The average female has between two and five children over her lifespan, and raises between none and two of them.

The average male has between five and twenty children and raises all of them, sometimes with the help of co-mates and sometimes without.

15% of the female population has more than one mate and the rest have between one and none.

Males have custody of children and females do not.

Females aren’t expected to contribute to child-care or domestic responsibilities, they are, however, expected to advance the social status of their matrilineage so as to get into the 20% with the resources to pass on their family name and status to their offspring, biological or otherwise.

Azulians have two names. The first of which is traditionally given to them by their biological father and the last of which is inherited from their biological mother.

Avola worshipers practice polyandry, Phiede worshipers do not have a concept of marriage and Varset worshipers are monogamous.

Quacksville is populated by Avola worshipers, the government districts are populated by a combination of all three and the land around the city is populated by predominantly Varset worshipers with agricultural communities capable of supporting the large number of children that result from long-term monogamous relationships.

Public opinion is that Varset worshipers are weird, Avola worshipers are greedy pigs and that Phiede worshipers are self-sacrificing. The average Azulian doesn’t prescribe completely to any of the three lifestyles and looks at anyone who does as an extremist.

Because of their rarity, male children have a higher value than female children, though in lower socioeconomic groups or castes, they are perceived as having a lower value since they cannot bring in money or resources into their mother’s matrilineage. Because of Azulu’s economic distribution problem, males, who have de facto custody of their children, are not afforded inheritance rights from their parents and instead use hypergamy as a means of securing sufficient resources to care for their children.

Certain religious factions in poorer and more violent districts (westhill) will sometimes either cull their male children or keep them under lock and key to prevent them from marrying into Avola worshiping families with which such communities have a vicious rivalry. The thinking being that allowing your sons to marry into a rival family or caste is the same as handing over the inheritance of your matrilineage to that family as their owning another male increases the number of children in their matrilineage and decreases the number in your allies matrilineages, thereby increasing the economic disparity between the 20% and the 80%.

Sociological differences:

If a female looks another azulian in the eyes it is seen as a sign of aggression and if they don't look away, it’s seen as defiance. Thus, males are expected to avoid eye contact. Males from opposing social groups will stare down rival females as a way of pissing them off and flaunting their social groups status.

Smiling with one's teeth showing is a sign of aggression. One only smiles with their teeth when their superiors aren’t present, otherwise it’s interpreted as a form of insubordination. Thusly, the matriarch of a social group will do this often to demonstrate her authority. Agatha does this all the time for this very reason.

Thusly, telling and laughing at jokes can be seen as an extension of this in certain subcultures. And jokes centered around death and violence are culturally similar to rape-y locker room humor. It’s something only one sex does to make them seem bigger and better than the opposite sex. (So when Agatha is using gallows humor in a debate, it’s not funny, it’s territorial. Which is why nobody ever laughs at it.)

Mouths are not sexualized, and the idea of kissing is viewed a weird, obscene thing humans do. (and not to mention dangerous) This is due to the fact that Azulains have one of the most powerful bite forces of any mammal and tend to use their mouths as weapons, biting limbs and flesh off their enemies and prey. Females will even kill and eat rival females in less civilized communities. So if your name is Joe Biden, do not ask one of them for a kiss because you'll probably get your skull crushed instead. Infact, a good rule of thumb is to stay at least an arm's length away. Especially as a male as your actions can be interpreted two different ways, neither of which you want.

If an Azulian of any sex is interested in a member of the opposite sex, they tend to stand right next to them in a way that is obstructive to other Azulains.

If an Azulain stands right next to a member of the same sex, it means they consider the other person their ‘bro.’ Being that proximity indicates the closeness of the relationship, it’s not a good idea to stand right next to a female Azulian if you’re not their significant other or drinking buddy. If you stand right next to a male, you’re a bit safer, so long as his significant other, family or friends don’t see you.

Members of a social group all tend to stand facing the matriarch of the group as standing with your back to them is considered a challenge to their authority unless you are male. In which case you are never in authority so you can face whichever way you want.

Because of their ridiculously high fecundity, Azulains have never had anything close to a hook-up culture. They view sex as a means of producing children, rather than as entertainment. Due to the power balance between the sexes, rape is physiologically implausible, and that combined with the fact that there’s a 90% chance that the female will get pregnant, and a 99% chance that the male will have to care for her children till they reach adulthood, both sexes tend not to fool around as it can have very bad repercussions.

Say, you're a dude. And you act like a human frat boy. Plenty of females would mate with you, but in three months they'd hand you one to five babies each and then leave. Now you're stuck with 20 kids to feed and clothe and educate for the next fifteen years. Welcome to single parenthood on steroids.

If you're a female and you act like a frat boy, very few males will mate with you because they don't want your babies. And if they do you’re mildly uncomfortable for three months, the end. Your social responsibility ends when you give birth. As a result, unlike humans, the women actually are more slutty than the men as the risk involved for them is essentially zero. However, also like humans, they tend to call whichever sex is the easiest to pick on whores, despite the fact that by definition it takes two to participate. Thus: all men are whores and women are just women.

As for birth control, abortion and contraception, the females consider it unnecessary and annoying and are more likely to lie about it than to actually use it. And many of them consider it counterproductive to spreading their genetics. Males therefore have to either convince them to use it or sneak it themselves if they're part of a particularly religious faction.

The general cultural perception of males is that they are auxiliary members of society at best, defective females or annoying necessities at worst. Because they can't fight as well as the females, and because the females like to consider every job outside of childcare a feminine job, males are more or less relegated to that sector. To the point that childcare is assumed to be the only thing they're good at/the only thing they should aspire to/the most important thing they'll ever do.

If a male does not have kids, he is considered a failure. If a female doesn't have kids it's presumed that she'll be slightly disappointed. Unless she's an Avola worshipper, in which case it's presumed that she had genes that would not help the survival of the species and that she either couldn’t have children or chose to commit generational suicide. (This is what Agatha does because she considers her mother’s genetics inferior and chose not to inflict the Durrem’s propensity for violence on the next generation.)

It should be noted that rich female Azulians are all essentially a bunch of unapologetic, classist yuppies.

The general cultural perception of females is that they are god’s gift to men. They can prevent males from being killed (by other females), create children so the males can fulfill their one and only purpose in life, and even support them financially if they want to be extra nice. And for that, the males should be grateful and do whatever the females want. After all, it was a female that created them in the first place. Which is a bit like giving someone a polished turd and calling them a selfish asshole when they don’t want it.

Because of the acirian genetics, both sexes have a tendency to abandon their young or not have any in the first place. Females, more so than males. Azulians with those traits also came with acirian-level aggression towards their own species, but not the regeneration that makes mass murdering your own kind a good way to further the evolution of the species which meant that they exited the gene pool pretty quickly, leaving mostly those with more dominant human traits. Mostly. Some were balanced enough to function within the society, and because of their disregard for life and limb, themselves and others, and the fact that the dominance of acirian traits made female offspring larger, meant that those with the acirian genetics tended to be high ranking in the social hierarchy simply because they could and frequently would beat the crap out of everyone else. A good way to spot these individuals was their tendency to have the same yellow eye color of acirians which also meant they had night vision where their more human counterparts didn’t. This spawned the idea that those traits were somehow more desirable because the people in charge had a higher percentage of those traits than the general population. Thus, Taba and likely her entire matriarchal line, were all sociopathic assholes who liked killing other azulians for fun because they were more acirian than human and that behavior is how acirians reproduce. It’s just that when you try it on species without regeneration, they tend to, you know, die. Permanently. However because acirians have no concept of death as a permanent destination, these people tend to also develop a bit of a god/immorality complex which has very un-pretty results.

However, thankfully, most Azulians are not that way. It’s only when you get higher up the social hierarchy that you start seeing more and more of it. Most average Azulians are decent people, and if the sexism shows up, especially in the lower ranking communities, it tends to be mostly just passive aggression. Kind of like how humans are today. Except males were expected and allowed to hold jobs even when they had children they were expected to take care of, and being that they don't have child labor laws, children would often pick up and help out with whatever job their father held regardless of the child's gender, (making Carl and Ellis somewhat typical) the males seniority status typically granting them higher social status than would otherwise be attainable, though a female with seniority status will always outrank their male peers. There is some prejudice against males entering higher paying more stereotypically female dominated fields, though not if they have female offspring or a wife in the same workplace as the social status typically transfers to all relatives regardless of gender. Though paradoxically it is seen as undesirable to date people in your same field of specialization which means that only families of lower socioeconomic status regularly follow this pattern, as higher ranking families tend to have more exaggerated sexually dimorphic traits, both physically and psychologically.

Their family systems, if they have a family system, usually consists of a female who spends most of their time advancing their status in the hierarchy through increased wealth and property (read: territory and game), a male who also holds a job, takes care of the children and sets them up with jobs of their own, (read: maintains the female's territory) and children who typically grow up to work in the class that their mother worked her family up to, regardless of gender. From there, the female offspring can work up to an even higher class, (or be bumped down if they lose a fight with someone who outranks them) and the males either stay at the level of their mother or inherit the level of their wife, be it higher or lower.

The degree to which this is enforced varies depending on the culture of the region and the social class being examined. At the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, people are generally aware the system exists at some point, but nobody enforces it nor follows its rules. At the very top of the ladder, this system is extremely important and violently enforced as it makes a big difference in the status of that particular matrilineal line.

he Azulian religion is somewhat similar to that of the Greeks and the Romans. They all follow the same system, but that system has multiple deities, each with a different value system, and each thinks they are above all other deities and will eventually become ‘The One True God.’ Each faction in turn, has its own text, narrative and subculture.

Phiede, is the spirit of death, judgement, insects, codes and agriculture. Phiede gets to decide who dies and how one dies, or more correctly, how awful ones death is, and where one goes afterwards. Phiede is the most uptight of the spirits, and has a long and extensive list of rules one must follow in order for one not to die a horrible death and be reincarnated as a flesh eating wasp or a dung beetle.

The code of Phiede, a rather long and parabolic text, supposedly written by a matrilineal chain of Turins chronicles the entirety of Azulu’s existence through the written accounts of said Turins, or as they are referred to posthumously, narrators.

The Turins, who can belong to any of the three spirits, are often the cause of the shifting of world powers, either because such things are predetermined, because it is in their nature or because only such people become Turins. Some have suggested that it’s genetic. Others that it’s simply the result of the victors always telling the final account of things. Either way, such texts, or chapters, are usually only found several generations later, hidden amongst the Turin’s belongings. It is unknown if such texts appear supernaturally, or if they are written in secret, because one thing is common among all Turins, and that is the fact that no one knows they are a Turin until the text is discovered. Not even other Turins will know, even if they are related as can sometimes happen. There may be suspicions, rumors and the occasional public execution, but no one owns up to anything until everything is said and done and the story concluded.

The public perception of Turins, particularly those owned by Phiede is… complicated. Phiede’s Turins tend to be ruthless, combative, code and law oriented dictators who do the right thing by the letter of the law only. If not dictators, they will hold a similar position in some establishment, and serve to inflict the code of Phiede on the general population and enforce her rules. Therefor those that feel her rules should be enforced are supporters of anyone they even remotely suspect as being one of Phiede’s Turins, and on the other hand, those that think Phiede is missing the point of morality and using it as a justification for her own immorality, Phiede-Turins are dangerous and to be avoided, though not necessarily evil.

Agatha, for example, often says that she is one because it makes people uncomfortable.

There are a total of 30 confirmed Phiede Turins, making them the rarest variety. The definition of Turin in general is one who for some reason or another is killed, rejected by Varset and resurrected by Avola as an Azulian, rather than being put back through the filter that is lower life forms. Why this can happen varies. Either in a past life that person had walked the line of morality such that Varset disapproved of them but Phiede thought they were perfectly acceptable and saw no need to exact vengeance, or they did so in the current life, which was recorded and they were reincarnated as an Azulian who behaved well enough the second time around to be accepted by Varset. Both halves can be recorded or just one. Sometimes the same Turin reoccurs five or six times before they’re finally accepted by Varset, sometimes it only takes a single iteration.

Avola, is the spirit of life, pleasure, status, survival/reincarnation, enlightenment, war, tides and the moon (and, anything else her followers would like to tack on). Avola has no real rules, just that if one knows and aids in Avola’s destruction of all other spirits, that one will be protected from Phiedes judgement. Or, at least that's what it used to be. Since Taba took over the church of Avola and all its chapters, she has instituted a litany of rituals and requirements for maintaining favor in Avola's eyes, and thus immunity from Phiede’s rules. Why? Because Taba doesn't believe in religion and just enjoys messing with people in new and sadistic ways.

Avola Turins tend to be prophets, the highly educated, emotional people who feel that they need to be the most highly praised, acclaimed or respected and typically will do stupid things to impress people or prove themselves. They tend to believe that each person is unique and that self expression is more important than following the rules. Their pre-Taba ideology was basically:

When the messiah leads the rebellion *puffs joint* As long you fight for Avola, you can do whatever maaan. It's all good.

Post-Taba ideology is: it's all good so long as you routinely subject yourself to physical and psychological torture and serve The One True God doing whatever she, through Taba, commands thee to do. And the minute you stop doing as you're told you're a rebel and your sins now count against you and are punishable by death.

Varset, is the spirit of personality, family, memory, victory, the sky and culture. Varset has control of, or more correctly is, a ‘realm’ called varsita which stores the lives and memories of those who they deem worthy. Varset is a hive mind, a conglomerate being, formed from the lives and memories of those it accepts and fuses with. People who do not fuse with the conglomerate upon death are reincarnated as something else. If varset finds them especially repugnant, Phiede gets to turn them into whatever she wants. In Azulian mythology, Varset was originally two people, Vara and Aset. Aset was an albino and was thusly owned by Avola. When Avola got into a fight with Phiede over a particular building, Phiede struck Avola’s army dead, Aset being among them. When Vara found out about this, she used magic to absorb Aset’s spirit and half of his physical features, forming Varset. The myth being that this initial fusion is where chimerism and hermaphrodites come from. (It should be noted that the relationship between Vara and Aset was not sexual as Azulians do not associate sex with friendship, loyalty or emotional bonding. In their culture the two belong in completely separate spheres and they often don’t form a venn diagram. In fact, in the original text, Vara and Aset were both female, and had, if anything, what we would call a bromance. Aset was only changed to male afterwards when someone felt the need to explain why some Chimeras have mixed primary and secondary sex traits.) That story then evolved and was added to thanks to Turins and Conduits (which will be discussed below), becoming that Varset managed to transcend the physical realm and cycle of reincarnation imposed by Phiede and Avola, because they were composed of two spirits with different karmic ratings (Vara was to be reincarnated as an Azulian and Aset a dung beetle) fused together so that the resultant being is more or less trapped in a state of ‘quantum uncertainty’ or limbo. And because having nothing but one other person to talk to is lonely and boring, Varset began using a stronger form of Vara’s magic to absorb the spirits of people who Varset viewed as ‘worthy’ or the victim of karmic injustice. It was then said that Varset (whose name has evolved since then past the point of articulation) had, through the amassed power of their spirits, created another realm, superior to that of Avola and Phiede.

Varset Turins are not called Turins, rather Conduits. Conduits typically have abnormal skin tones and are the only variety which can be of any sex. Conduits can channel whatever spirit is present at the time and are the only Turins which can break the ‘no one knows for sure whether they are or not’ rule. They are typically rather nice people who follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of it.

Krytocracy: A government ruled by judges who govern based on a system of social philosophies intended to progress society towards a progressively more desirable state.

Background:

Historically, Azulu has swung between dictatorships, anarchy and dictatorships again as the vigilante groups responsible for the anarchy take over, either by popular vote or millitant force, become corrupted and power hungry and then proceed to use their autocratic power to micromanage every aspect of their country, forcing it to conform to their ideology and agenda. Thus, Azulu has always consisted of warring factions, typically theocracies, and has developed an often convoluted social hierarchy and class system with bubbles of different ethnic groups created by past government systems constantly warring against eachother in addition to the current governmental systems vying for total control.

In more recent history, with the invention of nuclear warfare, 1/3rd of that system was destroyed along with 1/3rd of the population. In the vacuum that followed, the heavily militarized cult of Avola gained control of the entire colony for approximately six years before assets were sent in from a neighboring planetary system (and country) to overthrow the current dictator, Taba Durrem. They ultimately gained control of about half the colony, suffered repeated military and terrorist attacks over the next ten years before Taba was killed by her own daughter who then went on to take out much of the now destabilized terrorist organization with the help of her largely ex-military vigilante group. After forming an alliance with the foreign democratic state, the vigilante group turns over governmental control to their allies, who proceed to grow more and more corrupt and burocratic as time passes. Eventually, Agatha (who has become a sort of folk hero) runs for the equivalent of president, and upon being elected, uses her popularity and a well timed coup to overthrow the powers that be before setting up a crude, more violent version of the below system. Several years, (and assassination attempts) later, she appoints her half-sibling (on her father’s side) Mave as a sort of co-dictator due to the fact that Mave is quite popular for her frequent public criticism of her sibling. If the following seems to switch rapidly between two extremes at times, their haphazard collaboration is the cause.

Currently, Azulu is ruled by Agatha who serves as representative/intimidator to the GFUN council, and Mave, who makes most of the civil codes and oversees the institution of criminal law so as to prevent it from being too ‘radical’ and/or militaristic. Together, they have the power to invent, veto, alter or intervene in any aspect of the Azulian government, though both parties must be in agreement if change is to be instituted. (Which, because Mave is a socialist and Agatha an autocrat, results in policies that border on the darker side of communism.) The current governmental leaders are, in effect, placeholders, and will only remain in charge until two people more qualified are voted into office.

However:

In order to be qualified to run for Chief Justice, one must have a total implicit bias of zero and must have the highest national education level in law, international politics, economics, anthropology, forensic science, and environmentalism. There is no age or species restriction, though the chief justice must be a registered citizen, and have no outstanding criminal history.

(It should be noted that Azulu is generally governed by the concept that if an action is justified, it cannot be criminal. So people generally view Agatha as either justified and non-criminal -in a way that can border on hero-worship- by definition or as an insane, immoral dictator who is only functional because her sister prevents her from doing anything completely depraved. It should be noted that Azulian citizens are usually of the former opinion and everyone else the latter.)

Insofar, Agatha has had the lowest implicit bias score of the Chief Justices, her outstanding biases being against religious individuals, bullies, people who insult her family (only she’s allowed to do that) and convicted criminals, whereas Mave is biased against serial killers, psychopaths, televangelists, bureaucrats, fascists, racists, loud mouth bigots, rich jerks, drug addicts, and people who litter. Especially people who litter.

Surprisingly, the culture is not split along racial lines. Two main cultures dominate the GOF; the Southern Song, and the East Wind.

The Southern Song considers itself to be the ones most capable of organisation, or at least, the ones most vociferous in promoting co-operation between members of the GOF. History is an important subject to this culture, though few take it to the extremes of venerating the Creators, nearly everyone within the Southern Song will have an opinion on that subject. Politeness, formality and civility are treasured, such that outsiders may not realise that they have born witness to a major disagreement. Worse still, an outsider may not realise that they are making a terrible social gaffe, fail to recognise the signs of displeasure, and only realise they are now considered a pariah when they are no longer invited to social events. A relatively sheltered life within the jungle-ruins of the Creators has given the Southern Song an air of refinement and knowledge of their place in history. To the East Wind, they are seen as stuffy, slow, but useful to have around.

The East Wind territory is home to scarred lands and the ruins of devestated cities left behind in the wake of the fall of the Creators. Faced with the constant reminders of an age long since passed, their culture is considered - by the Southern Song, at least - a little odd. Some are prone to fatalism, seeing the wreckage of terrible machines of war. Some promise to live their lives to the fullest, knowing that it could all easily end for them just as it did for their Creators. Some dream of the stars a as a way to avoid the terrible threat of extinction. Regardless of the nature of the actions they take, they value the simple act of acting - they consider themselves to be a dynamic people, propelled forward by the explosions that tore apart the Creators. Loud, boisterous, active, they are the means by which the Greater Orpil Flock reached the stars. To the Southern Song, they are reckless and difficult to understand, but useful to have around.

Political life is dominated by various Ministries, with each having very strict limits on what they may control. However, most Ministries employ a number of exceedingly clever people who have the task of arguing just how their interpretation of statutes and codes allows their own Ministry to interfere in a matter that might not directly be within their domain. Open violence between the Ministries is more or less unheard of, but dirty tricks, espionage, assassination and strongly worded letters have all been deployed in the name of one Ministry or other. Each Ministry is led by a Minister, and the squabbling group of Ministers forms the government of the Greater Orpil Flock, with a directly elected "Speaker" acting as something akin to a head of state. Elections for Speaker are held every ten years, and each Ministry is responsible for it's own arcane processes by which it chooses a Minister.

Recently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have suffered a series of set-backs. The Ministry of Harmony - responsible for the (rather limited) armed forces of the Greater Orpil Flock - has seen a rise in prominence in recent years, partly due to the election of Speaker Mallicum (a close personal friend of Minister-General Fortidae).

The History of Ave-Orpil, and the Greater Orpil Flock, is generally broken down into three ages. There is the Age of Life, the Fall, and the Modern Age.

The roots of the three species that comprise the "Orpil" are in the Age of Life. By their understanding of history, the Creators brought the Orpil species out of the darkness of ignorance, such that they might carry the brilliance of the Creators onwards into the future. It is regarded as something of a Golden Age, mostly due to the efforts of romantic writers who promoted the image of the Orpils and the Creators living as equals in a peaceful society. While scholarly studies suggest that this was certainly not the case, that the Orpil species were just one set of many that were uplifted and that the act of uplifting itself was considered distasteful by many of the nation-states that the Creators lived in. To the majority, however, they remain the multi-armed, flightless pseudo-gods, who chose their ancestors for a life of greatness.

Then came the Fall. To the Orpil, an unexplained, mysterious event that devastated the Creators. Many presume that outside interference is to blame, while the truth is that conflict between a number of states escalated into a highly destructive, global war. One continent - the cultural home of the East Wind - is particularly scarred, while the rest of the world has been steadily reclaimed by nature, and the inheritors of the world, the Orpil.

The Modern Age begins with the reclamation of the Creators works, the adaptation of their technologies to use by the Orpil and the establishment of the Greater Orpil Flock. Reclamation was slow; so much was lost, many areas were initially uninhabitable, and the barely sentient Orpil left in the wake of the Fall were forced to scratch an existence in the shadows of the ruins. True intelligence, as the Orpil reckon it, actually developed during this time - and it was a slow, slow process. "Official History" paints a picture of brave Orpil striking out of the still-smoking wreckage with mastery of the tools left by the Creators. The truth is that, just like many species, they went through various ages of technological progress, albeit significantly accelerated by the guidance of technologies left behind by the Creators.

The history so favoured by the Southern Song is of recent, modern history, and the formation of the Greater Orpil Flock out of the East Wind and the Southern Song. It was a time of coming together, of cut-throat negotiations, of compromises and agreements that led to the creation of the first Ministries, where Song and Wind could come together and share in a mutual interest. Local governments began to be replaced by the Ministries, and the bureaucracies endemic to the Ministries began to blossom, absorbing various political functions. Finally, the Ministries were ascendant, and an accord had to be reached - none of the Ministries, with their specialisations, could allow another to lead them, but a leader was needed.

Wars followed. Once great Ministries fell, some absorbed by others, others scattered to the winds. A compromise was reached once again, following the surrender of the Ministry of Arms & Armour to the Ministry of Harmony; no Ministry would be placed above another, and the leader shall be directly chosen by the "Greater Orpil Flock", comprising of the Southern Song people and the East Wind people, regardless of what Ministry they were employed by. With disputes mostly put aside, and grudges kept to themselves, progress began to happen fast. Three hundred and sixty five years after the election of the first Speaker, and the establishment of the Greater Orpil Flock as a (mostly) functioning government that stretched across Ave-Orpil, we arrive at the modern day.

Prior to the rise of the Ministries and the establishment of the Greater Orpil Flock, each community tended to adopt their own legal code. In the modern age, the Ministry of Justice is responsible for most things legal. There are no laws, as such, but rather agreements and understandings. A party who feels aggrieved by the actions of another may seek justice from the Ministry of Justice, who will consider, as best they are able, whether actions taken against the aggrieved party constitute a crime. The ponderously slow bureaucracy of the Ministry of Justice check prior rulings of the Ministry to help determine whether a crime has actually taken place, though individual Adjudicators can rule on one side or the other based on their own judgement. If found guilty, relevant information is handed to the Ministry of Harmony.

Punishments, like legality, vary, and is decided upon by representatives from both the Ministry of Harmony and the aggrieved party. Periods of indentured servitude are generally preferred to other punishments, with the guilty party becoming a low-paid employee of the aggrieved party.

One of the obvious, and often exploited, loopholes in the system is that the Greater Orpil Flock does not pursue legal recompense, but that it comes down to the single aggrieved individuals, or those that are close to them. Political assassinations are often incredibly bloody affairs, as if there are no "aggrieved individuals" left to complain about it, no criminal action has taken place.

If we want to get into the specifics, Acirians are approximately 3-4 and 1/2 feet tall, green or violet skinned depending on their pigmentation or lack thereof, green being the pigmented version. A pigmented Acirians skin is actually a light yellow color and the intensity of the color will change based on diet. An Acirian who lives off standard space-fare from a wide variety of planets will typically be green while ones who eat a more restricted or electrolyte and mineral deficient diet will typically be a light blue or purple in color. If the Acirian has not regenerated recently the color intensifies in either pigmented or unpigmented types. It is possible for a green Acirian to turn Violet and vice versa. This is most easily observed after an Acirian regenerates 30% or more of its body mass as it takes awhile for them to regain proper electrolyte and mineral levels.

An Acirian's 'brain' is not limited to its skull, it has small clusters of neurons and glial cells all throughout its body which serve as data caches for the central nervous system. This is an essential survival mechanism that allows Acirian's to retain back-ups of important information in case they lose their heads. Should this happen, the Acirian will remember all information it had deemed important, but will be unable to recall extraneous data resulting in memory gaps and subject-specific memory loss.

The trick to Acirian regeneration is that there are specific gene sets that activate to regenerate specific organs and cell types. This, combined with the fact that they have undifferentiated stem cell clusters known as blastema stored in small grouping all throughout their bodies means that if a wrong gene set were to be activated artificially such as in laboratory tests, an Acirian could grow a kidney where they were supposed to be regenerating a hand. It is also possible for them to grow cell types and organs from other species that would normally not be compatible but that requires that all the genetic information that goes into making that specific organ be reproduced and held in the kamikaze protein transport unit that acts as part of the Acirian immune system specific to targeting foreign cells or cancer. All signaling information not presented in such a way is ignored. The only other species that has a immune system similar to an Acirians in that of Azulians who are in fact a splice between an Acirian and Human chromosome set.

An Acirian's cardiovascular system runs their hemocyanin blood through a set of organs specific to their species called, shockingly, Liver-like Blood and Blastema Alteration System, or LBBAS, because Acirians inability to name things creatively has been around since their species started vivisecting themselves to determine why they didn't stay dead like other creatures. Anyway, the LBBAS, as the name suggests, is passably similar to a liver but that's as far as it goes. It functions as a blood filter yes, but it also generates blastema and can generate the full range of gene sets responsible for everything that makes up an Acirian, however it only activates if the Acirian goes into cardiac arrest in which case it functions as a reset button, taking inventory of the entire biological system through a system-wide reset-specific nervous system that, to put it simply, liquefies all damaged tissues by differentiating their cells using something similar to our neuropeptides which spread from the nearest severed nerve to the surrounding cells, telling them to revert to stem cell mode.

Using the lymphatic system, the LBBAS signals the body to flush out everything after the severed nerve that isn't a stem cell. This allows Acirians to survive most poisons and toxins as the second they cause the subject to stop blood circulation, they get flushed out of the system with lymphatic fluid.

However, in the case of venoms, since they tend to remain in the bloodstream, after a reset has occurred, if the problem is not resolved by the LBBAS-related nervous system, the blood is then filtered through the LBBAS and the immune system put into hyperdrive which results in any proteins still in circulation being metabolized or isolated prior to them being flushed out of the subject via the digestive system, or more correctly, the upchuck thereof.

Neurotoxic venoms, poisons and toxins still affect Acirians similarly to other creatures with the addition of the effects of its interference with the LBBAS related nervous system which can result in misidentification of stem cells for foreign cells and vice versa. It can also cause the LBBAS to go into reset mode without the Acirian actually going into cardiac arrest or for it to fail to do so in the case of cardiac arrest.

Common symptoms of neurotoxic poisoning in Acirians are seizures, heightened allergic reactions, liquefaction of unaffected organs or body parts, inhibited or altered regenerative abilities, neurological degeneration followed by an imperfect reset in the case of an altered LBBAS reset. With no LBBAS reset or response, symptoms and outcome will match exactly those of regular subjects although in some cases treatment will vary.

As a result of the above, if an Acirian goes into cardiac arrest resuscitation of any kind is detrimental to recovery due to damage to ribs and the increase in blood circulation interfering with LBBAS related functions which, due to organ liquefaction, can result in internal bleeding, falsely triggered regenerative shut-down, volume loss and later growth abnormalities and cysts due to the circulation of region specific neuropeptides and stem cells to unaffected parts of the body. Depending on the nature of injury resulting in cardiovascular shut down, side affects can even extend to later infections or substance related tissue damage due to transfer to other parts of the body.

The only case wherein resuscitation is beneficial is when the LBBAS fails to engage as a result of neurotoxins inhibiting its neurological signaling system. In this case it's best to administer anti-venom if available and resort to resuscitation only as a last resort. If that doesn't work, it may be necessary trigger regenerative function despite the fact that the system by which that normally occurs is out of commission. The easiest way to do this is to damage the LBBAS directly via a sharp pointed object like a knife, sword or spear. However this requires the knowledge of where the LBBAS is, and if one does not know, the certified medical procedure of chucking the subject off a cliff to reset everything in one go has been known to work. If no cliffs or other suitable objects are available, the 'stab/shoot till find' method will also work.

As for Acirian personalities, they all typically have a built-in hatred for others of their species in a way that is similar to humans built in attraction for the opposite sex. This, unsurprisingly, is due to the fact that Acirians reproduce by effectively killing each other.

So, it logically follows that Acirians more inclined to kill each other are more likely to create clones thus more likely to represent the majority of the Acirian population.
it should be noted that Acirians with dietary deficiencies are less inclined to this behavior thus creating the assumption by some people that blue and purple Acirians are a less hostile subspecies. Due to the fact that Acirians are viscerally disgusted by each other and violently inclined in general, but also at the same time obsessed with all things logical, once they developed the technology to live entirely in space, the dispersed widely in an attempt to never see another one of their species ever ever again. This results in some people thinking that they are fictional, endangered or otherwise exceedingly rare as they've probably not seen more than two within their lifetime and certainly not more than one at the same time. However, while this assumption is wrong, Acirians are in decline due to the invention of space travel which aids both their dispersal and risk taking/accident prone tendencies. The subsequent invention of advanced incendiary devices which are the leading cause of permanent death among Acirians, simply does not jive at all well with their risk taking tendencies which tend to lead them into situations where encountering such devices is highly probable.

Male


Female

From the perspective of humans, azulians fall somewhere in the uncanny valley. Their basic skeletal structure is similar, save shorter, double jointed legs, thicker bones, longer arms, a rib structure that looks like it belongs to a quadruped or a reptile and a completely different skull shape. Because their arms and legs are roughly the same length, it’s possible for them to run on all fours, though in practice this is really only used to climb things. Both their hands and their feet are prehensile, and their feet partially double jointed. They typically walk with their toes at least partially curled up, like how you would mime a cat paw with your hand. They use both copper and iron to oxygenate their blood, which looks like watery elmer's glue with a drop or two of purple food coloring.

Females favor the acirian portion of their genetics, whereas males favor humans. This is due to the way fetuses develop. All of them start out as female, and acirians don’t have Y chromosomes, (they actually only have one X chromosome) so for XY fetuses, the genetics of humans take over making them smaller than their female counterparts.

Because acirians only have one X chromosome, (Thus only X chromosomes were spliced together) a female Azulian (XX) doubles up on the acirian traits, and without the lack of a second X chromosome and without the presence of a Y chromosome, their growth is uninhibited (because all acirians were derived from a clone with Turner’s syndrome). This results in faster regeneration, a more acirian-like skull shape, sharper teeth, and a muscle attachment ridge on the skull, making their bite force much stronger. Another difference is ribs.

You can tell which skeleton is female, and as they have more ribs than a male Azulian. Again, this is because acirians have snake like ribs and humans do not. Azulian females think more like acirians, have better depth perception and a more visual memory. They're also more aggressive and some are just plain territorial. They're more easily swayed by mob mentality and are more likely to start fights for no reason and don't particularly care about the outcome, they fight for the sake of conflict. They also will use all of their strength when attacking, unlike humans who use about 10% due to them actually having a sense of self preservation. An Acirian will punch hard enough to break their own arm, and they don’t stall, hold back or run away because they might get killed, because behaviors that lead to injury increase the number of derivative acirians produced. Azulian females, will do the exact same thing as Acirians, except their arm isn’t going to grow back like an Acirians. Ergo, the logical side of them will know they shouldn’t hit that hard, but it’s not instinctive or subconscious, so if you make one sufficiently angry, logic will no longer apply.

Someone once said that it’s not the strongest, the most skilled or the most intelligent person that wins in a street fight. It’s the most determined, because they don’t hold back and they fight dirty. Azulain females fight this way by default, which is why the police there are all trained to shoot to kill, because if you don’t kill them they’ll keep attacking and will do a lot more damage than most other species.

Azulian males have this problem, but to a much lesser extent due to the following:

An Azulian male does not have a muscle attachment ridge, doesn't have the exaggerated reptilian bone structure and tends to think more like a human. They have a lower pain tolerance, tend to have a better sense of right and wrong, and tend to be significantly smaller than the females.

They also have better color perception, and live an average of ten years longer, despite their slower regeneration and higher risk for cancer. Their arms tend to be shorter and their legs longer, giving them an advantage when it comes to running and a disadvantage when climbing. Thusly track is considered a boy sport and parkour a girl sport. Muscle mass wise they're about the same as females when size differences are controlled for, so if a short female fights a tall male they're about evenly matched in terms of strength, except the female can bite through bone and the male cannot. Due to proportion differences, the fighting styles of males and females are different, females favoring punching and males favoring kicking. Though because of behavioral differences males tend to view fighting as less important than females do and so on average tend to be less fit. But because they're not incapable of it or terribly disadvantaged biologically, females tend to view them as smaller, lazy, crybabies and thus show them very little respect.

Because of the differences in the way acirians and humans develop chimerism is extremely common among males, and less so among females but it is not unheard of. This results in a vitiligo and calico like hair patterns which is seen as attractive by females, thus increasing its prevalence rate. It also sometimes results in chimeras composed of male and female cells, which can result in anything from death to mixed primary and secondary sexual traits. Typically, intersex chimeras will ‘pass as female’ Because historically the legal system and Trifecta Law allowed females more rights than males. That, and it is seen as gay for a female to harass a ‘female’ chimera, but perfectly acceptable for them to do so if the chimera is ‘male’, in part due to the visual similarities between vitiligo and chimera. Which means that most females claiming to have vitiligo are intersex chimeras and most males females assume to be chimeras just have vitiligo.

There are a number of genetic disorders that result from the gene splicing and usually come about in cases of inbreeding, which tends to exaggerate either human or acirian traits. In males, this can result in dwarfism, leukemia, bone neoplasms, deformed skulls, and club feet. In females, it causes completely unregulated growth to the point of organ collapse, skin cancer (green slimy patches), severe antisocial behavior, paranoia and psychosis. Yellow eyes and blueish hair are heavily associated with this disorder, the blue hair being most commonly found in males and the yellow eyes only in females. If a female has both they're typically only a few generations away from the above disorders as both traits are the result of genetic mutations that, if both parents are carriers of, results in either of the above disorders depending on the gender of the child.

Sexual.

Pregnancies last an average of 3 months, a full-term baby weighs 3.5 pounds (1% of the mother’s weight) and up to five can be carried to term without adverse effects as the mother/fetus weight proportion is still around half (5% of the mother’s weight) that of a normal (single fetus) human pregnancy (~11% of the mother's weight.)



Azulian fetuses develop extremely quickly, and are born with teeth and hair but very little fat, inside a clear egg-like placental sack and often have something similar to a yolk attached to their stomachs, a genetic throwback to the amphibious portion of their genetics.

If a fetus is female, the mother will produce estrogen during the first month of pregnancy, before switching to androgen for the remaining two months. If the fetus is male, a much smaller amount of androgen is produced. This is why males born with non-identical siblings tend to be bigger and stronger than those with no female fraternal twins.

If a baby is born prematurely, and the placenta is still intact, it is possible for it to be taken to a hospital and grown in vitro, like a giant gelatinous lizard egg, though because of economic reasons, this rarely ever occurs.

It takes ~72 hours for an infant to open it’s eyes, and they are capable of eating solid foods immediately, though in family units they are often fed milk for a number of weeks regardless as it boosts their immune systems and lowers infant mortality rates.

The average age of puberty ranges from 9 to 19 for females and between 15 to 18 for males, depending on diet and recessive alleles, the higher the food quality and the lower the number of recessive alleles, the earlier the Azulian reaches puberty, and vice versa.

Given access to the resources required to care for them, if a female is sexually active, she can have an average of 1-2 children per-year for 29.5 years, without adverse health effects, producing 29-59 children across her lifespan, 22-44 of which will survive to adulthood.

40% of children are male, 5% are intersex and 55% are female.

Female children have faster metabolisms, grow faster and store more fat than their male counterparts. If they do not have sufficient fat reserves at puberty, their growth is stunted. Thus it is possible for a male to grow to be around the same height as a female, but only if he was a fraternal twin to a female and eats much more than his metabolism would otherwise dictate.

The average life expectancy for females is 46 years, and the average life expectancy for males is 62 years. This is due to behavioral differences as biological ones would have females living to around 132.

The average cause of death for females is murder or (wo)manslaughter, and the average cause of death for males is cancer.

Because of this females can have children from puberty until death as menopause is not commonly encountered.

Females get a growth spurt at puberty and males stop growing.

She has two distinct modes of thought. One she uses around people she trusts implicitly, and one that she uses around everyone else.

The first mode is very calm. She says what she’s going to do before she does it, she tries to be, in her own way, considerate of other people’s emotions and sensitivities. She’s crap at it for the most part but she does have her moments. Her adopted children see it as mere stupidity but it’s actually a lot more sinister than that. She wasn’t properly socialized as a child, in fact, she was deliberately and violently conditioned to be a sociopath. As a result, while she can vaguely get the sense of things like empathy or remorse, it’s extremely rudimentary and easily turned off and so she has to consciously fake a lot of interactions.

Her second mode only appears calm. It’s a façade that allows her to maintain the element of surprise as all her responses are calculated. One can never tell when she’s angry, which is her intent. You could point a gun in her or any of her family member’s faces and she wouldn’t so much as blink. However, the second you gave her the opportunity, she’d rip your head off and mount it on a spit. In public, she’s one of those deceptively calm people whose quietly planning to kill you or attack you when she know no-one is looking. Tick her off enough and she’ll publically eviscerate you, though it takes a lot to make her go completely bizerk. One sure fire way of doing that is to violate one of the few moral sensibilities she has left. Brag about raiding villages, killing the women and raping the men (or whatever order that goes in for your species) and you’re guaranteed to die right then and there.

As a result she has a rather bipolar reputation. Either people revere her as a sort of avenging super power, or they fear her as a sociopath and a violent dictator incapable of both forgiveness and mercy. Often both beliefs exist simultaneously.

Her personal history as a revolutionary who staged a successful coup and singlehandedly defeated a terrorist sect, before going on to be an extremely successful hitman (some would argue serial killer), then a lawyer, then a dictator, means that other members of the GFUN council find her absolutely terrifying as while they were elected to or inherited their position, she got hers but climbing up the mound made by her enemies corpses, and there’s no reason to assume that she wont add them to her list.

She was raised by her mother, a sadistic cult leader who was extremely abusive and forced her to kill people who didn’t follow the Code of Avola. (Children who were born in sets of three, men who grew their hair out after marriage, defective girls who wouldn’t join the military. Members of foreign countries and belief systems.) This didn’t do what her mother expected and make her into a psychopath who could carry on her legacy, instead it caused disillusionment and eventually a nigh suicidal escape attempt that landed her in a foreign jail as a POW. Due to what she had already been through at the hands of her mother, no form of interrogation was effective as at that point she really didn’t care what happened to her. The only thing that would get her to talk was if the let her out of solitary confinement.

Then she made them let her walk around town (with security, obviously), then she demanded they give her a citizenship. Because she had reliable and valuable intel, they grudgingly obliged, making her wear a tracking device and stay within a specific range. She later demanded they remove that as well, and they countered that if she acted as a part of their military and actively took out members of her mother’s cult, they would still track her movements, but she wouldn’t have a range. She agreed to this, and became their personal hitman.

They planned to kill her eventually and blame her for a number of war crimes they committed, but she was shot down during an attempted assassination of her mother. One of the soldiers she worked closely with (Ellis) took the opportunity to remove the tracking device, and claim that she had been killed by an IED before dragging her to safety and calling her in as a civilian casualty. Because she didn’t have an ID, the paramedics ran a DNA screen to find her next-of-kin resulting in her father being notified of her existence.

Obviously, he realizes who her mother is, and what kind of mess that entails, but chooses not to say anything. He even goes so far as to pretend that he doesn’t know when he claimed that she lived at his house and went to the neighboring country to research something for her classes. This of course is suspicious given that she had clearly been malnourished before she was shot and had some suspicious old injuries, but the hospital was too swamped with other issues to worry about it. As a result, her father ends up taking in someone who he knows next to nothing about. Luckily at that point she’s not mobile enough to be a threat, and by the time she recovers is more or less functional as a person and knows what medications to take to help manage her PTSD, but functional is very far from ‘normal’ and after a few months her father realizes he’s in way over his head and endangering his other children who are all more or less terrified of her.

She leaves on her own accord and quickly goes right back to hunting down and killing cult members. Her father realizes what she’s doing when reports of ‘The Janitor’ start popping up in the news. He tries to confront her about it and stumbles into the middle of a sting operation instead. This prompts Agatha to use him as bait for her mother, Taba. As a result he not only sees her violently take out a number of henchmen, cut off his ex-wife’s head and throw it into a crowd of petrified bystanders, he’s nearly killed a number of times as well. To say he avoided her after that would be an understatement. He didn’t go so far as to help the police catch her, but certainly didn’t want anything to do with her.

Once the cult is killed and more or less deteriorates because of its leader being dead, she decides to go after the criminal justice system that thought it was a bright idea to put her in solitary confinement, use unethical interrogation methods, use her as their personal hitman and then plan on killing her afterwards. She goes to law school by day and disappears people at night.

She is then contacted by her father again and recruited to serve as her half-sister’s body guard due to the fact that Mave is albino and there are still a lot of people who think if they kill one it will give them magical abilities and cure them of their ailments. The way her father figures it, Agatha’s an atheist, hates religious people and seems to want to protect innocent people from evil and has no problem risking her own life to do so and her success at dealing with extremely dangerous high risk situations speaks for itself. So the risk she poses to Mave is essentially zero.

She serves as Mave’s body guard for all four years of Mave’s college education. Eventually they become friends and Agatha manages to fix things with her father. Things are going about as well as they can until Mave discovers something fishy about their civilization as a whole, eventually leading them to the conclusion that their civilization and species itself was created and put there by aliens. (Will be discussed in Mave’s sheet.) From there, the story breaks down depending on who you ask and what you’ll believe. Agatha claims she was sent back in time 14 years by the Acirians during which time she served as a lawyer under her pseudonym Tessa Koffmat, got herself elected president, married some psychologist who had also escaped from her mother’s cult when he was younger, adopted the daughter of one of her childhood friends who Taba had killed, and used her knowledge of future events to screw over the aliens controlling ‘her’ planet, steal their tech and then throw their leader ‘Zalphar’ out the airlock of it’s own ship. After which she used it’s time travel feature to establish and manage colonies on other planets in the past such that when it finally got to the year she was sent back, she had successfully propelled their civilization into the space age.

Problem with that story is that she has refused to provide evidence for the existence of said ‘time machine’ and the Acirians deny any involvement with the Azulians and claim such technology doesn’t exist. And that even if it did, they certainly wouldn't leave it lying around where space-Dexter could get a hold of it.

Thusly, Agatha and the Azulian Empire as a whole are surrounded by more outlandish conspiracy theories than the Clinton family.

A, Plenty of cells: Easygoing, incredibly smart, risk taking, can manipulate himself in and out of most confrontations, altruistic when it’s not detrimental. Claymoor has a developed sense of humor and enjoys messing with people through pranks and psychological manipulation. Firmly anti-antagonistic (overall). Sporadic kleptomaniac.

B, Reduced cell count: Easily irritated, more cautious than normal, less mental capacity (depending on cell loss), competitive, agoraphobic, venomously sarcastic, somewhat ‘unhinged’.

C, Massive cell loss: Self preserving, nearly animalistic, unintelligent, voraciously consumes nutritive material with little care for its origin, violent.

Claymoor was created in a lab, the ****** developed a biological weapon capable or wiping out other life from entire planets in a matter of days. It was designed to use silicon for its cell structure, and scavenge any biological molecules, carbon or silicon based, for material. The cells were controllable because, in the presence of oxygen ,genetic material would break down and trigger cell liquification after a week, leaving hollow silicon spheres and protein soup behind. Grey goo. The weapon was used to purge five pre-space age planets for colonization.

On the third planet purged, a group of cells persisted, originating from an unknown number of mutated variants which had sustained genetic damage from nuclear bombs used as countermeasure. The genetic tag that caused these cells to self destruct was apparently destroyed or inactivated by ionizing radiation. These cells quickly spread, allocating genetic information from various vanquished cells.

Generation two was largely unopposed in the near sterile soup of protein left by the first generation of cells. The ****** had already begun the setup of a colony when the second generation reached their location. The precautionary isolation suits were useless against and all but of the 253 ****** were consumed. The survivor escaped by dumb luck, having returned to the drop ship to retrieve his personal belongings.

The survivor passed by an external camera feed and saw the gelatinous mass begin to creep onto the raised platform. Knowing what the inevitable results would be if he attempted to wait for more crew to board, he took off, the jump jets from the drop ship incinerating everything within a hundred meters. Shortly thereafter, he dropped antimatter power cores from the ship, sixteen in total, around the equator of the planet, leaving nothing more than a molten blob of metal and rock.

Unbeknownst to the survivor, when the jets fired, a single drop of cell goo had splashed into the gasket of the dropship door before it was sealed. Here the cells ate away at the silicone rubber gasket, surviving the short journey to the orbiting station with ease. The exterior of the ship was sterilized with x-rays and antimonic acid.

The cells were unharmed in their protected location, and remained undiscovered. The cells invaded the station, but the relative sterility of the station did not promote rapid growth, forcing the cells to adapt. The cells lived under the floor grating for a time, but soon found the air distribution system, where organic particles and other comestibles were more plentiful.

Suffice to say, the cells quickly evolved into what is now Claymoor, picking up all kinds of alien genetics along the way, improving their genetics until they began to organize themselves into a colony. This colony continued to move as a unit, but the key difference was that the cells began to differentiate to work together more efficiently. At this point, the cell had the ability to see, feel vibrations, and detect temperature. All this took just thirteen days. On day twenty five, the beginnings of a neural network had begun to form, and on day fifty, the cells had a sort of brain, which was learning incredibly fast.

Day 67: An ambassador for the GFUN seized the station with heavy military enforcement on ‘suspicion’ of genocidal crimes. The ambassador that boarded the station was some kind of cephalopod, and cell generation 583 assimilated its genetic material from mucus residue it left behind. Generation 597 had full control of its color and texture, chromophores were developed in the surface layer of cells.

Day 74: The inhabitants of the station, now prisoners, were being removed from the station. Claymoor was becoming sentient. Day 85: The station was all but deserted, a skeleton crew of GFUN officers remained, keeping the systems in order. Claymoor had become fully sentient, and was learning the Standard Language by tapping into communications between personnel. Day 99: Claymoor had a grasp on Standard language, but was nearly out of food. The gardens had been shut down to conserve power.

Day 102: The station was decommissioned, set into a stable orbit, and the last of the GFUN crew scavenged gear and valuables. Claymoor boarded the GFUN ship by disguising as case of valuable lab equipment.

Prior to being assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nona Bellicae held a number of fairly lowly positions within the ever-expanding bureaucracy of the Greater Orpil Flock. While many within her extended family had natural aptitudes that made them ideally suited for some particular role or other, Nona could find no particular role that spoke to her. Bumped from department to department in order to find the right position, by the time she arrived in Foreign Affairs she had a fair understanding of the politics that dominated the other Ministries, along with a string of mostly useful contacts.

Nona was first assigned as a diplomatic envoy, attached to a Ministry Diplomat, that would help oversee the First Application for Membership with the Galactic Federation of United Nations. Disputes within the most prestigious of the Ministries - the Ministry of Harmony, the Ministry of Environmental Concerns and the Ministry of Procurement - regarding the prominence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the age of space travel saw the three reaching an agreement that Something Must Be Done. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs would be purged of their senior leadership, and in its place would sit leaders and officers that could be easily controlled.

Nona Bellicae would be one of those people. Following the tragic death of Ministry Diplomat Graffil in an air-lock accident, along with the grief-stricken suicides of his direct staff and the unexplained fire that consumed a communal habitation area belonging to his relatives on board the MFAV Wings of Hope, Nona was given the field promotion to "Ministry Diplomat". Now the badly damaged, understaffed Wings of Hope limps along to meet up with representatives from GFUN to negotiate their admittance into the - with the interests of the other Ministries firmly in mind, of course.