Species Name: Cel
Human Ancestry: Y
Racial Orientation: Powerful psi-tech and dimensional manipulation, with primitive manipulation of time and a total lack of further advancement. They cannot time travel, I assure you.
Homeworld Type: Their homeworld, a massive ball of dust and rock, is protected with only the thinnest of atmospheres. Massive spires cluster around areas of seemingly minimal importance. Craters are not uncommon. The thin atmosphere allowed countless objects from the void to slam into the planet.
Physiology:
The Cel’s external appearance has changed little from the sample used to produce their species. They are tall, thin, fair skinned things that lack any especially strange variations from the human precursors.
The most striking differences come in their internal organs. They do not require oxygen, food, or water, being capable of surviving entirely on various forms of energy. They include most forms of electromagnetic radiation, and the psionic energies of other lifeforms. It’s not uncommon to see Cel as vampiric creatures. One would be perfectly content to consume the life of another to sustain themselves, were they without other sustenance.
On the subject of energy, Cel generate and manipulate energy with masterful ease. Their minds are finely crafted things that allow the production of great psionic feats. They express little concern regarding the flow of time, thanks to a combination of excellent medical care and advanced technology. Most forego extensive physical training in favour of practicing shooting mind bullets, but there is a certain level of natural leanness that comes with being a Cel.
They possess lips, two eyes, hair, and all of what one would expect from close relatives of humans. Hair colours tend to be dark. Blacks, browns, and so on. Eye colours, in contrast, are often bright, and what one might call dazzling. It’s suiting that such an aesthetically inclined race possesses such graceful appearances.
Government Type: An unusually efficient feudal empire. The emperor or empress sits atop their throne at the desolate homeworld and governs those issues which affect the entire empire, while vassals and vassals of vassals keep themselves occupied with less important occurrences.
History:
A mere hundred Cel awoke from the Great Slumber more than five thousand years ago. Their planet, ravaged and broken, was a barren place where no other species dwelled. It was fortunate that other species were not necessary to survive. Long nights were spent around fires fueled on the soul, and long days were spent scrambling through dust and ash. Spires, impenetrable and ancient, served as a constant reminder that this was not their world. The Cel grew up with two maxims: There is no life. There was life.
They never had to evolve. They had no records of a time before being an enlightened lot. Every Cel, in a most peculiar way, seemed to have awoken with total knowledge of how to control their psionics, a myriad of machines they had never seen, and more that would take entire books to detail. They were not a lot who found themselves particularly concerned with the world around them. Rocks and dust and impenetrable ruins were the only things around, aside from other Cel. Their clothing was all that they owned, and eventually that would degrade and whither away. There was nothing to do except enjoy the company of each other. Nothing changed, not ever. Well, nothing changed until something did, infact, change.
A single tribe vanished. It was not something anyone took note of because, at first, all assumed that tribe was just sitting still, or traveling a lonely path in some particularly desolate places. It was not until there had been no sign of the lost tribe for a total of fifty years that anyone paid attention. Those who took notice investigated the paths that the missing tribe had walked. People often moved between tribes, and walking the same roads for so long forced one to memorize them. It took a mere six years to discover what caused them to vanish.
In place of the lost tribe was a new spire. Unlike the others, it did not have a hide of impenetrable metals. This spire was a smooth, semi-transparent things. Those who discovered it could see winding steps leading from its base to a peak that disappeared into the starry sky. An entrance lay wide open, simple double doors comprised of a hard material they had never encountered before. It was brownish, and decorated with darker lines that traveled in a vertical pattern. The great spiral staircase carried them high above the ground. Some found that they did not have the heart to continue, and had to stop. So massive was the structure that it took a days’ time to reach the summit.
At the summit, those who made it all the way were bathed in light. All around them was a great, celestial map of their solar system. They knew these words, moons and planets and stars. They knew what they meant, too. The lost tribe appeared to be lost forever, but this tower was something new and valuable. It was filled with information, sustenance, and space for every Cel on the planet. Over the many years of aimless wandering, the Cel had reproduced and grown. There were a good 2000 of them now. The tribe that discovered the tower came to a consensus very quickly. Half of their number, a good fifty, would stay with the tower and watch over it. The other half would seek out other tribes and direct them to the tower.
Skip ahead a century. Every Cel lived in and around the tower, feeding off energy it emitted and pondering why it had appeared. The cleverest among them took on the monumental task of reading through the countless documents that seemed to be stored in a great databank within the tower. As far as they could tell, this was a library. Still, the lost tribe was still gone. It would be forgotten over time.
Skip ahead another century. The Cel are no longer detached from their existence, or at least not as badly as before. They understand the need for material objects because of what they have read.
Skip ahead fifty years. A star falls from the sky and slams into the library, punching cleanly through it, rather than toppling it. Two hundred Cel die. They had begun to learn of combat and war, and those who specialized in using their psionics for defense and attack investigated. This was not the first star to fall. Twenty years prior, the stars had lit up and fallen with disturbing regularity. The wisest Cel believed something called a war was happening beyond their world. The stars, more often than not, released Cel-shaped creatures made of gleaming material, not unlike the impenetrable spires. They tried to kill Cel, and were put down, then dissected. None had ever hurt the library, but there was a first time for everything. As Cel warriors converged on the most recent star to fall, six more stars landed at the summit of the library. This was an unprecedented event.
Those who remained at the library were not knowledgeable when it came to using their minds for battle. They fell to the metal creatures and their weapons, things the Cel barely understood, and had not even conceived until witnessing them.
Twenty years later, the Cel lived on, despite this invasion of their most sacred treasure. Their numbers were crippled, and those who now lived were either warrior or scholar, but at least they lived. Now, they had new things to dissect and study. The great library had been damaged, but the contraptions that the metal creatures came to ground in were relatively undamaged. Some, anyway. It took a rough century of recovery and study to figure out what the hell anything was. They saw more contraptions (Not stars, for they had grown out of such foolish thinking.) descend, but they always reached far away lands that the Cel didn’t care for anymore.
The Machine Men feared the glass tower. It was filled with creatures who looked like their ancestors, and fought in a manner that shattered everything they thought they knew about organics. Their broken people united on the far side of this desert world. It was mineral rich, and totally lacking in life. It would have been perfect, if not for the one native species that had felled far too many Machine Men for comfort. The mechanical ones prospered over their modest domain for the two centuries following, always monitoring the glass tower with cautious hope that the Cel within would simply die out. It was a terrifying and panic-inducing thing when, rather than dying out, they used the knowledge in the glass tower and the corpses of Machine Men ships and soldiers to construct their own devices. The Cel refused to be stamped out. They responded to every exterminator team the same as they responded to scouting parties in the first days of planetfall. The organics flung great bolts of psionic energy and tore them apart.
The Machine Men and Cel sat in their stalemate for some time. They simply stared at each other from afar, nervous and twitchy. As knowledge grew, both sides attempted more drastic methods of exterminating the other. First, small armies of warriors would be slain at the gates of Machine Men cities. Then, Machine Men would be ripped apart and turned into scrap at the gates of the glass tower. Cel try to summon a psionic storm, Machine Men snipers foil them. Machine Men try to launch a missile into the glass tower, Cel direct it into space with portals. The only change in pace- The great break in the monotony came in the form of nuclear retribution. The Machine Men were mad with paranoia. They unleashed a salvo of missiles against the Cel, and the Cel redirected them once more, but this time they turned them upon one of the great spires. Over time, the scholars and teachers had begun to question the presence of the eternal structures that had been with them since their awakening. Their plan succeeded. One of the spires was cracked open, and it began broadcasting a distress signal to creatures no longer present. They would not come, but Machine Men and Cel would.
The Cel got to the spire first, and they looted all the knowledge it contained. The bloody war that was fought over the remaining spires was the worst that the Cel would see in all their years, and perhaps the bloodiest they would ever have. It took a hundred Machine Men to kill a Cel, but every Cel was precious, and Machine Men were not. They could be manufactured by the thousands. In the end, the Cel would be relying on the technology stolen from the first spire, and now many others, to win the war. The Machine Men were ready to deal with psionic bullshit, yes, but they were in no way prepared for the full force of the technology found in the spires. How strange it would have been to any other species to witness! The Cel learned how to manipulate time and create pocket dimensions before they learned how to build starships.
The Machine Men fell... with time. The Cel committed unspeakable atrocities to end the war, though. Their people had become an inquisitive, bright race before the endless rivalry with the Machine Men. The all-consuming conflict turned them into conquerors and dictators. With the secrets of technology available, they ripped open their planet for its resources and made a great harvest. No longer were they doomed to be nomads, now they were rulers. The Machine Men had taken the lives of Cel, yes, but they had also provided the means for advancement. The Cel would forgive them long after they had gone extinct. They set to the task of making order out of this ruinous planet. They constructed dark, sleek void ships with crystal cores. They built cities around the spires, and a capitol around the glass tower. They refined their understanding of time and space to the point of weaponizing it. Perhaps the Cel did not have a great understanding of sciences grounded in the material universe, but none could question their power of psionics, time, and dimensions. Their cities were unassailable, dark fortresses citadels. Their ships were looming, black war machines. Their weapons were their minds, and potent energy blades that cut through armour and flesh with ease. Their armour was lightweight, shadowy, and bolstered with shields produced by manipulation of space.
The Cel ascended into the void and laid claim to planet after planet, tightly gripping five solar systems, then ten, then twenty. Their expansion finally grinded to a halt after acquiring thirty, but not of their own will. No, the Cel’s struggle to be a unified and powerful species was not over yet. They expanded faster than they developed an efficient, interstellar government. As a direct result, the outermost colonies erupted into rebellion against the homeworld and its closest solar systems. Fleets of dark voidships dueled over planets and moons for years, Cel died, automatons were reduced to scrap, and psionic storms raged. Just as the balance began to tip into the favour of the autocratic, imperialist homeworld, an anomaly drew the attention of both sides of the war. One of the moons, a strategically important body that was adorned with gleaming cities, had gone dark in an instant. Investigators went missing, and a cease fire was called to ascertain the nature of this disturbance.
They found their cities. They found empty spires and citadels that no longer held a single soul. The cease fire was allowed to extend for months in light of this. Millions had vanished, seemingly overnight. This had to be addressed. Warriors inspected every meter of the moon in an effort to find any answers. No answers came, only more questions in the form of a vault. At the moon’s seat of government sat a citadel, and beneath the citadel sat a vault. It appeared to have been excavated by the Cel who dwelled upon the moon before they vanished. The rebels offered to devote their surplus of scientists, who they had garnered through talk of freedom and democracy, to the task. The imperial Cel allowed this, and withdrew from the moon with a cunning plan to break the ceasefire pact. They nearly did, too.
The imperial fleet assembled for a devastating crusade into the heart of rebel territory, but it was called off in a turn of events that left the entirety of the Cel’s nation destabilized. Not only was contact lost with the labcoats and military personnel on the moon, but with that entire solar system. After a final message was received from the vault and those who investigated it, that system’s sun detonated as a supernova. Billions died in the cataclysmic event, centers of trade vanished, fleets burned, and the population of the race as a whole dropped far too much for comfort. The final message, a chilling secret kept to this day, was merely this: Lost Tribe discovery, urgent.
After the initial shock of this event’s implications, the imperial Cel produced an elaborate cover-up and swiftly reunited their empire. This time, an iron grip would be kept on all, and they would oversee all secrets and relics.
Now, the Cel are an interstellar feudal state that practices some rather extreme autocracy, and stands at the admirable, but not incredible, size of 29 solar systems. They spy frequently, assassinate often, keep a huge military on hand, and can be described as shadowy and untrustworthy.