:thinking: I should worldbuild more for Tiah's home planet and xenobiology. I never went much into it other than her kind (Anguills) are amphibious, and live most of their lives in knee-waist deep lakes that cover most of their planet.
They live in large community units where immediate family isn't really relevant. They are all the same sex, but reproduce sexually based on hormones cycle presentations. The closest concept to gender they would have is profession, since that determines your space in the social setting.
mostly I'm interested in thinking about how their culture shakes their language and counting system. They have bilateral symmetry in their bodies like humans, but a lot of the fauna around them has rotational symmetry, as well as ripples in water. I'm picturing their writing system being based around this, with like stars or points around a circle representing words/letters. Maybe from this, sentences don't particularly have a start or end, but a series of concepts together in it. ("The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" could also be written like "dog brown over fox jump quick lazy" so to speak). Their concept of time might be very cyclical, probably measured by the average hormone cycle of an adult or something else predictable and repeated. Order of events is not usually considered important, moreso that they all happened together during a set of time.
arranging rocks in concentric circles underwater is an art from. different colored rocks can create shapes from the rings or show a word or phrase. they have compasses (the circle drawing kind) as a major writing tool.
spoken word has a lot to do with trilling vibrations that are felt by antennae and not particularly audible, especially to humans. Angills have ears, but they're covered by skin and aren't very sensitive. Talking closely with someone could be heavily contact based, humming into their hand or with your face against their body somewhere.
They don't wear clothes, but do have fabric for making nets, beds, cloths for washing things, bandages, etc. I am not sure they'd have fire, or at least the ability to use it on their own (i.e., lightning can make fire, compost can make fire, but they don't have a need or ability to generate it on purpose). Although maybe they do, I like the idea of them having glass and pottery. Maybe there's extremely hot thermal vents that create dry areas of land that act in a kiln-like fashion, and are cyclical so during cool periods they can lay pottery or sand or something out and when the heat cycles back around it fires it?
I like to think their planet is humid as hell. everything always feels damp. everything you own is wet all the time. Stuff can be dried by tying it up out of the water or over a thermal vent, or packed in salt. Angills are freshwater creatures and are very sensitive to the high salinity of the salt ocean in the southern hemisphere. Not to mention the salt ocean is where most the hazardous animals live.
There's lots of tube-like fish in the lakes Angills live in. They range from teeny tiny to about a foot long without domestication, but can be up to eight or nine feet long if raised to a good length. Fish is their main diet, supplemented by algeas that secrete vitamins and other things that help with total health. Non-food animals around include axolotl-like salamanders that are often kept as pets (sorta like if humans kept monkeys tbh), starfish, barnacles, snails, flatworms, leeches, Jellyfish, and various large slime-like colony animals.
Plant life on their planet is mostly grasses, kelps, and large trees somewhere between a boabab and a mangrove. Some areas have dense high canopies, making very dark secluded areas and others are miles-wide lakes without any coverage at all.
Their moons are positioned as such that one is usually always full, providing lots of light at night. Bioluminescent algae and slime are often kept well-fed in areas that are often dark, although Angills have excellent night vision as well as heightened other senses to accentuate it. Since conversation and writing are both very tactile, there's not much need for extra light around. Except for near developing tadpoles, which cannot sense well yet and grow better when given ample exposure to light as they develop.
their life cycle goes from eggs (roughly softball sized and soft, laid one at a time with a decently high mortality rate at this stage), which hatch into slightly larger than a softball sized tadpole (bulbous head and bean shaped body with a tail). Slowly it grows antennae and legs and is behaviorally little different from the domesticated salamanders. Once it is about the size of a newborn human, it's behavior shifts to be more like it's adult form, wading in the water like a little toddler and humming. It fully resembles a tiny adult around 1 year (Earth year) of age. Adults reach sexual maturity around 10 years but aren't socially considered adults until 12. Their lifespan is roughly 50 years. The older an Anguill is, the less time it spends underwater, some even chosing to spend their final days completely beached.
Their reproductive cycle is roughly (and times are in Earth time, which isn't too different from Anguills time tbh) one month long, starting with a week of producing semen, followed by a week of sterility, then a week of producing eggs, and a final week of either gestation or sterility, depending on if insemination occured. They have cloaca-like vents, lined with villi and mate by doing a cloacal kiss. It's very pleasurable and is often done For Fun And Bonding outside of matching reproductive cycles. It's not terribly easy to know which stage of the cycle you're on until climax, although there's some other hormonal shifts that can indicate it (that I'll develop later). They also do hand and mouth stuff and probably have new and interesting kinks that I can't even fathom. They do have strict boundaries about not involving children in sex, killing, and the dead. These things aren't taboo, but are generally kept a little vague and not directly involving children, though this can vary on community unit.
Anguills sleep in a mud nest lined with cloth or grass and in a pile around other Anguills, curling their large tails around one another as skin to skin contact is important for them. They have somewhat random sleep cycles and it's considered important to sleep when you need it, so they often nap or drift between insomnia and hypersomnia.
Profession roles are pretty "standard" though again vary on community. Children of about 10 are coming if age and are expected to start figuring out where they work best. There's things like scribes, artists, teachers/caretakers, doctors, hunters, infrastructure, science, potters, etc.
I haven't fully decided how Tiah really comes about knowing about humans. I know she's a scientist, an astronomer specifically. But considering how low-tech their society is, I can't come up with how shed know specifics about Earth, unless maybe she posesses a probe that contained information about Earth in its capsule that crashed on their planet. It's all gibberish to her but she's been working on cataloguing and decoding what she can. Which is why she's so excited to meet humans when they make first physical contact, and she even can write a little of some Earth words to communicate back. Sidenote I use she/her for her bc she's decided human women are amazing and awesome and sexy and she wants too be one too so she picked out Girl Gender for herself for her Earth Gender. Her Anguills gender is UFOlogist.
okay it's midnight I need to go to bed instead of brain dumping world building into a text post