Posted by Garz 4 years ago Report

Fascinating race!

It's very descriptive, too - makes it very clear what the digestion process feels like, which is notable as it sounds pretty painful!

Due to them processing ore within themselves, I can see a lot of humans making plenty of deals to utilize that. Of course, the humans would have to be more than willing to take a few risks to do so, given they're particularly delicious.

You mentioned that any females born to a Chromala would be of another species; this means if they were to hypothetically breed with some other dragon type the more conventional way, I presume?

You also noted that they live in groups that form basically-cities, but also that they predate on orphaned chromala. Is general chromala-vs-chromala violence or devouring uncommon? With barbed tails I presume they have some competition for mates, but even that could have been a thing of the past and doesn't mandate a lack of cooperation.

Them having multiple methods of reproduction is additionally fascinating. The experimentation which discovered 'Hey, we can use humans to get an extra chunk of semen' must have been very fun for the chromala and significantly less fun for nearby humans, haha.

The second method sounds especially painful and is very well described. When they use a captured human for a substitute, does it matter what gender the human is (So I guess that means, does the human require a womb for the egg, or will it just being inside the human work so a male captive would work all the same?) And due to size differences involved, does this result in significantly fewer eggs?

And for the third method, do humans who were chromala remember their previous life, or is it entirely physical changes?

Very neat race ^_^ Sorry for all the random questions, they're just neat and have me thinking of story ideas.

Posted by BrokenButterfly45 4 years ago Report

Oh, wow, I didn't expect the questions or interest! No worries at all, thank you so much for asking! Let's see here...

I had written it with the intention of them being able to breed with any species, though because this is one of my older race write-ups, I didn't think to clarify that. Or, to put it a different way, a Chromala can breed with anything that would survive the encounter (which I generally confirm to be any race, because it's just more fun that way and I'm not into "death by sex" in that way), but any females are of the other race. So two Chromala can't breed a female, and any Chromala x nonChromala pair that results in a female has the female of the NonChromala race.

Chromala-on-chromala violence and devouring is seen as an existing fact of life that's fairly uncommon. Essentially, chromala are social enough that there's very little risk to living in city-groups (and a lot of gain), but it wouldn't be unheard of for fights to break out over mates or territory, or for a certain persistent rival to end up in the other suitor's stomach. Think of it with the frequency of car crashes in real life -- it can happen, and it does happen, but it doesn't happen persistently or often enough to dissuade you from actually driving.

As for captured humans, it doesn't matter. Regardless of the sex, they can hold the eggs, because the eggs don't care where they are and human digestive acids aren't strong enough to hurt them. (So a human could still eat with eggs in their stomach, it'd just be... uncomfortable, but the dragon doesn't care.) It does indeed result in fewer eggs as well, yes, so as not to seriously harm the captive human.

As for the memories, yes, the chromala-human does retain the memories, but they also regress to the instinct and mind-state that chromala have, so they don't really bring any "regrets" or "horror" over their change, even if it was unwilling.

I think that covers everything! ^^ Let me know if you have more questions.

Posted by Garz 4 years ago Report

Thank you for the responses! That does clarify things.

These creatures are definitely fascinating! I'd like to write a short fanstory with them, although 'what precisely about' I'm still contemplating as there's a lot of ways it could go, haha. (Well, presuming this is okay. Is this okay?)

One last question does come to mind, though - mentality. When you noted that Chromala often trick humans it got me wondering, particularly as in the example story neither spoke. Are they kinda feral animal-like intelligence, so 'cunning beasts'? Or are they more human-like intelligence, just with a different mental perspective about the world?

A trickster Chromala is definitely jumping to mind, I'm just making sure I understand what a Chromala experimenting would be like!

Posted by BrokenButterfly45 4 years ago Report

Yep! For any races I do write-ups on, my rule is that as long as you credit me with making the race and link back to the initial racial post, you're free to write/draw/whatever about them.

Mentally, it's sort of a mix! They tend to be more feral in that they get information across with body language, scents, growling, but they're intelligent enough to speak, so they're sort of like ancient human-type. If that makes sense?