Nop

The **nop** (*Pascoquaticus inops*) is a species of medium-sized, featherless, pliosaur-like bird with smooth, primarily white skin with bluish-gray and black blotches. The nop originally did not exist, but has since been created by SciiFii and introduced across the world's oceans to help boost biodiversity. The nop is one of the only five living members of the porplet (Paelagiuvenatorinae) subfamily, which are most closely related to a widespread subfamily Carduelinae. Unlike daydreamers and like the luddies, the nop is a herbivore that primarily feeds on many aquatic vegetation such as kelp. Due to being fully-aquatic, the nops give birth to several live young rather than laying eggs. The nops are most often raised by pastoralists, aka large prey specialized daydreamer ecotypes, which live very different lives from fishers, aka, small prey specialized daydreamer ecotypes. The pastoralists are insular and even neophobic, their culture favoring keeping within their own kind. While fishers are often outgoing and curious - and sometimes, on extension, can be pushy and aggressive - pastoralists are generally shy and avoidant unless no option to retreat is available. Their lives are more monotonous, dedicated to herding their nop lifestock, which is the main thing they eat. They dedicate the majority of their day to day lives to guarding the nops, which like the daydreamers never need to lie down and rest as their brains sleep in hemispheres. Herding ensures the stability of food supply at the expense of many other pursuits. It also occasionally brings them heat from the fishers, and certainly contributes to the lack of communication between the two, for the nop is not a fish, or even another type of porplet bird; it is fairly closely related to the daydreamers and luddies. But as different as fishers are from pastoralists, the chasm is far deeper between these cousins. The nop has been a domesticate of the daydreamer, a population whose evolution has now been artificially controlled for many decades by its captor species. The nop is not as intelligent as the luddy, not just slightly, but to such a degree they have lost all the hallmarks of high intelligence shown by their ancestors, including some things as primitive as base emotional states. The nop’s more intelligent near-sapient ancestors were domesticated and held captive by the early daydreamers, to the point escape from their predators long became impossible. In spite of - or perhaps because of this - the nops lives a life virtually devoid of any fear or negative emotion at all. It has so long been altered by selective breeding for docility and edibility that fright has all but been bred out of it, replaced by a constant sense of ease, as there was no benefit to terror of a fate inevitable to all. The nop’s body changed with its mind, growing as fat as physically possible while still remaining the ability to move, maturing earlier and producing more young for the daydreamer’s table. The two could scarcely be less alike today. While luddies rely on large groups of similar appearance to reduce the chance of a predator picking out a single individual, nops became selectively bred for unique and interesting markings and now exist in many colors. And while every luddy is free, but lives in a shadow of fear of the day everything ends, no nop is free from daydreamers - for a nop without a shepherd is helpless, sure to almost immediately killed off by wild predators. Yet nops live a life of bliss until their final and inevitable deaths at the jaws of their caretakers. So docile they have become, their once bright minds melted down to mush to simplify the daydreamers daily task of controlling them, that even as death comes the nop seems not to take notice. Pain, a sensation only really useful if there is a way to escape it, has dulled in them. They will graze and chew the grass until their bodies are too broken to physically go through the motions, even if predators are eating them alive piecemeal. The pastoralists, a moral animal, still kill them first in a kinder way as a matter of course - but the fate to any which escaped into the wild would be to be eaten alive. Could the nop talk, it could argue its life is better - it is free of all worry and responsibility. The perpetuation of its kind is always assured. But the luddy can talk - and disagrees, valuing the most fraught freedom over a safe captivity. Very different evolutionary history has forged them into disparate beings, no longer able to communicate or recognize themself in the other. The nop now falls deep into the luddy’s uncanny valley - a frightening, wrong creature. The nop has simply forgotten how to communicate at all; with the language-processing centers of its brain atrophied, it cannot talk or even want to. Even its most basic instincts are reduced; mothers do not bond to their calves nor calves to their moms, simply instinctively feeding from any nearby adult which will spit up pre-chewed meals for them on reflex. The nop’s personhood has been taken from it by the daydreamers, no matter how happy it may currently seem to be with its lot. To do so may be morally wrong by the standards of humans and is wrong to fishers, too. But there is still a debate whether or not if the perpetuation of immorality still worthy of ire, as the nop itself no longer recalls being free, could not understand the situation, and can no longer take care of itself, being rejected even by its sister species as a veritable monster. It isn’t hard to understand, from the fishers’ perspective and life experiences, why they have disdain for the pastoralists, those hunting ecotype daydreamers which keep the luddies’ closest of kin as sheep fattened for food. To a fisher, a pastoralist could be perceived as an unapologetic murderer that enslaves, slaughters and eats other people who are not able to defend themselves. And yet it is easy too to sympathize with the pastoralists, who only seek to be left alone to their relatively simple lives, not wishing to bother anyone else. Fishers to them can be judgemental extremists, eating only a tiny selection of the available food they could be eating for arbitrary reasons, and which have a bone to pick with any fellow daydreamer culture that hunts anything they deem inappropriate. Both sides are debatable, but both are also much more alike than they care to believe. Each too proud and holdfast in their beliefs to come to a middle ground on their own, they let their different beliefs divide them until their keratin teeth have been reshaped and their languages diverged. The conservation status of the nop is **Least Concern** due to successful conservation efforts, the nop's wide range and its tolerance to many of the human activities.