>>40953183>You have something with the mental power of a human, the ability to reason, but whose psychological nature must be fundamentally different. I like to imagine that they "see" with their empathic abilities first and the rest of their senses after. Their perception of an area is composed of what the creatures around them feel, and memories of feelings they've felt in the same area. Maybe they can even pick up residual emotions lingering in an area. So they'd just constantly be bombarded with all the psychic traces around them.
Imagine walking somewhere with one and passing a nondescript area. It means nothing to you, but she's just overwhelmed by its beauty because she can feel how something meaningful happened there at some point. On the other hand, towns might be unpleasant because there's just so many people and so much grief around.
They probably don't use tools, just because their natural abilities fulfill many of their needs.
Maybe the singular bonding has something to do with their powers. Maybe something about the person they bond with's feelings just clicks with them inside.
They definitely reproduce slowly. They're very rare and probably have only one or two children each. It's also probably harder because they want to reproduce with only their bond mate. Ralts takes a while to evolve too and is very weak, so they have to take a long time nurturing their child. I have this idea where they "nurse" using a sort of reverse-Draining Kiss/Dream Eater to share their own energy with their young.
I also have this idea where they pass memories down by showing them to their young, and that the memories they pass down could be passed down for many generations. They could even have a kind of "mythology" of their own that's passed down as a bunch of disconnected images.
