Alien Archive

Pīērin

Native to Mē'an, the incredibly intelligent Pīērin are one of the original three species of the Council. Incredibly intelligent and observant, they hold a good amount of influence over many of the older member races.

History

Roughly a million years ago two different sentient species began to evolve from the same species. The species remained isolated from each other till some time about four thousand years before the formation of the Council.

The two species; each having developed advance concepts such as written language, architecture, metallurgy, mathematics, and philosophy, conflicted with each other. Several centuries of war, slavery, and hatred ended with the two civilizations being wiped out by plagues.

From their ashes, the Pīērin rose. Whether they were a third race that had remained in obscurity for a million years, a new race fresh to the stage, or a crossbreed between the two other races is not know, the important part is that they were immune to both of the viruses that wiped out the other races.

The Pīērin rebuilt quickly, preserving knowledge from both races and using it to establish a high level of technology early on. By the time civilization had fully recommenced a century after the plagues, they had progressed into the steam era and where making a headway into the electrical era. Some historians from other races view the technological progress over the next six hundred years as slow, but a close inspection reveals that Pīērin society was fully self-sustaining from near the beginning and progressed at a rate demanded by their slow population growth.

Flash forward to fifty years prior to the formation of the Council. The Pīērin have delved into space exportation, not because it was their, not because it was hard, but because they understood their moon was void of all life, and thus could be mined for rare earth metals without environmental impact.

The Pīērin almost stopped there, and would have if they hadn't started receiving weird signals from nearby stars. They monitored these signals, initially just feint waves of radio chatter, but then something happened they didn't quite understand, a radio wave blinded all sensors and normal communication arrays for a quarter second. When latter analyzed, the event happened simultaneously for their home world and all of their probes and mining ships, the farthest two being separated by five light hours.

Realizing that FTL was a possibility, the Pīērin worried. They feared that a tachyon burst could not be a natural phenomenon, and that it meant some other race exited nearby, and now had the ability to travel interstellar distances in a reasonable amount of time. As the Pīērin looked into it and developed their own system of superluminal travel, they worried more, understanding just how cheap an interstellar ship could be.

Their first warp capable ship was completed and launched on its maiden flight to the nearest star system five years prior to the formation of the Council. And like insects to a flame, the ripples in space brought the attention of the Avin.

Modern Culture

Pīērin can be found thinly spread across nearly every populated planet and are quite proud of the fact they have an embassy on every planet with a civilian populous. While found anywhere and everywhere, 25% of their population resides on their home world of Mē'an with another 25% divided amongst Nī'an, Gona, Sheer'at'a, and New Eden.

Pīērin are hermaphrodite and unlike many other races of hermaphrodite such as Myren and Magi, they never had gender in there culture and are confused by many of the concepts that gender present such as gender roles, sexual orientation, and monogamy.

Pīērin marriage and way of life is based around duogamy. Usually this means that three Pīērin enter into a marriage contract simultaneously, although sometimes two individuals will marry with the intent of adding a third at a latter date.

In past times, and still in substantial amounts these days, Pīērin family units all have the same vocation. They work together in pairs with the third one watching over their children, switching off on this every two days.