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."
