Rampantarans: The Topic-By-Topic Guide

*This guide is meant to be styled like a glossary, featuring various subjects about life of the vaguely insect-like Rampantarans. A chapter-view, featuring each update to the glossary in a new chapter is planned to be created later on as well as a small section featuring some sketchwork regarding Rampantaran life. The work on the general page about Rampantaran civilization continues.*

**Camping:** For a Rampantaran, camping is one of the top hobbies and those who possess advanced spacecraft also travel to different planets/moons just to camp. They also tend to bring home all sorts of junk they find on their trails, but, on the plus side, they rarely litter. One of the inventions Rampantarans use for camping trips is a gigantic latern, that doubles as a campfire when put down and fed certain materials. On hot planets, Rampantarans use endothermic version of the fire, which instead drags the surrounding heat inside it, forming a dense round object found in the remains of the fire, after the flames burn out.

**Cold-tolerance:** Despite being cold-blooded, Rampantarans can, for a few days, survive being frozen due to having fast healing abilities and anti-freeze based chemicals inside their circulatory system. Cautious Rampantarans carry a temperature-measuring communicator with them, which send data to a rescue centers. If a Rampantaran is frozen solid or neglects sending manual signals each hour to the center to confirm that they are still alive, a rescue party is sent to retrieve the Rampantaran from the frozen planet. Of course, a Rampantaran needs to sleep and so they cannot tap on their communicator every exact hour, so they train certain freeze-resistant pet companions to do that for them and also send a SOS signal if the pet sees them frozen solid and unresponsive. A robot also can be used in place of a pet.

**Gangs:** Rampantaran criminal activity and congregations tend to happen when their youth go through particular molting periods during age when they think that they are already grown-up aka something along equivalent of teenage years. These particular Rampantarans, feeling weak, awkward and unwanted, end up joining groups lead by more confident Rampantarans. The resulting groups on their own, may range anywhere from good-intentioned to downright malicious. The members of less savory groups are driven to pick on other teenage groups that are either more creative, nicer or productive. In addition, they also cause ruckus in local Rampantaran facilities, but since the attendants there are often thick-skinned in temperament and are trained to fight if necessary, doing so mostly doesn't pay off.

**Generosity:** The act of giving can be a somewhat complicated concept for a Rampantaran. They may feel rather greedy with their belongings, but will eventually part with some of them if the reciepient has proven their right to receive said belongings. Because of this, Rampantaran, from an early birth has a fairly advanced body language to conwey how much it needs a certain object, right up to the point that they don't even need to make loud noises as often. This displays of body language are able to toggle empathy in Rampantarans that are in the position to give. Needless to say, the result is that there is quite a large beggar community in Rampantaran towns, but a lot of beggars usually tend to be on the low end spectrum of perfecting their cultural pantomime (which may be why their lifes took an unlucky turn, seeing how important body language is).

**Gymnastics:** Rampantarans are great at exercises/sports games that require speed, wall crawling or the ability to work in unison. Because of that other alien races may write them off as hive-minded, but in reality their hive-mind is highly optional and doesn't get in the way of most of the stuff they do. Rampantarans would rather stay away from weight-lifting and other excessive strength exercise, because they are only able to maintain necessary strength and muscle composure, if they are excited, when carrying a large object in their hands or mandibles (befitting their lifestyle of collection stuff). But if they attempt to do this when they lack the adrenaline of excitement, then such Rampantarans would end up drastically injuring themselves.

**Metamorphosis:** The insect-like Rampantarans don't go through metamorphosis themselves, but they are fascinated by aliens that do. About 70% of domestic species kept by Rampantarans are capable of metamorphosis and this is thought to encourage keepers to be more caring and able to take care of each stage, which each having different requirements. There are also all sorts of mishaps (a caterpillar stage can be a ravenous beast, an adult stage - a flying, poisonous being driven to migrate constantly), but those are still considered to be a enrichment in Rampantaran life.

**Moon:** Rampantarans tend to feel most morally stable when they get to witness full moons in the sky, and the higher the number of moons, the better. Several organizations tend to provide Rampantarans with stuff that lets them to supposedly find out valuable "artifacts" by analyzing the coordinates of several moons in the sky. Whenever Rampantaran settles ends up on a planet, which has no moon, they may get kooky and do some crazy stuff, but it's more of a 50/50 chance, which is even more diminished if the Rampantaran crew has been prepared for visiting such planets. Rampantarans, despite the importance of the moons, do not see any of those as a deity, instead viewing them as celestial objects capable of powerful pseudo-scientific feats.

**Outlaws:** As mentioned in Gangs section, Rampantaran society doesn't have the best of social cohesions. Among crimes, the most reviled ones is causing acts of violence using ice weaponry, parasitic fungus/worm bombs, things that cause mass-scale flooding or emit strong bursts of light, three of the elements which can quickly kill a Rampantaran citizen and the last one capable of causing lasting disabilities. Getting caught commiting any of the above mentioned offenses, causes rowdy Rampantarans to be on the run from the (fairly advanced) protectors of law. The outlaw individuals and gangs often end up hiding out in almost the very same environments they tried to unwittingly recreate, while using their weapons - icy biomes, underwater biomes or biomes which have very bright illumination. In other, safer places they may get tattled on and found out, so they tend to steal equipment to survive the harsher biomes.

**Pets:** Actually Rampantarans are not specifically drawn to hoarding animals/plants and take them from their natural habitats. It used to be a bigger thing in the older days of Rampantaran civilization, but now Rampantarans have become more ecologically aware and tend to leave environment alone, instead collecting objects resembling debris and mechanical junk as well. The skill of creating robots has become more prominent among Rampantarans, despite them lacking high artistic-abilities. So the robots may turn out rather strange and childish-looking, but even so they behavior-wise make good pets and manual laborers wherever necessary. The act of raising and taking care of organic pets is now more of a educational project to teach the Rampantarans more about the life of non-sapient species and also about the act of taking responsiblity. As of result, Rampantarans take effort to recreate mini-habitats for their pets at any opportunity (which is the plan, but other times it's failure - good intentions alone can't always lead to success).

**Toys:** Young Rampantarans are interested in basically nearly any holdable object and tend to play pretend with these objects, imagining that they are different objects that they don't have yet. The purpose of this is to train Rampantaran brain for the future tasks of being able to categorize multitude of objects that they, as adults, will gather across the solar system. Due to their massive interest in lots of stuff, Rampantaran kids may have short attention span, but they, to a near genetic level, manage to tame their interest, whenever the adults tell them that they are in for a "almost no stuff at all" timeout. With this kind of discipline, Rampantaran kids quickly develop superb maintanance of their state of being interested, rarely getting bored, but also getting distracted way less (but how much it depends from individual to individual).

**Washing:** To a Rampantaran getting the right temperature of water is very important, considering their cold-bloodedness. They are also not fans of having too much water around in one place. So the Rampantarans invented about four different chemical brands, that make the water condense into a still-liquid shape similar to a water drop on a surface (based on how small Earth insects are compared to a realistic water drop). But Rampantarans are roughly human-sized and yet they attempt to bathe and clean stuff inside these strange, bathtube-sized water mounds. That being said, Rampantarans can be notoriously bad at planning, which results in the condensed water jelly flan ending up being placed on an uneven structure and subsequently quickly flowing/sliding away, inconceiving neighbors and passerby.