Ciracaana
Vital Statistics (At a Glance)
Pronounced ' sear ah CAH nah '. Singular is Ciracaana. Possessive is Ciracaanan. Plural is Ciracaana.
- Species Type: Pelted
- Origin: Engineered (third generation)
- Frame Type: Centauroid
- Average Height: 8'-9'
- Average Lifespan:
- Gravity Preference: medium-light
- Homeworld: Ciracaa
- Native Language:
Appearance and Physiology
Appearance
The Ciracaana are very tall, rangy, and built for speed, with the tallest individuals topping out at almost nine feet. They have foxlike faces and ears and catlike tails and paws with retractable claws… but five fingers and nails on their hands. Their coat patterns are wildly variable, from zebra stripes to big cat rosettes, piebalds and paints, random spattering and plain.
Physically, if you are a Ciracaana you are a tall furred centauroid, with nearly infinite choices in coat pattern, a plains hunter’s lean flexibility and speed, and a cat’s liquescent backbone. You will tower over everyone around you, with rare exceptions.
Physiology
Society
Member of what nations here. Information about colony worlds here.
Stereotypes
Both of the centauroid races are easygoing, friendly, and inherently stable. If you are practical and assertive when need be, good at working in teams, capable of passion on the right topics, and have the sort of easy confidence that very large individuals have among shorter/smaller people, you may enjoy being a Ciracaana. If you are intrigued at the thought of helping to create a tribal culture, complete with language, traditions, and living history, you may want to be one of the plainsfolk Ciracaana, who mostly keep to themselves but who are deeply involved in making their race’s destiny: all the Ciracaana, no matter how far-flung, look back to the tribal Ciracaana for cues on how they should behave and believe. If you prefer the technology and bustle of the Alliance, you can choose to be one of the cityfolk on Ciracaa, or one of the Ciracaana offworld, who are well-regarded for their unruffled temperaments and their size, power, and grace. Many offworld Ciracaana work in security, construction, or in the military—but there are also notable Ciracaana dancers and acrobats who travel with troupes. They are unparalleled runners and extremely flexible, and if they were more interested in copulation they’d be in high demand in those industries as well… as it is, they crop up in romance novels more often than one would think plausible.[1]
Common Family Structures
Religions
Apparently there is a Mother Cult that makes pottery.[2]
Native or Common Dress
Naming Conventions
Language
Labials, labial-dentals, and dentals:
- p, b, w, m
- f, v
- th, th
Others:
- alveolar: t, d, s, z, r, l, n
- palatal: sh, zh, ch, j, y
- velar: k, g, ng
- glottal: h
Other
Kits like to play "yarn games" (like cat's cradle).
History
Seeing the problems of completely removing a species’s sex drive, the Ciracaana's design team left their experiments some desire, if more muted. They built their race to be rangy plains-types, imagining them as hunters following migratory herds for food. They even found a likely world partway through the process and made sure the Ciracaana would be able to eat the native beasts. Unlike the unforeseeable mistake that revealed the Pelted creators to the Glaseah, what happened with the Ciracaana was a preventable accident: some of their number “woke up early” while their creators were inducing their artificial memories and language. The mess only got more tangled and less easy to recover from. The Ciracaana are clever and not easily distracted, and once they had the prey in sight they harried it to its end and discovered that they weren’t native to Ciracaa at all, but made-creatures with a botched language and false dreams of how they might have lived on their not-native-to-them world.
This resulted in some discussion—between the Ciracaana, who ignored their makers’ apologies, pleas, and explanation. Some of the Ciracaana wanted to join their makers and investigate the high-technology lifestyle that had created them; others were fascinated by the false dreams of a life on the plains and wanted to be those aboriginal nomads. They agreed, with the mostly good-natured bickering of siblings, to split up. Since more of the Ciracaana wanted to recreate that nomadic lifestyle than wanted to go into space, they claimed most of the planet for their tribes, leaving the remainder to settle in two cities they could use as launch points for visiting offworld. To this day, the majority of Ciracaana are found on Ciracaa, chasing the herds. They are using the seeds of the language and lifestyles suggested to them in dreams as springboards to create something new and entirely theirs, and anthropologists are fascinated by what they’re doing. The remaining Ciracaana can be found in those two cities (one per hemisphere) and in the Alliance, where they are rarer than the Glaseah but still considered excellent company: also stable but more capable of emotional engagement and passion, with a long-viewed predator’s eye, and a pack’s sense of working in teams for the betterment of the group. They are affable but more aggressive than their Glaseah counterparts, but they lack the quick and violent tempers of the Aera, who helped provide the pattern for their falsified history.[1]