1. Race name Silennians
2. Characteristics Silennians are intensely bioelectrical mammalian humanoids with a tight-knit tribal culture and a hostile homeworld. They're spacefaring by default, living in the calmer space around their 1000-years hostile home planet.
They are advanced, but not in a conventional sense - their bioelectricity, honed to a razor's edge of control, lets them take water - from their world, by default, though any water, being an extremely common substance, will do - and do a wide variety of things with it. They can split it into oxygen and hydrogen so they can breathe it (and change it back from component gasses), prevent it from becoming frozen in the facuum of space, control its flow precisely in a Micro-G environment, even freeze (and keep it frozen) in hostile conditions.
Their ships are, in fact, electrified ice structures.
In recent centuries, they've been developing psionically, as well, allowing them to develop their own warp drive - truly remarkable, considering that they never developed much more than basic electronics on their own.
They live in tight-knit tribes because it takes several with good teamwork to make and maintain a workable 'ship', and their roles in their tribe depend upon the nature of their psionic powers and degree of bioelectical control.
The average Silennian is a humanoid about 7 feet tall with a lean, willowy build and a coat of thick fur, ranging in natural tones from white to black, (also unusual colors, such as blue or pink, in the full spectrum). They also have hair in a human sense, often kept long and held away from the face one way or another.
Sprouting from the middle of their back is an array of furred tendrils, anywhere from two to sixteen in number, each a fully articulating, prehensile appendage about three inches in diameter, which they use partially to supplement two hands (each with four digits - one thumb, three fingers) and in locomotion, around twice their body's length each. The primary function of these tentacles, however, is the fine manipulation of the bioelectricity their body produces.
Each has four eyes - two facing forward, two facing out on their skull, each on either side linking into a single optic nerve (giving them 180 degree field of vision)- and a canid snout, their nose itself double-nostriled and slitted, adapted to an amphibious nature - about nine times as strong a sense of smell as a human being, in or out of water. A tertiary function of their tendrils is as sensory organs they can feel electrical flows and vibrations, thus, they constantly writhe and explore their surroundings.
The average silennian is very honest and genial. They are omnivores by genetics, herbivores by culture.
3. Homeland The silennian homeworld, Bavandi, is a wretched little hole of a planet, a storm world situated in the middle of an asteroid belt that beats on it constantly, its moons shattered into fragments upon which the silennian race lives in ice dome structures sometimes several hundred feet tall with self-contained atmospheres.
The majority of Silennians live away from that, their tribes wandering and intermingling with one another in the space between the moons and the planet and beyond into the asteroids, returning to Bavandi with metal and salvage.
4. Special abilities and distinguishing features
-Silennians are intensely bioelectrical. The average member makes enough juice in one hour to power a modern-day household with all its lights on and appliances running for several years. Most of it is wasted most of the time, but when they put it to use...
- Silennians don't have conventional ships. Their vessels are structures made out of supercondensed ice. impulse propulsion is achieved with electromagnetic distortions, pushing and pulling the vessel about without visual displays, save the occasional arc across the hull.
-Silennian EM distortions act as a kind of repulsor shield.
-The Ice plating is very durable, capable of withstanding a great deal, then quickly regenerating damage.
-weapons: Lightning bolts from group concentration can arc at impressive ranges, wreaking havoc and destruction upon what they strike, shorting electrical systems. Sometimes, Silennians form magnetic ice structures and craft a railgun of sorts to fire large chunks of supercondensed ice at foes.
-Psionics are a Silennian forte. Three in five, a majority, of silennians are psionically adept. One in three of those is a truly gifted and powerful psion.
-Silennian warp drive technology is based on Elocation principles. Rather than folding space alone, their warp drive folds space AND time, allowing for extremely precise navigation with relatively little preparation or calculation ahead of time.
5. Life cycle Silennians begin life with relatively weak bioelectricity, too weak to sustain themselves in the aqueous environment Silennians ordinarily dwell in. The entire tribe works together to provide air for the young, and it takes the entire tribe to keep them alive during that first year when the child is incapable of splitting their own air. Learning to split water to breathe is equivocable to human children learning to walk - an absolute essential skill.
Once this first development occurs, the child is expected to help others breathe - this teaches them compassion and comraderie, and a rapport is quickly developed among the young of the family. The group, often two or three to each mated pair, grows up together in this way, helping each other and learning from the adults whatever they can, each child's talents encouraged to flourish and grow under the instruction of an adult with similar talents within the tribe, in a kind of open classroom apprenticeship.
At about 5 years of age, the kits are well into learning from their mentors and distinct roles among them begin to form. By fifteen, they are considered full adults, and their fate from there depends upon the tribe that reared them.
If there are more young, the children often stay to help the adults rear them, leaving after a year more often than not, once the children are capable of living on their own. This group of new adults then forms a tribe of their own, and take up a custom dating clear back to the first exodus from the surface of Bavandi 1000 years ago - the White Path. The Multi-year journey to Bavandi, then to the very outermost edge of the asteroid belt is perilous, and some tribes don't survive the ordeal (or get stranded somewhere out there when a member or two dies during the journey, crippling them to be picked up by another tribe undergoing the White Path) but those that make it home again after seeing the edge of their homeland are recognized as a true tribe, and as complete, responsible, powerful silennian adults.
By that point they've earned it.
Silennian genetics is not like human genetics - they suffer no ill effects, no matter how closely related a mated pair may be, genetically speaking. Sometimes tribes intermingle for this as shows of good faith or to smoothe trade relationships, or perhaps out of friendship or comraderie, but some tribes never mingle sexually. It often depends on the tribes themselves - no two are exactly alike.
Silennians mate for life, true to their ideas of loyalty - when they pick a mate, they have picked their mate, and will stay with them faithfully until the day they die - which can be a bloody long time, considering they don't suffer genetic degredation over time. There are members of the species old enough to remember life on the surface of their homeworld.
When one in a pair dies, the other becomes sterile and dies shortly afterward. Sometimes, other tribe members will ritually end their beloved friend's suffering early and release the two as a pair: this is an act of loving mercy - to lose one's mate is to die a slow, painful death in lonliness and sorrow. It's no wonder, then, why a pair will defend each other viciously.
When a silennian at last dies, their water is released and is allowed to mingle into the water they all use - in this way, the family is never truly apart, and the ancestral essences are preserved. The body, then, is simply destroyed - Being returned to water in this way obliterates it completely.
6. Cultural description
Silennians are an almost inherently genial species, as makes sense in such tight-knit families where a single loss would be catastrophic. While their psyche is alien and a humanoid mind would have difficulty understanding their vocal language or culture, they themselves are adaptable creatures that are capable of speaking and understanding other languages with ease - this also comes with having to deal with and diffuse situations among themselves quickly, as a survival trait.
They have very stable relationships, and go to great lengths to keep them that way. Human tendancies to rapidly make and break bonds baffle them - one thing they have much difficulty understanding. Once a Silennian attatches themselves to a person, regardless of species, they stick with it - loyalty is something paramount in their society. Dishonesty is also alien to them, but for similar reasons as disloyalty.
Murder is abhorrent to all Silennians. The loss of a member of any tribe is an unspeakable tragedy. The notion that someone did it intentionally is horrific to them. The loss of a cherished family member to murder is something no Silennian ever forgets or forgives, and they will go to great lengths to get their hands on the killer, and when they do... Their laws are clear and draconian regarding murderers - when caught... well, they don't take prisoners or offer mercy. For a friendly race, they can be surprisingly cruel and ruthless when it comes to this detail.
They work metal only rarely, and metallic items are very special to them. Electronics are something recent to them, and rely on their own bioelectricity to function, rather than an external power source. Thus, their technology has developed in a different way - with no hard limit on their power source (their bodies can produce enough energy in an hour to power a modern home for several years), the devices they have come up with are compact and personal by nature, requiring conventional technology many times the size and weight of their device (since human-engineered technology and similar tech requires considerations of power source, power routing, etc. Theirs does not.)
Magic is an alien concept to them. Psionics however, they understand. In recent centuries, they have begun to develop psionic prowess. It is something the race has pursued aggressively and sought very hard to tame and harness. Three in five Silennians is psionic, one in three intensely so, on a scale comparable to the race's bioelectricity.
Psionics was accepted from the get-go as gifts, special abilities that the tribes could benefit from. Psionic silennians, called "Mei'Taar" by their kin, are nurtured and encouraged to branch out and bear fruit by their families. The varied nature of the gift itself defines the Mei'taar's role in their family.
The most common disciplines among the race are Psychokinesis (the manipulation of the world around them, which often gets placed in the tribe as a warrior), Elocation (Movement of oneself and others in space and time, which assists in the tribe's ability to move, and even create warpholes, the basis of Silennian warp technology), Metacreativity (the manifestation of the psion's imagination on the world around them, which earns them the role of the shaper, aiding in controlling the ship's shape and efficiency), and Metacognition (clairvoyance - the ability to percieve and understand outside normal means - esp, allowing a tribe to react to danger before it happens, save resources on journeys by figuring a quicker route, and save the lives of their kin by taking less dangerous paths.)
Only rarely do Silennians manifest Telepathy, however - and that psionic discipline is held special to them, the manifestors of it known as Seitar. The ability to reach out into the mind of others is a dangerous and wonderful thing. A Seitar that reaches adolescence and does not go mad or die often forms the core of a tribe, connecting the minds of the family and attacking the minds of their foes - more often than not to avoid confrontation altogether.
7. ReligionThe bond of family is almost like a religeon to them, and if that is so, they are zealots. But the truly closest thing they have to a religeon is a form of ancestor-worship. Tales are told of deeds from long ago, of bold males and females who saved their tribes, who loved, who lost, who lived, and why they died. Storytelling, and stories, are special to them for this reason (but true ones are the best ones). Oral lore of ancestors is the primary communication, and many silennians have a hero from the past of their family they identify with strongly. Some take this a step further and claim to be reincarnations of that hero - and other silennians respect this notion as fact... it might even be true.
