Meeri

The meeri were created by Kandrel and appear in the short story Unintended in Tales of Hayven Celestia.

Writing for Meeri

Physiology

Meeri are a bio-engineered otter-like species designed for the harsh rigors of space, rather than having adapted to it as a previously planet-faring society.

• Meeri lack ears and have no concept of air-vibrations as a means of communication. They can't "hear". They can only feel sounds if they're so strong that they cause vibrations they can feel with their paws.

• Meeri have long ambulatory feelers sprouting from their head near where their ears would be. They use these for fine motor control, as communication, and as self-defense in extremis. The tips of their feelers are furless and conduct electricity. Meeri bodies generate and store small amounts of charge that they use to communicate by touching feelers with another meeri. Most other species find the small arc of electricity that the feelers create unpleasant or painful. The feelers are dexterous, but not strong. When called upon to lift or carry things, meeri will typically use their paws.

• Meeri typically move about on all fours, and while they have thumbs on their forelimbs, they don't think of them as "hands" like many other species do.

• Meeri respirate using nitrogen, but given how this is a part of so many other atmospheres that sapient species rely on, they're tolerant of a wide range of atmospheric conditions. They find oxygen, ammonia, bromine, and carbon atmospheres agreeable. They can survive for some time in sulfur atmospheres, but the smell bothers them. They're specifically intolerant of chlorine and fluorine atmospheres, given its corrosive reaction with their fur (see below.)

• A layer of guard hairs below their pelt contains a high amount of bismuth, which acts as a natural shield against stellar radiation and solar winds. It also means they're impossible to medically x-ray. Their fur is also denser and heavier than their size would suggest. Because the fur still feels silky-smooth, many other species simply assume the meeri are natural chonkers. This is only half-right. A good amount of that extra mass is in their pelt.

• Meeri are comfortable in deep space, needing only an occasionally pull of air from a respirator and a method of moving around. They train even from a young age with small maneuvering jets on each of their limbs. All entrances and exits from the meeri's bodies have tightly nictitating membranes and sphinctres that are strong enough to withstand the void of space. "Closed" is the natural state for these, so anything that would normally happen while unconscious needs to be done consciously. For example, meeri wake every few hours while sleeping to breathe.

• While in space, meeri's biggest problem is heat dissipation. They're most comfortable in deep space, at a decent distance from a star or other radiating body. When working in space near a star they'll commonly require regular breaks to cool down.

• Meeri have three sexes. Male and female can only breed with the assistance of a third gender that collects and alters male genetic material that they then deliver in turn to the female. The ratio of male and female meeri is generally even, but only one in ten pups are born third gender. While mating and breeding is normally done simultaneously in a threesome, the third gender can store some small amount of semen for a period of time they can later use to breed even without the presence of the male. Meeri males and females are infertile together without the assistance of a third gender. The third gender must make the conscious choice to include semen from their reservoir when ejaculating, or the coupling will, again, be infertile.

• Meeri have typically long lifetimes that naturally end around after around a hundred years.

• Meeri are omnivorous, though their diet requires a decent amount of bismuth, which isn't common in other cuisines. There's a breed of seaweed and a few types of fish that den ships farm aboard that form the majority of a typical meeri's diet. Outside of a den-ship, meeri require metal supplements or they will start to suffer from a variety of maladies related to the deficiency, starting with their fur growing in wrong or incomplete.

Society

Meeri exist almost entirely aboard sizeable "den ships" that house between a tens to low-hundreds of thousands of meeri at once. Their society is a social commune of many family groups, whose heads form an unofficial voting committee that make any significant decisions for the den ship as a whole. The vast majority of family heads are third gender, as they generally feel a stronger pull towards social engineering and responsibility. This isn't a requirement, though, and socially there's very little significance to a meeri's sex in social expectations.

When a pup is born, it's not uncommon for the third sex breeding partner to refuse to disclose the father's identity. Meeri family units take responsibility for raising pups, regardless of parentage. When pups are orphaned from their family before maturity, there's strong societal pressure for any family unit to adopt them regardless of circumstance. Even into their majority, a meeri without a family is commonly adopted into any family that they feel some kinship with. It's regular for adult meeri to leave their family and join another, such that it's a toss-up whether two adult meeri in the same family actually share any heritage. It's up to the third sex to understand the provenance of the genetic material they carry to avoid inbreeding.

Perhaps because of the conscious control of creating offspring, meeri view sex to be a fairly casual activity. They sleep in family nests, semi-spherical cushioned indentations in the floor of their family chamber. A typical meeri family will consist of anywhere between five members at minimum to nearly twenty. Above that, the family living area becomes too chaotic, and the family tends to fracture into two or more smaller families.

The most dangerous natural predator of meeri is disease. Each den-ship is separated into a few hundred segments, each with its own environmental controls. Even the smallest disease that's discovered will cause a segment lock-down, effectively quarantining that section of the ship until the sickness is diagnosed and either determined not to be transmissible, or that its run its course among the quarantined population.

Place within Hayven Celestia

The vast majority of meeri den ships occupy a gap between star clusters (named Brindeltek and Crontec) near the edge of the Krakun Empire claimed systems. As this is at the edge of krakun space, there's a lot of piracy and illicit travel through this sector. However, as the majority of krakun business happens in the small gravity wells around systems, the deep vastness of space in between the systems is mostly un-traversed. Meeri, unlike most travelers, prefer to avoid solar systems and planetary gravity wells. They harvest asteroids and ram-scoop nebulae. Because of this, the meeri live basically unobserved by the krakun that have technically claimed sovereignty over their systems.

Further, even the krakun would be mostly uninterested in chasing after the den ships. Sending war cruisers into deep space on decades or centuries long voyages only to find a ship, blow it up, and return, is just a waste of resources that most corporations don't consider worth their time. Those krakun who are aware of the meeri's presence tend to think of them as deep-space pests rather than active threats to their hegemony.

Hidden anchored in deep space, however, the meeri do have a few secrets. They have a network of small jump gates unconnected to the krakun's wider gate network, only large enough to fit one of their "skipper ships" (no larger than a narrow frigate.) The gate network covers an area only a few tens of light years across in each direction, which they consider "Meeri Space." The den ships are ponderous and vulnerable, but rarely leave deep space where they're protected by the vast distance someone would need to go out of their way just to cause them trouble. The skipper ships, though, are used for trade, diplomacy, and piracy. Given the secrecy under which their jump gates are hidden, it's not uncommon for a meeri vessel to appear unexpectedly, steal from an unescorted transport or hauler, then disappear just as mysteriously as they appeared.

While meeri are generally considered mostly harmless to other species, any danger to their den ships, or to the secrecy of their jump gates, is met with immediate and unapologetic violence.

Origin

Trusted outsiders might be told stories of the ancient predecessors who designed them, and who first created the jump gate network in their small area of space. According to the meeri, these progenitors were massive "Spirits of the Grey and Blue", wise and long-lived. The meeri themselves don't have a home planet--and never did--but their Spirits of the Grey and Blue did.

In reality, the species that created the meeri have no modern name, as they were extincted more than two thousand years ago by the krakun. There was an ocean-world with a sentient species of long-lived intelligent whales. They were ingenious bio-engineers, and meeri are just one among many species they created to fill their little corner of space with life. The whale's home planet was named by them "Grey and Blue."

An ancient meeri scout encountered a geordian gate, and natural meeri curiosity took over. The technology they brought back to Grey and Blue, and that started the proliferation of the jump gates. No more than a hundred years after that incident, though, a krakun scout found Grey and Blue, and some years later when the fleet arrived, there was a short and one-sided exchange of munitions. The krakun left the planet lifeless and its atmosphere ruined beyond recovery.

The meeri are curious and creative, but didn't inherit the scientific genius from the whales of Grey and Blue. They have the technical mastery to maintain the jump gate network, but haven't been able to add to it. They also have no talent with biogenesis or bioengineering.