Tethyans

sing. Tethyan, adj. Tethyne

For trillions of years their hellish simworld ticked, and in it the Ikoska transformed into something that should not exist, could not exist, in the whole era when the stars burn. Something from beyond time.

Origin: Simulated Evolution
Environment(s): Hard Vacuum, Human, Benthic, Hyperthermic, Cryogenic
Body Plan: Hard articulated shell with six vent ports for reconfigurable limbs.

Tethyans are a telene species evolved in an environment engineered by by Kichalteron researchers. In realspace, their preferred environment is benthic regions of large, high-gravity aquatic worlds. They have incredibly strong bodies and can withstand almost any environmental conditions including hard vacuum and the atmospheres of Gas Giant planets.

Origin

Tethyans emerged from Simulated Evolution via a Kichaltric attempt to understand the Vimana. Unlike the Vimana, whose creation heralded long eras of disaster and domination, Tethyans were kept from evolving a superluminal engine. Also unlike Vimana, Tethyans have a failsafe: they have no sense of ordered time with a dormant Hyladrome.

Description

Tethyans are massive six-limbed beings with long necks and tails that grow to 500-1000 meters in length from head to tail. Their bodies are built from incredibly strong and self-healing materials similar to the hulls of Vimana, but are much more flexible. Their limbs emerge from large vent-ports as masses of nanocomponents the Tethyan concsiously assembles into tissues and joints. Four of these ports are on the underside of the body, with a third pair opposite the neck at the top of their forward body section. These ports each sport a long, hinged, triangular cover called an elytron that often forms part of the limb structure. Between their six possible limbs and strong, thick tail, Tethyans are dynamically stable in any orientation: they cannot be rendered helpless by rolling them onto their backs. This makes them excellent defending themselves in close combat and in low- or no-gravity environments in general.

The two main body sections are joined by a sphere that is often said to be perfect. Its shine is attributed to the fact that Tethyans' body chemistry incorporates non-baryonic matter, an arrangement only known to arise from the contrived scenarios of Simulated Evolution.

Tethyans store extremely high-energy mass within their bodies. With this they power natural Plasma Shields. Four antennae at the centermost edges of their body sections allow them to channel these shields to become powerful slower-than-light interstellar engines. Left to their own devices, Tethyans use these to migrate in clans of millions that can easily boil a terrestrial planet's oceans.

Hylavation Characteristics

Tethyans have a native Hyladrome embedded in their forward body section. Their original ideal Hylavation guest is an adult Kichalteron, but many other species including Humans are known to practice Hylaesis with them.

Tethyans require an active Hyladrome to enable ordered, time-aware reasoning. Partially this was intended as a safeguard to prevent Tethyans from forming cartels like Vimana. Partially, this extreme quality evolved because the Tethyans evolved for eons with nothing able to predate them.

Tethyans have massively-parallel loci of attention. When under Hylavation they are able to share both their conscious attention and their sense input with their dyad guest.

Piercing: Tethyans must have their Hyladrome covers pierced and gauged like an ear to accomodate an ejection system. This points to the subtle distinction between qualities that can result from evolution and those that, although seemingly-simple, must be done by conscious intention.

Internal Structure and Organs

Although Tethyans are renowned for being able to reconfigure their limbs and bodies at will, they do exhibit some internal structure.

One higher-level organization within their bodies are Hypertissues, sheets of nanocomponents that lay themselves out with fractal geometry. These structures are wound in spirals or stretched into ribbons in order to dial in the desired density, thermal rejection properties, and strength for the various parts of the Tethyan's body. Hypertissues can borrow material from adjacent ones, and new tissues can be woven on-demand from pools of raw nanocomponents kept in reserve.

A Tethyan's discrete organs can move almost without restriction. Most of them will remain in the torso for logistical or thermal reasons, and some of them can even move quickly enough to avoid incoming damage.

Notable Brain Components

Umwelt Scoop

Allows a Tethyan to rapidly build and swap out perceptual contexts. This is important since a Tethyan's mind works like a quantum sieve: their experiences are unordered, vast landscapes of context. If they are in a familiar place, or Hylavate a familiar guest, their current perceived location is the set of previous memories of that location or Dyad.

A mind like this is good for instinctual astronavigation since orbits are cyclical. The visible stars and other queues can be quickly correlated with an exact orbit since all similar memories are in-context simultaneously.

Nanocomponent Kineastator

Brain component that manages the constantly-shifting forms of a Tethyan's limbs. This is analogous to human proprioception but vastly more complex. One comparative measure of this system is its Resolution, i.e. how fine of an individual structure can be maintained without falling back on the Nanocomponent mesh's local tendency to fulfill the Kineastator pattern.

Mind

When Tethyans consider those around them with ordered minds, their perception of those individuals is almost like that of a reality show editor. They have all the memories and moments in hand, but to have a sense of the individual they must choose slices, shades, and aesthetics with which to filter the individual's total actions (plus the Tethyan's own probabilistic sense of the individual's past and future) to arrive at a time-independent image of the total individual.

Due to the way their minds work, Tethyans do not engage with the concept of linear words. Normally, aside from precanned messages, Tethyans don't use language with an empty Hyladrome.

Imagine you could watch a movie and instinctually know the next line due to a quantum probabilistic comprehension of human language. Movies (and human language) wouldn't be very interesting.

Because Tethyans don't order their experiences, it's quite possible to capture a Tethyan and coerce it into regarding its captors as its fair keepers and guests, seeing its former company as usurpers.

Depictions

As a TTRPG class: Superheavies and Living Starships