Mansects evolved on Earth, the result of an insane experiment in the mid-21st century, a time when Earth's population was desperate for a solution to the pollution that threatened to overwhelm what was once a beautiful blue world.

The wild and dangerous 21st century, when all the promises made by science in the 20th century were broken like so much genetic code. It was one long orgy of scientific experimentation.

Church groups built particle accelerators. High school science classes were splicing genes. Why? Because they could. Much of this "garage science" involved increasingly desparate and bizarre attempts to deal with the rapidly growing pollution problem. The madman who injected Human Growth Hormone into a group of genetically altered insects in an attempt to create a strain of pollution-eating super bugs thought he was doing something wonderfully admirable.

He changed everything. No one ever knew his name.

Mansects are genetically half human and half insect, but neither humans nor Mansects care to admit anything about this and since the true facts of their origin on Earth are lost to everyone but you and me, this is how the situation rests.

The secret fear of humans is that Mansects are the next link in the evolutionary chain and have the potential to replace humans, and this could be true. Since their origins are murky, many humans also suspect that Mansects were somehow created by humans, rather than simply "arising" from some act of God around the toxic waste pools where they tended to cluster for warmth and nourishment.

Mansect is the general term for the race, and is also the term for adult males. Adult females are called femsects and children are called grubs, although the terms boysect and girlsect, while slangy and ungrammatical, are used casually by almost everyone. The young hatch from egg cases that are secreted by the female, sometimes singly but usually in twos and threes, and fertilized by the male.

The most important difference between insects and their Mansect descendants is that Mansects are all one species. However not all males can impregnate every female's eggs. Grublessness is not uncommon among Mansects, who mate for life. Grubs are therefore valued highly and nurtured carefully.

Mansects have a tough exoskeleton, composed of individual plates called sclerites, and an internal musculature that is highly protected. Bullets bounce off them, another thing that scares the bejeebers out of humans. Hands, head and feet have a more flexible and leatherlike but equally tough epidermis. A characteristic of all the joints in their bodies is an energy-generating substance called resilin in the flexible intraskeletal disks, making Mansects somewhat stronger and springier than an equal-sized human. However their exoskeletons allow for slightly less overall flexibility than humans.

Mansects retain many insect characteristics like wings and antennae. Many male Mansects, like the clumsy Bunglebees, have wings but cannot fly. Functioning wings are more common in femsects. Winglessness is pretty common, and Mansects are not known to take this personally.

Antennae endow Mansects with both empathic and telepathic powers. Mansects share a group consciousness called the hive mind that allows them to sense each others' moods and feelings, though not necessarily exact thoughts. However, lying and crime are virtually unknown among Mansects. The length of one's antennae has a direct correlation to the strength of these powers.

Mansects are cold-blooded. On Earth they clustered around waste sites not just for nourishment but for the heat such locations generate. Aside from being able to digest most kinds of toxic waste, Mansects are vegetarian and exist almost completely on cellulose fiber, either processed or raw. Though still possible, the eating of waste materials is considered a social faux pas.

Mansects can change color, either for camouflage or in response to their moods. On Earth, they tended to be the colors of mud, and in addition to dressing in rags and living in shanty towns, this is how most humans remember them. Once on Arthropoda, however, their natural colorations blossomed and now they're an iridescent rainbow of hues. Color discrimination is unheard of. Mansects are amazed that humans make such a big deal of skin color.