Yotsvíír
This is a LONG one because the Yotsvíír are the most fleshed out species I've ever made.
If you read to the end, then good on you!
Please let me know you made it this far by asking questions if you have any. I don't really have anything to do so I will answer anything as long as it isn't something that I have planned for later!
With out further a-do:
The Yotsvíír are a 5'11”, tripedal alien race with eye stalks on the sides of their heads and spiracles that lead to their lungs on the backs of their necks. They have one leg at the center front of their body and 2 hind legs and their mouths are on the bottom of their heads. They also have armadillo-like face plates that protect the front of their head as that is where most of their brain is kept.
Yotsvíír only have three legs, that being one front leg and two hind legs. Their front leg sits in the center of their chest, reaching all the way to the ground with 3 major joints through the “arm.” They have a very mobile wrist, being able to completely rotate their hands 180 degrees each direction. They have 3 “fingers” and one “thumb,” the thumb being located at the base of the “palm.” They support themselves on their fingers, never touching their palms to the ground when they have fully developed (infant Yotsvíír often struggle with walking). Their middle “finger” is the longest and second most muscular finger in the foot. Their fingers only have two joints: one at the base of the hand and one in the middle of the finger. The ends of their fingers and toes are tipped with padded skin that they stand on. Their hind legs are similar to their front foot, though the thumbs are flatter and act like their heels. These foot-palms also never touch the ground.
Their skin is a deep grey color and their skin is amphibious in appearance with colors that run down their back. They originated from a planet close to the Nai homework, hinting at possible connection between the two.
The Yotsvíír are well known for their trade routes and are said to be the ones who mapped out the Fold Points to construct the Jumpspace Highways. They run a trading guild and supply materials and cargo all throughout the galaxy.
Yotsvíír can live up to 90 years old.
A strange fact about the Yotsvíír is that their reproductive organs are hidden inside of a fleshy pocket in their mouth next to their tongue. This resulted in a rather humorous interaction when the Humans were seen kissing by a Yotsvíír and the Yotsvíír was disturbed as they don’t understand sex the same way we do. When Yotsvíír engage in coitus, they remove these organs (shaped like snakes) from their mouth pockets and “kiss,” placing each other's organs into each other's pockets. The female reproductive organ is usually smaller than that of the male reproductive organ and is essentially a key as it opens the passage for reproductive fluids to exit from the male reproductive organ, impregnating the female Yotsvíír as the reproductive fluid inseminates the female's “eggs.”
These “eggs” are then pushed down a tube lining the stomach and are kept in the womb until they are ready to hatch, in which case the mother essentially vomits up her eggs (usually 7 per gestation) and incubates them for up to a week and a half until they actively hatch, resulting in small, colorful hatchlings covered in fuzz and protective plating. Yotsvíír eggs are usually hard and oval in shape, with parents preferring circular, pot-like nests made of clay or soft fabrics. These eggs are usually a beige color with red and cream colored freckles (though some are just a cream color), being nearly a foot in length and around half foot in width. These eggs usually have sea foam green yolks due to the color of the vegetation that Yotsvíír eat. A baby Yotsvíír is referred to as a “chick.”
Since the Yotsvíír's “nostrils” are on their back, they usually use those for communicating, with each nostrils having its own double-vocalchord-like structure. This means that they Yotsvíír are great singers and are also capable of mimicking nearly any and every sound if they practice enough. The native language of the Yotsvíír is a microtonal musical language that consists of stacking different sounds on top of each other to create sentences and convey emotions. The Yotsvíír are capable of eating while talking. This is due to the fact that their digestive tract is separated from their respiratory system. Yotsvíír commonly become agitated by the fact that Humans (and other species) have to chew and swallow before speaking. Yotsvíír have 8 respiratory spiracles: two on the back of their head behind their eyes and 6 running down their back at the base of their neck. The top two are used purely for breathing. The rest are also used for respiration. Each respiratory spiracle on the back contains two larynxes, three sets of vocal chords, and 2 syrinxes. They are amazing mimics and musicians.
They Yotsvíír have 6 pairs of lungs, all stacked up against each other. These lungs are rather flat and are located near the neck, closer to the nostrils than in that of respiratory systems found in Humans. The native language of the Yotsvíír, Ffryukpde, was a highly complex language composed mainly of chirps, tonal syllables, and various notes and songs. It was a stacked language, with paragraphs usually being said in one sentence. This allowed the Yotsvíír to develop the unique ability to deconstruct complex ideas and hold the context of multiple things happening at once. Yotsvíír have flaps of muscles that they can control that cover a very sensitive hearing organ. They have the ability to mute their hearing, making them great navigators around sirens and other loud or annoying noises.
The most common difference between sexes is that the male Yotsvíír have a large colorful patch that runs down their back starting at the top of the head while female Yotsvíír have freckles instead. These freckles and patches are usually in one color but there are a variety of colors a Yotsvíír can have on their back, similar to how Humans have colored irises.
Yotsvíír has a strange nervous system. Much like the clitoris on the female human body, the Yotsvíír have a very sensitive and stimulating part of the body located near their chins and on the top of their head. Instead of engaging in insemination to experience pleasure, the Yotsvíír rub their heads and chins on top of the other's, creating a bonding experience via pleasure. They also have a kind of kiss that they do. Instead of kissing with their mouths, they dip their heads and put them together like swans would. This activates some of the nerves on their heads and gives them the same sensation as a French kiss would for Humans. It is a common display of love in their culture. There is also a familial and friendly version of this, involving bumping their face plates together like a paw to the Klingon culture.
Unlike Human culture where sexual bonding is experienced in the act of sexual reproduction itself, the Yotsvíír don't see it the same. Instead, the bond us made in the “foreplay” and the cuddling afterwards. Since the top and bottom of the head (beak) contain more nerve endings than the Human clitoris, rubbing each other's head together is very pleasurable experience for Yotsvíír. Both male and female have these nerves. Basically, when the mating season rolls around (and it does though it's weaker than when they were animalistic), a Yotsvíír couple will sit in a artificial nest (basically a collection of blankets and pillows) and rub their head together. They do this for hours at a time until they become overstimulated and stop. While they do this, if they want offspring, they will take a short break and reproduce (in Yotsvíír fashion) and then cuddle until they fall asleep. Inter-species couples will usually have the opposite species pet the Yotsvíír partner. It's the same concept as petting a cat, though for Yotsvíír, it's much more enjoyable than cats feels it. Yotsvíír have a version of sperms banks though it's very different by Human standards. Unlike Humans where reproductive liquid is produced separately by a member of the opposite gender, the Yotsvíír need a female organ to unlock the release by the male organ (this was previously explained). The Yotsvíír actually developed medical tools that were used to unlock the male organ to release the Yotsvíír reproductive liquid. Female Yotsvíír who lacked mates would then use this stored fluid to artificially impregnate themselves with offspring.
Yotsvíír are more like fatherless birds with amphibious skin rather than the other way around. They are amazing mimics and musicians. Many Yotsvíír have small, finger-like tendrils that grow out from the base of their eye stocks, that of which they can control. Each tendril has three, small, muscular branches, allowing the Yotsvíír to manipulate intricate things despite only having three legs. They grow longer as the Yotsvíír ages and help with grooming and intricate tasks. These tendrils were originally biologically engineered by them. The Yotsvíír also have a tongue-like muscle that separates their respiratory spiracles into inhale and exhale orifices. They can control it, choosing to use circular breathing if they wish. The sound of Yotsvíír breathing is unique, often unsettling or confusing Humans, as it is a continuous sound of simultaneous inhaling and exhaling that never ceases as the Yotsvíír can choose how to breathe.
The Yotsvíír brain is located at the front of their "beak" (head), being protected by the plates at the front of their face. The Yotsvíír can squint to more precisely see their surroundings, mainly with Yotsvíír doctors, scribes, and engineers doing this, as well as any Yotsvíír watching a display screen.
Yotsvíír children are actually precocial at birth, behaving the same as recently hatched chicks. They are capable of eating from birth having developed a form of herbivorous teeth in the womb that are used for the first 3 years of their life, eventually being replaced by the radula-like tongue and hard-palate of an adult Yotsvíír. Yotsvíír eat via plucking food with their muscular tongue and rubbing it against the hard palate in the front of their mouth (a bumpy, radula-like boney structure), converting it into a mush that can be regurgitated or eaten and digested by their two stomachs.
Baby Yotsvíír also have gecko-like patterns on the ends of their three legs, letting them climb and hide preferring to sleep upside down to promote blood flow, though they later lose these grippy patterns and sleep like other mammals when they are older, resting on their legs and laying their heads down while tucking their eye stocks under their necks for protection (some Yotsvíír cultures even hide their eye stocks in their mouths).
When a Yotsvíír mother feeds her babies, she creates a mush out of food and puts it on her tongue, pasting it into the hard palate of her child's mouth. Yotsvíír are herbivores in nature, commonly eating roots, bark, and thick vegetation. They are not opposed to eating meat, but are mostly vegetarian as their mouth did not evolve to chew (something necessary to eat meat).
Their posterior ends in a short, wide tail, though this doesn't cover their anus as their anus is located further down and is used for both urination and defecation.
Yotsvíír often carry their offspring on their backs, wrapping their tongue and head tendrils around them and lifting them onto their upper spine, careful not to cover their respiratory spiracles. The skin of the upper spine acts like a kind of scruff, looser and grippier for the infant Yotsvíír to comfortably latch onto and rest on.
Yotsvíír have long, muscular necks which make up a third of their height (the other thirds being their torso and legs). When in danger, a Yotsvíír will usually prefer running backwards as their front leg is better at pushing against the ground. This allows them to propel themselves much faster than with their hind legs, landing on their hind legs and pushing off with their front leg. Since they have full panoramic and fish-eye vision, they can see their predators while still perfectly seeing where they are going. They usually place one eye stock under their head and one straight back to try and see under them as not to trip. Due to the constant visual input, the Yotsvíír brain is oftentimes overloaded, resulting in a wide, whitish color that represents where the Yotsvíír is focusing its attention on its eyes. Their brains are capable of taking in all of the visual stimulus, though it's like watching something through your peripheral vision to them if they aren't trained in full panoramic vision.
A unique behavior of the Yotsvíír is that when they sleep, they remove all saliva from their mouth (they have full control over their glands) and sleep with their eyes in their mouth to keep them protected. When a Yotsvíír is tired, they often hang their eye stocks or at least hold them forwards under their head.
The plates at the front of the Yotsvíír's beak also hide olfactory nerves that allow the Yotsvíír to smell. The native atmosphere of Yotsv is mainly pure carbon dioxide and their lungs produce oxygen as an output. Yotsv was a rather acidic planet but due to a denser liquid form, the fluid on the planet remained the same. Native Yotsv flora usually relies on heavy liquids for drinking. This acidic nature of Yotsv may also be why Yotsvíír are more comfortable in acidic environments, as engineers, or on planets like Huew and Eo.
The gravity of Yotsv was around 2 times the gravity of earth. The Yotsvíír were great navigators and ambassadors and were the first to map Jumpspace, marking Fold points and trade highways inside of The Fold. The Yotsvíír have deep sea green colored blood that becomes brighter and almost seems to glow when it is oxidized.
High-ranking Yotsvíír officials commonly wear artificial crests on the top and bottom of the front of their “beaks.” They also hold their head tendrils up as means of identity, holding them in different positions like a hairstyle. Richer Yotsvíír can also afford artificial arms that attach to their backs and allow them to use things more efficiently. The most influential member of the Yotsvíír officials was Ē'gchōnik of House Y'ygan'g. The inheritor of the Y'ygan'g throne, he was a fond enjoyer of old Earth music, even hiring his own orchestra to play for him in a theater that was built for his own non-digital entertainment.
YOTSVÍÍR SUB-SPECIES
Bedouin: A subspecies of Yotsvíír adapted to life on Quas. They are nearly identical to regular Yotsvíír aside from a few differences. Their eye stalks are shorter and have clear third eyelids, allowing for them to see even when their third eyelids are closed which is very helpful in sandy weather. They have flatter feet to help them walk on sand and a shorter tail. Their facial plates have almost completely flattened to prevent sand from getting stuck in them. Their lungs have a filter-like tissue that covers their nostrils to prevent dust from getting in their lungs. They are dark brown in color with a light beige color that runs down their back from their head and along their legs. Their ear skin is more flappy and muscular allowing for heat release and a skin tight seal on their ears to prevent sand from entering their ears.
If you read this far, CONGRATS! It means you care! Please let me know you made it this far by asking questions if you have any. I don't really have anything to do so I will answer anything as long as it isn't something that I have planned for later!
Have a great day!
"See you on the rails, engineers!"
