Gerret

The first humans to encounter this race called them "gecko ferrets" which got shortened to "gerrets" and the name stuck. This race is driven by a need to explore and understand and they're constantly seeking out new knowledge and new experiences.

## Biology

Gerrets are a carbon-based life form that runs on DNA, with structures comparable to earth life. Gerrets are about 1.1 to 1.4 meters long, furry, with six legs. They have ferret-like bodies and their paws are covered in variably sticky threads of thin hair that allow them to stick to walls like geckos. Even, given their smaller size they have the shorter reaction time and higher speed that one would expect. Their lifespans are about 2/3 of a human's. They tend to have a slightly higher metabolism as well.

While life on most worlds increases or decreases its birth rate in response to overcrowding, gerrets adapt psychologically rather than physiologically. As overpopulation occurs, male gerrets face an increased drive to experiment with a corresponding decrease in self-preservation instincts. Most gerrettian heroes are those who died in the pursuit of knowledge, with their notes surviving to educate those who remained.

## Encounter with Humans

Gerrets were the first alien race to be encountered by humans.

Humans generally took one of two ways of dealing with the gerrets. Business owners generally saw them as a gullible indigenous population, often willing to overpay for cheap technological junk when they had no idea what it was or how it worked. Gerrets were also so willing to work in human factories and business that they ruthlessly underbid each other for the privilege, often willing to work for free. To that end, the business owners hired millions of gerrets, putting up with the rampant workplace theft and high turnover that usually came with the job.

Meanwhile, a number of humans came to decry the way gerrets were being treated, and ended up being labeled protectionists. These people decried the poor treatment of gerrets in the workforce, comparing it to slavery. They were even more abhorred by the fact that gerrets quickly began adopting human mannerisms, wearing human fashions and incorporating human phrases into their language. They tried to stop human missionaries from attempting to convert gerrets. All of this was in an effort to protect the sacredness of gerret culture.

The problem with both groups is that they assumed whether consciously or otherwise that gerrets were inherently inferior, that they were too stupid or uneducated to know what they wanted for themselves and they were too unsophisticated to deal with the wonders of human culture. Too few humans thought that gerrets could be as smart as a human. No one realized the truth that they were, on average, smarter. Human saw that the gerrets would buy or steal human technology and play with it, sometimes dying in the process, and continue to do so, not realizing how quickly and effectively the gerrets were reverse-engineering the human tech. People saw gerrets emulating human culture and wrote it off as mimicry, not realizing how little they understood of the mutability of gerret culture. Gerrets are primarily driven by a need for novelty and exploration

Meanwhile, while gerrets took two decades to reach the same level of technical understanding of technology as humans did, it took them even less time to understand human culture and psychology better than humans did. This quickly led to an explosion of gerrettian art aimed at communicating gerrettian mindset to humans in a way that humanity could enjoy and appreciate.

Though gerrets spoke a variety of languages before human arrival, usually a series of high pitched sounds and chirps, their official langues is English. They were eager to pick up human languages, and it soon happened that if you were to pick two gerrets at random, they only language they'd likely have in common would be a human one. To that end, few gerrets speak their indigenous languages anymore except for historians.

## Technology

Gerrets had a level of techonology roughly comparable to the steam era of human history when they were first encountered by humanity. How

Gerrets often see potential in technology that humans do not, frequently finding ways to use devices to accomplish a function they were not meant to accomplish. Gerrets typically prize getting the most out of a device, even if this means creating a device that has a number of unrelated functions, such as a gun that can also cook eggs and serve as a motor. Gerrettian tech is usually more complicated, and as a result more fragile than other manufacturers' tech, but it is also filled with a number of functions and special abilities that aren't immediately apparent, sometimes that aren't even listed in the manual.

## Psychology

Gerrets are eager to seek out the new and quick to discard even tried-and-true ideas. This leads to them continually reinventing the wheel as they embrace new idea after new idea until the old becomes new and interesting again. Gerrets are also highly empathic, quick to understand how others feel and see things from another perspective. Interactions with the Turgons seem to indicate that humanity's relatively peaceful coexistence with the gerrets is not due to humanity's suppression of its typical urge to conflict but instead the gerrets' ability to quickly embrace our way of thinking, understand it, and then effectively communicate their way around tension points.

Gerrets are also known for their short attention spans. They typically spend only a few years in a career before moving on. They attain something approaching mastery by training one or two replacements who quickly learn the demands of the job and then replace their teacher who begins apprenticeship under another gerret. Even still, gerrets rarely reach the pinnacle of excellence that humans are capable of in a single, specific area. But what they bring to the table instead is a wide variety of experiences and knowledge from a hundred seemingly-unrelated fields that allow them to come up with new ideas and insights that humans would have difficulty reaching.

Gerret history is filled with few wars. The fighting that did occur was often a raid to capture resources or quickly drive out a rival population than an attempt to subjugate another people or establish an empire. Fighting is a short-term endeavor, usually lasting half a year to three years, and without the long-term resentment against the enemy that humans often experience. Gerrets also used raids to take what humans initially called slaves, but recent scholarship is calling that into question. Gerrets would capture from another people group, but the captives were not treated as a workforce of inferiors. Rather, the captives would quickly become members of the new tribe in good standing, often being willing to go to war with their old tribe if there were still any hostilities. The reasoning behind this phenomenon is still debated among humans, but few definitive explanations have occurred. Gerrets had attempted this on human captives but the practice was quickly halted after harsh human reprisals and the fact that human captives did not seem to integrate well into the gerretian social structure.

While humans are generally the dominant race in the alliance, few would argue that the gerrets don't dominate the arts, and among those who do argue that untenable position, the only ones who can do so convincingly are usually gerrets. While human art tends to be either familiar and cliched or avente garde and meaningless to the common man, the masters of gerretian art routinely create pieces that work on all levels and have something to say to both the most jaded cynic and the most unitiatiated novice. Classical, pre-contact gerretian stories usually have much less conflict than human ones, preferring to provide a mystery or a setting to explore or a puzzle to solve. When gerretian art depicts a human and gerret protagonist pair, the gerret will usually find out the important facts and leave the actual resolution of the conflict to a human. For example, a gerretian dectective might figure out who committed the murder and leave apprehending and prosecuting the perpetrator to human authorities.

Gerrets are usually eager to visit new worlds and within fifty years of humanity's visiting Gerrettia, more than half of the population had moved offworld.

Gerrets lack the systematic, organized approach that humans take to religion. They view approaching the spiritual as a journey, something that takes place in stages.

## Military

Gerrets are underrepresented in the alliance armed forces. They chafe under the rigid discipline of the military. Additionally, their shorter lifespans leave them less time to advance their career to the highest ranks. Gerrets also have a higher empathy for other people groups than humans and turgons do, and they have less patience for prolonged wars, meaning they are usually the first race to make a large cry for peace. And given their representation in the art community, that cry is loud and clear. This means the navy and marines consider them poor recruiting prospects.

That said, the military rarely reach their recruitment goals and gerrets are often willing to risk their lives for a new experience, so gerrets are found in every military branch. Gerrets make great fighter pilots, with their small bodies and shorter reaction times. Gerrettian technology is known for being quirky and experimental, not trusted for building large ships and expensive projects. But the navy is willing to take the risk on fighters, and gerrettian fighters are often known for being cutting-edge and able to exploit previously unseen oversights in traditional battle technology and tactics. Gerrettian fighters designed for gerret pilots have a number of small edges over traditional fighters that often give them a substantial advantage in a fight.

Gerrets' technical expertise combined with their ability to fit in tight passageways makes them an essential part of any ship's engineering crew, and their tendency to make unauthorized upgrades often goes unnoticed until it saves the lives of everyone aboard, and often it's not even noticed then. Alternatively those unauthorized upgrades sometimes cause massive cascading failures.

Gerrets make capable infantry. Though they often lack the discipline and years of experience of humans, their small profile makes them harder to hit and their agility and senses allow them to be the first to spot trouble and also maneuver quickly and effectively to deal with said trouble. Even when wearing powered armor, their agility and small size mean they can fit through cramped passageways and navigate rough terrain better than any human, whether wearing powered armor or not.

Gerrets make an odd choice as commanding officers. Gerret tacticians routinely beat human and turgon officers in wargames, and it is a rite of passage for a human officer to take on a series of opponents, mostly gerrets, in a variety of tactical scenarios. The officer being tested is often given overwhelming numbers, just to teach him a lesson in humility as his gerretian opponent trounces his forces. Many have suggested simply promoting the gerrets directly to be in charge of the armed services, and while many gerrerts have taken up officer rank, with a few even reaching captain level, none have remained in the service long enough to advance to high rank.

Part of this is due to gerrets' desire to seek out new experiences, and even a fast-tracked promotion ceases to offer the novelty that gerrets thrive on. However, there is another factor. Gerrets are more intuitive than humans, meaning they are more empathic, meaning they have a greater trouble giving the hard orders that lead to their men dying as well as to the taking of many lives, some of them innocent. This is multiplied the higher up the command chain one goes. Gerrets enjoy the theoretical side of tactics and command, but rarely the practical side.