Mantaiiga

Mantaiiga are large, airborne batoids that live a nomadic life flying over great oceans. Due to their unique way of life and their size, they lack any real natural predators. However due to these same factors, Mantaiiga are especially susceptible to thunderstorms and hail.

## Appearance

Mantaiiga are on average 1,300 feet long, with a wing span of 900 feet. Their tails are sleek and streamlined, except for the base, where three sets of distinct fins sprout outward from each side. Their eyes are situated on thick stalks that protrude from the mains body, each heavily armoured and possessing 12 kinds of spectral receptors, allowing for significantly enhanced colour vision. The mouth of a mantaiiga contains a set of small, vestigial, teeth leftover from its previous evolutionary state.

Mantaiiga keep themselves afloat in the air by keeping the wind under their wings. When lifting off from the water, a mantaiiga can use its naturally powerful muscles to blast out of the water, straight into the air.

### Mantaiiga Subraces

Mantaiiga are divided into two distinct subraces, each with noticeably different skin patterns, Mantaiiga-Corrosion, also known as Raindancers, and Mantaiiga-Surge, nicknamed Stormwardens.

#### Mantaiiga-Burn

Raindancers have a coat of dull-green over the tops of their body, while their bottom half is a near-white light-blue. The fins on their tail are green all over. Raindancers are equipped with hundreds of special glands in their tails that can produce a potent corrosive, able to erode many kinds of biological materials. It does not dissolve in water, making it an effective hunting strategy above oceans, as well as a strong deterrent for any attackers on the ground if it ever passes over any.

#### Mantaiiga-Surge

Stormwardens are coated in black, with a dark blue belly and underside of their wings. Their wings also possess yellow nodes with slim markings connecting the nodes to one another. Stormwardens can activate these nodes to send out immense electrical surges, easily able to kill off small piscine animals when activated in water. During heavy rainstorms, stormwardens can also use this ability and make the electricity pass through the raindrops onto the ground or water below, forming vicious, thunderstorms.

## Behaviour

### Lifestyle

Mantaiiga live isolated from one another, travelling across the seas and in remote cases over land. When two or more of them cross roads, they will in general ignore each other, unless they are of opposite sexes and it is mating season. A mantaiiga may live up to 600 years from the moment it becomes an adult, however no one knows how long it spends its life as an infant.

On rare occasions, a mantaiiga may have been infected with ludai, a species of mollusk that live in shallow waters. When these creatures enter the body of a recipient at a growing age, the recipient may lose its ability to die of old age altogether, called negligible senescence. This affects mantaiiga differently though due to their sheer size. They can remain healthy for up to 2,500 years until the potency of the infection can no longer sustain the mantaiiga's wings, which start to shrivel up and erode, eventually crashing the creature into the seas as it can no longer keep buoyancy. Once this happens, the Mantaiiga will slowly perish through different ways, such as falling prey to marine predators or simply being crushed under the pressure of the deep sea.

### Diet

Mantaiiga are piscivores that use their unique abilities to kill hoards of fish in the ocean before sucking the hordes, along with copious amounts of water, up into their bodies. Their metabolism is exceedingly slow, requiring them to eat only once every month.

Raindancers often fly high above the water to drop their chemicals, as to maximise spread. Once the creatures that came into contact with the fluids died, the mantaiiga dives down to eat the corpses. Stormwardenson the other hand descend into the water to a moderately deep point, at which they unleash their electric power. This method often yields more food than the raindancer, the hunting method requires much more energy to execute, equaling out the differences between the two.

### Reproduction

Not much is known on how mantaiiga reproduce, although it is known they only mate in the winter. They seem to dive into the deepest trenches of the ocean along with a mate, where they can stay for years. Young mantaiiga have also never been recorded, though it has been theorised that some cases of giant batoids stranded on shores may be infant mantaiiga.

Hybrids of raindancers and stormwardens have been encountered, but are most likely sterile. These hybrids possess of both the burn glands and surge nodes of the full races, often with differing functionality. Some hybrids may simply have the green colouring while its burn glands are useless, whilst another may have as much power in its surge nodes as it has in its burn gland.

## Origin

Mantaiiga likely evolved from smaller batoids in the seas, but it is unexplained how they attained their megafauna property, nor when they began being able to breathe air.