The Sol System is built out of many worlds, home to many people from many different backgrounds, and few places in the system are as great a melting pot of these worlds as Titan Garden, Saturn's domed little hub city. In this four-part series we'll look at the people who make up this bustling system- the Inner Belt, the Outer Belt, the Androids and the Extrasolars- and see what makes them tick.
Not every sentient lifeform in the Sol system is actually from the Sol system. While the people of Sol have mastered interplanetary travel, their technology hasn't yet reached a point where interstellar or intergalactic travel is in their grasp. For other species, however, hopping from star to star is routine, and a couple of them have found our cozy, bustling little system a compelling place to be. For other species, space itself is home and the worlds around our star are just more space to visit, and for others still their roots extend into layers of reality we can hardly comprehend. Sol is a big place, but the universe around it is so much bigger, and ours isn't the only corner of it teeming with life.
For our purposes there are four major groups of Extrasolars whose business intersects with our own. This is not an exhaustive list of who all is out there, but if you're puttering about in your personal starship these are the most likely visitors you may have a chance encounter with. Safe travels, friend!
"Hmm? They're alright. Interesting alloy composition. Still got some impurities to pound out. Takes a hammer like a champ." -- Fiss, Terran blacksmith
Homeworld
Most people, as in the vast majority of people in all worlds across all galaxies, come from moons or planets, balls of rock or gas spinning and hurtling around their orbit. Unique among these people are the Solzari, a sentient plasmid species who call the star Antares their home. Using the star's own magnetic field as a topographical map, Solzari navigate the Antarian surface like a great pelagic sea. In defiance of our own understanding of stars and heat, Solzari have developed and maintain surface-level habitats, great tessellated honeycomb cities of metal in specially-curated cooler patches of the red star's surface, where the sentient minds of the Solzari can pursue the enrichment of craft and enjoy a bit of privacy from the light of their neighbors. It's thanks to Antares being a mature star that the Solzari were able to control patches of temperature in a way where building material would not simply vaporize, and it's the Antarian binary star- a second star connected to their own- which allowed them the resources to build a platform for technological development in so hostile an environment as theirs. Maintaining the Antarian honeycomb cities requires a tremendous amount of energy, and this is the primary reason other worlds are eventually met with a Solzari survey mission.
Appearance
According to their lore, the Solzari people emerge from the depths of Antares itself, surfacing as small sparks of life from the depths of the star's churning nuclear core, from the bottom of their proverbial ocean itself. A new Solzari life surfaces, awakening in the star's top-layer magnetic field and finding themselves alone in a vast and luminous world. A young Solzari is little more than a spark, a fleck of emberlight, but as they mature they grow in size, becoming roughly as large as a Terran melon. Solzari glow in many colors, either bearing the whites, blues, oranges and reds of the stars themselves, or they may take on the blues and greens of burning copper or zinc, or some other mineral flame. They speak in the warbling pings of deep space noises, but can concentrate their sound emission to emulate the speech of other worlds, which, thanks to their abstract way of creating speech, they've very good at picking up and replicating. The Solzari are, at their core, floating motes of heat and light capable of thought, speech and reason.
In the same way air-breathers need special suits to explore the depths of the sea, or planetary life needs special equipment to explore the stars, the Solzari need special accommodations to venture out beyond their native home on the surface of a luminous star. To do this, the Solzari created great skeletal suits of conductive metal, without hinges or joints, standing between seven and nine feet tall with long, sharp fingers and curled crests on their shoulders and hips. A lantern-like cage sits at the top of broad metal shoulders, and it's in this lantern that the Solzari actually sits. The top of their head and the arms of the lantern cage collect and transfer the Solzari's innate heat down into the rest of the metal body, heating and softening it enough that it can bend and articulate, giving the little motes of heat a physical body they can use to manipulate the world around them. The core of how this works is, Solzari are heat, and so the heat that spreads throughout their metal body is the Solzari, it is an extension of their self. They inhabit their suits by literally being the heat inside their metal bones. These suits will often have one or two rings on their head or shoulder; these rings allow the Solzari to store their metal suits while they are traveling great distances in a starship or when they want to leave the honeycomb cities of Antares to swim in the hot surface seas. By suspending the solid metal suits from the top, when a Solzari leaves their lantern they take their heat with them, and the limbs on their suspended suits will hang down and harden again, nice and straight for easy storage.
The Solzari lantern suits come in a few configurations, but they generally always appear as a long and lanky iron skeleton with a lantern head. Some older models were more ornate in their construction, using four posts to support their lantern top and largely relying on flame-resistant organic material for insulation. Newer models have been developed since certain species found new ways to fight Solzari, having six lantern posts and a thicker, more geometric cap. Newer models also incorporate a reflective shell layer designed to reflect heat back into the metal skeleton of a Solzari, providing a mineral way to insulate their frames from the cold of these distant systems that doesn't rely on storing and preserving organic material.
While their lantern suits are the most common way other people see a Solzari, they aren't the only conductive vessels the plasmid species can inhabit. In one particular case, a lone blue Solzari visiting Sol found a discarded Delta Android shell which they have inhabited, living in the heart of the metal frame and wearing it like it was their own skin. The heat of the Solzari's presence causes damage to the battery supplies, maintenance of the Android shell is difficult and their computer functions are not accessible, but it is one alternate way a Solzari can blend in and become a part of the great honeycomb of life found throughout the Sol system.
Characteristics
Life as a star-dweller drastically shifts the scope of what is dangerous and what is not, and Solzari technological development reflects the unique needs of their people.
- Solzari live for a very long time, on a scale that has not been recorded by the people of Sol but is estimated from Solzari description as being "somewhere between 'centuries' and 'a millennium'".
- They have an innate ability to quickly pick up patterns in speech and replicate spoken language after sufficient exposure to dialogue.
- The Solzari themselves are largely impervious to weapons, although their lantern frames can take significant damage.
- Their lives are mostly maintained by a diet of radiation, which they can pick up from the background of the universe, also they can burn the calories in organic food or drink to pantomime eating a meal.
- Being children of a binary star, the Solzari tend to form strong bonds with another lifeform in emulation of Antares itself.
Little Orbits
Solzari are motes of flame who emerge from the heart of Antares into a vast and lonesome world, so they often look to one another for stability and meaning. For whatever reason, Solzari gravitate to a particular other-half and forge a strong emotional bond, creating a small binary star system of their own. Like the flickering wick of a candle you appear, you shine and eventually you burn out and dissipate into the aether, but also like a candle you tend to lean closer to a certain other flame when it is nearby, and both your lights glow brighter for being together as you are. And like a star system, a binary pairing of Solzari provide a stable core for the flickering new embers that emerge from Antares to latch onto; Solzari often adopt new sparks of life to raise as their own, forming orbital systems around themselves that can range from one little flame to many, and when those Solzari mature and are ready they will leave their family orbit, find their other star and form little systems of their own. Solzari form literal found-families, sharing what they have so the little embers can grow big and bright and add to the collective shine of the Solzari people. An orbit of Solzari will often claim a space in the tessellated honeycomb cities of Antares where they can congregate, rest and grow their bonds in privacy. They care for one another above all other things; in the lives they emerge into, each other is all they have.
Feeding the Flames
As for the rest of us, well, that's a different story. There is no way to verify how their civilization began, but it is understood that Solzari require continuous sources of power to fuel the technologies they've developed that allow them to maintain the cooler sunspots of Antares and, by extension, the mineral framework that forms the habitable little islands in their endless sea of sunfire. They are sentient minds, it isn't for them to just drift through the tides of magnetic fire for all eternity, they need to define spaces and build to explore their crafts. Their lifestyle requires fuel to maintain, and that fuel comes from other star systems.
There were once worlds around Antares. It's believed the Solzari found their first mineral technologies after riding the arm of a solar flare and landing on one of these worlds. Whatever happened between then and now is not known to Solar historians. Today, the worlds of Antares have been mined bare of minerals, there is nothing left. Those minerals were used to build an array of solar panels around Antares B, the intensely-hot blue-light star paired with Antares A, harnessing the energy it puts out to fuel their own technological acceleration, but as their technology advances, the support of Antares B alone was not enough. So the Solzari build ships that can cross galaxies to find other stars, inhabited or otherwise, that they can draw power from.
A Solzari starship contains a large sphere of starfire suspended in a metal frame. The Solzari will hang their lantern suits in a metal hangar, a sort of halfway point in between the warmth of their starfire and the cold of space. During their flight Solzari inhabit their ship's starfire core a bit like a fishbowl, everything they need can be found therein. These starfire cores give Solzari ships a very unique appearance, and are the fabric of rumors whispered by Terran starfarers from one port to the next.
When the Solzari arrive in a star system, they survey its orbiting bodies for mineral composition with the intent to build what we'd call a Dyson Sphere, or an all-encompassing sphere of solar panels that can contain and collect the full energy output of a star. Small stars with large planetary systems are preferable, as they can be mined fully and enclosed quickly. Life on those planets is not of any real concern, as the Solzari feel that they alone are uniquely entitled to lay claim to the stars the way other species lay claim to planets. "If you'd like to dispute our claim, come join us on the star's surface and we can talk it out there" is the party line- if you believe this star is yours, then simply land on it yourself and survive. If you can't do this, then what claim do you have to this resource? The people of Antares have greater need for this star than you do, after all.
Rapid Escalation
When the Solzari come to your system they carry a disquieting nonchalance with them. They don't come as armies or as a military force, in fact they don't come with personal armaments at all. The Solzari have never had the need to keep a sword on their hip or a rifle on their shoulder, that style of organized violence is not their way. When they arrive, they come as a mineral extraction company. They survey, they identify key deposits and they begin digging. Whether or not you're there to see them do it is irrelevant. They don't have bodies to harm, and soon you'll be gone and they'll simply move on to the next star. Their notion of "weapons" and "conflict" don't match our own. If you are bothering a Solzari they will turn and use their lantern suit's long red-hot claws to rend you with a swipe or pierce your body with an open-fingered thrust- whatever red clay you're made of will spread out on the ground and you will leave them alone, and they will resume their work. If you pose a significant threat to Solzari, they do not bother with personal weaponry, they escalate directly to ship-based artillery cannons, channeling the core of starfire in the hearts of their starships through a lens-like cannon and simply vaporize the organic lifeforms in their path. With that problem resolved, they go right back to mining. There is no middle ground for the Solzari.
When people attempt to fight off a Solzari extraction team they'll use whatever weapons their technological progress level allows. Ranged weapons generally do not bother the Solzari, as projectiles will pass through their skeletal metal frame or simply plink off their solid metal bodies. Melee weapons ramp up in effectiveness depending on progress levels, ranging from comically useless at lower technology levels to "your best bet" at the progression of the starfarer.
One band of Sol system outlaws discovered that rending the heat-collecting lantern cage of a Solzari suit is the only real way to halt their threat. Chainsaws, crystal blades, red-hot scythes and wave cutters; if you can cut or grind through the metal posts on a Solzari's lantern the wide brim is no longer there to collect their heat, which will dissipate out into the vast cold vacuum of wherever you happen to be. It is exposure to the cold that puts out a Solzari flame, and if you look past the walking metal skeletons or the seeming imperviousness to harm, it's simple science that spells their undoing. They're at home on a star, and out here they're far from home. Pop their top and their heat will equalize itself out into the infinite void of the cosmos.
The Solzari Way
The expansion of energy-collecting missions into other star systems is necessary to facilitate the expansion of Solzari technology, but many within the Solzari species argue it's not necessary to maintain the comforts they already have. Some believe the Solzari, advanced near to the limits of what they can sustain, have lost their way. Antares is a binary star, and in the core of every Solzari family is that binary attraction, that core of support that builds orbits that grow into their own system. The Solzari Way is not to expand endlessly, but to nurture those who are thrust into consciousness, and yet here they are, their own Antares B surrounded by panels, giving all of its energy to feed their own star. When new consciousness is thrust upon the people of other stars, the Solzari are not arriving to bring them into their orbit and nurture them, they arrive to rob them of their starlight to feed their own world. There is a great philosophical debate within Antarian culture that the trajectory of their technological ascent has led them astray, that this is not who the Solzari people ought to be. Dissenting members of Solzari survey and extraction teams are becoming more and more of a logistical problem. Yet, the people of Antares are currently acclimated to a standard of living that must be maintained, and whatever they elect to do in the future, the momentum of Solzari progress demands they continue harvesting stars for power. And so long as that momentum exists, Solzari will emerge to do all they can to resist it.
The people of Sol are vibrant and beautiful. Some Solzari believe they are worth fighting for. And some band of Solar outlaws, they tend to agree. A large Terran starship has occasionally been spotted fighting Solzari survey vessels in and around the Asteroid Belt over the past twenty years. It's hard to say if a larger fleet is coming, but the Solzari's attention is currently on our worlds. Whether they join us or mine us into darkness is yet to be seen, but everyone has their own stake in a particular branch of those possible outcomes.
"You'd think something that big couldn't fit in a space that small, but it's all the same to us. The Zephyleer can chase them down any burrow they hide in." -- Leaf, Neptunian Skyguard Commander.
Homeworld
Terrans have known about the Andromedan homeworld for centuries. Early astronomers first detected the little world almost by accident in an age when only Martians roamed the Inner Belt, but even in that time the Andromedans were already traveling from one galaxy to the next. Their home planet is not unlike Terra itself, having rich soil, rocky features, ample water and sprawling woodlands, giving rise to a species who bears their own arrogant curse, believing themselves to be the primary species in the universe, the one to which all others are compared. The Andromedan homeworld provides all the resources needed to raise a savvy and social civilization, seeing them sail from the seas to the stars. For all intents and purposes, imagine Andromeda Prime as you imagine Terra itself, except a Wellspring of Infinite Potential did not form. One dominant lifeform rose above all others. They are our Andromedan neighbors.
Appearance
Andromedans look like large rectangular centipedes that have evolved to walk upright. Their carapaces come in a range of colors spanning from reds through purples into blues and then teals, with grey tones reserved for their underbellies. Their heads have large shearing pincers and long antennae, they have plural sets of eyes and their tails have sharp spines. Along the length of their bodies they have pairs of bug-like legs they can use to skitter about, crawling through narrow tunnels quickly and effortlessly, alluding to their origins as a species. Near the middle of their body segments their leg pairs display evolutionary adaptations, and also demonstrate a dimorphic branch into two types of Andromedan.
Neptunians have their own words for each type of Andromedans, but they roughly translate into "big guys" and "little guys".
- Big Guys are characterized by the development of larger and stronger hind legs, which they use to support their body as they stand up in an S shape. They usually have about six of these special hind legs, and they can move pretty quickly for their size. Midway up their body their legs specialize into arms, with some developing a pincer-like thumb and two pairs in particular growing large, developing dexterous grasping hands.
- Little Guys, in contrast, develop their dexterous arms from pairs of lower legs. They have twice as many eyes as Big Guys, and instead of long hind legs they develop sets of gossamer wings they can use to buzz around and float in the air. Little Guys don't have their large shear-like mandibles on their face, their mouths instead develop a long proboscis-like tongue and their shears form at the tail segment of their body, where they can better snip at their prey from the air.
Both Big Guys and Little Guys are equally able to crawl around on the ground using all of their sets of legs, specialized or not. As a rule, if they can fit their head through a space, the whole rest of their body can fit through that space as well. They're remarkably mobile for creatures of their size.
Characteristics
Terrans have long feared bugs, and giant bugs especially. Fortunately it's mostly Neptunians who are currently dealing with the Andromedans, and they've taken some careful notes about their invasive new adversaries.
- Andromedans have a similar short lifespan to Terrans, living about 60 years each.
- They lay clutches of thousands of eggs, which hatch and devour each other until those remaining don't find their undevoured siblings worth the risk anymore.
- All Andromedan grubs are hatched the same, and grow into Big Guys or Little Guys depending on the needs of their current colony when they come of age.
- They have excellent low-light vision.
- Like Venusians, they can regrow segments of their bodies that are damaged or cut off, but those segments cannot grow a new head. Venusians can't do this either, by the way. Just to clear that up.
- Andromedans have an omnivorous diet and enjoy a rich culinary tradition once they grow past the age where they're busy eating their siblings.
- Unlike Terran perceptions of bugs, Andromedans are extremely intelligent. They did fly here all the way from Andromeda, after all.
- They've been teaching each other to speak Neptunian.
- Andromedan technology is unique, and other species cannot turn it against them.
It's Made Of What??
Andromedans live short lives and are constantly repopulating, so they exist as many very flat generations at any one time and are always passing down knowledge to the strongest of their brood. As this knowledge passes through the generational wafer it is constantly being re-evaluated and built upon, and this is the foundation of Andromedan technology. Some Andromedans develop their specialist knowledge, but instead of keeping it to themselves they pass it on to as many other Andromedans as possible, so when they all produce their own generational layer they can pass that knowledge onto them to explore and permutate, and so on. So needless to say, there's a strong core of technological understanding that underpins the Andromedan collective knowledgebase.
Knowing this, we can look at how Andromedan technology works. Andromedans aren't an extractive species, they live rather harmoniously with their environments. Most Andromedan technology is actually made from a fast-hardening and silk-like secretion the Andromedans spin into whatever shape they want. Chemical composition of the secretion can be controlled through dietary choices- using a plural set of digestive sacs the Andromedan can eat one substance in order to spin electrically-conductive or magnetic components, or eat another to give a stronger keratin-like hardness, or another still to make a material that is lightweight and flexible. They can store a number of these substances in their digestive sacs and draw from them as they construct their technological components, fitting smaller pieces together into larger pieces. They are effectively big 3D printers who can hork up whatever piece of technology they want, whenever they want, so long as they can find the right diet to spin secretions with the necessary properties.
Seriously, They Make It How???
Neptunian Skyguard have captured a number of examples of Andromedan technology, but none have been able to figure out quite how they work. Andromedans tend to print up technology in simple geometric shapes- they like squares and rectangles, and they tend to make spade-like blades as their preferred style of knife. They will print up tablet-like computers they can use to interface with and disrupt Neptunian technologies, and they tend to carry square flashcaster-type weapons which fire wide, thin beams of some kind of energy, something sharp that leaves wide cuts in armor and will cleave through unprotected flesh like a guillotine blade. These weapons don't have any kind of trigger mechanism, Neptunian scientists believe it may be activated by some chemical secretion from their hands, or a signal from their antennae, but the fact of the matter is no current Skyguardian soldier has been able to pick up a piece of Andromedan technology and turn it against its creator.
Headway has been made in deciphering the devices they tend to carry on their backs. Andromedan invaders often carry a kind of backpack with outshoots of their blue-silk technology which Neptune believes are a combination of long-range communications array and an energy charging node to help power their various technologies. It's not yet known how these backpacks accumulate energy but the leading theory is they tap into the innate electromagnetic fields present around many planetary bodies. More research needs to be conducted to know for certain.
Due to a combination of the above factors, the Skyguard have not been able to capture an Andromedan alive. They have too many arms for their current restraints and it's impossible to strip them of weapons and armor, since they will 3D print themselves whatever tools they need. One unit documented a case where an Andromedan Big Guy was caught in a containment field, and they simply "coughed up one of those little computers and disabled the field emitter remotely, and then disappeared into an air duct". The inability to apprehend an Andromedan has proven frustrating, and is a big reason why we know so little about how they work.
A Show of Force
The whole reason Andromedans are buzzing around the Sol system at all is because they have long known what Solar astronomers only discovered centuries ago. The Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies are drawing nearer to each other, and in a couple billion years they'll collide. In the time before that the two galaxies will become closer and closer neighbors- Andromedans already have intergalactic travel capabilities, but we do not, so they've decided to take the initiative and come meet us before we meet them. They emerged as the sole dominant lifeform on their own world for a pretty good reason, and now that they know we're edging in on their space they want to make sure when our galaxies meet that Andromedans are the dominant presence in the neighborhood. At the outer orbit of our system they have met the Neptunians, who aren't particularly interested in negotiating on Andromeda's stacked terms (or, in the case of the followers of the Old Myths, negotiating with anyone who would threaten their generational claim to Terra). Where Solzari tend to be an Inner Belt problem, Andromedans are an Outer Belt problem, at least for the time being before either group becomes an Everyone Problem.
Speaking of which, the Neptunians don't intend to fight the Andromedans alone. For all their whining and complaining about skittery lifeforms with too many legs, the Terrans did get one detail right about the Andromedans: they don't particularly like fire. Their carapaces don't vent heat very easily, and when they're carrying sacs full of half-digested 3D printing material goop a bit of fire causes them all kinds of problems and tends to trigger a retreat. For this reason Neptunians have been seeking Mercurian and Venusian mercenaries to supplement their Skyguard forces- Mercurians for their innate resistance to and familiarity with very high temperatures, and Venusians, perhaps insensitively, because they sometimes look like bugs themselves. A Venusian's paralytic venom does wreck havoc on an Andromedan's nervous system, and their Carapace Form can soak up a few shots from those guillotine-like bladecaster pistols of theirs, so while their reasoning was a bit ill-considered, they do find good allies in their Inner Belt neighbors. Terran mercenaries they've mostly stopped bothering with, since they're either too squeamish about bugs of they've watched too many movies about alien insects.
It's been said that somewhere, just beyond Pluto's orbit, a couple Andromedans have set up some kind of intergalactic truck stop, a place meant for Andromedan ships but who find wayward Solzari and other Extrasolar lifeforms pop in for a bite to eat and a refuel of their craft. They say a Martian explorer was the first to set foot in that truck stop, because of course they were, and we really only have their word that it's there, but the people there weren't hostile and the food was pretty good. The fact that this Martian came home alive is their proof that there's more to discover and good people to meet beyond the edge of our own galaxy, but the guys at the pub will just say it's proof they're making the whole thing up. Either way, no one else has been bold enough to make the trek out beyond Pluto to see it for themselves.
"So they sent me up there to see what's wrong with the satellite, and I'm tellin' ya, this thing was as big as a Callistan freight hauler! So anyways, we loaded the harpoons..." -- Brem, deep space whaler
Habitat
A lot of us think of outer space as a whole lot of nothing, just a big empty void where nothing exists and nothing can live. It's cold but you'll boil alive if you're exposed to it, there's no air so you want to exhale if you gotta swim through it, and it's dark despite all the light shining on everything that's up there. Space is a vast expanse of contrasts pulsing just on the other side of our starship bulkheads, so naturally some lifeforms exist in space itself in defiance of our beliefs, or as a reminder of how much we still have to know about the universe around us.
Xenofauna is the term given to creatures who aren't entirely sentient but who are definitely alive and swimming through space. They tend to have a taste for ice, salt and other minerals, but ice in particular is the big draw, so they're frequently found nibbling on space stations, stardocks, starships and satellites. When one moves into town someone has to head up there and convince them to leave, one way or another, and that's easier said than done.
We have our trade routes pretty well mapped by this point, and no one has pinpointed where Xenofauna come from, so it's largely agreed that they drift into the Sol system from outside its boundaries, riding the warp currents like a wave until they find something interesting to grab their attention. They are inscrutable but they come in a few common flavors.
Appearance
Xenofauna are a diverse lot, but they tend to come as a mix-and-match of two sets of five characteristics each, so if you take one trait from one group and one trait from another, you've probably described something that has nibbled on a Titan relay satellite before. We'll call these two groups Colors and Shapes.
The five major Color patterns of deep space Xenofauna are:
- Rainbow: It's dark up in space, and some critters want to be found. These creatures have brightly-colored hides, usually glossy in a way that catches the sunlight as they maneuver through the void. Rainbow-colored Xenofauna hides fetch a high price, as many designers can incorporate them into exclusive jewelry or attire.
- Bioluminous: This is sometimes an invitation, other times it's a warning; it takes a skilled whaler to know the difference. Bioluminous Xenofauna tend to have neutral-colored hides with strips of flickering colored lights, creating their own light rather than reflecting the light of a star. Deep space bioluminous oils are a prized commodity, but if you don't read the reading correctly they can take an expensive toll on your starship.
- Rocky: It's believed Xenofauna with Rocky hides tend to make homes in comets or asteroids somewhere, but this coloration tends to indicate a creature has a tough exterior and will be stubborn to dislodge. Rocky hides are useful materials for making flexible and well-protected spacewalk suits, as they have an innate resistance to deep space radiation.
- Camouflage: Space isn't all dark, there's an uncountable number of colorful nebula and twinkling stars up there, so when Xenofauna don't want to be found they tend to develop hides that look like the stars around them. Camouflage Xenofauna are often docile, and are particularly beautiful to see in person. They also make fine trophies, and rich guys on every world will pay a premium for a well-cured camouflage hide.
- Shaded: Some creatures don't want to be found not to avoid conflict, but to initiate it. Shaded Xenofauna are extremely hostile, and spotting one is a great big problem. They have light-absorbent hides that even appear dark under a floodlight, and require special thermal and electromagnetic sensors to reliably detect. They are responsible for a number of shipwrecks, and are a compelling reason to maintain the weapons array on your starship. The Terran Star Navy is always buying parts from these creatures.
Pairing with that list, the five major Shapes of Xenofauna are:
- Schools: Groups of smaller Xenofauna who tend to travel in packs. Schools are the hardest target for whalers to deal with because you can't just harpoon the one thing, you have to shoo the whole school away from whatever they're nibbling on. They tend to flow in unison and feed as a swarm. An angered School of Xenofauna will pepper a starship from all angles, turrets are not a useful defense against an incited School. Overclocking forcefield projectors is a recommended strategy, but ultimately you'll want to escape as quickly as possible.
- Whales: If it's got one big elongated body, a mouth and some fins, you got yourself a Whale. Whales are very dense, their fins soaking up solar rays and carrying them along on warp currents. A Whale bumping into the side of a starship- by accident or on purpose- is a big problem, they have a lot of mass to throw around and your forcefield projectors might not take the hits with grace. Whale meat is surprisingly edible, and Ganymedeans in particular are interested buyers. Just be very careful, these Xenofauna are like giant bludgeons, they will smash a whole starship in one shot.
- Squids: Xenofauna sometimes have a shell they can hide in, a whole ring of eyes and a bunch of tentacles with little mouths on the end; whalers tend to call them Squids despite them being pretty distinct from the Terran namesake. Squids got soft insides but their shells are really tough, you either gotta coax them out in order to cull them- you could blow them up with your ship weapons but the shell debris is just as dangerous to you, and then you can't sell it for nothing. They have a complicated number of wriggling mouths that make dislodging them from a satellite quite a feat.
- Jellies: A type of Xenofauna with a soft central body and a number of long tendrils. Jellies prefer to drift along and, when they encounter something tasty, entangle that thing in their tendrils and pull them into the mouth on the underside of their body. Jellies release a corrosive mist they use to break down their food, so handle them with care. Recklessly blasting a fragile Jelly with your ship's cannons will result in your ship's hull taking enough corrosive damage that re-entry into a planet's atmosphere may prove fatal. Seek stardock inspection and repair immediately upon exposure to Jelly Juice.
- Flats: Terran whalers compare them to ocean sunfish. Flat Xenofauna are one of the more dangerous obstructions for starfarers traveling at high speeds, as they tend to take up a lot of vertical space compared to other types of Xenofauna. Flats have very sharp and powerful jaws they'll use to nibble on hard minerals to dislodge as much tasty ice as possible, and will often be found draped over comets like a blanket having themselves a little feast. Flats will take a big bite out of starships, their jaws do not discriminate.
Hazards
Encountering Xenofauna isn't a tremendously common occurrence, but they show up often enough that every starfarer needs to be aware of how to deal with an encounter with one. There are a few ways in which Xenofauna pose a danger to starfarers. The first and most notable way is by damaging emergency relay satellites- even if you're somewhere else, if you're in distress and your emergency signal can't get picked up by Titan Dispatch, help can't be on the way. Keeping satellites clear and working is a full-time job, because even though Xenofauna aren't always around, they could be anywhere at any time, and when you do learn about a disruption in your satellite array it's usually because it's already been disrupted.
The second major danger of Xenofauna comes when a starship is idle or parked somewhere: these are big creatures who are really only used to seeing other big creatures up in space so when they see a big metal ship they just assume, hey, that's a shiny new creature over there isn't it? Xenofauna directly engaging with ships may poke at them, they may prod them, they may pull on them to see what they do. They might take a bite out of them, they might bodycheck them or they might taste some ice on them and dig in for a meal. The most dangerous of these scenarios are when Xenofauna perceive the starship to be a threat and go on the attack- shipwreck salvage companies like Timberwolf or Red Raven can usually tell what type of Xenofauna is responsible for a shipwreck and how it happened just by the specific patterns of damage found on a floating space hulk.
The last and hardest hazard to account for is Xenofauna getting in the way of starship transit. Astronav computers run a lot of calculations to account for movement of known space debris in plotting a course for travel, and riding a warp current usually locks your ship on a particular course that Xenofauna also like to glide along on; it's entirely possible for a starship moving at sub-light speed to slam directly into Xenofauna who happened to be loafing around in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's recommended to keep your forward shields up while riding a warp current for mainly this reason, an impact at high speeds with any type of Xenofauna will cause severe damage to your forcefield projectors, but that's hugely preferable compared to the alternative of an unshielded ship slamming into a giant slab of space meat. Some captains think diverting power from shields to their engines will put more pepper sauce in their pulse thrusters, and they're generally right, but you run the risk of that miniscule chance that a Rocky Whale is parked in your path waiting for you to hot rod your way through it. The mess these impacts make is horrific, the debris scatters wide and creates an even larger hazard for future starships to hit, and if it happens on a major trade route then a Xenofauna and a reckless captain can cause a multi-ship impact event that will need a lot of cleanup very quickly to resolve.
There are Solar Xenofauna Tag and Monitoring services who keep an eye on space to find new visitors from beyond Pluto to tag and feed into the Astronavigational Live Computer Data Feed, giving ships and their Delta droids a heads-up to the movement of known obstructions, but the thing about Xenofauna is space is huge and they don't care much for boundaries or announcements, they will show up when they please and cause all kinds of trouble before they're noticed and cataloged. If you do happen to encounter one safely, however, they're a beautiful sight to see. Be sure to take pictures and share the stories with your friends, many people will go their whole lives without seeing Xenofauna up close and in person. Be sure to capture those moments when you can.
"We like to think everything is measurable because we have measurements for everything we know. The thing is there's stuff out there we don't even know we need to measure. Stuff that knows all about us." -- Dr. Syff, Timberwolf science officer.
Beyond The Veil
Sometimes things fly under the radar. For as much as we know about our homes, our worlds and our neighbors, there are things that live in the gaps between the tiles of our knowledgebase that elude our understanding. What we know is never a comprehensive catalog of what is knowable, there is always going to be some odd little surprise waiting to reveal itself to us, some anomaly that defies categorization or some deeper layer of our universe we have never had the tape rule to measure. Herein at the end of our catalog of life in the Sol system we'll look at five kinds of anomaly that lurk in the blurry peripheral of our collective eye. This is not an exhaustive list- there is always going to be something out there we don't know to think about. It's a vast, cold universe, it is good to regard it with humility.
Ceresian Fungal Colonies
Found throughout the Asteroid Belt, Ceresian Fungus is a cannibalistic saprophagous fungi which grows in dense colonies. Ceresian fungal spores can float in space for a very long time, eventually finding some piece of dead organic tissue to land on, where they will flower and grow. A colony of Ceresian fungi will devour that starter meal, die and rot themselves, whereupon new Ceresian fungal spores can blossom and maintain the colony. It's not know that Ceresian fungi originated from Ceres itself, but that was the first place it was discovered by Sol's locals. Fungal spores have occasionally been known to flower on shipwrecks, devouring the dead and caking a ship in patches of bright pink- as long as one little spore drifts along and finds itself a meal, a new colony can form.
The novel curiosity about Ceresian fungus is that, when it grows in sufficient density, it forms a neural network capable of thought and understanding. Asteroid miners have long known about Ceresian fungus and generally treat it as a weed infestation, but they did not know that the entire time these fungal colonies were another sentient lifeform, that they could feel and remember. It wasn't until a Ceresian fungal spore flowered inside the corpse of a failed Europan colony that one of these sentient colonies finally had the means to stand up and be noticed. Their friends call them Teddy, and they are a testament to what we don't know about what is right under our noses. Teddy demonstrates that if a Ceresian colony grows into a piece of machinery, even one full of electronics, it can learn to interface with that machinery and treat it as an extension of its consciousness. Other Ceresian colonies may yet form in other mechanical bodies and demonstrate their sentience, so long as there's a scrap of organic tissue in there to get the colony started.
Cryptids
Every world has its stories about life unknown, about creatures that stalk and feed or lurk and hunt, creatures who snap up bad little kids and gobble them up when they misbehave. Sometimes these stories are cautionary tales, sometimes they're rooted in some misinterpreted spectacle, fashioned out into compelling tales that only grow as they're passed down the generational line. Other times these stories are true, and something does lurk in the corners where light doesn't shine. They might not always hunt us, but in an age of interplanetary space travel the presence of Cryptids from all worlds keeps us on our toes. They may be home-grown, native to a world you've never been to before, stories you haven't yet heard which the locals know by heart. A local legend may be real, it may hitch a ride on an unknowing starship and find itself on a whole other world, to be found by locals unprepared for such an encounter. The fact that we've stitched the worlds of our system together means we've also created a network for our monsters and bogeymen to travel across as well, a fact few people spare a thought to even consider.
Titan Garden is the hub colony of the whole Sol system, a domed city on the moon of a world with no sentient lifeforms to claim its own, belonging to no single world, inhabited by people from every corner of every moon and planet. It's possible for any of those world's Cryptids to hitch a ride to Titan, but if they arrive there they'll encounter the moon's own homegrown anomaly: Camerahead. The long-mad Martian brain piloting an ancient machine body, its life extended beyond its natural boundaries, Camerahead helped build Titan Garden, it knows every inch of the structure, and it wants to protect the thing it sacrificed everything to build at all costs. What it perceives as a threat worth protecting is abstract and grows hazier by the day, but it will crawl through pipes, cling to ceilings, click its camera lens and shriek in the nerve-shattering tone of a dialup modem before leaping onto a threat and rending it to pieces. Even out here on Titan where people never walked, even out here Cryptids are found, challenging our complicity and keeping us forever on our toes.
Ghosts
Ghosts exist. The byproduct of the phenomenon of sentience, ghosts are believed to be an imprint of tremendous emotional resonance released at the moment of death. It's thought that ghosts are formed when the sheer battery energy of a conscious mind is released all at once in a moment of extreme emotional eruption coinciding with the extinguishing of a life. A ghost is like a paradimensional copy of a person as they exit this dimension, lingering and haunting our world. At least, that's what the ghost hunters say. Who can say for certain what compels a ghost or a spirit to reach across the veil and interact with our world? The fact remains that they're here and they still have a hand on the threads of our fabric of reality.
Space is a dangerous place and countless starfarers have lost their lives in the void- the emotional resonance of dying in space is a bit different today, you sort of expect that it's going to happen, but around the dawn of interplanetary travel dying on a mission to space was a big deal. You were among the first, you were paving the way for those to follow. Back home they would hold memorials in your honor, they might teach about you in history books, and you would never be coming home to see any of it. The early dead still hang in space, alone and stranded far from the worlds where the memory of their sacrifice persists. Occasionally a modern starship may pass through space where these historic losses took place, where ghosts of the pioneering dead still hang, and in that moment something tangible, something physical, something real intersects with these baleful spirits, and in that moment they hang on. The ghost now has a physical anchor, it now has other sentient minds, other emotional anchor points to latch onto. Now your ship is haunted by a three- or four-hundred year old spirit. It may be longing, pleading for answers you can't provide. It may struggle with the changes that have happened since their time, with how casual space flight has become. They may feel angry at being left to drift in space while an ideal of themselves lives on in the history of their people, and they may lash out at you and your ship, beneficiaries of their untimely demise. Ghosts are real and they can latch onto your ship if you pass them in space. Your starship can become haunted, and then you have a very weird and difficult problem on your hands. Good luck, and have empathy in your heart, it may be your best hope of resolving your ship's newest passenger.
Subspace Lifeforms
There is a gap between dimensional instances that we call Subspace. A Terran warp drive engineer has developed a way to dip into and out of Subspace, crossing vast swaths of the Sol system as a sewing needle stitching through a curled fold of cloth. One or two Terran spellcasters have found ways to tap into Subspace, to harness the energy of the space between spaces in order to fuel their magics. And just like our own fathomless void, there are creatures that live in Subspace, who are built for and abide by natural laws that are alien to our own. Sometimes, by some means or another, while we're beginning to poke holes in our own dimensional bubble- sometimes Subspace Lifeforms come through the holes, and like oil and water or like two seas clashing together, they never blend neatly into our reality.
When Subspace Lifeforms emerge in our universe they are forced to comply with our natural laws- there are no other laws they can abide by! But they are creatures from somewhere with entirely different natural laws, so in being forced to conform with our universal rules they break down and corrupt in bizarre ways. "It's like pulling apart a kind of cotton candy made of TV static", one witness described their encounter with a Subspace Lifeform. They are crunched and distorted in all the ways incompatible signal formats manifest, that is the best way to describe what seeing one looks like. What's more harrowing, though, is seeing what happens when entities from our own reality overlap with a Subspace Lifeform. These creatures are being bent to fit our laws, and even if you exist under our own natural laws, being caught inside a Subspace Lifeform subjects you to that twisting and that distortion, and there's not much that can be done to un-twist you. The cries of men betrayed by their own universe hang heavy in the space where they overlapped with a Subspace Lifeform, even after the creature was banished back to Subspace, the imprint lingers, like a sound file playing after a program has crashed. It is very, very rare that anyone would bear witness to a Subspace Lifeform, but the fact that they've been seen at all warrants an entry in this record. Do not, under any circumstances, hope to encounter one in your lifetime.
Slimes
Our final look into the unknown leaves us on a more pleasant note. Everyone knows Slimes! These gooey gelatinous creatures, oft picked on by nascent adventurers and beloved by fans for their gentle appearance, are native to Terra-- I mean, to Gany-- I mean... native to Neptu-- ahh! Everyone has stories about Slimes on their homeworld, and everyone seems to think Slimes are an innocuous quirk of their neck of the woods, and everyone is actually correct. Curiously, Slimes are a form of life which is native to basically every world, simultaneously. They're from anywhere, they've always been there.
It's a real head-scratcher, once you put the pieces together. They didn't spread with the advent of starships, every world has always had Slimes somewhere, in some forest or lurking in some old dungeon. They predate space travel. Did they drift in from space? Well, they're not particularly sturdy creatures, considering the basic weapons young adventurers blop them with it's very unlikely they would survive the burn of atmospheric entry. The more one thinks about it, the more it seems like to have always been here, they would have had to trace back to a common origin of our worlds. And you keep tracing back further and further and that intersect point reaches very, very far back into the past. That can't be right, right? They're just funny little creatures, don't worry about it. They don't mean no harm, they don't hold animosity for getting blooped all the time. You've got the stars to explore, don't worry so much about the green Slimes outside your childhood village. Though it is strange to hear people from other worlds talk about the blue Slimes or the pink Slimes outside of their own... nah. You've got bigger things to worry about.
People of Sol
The Sol system is a big place, bustling with life. You'll meet people from all kinds of worlds with all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of tricks up their sleeves. Go meet new people, share your story and write new ones together with your fellow starfarers. This guide will give you a rough idea what to expect to encounter in places like Titan Garden, but nothing besides first-hand experience can fully prepare you for the breadth of life within Sol's reach.
Safe travels out there. Remember: it's cold in space, so be sure to dress warmly.