I’ve spent a lot of Sundays now developing alien races and the year is coming to an end. Is it time for PDR to do something different? Well, if it is, I’m going to ease myself back to those “human” things by looking at a couple that have been interacting with aliens.

Alien Abductees

Dan Hastings is a university student who has a part-time job at a grocery store. If he were asked, he’d probably say he was a pretty ordinary guy. The truth is, though, that Dan has trouble sleeping. For as long as he can remember, he has had dreams of strange beings surrounding him and doing strange things to him while he can not move. At least, he tells himself that they’re dreams, though he believes that they are real. What Dan doesn’t know is that the beings who have been doing this are a Strondovarian science crew that orbits the planet in a secret station and is experimenting on Dan’s mind. The first Strondovarians to discover the planet they are interested in testing the limits of the human mind by giving Dan Hastings mental powers like telepathy to see what he does with them.
Universe: Blue

Unlike Dan, Paula Parker has not returned to Earth after she was abducted. Paula was only seven years old when she went missing during a family picnic. Her family never got any closure to her disappearance, because she had been stolen by an alien who had created a wormhole to reach the Earth, taken the child and left. The abductor, whose purpose Paula never learned, was a large creature with advanced technology but never expected that the child could be a threat. Paula lashed out at her kidnapper, smashing a piece of alien equipment and causing an explosion. The alien died, leaving Paula stranded at the alien’s headquarters on an apparently otherwise empty world. Paula survived, learning what she could of the alien technology. She eventually figured out how to use the wormhole device, but had no idea how to tune it back to Earth. She had adventures on many strange planets and met many strange peoples, none of whom had any idea what humans were or where they came from. The universe is large and finding a single planet in it is near impossible if you don’t know where to start. Paula had to give up on ever seeing her world again, and for over a decade has fought for her survival among the stars.
Universe: Orange

It must be noted, however, that humans aren’t the only ones who are getting stolen by weird forces from beyond their homeworld. Carmohka is a Hivrhin One, the strongest warrior of her city, perhaps of the entire planet. She was participating in a plan to raid a neighboring city’s Queenhouses, if the mission had been successful, her city would have become the dominant power in their hemisphere. But without warning, while en route to the job, a strange flying craft appeared above Carmohka for just a moment, and Carmohka vanished. Her allies never got any explanation, her superiors had to assume she’d become a coward and fled. Even Carmohka doesn’t know the truth, because as soon as she was aboard the strange craft, she was placed in suspended animation by her captors, an alien race intent on capturing the best warriors and preserving them for a threat they predict will arrive in the future.
Universe: White

Strondovarians

The Strondovarians are an intelligent people. Their planet, Gurx, is not terribly large and it had quite limited resources, which meant that the Strovdinians had to learn quickly to work together. Their culture came to value intellect and cleverness because those were the traits that ensured their survival. But for all their focus on brains, they are not weak by human standards. The average adult Strondovarian stands over two metres tall and their four powerful arms are strong at both pinching and punching.

Gloueb is an astronaut. With the resources of Gurx running out, the Strondovarians were quick to seek out other worlds that could be useful, and they found them. They now have a vast space network of spacecraft that are gathering resources to build a New Gurx, a giant artificially-created world that will be more appropriate for their race. Astronauts like Gloueb have, for generations, been collecting asteroids, comets, and materials from other planets and gathering them together in orbit around the chosen star where construction on the superstructure has begun.

Evpel is a contributor to the Knowledge Base Of The Strondovarians, the massive digital collection of all information deemed important to the species. For whatever reasons, the Knowledge Base is not a complete repository of information, but just that they deem “Noteworthy”. It is part of Evpel’s job to determine what is Noteworthy and, unfortunately for Evpel, there are Strondovarians who want little more than to be remembered throughout history by getting declared Noteworthy. These attention seekers don’t care what they get famous for, as long as they are famous, so they will try to become famous for all sorts of criminal acts. On one occasion Evpel was even kidnapped by someone trying to prove their importance. After Evpel’s was rescued, all information that could even suggest the kidnapper existed was stricken from the Knowledge Base, from making sure the crime was not mentioned, all the way to reducing the stated population for Gurx by one.

And Bukkel is devoted to the study of the mind and unleashing any and all mental powers that could be possible. A lot of Strondovarians consider the ultimate goal of life to be the transcending of physical form to become beings of purely mental energy. That may still be a long way off, but Bukkel is hoping to make strides toward turning that into a reality. A lot of the research involves actually performing operations on living subjects, either volunteers, infants bred for the purpose, or unwilling subjects sentenced to this as punishment. Bukkel also makes puzzles for fun.

A Fact About Strondovarians: The design of Strondovarian knees (which they have several of in each leg) is such that they move almost every which way. This makes it very hard for a Strondovarian to be knocked off balance, but they can’t run particularly fast because of how complicated it gets.

Universe: Blue