This whimsical pot clad creation came from a simple sketch drawn while thinking up new idea’s for future Calci golem designs (Bone, rubber, stone), and my own personal interest in the biology of the Portuguese man o’ war, a colonial organism made up of not one individual species, but several, known as zooids. It was this idea of a symbiotic relationship among two distinct species, as well as a species relationship with an external non-organic structure, as seen in my Calci golem designs, which lead to this alien oddity, the Klingting.
Terracotta Klingting
The Klingting is not one, but two drastically different species living in a symbiotic relationship that together form a single colonial organism. The two creatures that make up an individual Klingting are, the Kling, a bulbous fish like animal with two arm-like eye stalks, and the Ting, a green gelatinous slime mold decedent.
Both species survive together in a perfect state of mutualism. The Kling provides all the benefits of a complex organism, such as, sight, the ability to communicate and in the case of the Kling, sentience, all of which is shared through a neural bond between the two. It also provides the Ting with food in the form of its waste and a special sugar it excretes. The Ting in turn provides the Kling with a liquidity home, a means of terrestrial mobility, a boosted immune system and further protection from its ability to form inorganic shells. If separated both will eventually die, although the Kling can sometimes survive if it finds a body of suitable water.
The Klingting communicate with each other by drumming on their inorganic shells, hence their onomatopoetic name Klingting.
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