Species: Rlaan Defender, Rlaan Worker

Physical Characteristics:

Ammonia-blooded, methane breathers from a cool world distantly orbiting a warm 
star, the Rlaan are a collection of oddities.  Unique among the known space-
faring groups, the Rlaan are actually two separate species, the defender and 
worker groups having produced sterile offspring for the past several hundred 
thousand some years.  Both species are similar in appearance, with the primary 
differences being size (the defenders are much larger), the degree of fine 
control in the manipulator appendages (the workers have better fine control), 
and the structural integrity of the skeleton (defenders are less fragile than 
workers).  The defenders tend towards darker shades of red and purple, whereas 
the workers are somewhat pale.  Though the offspring of worker-defender matings 
are sterile, these hybrids exist as nearly 4% of the population, and have come 
to play important social roles.

Each Rlaan is radially symmetric with four equivalent segments.  Each of these 
segments contains one compound eye composed of four segments, one ambulatory 
appendage, one mouth with four mandibles, one manipulator appendage, various 
local organs, and portions of the central organs.  The Rlaan skeleton is a 
supported exoskeleton, that is to say, the exoskeleton is supported internally 
by a network of millions of small extensions of the skeleton, which together 
form a sort of highly porous lattice that the soft internals reside in.  A 
defender stands about 1.5 meters high at the top of its carapace, and 2 meters 
high at its knee joint.  The central body is around one meter in diameter, and a 
third of a meter in thickness.  Out of this central body come the four abulatory 
limbs, going up and out from the body to the knee joint, and then proceeding 
down where they terminate in a four-splayed gripping foot. Suspended below the 
central body is the head portion of the Rlaan, about half a meter in diameter 
and also about a third of a meter in thickness, with its bottom covered in a 
particularly thick extrusion of the exoskeleton.  The manipulator appendages 
sprout from the region connecting the head with the main body, and end in four 
radially arranged fingerlike structures.  A workers dimensions are about 70% 
that of a defender.


Habitat:

With equatorial temperatures peaking near 230 K, seas of ammonia, and a methane 
atmosphere, the Rlaan homeworld is not what most species would consider a prime 
vacation spot.  Life on this planet progresses at a rather slower pace than that 
on water worlds, but proceeds nonetheless.  From the point of view of ammonia-
methane life, the Rlaan planet is actually quite toasty.

Culture:

Rlaan lifespans tend to be between 250-350 years.  This is believed to be a 
large factor in their cultural homogeneity and the methodical nature of their 
advances, both through space and as a culture.  Rlaan culture itself is a very 
dry affair, with social dynamics primarily involved around expository 
investigations of philosophical debates that have yet to be satisfactorily 
translated into the language of any other species. Their music, if it can be 
called such, has been compared to the set of frequencies one would expect to 
register if a Myztherian Octpanther were let loose in a campanile.
 
Rlaan written language appears as a sequence of characters consisting of one to 
four slashes in each of four quadrants formed by a pair of crossed lines.  It is 
read in a counterclockwise spiral out from a blank central region that is 
reserved for the signature glyphs of the author.  The Rlaan have vast stores of 
written documents going back thousands of years, but attempts to decipher most 
of them have met with limited success, as the concepts often being discussed 
seem to have no corollaries in the languages of any other species.

The Rlaan are governed by a body whose name translates to The Rlaan Assembly 
it appears to be some form of representative democracy, but the exact methods of 
choosing ones representative seem complex and arcane beyond the tolerance of 
most observers to bother attempting to figure out.  This body then churns out 
laws and regulations at a breakneck pace, the enforcement of which is then 
delegated to the complex Rlaan Bureaucracy.  Attempts to understand the inner 
workings of the Rlaan Bureaucracy have met only with confusion for all parties 
involved.  Strangely, the members of the Assembly are disproportionately sterile 
hybrids, believed by the Rlaan to be more levelheaded than either the aggressive 
defenders or the timid workers. One thing that did translate clearly, however, 
was the Rlaan differentiation between civilian and non-civilian.  Given their 
biological distinction between these two, it is easy to see why the Rlaan have 
such firm views upon how civilians should be treated.

Rlaan science is more advanced in the fields of chemistry and genetic 
manipulation than any of the other space-faring races.  The Rlaan are also quite 
knowledgeable about materials science and the advances in the latter are often 
related to the former.  Aside from these noted cases though, Rlaan science 
advances more slowly than that of the Humans or the Aera, and the extent of its 
advances is more a measure of the age of Rlaan investigations into science than 
any particular brilliance on the part of the Rlaan.  Though not truly 
uncreative, the Rlaan seem hard pressed in the department of inventive 
spontaneity.  In particular, the Rlaan are rather behind humanity in their 
exploration of both artificial intelligence and integrated biomechanical 
systems.
