The Zalamath

The Zalamath are the first of what will hopefully become many posted creations of mine. They’re a race of aliens who inhabit Zalamar, the second of four planets orbiting the main sequence star Szeleth-Deluran. Zalamar is slightly closer to the sun than Earth, and therefore hotter and dryer, bur not by a terrible amount. The average temperature for the summer is 105 degrees fahrenheit, which is very uncomfortable, but still tolerable to most humans, provided they’re correctly hydrated.

The Zalamath have slightly less body space to heat, and also have camel-like water stores on their backs (not humps, however). Their skin is a smoky gray, and their eyes range anywhere from brown to curdled-milk yellow. They don’t have hair.

Zalamar as a planet is covered about forty percent by dunes, with another forty percent going to water, and the remaining twenty to the valleys. Dunes are generally miles upon miles of fairly rough sand, with grass interspersed and groves of short trees, something like a cross between an acacia and a lichen. They are very hot and dry, and there really isn’t much on most of them besides military outpost and smallish towns. Valleys, on the other hand, double as farmland and urban areas. As the Zalamath equivalent to wheat is a mosslike perennial that ripens every winter, forming stalks and growing up off of stones. It grows in the valleys, where there is more water. As for the oceans, they’re everywhere, a lot of small, cut-off oceans, linked by underground rivers (consequently, these flow underneath valleys, which therefore have more water). The cities on the oceans are generally the trade centers, as ocean trade is still important. The oceans are very salty, and it doesn’t take much to float on them.

The Zalamath have also colonized Zalamar’s three moons, Thevar-Surbeijan, Thevar-Velijan, and Thevar-Gasijan. Velijan is the largest, and has something close to an atmosphere, so it was the first colonized. Patches of it are in the process of being terraformed from a rocky, cold desert to a warm-ish plain. Surbeijan is undergoing the same process, but on a much more limited scale. Parts of the almost-atmosphere are methane gas, which is dampening the efforts. Gasijan is the smallest, and there is only one full settlement, but preparations are being made for another.

Zalamath politics is very odd. They are both peaceful and paranoid, kind of like Switzerland gone mad. They are effectively the type to sign a peace treaty and never talk to you again, unless you get into a war or the peace treaty is broken, in which case they will send minimal aid or an entire war fleet, respectively. They are usually content to leave others alone, colonizing slowly and barely expanding for years.

They do, however, have a military. The Zalamar Defense Fleet is powerful and quite large, with more than six hundred ships in full orbit around Zalamar. The Zalamar Planetary Guard is not quite as large, but has many, many permanent outposts in the dunes, which send out regular patrols of snake-like tanks. However, a much-overlooked portion of the military is the Zalamath Exploration Fleet, which is underfinanced and treated worse than any other portion of the military. There is a good training program, and the fighter pilots or turret operators of the fleet are as well-trained as anybody, but they are generally put down as barbarians by the majority of the planetary population.

This is about all I have right now. I’ll get back to you later.
Maybe even tomorrow!

~ by pieboy on September 26, 2005.