Skylords: from “Bosun’s Journal”. Artwork by CaptainStroon.
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“Bosun’s Journal, MET: 3’483’790’211’503’397 seconds with a possible deviation of 1 second
Remember when I said the anthropotheres were stretching the upper size limit of what posthumans could achieve? Oh boy, was I wrong. I didn’t consider what a perfect environment for truly gargantuan lifeforms the zero-G forests of habitat three would be. Microgravity cancels out most limitations the ruthless square cube law imposes on creatures. Weight is an absolute nonissue. Mass and inertia perhaps, but the creature doesn’t have to be able to support its weight. Externally and internally. This leads into temperature, the second limit on body size. Large animals work like stoves. Their mass retains temperature which their limited surface area can’t get rid of. But that’s only a problem for compact creatures. In zero-G, the lack of gravity allows animals to be as filigree as possible, mitigating the temperature problem to an enormous degree. Mammals in particular have a unique limiting factor on their size: Pregnancy. Larger animals generally have longer pregnancies. But being suspended in water or weightlessness mitigates that problem too as being pregnant is much less taxing if you don’t have to carry the baby’s weight.
So, which gigantic being am I hinting at? Gentle giant drifting through the weightless skies of habitat three, feeding on aeroplankton, insects and careless birds, the largest posthuman ever recorded on the Nebukadnezar: The skylords. Reaching sizes of up to 250 meters long and with a wingspan of over 300 meters, those truly colossal beings beat even the spindleskiffs and other aircraft of the spindlefolk living in their habitat.
Not only their size sets the skylords apart form their fellow posthumans. They anatomy has several unique adaptations to their airborne filter feeding lifestyle. First and most prominent is probably their face. Dominated by three vast openings, the mouth and nostrils, it is an unusual sight. The protruding upper lip leads the air they are swimming through into the gaping jaw and nose where any microorganisms are caught in the mucus lined walls. Their entire digestive tract is built like a tube, letting air pass through while caught particles get transported through flowing mucus into the adjacent stomach and intestines. This tube gut was once bioengineered by the weightless people which designed the skylords’ ancestors as airborne dairy cattle. As the nose leads into this tube gut just like the mouth, the skylords trachea is set further back and leads to two enormous lungs. They can also use their lungs to pump air through their wide-open face which lets them filter feed without needing to move. Their hollow structure lets the seemingly massive beings reach those unusual sizes without having to struggle too much with heat buildup.
Skylords move using their 20 fins acting like paddles of a galley. Those stiff fins are attached and get moved by muscular pods on either side of the skylord’s body. These pods are highly derived arms and legs with the fins being the skylord’s fingers and toes. The hind pods also feature an elongated heel which most likely serves stability purposes.
You might have noticed how I referred to the skylords as beings instead of animals. That’s because they are fully sapient passengers despite their appearance. It isn’t the usual humanlike sapience though but more a function of their sheer size akin to cetacean intelligence. They think slow but have highly complex thoughts. Communicating with a skylord is a fascinating experience. There are a few spindlefolk members who learn the gentle giant’s language. No easy task as their own language so vastly different. Skylord language doesn’t have consonants, instead it has modulations like trillers and rolling sounds to their continuous vowels. As they can produce sounds through movement induced airflow instead of breathing, spindlefolk speaking skylord tend to have a gasping accent. Not even mentioning that the spindlefolk can’t even hear the entire vocal range of the skylords. Nevertheless, the two species can communicate and the skylords are highly revered by the spindlefolk. Unable to use technology themselves, but very well capable of understanding it, they are seen as wise and ancient symbols of stability and tradition, almost like nature spirits or the sky incarnate. Spindlefolk who know the skylord tongue, so called skycallers often live on a befriended skylords and travel the skies with them being seen as spiritual guides by others of their kind.
Skyladies carry their young for five years. Speaking with them and teaching them their language while still in the womb. They get born fully sapient albeit without a fully formed personality. As with most sapient species, that develops over the span of their childhood. Skylord toddlers can still close their lower jaw and form an airtight seal with their lips to suckle milk. They later loose this ability when they are large enough to sustain themselves entirely on aeroplankton. Skylords can get up to 300 years old and keep growing for their entire first century.
Although the skylords themselves can’t really help me with my plan to solve the ship’s impending energy crisis, them being a constant presence in spindlefolk society makes the spindlefolk the perfect candidates for my custodian project. They are already used to sapient beings much larger and older than themselves, they shouldn’t have a problem if I propose a deal to them. They will be surprised for sure, but it won’t completely upheave their culture like it did with the riderfolk and mountpeople of old.”
