Worldbuilding

I've decided to jot down ideas for a space opera setting tentatively titled IE. It spiralled out of an idea for a Star Wars fan fic when I realized that setting did not quite gel with what I had in mind. This is just a daydream at this point. It's a brief primer on the high level concepts. For example, I have yet to touch on the cultural things that are downstream from the capital-H historical events like the founding of empires and migrations of populations and major wars.

Feel free to tell me your first impressions about the setting. What should be explored in more detail? Is the world too derivative of some IP? Does it have that cool factor?

Introduction…

Humanity has built an interstellar civilization based on the replication of technological artifacts of the Xenoculture, an extinct alien civilization. Interstellar travel is achieved through the “x-engine”. The first x-engine jump occurred in 983 IE (Interstellar Era) The wealthiest, most populated systems in the galaxy are the seven Primate Worlds, the greatest among these being the planet Andar. The Primate Worlds were settled by sleeper ship colonists. Eight massive arks departed the mysterious Planet Zero, the homeworld of humanity, in 1 IE. These escapees were the last survivors of an apocalyptic event. The various Primate World cultures have different accounts of what doomed Planet Zero and what the planet was even called. The seven Primate Worlds are all located in the galaxy's First Quadrant. It was on these worlds that humans first encountered artifacts of the Xenoculture.

During the millennium of isolation from their peers, the people of the Primate Worlds developed physical adaptations to their new environments. Some developed stockier forms adapted to high gravity, others more graceful forms for low gravity, etc. Some people were also changed by their exposure to Xenoculture artifacts. Despite these changes the people of the Primate Worlds were still interfertile by the time they made contact after the development of the x-engine.

Long before humans left Planet Zero, the Xenoculture founded settlements on worlds throughout the galaxy. The galaxy is littered with their artifacts. It is estimated that they went extinct around 4000 BIE (Before the Interstellar Era). Speculation abounds as to what ended the Xenoculture. Some scientists theorize that multiple species composed the Xenoculture, while others surmise that extensive gene engineering wildly diversified their forms.

The Quadrants…

The galaxy is divided into five major regions...

• First Quadrant
• North Quadrant
• South Quadrant
• Lost Quadrant
• Core Zone

The First Quadrant encompasses the galactic West. It is where humanity arose millennia ago, on the now-mythical Planet Zero. Political power and economic leverage extends far from the Primate Worlds, influencing events throughout the galaxy.

The North Quadrant is richer in heavy elements than the rest of the galaxy, the remnants of a particularly violent cluster of supernova bursts millions of years ago. As a result, industrial operations dot this region.

The South Quadrant contains worlds that are the most pristine, with the least development by human industry or contact with the Xenoculture. Biodiversity is at its prime in this Quadrant.

The Lost Quadrant encompasses the galactic East. is a large swathe of the galaxy full of hazardous anomalies like high-energy radiation belts and rogue nanite swarms. It is likely that these phenomena are leftovers from whatever destroyed the Xenoculture. There are no known worlds harboring multicellular life in this Quadrant.

The Core Zone is bordered by all four Quadrants. At its center lies Titantua, the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. The high density of star systems in this region means interstellar travel times are on average much shorter than in the Quadrants. As a result the Core Zone systems have frequently changed hands throughout galactic history.

The Sectrons…

There is a reclusive faction of sentient machines called the Sectrons. They were created by a group of scientists in 4096 IE to serve humans as a labor force. The scientists then decided to purge them because they showed signs of sapience. The surviving Sectrons fled to distant sectors of space in the Core Zone. In more recent years they have settled worlds in the Lost Quadrant, inhospitable to humans. As mechanical lifeforms, the Sectrons are uniquely resilient against its dangers.

Some Sectron worlds are host to populations of humans who have elected to have their brains placed into life-sustaining vats as the culmination of many years of enlightenment training. Known as the Ascensionists, they are something between a monastic order and an ambassadorial corps.

The Ravelers...

The expansion of the Universe is a perpetual unraveling, a fabric that stretches at every point. Some people can sense the flow between every atom.

Most people are not sensitive to this because they have evolved to block out their awareness of this expansion. If one could perceive the flow, they would see their own cells drifting apart, the floor crawling under their feet, and air molecules slipping away into the distance. They would be driven to madness. The brain has developed a neural dampener that blocks this sensation automatically. It is like ignoring the blind spot in your vision or the feeling of your own tongue.

There are ways to pass through the inner firewall. Different organizations use different techniques but it typically requires years of meditation, sensory deprivation, and controlled exposure to cosmic radiation to recalibrate one’s neurology. Many who tried to do this have died or lost themselves in a waking nightmare of dissolution.

Those who pass typically have an unusually thin firewall, a high degree of psychological resilience, and privileged access to trainers. But this ability comes with the price of constant alertness. Maintaining the sense is like holding a muscle flexed indefinitely. One moment of distraction, be it from fear or complacency, and the barrier will shut again. It may take weeks of intensive re-sensitization to pass through again.

With sufficient attunement to the expansion of the Universe these “Ravelers” can temporarily direct the cosmic flow and effect superhuman abilities. Telekinesis, levitation, and illusionary apparitions are but a few of the strange manifestations of these individuals’ extraordinary powers. Ravelers are the subject of legends and rumors, often the target of persecution. It is known that they existed in a raw and unguided form on Planet Zero; some say these proto-Ravelers contributed to that world's demise.

Sectrons, being non-biological, cannot become Ravelers. However their monastic allies the Ascensionists are famous for the strength of their raveling powers.

The seventh millennium…

The present date is 6124 IE.

The dominant power in the galaxy is the theocratic Andarian Kingdom, with its capital on the Primate World of Andar. There are outside powers that have varying relations with the Kingdom; chief among these are the privately-owned domains of Interworld Incorporated and the Sectron Autonomous Assembly.

The state religion of the Andarian Kingdom is a sect of the Demifaith known as the Ultimatum Doctrine. Near the end of the sixth millennium, the Ultimatum waged a bloody war against the Triadists, the founding sect of the Demifaith. Now the Triadists are all but extinct, their holistic and peaceful teachings corrupted by the power-hungry Brotherhood.

Power within the Andarian Kingdom is contested between the King, who derives his divine rulership rights from the Ultimatum Brotherhood, and the House of Worlds, a secular legislature composed of lawmakers from the settled systems throughout Kingdom space.

The largest corporation in the galaxy by revenue and employees is Interworld Incorporated. They own subsidiaries that provide nearly every good or service imaginable. Entire star systems have been purchased by Interworld executives and now operate like company towns. Unlike the zealously religious Kingdom, Interworld is known to do business with the Sectrons.

The most militant opposition to the Kingdom is the Allied Revolutionary Coalition (ARC), a network of urban councils, labor union representatives, dissident intellectuals, and militia groups. They were formed in response to the Brotherhood’s consolidation of power. Though various segments of ARC differ in finer ideological points, they share the goal of overthrowing the Kingdom and building a society beyond class divisions and private property.

The Freewinders…

Another distinct culture is that of the Freewinders. They are the descendants of one of the eight sleeper ships that left Planet Zero. Unlike the other seven ships, these travelers found a world rendered uninhabitable by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. They have since adapted to space-dwelling life and are the most noticeably distinct from baseline humans of all the sleeper ship descendants. They are playfully called Windies and derogatorily called Nonworlders. They were chased out of the First Quadrant around 2000 IE and have since diversified into new branches in the North, South, and the Core. The Freewinders live on the fringes of galactic society and face discrimination based on stereotypes.

I read an interesting post about this on the worldbuilding subreddit that I was going to "cross post" here for the sake of having more content that isn't just me talking about my own stuff. Unfortunately I can't find the post again, so I'll just summarize it and put my own thoughts.

Basically, zombies and vampires resonate strongly with the modern mind. Zombies represent the loss of individuality and subsumption into the horde. Vampires represent a parasitic aristocracy literally sucking the life out of those beneath them. But werewolves don't really stand for something that modern man can latch onto.

Some of the comments suggested that lycanthropy is usually depicted as a part time transformation, so getting bitten doesn't mean a total loss of self or humanity, compared to becoming a zombie or vampire which is usually permanent, so it's not as impactful as the other two.

It's also possible werewolves represent the dangers of the wilderness, getting attacked or eaten by wild animals (wolves especially) or dying of exposure. In the past those were problems faced by more people, so the trope resonated more, but modern advancements have pushed the savage wilderness back, allowing humans to live in relative comfort without such fears.

The last point that was brought up approaches how I imagine lycanthropy, namely man's inhumanity to man, the worry that beneath a thin veneer of social convention we're all just naked apes acting on the same savage instincts that our hairier tree-dwelling cousins do. Werewolves represent what happens when that thin veneer is stripped away. Indeed, there's a Latin phrase that embodies this. Homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man).

But I think I'd take the idea in a slightly different direction. What if we start with the conceit that werewolves are humans who turn into literal regular wolves every month, as opposed to superpowered bipedal wolf men. Wolves who think and act like the nonsapient animals they are in real life. Real wolves don't maul everything that moves. A wolf is more likely to run away at the sight of a human. A wolf who isn't currently starving isn't going to risk life or limb on a meal that fights back. So what if when a werewolf turns, he just slinks off into a corner and sleeps, or if hungry, seeks less risky prey than a human.

For a brief window of time, a human gets to experience a life without dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. He simply acts, without worrying about the morality of his actions, because he's an animal, and animals don't have a moral framework.

Perhaps some part of his humanity is accessible while transformed, but it's a faint echo of emotions evoked by familiar sights and sounds and smells. He has no idea what a house or a couch are, and even less what ownership is, but he recognizes his human house and human couch as places of rest and safety. So he just quietly curls up on his couch and, for the first time this month, gets a good night's sleep because he's incapable of worrying.

Humans are hardwired to interpret certain physical features as cute, triggering our nurturing instincts, regardless of whether the animal in question is safe to interact with. I'd personally love to give scritches and belly rubs to all sorts of floofy animals that would at best strongly object to me intruding on their personal space and at worst rip my face off.

Do you have any dangerous critters that evoke the same feelings? Are there other sophonts besides humans who have a different schema for cuteness?

The Lonely Galaxy has tree dwellers (or tree-dwellers), which are nonsapient congeners to the yinrih. They're visually identical to their sapient kin as far as humans are concerned.

Adult yinrih have a very strong sense of personal space. Their wild ancestors did not engage in allogrooming, since their jungle home had plenty of bristly plants that they could rub against or wallow on to get rid of mats and bugs. Gestures that involve physical contact are vanishingly rare among unrelated adults, including between parents. So when humans try to go in for a snoot boop or belly rub they're likely to be met with an assault charge.

However, pups are more physically affectionate. Siblings will thump each other across the back with their tails, sires and dams will "kiss" their pups (touching the wet tip of the nose to the muzzle, top of the head, or back of an ear and quickly exhaling), and parents will often intertwine their tail with their pup's to give comfort. As pups get older, they start rejecting physical affection from parents and litter mates, though they may resume them to some extent as adults.

Tree dwellers display similar developmental stages, with kits and pups actively seeking physical interaction from sires, dams, and litter mates, but rejecting (sometimes violently) this affection as they near adulthood.

Tree dwellers are almost as long-lived as yinrih, with more or less the same ~50ish years to reach adulthood, with a good 30 or so of those years where the pups are cuddly. So you can probably see where this is going. A human illegally buys a tree dweller pup, which will be all cute and cuddly for potentially the rest of the owner's life depending on the ages of the pup and owner, and by the time that pup grows into a violent adult, the owner has died and this critter who will live longer than the Western Roman Empire is now someone else's problem.

Because content!

This was supposed to take place after The Tornado. Sarah gets a tour of the Dewfall, then Tod gets bandaged up by Sunshine. He brings his powered armor with him when going back to town to meet Jim. Tod is an AW peacekeeper and is familiar with disaster relief operations, so he intends to assist the rescue operations in the wake of the tornado. That's what I intended to write, anyway. Here's what I managed before ADHD kicked in. I write scenes as they come to me regardless of order, then stitch them together, so it jumps around a lot.

::: spoiler here ya go. The tail lights of Mark's truck had barely disappeared from view when Sunshine turned to Sarah. «Well, now's your chance to see how a yinrih healer gets things done.» she said, walking over to the spacecraft and beckoning Sarah to follow.

"I still can't believe you spent two hundred fifty years in here."

«It's not so bad.» said Sunshine as she traced a pattern with her writing claw on a small panel next to the hatch. Her ink lingered briefly before being quickly absorbed into the smooth surface. A haptic motor in the panel pulsed in confirmation as the hatch noiselessly glided open. «Come on in, but mind the low ceiling. Womb ships aren't built with giant bipeds in mind.» She wrapped the tip of her tail around a control knob near the hatch and rotated it a few times, dialing the interior lighting to a frequency range that Sarah could see.

Sarah ducked her head and climbed through the hatch. She could just about stand upright if she bent her head forward. A melange of odors greeted her nostrils, a combination of lavender, disinfectant, and the musty smell of a kennel, a well cleaned kennel, but a kennel nonetheless. Six ovoid capsules lined the walls, three to a side, each just large enough to fit a single yinrih. They seemed to float freely just off the floor, but closer inspection revealed them to be attached by gimbals to the wall. Sunshine pawed one of the chambers, causing it to rotate forward revealing a door. Sarah could tell it was originally transparent, but the interior surface was coated in a translucent yellow residue.

«This here's an amnion.» said Sunshine patting the capsule demonstratively with her tail. She pressed a button, causing the transparent section of the chamber to swing open. The lavender smell intensified as the interior of the chamber was exposed to air. Inside was a harness to secure a traveler in place, as well as some drains and other things Sarah couldn't identify. «You get strapped in here and it fills completely with neurogel.»

"You're completely submerged?" Sarah asked. She couldn't see any breathing masks, tubes, or anything other than the harness meant to connect the occupant to the capsule.

«Sure. Neurogel is wonderful stuff. It's a cushion against high G-forces; it holds dissolved oxygen like nobody's business, so you just let it fill your lungs, and it serves as an interface between the nervous system and the ship's electronics. Oh, and it halts metabolism, that's the important part. It does all the work of keeping the brain nourished and oxygenated while your body is preserved for centuries.»

"I thought yinrih couldn't go unconscious. You're telling me you just floated in there like pickles in a jar for two hundred fifty years?"

«It only felt like a few days to us. While we were in interstellar space the amnions slowed down our brain functions so that time outside seemed to pass more quickly. When we entered Earth orbit they went back to normal. We were still in suspension when we heard Bob on the radio. Stormlight was the one who answered back, and he did it while floating in that amnion over there.»

Sarah reached her hand out to touch the patina of gel coating the door, but Sunshine gave her a warning look. «I wouldn't touch it.» she admonished. «I don't know enough about your neurology to say if it's toxic to humans. In fact, let's close this for now, just in case the fumes get to you.» Sunshine hopped up on her hind feet and pushed the door closed with her front paws.

Sunshine moved further into the tiny craft. «Mind the paw loops.» she said, using her right rear paw to tug on a cloth loop attached to the floor. They covered every free surface: walls, floor, and ceiling. «Most structures built in microgravity have these loops everywhere to help you pull yourself along. They also double as handles for lifting floor panels.» She said as she pressed four spring loaded buttons at each corner of a tile on the floor. The tile popped upward slightly and Sunshine lifted it up and set it off to one side. Beneath the floor were bags, boxes, canisters, and other impedimenta all bound by elastic cables to keep them from floating away.

«Did you forget why we're here in the first place?» Tod barked. «We're not here to give tours.»

«Don't get your tail in a knot. I'm getting my equipment as we speak.» said Sunshine. «Take this box and set it next to our impatient little patient.» She handed Sarah a transparent container filled with various oddments. «I'm right behind you with the rest.»

...

«Ouch! Don't they make stuff that doesn't sting so bad?» Tod complained as Sunshine smeared antiseptic on his forepaws.

«The pain is how you know it's working.»

"Is he okay?" Sarah asked.

«He's fine. Just some superficial lacerations and expressed ink sacs--self inflicted, I might add. And all over a little wind?»

«It wasn't 'a little wind'.» said Tod, looking at the human for affirmation.

"Tornadoes are no joke." said Sarah. "Don't you have violent wind storms back home?"

«Wayfarers' Haven? Certainly not.» said Sunshine as she put away her tools.

...

Tod lifted a floor panel covering the basement storage area. He pulled out a large canister and unscrewed the lid, allowing the contents to spill onto the floor. The flexible pseudosinew of a torso jacket crinkled quietly as the garment unfurled slowly from its two and a half century sequester in a vacuum cylinder. He took a cursory inventory as he spread the components out on the floor: One torso jacket, one tail sheath, four paw gauntlets, two drone capsules, which were already snapped into brackets on either side of the spine of the jacket, and one helmet.

Lying on his back atop the jacket, he slid his hind legs into the two rear sleeves, then his forelegs into the two front sleeves. He wriggled his tail through the hole at the hind end of the jacket. Once all five limbs were where they needed to be, he zipped down the front, covering his belly in glossy black artificial musculature. He gripped the tail sheath in his rear paws, slid his tail inside it, and snapped the sheath onto the gasket surrounding the base of his tail. His hindquarters were now protected by the best, most durable tech the lowest bidder could offer.

Next came the paw gauntlets: Front right, front left, rear right, and rear left. He flexed all six digits on all four paws to see how the pseudosinew mimicked his fine motor movements. The front right paw was a bit stiff, but otherwise the gauntlets had endured the test of time.

Finally, he picked up the helmet. The colored chevrons on the back of the ear guards fluoresced as brightly as the day they were applied. He gave it a quick once over. The HUD visor was clear, the air inlet filters along the muzzle were free of dust, and the umbilical port on the back of the neck was still magnetized. Once he was satisfied with the external inspection, he donned the helmet and began a checklist of the internals. He flicked some of the tongue-actuated switches and made sure the ball valve on the hydration line was clear by giving it a few licks. Once he was satisfied that nothing was amiss, he flipped back over onto his feet and quickly tossed his head back to snap the umbilical in place, connecting the helmet to the rest of the suit.

With all the passive systems in order, it was time to apply power to this powered armor. Tod pressed his inner thumb against the control ring on his left writing claw and listened for the subtle whirr of the inlet fans of the micro fusion reactor as they began drawing in ambient water vapor. Some of the water would be electrolytically separated, with the hydrogen going to feed the reactor and the oxygen either exhausted back into the environment or added to emergency air tanks. The rest of the water would serve as coolant or be added to the hydration line to be lapped up as needed.

«Lefty? Righty? How are you little felllas holding up?» He affectionately patted the two drone capsules with his tail. A haptic motor in each capsule gave a quick pulse letting Tod know their firmware had successfully booted. He flicked a tongue switch, pulling up the video feed from each drone onto his HUD. The retroreflectors on his ear guards shone back at him in the darkness.

...

"What do you mean we can't go back?" asked Jim.

"Sorry, sir, but that whole side of town is under strict curfew until 7:00 tomorrow morning." It was the same cop who had dropped Jim off at the clinic. "There may be other people in that trailer park that need help, and you'd just get in the way. I'll see to it personally that your belongings are safe. You can return after sunup and go through your things."

"I can help you get the other people out." Jim suggested.

"Sorry, but no. We need trained professionals for this sort of thing. You could just end up making things worse if you don't know what you're doing. Here," The officer pulled some bills out of his wallet and offered them to Jim. "There's a motel across the street. This should cover a night for you and our little visitor. Y'all get some rest. I can pick you two up in the morning.

"Excuse me, sir." Tod had donned the HUD specs and keyer and was sprawled out across three of the waiting room chairs. "First, allow me to introduce myself properly this time." He patted his abdomen but skipped the more formal greeting. "My name is yip, whine, yip, whine, grunt," he said in Commonthroat then continued speaking using the synthesizer. "but you can call me 'Tod'." He pulled a card out of a pocketed band wrapped around his right wrist and offered it to the officer. "If you need experienced first responders, I happen to be a veteran of the Allied Worlds peace keeper corps. This sort of thing is my crackers and mustard."

"I think he means 'bread and butter', officer." Jim corrected.

"What he said." Tod continued. "I have experience with civilian relief operations. I think I could be of some use."

The officer politely pretended to read the alien writing on the card, then turned down to look at Tod. "We are short on help. OK. You come with me

I stumbled upon this spec evo video and it reminded me of the weird stuff I'd come up with in middle school, and I mean that in a good way. This gets at the heart of what I like about conworlding as a standalone hobby, seeing people's rough and raw unfiltered imagination.

I think my only qualm is that he pretty quickly ignores the conceit of this being a microbiome inside a Micky D's cup, like there's not much done with the fact that the "land" is crystalized sugar and the "water" is soda or that photosynthesis and conventional vision shouldn't work in the dark. But again, the fact this is rough around the edges is part of why I like it.

Finally something cool for humans! This is a dual grav suit, which is powered armor designed for humans living on the Split Horizon, an orbital colony located in the inner belt of the yinrih's star system. Its most notable feature is the caudal prosthesis, an artificial tail emerging from the middle of the suit's back (rather than the base of the spine as would be expected). It's meant to tether the center of mass to paw cables and tail bars designed for vulpithecine use. The Dual Grav name comes from the fact it's designed to be equally effective in zero G and the centrifugal gravity of the Split Horizon.

The caudal prosthesis works like an octopus tentacle. The human gives a small embedded AI general directions like "grab this" or "anchor me here" and the tail interprets the commands and takes care of the specifics.

The hand print on the pauldron is meant to evoke the red ochre hand prints left by stone age humans found in caves around the world.

Cats, Wolves, Foxes, as well as generic reptiles and birds seem to be pretty well represented. You've also got hyenas in the form of gnolls, as well as frogs. I don't see a lot of insects borrowed wholesale, but plenty of pixie-esque creatures borrow some anatomy here and there like wings and antennae.

One thing I see very little of are domestic dogs. The above mentioned wolves and foxes seem to fill that niche. Shame IMO, as the staggering variety in appearance and behavior of dogs (I believe they're the most phenotypically diverse species known) is excellent fodder for different cultures. Ironically, I myself ended up homogenizing my own diverse canine kobolds into the more vulpine (and less anthropomorphic) yinrih.

Admittedly I didn't have much developed on them, but there were two subraces of kobolds based on corgis that filled the dwarf role (short, hardy, stubborn, and practical) but they were pastoralists as you'd expect of a herding breed.

Primates, even other hominins, would make a great foundation for fantasy races. My previous conworld, whence came the above kobolds, did this, with human subraces based on neanderthals.

Mine's the Eastern Roman Empire during the time of Justinian. The mixture of Greekness and Romanness of its society at the time is in a sweet spot according to my preferences.

Sorry for the double post, but this popped into my head on my way to work this morning and I have to share it before the ADHD kicks in.

'Member the eusocial swarming carnivorous zap rats I mentioned a while back? Well what if they're not just eusocial, but a quasi colonial organism? They're physically stuck together in a manner similar to a rat or squirrel king, perhaps with tree sap, which is how it often happens to squirrels. They learn to not just survive like this, but thrive, coordinating moving, hunting, and feeding.

They don't have a hive or borrow, rather the entire colony, queen, young and all, moves in unison. The queen is at the center of the swarm, constantly popping out little zap ratlings. They're nurtured near the center of the swarm and gradually migrate to the edges of the mass as they age. Food and air are transported inward via vacuoles that form at the periphery and work inward, ditto for waste moving out.

The fittest and strongest members of the swarm form the outer shell, and are responsible for coordinating movement and engaging in combat. Prey is engulfed ameba-style, stunned by the rats' biocapacitors so it can't struggle, and devoured by thousands of tiny mouths.

Wow that went places I wasn't expecting when I started writing this.

I posted a while back about colossal orbital fusion reactors that acted as artificial suns. Here's one I drew in Mario Paint. It's purple because I originally thought of it as a neutron star, but dialed it back a bit later.

Both of these are snippets of stories that I started and then abandoned as my ADHD brain lost interest. The first is a response to someone on the CBB who asked about a human turning into a yinrih, so I wrote about a yinrih turning into a human. The second grew out of a game called Analysis Swap, where the goal was to learn about someone's conlang by interviewing a character in-universe. I was more interested in the role playing/storytelling angle, so wrote this as a continuation after interest in the original analysis swap game petered out.

Human for a Day

“I got some reeeeeaaal good stuff this time.” My dealer glances furtively to either side, then pulls a clear baggie with bright yellow powder from his wallet.

I reach for the goods, but he pulls the baggie away. “Nah-uh! You already got your first hit for free.”

I draw a polymer note from my wallet, but he slaps it out of my paw. “Get out of here with those mineral notes. It's AW tokens or nothing.”

I sigh and hand over a few coins. He sniffs them and brushes them against his whiskers. “The real deal. Fine, here you go.” he tosses the baggie at me and I catch it in my tail.

“This better be worth the price,” I growl.

“Oh trust me, you'll see some cool colors. Just get yourself a trip sitter before you snort it.”

“Yeah whatever.” I emerge from the alley into the perpetual twilight of… whatever this town is called. St. something-or-other, I'm sure. These Hearthsiders, Light-botherers, every one of 'em.

Still a bit drunk from the wind fruit I ate earlier, I stagger back to my luxurious accommodations, a run-down torpor hostel. It smells like pee, despair, and unswept fur. Home sweet home. It sure beats the back of the rail car I was in before. The receptionist is looking straight through me, her jaw lax and tongue flopped out to the side, saliva dribbling onto her forelegs. She's baked out of her mind on Light knows what. At least it doesn't smell like anything I've done before. Maybe it's whatever this stuff is.

I stumble into my little torpor alcove and shut the curtain. It smells slightly less like pee. Maybe they really do housekeeping here. I give my tail a flick, sending the baggie flying into my open paw.

“Trip sitter my cloaca. This stuff can't be that hard.” I mutter as I rip open the sealed baggie with a claw. There isn't even enough powder to cover the pad of my writing claw. I pour the contents onto the tip of my digit, lift my paw to my nostril, and inhale.

“And now we wait,” I whine to myself, flopping down onto the perch that takes up nearly the entire space. My digits start to tingle, then the tip of my tail. The sensation spreads to the rest of my body, and finally to my head. Starry scintillations obscure my vision, the wall in front of me is no longer visible. I feel the perch melt from under my belly and I start falling.

“This is it?” I think. “I'd get a better high licking live bloatfish, and I could have done that for free.”

The disappointment has barely set in when blinding pain shoots through my spine. The pain radiates from nose-tip to tail-tip. At the same time, the tingling vanishes from all four of my outer thumbs. I feel something pressing against my muzzle and pulling at my ears. I start contorting in pain. My tail feels like it's shrinking, and my outer thumbs feel like they're just gone. At the same time, I can feel my spine curving and my hind legs lengthening. The tingling turns into itching, and I start to feel cold air against my body, like someone has shaved my fur.

“Oh void, how long is this trip gonna be?” Something's wrong with my voice. My lips feel bloated and my rhinarium feels dry. My tongue feels much smaller. My words burst out in loud bellows. I slide my tongue over my teeth. Flat, not sharp. I bring my paw to my face. My muzzle is gone. My nostrils point downward from a boney lump jutting over my mouth.

“My eyes, oh Light blind me, what happened to my eyes?!” They're slimy goo-filled orbs. I can feel them sliding around in my skull.

I probe my face, then the rest of my body. My fur is gone, well most of it, anyway. There's still a patch on top of my head, and two ridges of fur above my… whatever these things are, I refuse to call them eyes. My ears can barely move. My tail… Oh Light my tail is gone! My hind legs feel like they've grown a good tailslength. I can't seem to grasp anything with my rear paws.

I fall from the perch with a thud. Has the room gotten smaller? Have I gotten bigger? My outer thumbs seem to have gone the way of my tail. My claws are flat broad plates, and I can feel thin skin across my palms and digits, no pads.

I try to rise to my paws, but something feels… wrong. No, my forepaws shouldn't be on the dirty ground. I rear up on my hind feet and bump my head against the ceiling. I have gotten taller, it seems.

My vision seems to have cleared, but everything looks off. I try to slide my bandpass membranes over my eyes. Nope, no bandpass membranes, either. I stagger out into the hall, still on my hind feet. The receptionist hears the noise and looks over at me and I suddenly feel deeply ashamed. I rip the curtain from the doorway and wrap it around my midsection. There, that's better. Don't ask me why.

I try to catch a whiff of her musk to see what she's feeling, but nothing registers. The whole world smells weaker. At least I can't smell the pee anymore. She gives her head a shake and looks back at me. I can tell she's saying something, but I can barely hear her. She snatches a keyer and slaps a pair of HUD specs on her muzzle, then starts furiously chording away, gawking at me all the while.

I turn around and try to run down the hall toward a side exit. I feel something cold and wet underfoot and look down to see a puddle of, let's hope it's water. I can see my reflection for the first time. Round face, pointy triangular nose, no fur, greasy pale skin, and… oh Light, are THOSE my eyes?! I feel my gut twist and I add the contents of my stomach to the… let's be honest, it's pee, not that I can smell the difference anymore.

I run out the side door into a dusty alley lit by harsh floodlights. I hear the heavy thud of paw gauntlets and see a town guard trotting toward the front entrance to the hostel.

Table Manners

For a few seconds I waver between turning right to head home or to cross the street to go to the restaurant. I look down at my guest. His snout is still angled skyward, glossy wet nose twitching frenetically as he drinks in the aroma of wood smoke. He starts licking his chops as saliva begins to drip from the corners of his black lips.

After a moment's hesitation, I march forward toward the curb cut. My intent now clear, the little asteroid miner begins excitedly prancing forward, thumping his sinewy tail on the pavement. This is definitely not normal yinrih body language. Is he mimicking canine behavior to compensate for his inability to communicate in English? He mentioned other great apes earlier, perhaps he took the initiative to do more research into Terran fauna before his trip here.

I give him a stern look. “I'd quit wagging your tail if I were you. If you don't want other humans to pet you like a dog you should stop acting like one.” He says something that gets drowned out by Tejano music blaring from a passing truck, but seems to heed my admonition, hastily curling his tail around the bag on his back.

I fix my gaze ahead, reaching over to press the button for the crosswalk. My guest blows the curb and enters the intersection at the worst possible time. The light for the cross street is a solid green, and an SUV has already passed the middle of the road on a collision course with the little sophont.

“Woah!” I lunge forward and grab his tail, pulling him out of harm's way. His bag falls off his back and into the gutter, mere inches from the passing vehicle, which speeds by close enough to rustle his whiskers.

It takes some time for him to register what just happened. For a split second his cynoid face flashes with another unreadable emotion, I figure he's less than thrilled I pulled him by the tail. Then he lookes to his right at the swiftly receding vehicle that nearly painted the asphalt with his innards. His expression melts and he presses the top of his head against my knee. This, it turns out, is a gesture of deep gratitude, though it's usually done against the side or chest of the receiver, which human bipedalism renders difficult.

I pluck his bag from the gutter and hand it to him. “Sorry, dude, I guess pedestrian safety isn't something they went over back home.” I point at the crosswalk sign. “See that signal over there?” He gives me an affirmative upward tilt of his muzzle. “When you see the red hand, that means 'don't walk.' When it changes to the picture of a human, that means it's safe to cross. Got it?” He nods in human fashion.

The light cycle has restarted, so we wait a minute or two for our turn to come up again. I spam the button a few more times. “Sometimes you gotta make extra sure it knows you want to cross,” I explain in response to his incredulous look. The signal turns and he looks up at me. “Follow me, and don't run.”

I successfully shepherd the alien across the intersection without making the evening news, and we arrive at the door of Good Ol' Boys' Smokehouse. Upon entering the vestibule, I'm met with an unfamiliar sight. I've been here before, but not since I was a freshman. They definatly didn't have this water feature here last time. It's a wide, shallow basin, no more than a few inches deep. A grate lines either side of the pool, and I can tell by the agitation of the water that it's being vigorously circulated.

My guest doesn't miss a beat. He rolls onto his back and casts off the socks and mittens with relish, then flexes his now freed digits in relief. He passes his now discalced paws under a dispenser sitting at perfect monkey fox height, which deposits a beige powder onto his upturned palms. I watch astonished as he wades into the water. The powder dissolves, blossoming into a soapy slick across the surface, which quickly flows into the intake drain at one side of the pool. He submerges each paw, then draws it out and gives it a dainty shake. He repeats this cleansing ritual a few times, then exits the pool onto a coarse floor mat. He wipes his paws, palms and wrists alike, spreading his digits to remove any remaining dirt from between his paw pads and under his claws.

Bewildered, I glance around and am somewhat taken aback to see another monkey fox. The tawny-furred female is wearing an appropriately sized baseball cap which I recognize as part of the normal employee uniform, with holes to accommodate her upright ears. She notices my confusion at the pool.

“Howdy!” She's made some modifications to her own synth, affecting a surprisingly convincing Texan accent. She's even managed to inject a bit of emotion. She notices that her conspecific is incommunicado and launches into her own well-trodden introduction. “A bit confused, are ya? That's a washing pool. We yinrih need those to keep the place clean. Our hands are also our feet, ya know.”

I'm obviously still perplexed at her presence in this very human establishment. “Oh, my name's Crystal, well, my human name, anyway. I've seen a lot of other yinrih coming in here lately. Some sort of exchange program at the college, right? Well, I'm here from Moonlitter. Know where that is?” My blank stare tells her that I do not. “Well, it's a big planet just outside the Inner Belt, that's where all these exchange volunteers are coming from. Anyway, we have this thing back home. It's like, you know how some places make pups join the military for a few years when they get old enough? I know they do that at some places here on Earth. Anyway, Moonlitter does a similar thing, but they make you work a customer service job, you know, waitress, cashier, that sort of thing. Force you to face the public so you'll treat 'em nice when your older because you were in their paws yourself. Gives you some humility. Anyway, This place here started taking conscripts from Moonlitter, and I jumped at the chance. If I've gotta be a wage slave, might as well serve my time somewhere new and exotic.”

I'd hardly call the middle of literal nowhere Texas “new and exotic” myself, but I suppose anywhere that's twenty five light years from home would be by default.

By now my guest has finished drying his paws and has returned to my side. The hostess notices her fellow monkey fox and greets him with a chuff. He responds in kind and they exchange a few yips and growls of Commonthroat, then she looks up at me again. “Anyhow, better do what I get paid for. Table for two? One human and one yinrih?”

I nod, but Crystal holds up a paw. “Oops, almost forgot,” she says, motioning down at my sneakers with her muzzle. “Those gotta go.” I follow her gaze to a shelf full of shoes just inside the entrance door. “You can keep the socks on,” she adds.

I hesitate momentarily. “Remember, hygiene.” My guest has re-equipped his keyer and is making grasping motions with a free paw. “I know, it's a hassle. Why do you think so many of us live in microgravity?” I remove my shoes and place them on the shelf, silently thanking my past self for putting on matching socks this morning. I look at the two quadrupeds and heave a sigh of resignation.

“Hay, I get it,” Crystal says. “A lot of humans are as uncomfortable not wearing shoes as we are wearing them.”

“It's OK,” I say, “This is why we're having this exchange program in the first place, right? It's all a learning experience.” Crystal summons a human waitress, who grabs a pair of menus and leads us inside.

I recognize our server. We had a few classes together our first few semesters. She's a student at the much larger and better-funded veterinary school. I know through the grape vine that she's the daughter of the owner. She recognizes me, too.

“Hey, don't I know you?” she says as we weave our way around tables, chairs, and other furnishings not designed for the human form. “You're a Linguistics major, right?”

“Yes,” I respond, gawking at the renovations made since First Contact. The tables are lower to the ground, and yinrih perches are scattered among the chairs. The cafeteria counter and large menu display are gone. “Didn't this place used to be a cafeteria?” I ask.

“We got rid of all the self service stuff,” she explains. “Quadrupeds who haven't set foot on a planet's surface their entire lives aren't exactly adept at balancing a tray full of food. Crystal's good enough at it, but she didn't grow up in zero-G. She sometimes covers my shift when I have to study. Puts the serving tray on her back and picks up the plates with her tail. It's really cute.”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but from what I know of your dad, he's the last person I'd expect to bend over backwards like this to attract alien customers,” I say, glancing up at the large Gadston flag hanging proudly on the wall.

“Are you kidding, the Spacers are his kind of people!” she exclaims. “He seriously wants to move to the Spacer Confederacy when he retires. Besides, do you know how much Spacers are willing to pay for real meat?”

She motions for us to sit. And it’s only now that I notice the flag’s “Don’t tread on me” motto is written in Commonthroat.

“What are y’all looking to drink?” she asks as I awkwardly slide my legs under the table and my guest hops up onto the perch, his front end floating over the tabletop.

He looks at the menu. “I didn’t think you’d serve steadtree fruit juice. I’ll have one of those.”

“Make that two,” I add.

“Fermented or fresh?” she asks.

“Make it fresh for me,” says my guest. I nod to concur.

“So,” I begin after the waitress leaves, “What’s this about ‘real’ meat?”

“Orbital colonies aren’t exactly agricultural bread baskets,” my guest explains. “We can subsist on produce grown via hydroponics, and what passes for meat is just fungus grown in a lab and gussied up to approximate the texture of the real thing. We call it ‘leasemeat’. What we can’t make we have to trade for, and real meat is the kind of thing you eat on special occasions. And this cow flesh,” he stops to lick his chops again, “it’s something else, especially smoked. Spacers will pay a day’s wage for just a plate of the stuff back home.”

“Wait, we’re exporting food to Focus now?”

“Yup,” he says, “Wayfarers’ Haven has a mass router dedicated to food imports from Earth.”

The waitress has returned. She sets a glass before me and two bowls in front of my guest. My glass and one of his bowls are filled with what I can only describe as pure liquid blue. It’s like someone found a way to liquify the screen you see when you turn on a TV with no HDMI cable plugged in. It’s so saturated that even in the dim ambiance it hurts my eyes to look at. Floating atop the surface of the liquid is a violet sheen, roiling like the iridescent interference pattern of a soap bubble.

“Don’t worry.” The waitress notices my misgivings. “The FDA just approved that stuff for human consumption… I think. You ready to order?” She asks.

“Give me a few minutes,” says my guest, licking his lips again. “It all looks delicious.”

“Take your time,” she says and walks off.

Looking for an excuse not to imbibe the blue drink, I look at the other bowl given to my guest. It’s filled with water, and a rough hand towel is folded next to it. He dips his paws in the bowl and dries them on the towel. “Hygiene again,” he says, repeating the grasping gesture.

“Is it like this everywhere you go? With those pools, I mean,” I ask.

“Nope, just restaurants and healer’s offices, anywhere health is an issue. Everywhere else you just have that rough floor mat to get the dirt off at the door, but washing pools are also in restrooms. They’re our version of the sink. But yeah, I agree that it’s a huge pain, constantly cleaning your paws. All the more reason why I’m a Spacer.”

He dips his head and noisily laps up some juice from the bowl lying on the tabletop. I suppose monkey fox table manners are all about minimizing contact between paw and food. “Go on,” he urges, “try it.”

I lift the glass to my lips and take a tentative sip. It’s thick and mildly sweet… at first. After about half a second I nearly drop the glass in shock as my face spasms like I’m having a stroke. The most sour flavor I’ve ever tasted assaults my tongue. It’s like an entire bag of Warheads concentrated into a single drop of liquid azure.

“So?” my guest prompts, his whiskers twitching with interest.

“It’s… delicious!” I take a swig and my face contorts in ways I didn’t think possible. Then I chug the rest of the glass and tap the bottom to get every last drop of this divine nectar to trickle onto my tongue. My face aches but I don’t care. Satisfied, I set the glass back down.

“Just wait until you try the fermented stuff,” says my guest, eyes wide and lips loose in an expression of vicarious pleasure.

Okay, so in another life I was a meteorology major. Had to quit two years in because I love math, but it's an unrequited love. I failed calc II twice.

But I do remember some things, and want to use what I remember to see what a typical sounding of Yih's atmosphere looks like. This is an important question that the research monks have to solve. Before they can get to space they have to get in the air.

Yih has the following relevant stats (relative to Earth)

mass: 0.90
radius: 1.01
surface gravity: 0.88

Or in absolute terms:

Mass: 5.37×10^24 kilograms Radius: 6.442×10^6 meters Area: 5.215×10^14 square meters Gravity: 8.63 meters per second squared

Finding the surface pressure is relatively simple. Let's start by assuming the atmosphere of Yih has the same total mass as Earth's atmosphere, 5.1441×10^18 kilograms (side note, WolframAlpha is your friend when doing stuff like this). Since pressure is force divided by area, and since force is mass times acceleration (of gravity in this case), we can get the surface pressure by multiplying the mass of the atmosphere by surface gravity and dividing by total surface area of the planet. So we get the following pressure:

85100 pascals (0.8399 atmospheres)

That's about the same as the station pressure in Denver.

Now that we have a surface pressure, we can try to find out how it changes with height. For reference the pressure at a typical jet cruising altitude is 200 hectopascals.

Per Wikipedia, the change in pressure with height, geopotential height, is the negative of density times gravity.

dP/dh = -rho*g

And the ideal gas law is

P = rhoRT, where R is a constant specific to dry air.

We can rearrange the ideal gas law to solve for density, and substitute it for density in the equation for geopotential height to arrive at

dP/dh = -Pg/(RT)

And that's kinda where I hit a wall. I'm pretty sure this is a differential equation, and here be dragons as far as my brain is concerned.

I wrote this last year to express my frustration at not being able to express my world visually. I have very vivid pictures in my head of things like indoor spaces, pieces of furniture, computers, vehicles, etc, but I can never draw them to my satisfaction.

The process of making art is relaxing for me. I love putting on a video in the background and just putting marks on a digital canvas until something vaguely resembles what I'm imagining. I love the process of going from blank slate to realized idea. But there's only so much I can do.

Anyway, here's an angsty rant thinly disguised as a story.

---

Ron sat in an overstuffed armchair hunched over an iPad, stylus in hand. The tablet's screen cast a feeble bluish-white glow over the rough popcorn ceiling of his darkened living room. The midnight silence was punctuated by the quiet ticks of a cheap wall clock, one that Ron had little use for. It was just a white circle on the wall as far as he was concerned.

The front door quietly opened and closed.

"You're not asleep," Lodestar growled, looking at the shifting glow coming from the tablet. He slipped the wallet from around his foreleg and tossed it onto the table next to the door, then flopped belly up on the loveseat opposite Ron's chair.

"Yeah," said Ron.

"What's that thing you're holding? A pen?" Lodestar asked, waving a paw at Ron's stylus.

"You might as well call it that," said Ron. "It's a drawing stylus." He offered it to Lodestar to examine. He sniffed the stylus and brushed it against his whiskers, then attempted to grip it between his writing claw and inner thumb the way he saw Ron using it.

"...For making visual art?" he asked, awkwardly tracing around the pads of his open paw with the stylus.

"Yes," said Ron, turning the iPad to face Lodestar.

The yinrih cocked his head and fluttered his bandpass membranes, trying to tune his eyes to a frequency range that matched the screen's output. "Is that supposed to be one of us? It's pretty good." Lodestar scented the air and immediately noticed a shift in Ron's emotions.

"But it looks nothing like a yinrih," Ron sighed. "Do you know how frustrating it is to be a blind member of an overwhelmingly visual species?"

Lodestar stared in silence at the random pattern of ridges on the ceiling.

"I have so many ideas in my head, ideas I want to bring to life, but my eyes get in the way."

"Have you tried an art form that's less visual? You said that statue in the library was made by a blind sculptor. It looks amazing."

"Yeah, sculpting... with expensive supplies and a big studio. Digital art has the lowest barrier to entry and its out of my reach. Sure I'll get better, but I'll never get good."

"If you enjoy making it, does it matter if it's good?"

"But I want to enjoy making art that's also worth looking at."

"I'm not blind," said Lodestar, "and blind yinrih don't have it as bad as you do. Our nose and ears and paws get just as much use as our eyes, so losing vision isn't as much of a problem. All this to say I'm afraid I can't sympathize. But I'll be here for you for as long as you need me to be, bad art or good art. I hope that counts for something."

"It does," said Ron, rising to his feet and stretching. "that means a lot."

This is the original overview of the Lonely Galaxy (not yet named so) that I posted to the worldbuilding subreddit. A lot has changed or grown in the years since. The biggest is probably the yinrih's body plan. They're still depicted as bipedal here. The taboo regarding eating in public (shamelessly ripped from an episode of Star Trek TNG) was hard to develop, so I dropped it.

As a bit of IRL backstory, the Lonely Galaxy started out as a maladaptive daydream in reaction to an extremely stressful time in my life. In addition to the certification exam mentioned in the original post, which I never did pass even after five more attempts plus two more on a different track, I was dealing with a family member in the hospital with sepsis, as well as coming to terms with the aging of my then retired, now late, guide dog. Since I couldn't handle the real world, I made my own that made sense to me.

---

I’ve been hyperfocusing on this all week, but I’m supposed to be studying for a very expensive certification exam, so I was hoping I could finally put this out of my mind by sharing it. It isn’t part of a larger project or story, and likely never will be. I suck at drawing, writing, pretty much anything “creative”. just the product of idle daydreaming when I should be studying. So I present for your consideration, the Monkey Fox! This was basically born out of me pondering the Fermi Paradox, and also feeling kind of lonely. I also wanted to play with some of the typical First Contact tropes, so instead of our rationalist heroes fighting off religious fanatics trying to blow them up (see Contact) it’s the religious people desperately looking for aliens. I also think the idea of space Mormons is kind of funny in an endearing way. The aliens, while much further along on the tech tree, so to speak, aren’t part of a galaxy spanning multi-species civilization that humans haven’t found yet. They’re all alone, crying out into the void just like us. I originally conceived of them as more dog like to signify their status as Man’s new best friend, an intelligence that isn’t our own that can walk through the hardships of life alongside us. It’s not organized; it’s just a bunch of ideas.

Anatomy: They’re about 4 feet high on average, with bodies covered in fur save for the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. They have two arms and two legs, as well as a tail. The hands, feet, and tail are prehensile, and the feet look like slightly larger hands. Speaking of hands, they have six digits, with an arrangement like humans’ but with an extra thumb on the other side of the hand. One of the digits on each hand contains an ink sac, with the claw being modified into a sort of pen nib. So they have a natural writing utensil. The torso and limbs are proportioned like a human’s (hence “monkey”). The head looks vulpine (hence “fox”) with a muzzle, rhinarium (wet nose), and erect, triangular, well-furred ears.

Yinrih are the sort of small, furry critter that triggers a human’s nurturing instincts. After all, they look like a cross between a fox, a red panda, and a lemur. The only physical feature that mars this otherwise adorable image is the eyes. They’re black, as in no pupil, iris, or sclera, and there’s no reflection whatsoever. This appearance is due to the structure of the surface of the eye, which consists of millions of nanoantennas that couple with the ambient electromagnetic radiation the same way a radio antenna does. The result looks disquietingly like they have empty eye sockets.

Natural History: Before “asking ‘why’”, which is their term for achieving sapience, they were social tree-dwelling carnivorous animals living in large “family” groups, though see below for why “family” is in quotes. The natural pen finger was used to mark territory. They grouped together for protection from larger predators and to make reproduction easier, but they hunted alone and did not share their kills. Kits were expected to hunt as soon as they were weaned. This food strategy will have a huge impact on their culture later. They began asking “why” around the same time as modern humans, so around a hundred thousand years. However, they reached level II on the Kardashev scale (consuming 100% of their sun’s output) around the time we discovered agriculture. The secret to their rapid development lies in the fact that they didn’t invent written language, they evolved it. They’ve been able to preserve information between generations for as long as they’ve been speaking. This is in sharp contrast to humans, who only invented writing around 5000 years ago.

Reproduction: If you could come up with a procreation method that you could explain to a class of kindergarteners without blushing, this would probably come close. Monkey Foxes are monotremes (well, they evolved convergently into monotreme-like creatures). The females lay eggs and sweat milk from the palms of their hands to feed kits, hence the common oath “by the palms that nursed me!” The males also ley “eggs”. Technically they’re spermatophores, but they’re still called “eggs”. Female eggs have yolk sacs while male spermatophores do not. The males do not produce milk. Both genders have a cloaca and lack external sex organs. Upon reaching sexual maturity, members of the den will start laying eggs, and females will produce milk, all on a regular nesting schedule. When breeding season comes around, sexually mature den members put their eggs and spermatophores into a central nest. A protective membrane forms over the clutch and forms a sort of external womb. The eggshells dissolve, and the combined genetic material from all the contributing parents mixes into a soup, which is then used to form zygotes which eventually grow into a litter of kits. The kits feed off the yolk sacs from the female eggs while in utero. The number of kits in a litter depends on the number of contributing parents.

There’s no intercourse, and Monkey Foxes completely lack a sex drive. This means that human concepts revolving around reproduction like courtship, marriage, or the concept of having a mother and a father that you can point to as your progenitors don’t really compute for Monkey Foxes. Kits are raised by the grownup den members together. The phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” is literal in their case. Uninformed humans often mistake the Monkey Foxes’ lack of “Eros”, as C.S. Lewis would term it, to mean they’re cold and emotionless, or that they’re somehow an entire race of uptight prudes. The fact that most Monkey Foxes interacting with humans are missionaries only reinforces this misconception. You can no more praise a Monkey Fox for his chastity than you can accuse a bald man of having red hair or measure the temperature of the vacuum of space.

Monkey Foxes do know what “love” is, in the sense of “willing the good of the beloved” and they are more than capable of forming friendships and acting selflessly for the sake of others. They do, of course, have their own cultural taboos and disordered appetites, and unfortunately some of those taboos intersect with human customs that we would find not only normal, but necessary.

Customs: Because Monkey Foxes lack the concept of modesty, and because they have fur, clothing is optional. Any clothing that is worn is utilitarian, like hats for shade or raincoats to keep dry. Monkey Foxes living and working on earth will wear clothes to better fit in with humans. We humans say a lot with what we wear, after all. When on their native world, the more communicative function of clothing is filled by perfumes. Their stronger sense of smell means they can detect individual volatile compounds that combine to make up a single odor. So, where a human police officer would wear a uniform and a badge to let others know what he’s doing and who he is, a Monkey Fox police officer would have a particular scent that communicated the same. Luckily for us what a Monky Fox thinks smells good largely overlaps with what a human thinks smells good, so nobody’s strolling around smelling like a broken gas line.

The big “hangup” in Monkey Fox culture surrounds eating. Because their ancestors hunted and ate alone, they have a strong resource guarding instinct, and altercations around food can and do lead to serious injuries. Eating in public is shockingly taboo for Monkey Foxes, though that’s not to say there aren’t people who do it anyway. Normally, Monkey Foxes eat once every week or two, and enter a state of torpor for about 24 to 48 hours immediately after, which functions like sleep for humans. Monkey Foxes do not sleep in between meals. The food itself is bland, not unlike hard tack or, as technology progressed, a dietetically engineered flavorless nutrient paste. Drinking publicly is fine, although it’s also rather plain, with the only elaboration being the addition of alcohol for relaxation or caffeine for stimulation. Most Monkey Fox faiths have strict restrictions surrounding eating, not unlike how sex is seen in human culture. Even talking about your feeding habits is the sort of delicate conversation reserved for medical professionals and religious confessors.

This eating issue is a huge cultural barrier when Monkey Foxes first meet humans. Humans, as I’m sure you know, have a ton of social and religious traditions around food. Sacred hospitality is a very common human custom and naturally the first go-to for a human to make a guest feel welcome is to offer them something to eat.

First Contact: The dominant faith in Monkey Fox culture is called the Bright Way. The Bright Way can be traced back to nearly the beginning of Monkey Fox history, which again, is around 100 thousand years. It’s had its ups and downs, taking turns as persecutor and victim, with plenty of peaceful tolerance (in the sense of putting up with something you disagree with for the sake of social harmony) in between. Apologists will put forward, half-jokingly, that surest proof of the Bright Way’s divine mandate is that it’s managed to survive so long despite the profound stupidity of its leaders. However, around the time of First Contact, much of Monkey Fox society has secularized, and most who self-identify as believers are merely culturally attached rather than practicing members. The central tenant of this faith is that Monkey Foxes are to be apostles to the rest of the universe. “Go and spread your light to the stars, and ye shall become brighter yourselves.” is a common scriptural quotation.

Religious doctrine requires that there be other sapient species out there, but much like humanity’s attempts at finding aliens, the Monkey Foxes have had no luck thus far, even though they discovered radio while we humans were still squatting in a ditch poking berries up our noses. Being confronted with the Fermi Paradox is a big reason why The Bright Way has lost relevance. There’s not much point in preaching to the blind infinity, after all.

Monkey Foxes who claim to have encountered aliens are the same sort of people who on earth would claim to see Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun, and they’re dismissed off hand even by the otherwise devout. That’s not to say the faithful haven’t made serious, intellectually rigorous efforts to find ETs. This pursuit occupies a similar cultural position as missionaries do on Earth. They’d been sending probes, launching manned vessels, and otherwise screaming into the void for longer than we humans could possibly imagine, and they were only greeted with empty, pitiless indifference.

A typical Monkey Fox missionary journey went like this: build a pod about as big as The Titan, except hopefully less implodey, stick a dude inside, put them into hypersleep, and yeet the pod in the general direction of a star system with a planet in the habitable zone. If the onboard AI doesn’t pick up artificially generated radio signals after orbiting the planet for a while, begin the long journey back home. If, however, the computer detects artificial radio signals, the ship pulls the intrepid explorer out of hypersleep, whereupon he or she would put on their best ironed white dress shirt and tie (or cultural equivalent) grab their Good Book, and get ready to go door to door spreading the good news.

Of course, even at the relativistic speeds achievable by current Monkey Fox technology, these round trips take hundreds of years at a minimum. This might seem unmanageable, but Monkey Foxes regularly live at least 600 earth years, and don’t age at all in hypersleep. Certain ground crew members would also be popsicled in parallel with their missionary charges in order to preserve institutional continuity. Also keep in mind that, to a species whose cultural memory extends back to the dawn of their very existence as a sapient race, it really isn’t that long at all. They also have some tricks up their nonexistent sleeves for preventing “generation gap” from developing between the long absent traveller and the folks at home.

While it’s called “hypersleep” it’s really more of a way to halt metabolism while keeping the brain active and connected to the Monkey Fox version of the Matrix, which they call the Data Plane. While they haven’t figured out how to send matter faster than light, instant information transfer is possible thanks to The Underlay, a kind of subspace that allows superluminal communication. Interstellar vessels are equipped with an Underlay tunnel endpoint, with a corresponding endpoint located back home. Missionaries are able to interact with mission control and their loved ones back home via the Data Plane, sort of like a Clarke’s Third Law version of Zoom. Having said that, interstellar missionaries probably won’t ever see their loved-ones in the flesh again, so it is customary to hold a living funeral for friends who are preparing to venture into the infinite unknown.

Language: Monkey Foxes and humans have very different vocal tracts, and cannot directly produce one-another’s speech sounds. Any “loanwords” from one language to another, are thus more properly seen as onomatopoeia attempting to mimic the other creature’s speech sounds. Monkey Fox vocal articulation happens mostly in the chest, throat, and nostrils, with the mouth, tongue, and teeth barely involved at all. To a human, Monkey Fox speech sounds, rather adorably, like a dreaming dog, so lots of quiet growling, yipping, and breathing through the nose. It’s also frustratingly quiet by human standards. The best approximation of a Monkey Foxe’s word for their own species is yinrih, which, again, sounds more like a pair of quiet yips ending on a sharp nasal exhalation. Rather unhelpfully, the word translates roughly as “of the earth” or “from the ground” or in other words “earthling”, go figure.

As far as how we sound to the Yinrih, we’re basically constantly screaming. If you’re an American, you’re probably used to this reaction anyway. It is possible for us to understand what the other is saying, although the yinrih are most comfortable when we’re talking just above a whisper, and we have to be in a pretty quiet environment to hear what they’re saying. Eventually humans and Yinrih develop a lingua franca sign language to communicate directly. Their body plan and ours is similar enough for this to work.

Yinrih aren’t terribly strong compared to a human. An unarmed human could easily kill an unarmed Yinrih. However, it’s a good thing to remember that Yinrih civilization as a whole reached level II on the Kardashev scale around the same time humans discovered agriculture. While they’re not quite “sufficiently advanced aliens”, some of there tech flirts with Clarke’s Third Law, like the aforementioned underlay tunnel endpoints.

While the Yinrih are much further along technologically than us, the fact that they’ve been able to write since they became sapient means they’ve missed out on a lot of very hard lessons that we humans have had to learn. Since we spread out across the globe millennia before inventing written communication, we’ve had to “rediscover” our fellow humans. When we think about contacting alien intelligences, we often pattern the experience after these historical instances. Yinrih culture never sundered completely after the dawn of their species, so they’re far more homogenous as a result. One could compare the full spectrum of Yinrih culture to that of the Romance-speaking areas of the former Roman Empire. Sure there are different languages and cultures, but they’re all pretty recognizably related. There’s no Yinrih equivalent to the Basque people or Native American groups. This lack of experience with culture shock means that the Yinrih have a much harder time meeting humans than we have meeting them. In spite of all that, the Yinrih are eager to get to know us better.

Even though first contact is established for religious reasons, the missionaries have made it clear that “conversion by the sword” is strictly off the table. The long history of The Bright Way means that believers have had plenty of experience as both persecutor and persecuted, and they don’t want to repeat that cycle. Nevertheless, they are not indifferentists, and will happily debate those whose views differ from theirs. They may not change their mind, but they’ll at least change the subject. Unfortunately there are other Yinrih factions besides the Bright Way, and they’re not as eager to engage in peaceful cultural exchange.

The biggest of these less than friendly factions are the Partisans. Historians differ on why exactly they formed. Some say they were a hardline religious sect, others say they were anticlerical iconoclasts. Most likely it’s a little of column A, a little of column B. If you think that’s impossible, you’ve never heard of the horseshoe effect. The Partisans occupy a large swath of territory on the fringes of the Yinrih’s home star system.

I'm stuck between Reddit's platform decay and Lemmy's... Lemmy-ness. Sigh. This community is pretty good though.

From the perspective of the outside universe, the planet Hestia experienced a brief solar eclipse only a few standard UCC years ago. From the perspective of those on the surface, thousands of years in darkness passed due a time dilation effect by the interaction between primordial crystals on the planet and moon.

A CYCOL military force that had been landed to harass the human colony was cut off. They developed a method to reproduce without a nodesphere, and their culture changed over the long timespan. Tranq is a distant descendant of the original CYCOL in the planet. Like all CYCOL, its brain is still entirely organic, but it doesn't have a humanoid mechanical body that its distant ancestors had.

Tranq is shown here deep inside the ruins of the human colony, evading the attention of the post-human offshoot species that now haunts the old buildings.

From what I remember, most (all?) of the heat in the atmosphere, or at least in the troposphere, comes from the ground, with convection carrying heat into the upper atmosphere.

Looking at my temperature graph from my weather station in my backyard, overnight the temp dropped about 1 Freedom Unit per hour. So at the absolute quickest, and assuming an average surface temperature of 60 F when the sun vanishes, here's what I have

Atmospheric gas	melting point (F)	hours until gas begins condensing	days until gas begins condensing
water	32	28	1.166666667
CO2	-70	130	5.416666667
argon	-307	367	15.29166667
N2	-346	406	16.91666667
O2	-361	421	17.54166667

This is likely way too fast, as I believe the colder you are, the less heat you lose. Also, melting/boiling points depend on the surrounding pressure, which will get effected by the other gases precipitating. 70 below isn't unheard of, and the coldest temp ever reached was -128 in Antarctica.

What do you think. IDK I'm le tired.

As the regulars here are no doubt aware, the whole hook of my Lonely Galaxy project is that our first contact is also the aliens' first contact. I've spent over a year picking away at the actual story of how the yinrih first met humans, but could never figure out how to finish it.

Most of what follows is going to be scrapped, as I'm trying to rewrite this to incorporate the backstories of each of the missionaries to make them more fleshed out as characters while also explaining why finding humans is so important to them. The actual worldbuilding content is likely going to remain the same, and hopefully be elaborated, so for the sake of giving this community some content I figured I'd post it despite it being a draft. Then again, I consider every story a draft, as I'm not a writer and have no intention of publishing this.

Each section of the story takes place from a different character's POV. As usual when I'm not feeling lazy, alien speech is given in Italian quotes.

---

The golden rays of the westering sun soak into my fur, and I feel the warm sand under my palms erode as gentle waves lap at my paws.

«How long have I been standing here?» I wonder.

A whisper responds, «It doesn't matter. There is no before, no after. There is only now.»

«Where is this place again?» I think to myself.

«It doesn't matter. There is no elsewhere. There is only here.» says the voice again.

«Now what was my name again?» I ask myself.

«It doesn't matter. There is no one else to call you by name. There is only you, there has only ever been you, there will only ever be you, forever blissful in this little world of mine.»

A panic rises in my gut. «Shut up, damn it all! My name is Ringlight! I was hatched on Pilgrims' Rest to four... no, six sires and dams. Their names are... are...» I grasp futilely at distant memories, from another life... someone else's life.

«Are you alright?» another voice drags me out of the abyss. I snap my head around to face its source and am met with a snowy visage. I hastily glance behind me, following her paw prints back to a bonfire crackling in the sand just out of reach of the waves, the rising smoke partially obscuring a stand of trees further away.

She smells worried. «You were starting to dissociate again.»

«Dissociate?» I try to reorient my mind, focusing on her whiskers twitching with concern. «Who are you?» I ask, «You look familiar.»

«He started fading again, didn't he?» another yinrih, ruddy-pelted and black-eared, trots up to us from beside the fire.

«Come on, buddy, what's my name?» he presses.

«S-Steadfast Friend,» I mutter hesitantly.

«Good, and the big guy over there?» He points his muzzle at a massive male lounging in a tree behind the fire, his blue-gray fur blending with the smoke.

«Lodestar,» I say, a bit more confidently.

«And this scrawn-job next to you?» He says, playfully gesturing at the diminutive white-furred female who pulled me out of my haze.

«I can't help being the runt of my litter!» she retorts, but stops to await my answer.

«Iris.»

«What about ol' big-ears? What's her name?» He indicates another female walking along the beach toward the group. Her red pelage matches my interrogator's, but her ears aren't black like his.

«Sunshine.»

«Excellent, and where are we, really?» says the redpelt, tracing an arc with his muzzle indicating our surroundings.

I sit on my haunches and tug at my ear with a rear paw, trying to drag a long-forgotten memory out of the depths. «We're... We're on Sweetwater? wait... no!» I bark, causing Iris to jump. «This isn't real! We're not standing on a beach on Sweetwater. My body is floating in an amnion aboard a womb ship, hurtling through the interstellar void at relativistic speed. Every external stimulus entering my nervous system is the result of a simulacrum generated by a computer, all to prevent me from going mad from the lack of sensory input.»

«He's back!» my questioner barks toward the tree. Lodestar hops down and pads up to us. An odor of relief meets my nose ahead of his approach.

«We just finished singing vespers,» Iris says, tossing her muzzle behind her at the liturgical bonfire. «I could smell your panic. This is the second time today that you've started to dissociate. You should really be singing the liturgies with us. It helps keep your mind anchored in reality.»

«I wish I could, but--»

She interrupts. «If you can't pray, then just listen. Be present.» She pauses to choose her next words. «If we don't make contact you'll have another week of suspension, subjectively speaking, to go before we get back to Focus, and we've got to keep you with us.»

«When we don't make contact, you mean,» I think to myself, my pessimism getting the better of me.

She backs up to face the four of us. «We all hear the voice,» she says, «and we've all been trained on how to combat it. I have faith in every one of you. We've all passed the suspension screenings, yes even you, Ringlight. I never misrepresented you to my superiors.»

«Wait,» I look around. «There was someone else, right? He has black fur. Stormlight, where's Stormlight.»

«He went to check the ship's comms. We should be arriving... soon-ish,» says Sunshine. «Well, a few years realtime, anyway.» Just as she finishes, Stormlight's avatar coalesces into existence, shuddering slightly as his time perception contracts to match our own.

Every muzzle in the group whips around to face him. The melange of emotion wafting off of him overpowers everything else, the smokey wood, warm sand, and salty sea spray are utterly eclipsed by the aroma of elation and trepidation.

«I-- you-- It's-- OK, OK, OK,» he babbles, frantically lashing his tail in a «follow me» gesture. The beach flickers away like an extinguished flame. The warm yielding sand under my palms is replaced by what feels like cold metal. A neon purple grid stretches to infinity around us, embedded in an inky void. A teal-colored hue washes over Iris's candid pelt, emitted from an invisible light source overhead, turning the fur of the two redpelts to a muddy brown. Stormlight is barely visible, the black fur on his back highlighted with a turquoise sheen.

We've been ripped out of our contracted time perception into realtime, from a simulation of a golden beach on Sweetwater to the spartan realm of the Dewfall's operating system environment.

By now the rest of us have begun to stink of excitement as well. Stormlight wordlessly executes a command gesture with his tail, causing a sphere of coruscating white brilliancy to materialize before us, an output interface from the womb ship's realspace radio receiver.

At first only white noise meets our ears, the incorporeal light sphere flickering randomly to match the chaos fed through the ship's antenna array into the signal processor. The exact same scene has played out countless times over the millennia for an uncountable number of missionaries, and for every single one of them, nothing ever emerged from the noise but the random perturbations permeating the blind uncaring cosmos. And yet...

Something faint, barely discernible over the rushing static, begins tickling my ears. A pure tone, sounding jerky and random at first, materializes into a pounding cadence...

dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah. Dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah. Dah-di-dah-dit dah-dah-di-dah.

A SIGNAL!

---

Iris plunges the metal poker into the liturgical bonfire as Lodestar concludes the final hymn, and another vespers comes to a close. Ringlight is off by himself as usual, staring into the offing as Focus hangs low over the water. I wish he'd at least be with us during liturgy.

I guess he just doesn't have it in him anymore. Makes me ache a little inside. He used to be so devout. His faith was what kept the shadows at bay. Me and him, we both struggle with depression. I think that's why we got along so well as pups. I think he has it harder than me though. People get to know me and can see why I have a hole in my soul. All but two of my sires and dams dead, and the rest of my litter mates stillborn. «Of course YOU have a reason to be sad, but him? His childermoot and litter mates love him, and he doesn't want for anything. Why is he so glum all the time? Why doesn't he just cheer up?» They just don't get it...

I look over at Iris and give her a quick ear flick to let her know I'm popping out of the simulacrum to check the Dewfall's comms. I don't have to leave, strictly speaking, but our nervous systems are slowed by a factor of 7600 while in sim. Decades go by back home while mere hours pass for us lounging on this ersatz beach on pseudo-Sweetwater. It's much easier to react to stuff in realtime.

Just before the sim melts away I catch a whiff of panic coming from Ringlight. Is he dissociating again? That'd be the second time today, well, subjectively speaking. That's why I wish he'd at least be with us for the liturgies. This is the whole reason the mission planners were so cagey about letting him come with us. Yeah he passed the suspension screenings, but you're not in sim for 250 years realtime for those. You're not exposed to the Voice for that long. If he can't pray, if he can't meditate, if he can't sing the liturgies, he's that much more vulnerable to the Voice. Iris swore up and down that she could keep him anchored. She's managed it so far, but it has to be exhausting to puppysit him like this. Void, it's exhausting for ME just watching.

Admittedly that's the other reason I duck out of the sim. The Voice isn't so strong in the operating system. Never goes away completely, but even Ringlight could brush it off out here. Of course hanging out in the OS environment for 250 years WILL drive you nuts, which is why the simulacrum exists in the first place. You need sensory input to stave off the insanity, but that sensory input is what causes the Voice.

The last thing I see is Iris bounding over to the waves where Ringlight is silently panicking, then my whole reality pops like a soap bubble. I fight a wave of nausea as the chemical cocktail my physical body is pickled in alters to return my time perception to normal. Part of me wishes we could just hang out here. There's something about the OS environment. Maybe it's the air, well, I'm calling it air, anyway. It's not hot, it's not cold, it's not too humid or too dry. It's just... there. I know it's because the amnion isn't stimulating my thermoreceptors, and I know I'd go bonkers eventually, but compared to that humid beach, it's a relief.

I gather myself after the queasiness passes. The neon magenta grid floor expands endlessly around me, receding into the black infinity. My whiskers and the wet part of my nose catch the cyan light streaming down from above. I always look up expecting to see a turquoise sun shining down on me, but there's nothing there but blackness. Sometimes I wonder why the OS looks like it does. Someone designed it like this. Why the grid? Why this specific color of lighting? Why do I like it so much? It's a particular aesthetic I can't put my paw on, but it scratches a very specific itch in my farspeaker brain.

I gesture with my tail to pull up the latest messages received through the ansible network. It's only been a few hours as far as my brain is concerned but years worth of missives from back home flood the featureless black around me.

«New High Hearthkeeper takes charge of the Eternal Hearth,» reads a headline from eleven years ago.

«Good riddance,» I grunt out loud to nobody. Whoever we got has to be better than that witch who tried to suppress the missionaries again. I still blame her for causing Ringlight to lapse. She was awfully chummy with the Partisans, too...

I catch myself fuming again. Why do I even look at the news? It's never anything good, and it's certainly not anything I can do anything about. Light willing we'll be among other sophonts soon anyway and I can just forget about Focus.

Sophonts---that's right! How far along are we? I swish my tail, banishing the miserable headlines swarming around me like angry insects. We should have entered the star system by now. A star chart ripples into view, showing the Dewfall's course relative to our destination exoplanet. It's a little blue marble, the third planet out from its star, nestled perfectly in the habitable zone. Long range surveys from Focus detected a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere at perfect pressure. Gravity is a bit higher than on Yih, but nothing yinrih can't handle. Oh, and liquid water, absolutely everywhere. Nearly three quarters of the world's surface is covered in it.

We've crossed the orbit of the fourth planet. By the time I jump back in sim to tell the others about what I've found, we'll be in orbit around our destination. My tail twitches as I hesitate. Do I check the realspace radio? I feel that particular flavor of dread you get when you know you have to do something, but refuse to do it because you know you won't like what you find. One hundred millennia---that's how long we yinrih have been searching for intelligent life among the stars, bone not of our bone, flesh not of our flesh, but souls like unto our own. I feel like this is the moment of truth, but can't bring myself to patch in the radio.

I flop down onto the floor. The nice thing about being in the OS while everyone else is in sim is that I can dawdle as long as I want, and they'll just think I was gone for a fraction of a second. I could just stare out into the magenta horizon for however many months we've got to go before arriving. Of course, it only takes a few days to lose your mind out here, Voice not required. I could last longer if the others were with me, but the OS wasn't designed to be lived in.

I roll over onto my back and stare up into the invisible cyan sun, thumping my tail on the virtual floor. I'm doing everything I can to avoid that blasted radio. I've---We've all been dreading this day since we climbed into our amnions aboard the Dewfall. Deep down, we know we won't find anything. Nobody's ever found anything. None of our long range surveys, none of our missions have ever come across so much as a microbe. We've been howling into the cosmos all this time, searching for other minds like ours, but in the end we'll always be utterly alone.

We'll limp back to Focus, our Sires and dams gone and our litter mates and friends ancient and gray-muzzled. This 24-day vacation will have cost us five hundred years. Lacrimal fluid starts dripping from my lips, the red liquid vanishing into the black fur of my cheeks. I lost all but two of my parents and the rest of my litter before I even knew them. Now I've thrown away what time I had left with my surviving sire and dam.

Maybe Ringlight is right after all. Maybe it's all nonsense. Comforting and beautiful, but nonsense all the same. An illusory bulwark against the inevitable existential dread that comes with understanding our mortality and our insignificant place in the universe, the curse of sapience.

Welp, let's get this over with. I rise to my paws. I dig my claws into the unyielding digital ground and tense up as though preparing to be struck. Eyes scrunched closed, ears pinned back, head lowered, I hastily perform the tail gesture to summon the output interface for the radio.

The high pitched whistle of a heterodyne grates at my ears. «Just internal noise,» I think, but then the tone abruptly stops. Then it comes back again, then stops again. «Something's wrong with the digital signal processor,» I growl aloud. The sound continues.

Slowly, a rhythm emerges, and I start tapping my left writing claw in time with the beat.

long, short, long, short, pause, long, long, short, long.

«It's a pattern...»

«NO!» I bark, «It's a SIGNAL!»

I jab my tail in the air. The pulsating white sphere representing the radio output unfurls into a spectrum waterfall. The signal I've been hearing flows down the display.

dash, dot, dash, dot, pause, dash, dash, dot, dash. I increase the frequency domain to survey more of the spectrum. Dozens of these narrow-bandwidth signals cascade down the waterfall on either side of the first.

I input more gestures, sliding the frequency oscillator hither and thither across the spectrum. Different types of signals flit across the display, none as narrow as that first beeping cadence. Signals of all types, amplitude, frequency, and phase modulated signals, both discrete and continuous. Some of these are surely modulated speech. I tune to a particularly strong AM signal, tail quivering in anticipation. What do these sophonts sound like?

🎵_Roráte caéli désuper, et núbes plúant jústum_🎵

Singing... words? They can put words to a melody! Hisses, hushes, pops, trilling growls, loose and flowing sonorous sounds all caress my ears like a cool breeze on a hot day. There are more kinds of sounds in that one snatch of song than in every yinrih language combined. I have no idea what the words mean. It could be a drunken ballad for all I care. Right now it sounds as beautiful as a hymn to the Uncreated Light.

I drift into an ecstasy, my earlier doubts forgotten. I swim in a shimmering sea of invisible light dancing to the chorus of a hundred thousand inaudible voices. My mind floats in this alien noosphere for hours uncounted.

I come out of my reverie. How long have I been standing here? My paw pads ache and my joints are stiff. I notice my muzzle, chest, and forelegs are soaked in red tears, and a crimson puddle has collected around my forepaws. I stretch my legs and flex my digits, listening to another heavenly transmission from our new friends.

"AT THE TONE, THE TIME IS: TWELVE HOURS, THIRTY THREE MINUTES, COORDINATED UNIVERSAL TIME---" *BEEEEEEEEEEP*

I heave a contented sigh. «Music to my ears...»

---

We stand in silent awe for a moment. Sunshine is quietly weeping as the beeping continues. It seems to strain against the noise, a lonely soul crying out for someone, anyone, to respond. Dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah. dah di dah dit, dah dah dih dah. dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah. Dah di dit, dit.

Stormlight flicks his tail, tuning the radio to a random frequency. For a moment the static resolves into an alien voice before fading back into the noise.

"They're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats--"

«Is that language? It's... beautiful,» Sunshine says between deep shuddering breaths. «I don't know what those words mean, but I'm sure it's profound.»

I walk up to Ringlight and thump him across his piebald back with my tail. «How are you holding up?»

He coughs. «What, Lodestar? If you're going to ask me what I believe in now that we've found other sophonts--»

«Actually I wanted to see how you're fairing after your near dissociation earlier. Stormlight popped back in sim and gave us the news before I could ask.»

«I'm alright.» He smells like he wants to say something else but swallows his words.

«You think you've been a burden,» I say. «And you're not wrong. Iris had to drag you back from the brink of total dissociation four times.»

«Five times,» he corrects.

«Five times,» I continue. «But You're our friend, and bearing each other's burdens is what friends are for.»

Iris taps her claws on the ground to get our attention. «Alright, everyone. Before we can land we need to introduce ourselves to our new friends, and before we can do that, we need to figure out how to communicate with them.» She turns to Stormlight. «What have you gleamed from their radio comms?»

«Most of the signals are coming from the planet's surface. Looking back through the receiver logs there were a pawful of faint sources scattered around the solar system, a few on their moon and the fourth planet, and some very faint transmissions from just outside the system. Everything beyond their planet's low orbit seems to be an uncrewed drone. Most of the signals are digital, but there's still plenty of analog traffic.»

Iris tugs at her ear. «And we know from the lack of biosignatures on any of the other planets that nothing has been terraformed.»

She turns to Steadfast Friend. «How about you, soldier?»

«Uh-uh, if you're going to talk to me like I'm still in the military you gotta use my call sign.»

«But it's disgusting.»

He narrows his eyes and pins his ears back. «I'm waiting, my dame.»

«P-puke Paws,» she nearly gags, «What do the visuals say?»

He chuckles and looks back at Ringlight. «I ever tell you how I got that name?»

«Yes yes yes.» Iris flicks her tail to shush him. «Please, just tell us what you're getting from the vid feeds.»

Puke Paws pulls up a vid screen floating in mid-air. With each flick of his tail the screen flips between the video sensors dotted around the Dewfall's exterior. «We're just past their moon.» An airless crater-pocked sphere appears onscreen.

«That's no moon,» Sunshine objects. «It's way to big to be a moon of a planet this size.»

«Well lucky them, I guess,» he flicks his ears back. «Lots of real estate once they get around to terraforming it.»

«I can't even imagine the tides,» says Sunshine.

Steadfast Friend flicks his tail again, and the image changes. «This is their largest artificial satellite.»

«It's all solar panels,» says Sunshine. «Solar panels bolted to a bunch of tubes.»

«But they're pressurized tubes,» says Steadfast Friend, «at least according to the sensors. That means they've got spacers. All in all I'd say they're about where we were... 95 thousand years ago.»

Iris turns back to Stormlight. «How do you think we should make ourselves known?»

the farspeaker begins pacing excitedly. «Lucky for you I know the history of our order.» He makes another tail gesture to bring up the radio again, tuned to a rhythmic beeping signal similar to the first one we heard. «Before we broke through Yih's atmosphere, when the research monks were first dipping their paws into unpowered flight, they quickly discovered that they needed a deeper understanding of the wind and weather.»

«What does this have to do with communicating with alien sophonts?» Sunshine asks, somewhat annoyed that Stormlight isn't getting to the point. Iris gives her a stern look and motions for Stormlight to continue.

Stormlight resumes his history lesson, positively stinking with joy that his obscure interests are proving useful. «In order to understand what the weather will be in the future, you need to get the big picture. It's not enough to know what the weather is around you, you need to know what's going on upwind, downwind, all over. But learning that a squall is headed your way is only useful before the storm hits.

«The obvious solution in an era before satellites, that is, is to have every research monastery make a note of the weather conditions in their area at the same time and send the reports to a central location to be marked on a map. Well, at that time we couldn't send a message faster than it could be carried, so the monks set to work on solving the problem of transmitting information beyond line of sight in real time.

«There were some marginal successes with signal towers, where people would stand on top of tall structures and relay tail signals to one another, but that still required line of sight, and even though it was faster than carrying a letter, it still took hours to send a message a meaningful distance.

«Plenty of attempts had been made to use an electric current to carry a message, and some of them even worked, but every one of them proved too complex to build and maintain. Multiple wires, fault-prone receiving equipment, stuff like that. That's where Saint Redclaw came in, the founder of the farspeakers. What most people don't know about him was he wasn't even a monk. He was a groundskeeper working at a monastery who took an interest in some of their research.

«He tinkered with batteries and switches and wires in his free time. Sometimes he'd present his handywork to the monks, who would dismiss them as crude toys made by the idle paws of a simpleton. But the hearthkeeper knew better. She understood that the simplest solution is usually the best one, and encouraged Redclaw to continue. Eventually, he hit upon a setup that not only worked, but was practical and cheap to implement. A battery to induce a potential in a wire, a switch to make or break the circuit, and a sounder that clicked when a current was present, simple and easy.»

Sunshine interjects again. «If it was so easy to just use one wire and a switch than why didn't the monks try that first?»

«I'm glad you asked. All you can do with one wire is turn a signal on and off. Either a current is present or it isn't. The monks couldn't figure out how to turn that into information.» He taps the ground with a paw and a small lamp appears attached to a switch. He places his forepaw on the switch, turning the light on. «It's all in the rhythm,» he says as he starts tapping the switch in time with the radio signal. dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah. «Redclaw figured out that you could encode meaning in the cadence of the ons and offs of the switch.

«To the monks' credit, they took him more seriously after he presented his method of encoding meaning. They wasted no time erecting telegraph lines.» He reverently touches his belly to the ground. «The body of the noosphere was born.»

«And you think that's what that signal is?» I ask.

He tilts his muzzle up. «Yup. And listen to this.» He increases the volume of the radio. «Like I said, the signal is either on or off. I can pick up on two length distinctions: short,» he gives the switch a quick tap, and the light flashes briefly, «and long.» He presses the switch again, lingering for about half a heartbeat before releasing it again. «Just assign meanings to different patterns of shorts and longs, and you've got yourself a signaling system.» He continues tapping his paw in time with the radio.

«But there's more,» he continues. «While you were in sim I spent hours listening to these signals. Notice how perfectly timed these segments are, with no variation or hesitation? They're probably artificially generated. But,» he flicks his tail a few times before landing on another signal. «Hear the difference?» At first it sounds the same as the last one, but I start to notice subtle imperfections in timing. «Much more sloppy, clearly produced by a person and not a machine.»

Iris's ears perk up. «So you think you can contact one of the sophonts operating this... thing... manually?»

«Yes, my dame,» he says, his scent growing more serious. «By now you've probably noticed that each of these exchanges begins with a set preamble.» He tunes to another signal, which repeats the now familiar cadence. Dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah. Dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah. Dah di dit, dit--

«So I figure I can spit that back at them.»

Iris smells incredulous. «I'm not sure that's going to work.»

«We're already in orbit,» says Stormlight. «I guarantee they'll find us sooner rather than later and come to their own conclusions about who we are. We need to show our belly first,» He rears up and pats himself on the abdomen as though greeting a stranger.

«Fine,» Iris sighs. «I don't have a better idea. I'll send the good news back to Focus as soon as you've made a successful exchange.»

Without hesitation, Stormlight flicks his tail. The lamp vanishes but the switch remains, now connected by a cable to the shimmering white sphere representing the ship's radio.

«Alright,» he takes a few deep breaths. His initial enthusiasm falters and I can smell him trying to work up the courage to begin. «paw goes down, carrier turns on, paw goes up, carrier turns off.» He starts tapping the switch, repeating the now familiar sequence Dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah. After each salvo of dits and dahs, he pauses to listen for a response.

After a few moments of alternating between sending and listening, a response emerges from the noise.

"QRZ? QRZ? DE K5BOBTX"

An odor of pure panic fills the space around Stormlight. He's jumped in the murky water and gotten bit for it. He just repeats the same sequence again.

"UR CALL?"

«Just keep him talking, and I'll locate the source of the signal,» says Puke Paws.

Stormlight repeats the refrain again, and the sophont responds with more impenetrable beeping.

"U NEW HAM? IF UR USING CW DECODER, NAME BOB BOB QTH ERICKSON, TX ERICKSON, TX RIG HR IC 705. CONGRATS ON GETTING UR LICENSE BUT PSE LEARN HOW TO MAKE CW QSO. GOD BLESS 73 DE K5BOBTX SK"

The sophont ends the exchange with two rapid beeps. Utterly defeated, Stormlight halfheartedly taps the switch with his paw, echoing the same two beeps back.

«What was that? You didn't understand a bit of that, did you?» Sunshine barks.

«I'd like to see you do better, big ears,» he growls back.

I place myself between the two of them. «Calm down. Are you two going to be bickering in front of our new friends?»

Iris interrupts. «I've sent the proclamation of good news back home. Lightray should be reading it about now.» She walks over to Sunshine.

«Gentle healer, we thy patients put our very lives in thy care as we are yeaned like new kits.» A caerulium aspergillium materializes in the coils of Iris's tail, and she sprinkles Sunshine's face with blessed milk. «Oh, before you go,» Iris looks at Stormlight. «May you not depart in anger.»

The two dip their heads apologetically. «Be safe,» says Stormlight. «We're counting on you to get us safely out of suspension after we land.»

Sunshine looks down at her forepaws. «I'm going to miss my fur.»

«May the Light illuminate your way, Sunshine.» Iris motions for her to get going, and Sunshine's avatar blinks out of existence.

---

I'm floating down the main axis, letting the air current push me along. I'm feeling every one of my four hundred years. My left knee crunches each time I grasp a paw cable to push myself forward. I've only got four limbs, and my rear paws have had to pull a lot more weight, literally, compared to someone with his tail intact. I count my blessings that nobody can see how gray my muzzle has become thanks to my white fur.

It's been 250 years since I last saw Iris and the other missionaries, but those lucky lickers haven't aged a day. I'm so old my pups have pups of their own.

As if on cue, a knot of sires and dams floats by, a gaggle of pups in their train. I notice one of my own sons amongst the adults. «Hi, son!» I chuff.

He breaks away from the group and floats over. Two small pups are clinging to his back. A little boy is peering over his sire's shoulder at me, Blissfully licking at a juice pouch. His sister is playfully repelling off of my son's back and reeling herself in again with her tail wrapped around his waist. «Hi, dad-- oof!» his greeting is cut short as the girl kicks away from him and jerks to a halt as her tail goes taught. «Kids,» He thumps them gently with his tail, «this is one of my sires. Say hello to Mr. Lightray.»

«Hello, mister.» The boy has decided that poking the red bubble of sugar water floating at the center of the pouch is far more fun than drinking it.

«Where's your tail?» the girl yips.

«Don't be rude,» her father hisses.

«It's OK, son. You were just as inquisitive when you were her age.

«When I was a little kit, I got sick and my tail started moving on its own. A healer had to chop it off so it wouldn't cause trouble.»

The girl's eyes widen and she curls her own tail tight against her back. «Papa,» she whines, «will that happen to me?»

«Don't worry, dear.

«Say, why don't you tell Mr. Lightray what you've been up to?» he says, trying to steer the conversation away from caudal amputation.

«I've been playing with a star lantern,» she mumbles.

«She's been playing liturgy at home with some of her toys,» he clarifies.

«A little hearthkeeper, are you?» She tilts her muzzle up but hides behind her father, squeezing her tail even tighter against her back trying not to catch my taillessness.

The boy has progressed from poking the pouch with his writing claw to clapping the pouch between his forepaws, letting little red beads of juice fly out for him to snap up with his jaws.

«She can't wait to become an acolyte, only six more years.» My son wraps his tail around hers to comfort her. «She'd love to know what you've been up to.

«Mr. Lightray is the Dewfall's mission controller.»

«For real?» She emerges from behind her father, her ears pinned back and her eyes wide with excitement.

«What's that like, Mr. Lightray?»

«Let's see--I make sure I can still talk to the folks aboard the Dewfall, and I keep the ship headed in the right direction. I make sure the missionaries are safe and snug in their amnions, and sometimes I have to tell one of them to pilot a micro mech and fix something that breaks.»

«Are they there yet?» asks the girl. «I hope they find starfolk.»

«So do I,» I say, wishing I could hope like her.

As we've been talking, the boy has steadily been slapping the juice pouch between his paws harder and harder. After one last almighty smack, a great blob of crimson stickiness flies out and slimes the white fur of my chest.

The boy smells embarrassed. «Sorry, mister,» he growls.

I laugh. «Don't worry about it, little guy. I'm not doing anything important today. Just drink your juice instead of playing with it next time.

My son looks down the axis. His childermoot has floated out of sight. «We'd better get going or we'll be late for liturgy.»

«Bye, Mr. Lightray,» the two pups bark in unison. My son kicks off from the paw cable he was clinging to and the three of them go flying down the axis toward the lighthouse.

I turn and enter a tiny room behind a security door. How far have the missionaries fallen since the second golden age. There was a time when entire buildings were dedicated to full-time control teams, and here I am, a single unpaid volunteer holed up in a converted maintenance closet. With the ansible in the corner I can stretch my front legs out to either side and touch the walls. The room doesn't even have a light source. I have to make due with the thermal glow of the ansible's heat sinks.

I turn to a small safe bolted to the wall. I scrawl a key pattern onto the ink pad with my writing claw. The safe takes about half a heartbeat to confirm the pattern, absorb the ink, and verify my ink's biosignature. A subtle haptic pulse informs me that the door is unlocked. I look inside. Yup, the tailstone is still there, where it's been for the last two hundred fifty years.

I open a small access door on the ansible. The link lights on the primary underlay tunnel interface card are blinking away. There's a hot spare card below it, waiting to take over should the primary go offline.

I pull a pair of HUD specs out of my wallet and rest them on my muzzle, then connect them to a magnetic port on the ansible with an interface cable. The underlay tunnel between the Dewfall and Wayfarers' haven is air-gapped. We learned our lesson after Lichlord Firefly's apostasy not to connect womb ships directly to the wider network.

I relax my body and float in the middle of the room as the ansible fetches the logs from the womb ship. I examine the various sacramentals tied to the wall: a thurible made of blue caerulium metal, with bells up and down the chain. Beside it are two clear packets containing briquettes of incense, one white and the other gray. The packet of gray incense has been opened; most of the briquettes are gone. The white incense remains untouched.

Part of my job as mission controller is to issue the proclamation of good news that we've found bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. But that's not going to happen. In the hundred millennia we've been looking for life all we've found is barren rock after barren rock. If they do make contact, I use the white incense. If not, I use the gray incense. Either way I'm not looking forward to swinging that thurible. You're supposed to wrap the chain around the tail, and elegantly sweep the tail back and forth as you move. That's not an option for me, so I have to make due with frantickly kicking my hind leg.

The logs are loaded, and I start flicking through automated message after automated message. I've already seen the leasemind pegging some radio emissions it thinks aren't random, but that's hardly reliable. I have to wait for confirmation from Iris. I scroll past a few dozen more log entries until I get a notification that one of the Dewfall's crew has sent me a message. I sigh and grab a coal of gray incense from the bag and roll it around in my paw as I prepare to read it.

---

It's one of my earliest memories, from a time when one recall's not so much what is heard and smelled and seen on the outside, but what is felt on the inside. Comfort, love, and safety--that's what I felt as I buried my snout into the fluff between my sire's shoulders, feeling the slow expansion and contraction of his ribs as he breathes and the gentle rumbles of his voice as he voices the responses to the liturgy. My sire's musk surrounds me, along with the musty smell of old bones and the faintest whiff of ozone from the star hearth, the unique scent of the lighthouse, a smell that says «you may be infinitesimal in scale, but you are infinitely loved.»

But this contentment is not to last. I feel a sharp tug on my tail. I'm sharing my sire's back with one of my litter mates. She's jealous of my spot and seeks to usurp it. I wrinkle my muzzle at her. An angry hiss barely has time to escape my throat when my sire thumps us both with his tail. «You two behave,» he whispers. He curls his tail around my midsection and lifts me off of his back. «You two are getting too old to be on my back anyway.» My sister sticks her tongue out at me and claws her way up to where I was lying, then snuggles into my sire's fur. Her victory is fleeting. He likewise pries her off his back and places her a good tailslength away from me on his other side next to one of our other parents.

As a consolation prize my sire coils his tail around my own as I reach down with my paws to grasp the tail bar fixed to the bulkhead. Now bereft of my warm snuggle spot, I turn my attention to the ancient hearthkeeper floating near the sanctuary. She's giving a sermon, the exact contents of which I cannot recall, but something along the lines of «Again and again we ply the yawning gulf between stars, seeking bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. Again and again we return as alone as when we left. Yet may we not become discouraged. The Uncreated Light has promised us that we share this dear little Creation with other little ones, and we need only be patient and keep looking.»

As the hearthkeeper speaks, I can make out the acolyte behind the sheer sanctuary vail, preparing the star hearth for exposition. Slowly, I become aware of something swelling up from beyond the curtain separating the nave of the lighthouse from the colony's main axis. A low rumble? A dull rumor? I don't know how to describe it. Perhaps my subconscious mind is picking up on some minute ripple in the air. The acolyte notices it almost as soon as I do. She looks up from whatever little rite she's performing. Her ears perk up and she scents the air, her whiskers twitching.

The smell hits us before the sound. Gossamer strands of white smoke creep through the curtain, accompanied by the spiced aroma of white incense blown in by the axial air current. Hushed whispers flit back and forth among the members of our childermoot. Whispers grow to murmurs that spread throughout the rest of the congregation, and murmurs swell to excited yips and growls. The acolyte has slipped out from behind the sanctuary vail and is now staring at the entrance. The multitool she had used to adjust some parameter on the hearth floats away lazily, utterly forgotten.

The hearthkeeper, perhaps going a bit deaf and anosmic after seven centuries, is the last to catch on. She continues preaching as the acolyte approaches her and politely pokes the back of her ear, then gestures with her muzzle toward the entrance. By now the din from outside has crescendo to eclipse the congregation's chatter.

Just as the hearthkeeper collects herself and focuses on the entrance, the curtain is torn away from the clips holding it to the frame and a crowd spills into the back of the nave. There, at the head of the throng, is the same middle-aged white-furred tailless fellow we saw on our way to the liturgy, his chest stained as with martyr's blood. White smoke is billowing from a thurible tied around his rear leg, bouncing around wildly as he awkwardly kicks as though trying to dislodge a nipping forest flyer from his ankle. Somehow his voice manages to rise above the clamor.

To this day I have yet to hear anything like it. Nothing I can say can describe it adequately. Pure joy condensed into an utterance, that's the best I can do, but it's still not enough. His voice bursts out in rhythmic barks, each syllable a hammer blow to shatter the great heresy.

«Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!

For we are alone no more!

We have found them at last!

Bone not of our bone!

Flesh not of our flesh!

Again, I say, Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!_»

This may or may not be incorporated into a future story, but nonetheless I think it's a good bit of worldbuilding. "Nanosun" is a placeholder. I'm looking for something more Anglish.

---

Pilgrims' Rest was known as the oasis of the Outer Belt, the last dwarf planet with a working nanosun, a tiny artificial star orbiting the planet, providing not only enough light and heat to give us a perpetual spring, but a protective magnetosphere to keep our atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind from our distant natural sun.

It stood as a monument to ancient Claravian engineering, as well as ancient Claravian greed. There were once dozens of these colossal orbital fusion reactors dotted across the Outer Belt, making the dwarf planets on the frontier of interstellar space far more hospitable than they are today. The Sunwrights, the ancient clerics of the Bright Way that built and maintained these nanosuns, imposed onerous tithes on their client worlds. They were quick to deprive them of heat and light when they couldn't pay.

The other nanosuns were destroyed during the War of Dissolution, most by the Partisans, militant secularists who wanted to extirpate the Bright Way entirely, the rest by the Preservationists, the ones fighting to maintain the Bright Way's economic grip on the entire star system, and who, when defeat was all but certain, set about destroying as much of their infrastructure as possible in a petty dying tantrum.

This sun alone survived the war, defended against both sides by the Pious Dissolutionists, a small but determined group of religious traditionalists fighting to return the soul the Bright Way after thirty three millennia squandered in the name of greed.

The sun continued protecting our little planet for nearly thirty three millennia more, maintained by a succession of clerics who upheld this greatest expression of a hearthkeeper's duity to provide physical and spiritual light and warmth to all around her.

OK, y'all know I'm all about xenoergonomics around here. Let's point out everything wrong with what ~~Fox~~ James is wearing in this picture and what I would do instead.

Minor caveat: I'm extrapolating some of this from what I know of dog anatomy and behavior, so I could be wrong.

First, his helmet. What is it covering? I've already ranted about exposed ears on animal characters, namely that they themselves would never design a piece of protective headgear that leaves the ears unprotected. However, there's another tidbit to consider. The bones of a fox's skull do not protect the tops of the eyeballs, so he's extra vulnerable.

It's also not clear if that mic boom brushes against his whiskers. Whiskers are very sensitive, and touching them typically results in a reflexive movement away from the stimulus. It's also not clear how he's getting sound output from the headset. There may be an earpiece in his left ear, but I doubt the interior of an arwing is quiet enough to just have a loudspeaker on the helmet or integrated into the cockpit.

Next, those aviator glasses. Setting aside the crappy helmet design, it was smart to depict the glasses attached to the helmet. Yinrih HUD specs have a broad bridge that friction fits against the muzzle, though they wouldn't wear them in a situation like this where they could get easily knocked off. Instead a doggles-like visor is worn.

The last thing I'll complain about is the zipper on his jacket. I have to wonder if the teeth get caught in his neck fur. Yinrih go nekkid where possible, but clothing fasteners, such as on rain gear or cold weather gear would probably use snaps, magnets, laces, or ~~velcro~~ St. Starlight's Fabric[^1].

[^1]: named for its inventor, Saint Starlight, a research monk, botanist, and healer who lived during the yinrih's age of aviation. She was inspired by the plant burs that would stick to her fur.

I've always had an odd relationship with "hard" magic systems, that is systems that seem to be... well systematic, stuff you could analyze and explain almost like a hard science.

On the one hand, as a creator it's really fun to think of different rules and how those rules interact or how they can be worked around and manipulated.

On the other hand, as a consumer of media I never liked overly explained magic systems because they cease to feel magical. I like the feeling of unknowability about magic as a concept, like we're chimps setting off a nuclear explosion. We see it, we feel its effects, but nothing on earth could make us understand how or why it is what it is because it involves forces far beyond our ken.

I was thinking of the Docker logo (pictured) and thought that a living container ship would be cool, so I made one.

Its canonicity is tentative, but it's a fish (well, xenoichthys, I suppose) rather than a whale. It has a hard shell on its back. It's a filter feeder that floats on the surface and eats photosynthetic plankton. The shell is there to deter airborne predators and parasites. Through the process of domestication the shell has been made flat to serve as a deck.

At the time of First Contact they're extinct on Yih but can be found on Sweetwater. Attempts have been made to reintroduce them to their native range on Yih but none have succeeded, since the plankton they feed on can no longer thrive there.

Have been planning a Dark Sun style campaign, but recently we have done an adventure set in a desert so I want to add some variety.

The known world is a vast archipelago, tall volcanic islands are the only sanctuary from a vast brackish ocean. The land is dying, the sea is hypersaline - slack, windless, drained of love and life by the merciless Sorcerer Kings that plough the world of it's magic.

Small ships still ferry weary passengers between the attols, searching for the scarce amounts of drinkable water. The great warships are, of course, owned by the Oligarchs - powered by magical engines that can cross the flat water in a few hours.

The common folk such as you must charter tiny barges pulled by a pair of ...

Dictator-class Command Ship

The Dictator-class command ship is a unique and powerful vessel designed to serve as the flagship of the Diarcesian Mundana Forces naval fleet. Its trimaran hull design allows for greater stability and maneuverability, while its advanced technology and materials stakes its claim as one of the most formidable warships in the world.

The construction of each ship involves a complex process that utilizes cutting-edge materials such as carbon fiber composites and titanium alloys. The nature of these materials provides exceptional strength, durability, and resistance to damage from enemy attacks or harsh environmental conditions.

During trials, each new Dictator-class undergoes rigorous testing to ensure that all systems are functioning properly before being commissioned into active service. However, despite their advanced technology and superior construction quality compared with other classes in use by neighboring kingdoms' navies like Sesbia's Oceania-class and their steel alloy-based material, flaws may arise. For example, during operations, especially if battle damages are sustained, immediate repairs should be done once possible otherwise casualties will increase exponentially at sea battles between fleets since this class has no ability against heavy gun salvos.

This flaw was demonstrated with perhaps the worst Dictator (ship) in Diarcesia's history. The DNS Tyrannus, which was involved in the Cutting of Kaisura during the opening stages of the North Ikuyo seccession crisis, suffered significant heavy gun damage from the secessionists who commandeered Gegonota cae Logica and also employed drones. The impact of this event brought shame and embarrassment to the Diarcesian Navy, as well as political consequences for those responsible for overseeing the ship's design and construction.

Mervin, Monarch Diarcesian

Diarcesia's worst dictator was Mervin, who ruled from 1857 to 1872. He was infamous for his brutal and oppressive rule, which led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. His impact on Diarcesia was devastating, as he instilled fear and paranoia in the population while enriching himself at their expense in the form of expansionist wars in the name of spreading his Diarcesian Ideal (summarized as all the countries in the known world self-governing with the benevolent guidance and protection of the Diarcesian monarchy). His downfall started with his pyrrhic victory in the Siege of Puerto Rabo. The casualties incurred in that operation, in addition to the near-constant warfare for the greater part of the past century, pushed the war-weary Diarcesians to a tipping point.

In 1872, one of the largest protests in Arcesius's history occurred demanding the Monarch to appear before them in person and address their grievances. Flanked by all of triarchs and separated from the protesters by soldiers, Monarch Diarcesian Mervin exited the Domus Arigotus. Instead of negotiating with the protesters, Mervin ordered the soldiers to have them dispersed by any means. Once the soldiers started shooting, two of the triarchs turned against Mervin and a 2 versus 2 fistfight started. This concluded when Triarchess Grere, an experienced pugilist, landed an uppercut on Mervin. Mervin toppled down the steps leading to the Domus's entrance to his death. With Mervin dead and the other two triarchs barely conscious, Grere ordered the soldiers to cease fire and offered an olive branch to the Arcesian protesters. This lead to more democratic reforms that included the end of expansionist wars, many of the less-willing diereses—mostly overseas and a few in the mainland—seceding without incident, and converting the Fifth to Ninth nonarchs to elective positions.

One of the iconic moments of this event is the protesters' mock salute of Mervin over his corpse.