The quacinis are a humanoid species inspired by the relationship between me and one of my friends. Their goal as a species is to create and to know. They are nomads that roam the world in order to know everything about it and to create things in it for fun, for the sake of science and/or as a form of art. They gather every twelve years to share knowledge and announce big unanswered questions so that they have an idea of what to focus on for the next dozen of years if they’re ever done with their current projects.

The Ash gender is primarily creative. The first question they ask when they learn something is “what new things can I create with this?” and “how does this help me answer my questions?”. Although they do have a sense of ethics and self-protection, it’s easily outgrown by their curiosity and wish to create things, which often results in them hurting themselves or others.

The Ember gender is primarily artistic, but they double as protectors for their entire species. One could say they are the ethicists of the quacinis, constantly making sure no one gets hurt and providing safer alternatives to whatever experiment someone is trying to do. Without them, the species would have been gone dozens of years ago.

A healthy relationship between an Ember and an Ash (or an Ash and several Embers, or an Ember and several Ashes, or several of both) will often look like a constant push and pull between working together on projects and stopping each other because their focuses diverge. They’re constantly trying to reach a middle ground between what’s efficient and what’s safe. These would get unhealthy if they were to ever get tired or stressed of the other, or if they get to a point where they never reach an agreement, and thus can’t work on their pursuit of creation and knowledge.

Between Ashes and Ashes, there are three ways they can relate to each other: as rivals, as friends and as colleagues. Its important to note that they don’t interpret these as only relationship dynamics, these are ways that you can feel towards others, like the difference between friendship and romance.

As colleagues, the main way they will bond is by working on projects together. Depending on how close they are, you’ll rarely see them working on separate projects, and when they do, they’ll mostly keep the other updated on theirs, giving each other advice, testing out each other’s ideas, working together always. It’s important for them to not become dependent on the other to work on their projects - yes, they love working together, but letting that take over their lives would be unhealthy.

As rivals, the main way they bond is by working against each other, but together towards similar goals. Anytime they have a hypothesis that contradicts the others’, they’ll work hard to prove the other wrong. In the end, whoever was right was just right and they keep working on their project until another chance for rivalry occurs. Similar to the previous kind of relationship, they keep each other updated on what they’re doing. It’s important for them to not let this rivalry become violent, and stuff like sabotaging the other’s projects would be unhealthy in a relationship of this kind.

Friendship is just normal friendship, its actual meaning is vague, but it often involves an emotional aspect that isn’t necessarily connected to their pursuit of knowledge and creativity. A way in which friendships are different to other relationships manifests in their language: Usually, when they greet someone and try to get conversation, their way of asking “how are you?” literally means “what is the current state of your projects?”, but for friends, it’s more common to ask “what is your current state?”

For Ash-Ash relationships, only rivals and colleagues are mutually exclusive, but they both can be together with friendship, For Ash-Ember relationships, rivalry and colleagueship are combined.

I still have not written anything about Ember-Ember relationships or drawn anything about the physical appearance of this species, but I’ll hopefully get to that soon.