Hellsborough Exposed — xin-culture

Van, on the The Xin warriors who had just killed Shad, walking toward him unarmed:

— Naked? I asked.

— Yeah, them xin have tough warty hides, no real need for the clothing we're used to. Nothing more than their armour, their weapons, and the badges of honour that prove their rank.

— Sounds similar to the military in the off-world.

— Does it? Your soldiers are naked then?

Hunting animals are an institution among The Xin, who keep Dyapnids in much the way humans turned ripperthroats into barkers, and I am not convinced either species came out of that arrangement better off. What makes a dyapnid worth the trouble is that it is a denizen of the third kind: not of the hex, not engineered by anybody, simply something evolution threw up in the wild that happens to have access to the hive mind. Packs that never found a xin master are still out there marauding The Dark Peak in numbers, and those ones answer to nobody.

Cryptobites — heavy dray animals originally bred from Mentiloth, now self-sustaining — occupy a specific niche in xin society: transport between communities, and silk production for clothing, bedding, and the construction of xin yurts. It is one of those arrangements that sounds practical until you remember that the founding stock of the species was the notoriously unstable and venomous Mentiloth, at which point the silk blankets become slightly less inviting.

Dyapnids — large black beetles, fast-moving, hive-minded, and surprisingly useful in the right hands — have been domesticated by the xin as hunting animals, in the same way that humans once domesticated ripperthroats as barkers. Those Dyapnids that weren't domesticated maraud The Dark Peak in sizeable packs, which is arguably the more impressive outcome for both parties.

Xin wound medicine is the most practically useful system of healthcare in The Dark Peak, and they have no interest in sharing it with anyone outside their encampments. A combination of Mentiloth and Cryptobite products and several hundred years of applied Dark Peak botany has produced techniques that extend xin life to several centuries. This is presumably relevant to anyone considering provoking a xin tribe: the individual you are insulting may have had several hundred years to develop a considered response.

Among the xin, the women make everything used in war — the powder, the cartridges, the firearms — and when the fighting is actual rather than tactical, they are the reserves who, by Van's account, fight with more intelligence and ferocity than the men. The men specialise in strategy and manoeuvre. This division strikes me as more sensible than the off-world version, though I have learned not to mention it to Van's xin contacts, several of whom are of the strategic type.