Teppalan wildlife

Humans share planet Teppala with many other sapient species. In fact, humans have settled only about 15% of the landmass of their planet; other areas are dominated by some other species. Humans often do not go into these territories because they could easily be eaten even though these animal nations generally consider themselves friendly to the human nations and will work in harmony with them at a distance.

Penguins

Penguins range in size from 0.2 humans to 13 humans, with the largest ones in control. Planet Teppala is currently in a long term warming phase, and the penguins are intelligent enough to realize this. They know that their territory has been steadily shrinking with each coming century. Although shrinking ice sheets actually bring penguins' societies closer together, the penguins are worried about problems with food supply as well as the eventual possibility of all coastal ice disappearing entirely.

Penguin-human relations

The aboriginal Repilian people had shared their homelands with penguins for their entire 54000 year history. However, the warming climate that appeared around the year 10000 BC quickly pushed penguins to only the northern fringe of Repilian territory, where Repilians themselves rarely attempted to go.

In the early 2400s, humans of mostly Pabap ancestry began to move into several penguin nations along the southern edge of the polar icecap. THe humans chose these lands because even though they knew their life would be painful and poor due to the total lack of vegetation, they too knew that the climate was warming, and wanted their distant descendants to have first pick on what they felt would become the world's choicest farmland in the far future. And even now, the ocean provided them plenty of fish and a few occasional birds to live on.

The penguin nations of Sysep and Wabubbu (Pabap names, not from the native penguin languages), along with several others, chose to allow human settlement in their nations since the humans promised them help with medical care and waste disposal services that were difficult for penguins to do on their own. In return, the penguins brought them fish to eat. Thus humans in Sysep and Wabubbu no longer needed to spend ten hours a day searching the ocean for fish to eat; it would be entirely brought to them. Luckily this part of the ocean was protected for the time being by sections of the icecap that connected with other land masses, effectively turning it into almost a freshwater lake, and preventing any large ocean predators that could potentially kill both humans and penguins from spoiling their new paradise.

Penguins and humans in theese nations (called "Sysepia" or Wawiabi) lived and mingled with each other, since neither species had much to fear from the other even though penguins could pierce human bodies with their beaks and humans could step on some of the smaller species with their feet. Humans were not allowed to carry weapons, however, since they had only ever needed weapons to kill fish at sea and this was no longer a problem for them.

Humans in Sysepia cooked their meat, just like humans in the rest of the world. The penguins soon learned that they appreciated cooked meat as well, and this led to a decreased appetite amongst penguins, as they drew more nutrition from the prepared foods humans had taught them how to make, but this in turn meant that penguins were now dependent on humans for their food, even though humans were dependent on penguins to bring it to them.