Kobolds

It seems the those below did try to get by without human slaves once or twice.  Big Charry was only the seat of their civilization, and there are outposts all over the countryside, and a lot of those have local populations left over from those times.  Those local populations have local names, depending on who lives near enough to them to name them and what animal they got made from in the first place, but collectively, they're called kobolds, at least that's what Charry folk and Cantoneers call them.

Those underground had the means to mess with the biological plan of living things.  There's plenty of evidence of that all over this land, independent of kobolds.  Kobolds are more dramatic than most, since whatever animal was their ancestor before, these days, they something like that changed to a similar to human body plan.  Walk upright, use hands to make tools, have languages of varying complexity, better or worse understanding of social dynamics (kobolds made from dogs are more social and better able to deal with social behavior than, say, kobolds made from squirrels).  Kobolds tend to inhabit the areas that were assigned to them by those below, long abandoned of whatever purpose they were put there to fulfill.  Some are fairly social and even sociable, some are less so.  Some seem to harbor an instinctive distaste for humanity, some don't.

Kobolds tend not to live a lot longer than their non-anthropomorphized ancestors.  Those below were not very careful when making them, and health problems tend to accrue on them quickly after they reach maturity. Likewise, kobolds drawn from less common stock or living in isolated areas tend to be very inbred, with the host of problems that creates.  Interactions with humans tends to be mixed.  In the Cantons, there are small communities of dog kobolds and a little consortium of fox kobolds that integrate fairly well with human society.  In Big Charry, however, the swamps are filled with nutria, beaver, muskrat, opossum and raccoon descended kobolds which constantly raid one another and any humans they find, which makes them one of the most pervasive threats to expeditions in the region.