Altevian

The Altevian (al-tae-vee-in) is a species of tall, rodent humanoids that are akin to rats for their features. The Altevian, unlike most species, do not have a home planet, or system, adopting a fully nomadic lifestyle for their survival across the stars. Instead, they have opted to live in massive super capital-class colony ships with a flagship as the place they would call home.

Overview

The Altevian speak the unique language of Tavan. Use this in-game by using ,E.

All Altevian have photosensitivity and would need extra protection with welding and other light intense operations

Altevian have sharp fangs in their mouth as well as claws and will scratch and bite, instead of punching, to deal more damage

Biology

Over the past millennia, the hegemony’s species evolved from their focused scavenging and survival tactics to what they are today. While still skilled scavengers, they gained a focus and understanding of trade and better practices between themselves and others outside of the hegemony. The altevians today are more akin to that of the average galactic citizen across the cosmos, and less of their original brutish scavenging days when they were starting out on their journey.

Speech Patterns

Speech patterns will vary from ship to ship, but they all keep a somewhat consistent mannerism. These are a lot more obvious if they speak a language that isn’t their native Tavan. The following are the common mannerisms by classification of colony-ship:

• Flagship: A mix of all known mannerisms
  • Examples would be bits and pieces of all the other patterns from the rest of the fleet. There is no specific pattern that altevians follow here.
• Research Fleets: Proper & Deliberate speech patterns. Comes off as snooty at times
  • No use of terms of “y’all, you’re, they’re, it’s, won’t” or other short-handing other phrases. Research fleets will take their word usage literally and spell out everything
• Combat Fleets: Brash & Dismissive speech patterns
  • The combat crew speaks with heavy use of short-handing and coming off gruff in their voice. Extensive use of talking like the following: “Y’all ‘bout to deal wit’ tha pain fer gettin’ in trouble from tha brass lil’ squeak.”
• Mining & Salvage Fleets: Tired & Hostile speech patterns
  • Examples would include excessive usage of sarcasm, indifference, or flat-out insulting between others. Even those they respect or see as a friend would still insult them, but out of love and care
• Husbandry Fleets: Polite & Soft speech patterns
  • These fleets communicate with an old-style like drawl and rural aspect. Shorthanded is key and would show kindness and respect to anyone and anything, even hostile. Though in this case, they’d be more akin to telling the person to go to hell and making them look forward to the trip.
• Admin & Intelligence Fleets: Mixed of most mannerisms
  • Similar to the flagship, but with a heavier focus on how the research ships operate and speak. While they might shorthand their speech, there is still a heavy focus on deliberate and focused wording

Physical & Mental Traits

In terms of strength and handling themselves they are rather durable and can handle lifting heavy objects to fifty pounds with little to no effort. However, altevians that go onto planets and experience real gravity seem to report difficulties in keeping their footing and are more likely to fall over from slight bumps even with their strength. The inner biology of altevians has a lot of similar systems to most of the humanoid species that are out and about in space. For instance, they have a singular heart, their bodies run at a similar temperature to humans, and their bone strength is on the same level as most species. Things change a little when moving down to their midsection. An altevian possesses exceptionally strong stomachs that can process most items ingested with little to no difficulty and also have an innate high tolerance to ethanol-based liquids due to this.

Another thing to note with altevian physiology is their endurance. They can handle tasks for extended periods, and also can easily traverse on foot for long distances without the need for immediate rest. This is most likely due to their old lifestyle before they became a space-faring species, but has just remained an active trait due to the shift of work and demand of keeping massive ships from falling apart.

Altevians as a whole are a mixed set of murids that could almost be classified as a different kind of species between the different colony ships they hail from. Between all the different traits and skills of the fleet, there are a few key identifiers to note with their makeup between all the colony ships that they all share.

• Their teeth are sharp fangs and can pierce through the skin with ease
• Their claws are exceptionally sharp and can easily rip through most fabric and flesh with little to no issue. The length of these claws though wouldn’t be any longer than that of the Teshari & Vox
• A moderate percentage of the population can secrete a mint-flavored venom from their fangs that acts as a numbing agent. Most altevians that have this trait have a negative response and feeling towards all things mint flavored
• Height and other sizing factors vary on which classification of colony ship they grew up on. However, the average height around the hegemony is around a solid 7’0”. Altevians that have not been genetically modified have recorded sizes as small as 4’0” and as tall as 10’6” roughly
• Altevians have an average life expectancy of 90 human years
• The common fur colors altevians have are red, brown, black, gray, white tan, and gold accents. However, with gene-modding, there are some reports of altevians taking on more unique color palettes

Background

The Colony Ships

Altevian Colony Ship life inside the bio-domes. (( Artist is - https://twitter.com/HaukeyHauk ))

The Altevian Hegemony consists of colony-ships surrounded by massive fleets as a “nation” that all strive for a similar large-scale goal and a grand-scale goal. The large-scale goal differs per “nation” whereas the grand-scale goal is the overall betterment of the hegemony. This means providing resources, crew power, technology, medical aid, combat support, and anything else that would align with their survival. There are currently around a few dozen colony ships each with different designs, but all are of similar mass and scale. Each ship is on average around 60 Km³ with a population averaging out at 95 thousand per square kilometer and puts the average population of each ship at 42.75 million inhabitants. The current total population of the hegemony is estimated at around 2 billion inhabitants in total.  

The Hegemony operates all their vessels under the same callsign AH-XX, or Altevian Hegemony, for all their ships up to the colony ships. The Admiral, or ruler, of the hegemony, has the final say on operations and routing for the fleet movements, but they typically only used this power during times of conflict. Normal fleet operations give the colony-ships full autonomy for their travel and orders with only a fleet warp back to their flagship roughly every three months to resupply and update records with everyone else. While each ship can in theory handle the operations and tasks of other colony ships they might not have the advanced equipment to provide the same level of support their counterpart has. The fleet has divided its types of colony ships into the categories as follows:

• Flagship (Capitol) - AH-CV Migrant
• Research & Development
• Combat & Warfare
• Mining / Salvaging / Production  
• Husbandry (Farming & Water Collection)
• Administrative / Intelligence / Trade / Misc.

The fleets of the hegemony consist of a few specific ships with confidential operations aboard them. This ranges from advanced and secretive research to covert operations. The hegemony does its best to keep snooping eyes from peering into too much, but the basic knowledge of what their fleets do is known to a small extent. The following ships for this are:

• AH-CV Great Maw - Researching into specifics of improved animal husbandry to min/max feed & water to provide meat
• AH-CV New Treasures - Focuses on salvaging high-value tech and ruins and does not provide details on what’s recovered
• AH-CV Crimson - Elite Operations and handles the end step of takeovers of a system. The Altevian Hegemony does NOT want to use this fleet and will only send them out after all other diplomacy operations have been tried
• AH-CV Desolation - WMDs and other high-value weapons research
• AH-CV Banner-watch - Does NOT play well with non-altevians, and is best avoided by all visitors and non-altevian crew. Non-altevian rodent crew MIGHT be okay, but best to avoid
• AH-CV Despot - While they do help manage relations with other factions in terms of trade and continued trust, the Despot is also the hegemony’s intelligence-gathering organization

The star charting and routing of the ships are designed to constantly reconvene at least once every 3 Sol months in a staggered fashion with the active flagship. The staggering pattern is to prevent overwhelming a system with their fleet unless it’s for combat-related operations. This is to allow the fleets to resupply with the flagship. This also covers updates to research, exploration, combat, and other matters related to the hegemony's betterment.

Each colony ship is designed to provide hanger services at all times for their fleet, and to visitors, in the star system, they’re currently in. The hangar bays in the colony ship can handle destroyers and cruisers with shuttles coming from their carriers and capital ships. The exact number of ships fielded with each colony ship varies greatly depending on their role and operational duties. The rough estimate per colony-ship would be around a fleet power of a few thousand, or more, combat class vessels. This does not include their civilian and smaller class craft that can field weapons. The Combat class colony-ships would break this trend, but numbers aren't known or exact for this.

Colony Life

Life inside a colony ship would be similar to living in a metropolitan area of any major settlement. All colony ships will house a primary promenade with a bio-dome of some degree but vary depending on the specific ship. If any trade occurs in the colony-ship itself it would be in the promenade which provides temporary housing for visitors dotted around all the shops and facilities for crew and guests alike. The housing itself would vary in size from a standard small unit to a modest multi-room facility for crew with families. This style of living, while fine for altevians, is documented to cause minor mental strain on species that enjoy their open space and vast housing units, and is recommended for these species to restrict their time to only visiting the provided temporary housing units in the promenade of a colony-ship. With all things, there are parts of the colony ships that with a structure so massive there will be parts that’ll eventually fall into disrepair, and turn into what would be considered by most as a slum or derelict part of the ship. The derelict sections of the ship would have multitudes of issues ranging from faulty power, water issues, food distribution problems, or just generally poor standard of living. The derelict sections of these massive colony ships would typically house the rejects, downtrodden, or the general underclass. Residents from these upbringings would flock to this area since the standard security and operational services that keep the ship running would not dare take a step into the lower hulls.

Culture

The Altevian Hegemony’s first foray into the galactic core of empires and corporations is still a rather recent development in their history. While the altevian’s have already known the Vox since the early days of their journey into the stars it wasn’t until around 400 years prior that the altevians ran into the Akula and established their first non-aggression pacts and trade deals with empires closer to the galactic core. Over the next few centuries, the Altevian Hegemony would see rapid growth and the establishment of their newest colony ships that would help further this growth.

Altevians today lead a very mercantile first way of living and operate on a basis of continued growth and knowledge to share with their kind. The recent notion of altevian’s leaving their constantly moving homes is nothing unexpected of their kind. Being nomadic an altevian still wants to explore and see what they can, some more than others, and this is where the core systems start to see applications and requests of travel to their own homes from them.

Conflict continues to remain a rather sparse issue for the Altevian Hegemony due in part to their ease of travel, and logistics of moving their entire home with just a warp. The Altevian Hegemony also ensured to provide any medical and general aid to areas in dire straits to help empires and other species not run into a similar fate as the hegemony experienced back in its early days.

Leadership

Leadership aboard the colony-ships of the hegemony are operated by a primary family that filled the role of command team of their ship since it was deemed livable. The average size of the family that “owns” the colony ship is usually around 5,000. The captain of the colony ship and most of the bridge crew is staffed by the family itself, but there are instances where the senior staff of certain departments will have someone from outside the family assigned to a position. There are no recorded instances of a family of a colony-ship stepping down, or being forcefully removed, from the control of the colony ships.

The captain and spouse of the captain are considered the highest level of command on the colony ship they operate on, and this includes the flagship. However, the official “leader” of the entire hegemony is selected between a democratic vote of all the ships and their crews on who will fill the Admiral role of the hegemony from the council that sits in the flagship. The council is composed of the primary families that operate on each flagship and the pool of candidates for the election of the Admiral all come from this same group. Once an Admiral is elected they typically run the hegemony for 10 years, and after the 10-year period passes, they are up for re-election along with other potential candidates to take the seat as Admiral. The council the Admiral comes from acts as a secondary level of leadership that handles all new laws and major orders to issue out to the fleet and assists in handling most of the mundane issues that are brought up to the hegemony.

The Admiral of the hegemony can utilize a set of decrees at any point in time for the entire fleet as a whole. This goes from rallying to the flagship, to focusing operations on a specific resource, technology, or anything else of merit to the hegemony. The Admiral also has the final say on law if they feel it’s too detrimental to the hegemony if the council originally passed it.

Operations Between Colony-Ships

The hegemony itself has an assorted view upon each other but strives to keep aligned on the same factors to everyone’s best ability. This does not mean that there isn’t strife in the hegemony. While overall inner relations with the hegemony remain positive there are a few primary issues of note that are as such:

• AH-CV Prosperity
  • After an inner struggle between the families of the old flagship around 22XX the entire empire kept a cautious attitude towards the colony-ship and its crew. The Captain of the Prosperity deemed it best for them to no longer serve as the flagship for their empire until they had resolved the conflict and worries between the families and relinquished control of the empire over to the AH-CV Migrant. This has helped over time in repairing the fleets’ worries but until the incident is resolved all other colony ships will continue to remain careful.
• AH-CV Banner-watch
  • Due to the hyper-aggressive and hostile attitude towards non-altevians, the majority of the hegemony tends to not talk about the ship to others. If it is brought up it is more of a warning, and a strong advisory to avoid the ship at all costs if it ever enters warp into a populated system. The current flagship of the hegemony works with the Banner-watch command team at all times to keep their route away from populated systems unless needed.
• AH-CV Despot
  • The hegemony tends to be wary of the Despot crew due to their nature of intel gathering. The crew utilizes a strong silver-tongue tactic for their work, and reports of the Despot crew crop up about them using these same tricks on other altevians when there is no need for it. If it wasn’t for their expert handling of the logistical nightmare of the hegemony they’d most likely be disliked
• AH-CV Migrant
  • The Migrant has always had a rather rocky history with the hegemony due to their excessively prim and proper attitude towards non-atevians and altevians alike. Before the Migrant was designated as the new flag-ship they were a diplomatic and visitation fleet. The recent change of their ship being the new flagship has been met with mixed success.

Job Preference

Altevians can be found working just about any jobs that can be found aboard Nanotrasen facilities, though they tend to stick to roles most associated with the ship they came from.

Rankings & Work

The Altevian Hegemony operates as something humans would think of as a navy, but this extends to every single inhabitant aboard every ship owned by the hegemony. From service workers, to the Captain and Admiral, everyone Altevian of age would have on them somewhere an emblem with jewels embroidered onto it marking their rank. The rankings are not concrete and serve more of a primer or quick glance on what that specific altevian does in their life, or how dedicated to their work they are. The rankings consist of the following:

Ranking	Service	Operational	Senior	Leadership	Admiral
Primary	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Tungsten
Secondary	Opal	Sapphire/Emerald	Ruby	Diamond Black Diamond	Red Diamond

Altevians are durable and hardy workers that sometimes take their job too seriously. They've been known, and seen, by other species to pull in more hours than expected or have a work ethic that some would call unhealthy. Of course, most altevians will just shrug if this is brought up and carry on with their work. While for MegaCorps and other empires see this as a major boon in their eyes to have hardy workers like this, a few unions and other groups have tried to strive for the Altevians to take note of the utilization and what some would call abuse of their skills and try and "Take it easy."

Relations

The Altevian Hegemony has opted to go with a xenophile-based approach when it comes to contact with other species, and more so much larger empires that are scattered across the stars. While the hegemony itself has been around for some time they’ve only recently entered the spotlight of the larger empires, and some still see them as little more than fancy pirates, or a potential vassal candidate. Regardless of the relation, the Altevian Hegemony might have with any of the other empires, they will always ensure that medical aid and support are available to even their enemies to an extent.

Altevians and knowledge of their hegemony itself are kept firmly separated from conversations from the other empires out of their own beliefs and past. If someone that isn’t from the hegemony started asking more personal questions about a ship, or the life of an altevian, most will probably be greeted with a non-answer to change the topic.

The list below will only note significant relations, or notes, about another empire with the Altevian Hegemony itself. If it is not listed here then the altevians have either not heard of them, don’t have an established trade relation with them, or they’re just on neutral or cordial ties.

Vox

The Altevian Hegemony shares a very odd “alliance” with the Vox. They are one of the only species that seem to get along with them without either side hiding a knife behind their back... instead, they have it on the table itself. The Vox was the first empire that the altevians knew due to their original home back before they became the nomadic spacers they are known as today. Upon their initial meeting, it went about what would have been expected with Vox relations, but it quickly shifted once the Alteivans and Vox opened discussions of trade. With both viewing salvage as such an important commodity, both having a past that resulted in their old living style shifting to a nomadic style, and the fact they both shared a very similar colony-ship style housing quickly made the two see each other at least on the level of understanding.

Nowadays the two groups are polite towards one another and do their best to keep a respectful distance with their colony ships to not overlap operations between their groups and to risk stretching salvage thin. There have been reports though of the two empires warping into the same system, but for what ends most do not know due to both their secretive mannerisms to most outside entities.

Greater Human Diaspora & Terran Commonwealth

The conglomerate of the human empire is an interesting line due to the different inner communities between humanity. While the Diaspora as a whole is more open towards the hegemony to conduct trade, the commonwealth wishes to keep them at a star system's reach, but will still trade with them.

Altevians see the humans as easy to work with despite the conflicting mannerisms between different humans and lifted a few of their usual restrictions of trade of the hegemony between them. The hegemony is still rather cautious though with humans due to their troubled past, and an innate desire to focus on medical trade.

Unathi Hegemony

Due to the vast number of clans and the operations of the hegemony, the Altevian Hegemony currently keeps its distance from operations with the Unathi.  This is mainly due to the relation the Altevian Hegemony has with the human factions before meeting the Unathi.

Elysian Colonies

The Elysian Colonies would be the only empire in that the Altevian Hegemony would have a somewhat negative standing. Unlike the Unathi which the Altevian Hegemony regards as a neutral term at worst, the open slave trade the Elysian Colonies allow caused a lot of strife in the hegemony on debating going into an open war with the faction. However, they recognize that parts of the colonies are not on the same set of ruling and as such went with a blanket embargo of trade at this time.

Relations to MegaCorps

The Altevian Hegemony has recently focused more of its resources and attention on the numerous corporations that are scattered across the galaxy. Currently, the hegemony has only a few contracts with smaller-scale companies for rights to salvage as payment for offering system defense operations to them. There is at the moment only one trade agreement the Altevian Hegemony has made with a specific mega-corporation due to most other companies regarding the Altevian Hegemony as a small player in the grand galactic-scale still. This indifferent attitude has caused a majority of the hegemony to see MegaCorps as a leech to the smaller businesses, save for the very few that have signed a treaty, or agreement, with them.

NanoTrasen

NanoTrasen is the primary non-empire entity that the altevians work with on numerous occasions, and only recently have signed an official trade agreement between the two. Thus, this agreement paved the way for NanoTrasen to hire and take on altevians as new employees. The Altevian Hegemony as a whole was at first a bit concerned about such a unique and new prospect with one of the mega-corporations of the galaxy. However, after a few years of trade and betterment for their hegemony as a whole, the Altevian Hegemony was quick to ease off their worries with NanoTrasen. It was only about 5 cycles ago that the Altevian Hegemony offered special rates for their independent contractors to offer their labor and set of skills to NanoTrasen to further improve relations. Within the past cycle, the hegemony has further opened the hiring allowance between NanoTrasen and the hegemony to allow a broad spectrum of experience from Principle Engineers down to a line cook to help fill the rank and file for NanoTrasen.

Vey-Medical Technologies

The trade agreement with Vey-Med is more of an agreed-upon rate of procuring Re-sleeving and other revival-based technology blueprints while providing a percentage of medical-grade salvage found on wrecks. The agreement coming from Veymed itself requesting salvage as the payment for the blueprints to upgrade all the facilities with up-to-code medical equipment was seen as a high level of respect towards the Altevian Hegemony and has caused a shake-up in the hegemony on numerous swaths of medically trained altevians offering their skills to Veymed. However, the technology for the revival systems is still new to the hegemony, and most altevians are a bit cautious in utilizing the services offered. This is further hindered by how much sway the Despot has regarding record-keeping on who uses the services, and for what purposes.

OOC Etiquette

The altevians are meant to be played similar to other standard non-whitelisted species. They would operate similarly to how humans would with the unique colony-ships that are essentially nations in of themselves thus allowing a wide array of playstyles to fit most players’ interests. Altevians are a somewhat prideful species happy with their empire, or at worst, neutral with their worries about the direction it could be going and would not be one seen to talk about their empire in a negative light in general. They would however have their issues about one or more of the specific colony ships. In terms of job handling and actions on the station, altevian’s prideful nature would show here as well and they’d ensure to at least be good, or happy to learn, at the job they were hired on for. At the end of the round though, all that’s important is that you’re playing a character that you enjoy playing, and one that provides a fun story for those around you to partake in and share along with you.

Roleplay Notes

Each ship that an altevian comes from will have small differences from each other, with the major difference being from the primary classification of the vessel. Unless the previous document stated otherwise in Relations Between Colony-Ships, all altevians see each other on at least neutral terms. If there are any concerns with how to play this species, note that if you play them in a style of just humans, but as rats, you won’t be in a bad spot! Playing an altevian from the flagship would be your easiest experience since this would allow for any general type of playstyle or behavior you’d like them to have. Having your space rat come from one of the more task-specific ships would come with a few caveats and mannerisms that’d provide a fun little challenge for folks newer to the roleplay aspect of the game. With any species, no one is without flaws, and Altevians are not exempt from that and your character easily can show one or more flaws of themselves, or the empire’s mannerisms rearing their head into the spotlight. Altevians also are secretive about their empire’s day-to-day operations, and the empire as a whole to NON-altevian crew. If people try to ask about specifics of their life personally, that can be left up to the player. That being said, some altevians might be a bit more relaxed on sharing some specifics, and more so if it’s about one of the ships they might not like.

Lore
Essentials	Factions	Locations	Species	News	Miscellaneous
Vital Lore Backstory Timeline	NanoTrasen Commonwealth of Sol-Procyon Ares Confederation Unitary Alliance of Salthan Fyrds Free Trade Union Trans-Stellar Corporations United Federation United Solar Defense Force Unathi Culture	Virgo Orbital Research Establishment Virgo-Erigone Virgo-Prime Al'Qasbah ITV Talon Moghes (Unathi Homeworld) Sol Infernum Sanctorum	Akula Alraune Altevian Black Eyed Shadekin Diona Hanner Lleill Human Lleill Nevreans Promethean Proteans Shadekin Skrell Synthetics Tajaran Teshari Unathi Vasilissans Vox Vulpkanin Xenochimera Zaddat Zorren Custom Species	Periphery Post Free Anur Tribune	Infrastructure Thaler Standard Operating Procedure Admiralty law Bluespace Phoron Languages Personal Lore Catslug
Legend: Up-to-date Partially outdated Heavily outdated Partially outdated pages need a pass from lore masters to ensure they conform to current lore, but may be correct as they stand. Heavily outdated pages directly contradict established lore OR are severely lacking in lore.