Taserflame

The taserflame split from its ancestor. It has taken on a preference for tougher and potentially toxic food, but rather than investing in a larger gut or poison resistance, it has taken a different, less energy-intensive approach. This creature has learned to make and control fire, which it uses to cook its food. This has allowed it to consume organisms which it normally would not be able to due to its small size and lack of teeth. The behavior has its roots in accidental fire-starting, which can happen to any tasertongue, and gradually became favorable both by them as individuals because it made food taste better and evolutionarily because it allowed them to eat things they couldn’t previously. The current form of the cooking behavior came about from roughly 200 thousand years of optimization.

The appearance of a tasertongue which uses fire to cook its food may immediately bring back memories of the extinct sagon, a sophont which was tragically wiped out by the expansion of endless ice and tundra which defined the Bloodian period. The taserflame is no sophont, however—indeed, it’s on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum among living tasertongues due to its ancestor going through a period of having no predators to keep up with. This is not to say it isn’t smart, of course, as it’s very difficult for the sister lineage of a sophont to lose it all even over tens of millions of years. But the emergence of fire usage is not directly connected to intellectual ability or tool use at all—rather, it is rooted in biology. Like all tasertongues, the taserflame can produce an electrical shock using its tongue. This can create a spark, which in turn can potentially set dry plant material on fire. Unlike other organisms which can only create fire using incredibly advanced tool use, the taserflame can quite literally grab some kindling and will it to be set ablaze.

Taserflames can build fires wherever they please using piles of wood, but these are only used for warmth. Their tool use is overall limited; in fact, depending on one’s definition of tool use, one could argue that they can’t use tools at all, as they do not use objects as extensions of their bodies. As such, they cannot hold sticks with a food item attached to the end over a fire like they’re roasting marshmallows, so to cook, they must instead use a fire pit with sticks laid over it like a grill to suspend their food. They do not make their own fire pits, instead using natural dips in the ground or repurposing abandoned bannertail spawning pools. Dry wood, plent bones, or dung gathered from their surroundings is used as fuel, and, using their electric tongues, kindling such as dry leaves or plent cotton is set ablaze and immediately dropped in the pit. Over a scaffolding of sticks laid across the pit they place fresh meat, crystal branches, and various leaves, fruits, and small fauna which would otherwise be toxic to them. The process of cooking neutralizes toxins, kills harmful microbes, and increases the amount of bioavailable nutrients by breaking down cell walls and complex tissues, and tough leaves which would normally prick their mouths soften into something far more edible. This is especially valuable because, like most plents, the taserflame has a blind gut and as such can only digest one meal at a time; making food more nutritious and easier to digest allows it to get more out of that one meal before it regurgitates it to eat something else.

Like their ancestor, taserflames live in groups, though they rarely exceed 50 members. A group of taserflames is called a mob. They do not migrate, instead preferring to inhabit a specific area which is not likely to be burned down by their use of fire, such as a collection of small caves or an abandoned bannertail-drakeshrog “village”. Unlike other tasertongues, which often violently smash their heads together over disputes or mating rights, taserflames are largely more social and friendly with one another and all headbutting is comparatively gentle and ritual, more comparable to goats than, say, pachycephalosaurs; as a result, their skull caps are smaller. Their small body size makes them vulnerable to predation, but at the same time, they can also easily duck into small hiding spots which their predators may struggle to extract them from. Though taserflames do not instinctively use tools, their reflexes to avoid burning themselves will sometimes result in them chucking a burning pile of leaves straight ahead; some individuals may do this intentionally to scare away predators after previously doing so on accident, though it can backfire if there’s a lot of flammable material around.

Taserflames often split up into smaller bands of 3-8 to forage and hunt. In addition to collecting their usual diet of toxic and hard-to-digest flora and fauna, they regularly follow large predators on hunts and use their knife-like fangs to cut slabs of meat (or, more rarely, entire limbs) from fresh kills. Due to their small size, they are usually ignored when they do this and are only rarely picked off as food. Pack-hunters, especially multi-species packs such as those of bannertails and drakeshrogs, may even make room for the taserflames while eating due to their instincts to share.

Like their ancestor, and like most terrestrial plents, taserflames mate mouth to mouth and give live birth. Unlike their ancestor, female taserflames do not stay in one place while pregnant. However, they do still stay relatively close to home to avoid endangering their unborn offspring. Pregnant females stand slightly upright during late pregnancy to avoid tipping over. They give birth inside dens, which are usually made from natural caves, hollow logs, or abandoned nests or burrows of other creatures. Their offspring are semi-precocial, already fluffy and able to move around on their own but largely helpless, somewhat like toddlers. They reach full size in less than a year due to their highly nutritious diet. Notably, while adults can still digest raw meat if they need to, juveniles cannot.

In addition to behavioral changes, the taserflame has some body changes. Its butt nostril is bisected, granting redundancy that protects it from suffocation. The skin on its tongue is more calloused and pigmented to protect it from its own flame as well as from accidentally absorbing uncooked toxins, and as a result, it can no longer smell using it; however, this is not a problem, because like all plenthogs it has been able to smell using its barbels (which its fangs are set on) all along for hundreds of millions of years and never actually needed to smell with its tongue in the first place. Its fangs are more knife-like and are used to cut its food, particularly to remove thorns and spikes and chop up larger pieces of meat, like a built-in version of its extinct sophont relative’s butchering tools. Its tympanic ears are set deeper into its head, making them less vulnerable to damage. The rise of cooking and the need to run from predators has resulted in taserflames generally taking on a leaner build.