The Coalition of Aexen Powers
The Grazan
An Grazan stands without its second skin, gazing into a holo-sphere, an unusual, potentially lethal action.
Grazan stand about a meter tall if they were to fully stretch their legs, have four eye clusters that offer them large fields of view, and rather thin, heavily segmented exoskeletons that were once far thicker. These exoskeletons thinned and segmented to allow the Grazan more range of motion and to work with more intricate, small details, defeating most of their protective purposes. Most of the Grazan 'strength' comes from their enormous neuron mass that fills what would commonly be identified roughly as their "cranium," running down along their "backs."
Of course, you'll almost never see a naked Grazan. From birth, they live within their technology, their Second Skins, biomechanical constructs that house their frail bodies, feed them, and protect them from the outside elements. They subsist off nutrient paste, formulated mostly from a fast-growing underground fungus. Their atrophied bodies practically cannot survive outside their Second Skins without incredible conditioning beforehand and immunity injections.
Needless to say, Grazan are basically incapable of reproducing naturally anymore, instead being forced to rely on growth pools filled with painstakingly-made eggs combining donor sex cells from female and male Grazan, each egg requiring a fairly large support apparatus to grow it, with many eggs failing to take to the apparatus in the first place.
Grazan tend to individualize themselves using intricate tattoo-like art painted onto their Second Skins, something they pride themselves on.
Name of Homeworld: Aexen
Stat Placement:-- Toughness: 0 (Grazan can only leave their Second Skins with incredibly long preparation beforehand. Needless to say, they're quite squishy, and would be prone to dying from incredibly small scratches were it not for their advanced life support systems integrated in their Second Skins.)
-- Reproduction: 0 (Being incapable of natural reproduction is an enormous impediment to the Grazan, and the sheer amount of resources that goes into growing a single individual is quite large. The growth pool must grow them for many months, carefully monitoring the individual, then the individual must basically be transplanted into a Second Skin, which has to be upgraded as they grow further.)
-- Industry: 2 (The Grazan manage to supplement their lack of numbers with their brilliance in robotics, creating sophisticated, sometimes borderline sentient, machines to work for them. This has the second benefit of keeping Grazan from engaging in potentially dangerous work.)
-- Psyche: 6 (The enormous neuron masses that the Grazan possess are not only packed full of nervous tissue, but this tissue exhibits the unusual ability to form far more connections than most creature's brains as well. The result is that the vast majority of Grazan would be, to humans, absurdly intelligent geniuses, with the most intelligent Elder Grazan possessing an intellect that makes humanity's geniuses look like five year old children. Many humans could identify this state of being as perfection, but the Grazan could easily prove intelligence is not the path to a New Eden.)
-- Morale: 2 (Grazan typically fight with average morale, if you call what they do "fighting," tending to use an army composed mainly of robot warriors as their frontline. Whenever possible, Grazan will not put themselves at risk if a machine can take their place, and will often value their lives quite highly. Because of this, Grazan often exhibit a form of warfare almost similar to some feudal humans, where Grazan who know they are defeated will yield to their better before death. This form of warfare is generally meant to help sustain their numbers as best they can, and the Grazan almost instinctively fight with the knowledge of the great situation in mind, preferring to show mercy before vengeance.)
Brief Planetary History:
The Grazan are unusual beings whose ancestors were six-limbed insectoids most similar in nature to Earth ants, chained within a hive heirarchy. The Grazan remained this way, according to their historians, up until a few million years ago, at which point Lodier, the star Aexen orbits, began producing far more radiation than normal. This radiation tended to become concentrated in specific surface fruits that the Grazani Queens loved to consume, quickly resulting in their radiation deaths, as well as producing unusual mutated offspring.
The vast majority of these offspring are assumed to have died, but one lineage resulted in new Grazan with females that could all reproduce, instead of being tied directly to one singular reproductive female. Evolution and adaption took over, leading to an out of control population that periodically caused mass extinctions and death on Aexen for millions of years, until the Grazan began losing the ability to lay hundreds of eggs and experienced abnormally large amounts of cephalization resulting in "heads" that essentially ran down their entire "backs". Intelligence began to decide dominance, and things went from there, leading eventually to the anatomically modern Grazan, pre-addiction to technology.
The furious growth of Grazan technology is typically agreed upon by historians as having begun roughly three thousand years ago with the first appearance of sophisticated tools. From there, the Grazan advanced in leaps and bounds, forming hundreds of societies and nations that spent much of their time killing one another with increasingly more advanced weapons because they simply reproduced too quickly. But this pace of war slowed as the general welfare of the global population increased, leading to slower and slower hatchrates as the people focused their attention on other issues.
This slow growth was disturbed as the Grazan broke headfirst into the atomic era shortly after, approximately two centuries ago as the atomic bomb came under the control of a single Power on Aexen. This one, old Power, the name of which has been intentionally erased from history by the modern Coalition, recognized their advantage and capitalized upon it with cold, calculated ruthlessness. They engaged in a near-global blitzkrieg, tactically nuking opposing forces that stood in their way, burning Aexen in nuclear fire for nearly three decades. In response to this old Power's aggression, the Coalition was formed of the remaining Powers.
The Infinite War waged nearly seven more decades before the Coalition achieved victory; exterminating the entire population of the aggressor Power as accomplices to global genocide and wiping their name from history to ensure they would not rise again. But the cost was enormous. The Infinite War had spurred incredible advances among the Grazan, which, combined with the already hostile, irradiated Aexen becoming even more irradiated, led directly to the development of the Second Skin Project.
Originally the Second Skins were meant as protection against the ever-increasing radiation bathing Aexen, but their functions only become more and more invasive and advanced. When the Infinite War ended, the Grazan found themselves unable to leave their Second Skins, as an ultra-irradiated hell awaited them beyond the suits of metal and plastic. So they stayed inside their suits, never leaving them again, save for a few isolated experiments and incredibly foolish Grazan, until a hundred years passed, leading to the present day.
The Coalition of Aexen Powers reigns supreme over the whole of Aexen, though the individual Powers tend to exert more control over their own realms than the Coalition itself does. The Grazani bodies have atrophied significantly, and they have remained embedded in their suits, relying upon them simply to survive. Much of the old aggressor Power's land has been reconstructed, though efforts are ongoing to attempt to repopulate it, but a new prospect has presented itself to the Grazan: Faster-Than-Light Travel.
Previously, the Grazan had already spent a large amount of time exploring their solar system, but they had generally refrained from creating colonies, as it was seen as unnecessary and expensive to maintain these colonies, and they served little purpose. But the discovery of FTL awakened within many Grazan a drive to explore the stars that populated their night sky now that it was finally feasible...
