A Vaylen Primer
From Black Country Role Playing Society
Contents |
A Vaylen Primer
This text is taken from the Burning Empires wiki
What is a Vaylen?
In its immature form (ie: before it has "integrated" itself with a sentient host being), a Vaylen is called a "Naiven." Only after it has become integrated, is the resulting dual-creature called a Vaylen. A Vaylen, therefore, can look like a normal human being. This is because the "prime caste" in Vaylen society for the last 8000 or so years has been human. Before that it was an aquatic creature. Lower castes include Kerrns, Trolls and other genetic creations.
How do they reproduce?
Naiven were originally water creatures. They reproduce sexually, but their gender is changeable. Generally the ratio of females to males in a given population is ~10:1. If there are not enough females, the males will change gender and become females. Female Naiven breed twice a year, laying clusters of eggs which the males fertilize. Every birth cycle produces clouds of young. On the world of their origin, young Naiven were a food source for other animals, so reproduction in large numbers was a survival mechanism. In their current interstellar society, the Vaylen maintain tanks full of Naiven family members (all Naiven are kept in nutrient tanks... like big aquariums). Alliances between family lines allow interbreeding of the various family's Naiven. Because they reproduce so rapidly, and because Naiven are of such value to the family (in which status is measured by the number of prime castes the family can claim), the demand for hosts is extremely high. It's not atypical for a Vaylen family to "own" entire worlds of potential hosts, to be culled as hosts for their Naiven.
Why are they at war with humans?
Human beings are of great value to Vaylen society, because they can only maintian their place in the prime caste if they have human hosts (ideally, one for each of their Naiven... a goal that, because of the number s involved, can never be reached). Even with millions of carefully managed slave-worlds, the nature of Vaylen society creates a constant demand for more. Internal pressure for hosts fuels the Vaylen impulse to cross into human space and capture new stock. It isn't the great Vaylen families that drive the wars, it's the up-and-coming lines, the offspring of the great families that want to increase their own status, that creates the impulse towards war.
Some older families still maintain the ancient aquatic caste, but they have long since been supplanted by the human caste in Vaylen society in general.
Why are they so focused on Genetic research?
Even the greatest Vaylen families, owning hundreds of farm-worlds, cannot provide prime caste hosts for all of their Naiven. Some Naiven are reserved for breeding purposes, but many others are "sacrificed" to lower-caste hosts like Kerrns, Trolls and the myriad other creatures created by the Vaylen geneticists. The lower castes do all of the dirty work for the Vaylen families. The prime caste is reserved for the most mentally & physically stimulating activities. In order for a family to gain and hold status in Vaylen society a lot of work must take place: building and maintaining an industrial base, administration of the farms (agricultural and caste), mining, surveying, warfare.. all of the things that make a human society function are mirrored in the Vaylen worlds. The genetic creation of lower host races permits the Vaylen to accomplish this.
How did the first Naiven get into a human mind?
Since a Naiven cannot penetrate the human skull without surgical assistance, an outside agency, generally a Vaylen, is required. This opens the "chicken and the egg" quandry... how did the first Naiven get into the first human head? The answer lies with the ancient aquatic prime-caste. The world on which the Vaylen developed was a water world, in which a sentient being (the soon-to-be Aquatic Prime-Caste), was also present. The Vaylen in their primordial state were parasites which were able to gain gross motor control of other species (all of them invertebrates), eventually gaining sentient control of the higher species. With these advanced creatures as hosts, the Vaylen, as a sentient species, was born. They became spacefaring, taking their host species to the stars with them. It must have been one of these aquatic prime-castes that was the first to crack open a human skull and insert a Naiven. The Naiven were quickly bred to survive in the Pineal Fluid of the human Ventricles (not a huge leap, since they were already water creatures), and the human caste came into its own.
Vaylen Society
The central fact of Vaylen culture is its reliance upon the Host (Alemai).
NAIVEN: ("low state" "natural state") Vaylen which have never achieved sentience are Naiven. Humans often use this term (incorrectly), to refer to the worm part of a Vaylen/Host organsim.
VAYLEN: ("high state" "evolved state") The first time a Naiven "downloads" (Asijemin) its chemical repository of racial memory and processes that memory with the faculties of a sentient host-being, it is said to have evolved into the Vaylen form. There are two subheadings for Vaylen:
EXOPARASITIC STATE: A Vaylen in its natural state ("Exoparasitic"), differes from a Naiven only in that it can have encoded commands in place of the Naiven's blind instinct. A Vaylen which has attached to, but is not integrated with, a host is still considered to be Exoparasitic.
ENDOPARASITIC STATE: A Vaylen which is integrated w/a sentient host or Artificial Intelligence is in its Endoparasitic State. The definitive function of this state is interface between the Vaylen and its host. For example, a Vaylen that's inside a host, but not currently accessing its resin/host interface is Exoparasitic.
ENCODING: When a Vaylen abandons its host in an emergency, it encodes its parasitic form with a series of simple commands (more accurately instinctive imperatives), which will guide its actions in its natural state. Its accumulated sentient memories are too sophisticated for it to process in its parasitic form, but are stored chemically, to be retrieved when it re-enters a host (returns to the endoparasitic state).
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