Picoco
The Picoco is the one kin of the Pikon and it is not a lesser court or a rival line. It is the creature that lives on the floor of every hall the Pikon have ever held. "The smaller, nuttier and lesser intelligent strain of the Pikon. This species is solid and round, and of less attractive colors, with hints of vibrance among its feathers."
They attach themselves to Pikon and are not controlled: "these follow the Pikon around and do as they wish, without needing to be mesmerized. They feast on the left overs, and find them beautiful." They were never appointed and cannot be dismissed, and a Fan Ascendant who ordered his Picoco out of the hall would be ignored. A Picoco is the only creature in the world that adores a Pikon of its own free will.
Body
Three to four feet, round, dark blue-green with a copper sheen at the neck. They have no head nodes and no working display, which is the whole difference between this kin and the lords, and which is why they have hands that work and legs that run and a normal brain in a normal skull.
In a Pikon the braincase is no larger than a Nu'uman's and the thinking is done by a cord of nerve running out along a twelve foot train, with every eye-pattern a swollen terminal and the three nodes on the skull the emitting end. That organ costs more to run than any other in the WildKin and it is the reason a lord is six hundred pounds and seated. The Picoco carries none of it, and is therefore quick, dextrous, and able to work.
Life
They are everywhere in a held city: carrying trains, brooding eggs, raising chicks, running messages, fetching food, taking beatings and chattering the entire time in a fast doubled Common that the court has never bothered to learn to follow. The Pikon young are fed and cleaned and taught to walk by creatures they will spend their lives ordering about.
They keep no faith, hold no rank and own nothing. They eat what the court leaves. When a court moves on they follow it out of the gate without being told, and they are the reason courts that keep their trains carried have half the tail-mite of courts that do not, though no court has ever attributed the difference to them. They talk constantly and "often mumble them so fast in passing they are hard to understand." Their names are what they call each other, which is a doubled sound: Bibbit, Nokno, Sassa, Torto, Pim-Pim.
Regard
The court strikes them as a matter of routine and the world outside barely distinguishes them from the lords. One of them, Bibbit, is remembered by name in a city its court hollowed, because it was the one that fetched the bread.
What happens to a Picoco whose lord dies is the one thing about them that anybody in the outside world finds sad: it stays. Husked cities are silent except for one sound, and travellers who have heard it describe it as somebody talking quickly in an empty street.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How long a Picoco lives, which the record nowhere states
- Where Picoco come from, since the court's hens lay Pikon and nobody describes a Picoco nest
- Whether the ones left behind in the husks are still alive, and how many husks still have one