Upsallan

## Summary

   Upsallans are insectoids known for being slow and patient, but with the ability to move at incredible speeds for a short time when necessary.

## Overview

Hailing from Upsalla, the Upsallans stand between five and six feet tall. They are often seen as lazy and unobservant by other races, but this opinion is misinformed. They simply do not work hastily nor react quickly to most things they notice. Upsallans are incapable of maintaining a sense of urgency for more than a few minutes. While they can still understand that something is time sensitive, important, or dangerous, they feel that hurrying is something one only does in the short term. This is a direct result of their inability to maintain a state of vigorous activity for an extended period of time.

## Culture

Upsallans have a long tradition of collectivism. For their entire civilized history before their introduction into the galactic community, it has been a necessity for the fastest among them to provide food to the others. Even among those who are neither elderly nor infirm, fatalities would have been common were everyone left to collect food themselves. However, the swiftest among them could trivially collect enough for several people, incurring little danger to themselves. As such, they have cultivated a strong sense of duty to one's community. One's health is the responsibility of those in power, not the individual themselves.

## Physiology

Upsallan describes a group of several species of cold blooded bipeds that share the core features for which they are known. These features include a thin chitin exoskeleton, two to four wings, and a shifting metabolism designed for the storage and release of large amounts of energy. The main feature for which Upsallans are known for is their ability to move at incredible speeds for short periods of time.

They owe their incredible bursts of speed to their unique metabolisms, which switch from low to high energy states depending on what is required. They mostly stay in their low energy state, in which they eat and drink small amounts almost perpetually. This is because they are incapable of producing fats to store energy. However, they produce an arguably superior alternative, referred to as Uppsala jelly. It stores dozens of times more energy, but takes hundreds of times more energy to produce. This allows for a short, but intense, high energy state. In this state, an Upsallan is capable of accelerating to sixty miles per hour in one second from a resting position and up to two hundred miles per hour within ten seconds. Using their wings, they are capable of leaping sixty meters with a running start.

Their young are known as Ago, and remain in an egg or pill bug like state for 17 Federation years until they emerge as juveniles. Instead of a shell, they are born within a mucus membrane that protects their still developing exoskeletons for the first two years of their life, until it is eventually metabolized. Parents speak to and stroke Ago to educate and establish basic trust. They feed them a slurry that they form within themselves and regurgitate into a mucus membrane on the top of the Ago. An Upsallan reaches maturity at 40 years and live on average to be 250.

Upsallans breath from spiracles distributed around their exoskeleton. A lack of large centralized lungs means that they cannot hold their breath for more than a few seconds, but the spiracles are adapted to filter out a large variety are toxins and particles that infest the air. In particular, they can breath comfortably in areas with high concentrations of smoke and carbon dioxide.