Post by Artisia on Sept 28, 2014 22:16:50 GMT
((WORK IN PROGRESS - I am a slow and lazy forum user, I will update this thing over time ^^'))
Race: Seldani
Homeworld: Viil (no longer existing). Seldani lore is a bit nebulous about events prior to their exodus on the Drifters. The destruction of their homeworld is presumed to have been caused by some kind of geomagnetic catastrophe, possibly of artificial origins. Much of their knowledge has been lost in the turmoil, and the Seldani loremasters still occasionally debate if their downfall was brought by an adversary species, or was self-inflicted by their own technological pursuits.
Current habitat: thirteen Drifter worldships; most of them are actually hollowed asteroids, but the smaller ones are entirely artificial.
- Mallon: 1.120.000 inhabitants. Built inside Viil's smaller moon, the Mallon also possesses the largest support fleet. The Mallon was the seat of the promulgation of the New Ordinament. The moon's rock, other than acting as the Mallon's outer hull, is also the only known source of the mineral used in the Seldani transphasic warp drives. This has so far ensured a predominant role of the Mallon's Council on the Seldani culture. The Mallon is always accompanied by the Zesiet.
- Yilleni: 250.000 inhabitants. The only Drifter that made contact with the Milky Way galaxy.
- Kalleni: 250.000 inhabitants. In many aspects a twin of the Ylleni, its inhabitants came from the same culture on Viil.
- Eqqur: 210.000 inhabitants
- Yorua: 180.000 inhabitants.
- Menteru: 170.000 inhabitants. Built in an asteroid particularly rich in carbon, silicon and duranium, its fabrication facilities are by far the most advanced.
- Sogris: 120.000 inhabitants.
- Neneve: 120.000 inhabitants.
- Ponduc: 120.000 inhabitants.
- Hyssali: 90.000 inhabitants. The oldest entirely artificial Drifter, and by far the one that suffers most about overpopulation. The Hyssali never strays too far from other Drifters, as it is very often in need of logistic assistance. It is currently accompanying the Eqqur.
- Deruac: 60.000 inhabitants. Considerably smaller than the Hyssali, this second artificial Drifter was built by a reclusive culture, and to this day it still maintains its isolationism. After the departure from Viil, the Deruac came in physical proximity to other Drifters only for the promulgation of the New Ordinament, taking its leave immediately after. While it maintains subspace communications with the Mallon, nobody has actually seen the Deruac and its inhabitants for the last 5900 years.
- Zesiet: 50.000 inhabitants. So far the only Drifter built after the loss of the homeworld; when the Menteru's engineers embarked in the massive work of building the Zesiet, their initial purpose was to solve the Hyssali's overpopulation problem, by transferring one quarter of the inhabitants (together with small groups from other Drifters) into the new one. This plan never came to be, because shortly after the completion of the new Drifter, the Veviel rebelled (see below); since a portion of the Veviel's population managed to flee and sought refuge to other Drifters, it was deemed appropriate that the new Drifter was given to them. The Mallon's Council also decreed that the Zesiet would always remain close to them, in order to keep a watchful eye on its inhabitants.
- Veviel: 230.000 inhabitants at the time of its disappearance (see the Culture paragraph about the Veviel's fall).
Classification: Humanoid (dextro-aminoacid based lifeform)
Genders: Male and Female
Average lifespan: 90 cycles (1 cycle = 8,1 years)
Government: Each Drifter has its own Council of Elders; the thirteen Councils communicate very rarely with each other, through telepathy when two drifters are close, or with a dedicated subspace grid over long distances, but otherwise every Drifter is on its own.
Military: The Seldani do not possess a proper military force. their standard modus operandi is to avoid being detected by potential hostiles. If they are approached, diplomacy and negotiations are their weapons of choice. Each Drifter has a small flotilla of scout vessels and support crafts; while no Seldani ship has ever been built for war, their vessel designs (and their weapons) are generally bigger and sturdier than those of most of the other races. Whenever the use of force cannot be avoided, a small group of scouts can still produce enough firepower to discourage a sustained resistance, and give enough time for the Drifter to get away from danger.
Appearance
Seldani are very tall, their average height is around 2 meters; their physique is rather thin and slender in proportion, particularly they tend to have narrow and pointy chins and very long and thin fingers. Their skin is generally dark in tone, varying between several shades of dark red, brown and dark green; the skin colors are not tied to the genotype, but are determined by the substances absorbed by the egg in the mother's womb. The most prominent feature of their visage are their facial crests: two big plaques on the forehead and four smaller protrusions, two per side, growing from the brow and cheekbone; the forehead plaques usually have slightly different colors than the rest of the body, and their saturation increases during the mating periods. They are extremely vascularized: a plaque fracture is intensely painful and produces abundant bleeding. The smaller protrusions are inert bark-like growths, they stop developing after maturity and do not regrow if broken.
Seldani skulls have a pronounced ridge and are elongated backwards; their cerebral volume averages at 130% of the human brain. Their eyes have black sclera and brightly colored iris, usually similar or complementary to the skin tone. Seldani do not have any kind of body hair; their brow line is prominent and usually forms a straight line under the forehead. The nose bridge is almost curve-less as well, ensuring that Seldani noses are usually short and with small nostrils.
Physiology/Biology
The evolution of the Seldani species must have been unlike anything ever happened in the Milky Way. While in this galaxy the majority of the sentient species are either mammals or reptilians, the Seldani originated in a corner of the universe where evolution was won by vegetal-insectile hybrids. Seldani biorythms are considerably slower than those of Milky Way vertebrates; their nervous system is also radically different, allowing for a more distributed and direct control over their bodily functions. Their usual "deep calm" demeanor noted by other races is due to the fact that they often do not manage to estabilish an empathy with the more "agitated" species; those Seldani that are chosen to interact repeatedly with other species are specifically trained to identify, learn and simulate their body language, in order to appear less "alien" and facilitate diplomatic interactions.
Seldani skin is very thick; other species have described it as a "softened exoskeleton", and this description is not very far from its evolutionary origin. It is true, however, that over the last three millennia the newborn Seldani have shown slightly thinner skin layers; Seldani scientists have determined the cause in their lives on-board the Drifters: while their people have gone to untold lengths to ensure that the massive worldships can sustain their species in every possible way, the inevitably more sheltered and aseptic environment and the numerous generations passed within it are starting to influence their evolution.
Seldani reproduction is very different from the standard of the Milky Way sentient species. Upon reaching maturity (circa 20 cycles) a young Seldani enters the first mating period; these phases last for usually a couple weeks, and repeat every cycle for the rest of their lives, as long as their bodies are able to perform the reproduction. During this period, called mes'at, the forehead plaques are brightly colored, and a small gland placed on the backside of their skull starts emitting pheromone-carrier spores. These spores remain active in the air for no more than a couple hours, and usually die within a few minutes when they touch a surface in a normal environment, but in a particularly warm and damp ambient, or if several fertile Seldani are emitting spores in the same room, sometimes the spores can start replicating on their own, thus saturating a certain space with pheromones for entire days. Seldani spaceships, expecially the smaller scout vessels, have powerful and extended environmental systems to avoid spore saturation. Every individual produces a specific " flavor" of spores, and the mes'at makes their noses particularly sensitive; especially if the Seldani is very young and in his first mating periods, the effects of the mes'at can be so potent as to render him almost oblivious to anything but the smells in the air. During this "spore trance" a Seldani becomes little more than a brain with a nose: he will sit or stand still in crowded places and emit an instinctive psychic call, advertising his availability for reproduction; it is said that the matchmaking happens like the tuning of two instruments: when a male and a female detect a particularly pleasing call, they start drawing to each other almost unfailingly, even in the most dense crowds; upon reaching proximity, the smelling of the respective spores is the final test of compatibility.
It's easy to imagine how much more complicated this process could become on-board a Drifter; despite these ships being massive, the number of inhabitants is still so high that most of the communal places would be almost permanently saturated by spores. After the first decades of travel in the Drifters, historians report that several attempts to rationalize the matchmaking were made, with little success; everything changed 730 cycles ago, with the fall of the thirteenth Drifter and the rise of the New Ordinament: among the extreme measures of social engineering performed by the Elders on that occasion, it was also decided that the burden of finding a mate was to be lifted from the hands of natural selection. Now, a sample of staminal spores is taken from every Seldani at birth, and inserted into a genetic databank. When the first mes'at manifests, the young one is to report to the nearest medical quarter, where he receives a suppressor for the spore production, and a proper match for his spores is found in the databank.
Seldani DNA has a triple helix, showing a considerably greater resistance to mutations occurring during the mitosis phase of cellular replications; in simpler terms, their natural evolution is extremely slow-paced, as every new generation is nearly genetically identical to the parent one. Another peculiar feat of the Seldani DNA is about the third helix, which is only loosely tied to the rest of the molecular structure; contrarily to most of the other species, where the phenotype (the genetic instructions regarding the physical aspect of the individual) is coded in chromosome structures, the Seldani phenotype is coded in the third helix of the DNA. The molecular bonds that keep this anomalous helix in place are extremely susceptible to the conditions of the host cell; the result is that, while the normal evolutionary mutations are extremely rare, more direct external factors like nutrition, hormones, radiations, by affecting the cell's functions can inflict a mutation to the third helix. It may happen, therefore, that a group of Seldani that is subject to a specific factor for several years can produce offspring with peculiar physical traits. For example, those Seldani that on-board the Drifters are tasked with the care-taking of the food enzyme vats, and breathe their vapors all day, give birth to children with slightly thicker and darker skin. This genetic peculiarity has led to the custom of consuming certain foods or chemicals during the gestation, in order to grant the future offspring the more pleasing and socially appreciated looks. After the institution of the New Ordinament, the Councils have declared this custom "non desirable", although they didn't specifically forbid it.
Technology
WIP
Culture/Philosophy
WIP