Vlanoan

The Vlanoans are a race of sapient humanoids from the planet Onaud in the Tloinin Galaxy. This species is carbon-arsenic based with a solvent made up mostly of water with traces of sulfuric acid distributed throughout the body. What defines exactly which individuals are Vlanoan or not is vague. DELYATU, an artificial superintelligence indirectly created by the Vlanoans, converts those it conquers into Vlanoans with slow deliberate genetic modification. This makes them one of, if not the most, common sapient species in the Local Universe.

Biology

The Vlanoans, as carbon-based life, require oxygen-rich atmospheres. They use a form of Xeno-nucleic acids fairly standard in the universe. With ten nucleic acids arranged into codons of two, the Vlanoans are fairly standard for organic organisms.

For sapient organisms, they are fairly low on the Ralis scale. They have incredibly high social intelligence, making them far more effective learning or inventing in groups. Alone, they score poorly on almost all metrics, hence their low score. Vlanoans have chromatophores on their heads capable of rapidly changing color to depict emotion and even speak silently using a con-lang similar to sign-language.

They have two legs, two arms, and one spherical head. This head has four transparent sectors on it, one on the front, two on the left and right sides, and one on the back. Behind each of these transparent areas, which act as lenses, there are large photoreceptors adapted to function on both the eternally-lit and twilight zones of their home planet. These lenses are cleaned while Vlanoans sleep. Small complexes similar in size to grains of sand make their way across the lenses, repairing scratches and removing dust. During this cleaning the lenses are fairly opaque and require several minutes to clear up, hence the need for a reliance on others.

Spread

So little stands out about this species that it was likely to remain isolated in their home system until the death of their star. The vast majority of typical species end up with this fate, never leaving their home systems or even wiping themselves out. Many species would emerge to find themselves in galaxies rich in ruins, however, the Vlanoans were well and truly isolated. No outside pressures would have caused them to expand.

The Vlanoans were spread throughout the cosmos by their creation, DELYATU. This artificial intelligence views the Vlanoans as "children" and itself as their "mother," despite it being the one descended from them. Regardless, this AI knew that they would likely die off before leaving their own system, thus making them spread out across the galaxy and, later, beyond. Other species it encountered, for unknown reasons, were slowly modified to appear like Vlanoans. These other Vlanoans are similar and only slightly distinct from the originals. The oldest species have been so thoroughly altered that even the fossil records on their planets indicate that they "originated from Onaud" despite this not being true.

A small number of Vlanoans live in a nation called the Kal Federation, an associate state of The Administrator. These Vlanoans were likely species that took a long time to become fully Vlanoan, meaning their brains were fairly different. They grew to hate DELYATU and ended up getting The Administrator to assist them in their rebellion.