The name Rooquer means "longtail." It is by this name that they are most commonly known to other species, and they are far from unknown in the world. The Rooquers are one of the most common intelligent species in the world thanks to their incredible breeding rate. They have been aided as well by an intense curiosity and an industrious nature that quickly turns initial exploration into rapid expansion. In earlier days they were marked just as strongly by more negative traits and there were periods when the Rooquers stood at the edge of exterminating every other species (and some were in fact driven to extinction) but in the end they were as damaging to themselves as they were to their enemies.

Today's Rooquer may scheme, but if he is more concerned with personal power than with the well-being of the community then he is the exception now and no longer the rule as he was in the past. For all that they frantically run to and fro for the sake of their great projects, modern Rooquers are mellow in comparison to their ancestors. They had to be; they are descended from the ratlings who didn't kill each other off for the sake of ambition.

Life

Rooquers breed quickly and live and die just as fast. Longtails reach physical maturity at the age of ten and females are able to produce a pair of litters of five to ten pups each, every year. As their society has developed they have cut back ever-so-slightly on their rate of reproduction and mothers usually have only one litter every other year but this still results in an impressive rate of population growth for the Rooquers. During times of war or other disaster, this self-imposed limit on breeding is lifted and the population effectively bounces back four times as quickly as normal. This ability to easily induce population growth faster than what Longtail society is accustomed to is the primary cause behind this limitation and even with it there are often problems coming from overly-high population numbers. Rooquers begin suffering from sterility and physical infirmity around twenty but are still capable of serving as instructors. While a Rooquer can technically live for as long as thirty years, few pass their twenty-fifth year and many die a couple of years before even that.

Family

While it may not appear to be so at first glance, given the limitations imposed on population growth, reproduction forms an important aspect of Rooquer culture and carries an almost religious aspect which is mostly divorced from the concept of marriage. Longtails have a reputation in some lands for thievery but it is cultural traditions that they most often pilfer, the idea of pairing off into spousal pairs being one of them. Like so many things which they've adapted for their own purposes, the Rooquers have given their own spin to it over the generations. An incredible amount of emphasis is put on the idea that spouses are partners and companions and Rooquers marry close friends who bear traits complementary to oneself, regardless of gender or other qualities. Their marriages, despite this, are extremely loose. Rooquers have only mimicked the custom of marriage and have made it fit with their preexisting natures. They have never understood or gone to great effort to emulate the idea that marriages are exclusive affairs where sex or romantic love is concerned (and whether they understand even romance, exclusive or otherwise, is questionable).

Citadel-Sculptures

The ratlings have a curious concept of religion. Where others get their gods from is unknown to them, whether from a historical standpoint or a religious one, but the Rooquers pay heed to all the religions that they are aware of and put at least a little bit of faith in each of them. But these religions are not the religions of ratlings, and their gods are not the gods of ratlings. Indeed, the ratlings found themselves in this world bereft of patron gods entirely. But they cannot simply adopt the gods of other people even though they are in need of gods. Those other gods are not Longtail gods, after all.

The solution to this problem is simple. "We will create gods of our own," says the wise Rooquer, and so they will and so they do. These gods are no mere invisible beings of ichor and transcendent nature, native to ethereal realms, fickle shepherds who are distant from their flocks. These are gods of stone and brickwork, gods whose home is here in the physical world, gods whose size reaches titanic proportions. Their might and their power is plain for all the world to see.

The Rooquers do not merely create their gods. The Rooquers build them and construct them. The word is Swook and the literal translation is "citadel-sculpture." Each one is an immense structure (Kehrquoos is comparable in size to the Cologne Cathedral, with spires that let its height nearly reach that of the Eiffel Tower) and takes centuries of work to complete, but these are the only two things which can be said for all Swooks because they are not merely buildings. They are works of art. Each one is an individual construction worthy of inclusion on any list of world wonders and several generations of architect ratlings might spend their entire lives simply working on designing a Swook before anyone gets around to laying the first cornerstone. If it even uses stone. Kehrquoos was constructed mainly out of blocks of fossilized coral. Dozens of shrines (it could be said that these are lesser Swooks, demigods or angels to the high deities that the Swooks present) are located in the general area of a Swook. In contrast, their own middens are humble affairs that typically have seven square feet of space for each occupant.

Ratlings practice extreme dedication to their crafts. With their short lives they can't afford to branch out but instead have to specialize. The same construction project might rely on the skills of many different mason schools, each of whom works with a specific technique. A Rooquer mason will learn brickwork, perhaps, or dry set style, and he will learn every last technique known to that school but will never learn another method of masonry.

Diet

The Rooquers drink mainly milk and water. They have a higher tolerance for diseases and poisons which lessened the importance of alcohol. Snakes and other reptiles and insects are eaten. From their goats they get milk and many kinds of cheeses, and the ratlings are famous for their dry cider, which is made from apples with a high acid content. Their sausages are spiced and their almonds (the ratlings are fond of nuts) are sugared. Wheat is ground into a flour which can be turned into bread or roasted and made into a porridge. Thistles, artichokes, mushrooms and onions are basic food crops, and cabbages are considered a good cure for most minor ills. Lentils are a staple food for travelers because they are easy to transport. Bean stews are eaten regularly, usually thickened with liberal amounts of animal fat and sweetened with pieces of fruit or straight juice.

They like water a lot and are found on every coastline in the world except for those whose other inhabitants have gone to great lengths to exterminate the Rooquers. Whether they can get it directly from the water or have to import it from their luckier cousins they eat clams, eels, crab, shrimp, and fish, especially sea bass and salmon. Despite how plentiful it is, few of them eat seaweed, which is often considered to be poisonous or supernaturally unlucky according to folk tales that date back to the more aggressive period of their history, and most varieties of seaweed have a foul taste for a Longtail.

Magic

Storytellers, or serkasoo, are hardly just that. They are historians, because their stories are the stories of the past and all of the important deeds of long-dead Rooquers live on in their memories. They are advisers, because their stories contain the accumulated wisdom of untold generations. They are arbitrators, because their stories tell of earlier situations which mimic this one and tell how they were resolved. They are praise-singers, because their stories are sung and who better to say if a deed has merit than those who sing the stories of the great? Storytellers tell stories, and in so doing they hold the world and the Longtail people in their paws.

They have deep connections to spiritual, social, and political powers, even among non-Rooquers. The ratlings themselves consider them to be witches: Speech has a power. It can civilize barbarians and make proud kings collapse to their knees in grief. Those who have been taught to wield it like a blade are nothing less than some of the most powerful, if also most subtle, wizards in the world.

The storytellers hardly have a monopoly on knowledge of the past, however. Stories and history are important for all Rooquers to know, not to mention the value of other facts, and the over the long stretch of their civilization's history the serkasoo- and the ratlings in general- have become adept at encoding important information using simple mnemonic devices. Stories are frequently filled to the brim with information, and not just about historical events- a group of young ratlings studying the blacksmith's trade may be taught the story of a previous blacksmith in the community who became noteworthy for his deeds, and in so doing learn as much about his techniques as a reader of Moby-Dick learns about whales and whaling. This requires a little bit of editing to any tale in order to make sure that it serves multiple purposes, and sometimes a tale is totally made up for the sole purpose of passing down ethical and practical lessons, but the Rooquers make a distinction between fact and truth, the latter of which must be possessed by any story worth telling and which may be present even within fiction. While the Rooquers have produced few writers (literacy is not common among the ratlings) compared to other races, this method of storytelling has given them a highly distinctive style which, like Moby-Dick, is usually either loved or hated, with little middle ground.

Names

The first thing that anybody notices when a Rooquer introduces is that ratling names are very long. Something on the order of Bosooun-anyasua-yet-isalye-akkee-yet-alae is actually a little bit on the short side. Rooquer names are generally just physical descriptions combined with occupation, translating into things like Storyteller-with-black-patch-size-of-paw-over-right-eye-and-missing-tooth-and-wide-gray-eyes. Someone who knows their language can get an accurate mental picture of any Rooquer simply by hearing the ratling's name, assuming that he's willing to listen for a bit.

Real names, the ratling equivalent of Paul, are prestigious and must be earned. Most ratlings who get them only receive their "historical names" posthumously, but every ratling told of in a story has received a historical name. In day-to-day life most ratlings use nicknames that are a shortened version of their descriptive name, a different descriptive name which describes character or quirks ("Twitches-frequently" or "Draws-with-charcoal" are both valid nicknames), or simply a couple of syllables that the Rooquer likes. Unlike descriptive names, which are determined by the community after a short period when everyone has settled on which traits are important enough to mention (nobody is going to mention the storyteller's patch of black fur when that's been running in the family for long enough that it runs in every family), and historical names, which are granted by storytellers, a Rooquer determines his nickname for himself.

Next Month: Nearly a dozen different castes, divided into intricate subcastes all differing on touchability, purity, and permission to eat this or drink that, in a Closer Look at Castes.