Exoles

The origin of the Exoles is a closely guarded secret among the Exoles, their home being located in a dense nebula that has little seeming value to other races. The Exoles are able to keep the location of their home a secret easily, since they have evolved the ability to not only survive in out space, but to thrive there. Exoles now ride through space, soaring on solar winds among other methods of travel (they can easily hitch a ride on an unknowing spacecraft), and only stop into planetary atmospheres on rare occasions. There is not a lot of “society” among Exoles, as they largely roam the cosmos solitarily, but they do come together for matters concerning that secret home of theirs.

A group of Exoles first made a cameo appearance in a Hover Head story, then one was insulted by Little Choy.

Always Soar is a traveller who is interested in seeing as much of the universe as it can during its lifetime. Having left home early in its life, Always Soar has never returned. Instead, it has encountered more different places and things than any of its peers, and these life experiences are what it cares about most.

Star Watcher is content to stay in a relatively small part of space. Having found a trinary star system in Sector Bokka that has dozens of worlds going around it, providing resources and comfort and that is all that Star Watcher could want.

Fast Drift is one of the Exoles most involved in keeping what little Exole society there is, alive. Taking messages between the home and the far-flung Exoles, Fast Drift makes sure that everyone is as up on the latest news as it is possible to be in a species spread across veritable light-centuries.

A Fact About Exoles: Communication between Exoles comes in several forms. They can create pulses of radio waves that create patterns of “words” which is ideal for communicating at a distance in space (and is also the language with which they communicate with other species), but it is very draining of the body’s resources. For more intimate and detailed communication, Exoles will entwine with one another and slowly writhe and wiggle in ways that get their meanings across clearly and with much less use of energy.

Universe: Bronze

C.T. Young (whose initials don’t stand for anything) appears in the 1953 film Bright Road. C.T. is a troubled student who is singled out by Miss Richards, a new teacher who hopes to turn him around. Indeed, C.T. does not see the point of going to places like school and church, and when there he is completely unable to hide how much he doesn’t want to be there. It takes him two years to get through every grade and the old teachers have given up on him as a “backwards child”. But he isn’t a bad child. He doesn’t really associate with the other schoolchildren much, apart from his girlfriend Tanya, but he is extremely well behaved at home where he not only helps take care of the kids who are younger than him, but also uses the profits from selling his honey to do things like buy paint for the house. For Christmas, he even gives a jar of that honey, his only source of income, to his mother with a note saying it is “from the bees” and that’s pretty cute. C.T. loves other animals too. He has a dog named Come Here (who, incidentally, seems to be smart enough to warn him when he is running late for school), sings along with birds, and is fascinated by a caterpillar going into a cocoon which is a useful metaphor for his own story. Basically, C.T. is a very good child who just doesn’t fit into the usual schooling methods and that’s what Miss Richards sees in him. She recognizes that he is skilled at drawing and encourages him there. She also catches him helping another kid with math problems, proving that he may not care enough to do it for his own sake, but he’ll do it to help someone else.

But I’m not here to review good children. Lets focus on the beekeeping stuff. Of the bees he says, “Me and them, we’re sort of in business. They make a little honey, I sell it.” It doesn’t sound like he makes a lot of money, but the fact he makes any is a good start. At the film’s climax, a swarm of bees comes through the open classroom window looking for somewhere to hive. C.T. is unfazed as he stops the other students from panicking or harming the bees, grabs the queen, places her in a jar, and carries her, his hand covered in bees, to find a nice tree in the woods where they can live.

Unfortunately, that is a redemptive moment for an earlier bit of Beekeeper Rage. Granted, it takes an awful lot for C.T. to work up to that moment of anger. His girlfriend Tanya dies of pneumonia, which is understandably something one would be upset about. Then, after he returns to school, having skipped for a while, he finds classmates singing the “Three Blind Mice” song, which has always upset him for its imagery of cutting off tails of the mice (he loves animals that much). He reacts to this song by grabbing a jump-rope and swinging it around as a weapon to lash out at everyone, then gets into a fistfight with another student.

I like my beekeepers to be good fighters, and though that C.T.’s only fight is a Beekeeper Rage moment is sad, he does acquit himself well. He is also able to take several hits on the hands with a ruler from the principal without flinching. And, though he is told he must apologize, he notes that, after he saved everyone from the bees, he was forgiven without needing to apologize. Way to get a moral victory, C.T.

3 Honeycombs out of Five.

For the record, the movie is based off a short story called “See How They Run” by Mary Elizabeth Vroman, but in that story there is no mention of C.T. keeping bees, so it is not canon here.

The Circle is a small, but very densely populated galaxy (which we encountered as the home to the Dellwellians). With many, many planets making up a galaxy-wide society, there are vast shipping lanes that bring supplies between worlds. This is prime territory for criminal activity, and one crew of such criminals go by the name “The Feral Pirates”.

Murb Deel

Murb Deel is a Drutag, and Drutags are not a species native to the Circle. Back home, Murb was a test pilot who was flying a new type of spacecraft when something went wrong. Murb has no idea of the physics of what happened, but the next thing he new he was in a new galaxy and surrounded by Space Pirates. Luckily, the Drutag are a species who advance in rank by being superior in combat, and that worked with these pirates too. Murb is now in charge of a pirate ship with a crew from a bunch of species from this strange new galaxy. Though Murb is not bloodthirsty, crimes being committed to make a living are fair game. And, of course, proving the superiority of the ship in battle is a must.

In any other story of this sort, this is the role that would be occupied by a human. If it isn’t clear by now that PDR don’t necessarily play that way, I don’t know what to tell you.

Haqwad

Second in command to Murb Deel, Haqwad is the femme fatale of the crew. Skilled with martial arts and espionage tactics, Haqwad’s real skill is the art of seduction. Haqwad occasionally hints at a mysterious past in which she was an assassin, but that is just to draw suspicion away from her real mysterious past as a member of a law enforcement agency.

Henjuen B

Henjuen B is from a species that could best be described as “brain cells inside large floating devices”. Henjuen B is the pirate ship’s chief mechanic, keeping the thing running even when it is being blasted apart by enemy fire and replacement parts are just too expensive to get right now. Perhaps rightfully so, Henjuen B is a cantankerous sort and plays it up, often playfully bantering with the rest of the crew, especially Pilot.

Pilot

Pilot is not a robot, but a member of a species who used their advanced technology to upload themselves into computers. The rest of the species has suffered bad times, with a sort of computer virus corrupting their memory banks and forcing them to go into sleep mode. Pilot now works with the pirates in the hopes of finding the means to save the rest of the species, but is also not averse to having a fun time along the way.

Swobbin

Swobbin is something of a loose cannon. Nobody else on the crew is quite certain if Swobbin is typical of her species, or if even among them she would be considered crazy, but she is almost suicidally reckless and unpredictable. She’s the sort who might betray the crew for the right price, but she’ll probably then kill the payers when she loses interest. She’s the type who might try to trick the crew into going to a planet where there is supposed to be treasure, but there is actually a bunch of people she wants to beat up. They can only justify keeping her around because she is really good in a fight.

Dworreh

Dworreh is the team’s muscle. From a species who are so feared that they aren’t even allowed to leave their home sector without permission from law-enforcement agencies, Dworreh is the secret weapon that the pirates don’t advertise unless they are planning on taking no survivors. Dworreh is less concerned about keeping the secret and is more eager to get into action than the others would consider wise.