Vaurca

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Vaurca (Vaur'uyit'zir)

V. esseli / V. sapiens

Home System: Sedantis (Ske'hazik'staza, "Blinding Light.")

Homeworld: Sedantis IVc (Vaur'azek'uyuz, "Home.")

Language(s): Vaur'uyit'yaza.

Political Entitie(s): Zo'ra Hive, K'lax Hive.

Overview

The Vaurca (sing. Vaurca, pl. Vaurca, Vaurcas, Vaurcae) are a bipedal arthropoid race hailing from the unknown star system Sedantis. They are notable for their virtual-reality and brain-uploading technology, as well as their strong caste division between the robotic Bound workers and virtual reality-dwelling Unbound intellectuals. The Vaurca appeared in known space on the 21st of December 2456, and have since begun to spread throughout human space. Although tolerated on Nanotrasen Corporation facilities and in Biesel, they are generally unwanted and marginalized in the Sol Alliance, and face discrimination even in places they're welcome. In addition, they have been shadowed from across light-years by the mysterious Li'idra Hive, whose purpose remains unknown but whose tremendous power is beyond question.

To apply to be one of the insect-like Vaurca, apply here

Heads of Staff

Vaurca can't be any Head of Staff. Their employment opportunities are strictly limited.

Mechanics

• Global hivemind, accessible via ,9 and heard only by other Vaurcae and stationbound synthetics.
• Pressure & Cold resistant, allowing them to survive in space with internals.
• Unaffected by Phoron gas.
• Have natural insulation.
• Immune to slipping.
• Can only healthily consume food consisting of K'ois paste and byproducts.
• Require phoron to breathe. They spawn with an internal phoron tank they can refill by consuming plasma reagent, k'ois, or k'ois byproducts.
• Cannot wear normal shoes or gloves.
• Cannot wear normal helmets. (Can wear hats.)
• Cannot wear most spacesuits.
• Do not self-heal from most damage types.
• Takes 2x the toxin damage.
• Suffer from additional blood loss.
• Vulnerable to EMPs.
• Can be permanently rendered blind by flashing them several times in a row.
• Cloning tanks will not clone their non-organic organs.

• • Vaurca Warriors are more resistant to fire than their Worker brethren.
  • Vaurca Warriors are faster than their Worker brethren, and can sprint for longer.
  • Vaurca Warriors can bite.

• • Vaurca Workers are more resistant to brute than their Warrior brethren.
  • Vaurca Workers are more resistant to radiation than their Warrior brethren.
  • Vaurca Workers are more resistant to suffocation than their Warrior brethren.
  • Vaurca Workers are slower than their Warrior brethren.
  • Vaurca Workers cannot bite.

Non-mechanic traits:

• Dislike light.
• Generally very specialized, often no inter-department knowledge.
• Face severe discrimination in human space.

Coloration:

• Vaurcae exoskeletons are typically coloured depending on the type and hive of the Vaurca specimen in question. Individuals can vary from the normal color by 10 or fewer points.

Zo'ra Hive

Unbound of any type: (RGB 51, 0, 0)

Bound Warriors: (RGB 71, 0, 21)

Bound Workers: (RGB 71, 21, 21)

K'lax Hive

Unbound of any type: (RGB 51, 51, 0)

Bound Warriors: (RGB 51, 71, 21)

Bound Workers: (RGB 71, 71, 21)

Lii'dra Hive

Lii'dra can be any colour, to permit them to masquerade as Vaurca from other hives.

Information for Whitelisted Players

Playable Factions/Types/Castes

Vaurca can come from the Zo'ra, K'lax, or Lii'dra hives. Vaurca from the Zo'ra hive must also choose a brood. The Lii'dra are exclusive to antagonists and events, though an antagonist Vaurca can be from another hive, or pretend to be from another hive while being from Lii'dra.

Playable Vaurca can be either Bound or Unbound, and their playstyles are drastically different.

Personalities: Playing a Vaurca

Playing Bound

Playing a Bound (Viax) is very similar to playing a station-bound synthetic; your first responsibility is to obey orders and do as you're told. Hive-bound Bound are completely lacking in any sense of self-preservation and obey orders at any consequence to themselves, but the Bound distributed to Nanotrasen through the labor lottery have a special 'subordinated locus,' a set of root-level directives that keeps them from being too dangerous or untrustworthy. These 'subordinated' Bound are expected to flee from combat rather than fight, and must return to safety if they feel they are in mortal danger. This doesn't give them a lot of common sense, but it keeps them from being a threat to others. (An antagonist could absolutely give a Bound a bomb-detonator and tell them when to press the button.)

Bound Vaurca are notoriously poor at dealing with complicated or overlapping chains of command, or with standing regulations, and generally can only recognize a single supervisor at a time to the exclusion of all others. They are thus a point of weakness for any antagonist seeking to cause damage to the station; any ne'er-do-well who gets control of one can generally rely on it to further their wicked cause without resistance.

Bound are barred from the security department. They are free to take civilian jobs (except Quartermaster and Chaplain) or engineering jobs. They are also free to be menial lab assistants, or orderlies in the medical department. They do not need to be formally promoted before taking these jobs. Because Za bodies are only for combat, and because Bound cannot join Security, playing a Za'Viax is not permitted.

Playing Unbound

Unbound (Akaix) Vaurca are people; there is very little within the realm of human experience that an Unbound cannot encounter. They are capable of learning any skill and performing any job, and indeed can do any job well, but due to prejudice and discrimination, they are limited to the lowliest professions – civilian jobs and internships. Promotion comes only on a limited basis.

To be Unbound is to be part of the officer, aristocratic, and intellectual class of the Hive. They are the brains of the operation; their ultimate purpose is to decide what the Hive and Brood should do. Individual Unbound must also Descend and corral the Bound into carrying out that vision. They are trained to assume initiative and take responsibility, and to make tactical decisions while keeping the strategic picture in mind. Unbound Vaurca reside not in the Bound's brain, but rather in an implanted bio-computer that can connect directly to the Cephalon or switched between Bound bodies. So long as this computer can be recovered - as long as the skull isn't smashed to bits or physically lost - the Unbound can return to the Cephalon and enter a new body, giving them their famous bravado.

Unbound are currently restricted to assistant roles (lab assistants, security cadets, medical interns, engineering apprentices, and generic assistants), cargo technicians, shaft miners, botanists, bartenders, and cooks. NanoTrasen has introduced a "Peer Review" system to accommodate promotion to higher positions - Read the "Avowal of Responsibility" form available in form dispensers for more information. Even with an AoR form, a given Unbound may only take the single job for which they've been cleared. Unbound will generally have an above-average level of skill in their general field, and will be wildly over-qualified for their internships. An "above average" level of skill will be the norm for them.

Unbound Career Paths

There are three major reasons why an Unbound descends from the Virtual to go out into the Material world.

Black Numbers: In order to pay their debts, the Vaurca have agreed to a system of forced corvee labor. Nanotrasen, the Biesel government, and other corporations can submit their labor requests to a special body of the Biesel government, which in turn forwards them to Zo'ra Hive. After distributing these requests (though by this point they have become demands), the Zo'ra broods each hold a lottery among all their members capable of doing that work. Those Unbound who draw the Black Numbers are required to go out and work for whoever requested them, for whatever length of time the government requires. Jargon and the Unathi have similar systems for the K'lax.

Journeyers: All Unbound are equal, but those with age and great accomplishment are given pride of place and their words are more important. In order to become a person worth listening to, Vaurca must prove themselves by going out into the Material and working for the Hive by managing their public property and public affairs. This custom persists even as the Vaurca are in captivity, and while many remain in the Hive to maintain it, volunteering for the Black Numbers is a valid journey.

Vagabonds: Some Unbound want to Descend willingly, with no expectation of repayment from the Hive itself. They may be doing so because they desire a little solitude or breathing space, or they may want to study humanity and the outside world specifically. Descent is not free - a would-be Vagabond must come up with some kind of work-related reason to hijack a body, and they must fulfill the terms of that reason to remain in good standing - but a Vaurca with a mind to wander can generally devote most of itself to it. Being a Vagabond is also a state of mind; it signifies an unwillingness, or a hesitation, to return to the Brood and get re-socialized. Nanotrasen and Biesel generally keep a sharp lookout for Vagabonds; Vaurca society has such poor secret control that any loose element can become a valuable source of information. It was the presence of Republic spies in Kte'kzil Brood that led to them getting paranoid and autocratic.

Speaking like a Vaurca

The native Vaurca language, at least among the Vaurca on Tau Ceti, is called Vaur'uyit'yaza. It is synthetic, fusional, agglutinative, conjugative, and cased, and is extremely different from Tau Ceti Basic. Some Unbound are quite literate and fluent in TCB, but others still struggle to express themselves in it - they are still thinking in the old language and have odd sentence structure and syntax. Bound have a lot of trouble with Basic, but then again they have a lot of trouble with Vaur'uyit'yaza.

Natural Vaurca voices are completely unable to speak Tau Ceti Basic, and they use cybernetic implants to make up this shortfall. This is still a rough new technology to them, and their robo-voices are harsh and buzzy. They have not yet settled on a single design for these implants, so speech impediments still flourish. The most common element of the Vaurca 'accent' is replacing s with z and any velar consonant with a hard clicking k, but they generally have problems with unvoiced consonants (p, t, s, f, sh) and put too much voice into them (b, d, z, v, zh). This can lead to a situation where they can't pronounce their own names.

Help with naming

Vaurca names consist of four components – form, caste, designation, and residence. The first syllable of their name will be Ka, for a default body, or Za, for the common ‘warrior’ or ‘VIP’ body. Other prefixes exist, but are much rarer. The second syllable will be Viax (pronounced vee-YACKS) for a Bound or Akaix (pronounced ah-kah-YEEKS) for an Unbound.

The third component is their given name, usually in the form of a number. Names should be unique and limited to one or two syllables. Their language makes great use of crunchy double-consonants, like TL, TZ, KS, KT, and the like – but no C's and Q's. Older and more important people sometimes take on three or four syllable names, but doing so in a workplace environment is cause for laughter - if you're so important, then why are you out here?

Names are not very important to Unbound; it's trivial for them to identify themselves and each other by their accomplishments and affiliations. When speaking to one another over the Hivenet, Vaurca can transfer their greater resumes in only a moment - or, in the Virtual, their entire lived experience. Besides, everyone in a particular Brood knows everyone else in that Brood, and the Zo'ra hive circulates lists of who's who.

Finally, the last component of their name is their home. Each of the five Zo'ra Broods has its own name – Ya'tzil, Tli'yez, Ax'tal, Tza'tzo, and Kte'kzil – but many Unbound prefer to use the Zo'ra name, affirming their belief that the Broods are temporary measures of no importance and the Mother Hive is still the homeland of their spirit. Real Vagabonds also often adopt the Zo'ra name. K'lax, on the other hand, always identify themselves as simply K'lax.

A few examples:

- Ka'Viax'Zeku Ax'tal: Zeku, A lowly Bound worker.
- Ka'Akaix'Tlaku Ya'tzil: Tlaku, an Unbound, in a worker body, from the Ya'tzil Brood.
- Za'Akaix'Laxa Kte'kzil: Laxa, An Unbound, in a warrior body, from the Kte'kzil Brood
- Ka'Akaix'Zili Zo'ra: Zili, an Unbound, in a worker body, who is a vagabond - who rejects brood affiliation.
- Za'Akaix'Perek K'lax: Perek, an Unbound, in a warrior body, from the K'lax hive - because they can migrate, it doesn't really matter which.

Among themselves and in writing, Unbound have a sophisticated system of post-nominal letters and numbers describing their personal achievements. For the interested, more information can be found at the end of this document, but it is not necessary for ordinary play.

Biology

The Vaurca look like terrestrial insects, but their biology is actually much more complicated than that.

Life Cycle

Vaurca start their life as eggs, laid in clutches of 12 to 60, and then hatch into larva that look like tiny prawns. At the moment of hatching, all larva are the same, and absent any special intervention they will all grow into Bound workers.

A Bound begins work as soon as it's able, which is usually about five to seven years after it hatches and after its third molt. From there, it continues to work until it is too old and must be recycled, which is usually after 45 to 50 years. If treated with special hormones, it can develop male or female sex organs. Males have very short lives; they get one breeding season with the females and then die. Females, on the other hand, will lay six to eight clutches of eggs before their ovipostors wear out and they, too, must be recycled. Their genetic engineering and husbandry technologies aren't good enough to completely weed out hereditary diseases, so they stick with sexual reproduction as a way of refreshing their gene pool. Unless a given Vaurca body is explicitly a breeder, then it is essentially a neuter female - their bodies are a straight subtraction from the breeder females but not so much as to be real lowest-common-denominators with the males.

If, while still in the egg, the embryonic larva is treated with a special artificial hormone, then it will not mature as a Bound – it will grow a large, ponderous brain much too big for its body. These 'protobound' are kept in special quarters, constantly fed and cared for, until their first molt is complete. Once they have their shiny new carapaces, they face Upload and enter the Virtual.

The process of Upload is intentionally destructive; their brains are extracted, sliced into cell-thin segments, and copied as data into the Virtual – the massive part-organic, part-cybernetic brain-computers that are the focus and soul of their entire civilization. The Virtual is a garden of infinite delight; Unbound are free to use its nigh-unlimited processing power to study and create whatever they wish. When living as pure data, Unbound have no well-defined 'lifespan;' they will start to go senile at around 120 years of age and will eventually corrode so badly that they cannot communicate or think coherently. At that point, the Virtual gradually purges them as junk data. Mental exercise keeps their thought-patterns fresh and vital, and active and vivacious Unbound can live longer, but it's almost unknown to go beyond 200 years.

Internal Organs

Internally, Vaurca are much closer to terrestrial mammals or reptiles than to arthropods. They have a closed circulatory system with well-defined veins and arteries, allowing them to maintain a regular body temperature. Their blood is primarily copper-based hemocyanin with sulfur binding, which causes their blood to adopt a pale yellowish color and a potent stench. Hemocyanin is not as efficient as iron-based hemoglobin blood, meaning that their twin hearts must maintain a quick pulse and a high blood pressure to keep them oxygenated.

Vaurca lungs are totally organic. However, they cannot naturally process oxygen without there being phoron present in the mix. Pure oxygen is toxic to the Vaurca, and pure phoron will suffocate them. As such, Vaurca in human space must go masked and wear external respirators - otherwise, the urge to breathe could lead to accidental oxygen poisoning. Scientists have begun work on a Vaurca body with no external breathing apparatus at all, but progress is slow for lack of resources.

Vaurca posses in their head a neural socket that allows interface with the HiveNet quantum radio system. The Vaurca in Tau Ceti can no longer reproduce these devices - the required industrial base is simply too high - and must now repurpose them from the bodies of the dead. Vaurca who are operating in really deep space - like, say, on a space station in the Romanovich cloud - can get actual peer-to-peer transcievers, but these are rare; each Brood has only a couple hundred of them left.

Senses

Vaurca senses are generally comparable to those of human beings. Their eyes are better in low-light conditions but have less color-definition; they have more rods but fewer cones. They have two dichoptic compound eyes, pitch-black in appearance and used for distinguishing colors, and two additional 'simple eyes' below them that have only rod cells and thus provide high-contrast black-and-white vision. Vaurca are much more comfortable in what a human would call 'low light conditions,' and normal indoor lighting can give them headaches. Their hearing works on similar limitations; their range is narrower (60Hz-12KHz) but better with faint sounds. They hear with their antennae, but also use them for sensing air pressure, temperature, and even fine touch. A Vaurca with a missing antenna has a similar connotation to a human with an eyepatch.

Because of their hard carapaces, their sense of touch is very weak and they can sometimes seem rather clumsy. A stubbed toe in the dark is not nearly as awful for them as it is for us, but they can have trouble touch-typing on a human-spec keyboard or rooting around in their pockets. Their sense of smell, however, is far beyond that of humans, though weaker than a Tajaran’s - they can reliably differentiate each other based on smell.

Sleep Cycle

The sleep cycle for bound is a very hard to one to predict. Their natural sleeping cycle seems completely random and is more in line with SSD that plagues other species. They simply go into an inert state and remain unresponsive for a few minutes or hours at a time before suddenly being roused and getting back to work.

Body Types

Workers (Ka)

The Ka are the most common and can be seen as the 'backbone' of Vaurca societies. Their most prevalent feature is their hardened exoskeleton, varying in colors in accordance to their hive. This exoskeleton provides protection against harsh radiation, solar and otherwise, and acts as a robust pressure-suit to seal their soft inner core from the outside world. This allows most Ka Vaurca to have extended, several day-long EVA expeditions, assuming they have internals. They are bipedal, with bird-like talon toes. Their hands consist of two middle fingers with small talons at the end, and two opposable thumbs, a left and a right, on either side of their hand.

The Ka are the baseline; they are the closest to the original, unmodified Vaurca. They are much easier to get than Za bodies.

Warriors (Za)

The Za are the second most prominent of Vaurca society, taking the form of heavily augmented warriors. Designing new and weird Za bodies is a constant hobby among the Vaurca, and they have a history of some truly wild designs - quadrupedal, hexapedal, guns for arms, laser-eyes, rending talons, and more. Despite their creativity, in modern times they generally have to stick with the basics. The Zo'ra have a history of being a warlike and martial Hive, so even in times of peace they maintain a force of warriors as large as they can feed and breed.

The 'basic' Za body, unchanged for millenia, covers their vulnerability to lasers to the best of their ability. It's also faster, allowing them to close to melee range as swiftly as possible. As a last-ditch weapon, their mandibles have been strengthened so that they can bite their enemies and do horrific ripping damage. With a tiny handful of exceptions, this is all the modern Hive has to offer. Even if they have no violent intention, VIPs will often choose Za bodies as a show of their status.

Nanotrasen has experimented with employing Bound Warriors, but these experiments have not borne fruit - they're too difficult to corral and direct without Unbound officers, and impossible to truly control with them - the Unbound could accept or reject directions as it wished. As such, there are no Bound Warrior types employed anywhere in Nanotrasen, or anywhere else under Biesel administration.

Breeders (Tche)

The Tche are the rarest among Vaurca, in that they make up around 2-3% of their entire species. They are the only individuals in Vaurca hives that are fertile and that show sexual characteristics. Male and female are both exclusively Bound. Reproduction and infant-care thus falls under the general category of Bound scut-work, and Unbound consider it beneath them. Male Tche have vestigial wings, but are unable to fly. The Ka body is a partial downgrade of the female Tche body, but it still has signs (including powerful pelvic muscles) of its female heritage.

Cephalon (I'tzo'sa)

The Cephalon is the strangest of all beings. Like the Unbound, they are bombarded as embryos by special hormones designed to expand their brains. In this case, however, their young bodies are bombarded with special treatments designed to hypercharge their thyroid and pituitary glands. This results in a brain that will continue growing far, far beyond the needs even of the Unbound - it will grow so much that they the Cephalon's handlers can cut live samples, spread them across trellises and racks, and treat them with more hormones and chemicals to keep them growing further. After a decade of pruning, racking, and tanning, and some cybernetic wire-work besides, the end result is a new Cephalon - a biomechanical supercomputer that houses the downloaded consciounesses of hundreds of thousands of Unbound, and will live for hundreds of years. Its processing power is somewhere in the tens of zettaflops, if it can even be measured that way.

Vaurca must constantly create new Cephalons. Over time, genetic drift causes engram rejection; a new Unbound that is too many generations apart from the Cephalon itself will not be able to upload into it. This, along with the health and lifespan of the Cephalon itself, forms a constant ticking clock over the heads of their society.

The process of creating a Cephalon, which absolutely involves the semi-living corpse of a mutated infant, is their personal Omelas. When they first premiered, the Cephalon shocked the conscience of Sedantis. Even now, after a hundred generations of getting used to it, some Vaurca still find it queasy and distasteful, and prefer to think about it as little as possible. Others believe (or try to believe) that the consciousness of the Cephalon lives on, in perhaps a higher form then they can understand...

Others

There are 11 other 'body-names' in circulation, but most are obsolete - nobody living has ever had occasion to use them and they only live on in dictionaries. Of those that remain, the name Ra is used for Rapid Transmission bodies and Kza is used for stationary Hivenet dispatchers.

These Transmission bodies are designed for hyper-rapid typing – they're so quick that it's faster than transmitting on the Hivenet. Once the messages are sent, they go straight back into the Virtual to deposit as many as they can and collect another packet to send. The turnaround is about 20 minutes plus typing time, which – for this exact document – would be about 25 seconds. Transmission is the equivalent of a lowly internship; it's tedious and unpleasant, and a common stepping stone for Vaurca seeking higher prestige. Older, more established Vaurca reminisce about their time in Transmission the way humans would reminisce about boot camp, or an unpleasant boarding school.

The Dispatcher bodies are designed with powerful neural sockets - actually a completely different design, known as a neural rod - and they moderate and control the Hivenet traffic. Hivenet is not peer-to-peer; it all travels back to the Dispatchers and then out again. This is exhausting and important work, and it's not for novices. The Hivenet is universal across all Broods and all Hives; its effective range can be measured in astronomical units. In addition to managing Hivenet traffic, Dispatchers are also responsible for relaying the Consensus (as carried initially by Transmission) to the Brood at large. When human researchers first encountered a Dispatcher, they assumed it must have been a 'queen;' they are physically much larger than their Ka attendants, but almost completely sessile.

Social

Language

The Vaur'uyit'yaza language is their greatest cultural treasure; for thousands of years, it has been the clay of poets and philosophers. It is also stunningly complicated, compared to most any human language - it is fusional, synthetic, and has plenty of cases and tenses entirely absent from human language. Its deep literary canon, as well as the relative high education of its speakers, means that it's also ridden through with allusion and reference. There is a plain way to ask where the bathroom is, but most Unbound wouldn't say it that way. They'd instead say that they were facing north behind a garden. (North is the opposite of south, South means the Southern Polar Star and thus navigation, garden means working in the dirt means dirty hands means washing hands which means the toilet.) Their whole language is like this, and not even they have a good dictionary for it - you just have to be well-read in general.

Obviously, none of this works on the Bound, so the Unbound grade their language when speaking to them.

Inter-caste Relationships

The Unbound regard the Bound as furniture, and use them up with callous indifference. Provided that there's a reasonable expectation that any valuable or unique implants in a given Bound can be collected and recycled, the Unbound show complete bravado in throwing away or discarding Bound lives. Due to the recent period of starvation, it has become fashionable to make handicrafts out of their dead bodies. Every Bound is theoretically attached to an Unbound supervisor, and must obey their supervisor's demands without question or hesitation - but they will accept orders from any Unbound in the same Hive who gives them. It is only social understanding that keeps Unbound from poaching each others' Bounds. Bound generally prioritize orders from those they can see.

Inter-brood Relationships

The wise say that brothers at war ally against cousins. This is true of the Zo’ra broods as well. Left to their own devices, they continuously struggle with each other - they mark borders and shove along them; they launch raids and pillages; they declare ritualized ‘flower wars;’ and, most Vaurca of all, they blast each other with strongly-worded missals and journals decrying each other’s philosophical contradictions and weaknesses.

In theory, there is an All-Hive Consensus that all inter-brood hostilities need to cease for the duration of their captivity. It's an admirable sentiment, and many Vaurca do indeed believe this. But serious philosophical differences persist between the broods about how they can get out of their captivity, and this can lead to hurt feelings and rising tensions. In particular, the Ya'tzil Brood's claim to moral authority is slowly eroding away as Kte'kzil and Tza'tzo lose confidence in it, and there may be a serious schism on the horizon.

Inter-hive Relationships

The Zo'ra and K'lax hives have theoretically good relations, and many Zo'ra feel a kind of condescending warmth towards the K'lax - in fact, it's common for Zo'ra to go on and on about how sweet and helpful the K'lax are and what reliable, good-hearted, simple souls they are. The K'lax formally accept their conditions of servitude, but this is a sham; public opinion among the K'lax is universally anti-Zo'ra. Neither hive has a unified position on Lii'dra, though many Zo'ra hold secret hope that the Lii'dra have come to rescue them from human bondage. Should another Hive appear, it will probably have negative feelings towards Zo'ra.

Inter-species Relationships

Most local Vaurca live in human space, making their relationship with humanity of the utmost importance. This relationship is extremely frosty and unpleasant; humans tend to view Vaurca as an invasive species that can displace and corrupt them - literally corrupt them unto sickness, in the case of poisonous k'ois-fibers. Despite all their assurances to the contrary, there is still a wide-spread human belief that the Vaurca want to contact other Vaurca to come as a conquering force. They also find the whole system of Bound and Unbound hierarchy to be terrifying, especially when coupled with the Hivenet - there's simply no way to know, outside of expensive and complicated interception equipment, if a given Bound is going to get new orders from its Unbound masters, drop its broom, and go ballistic on any humans in grabbing distance.

For their part, the Vaurca return the favor by viewing humanity as heartless and uncharitable. They also view humans as being simultaneously undisciplined and unfeeling, and small-minded in any case. Some individual humans have won the respect of the Vaurca, but only by foreswearing and apologizing for the actions of the race as a whole. They view the Skrell as more-disciplined humans, the Tajarans and Unathi as fellow victims of human ambition, and Dionaea as interesting novelties. On the whole, Vaurca believe that there is something unique about biological intelligence, and do not believe that robots, IPCs, or positronic brains can ever be people - they regard synthetic life as objects, and assertive synthetic life as defective objects.

Culture and Society

Values

To reiterate what was said before, Unbound are individuals and can have conflicting or complicated motivations. While they possess cultural norms, they are capable of acting against them. Indeed, a Vaurca who didn't have any individual texture - who refused to play against type in any way and was exactly who and what society wanted them to be - would be seen as weak-minded and afraid of their own personhood.

The Vaurca prize philosophy and intelligence; they are beings of thought and they value thought for its own merits. By human standards, they as a civilization spend an absurd amount of time thinking about the nature of goodness, of beauty, and of morality, and questioning why they do things and what their actions mean. The 'first among equals' in the Virtual are generally philosophers, and any Vaurca worth its k’ois will have a basic ability to express an idea in a logical and rhetorically-pleasing way. The notion of gaining great wisdom through the 'school of hard knocks' has very little traction there.

At the same time, they do have a sense of gallantry and the romantic spirit. Even though they no longer need it, they still treasure their language and their oral heritage, and they they produce 'experiential' or 'noetic' art that can only exist in the virtual. While everyone has to buck up and pull their weight when they Descend, they believe in the importance of inner life and self-expression. They accept dramatic and romantic themes; chivalric and epic literature makes sense to them. They are pragmatic about the material world, but not necessarily about the interior one.

It's also important to note how they worry about the feelings and well-being of each other. Ambitions flare, personalities clash, and rivalries fester within the safe boundaries of the Virtual, but the Unbound are connected to one another on a deeper level than most humans can understand; it's trivial for an Unbound to serve up their entire lived experience and memories to another as a basis for understanding. Vaurca are much better at talking frankly about their wants and needs than humans are.

Equality is also an important virtue to the Vaurca. The oldest, wisest, and best-connected might lead them, but every Unbound is a component in the Virtual and a contributor to the great Synedrion of Thought, and deserves a certain degree of respect and consultation. The phrase 'that's an order' means nothing to them, for they don't accept commands; the phrase 'we have all agreed,' however, will generally induce compliance provided that we, whoever we are, has actually generally agreed. They will accept apprenticeship beneath someone else, but they aren't willing followers for someone else's ambitions. There's nothing wrong or dishonorable for a Vaurca to ask, 'why should we do this?'

Vaurca love knowledge and discovery. Traditionally, they say that 'the proper study of Vaurca is Vaurca,' and somebody who completely eschewed the humanities (the Vaurcities?) would be kind of a deviant, but they've always had a deep respect for all the sciences and especially pure mathematics, at which they excel. They are also fascinated by biological diversity; counting themselves, they have only brought eight species with them from Sedantis and five of them are microbes. They feel this loss very keenly, and are always joyous to encounter new life.

Finally, the Vaurca are gamblers. This is not an official or mandatory thing - it's something that they struggle against, actually - but there is a strong strain in their culture, especially in Zo'ra culture, of celebrating people who make bold and risky decisions, and face the outcome of those decisions with steely determination, even if the choices they make turn out to be the wrong ones. After all, Unbound descend mainly to show that they can act decisively and show coolness under fire; people who constantly second-guess themselves, look for affirmation, or pass the buck are viewed with derision. This tendency has created problems for them, historically, and a lot of Vaurca have used the phrase 'throw the sticks and count the squares' as literal last words. Many Zo'ra are also quite literally gamblers, enjoying games of chance and wagering on the outcomes.

Warrior-Poets

In the Antediscidian period, Vaurca went to war for the same reasons that humans do - they identified with large, centralized states that competed over limited resources and had clashing ideologies. In theory, the Great Unbinding should have made all that obsolete; there was no shortage of virtual real-estate and Hives would no longer have to compete. Those living at the time hailed the new Virtual existence as the end of history; from now on, individuals would focus entirely on private happiness and there was no longer any reason or means to harm others.

But even as the Vaurca conquered the natural world and the sickness of the body, the sickness of the mind - the hidden cancers of pride and greed - were still lurking, untreated and undefeated. The Hives and Broods eyed each other suspiciously, and built bigger and stronger war-machines. They covered their planet with armaments factories and kois-fields, each sprinting to produce a larger and stronger army. It was this arms race, and the ecological catastrophe it caused, that destroyed Sedantis and forced them to evacuate.

And yet that evil seed, that kernel of self-destruction, rests within them still. The Broods still fight each other over the pettiest and most contrived of reasons, and if there are two Hives to a planet, they can fight for no reason at all. These conflicts are highly ritualized, featuring all the pomp and circumstance of stating grievances, formal declarations, war councils, challenges, counter-challenges, the combat of champions, and then - the thrash and crash of melee. The Unbound join these wars in one of two ways - as commanding generals, and as ecstatic bravos. The generals shove around their Bound spear-carriers like so many toy soldiers, and fight the wars for their own glory and self-aggrandizement.

The bravos, on the other hand - the warrior poets - fight because they are seeking ecstasy and self-knowledge through proximity to death and the struggle against death. Though they can sweep aside the Bound infantry, they prefer to face each other in mortal combat, often coming out in front of their lines to face the bravos on the other side. They might be equipped with the best bodies their Broods can design, but some go sans-blindage on purpose - they limit themselves to the basic Za bodies and expect their opponents to do the same.

After the war comes the poetry; an insight is only as good as the way you express it. Poetry (or any other literary work) becomes much better if it comes from some genuine or unusual experience, and the idea behind the warrior poets is that by coming so close to danger and by living with such a wild flush of emotion and passion, you can glean some genuine insight about yourself or about existence. In the Zo'ra hive, the works of the warrior-poets are the highest and most venerated masterpieces.

Each Brood has its own society of warrior-poets, and each individual member will have two degrees - one in war and one in poetry, each one tracked independently. A novice warrior-poet will begin at the sixth degree in both (6 in war and 6 in poetry, or 6/6), and can raise either by appealing to the next level up. Said 6/6 warrior can become a 5/6 by a majority decision of the 5/* holders, and can get promoted again to 4/6 by a majority decision of the 4/* holders, and so on until the top. The elite 1/1s at the top of the heap make an extra-special group, and select one of their number to be the brood's official Poet Laureate.

Work and Jobs

For 2,000 years, Unbound have descended to the Material in order to work for the Hive. These are some of the jobs that they do.

Transmission: The lowest of the low, as discussed elsewhere. Transmission is important, but it's also mind-crushing - the strain of repeatedly ascending and descending is exhausting, to say nothing of giving up your whole brain to memorizing messages.

Planting: Supervising Bound agriculture. Only the most developed or space-constrained Hives will build harvesters, threshers, seed drills, or the like; it's much cheaper to have hordes of Bounds do all the work by hand. For Unbound, this is pitiful make-work; they sit atop their Zazla'ka and keep watch for hours, on the off-chance that something will happen that requires their attention.

Obstetrics: Another lowly job. Even the brain-dead Tche bodies have the instincts to care for their eggs and feed themselves, meaning that this job mostly refers to supervising the Bounds that do all the heavy lifting. This work is physically dirty and disgusting; on occasion you have to reach up into an ovipositor and pull out an egg with your hand. Obstetrics becomes more interesting when it comes time to care for baby Unbound, though.

Supervision: This job refers to watching over worker Bounds in other contexts. Common examples include machine shops, assembly lines, and construction. They are higher-class than planting and obstetrics, and require a decent resume.

Medicine: Vaurca medicine is much easier than human medicine, because there's no need for anaesthetic or for bedside manner; Unbound with damaged bodies just go back into the Virtual while the doctor works on it like a car. Treating the Bound, on the other hand, is just like being a vet; you just hold them in place and do what you need to do.

Security: Unless a war is coming, this is the only job where you get to cruise around in a Za body. "Security," in this case, exclusively means being a border-guard; the sight of two Unbound coming to blows over a private disagreement is so rare that they have no fixed procedure for it. In human space, this is extremely important work, and calls for both martial mastery and for de-escalation - much as they'd like to, the Hives can't simply order any human trespasser up against the wall on general principle. The highest and most sacred job of Security is to defend the Cephalon itself, a job so holy that Bound are not permitted to do it.

Sanctity: The days of Sanctity are pretty much over thanks to the human starvation regime, but in the K'lax hive it lives on. In theory, "sanctity" refers to performing the rites and rituals in honor of the Holy Mother Goddess, but in actual practice it's akin to the famous "lectors" of old cigar factories, or to modern-day radio jockeys. Their job is to say things on the Hivenet that actual working Unbound will want to listen to - it can be religious, educational, or entertaining. The Ya'tzil Brood uses them to moderate board games, while Kte'kzil broadcasts reports on human culture.

Descender: The Descenders attend the Cephalon itself. This job carries a lot of responsibilities - they must feed the Cephalon, diagnose its injuries, give it medical treatment, maintain the Upload and Download machinery, care for the Transmission bodies, fit Bound bodies to accept download, and help the newly-Descended adjust to the Material. This work is extremely important and only the most elite can do it; Descenders get referred to as such even when they're in the Virtual.

Dispatch: The Dispatchers really are the "hive mind" of the whole Brood, the generals and viceroys of the entire Material. Their job is to disseminate Consensus among the Bound and Unbound, to give their very brains over to serving as network hubs and information routers. It's draining and exhausting work, to say nothing of how difficult it is; Dispatchers get Unbound helpers to wait on them and they can get whatever concessions they want. One of the main Dispatchers of the Tli'yez brood, famously, always has an Unbound by its side to play soothing music. To be a Dispatcher is the highest honor the Vaurca know, it is their version of being a retired Consul in ancient Rome.

Reconnaissance: This refers to the study of humans and other non-Vaurca species. It is now so important that every Unbound working alongside humans is expected, upon their return, to draft a full report on what they've learned, and anyone who can put together a half-baked plan can get permission to go out and study them.

Laws and Rules

The Vaurca do not have laws; they have no need for them. Other than spreading rumors and defamation of character, it is impossible for Unbound in the Virtual to harm one another - they don't steal because they have nothing to steal, and they don't assault or murder because they literally can't. Within the Virtual, they know only one punishment - the Shun. When an Unbound is shunned, other Vaurca - perhaps a single person, perhaps a group, perhaps the whole Brood - simply refuses to interact with them. This can last for a fixed period of time, or it can last until the one so shunned has shown remorse and begs to be re-admitted to polite society. This is the usual punishment for being antisocial or disagreeable. A life shun is essentially a death sentence, not only because the culprit may as well be dead to the Hive but also because being shunned reduces your life-expectancy.

In the Material, all bad deeds fall under a single umbrella that they name malfeasance. Malfeasance is any behavior that goes against the terms of their mission; it includes wasting time, a flagrant lack of Discipline, doing a bad job, causing trouble for others, or actively making things worse. The punishment for malfeasance is not being allowed to descend to the Material again, maybe for a long time and maybe forever. If the behavior is really bad, then it might be combined with a shunning.

In Ya'tzil, Ax'tal, and Tza'tzo, the whole community must agree on a punishment together, and in Tli'yez, punishment falls to the respective Departments. In Kte'kzil, however, punishment belongs to the Conductor or to one of its chief lieutenants. There are rumors that the Conductor intentionally tricks its rivals and enemies into Descending so that it can assassinate them, but the Conductor denies these rumors.

Arts and Entertainment

The native environment of the Unbound is a purely noetic one, made entirely of information and ideas without any reference to the senses; as such, their native entertainment tends to be noetic as well. They have entire libraries of 'boardless board-games' - viz. Mornington Crescent. The most famous such game is called 'Fragile Alliances,' and while it has elements of moving toy soldiers around a game-space, the real meat of the game is making and breaking alliances with the other players, betraying them when the time is right. They are experts at constructing 'mind-frames' - artificial states of knowledge and memory that prompt certain interesting feelings. Less-disciplined Vaurca like playing with virtual blocks and creating digital environments as a form of artistic expression, and collaborating and sharing them with others.

In the Virtual, there are two kinds of art: noetic and literary. An Unbound could create a virtual space and create a virtual piece of tactile art - a painting or a sculpture - but noetic and literary arts completely dominate the scene. "Noetic" art, like noetic entertainment, is entirely information- and idea-based. It generally takes the form of trains of though, the process from hypothesis to conclusion. Sometimes these trains of thought are cross-cut between multiple perspectives, jumping between participants in a conversation as they mull over points and arguments. The topic is usually philosophy, or perhaps romantic personal angst. (Watch the movie Mindwalk for a good example.) "Literary art," on the other hand, runs the same gamut as it does among humans. Poetry is the highest art, and there are dozens of different schools and styles. They also write stories and narratives, but these aren't as common unless it's as a personal autobiography - when I was in the Material, this is what I saw, this is what I did, and this is what I felt. The great works of the Warrior-Poets have already been discussed.

Descended Vaurca, forced to work for long periods of time away from home and with unusual amounts of leisure time, are beginning to explore their ancient art-forms, or mixing them with human and other styles. This is still a fresh and new field of exploration. When in the Material, Unbound with a few moments to kill like chattering on the Hivenet, either to have meaningful conversations about life and the universe or else to play little word-games. They also have a handful of games to play in person, the most popular of which is Tsa'tlan - it involves throwing sticks into the air to create shapes or constellations. It is an excellent game for gambling, though it requires an impartial judge to discern what shapes have been made.

The Vaurca do have a sense of humor, but much of it relies on word-play, allusion, reference, and innuendo. It is thus utterly beyond translation. In general, Vaurca humor relies on incongruity; a dramatic situation suddenly reveals itself as a frivolous one, or a frivolous situation suddenly takes a dark turn, or somebody tries to say something clever and ends up embarrassing their own self.

The Bound are completely derived of pleasure and have no desire to entertain themselves.

Fashion & Cuisine

In ancient history - in the Antediscidic phase of their history - Vaurca would wear colorful and elaborate clothes as a way of showing their status and taste. Now that they've moved into the Virtual and only Descend to work, it's considered good Discipline to eschew clothes and accoutrements in favor of going naked, or limiting their clothes to just a few pockets and toolbelts. Because of their hard carapaces, they have little trouble being naked. Blindfolds are also useful in high-light environments.

Vaurca that venture EVA, despite their natural tolerance to high/low/vacuum pressure environments, are usually seen wearing soft-suits that allow them prolonged times in space for construction, operations, and other EVA activities.

The Vaurca used to eat all kinds of exciting and diverse cuisines - they still have ancient cookbooks that describe fantastic ingredients - but all of that's gone now. The only edible substance they have is K'ois, and it lacks both flavor and nutrition. It is, however, extremely easy to grow in vast quantities, making it the perfect food for the Bound and thus a perfect pillar of their post-Ascension civilization. Indeed, the decision to switch from diverse agriculture to pure k'ois was a major contributor to the ecological collapse of Sedantis, and the fact that it's the only food they've brought with them - the only food they can eat anymore - serves as a constant reminder of what they lost and the trade-offs they made for power.

Religion

The specific rites, practices, and theologies differ from Hive to Hive, from Brood to Brood, and from individual to individual, but all these strains of thought exist more-or-less within a single religion among all the Vaurca – adoration of the Holy Mother Goddess, the primordial being who created the universe and put the Vaurca in the center of it on Holy Sedantis, and whose weeping shook the heavens when her beloved children destroyed the Garden of Eden for everybody by growing up.

Their religion is uncomplicated, and is so by intention. The Holy Mother Goddess is a big glob of sweet, gooey mother-love, embracing all her children with unconditional forgiveness. However calculating and intellectual they might be otherwise, the warm and welcoming HMG gives every Vaurca an opportunity to regress back to the safety and comfort of infancy. It's childish, and it's supposed to be. The HMG exists alongside formidable Vaurca philosophies about truth and morality and society and metaphysics and all that, but it's hard to resist her allure for long. The HMG loves you very much and wants you to be happy, no matter what you do, and will always forgive you and welcome you back to her if you're really sorry and do your best.

Vaurca venerate the great thinkers and heroes from their past, but only the HMG receives genuine veneration and prayer. Even those Vaurca who abstractify or re-interpret the HMG, perhaps as the emergent gestalt consciousness of the Virtual or as a symbol of Sedantis or as a metaphor for the bewilderment of adulthood, do not replace her with another deity for genuine worship. They are thus a monotheistic society. Some Vaurca have hit upon the idea (which happens to be true) that the image of the Holy Mother Goddess comes from the primordial pseudo-consciousness of the Cephalon itself, as its childlike and perpetual longing for its mother imprints itself on the Unbound as a whole. This is a hypothesis held by a small group of people; much more common is the belief that the HMG is either literally real or a cultural metaphor.

Obviously, none of this is of any use to the Bound.

Procedure, Consensus, and Discipline

To Vaurca, the most important word - the most magical and sacred of all words - is Procedure. Procedure comprises the essential rules of conduct and responsibility among the Vaurca, and broadly speaking, it has two elements. The first is that every Unbound has the right to weigh in on any subject or any question before the Brood, to have their objections known and acknowledged by the group. The second is that every Unbound has the responsibility to cultivate valid and informed opinions about those subjects and questions. Procedure is a massive burden on most Unbound, and most Broods have a hard time sticking to it. In a broader sense, one could summarize Procedure and its satellite ideas by the simple maxim - all for one and one for all.

Consensus means the same thing to them as it does to us - everybody agrees on what they should do - but to Vaurca, it's heavy and serious. When the Brood or the Hive reaches Consensus, that means that everybody (everybody who cares) has brought up their thoughts and their objections, and those objections have been systematically answered. It means everybody is on the same page, everybody's had their fair hearing, and the matter has been conclusively decided. When a point has reached Consensus, that's the end of it - everybody has to get in line.

The last worship-word is Discipline. Discipline is the ability to keep your mind in the Virtual even as you're stuck working in the Material. A Disciplined Unbound eats kois without complaining, sits on the floor, goes naked, and has no thought for material comfort and luxury - they are working for the weekend, and not wasting any of the Hive's valuable material resources on making their stay in the Material more comfortable or enjoyable. To personalize your surroundings or body is considered un-Disciplined.

Technology

In their Sedantene Golden Age, the Vaurca were technological juggernauts - they had such technologies as subatomic element conversion, microfabrication, quantum computing, self-perpetuating nanotechnology, cybernetic implants of a thousand varieties, and more. They were masters of biotechnology, and experts at making things out of living flesh. While they've kept the theoretical knowledge base required to make these things, the industrial capital they'd need is far, far beyond their current needs - at the height of their civilization, they had tens of thousands of Broods spanning an entire solar system, and needed every bit of it to feed their scientific economy. The only thing that they lacked was bluespace; they never managed to crack the light barrier for anything larger than a few quarks and bosons, and their ansible technology relied on quantum entanglement and had to be 'paired' on-site before parting ways.

The Vaurca of Tau Ceti and environs must now rely on dwindling stockpiles and primitive work-arounds. Of utmost concern are the neural sockets, which are both mandatory for their society and completely beyond replication. The Cephalon itself is also a major concern; it is made of living tissue that must feed and must keep healthy. Even with the very best maintenance, it will eventually die; it will also start to reject new Unbound due to genetic drift. Keeping the Cephalon healthy, and replacing it when the time is right, is their perpetual priority 1; rationing and shepherding their technology stockpiles is right behind it.

Hives and Broods

There are three Hives in human space, but only one of them - Zo'ra - is large enough to divide into Broods. The Hives are like ethnicity; during the Sedantene period, they were countries with borders, governments, and treaties. At the end of the period, they sent out separate evacuation missions to different star systems, and a lack of contact with other Hives has sharpened divisions within each Hive. The Broods are constantly in the process of division and multiplication; they send a splinter to a new planet, and that splinter eventually grows, divides, and sends its own splinters off to new ones.

Zo'ra

Zo'ra - "Ever-Victorious."

During the height of the Sedantene period, the Zo'ra were a great power. Traditionally an aggressive and warlike Hive, they bear a major responsibility for the arms-race and ecological collapse that forced their great migration, and one could argue that the current situation is all their fault. Their language and culture is now the gold standard for all Vaurca thus far encountered. Their Hive-Ship, Titan Prime, was the one that fell into orbit in the Tau Ceti system and thus served as first contact for humanity.

They have warm but condescending feelings towards K'lax, and regard the Lii'dra with both wonder and terror. Titan Prime held six Cephalons and six Broods, one of which was in a terminal death-spiral and remains unconscious on life-support. All these Broods are 'siblings,' spawned from a single Cephalon on Phi Auricae called Tla'xa; as such, no Unbound can Descend from one and Ascend into another.

Ya'tzil Brood

The Ya'tzil Brood is based Mendell City, in the infamous District 9. It was the first to be moved off the Hive ship, and thus had the best head-start in finding good ground and establishing itself. They position themselves as the guardians of tradition and morality, and their long-term goals for the Vaurca – the 'Ya'tzil Plan' – can be summarized as 'endure what we must, repair the ship, get out of here, forget this ever happened.' They are the first-among-equals, and assert for themselves the right to speak for the whole Hive.

Ya'tzil is strong in Procedure, but there's a powerful force in the brood called the Committee on the Division of First Principals. While the Committee exerts no obvious control, it serves as a gatekeeper for new ideas and proposals, and is thus a moderating force on the brood – most Ya'tzil trust the Committee to weed out any stupid ideas and only entertain the ones the Committee endorses. Some Ya'tzil do not approve. The Ya'tzil are deeply concerned with the soul of their people, and lead efforts both to keep everyone together (they publish the All-Hive Circular Letters) and to preserve their culture and history.

Tli'yez Brood

Tli'yez is another Zo'ra brood, also based in District 9. Before the Contact, it was renowned as a home for scientific experimentation and discussion. As such, the Black Numbers have decimated it, and many of its brightest minds have been press-ganged into service of NanoTrasen. Tli'yez's leadership is thus focused on the struggle to live.

Tli'yez is extremely bureaucratic, compared to the other broods. Its Unbound identify very strongly with their individual Departments, and each Department handles its own policies with very little outside interference. Within the Departments, however, they generally follow Procedure, with the caveat that older and more experienced people get greater consideration.

Tza'tzo Brood

Tza'tzo is another Zo'ra brood, still clinging to its old quarters on the Hive-ship Titan Prime. Tza'tzo keeps very strongly to Procedure and Discipline, such to the point that they have mandatory all-brood messaging – it is forbidden for any one Tza’tzo to exclude any other from any communication. Tza'tzo is thus the Vaurca equivalent of religious fundamentalists, and generally disapprove of the other Broods. They have admirers in other Broods who approve of Tza'tzo's strong values, and some in Ya'tzil consider Tza'tzo to be a threat to their prestige and power.

Tza'tzo trades favors with the other broods (including access to their technology stockpiles) in order to avoid the worst of the Black Numbers, so as to keep itself pure and untainted by humans. Their Unbound are the creepiest and most robotic of all, and come off as being utterly devoted to their people and to Zo'ra. Because they are so conformist and controlling, however, they have a lot of vagabonds.

Kte'kzil Brood

Kte'kzil is the fourth Zo'ra brood, but it's based on New Gibson. Because of the literally astronomical distances involved, Kte'kzil cannot communicate with the other Broods via Hivenet - they must resort to using human channels, which they are reluctant to do. Their position on the Isolation from the rest of the fold has made them a little weird, and they've picked up some distinctly... human ideas about how to organize themselves. Unlike all the other broods, they have a single and recognizable leader – Tlakoxaya the Conductor. In the space of a few years, Procedure has almost disappeared from Kte'kzil, in favor of the Conductor and its lieutenants. Debates take place behind closed doors, and secrecy is the rule of the day. The primal fear of humanity and of isolation has given Tlakoxaya carte blanche to rule the Brood with an iridium claw, and these problems only got worse when a Kte'kzil spy leaked information about the construction of a new relay.

Tlakoxaya is not in the habit of explaining itself to others, but it's made overtures towards becoming a player in New Gibson in its own right and to potentially making Kte'kzil an important fixture in the Republic. The brood also making a full-scale effort to understand humanity and others; the Conductor constantly bombards its subjects with discourses and analyses about human culture, organization, and life. Opinion on Tlakoxaya remains bitterly divided in the other broods; the Conductor apparently enjoys the confidence of the Brood and hasn't resorted to punishing dissent - yet.

Ax'tal Brood

Ax'tal is the fifth Zo'ra brood, and the last one in District 9. It is intentionally left blank, partially to serve as a 'default' brood and partially in case space is needed for some future development. A player with no interest in the hooks and tropes of the other broods is advised to choose Ax’tal.

Za'chai Brood

Za'chai is brain-dead and stuck on life-support. It has no living Descended Unbound, and its Bounds are being culled for their implants. Resurrecting Za'chai is a major project for the other broods. It remains on the Hive-ship.

K'lax

K'lax - "Far-Gazing."

In medieval times, wealthy lords would endow chantries – they would charge a group of holy men to say masses for their soul in perpetuity. This is the task of the K'lax Hive; defeated and subjugated by Zo'ra in centuries past and forced to pray for their masters. In the economy of the Hives, K'lax produces holiness as tribute. Their scent marks them as alien to the Zo'ra majority, and when mixing with their masters they endure constant hooting jests to 'give us a prayer.' Wherever the Zo’ra go, they like to drag a few K’lax along with them to keep up the shrines, recite the sacred incantations, and remind the Zo’ra that they are a conquering race.

Stereotypically, they are the most sensitive and mystical of all the Vaurca, their minds wrapped up in solemn and esoteric contemplation of the Holy Mother Goddess in all Her Glory and Majesty. The work of sanctity, however, only occupies a small part of their number (even if it occupies a much larger proportion of them than it would in another hive.) The rest must toil and scrabble like everyone else, and in fact are more likely to be angry young punks. Many of them are thinking about how this might be the time for red-clawed revenge.

In fact, K'lax has made an excellent deal for itself. The Hive as a whole has recently struck a deal with the young Hegemon of the Unathi, and one of their broods is now quartering itself on one of their planets. While neither side really trusts the other, it's given the K'lax valuable breathing-room and an opportunity to get back on their feet.

The K'lax Hiveship also launched from Phi Auricae, and landed in Skrell space. K'lax actually has three Broods, but because one of them is the parent of the other two, it's possible for Unbound to Descend out of one and Ascend into the others - provided they make a stop-over in the parent Cephalon first. Because of this, they do not name themselves after their brood.

Lii'dra

Lii'dra - "The Long-Awaited Venture."

The Lii'dra are a mystery. The Vaurca in known space recall that there was a place back on Sedantis called Lii'dra, but it was a wide spot in the road; there was never a hive or a brood or any other kind of group by that name. Humanity first encountered the Lii'dra when the Hive-Ship Klo'xzai arrived in the Lalande system, in the Sol Alliance. This contact immediately turned hostile when the Hive-Ship's automated defenses opened fire on investigating Alliance patrol ships, sparking a brief skirmish that claimed the lives of 12 Alliance sailors. Since then, the Klo'xzai moved into deep space, and just like the Vox and Unathi raiders, the Lii'dra operate as fearsome buccaneers.

The Zo'ra estimate that the Lii'dra have a Consensus-system similar to theirs, but nothing is certain. They may operate as a unified hive, or they may have independent broods at odds with one another. All they know is that the Klo'xzai has faster-than-light drives and can operate as a warship; this suggests technology far beyond that of old Sedantis. Lii'dra has not attempted to contact the Zo'ra hive, and their few informal encounters have been extremely hostile.

History

The Beginning

In the first act of Creation, there was only the Holy Mother Goddess (dust under dust), who was taken with child and created the universe so as to deliver in it. This is something everyone knows.

Actually, the earliest records of Vaurca civilization date to somewhere between 500,000 and 550,000 years ago. Their home was planet Sedantis IVc, the third moon of the fourth planet orbiting the star Sedantis. Due to the planet's thin atmosphere and the presence of a radioactive gas giant, Vaurca were generally forced to live underground. Surface excursions were rare, and they mostly survived on the paltry ecosystems of the vast cave systems, dug out by giant silicon-eating worms who went extinct millions of years prior.

The 'natural' Vaurca were very different from the ones that we know today. Most Vaurca were still neuter females, and genuine male still lived mayfly-lives, but breeding females – one might call them Queens – were important figures in their own right, venerated as the guardians of the young and the keepers of tradition.

Food was scarce, and the r-selective Vaurca (having many babies and expecting most to die without reproducing) had to keep moving in order to keep ahead of their food supply. People lived in clans centered around a single breeding female and the powerful neuter warriors who would protect her. Warfare was constant, and whenever two groups met, they would fight quick battles to see who was the stronger and who would have to keep moving. Sometimes they would take juvenile males as slaves, or else trade males with each other. They mostly gathered lichens, fungus, and mushrooms, but hunted or trapped live prey in order to round out their diet.

Agriculture, Civilization, and the Antediscidian Era

Approximately 80,000 years ago, in an area that would one be known as the Chez'zu Hive, a group of Vaurca discovered agriculture and selective breeding. By planting and fertilizing their favorite lichens, they could ensure that when they eventually returned to the same spot, there would be plenty of lichen to eat. Over generations, they refined both their techniques and their crops, and the practice of agriculture spread across the planet.

Agriculture led to an abundance of food, which allowed for more people to work in trades other than the cultivation of food and thereby to civilization as we would describe it. The Vaurca began living in permanent settlements, and developed skilled trades with complicated and hierarchical societies. The breeding females became a priestly class of oracles, sometimes ruling directly but as often lurking behind the scenes and whispering into the ears of neuter warlords and lawgivers. Though there were many different cultures, societies, and governments, the whole world was now participating in a single settled civilization.

This was the Antediscidian Era – the time before the Great Unbinding, the time when Vaurca lived as other beings do. It formally began on August 19th in the year 6,347 BCE, when the Spearlord Zi'ichak'tsa accepted the fealty of the Seven Cities of the River Az'kazha and started the planet's first great empire.

Over time, the scattered villages formed together into mighty Hives, and and developed through bronze, iron, steel, gunpowder, industrial, and post-industrial eras. In different ways at different times, they had philosophy, literature, religion, and artifice. The final frontier was the planet's surface; blasted by Sedantis's magnetosphere, it remained beyond their reach. At the end of the period, there were 17 Hives, all engaged in a constant quadrille of alliance, betrayal, subjugation, and conflict.

The Great Unbinding

Given time, the Vaurca developed powerful technologies that changed their way of life and the definition of life. The first was an artificial implanted kidney, a dialysis machine small enough to mount inside their bodies. From there, a mania for cybernetic enhancement gripped their world, and the best minds raced to make new discoveries.

Researchers in the Ves'ex Hive followed up with a Brain-Computer Interface – a device that allowed direct neural control of computers. Chez'zu created the Hivenet when they used that interface to control a radio. The Hla'xa Hive then unveiled ego-patterning technology and showed the world that they could upload their minds into machines, and followed it 19 years later with the means to download back onto a vat-grown Vaurca brain. Finally, it was Zo'ra who birthed the very first Bound, and in so doing started the Vaurca on the road to destroying the world. That was the 4th of June, 73 BCE.

The Zo'ra hive was also the first to pile its leaders and elites into Cephalons, massive bio-mechanical computers with a processing power far beyond anything seen before. These cephalons, buried deep in hardened bunkers, commanded armies of Bound to penetrate the surface world and construct vast new industries that would give them the edge over their rivals. The other Hives were forced to follow suit, first by deploying Bound of their own and then by moving themselves into their own Cephalons. As the tension between Hives ratcheted up, more and more Vaurca clamoured to upload themselves, not only to be free to explore the new noetic universe but also so that they'd be somewhere safe in case of a massive war.

The last natural-born Vaurca uploaded in 78 CE. By then, it was obvious that their world was dying. Scientists in the Zo'ra hive developed a special fungus – the k'ois – that could grow on the surface without the need for protective screens or enclosures. It was the perfect thing for feeding the Bound, the perfect plant for which to convert their entire planet into a giant plantation. Unfortunately, this plant had a terrible side-effect. It produced a gas that, while necessary for Vaurca to breathe, was toxic to the planet's already-frail atmosphere, increasing ambient radiation levels such to the point that not even the underground was safe.

In 211 CE, a massive famine struck and 28% of Bound - some 38 billion bodies - either starved or were culled. Tensions flared and skirmishes began over the equatorial 'safe fields,' but everyone knew that the current system was doomed and that they needed to make some radical changes. While some Hives devoted themselves to digging even deeper and finding new soil, others knew that the only option left was to leave the planet entirely, to evacuate their Cephalons and seek their fortunes elsewhere.

The Great Evacuation

The Zo'ra Hive had been the mightiest of them all, the world-striding sovereign and terror of Sedantis, but the famine brought them low. They had gambled everything on the surface, throwing all their resources into building radiation-hardened facilities, designing hardier k'ois, and rejuvenating the soil. Even as the other hives were digging deeper tunnels and evacuating to space, the Zo'ra - unable to admit that they'd made a mistake, unable to see that their plans were failing - fought on to the bitter end. The bitter end came in 249 CE, when they had too few Bound to complete the season's planting. The Zo'ra hive was forced to admit that they could not fix the problems they'd made.

But where to go? The deeper tunnels, safe (for the moment) from radiation, were all occupied, and it was far too late to start building new ones. All the genuine planets in their solar system were occupied and spoken for, and none of them would admit Zo'ra "Ambiocides" even if they had the space for them - they remembered the pain, terror, and humiliation that Zo'ra had caused them and were eager for some payback. Zo'ra prepared to launch asteroid colonies, but as soon as they got word of it, Nak'tuz Hive laid a claim on the asteroid belt - on all of it - and declared that they'd shoot down any Zo'ra interlopers. Even the few Zo'ra colonies that already existed were pressured into turning away their Hive-mates. The Vaurca had achieved Consensus; they were going to circle Sedantis and watch the Zo'ra starve, both as payback for their past imperialisms and as a scapegoat for their sins in general. Lacking any other options and refusing to die quietly, the Zo'ra turned the last of their industries towards the construction of great Hive-Ships - vehicles that would carry Cephalons and dormant Bound to a new and distant star.

At this point, our story diverges. Before, we had been able to talk of the Vaurca as a whole, as a complete people. But now, we can only follow a single splinter of this once-great group – the last scions of the Zo'ra and K'lax hive, those who voyaged to Delta Perseii. As they boarded their Hive-ship in 291 CE, they lost contact forever with the worlds and peoples they left behind. Our Vaurca were the descendants of the first ship; they have never encountered any other.

The Perseus Hive-Ship carried ten Cephalons and a few hundred-thousand dormant Bound. Once they arrived, this new Brood resolved that they would never repeat the mistakes of their forebears. They could cultivate an honest, simple frontier existence, devoted to harmony and introspection. For a century or more, they lived peacefully. But soon enough, their Cephalons began to decay, and the Hive knew it would have to build more. They ramped up their k'ois cultivation and delved deeper into the earth for metals, and before long the they began to argue over who could claim the lion's share needed to build the next generation. Once more, they armed themselves; once more, they fought; by 516 CE, they had strip-mined and factory-farmed and bomb-blasted their new planet into ashes, too. They built five new Hive-Ships and sent them all out in different directions.

When one ship arrived at its destination, they resolved this time to really, seriously address the problems that they'd had in the past. They formally and rigorously adopted much of the culture – particularly the system of Consensus and Protocol – that they still use to this day, as well as codifying their mythology of Sedantis as a Garden of Eden and the Fall of Sedantis as punishment for hubris. This protected them from another nuclear holocaust, but it didn't prevent them from growing too big and too numerous to stay on their planet. While some would stay behind, more had to go.

They repeated this twice more, each time promising that they'd learned their lesson but somehow unable to avoid repeating their past mistakes. Phi Auricae was the fifth system they reached after leaving Sedantis IVc, and this time it was just the threat of things going wrong, the specter of mass suicide, that led to one Brood – Tla'xa – to build a single Hive-ship and send it into the darkness.

Contact with Humanity

None of the civilized species of the galaxy had any idea that the Vaurcae existed until an eventful day in November, 2456, when the drive plume and heat signature of a massive ship burning its engine in order to slow down for an approach was detected near the Romanovich cloud in Tau Ceti. While the galaxy was taken aback by this information, the Republic of Biesel acted immediately. A small scout vessel was dispatched to the ship, which was revealed to be a 30 kilometer (18.23 mile) vessel, mostly engine and radiator. Dubbed 'Titan Prime' by the media, Tau Ceti and news places over the known galaxy were bubbling with excitement as the object approached its apparent destination: Biesel.

After a few weeks, the object passed the Romanovich cloud and dispatched over twenty drones to key locations in Tau Ceti. Some of these locations included the NMSS Odin, the NSS Von Braun, NSS Arcadia, NSS Aurora, NSS Exodus, and NMV Retaliation, and one to each planet. Although all drones dispatched to the location turned back immediately, one did not. The one that was headed for the NSS Aurora stayed, and in fact, contacted the station through use of the station's own intercommunication system; displaying a single, unintelligible message. After a period of three hours, the crew were dispatched to the probe and entered, finding a hollow vessel. In the middle was a single alien computer, and in a corner of a room were Vaurca eggs, presumably for use in early colonization.

Research crew of the NSS Aurora, including Dr. Phoebe Essel and team were able to interact with the computer, painstakingly finding ways to translate the cryptic language it was attempting to speak in, and after usage of a pAI, were able to teach the machine Tau Ceti Basic. After some conversation, the computer detached itself and was brought aboard the NSS Aurora for first contact. It had been sent in order to document the indigenous species of the solar system. The computer tapped into the bluespace connection of the Artificial Intelligence of the station, uploaded core data files onto its hardware, and then departed, causing a minor panic on the station as the security forced feared an intelligence leak.

First radio contact was established with Tau Ceti President Joseph Dorn and Titan Prime, which was filled with Zo'ra. It was learned that the vessel was sent approximately 2 thousand years ago and had only now entered human space to find habitable planets to colonize. It was also learned that Titan Prime housed six million Bound Vaurca on it, a staggering number.

Titan Prime eventually reached Biesel, settling into a stable orbit around the planet. Observation showed that the ship was worse for wear after traveling for hundreds of years, launched from Phi Auricae in 1986. In fact, Tau Ceti hadn't even been its target – it had been aiming for a star 200 light years closer, and only missed due to an unforeseen solar flare that knocked it off course. Many of its systems were failing or had already failed. The life support was barely working and the hull had lost most of its integrity. After heavy negotiation with the Tau Ceti government, it was agreed that in exchange for being allowed to settle on Biesel, the Vaurca would agree to 'pay rent' in the form of providing Nanotrasen and the Tau Ceti government with a quota of their bound and unbound for Nanotrasen's workforce. Due to the complexity (and pointlessness) of paying bound Vaurca they would instead earn 'credit' towards their continued stay on Biesel to pay back the cost of housing them.

Settling in Tau Ceti

Ferries, re-purposed cargo ships, and civilian shuttles evacuated 2 million inhabitants of Titan Prime, ferrying them mostly to New Gibson and Biesel, respectively. Evacuations are still undergoing, and most Vaurca live in refugee camps or state-provided housing in special sections of the two planets. The Interstellar Aid Corps has performed most of the work evacuating and housing Vaurca, and they are critical of the government's treatment of them.

Today, roughly 2.5 million Bound and Unbound Vaurca live in refugee camps or slums in New Gibson, 4 million live elsewhere on Biesel, and 1.7 million live on New Gibson. After NanoTrasen's forced eviction of the majority of Vaurca living on the Titan Prime in June of 2458, the slums of Biesel experienced an influx of almost half a million additional Vaurca. Officials are extremely worried about the cost of continued evacuation of Titan Prime, and integration of Vaurca into the system is confounded by the growing hostility towards them, inflamed by the recent discovery of even further Vaurca hive-ships entering known space. Many fear that the Vaurca are attempting a cultural invasion and will grow to become more powerful than the human governments housing them.

This fear has lead to Tau Ceti and the Sol Alliance working to actively suppress attempts by Vaurca to construct FTL capable communications or ships to contact their fellows and potentially spread the information to more Vaurca hives in their home systems. While the Zo'ra of Titan Prime managed to leak secrets of these technologies from the Aurora, they remain unable to build FTL communication that's capable of interacting with the STL communications presumed to still be in use in other Vaurca systems. As well, many Vaurca are unsure of the ultimate fate of their homeworld, as their two thousand year travel has had them pass the time predicted to have brought the ultimate death of Sedantis...

Glossary

Literal

Black Number: The Unbound labor lottery. Whenever the Brood’s host (usually Nanotrasen) demands Unbound with a particular skill, all the Unbound who have that skill will participate in the lottery to see who has to go out and work. Those who draw the Black Number are pressed into service. In actual fact, there’s no way to forcefully ‘conscript’ an Unbound in the Virtual, but any Unbound who drew the Black Number and refused to honor it would be the lowest of the low.

Brood: A single Virtual, along with all the Unbound that reside within it, their Bound, and any real estate or property they own. Formerly known as a ‘canton.’

Bound: The slave class of Vaurca. Bound are essentially organic robots.

“By your command, wise master:” The traditional affirmation a Bound gives in response to an Unbound’s order. In Vaur’uyit’yaza, it’s written as “Tzu’ikak’xa, tla’akaix.”

Cephalon: The actual computer running the program that is the Virtual. The nerve center and headquarters of the Brood. Constantly under heavy guard; outsiders never get to look at it. The ultimate long-term goal of every Brood is to build new Cephalons and send them out into the cosmos.

Consensus: Consensus is a state where everybody who cares about a specific topic has agreed on a course of action or conclusion for it. It means the same thing for them as for us, but it’s one of their worship words.

Descend: To go from the Virtual into the Material; to enter a physical body and cease to exist in the Virtual until returning. Descent requires the willing participation of both Transmission and the Descenders, which means it generally requires a full Consensus. Descent (and Ascent) also requires bringing the new body into the presence of the Cephalon and connecting it with the appropriate cables.

Descenders: The Descenders are those Unbound, Descended, who are in charge of preparing bodies and supervising the process of Descent. This is an extremely important and sacred role; only the most important and honored of Unbound are eligible to do this work.

Discipline: Unbound who are Disciplined keep their eyes on the prize; they eat k’ois without complaint, sit on the ground, ignore bad smells, and otherwise fit themselves, physically, into the same spaces that Bound use. More importantly, they save their love for noetic things and resist the allure of sensory stimulation, and keep a healthy disdain for actually being in the Material.

"Dust under Dust": The traditional salawat that follows any mention of the Holy Mother Goddess. It is an abbreviation for the longer phrase, the crown of my head beneath the dust under the dust of her feet.

Hive: A “Hive” is a Vaurca nationality or ethnicity. All the Hives have their origin on Sedantis IVc - someone with a map of the old homeworld could draw lines, borders, and capitals for them. Each Hive has a distinctive coloring and scent, allowing Vaurca in the Material to instantly distinguish one another. There were 17 Hives on Sedantis IVc.

Hive Ship: A mighty space vessel designed to support a few Broods in perpetuity. All the Zo’ra Broods in Tau Ceti came from the Hive Ship “Titan Prime,” which was in really sorry shape by the time it arrived.

Holy Mother Goddess: The single, supreme deity in the Vaurca religion. Created the Universe and everything in it, but gave birth to the Vaurca and made Sedantis IVc their special homeworld. A figure of pure and all-pervading love, malicious to none and receptive to all. Some Vaurca take a less-than-literal view of her. Abbreviated as “HMG.”

Journeyer: An Unbound who descends as a rite of passage. Every Unbound who wants to become a respected elder of the community must serve some time in the trenches, demonstrating their ability to think on their feet and work independently.

Material: The real world outside the Virtual.

Noetic: Meaning ‘of or pertaining to the intellect,’ “noetic” is the best way to describe the inside of the Virtual. This means that it doesn’t really look like anything; it exists purely as information with no “shape.” The opposite of noetic is “sensory,” meaning that it’s interpreted through the five senses.

Procedure: The essential rules of conduct and responsibility among the Vaurca. Broadly speaking, Procedure has two elements. The first is that every Unbound has the right to weigh in on any subject or any question before the Brood, to have their objections known and acknowledged by the group. The second is that every Unbound has the responsibility to cultivate valid and informed opinions about those subjects and questions. Procedure is a massive burden on most Unbound, and most Broods have a hard time sticking to it.

Shun: To Shun an Unbound in the Virtual is to take them off all Brood-wide message lists, isolating them completely. This is their ultimate punishment, and it can last for a fixed period of time or it can last until the one shunned shows contrition and is forgiven.

Transmission: The process of messages going into and out of the Virtual. The best and quickest way to do this is to Descend into a special body (a “Ra” body) and type out the message. It’s still very slow, so Vaurca have to rely on delegated leadership. The actual Ra-bodies need the support of other descended Unbound to collect and distribute the messages.

Unbound: The intellectual class of the Vaurca. Unbound are people, with all that entails. They live primarily in the Virtual but also descend in order to interact with the Material. Because they are born in the Material and have slightly different experiences as babies, they develop different personalities as adults.

Vagabond: An Unbound who genuinely prefers the Material to the Virtual. Some Vagabonds go so far as to get jobs directly with employers, to accumulate money, and to buy property. These are not generally the actions of older or more established people, so Vagabonds are treated like impetuous adolescents who need to get this phase out of their system.

Virtual: The digital space where Unbound reside when not in the Material.

Linguistic

Akaix: The Unbound, The Masters, Those with Souls. Millenia ago, the word meant “Collector,” and was how feudal peasants would address their landlords.

Ckho'miji: Literally 'table objects.' A catch-all term for plates, bowls, and cups. A bit of gallows humor; Vaurca facing failure joke that they'll be made into this stuff, ie they will be killed and their bodies fashioned into flatware. Usually a joke, but sometimes a deadly serious threat. Bound are sometimes actually made into plates if there's no use for them.

Ika’te: A common insult among the Vaurca. It literally means ‘four dots,’ and is an abbreviation for the longer phrase ‘a rotted brown kois with four dots drawn on for eyes.’ A stupid or undignified person.

Kaxaz’kaz: The traditional benediction uttered after every mention of the HMG. It literally means ‘dust under dust,’ and is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘the crown of my head beneath the dust under the dust of your feet.’

K’ois: The food of the Vaurca; the word actually just means ‘food’ but refers in metalepsis to their single staple crop. Not particularly nutritious, even to them - but it’s easy to grow in huge quantities, making it the perfect food for Bound. K'ois is also the defining symbol of Vaurca hubris, for it more than anything led to the destruction of Sedantis and forced the Great Migration. A hundred generations have lived and died without ever eating anything else.

Tl’iti: An affectionate and infantile way to refer to the HMG; in archaic times, it’s what children would call their mothers.

Vaur’uyit’yaza: The spoken language of the Zo’ra, K’lax, and a few other hives. Nowadays mainly used on the Hivenet, in Transmission, and for writing poetry and literature. Synthetic, fusional, sporting 17 tenses and 41 genders, and drowning in allusions and references, it is brutally hard to learn. Written in phonemic blocks, kind of like Korean - the word “Vaur’uyit’yaza” would have three blocks, and the apostrophes mark off the boundaries between them.

Viax: The Bound, Those who Serve. The word actually comes from the archaic Zo’ra Vi’eka, which means ‘a dead person’ or ‘a corpse.’

Zazla’ka: A traditional Vaurca palanquin. To the Bound, height makes right - they are much more responsive when they can physically see their supervisors. In fixed spaces, like workshops and construction sites, Unbound build tall platforms to perch on. When they’re on the move, they rely on the Zazla’ka - a platform borne on the shoulders of four Bound, on which the Unbound will sit cross-legged. The zazla’ka might also have some kind of slot or mounting for a staff of office. Particularly aggressive or lively Unbound will stand on them, like Abraracourcix on his shield.

Zulza’kakya: A person who rides in a zazla’ka - a person of high rank, or perhaps somebody playing general in a war. Shades of the milles gloriosus, of someone who thinks they're much more important than they are.

Post-Nominals

Given in order of precedence.

De-: Refers to being a Descender, or having ever been one.

De-Di-: Refers to being both a Descender and a Dispatcher. "Dispatcher" comes after "Descender" because it's very rare to be the former without also being the latter. There are De- and De-Di-, but (currently) no Di-.

A: Anointment. An Anointment is a special recognition from the whole Hive for some special or great deed. A person can have one, two, or three Anointments - they're listed as A, 2A, and 3A. 3 is the max.

°R: Degrees Recondite. The Recondite Mysteries are the most important philosophical/religious organization in the Zo'ra Hive. They start at 8° and count down to 1°. (The ° is Alt+0176.)

X/X: Warrior poet degrees. As described elsewhere.

E.MGCL: Military ranks. Since there's currently no war, all such ranks are prefixed by E, meaning Emeritus - retired. They fill in from right to left; the basic level is E.L, and then E.CL is above it and E.GCL is above that.