Accore (Ijian)

The accores dwelling in the oceans of the world of Ijian are one of the major aquatic races of that world. While not well known to many landdwellers, they are common in the oceanic depths, throughout much of which they are arguably the dominant ellogous race.

Appearance

Like all accores, the accores of Ijian appear nearly human from the waist up, but below the waist their bodies split into a number of tentacles like those of a cephalopod. The accores of Ijian each typically have nine tentacles on their posterior parts, though uncommon mutations occur, and of course some accores lose tentacles due to injury. A few accores, when tentacles are severed, exhibit unusual regenerative abilities, and end up growing two new tentacles in place of the old, and, presumably because of this, accores with ten or even as many as thirteen tentacles have been spotted. Rarely, this regeneration occurs in the accore's humanoid half as well, leading to accores with extra fingers, or entire extra arms. At least three confirmed cases have been observed of accores that regrew multiple heads; while they claimed to have regrown them in place of a severed head (and in at least one case certain evidence supports this claim), it's not at all clear how a headless accore could have survived long enough to regrow the new heads. For that matter, it's not at all clear what leads some accores to have this unusual regenerative ability in the first place; in seems to inhere in less than four percent of Ijian's accore population, and aside from the fact that it appears to run in families there's no obvious pattern to its occurrence.

Ijian's accores come in several colors, which seem to more or less breed true, with occasional exceptions. Deep red are the most common, but purple and blue are fairly frequent, and black, silver, and lime green are somewhat unusual but far from unheard of. The various colors of accore are mutually interfertile, but the results of a crossing are unpredictable. Many accores have speckles of a different color, though the genetics behind this feature seem more complex. Almost without exception, the skin of the accore's humanoid upper portion and of its tentacular lower portion are the same color.

Aside from its skin color and rubbery texture, the upper portion of the accore looks very close to human in almost every particular. The fingers are slightly blunter and the nails slightly thicker than on a typical human, and the accore's mouths are slightly wider on average. The inside of the mouth, too, differs from that of a human; Ijiane accores sport not separate teeth, but shelly ridges in jaws which can regrow if damaged, and their tongues are longer and thinner than a human's and colored bright purple or pink. The most notable difference, however, is in the hair. Accores have no body or facial hair, and the "hair" on the tops of their heads isn't really hair either, but rather narrow tendrils of caoutchouteux flesh, concolorous with the rest of the accore's form. Biologists call this stringy covering the coronal cirri.

Variation

The features of Ijian's accores exhibit some regional variation, perhaps analogous with the different ethnicities of humanity. This is largely independent of their coloration, with all colors appearing in all accorine ethnicities. Some biologists have identified four main ethnicities into which the accores can be categorized, though certainly not without intermingling. The round-faced otoli are slightly larger, on average, than the other ethnicities, and often exhibit slight webbing between their arms and torsos. On the other hand, the ytyr tend to be somewhat smaller than others; they have oval eyes and relatively narrow mouths, and their cirrous tapet extends farther down the sides of their heads than on most accores, sometimes leading to large "sideburns". The mirima have broad noses and sharply defined cheekbones; they also tend to have fatter tentacles and much longer coronal cirri than most other accores. Finally, the aral are the only accores to commonly have anything resembling body hair, often bearing filamentar projections similar to their coronal cirri running down the fronts of their abdomens; they have triangular heads and eyes with prominent epicanthal folds. There are those who believe that these four principal ethnicities of the accores are, if not distinct thedes yet, on their way to becoming so, but this is unproven. It's not even certain whether the difference between them is due to some magical effect or to simple genetic divergence.

Biology and anatomy

The accores of Ijian are primarily carnivorous, eating a wide variety of marine fauna, from fish to various mollusks and cnidarians. Their carnivory is more or less of necessity, plants being scarce or nonexistent in the depths at which many of them dwell. Nevertheless, they can eat plants or algae if necessary, and some accores who make their homes on continental shelves do supplement their diets with various seaweeds. They don't digest vegetable matter efficiently, however, and cannot sustain themselves on a wholly vegetarian diet. Among some (human) cultures, accores have a reputation for anthropophagy, but this belief, while not without foundation, is exaggerated. Some accores do consume human flesh when they can get it, but they are few, and far fewer still are those who regularly seek it out.

Despite their external similarities to humans, the upper parts of accores are quite different from humans internally. Most notably, they have entirely different skeletons. Unlike some strains of accore, the accores of Ijian do have hard endoskeletons in their upper halves, but these skeletons are not made of bone, but of aragonite and chitin. While the joints and protuberances of the skeleton are in roughly the same place as in a human, giving the accore a superficially human appearance when the skeleton is covered in flesh, a bare skeleton of an accore bears little resemblance to a human skeleton. In any case, the accore's skeleton extends only to its waist; the tentaculate part below the waist is entirely boneless.

Reproduction

Like most accores, those of Ijian are duosexual, comprising both male and female individuals. Its genitalia, however, resemble neither a human's nor a cephalopod's. The male accore has a long penis resembling a tentacle, which however is generally retracted within a cavity in its body, in the middle of its actual tentacles. The penis generally emerges only when the accore is aroused and ready to begin intercourse. During the act of subagitation, the male and female accores generally intertwine their tentacles, their caudal surfaces facing each other, putting the male's penis in direct contact with the vagina of the female, which is similarly positioned in the middle of its tentacles. When the male's penis is retracted, and especially when the caudal surface between the tentacles is not exposed, it is difficult or impossible to discern the gender of an accore from its caudal half. It can, however, usually be discerned from its humanoid part, which exhibits similar secondary sex characteristics to humans.

While they can copulate at any time, female accores are only fertile during their estral periods, which occur at random periods. There is no outward sign of the female's estral status, and the female herself may not be aware of it, although some female accores do have a knack for sensing when they enter estrus. Irregularity notwithstanding, on average a female accore is in estrus—and therefore fertile and capable of conceiving young—about fifteen times a year, with each estral period lasting on average about four days.

If successfully fertilized, a female accore will, after about a month, lay a long, sticky ribbon of oval eggs. Each egg is about five to six centimeters wide, and each laying produces twenty to fifty eggs, the average being around thirty. For whatever reason, about a third of the eggs in a ribbon generally are not viable, but the remainder hatch into tiny larval accores that have not yet developed the shelly endoskeletons and do not yet have well-defined humanoid bodies, bearing closer resemblance to just tiny squid than the half-humanoid entities they may eventually become.

Culture

The majority of Ijian's accores are thralls to Oöth, the unearthly entity trapped on the other side of the world. They serve their master's strange purposes, working in subtle ways to free Oöth from its imprisonment to once again roam Uren and work its will. Many of them openly worship Oöth as a god, erecting enormous temples at the bottoms of the seas where they enact their bizarre forms of worship. It is widely believed that Oöth actually created the accores, as he certainly did some other servitor races. This, however, is unproven, and there is reason to believe that it isn't the case. For one thing, much about their cultural diversity suggests a long-extant race only recently corrupted by Oöth's influence, rather than a race specifically created to serve it. In any event, while most accores of Ijian venerate Oöth, not all do; a sizable minority dread the thought of Oöth's liberation, and oppose their conspecifics who seek to free it.

Devotion to Oöth notwithstanding, Ijiane accores are extremely culturally diverse. There are, however, a few cultural universals that, if not really true of every accore community, is at least true of most of them, both those that serve Oöth and those that stand against them. Accores tend to have a love for geometric designs and patterns, and in particular of regular polygons (including star polygons), which are frequently prominent in their art and architecture. More than visual patterns, however, accores are enthusiasts of the sense of touch, filling the surfaces of their homes with interesting textures to slide over, and often carrying oddly-shaped gewgaws called tigs that serve no other purpose but to be toyed with and felt.

Clothing

Clothing styles vary widely by region and culture. Many of the accores of Ijian routinely wear no clothing at all. Others, however, wear garments fashioned either of leather cured from the skins of benthic beasts, of the silk of a kind of Ijiane holothurian called the tetherbetch, or created through magical processes. All of these materials are, of course, extremely rare in the continental interiors, and considered extremely valuable; a landdweller who gets his hands on accore clothing can sell it for a very high price in the right markets.

Curiously, even among those accores that do wear clothing, there seem to be no universal nudity taboos, the particular part covered varying by culture. Among some accores, it is considered unseemly for either sex to go about with the upper, humanoid part uncovered, while the lower part, with all its tentacles, is left bare. To others, conversely, it makes no matter whether the humanoid torso is clothed, but decency demands that the tentacles be properly sheathed. All but the most cosmopolitan of accores holding to either cultural norm would be scandalized by encountering those of the contrasting moeurs—or, needless to say, by those (rather common) accores that think nothing of gadding about with no clothing at all.

Family structures

The survival rate of the larval accores is not high, between their preying on each other and succumbing to natural hazards. For the most part, this is of little concern to the parents, who don't look after their eggs (often laying them in a communal area so they don't even know whose young are whose) and who generally don't think of their spawn as individuals worth caring about until they reach at least a year of age, by which time their endoskeleton has begun to harden and they start to take their adult form. Indeed, in many cultures accores think nothing of eating larvae of their own species, to the extent that dishes of such larvae may even be served in restaurants. In any case, the relatively large number of eggs laid by a typical female accore over the course of her lifetime easily makes up for the low survival rate of the larvae, and the accore species continues to thrive.

Larvae that do survive long enough to reach "personhood" in the eyes of the adults are rounded up and brought back to the accore community. In most cultures, the accores' children are brought up communally in crèches, with their parents not even knowing (or caring) which children are genetically theirs. For individual accores or accore couples to try to raise children on their own outside the crèches is rare, though certainly not unheard of. Accore names tend to be somewhat random, though different cultures grant them in different ways. In some cultures, the young accores are not given names before they speak, whereupon they are named after some of their own first babbling sounds. (This does not, of course, preclude their being called by unofficial nicknames prior to this event.) In others, they are named by prophets of Oöth, who give them names supposedly inspired by Oöth itself (but more likely simply invented by the "prophets"). Some crèches dispense with any such formal naming techniques and simply give the larvae whatever names the nurries arbitrarily come up with. In any case, perhaps to compensate for the vagarious nature of the names they're originally given, many accore cultures allow individuals to choose new names for themselves on coming of age.