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swestrupWell, we're off to Worldcon in another 40 minutes, all going well. I'm supposed to wake the SO in 10 minutes, although she only went to bed at 6:00 am. For someone who used to spend all her time on the road, she is amazingly bad at getting ready for a trip. We have a more complex list of things to do for our annual Holloween party, and she has no trouble with THAT.
Anyway, I've decided that since I've gone and friended a bunch of folks because of their interest in xenobiology that I would post a set of aliens that I've been working on, for comment and for help. You'll notice that I typically start with the biology when I design aliens and use that to determine psychology and use that to guess at culture. The problem with the creatures below is that I've only got a sketch of the biology so far. Any insights anyone has on their biology, sociology, culture, what-have-you is welcome.
Oh, and these are all legal 'player character' aliens, so I'm not giving any secrets away here:
Call themselves "Blue Fades". Tetrads are a metalo-organic species designed as a slave race in the distant past. Tetrads are tetrahedrons about 1 meter on an edge. From each point on the tetrad sprouts a metallic tentacle with a very complex surface structure which allows the tentacle to grip on the molecular scale. The tip of each tentacle contains a weak laser and around the base of each tentacle is a ring of eyes. In the middle of each face of the tetrahedron is a mouth. The tentacles are a pastel blue, but the rest of the creature is able to change color on demand. Tetrads use their color shifting as a primary language when close up, and use their lasers to converse over longer distances.
Designed for spaceship repair and maintenance, tetrads are happy in zero-g or vacuum. Their tentacles are designed for tensile, not compressive, strength so they cannot 'stand' in any gravity over about .5 g, but can happily hang from the ceiling in up to 5 g environments. Their mouths double as access ports to mounting hard points for heavy equipment, plus there are data ports in there. They can only eat specially designed metalo-protein soups from containers designed to interface to the feeding tubes in their throats.
The skin of a tetrad is tough but thin and covers an interior which is a metallic sponge woven with highly distributed organs. If in space or a non-reducing (ie unbreathable) atmosphere then any puncture wound, such as from a bullet or micrometeorite, will almost instantly heal over with little or no effect on the tetrad. Should oxygen, chlorine or any other highly reactive chemicals get into a wound then the tetrad may require immediate anti-poisoning treatments or could face major internal damage.
The tentacles of a tetrad are made of much sterner stuff. They can withstand temperatures from near absolute zero to that of molten steel and are immune to even highly corrosive chemicals. In the event that a tentacle is damaged the only recourse of the tetrad is to discard the damaged section and regrow more tentacle from the base at a rate of roughly 2 cm per day.
The most interesting piece of tetrad physiology is that they are not individual creatures. Each tetrad is actually composed of 4 monads strongly linked by their interior hard points. Each monad has one tentacle, a row of eyes and a mouth. Most of the time the four monads cooperate and act as a single being, but each monad will specialize in a (usually) different area of expertise. One monad may have faster reflexes, one might have a large body of collected knowledge. Another may specialize in analysis of equipment failure, and the fourth may be devoted to creative endeavours.
When mating, three tetrads will break into their individual monads and will recombine to form four 'triads' each having a monad from each of the original tetrads. Over the course of the next few months the three monads in each new being will cooperate in a joint effort to grow a new monad to make the tetrad complete.
Tetrads seldom break up and recombine for other than mating reasons, but they have been known in exceptional circumstances to piece together a new tetrad from carefully chosen monads so as to help solve a particular problem.
The race that created the Tetrads is unknown but appears to be extinct. The best guess is that they were wiped out during some sort of war that involved an unknown data-destroying technology. The only known Tetrads have been found drifting in huge spaceships of advanced design in which all of the computers and data storage devices have been wiped clean. Usually the tetrads themselves have lost all but racial memories of their former masters and have fallen into living at a medieval tech level or worse.
One of the most recent races to join the Imperium, Tetrads have quickly acquired Imperium level technology and have agreed to work hand-in-hand with the Imperium to attempt to decipher the advanced technology of the Tetrad's derelict ships. In return the Imperium is actively hunting for more of the Tetrads and their ships to bring them back into civilization.
Appear as warty, pock-marked beach balls enmeshed in a fishing net. The tough outer tegument of the ball covers a complex layer of glands, spinnerettes and neural tissue. The webbers can spin (and fire) retractable webs of sticky neural tissue studded with sensors and special toxin glands. Webbers are traditionally solitary and originally lived in dense forests or narrow canyons. They lay out their complex webs over a volume roughly the size of a house. Within that space they can move at lighting speed by a combination of reeling in and playing out their web lines so as to catch any small creatures that enter their area. They eat by enmeshing a creature in a web studded with digestive glands and sucking up the resulting slurry. If a creature too large to handle appears, they can retract their entire web system back into their bodies in seconds. Damage to their webs is mildly painful, but not serious on a small scale.
Webbers prefer to stay in their chosen territory and communicate with others via complex chemical signals that can waft on breezes for hundreds of miles. When they need to find a new home, or for mating purposes, they can slowly move outside their webs by firing web tendrils at walls and trees and swinging or dragging themselves along.
Despite lacking true limbs they are able to perform basic manipulation of materials by extruding sticking ropes with which to lift and pull things. Fine manipulation can be accomplished (with difficulty) via the use of short prehensile spinnerettes on their undersides.
Webbers had reached their equivalent of our Industrial Revolution when they were absorbed into the Imperium. They have taken to modern neural interface technology with gusto and now often work as traders, middlemen, programmers or other jobs where patience and care are more required than manual dexterity or strength.
Mummers are a strange plant/fungus symbiosis. Neither alone shows any intelligence, but the two combined are highly so. The plant part of a mummer is roughly 7 feet tall with a central woody body raised off of the ground by one to seven rubbery roots in a manner reminiscent of mangroves. From the top of the woody torso sprout large palmate leaves that can furl into a knot during darkness or when the creature feels threatened. Without its symbiont the plant roots in mud or wet soil and cannot move or think. The fungus part of a mummer is very long, tape-like (2-4 cm wide) and weaves itself into basket-like structures in the soil or in tree tops. These baskets hold soil and/or water in a mixture conducive to the growth of young plants.
Once a plant has started growing in the basket, the tape grows as well, wrapping itself around the plant's trunk and mummifying it. The tape is studded with a myriad of environmental sensors which are used to sample the local environment so as to allow for better care for its host. The tape fungus is very tough and its wrappings will often protect young plants from other fungi and insectoid predators. In addition the tape has a high tensile strength and can constrict with amazing force. This is very useful since native plants often have multiple air roots, and the tape fungus can bend and release different roots (each rooted in a soil-filled basket) to cause a plant to slowly shamble towards better growing conditions. The protection of a tape fungus is not without great cost though as the fungus produces tiny tendrils which bore into the plant and sense its inner condition while simultaneously sucking out the sap to feed the fungus. In all but the more vigorous of plants this sap sucking eventually leads to the death of the host plant, at which point the tape dries up and crumbles into spores which blow with the wind, only to land in organic mulch and grow new baskets.
When a mummer-plant seed germinates in a mummer-fungus basket something very special takes place. The fungus tendrils grow into the plant's torso as usual, but there they encounter complex chemicals secreted by the heartwood that directs the further growth of the tendrils. Rather than forming chaotic tangles throughout the body of the plant, they are directed to grow and form an ordered neural layer in spongy sap-laden wood specifically evolved for this purpose. With the completion of the neural net, a whole cascade of changes takes place within the plant as autonomic systems cede their regulation over to the net. The metabolism of the plant increases, the fungi sensors become full blown senses and a new sapient mummer is born. The sentient mummer appears as a multi-legged multi-armed mutant 'mummy' (hence the name) with green leaves sprouting from the top. Even with their advanced plant metabolisms, Mummers are not especially fast movers but they are highly intelligent and very strong.
When the Imperium first encountered the Mummers they had already spread to colonize 4 other star systems. Pacifists by nature, the Mummers apparently never considered any other route but joining the Imperium and becoming staunch citizens thereof. The news of how other races have reacted to the growth of the Imperium came as a major culture shock.
The lizards are not technically reptiles although they do have a rough greenish-brown skin that closely resembles scales. Stretched out, their tailless bodies are close to 10' long, with two pairs of legs at the back end of the torso, two pairs of arm/legs at the front of the torso and an extensible neck ending in a blunt-snouted face with three independently-focusable eyes symmetrically arranged around the snout. When on a level surface they normally carry themselves curled up into an 'S' shape, with the rear legs taking all the weight and the front legs acting as 2 pairs of arms. The feet or hands of the lizards are all the same shape, although those on the back legs are thicker and less dexterous. Each hand has 4 opposed, clawed fingers arranged in pairs on either side of a horny thickened palm (much like a chameleon's foot).
Arboreal by nature, the lizards are well adapted for climbing and running along branches. By gripping with their back legs and extending their middles they can grasp higher branches and pull themselves up (somewhat like an inchworm does). They have an exquisite sense of balance and can perform feats of tight-rope walking with ease. To aid in their capture of the soccer-ball sized insectoids that they eat, their necks can rapidly extend and their mouths can open in an enormous 3-way gape that can swallow a beach ball. If properly braced, a lizard can extend itself from the usual curled position to fully extended and back again in a small fraction of a second.
Somewhere in their history the lizards had smaller ancestors with gliding membranes stretched between the 2nd and 3rd pairs of legs and attached to the long middle torso. Long since atrophied, the only remnant of the membrane is a 1cm flap of skin that runs from each back wrist on the front set of legs, along each side of the creature, and to the front ankles on the back set of legs. A small subset of the race that works extensively in low or null-g environments have undergone genetic modification so as to regrow the membrane, which can be very handy in anything less than .2 G's.
Although not particularly aggressive as species go the lizards have a well defined sense of territory and fought viciously to oppose the expansion of the Imperium into their space. The war was brutal but short with the Imperium annexing all 30 stars in the lizard's federation some 50 standard years ago. Since that time much of the resistance to the annexation has been overcome by the Imperium's carefully crafted education and assimilation campaigns. Still, there is lingering dislike for the Imperium among some of the older lizards and so the 4th Imperial Armada and the 1604th through 1629th Legions are permanently stationed in the system of the Lizards home-world.
The frogoliths are a semi-sessile race that vaguely resemble huge barnacles. They start life as tadlings: aquatic, free-swimming, teardrop-shaped, green animals with a single long flagellum that they use to propel themselves through the water. They are, at this stage, mindless feeding machines which gorge themselves on anything they can catch. Out of the millions that spawn a few manage to reach the maturation size of 30 Kg, usually taking about 5 standard years to do so.
Upon reaching maturation size the tadling starts to develop intelligence and will seek a food-rich spot to anchor itself to. This spot can be either on land or in the water as the tadling will also develop lungs at this point. Having anchored itself with a secreted glue, the tadling will build a thick polycarbonate shell around itself which it will never leave. While building its shell the tadling will finish its transformation into an adult.
Now disguised as a local boulder the frogolith will scan the area with a combination of sonic and electrical field senses and wait patiently for food to wander by. Quick as lightning, one to seven immensely strong and tough prehensile tongues can lash out from a hinged opening near the top of the shell and snare a creature. If dragged close enough to the frogolith, shorter sword-edged butcher's tongues can come into play to chop up the food so it fits into the shell opening. Any indigestible parts of the creature are formed into solid pellets and later spat a considerable distance from the rooted frogolith.
Initially a frogolith is able to unglue itself from its perch and use its tongues to drag itself along the ground. In gravities less than 1.5 Gs any frogolith that is forced to move will often perform a tongue stand and walk around on its grasping tongues. As a frogolith ages it will grow steadily larger and its shell will be worked and reworked to be thicker, stronger and heavier. Eventually the frogolith will no longer be able to move under its own power and thereafter stays in one place.
The frogoliths were at a stone-age level of technology when first brought into the Imperium over 500 years ago but have long since adapted to high technology and have incorporated it into their shells. Nowadays a typical Frogolith perch has power, data and sewage connections and may well be mounted on an anti-gravity skiff or bonded to a starship's equipment. The modern Frogolith also builds small interior pockets into its shell for storing important documents, money and possibly even weapons.
In fact a significant fraction of the Frogolith population has the necessary level of aggressiveness to be professional soldiers. Such Frogoliths have their shells replaced with the latest armor and life-support systems and often sport anti-gravity and heavy-weapon rigs. The current style amongst Frogolith troops is a matt-black cigar-shaped flying shell with multiple weapon ports.
Imperium Tech Levels are measured in a number of different scientific and technological categories because of the well-known fact that different cultures develop different technologies at different rates. Never has this proved so true as in the case of the Eaters. They were the first creatures ever discovered that had invented advanced nanotechnology before the wheel.
The Eater's home world is (to humans) a very uninviting place. It has a surface gravity of 1.3 g and a complex atmosphere rich in both oxygen and chlorine along with a significant proportion of sulphur and nitrogen compounds and is practically opaque to human vision. At some time in the distant past a number of permanent cracks in the mantle formed in the crust of the world and are still spewing noxious gases into the air. Around the same time, all plate tectonics ground to a halt and mountain-building all but ceased, possibly due to the unusual amount of heavy metals in the planet's makeup. As a result the surface has eroded to the point that there are no true mountain peaks anymore and the oceans are nowhere more than a few hundred feet deep.
The native life on the planet all looks strikingly similar to the unaided eye. Vast mats of bacteria and algae float in the waters and coat the land. Slime molds cling to most surfaces and slimy oozing blobs slither over each other in a grotesque display. From space, if one could see the surface, the entire planet would appear to be rotting.
Looks would be deceiving and, in fact the planet's biodiversity far exceeds that of any other planet. An astounding variety of different biochemical processes are used by the native creatures. Multiple incompatible DNA equivalents are in use and widely varying sets of chemicals are used as building blocks for the native life. Many of the variants evolved to make use of chemical processes dependant on one or more of the various rare metals found dissolved in the poisonous seas of the planet.
Whereas on Earth the inevitable evolution of predation led to the Cambrian explosion of morphological forms, on the Eater's world it led to an arms race in chemical warfare and attempts at mutual inedibility due to poisonous biochemistry. After billions of years of this arms race most of the planet's creatures are photosynthetic (in the high ultraviolet) and are inedible. Those few predators that do exist can typically only safely digest one or two different species.
The one major exception is the Eaters, the planet's only true omnivores. Blessed with an extremely flexible metabolism the Eaters evolved intelligence so as to be better able to control their own internal biochemistry. As a result the Eaters are able to ingest a random creature and consciously determine how best to digest it.
From this beginning the Eaters learned the native biochemistry by instinct and developed a language based on the secretion of complex chemicals. The Eaters mark the dawn of their technological development, their 'stone age' if you will, with the first chemical synthesis of a primitive virus with which to attack a neighbor. From there they went on to learn macrobiology, genetics, animal husbandry, psychology, materials technology and writing.
At the time they were discovered by the Imperium the Eaters had yet to discover (macroscopic) fire and had never even piled one stone on top of another, but they had genetically re-engineered themselves for greater flexibility, had eliminated all hunger and disease, had developed the ability to replicate arbitrary materials on demand, had constructed complex quantum AI systems far ahead of anything the Imperium had ever seen and had xenoformed their whole world to their satisfaction. They had even worked out a new and interestingly divergent Grand Unified Theory and a variant of the hyperdrive and were working on basic atomic theory so that they would have a way to power a prototype.
After a rocky start due to basic misunderstandings as to what each side wanted and what each side considered taboo, both the Imperium and the Eaters have profited immensely from the interaction. To this date the difference in psychology between the macroscopic viewpoint of the Imperium vs the microscopic viewpoint of the Eaters has led to each side maintaining an edge over the other in certain tech fields. The resulting trade has enriched the Imperium and made the Eaters the wealthiest (per capita) race in the Imperium.
The first remote probe that surveyed the Puddlars home planet returned a verdict that the planet was unlikely to be of any value to the Imperium. The heavy gravity (5.2 Gs) and thick atmosphere full of nitrous acid made the planet unworthy of colonization, there were no resources detected which were not more easily obtained elsewhere, and the only life that the planet harbored was primitive, aggressive, single-celled, and caustic. The only feature of note were spectrographic readings of some organic molecules of unusually long length that might be worth scientific investigation.
A number of years later a follow-up survey was duly launched and since the subject under investigation was long-chain molecules, a ship crewed by Eaters volunteered to do the work. Their report back to the Imperium could not have been more different.
The report stated that the single-celled creatures were actually single molecules of unprecedented complexity. Even the advanced molecular science and AI systems of the Eaters had difficulty in fathoming how the metabolisms of the creatures worked. In addition, they stated that one species was not only intelligent, but highly civilized. The report spoke of lyrical poetry, stories and plays of tremendous depth, profound philosophies, microscopic mosaics of exquisite beauty and musical compositions to shame anything the Eaters had ever encountered before.
Despite the Eaters claims that their translations of the Puddlar works into macroscopic contexts lost many of the subtleties of the original creations, the results became instantly popular throughout the Imperium and beyond.
The unique physiology of the Puddlars make then a subject of ongoing study. The single molecule that makes up a Puddlar is extremely complex and has many branching sub-units with poorly understood properties. The analysis is made more difficult in that the sub-units can detach and reattach from the main framework, often change their basic shapes and chemical properties, and frequently seem to perform several different functions at the same time. As a result, many of the medical and personal technologies of the Imperium are unavailable to the Puddlars. There are no known equivalents of neural interfaces, medical packs, regeneration chambers, or even simple anaesthetic or therapeutic drugs. Even the nanotech translators that the Eaters created for them are mere passive devices clamped to inessential binding sites.
Physically, a typical Puddlar is usually a yellow, translucent ellipse approximately 1 meter long, « meter wide and 1 cm thick. In this state they appear to be liquid and flow from place to place, eating a shallow furrow in the ground as they do so. They absorb all respiratory gasses and required minerals by direct chemical scouring of anything they come in contact with. The effect is similar to that of a military hyperacid (although technically Puddlars are hyperbasic). This scouring is under limited control; it takes concentration to either selectively etch a substance or to refrain from doing so.
A Puddlar is not limited to a liquid state. They can also become solid or gaseous at will. Their solid state is spherical and crystalline and in this state their physical metabolism slows greatly and they need to neither eat nor breathe, but their mental processes greatly increase in speed and depth. A Puddlar in this state can survive in a vacuum or go without food for up to several months. In their gas state the opposite happens: their respiration and metabolism go into overdrive (with a concomitant increase in their corrosiveness) and their ability to think decreases sharply.
In any state a Puddlar is extremely hard to damage. They can easily withstand extreme physical and energy impacts, seem immune to even intense radiation and have been known to shrug off lightning strikes. They can survive in most atmospheres and are equally happy on land, under water or in an ammonia sea, so long as they can scavenge the chemicals they need. Their only reaction to extreme and prolonged heating is to involuntarily gasify, and under intense (over 10 g) gravitational fields or when extremely cold they will solidify.
Should a Puddlar somehow become damaged they will either instantly heal themselves by scouring their environment for needed repair chemicals, or will immediately die and deliquesce. Due to a lack of mental backup technology, such deaths are always permanent.
Anyway, I've decided that since I've gone and friended a bunch of folks because of their interest in xenobiology that I would post a set of aliens that I've been working on, for comment and for help. You'll notice that I typically start with the biology when I design aliens and use that to determine psychology and use that to guess at culture. The problem with the creatures below is that I've only got a sketch of the biology so far. Any insights anyone has on their biology, sociology, culture, what-have-you is welcome.
Oh, and these are all legal 'player character' aliens, so I'm not giving any secrets away here:
Tetrads
Call themselves "Blue Fades". Tetrads are a metalo-organic species designed as a slave race in the distant past. Tetrads are tetrahedrons about 1 meter on an edge. From each point on the tetrad sprouts a metallic tentacle with a very complex surface structure which allows the tentacle to grip on the molecular scale. The tip of each tentacle contains a weak laser and around the base of each tentacle is a ring of eyes. In the middle of each face of the tetrahedron is a mouth. The tentacles are a pastel blue, but the rest of the creature is able to change color on demand. Tetrads use their color shifting as a primary language when close up, and use their lasers to converse over longer distances.
Designed for spaceship repair and maintenance, tetrads are happy in zero-g or vacuum. Their tentacles are designed for tensile, not compressive, strength so they cannot 'stand' in any gravity over about .5 g, but can happily hang from the ceiling in up to 5 g environments. Their mouths double as access ports to mounting hard points for heavy equipment, plus there are data ports in there. They can only eat specially designed metalo-protein soups from containers designed to interface to the feeding tubes in their throats.
The skin of a tetrad is tough but thin and covers an interior which is a metallic sponge woven with highly distributed organs. If in space or a non-reducing (ie unbreathable) atmosphere then any puncture wound, such as from a bullet or micrometeorite, will almost instantly heal over with little or no effect on the tetrad. Should oxygen, chlorine or any other highly reactive chemicals get into a wound then the tetrad may require immediate anti-poisoning treatments or could face major internal damage.
The tentacles of a tetrad are made of much sterner stuff. They can withstand temperatures from near absolute zero to that of molten steel and are immune to even highly corrosive chemicals. In the event that a tentacle is damaged the only recourse of the tetrad is to discard the damaged section and regrow more tentacle from the base at a rate of roughly 2 cm per day.
The most interesting piece of tetrad physiology is that they are not individual creatures. Each tetrad is actually composed of 4 monads strongly linked by their interior hard points. Each monad has one tentacle, a row of eyes and a mouth. Most of the time the four monads cooperate and act as a single being, but each monad will specialize in a (usually) different area of expertise. One monad may have faster reflexes, one might have a large body of collected knowledge. Another may specialize in analysis of equipment failure, and the fourth may be devoted to creative endeavours.
When mating, three tetrads will break into their individual monads and will recombine to form four 'triads' each having a monad from each of the original tetrads. Over the course of the next few months the three monads in each new being will cooperate in a joint effort to grow a new monad to make the tetrad complete.
Tetrads seldom break up and recombine for other than mating reasons, but they have been known in exceptional circumstances to piece together a new tetrad from carefully chosen monads so as to help solve a particular problem.
The race that created the Tetrads is unknown but appears to be extinct. The best guess is that they were wiped out during some sort of war that involved an unknown data-destroying technology. The only known Tetrads have been found drifting in huge spaceships of advanced design in which all of the computers and data storage devices have been wiped clean. Usually the tetrads themselves have lost all but racial memories of their former masters and have fallen into living at a medieval tech level or worse.
One of the most recent races to join the Imperium, Tetrads have quickly acquired Imperium level technology and have agreed to work hand-in-hand with the Imperium to attempt to decipher the advanced technology of the Tetrad's derelict ships. In return the Imperium is actively hunting for more of the Tetrads and their ships to bring them back into civilization.
Webbers
Appear as warty, pock-marked beach balls enmeshed in a fishing net. The tough outer tegument of the ball covers a complex layer of glands, spinnerettes and neural tissue. The webbers can spin (and fire) retractable webs of sticky neural tissue studded with sensors and special toxin glands. Webbers are traditionally solitary and originally lived in dense forests or narrow canyons. They lay out their complex webs over a volume roughly the size of a house. Within that space they can move at lighting speed by a combination of reeling in and playing out their web lines so as to catch any small creatures that enter their area. They eat by enmeshing a creature in a web studded with digestive glands and sucking up the resulting slurry. If a creature too large to handle appears, they can retract their entire web system back into their bodies in seconds. Damage to their webs is mildly painful, but not serious on a small scale.
Webbers prefer to stay in their chosen territory and communicate with others via complex chemical signals that can waft on breezes for hundreds of miles. When they need to find a new home, or for mating purposes, they can slowly move outside their webs by firing web tendrils at walls and trees and swinging or dragging themselves along.
Despite lacking true limbs they are able to perform basic manipulation of materials by extruding sticking ropes with which to lift and pull things. Fine manipulation can be accomplished (with difficulty) via the use of short prehensile spinnerettes on their undersides.
Webbers had reached their equivalent of our Industrial Revolution when they were absorbed into the Imperium. They have taken to modern neural interface technology with gusto and now often work as traders, middlemen, programmers or other jobs where patience and care are more required than manual dexterity or strength.
Mummers
Mummers are a strange plant/fungus symbiosis. Neither alone shows any intelligence, but the two combined are highly so. The plant part of a mummer is roughly 7 feet tall with a central woody body raised off of the ground by one to seven rubbery roots in a manner reminiscent of mangroves. From the top of the woody torso sprout large palmate leaves that can furl into a knot during darkness or when the creature feels threatened. Without its symbiont the plant roots in mud or wet soil and cannot move or think. The fungus part of a mummer is very long, tape-like (2-4 cm wide) and weaves itself into basket-like structures in the soil or in tree tops. These baskets hold soil and/or water in a mixture conducive to the growth of young plants.
Once a plant has started growing in the basket, the tape grows as well, wrapping itself around the plant's trunk and mummifying it. The tape is studded with a myriad of environmental sensors which are used to sample the local environment so as to allow for better care for its host. The tape fungus is very tough and its wrappings will often protect young plants from other fungi and insectoid predators. In addition the tape has a high tensile strength and can constrict with amazing force. This is very useful since native plants often have multiple air roots, and the tape fungus can bend and release different roots (each rooted in a soil-filled basket) to cause a plant to slowly shamble towards better growing conditions. The protection of a tape fungus is not without great cost though as the fungus produces tiny tendrils which bore into the plant and sense its inner condition while simultaneously sucking out the sap to feed the fungus. In all but the more vigorous of plants this sap sucking eventually leads to the death of the host plant, at which point the tape dries up and crumbles into spores which blow with the wind, only to land in organic mulch and grow new baskets.
When a mummer-plant seed germinates in a mummer-fungus basket something very special takes place. The fungus tendrils grow into the plant's torso as usual, but there they encounter complex chemicals secreted by the heartwood that directs the further growth of the tendrils. Rather than forming chaotic tangles throughout the body of the plant, they are directed to grow and form an ordered neural layer in spongy sap-laden wood specifically evolved for this purpose. With the completion of the neural net, a whole cascade of changes takes place within the plant as autonomic systems cede their regulation over to the net. The metabolism of the plant increases, the fungi sensors become full blown senses and a new sapient mummer is born. The sentient mummer appears as a multi-legged multi-armed mutant 'mummy' (hence the name) with green leaves sprouting from the top. Even with their advanced plant metabolisms, Mummers are not especially fast movers but they are highly intelligent and very strong.
When the Imperium first encountered the Mummers they had already spread to colonize 4 other star systems. Pacifists by nature, the Mummers apparently never considered any other route but joining the Imperium and becoming staunch citizens thereof. The news of how other races have reacted to the growth of the Imperium came as a major culture shock.
Lizards
The lizards are not technically reptiles although they do have a rough greenish-brown skin that closely resembles scales. Stretched out, their tailless bodies are close to 10' long, with two pairs of legs at the back end of the torso, two pairs of arm/legs at the front of the torso and an extensible neck ending in a blunt-snouted face with three independently-focusable eyes symmetrically arranged around the snout. When on a level surface they normally carry themselves curled up into an 'S' shape, with the rear legs taking all the weight and the front legs acting as 2 pairs of arms. The feet or hands of the lizards are all the same shape, although those on the back legs are thicker and less dexterous. Each hand has 4 opposed, clawed fingers arranged in pairs on either side of a horny thickened palm (much like a chameleon's foot).
Arboreal by nature, the lizards are well adapted for climbing and running along branches. By gripping with their back legs and extending their middles they can grasp higher branches and pull themselves up (somewhat like an inchworm does). They have an exquisite sense of balance and can perform feats of tight-rope walking with ease. To aid in their capture of the soccer-ball sized insectoids that they eat, their necks can rapidly extend and their mouths can open in an enormous 3-way gape that can swallow a beach ball. If properly braced, a lizard can extend itself from the usual curled position to fully extended and back again in a small fraction of a second.
Somewhere in their history the lizards had smaller ancestors with gliding membranes stretched between the 2nd and 3rd pairs of legs and attached to the long middle torso. Long since atrophied, the only remnant of the membrane is a 1cm flap of skin that runs from each back wrist on the front set of legs, along each side of the creature, and to the front ankles on the back set of legs. A small subset of the race that works extensively in low or null-g environments have undergone genetic modification so as to regrow the membrane, which can be very handy in anything less than .2 G's.
Although not particularly aggressive as species go the lizards have a well defined sense of territory and fought viciously to oppose the expansion of the Imperium into their space. The war was brutal but short with the Imperium annexing all 30 stars in the lizard's federation some 50 standard years ago. Since that time much of the resistance to the annexation has been overcome by the Imperium's carefully crafted education and assimilation campaigns. Still, there is lingering dislike for the Imperium among some of the older lizards and so the 4th Imperial Armada and the 1604th through 1629th Legions are permanently stationed in the system of the Lizards home-world.
Frogoliths
The frogoliths are a semi-sessile race that vaguely resemble huge barnacles. They start life as tadlings: aquatic, free-swimming, teardrop-shaped, green animals with a single long flagellum that they use to propel themselves through the water. They are, at this stage, mindless feeding machines which gorge themselves on anything they can catch. Out of the millions that spawn a few manage to reach the maturation size of 30 Kg, usually taking about 5 standard years to do so.
Upon reaching maturation size the tadling starts to develop intelligence and will seek a food-rich spot to anchor itself to. This spot can be either on land or in the water as the tadling will also develop lungs at this point. Having anchored itself with a secreted glue, the tadling will build a thick polycarbonate shell around itself which it will never leave. While building its shell the tadling will finish its transformation into an adult.
Now disguised as a local boulder the frogolith will scan the area with a combination of sonic and electrical field senses and wait patiently for food to wander by. Quick as lightning, one to seven immensely strong and tough prehensile tongues can lash out from a hinged opening near the top of the shell and snare a creature. If dragged close enough to the frogolith, shorter sword-edged butcher's tongues can come into play to chop up the food so it fits into the shell opening. Any indigestible parts of the creature are formed into solid pellets and later spat a considerable distance from the rooted frogolith.
Initially a frogolith is able to unglue itself from its perch and use its tongues to drag itself along the ground. In gravities less than 1.5 Gs any frogolith that is forced to move will often perform a tongue stand and walk around on its grasping tongues. As a frogolith ages it will grow steadily larger and its shell will be worked and reworked to be thicker, stronger and heavier. Eventually the frogolith will no longer be able to move under its own power and thereafter stays in one place.
The frogoliths were at a stone-age level of technology when first brought into the Imperium over 500 years ago but have long since adapted to high technology and have incorporated it into their shells. Nowadays a typical Frogolith perch has power, data and sewage connections and may well be mounted on an anti-gravity skiff or bonded to a starship's equipment. The modern Frogolith also builds small interior pockets into its shell for storing important documents, money and possibly even weapons.
In fact a significant fraction of the Frogolith population has the necessary level of aggressiveness to be professional soldiers. Such Frogoliths have their shells replaced with the latest armor and life-support systems and often sport anti-gravity and heavy-weapon rigs. The current style amongst Frogolith troops is a matt-black cigar-shaped flying shell with multiple weapon ports.
Eaters
Imperium Tech Levels are measured in a number of different scientific and technological categories because of the well-known fact that different cultures develop different technologies at different rates. Never has this proved so true as in the case of the Eaters. They were the first creatures ever discovered that had invented advanced nanotechnology before the wheel.
The Eater's home world is (to humans) a very uninviting place. It has a surface gravity of 1.3 g and a complex atmosphere rich in both oxygen and chlorine along with a significant proportion of sulphur and nitrogen compounds and is practically opaque to human vision. At some time in the distant past a number of permanent cracks in the mantle formed in the crust of the world and are still spewing noxious gases into the air. Around the same time, all plate tectonics ground to a halt and mountain-building all but ceased, possibly due to the unusual amount of heavy metals in the planet's makeup. As a result the surface has eroded to the point that there are no true mountain peaks anymore and the oceans are nowhere more than a few hundred feet deep.
The native life on the planet all looks strikingly similar to the unaided eye. Vast mats of bacteria and algae float in the waters and coat the land. Slime molds cling to most surfaces and slimy oozing blobs slither over each other in a grotesque display. From space, if one could see the surface, the entire planet would appear to be rotting.
Looks would be deceiving and, in fact the planet's biodiversity far exceeds that of any other planet. An astounding variety of different biochemical processes are used by the native creatures. Multiple incompatible DNA equivalents are in use and widely varying sets of chemicals are used as building blocks for the native life. Many of the variants evolved to make use of chemical processes dependant on one or more of the various rare metals found dissolved in the poisonous seas of the planet.
Whereas on Earth the inevitable evolution of predation led to the Cambrian explosion of morphological forms, on the Eater's world it led to an arms race in chemical warfare and attempts at mutual inedibility due to poisonous biochemistry. After billions of years of this arms race most of the planet's creatures are photosynthetic (in the high ultraviolet) and are inedible. Those few predators that do exist can typically only safely digest one or two different species.
The one major exception is the Eaters, the planet's only true omnivores. Blessed with an extremely flexible metabolism the Eaters evolved intelligence so as to be better able to control their own internal biochemistry. As a result the Eaters are able to ingest a random creature and consciously determine how best to digest it.
From this beginning the Eaters learned the native biochemistry by instinct and developed a language based on the secretion of complex chemicals. The Eaters mark the dawn of their technological development, their 'stone age' if you will, with the first chemical synthesis of a primitive virus with which to attack a neighbor. From there they went on to learn macrobiology, genetics, animal husbandry, psychology, materials technology and writing.
At the time they were discovered by the Imperium the Eaters had yet to discover (macroscopic) fire and had never even piled one stone on top of another, but they had genetically re-engineered themselves for greater flexibility, had eliminated all hunger and disease, had developed the ability to replicate arbitrary materials on demand, had constructed complex quantum AI systems far ahead of anything the Imperium had ever seen and had xenoformed their whole world to their satisfaction. They had even worked out a new and interestingly divergent Grand Unified Theory and a variant of the hyperdrive and were working on basic atomic theory so that they would have a way to power a prototype.
After a rocky start due to basic misunderstandings as to what each side wanted and what each side considered taboo, both the Imperium and the Eaters have profited immensely from the interaction. To this date the difference in psychology between the macroscopic viewpoint of the Imperium vs the microscopic viewpoint of the Eaters has led to each side maintaining an edge over the other in certain tech fields. The resulting trade has enriched the Imperium and made the Eaters the wealthiest (per capita) race in the Imperium.
Puddlars
The first remote probe that surveyed the Puddlars home planet returned a verdict that the planet was unlikely to be of any value to the Imperium. The heavy gravity (5.2 Gs) and thick atmosphere full of nitrous acid made the planet unworthy of colonization, there were no resources detected which were not more easily obtained elsewhere, and the only life that the planet harbored was primitive, aggressive, single-celled, and caustic. The only feature of note were spectrographic readings of some organic molecules of unusually long length that might be worth scientific investigation.
A number of years later a follow-up survey was duly launched and since the subject under investigation was long-chain molecules, a ship crewed by Eaters volunteered to do the work. Their report back to the Imperium could not have been more different.
The report stated that the single-celled creatures were actually single molecules of unprecedented complexity. Even the advanced molecular science and AI systems of the Eaters had difficulty in fathoming how the metabolisms of the creatures worked. In addition, they stated that one species was not only intelligent, but highly civilized. The report spoke of lyrical poetry, stories and plays of tremendous depth, profound philosophies, microscopic mosaics of exquisite beauty and musical compositions to shame anything the Eaters had ever encountered before.
Despite the Eaters claims that their translations of the Puddlar works into macroscopic contexts lost many of the subtleties of the original creations, the results became instantly popular throughout the Imperium and beyond.
The unique physiology of the Puddlars make then a subject of ongoing study. The single molecule that makes up a Puddlar is extremely complex and has many branching sub-units with poorly understood properties. The analysis is made more difficult in that the sub-units can detach and reattach from the main framework, often change their basic shapes and chemical properties, and frequently seem to perform several different functions at the same time. As a result, many of the medical and personal technologies of the Imperium are unavailable to the Puddlars. There are no known equivalents of neural interfaces, medical packs, regeneration chambers, or even simple anaesthetic or therapeutic drugs. Even the nanotech translators that the Eaters created for them are mere passive devices clamped to inessential binding sites.
Physically, a typical Puddlar is usually a yellow, translucent ellipse approximately 1 meter long, « meter wide and 1 cm thick. In this state they appear to be liquid and flow from place to place, eating a shallow furrow in the ground as they do so. They absorb all respiratory gasses and required minerals by direct chemical scouring of anything they come in contact with. The effect is similar to that of a military hyperacid (although technically Puddlars are hyperbasic). This scouring is under limited control; it takes concentration to either selectively etch a substance or to refrain from doing so.
A Puddlar is not limited to a liquid state. They can also become solid or gaseous at will. Their solid state is spherical and crystalline and in this state their physical metabolism slows greatly and they need to neither eat nor breathe, but their mental processes greatly increase in speed and depth. A Puddlar in this state can survive in a vacuum or go without food for up to several months. In their gas state the opposite happens: their respiration and metabolism go into overdrive (with a concomitant increase in their corrosiveness) and their ability to think decreases sharply.
In any state a Puddlar is extremely hard to damage. They can easily withstand extreme physical and energy impacts, seem immune to even intense radiation and have been known to shrug off lightning strikes. They can survive in most atmospheres and are equally happy on land, under water or in an ammonia sea, so long as they can scavenge the chemicals they need. Their only reaction to extreme and prolonged heating is to involuntarily gasify, and under intense (over 10 g) gravitational fields or when extremely cold they will solidify.
Should a Puddlar somehow become damaged they will either instantly heal themselves by scouring their environment for needed repair chemicals, or will immediately die and deliquesce. Due to a lack of mental backup technology, such deaths are always permanent.
