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Description
Delugian/Mlok (Mlok diluvii)
Name meaning: “Deluge salamander”, from Czeck mlok, "salamander", and Latin diluvii, "deluge".
Adult length: 7-8 ft (including tail)
Adult height: 4 ft
Adult weight: 200-250 lbs
Classification: Pleurodelinae
It used to be claimed that man was the only species with an understanding of morality. All creatures were compared to mankind in terms of superiority or inferiority in some way or another, and Homo sapiens was considered the pinnacle of evolution - any creature that became sapient would inevitably adopt a human-like anatomy. This conceit would come to be challenged in recent years by the cockroach-like Nebulans, and perhaps more dramatically, the eldritch shape-changing beings called the Xiliens. But even before they came to Earth, several other sapient civilizations had already been discovered, descended from some most unlikely sources.

In 1936, Czeck seaman Captain J. van Toch discovered a most unusual species of newt on a small island near Sumatra, who first happened upon an earth hollow leading to the undersea city of Mu, a vast subterranean community of these facultatively bipedal, terrestrial amphibians with the ability to survive in saltwater. Originally assumed to be humans which had adapted to live underwater during the global flood of God, they came to be called the Delugians as a result, though while the term has stuck in the public consciousness since then, the proper name of "Mloks" is preferred in the modern vernacular; the Czeck word itself possibly derives from the calls supposedly made by the creatures according to historical accounts, since scattered sightings of them were conflated with the myth of fire salamanders being elemental beings centuries ago.

Upon their discovery, human scientists concluded that the mythologies of a number of ancient Pacific civilizations on the surface world were influenced by the presence of these Delugians, with stories of water-dwelling sapient beings with undersea cities of their own being recorded since antiquity. The people of Mu were, as per the social norms at the time, employed in pearl farming, and as their existence came to be known, populations of these creatures began to emerge throughout most of the Pacific and interact with humanity as a whole - Mu was, in fact, the capital city of their far-reaching civilization. Their capabilities astounded the scientific community, and on the flipside they were incredulous that purely landlocked, live-birthing mammals did not require the water to colonize all parts of the world and give rise to a new civilization. Humanity owned the land while the Mloks colonized the sea, being able to tolerate extreme temperatures so that, whereas man mastered fire, they employed geothermal heat from undersea vents and volcanoes to establish their technology. Here was where human prejudice would cost them: being steeped in the myth of cold-blooded creatures being stupid and unfit for survival, they had assumed that the Delugians were inferior to man just because they were a type of newt. The Salamander Syndicate, founded by industrialist Mr. Gussie H. Bondy, was established in the hopes of providing the Delugians with a contributing role in society, but the newts were relegated to menial roles in industry which they took as a race-wide insult. The unhelpful escalation of hate crimes against Mlok-kind and increasing tensions caused the sentient amphibians to debate extensively about the option of waging war against humans. Before any action could be taken, however, World War II sprang forth, forcing them into hiding lest they be persecuted even more - and once the United States became involved, so did the usage of nuclear weapons.

When the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed on August 6 and 9, 1945, the Mloks inevitably learned of what had happened and, fearing for their own civilization, pleaded for the governments with such superweapons to put a stop to their use at once - but they were once again silenced as a minority. It wasn't until a certain incident in 1954, involving what could only be described as a physical patron deity towards the Mloks, that the world finally heard their voice, too little too late. Devastated and fed up with humanity not only basically destroying itself, but also corrupting their most important godly figure, the Mloks chose to retreat to their ocean homes en masse and never again interact with the world of man, waiting for when the time was right to reclaim the oceans as their own. It is perhaps because of the folly of man that the history of the sea's dominant race is still poorly understood, being so heavily guarded even before they met the people of the land, who had seemingly closed the door to being on speaking terms with them forever - the Atragon's appearance near Mu in 1963, for example, was treated as a gesture of war, though their attempt to destroy it ended in failure and such extensive property damage that their planned retaliation ultimately fell through. It would not be until decades later, when the consequences of the Atomic Age finally caught up with mankind in the form of repeated alien invasions and the rampage of the rogue necromancy experiment called Ghost Godzilla (Yureijira), that the Mloks finally understood that doing nothing would solve nothing with the entire planet at stake. Achieving mutual trust between the two races was still an uphill battle, but if they had to put aside their differences to keep the world from being seized from the cold, dead hands of both of them, then so be it.

The average adult Mlok is shorter than a person, but heavier in terms of weight. They have an odd resemblance to palaeo-tyrant retrosaurs, with a diagonal spine and a large tail for balancing the body, but a skin texture akin to a toad, being moist and bumpy, with a waxy skin secretion to avoid drying out in the sun that they renew each morning, like with frogs of the subfamily Phyllomedusinae. Their large, muscular legs, long plantigrade feet, and grasping arms are rather frog-like in form, with an oddly kangaroo-like stance; they even hop like kangaroos instead of running when moving quickly, though they walk bipedally like a person when moving at a slower pace. The head is classically newt-like with lots of renewable needle-like teeth in the wide maw, small nostrils, large forward-facing eyes with horizontal frog-like pupils, and an inflatable frog-like throat pouch for vocalizing. Colors and markings vary as much as the skin and hair colors of people, but the main body color tends to be gray, green, brown, or black, with a pale-colored belly of any of the hues aside from black, while the dorsal markings can be red, yellow, brown, lighter green, or dark gray - solid-colored individuals are just as common as patterned ones. The dominant gene for their eye color gives them green or blue eyes, and the recessive one gives them red or orange ones. Whereas humans emote using their faces more than gestures, Mloks use their body language exclusively; both species employ varying tones of speech for the same purpose, however.

The mating and reproduction of Mloks is largely the same as that of other terrestrial salamanders, with gravid females attaching clusters of eggs to an object over a standing body of water, but like some species of frogs, the father remains with the non-sapient young to protect them until they reach their age of developing sapience - comparable to puberty in humans, it happens after a decade. Only 10% of the babies last that long, the rest dying to environmental hazards, predators, and cannibalism by their siblings. Because the fathers protect the young, their society is female-dominated, with the females tending to be breadwinners and the males having had to struggle for equal rights over the eons, rather than the other way around as with humans. Their technology level is similar to both the ancient Greeks and feudal Japanese - advanced enough to express advanced knowledge of the arts and sciences, but bereft of industrial-era technology due to the unavailability of the requisite materials and innovations. Their main triumph, however, is bio-engineering. It is not known how they have been able to perfect the art of hybridizing genetic information to produce completely new creatures compared to what humans are capable of; whereas the best we have been able to do is to create an organism that looks completely identical to the un-modified strain, with the foreign genes changing very few aspects on the outset, the Delugians pride themselves on a variety of creatures under their care and protection which are found only within their civilization and which seem to be artificial in origin. It is possible that they, and not humans, were the first to discover the strange properties of the mutagens common to most kaiju, repurposing them and the viral bodies that transmit them for their own ends - and according to some scientists, both human and Mlokian, it may have been these mutagens themselves that allowed the ancestral salamanders access to human-level intelligence in the first place.

While the Delugians are mostly practical, materialistic and industrial in terms of society and culture, just like us, they do express religious piety towards certain entities they consider to be far more powerful than them - it's just that unlike humanity personifying concepts like forces of nature, the deities their theologies revolve around are very much physical in form. As the Mloks' turbulent history with the Atomic Age can testify, a certain colossal temnospondyl in particular is their supreme god regardless of locality, and they regard hurting him by any means as blasphemy of the highest degree.

**********

Seatopian/"Moleman" (Civitafossor morlockii)
Name meaning: “City-digging Morlock”, from Latin civitas "city" and fossor "digger" along with Morlock, the fictional subterranean race from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
Adult height: 7.5-8 ft
Adult weight: 500-650 lbs
Classification: Talpidae
The surface of the Earth is a familiar sight to the human eye, and so much of it has been explored by now that if any other sapient races lived on the surface before, they would have either ventured into places beyond the reach of man until recently or otherwise went extinct. While the Mlok race survived by living in the deep oceans where man would have difficulty navigating, the Seatopians, unlike what the name given to them by humanity suggests, are not marine creatures, but subterranean ones, living deep underground in a world without any light at all - a less commonly used layman term for them is "molemen" for this reason, but this is not widely accepted in academia even though the Seatopians are indeed descended from talpid stock, being most closely related to the North American moles such as the famous star-nosed moles they so resemble (if only in appearance, not in scale).

The origin of the "Seatopian" nickname for these sophont burrowers is a subject of debate; the leading theory is that they were once said to live beneath the ocean floor like many primordial deities and monsters were said to do, although this is not completely true - the mole people do sometimes establish communities or "colonies" directly under the ocean should they reside in coastal areas, but only when forced to do so by their avoidance of humans, and they are just as likely to live in the naturally existing earth hollows and tunnels already present. The racial name the Seatopians give themselves is not pronounceable to the human tongue, since even though they are capable of producing sounds in the same audible range as people and many have learned human speech to the point of fluency, their original language consists of a series of high-pitched chirps, squeaks, and whines that a human ear would struggle to process, thought to be derived from their natural echolocation. What at first appear to be eyes on their armored faces are in fact massive dish-like plates surrounding the forward-facing ear canals, with fleshy valves over the openings giving the illusion of "eyelids". They have no true eyes at all, having no need for them underground, so they sense the world through their ears and noses instead; this means that contrary to popular belief, they are not vulnerable to bright lights and are thus capable of functioning in daylight as much as underground or at night. They are more sensitive to loud noises and sharp odors than humans, however, and consequently they aren't too fond of the noisy, smelly, and often veritably uncomfortable hustle and bustle of urban human cityscapes, preferring the quieter recesses and earth hollows they call home; much of their technology is in fact engineered with minimal noise production in mind (systems akin to the kind used in human-built maglev trains are used in place of wheels in their vehicles for example). That said, many Seatopians are skilled engineers in spite of their lack of sight, and it may in fact be their reliance on other senses that requires them to ensure that they get their innovations right the first time. Their technology is in fact more advanced than that of humans - to the point of cybernetic enhancement, even - in part because they only rarely wage war amongst each other. The interconnected nature of their homeland of earth hollows and tunnels means they aren't concerned with the kind of turbulent relationships that make up human international politics - fighting over the tunnels everyone uses is useless, so they have more time to think forward for the good of the moleman race as a whole.

Unlike the country-wide governments of man, Seatopian politics is based on more localized communities, with each "colony" being its own individual city-state of sorts; cultural and material exchange is often done through migration from one colony to another, which also helps maintain genetic diversity among the mole people in a geography where the units of society have no choice but to live in relative isolation. Differences in culture, opinion, industry, and outlook occur on the level of the colonies themselves without any more expansive conglomerates of territory to speak of, although alliances between colonies are known to occur for convenience. This makes it easier to handle inter-colonial politics because, rather than an issue being the problem of an entire nation regardless of it being relevant to just one specific territory, it is that territory itself that has to resolve it. As such, responsibility falls more towards the localized heads of each community which, in turn, gives them more leverage and therefore more political power. If a colony presents a problem that the alliance it is a part of considers unacceptable, the alliance can simply cut off the colony it has issues with and want nothing more to do with it, rather than having to chip in to fix it under pressure from foreign relations - essentially, from a Seatopian standpoint, the problems plaguing a particular colony are the problems of its people alone. This means that if two colonies do come to blows over resources or living space, other local communities will go out of their way to isolate the conflict from the rest of the world to prevent collateral damage from straining relationships with those around them.

This is not to say that letting the colonies themselves hash out their problems without centralized governments is a flawless system, however. It has in fact led to more than a few cases where a Seatopian city at war sought outside help when the conflict turned out to be too costly and diplomacy not an option, only for the interested party to refuse to aid them, dooming the troubled city to destruction and forcing its residents to find other colonies to live in. It is just as likely however that a city-state will intervene on behalf of the city which they believe will present a greater political or economic benefit to them should they form a partnership with it, which is arguably how alliances are formed in the first place. Agreements and difference-settling don't have to be entirely homogeneous, either, as many Seatopian cities which have a firm opinion on a particular subject such as sustainable mineral cultivation or relationships with subterranean kaiju are neighbors and allies with cities whose views on that subject are not as supportive or denigrative, being understanding of their compatriots but also willing to provide "devil's advocate"-style feedback to determine how beneficial the viewpoint is as a whole, helping the more extremely opinionated colonies avoid stepping out of line. The most hotly debated topic, naturally, is their handling of the human race - while most Seatopians worldwide prefer an avoidance policy of only coming above-ground for resource gathering if absolutely necessary and staying far away from human civilization, there are "splinter factions" of social alliances which have chosen instead to wage war against humans before they encroach on the moleman homeland (which they believe is inevitable). While the Seatopians were largely unknown to human academia prior to the atomic age, several colonies that lived in and around the north Pacific took umbrage at the same destructive weapon testing that awakened most of the kaiju now active today, and attempted to set an artificially enhanced kaiju of their own on Japan in 1971. Ironically, this would lead to a smaller counter-movement once the Seatopians caught up with much of human history, with some of them recognizing that only a small portion of the human population was causing the issues plaguing the world at large - an all-too-familiar scenario in mole peoples' own society. The Seatopians which have ventured into the human world on their own volition to try and repair relations with us have been branded as heretics and outlaws by the rest of their society, and in surface-world society humans still outnumber them a thousand to one, but they still hope to bring about a new era of cooperation among all of humanity in the long-term rather than forcing everyone to rely on just a few ignorant people with more power than the rest of them. Whether their faith is well placed, of course, remains uncertain.

The typical Seatopian life cycle is somewhat faster than that of people, with a life expectancy of between 40 and 50 years rather than humans' being close to 70, and they take only 7-8 years to reach puberty and 15 years to reach sexual maturity; they are not monogamous, with females raising their litters of two to five young alone until they can fend for themselves. Studies into their evolution, by both human and Seatopian scientists, place their origin at approximately 4 million years ago, though their exact region of origin is unknown; it's possible that like the Mloks, they were influenced by kaiju mutagens when their ancestors found their way into the earth hollows preserving various extinct species, and grew to a larger size and developed a social, colonial lifestyle as a means of coping with the exotic, dangerous locals. Seatopians are in fact larger, heavier, and bulkier than humans, with thick, greasy pelts almost like velvet or shag carpet along with pangolin-like keratin "scales" on their faces to protect their heads when burrowing, which can be raised when aggravated to make themselves seem bigger and more intimidating to the echolocation of their kin. Their massive claws and the bony spikes jutting from their wrists are adapted to tear through soil and burrow as adeptly as a more typical mole, although they are useful as defensive weapons as well. These are clumsy, hefty appendages however which are not useful for finer manipulation - that role goes to their bizarre, almost sea-anemone-like noses, which have a sense of smell 3,000 times more acute than that of a human, along with between 16 and 20 fleshy feelers which are not only as touch-sensitive as human fingertips, but prehensile as well; they even have "fingerprints" like humans do, and no two noses are shaped exactly the same. It is often standard procedure for a Seatopian to bring his or her face up close to whatever handiwork they're working with, keeping their breathing gentle enough to avoid disturbing any delicate equipment, and use their feelers to control their implements as needed, organizing everything in their workspace so they know exactly where each component or tool is located. Heavier lifting or hitting is reserved for the arms themselves, and for tasks that require a broader range of perception they can use their echolocation, and even infrared reception to some extent thanks to an array of sensory cells between and just above the nostrils. Of all their senses it is sight which is lacking, for obvious reasons, but even though many technological and psionic advancements have enabled the brain signals relevant to sight to be projected into one's mind to allow them to "see" like we do, most Seatopians are actually terrified of this experience, and consider it baffling that anyone could be reliant on a sense that barrages the mind with such a confusing influx of stimuli which would drive someone mad if exposed to it for too long. All personal communication is through speech and scent, all long-distance communication is through codes of sound, and any written word is preserved through shapes and textures engraved or embossed on non-perishable material, which can be detected through either echolocation or touch-sensing.

Like their ancestors, the mole people are strictly carnivorous, their large mouths full of sharp teeth unable to adapt to anything but flesh, and so they either raise livestock or hunt other animals they share their home with. While they aren't afraid to sample the flesh of sophont surface-dwellers like humans in a vaccuum, contrary to popular belief they do not farm or hunt people for sustenance, and nearly all Seatopian colonies outright condemn this practice. Most are in fact squicked out by the propsect of hunting live people, considering it needlessly cruel, and any long pork they may consume is exclusively from corpses either taken from morgues and cemeteries in desperation or even donated to them by human societies both aware of their existence and sympathetic to their needs (though this is much rarer for all sorts of reasons). Ironically, Seatopians aren't disturbed by the practice of euthanistic or funerary cannibalism - instead of burying or cremating their dead or those they have to put down due to terminal illness or mortal injury, they strip the body of any edible tissue for later consumption (though out of respect for their dead, the meat is taken only by the immediate family of the deceased) and process the rest into other resources as required or feasible (burning the bones into carbon-rich ash for steel production, for example). For both cultural and scientific reasons, they believe that the brain and central nervous system is fatally poisonous*, treating it as a non-consumable resource and avoiding it as though it's diseased. This is even hinted at in the mythos of the Seatopians, wherein one of the earliest folkloric tyrants among them descended into madness after eating the entire head of a hapless rival he'd had assassinated, believing that doing so would grant him authority over the molemen said rival was leading (at least before the bloody uprising from which Baragon originated proved him fatally mistaken).

The kaiju that the Seatopians worship as deities all share a fossorial lifestyle - such as Gevora, Angurius, Sasori, and their own creations Baragon and Megalon, among others. Unlike other kaiju-centric religions where the creatures embody different aspects of the natural world, the Seatopians' views of the creatures is that they embody certain virtues that moleman-kind should aspire towards, with some even being artificially created by the Seatopians in a joint collaboration with several prestigious Delugian communities to fill in the gaps for qualities they deemed "missing". As such, the kaiju an individual Seatopian defers to the most is arguably the greatest indicator of their personality in a manner not unlike human astrology, and it's telling that those who follow the ideals embodied by the kaiju most likely to aid the surface world (with Anguirus and Baragon sharing the majority in this respect) are the ones most likely to cooperate with humans and other sophonts themselves.

* Which actually isn't that far from the truth , by the by.

**********

Everything referenced is copyright to its owner. The art and my interpretation of course are mine, though!

Here are the first two sapient races to be introduced to the Let Them Fight project! I'd come up with the idea of the Delugians a while ago but only recently thought of my take on the Seatopians after deciding to tie the origins of the next three kaiju together. The art is kinda rushed and amateurish, but I hope it and the lore work well enough.

The basis for the Delugians was War of the Newts, a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek, although their involvement with Mu and the Atragon was taken from the 1963 Atragon film as a means of integrating them into the LTF canon. The name of this race is derived from Lithographia Helvetica in 1726, where Johann Jakob Scheuchzer described a Miocene salamander fossil (now known as Andrias scheuchzeri) as Homo diluvii testis (Latin: Man, a witness of the Deluge), which was incidentally the inspiration in the first place for Čapek's novel. The bit about them being skilled bioengineers was added at the last minute, though, since I needed some way of handwaving the fact that the kaiju they are related to are artificial in origin and needed someone to make them in the first place. I figured it'd be fitting because of how amphibians are critical indicators of the health of ecosystems, so you'd think sapient ones would be aware of the natural world more than us humans.

I'm probably not the first to take the approach of making the civilizations from fictional locations in the Godzilla series into nonhuman sophont species (Transapient did that as well), but screw it. I refuse to believe that a society can live underground for such a long time without changes to their physique, and I also wanted to homage The Time Machine story a bit, so I made my Seatopians synonymous with the Mole People from the 1956 movie of the same name. There's a bit of a mole-based kaiju I made for a contest in this design, though I did adjust it to look more humanoid to fit the rubber suit aspect common to the films of the time. Am I making a huge mistake by having the LTF Seatopians look like this? Possibly. Do I regret doing so or anything else I've done to make them as distinct as possible from the completely ordinary humans in funny clothing seen in Godzilla vs. Megalon? Absolutely not. At all.

Hope you like these, and stay tuned for more! I may come up with a few more nonhuman races for this 'verse later, but I've got other business to attend to for this project - aside from the three I've already illustrated and only need to write the bios for, there's one more kaiju to actually draw to cap off this round before putting the project on temporary hiatus. Sit tight, guys - it's gonna be a doozy!

Description
Delugian/Mlok (Mlok diluvii)
Name meaning: “Deluge salamander”, from Czeck mlok, "salamander", and Latin diluvii, "deluge".
Adult length: 7-8 ft (including tail)
Adult height: 4 ft
Adult weight: 200-250 lbs
Classification: Pleurodelinae
It used to be claimed that man was the only species with an understanding of morality. All creatures were compared to mankind in terms of superiority or inferiority in some way or another, and Homo sapiens was considered the pinnacle of evolution - any creature that became sapient would inevitably adopt a human-like anatomy. This conceit would come to be challenged in recent years by the cockroach-like Nebulans, and perhaps more dramatically, the eldritch shape-changing beings called the Xiliens. But even before they came to Earth, several other sapient civilizations had already been discovered, descended from some most unlikely sources.

In 1936, Czeck seaman Captain J. van Toch discovered a most unusual species of newt on a small island near Sumatra, who first happened upon an earth hollow leading to the undersea city of Mu, a vast subterranean community of these facultatively bipedal, terrestrial amphibians with the ability to survive in saltwater. Originally assumed to be humans which had adapted to live underwater during the global flood of God, they came to be called the Delugians as a result, though while the term has stuck in the public consciousness since then, the proper name of "Mloks" is preferred in the modern vernacular; the Czeck word itself possibly derives from the calls supposedly made by the creatures according to historical accounts, since scattered sightings of them were conflated with the myth of fire salamanders being elemental beings centuries ago.

Upon their discovery, human scientists concluded that the mythologies of a number of ancient Pacific civilizations on the surface world were influenced by the presence of these Delugians, with stories of water-dwelling sapient beings with undersea cities of their own being recorded since antiquity. The people of Mu were, as per the social norms at the time, employed in pearl farming, and as their existence came to be known, populations of these creatures began to emerge throughout most of the Pacific and interact with humanity as a whole - Mu was, in fact, the capital city of their far-reaching civilization. Their capabilities astounded the scientific community, and on the flipside they were incredulous that purely landlocked, live-birthing mammals did not require the water to colonize all parts of the world and give rise to a new civilization. Humanity owned the land while the Mloks colonized the sea, being able to tolerate extreme temperatures so that, whereas man mastered fire, they employed geothermal heat from undersea vents and volcanoes to establish their technology. Here was where human prejudice would cost them: being steeped in the myth of cold-blooded creatures being stupid and unfit for survival, they had assumed that the Delugians were inferior to man just because they were a type of newt. The Salamander Syndicate, founded by industrialist Mr. Gussie H. Bondy, was established in the hopes of providing the Delugians with a contributing role in society, but the newts were relegated to menial roles in industry which they took as a race-wide insult. The unhelpful escalation of hate crimes against Mlok-kind and increasing tensions caused the sentient amphibians to debate extensively about the option of waging war against humans. Before any action could be taken, however, World War II sprang forth, forcing them into hiding lest they be persecuted even more - and once the United States became involved, so did the usage of nuclear weapons.

When the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed on August 6 and 9, 1945, the Mloks inevitably learned of what had happened and, fearing for their own civilization, pleaded for the governments with such superweapons to put a stop to their use at once - but they were once again silenced as a minority. It wasn't until a certain incident in 1954, involving what could only be described as a physical patron deity towards the Mloks, that the world finally heard their voice, too little too late. Devastated and fed up with humanity not only basically destroying itself, but also corrupting their most important godly figure, the Mloks chose to retreat to their ocean homes en masse and never again interact with the world of man, waiting for when the time was right to reclaim the oceans as their own. It is perhaps because of the folly of man that the history of the sea's dominant race is still poorly understood, being so heavily guarded even before they met the people of the land, who had seemingly closed the door to being on speaking terms with them forever - the Atragon's appearance near Mu in 1963, for example, was treated as a gesture of war, though their attempt to destroy it ended in failure and such extensive property damage that their planned retaliation ultimately fell through. It would not be until decades later, when the consequences of the Atomic Age finally caught up with mankind in the form of repeated alien invasions and the rampage of the rogue necromancy experiment called Ghost Godzilla (Yureijira), that the Mloks finally understood that doing nothing would solve nothing with the entire planet at stake. Achieving mutual trust between the two races was still an uphill battle, but if they had to put aside their differences to keep the world from being seized from the cold, dead hands of both of them, then so be it.

The average adult Mlok is shorter than a person, but heavier in terms of weight. They have an odd resemblance to palaeo-tyrant retrosaurs, with a diagonal spine and a large tail for balancing the body, but a skin texture akin to a toad, being moist and bumpy, with a waxy skin secretion to avoid drying out in the sun that they renew each morning, like with frogs of the subfamily Phyllomedusinae. Their large, muscular legs, long plantigrade feet, and grasping arms are rather frog-like in form, with an oddly kangaroo-like stance; they even hop like kangaroos instead of running when moving quickly, though they walk bipedally like a person when moving at a slower pace. The head is classically newt-like with lots of renewable needle-like teeth in the wide maw, small nostrils, large forward-facing eyes with horizontal frog-like pupils, and an inflatable frog-like throat pouch for vocalizing. Colors and markings vary as much as the skin and hair colors of people, but the main body color tends to be gray, green, brown, or black, with a pale-colored belly of any of the hues aside from black, while the dorsal markings can be red, yellow, brown, lighter green, or dark gray - solid-colored individuals are just as common as patterned ones. The dominant gene for their eye color gives them green or blue eyes, and the recessive one gives them red or orange ones. Whereas humans emote using their faces more than gestures, Mloks use their body language exclusively; both species employ varying tones of speech for the same purpose, however.

The mating and reproduction of Mloks is largely the same as that of other terrestrial salamanders, with gravid females attaching clusters of eggs to an object over a standing body of water, but like some species of frogs, the father remains with the non-sapient young to protect them until they reach their age of developing sapience - comparable to puberty in humans, it happens after a decade. Only 10% of the babies last that long, the rest dying to environmental hazards, predators, and cannibalism by their siblings. Because the fathers protect the young, their society is female-dominated, with the females tending to be breadwinners and the males having had to struggle for equal rights over the eons, rather than the other way around as with humans. Their technology level is similar to both the ancient Greeks and feudal Japanese - advanced enough to express advanced knowledge of the arts and sciences, but bereft of industrial-era technology due to the unavailability of the requisite materials and innovations. Their main triumph, however, is bio-engineering. It is not known how they have been able to perfect the art of hybridizing genetic information to produce completely new creatures compared to what humans are capable of; whereas the best we have been able to do is to create an organism that looks completely identical to the un-modified strain, with the foreign genes changing very few aspects on the outset, the Delugians pride themselves on a variety of creatures under their care and protection which are found only within their civilization and which seem to be artificial in origin. It is possible that they, and not humans, were the first to discover the strange properties of the mutagens common to most kaiju, repurposing them and the viral bodies that transmit them for their own ends - and according to some scientists, both human and Mlokian, it may have been these mutagens themselves that allowed the ancestral salamanders access to human-level intelligence in the first place.

While the Delugians are mostly practical, materialistic and industrial in terms of society and culture, just like us, they do express religious piety towards certain entities they consider to be far more powerful than them - it's just that unlike humanity personifying concepts like forces of nature, the deities their theologies revolve around are very much physical in form. As the Mloks' turbulent history with the Atomic Age can testify, a certain colossal temnospondyl in particular is their supreme god regardless of locality, and they regard hurting him by any means as blasphemy of the highest degree.

**********

Seatopian/"Moleman" (Civitafossor morlockii)
Name meaning: “City-digging Morlock”, from Latin civitas "city" and fossor "digger" along with Morlock, the fictional subterranean race from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.
Adult height: 7.5-8 ft
Adult weight: 500-650 lbs
Classification: Talpidae
The surface of the Earth is a familiar sight to the human eye, and so much of it has been explored by now that if any other sapient races lived on the surface before, they would have either ventured into places beyond the reach of man until recently or otherwise went extinct. While the Mlok race survived by living in the deep oceans where man would have difficulty navigating, the Seatopians, unlike what the name given to them by humanity suggests, are not marine creatures, but subterranean ones, living deep underground in a world without any light at all - a less commonly used layman term for them is "molemen" for this reason, but this is not widely accepted in academia even though the Seatopians are indeed descended from talpid stock, being most closely related to the North American moles such as the famous star-nosed moles they so resemble (if only in appearance, not in scale).

The origin of the "Seatopian" nickname for these sophont burrowers is a subject of debate; the leading theory is that they were once said to live beneath the ocean floor like many primordial deities and monsters were said to do, although this is not completely true - the mole people do sometimes establish communities or "colonies" directly under the ocean should they reside in coastal areas, but only when forced to do so by their avoidance of humans, and they are just as likely to live in the naturally existing earth hollows and tunnels already present. The racial name the Seatopians give themselves is not pronounceable to the human tongue, since even though they are capable of producing sounds in the same audible range as people and many have learned human speech to the point of fluency, their original language consists of a series of high-pitched chirps, squeaks, and whines that a human ear would struggle to process, thought to be derived from their natural echolocation. What at first appear to be eyes on their armored faces are in fact massive dish-like plates surrounding the forward-facing ear canals, with fleshy valves over the openings giving the illusion of "eyelids". They have no true eyes at all, having no need for them underground, so they sense the world through their ears and noses instead; this means that contrary to popular belief, they are not vulnerable to bright lights and are thus capable of functioning in daylight as much as underground or at night. They are more sensitive to loud noises and sharp odors than humans, however, and consequently they aren't too fond of the noisy, smelly, and often veritably uncomfortable hustle and bustle of urban human cityscapes, preferring the quieter recesses and earth hollows they call home; much of their technology is in fact engineered with minimal noise production in mind (systems akin to the kind used in human-built maglev trains are used in place of wheels in their vehicles for example). That said, many Seatopians are skilled engineers in spite of their lack of sight, and it may in fact be their reliance on other senses that requires them to ensure that they get their innovations right the first time. Their technology is in fact more advanced than that of humans - to the point of cybernetic enhancement, even - in part because they only rarely wage war amongst each other. The interconnected nature of their homeland of earth hollows and tunnels means they aren't concerned with the kind of turbulent relationships that make up human international politics - fighting over the tunnels everyone uses is useless, so they have more time to think forward for the good of the moleman race as a whole.

Unlike the country-wide governments of man, Seatopian politics is based on more localized communities, with each "colony" being its own individual city-state of sorts; cultural and material exchange is often done through migration from one colony to another, which also helps maintain genetic diversity among the mole people in a geography where the units of society have no choice but to live in relative isolation. Differences in culture, opinion, industry, and outlook occur on the level of the colonies themselves without any more expansive conglomerates of territory to speak of, although alliances between colonies are known to occur for convenience. This makes it easier to handle inter-colonial politics because, rather than an issue being the problem of an entire nation regardless of it being relevant to just one specific territory, it is that territory itself that has to resolve it. As such, responsibility falls more towards the localized heads of each community which, in turn, gives them more leverage and therefore more political power. If a colony presents a problem that the alliance it is a part of considers unacceptable, the alliance can simply cut off the colony it has issues with and want nothing more to do with it, rather than having to chip in to fix it under pressure from foreign relations - essentially, from a Seatopian standpoint, the problems plaguing a particular colony are the problems of its people alone. This means that if two colonies do come to blows over resources or living space, other local communities will go out of their way to isolate the conflict from the rest of the world to prevent collateral damage from straining relationships with those around them.

This is not to say that letting the colonies themselves hash out their problems without centralized governments is a flawless system, however. It has in fact led to more than a few cases where a Seatopian city at war sought outside help when the conflict turned out to be too costly and diplomacy not an option, only for the interested party to refuse to aid them, dooming the troubled city to destruction and forcing its residents to find other colonies to live in. It is just as likely however that a city-state will intervene on behalf of the city which they believe will present a greater political or economic benefit to them should they form a partnership with it, which is arguably how alliances are formed in the first place. Agreements and difference-settling don't have to be entirely homogeneous, either, as many Seatopian cities which have a firm opinion on a particular subject such as sustainable mineral cultivation or relationships with subterranean kaiju are neighbors and allies with cities whose views on that subject are not as supportive or denigrative, being understanding of their compatriots but also willing to provide "devil's advocate"-style feedback to determine how beneficial the viewpoint is as a whole, helping the more extremely opinionated colonies avoid stepping out of line. The most hotly debated topic, naturally, is their handling of the human race - while most Seatopians worldwide prefer an avoidance policy of only coming above-ground for resource gathering if absolutely necessary and staying far away from human civilization, there are "splinter factions" of social alliances which have chosen instead to wage war against humans before they encroach on the moleman homeland (which they believe is inevitable). While the Seatopians were largely unknown to human academia prior to the atomic age, several colonies that lived in and around the north Pacific took umbrage at the same destructive weapon testing that awakened most of the kaiju now active today, and attempted to set an artificially enhanced kaiju of their own on Japan in 1971. Ironically, this would lead to a smaller counter-movement once the Seatopians caught up with much of human history, with some of them recognizing that only a small portion of the human population was causing the issues plaguing the world at large - an all-too-familiar scenario in mole peoples' own society. The Seatopians which have ventured into the human world on their own volition to try and repair relations with us have been branded as heretics and outlaws by the rest of their society, and in surface-world society humans still outnumber them a thousand to one, but they still hope to bring about a new era of cooperation among all of humanity in the long-term rather than forcing everyone to rely on just a few ignorant people with more power than the rest of them. Whether their faith is well placed, of course, remains uncertain.

The typical Seatopian life cycle is somewhat faster than that of people, with a life expectancy of between 40 and 50 years rather than humans' being close to 70, and they take only 7-8 years to reach puberty and 15 years to reach sexual maturity; they are not monogamous, with females raising their litters of two to five young alone until they can fend for themselves. Studies into their evolution, by both human and Seatopian scientists, place their origin at approximately 4 million years ago, though their exact region of origin is unknown; it's possible that like the Mloks, they were influenced by kaiju mutagens when their ancestors found their way into the earth hollows preserving various extinct species, and grew to a larger size and developed a social, colonial lifestyle as a means of coping with the exotic, dangerous locals. Seatopians are in fact larger, heavier, and bulkier than humans, with thick, greasy pelts almost like velvet or shag carpet along with pangolin-like keratin "scales" on their faces to protect their heads when burrowing, which can be raised when aggravated to make themselves seem bigger and more intimidating to the echolocation of their kin. Their massive claws and the bony spikes jutting from their wrists are adapted to tear through soil and burrow as adeptly as a more typical mole, although they are useful as defensive weapons as well. These are clumsy, hefty appendages however which are not useful for finer manipulation - that role goes to their bizarre, almost sea-anemone-like noses, which have a sense of smell 3,000 times more acute than that of a human, along with between 16 and 20 fleshy feelers which are not only as touch-sensitive as human fingertips, but prehensile as well; they even have "fingerprints" like humans do, and no two noses are shaped exactly the same. It is often standard procedure for a Seatopian to bring his or her face up close to whatever handiwork they're working with, keeping their breathing gentle enough to avoid disturbing any delicate equipment, and use their feelers to control their implements as needed, organizing everything in their workspace so they know exactly where each component or tool is located. Heavier lifting or hitting is reserved for the arms themselves, and for tasks that require a broader range of perception they can use their echolocation, and even infrared reception to some extent thanks to an array of sensory cells between and just above the nostrils. Of all their senses it is sight which is lacking, for obvious reasons, but even though many technological and psionic advancements have enabled the brain signals relevant to sight to be projected into one's mind to allow them to "see" like we do, most Seatopians are actually terrified of this experience, and consider it baffling that anyone could be reliant on a sense that barrages the mind with such a confusing influx of stimuli which would drive someone mad if exposed to it for too long. All personal communication is through speech and scent, all long-distance communication is through codes of sound, and any written word is preserved through shapes and textures engraved or embossed on non-perishable material, which can be detected through either echolocation or touch-sensing.

Like their ancestors, the mole people are strictly carnivorous, their large mouths full of sharp teeth unable to adapt to anything but flesh, and so they either raise livestock or hunt other animals they share their home with. While they aren't afraid to sample the flesh of sophont surface-dwellers like humans in a vaccuum, contrary to popular belief they do not farm or hunt people for sustenance, and nearly all Seatopian colonies outright condemn this practice. Most are in fact squicked out by the propsect of hunting live people, considering it needlessly cruel, and any long pork they may consume is exclusively from corpses either taken from morgues and cemeteries in desperation or even donated to them by human societies both aware of their existence and sympathetic to their needs (though this is much rarer for all sorts of reasons). Ironically, Seatopians aren't disturbed by the practice of euthanistic or funerary cannibalism - instead of burying or cremating their dead or those they have to put down due to terminal illness or mortal injury, they strip the body of any edible tissue for later consumption (though out of respect for their dead, the meat is taken only by the immediate family of the deceased) and process the rest into other resources as required or feasible (burning the bones into carbon-rich ash for steel production, for example). For both cultural and scientific reasons, they believe that the brain and central nervous system is fatally poisonous*, treating it as a non-consumable resource and avoiding it as though it's diseased. This is even hinted at in the mythos of the Seatopians, wherein one of the earliest folkloric tyrants among them descended into madness after eating the entire head of a hapless rival he'd had assassinated, believing that doing so would grant him authority over the molemen said rival was leading (at least before the bloody uprising from which Baragon originated proved him fatally mistaken).

The kaiju that the Seatopians worship as deities all share a fossorial lifestyle - such as Gevora, Angurius, Sasori, and their own creations Baragon and Megalon, among others. Unlike other kaiju-centric religions where the creatures embody different aspects of the natural world, the Seatopians' views of the creatures is that they embody certain virtues that moleman-kind should aspire towards, with some even being artificially created by the Seatopians in a joint collaboration with several prestigious Delugian communities to fill in the gaps for qualities they deemed "missing". As such, the kaiju an individual Seatopian defers to the most is arguably the greatest indicator of their personality in a manner not unlike human astrology, and it's telling that those who follow the ideals embodied by the kaiju most likely to aid the surface world (with Anguirus and Baragon sharing the majority in this respect) are the ones most likely to cooperate with humans and other sophonts themselves.

* Which actually isn't that far from the truth , by the by.

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Everything referenced is copyright to its owner. The art and my interpretation of course are mine, though!

Here are the first two sapient races to be introduced to the Let Them Fight project! I'd come up with the idea of the Delugians a while ago but only recently thought of my take on the Seatopians after deciding to tie the origins of the next three kaiju together. The art is kinda rushed and amateurish, but I hope it and the lore work well enough.

The basis for the Delugians was War of the Newts, a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek, although their involvement with Mu and the Atragon was taken from the 1963 Atragon film as a means of integrating them into the LTF canon. The name of this race is derived from Lithographia Helvetica in 1726, where Johann Jakob Scheuchzer described a Miocene salamander fossil (now known as Andrias scheuchzeri) as Homo diluvii testis (Latin: Man, a witness of the Deluge), which was incidentally the inspiration in the first place for Čapek's novel. The bit about them being skilled bioengineers was added at the last minute, though, since I needed some way of handwaving the fact that the kaiju they are related to are artificial in origin and needed someone to make them in the first place. I figured it'd be fitting because of how amphibians are critical indicators of the health of ecosystems, so you'd think sapient ones would be aware of the natural world more than us humans.

I'm probably not the first to take the approach of making the civilizations from fictional locations in the Godzilla series into nonhuman sophont species (Transapient did that as well), but screw it. I refuse to believe that a society can live underground for such a long time without changes to their physique, and I also wanted to homage The Time Machine story a bit, so I made my Seatopians synonymous with the Mole People from the 1956 movie of the same name. There's a bit of a mole-based kaiju I made for a contest in this design, though I did adjust it to look more humanoid to fit the rubber suit aspect common to the films of the time. Am I making a huge mistake by having the LTF Seatopians look like this? Possibly. Do I regret doing so or anything else I've done to make them as distinct as possible from the completely ordinary humans in funny clothing seen in Godzilla vs. Megalon? Absolutely not. At all.

Hope you like these, and stay tuned for more! I may come up with a few more nonhuman races for this 'verse later, but I've got other business to attend to for this project - aside from the three I've already illustrated and only need to write the bios for, there's one more kaiju to actually draw to cap off this round before putting the project on temporary hiatus. Sit tight, guys - it's gonna be a doozy!