Naysha
The Naysha are one of the first generation of the Pelted.
History
The only aquatic species of the initial batch, Naysha are a special case because they were not made “on the clock.” The lead scientist of Project Homefront, Joseph Shandlin, “doodled” the specs for the Naysha on his own time because he wanted to experiment with uplifted marine animals, something the government project couldn’t afford to greenlight because of the difficulty placing the future aliens on other worlds, and because they required a different environment for development than the other land-based Pelted, doubling the expense.
But Shandlin loved water, so he did the research and ran the models, and came up with a template he thought, regretfully, would work. Because of legal issues with the contractors, he never reaped the financial rewards of his genius, and the modest salary he drew while working on Project Homefront wasn’t sufficient to renting the contractors’ equipment to make his Naysha a reality. After the political problems drove him from the project, he left the specs behind. And someone decided to try to create the creatures, because the market for genetically engineered pets was still high enough to justify having something novel to launch. They knew that anything Shandlin touched was guaranteed to work, unlike the projects his colleagues worked on, so they went with it.
Unfortunately, by their standards the Naysha were a complete failure because they couldn’t speak. It was assumed this was an error in the template, something that removed their vocal cords… but in actuality, Shandlin was equipping them to communicate underwater using the system that works for dolphins and whales. The Naysha can hum, click, and “sing” like their marine brethren, but typical human languages are beyond their ability to articulate. Hannah Esterby, a linguist and speech therapist, was hired to address this issue, but the best she could do for the Naysha was develop a sign language they can use with their webbed five-fingered hands... something they took to with gusto.
Learning that the creator of these magnificent people didn’t know about them, the therapist introduced their pod leader to Shandlin, creating a friendship that endured past the Exodus, for Selena, that Naysha, choose to remain behind when the other Pelted fled Earth. Esterby also married Shandlin, and she and Shandlin bought a waterfront property they remodeled to allow Selena to participate in their lives more fully.
The Pelted found the Naysha a likely world, named in the catalog Aquaria, to keep for their own during the Exodus, but the Naysha did not like the idea of abandoning their Pelted kin. Most of them scattered themselves in the oceans of the other Pelted “homeworlds,” and while there’s a large concentration of them on that original water-world, they don’t consider it their homeworld. [1]
Appearance and Biology
Naysha are an air-breathing, mammalian aquatic species with both human and cetacean DNA. They have humanoid torsos and delphine bodies, with two sets of flukes and the horizontal tail of a marine mammal.[1] They also have fishlike skin and webbed digits. Their heads are hairless and their eyes are as big as a fist. Naysha are nine to ten feet long.[2][3][4]Naysha nurse from teats at the lower body, and while females can have breasts on their upper bodies they tend to sublime away beneath the constant exercise of their lives beneath the water. Naysha males and females tend to look similar, thus. They have the frictionless skin of sea creatures, and some of them are born with hair on their skulls, though it’s not usual. And like sea creatures, they have senses not finely developed by animals on land, like the ability to sense electrical fields.[1]
Naysha have very large eyes that come in any number of fluorescent colors. The Naysha can be any number of surprising colors; much of this exotic shading was lifted from tropical fish. Their lower bodies are often bright colors, blue, violet, neon pink, yellow, red, striking green, peach and many other colors in many combinations of stripes, spots, 'eyes', or other patterns. They can also come in shades of gray, black, and white, often countershaded like orcas. Their upper bodies will tend to continue those colorations and patterns, but the occasional Naysha is a mash-up of orca-like austerity and tropical fish fluorescence.[1]
- Average Lifespan: 150 years (m) to 157 (f)
- Average Height/Length: 7-9 feet for males, 6 to 8.5 feet for females
- Gestation: 13 months
General Attitude and Personality
The Naysha's desire for company mystifies the Pelted, because the language barrier often makes the Naysha seem inscrutable. They aren’t: they are playful, curious, gregarious people who nevertheless live to the rhythm of water. They have water-people’s sense of perspective, and the good humor that their well-designed biology and their life of constant exercise and travel provides.[1]
Society
One might assume that such aquatics would eschew technology, but the Naysha find a high tech lifestyle pleasing, since it allows them to interact with the rest of the Alliance. It’s not at all rare to find Naysha everywhere from a starbase’s water environment to a starship’s, where they interact with air-breathing crew via airlocks, pools, and interfacts that translate sign for Pelted who don’t know it. Waterproof consoles allow Naysha who want a stronger connection to modern life to partake in it, and the Naysha are indispensable in the realms of aquatic science and engineering: they themselves are responsible for many of the technical breakthroughs that allowed them to join the Alliance more fully, and if they can’t machine their own parts, they are more than capable of designing and modeling them and having the Pelted’s on-land facilities manufacture the results.[1]
Religion
The "homeworld" Naysha brought with them a deism they picked up from Earth, which posits that all life is ever-changing, ever-evolving, ever-growing; this belief is certainly influenced by the fact that Naysha are constantly swimming, never remaining in one place for longer than one season. They do not assign a definite personality, mission, or sex to God, referring only to the Universe as being a benevolently watchful entity. "The Universe is watching," they tell each other, amused and bemused, reassured. Aquarian Naysha refer tothe sun and the moon that into the upper levels of the ocean the Bright Eye and the Quiet Eye, the eyes of the Universe (an interesting commonality with the Phoenix).
Family and Relationships
Naysha form pods: two or three families that keep company in the wild.
Art
Common art forms for Naysha in their native habitats involve the sculpting/build-up of coral reefs, braiding of seaweed and fronds, and dancing.
Naysha and Platies
The Pelted, discovering an almost entirely aquatic world, had sent a team to explore and thought it sensible to bring some Naysha scientists to join them. The water of this world intrigued them: dense and thick with alien chemicals—“like a womb,” one of them famously likened it—and through this soup flew enormous creatures that resembled flatworms the size of shuttlecraft.
And these creatures, the Naysha instantly knew to be sentient, and could communicate with them no land creature could duplicate. Not by talking, but just by a mutual water-sharing knowing.
Unsurprisingly, the Pelted questioned this, until the Naysha led them to miniature versions of the flatworms and insisted they were the same species. Consequent examination proved this out, and the Pelted allowed that the Naysha could apparently communicate with these aliens, and asked them to do so.
That particular mission was an adventure. By the end of it, the Pelted wanted the Platies (named because of their resemblance to members of the Platyhelminthes, the “flatworm” phylum) in the Alliance badly. Because it appeared that the Platies had senses even more extraordinary than the Naysha’s: they appeared to extend into timespace, and could in fact fold it to travel. Since the Platies seemed amenable to the friendship, the Alliance inducted them into its membership at the suggestion of the Naysha, who said that the Platies would welcome the protection of membership status, and prefer it to the responsibilities of being an allied species instead.[1]
Communication
The Naysha use sign language to communicate. Computer translations are possible, but those who interact with Naysha frequently may choose to learn sign and use it, both for practice and courtesy.[2]
Naysha communicate with Platies via some mechanism as yet unknown, and indescribable, to other species; it's described as a "mutual water-sharing knowing."[1]
Sign Language
The sign language that is the Naysha's primary way of communicating was developed by Hannah Esterby, a linguist and speech therapist, on Earth, with the aid of Selena. Naysha who frequently interact with drylanders may give them new individual names that are faster to sign than spelling out their names letter by letter.[2][5]
Signs and Conventions
- slap water for emphasis
- tap water to draw attention
- splashes are interjections
Trivia
- Because their language relies on body movement, and because they were engineered as (and remain far closer to) predators, the Naysha are very sensitive to body language. While their lifestyles and attitudes make them poor candidates for emotional therapists, they make excellent physical therapists, and, when they choose to, good ambassadors or detectives, or any other job that relies on body language cues for information.
Characters
Images
Gallery Notice: Image "File:Alysha-sar-and-platies.jpeg|Sar and Alysha signing, with Platies in the background
File:Illo-currentlock.jpg|Alysha and Sar at the currentlock Illo-Naysha.jpg|Naysha swimming with Platies Naysha-and-platy-full-body.jpg|Full-body image of a Naysha and a Platy Naysha-and-platy-profile.jpg|Profile image of a Naysha and a Platy" not found or API unavailable.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Pelted Guidebook
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Who is Willing, Chapter 1
- ↑ Who is Willing, chapter 5
- ↑ Who is Willing, chapter 6
- ↑ Who is Willing, chapter 8