D10 Horrid Bats of the Speculative Evolutionary Future

This post is dedicated to Ènziramire, who asked for it for whatever reason:

1. Samara Bat: A member of the subfamily Desmodontiae - better known as vampire bats. The samara bat has traded its ability to fly for extended periods for a peculiar feeding method. It will cling upside-down to branches in a deep torpor until it detects large, warm-blooded prey passing beneath, then drop in a tight spiral onto it - its wings are edged with papercut-sharp callouses, and its claws are long and sickle-like. Together with the anti-coagulating properties of its saliva, which the bat will apply to its wing-edges and claws, it's able to bring down prey from blood loss within minutes.

2. Jockey Bat: A parasitic species derived from the spectral bat which exists in a symbiotic relationship with a modified rabies virus. Compared to its ancestor, the jockey bat has a smaller body and much-reduced wings, while its head and teeth have remained comically-large in comparison. The jockey bat will latch onto the back of the neck of its hosts and inject a viral load directly into its cerebrospinal fluid, ensuring a minimal incubation period for the virus. The modified virus ensures an expression of furious rabies in 99% of observed cases. While the bat typically remains passively attached to its host, detaching only to mate, feed on creatures its host has killed, and to implant pups in carcasses of the same, it is also capable of directing its host's behaviour through hypersonic chirps to a limited degree, directing it away from the hosts of other jockey bats and even overcoming its virus-induced hydrophobia to extend its useful lifespan.

3. Blunderbuss Bat: Once thought to be its own species, now known to be the dinergate of the partially-eusocial descendants of the Honduran white bat. The blunderbuss bat is characterized by grossly-overdeveloped chest and leg muscles, along with thick wing membranes. The blunderbuss bat spends its idle time collecting sharp rocks and bits of metal, and when its nest is threatened will gather up these collections in its wings, anchor itself in place, and hurl them like a living catapult with enough force to deter or even kill any prospective bat-eaters or incautious people.

4. Bloodhound Bat: One of the horrors that came out of the sanguine oligarchates of New Zealand. Bloodhound bats are the size of large dogs, with a gait and body plan somewhere between a cheetah and a gorilla. Infamous for their sense of smell, bloodhound bats' ability to detect odour signatures put cancer-sniffing dogs to shame - their primary use was hunting down compatible and beneficial blood sources for their masters. Their secondary use - its efficacy much-exaggerated - was for their ability to smell emotional states, which made them a weapon of terror to police treachery in the ranks of their masters' private militaries. Not related to vampire bats at all, in fact a heavily-modified eastern tube-nosed bat - perhaps the most heavily-modified of any mammal of the Middle Anthropocene.

5. Firebomb Bat: A bio-organic weapon deployed against China in various unofficial attacks by proxies of the American military across the 21st century. The firebomb bat is nigh-indistinguishable from the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat, and in fact is capable of cross-breeding with the latter, with the firebomb bat's characteristics proving dominant. When the firebomb bat detects wooden structures or a sufficiently sizeable area of dry vegetation, it will enter a period of gorging itself, rapidly building fat and an internal store of acetone. A static spark from its own fur will then ignite it and cause it to explode - an explosion intended to incinerate its nest and any surroundings. Rampant spread of the firebomb bat lead to extermination of the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat population.

6. Beautification Bat: The product of an ultra-luxury gardening brand during the initial period of proliferation of advanced genetic engineering technology, that graceful, brief, and less-regulated time before the release of the GenoDie virus and other such terrors. Transgenically-implanted with preserved portions of the genomes of extinct butterfly populations, the beautification bat would transfer a portion of consumed insects into a secondary "stomach" which would act like a caterpillar's chrysalis, breaking down their organic matter and reconstructing it into algorithmically-lovely new pseudo-species of butterflies, which would then be regurgitated, and be unable to reproduce or even eat on their own - their only purpose being to flutter about looking pretty for a while.

7. Vaccination Bat: The product of that less graceful, less brief, and much more regulated time after the release of the GenoDie virus and other such terrors. A hybrid of vampire bats as well as insectivorous and frugivorous bat species, able to switch between feeding modes based on what was abundant in their environment. Used to non-consensually distribute vaccines, bacteriophages, and similar viral remedies or gene-modifiers to reluctant populations in an age of total biowarfare. The vaccination bat was phased out soon after its initial deployment for the much-less obtrusive vaccination mosquito.

8. Manual Bat: Created due to the collapse of inorganic production capacity - particularly of advanced computer technology - during the Middle Anthropocene, and to ameliorate the problem of large portions of the human population being maimed by conventional warfare or deformative bioweapons. Manual bats resemble spindly, partially-furred hands, and with the exceptionally-sensitive suction pads on their feet and tails will latch onto a wrist (or whatever stump one has) and translate twitches in the muscles and nerves into suitable movements of their own "fingers". Manual bats are able to survive for long periods of time off a solution of high-fructose corn syrup. Widespread use of manual bats is blamed for white-nose syndrome making the zoonotic leap to humans.

9. Bivouac Bat: A quite-agreeable species, symbiotic with many other creatures. It's adapted to the wildly-swinging weather and temperatures of the Late Anthropocene by becoming a living shelter - the dome of its wings strikingly reminiscent of the tents used by baseline humans centuries earlier. Bivouac bats live off the dung and other detritus of the creatures which take shelter within its body, and are able to survive on such a diet by, like tunicates, self-cannibalizing all their unnecessary organs (such as their brain) when they metamorphose into their adult form.

10. The Divine Child of Guidance: Either an incarnate god or an accident of feral transgenesis agents. A miraculous being, in either case. It resembled a human infant with the head and wings of a bat - each of its wing-fingers tipped with a hand. From where it fell stillborn from its mother, each hand was pointed in the direction that indicated the position of something that would prove to be vital for the survival of her group of refugees: a cache of supplies, the base of a remnant of the JSDF, and suchlike. The cult of the Divine Child of Guidance would last for two centuries thence, and divinatory practices used by that cult based on the casting of bat bones and amniotic sacs would last for many times longer.