Inyx
| Inyx | |
|---|---|
| Status | Minor Race |
| Classification | |
| Size | 2.5 M |
| Weight | |
| Homeworld | |
| Multi-world | yes |
| Canon | yes |
| Extinct | {{{extinct}}} |
| Reference | GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 2 |
The Inyx are a race of aquatic, parasitic ergovores. Their ancestral hosts were whale-sized sea creatures who could generate electrical currents in the same manner as electric eels. The Inyx attached themselves to their hosts' bodies, feeding off this bio-electricity. To prevent their giant hosts taking offense, the proto-Inyx always trickled back a bit of the electric current they stole, in carefully modulated voltages designed to stimulate the pleasure centers of their hosts' brains, addicting them to the Inyx's presence.
Ecological turmoil resulting from a comet impact on their homeworld led to the rise of predators that found the hosts of the proto-Inyx especially tasty. To protect their hosts, the Inyx had to become more intelligent and cooperative. They developed the rudiments of sentient behavior, took their first steps out on land, developed fire and industry, and created a civilization that eventually reached into space.
The Inyx did not discover jump drive, but their slower-than-light ships reached nearby stars, aided by the species' natural longevity and low life-support requirements. Sometime during the Long Night, they contacted both Aslan and Solomani exploration missions; by carefully playing both sides against one another, they secured a place in the middle, establishing alliances with several Human client states and AsIan clans rimward of the Hierate.
Today, the Inyx represent a potent economic force on the Rimward edge of known space. Their cultural adaptability, market savvy, and lack of territorial ambition help them secure corporate footholds on hundreds of Human, Aslan, and other worlds.
PHYSIOLOGY
Visualize a collection of six soap bubbles, joined to form a roughly spherical shape, with one bubble in the center and the others spaced around it. Each bubble is 3 feet across, and the whole about 8 feet wide. Give every surrounding bubble a single opalescent tentacle, 6 feet long, 4 inches wide at the base, and tapering to a finger's breadth at the tip. The entire object gives off a soft phosphorescent glow. Underwater or in zero gravity, it swims like an octopus, moving with a boneless undulating grace.
Although they are carbon-based life forms utilizing traditional hydrogen-oxygen-carbon biochemistry, the Inyx push the edge of "life as Humans know it." Rather than being carnivores or herbivores, they are ergovores, living storage batteries who use their tentacles to convert electricity directly into the energy needed by their bodies. Even their brains and nervous systems have more in common (by analogy) with a fiber-optic computer than with what Humans expect of "life."
Source: GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 2