The Beast Fears Fire - Teigou Squirrels

Teigou Squirrels [Want 2]
Impulse - To Repel Trespassers Through Theft and Sabotage

There's no shortage of dangerous animals in the Teigou; black and grey striped umbral tigers, lantern apes, arboreal monitor lizards, carnivorous butterflies, giant catfish... Take your pick, there's lots of dangerous things to be found. I've chosen to give only one of the many species of animal in the forest its own entry because it sits at the center of a debate over sentience that's been going on for several generations.

The accepted definition of sentience in civilized lands (in the west, it's tied to fair skin, long noses and the ability to grow a beard, apparently) is the ability to communicate in a language that is comprehensible to other sentient species. The squirrels of the Teigou can't do that, or they won't and have no interest in trying. Fluent speakers of Demersal, which allows some limited communication of meaning between sentient animals and... well, non-communicative ones do report some success in communicating with the squirrels, but it is limited and the squirrels don't seem very interested. There are, also no reports (this being the other method for determining whether a species is sentient or not) of elves being able to inhabit a squirrel, but elves do not feel a difference between not being able to inhabit a creature that can't be their host and one that doesn't want them to be their host. Thought experiments involving trowir have, thankfully, remained entirely in the conceptual realm.

Teigou squirrels resemble the gray squirrels common throughout Murren (Crickton maintains a large population of red squirrels) with black fur and unusually large size - adults weigh in at around 12 kilograms, some specimens managing up to 15. They are arboreal and similar to their smaller cousins in most respects, subsisting on nuts, fruit and seeds, but unusual for a non-predatory animal, Teigou Squirrels are quite aggressive.

Also unusual for any animal considered nonsentient, they build structures, make and wear adornments, carry weapons, and defend their homes and territories with traps, lots and lots of traps. Teigou squirrels are highly social rodents, and band together to drive out predators, including (and especially) humans. They are capable of recognizing weapons and other items of importance among human kit and perform raids to steal or destroy the items they find most threatening or interesting.

Harm - 1 or Peril [Snared] or Moderator Hard Move [Take Their Stuff] Teigou squirrels do possess thumbs and will fight with small bows and slings, which are perhaps less dangerous than weapons sized for humans, but still dangerous. They also use snares and stake traps to capture, injure or drive off intruders. Generally, though, they find the easiest, when facing humans, to wait until dark, raid the camps and make off with anything they can drag away. Teigou Squirrels have fairly weak eyesight, but keen hearing and sense of smell, which gives them some advantage in the dark over sight-dependent opponents.

What Could it be? It's a Mirage!
When you've trespassed on the territory of the Teigou Squirrels and they have decided to do something about it, face Want
On a Hit, you catch them trying to get into your stuff before they've taken much. They have one thing of yours, though, and you must either make the Grabbed by the Goolies move or kiss it goodbye.
On a Hard Hit, you discover and rebuff the squirrels before they get into your things.
On a Miss, you lose an item of my choice and suffer Harm as stated (including losing another item of my choice as per the Hard Move [Take Their Stuff].

In the pines, in the pines where the sun never shines.
The question that usually comes up when talking about the Teigou squirrels is why, given the Murrenic tradition of interspecies recognition of sentience, is there even a debate about this? Two reasons. First is that the historical record places the Teigou squirrels suddenly gaining the ability to build, adorn themselves and use weapons within the last 150 years or so. There's no hint of an event that caused them to develop so quickly, but records from before about a century and a half ago characterize the squirrels as being fairly clever as apes go, let alone rodents. While it is possible that the chroniclers among the Song shaded their accounts, it would be uncharacteristic of what we know of their history to shade it that much. Accounts of the war with the Hemlocks don't shy away from outright war crimes committed in the conquest of the Teigou. That said, they did not eat the hemlocks.

That's the other reason. While the practice has dropped to nearly nonexistent, the squirrels of the teigou used to be a mainstay of the Song diet, and there is some evidence that, in lean winters and isolated areas, some folks still living know the taste of Teigou Squirrel. The spiders and the great wolves who live in the Teigou don't shy away from squirrel flesh like most humans do in modern times, and some folks hypothesize that the relative harmony between humans, wolves and spiders doesn't help the squirrels with overcoming their trepidation toward humans. It's mostly the spiders who lobby against classifying the squirrels as sentient, since they find their allies get upset when they eat things so classified, and Teigou squirrels are a mainstay of their diet, too.