Akha'lae


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Akha'lae (plural form; Akha - singular) genetic lineage has been traced for certain to a six-limbed, largely bipedal race. They were warrior-explorers and planet seeders, torn apart by social and political infighting that drove almost half of them from their world of origin. During its peak, the Akhai empire stretched across six galaxies.

Overview
The Akha'lae genetically anomalous and slightly unstable make-up allowed them a very important advantage. What they ate changed their physiology. They picked out and incorporated any genetic advantage of anything they could kill for food. But it meant that arrivals to far-flung colonies found people very different from themselves, ones they were no longer compatible with.

The first re-meetings between them were bloody wars, the First Fall of the Empire, with cannibalism being the end goal. Eventually all ark-ships and colonies were outfitted with state of the art genetic and birth labs, to help facilitate reintegration between old and new colonists. Blood compacts, large interlaced communities of families, were formed within and between colonies for ease of trade and communication. There are probably still Akha colonies far from the beaten path that have retained their seclusion after the Second Fall of the Empire, in which the compacts became law.

Their old technology stands in the middle of a newfound religious fervor, allowing them to continue to reproduce strictly within their own compacts despite the incompatibility of most adults and sterility of most natural born children. In what they claim to be a process of pure Akhai mysticism, they also still somehow manage to transfer entire consciousnesses between old and new bodies. It gives them the pretense of being able to live forever, though after a number of jumps, even that is entirely fallible.

Ancient Sociology and Physiology
At the beginning of their history, something even the Akha'lae have no record of, their six-limbed ancestors were more akin to mollusks than any other type of creature. (Do not mistake this as 'they were slugs,' they are unrelated to Earth mollusks, although shared many traits in common.) They existed in a symbiotic relationship with their main food source, a small, placid, furred, herbivorous creature the Akha'lae called luya. Luya, in turn, required vast tracts of open land, without which they would cease to reproduce, so the Homeworld remained undisturbed in the state of equilibrium for millenia.

An undisturbed homeworld, however, meant half the year was bitterly cold, too cold for snow, and the other half was still cold, just with snow. Akha'lae lacked the capacity to grow fur to protect themselves, since they had evolved from aquatic creatures, not terrestrial, as the luya had. Their consumption of the animal incorporated the coding for fur into their DNA, although young ones were still born without it.

It is unknown when the first Akha planted a garden to attract luya, instead of following their constant migration across the tundras. But it fundamentally changed the way the relationship worked. Pair-bonds became mostly stationary, tending small plots of the hardy tundra-plants, the roots of which were the luya's preferred food source.

Stationary pairs led to clans, then villages, and eventually towns that threatened to encroach on the space the luya needed. But without the luya, the Akha'lae would die. Without the covering of fur that the relationship provided them, their physiology made it impossible to brave the cold for any appreciable length of time. So the idea came to tame luya, change their predilection from vast wandering, without which they would refuse to mate, into a constant state of readiness, so they might be tended along with the small garden plots. The ones that walked the farthest, the Ahka'lae still killed and ate. The ones that merely wandered in small loops or back and forth between near points, they left alive and protected.

This was the their first foray into selective genetics.

It was not the complex method, the one used by them in the present, but the selective breeding eventually gave them a constant food source that remained nearby.

Physiology

 * "Competition encourages efficiency. Efficiency encourages uniformity."

Psychology
Brave and loyal, if often callous toward their pair-bond, Akha’lae are still very much solitary creatures. Otherwise intensely paranoid, due to constant contact with others, since their primary mindset has not moved beyond nomads traveling in singles and pairs. Their own minds are the only things they’re not willing to tamper with before birth. A very primary drive is always for more space, further away from each other.

A tendency toward sadism doesn’t help them put up with each other much. As a whole, they’re aggressive and intelligent, but have mostly ceased channeling it into full-scales wars with each other and instead into constant competition. To build better, go farther, improve everything.

Their only real concern is with their own standing, being perceived as an opponent not worth challenging to the rest of their species. But because the Akhai Empire considers itself civilized, the Akha’lae use careful political moves and wars by proxy, and the number of mysterious deaths are reported as transfer-failure.

For all their reflexive aggression, however, they are intensely loyal to the mate they chose. Akha’lae will kill and die for their pair-bonds, but they view children as bothersome. In the past they only looked after them until their fur grew in, still being quick to abandon them. They are solid and protective parents, but only up until their offspring have matured.

Politics
As a whole, the Akhai Empire is extremely concerned with genetic purity. However, getting any of them to agree independently what that is has always proved impossible. So they don't move toward doing much about it, content to only minorly meddle in the upper level politics of most other species. The average civilian is rarely aware of their presence, because their aggression is, these days, usually directed at learning to more efficiently exploit others, instead of forcing compliance.

Technology
Fundamentally, the Akhai Empire does not understand most of its' current technology. Despite their advances in biological technology, they are highly religiously reverent toward other surviving technology. Rituals and appeasements are offered to highly complex machinery in order to keep it running. It can be repaired and sometimes relocated, but no current effort is underway by the larger, better funded Compacts to actually attempt to understand or replicate any technology over a thousand years old.