Virillian Confederation
Known for their shrewd frugality and penchant for money, the Virillians are a cephalopod based lifeform from the ocean world of
Crustae. The Virillians are neither youngsters in the galactic scene, nor the grizzled veterans of old -- but rather lay somewhere in the middle. They were responsible for the
Great Galactic Crash that occurred 12,400 years ago when over a thousand Virillian firms crashed in the wake of an emergent political scandal, nearly even non-violent and sentient civilization had some vested interest in Virillian lenders and was largely effected.
Often called swindlers, thieves and all salesmen, the Virillians favor profit and credits over anything else -- ethics, loyalty and even the lives of others. This has generated animosity in some other law based civilizations where things like murder is wrong, no matter what financial matter is at stake. The Virillians are alleged to have bought the fabled plans for the X4-001 Virus,
Black Tide from the Allorisian Combine and sold it right to their enemy, who helped reverse engineer a cure to become immune, while the Allorisians were not. Virillians consider this a silly legend.
BIOLOGYVirillians typically stand around four feet tall, but their limbs outside of water are only strong enough to keep them up in a bent, crooked angle. In water, their natural environment, a Virillian is anywhere from five to seven feet long. They have a roughly humanoid body with heavily wedged fingers and toe digits that are laced with cartilage, but not bone -- making them brittle. The most distinguishing feature of a Virillian is it's tentacled mouth, supplanting eight tentacles that are used to pull food into it's mouth as well as used as tertiary sensory organs.
The Virilians have an elongated skull of rigid cartilage and bone, it is dense enough to resist the intense water pressures of their oceanic homeworld and has thus come to help form the phrase:
Harder than a Virillian skull, indicating the toughness of some particular feat or person. The skull houses a single elongated brain, but it is largely rudimentary for all intents and purposes.
The Virillian homeworld,
Crustae is entirely aquatic and thus the Virillians have evolved with an aquatic environment in mind. Because of this, Virillians cannot survive outside of at least partially submerged water for more than five or six hours without a device called a
Hydrator, which is an apparatus that attaches around the neck that feeds into the Virillian's gills and can supply up to an extra twelve hours of water, though without a fresh water source the Virillians often go through mild discomfort as their skin prematurely dries out.
CULTUREVirillian's top priorities are profit and hedonism via profit. Regulation is largely non-existent and while economic monopolies have formed in the past, the Virillian culture has shown time and time again the precedence of the boom and bust cycle. Virillians seek to work hard so that they can not work hard at a later date. When not working -- whether it be toiling in a mine or selling in a marketplace, Virillians seek the solace of sexual gratification, luxury goods in the form of barbiturates, psychotropic drugs and gambling.
Virillian's are hyper individualistic and are always seeking to supplant their superiors for a bigger purse. A Virillian would more likely sell it's own child than it would make a bad investment and it is because of this that thirteen of the most fourteen richest individuals are Virillian's, that fourteenth outlier is believed to be one of the original owners of the Eudaimonia Foundation.
Even the most common Virillian citizens have intricate understanding of business regulations, intragalactic economic functions and faster-than-light credit decay rates that would make other civilizations scoff. This understanding has led to the foundation and stability of Virillian banking and gambling. On every Virillian world, and many non-Virillian worlds, Underworld Station as well as the Eudaimonia Foundation Virillian bankers and casino's exist. One to give (to later take), and one to take (and seldom give). This has cast the Virillian's in a bad light, other civilizations casting them as thieves and swindlers, but when you need an economic adviser, there is no better selection than a Virillian.
MILITARYThe
Virillian Surface Fleet manages over seven thousand surface and sub-aquatic vessels to help govern it's homeworld, but it has rarely seen use as other civilizations do not nominally possess the technology to invade the intricate sub-aquatic arcologies of the Virillian home planet.
The
Virillian Space Fleet is not the largest, nor the most powerful in the galaxy and is composed of around fifteen thousand vessels -- four hundred of which are capital ships and fifteen of which are
dreadnoughts, immense war ships that are miles long and brimming with weaponry. The Space Fleet's military doctrines are designed with asset protection and planetary defense in mind, with an emphasis on kinetic shielding and survivability.
The
Virillian Army is composed of less than 0.04% of the entire population of their intragalactic empire, with around 255,000,000 soldiers. These soldiers are equipped with
Hydrators and the famed Piton Guns, weapons that fire kinetic spikes that pin the target against anything behind it. The distinct
Puh-Tun sound of the projectile being fired is the reason for it's name. Due to the fragility of the Virillians in combat, with their fleshy epidermis and their brittle, mostly cartilage based skeleton, the Virillians often fight their wars employing huge amounts of mercenaries, or buying off those who would see them destroyed.
FortunesFaded
Spiffy
Scrawl Banditta
