The Tiny Hungering Vulpines (Patreon)

The Tiny Hungering Vulpines are a species I've been working on for a little while now, but she actually started off as a bit of a throwaway joke empire in a game called Stellaris. Selecting as vulpine portrait, I made the Devouring Swarm empire and called it the Tiny hungering Vulpines, and along with almost twenty other AI empires, I played Stellaris with the full expectation she would be immediately destroyed.

I was wrong. Oh, how I was wrong. Every single game she devoured large sections of the galaxy, and every single game defeating her was a terrifying challenge. I don't know how, but I somehow managed to stumble across the right parameters for a terrifying species. And with that seed of an idea, the Tiny Hungering Vulpines were born as a space faring organism.

The Tiny Hungering Vulpines are a gestalt consciousnesses; a hive mind. Each and every drone is a reflection of a single mind, a single personality all inter-connected with one single voice and mind. She is also a Devouring Swarm: Her entire existence is to breed and feed. She requires prey in order to gain numbers as well as sustenance, as every single Swarm Fox drone is female. Thus to reproduce, she will extract genetic material from male prey, and lay her eggs in female prey. But more details on all that later~

Friendly, almost playful in nature, her personality is quite dominant and once in a conversation with her, you might well find her quite the agreeable and even teasing organism to talk to. She will happily answer questions her captured prey ask her, though all too often the answers are not what the prey will want to hear.

Her name is one she chose for herself, and best reflects the earlier stages of her swarming, where the smaller Larval Swarm Foxes, Proto-Vixens, Seekers and Sister-Vixens are used in overwhelming numbers to swarm over a planets defences. Even at the mid-stage of the swarming, the Breeder-Vixens are in height a head shy of a human, but then come the Keepers and Brood Mothers, both towering over the average human and largely unreported due to a lack of survivors from these stages.

During her swarming, defences on a planet will have great complications dealing with her numbers: Not only is she raining down on the planet from uncountable space craft, but wherever she overwhelms defences she will disarm her prey and if even remotely possibly use the defenders own technology and war machines against them. By the time effective ways to deal with here might be thought up, it is often far too late.

Once she has bred and fed upon a planet, she will use it's existing factories and machines to construct ships with which to fly back to the stars, utilising her millennia worth of gained knowledge from various prey worlds to made high functioning space ships out of even potentially pre-atomic technology planets.

And she wants you. Oh, how she wants you. Just let her scratch through your screen to say hello oh so personally~