<h2 align="center">Tikali </h2> <p align="center"> <img src="https://github.com/Insculpo/Sandbox_Galaxy/blob/Galactic/Stellar_Abyss_Setting_Bible/Photo_Directory/Tikali.jpg"> </p> ### Overview Located on the world of [[Long_Step]], in orbit of a K-class star, the Tikali thrive. The Tikali are mostly seafaring creatures who developed over the ages to the state they currently are in now. That is as one of the most advanced beings in the known galaxy. And from origins grotesque and dirty- from the salty swamps of hardgrowth which had been the incubators of civilizations on the Murk for millennia. The Tikalian canon stretches on for a span of ages before they ever grabbed ahold of the rocket or paddled their way to the stars when networks of floating cities run by elite families were the norm. The development of steel happened less than a century before space travel, of which came more about due to their innovations in chemical warfare than anything else as their world became ever more interconnected in the thousand years leading up to the launching of the first rockets and the eventually information revolution which radically destroyed over ten thousand years of entrenched clans within a century as the Tikali shifted to a deeply molecular existence and became one of the few beings to happen upon a system of FTL in the known universe. ### Biology The Tikali are from a murky, swampy world. There is an absence of polar caps due to the greenhouse effect, leading to a more carbon rich environment than on [[Earth]]. Their world has more homogenous temperature than earth, but there is still amazing amounts of variation thanks to the nutrition poor soils demanding a diversification of methods for attaining foods. The Tikali themselves are a fresh water creature that has numerous spikey tendrils that flare up in certain situations, with control over verticals or horizontal spoke flaring. Their movement stiffens when the spikes flare, for obvious reasons. These barb-like spikes are long and flowing normally. They can "walk" using the verticals spikes through a swiveling motion on land, clumsily, but good enough that they have been able to achieve a somewhat amphibious niche over their evolution and eventually became intelligent due to a chaotic mess of pressures and mating selection on intelligence instead of barbs- such pressures leading to the sapient modern Tikali. The modern Tikali spent much more time as a Stone Age species, but this was deceptive as they achieved much greater developments in textiles and stone craft to the point where they were making crystal shotguns, gun powder, pump based transport systems and whatnot before they even had automation, which they had before jumping to iron tools and rapidly just kept advancing from there, going from a agricultural society to a space faring one within a century. The Tikali are a species with multiple sub-species of highly varied coloration, size and physique. All of which tend to be around 6-11 feet in length, have eight spinefins, retractable arms, four eyes and a mouth flap. The Tikali have a flat beak beneath the he mouth flap along with molars. The Tikali have cilla across their hide and back, while their sides have the pointy spine fins which play a amazing versatility of purposes both naturally and in their society. The Tikali in regards to gender dimorphism seem to have longer barbs for males than females, the males tend to be of similar size though they do tend to be a bit smaller (though this is often hidden by the longer barbs). There is variance in colors and the males tend to have more vibrant colors, but that isn't culturally universal- there are Tikali subspecies with the opposite situation. The Tikali are peculiar in how their species never seemed to have any census on if they are a neutral, patriarchal or matriarchal species and this isn't helped by their means of reproduction that can have things go both ways much more easily. The poisonous hair Tikali have is not poisonous to their young, and so the baby Tikali often will hide in the hair of their caretakers. This habit they extend very liberally. The Tikali subspecies include the smaller, paler Tidal Tikali, the Murk Tikali, who are larger and like more salty, swampier environments, the Long Tikali known for their long grappling reach. Primarily their kind has rapid copulation and egg bearing of purses that the males or females will ornament themselves with for transport. The egg ornaments feature prominently as a symbol of fertility, even symbolically for this reason. The Tikali tend to practice systems of opt-in parenting with their clan groups which can number in their primitive cultures in the hundreds. Who parents varies highly. The Tikali are shockingly adaptable with their design, and have used technology to make themselves able to slide about on land more effectively (they tend to prefer winter seasons due to snow having more friction, for one). Their grappler arms are the most notable feature, more so than their spine fins they use as paddles or walkers or their barbs hair that both kills and protects. These grappling arms are pressure based, and are remarkably compressible for the spring-like launch the Tikali can give them. They can also expand and retract their arms at other rates. These arms are developed from a proboscis used to catch prey, punch or stab rivals, hold onto rocks or grab stuff in general and diversified highly in its role over many generations, less flexible hands are known to be on the close relatives of the Tikali. The Tikali hand is able to manipulate the environment around them to remarkable precision, to the point where they became able to make complex tools and from there make civilization as their psychology became more and more sapient. Their fingers: Their fingers tend to be able to shift from being parallel to perpendicular to each other. They lack joints, but these fingers make up for that by having incredibly effective muscles they harden with resistance. The Tikali had amphibious traits for millions of years, their whole class is like that in fact. This class lived in colder areas and so is known for having quasi-mammalian traits, namely their radiation of internal body heat and their hairiness. The Tikali generally thrived everywhere of course, Tikali in warmer regions actually would shave themselves and in very cold regions pack on the dead animals. Tikali clothing generally covers their barb-like hairs, with holes sometimes in them for their babies to hide inside (Tikali cultures vary with this- some of them had a specialized care taker while others expected care takers to be everyone. The argument goes on to this day. You'll never hear the end of it. Ever.) The Tikali have two biological sexes and a very subjective sense of gender, much more so than what you see with humans in agricultural times (though technological humans are much more like how the Tikali always were). This is made worse by the high variance in Tikali, as the Tikali have a lot of plasticity in their genetics. Big and small, numerous colors, which sex gets the longer hair (or if neither do) and so on all factoring into things. It's a mess. However they always have 10 spinefins, 4 eyes, barbs, 2 retractable arms and 4 fingers on each arm. Tikali counting is base 18 or base 8 as some of their cultures count both their spinefins and fingers. Tikali reproduction itself is done through a docking process, and is incredibly touch intensive as the males literally sweat their sperm, though this requires intense stimuli explaining why unlike say, coral spewing their sperm in the water they need contact heavy sex. The females soak it, the more the better. This system has the drawback that unlike humans, blocking sperm transfer removes the pleasure. However, since female Tikali have egg purses that they can ornament anywhere (be it on a spine fin of another Tikali or somewhere safe) or just leave to some animal to eat it doesn't really make much difference other than needing more food for a bit. The Tikali are technically a K-type, the purses gestate for just a few weeks before developing separately from the mother Tikali as a egg that the baby eats its way out of. Egg purse skins of various species are fed to young Tikali in some cultures, as they give more nutrition. Older Tikali still eat egg purse skins. It's like milk for them. The Tikali notoriously are claimed "to eat anything"- rotten foods rich in bacteria are a frequent delicacy for them, for instance. That betrays their scavenger roots, as much as the veil of predation and massive aquaculture networks in recent times is placed. ### Cultural Norms The Tikali lack a sense of territoriality, like we do. Land ownership as a concept seems to just not make sense to them. The Tikali understand owning objects and living things, but they can't understand properly owning a house. This is because the Tikali tend to cohabit places, even ones their fellow Tikali built. If you do not steal objects owned by other Tikali, you are good. You can easily see this with their floating modular towns which have no real property ownership, but may the chains forbid you take from a clan outside your own! The second major tenet of the Tikali is that they don't understand good and evil. Their moral systems come in two shapes. A mono morality and a reciprocal morality that shows their ideals of justice and law much more clearly than anything else ever could. As the Tikali has "noble" behavior, and a absence of it. Noble traits Carry a lot, but the common metric is that you either have the traits or you don't, and if you don't have the traits you are in big trouble. In effect, they have ideals more than defined traits for both good and evil. They don't frame their moral system that way and find our way of doing it clunky at times. The Tikali also have a reciprocal moral system among some of their cultures that can get rather absurd as the idea is any transgressions done must be done back to correct the problem. The implications of this are quite staggering- it basically means there are Tikali who believe rapists should be raped themselves, Tikali who think people caught stealing should have stuff stolen from them in return, Tikali who if you scam, think you now must suffer from a scam and so on. Kill tons of their kind, they believe they must kill a similar amount in return. This attitude infests the [[Silent Pact|Silent Pact]]. ![[Tikali History]] #Tikali #Galactic-Region/TheMurk #aquatic #sapient #tool-use/K1-Civ #Star/K-Class #biochemistry/Carbon/Water