Gode'Bali

A species utterly amongst the stars. The Gode'Bali are a species of hexapedal amphibious crustacean-analogs, long since cast away from their ruined homeworld.

## Appearance and biology

The Gode'Bali are a species of hexapedal crustacean-analog entities, covered in thin, chitinous plates with softer regions along their joints. The Gode'Bali, though capable of remaining on land indefinitely, require a constant supply of water to maintain their internal biology and relatively gill like breathing methods. The Gode'Bali's limbs are capable of, via a collection of hair-like structures along their edges, locking together into various forms for swimming or defensive capabilities.

The average Gode'Bali is significantly smaller than a human, standing a meager 3ft off the ground on all six limbs. Each of their limb-structures are entirely prehensile, capable of operating as both locomotive and manipulative appendages.

The Gode'Bali are bilaterally symmetrical, possessing a forward-facing series of four eye-stalks, arranged in a rough X-fashion around a chitinous, plated set of internal, extendable mandibles designed to crush and tear.

## History

The Gode'Bali evolved on a rocky, shallow-sea homeworld. They developed within the kelp-lagoons and corals of their planet in relative safety, eventually stretching their newfound legs onto the endless small atolls and sandbars that dotted their planet. From these humble beginnings, they followed a relatively similar path to that of humanity, finding rich resources coating their home-planet and jumpstarting into their own industrial age with relative ease.

Their society quickly developed vast trade coalitions from their initial tribal guilds, each working for their own betterment via trading resources more easily found within certain archipelagos. From these coalitions greed, as their people entered their mechanized age, the first of three world wars occurred. The second having come from the economic fallout of the first, with the third following similar conditions of greed and profiteering roughly a hundred years after the second.

These coalitions grew steadily in power, rapidly overtaking the former world governments as they continued their exponential growth of profiteering. It was here that their course split, for, as global warming and pollution began to manifest, their society did *not* stop nor slow their industrialization.

They did not slow down even as their worlds atmosphere began to choke on noxious fumes. They did not stop even as their clouds began to rain down acid strong enough to tear apart most above-ground structures. They did not stop as their air became unsafe to breathe, and total environmental collapse occurred beyond their habitats.

There were riots, periodically. Rebellions. All were quelled by brutalistic methods. Weaponized viruses, population cullings, forced labor work. All done in the name of ever-greater profit, of ever-greater power in a dying, venutian world.

Then, all at once, their people rose up. All across their world near-simultaneously, the peasentry engaged in mass-revolt, overthrowing their rulers in a matter of hours. Every shuttle, every station, every satellite and scrap of spare metal they could possibly find they bolted together and forced from their atmosphere.

Within a decade, their people, or what little had survived of it, had escaped into orbit around their world, and in short order to the system beyond. Finding the rest of their home system uninhabitable, they scavenged what they might from wherever they could land and escape quickly, and built their new homes.

Immense, angular things in the stars. Unneeding and uncaring for gravity due to their aquatic evolution, they roam the stars with ease in entirely practically designed, half-flooded vessels.