Alce

Alces are a humanoid species somewhat resembling birds or wingless griffins. They are one of many species originating in Universe C, and their existence seems to have a cosmic tie to Davepetasprite^2.

This page is a work in progress.

## Anatomy & Physiology

Alces are bipeds with two arms, two legs, and a long tail. Their skin is covered by a mix of fur and feathers, the latter mostly limited to their extremities. They have cat-like ears and long beaks. Their hands resemble a cat's paws, albeit with longer digits, while their feet resemble crow talons. They are naturally semi-arboreal climbers and are capable of clinging to a perch with their feet and swinging their tail to swivel around while their arms are used for other tasks.

Alces vary in color and patterns, usually resembling corvids of some kind. Though their literal appearances are more varied, they are typically stylized to a mix of black, white, and blue. Similar to humans, prior to the age of exploration alces varied in appearance regionally. Unlike humans, their regional difference trends are not primarily in their color, but instead in fur length, with colors and patterns serving more as individual identification. They undergo a complete moult biannually, switching between either summer and winter or wet season and dry season coats depending on their climate of origin.

Alces lack sexual dimorphism--males and females look exactly the same on the outside, so much so that in many cultures the distinction is meaningless outside of reproduction. They are heterosexual reproducers, much like humans, though their default attraction--to an outside observer--is bisexual and monogamous.

Alces lay hard-shelled eggs which hatch into naked, helpless kittens. Juveniles are primarily quadrupedal for much of their lives and are instinctively drawn to high places.

## Society & Culture

### General

Alces left to their own devices tend to form flocks made up of 9-27 family units. Larger groups have to be kept in order through subdivision of leaders, with the largest stable community having a single leader commanding three immediate subordinates who in turn have three subordinates beneath themselves, who each commune with a group of flocks.

In contrast to their natural abilities, alce cities lack infrastructure encouraging climbing as a means to get around, similar to how human cities generally lack anything that would require brachiating despite it being within their natural skill set.

As a species without sexual dimorphism, though alces formed some gendered language based on reproductive type, without external differences to back it up most cultures refer to individuals as neuter outside the context of reproduction. When a culture is plagued by a low birthrate and falling population, or suddenly lost a lot of its population to disaster or war, reproduction-based gendering and heterosexuality may be temporarily pushed more strongly in order to raise numbers. Most of the industrialized world was in the aftermath of one such event, which had occurred on an unprecedented scale, by the time the species played the Game.

As egg layers, alces tend to have considerably less concern about reproductive consequences--an egg does not need to be carried inside its mother and can be instantly transferred to an adoption center. Concerns about overpopulation is curbed by up to half the population at a time being involved in a homosexual relationship, rather than a heterosexual one, outside of emergency situations such as a population decline.

Alces both before and after the Game have a cultural habit of subdividing things into a particular symmetry resembling 3 groups each with 3 subgroups. This allows problems to be tackled on a small scale to determine a BEHESTMENT [B] which will address them all. The equation for estimating the impact of a behestment is B3\*3, sometimes written as just B33.

### Pre-Game

Alces before the Game never had a single unified society, and due to their universe of origin being entirely post-Sun, their planet never had a First Guardian to guide it. Nonetheless, they maintained some cultural features connected to the Game due to their cosmic connections to Davepeta and their relatively early discovery of the frog temple.

Similar to the rest of their culture, alce religion and mythology was never unified either. However, they had many repeated motifs in their mythology. Celestial bodies were commonly likened to eggs, and likewise were thought to have been laid by their gods. Some cultures included the sun in this, but observations of solar flares and coronal mass ejections were, over time, interpreted as the wings of a great god. This led to a general acceptance of the sun as the center of the universe, however not all cultures fully accepted that the sun was also a god and instead imagined it as still an egg some day hatching into a flightless entity which all others were to sail around on great feathered wings. Intermixing of all these different ideas resulted in wings being a symbol of divinity across most of the world.

### Post-Game

Post-Game alces, due to the bottleneck of only 8 ascended individuals from whom the entire species was re-created using ectobiology, have a noticeably different culture from their predecessors in Universe C. Initially unified, they eventually splintered into several new groups which can be broadly sorted into a few different categories each with their own subcategories based on their mythologies:

* Creator worshippers, which retain relatively accurate cultural memory of the creators of their universe and focus religion and cultural ideas on them specifically
	+ The conservative theists, which continued to worship the original Creators without additions or subtractions
	+ The 9 cults, which formed around specific Creators (the 9th being worshipers of the Knight's guardian, who was not an alce) while the rest were regarded as less divine
	+ The pantheists, which retained all of the original Creators as gods but elevated other figures later until they had a vast pantheon
* Sequels, derived from an attempt by the Creators to recreate their own familiar culture and religious groups--which then evolved into unrecognizable forms based on the undeniably significant, entirely real event of an entire new universe being created.
	+ Alce Evangelicals, who have combined the definite knowledge of a past universe that also had alces and the concept of celestial bodies as eggs, as well as the apparent ties between the Creators and specific celestial bodies, to become tyrannical puritans enforcing their code of morals under the guise of becoming worthy of being "hatched again" from celestial bodies as winged gods of the "next universe"
* New faith, various groups which independently lost or rejected cultural memory of both the Creators and the old universe
	+ Atheists, which have no concept of specific deities but may or may not have a concept of spirituality
	+ Animists, who deified animals
	+ Manists, who deified mortal ancestors and other ancient figures

## Naming Conventions

Alce names have 5 letters and often contain at least one of the following letters: F, L, H, or W. They never contain harsh unvoiced sounds such as P, T, and K, and CH.

## Etymology & Inspiration

Alces are based on griffins. "Alce" is a term sometimes used for wingless griffins