Tzientai

The Tzientai are the most populous and, at least before the humans and the Grand Galactic Allied Empire showed up, most privileged species of the Mahmood minor sector.

For most, a Tzientai strikes an intimidating picture. Most stand over three metres. A Tzientai has four long arms, with large four-fingered hands, and equally long legs that terminate in massive, hard hooves. Their skin is grey and hardened, studded with keratinous growth, and coated in thick hair, giving them what is essentially natural armour. While their bodies don't have quite the musculature one would expect of their size - due to their preference for low gravity environments and, indeed, inability to tolerate heavy worlds - the rangy, stretched-out look this produces can be all the more threatening.

The planet Morgenstern has no natural water and only trace atmosphere, so the Tzientai were born struggling. While they can make low nutrition go a long way, death by starvation has never been far from a Tzientai mind. Primitive Tzientai would roam the landscape, eating whatever they could find, whether plant or animal (or, in many cases, Tzientai). This hardened the Tzientai as a species, making them tough and difficult to deal with. They were also the first species in the sector to attain spaceflight. If they hadn't been, history would have gone very differently.

The Tzientai quickly met the Soch-Metions, the Kikkenik, the Artivene, and the Yoffnel, and aided each species to a greater or lesser extent in their own ambitions towards spaceflight. Not willing to risk any of the new colonies they'd founded - many of which were far less desolate than Morgenstern - the Tzientai were relatively peaceful in this early expansion, and the five species joined together in what was called the Fortunate League. The Tzientai, at least as far as the ones that presented themselves to the League, were always somewhat distrustful of their fellow species, and this came to a head when they discovered the Kabiti. Terrified that this was a group that could strip away everything the Tzientai had gained and throw them back to the airless desert, the Tzientai were aggressive enough towards the new species that they lost the trust of the rest of the League (which fell apart without its linchpin) and finally started a bloody interstellar war that lasted more than forty years.

So many Tzientai were pressed into service and so many died that even that (evolution-wise) short span of time actually yielded selection pressure; a certain number of Tzientai bore a natural mutation that made their neurons work in different pathways than the norm, making their thought slower, but also making them strongly resistant to psionics. In a war against the psionic Kabiti, these mutated Tzientai were more likely to survive, meaning that in the modern day, that mutation is near universal.

The Tzientai eventually subjugated the Kabiti. In so doing, they had transformed their civilisation entirely, and syncretised many Tzientai religions into the worship of a pantheon of raging war gods. This religion absorbed the military and the government alike, and led to the Asenkeld Empire, where a Tzientai religious dictatorship with Kabiti janissaries spread out across the sector in conquest. The Empire held sway over the minor sector until the Grand Galactic Allied Empire arrived.

Due to the nature of the Asenkeld religion, canon law states that all of the Tzientai's war gods died in the war against the GGAE. This was a line of thought encouraged by the human invaders, since a dead god was unlikely to raise a crusade. Perhaps oddly, this has not quelled the Asenkeld religion; worship now consists of dramatically mourning the dead gods, bemoaning the glory days, and encouraging the Tzientai people to make themselves 'proper tombs' for their departed deities.

The Tzientai have six sexes. Tzientai reproduction is a complicated affair.