Sweethearts
Species - Sapient - the Other Sweethearts are small, environmentally versatile sentient creatures that are well adapted to serve as unquestioning placeholder crew on the Arks, and poorly adapted to everything else. In size they are generally little taller than human knee level, and weigh only four kilograms or so. The reason for their lightness is that they are, of course, hollow, and spend their lives floating in various media.
In shape and colour, true to their name, sweethearts resemble a
human heart. Their abdomen contains hollow chambers that store and pump fluids depending on their environment. A complex genetic composition allows significant variation in their shape, and so their lower bodies can be slim or bulbous and divided into two to six primary compartments. Valves and ports allow for gas exchange. Intakes are positioned on the torso, vents on the abdomen. One to three pairs of branching tentacle arms stretch from the abdomen. Their skin is smooth to touch, sealed by a resilient membrane.
Internally, sweethearts hide a variety of physically anomalous tissues, collectively known as sweetmeat. These are responsible for converting food into propellants, ejected by the vents to produce their squid-like, backwards jet propulsion in vacuum. These propellants are unstable and quickly evaporate into nothing when expelled from the sweetheart, a process catalysed by ordinary matter, which dulls the edge of their breakneck locomotion when in atmosphere, making conventional air jets more efficient. Additionally, these tissues fuel the more exotic tools in their mouthparts, and provide the sweetheart with its narcotic properties.
At the top of the torso is a shallow hemispherical head, like a hat, with several shiny black eyes and a few loose tubes through which they emit sound. Due to the absence of tongue, jaw or lips, sweetheart 'language' mostly takes the form of fluting and piping. A tightly locked vertical slit conceals the delicate mouthparts.
Sweetheart mouthparts are a complex apparatus that varies between individuals. They consist of a variety of prehensile grasping and slicing tools, with more specialised equipment dependent on alleles- Particle agitators, welding torches, spinnerets. While relatively fragile, this array is not innocuous. At the risk of injuring themselves, sweethearts do have a bite reflex when sufficiently stressed. The speed at which sweethearts can accidentally lacerate other creatures is shocking to all parties involved. It is worth noting that due to their original purpose as a challenging hunt for entropites, sweethearts have a small, bladed secondary tongue designed with the express purpose of inflicting pain on change-eaters where little else can.
Life Cycle: Sweethearts are naturally polyploid, carrying numerous copies of each chromosome, and are often genetic mosaics. Due to this, a single sweetheart contains a population's worth of genetic diversity. It would take centuries of inbreeding for negative effects to show, and sweethearts have no incest taboo. This design quirk is a contingency that allows a crew with a full compliment of functional tools to repopulate from just a few individuals in case of catastrophe on the Arks or an increase in their numbers. Of course, it also makes captive sweetheart populations viable for regular slaughter and sweetmeat harvest, no matter how small.
Promiscuous hermaphrodites with no social or familial structure, sweethearts breed readily when conditions are good. In order to accelerate the breeding process while preventing overpopulation, sweetheart larvae can only mature if implanted into the fertile living tissue. Mostly this occurs in breeding pods on the Arks, of which only enough are kept open to replenish the crew. Unborn larvae are absorbed back into the parent. It is possible to breed sweethearts in the absence of an Ark or similar infrastructure by removing dormant larvae from their parents surgically and implanting them into a living animal, which, much like a caterpillar implanted with a wasp's egg, is slowly consumed by the larva. Large animals like cattle can handle several larvae at once, but rarely survive more than one.
Larvae simply resemble vertebrate hearts and veins, albeit growing without any need for skin. After a few months of incubation the sweetheart has developed its full complement of organs and may detach and start leading an adult life. At this stage they are usually half of their average mature size, which they reach within two years. Once they reach about fifteen years of age, sweethearts find a comfortable place to rest, and die without aging.
Description: Sweetheart psychology is, compared to other sentient species, underdeveloped at best. Their language is simplistic and they possess almost no sense of personal identity. Most forms of abstract thought are beyond them. They follow instructions without question, and are incapable of comprehending the concepts of manipulation, aggression, exploitation, or mortality.
To a sweetheart, all things are inherently good, equal to itself, and requires looking after. In an Ark environment, this means that a sweetheart crew will never be restrained by interpersonal conflict, and will apply themselves to maintaining the ship as if it were their own body, using their deft tentacles and tools incorporated into their mouthparts.
Outside of it, sweethearts require constant guidance and protection to keep them out of trouble. While their propellant systems give them almost unparalleled mobility in a vacuum and their adaptable sweetmeat metabolism can tolerate extended temperature and chemical extremes, and their instincts are acutely honed for survival in Lex, Galbar is an entirely different environment. High curiousity and an inability to judge motives or perceive danger all too easily leaves sweethearts open to trafficking, slavery, harvest, or simply death by natural causes not present in space.
Species not present in Lex provoke no fear in sweethearts, and so injuries received from them inspire emotional trauma and guilt due to the sensation of rejected empathy. Sweethearts are incapable of understanding predation, but will happily consume meat if prepared. Their bite reflex, once prompted, is distressing to them, as they cannot fathom how or why they have inflicted harm. Attempting to fix broken mortals in the same way they would an Ark conduit only results in further pain on all sides.
While sweethearts cannot hold on to emotions for long, the psychological distress of a life on Galbar mounts as the years go by. Specimens that have lived freely on the planet for a decade or so tend to feel guilt for everything they perceive as broken, and avoid contact for fear of perpetuating further harm. Soon enough they grow starved of affection and symptoms of chronic anxiety set in.
Interactions: What sweethearts lack in creativity and conventional intelligence they make up for in instinct and analytical problem-solving within a narrow context. From the moment they emerge from a breeding pod they are intimately familiar with the functional mechanisms of the Arks, and tirelessly perform maintenance. This extends to certain other biomechanical constructs as well. However, sweethearts lack ingenuity and direction, and thus require extensive leadership in order to actually pilot and operate the colossal vehicles.
Originally designed as nothing more than target practice for change-eaters that moved with speed and intelligence comparable to elementals, sweetmeat naturally contains a psychically active substance meant to complement and augment the hedonistic predator psychology of entropites. The drug acts as a stimulant that clears and sharpens the mind, spurs the reflexes, and lowers the rate of intrusive thoughts. As they grow in size and exposure, adult change-eaters develop a resistance, and sate their addiction as leisure and availability dictates.
Change-eaters being both ethereal and very large, the narcotic concentration in sweetmeat is massively overcalibrated for other mortals. Dosage determines the duration of effects, but intensity is always the same. For most, ingesting sweetmeat gives the user a few hours worth of manual control over their own cognition, allowing them to think faster and with far cleaner logic than when sober and take adept control of their body, senses and reflexes while delaying pain and exhaustion. All this comes at the price of losing their emotional, social and moral inhibitions, taking on the role of the utterly free self-occupied nihilist.
There are no negative effects when the high runs down. For a few ecstatic moments, a sweetmeat user can outwit and outmatch almost anyone without regret, guilt, pain, or tiredness. Their motivations are stripped of obligations to anyone but themself and their own desires, be they carnal or personal. Most critically, memories of the high, complex plans and reasoning made during it are exquisitely lucid. While drugged, the user is typically aware that the high will soon end and plans ahead, ensuring that the addict will not regret their own actions once inhibitions return. Sweetmeat users are notoriously hard to catch.
The addiction itself, where it occurs, is purely psychological. No chemical dependency arises from multiple uses. Once the high is over, a user is indistinguishable from anyone else, despite their vivid memories and dangerous plans. As the dosage is always so high, the slow accumulation of resistance rarely occurs in mortals.
It is worth noting that there is one side effect of the drug. Change-eaters are designed to consume, and sweetmeat helps them focus on their appetite. Mortal users, particularly addicts, gradually develop a desire to consume anything that is an exotic novelty, anything taboo. While this may start with foods too expensive to buy with legal wealth, pets, strangers, and lovers soon join the list.
Vec,
Timemaster