Carleans

Sapient Species

A baseline Skara Carlean

Carleans are a species of intelligent dragonlike reptiles, hailing from Carlea in the Cnara System. They are primarily located in Florathel, and are only just beginning to spread out outside it to the rest of Cosmoria. Carleans are mostly known for their cooperative, fair and peaceful attitude, and their species has only participated in a single major war.

With a history of rapid advancements, they became an interstellar civilization very rapidly Over many millennia, Carlean subspecies have originated, the descendants of the colonists of strange worlds, genetically engineered to live in their environments without support. As they colonized the Cnara Cluster, they came across the Frealee System, a system with a nascent planetary civilization at Darvikus. They spent a few years decoding their language, started a dialogue, sent a whole bunch of technology plans, and the civilization there rapidly rose to their own level. They joined the Cnaran Federation, their system was named the second capital, and the federation was renamed to Cnara-Frealee after the War of the Last Alliance.

## Appearance

Carleans are blue-gray winged reptilian creatures around fifteen meters long. Their long necks are lined with structures that look vaguely like gills. A Carlean's underbelly is covered by lighter, less stiff scales, and late in a pregnancy or after consuming a massive amount of food, these scales become slightly translucent. The tail of a Carlean has a set of long, thin spikes which can be shot like arrows in the case of danger, but this capability is useless as of the modern day.

## Biology

### Subspecies

Carleans are spread throughout the stars, and as such certain members of their species are adapted to many different environments. The most major among them are described below:

* Skara
* Verenn
* Deralka

The Skara subspecies is the most common of them, and the closest to their ancestral form in the skies of ancient Carlea. They are considered the "baseline form" of the carlean species.

The Verenn subspecies of the Carleans is found primarily on low-gravity planets, and as such has relatively shorter wings. However, there are some unexpected physiological changes, such as the fact that the gestation period is longer for no apparent reason.

The Deralka subspecies is found primarily on worlds with relatively thin atmospheres compared to Carlea itself. As such, they have lost the capability of flight, and their wings are vestigial. Deralka have the interesting capability of swallowing and digesting incredibly large objects, and they more commonly give birth to 4 or 6 children.

### Respiratory System

Carleans have a relatively simple respiratory system evolved from their marine ancestors. Air travels in through gill-like structures to the lungs, where oxygen is extracted and carbon dioxide is put back in, then deoxygenated air is blown back out. Carlean lungs, being required to take in enough oxygen to sustain a creature of this size, are quite large and span the length of the neck.

A major benefit of this system is that it never interfaces with the digestive system. This eliminates the risk of choking, though it does cause a few limitations in speech, as the openings cannot be used as efficiently to articulate sounds.

### Digestive System

Because of their huge size, Carleans need to eat a lot. To help facilitate this, Carleans evolved to have this odd-looking extendable jaw that can extend up to several meters from the individual in seconds, grab something out of the sky, and swallow it. This jaw can "unhinge", allowing a Carlean to ingest objects up to the size of itself. The esophagus is also rather stretchy, allowing for rapid conveyance of very large food items to the stomach.

The stomach is a relatively simple affair, made up of a really stretchy bag that produces extremely powerful acid to digest food. Interestingly, it has an incredibly high capacity, with the potential to contain and digest another Carlean. This gives you an idea of how much food they can hold at once, so they can eat less often.

After the stomach's contents are fully digested, they are passed through a really long wrapped up tube, the intestine. This absorbs all the nutrients and water in the liquified soup before it's voided.

Carleans have an interesting capability to consciously switch off the production of stomach acids. This serves two purposes, both of which are mostly obsolete in the modern technological society. The first purpose is to allow a Carlean to swallow huge amounts of food and regurgitate it for their young. The second involves protection. If a Carlean is under threat and near her young (or anyone's young, really), they can simply gulp them down and turn off digestion, protecting them in her belly until the threat passes.

### Nervous System

Being intelligent species, Carleans have rather large brains. Due to the large size of their bodies, Carleans have evolved to have incredibly fast nerve impulses to be able to reach the other end of the body in a reasonable timeframe.

#### Senses

Carleans have six main sensory inputs: vision, scent, taste, hearing, touch, and a thing called "proprioception". The first five work about how one would expect, the only difference being that the Carlean visual spectrum is significantly wider than, say, Humans. Proprioception, the sense of things happening within the body, is much sharper than in most life-forms. For example, a pregnant Carlean could acutely feel everything their unborn children are doing in the womb. No one's entirely sure why this sense evolved to be so sharp, although parasites which were prevalent before cohesive societies on Carlea could explain this.

### Reproductive System

They reproduce ovoviviparously, which means that the eggs are inside the mother's womb up until a few days after hatching. This means that the eggs do not require hard shells. Carleans almost invariably give birth to sextuplets (roughly 97% of the time) with the next most common numbers being 4 and then 2, with any other number occurring extremely rarely. The Carlean gestation period is approximately 1.5 standard years long, though there is some variation either way with the longest and shortest on record a truly insane four years, and two months respectively.

## Demographics

Carleans are almost solely found in Florathel, especially within the Cnara-Frealee Federation and neighboring states. The only known Carlean habitations outside of the region is the CFF embassy to Sagittarium and to the Shev'ra.

## Culture

Carlean culture has been influenced throughout the millennia by their pacifistic nature and other important properties.

### Religion

There are many minor religions scattered through Carlean space. However, most Carleans today and throughout their history are primarily atheist, as only 14% of the Carlean population follows any religion.

### Language

The Carleans once had an incredibly diverse set of languages, but as the planet unified, many died out. Today, a single language is spoken by the vast majority of the species, with loanwords from hundreds of extinct ones. This language places heavy emphasis on the pitch of syllables, with a subtly incorrect pitch potentially drastically changing the meaning of the word. Due to the unique Carlean respiratory system, a translating computer is required for other species to speak to Carleans, and fortunately these devices are commonplace.