so nearing the end of this challenge with the final creature designs i was starting to struggle with many other things, because it so happens that the end of semester college work assessments was also around the same time of this challenge, and afterwards i had to plan a trip to visit my family in my hometown, tl;dr, busy busy





but i managed to push through with the designs anyway, first batch was to expand upon the cetan homeland, in a vast, near-barren undersea plateau of rocks rising up from the depths in the middle of the open ocean. so in designing the creatures of this world, i don't want to just mash together undersea creatures to make some random thing that looks cool, i want the creatures to be a part of this world's ecosystem and interact with the humanoid cultures that has been established.

the cetan race are very resilient, they can make use of the few lifeforms that roam their barren rocky home. what started as small oysters and occasionally passing whales and dolphins, has been selectively bred for millennia into the varying creatures of their army today. massive oyster farms are grown atop the rocky plateaus, the cetans has learned to make their shells malleable when they are young so that they can manipulate them into useful shapes, and as they grow larger and larger, the forms they have taken shape to also scale up before it is time to harvest them. some farms are used for growing smaller oysters harvested for everyday tools, some are for armor and weapons, while the largest, can take several generations and hundreds of years to grow, and take extreme care to be properly nourished and toughen up, so hundreds of workers had to carefully oversee the project, much like the pyramids built by the pharaohs. These gigantic shells are then used as armor and mobile fort for the cetan's most important beast of burden, the colossal white whales that they use to travel far distances to the great reefs that they will raid for months. the whales live close to a thousand years and can last for very long generations so they are a very important symbol for the cetans, representing their might and control over the oceans.





but a really large mobile fort isn't enough for their month long raids, for the journey is long and food will be scarce. for every colossal whale pod, hundreds of cattle whales and sunfishes follow behind, herded by the cetans with their war narwhals, while the pathmaker whales lead at the front, spreading krill that the cetans collect daily into a massive net to then release in front of the collosal whale to both feed it and control its route. The cetan army cycles through several different tasks every day, some will herd the cattle, some will collect food for the whales, others handle navigation using their knowledge of astronomy.