Slylandro
| Slylandro | ||||||||
| Slyhome_comm.png The Slylandro Speakers | ||||||||
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The Slylandro are the only race known to live on a Gas Giant, which they call Source. They cannot travel through space due to their physiology, though they have bought a self replicating Probe (Catalog Item 2418-B) from the Melnorme to explore space for them and report back to them. The Slylandro have had contact with the Precursors, the original Ur-Quan and the Sentient Milieu.
They are essentially sentient bags of gas that float through their homeworld's atmosphere. Their bodies are incredibly fragile. Their vision is in a range that is different from most races and it is to their great dismay when they realize that they are transparent to human vision. They evolved from simple, unimodular consumers which thrived in atmospheric convection currents. Originally mindless but social creatures, they developed language to better coordinate efforts to herd their food source into dense concentrations. Despite the variety of life on source, the Slylandro claim to be the only ones to have evolved intelligence.
They have an egalitarian society but this, as Content to Hover comments, "doesn't stop some people from being stupid fools or jerks." Inhabitants of Source deal with bothersome individuals by simply going somewhere else on their massive planet. Because of the limitations of their world the Slylandro have no native construction, technology or written records. Attempts to create objects from animal carcasses are futile, as the construction becomes too massive and dives into the Depths, its bouyancy being overcome by gravity. Unable to maintain written records, the Slylandro employ long songs called History Chants, whose patterns and rhythms help prevent the record from being corrupted.
The Slylandro have very long lifespans. Content to Hover, a Slylandro speaker, claims to have been a nymph when the original Ur-Quan visited their homeworld more than 20,000 years ago.
In the Slylandro culture the principle unit of time is the Drahn, equivalent to four million rotations of their home planet, Source. A Drahn is sub-divided into two thousand Drahnasa. For even smaller periods of time, the Slylandro simply use the rotations of their homeworld as a unit of time. The following is an approximate conversion factors between Slylandro and Human units of time:
- 1 rotation = 14.2 earth hours ≈ 0.592 earth days
- 1 Dranhasa ≈ 1180 earth days ≈ 3.24 earth years
- 1 Drahn ≈ 2370000 earth days ≈ 6480 earth years
The current Slylandro speakers are Content to Hover, Joyous Lifting and Sullen Plummet