Vangoojie (noun)
Originally a subfamily of the larger species "vanjitera pliaesis," the modern Vangoojie became its own species when the ancient subfamilies split and migrated to the eastern front of Greater Illania. As the species became its own, it also gained many characteristic traits, some of which include the ability to burrow underneath the ground, create sound of frequencies up to 50,000 Hz, and stare at the
sun for an hour without blinking. The last of these things comes from a blatant and substantial gap in intelligence that the species's
evolution created. For reasons unbeknownst to scientists, any Vangoojie assigned from birth to be a civilian is incredibly lacking in intelligence. However, any Vangoojie deemed a king inexplicably gains intelligence beyond that of
genius level by
human standards. Despite this fact, there are no physical differences between a civilian Vangoojie and a king Vangoojie. Even so, scientists at Harvard University have deemed them each to be a species of their own; "vanjitera idocrisis" and "vanjitera eincisis".
The Vangoojie lifestyle, though different for both subdivisions, is a simple one. For a civilian,
life consists of eating, sleeping, staring at the
sun, digging tunnels that the king ordered to be dug, digging tunnels that the civilian thought the king ordered to be dug, and digging tunnels that the king did not order to be dug. For a king,
life consists of feeding, resting, covering fellow Vangoojie's eyes, watching over ordered tunnels as they are dug, stopping tunnels from being dug that the civilians thought were needed to be
done, and hurting itself whilst falling through a weak spot in the ground from a tunnel that had been dug directly underneath it. This entire lifestyle is epitomized by the
words of the researcher who originally watched these creatures in action, William Durr, when he says, "The
life of a Vangoojie king consists solely of living
life as it comes, making up for the idiotic things its peers do, and
forever being wrongly accused of being an
idiot itself, while in
truth being a
genius."