The Pnume, by Caza (Philippe Cazaumayou). I found it here.
In order to supply themselves with oxygen, the Soft Ones had to modify part of their digestive system and start swallowing air: but they did not, because their anatomy allowed them to form new parts with extreme ease. So, they opened small holes in the armour, primitively and typically a pair per segment, inside each of which the exoskeleton invaginated, producing a network of ever-thinner ducts that directly transported oxygen to the individual cells: for this, blood was not at all necessary.
The Soft Ones, albeit with great delay, learned the art of flight, but to do this they had to give up half of the few legs they had. But they didn’t, even though they had plenty of limbs; they simply had to expand a small part of the exoskeleton of two thoracic segments into thin plates and let the exoskeleton of the thorax itself, robust and elastic, be rhythmically deformed by specific sets of muscles so as to move these plates, now specialised in 4 perfect wings, and there was flight. Of course, even these new appendages later had a complex history of transformation according to specific specialisations: one pair of wings transformed back into a robust armour under which the other pair, membranous and suitable for flight, could be folded and stored; in some cases, the protective forewings were equipped with buttons and hermetic closures, so as to make it possible to take off even from the surface of the water, after prolonged immersion. In other cases, one pair of wings reduced its size considerably and became a pair of gyroscopes, very useful for stabilising flight; some species found that their habitat no longer required flight capabilities and so lost them so as not to drag around useless accessories, and so on, always according to astonishing variety and unpredictable possibilities.
Historical successions, observed from a distance, sometimes appear unpredictable and bizarre. Thus, it was that many species returned to water, especially fresh water; these environments are also populated by the Soft Ones, but as a rule the latter simply remained there, while they returned, completely changed. Moreover, the operation did not present any particular difficulties: just as the impermeable armour made it possible to leave the water without drying out, the same armour made it possible to return permanently to immersion without getting wet quickly: all that was needed was to solve the problem of the oxygen supply, and for that minor modifications were needed to the stigma system and to the creation of efficient ways of keeping air bubbles with them, for example under the wings or under specially modified exoskeletal parts. This was the premise for the creation of a high-performance physical gill: the gradual depletion of oxygen in the bubble for respiration continually drew more oxygen from the water to balance the partial pressures of the individual gases. Some of these systems achieved such efficiency that the first air bubble captured was enough for a lifetime.
In a few cases, the Soft Ones only had rudimentary larval forms, considered to be the legacy of primitive situations, since one of the salient evolutionary characteristics of these poorly differentiated beings was the progressive increase in parental care and protection of the offspring; in the most extreme cases the embryos developed inside the mother’s body, emerging from it very late and in a very limited number of specimens, sometimes even a few offspring per mother in the entire life cycle. They were opposites. First of all, each female had an countless, almost incalculable offspring, despite the fact that the life cycle was in most cases limited to just one year; then, even though there were cases of highly developed parental care and even viviparous or ovoviviparous habits, as a rule, they relied on the statistics of large numbers to survive and abandoned their young without making any contact with them: it should be pointed out, moreover, that even the youngest embryos were perfectly capable of looking after themselves. Many spent more time in the larval state than in the adult stage, whose sole purpose was reproduction: this is why there were borderline cases in which the adults did not eat at all and indeed were sometimes mouthless. Conversely, the larvae often had lifestyles of their own and, exasperating the concept of metamorphosis, could even be totally dissimilar to the adults in their appearance, behaviour, way of feeding and choice of habitats in which to live.
In very recent times, within the Soft Ones, a particular species differentiated itself, with bizarre forms, which first described itself as ‘man’ and now, due to obvious psychological problems, as ‘woman and man’. It is a very interesting being, not only because, like some of them, it did build complex yet anarchic and disordered societies, but because it is able to produce and accumulate vast quantities of food.
So, men and women began to work for them, depositing, concentrating and making huge food reserves available to them, of which they sometimes made greater use than the men themselves.
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(to be continued)
The skin of the angels 