Chabdach

The chabdach (pronounced /ˈtʃæbdætʃ/) is a segmented intelligent being from the plane of Sukkud. It has a three-segmented body with twelve jointed limbs, on four of which it walks upright. The chabdach's limbs end in prehensile claws with considerable manual dexterity.

Chabdachs exude from a gland at the tip of their abdomen a fluid that quickly dries into a fine, slightly sticky fiber. The creatures are adept at weaving this fiber as it leaves their bodies into nets or cloths or various other shapes. The color of the fiber varies depending on which of certain chemicals and enzymes the chabdach's dye glands incorporate into the "silk". Through similar means, the chabdachs can also control the hardness of the silk, from soft and almost slippery to rigid and tough.

Anatomy

Counting the head, the chabdach has four segments total in its body. The two middle sections, the superthorax and subthorax, are fairly similar, both ovoid in shape, with four legs and otherwise rather featureless. The claw-tipped legs of the thoraxes are the chabdach's main mainpulating members, each claw consisting of four radially arrayed, two-segmented pincers. The segment opposite the head is the abdomen; in the chabdach's normal stance this segment is actually oriented "upside down", with the dorsal surface facing downward and the ventral surface upward. This has the effect that the posterior end of the chabdach, the pygidium, points forward. The pygidium is pointed, with a row of barbs on either side; it is from an opening at the tip of the pygidium that the creature's silk extrudes, and these barbs the chabdach sometimes uses to hold strands of silk in weaving.

The head itself is somewhat wedge-shaped, with twelve compound eyes of varying sizes, though four are significantly larger than the other eight: two on the upper part of the side of the head, and two slightly smaller eyes below those. Long bristles sweeps backward from the top back of the head, serving both as tactile sensors and as the chabdach's olfactory organs. On the bottom surface of the blunt front of the head is another cluster of bristles, this one hollow and serving as the creature's mouth.

Diet

The chabdach subsists entirely on a diet of liquefied organic matter, mostly meat softened by injections of the creature's digestive juices. The chabdach is adept at making traps to catch prey, from simple nets and loop springes to elaborate constructions of loops and threads and counterweights. On their home plane, chabdachs often erect nets or other traps completely across passageways; chabdachs on other worlds may prefer subterranean tunnels with similarly constricted passages, or may make do with different kinds of traps in the outdoors. Some chabdachs pride themselves on catching intelligent beings in their traps and feeding on them, feeling that it shows their cleverness and superiority, but most are content to eat whatever small animals are easiest to capture.

Once it has its prey on hand, the chabdach eats by penetrating its victim's flesh with its specialized mouthparts and injecting digestive acids; after giving some time for the prey's tissues to be liquefied, it then sucks up the fluids through the same mouthparts. Often, before beginning the liquefying process, the chabdach will insert its mouthparts at a major vein or artery and suck out the creature's blood, therefore both gaining some quick food that it doesn't need to liquefy and killing its prey to prevent future struggles. Many chabdachs prefer to kill their victims before beginning the feeding process at all, either out of a desire to be humane or for their own safety, to prevent their food's fighting back. The killing is usually done by strangulation with a thick, tough cord the chabdach weaves for that purpose.

Society

On their home plane, chabdachs are colonial creatures, living in vast, almost castellar lairs called pavilions woven out of durable silk. From the outside, a pavilion seems to be an irregularly shaped mass of fabric, somewhat like a canvas wrapped around an irregularly shaped parcel; within, the pavilion contains numberous corridors and chambers, varying widely in side. Specialized forms of chabdach arise within a pavilion to support the community: great-clawed warriors to defend it from attack; enormous queens to rule and coordinate. These special varieties, or castes, seem not to be genetic, but rather to be forms that any chabdach has the potential to take on, and that are triggered by environmental conditions—no chabdach has ever been known to have taken on a specialized caste form outside a pavilion.

A wide area of territory around a chabdach pavilion is usually riddled with traps, both to gather food for the pavilion's residence and to discourage dangerous interlopers. Nevertheless, some chabdachs from the pavilion may travel to distant areas to hunt for food, both to provide for more variety in their fare and to avoid depleting the immediate area.

Some chabdachs may travel to other planes, either in search of knowledge or rare materials, or because they reject the gregarious nature of their race—or perhaps because they were brought to another plane against their will. These chabdachs may travel in small groups and create miniature pavilions in their adopted homes, but they may also live more solitary existences, creating silken lairs for themselves alone, although those lairs may still be as large as mansions. Such lone chabdachs may try to keep their existence a secret, hiding their lairs in out-of-the-way places... and perhaps slaying anyone unfortunate enough to run across them.

Taxonomy

Though chabdachs are often compared to spiders, their resemblance is fairly superficial beyond the fact that both creatures spin silk—and even then, chabdach silk is very different from spider silk. Their segmented form and their exoskeletons may make chabdachs resemble some form of arthropod, if not a spider specifically, but in fact they aren't related—chabdachs aren't technically animals at all, in the strictest sense, but a spiritual creature, made largely of élan autre, specifically of élan tordu. As such, they belong to the kingdom of Bestiae within the empire of Vitiata, and are related not to insects and spiders but to other exotic creatures of planes distant to Zien.

Chabdachs in Curcalen

In the world of Curcalen, chabdachs are often summoned to serve as weavers and tailors. In fact, most cloth products on Curcalen are created by chabdachs under the orders of some human summoner. A smaller town might have a single chabdach serving the needs of its inhabitants, under the direction of a merchant who sells the chabdach's produce to his customers. In larger cities, some industrialists maintain large factories staffed with dozens, or in extreme cases even hundreds, of chabdachs, all working constantly to fill the communities' textile needs.