The Hivrhin Ones

These people, from the planet Hivrhin, call themselves, in their language, the Ones. This is a reference to the fact that, though they now enjoy a strong sense of individuality, the species evolved from animals with insect-like hive mentality. Though they treasure their sense of self now, they still strongly believe in working together as a unit for a better society. That’s more than some other species can say.

That does not mean that there is total peace on Hivrhin by any means. While any individual “city” (their word for it is close to colony) is likely to be a very pleasant place, there are still conflicts and even wars between different cities.

Dr. Vedzax is one of the Hivrhin Ones.

Living in the Northernmost City, Wilgon is a member of the worker caste (though that is now a conscious choice, rather than a biological imperative) and she works at the planet’s largest spaceport. The species has been reaching into the stars for several generations now, and made contact with other worlds. It is rare for other species to visit the world. If they do, however, this likely the city they are going to see. As such, Wilgon has gotten a taste for other worlds and longs to one day get a job working on another planet.

Xarla is a worker for another city. She maintains the Queenhouses, which, as one may expect, house the city’s queens and their young. That particular city is at war with a neighboring one, and attacks on the Queenhouses are depressingly common, so Xarla has had to do a fair bit of fighting in between repair jobs. She has grown quite despondent and questions the meaning of what seems a futile life. Thanks to this, she is susceptible to a cult that has been growing in that city, trying to convince the people to begin a campaign to wipe out the rest of the cities and become the only lineage of the Ones. While Xarla is not yet fully on board with it, she enjoys the meetings with others who similarly feel that the world is not as it should be and that this could be a solution.

And Eughlunk is from another city, one which is located on an equatorial island. People there are known for farming, using small animals and harvesting a sugary dew from them. The city has grown rich by selling this dew to the rest of the world, and Eughlunk works as an educator for the city, showing the younger generations how to do the business. On Hivrhin, educators are actually well rewarded for their work, so Eughlunk lives a life of great luxury. There is even a good chance he will one day get to provide his genetic material to the queens to create a new generation.

A Fact About the Hivrhin Ones: The Ones do not have any popular form of fictional stories. It’s not that they can’t fathom it, they can understand why it might appeal to other races, and they can lie when they want to, but the idea of creating stories about events that don’t exist has never caught on among them.

Universe: White

Floatrians

Note that members of this species does not call themselves “Floatrians” as they do not have a name for their kind. They have not yet fathomed the idea that there are other worlds with people they would have to differentiate themselves from. They have evolved in an upper stratosphere of a gas giant planet. They are hermaphroditic leathery-skinned sacs filled with gasses that allow them to float. The heaviest part of a Floatrian is the “plate” above their three eyes. Floatrians can control bloodflow into this plate, and in doing so make patterns in the heat there. With vision going into the infrared spectrum, the Floatrians can see the patterns in each other’s plates and this is how they communicate (vocal communication would be quite difficult in the winds of their world). While they can project gas from an orifice on their back to facilitate movement, Floatrians also have fins that allow them to control their gliding and that suffices most of the time. While they can control the four “prongs” of their fins just enough to delicately grasp very small, light objects, they lack the finesse to really work with them and, as such, have created very little in the way of technology.

The primary diet of the Floatrians is made up of small creatures that, if they can be compared to Earth’s creatures, resemble a mix between plants and insects. Mostly, this means that the Floatrians are nomadic, following the insect swarms around as they seek out sunlight for photosynthesis. Neoss is a swarm claimer. It’s job is to stay as close to a swarm as possible, so that Neoss’s tribe may rightfully eat from it, while other tribes know to go find some other food source.

Boid, meanwhile, is a tribeless Floatrian. Having never formed the close connections to other individuals that would allow it a place in a tribe, Boid now travels far and wide with a valuable resource: information. Boid learns whatever bit of fact someone may find valuable (weather reports, news of tribes going to war, etc.) and, when coming across a tribe, will offer that information up for the right to feed at their swarm for a time before moving on.

But Vite is less kind. Leader of a tribe that doesn’t have a swarm of their own, Vite seeks out swarm claimers from weaker tribes and moves in to steal meals. With violence if necessary.

A Fact About Floatrians: When they are young and small, the Floatrians float quite high in the skies. As they grow older and larger, they can’t quite achieve the same heights (and don’t really want to). And as they get very old and weak, they tend to stay even lower, until they eventually die and fall finally into the winds and are carried away. It is perhaps for this reason that they, as a culture, tend to associate the direction of “down” with higher ages and higher numbers in general. To them, the number 100 is a “lower” number than 10, even though it is still a “larger” number. Also, they use base-4, but that’s beside the point.

Universe: Blue

I said last time that I have probably developed enough alternate Earths. Standing by that, this year’s Super Sunday theme will be Superior Species Sunday (though I’ll probably just actually call is Alien Sundays, because that’s better). Screw Earth. Let’s see what else my universes have got. Every week I will be fleshing out an alien species. Let us begin:

The Ugder

The species known as the Ugder come from a planet also called Ugder. They are a blue-skinned humanoid people with big heads, conical ears, thick black manes, and three fingered hands. Theirs is a cold and wintry world and, while they live there happily, they got off that world pretty quickly. When the Ugder first achieved space flight technology, there was still a continent on their own world which had not been discovered. For nearly two thousand years now, the Ugder have visited and colonized dozens of planets in the systems closest to their home, and met several species of aliens in the process. In most cases, the Ugder are the first alien species those other aliens have ever met, and these meetings are not always beneficial to both parties (the Ugder were especially cruel to the first aliens they met, the Shlafes). In recent years, however, the Ugder have begun to create more peaceful alliances with the aliens they meet, going so far as to try to organize a system of Space Government with representatives from various worlds.

Some representatives of the Ugder people:

Digmimm is a member of the Ugder Shipping Security Force. The Force trains pilots who fly fighter ships that escort Ugder Shipping Convoys through space to protect them from attack by criminals. Digmimm, however, encountered not criminals on her first mission, but first contact with a hostile alien force. She not only survived, but succeeded in driving off the attack with most of the convoy intact. This made her a hero to the Security Force and to the Udger at large, but what she doesn’t is that she has become infamous among that alien species, with her face being used in hateful propaganda as that group prepares for a war against the Ugder.

The planet Yimmin is home to a colony of anarchists that consider themselves apart from the rest of Ugder society. Yimmin the individual was named after this world by his parents, who were among the early colonizers of that world. Yimmin left the planet he was named after as soon as he could find a means to do so. But being from, and named for, a world that the rest of Ugder society considers a home to criminals, Yimmin had trouble finding a place. Ironically, it was this that caused Yimmin to have to turn to a life of crime. Yimmin is now making a living smuggling contraband between worlds.

Raised on an Ugder transport ship by his businessman father, Mimitimim found his own life when he became a writer of fiction. His first story, a coming of age tale about a young Ugder who was tortured by his schoolmates, was extremely popular and the young author settled down on planet Ugder becoming something of a celebrity. Settling into a life of parties and wallowing in fame, it took years for him to produce a new story. That second novel, about a farmer who lost his family and his mind during the during a space war, was also widely praised. He became the most celebrated author of his generation. He lived in a large home shared with a literal harem (as scandalous in Ugder culture as it would be in ours). Eventually his third story was finished and released. It was deemed unreadable by critics. Tasting failure and humiliation for the first time, Mimitimim did not react well. He covertly snuck off-world and now dwells on the seventh moon of an obscure world, in isolation.

A Fact About the Ugder: Though I said I was fleshing out the universes in which my alternate Earths take place, I am actually not doing that this week. The Ugder live in a universe unrelated to all those I spoke about last week. This is an alternate timeline that differs from so far back that when the stars and galaxies formed differently, so that the galaxies we know such as the Milky Way were never formed and wholly different ones did. This universe has no Earth or humans at all. If that isn’t a blow to anthropocentricism, I don’t know what is. We’ll call this universe “Narsidon” as it should not be a human word.