Arawak — Roleplayer Guild

Name of nation: The Tikallite Continuity/(Silent Pact or Silent Imperium depending on who you ask)

Species:

The Tikalites appearance wise are cream orange, eggshell white or silver colored insectoids usually described as somehting comparable to a spider mixed with a praying mantis, but with centuaroid traits (Having two front arms, two back arms and four legs).  Their insectoid design is mixed with their strange head which is comparable to folding leaf.  Size-wise they tend to be around a meter in height, though they often hover about the place using maglev tech.  The Tikalites organically are still existent, but many of them have much more advanced post-Tikalite forms instead nowadays and have what amounts to telepathy in these post-forms.  The Tikalites tend to stay in space, interacting mostly in space stations and rarely ever going into a planet’s gravity well which they view as a death trap.  Not all Tikalites think this way- there are Tikalites who attempt the ‘resettle a new world’ path (foolishly, to the Tikalites with Archiver related agendas) to varying levels of success or crushing failure (the latter of which being used as horror stories as to why no new home worlds should be made).  The Tikallites reproduce via internal fertilization and egg purses that become nymphs who often get the more dangerous tasks because they know so little- thus if they get captured and have their memories jacked, there will be little to no gains for their enemies who always are precieved to be hunting for their constantly shfiting wherabouts.

Description of government: They are ran much like a corporation, with a deep seated agenda that operations all follow.  They are more of a organization of like minded individuals who act in the shadows and strike from the shadows in their mission to get their long awaited retribution.  The rulers tend to be seated individuals in a somewhat oligarchal system with rigorous requirements to have authority- often seniority and a record of achievements in operations is a must to even be considered.  On the field commandos and operatives tend to act rather autonomously and this has meant defections have happened before- but said defectors can expect to become targets of their former friends who now view them as traitors.  The Silent Imperium itself behaves much like a decentralized police state as there is no citizens, there is no civilians.  Only operatives, researchers and engineers.  One as a nymph can be expected to be indoctrinated of the travsities and evils of the galaxy and the grand mission to kill god and going out on the field quite a bit as the young are ignorant and less valuable to capture.  One who survives the operations that involve direct interraction with outside entities and rakes up a reputation moves on to more managerial roles.  There is some freedom of speech, but it is viewed as priviledge more than a right and autonomous behavior is actually quite common for the older Tikallians, with small groups abusing said freedoms on a unsuspecting populous or explorer in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Description of military: The Tikallite military is more or less a black ops unit that has a widespread presence.  Their technology tends to use anti-matter as a suicide pact weapon.  Their spacecraft are not really classified, however they do use carriers, destroyers and specialist craft on a regular basis. They don't have a military designed for major engagements, instead they work on shock doctrine and surgical strikes.  The military basically uses the fast FTL to make itself seem far larger than it really is.  Their military is less a military and more the 'hard' branch of the operations of the Tikalli, especially with the Silent Pact.  For infantry engagements they use ion-based weaponry, particle pistols and all manner of gadgetry aimed at cryptic death.  Stealth devices they have plenty of, mainly working around heat masking.  

The Pact's Military is not known for being large, instead it is known for consisting of a multitude of strike teams instead of fleets.  For they just don't see much need for large standing fleets given their effectively nomadic operations and outpost network not being conducive towards the traffic of large fleets.  This is a hamper in that it means major fleet engagements are something the Pact simply cannot sustain despite their various technologies advantages and instead is reliant on surgical strikes, subversive operations and terror ops to fulfill objectives.

Subversive Ops
Subversive Ops are spying and propaganda oriented operations designed to alter the galactic political situation to be in favor of the Silent Imperium's Interests, that is the destruction of the Dominion and pacification of potential galactic evils before they can grow further.  

Terror Ops
Terror Ops are used to inflict actions of destruction in order to invoke actions on part of the target entity to destabilize domestic and international situations and accelerate the decline of an enemy civilization, ideally causing political fragmentation.  Terror Ops also include False Flag operations under their umbrella.

Surgical Ops
Surgical Operations are primarily smaller scale operations that concern with killing specific individuals or infrastructure with directed aims as a prelude to a larger scale attack.

Death Ops
Death Operations simply are operations carried out with the intentions of depopulating a sector and usually are carried out using chemical, nuclear or psychological WMDs.  Such Operations are exceptionally rare as no steps towards the removal of the Chelonians has gone to the last phase as of the current time.

Technological Overview: Tikalites lack any real empires, instead they have networks of activity about the galaxy that is given a force multiplier due to having very, very fast FTL compared to other cultures and they have done a great job of keeping a secret by rigging their FTL systems with anti-matter fail-safes that at times back fire horrifyingly.

  You might still get ahold of one if you can befriend and gain the trust of a Tikalite (I dare you to betray a Tikallite and see what happens).  The Tikalite are notable for being effective at cyber warfare or at least have been able to integrate individuals who are effective at it.  They have methods of decryption that work on even quantum computers.  The Tikalli tech is advanced, but their ships are not made for sustained combat, instead they are made for surgical/hit-and-run strikes.  They are reliant on a powerful shield system but have relatively fragile hull.  Tikalli spacecraft tend to be triangular in shade with three glowing lights.  The Tikalli tend to build infrastructure in interstellar space on isolated asteroids and planemos or near brown dwarfs and late-M dwarfs.  Generally nurseries are simply large spacecraft with living habitats and sometimes double as carriers (For there is no such thing as a 'civilian' spaceship with the Tikali).  Their ships are made to be hard to identify from a distance and stealth technologies like cloaks and dematerializers are used frequently by their operatives and agents.

In terms of magic, they are not a magical species at all.  Instead they have managed to make use of occult artifacts from prehistoric societies from time to time.  The most notable is the dematerializers that allow them to basically disassociate from this plane of existence for a brief period of time to spring ambushes or simply to hide from attackers who may presume them destroyed when a Tikalli ship uses its dematerializer (However, only the specialist surgical strike craft have these dematerializers- more conventional stealth systems are what all the other ships use).

The Tikalli also make use of many spaceships they hijacked and stole the identity of (people who mysteriously vanish into deep space at times may come back only to kill someone important) for assassination plots in order to circumvent security measures.  For the Tikali use their methods of indoctrination on other species as well, primarily for making sleeper agents and converting members of other species to their cause, sometimes by force other times because someone out there seeked out them (and the general protocol with the Tikali, especially with the Silent Imperium is that you either work for them from there on out or be terminated as a security measure).  

The explicit nature of their FTL system is based around Jumping, very fast jumps from points in space that passively charge and can be charged with multiple jumps at once (but jumping too frequently tends to cause a anti-matter melt down).  However, making two jumps in quick succession can be done if they have delayed the jump long enough.  These jumps are very rapid and occasionally even used to "teleport" in space engagements, though they usually can get away with that once and anymore risks making it impossible to retreat.  

-The Blink Drive
The Blink Drive is the more coveted indigenous technology of the Tikali, iterated upon frequently to improves its abilities and is viewed as the technology that saved the whole Tikali Species from total extinction.  There are plenty of poems and songs that just dedicate themselves to the Blink Drive and the freedom it has given the Tikali to go about the stars at astounding rates and with a precision very, very few other drives match.  These drives are one of the most guarded secrets the Tikali have and often make new ones in the nightmare scenario of a Blink Drive being reverse engineered as the last thing the Tikali want is another civilization that has these drives.  The drives are even rigged with emergency anti-matter detonators to prevent them from being stolen.  The Silent Imperium has a monopoly on Blink Drives for the most part and non-Silent Imperium affiliated Tikali usually are handed outdated models out of fear that outsider factions may exploit them.  The general trend with Blink Drives is to be able to make more jumps than longer jumps as the Blink Drives allow their ships to use FTL in smaller scale engagements, often to increase or decrease distance suddenly and change the mode of battle or to evade missile attacks.  

-Dematerializers
One of the very few magical devices the Tikali use, the Dematerializers are engineered from the ruins of a ancient civilization found on the fringes of the galaxy.  Making more of the devices would prove to the hard part as the Tikali don't understand magic, they weren't even aware magic was possible until they came across it in the stars and despite attempts to make psionics, have never succeeded in doing so.  However, appropriating magitech they have made much more success in.  Dematerializers temporarily disassociate a spaceship from reality, making it immune to being hit.  However it also is not able to change movement vector or attack back, meaning that it is more used as a dodger than a evader in terms of defense systems (by dematerializing so a missile attack harmlessly flies right through the ship).  However, the Dematerializer also finds lots of use as a ambush device as it is extremely hard to detect and can force enemy craft into close range engagements that they don't get first shot in.  Due to Dematerializers being appropriated tech, they tend to only be used on specialist space craft where more conventional stealth/distortion methods are in use.  

-Ionic Weaponry
Ionic weapons are very common with the Tikali.  The rifles themselves look somewhat like tuning forks and the width of these tuning forks determines how much concentration the plasma has.  Ionic weapons are known for not being loud, instead having a eerie hum as they project a multitude of charged particle clumps at relativistic speeds.  Ionic weapons have the draw back of not being terribly effective against lightly armored targets (however the death for a flesh only target is known to be drawn out and painful as their insides get slowly fried), despite the damage they do to conventional energy shields or heavily armored targets that lack certain protections.  They switch between a carbine-like mode and a sub-machine gun mode at the will of the wearer.

-Radiation Beam Weaponry
In assassination missions, radiation beams tend to be the weapon of choice.  Radiation beams can penetrate through walls, but not concrete bunkers.  The idea of a radiation beam is to snuff lives out from a distance without any contrails.  Radiation beams come in two flavors.  The Microwave beams which penetrate further but kill more slowly and painfully, usually best used on people in their sleep or in slow moving armor.  They need to be held on the target for a several seconds, though it still inflicts injuries and can be used repeatedly.  It is a bit messy with all the brain splattering, but it works well enough. The other beam used is the gamma ray beam which is highly energetic and tends to incinerate targets immediately, but tragically has the problem of taking too long to reload and being a bit heavy (It has to be set up unlike the other snipers the Tikali make use of).  The Gamma Rays have the effect of fanning out, and so is often used to kill a group of targets in a dense concentration at once.  Collateral damage is a frequent problem with the Gamma ray snipers and so is usually reserved for situations where the target must die.  Gamma Rays can be shielded from or dodged by sheer luck.   Sometimes however, the Tikali may use a less showy but gruesome device for dealing death like much more primitive, but tried and true gauss-based sniper rifles.  This is mainly for the semi-auto firing that they can't figure out how to do with the gamma ray or microwave snipers.

-Electromagnetic Weapons
Despite the existence of Ion and Radiation weapons, the Tikali at times still use gauss weapons that are highly refined and known for having a sturgeon-like precision.  Often used with Carbines and usually loaded with immolation roads (which are basically projectiles that super-heat on hitting their targets) these weapons find frequent use in situations where Ionic weapons are rendered less effective due to environmental interference.  Less advanced Tikali groups usually have these as well, when they aren't using gyrojets anyways.

-Antigravity/Void Tech
Antigravity is something the Tikali have achieved in their dark matter experiments in the void of space.  Anti-gravity actually caused a major technological revolution for them as the Tikali started obsessively using anti-gravity in their brown dwarf stationed outposts and engine systems.  Antigravity is used frequently by Tikali agents to see eye to eye with the larger species out there and as a means of freeing up their aim/movement on land via anti-grav suits.  (The Tikali often combine their anti-gravity with jet packs when they want to 'sprint')  Anti-gravity, or more accurately Void based technology is used in spacecraft to alter trajectory without having to use thrusters but can't be used as a thruster in of itself, meaning it isn't a full-on reactionless drive as acceleration/deceleration still relies on fusion based thrusting systems.  The implication of this is that their trajectory can't be predicted simply by looking at their thrust as the Void shift trajectory shifting is silent.

-Gravitational Beams
The manipulation of dark matter has led to exceptionally strange and deadly devices for he heavier weaponry of the Silent Imperium.  Of these deadly devices is the gravity beam, which amplifies gravitational forces on targets it hits to implode enemy spacecraft.  These beams can be seen coming and usually are used against capital ships anyways, as they aren't cheap to deploy.  Using them on planetary targets also tends not to be an option due to the gravity wells interfering with a shot.  It is strongly believed that this is another occult device given how irregular their use is. 

-Microjets
The Tikali even early on always were a dare devil society.  One joke with the Tikali goes that they would have wiped themselves out in increasingly retarded stunts if it wasn't for the genocidal war the Dominion waged on them.  Such stunts would have likely used microjets.  The Tikali despite their rather fragile frame really like moving rapidly, having a strong stimulation from kinetic movement. Strapping jets to themselves therefore seemed just like a logical conclusion, along with their overuse of roller skates.  Even in modern times the Tikali take up skating hobbies.  Microjets also found military applications in weapons, but their noisiness means that only non-Silent Imperium Tikali go around with rocket machine guns (also usually known as Gyrojets).  Microjets are used mainly on their suits and mirrors in many ways the relationship between the fusion thrusters/Void shifting used in their spacecraft- they use a rather unstealthy acceleration system, but can alter direction without causing ruckus.  Some Tikali, especially the assissin operatives are very advanced at rapidly turning on a dime through mazes while going incredibly fast, no doubt with help from reflexive stimulants.

-Modified Bodies
The Tikeli, due to their fragility in pre-genocide times experimented a lot with making it easier to piece themselves back together.  Losing limbs and eyes was such a frequent problem for them and the general lack of concern for losing limbs, more just the consequences of not having limbs led towards extensive research in making their bodies more modular, so that if limbs fall off they can be re-attached.  Further development was done such that as long as the brain is in-tact and there's enough parts lying around, piecing a Tikali citizen back together so they can continue their life unabated by silly things like smashing into walls or getting blown up in the latest war could be done.  Ironically the Tikali for their advancements in body transplants and prothestics were underdeveloped when dealing with medical diseases due to primarily just having parasite problems they solved by cutting limbs off or having their pet Yulats eat them.

-S&S Systems
Stealth & Shield is the standard for the Silent Imperium, whose whole military philosophy is built around being hard to trail, detect and hitting hard and without predictability.  The shielding systems also act as stealth systems and this is pretty much the case for every Tikali craft short of their stations.  Even their larger craft have stealth shields.  These shielding systems can be detected at closer ranges, but from a distance they are hard to discern from background radiation.  The shielding systems are not that terribly great at taking long-term punishment, but can recharge fast.  On foot, the shielding systems work much more effectively with the only way you ever notice an operative is by sensing their movement or noises.  If the shield barrier is broken, the Tikali becomes visible.

-Gforce Suits
Body suits are frequently used to handle strong G-Forces, higher gravity environments and in general are made to handle harsh conditions a naked Tikali simply couldn't handle.  The Tikali are not known for their armoring, and so their combat suits are more or less oriented to dealing with environmental conditions or deployed biological/chemical weapons than taking hits.  The Tikali are fragile physically and spent their tech not in making themselves tankier but in killing their enemies before they can kill them.

-Proxy Agents
A Proxy Agent is anyone that the Silent Imperium is using, usually of another species, as a proxy for activities in factions that they much prefer go unnoticed and because spying as a non-humanoid alien is annoyingly difficult- the fake bodies are just too awkward in movement and the detectors always find out.  These proxy agents often aren't aware they even work for the Silent Imperium up to when they are committing suicide once their job is complete.  Proxy Agents usually are used to get into secret data.  It can be possible to gleam who a proxy agent is by asking the right questions to them in Silentspeak however.

-Mind Wipers
Devices that can erase minds (causing vegetative death or simply erasing memories) and can be hand held.  These devices have imperfections however, as the muscle memories remain and enough reminders can cause past events to re-manifest in the minds of those with their minds wiped, this applies with the vegetative ones as well. Memory wipers are frequently weaponized and used as a tool of punishment, partial mind wipes what Tikali who want to leave the Silent Imperium's orbit tend to do in order to be free of potential assassination operations on their head (though that doesn't always work in regards to assuaging the fears of those at top).

-The Head of Despair
A mysterious occult artifact that they have only one of.  Its purpose is cryptic, but it is believed to be a channeling device of some sort connected to more magical realms.  The head is apparently hungry for magical beings and any place the head of despair is, magic can expect to be devoured away.  The Tikali, being a rational and scientific species do not believe in magic.  Instead they believe that there is some parallel, aether realm which permeates the universe that manifests the powers of magical entities that can be tapped into.  Much to the irritance of R&D departments, the Tikali have yet to able to make use of it like they have dark energy or antigravity.  The Head of Despair, found in the ruins of what was once believed to a powerful civilization built on ethereal energies however, is their best answer to a magical enemy.  It devours magic, and the Tikali just don't know why or if they should know why.  It is a very creepy thing, with its devilish grin and sophisticated tribalesque cultural markings.  The head's most dangerous trait however, is the mental contagion it inflicts on anything that stays near it too long.  It is known to cripple the minds of those near it and can spread severe depression like a plague.  This last trait is what keeps the head of despair from being used much, it is a severe risk to simply have around let alone use frequently.  Most often it is kept inside a hollowed out asteroid outpost in the middle of nowhere, just so no one has to deal with it.

Cultural Overview: The Tikalites are nominally traders and game players- they are prone to arranging scenarios for other individuals.  It is not sure why they have such an aggressively inquisitive culture that goes around harassing space going folk with weird games and tests or waging silent wars against nebulous opponents.  The Tikallites are a individualistic culture and don't have terribly high populations, but the obsession with the grand mission is something that is like their faith at this point.  They act on fulfilling their grand revenge against god- or the aliens that destroyed their home world.  This grand mission is ongoing as they have yet to fulfill true revenge; that is, to make them suffer as they did.  Chances are in practice they may go the extra step and go for full genocide so that they may finally be able to have a new home world without fear.  That's the ideology, in practice there already has been attempts to establish new home worlds.  These home worlders end up becoming very neutral traders and generally want to get away from the madness of the grand mission since they believe times have changed enough.  Such sanity sadly does not always pervail and the majority of the Tikallian's presence remains firmly as part of the Silent Imperium and those who continue the Grand Mission until it can be completed in earnest.  

The grand Mission evolved to include more determined 'evils' in the galaxy and the shadow war of subversion they wage against these forces, meaning that what they thought would only take a several centuries at most has taken them quite a bit longer.  After so many generations the Tikallians as they advanced and dealt with new galactic events as they came have lost a lot of touch with the initial motives but believe they are locked into the Grand Mission and cannot act openly until the Grand Mission is fulfilled because it has to be fulfilled and must be fulfilled.  The Tikallians interact in very private channels at best and believe that something may always be monitoring them as an assumption going in.  

The Tikallians are not culturally homogeneous.  Silent Imperium tikali are what this sheet focuses on most, but they are not the only Tikali culture.  Indeed, the Tikali traditionally have a more short lived, vibrant mode of society and the long term nature of the Silent Imperium is anomalous.  Even with the Silent Imperium despite the Grand Mission various 'side-missions' still keep getting embarked and at times it's a wonder as to why they don't just get on with wiping out the Dominion beyond their usual infrastructure sabatoge/random assassination of bureaucrats or arbitrary torture of the occasional Dominion citizen that all somehow ties to the Grand Mission as per the whole reason the Silent Imperium exists in the first place.  One theory Dominion intellectuals occasionally spout is that the Silent Imperium has no intentions of ever completing the Grand Mission, something that even the Tikali who abandoned the Silent Imperium even deny to ever be the case.  In their minds it's more than they just are poor planners and suffer from being too damn cowardly.

The overarching belief system of the Tikallians is based around an idea of reciprocal morality, punishments often tend to be the same as what the criminal did with certain exceptions.  A poor thief for instance usually ends up as a debt slave.  Murderers get murdered, humilators get humilated, harrassers get harassed and so on.  The Tikalians follow a rather black and white way of looking at the world where there is evil and good and that moral relativism does not exist.  Good and Evil in a way, is viewed as a currency in of itself with evil being defined as harmful actions inflicted on others while good is acting in alturism.  There is a large neutral zone of behaviors that simply aren't viewed as good or evil and thus there is remarkably few taboos.  Self-harm or behavior that is reckless is usually not viewed as a problem until it harms others.  Evil actions allow for evil to be inflicted on the perpetrator, while good actions should be recipricated with good actions back.  If not, there is a injustice.  This moral system is the crux for why despite seeing harming others as evil, the Tikali believe themsleves morally justified in wanting to kill almost every Chaleonian.  Their kind has a debt of evil that needs to be paid.  The Tikallians for this same reason tend to be more cautious with other societies in how they conduct themselves since they don't want to rack up an evil debt against other civilizations...  In practice the Silent Imperium has done just that on multiple occassions in their various incidents that were justified as part of the Grand Mission to wipe out the Dominion.

Moral relativism is frequently viewed just a way to justify evil.  Despite this in terms of social norms they can be shockingly liberal, though the sedate and professionalistic nature of the Silent Imperium can hide this.  It's the Tikallians outside the Silent Imperium who tend towards seemingly being fine with anything, and if anything, overly tolerant by the standards of many.  If it is non-harmful to others it's not seen as a problem.  The Tikali can be very judgemental of other species as a result, often frustratingly so unless you can manage to phrase things in their moral outlook.  Some strange, wry Tikallians have even been known to arrange games to see just what another species does in X situation as to see if they may be a future danger or a potential ally in the Grand Mission (but the Silent Imperium is more interested in working with other societies who the Dominion has done evil to).

Tikallite social customs are pretty simple and they don't seem bothered when dealing with other species however weird.

Tikallite Languages are a mixture of what cultures the last three million Tikali had and thus is a mess of inconsistent loan words.  Regional dialects and new languages started appearing as Silent Imperium and unaffiliated Tikali culturally and linguistically drifted, but one of the most spoken Tikali languages remains the mess of many mandibles that is SIlentspeak.

History: [[Disclaimer: This history is a placeholder.  I need to view this RP's lore more and arrange things to see who can fill the roles the Sprawl, Diovermes and so on originally had in their earlier history.]] The Tikalites first appeared thousands of years ago.  They managed to advance to a very considerable level and notably had a talent with making very fast Interstellar Drives, an inclination of their kind.  They still got invaded by the Sprawl 10500 years ago, but were able to keep an interstellar guerrilla resistance going for centuries that the resources a full conquest would have could not be devoted to.  When the Annihilation happened however, the Tikalite’s pluckiness faltered and they nearly were wiped out- nearly 90% of their population simply gone overnight.  The surviving nomads, advanced from their arms race in dealing with the Sprawl would go into obscurity.  

The Tikalites however, did not have contempt for the Sprawl- they gained contempt for the Diovermes.  As it was the Diovermes who wiped out their home world and most of their civilization as a collateral.  The Tikalites managed to reproduce and grow once more, but did so at the rim of the galaxy and never really settled back into having explicit colonies.  Instead the Tikalities remained mostly nomadic with a network of outposts and non-centralized activity that would be a huge issue in maintaining conformity.  At the same time, this network allowed for the development of many of their more advanced technologies based on ancient devices found in the fringes of the stars.  The founding effect of the mass extinction and all remaining Tikalites taking the same oath to go on the Grand Mission until it is complete helped, but over the next several thousand years with the foundation of the Silent Imperium and their shadow conflicts with multiple powerful societies who they believe may threaten their existence down the line the hollowness have begun being more evident.  But they still move onward, convinced that the Grand Mission is nearing its last operation.

It’s unknown what their end game is, the Tikalites likely don’t even know.  Make a galactic empire that is good instead of evil, continue as things are but without hostilities, resettle a new world when the Grand Mission is finally complete and start over?  It’s hard to really know where to go and they don’t really think about it as they need to make sure they finish their current objective first, which is the completion of the Grand Mission.

Other: Which factions can fit the bill of being the bastards who nearly wiped their kind out so long ago?  Be warned my faction basically will be enemies of your kind to the end of time and will never stop in their grand mission to make the galaxy a better place by ridding the galaxy of 'evil'.
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oZode's ghost

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