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| On the Cyrawaloc; A short introduction | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 11 2016, 06:17 PM (333 Views) | |
| Arawak | Aug 11 2016, 06:17 PM Post #1 |
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Newborn
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I place this here since it's more sci-fi world building than a exobiology project. It lacks the rigor or detail (I don't ever intend to spend much time imagining that many creatures for my alien species beyond certain domesticates and what they eat). ----- A grand society existed in the galaxy millennia before humans even became aware of the universe beyond simple superstition, a civilization created by not one species but three- and which acted for a thousand years in a state of peace and harmony that was never before seen or has been seen since. Such a state it was which the Cyrawaloc first established themselves that they seemed to ever since progressively tumble politically and culturally even as they further advanced technologically. The catastrophes the Cyrawaloc have unleashed on themselves and by collateral, others still haunt the galaxy to this day. They made the cancer to be a weapon of peace- it eventually gets used. They create the Ikeitans, self-aware bioships to further integrate their civilization psychologically, only for the Ikeitans to split off into an ongoing enemy of the Cyrawaloc. They uplift multiple species as part of their hierarchal system, only for said clients to end up handing their bestowed FTL systems to less advanced species in the fringes out of contempt of their 'patrons'. Despite losing their moral legitimacy millennia ago and having fractured into multiple separate parts, they still remain a powerful, hegemonic force to this day. So just what is a Cyrawaloc? A Cyrawaloc as mentioned earlier is multiple species combined into one. Cyrawaloc is a term that references the combination of the three seperate species of the Cyrawaloc- the Cyrs, Awas and Loka. The Cyrs is like the head of the Cyrawaloc, while the Awas is like the body and the Loka are like the arms. To further elaborate, The Cyrs are shelled, 4 legged parasites with large flaps who direct and control the Awas to better pastures in nature, but with the integration of the Loka a technological revolution occurred that begun the march towards a space faring civilization. The Loka essentially gave the Cyrs a way to interact with the world far more precise than anything the Awas could muster with their blunt heads. The Cyrs are smart, often in the role of directing the other two species and putting much of their thought process to systemic planning and communication with the other parts of its body. However, the more sociable Loka tend to speak to other beings in general. The Cyrs communicate in a series of weird, jittery hums while the Loka communicate in a more guttural fashion. The Cyrs is quite big as far as parasites go, relying on a younger, more larval form to latch onto their host before becoming part of the Awas itself. The Cyrs can adapt this system to machinery as well, for this reason alone neural robotic technologies are very frequently used by the Cyrawaloc. The Cyrs are loosely associated beings usually. They're not as social as humans are. However, they do have mating selection systems comparable to birds where the males tend to have more elaborate chilla and vibrant coloration. The Cyrs are intelligent and sociable despite this, but only started forming large social groups after a million years of post-convergence evolution. The Awas are large, tetrapodal herbivores with long, flat heats for grazing on velcrograss. The Awas exist in the same phyla as the Cyrs and share the flaps of their much smaller distant cousin. The Cyrs tend to possess a alpha male Awas, who than leads the other female Awas. Female Awas can be controlled by a Cyrs as well, but said control can be overridden by the Cyrs riding the males due to having to fight the instinctual urges of a female Awas to follow the alpha of the herd. Awas are more or less herd animals, with a collective mode of social organization. The Awas live long and have a reputation for storing things. Be it information, physical cargo or nutrition in their large humps. The Awas can handle a several hundred kilograms of weight before being too encumbered. The Awas basically are a pack animal who gained a state of semi-sapience from being exploited by parasites and don’t seem bothered by this relationship even in modern times. After all, the Cyrs and Loka "pay their rent" in a figurative sense. Also their tendency to lack any perception of free will helps keep them in line. The Loka are the limbs and hands of the Cyrawaloc and are of a intelligence between the Awas and Cyrs, but their ingenuity and dexterity (for their whole lifestyle is based around their handibles). They are beings who in nature were stalkers and ambushers. They make use of their hand-mandible in a extremely diverse set of ways, from digging traps to making tools and ambush snatching food to eat along with piecing together automovers, synthetic platforms and of course, starships. They're social creatures and can breed in large numbers, with whole regions simply infested in Loka. However, the lack of long-term mobility meant that the Loka in earlier history would be outcompeted by the gestalt forms of the Cyrawaloc who tended to have two or sometimes three Loka with single Loka or quadruple Loka being rather rare (for one Loka is never enough and four Loka on one Awas can be quite the mess). Non-combined Loka simply lack the platform the Awas give. At some point nearly a million years ago there was Loka who found the Awas as a useful way to get around and the Cyrs were tolerated since the Loka liked wrapping around the hump while the Cyrs just stood there on top. The Cyrs also wouldn't have let them on the Awas if they ate them. It's very rude to eat your host. Two Loka co-habit a Awas, a male and female for life and they are very trusting of other Loka as the Loka have language as well. The Loka languages complicate the Cyrawaloc writing system so much that ancient writings are borderline indecipherable to even modern Cyrawaloc. The Loka have developed a much more intense relationship with the Cyrs, as the Cyrs and Loka need each other to make fire, tools and eventually more sophisticated technologies/architecture. The Loka can stiffen/loosen their 20 or so flexible, but segmented joints as needed. The Loka are capable of independent existence more than the Cyrs or Awas, but without the mobility of the Awas the networks of communication that led to increasingly more complex inventions, tools and ideas would never have come to being. The Cyrawaloc are a very freakish anomaly in the existence of life, to say the least. Mind you that sapience in general is considerably anomalous, but the Cyrawaloc are an extra step more strange simply due to being three seperate species cooperating to make a single sapient capable of quite a bit. They are surprisingly versatile, though their adaptability is questionable due to the intricate nature of the three species involved. They require more food than we do- more mouths to feed after all, and have to sustain not one kind of diet, but three kinds. The completely parasitic diet of the Cyrs, the almost completely Herbivorous diet of the Awas and the obligate carnivorous diet of the Loka. They breathe oxygen and drink water like we do, but need more of it. This would seemingly be a inhibitor to a advanced space faring civilization- but remember that the only large species is the Awas and that the smaller two species are more intelligent. So they omitted the Awas in early space exploration until later on when the carrying capacity of spacecraft was such that the massive thing a full Cyrawaloc can be could be sustained for interplanetary travel. Before their advent as a technological society however, a long history existed where hundreds of civilizations, as written record appeared for them nearly forty-six thousand years ago with large gaps. For unlike us they did have a pre-pre-historic civilization some point over thirty millennia earlier whose nature is extremely enigmatic. In their millennia of existing, it is only in the fifth epoch (the Cobalt Epoch), which still is ongoing- that technological civilization began to flourish for them. The Cyrawaloc aren’t stupid, it should be noted, the span of evolution to civilization is actually shorter for them than it is for us (The modern Cyrawaloc appeared around 91000 years ago). It’s simply that they had written records for much longer. Humans meanwhile only picked up writing after having farming for thousands of years. The need for writing simply was greater to them due to how they age, live and die. Unlike us, the age of a Cyrawaloc is defined by the Awas itself and multiple Loka and Cyrs may inhabit the same Cyrawaloc due to the Awas living longer than either the Cyrs or Loka, of whom only live 40 to 20 years respective on average (Loka death rates are considerably higher simply due to being the victim of all sorts of horrible accidents that would just mean a lost limb to a human). Meanwhile the Awas can live over 80 years on average. Ceremonial coupling of Cyrs and Awas with Lokas integrated a bit later were crucial in ancient times and remain crucial today. For one of the priorities of numerous Cyrawaloc cultures was to sync a Cyrawaloc's lifespan as much as possible. Or at the very least, couple the young with each other as soon as possible in order to ensure a stable development. Breeding/Mating/Sex is something with a lot more variation, for the best means of syncing mating is always a mess. Breed all of the parent Cyrawalocs at the same time? Breed in such a way that all the children get born at once? Breed whenever you want and just trade the babies to fix the errors? There's no real right answer, but the general census imposed by the Cobaltines has been to just breed freely and worry about it later. (With specialized nurseries that focus on the converging of new Cyrawaloc based on supply/demand). The social effect of this is that family bonds are not really that strong. The Cyrawlaoc by itself is a individualistic entity, but the individual species act in a collective manner in favor of the Cyrawaloc as a whole. Cyrawalocs view themselves as superior together than apart and see individual Cyrs, Awas or Loka as lesser if not animals. --- Really what I just said is the tip of the iceberg. It's actually a bit overwhelming what the Cyrawaloc have gotten me into. They are supposed to be the 'big alien empire' of my sci-fi setting so to speak. I initially had a humanoid for the role (the Vaerkiff, a thick and rather boring brute species who saw the universe in terms of dominance and submission. Very boring and overdone. Their most interesting trait was that their symmetry was such that they had two fronts and no back), but ended up deciding on something more alien. Now I find myself having to basically develop technology in a way fundamentally different from human technologies due to the biometric differences having snakes for arms causes. They probably are too improbable to ever really exist, but I figured a composite species would be a interesting way to go with the big empire aliens and so here I am with the Cyrawaloc. I will further update this thread with more information and maybe even a couple pictures of them. I have pictures of them, just not very good ones or pictures that accurately depict what I wrote. I will say I haven't put too much thought into their planet beyond it having a slightly lower gravity, consisting of a large continent and a Australia sized landmass with quite a few islands in-between and having more steppe/shrub land regions than Earth. Edited by Arawak, Aug 11 2016, 06:19 PM.
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Oh look, links! Please no click the deviant art Please no click the Tumblr, you are just enabling him! | |
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| Arawak | Aug 13 2016, 02:37 AM Post #2 |
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Newborn
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Here's a picture (Warning: Huge): Spoiler: click to toggle It's too big to be a attachment. Stylistically I feel a pressing need to exaggerate the Cyrs (head) or maybe shrink the Awas. Arm length is a tedious problem with the Cyrawaloc since the 'arms' wrap around the rather steep hump of the Awas and biomechanically should be swivelling outwards. The orientation of the Loka is probably the hardest part with the Cyrawaloc since there way of interracting with the environment is bound to be exceptionally different from ours and that means needing to imagine not one, but three or more toolset tiers. This is the case also because there is more than one option for orientating the Loka on the Awas, especially if you start getting straps involved. -------------- The Cyrawaloc are a part of a much bigger project. One may recall the mess of Galaxy Theta and all those hashed out, mangled cretins with no context to their existence. After months of going back and forth on the kind of universe I even want, I ultimately ended up making a universe which involves a complex ecumene of life which takes priority over other parts of the galaxy. For you see, while the initial intuition should be that all species would simply develop away from each other, that just isn't the case for there is a tendancy for civilizations to connect and attract to each other. A field of stars with dead worlds or worlds where it rains glass, iron or rocks simply lacks the attractive complexity which worlds full of life do. That being said, the galaxy is still a complex and strange place. Expressing it in words can be tedious, so i'll use another picture: Spoiler: click to toggle The dots are very unrepresentitive of the current state of things, but each dot is a different species of notable presence in the galaxy. Not shown are the hundreds of others who didn't develop FTL. The galaxy appears deeply colonized, but this is not truly the case- there is lots of percolation going on here and there are billions of star systems. A few hundred million of which with a world that can be made habitable by just planting some trees there and having a bit of patience. All the green film you see around the galaxy is meant to basically be a way of depicting the density of worlds where life occurs. The greener it is, the more lively that part of the galaxy is. The map is obselete and not representitive of the current iteration of my fictional galaxy, but it still acts as a expression of how messy I precieve a galactic community to be. Species aren't like ethnics, they can't interbreed into local populations and so are inevitably going to remain seperate groups. Which means diasporias with alien species should be more common than ethnic diasporas. I don't think a interstellar civilization can even plausibly be culturally homogenous. Any precieved cultural homogenity on my part is more the product of being unable to truly grasp the depth of a system orders of magnitude more complicated than the modern world that it does me believing that the monospecies humans have the most cultural diversity in the galaxy. Some concentrations are the product of certain mentalities of said species- the massive tumors of dots are due to species who really do like having massive populations while some of the more spread out dots you see are the product of the more advanced species having outposts all over the galaxy. The reddish region is the Sprawl, which is a historical galactic empire whose ruins are inhabited by post-collapse neotribals and degenerative groups who simply ceased understanding how their own technology works. The blots around the galaxy are the product of a bioweapon known as the Cancer being used. The cancer is essentially a xenoforming super organism that over the course of a century can convert earthly worlds into worlds with acidic seas and a extremely toxic chlorine rich atmosphere. It's not a weapon that was suppossed to be used. But it was eventually anyways and now the galaxy suffers for it. The Cyrawaloc made it in their ancient history as a means of keeping civilization in-line through a black switch that they were confident would never ever be used. It wasn't, for nearly two thousand years anyways. The other species are out of the scope of this thread in general. I have info on them as well, but in general am not going to talk about them unless I write something that needs explaining. But take note of one species- the Asantum. The Asantum are important because they are large, tentacled things who colonize Jupiter's moon Europa around the time of the Mongols and they eventually become important in the first story I intend to write for this. For whatever reason I have felt compelled to ensure I have detailed out the civilization which the Asantum come from with as much vigor as possible since the Cyrawaloc will inevitably come into play later on. They just can't be ignored. They're too hegemonic to ignore even this early on. Next update will probably be on world view related things, mainly common ethical/moral trends established by the Cobalt Era which was basiclaly their eden. For the Cobalt was essentially thought to be the end of history after thousands of years of building up. But it was ruined and history started its engine again. However, the Cobalt did its part in at least giving a set of morals which the civilizations that existed around the time Socrates was executed built upon. Edited by Arawak, Aug 13 2016, 02:41 AM.
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Oh look, links! Please no click the deviant art Please no click the Tumblr, you are just enabling him! | |
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| Arawak | Aug 15 2016, 01:48 AM Post #3 |
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Newborn
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Basic Tool Use The basic, essential understanding of how Cyrawaloc use tools comes in how the Loka can leverage the Awas for better support in manipulating objects. The configuration I depicted in the second post isn't the only depiction that is possible with the Cyrawaloc. For there are also configurations which are partually a aspect of culture and partially an aspect of experimenting to find new, more effective means of tool manufacture. One major alternative to the double helix wrapping which the Loka usually do is a series of straps that run on the side and neck of the Awas. WHile more precise, such a set-up requires innovations roughly equivelant to stirrups and needless to say the ancient cultures which figured out the second configuration would prove to at times outcompete the groups which lacked the latches for their Loka. In terms of direct tool use, the Loka tend to have tools which can swivel from the sides of the Awas. This allows for long spears, shovels, reaping tools and pike-like weaponry to be a lot more common than ranged weaponry, which was a later innovation for the Cyrawaloc since the first ranged weapons were very unimpressive throwing sticks or rocks and ranged weaponry mostly came into the use when seige machines such as ballista started being built by the coastal bazaars around 14000 BC. The natural mobility of the Cyrawaloc meant that urban centers were more or less trade posts more than the large, concentrated cities that characterize more urbanized species be it Humans or the Aveterriat. In one way this mean that a advanced trade network existed for millennia on end in their ancient history which to some degree counter balanced the weaker urbanization of the Cyrawaloc, whose early civilizations revolved far more around shepherding than farming. For shepherding, all matter of prods were used and the sideways swivel which the Loka are exceptionally good at means that herding about their domesticates and fellow Awas. The Cyrawaloc often outfitted themselves with hard, organic substances that they frequently stylized to all manner of effects- often in the belief that their stylization enchanced the capabilities of their warriors. Next update will be more substantial and finally be a elaboration on Blolados itself. |
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| Corecin | Aug 15 2016, 02:02 AM Post #4 |
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Have you ever been bitch slapped for lack of listening? lack of doing what your told? cuz i'm not far from slapping you
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This is really well thought out. |
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7:47 PM Jul 10