Desert Orcs

Introduction
A race that recently arrived on Whiteleaf from a very different universe, the race that is being very questionably dubbed "Desert Orcs" are so different from any other known lifeforms that their mere existence raises uncomfortable questions, and agents of the well-meaning Tradespeak Empire are now struggling to reckon with those questions without making a very strange situation any weirder.

These beings refer to themselves as the "Uudmak'nehwolp'luu-tigvass'voop", a name within their frankly ridiculously-sounding language (a dialect of Orcish with heavy Sylvan influence, combining birdlike warbling sounds and canine or feline whines or yips, and sounds reminiscent of a brook's babbling or the sussurus of wind in the trees, with the gnashing guttural vocalizations and awkwardly clipped syllables typical of Orcish), which translates to "those who dwell comfortably in the place of empowerment". They have since come to equate this concept of a "tigvass'voop" with the deserts where the Empire has agreed to house them temporarily, but it originally referred to wherever they came from, a place which they have described extensively through their tradition of oral history, although the listeners often find it hard to believe. Their original homeworld was apparently known as Mizhmarn, and it hosted at least three other races, two of which from their descriptions resembled elves and dwarves, with enough contradictions about the fourth that they've been impossible to make sense of, beyond the fact that they clearly weren't humans or halflings or gnomes. The elves as described were clearly extremely magical beings, to the point that the performance of sorcery by anyone else in that world directly drained elven lifeforce and was viewed as an act of war; the dwarves were still stranger, as they were apparently literally physically made out of treasure, though the Empire hasn't been able to get much more about that straightened out.

But neither was as weird as the Uudmak (loosely "under-dwellers", a slightly insulting but tolerable shorthand for their proper name, which has since been deemed a racial slur but was accepted during the first contact period for the sake of making relations at least vaguely possible to establish). The bodily composition of these "orcs" appeared to have been the result of a biology textbook being rewritten by a stoned and hungry teenager, who then persuaded the Gods to create what he had described; while the aberrant details of their internal biology only became known to the Empire's military when hostilities first broke out (and very quickly ended, as will be described below), even the most cursory examination makes it clear that the Uudmak bear only a superficial resemblance to organic life. The sweat which sheens their bodies while in hot, humid weather is not merely water and salt, but is in fact a thin syrupy substance which resembles a mixture of honey and salted caramel; the sugar-rich milk from the females' breasts tastes like whipped cream with hazelnut flavoring and a hint of nutmeg, and even their saliva is pleasant to human tongues, as numerous members of the contact team discovered when they learned of the Uudmak's cultural fascination with, well, them. It later proved that humans alone were not recipients of this fondness; the Uudmak quickly proved to have a fondness for cross-species mating that rivals that of humans or baseline orcs, if not approaching the peccadiloes of dragonkind. Having taken each other's bodies slightly for granted back in their homeworld, they apparently thrived on the particular attentions of Whiteleavian races; local men found the demureness of the lithe, swarthy Uudmak females very appealing, and if anything the female members of the contact group (both the initial military regiment and several later diplomatic or anthropological missions) were even more enchanted with the strapping, boastful males. This isn't by any means a universal preference, but the fetish is common enough to be a cultural joke; many otherwise respectable Imperials flinch upon hearing phrases like "queen of truffles" and "yeoman-e" (a mocking reference to the first scribe-translator to get a "hands-on" lesson in the subtleties of the Uudmak "tongue" from a particularly meek and submissive painter; his name was Third Mate Randall Sumikuyo, fourth officer of the Airship Enterprise, and after marrying his instructor he spent the rest of his career being mocked, for having a "wife-uu" who could only communicate by drawing colorful pictures and writing captions under them).

== History ==

Contact with the Uudmak first occurred after roughly 100 villages, with an average population of 100 each, simply appeared overnight in a previously empty acreage of unfarmable scrubland within view of the less-aesthetically-pleasing neighborhoods of Trivium City, a wealthy and respected university town in the province of Ri'ilussed (formerly known as Primus, the 8th of the founding Imperial provinces, and thus exceedingly close to both the capital and the "old money" regions). Taking this inexplicable manifestation as some sort of teleport-powered invasion, the local garrison scrambled to put together a large expeditionary force to go investigate and "deal with" these new and unwanted neighbors; they were greeted first with friendly-seeming waves, but when they got within charging distance, several (male) Uudmak displayed what were initially taken as signs of extremely overt hostility - approaching at high speed, often while wielding things that appeared to be weapons, and disregarding both verbal and gestural commands to stop immediately. It later proved that this misunderstanding was due to cultural differences; the natural swagger and braggadocio which come standard in the lifestyle of these "orcs" prioritizes extreme blunt straightforwardness as the most friendly and welcoming form of behavior, so by their own metrics these seemingly raging attackers were just making haste to show solidarity with those they hoped to befriend. At the time, of course, the commanders of the several thousand crack Imperial troops on hand didn't think of such an odd possibility; they interpreted the situation as what it very obviously seemed to be, and weapons were quickly employed. These being excellent soldiers, about a hundred Uudmak died in seconds before one human casualty was suffered, and in the first few moments of the melee, the "orcs" were indeed attacking quite earnestly with implements of considerable violence...but within less than a minute of first managing to fell a few of the knights, the Uudmak began to display an extreme degree of consternation and shock, which soon clarified itself to be abject horror and revulsion. Noticing that their foes weren't just breaking and retreating in a total rout, but actively seemed to be disgusted and traumatized, the marshal leading the assault called it off, and the army's diplomats and translators were brought up to the front in order to make sense of the brief scuffle's outcome.

Approaching more cautiously and being viewed with shrinking wariness by the formerly belligerent creatures, the army found that the former frontline soldiers appeared to be in utter awe of them, and no longer showed any desire to attack; they didn't seem particularly bothered by their own casualties, but it seemed as though the idea of having hurt anyone else was almost anathema to them. Further examination of the weapons used proved that they could all double as tools or sporting equipment, and none were really designed for the serious work of killing; the wielders of these devices had exuberantly but carelessly employed them, and many had dropped the implements before fleeing, as if having not expected what they could do. As the tribe's women came into view, initially making what was later determined to be a peace offering in hopes of appeasement (the sexually-charged nature of this ritualized surrender only added to the confusion at the time, and naturally the officers didn't take advantage, having no idea what on earth was going on), the language barrier was hammered out and a clear picture of the situation emerged. While superficially quite aggressive in their natural personality - even to this day, desert orcs remain loud, gregarious, highly chaotic creatures who clash severely with individuals more inclined toward serenity and comfort, and are frequently described as obnoxious or disruptive - the Uudmak apparently had little real concept of violence, as the "wars" they'd fought against the elves and dwarves of their original homeland had been very ritualized and structured affairs, almost more akin to a political debate through interpretive dance than an actual battle. Their "charge" had been intended as no more than an exuberant embrace, and they didn't mind being killed over the misunderstanding, as their culture had virtually no death taboo...but what did disturb them the fact that when they had accidentally killed some of the humans, they'd discovered their opponents to be "made of meat", as their crude pidgin of Common and Uudmak put it (a more precise translation would later be found, "made of the inedible substance found when killing unnatural monsters"). Though they'd heard legends of "beasts in the shape of men" from "realms beyond the sky" whose bodies contained only "foulness and contamination" (a term slightly less stigmatized in their words than in ours), they'd always believed such stories to be mere childish fantasy; now, they were confronting the legend in real life, and that was after "the mountains changed" around their home for no discernable reason. It wasn't that they objected to violence, though they didn't quite understand it either; rather, it was the surprising and "unnatural" character of their opponents which had made them reverse their reaction instantly, and now they were still recovering from the shock.

Examination of the bodies left behind by the brief scuffle (each side being equally curious about the other) helped to clarify the mystery while also deepening it. The Uudmak were made of a substance that was sort of like animal flesh, of a dark and rubbery consistency, but they didn't smell very unpleasant where they'd been opened up, and their stomachs and intestines contained neither vomit nor excrement, but a substance vaguely resembling a mixture of various incompatible foods that had been pulped into a liquid state but not chemically digested very much at all (to use real-world terminology, it was essentially a smoothie straight out of a blender, albeit containing ingredients most people wouldn't wish to mix, like raspberry cheesecake and garlic mashed potatoes). The Uudmak showed no revulsion toward the spilled guts of their foes, and nearly got attacked again when they started to experimentally eat bits of the bodies; they displayed no understanding of why this would be thought wrong, and heartily encouraged the humans to consume their own fallen. The diplomatic corps were very uneasy about following this suggestion, but they needed answers, so they tried it, and the truth proved to be nothing short of baffling. The tough, stringy flesh of the Uudmak males resembled nothing so much as black licorice dipped in dark chocolate (females, it would later be found, are closer to red licorice and milk chocolate). It wasn't exactly palatable, but it was certainly more pleasant than trying to eat raw human flesh, and the brown substance that had spilled from severed veins was discovered to be essentially just a liquified form of chocolate with a few mildly unsavory extra ingredients, later determined to be the "orc"s' equivalent to platelets and blood corpuscles, which lent a strong note of spice and herbal savor in contrast to the sweetness of the primary fluid. The Uudmak had fortunately never heard of vampires, and so the fact that several soldiers immediately expressed a desire to try drinking the blood of the living Uudmak, including the females, caused only mild offense. This would eventually be done in the name of academic understanding, and today persists as an occasional fetishistic practice in humanoid/Uudmak interracial relationships; the blood is less palatable than superficial fluids like sweat and saliva, and the flesh is less edible yet, but overall virtually the entire Uudmak body is akin to what humans would call "food", peculiarly organized and inexplicably maintaining the processes of life. Even their biological byproducts are only somewhat unpleasant; we would compare them to chemically-treated industrial fertilizers, whereas the farmers of Whiteleaf are still using the old-fashioned kind, and thus would merely consider Uudmak droppings to be "odd", and less suitable to the task than horse or cow manure.

Lengthy dialogues with the Uudmak's oral historians got the rest of the truth into the open; the world of Mizhmarn was actually deep in the Feywild, a dimension which usually has little impact on the Whiteleaf cosmology (essentially a traveler who left Whiteleaf in search of the "fairy world" would generally pass through the Upper Plane of Arcadia and work his way up through the Protean Sea of Chaos toward the Fateheart, before finally arriving at the Realm of Dreams; only by taking several wrong turns on this journey could the especially disorderly Feywild be found, as the Gods of Whiteleaf didn't really plan on its inclusion in the universe they were creating, and it sort of just kind of got stuck in wherever there was room for it, rather than destroyed, just in case they ever wanted to have it around for some reason). A glorified demiplane which was likely created by some yet-to-be-identified deity, archmage, or particularly old and twisted hag, Mizhmarn hosted only four sapient races, as mentioned above, and all four of them were completely divorced from any trace of connection to the natural order, working entirely on the basis of Feywild "rule magic" and "name power" and similar principles, which the serious wizardly and clerical orders of Whiteleaf generally consider best avoided. Due to this, the exiled denizens of that world didn't make anything resembling sense according to the laws of nature as we understand them; druids were able to determine that bacteria simply could not grow on or in their bodies, and only barely began to break the substances they had eaten down long after they left the body. As a result, the "made of food" orcs could simply....live, as long as they had something to eat, without caring very much what it was; they had almost no sense of taste, their food could be virtually anything organic, and their bodies converted the ingested matter to fuel their growth processes, without any direct mechanism to actually allow this to happen (put simply, they don't run on science, and if completely disconnected from magic they would die instantly). One detail that only the most high-level scrying was eventually able to discover, and which still hasn't been released as general knowledge to the public, is that Mizhmarn was actually New Mizhmarn, and that the original world is long lost in the furthest deeps beyond known cosmology, theorized to be part of the original homeworld of the faeries, called simply Faerie, and just as impossible to actually reach as the Far Realm, though slightly less inimical to our form of life. Old Mizhmarn is theorized to have been the original birthplace of Orcs and Elves as a concept, long before their appearance on the now-destroyed Earth-like world where the Whiteleaf gods originated; even the ancient racial memory of the Aboleths may not be able to tell where these species initially began, but they are unquestionably far older than humanity, and if the Uudmak creation myths are taken literally, they may be older even than humanity's creators.

== Present Day ==

Since the population of Trivium City wanted their valuable empty field back, it was quickly decided that the Uudmak could not be allowed to remain in the Imperial heartland, and although they were reluctant to agree to relocation and were given a bit of a bum's rush before they had fully gotten on board with the idea, few of them seem bothered by this diaspora anymore. From their descriptions of (New) Mizhmarn, they weren't exactly that well off in their old home, and even though coming here wasn't their idea, it has largely worked out. The Empire has resettled the Uudmak in several previously uninhabited desert regions, as their bodies seem to take naturally well to a hot and dry environment, exactly the places that work least well for human settlement. This has led to the modern term "desert orcs" replacing their original shorthand name, though they still prefer that name's full version as their endonym, and see "desert orc" or just "orc" as merely an acceptable form of quick reference. The largest current population of desert orcs is in the Lentz'oi Valley, a dry and rocky wasteland suitable only for growing sorghum; other new homelands of the race are even worse for agriulture, so they mostly deal in subsistence farming to feed themselves, with the stench of cattle or sheep or goats appearing not to bother them.

Apparently there's still a bit of a lingering cultural sense among the Uudmak-Tigvass'voop ("dwellers in empowerment's place", the shortest not-at-all insulting version of their full name) that creatures "made of meat" are slightly sacred, or at least otherworldly enough to be exotic and fascinating; they don't mind animals, but are particularly drawn to humans and other humanoids, seeing them as borderline supernatural even at their most mundane...and also as being, to put it bluntly, made of liquid sex on legs. If anything about their new lifestyle bothers the still surviving elders of the first Uudmak generation, it's the fact that close to half of their race's population doesn't want to have children within the race itself, but finds interracial breeding to be an irresistable allure, which enthusiasm the human half of the equation of course tends to share quite equally. A desert orc woman can earn a pretty good living in any city in the Empire just by opening up an illicit massage parlor, and a much better living as an actual call girl or the like; males are only slightly less in vogue, with many pretending to hire themselves out as bodyguards or other mercenaries (now that they understand what real violence is, they react to it pretty much like any other flesh-and-blood being, albeit distinctly on the courageous and foolhardy side rather than being prudent or conservative about the risks), but being entirely unsurprised when the human women around them start craving the taste of dark chocolate and custard. The relatively rare practice of homosexuality also crops up around desert orcs at about triple the rate of any other humanoid race; the orcs themselves have no real aversion to the concept, but it usually isn't their idea, as platonic same-sex friendships are something which Uudmak culture very much takes for granted. A stalwart male desert orc is more than happy to just get a "bromance" going with some human dude, but if the guy decides to take matters to the next level, the Uudmak is less likely to show disapproval or even puzzlement at the suggestion, compared to nearly any other culture in or around the Empire.