JENET

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The Jenets, or Jenet, were a species of sentient, humanoid rodents, best known for their exceptional memories and scavenger nature. Other species often regarded Jenets as ugly and quarrelsome. They had pink skin, red eyes, and wiry fur, which grew sparsely on the body but more thickly on their heads. Their prominent whiskers twitched as they spoke. As adaptations to aid scavenging, they could digest almost any form of organic matter, and could rely upon keen eyesight, hearing, and smell. The species were excellent runners, climbers, and swimmers, and their flexible bodies allowed them to squeeze through openings as narrow as twelve centimeters by disjointing their long limbs and separating their cranial plates. Jenet reproductive biology encouraged rapid population growth, as both gestation and maturation occurred rapidly in comparison to those processes in many other species.

Originally from the planet Garban in the Tau Sakar system, the Jenets evolved into cunning survivalists who systematically drove into extinction those species that preyed upon them, an event they remembered as the Great Conquest. The exception was the danchaf, a clever arboreal species whose presence in Garban's forests prevented the Jenets from fully dominating such areas. As their technology progressed, the Jenets colonized the six other habitable planets that orbited Tau Sakar to ameliorate conditions on their increasingly overcrowded home world. Their communities across the system were distinguished by the species' tortuous bureaucracy, made up of Jenets whose jobs were simply to commit to memory as many facts about their fellows as possible. Jenet eidetic recall influenced social relations, as a Jenet's name contained a long list of his or her deeds and accomplishments and informed others of that individual's status in Jenet society. The rulers of the species were the Council of 127 and the premier. Jenet populations maintained Community Heaps, cooperatively owned landfills replete with scavenged and discarded items. With the ascension of Galactic Emperor Palpatine and the institution of the New Order, the Galactic Empire found the Jenets to be useful as slaves, because the rodents' high reproductive rate allowed their masters to pay little attention to the detrimental effects of poor labor and living conditions.

Those Jenets who migrated beyond the Tau Sakar system often found employment in fields that made use of their infallible memories, such as government, administration, and business. For example, a Jenet named Losh worked in the civil service divisions on Coruscant and helped Captain Gregar Typho of Naboo investigate the death of Padmé Amidala. However, other Jenets ventured into the galaxy's criminal element. The Invisible Shell, for instance, was a crime ring operated by a clan of Jenets on the planet Pavo Prime under the leadership of a male named Lorimar Lebauer. The species' ability to remember even minor details of things they had seen or heard also made them excellent spies. Despite their mistreatment by the Empire, few Jenets supported the Alliance to Restore the Republic or joined its successor state, the New Republic. After the Republic transitioned to the Galactic Alliance, at least some Jenets allied with the government; two such were Thorsh, a Jenet espionage agent during the Yuuzhan Vong War, and Reeqo Swen, a Jenet Jedi-in-training.

Jenets, or Jenet, were a species regarded as unattractive—if not repulsive—by Humans. They were sentient rodents who stood between 1.4 and 1.6 meters tall. Although a few individuals exhibited a highly muscled or corpulent physique, the average Jenet had a gaunt build characterized by long, thin limbs. Jenet locomotion involved a bipedal gait whereby they walked on their toes, with the long, wedge-shaped feet jutting upward at an angle. Their forelimbs terminated in four attenuated fingers and an opposable thumb, and their hindpaws in four elongated toes. All of these digits ended in sharp claws. Although Jenet physiology made them adept at running, jumping, swimming and climbing, their general form of movement was to scurry from place to place. They also exhibited extreme flexibility: a Jenet could fit through an opening as small as twelve centimeters across by dislocating his or her limbs and separating the individual bones of the cranium to squeeze through.

A Jenet's pale, oily, pink skin was covered in coarse, thin fur. It grew more thickly on the top of the head, where a mass of hair of a different color from the main coat might have manifested. Fur colors ranged from white or gray to red. Some individuals sported a short beard as well.

The rounded Jenet muzzle could grow quite long, terminating in a wet nose surrounded by stiff whiskers that grew to a length equal to the smallest opening through which a Jenet could fit. The beings had a keen sense of smell, developed to help them find food. A cleft upper lip lay below the nostrils, only partially covering a pronounced set of sharp, yellowish teeth. Jenets had small, red eyes set under thick brow ridges. The rodents were noted for their keen eyesight, another food-finding adaptation; they could see well even in low-light conditions. Their pointed ears lay flat against the head, providing most members of the species acute hearing—although not all Jenet shared this trait.

Jenets were omnivorous. They were able to digest virtually any organic matter, and their diet ranged from wild fruit to necrotic flesh. At least some members of the species slept with their arms and legs held tight to the body and the muzzle nestled near the hindlimbs.

Jenets had two sexes and reproduced sexually. Pregnant females carried their offspring in the womb for ninety standard days before bearing a litter of typically four to six young. Jenets matured rapidly; they learned to walk by two months of age and entered adolescence at four standard years. Jenets reached sexual maturity at nine and had a life expectancy of seventy standard years. Jenets were particularly fecund, so that a female rarely went more than a standard year before giving birth to another litter.

Jenets were temperamental and obsessed with trivialities, which led many other species to regard them as irksome and obnoxious. Despite their dominance over their home world both politically and technologically, Jenets were unabashed scavengers by nature. They never discarded anything: whatever they acquired was kept in their homes or in large piles in their community's warrens. These Community Heaps, filled with broken tools, leftover food, empty containers, and the like, were common property, and Jenets enjoyed rummaging through them to find items of use. Although they were omnivores, they did not hunt or raise animals; rather, they ate only meat they found from an animal that had already died. The species practiced animal husbandry to ensure that the wild creatures of their worlds did not overpopulate. The Jenets themselves had to contend with creatures that might try to eat them, so they kept an ear out for such attacks while working. The sentient rodents were adept at fleeing in an emergency, running and leaping to safety.

A notable Jenet trait was their extraordinarily accurate and detailed memories; members of the species never forgot even the most trivial datum. One manifestation of this characteristic was a tradition of ballad singing about ancient heroes, poems beloved by the rodents but considered doggerel by non-Jenets. This infallible memory also meant that Jenets never forgot slights and insults, and therefore could hold grudges indefinitely. In Jenet society, rumors and reputation were of paramount importance: Jenets could hold actions against even people whom they had never met, based merely on hearsay. Jenets cared little for what other species considered tact, so they were not shy about airing these opinions and grievances in public. Since they could easily recall any bit of information about another person, Jenets freely insulted each other, even when among close friends and family. Exchanges of excoriation were so common as to be a form of greeting, since an upbraided Jenet could usually recall some embarrassing fact about his or her interlocutor. Jenets took pride in being denigrated, for it proved they had gained enough notoriety to be worth the effort. However, few non-Jenets found such treatment enjoyable. Members of other species usually considered the Jenets' temperament to be argumentative, pedantic, dull, and uncouth. Some non-Jenets even accursed the rodents of fabricating memories so as to influence others. These widely held beliefs meant that many species simply chose to avoid Jenets when possible. Nevertheless, the Jenets had no tolerance for ignorance or duplicity.

The Jenets had access to all aspects of galactic technology, including hyperspace-capable starships. Nevertheless, their home world of Garban boasted only a limited-service spaceport. Most Jenets had a healthy work ethic, and their obsessive attention to detail made them useful employees. However, they tended not to learn technological skills and preferred to automate as much of their production as possible in lieu of mass labor. Members of the species particularly hated working as miners. Despite their fur, Jenets tended to wear clothing. The style of this varied with the individual; some males preferred loose-fitting tunics with trousers, while others sported a more militaristic look, with button-down jacket and epaulettes.Each member of a group led by Ludlo Lebauer wore an elaborate and expensive noron doublet and tunic suit with a blaster sidearm. Some females wore backless blouses with shorts that reached the knees and were slitted up the hip, a look considered provocative by male members of the species. Others had clingsilk skirts.

The Jenets evolved from rodent prey animals on Garban. Using the remains of ancient trash piles, archaeologists hypothesized that after the species had developed sentience, early Jenets lived in caves underground. They stayed in such cramped confines for much of their day, only stepping out to the surface to scavenge for food. Experts agreed that thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin, ancient Jenets organized against their predators and began an onslaught against the species they had once feared. Jenet legend revered this period, which they called the Great Conquest, as a time of heroes and warriors, immortalized in epic poetry. According to such tales, the danchaf of Garban were once a sophisticated and cunning species who ruled Garban's woodlands in packs and prevented the Jenets from penetrating the forests. The Jenet rulers Chirr't Ferr and Rhet H'rrr formed armies to drive back the danchaf hordes. H'rrr, according to legend, developed attacks to target camale danchaf—one of the species' four genders—and thus disturb the tree goblins' reproductive abilities. An epic titled *The Ballad of Shan'Gredor* told of the Jenet Ch'irrk Felt, who created a giant trap of pots, pans, and bright phospowder; the noise and blinding lights dazzled the danchaf and allowed the Jenet soldiers to slay them. Although such wars were unsuccessful in eradicating the danchaf from the planet, legend claimed that the Jenet attacks forced the danchaf to devolve into a primitive state and allowed the Jenets to spread out and dominate Garban. With the exception of a xenobiologist named Xemlorn, scientists dismissed any notion of a more sophisticated past for the danchaf, thus doubting the veracity of the Jenets' heroic tales. To the Jenets, however, the legends were key elements of oral history.

Jenet society came to be organized into clans and oriented around life in warrens. The Jenet bureaucracy developed, as did the positions of premier and the Council of 127. Jenets also learned to manage the animals on their world without resorting to widespread eradication. The species advanced technologically, eventually reaching spaceflight by their own innovation or scavenging a stardrive from another source.

Over time, Jenet fecundity and lack of predators caused the species to overpopulate Garban. The Jenets sent settlers to the other worlds of the Tau Sakar system, where they found conditions very similar to those on Garban—a fact that led scholars to postulate that an unknown intelligence once terraformed the planets. The Jenets eventually founded colonies outside the Tau Sakar system as well, and over time they reached technological parity with other advanced worlds in the galaxy. Their system became part of the Abrion sector in the Outer Rim Territories.

The Jenets' spread to other worlds inevitably brought them into contact with pan-galactic government. During the Galactic Civil War, the Galactic Empire took over the Tau Sakar system. Imperial sentientologist and propagandist Obo Rin included the Jenets in his *Catalog of Intelligent Life in the Galaxy*, a project commissioned by Lord Darth Vader to detail those sentient species of most interest to the Empire. Rin claimed that the galactic regime protected the Jenets from marauding members of the Rebel Alliance; in exchange, the Jenets gladly served the Emperor as laborers, mining ore from the planets of their home system. In the Jenets' view, however, they were mere slaves, forced to live in labor camps and undertake a task that they collectively deplored. The Empire found the Jenets to be useful workers on other planets as well due to their high reproductive rate, which rendered any worries about mortality levels moot. Accordingly, enslaved Jenets often operated in perilous work conditions. The Empire set up breeding facilities for the species in an effort to select for traits that increased their pacifist tendencies and compliance and decreased their intellects. Jenets willing to fight back against the Empire were rare, and few members of the species joined the Rebel Alliance.

After the collapse of the Empire in 4 ABY, the Jenets still had to contend with the after-effects of a generation of Imperial breeding programs and enslavement. The species never joined the New Republic, the successor state of the Rebel Alliance, due to their preference for being among only their own kind, although individual Jenets did serve in various capacities in the new government and its successor, the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances. The Shi'ido anthropologist Mammon Hoole included an entry on the Jenets in his publication *The Essential Guide to Alien Species*.

**JENET SPECIES TRAITS**

• • Ability Modifiers: -2 Strength, +2 Dexterity, +2 Intelligence, -4 Charisma

• • Medium-size: As Medium-size creatures, Jenets have no special modifiers due to their size.

• • Speed: Jenets base speed is 12 meters.

• • Photographic Memory: Jenets remember everything the experience. The GM can allow a Jenet to make a wisdom check to determine wether he’s heard of or seen (as appropriate) someone or something before. The TN depends on how likely it is that the Jenet was paying attention and how noticeable the detail seemed at the time. If there’s no chance of the Jenet remembering, the check fails automatically.

• • Low-light Vision: Jenets can see twice as far as normal in dim light. They retain the ability to see colors under these conditions.

• •Skill Bonus: Nimble and swift, Jenets are capable climbers and swimmers. They gain a +2 species bonus on Climb, Escape Artist, Jump, and Swim checks.

• •Bonus Feats: Jenets gain the bonus feats Alertness and Run.

• • Free Language: Speak Jenet.