Yasha Cadera
Mom'alor
Hetikles Baatir (Carers of Burning Sensations in the Sinuses)
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATIONIntent: To increase the playability of the Hodasal System as a Mandalorian location & to enrich the culture of a custom planet to hone warriors’ naturalist skills.
To give the Mandalorians a race of monsters to chase on Ashrah.
Image Credit: Pantip | Graphics Stanford | GanjaShark on Deviantart
Canon: N/A
Links:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Name: Hetikles Baatir (Carers of Burning Sensations in the Sinuses)
Designation: Sentient
Homeworld: Ashrah (Hodasal System) Used with permission from [member="Kaine Australis"]
Language: Baat, Mando'a, Basic
Average Lifespan: 250 - 300 years
Estimated Population: Rare
Description:
Gigantic feminist sentient lizards, Hetikles Baatir are hairless, usually bi-pedal warriors, with mottled skin and a strong and noble bearing. Due to the nature of their hip joints, Hetikles Baatir can engage in both bi-pedal and quadra-pedal motion with equal speed. Their constant joy is food, and their economy is based around the humble chili pepper.
They are often seen with their favourite weapons clipped to their belts, or placed on sashes around their shoulders. While the wearing of armour was not natural to Hetikles Baatir until humanoid races came to the Hodasal System, the wearing of animal skins and fine fabrics has become a fashion statement, especially with frivolous males.
PHYSICAL INFORMATION
Breathes: Type 1
Average height of adults: 1.7 - 2.3 m (Males Smaller than Females)
Average length of adults: 1.7 - 2.3 m (Males Smaller than Females)
Skin color: Yellow, green, white, cream, grey
Hair color: N/A
Distinctions:
- Strength: Hetikles Baatir on average carry a strength of 1 to 1.25 that of human male standard in a comparable body size.
- Seter: Grey and white, the Seter clan have articulated crowns atop their heads, like remedial fins. These are gifted with wedge shaped hands for the troweling of tubers and thought to be the superior agriculturalists, while being babied by the Suy, who take care of them for their lack of abilities in hunting.
- Suy: The majority of Hetikles Baatir are fin-less Suy, a grassland-evolving hunter-gatherer group.
- Slinky: Hetikles Baatir are capable of fully articulating every joint, and are natural contortionists.
- Sticky Fingers: The pads of these sentient lizards' limbs naturally suction to anything they're in contact with, making it possible for Hetikles Baatir to cling to nearly any surface, and steal many pocket's worth of things.
- Rejuvenation: As long as the nervous system has not gone through a significant amount of damage, and the spinal cord & brain are still attached, Hetikles Baatir can regrow limbs, and (if the stems of said organs still exist within the body) vital organs. The rejuvenation process must be undergone with concentration, and high-caloric food consumption. It is not an automatic process. The rejuvenation of a laceration or basic injury can be done in minutes of singular concentration. The regrowth of an organ, limb or major injury takes days of consistent meditation and near-constant input of high protein food.
- Spicy Foods: Hetikles Baatir love spicy food and drink to levels which could be considered intolerable to mammalian guests.
- Milk = Poison: Mammalian Milk may be tasty and nutritious to many, but to Hetikles Baatir, it is a lethal and immediate acting poison.
- Hunger: Starve a Hetikles Baatir for more than 5 hours and their joints become brittle, until eventually they lack the mobility to function, and die of starvation, locked in their bodies (full immobilization takes 3 days). This brittling of their joints is only reversible within the first 2 hours, beyond which the patient will have to live with permanent mobility issues.
- Short Sighted: Most Hetikles Baatir are nearly blind, but for artificial means of increasing eyesight (glasses, contacts, laser eye surgery, etc). While artificial means can increase eyesight, the visual spectrum on Hetikles Baatir is not to be completely trusted. This makes them ineffective as scouts, or in situations where smell alone would not be apropos in deciphering who/what/where. Due to this deficiency, any fighting in battle with Hetikles Baatir should equip their troops with certain colognes or scent-based tags.
- Incapable of Using Ranged Weaponry: Would anybody want near-blind creatures using blasters of any kind? As a species, Hetikles Baatir focus on hand-to-hand and pouncing techniques to take down their prey, and are useless with blasters, bowcasters or ranged weaponry of any kind.
- Sensitive Tails: Every enemy needs a target. Damage to the tails of a Hetikles Baatir causes incapacitating pain to the creatures, who will drop everything to protect their appendages.
Diet: Carnivorous & Starch Ridden - If any truth exists on the planet of Ashrah, it is the penchant for Hetikles Baatir to always know where the best food is. Being a voracious species, which must consume food every few hours, or risk their joints becoming immobile and brittle, the Hetikles Baatir are the planet's best chefs, agriculturalists, fishermen and hunters.
The species eats a lot. A LOT a lot. Perhaps this is why the culture has not sustained itself beyond the Hodasal System, or indeed their home planet by and large, without massive moveable pantries, which can produce a feast at a moment's notice. They also keep to the gathering and growing of spices from myriad planets, using chili peppers of varying intensity as a form of currency.
The average Hetikles Baatir feast includes mammalian meats, fish, shellfish, flowers, grains, vegetables, insects and fermented flower liquors.
Communication: Baat (A hissing language used between fellows of the species), Mando'a, Basic.
Having thickly-accented voices when speaking Mando'a and Basic, the Hetikles Baatir nevertheless are completely capable of speaking any language they learn fluently, and without more than a 'hissing' stutter at times.
Technology level: Galactic Standard Level - While development of their own technology is underrepresented within the culture, the Hetikles Baatir have been 'brought up' to the Mandalorian Empire's level of technology and although many prefer analog cooking methods, the majority of tribes are happy to have lightswitches, sunlamps, ships to travel in and blasters to fire.
Religion/Beliefs: Deity Worship - Kad Haran'gir
When the Mandalorians first encountered the Hetikles Baatir, the assorted tribes frolicked under the belief that the lowly tuber plant was god incarnate. So sacred did they consider the tuber plant (aka. Potato), that entire cities in the far reaches of Ashrah were built upon the site of naturally occurring plants. The growth, harvest and preparation of tubers was a religious experience only the most dedicated shamans were capable of performing without dire consequences. Holidays and songs were penned for the tuber, children named after the number of leaves on any given tuber plant, and it was the gentlemen of the house (whose tasks it were to stay at the homesteads and watch the creche young), who anointed their ridges with adornments of dried tuber skins as indication they were ready to mate and aide the next generation of Hetikles Baatir in their creches.
All offspring of the Hetikles Baatir are raised in creches, to mimic the way in which a tuber plant gives off more than one of its' roots, when you pull up its' leaves. This was considered so important, that the villages of the Hetikles Baatir were shaped in the same style as an uprooted tuber plant, and their houses are spherical-and-oblong to maintain a shape reminiscent of their worshipful (and tasty) plant god.
While the adoration of the lowly tuber remains, the Mandalorians came with tales of the Manda, and of Kad Haran'gir, the God of War and Destruction. This got the blood of many Hetikle Baatir females so heated they needed to stop sniffing tuber plants and mate with the nearest males right away!
They dedicated themselves to the worship of War and Destruction (except for tubers), and have become dedicated and fanatical believers in the Manda, and the pantheon of Mandalorian deities.
The Hetikle Baatir view Mand'alor the Infernal as Kad Haran'gir's mouthpiece, and gave to her the greatest of Hetikle Baatir honours:
A massive mashed tuber statue (with skins!) moulded and placed in the centre of each Hetikle Baatir village, to be renewed upon natural degradation, and only eaten in the most honourable of feasts or dire of circumstances.
General behavior: Hetikle Baatir are a warrior race of giant reptilian sentients, who love and adore two things: Battle and Food. A jolly bunch, when both desires have been satisfied, the Hetikle Baatir live their lives within the Mandalorian Empire and their homeworld of Ashrah with chittering songs on their mouth flaps, and a swish of their mighty muscular tails. They will upon any meeting immediately offer to cook and lay out snacks and drink, imbibing themselves with a ready enthusiasm.
Let one of the uncannily voracious lizards get hungry, and the fanged maws under their smiling jaws come to light. In battle, or in contest over food, the Hetikle Baatir are as vicious as Darth Carnifex on a bad day.
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
The prevailing theory on why the Hetikles Baatir have not taken the Galaxy at large by storm is the simple economics of tuber-based agriculture.
How could one traverse far and wide through the Galaxy above, when the tuber mounds had to be tended, and the tuber harvest festivals had to be gussied up for (with dried tuber skins, of course)? To say the Hetikles Baatir, named so by their Mandalorian discoverer Ambrose Vizsla for their love of spices and chili peppers, are the best of all agricultural tuber propogators is as accurate a statement as the simple fact before the day is out there will be found at least five separate occasions in every village for a feast.
The Hetikle Baatir eat. A lot. Without food every three to four hours, the Hetikle Baatir become irritable. After six hours, their joints begin to lock up, bodies freezing slowly in the jaws of inescapable death....
... which would be a rather massive problem if not for the bounty of tubers and the virility of the hunting creatures they eat all the time. Food itself is a celebration, and a joy, and the Hetikle Baatir are, by far, the best cooks in the known reaches of the Galaxy.
While the females go off to explore and hunt and enjoy being the dominant gender, the men folk stay closer to home, raise the children in creches, and create newer, pungent spice mixes and floral liqueurs highly prized for their honey-sweet nature and balance of the intense spice in their every day food.
Known to the Mandalorian Empire and the Hodasal denizens as a fine folk, if they're fed, the Hetikle Baatir are also known as ferocious and vicious warriors, upon which the battlefield will never see the like. Corner one of these vicious creatures, and they will eat you as soon as look at you, ensure you are not 'milk bearing', ensure you're properly deceased and butchered, coated with a spice rub and coaxed to pristine doneness over a fire until tender and juicy.
Usually in some form of handy pie or stew.
While not given to eating others of a sentient nature anymore, there have been occasions where members of the Hetikles Baatir have looked hungrily at others, when the meetings were long and the refreshment disappointing.
Beware, for now that the Empire has given them refrigeration, and the ability to import food, and package other food for transport, many warriors of the Hetikle Baatir are coming forth to the Empire and galaxy at large, to worship the Mouthpiece of Kad Haran'gir, taste the bounties of other great cultures, and hunt many a fine and tasty beast!
