Codex: Gabilani

They're eating her....and then they're going to eat me!......OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!

Name (Singular & Plural): Gabilani

Sexes: Male and female, equal split.

Height: 2’8” to 3’6”, with females averaging an inch or two taller than males.

Weight: 40lbs to 55lbs.

Hair: Black (naturally), many choose to dye their hair more unusual colors. As gabilani age, their hair greys and eventually turns white. Males can grow beards, however the species as a whole lack body hair.

Eyes: Two eyes, similar to humans, save that the pigmentation of their irises is black, making them virtually indistinguishable from their pupils to the naked eye. Gabilani have poor eyesight synonymous with a subterranean evolution. Glasses and ocular cybernetic enhancements are common.

Ears: Gabilani have large, pointed, flexible ears. These provide them with ausar-like hearing and a pronounced sensitivity to vibration.

Features

Gabilani are humanoid in structure, but are smaller in size to the galactic norm. They look not unlike scaled down humans, or more like the fantasy “goblin”, as they are commonly known by some terrans. This may be due to the fact that their skin has a green pigmentation in most cases, but can vary between yellowish and aquamarine. They have nearly identical facial features to human ones, aside from a tendency towards slightly larger noses and a more triangular visage.

Gabilani females are on average slightly larger than their male counterparts. This is matched with a higher level of natural strength and aggression in females over males.

Reproduction

Gabilani are a highly sexed species. They do not have an estrous cycle, and fertile females appear capable of having children at any time. Pregnancies usually last for 3 months, with mothers giving birth to 3 to 5 children per litter. Larger or smaller litters are possible, but very rare. A female gabilani's hips and buttocks grow larger with each pregnancy, and their sizes are often a good indication of how many children a particular female has had. Aside from the lack of an estrous cycle and body hair, gabilani have many mammalian traits and their females nurse their young with breast milk. Both gabilani sexes are quite capable of interbreeding with a number of races.

Gabilani vaginas are naturally loose, but possess a set of specialized muscles that let them twist and rotate their interior passage around. Females have full voluntary control over these muscles. These two characteristics allow them to house and tighten down upon almost any size and type of erection. Gabilani males often find it difficult to orgasm without some twisting on their dicks. This leads to male gabilani having greater sexual endurance than the galactic norm, taking a long time to orgasm whilst having sex with non-gabilani.

Despite their small stature, a male gabilani's penis is, on average, 4 to 6 inches in length and 1 and a half inches in diameter. It has a bulbous shape, featuring two distinct, sequential “heads” at its tip separated by a ridge.

Society

Gabilani are an intensely social species that become stressed when isolated far faster than most. They have evolved a competitive caste system that allegedly revolves around who is the most involved and dynamic within their society at any one time. For both of these reasons, exile is regarded as the worst punishment possible to the gabilani, outstripping even death, as execution involves being the centre of attention even if only for a short time.

Gabilani express a great love for mechanical invention. Whilst their appreciation of biology and medicine is limited, the great space stations upon which the majority of the species now live demonstrate a remarkable grasp of aerodynamics and engineering, particularly given the limited timeframe many of them were constructed in. Where they differ from the similarly practically-minded raskvel is a preference towards inventing new things, as opposed to repairing or recycling the old. This is identified as one of the key reasons for Tarkus’s environmental exhaustion.

Outside, cultural historians theorize that many gabilani societal traits suggest an overall veneration of “bigness”, possibly related to the generousness of a female’s frame displaying how many children they have had. How long a gabilani’s name is, for instance, displays how important they are considered to be, and the more spectacular an individual’s invention - or the more spectacularly said invention goes wrong - the more cultural cache is attached to him or her, above and beyond what an engineer or scientist of a different race might expect. Similarly to the raskvel, then, most gabilani view larger offworlders as profoundly sexually attractive, and aim to breed with them wherever possible.

Gabilani can interbreed with raskvel, however the progeny is always raskvel. The only race on Tarkus capable of outbreeding them, gabilani express a cultural fear and dislike of the raskvel, viewing their reckless approach to reproduction as the primary reason for Tarkus’s ruin. Higher ranking gabilani sometimes “adopt” raskvel as menial workers and sex slaves aboard their space stations. The gabilani High Command is currently locked in negotiations with the U.G.C. for full membership; one of the key provisos is that it explicitly wipes the practice of raskvel slavery out.

Cybernetics and Health

The passion for mechanical invention, lack of interest in medicine, and the frequency of industrial accidents in gabilani culture led to the species evolving the love of and reliance on cybernetics that they are remarkable for today. The gabilani developed physical cybernetic enhancements before microbe theory and blood transfusion, and a great majority employ significant mechanical bodily enhancement during their lifetime.

Replacement limbs and ocular enhancement are the most common procedures, however the gabilani are also capable of sophisticated internal adaptations, often aimed at combating the health problems they face as a result of spending most of their lives in orbit above their home planet. All gabilani are required by law to spend at least three weeks in a year on the surface of Tarkus to boost their skeletal and immune system strength, however some wealthier gabilani disdain this edict by having all or most of their bones replaced with alloy metal, and augmenting their respiratory systems with antiviral micro-bot plants.

This ability to easily replace defective organs and limbs with effective cybernetic replacements has greatly boosted the possible lifespan of the average gabilani, however their population has remained stable as a result of the scourge of industrial accidents in their frenetic society, and the likelihood of newer models of replacement organs going catastrophically wrong.