Aphidelites
They're living, right?
Part insect, mutated and enhanced. Part living circuit, magic and pulsing. As long as you don't look too far under the hood you can't be breaking too many taboo, can you?
Building on the Electrumpede as a technology and the leaps already in the Dreadnaught research, the aphidelites are a mix of personal companion and limited action golem/servitor.
Coming up to the knee of most Foliad, the Aphidelites (also known as the servo-bot in common parlance), are things that pulse between green and blue, with thin black legs and weird, triple jointed forearms. Each breath shows the spell circuits bent from the very blood vessels within the servo-bot, with eyes that sparkle with pulses of magic. Their long antenna provide extrasensory information, and each servo-bot has had its capacity to understand and be forced to follow simple instructions built into its very DNA from birth.
While aphid are often asexual reproducers, Aphidelites are neutered with only a few central 'queen units' kept to produce and disseminate worker units to those who trade for them. Servo-bots are quite skilled at performing the tasks allotted to them, although a physical assistant is often more able to perform most complex tasks - like memory and things requiring fine motor skills.
People of all roles and walks of life have taken to trading Aphidelites, either ones who have seen use, or newer batches, with small modifications to the internal circuits with each batch, enabling more and more tasks to be completed without failure. One of the current models has the ability to grow and moult semi-functional wings, although doing so requires an increase in the foodstuffs needed to power a servo-bot.
Comments