Imagine spending over ten years working on a sci-fi setting/story and only developing one of the supposedly numerous alien species in the setting until very recently. Couldn't be me. (It's me.)

Anyway, as of this week, the third new species for The Eating of Names is a go! They're called evvat'sa-i (plural; the singular is evvat'sa and the demonym is evvat'sa-nin), they resemble caterpillars/slugs with many pairs of limbs, and they're the survivors of a nuclear winter thanks to their homeworld's deep cave networks and thriving subterranean biosphere. They also didn't develop FTL tech on their own. Rather, they were just starting to explore their star system with STL tech when the rest of the then-young People's United Interstellar Council stumbled upon them and decided to violate the Prime Directive from Star Trek (which doesn't exist in this setting, resulting in many Tangled Ethical Quandaries™️ regarding technological and biological uplifting, both of which the evvat'sa-nin civilization went on to become pioneers in, to much in-universe controversy).

I also now have an evvat'sa-nin character for the main cast! Their name is Va'rish-eph and they're a talented multi-species medical doctor who got blacklisted from the industry for saying they'd provide medical care to someone even if they were a varsit and an enemy of the PUIC. Now they run a back-alley clinic for those who can't afford to get care through official channels (sadly, for-profit medicine is alive and well in at least some of the PUIC member states). And then they get a chance to do exactly the thing that got them blacklisted lmao, which is how they get involved with the protagonist squad. Also I'm debating the idea of Va'rish-eph having an unrequited crush on Srié, pending the development of lore on how evvat'sa-nin social dynamics tend to work. I have extensive lore on how varsit social dynamics tend to work (both in a vacuum/naturally and in the context of the Imperium/unnaturally), but since the evvat'sa-i are new I haven't quite decided yet.

Earlier today, I did something I haven't done in a very long time: I finished writing something! Namely, a ship fic about two of my Lancer OCs that started out intended as a crack ship and quickly ballooned into 11k words about the beginning of what is definitely no longer a crack ship. You can find it here!

It feels so good to have actually completed something! Granted, it's unedited, and the AO3 version linked above is in desperate need of HTML formatting, but those can come later when my ADHD isn't making my eyes glaze over at the thought of doing so.

Fuck, it feels SO GOOD to be worldbuilding again. I have ideas for stuff I’ve been procrastinating on fleshing out for years! A whole two new species have emerged for The Eating of Names, and I already have a ton of ideas for one of them!

The robot species (faiehn) has outlived the species that built them and now some of them worship their extinct creators! There's a lot of different religions practiced by faiehn across the galaxy, but reverence of the builder species is a common (but by no means universal) theme. They also use the slowest-to-set-up method of FTL in the setting, which is wormhole gates. The reason wormhole gates are slow to set up is because you have to send out an STL expedition to build the damn things first, but since the faiehn are machine life, the only thing that'll kill them is irreparable damage or malfunction, so they have the luxury of not needing generation ships to do STL missions. Or, at least, that's how it was done before the faiehn made contact with other species in the galaxy. Now that they're part of the People's United Interstellar Council (big pan-galactic alliance that was opposed to and in a cold war with the Imperium of Varsit), they have access to other species' FTL methods and use those for their gate-builder expeditions.

The plant species (tocala) is carnivorous and radiotrophic, and they have colorful flowers and stabby mantis arms! They come from a planet with a less protective atmosphere than most inhabited worlds, which is nevertheless covered in megaflora with a thriving biosphere and very little in the way of urbanization (the cities on their homeworld are built around and inside the megaflora while doing minimal harm to said flora). They use Alcubierre drives for FTL travel, and tocala FTL drives are what gives the Republic of Bequver the idea for how to modify their own FTL method to be more ethical, albeit slower than what the Imperium was capable of with their crueler FTL method.

Though I'm having some difficulty figuring out how a civilization of motile flowering plants would view their non-sapient pollinator animals. Maybe they've figured out a way to cut out the middleman and pollinate themselves. Relying solely on pollinators would probably reduce their ability to spread across the stars, but also, that could be interesting to work into the setting. Either way, the tocala would definitely have very different views and practices surrounding reproduction than animal life generally does, considering they kind of just reproduce passively rather than deliberately. Also, would it be taboo to eat a pollinator animal? Many things to consider...