[Cosmosdex] The Universal Encyclopedia
[Cosmosdex]
Pylvet
Vagabonds / Eternal Hunters
Pylvet
Art by, Aellivi
- Strength-7
- Intelligence-3
- Charisma-2
- Endurance-5
- Agility-5
- Luck-4
Common Jobs: Hunter, Mechanic
Likes: Independence, Travel, Combat
Dislikes: Uniformity, Urban environments
Attack Method: A balanced mix of melee and ranged combat with swords and guns.
Attributes
Homeplanet: KanostLifespan: Indefinite
Size: 5.10 ft tall
Diet: Sunlight, Meat, Seafood
Bodytype: Tailed Bipedal
Type: Plantoid Avian Mollusk
Social Class: Low Class
Rarity: Rare
Common Traits
This character is very good at adapting to new environments, but can't stand not moving on. A bit restless by nature.
This character is resourceful with foraging, hunting, and trading in many sectors, and are likely to share their expertise with crew members.
This character is slow to trust others and may not understand sincerity or integrity, believing that people must be motivated by self-interest. They may disobey orders or go against their own crew because they believe they are trying to trick them.
Physical Description
Pylvets are bipedal mollusk shells protecting their plantoid insides. Their faces have an armor-like exterior that covers all parts of their face but their eyes, which are draped in shadow. Similar to a helmet, they have a cone-like protrusion acting as a visor for their eyes, which is often ridged like a seashell. Vines extend out from under their helmets like hair. The amount, size, and placement of a pylvet's eyes have no consistency, and they slightly glow.
While pylvets can photosynthesise, most of their nutrition comes from eating. The mask part of their armor is the one detachable piece of their bodies, and removing it exposes their mouths. If lost, this piece of their armor cannot regrow. Pylvets often prefer to have something covering their mouths, and it's not unheard of to see those with lost mask pieces replacing it with artificial versions or other pylvets'.
They have avian legs and feet. Their toes are made of exposed vines except for their claws, which are sharp, conical tips. Their arms, sprouting from pauldron-like pieces of their shell, consist of exposed vines, varying from just one pair of large vines to several interwoven vines. While pylvets are flightless, they have tail feathers consisting of long and sharp plates. The shell of a pylvet can be any color or pattern, but they are most commonly reminiscent of seashells and nautiluses.
Pylvets lay about 20 eggs at a time, and they hatch into empty and near-lifeless shells that look like a snail's shell. These shells can survive in harsh weather and moderate physical assault, able to survive for several centuries before losing the ability to sustain true life. A pylvet does not start properly living from this shell until a plant seed of any kind is placed inside it.
The shell reacts with the plant seed to create a sentient pylvet, and this is the point in time where most pylvets would consider themselves properly "born", referring to it as germination. The plant seed will sprout, and it and the shell will morph together to create an infant pylvet, which looks like a snail with flesh made of plants. They mature into fully-developed adults extremely quickly, with the common amount of time being only a month and a half.
What a pylvet's vines look like are heavily dependent on the plant seed used to germinate it. A strawberry seed, for example, would make its vines airy, thin, and bundled together, with occasional strawberry plant leaves sprouting out from the vines. An acorn would make the vines thick and without bundles, with occasional oak leaves sprouting out from them. These vines, if they are fitting of the plant, can flower and even fruit if properly pollinated. Pylvets commonly braid their hair if it's thin enough to comfortably do so.
Pylvets rarely wear clothes, but can be found wearing accessories like necklaces, anklets, and occasionally capes. Any cloth they wear is typically bright and colorful.
Personality
Pylvets are a race of vagabonds who live independent and adventurously. This is the lifestyle they thrive on, and many will comment that living any other way feels wrong.
They live and work alone. This solitude is most common, but they are not necessarily adverse to social interaction- close-knit bands of pylvets that live and travel together exist in not-unheard of amounts. However, due to the nature of their birth and the fact that no pylvet is from their own homeworld, one could easily live their whole life without meeting a single other pylvet.
Yet there are some consistencies. Almost all are skilled fighters who carry both a sword and a gun on them. While they believe in function over fashion, many of their weapons are flashy, spitting out brightly colored lasers or slashing foes with a glowing blade. Often times, when they partner with someone, it is temporary and purely out of circumstance; pylvets are expected to be self-sufficient.
This also extends into their extremely short childhoods, where they are hatched and germinated without any parental supervision. They are born alone and the children must figure out how to survive in their environment or die.
As adults, they know almost everything needed to survive. Quartermasters well-versed in many environments, they are able to efficiently find food and build shelter in the wild, even if with no starting equipment. Additionally, many know mechanics and are comfortably able to repair weapons, ships, and robots. They learn these skills both from personal experience and the aid of Circles scattered across the universe.
As no pylvet is from their own homeworld, their government system is extremely scattered, consisting of embassy-like organizations called Circles. There are a handful on most populated planets, and each location has separate leaders from the other. Circles demand very little from a pylvet but provide valuable resources to them. They are non-profits that exist for the benefit of pylvetkind. Becoming registered with a Circle is optional, but in return, it provides proper identification and free access to its amenities. A pylvet can only be registered with one Circle at a time, though the process of changing Circles is free and fairly easy.
Circles offer lessons and goods in survival. Any uneducated pylvet registered with a specific Circle can go in and be taught via workshops how to build a fire, fight a dangerous animal, or related tasks for free, as well as be given free access to its questboard. Pylvets and aliens are able to go in and submit requests for jobs, varying from mundane pet walking to the more common and high-stakes- typically big fauna hunting. While anyone can sign up for a Circle workshop or use its questboard, both to post and take quests, aliens and non-registered pylvets must pay for a lesson or to take a quest. Workshops, the questboards, and the occasional sale of weapons and other goods is generally a Circle's only source of income, yet it is an effective one.
They are the closest thing to a pylvet-only society, yet they offer very little in terms of an organized culture. A lack of organization is the heart of pylvet culture itself, as both Circles and individual pylvets encourage gaining core values through personal gravitation, not by being taught by the family one might have been born with. Not even Circles provide organized culture like cuisine, holidays, or customs.
Most pylvets live off the land and travel frequently. They rarely call a single place home and are perfectly content to be homeless. While Circles are good for teaching survival skills, few are good readers and even fewer have a proper education. While they can usually read basic literature and a Circle's questboards, expecting a pylvet to read or write anything complicated is a reach.
Pylvets usually take jobs related to fighting or manual labor. While they rarely take salaried jobs, they can be gig hired, and many fit into the niche of hunting large and dangerous fauna. If not hunting animals, clockworks, anomalies, and people are common, and a staggeringly large amount of pylvets are hired to hunt outlaws in particular. Due to their technological know-how, being hired as mechanics is also not uncommon. Despite this, the income of a pylvet is usually low, and due to their frugal lifestyles, this is not much of an issue to them.
They rarely formally join crews. A lucky pylvet often has their own personal ship, meant for only carrying one or two people at most. They can be hired to tag along and follow a crew in said ship as they value their privacy. If they lack a ship or are convinced to do so through rewards, they can formally join a crew and become a true crewmember, though they might act slightly distant at first.
The exception to almost every Circle and pylvet's way of life is the Circle of Eternity, which is the by far the largest Circle, and, perhaps more notably, is located on a space station orbiting Kanost, the pylvet homeworld. Eternia, Eternity's space station, is the only true pylvet city. While pylvets of every other Circle and those unaffiliated with any tend to live a very rural lifestyle, Eternia is alike a modern city that is both has very little open space and is hard to leave.
While joining a Circle would normally be optional, all pylvets that live on Eternia are affiliated with the Circle of Eternity. Instead of being fighters and travelers, Eternians often live out almost their whole lives on the space station, get a higher education, and take on a salaried job with some kind of business. Almost every other Circle demands very little of a pylvet, but Eternity places an income tax on all its members.
Eternity has scouts around the universe searching for pylvets unaffiliated with any Circle. If allowed, they will bring the pylvet to its space station, give them identification, and allow them to gain education and a job on Eternia, all for free. However, it's hard to leave the space station as Eternity places a monetary fee on all its members who try to do so. Although aliens, as it is impossible for them to become an official member of the Circle of Eternity, are free to come and go as they please, this system strongly encourages Eternian pylvets to stay in Eternia.
Pylvets that manage to leave Eternia and remove their affiliation from the Circle of Eternity are generally free people, but the process of leaving is hostile and tedious. The government system will delay processes, other residents will criticise them, and sometimes they will even get attacked.
Despite this, Eternian pylvets have an almost zealously positive view of Eternity, Eternia, and the reason for the space station's existence. Eternity's main goal is to repopulate Kanost, the homeworld, yet the immense danger of the task and the amount of resources needed requires gargantuan amounts of money, which it acquires through giving Eternia's citizens a higher education and installing a tax to everyone there.
Eternians believe that, by rehabilitating and repopulating Kanost, only then can pylvets truly have a culture. Almost all believe that the scattered nature of the rest of pylvet society is an affront to what pylvets should be. To them, immigrating pylvets to their city, forcing them to integrate into their society, and making it difficult for them to leave is a good thing, despite the sense of wrongness they might personally feel from their own lifestyle. It is difficult for Eternians to comprehend the longing for travel they might feel, or the possibility that the scattered culture that the rest of pylvets follow is, in fact, a perfectly valid culture.
The population of Eternia steadily grows, and there's a certain irony that Eternity fails to realize- in their effort to preserve pylvet culture, they are completely destroying it.
History
Unlike modern pylvets, their ancestors lived on their homeplanet of Kanost. Like them, however, they followed the common culture of living on their own, traveling the planet, with even the biggest towns consisting of a few thousand people. Early versions of Circles existed and were the reigning governments of the pylvets. They developed slowly, but still lived comfortable lives for their lifestyle.
Until reports started coming in about vicious, near-unkillable monsters. This fauna, called kohans, were long, armadillo-like mustelids about the length of a van, sporting plated backs, and deadly sharp teeth and claws. No gun or sword could defeat them, and their skin was impervious to any weapon the pylvets could throw at them. Towns threw stronger and stronger attacks at them only to realize that not even powerful explosives could kill these animals. The pylvets' strongest weapons, still considered strong by modern standards, could barely make a scratch on them.
Kohans eventually became a planetary issue. They ravaged towns and hunted down pylvets regardless of where they were or who they were with, and they were slowly driving the species to extinction.
While the pylvets had no weapons that would work against them, they had surprising amounts of infrastructure. The Circles of the planet realized that kohans would lose their food sources if all the plantlife on the planet died, yet if there was infrastructure in place to let plantlife regrow after all the kohans starved to death, pylvets would be able to repopulate with their terrible predator gone.
They started mining tons upon tons of salt, and then the pylvets salted every inch of their own planet. As they had expected, the plantlife of Kanost withered and died. Without plantlife to sustain their own bodies, the pylvets, too, stopped being germinated, and all that remained of their species was empty shells waiting for a seed to be placed inside of them. Other species of animals started starving without plants to eat, yet the kohans, again proving themselves to be untouchable and viciously destructive, destroyed the pylvets' infrastructure for regrowth, which consisted of the very last living seeds on the surface of the whole planet. The kohans then buried underground, taking advantage of what the pylvets hadn't considered: subterranean plantlife unaffected by the mass salting.
Centuries passed, the surface of Kanost remained inhospitable, and kohans continued festering underneath. The pylvets had ruined their own homeplanet and failed to kill the one thing they did it for. Unable to germinate themselves, their shells persisted on the surface for this time until an alien exploratory crew landed, took some shells, and left, luckily staying for such little time that they were unaware of the monstrous fauna living on the planet.
The shells were sold to separate buyers, scattering them across the universe. Only after several years did interstellar society discover that the shells would grow into a sentient species when combined with plant seeds, which almost all in possession of the shells took advantage of. The now-germinated pylvets eventually rallied together and secured specieshood for themselves.
Crews returned to Kanost to harvest more of the curious pylvet shells. While those that didn't stay too long were able to leave safely, those that did had their ships and people destroyed by kohans attacking from underground, obliterating the first signs of animal life they had seen in centuries. While pylvet numbers continued to grow offworld, Kanost was marked as inhospitable and ships gradually stopped travelling to it.
The unusual nature of the pylvets' introduction to the wider universe meant that their society was extremely scattered. To link them together in at least some manner, they created the first modern Circles. However, several of the pylvets wanted to create a Circle centered around their homeworld, so they formed the Circle of Eternity and built a space station orbiting Kanost in order to safely monitor it.
Eternity functioned like every other Circle except for their clear desire to eventually kill the kohans and repopulate Kanost. Over centuries, and as Eternity's population skyrocketed, the viewpoints of these Circle members became more and more zealous and corrupted, and Eternity eventually morphed into its current state. With good intent, it tries to tell pylvets of what true culture is like and tries to gain money for alien weapons that actually have the capability to kill the kohans.
Their zealousness has become infamous among pylvets unaffiliated with Eternity, calling them extortionists trying to destroy their way of life. Regardless, Eternity's core mission has never changed, and they launch expensive project after project, trying to send drones and occasionally people down to the still salt-covered Kanost to kill the fauna making it inhospitable.
Home Planet
Kanost was once a lush planet filled with many biomes and the occasional town. The ancient pylvets' salting of it was extremely thorough and its effects still persist a millenia after the event, with no sign of wearing off any time soon. All buildings that were once there have been ruined, either destroyed through kohans or dilapidation.
The kohans are widespread underneath the surface of the planet and are able to sense when people and machines move around on it. While visiting the planet for a mere few hours is generally safe, staying for more than a day or two near-guarantees an attack.
Eternia, the de-facto homeplanet of pylvets now, is an extremely large and modern space station resembling of a fancy resort. While its main intention is to spend money on Kanost, it also spends money on itself and the wellbeing of its citizens, resulting in an almost luxurious place to stay. Commerce inside Eternia is heavily regulated and products there are expensively-priced.
Subspecies
None / Unknown.
Special
None.
Trivia
• Pylvets often encourage looting the dead, believing carrying their possessions to be an excellent way to honor them. This is also abused in that pylvets will sometimes take expensive items from the corpse of someone they never knew to "honor" them.
• Eternity usually sends down heavily armed drones down to Kanost to eliminate the kohans, but occasionally they will send down people for more precise tasks. They believe that Kanost should be a pylvet-only planet, but aliens can join pylvet soldiers in highly dangerous quests to kill kohans in exchange for gratuitous pay.
• The endurance and natural armor of the kohans rivals the most hardy creatures in the universe. Most modern weapons hardly scratch them, and only the most powerful (and expensive) weapons can kill them. Eternity has considered using nukes on them, but has refrained as they do not want to further destroy the natural ecosystem of Kanost. So far, at least, kohans only exist on there.
• Most non-Eternian pylvets are aware of why their true homeworld is inhospitable. However, few have a real desire to help Eternity due to the Circle's bad reputation and the lack of any real personal attachment to the planet.
Image Gallery
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