charis expected her pheromone glands to grow to their expected state when she reached maturity, but it became apparent that this would never be the case. Torix culture does not look highly upon queens who cannot control their brood, and with this defect Charis feared she would lose everything she worked so hard for.

She went to numerous Torix healers, and they all told her the same thing: this is not something that could be fixed. Refusing to accept her fate, she set forth from the lands of her House with her husbands and a few attendants to search the lands of other races for something that could help. Her intention was to locate either sorcery or surgery that could repair her body, visiting grand universities and isolated experts alike. While she originally had hoped she would find what she sought before long, the journey kept going on and took her farther from home than she ever expected. She and her often got caught up in some manner of local conflict, or were waylaid by misfortune or their own mistakes, or simply ran out of money and had to find ways to support themselves as the adventure dragged on. She saw world full of cultures vastly different to her own; even foreign Torix seemed to behave oddly. They were totally alien at first, though as time went on and she began to know the other peoples of the world more personally, she began to see how people built societies that worked (more or less) without the rules and rituals she once that were absolutely necessary. While she never gave up on the core ideals that were instilled in her by her upbringing, she saw saw parts of her tradition being unnecessary or even counterproductive to what she imagined was a good society.

And so, eventually she made the decision to return home with her band, its ranks now having been swelled with some new friends she made along the way. Years on the road with no results made her give up on restoring her body, but with the knowledge she gained abroad gave her hope that she could perhaps run her colony in a way that didn’t necessitate such direct control over her brood. While it was an exciting, hopeful prospect, she was still worried. She was unsure how her House would take this unorthodox behavior, and she was haunted by the myraid ways her engineered society could possibly fall apart. Still, she pushed onwards, as she always had during her travels. She made her preparations and started her brood.

Her brood is still relatively young and small, numbering only a little over 200 workers, though her demense does contain denizens of other species and a number of transient residents like traders and specialists. Without her pheromones, her workers need to be more independent, and authority is much less centralized than in other colonies. She hopes that the cultural difference between worker and noble will eventually disappear over time, though some old habits die hard. The rest of the House view her colony with suspicion, though for now they seem to tolerate her. She rules with a gentle hand, though there is much work she does away from the public eye of her brood in ensuring the independence and stability of her lands.

Her time abroad has caused some foreign customs to rub off on her, which makes her seem a bit eccentric in the eyes of some of her kin. She has mellowed out over the years, becoming a rather laid back and fun-loving queen, though underneath the lackadaisical exterior she is as tough and caring a mother as any other Torix ruler. Her physical strengths and skill have waned ever since she became a sedentary queen as opposed to an active princess, though natural intellect and wisdom earned as a veteran adventurer still serves her well to this day. While she is not as viciously ambitious as she was in her youth, she still has plans that extend beyond the borders of her estate, plans that she keeps in the dark even from those very close to her. She hopes one day her plans will come to fruition and change House Daktylis and the Empire for the better.