#ulexemp

Lomanos are a species of, uh… slug-fish-squid things. They hail from New Europa, the moon of an extrasolar gas giant. This moon has no life on the surface, but instead has a lush, teeming ecosystem present in the freezing ocean under its icy exterior. It’s here that the lomanos evolved remarkable capabilities to deal with their hostile environment.

Lomanos are capable of more neural plasticity than any other known lifeform. Their brains are extremely flexible units that can grow multitudes of new cells, and even new hemispheres. It can change shape entirely over the course of a few years, and retains this ability throughout their entire lives.

Lomanos do not have shells, hands, or even eyes, but they have remarkable learning abilities unparalleled by any other living creature.

To say lomanos are inherently sapient would be a mistake. In the cold, dark seas of their home moon, they live as unusually intelligent animals with a capacity to adjust to virtually any situation or environment by observing the animals around them and replicating their behaviour. But as the first humans to study them for their unusual abilities realised, non-sapient animals are not the only lifeforms they can change their brains to replicate.

By closely observing the behaviour of the scientists studying them, these lomanos adjusted their brains to perfectly replicate the abilities of the human brain; to experience the human condition, and to become sapient.

After some initial confusion, the first generation of sapient lomanos were established as people, and with their ability to rapidly learn new skills and concepts, they went on to create culture, infrastructure, and technology that rivaled species who had been sapient for hundreds of thousands of years.

Today, lomanos are present in and creators of some of the most powerful nations in the Local Systems. It is, for instance, a primarily lomanos nation that owns one of the three dyson spheres in this area.

However, their fragile, slug-like bodies are not capable of living out of water, let alone these wonders. So, sapient lomanos spend their whole lives inside an artificial robot body. Their incredible neural plasticity allows a newborn lomanos to adjust to both being sapient and being able to control such a foreign body with relative ease.

Fanart of an Azi Lana individual.

These are the Azi lana! The first sapient alien species humans contacted, after they both achieved space travel. I’ve been working on them since 2019 so it feels good to finally get a reference out for them! Since I made them I realised that six-limbed sapients are kind of a trope, so I hope I made them sufficiently unique. Regardless I love my little lizard-cat grey aliens.

The Azi lana are an alien species with a history of space colonisation only rivaled by humans, and often shared with them. I recently made a post about their biology here.

On that post I had someone wondering about their digestive system, and how they eat. This is a good question, because they don’t have jaws or teeth like tetrapods do, nor do they have an organ analogous to a stomach. Luckily, I already had a post about it in the works!

If you are a spec evo nerd, you may recognise the term liquivore. If you are a fly nerd, you may recognise it as the way many fly species eat. If you are neither of these things, let me explain.

Liquivores are animals who, instead of consuming their food and then digesting it, first digest their food and then consume it, usually with a proboscis of sorts. They are rare on Earth, but can be found among the fly family. They are less rare in speculative evolution projects.

The Azi lana eat by, first, piercing their food with a sharp barb on the end of their proboscis. This is always meat, because they don’t produce the proper enzymes to digest plant matter. An organ roughly analogous to the pancreas produces large amounts of digestive enzymes, which are regurgitated through the proboscis into the food. When the food has been sufficiently liquefied- it doesn’t have to be completely liquid, just soft and small enough to fit through the proboscis- it is swallowed back up the proboscis as if drunk through a straw. Many of the digestive enzymes are also salvaged and sent back to the pancreas, ready for re-use. When the food enters the small intestine, it is often not completely digested, so there are digestive enzymes housed there as well.

As you can imagine, this process is rather messy. Azi lana traditionally eat their food in bowls. Their non-sapient relatives make-do with tree bark, large leaves, shells, or even by simply digging a hole.

Since it isn’t easy to survive on meat alone, liquivorous animals are usually extremely unspecialised. They will eat everything they can get, including muscle, organs, arthropods, eggs, and more. After a predator makes a kill, they will leave nothing behind but bones and shells.

This means that the Azi lana aren’t at all picky in what they eat. To them, organs and bugs are just as delicious as steaks and bacon. However, different cultures have different rules on cooking food. An uncooked heart might seem gross to humans, but to certain Azi lana cultures, it is a delicacy.

Speaking of delicacies; in humans, foods like sugar are thought to be so tasty because they do not require a complicated digestive process, and are therefore easy calories. In Azi lana, the equivalent to this are protein-filled liquids. Liquids like blood, then, are considered dessert foods. Blood is a common dessert, and there is blood from many different types of species, each with their own unique flavour, to choose from, or even mix together. An ice-cream-like dessert made of blood is especially popular in the summer. More expensive delicacies come from less readily-obtainable liquids. One traditional example is cerebrospinal fluid, but the introduction of Earth livestock to the Azi lana has come with new desserts like milk and amniotic fluid.

Feeding habits over, I’d like to point out one other detail about this drawing. I don’t know how visible this is, but- the Azi lana is loafing! Like a cat! This is how they sit, because obviously they can’t sit like humans. They can also sleep like this, though it’s not as comfortable as sleeping while leaning against something, or on their side.

Most nations in the ULE prefer to create habitats or terraform planets specifically to their biological needs. This is useful, because it means that their citizens can travel to any part of the nation- habitat, planet, or moon- without suffering severe medical effects. However, this takes lots of time and resources, and as many planets can’t accommodate certain organisms even with terraforming, it ultimately limits the available space. So, the Eina jarn have taken a different approach.

The Eina jarn are a majority-Azi lana nation with a range of different territories and ways of life. Their ownership of one of only three dyson spheres in the area makes them a powerful faction. Notably, when they colonise new areas, they will genetically modify their own citizens to cope with the new environment, instead of the other way around. They have created three new varieties of Azi lana in total, all of which cannot sire children with each other or with the unmodified Xenosapiens alana, and so are usually considered entirely separate species.

X. hanwena (casually glewens) is a species of Azi lana modified to live on the moon Hanwen. Although the moon has been terraformed to hold oxygen in its atmosphere, it is half the size of Earth’s moon, and so glewens have been created for life under extremely low gravity.

To cope with this, their vascular systems, muscles, and skeletons have all been fundamentally altered, to the point where their organs would be crushed if they were to travel to the Azi lana homeplanet, Gi.

To take full advantage of the low gravity, they have also been given large membranes with which they can glide short distances. The membranes’ skin and muscle is supported by long, thin extensions of their bifurcated neural spines.

X. Larmwaa (casually engwells) is a species created to live on the super-earth Larmwa. This high-gravity planet has no oxygen in its atmosphere, and so engwells usually live in underground habitats.

To live under gravity that would easily crush others, these people have strong, light bones, sturdy muscles, and a fast, powerful heart. They also have an extra pair of legs, and their arms have been modified to easily bear weight, meaning they have a maximum of eight limbs to support themselves with.

Like humans, they can live in lower-gravity environments, but doing so for extended periods of time leads to physical changes like muscle atrophy and eventually severe medical effects.

X. Einaa (casually arjenjaals) have been modified to live inside the dyson sphere orbiting their star, Eina yerda. They are born and raised to carry out important duties, like maintenance of the dyson sphere, as well as worship and appeasement of the Eina jarn’s god- the star itself.

Arjenjaals live and work in zero-gravity. Their vascular and musculoskeletal systems, as well as their development period, have been highly modified- again, their organs would be crushed by higher gravity environments. They navigate the long, thin rooms of their home by pulling and pushing on walls and handles with their spindly limbs.

Genetic modification in the ULE is… complicated. It’s way easier to simulate projected changes in a plant or a dog, for instance, than in the human brain. And if, despite the computer simulation, you get it wrong, well… if it’s a plant or a dog, you can just try again.

When it comes to sapient species- humans, Azi lana, and such- it’s much easier to do something like replacing body hair with feathers, or adding a tail, or lengthening arms, than to completely overhaul bodyplan and anatomy. So while the former is common in some places, the latter almost can’t be done.

But while mere sapients cannot grasp the complexity of their own bodies and minds, they are not the only intelligent beings in the universe. Superintelligents are vast minds with the power to understand and grasp every aspect of the sapient brain. Though many are unconcerned with the happenings of mortals, a few have helped sapients along their way.

One superintelligence, Anwarth, has gone above and beyond for local sapient nations. Their portfolio includes blueprints for sapient robots, a brain implant that acts as a universal translator, and perhaps their crowning achievement: an algorithm that can create a functional person from DNA samples of entirely separate sapient species.

The GECCAI algorithm, as easy to use and consistently successful as it is, is the relied-upon method for creating hybrid offspring between two alien parents. Though all hybrids are created to do the basics- eat, move, communicate, etc- the different biologies of their alien parents means their own anatomy can be quite exotic. Both this and the inherent sterility of hybrids has sociological implications for their way of life.

Fabella is a freezing planet with extreme seasons. Only a thin band around the equator never experiences snow, and due to extreme axial tilt, the poles alternate between green tundra in summer and frozen hell in winter. The animals living here are almost exclusively warm-blooded- the most prolific are these mammal-like critters.

The first sapients are the draenen. They are long-distance flyers with incredible stamina, though landing and taking off cost a lot of energy. When fabella was discovered by aliens, the draenen had about to level of tech that we do now.

The second two are the felf and the wolfalf. The wolfalf are brood parasites specialised on the felf, meaning they leave their infants in felf nests to be raised by them. Wolfalf children look uncannily similar to felf. It is the arms race of intelligence that arose between the two species as a result of this parasitic relationship that contributed to their eventual sapience. When aliens discovered fabella, these two species had varying types of tech, but nothing comparable to the Industrial Age or beyond. Their modern relationship is quite complicated.

To put it simply I’ve had some medical issues and haven’t had it in myself to draw. I’m still not feeling good necessarily, but I’ve finally been able to draw something.

I felt like drawing a beaman, so I did. This one is leaning forward, almost horizontally, to take full advantage of the swinging motions of his tail while running.