Hailing from a planet on the opposite side of the galactic community from Earth, the Tavash are notable for not using their indigenously-developed faster-than-light drive until some seventy Earth years after its invention. This is just one indicator of the overwhelmingly prevalent worldview of the Tavash people: There is no sense in traveling out to find new things when solutions can just as easily be developed at home. This is a product of their biology and culture in their prehistoric hunter-gatherer days, which focused on creating large, secure nests within which a family group would spend most of their time when not hunting for food.
Compared to a human, the Tavash are very physically imposing. Standing eight feet tall at their largest and covered in thickly-armored scales, an adult resembles little more than an oversized bipedal crocodile--though biologically, there are some key differences. For one, the Tavash are not strong swimmers, living primarily on land in the vast equatorial plains of their home planet, though their body structure implies an amphibious origin. Additionally, though they are often presumed to be carnivores, a Tavash will readily and heartily consume any energy-rich biomass they can acquire. A visitor to any large Tavash eatery will nearly always find a smattering of strange foodstuffs, chosen only by their price at the nearest market.
Their role as ambush predators in the ecosystem before the conceptualization of active hunting resulted in a body type which is more healthy in a sedentary lifestyle than other species. However, as each family group tended to stake out a large territory for hunting, maintaining contact between mates over long distances (and through the thick fog which permeates their planet’s equatorial regions in the winter months) resulted in a peculiar array of abilities. An overdeveloped respiratory system and prominent vocal folds allow an adult Tavash to speak and shout at frankly absurd volumes at a wide tonal range, reaching deep into the infrasonic frequencies. To match their voices, the species also have a keen sense of hearing, to the point that even a 3 dB infrasound tone can be readily detected by adult Tavash. This allows a Tavash to communicate by voice alone over many kilometers’ distance, using a language designed to be audible at long ranges which shares no linguistic background with their standard spoken languages. It is surmised that this song-language was the first language developed by the species, with other languages being developed independently at later dates.
Such a linguistic background gives a Tavash inherent advantage in learning spoken languages of other species, though their fate as rather slow learners holds them back. Nevertheless, a member of the species who is dedicated to learning a new language may often be confused with a native speaker, thanks to their excellent grasp of pronunciation and dialect.
The Tavash also communicate through pheromones as primary indicators of their health and reproductive status, though the inherent range limitations of pheromones mean this is usually reserved for communication within a nest or territory. This has produced a strong sense of smell capable of detecting low concentrations of atmospheric contaminants in air almost effortlessly at short ranges. Tavash in human contact often make claims about being able to “smell a human’s lies” or similar, though this appears to be an attempt at humor in most cases. However, a Tavash’s vision is rather less developed than a human’s, with less-precise perception of the blue and green spectrum. This has resulted in a clothing trend of warm colors in large, easily-visible patterns for most of their history. Their written language is also rather crude as a result, to the point that technical documents must be written in the script of other sentient species if a Tavash engineer wishes to clearly express information.
A puzzling aspect of the Tavash (from the perspective of human researchers) is their unique trilateral gender structure; as the name suggests, reproduction is achieved with three partners, rather than the more common two. This sexual trimorphism, so to speak, created specific gender roles in the Tavash prehistory which have only been made defunct in recent generations. The egg-producing sex, referred to as M-type by human researchers for brevity, is the most dominant of the three, being responsible for the initial gathering of mates and the maintenance of order in the nest. Historically, M-types were thus the largest, strongest, and most outgoing of the three, briefly resulting in a stereotype of the Tavash being large, frightening creatures until humans were informed of the gender trinary.
The second, the H-type, was in prehistory the member of the species who traveled from the nest to hunt down prey and keep an eye out for predators. This resulted in a leaner body type better suited for long treks across the plains of their home planet, together with a more skittish demeanor. This predilection for travel has made H-types commonly found as land-based scouts for new colonies, not seeming to mind the isolation and hard living of such a life nearly as much as the other two genders.
Finally, the G-type served as a nest’s guardian, tending to the eggs and hatchlings of the nest while others were hunting. The hostile nature of their planet’s environment meant that G-types had to be particularly vicious fighters when cornered by simple sake of necessity. Also, in order to communicate with their mates even when they were many kilometers afield, G-types had the strongest voices of the three, a feature which has not had much use in the modern era outside of the Tavash All-Stars Opera circuit.
The rather strange reproduction cycle of Tavash, given their unique gender layout, has never been described in full to human researchers. It is a commonly held mantra by xenobiologists that unless Tavash reproduction suddenly becomes important to the fate of the galaxy, it is best to leave such arcane processes to the Tavash themselves and, in the words of noted xenobiologist Marcel Rhys, “try not to think about that whole mess.”
