Codex: Kalabast/Fhan’i

Name: Kalabast (singular & plural); Fhan’i (singular & plural)

Genders: Biologically, Kalabast 100% male, Fhan’i 100% female. Gene-modded exceptions are uncommon but existent.

Height: 6' 2" Kalabast avg, 5' 3" Fhan’i avg.

Weight: (105 kg) Kalabast avg, (75 kg) Fhan’i avg.

Hair: Kalabast grow thick amounts of fur from the top of their heads. Fhan’i grow thick, pale tentacles in a hair-like arrangement.

Skin Color: Kalabast grow short fur all across their bodies, which can be many natural shades from cream to dark brown. Fhan’i are hairless and albino white across their bodies, however their extremities are usually purple, red, orange or pink.

Ears: Kalabast have large, lynx-like ears. Fhan’i have finned, human-like ears. Although less impressive in appearance, fhan’i have a far superior audial sense to the kalabast.

Eyes: Kalabast have four eyes, two on either side of their face. The pupil is round but small, and the sclera is usually a rich brown or yellow. The Fhan’i have two black, pupil-less eyes. The fhan’i have poor natural vision whereas the kalabast are capable of perceiving infrared and ultraviolet.

Lifespan: 100-110 years Kalabast, 70-75 years Fhan’i.

Bodily Structure

The Kalabast are a digitigrade bipedal race with four digits on each limb, as well as a long, short-furred, prehensile tail. They tend towards a heavy musculature in their arms, enabling them to run on all fours over short distances. They have long faces and wide noses which, with their mane-like hair, lends them a profile not dissimilar to the great feline beasts native to Earth and Rosha. They have loose-hanging balls and a single knotted penis around 7 inches in length, with nodules along the shaft.

The Fhan’i are a plantigrade bipedal race with five webbed digits on each limb, as well as a long, semi-rigid tail. This tail is forked into two thick leaf-like fronds at the tip, and enables a natural expertise at swimming. A number of vestigial tentacles hang around this appendage. They grow large breasts which produce milk naturally; this milk has weak transformative and psychoactive effects on others, engendering arousal universally and testicle growth in those that have them. They have a feminine shape and face immediately recognisable to the galactic norm. Between their thick thighs they have a single vagina, notable for its cilia-lined, penis-milking interior.

Breeding

The Fhan’i naturally produce extremely adaptable ovi, which make them capable of breeding with almost anything with a male sex to produce fhan’i offspring after a six month gestation. The Kalabast are not as able at crossbreeding, but produce dominant sperm which makes kalabast offspring a near-certainty within those couplings they are capable of. Within kalabast/fhan’i pairings, a kalabast offspring is the outcome in about 1 in 4 cases - a fact that has enabled the continuation of both races, and shaped their shared history (see below).

Domestic History

The Kalabast are natives to Denkozenne, a lush world filled with a myriad of biomes. Like most denizens of the planet, they had a roughly equal split of males and females. Before the kalabast had fully evolved sapience, a spacecraft carrying the extinct Fhan’i antecedent race crash-landed in the warm marshes that dominated a large continent of the planet. After a short time these individuals apparently reverted to a primitive state, and came to rely upon captured Denkozennian males to propagate.

The two reached the Bronze Age at roughly the same time, and quickly came to be the dominant races on the planet. Unsurprisingly the fhan’i’s needs - and predilection to express it in the form of male slave-taking - lead to wars of escalating savagery, with the fhan’i’s numbers and organisation matched by the kalabast’s physical strength and richer territories. Around the turn of the Digital Age, a fhan’i cabal of extremists invented a solution to finally break the impasse: a genophage that would change the kalabasts’ own DNA to irreversibly stop them producing females. Released secretly into the planet’s atmosphere and seas in fhan’i controlled territories in huge quantities, the virus was horribly effective, removing kalabast females within a generation. Unfortunately for the fhan’i, once the kalabast had understood what had happened they attacked their enemies with a hitherto unknown unity and purpose, brought together by a shared hatred. Within five years, the kalabast had won a thoroughly pyrrhic global victory. Forced into reconciliation, the kalabast adopted the remaining fhan’i into their own society as second class citizens. Slowly but surely a new culture evolved, in which the fhan’i were kept as beloved pets or concubines, and breeding was carefully managed. With this benign form of sexual slavery in place, kalabast/fhan’i society became both peaceful and stagnant, with little to drive scientific endeavour. Many centuries passed by, the norm becoming more and more concrete with each passing generation until both races had come to see themselves as a single, conjoined people. This was the state of affairs when the anatae made landfall in the 10th Planetary Rush.

Galactic History

The Kalabast/Fhan’i represented a remarkably interesting but challenging project to the anatae; how to uplift them both, and dissolve the fhan’i’s slavehood, without upsetting the peaceful equilibrium the two races had managed to find? Around a dozen new worlds were swiftly annexed, with the most promising offered specifically to the kalabast to populate if they agreed to null their fhan’i pets second citizenship; the rest as alternatives. On all twelve worlds, the anatae relocated a slow trickle of alien migrants likely to be able to act as surrogates for one or both races.

Both races spread quickly throughout Imperial space. Whilst matriarchal fhan’i realms and hardliner kalabast slave kingdoms emerged, by and large the two fell along the lines the anatae were hoping, with open, equal societies under Imperial jurisdiction becoming the norm.

Present Day Culture

Over the years the relationship between the two races has broadly softened, with its former laws now acting as social tropes. Although they both have access to technology that can create female kalabast and male fhan’i, the kalabast regard the fhan’i as their ‘natural’ females, and vice versa. A general, genial patriarchal vibe still abounds; a kalabast is likely to keep 1-3 fhan’i as willing pets, although within U.G.C./Imperial space they will have the same legal rights as him. The kalabast are seen as natural leaders and providers, the fhan’i as muses and entertainers. This is by no means set in concrete; strict matriarchal societies exist, and both races are known to be sexually open-minded.

In more cultural terms the kalabast are stereotypically a laidback, individualist and pleasure-driven race. Historians and sociologists note that once in complete control of Denkozenne, their scientific advancement stalled completely. In comparison the fhan’i are energetic, inquisitive and selfless, and fit much more comfortably into the anatae way of thinking. They are almost always the liaison officers of their home planets and stations.

Reproduction

Though laquines can - and do - mate all the year around, females only become receptive to pregnancy during their twice-yearly heat-seasons. Occurring every 6 months, and lasting for a period of two weeks, it is during this time that females can conceive and experience the hormonal desire to do so. Medicinal supplements to quell these urges, and to reduce the arousing musk that they produce during this period, are now freely available, but it has had its impact on their social structure.

Hermaphrodites do feel heat, like females, but usually in a much weaker fashion. Approximately one fertile week out of every four, however, triggers an even stronger reaction than it does in females, overwhelming the laquine’s mind with the need to father and conceive offspring. In this state, they have even been known to sexually assault others in desperate search of sexual release. Hermaphrodites who feel their “burning” coming on traditionally take alleviating medicine and seek seclusion, emerging only when it is over... assuming they don’t have one or more partners that they choose to sate their lust with, of course. Conception occurs in the ‘typical’ mammalian format, and a litter of two to eight offspring gestate internally for a period of six months before being born alive. As this time period means that offspring from the last breeding season are born during the start of the next, and laquine biologies recover quickly, it is possible for a willing female laquine to be pregnant constantly throughout the year. An infant laquine is a small creature, about the size of a Terran rabbit, and quite helpless, dependent upon its parental figures to care for it for about a decade before reaching adulthood. Within the last thirty years, however, this reproductive system has been thrown off. Some unknown, plague-like affliction has spread throughout the species, wreaking havoc upon the laquine reproductive system. Firstly, it causes the breeding cycle to experience disruptions; sufferers find their cycle occurring out of season, or simply not occurring at all. Disruptions can result in sufferers experiencing only a single heat a year, only once every several years, or even total sterility. Even when heat is entered, breeding success is impacted; stillbirths and miscarriages sometimes occur, but most frequently, only a small number of ova will be fertilized, usually one or two at best. In many cases, even individuals who experience heat find themselves failing to conceive at all, no matter how virile their partner is. The effects of this disease are predominantly felt when laquines attempt to mate within their own species. Laquines attempting to crossbreed with other races have markedly greater success, with the primary difficulty being going into heat in the first place.

History

A relatively young species as far as the United Galactic Confederacy is concerned, the laquines of Asherah were discovered only towards the end of the last planet rush, when the human exploratory vessel Blue Orion entered a newly revealed solar system and encountered a scientific exploration vessel that had recently reached that same area and was quite surprised to encounter an alien vessel. First contact was tenuous, but swiftly proved successful, despite some diplomatic tension resulting from an incident when one of the laquine crew impregnated a female human scientist, and the laquine captain herself becoming pregnant by Captain Small of the Blue Orion. Peaceful acceptance into the U.G.C. followed quite soon thereafter.

Afterwards, the laquine population in the greater galaxy grew quite swiftly, thanks to the rather explosive breeding rate of the species. Though quick and eager to offer their services as organic crop producers, workers and even sexual operators, the speed with which the laquines colonised new lands outside of their own solar system attracted rumblings of discontent, especially from certain human organisations. Indeed, certain races have been known to openly proclaim the laquines as “pests” or “parasites”. Within the last thirty years, however, this accelerated rate of colonisation began to severely die back, as the laquine species found itself assailed by a mysterious plague-like condition that has caused widespread fertility problems. Indeed, the laquines have become increasingly introverted as a species, as more and more attention is being devoted to pursuing possible causes for the sterility plague - and, far more importantly, seeking out potential cures. Despite decades of work, the laquines’ top minds are still trying to unravel the dark secrets of this disease. This extreme and unnatural difficulty in analysis and diagnosis has led to conspiracy theories of it being artificially engineered, which has furthered the general withdrawal of the laquine community from the U.G.C. Medical experts have established by way of testing and observation that neither mod-transformed laquines, nor the half-breed offspring of laquines and other alien races, seem to be affected by the disease. This fact is carefully hidden from public consumption, an effort to minimize paranoia, conspiracy and xenophobia amongst an already suspicious and distrustful populace.

Other Notes

Though it is not socially enforced, traditionally, laquine culture falls under a gender-based trichotomy. Females are responsible for roles that revolve around caring for the children and adults, such as being homemakers, chefs or nurses. Males are responsible for tasks that require strength or endurance as a general rule; construction work, farming, manual labor, etcetera. Hermaphrodites, finally, tend to gravitate towards the social power and intelligence-based roles, such as scientists and politicians. As stated, these roles are not socially enforced - no one would force a female laquine to not be a scientist, for example - but they are traditional and thusly stereotyped amongst this species.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the size of their phallic organs, laquines usually associate ejaculate size with virility size instead. Semen quantity boosters are the primary subject of sexual spam amongst laquines, and semen-related mods are fairly common in their culture. Which is not to say that they don’t also tend to take pride in the size of their male members, just that cumshot size is usually more important. Though rare, it is established fact that priapric and mammarian hyperism conditions have been documented amongst laquines. Laquines have been confirmed as being capable of successfully crossbreeding with humans, kaithrit, kui-tan and ausars. Because they lack multiple nipples, communal nursing is the norm amongst laquines, and the average individual will have been suckled from dozens of willing milk-mothers during her or his youth. It has been theorized that this may have deliberately evolved as a social building mechanic. Perhaps as a result of this, polygamous relationships are not unheard of amongst laquines.