D E A T H C U L T I S T
- Intent: This post is intended to overhaul the original Anubian species within current Codex style, as well as to further flesh out the basics of Anubian culture and lore.
- Image Credit: Deviantart Artist, Smite
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: Snippet of conversation with species creator/owner regarding this overhaul.
- Links: 2016-era Species Submission, 2016-era Planet Submission
- Name: Anubian
- Designation: Fully Sentient
- Origins: Ankhypt, an Outer Rim desert world
- Average Lifespan: 110 Galactic Standard Years, barring outside causes such as disease or violence. 140+ is considered venerable, similar to humans nearing a century within their natural lifespan.
- Estimated Population: Planetary- Anubians are populous enough to begin the establishment of colonies beyond their homeworld, should leaders among them rise to do such.
- Description: A towering and physiologically unique species, Anubians are as easy to spot in a crowd as wookies and trandoshans. Such is their height that even those stricken with dwarfism are still likely to challenge the upper levels of average human height. Varying shades of fur color from lighter gray down to jet black better suited in the void of space can be seen among them, with this fur being thin and lacking insulation against anything colder than your average Spring weather upon temperate worlds such as Naboo.
Aside from a canid head with a long snout and towering ears, their torso and arms are practically a mirror match for many other more humanoid species; four fingers and a thumb upon each hand, with blunted nails rather than claws. Sexual dimorphism also matches near-human standard, with flat pectorals for males and prominent mammary glands for females. It is at the waist and lower that they differ significantly, with digitigrade legs more akin to a proper hound's leading a long distance down to canid paws that bare blunted canine claws. A short, vestigial tail ranging typically from eight inches/twenty centimeters to fifteen inches/thirty-eight centimeters sprouts from above their glutes, moving with emotion but otherwise having lost the evolutionary trait of providing balance.
- Breathes: Type I Atmospheres
- Average Height of Adults: 2.1 to 3 Meters
- Average Length of Adults: N/A
- Skin color: Varying, but lighter shades of gray.
- Hair color: Shades of grey, shades of black, and sandy tan colors.
- Distinctions: Canine-built heads, including associated ears, noses, and jaws. Slightly more advanced balance organs within the ears are present as well, but give no noticeable advantage in keeping balance above the human standard. Digitigrade legs set them apart from the majority of other plantigrade species.
- Races: Nerisubians (Gray fur coats), Orisubians (Black fur coats), and Khemasubians (Tan/Sandy fur coats)
- Force Sensitivity: All (Every single member is born sensitive to the Force, but lack training.)
Strengths:
- Species-wide Force Sensitivity
- Striders; The design and length of their legs allows them to easily outpace several other species
- Great Strength; Their natural size advantages lead to proportionally greater muscle mass, giving them greater feats of strength than the human standard
- Desert Dwellers; They're entirely at home within the desert, requiring less water in such heat than the human standard
- Greater Smell; Their noses are particularly sharp, allowing them to potentially track prey for several kilometers
- Greater Hearing; Those sharp ears can ear a mouse's feet scampering from a great distance, making whispered words harder to hide
- 'Soul Sickness;' A cultural descriptor for the flu-like effects that Force-nullifying beings and devices have upon them, including intense migraines and nausea.
- Cold Aversion; They fare poorly in anything cooler than a comfortable Spring season temperate environment
- Sonic Weaponry; They fare poorly against sonic weapons, and will often require surgical correction if attacked without proper protection
- Untrained Lungs; They are typically used to the somewhat thicker atmosphere of Ankhypt, and may become more winded upon other Type I worlds without some prior conditioning or artificial assistance
- Larger Size; Being so tall can be a curse as well, leaving them struggling to fit in certain chairs or lacking in viable cover during a shootout where shorter species might otherwise find plenty
CULTURE
- Diet: Omnivorous, with a preference for 'rare' cooked meats.
- Communication: Galactic Basic, Ankhyptian (and it's dialects), Various sign languages
- Technology level: Typically on par with the galactic standard, albeit struggling culturally to fully accept droids and other modern automation.
- Religion/Beliefs: The 'Mortuary Temple' is the leading - and only legal - system of belief for Anubians across Anubian space. At it's most basic levels, it is a system of ancestral worship combined with the glorification of death involving live sacrifice of certain creatures. The Mortuary Priesthood translates the will of their gods - manifestations of the Dark Side, often ancient Anubians who have become one with the Dark Side much as Jedi might transcend death - as well as discerns the lessons of ancestral spirits. Their pantheon is small and concise, consisting of Tempun-Hra (the Sun & Desert God), Het-Khet-Mot (the goddess of fertility and rain), Khnut (the god of war, vengeance, and murder), Thoth-Set (the moon-and-star god and patron of Anubian spacers), Nebron-Set (patron god of the arts, craftsmanship, and industry), and Onsaros (the mightiest of gods, lord of death and unlife). Once, the sister of Onsaros - Basistet, goddess of peace and poetry - was worshipped by all, but now her worship is considered heresy, with most Anubians not even aware of her once existence. She is a likely cultural manifestation of the Light Side of the Force.
The Mortuary Priesthood also keeps a secret of their gods from their people, who's revelation might shatter Anubian society. - General behavior: They live with similar nuclear family units that humans and near-humans have, albeit often with larger homes that commonly hold up to four generations (Great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children) within it. Education comes with a basic public education for the commoners and more privatized (read: superior) systems for the wealthy and noble elite for an average of twenty years, wherein they are expected to find apprenticeship. They are naturally diurnal, but with only a need for a minimum of five hours of sleep every 24 standard hours. Their Mortuary Temple religion plays a great deal in the lives of all Anubians, from the lowest of spaceport workers to the most elite of nobles. Wrestling is a favored pass time, as are various card games learned from the wider galaxy and local dice games. The average Anubian will look upon New Order-aligned cultures with disdain and hatred, having a cultural scar dating back to a near-genocidal conquest from the First Galactic Empire.
Historically, the Anubian people have only been space-faring for a relatively short amount of time, with skirmishes between the ancient Sith Empire and Old Republic some five thousand years ago bringing the hyperdrive and many other technologies to their society. These skirmishes culminated in an attempted colonization of Ankhypt by the human supremacist society of that old empire, but the eventual collapse of their empire soon lead to the few million colonists that were once warring with the native Anubians cut off and entirely without support. Within the next century, those colonial cities once poised to conquer a new world for the Sith were destroyed and subsumed. It might have ended far sooner - but the Republic had simply abandoned that region of space, uncaring of what primitive death cultists and old Sith remnants might do to one another.
This victory is attributed to their King of Kings, Great Pharaoh Acherres. According to legend, he ruled for nearly a thousand years before finally passing into the realm of Onsaros.
The surviving humans, rather than be culled in blatant genocide, were instead forced into subservience. Their technology from the stars was studied and copied, and soon the first indigenously produced Anubian starships were taking flight to explore the galaxy around them. Contact with the Hutts, Sith remnants, and the ever-growing reach of the Old Republic brought them much knowledge and wealth. Slave uprisings and other rebellions upon newly colonized worlds were put down with star destroyer and blaster, as well as the reliable blades and 'holy' magics of old. They kept a comfortable pace of colonization, claiming only a few dozen habitable worlds within a small, compact star empire that staunchly refused any and all overtures by the Republic to take a seat upon their senate.
Eventually, as millennia passed by and the old Sith were forgotten, the Anubians found themselves infrequently skirmishing with the Jedi, who saw their necromancy and blatant cultural affinity with the Dark Side as a dark mirror of what the Sith used. They were, of course, also fiercely opposed to the blatant slave trade that the Anubians participated in with the Hutt families - but this was no Zygerrian empire that could be so easily crushed; they were too distant, and too large for a mere Jedi strike force to dismantle, and the Republic Senate saw no use in waging a war with someone so distant when they had given the Republic no casus belli.
The First Galactic Empire, however, thought otherwise. In a swift and brutal conquest, every single Anubian colony was utterly destroyed by Palpatine's ships, and Ankhypt itself was thoroughly conquered with a puppet government set up. Palpatine would suffer no rival empires of Darkness.
When the Rebellion had won at Endor, Ankhypt revolted against the Imperial garrison and slaughtered them to a man, no longer needing to fear reprisal with the Empire fracturing and the New Republic cleaning up the mess in long and brutal campaigns. Any offers, however, were thoroughly ignored by the pharaoh of this time; Pharaoh Akela would not interact with a galaxy that had so brutally destroyed her people's interstellar civilization and conquered their home. She is remembered, above all but the King of Kings, as one of the greatest pharaohs in Anubian history, the Shield-Maiden of Ankhypt. Within her reign, Ankhypt was rebuilt to flourish once more, with the entire Osiris system coming firmly under Anubian control - and isolationism took hold of their society, cutting them off entirely from so many future events that would come around. The Yuuzhan Vong invasion never reached them, the first iterations of those post-Republic nations such as the One Sith and Galactic Alliance were refused any and all attempts at contact, and even their ancient trade partners in Hutt Space were all but cut off.
This protected them centuries later, when the Gulag Virus ravaged the galaxy. Total isolation had caused their technology to stagnate, and their homeworld to come close to suffering the effects of overpopulation, but it also meant that none who might have carried the virus would have entered their star system and live. Centuries pass by again, to a galaxy in constant flames as new states rise, fall, and rise again in these ever present power vacuums. The Netherworld Event shook Anubian society to the core, as well; many notable priests, generals, and nomarchs were spirited away, as were hundreds of thousands of other Anubians across the face of Ankhypt and the Osiris system's various inhabited space stations.
It was now that Anubian isolationism finally ended, and even a number of fledgling colonies were established once again to relieve the stresses of overpopulation - but the galaxy was ever cruel to them. The Bryn'adul monsters destroyed their civilization, and for a second time the Anubians saw their interstellar society crumble to foreign conquest. Survivors from those destroyed colonies, refugees fleeing the brutal occupation of Ankhypt, fled into the arms of the Sith - the Kainate faction, in particular. When eventually the Bryn'adul were cast down and scattered to the wind, the Anubians breathed a collective sigh of relief; it was only with the combined population of those colonial survivors that Ankhypt's shattered populace was able to swell enough to begin some sort of economic recovery. But with many of their Priesthood dead, and even the line of Pharaoh Akela utterly destroyed, the Council of Nomarchs has come to rule their society as an indefinite regency until a new pharaoh - or a new government entirely - can be anointed.
Then, perhaps once again, they shall begin the rebuilding of their ancient star nation.
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