@Dmyt Aside from oi, tu! klausies!, I'd be a bit stumped too. Perhaps you can post some of the others so that we can see what sort of titles you have in mind.

I also have an opinion-based question. I've been trying to come up with an organsim that produces a drug that can't be synthesised. For story reasons, I want it to be something that can be grown in captivity and the drug harvested from it, but can't breed in captivity, so it has to be obtained anew from wherever it naturally occurs when the previous ones die. I also want it to be something that isn't a species that would cause an ecological collapse if it was to be helped to go away.

Any suggestions?

Oh... it also needs to be something with at least one long spine that could in theory cause an epidural injection on a human at the back of the neck in just the right circumstances. That event need only be a 1 in a million chance, though. Possible, not likely.

@Mary @MontyWild Examples would be the American Hivemind having Titles like the Unchained Eagle, the Star-Spangled Sovereign, the Torchbearing Gunslinger, etc. The Chinese Hivemind has the Red Dragon, the Emperor of Ten Thousand Years, etc.

@MontyWild Porcupine? The spikes are like natural syringes that ooze out the drugs

@Dmyt Porcupines can breed in captivity. Even if they're alien porcupines, it seems that they could be farmed.

I'm after an idea for something from an alien biome colonised by humans that they exploit, but have no idea how to breed. They extract the drug from it, but when they die, they have to go out and get more.

Titles for the Latvian hive-mind... how about The Baltic Forester, since Forestry is important there.

Red and white rye-baker as a reference to their flag and rye bread which is very popular there.

Lielvārde leader

from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Latvia#National_dress

The Memory of Dainas, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daina_(Latvia)

The Mushroomer, since mushroom collecting is popular.

@Dmyt Have a look at kulturaskanons.lv/en

@MontyWild Microbe then? nature.com/articles/ja200816

I thought of a microbe... but they're also all too easy to breed. I need something that my MC can find some way to change or exterminate, and the lab specimens will eventually die, leaving no source for the drug.

I was thinking of something that lives in the sea, since it's easier for an organism there to be poorly understood, especially from an alien biome that has been colonised for a few thousand years by people who were at the start of the bronze age when they arrived.

chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Biological_Chemistry/….

Tunicates?

@MontyWild

@Dmyt Maybe not Tunicates... but a sort of tunicate cone-snail chimera-like thing perhaps. Sessile, but hunts using an attached dart like a cone snail.

The dart would carry the drug that is being harvested, and could in theory sting a person.

@MontyWild I wonder what drug it would produce and why.

Oh, that's easy. worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/257907/75.

Since it's a product of an alien biome, the hialutabu compound's effect on humans is a pure coincidence, and it has other uses with its intended prey.

@Dmyt Hialutabu's 'purpose' is rather f-ed up, which is why my story has someone who wants to get rid of it for good. To make that possible without necessitating mass murder and the destruction of libraries, the critter has to be impossible to breed in a lab.

@MontyWild A stinging insect, like a wasp or a mosquito. The drug might be its venom. It can't be kept in captivity because it moves around a lot (migratory wasps?) to find different sources of food, to visit the spawning grounds, etc. Any animal that naturally has a large range will be extremely stressed out in captivity.

@MontyWild Is this drug just produced for the government? I can see citizens getting addicted to this. It would make a great profit selling it to the terminally ill

The story is that on the world of Ruquelis, there are men, women and lilim. Lilim are women with wings, but they give birth to all three genders, while women give birth only to men and women. However, the lilim daughters aren't distinguishable from woman-children before 6-9yo. Lilim also have a lower birth rate. So, lilim are afraid that they'll be out-bred by women.

So... the lilim have set up institutionalised murder of women on Ruquelis. They justify this to themselves because people reincarnate, and hialutabu makes death pleasant - addictively so. Reincarnated people can remember their previous incarnation's death and want to repeat it.

(the scientists are having in-universe debate over whether "the wasps die of loneliness" is anthropomorphising them and they're actually just missing some obscure nutrient that the lab food doesn't have. but the end result is the same.)

In some contries on Ruquelis, women are considered to be meat animals. They grow up and are educated for the benefit of their next incarnation, and are then cooked (often alive, with a dose of hialutabu) and eaten. There are people who want to stop the cannibalism and murder, and halting the production of hialutabu is one step.

So, for the production of hialutabu to be able to be stopped in the story by a small group of spies, the species that produces it has to be vulnerable in some way.

So, @Toph an insect which reproduces in large numbers, even if it can't or won't reproduce in the lab, isn't vulnerable enough.

@MontyWild Why not make the drug producer codependent on some other creature? Like the wasps @Toph mentions and somehow make it so that the snail relies on said wasps to live?

@Dmyt That's a good idea... I had the idea that the sessile organism that produces hialutabu is only one sex of the species, and the other sex is something completely different that hasn't been recognised.

@MontyWild ... setting aside the drugged cannibal murder for the time being. How come they haven't already been out-bred a long time ago? This seems like an unsustainable state of affairs that must have started only recently.

"recently" ok well not within living memory, it could have been a hundred years or more

@Toph Answers to worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/233745/… show that lilim can survive if they're the apex gender. However, the lilim on Ruquelis didn't read that study, and cull women. They originally came from Earth roughly 10,000 to 6,000BC, and lilim did become extinct on Earth.

Lilim used to breed true and women became extinct long ago, but there was magical interference to bring back women for social reasons, and that change started the current imbalanced genders problem.

@MontyWild I'll admit, reading about your lilims is interesting. I have another setting with mages. There's a faction of mages obsessed with pain and extreme sensations. Reading your lilim lore is giving me inspiration. Can I borrow some of it?

So the Hialutabugen lives in all these different countries? Or is there only a small range where the actual animal lives, and everyone else has to import the drug/captive animal?

@Toph The hialutabu-producing organism would have to have a restricted range. Since they can be kept in captivity for long periods, they can be harvested when necessary, and then milked in a lab.

@Dmyt Ideas are free... just make up your own name and rules for how it works and you won't be plagiarising anything.

However, hialutabu has the effect that it cross-wires pain sensations to the pleasure centre, so no matter how unpleasant or harmful, users of hialutabu experience all pain or discomfort sensations as pleasurable. Hence its addictiveness, even across incarnations.

In a way, I've drawn from real-world history for Ruquelis. The Toltecs, Olmecs, Maya and Aztecs and other central american tribes had religious human sacrifice, and the Spanish who conquered them wrote that some would-be sacrifices whom they rescued demanded to be taken back to be sacrificed. Consider en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Maya_culture

So the women who were dosed with hialutabu, killed 'painfully' and eaten are reincarnated (thanks to reincarnation anchors that work as in worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/215307/75 and worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/233825/75) get to come back in their next life (and may or may not be a woman again) and say how good it was, thus perpetuating the practise.

@MontyWild Breeding in captivity can be rendered impossible by the creature needing space to breed. Cheetahs court by the male cheetah chasing the female down, for instance.

@Mary @Dmyt I'd thought of having the sessile organism be one gender, and the other gender being a migratory fish that the sessile gender catches and eats in order to reproduce, releasing a bunch of eggs and sperm in the process, which fertilise to become plankton. The motile gender grows and goes on a migration while new members of the sessile gender settle down and grow.