The Gaald

The most advanced native species of the planet Hiera, the Gaald were allegedly first encountered before the Scream in an expedition to map the caves beneath the Engelsberg, the Angel’s Mount, in Hiera’s northern ranges. Noticing the Gaald’s intelligence, usefulness, and unusual trait of digesting certain minerals into gold, the citizens of House Crux chose to utilize the Gaald as a labor and economic force, rather than destroying them. While initially conditions were deplorable, leading to near-extinction of localized populations in some cases, members of House Crux have worked to improve the lives of the Gaald for the betterment of both parties.

Description

The Gaald are bipedal, eel-like creatures, thought to have evolved from a species not dissimilar to the Amphiuma of alleged Terran origin. Standing approximately four feet in height, but growing to around eight feet in length, the bodies of Gaald are believed to have shortened over time from their evolutionary ancestors to be more easily supported by their legs. Their skin complexion is generally a shade of gray, varying from pale to almost black, and they are hairless, their tough hides comparable to those of lizards.

Gaald have a single, long fin running along their backs from just behind their heads to the tip of their tails. While originally likely used for swimming, as Hiera’s surface and oceans cooled the Gaald emerged, evolving the ability to sense air motion and sound vibration through the fin. Two small flaps of skin, likely once pectoral fins, are also common on the sides of Gaald, but they are thought to be largely vestigial.

Gaald legs are muscular with typically narrower calves and stronger thighs, and their feet are three-toed and webbed, allowing the Gaald to traverse rivers and smaller bodies of water both above and underground reasonably well.

Unlike eels, Gaald mouths are surrounded by shorter, tentacle-like appendages similar to those of Terran Cnidaria. These tentacles are used to grasp various items and tools, carry objects, and bring food to the mouths of Gaald, similar to how elephants use their trunks. Gaald mouths are partially concealed by these tentacles, and are lined with mostly hard, flat teeth used to grind up plant matter and mineral substances.

Behind their mouths, Gaald have two pairs of slitted, black eyes that are able to see at night or in dark caves, and two flat nostrils are present along the tops of their heads. Gaald are not historically exclusively subterranean, hence the evolutionary retention of their eyes, but they see a more limited color spectrum, roughly equivalent to Deuteranopia, or Red-Green Color Blindness, in humans. Their nostrils are uniquely capable of smelling various forms of rock, minerals, and plant life, even buried some distance beneath the earth, but studies have shown they can distinguish far less accurately between different animals or human-made alloys. The theory has been proposed that, without their eyes, a Gaald would barely be able to distinguish between a human and a squirrel.

Gaald tails are longer than the front of their bodies when measured from leg to end, and they are used both for stabilization and swimming. Gaald have also been known to swing their tails against cavern walls, possibly as a method of loosening mineral deposits or removing layers of earth and dust from the rocks beneath.

Unusually, Gaald are unaffected by a number of heavy metals, including certain gold and copper ores. They often digest these substances for part of their sustenance, defecating non-toxic forms processed by certain enzymes, loosely similar to the Terran bacteria Cupriavidus Metallidurans. Gaald are also resistant to a number of otherwise poisonous or inedible plants found on Hiera, meaning they tend to have little impact on the food sources of humans or other life on Hiera.

Gaald reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis. Some scientists have theorized the Gaald were once dioecious, having males and females, but that one of the biological sexes, likely the male equivalent, either died out due to the degradation of its chromosomes or never existed in the current evolutionary branch of the Gaald, only present in now-extinct subspecies. If such an event occurred, however, it would have happened so long ago that the Gaald no longer present any exemplary genetic markers of this event. As far as any studies have shown thus far, the Gaald have always been asexual.

History

Pre-Humanity

The Gaald were likely present on Hiera for milleniae, evolving from the earliest bits of life on the planet. It is believed they were at one point aquatic, consuming underwater vegetation, as well as mineral and ore deposits broken apart by the waves and movement of the seas. As Hiera cooled, dropping beneath the average temperature of a world like Terra, the Gaald moved onto land, evolving their legs from smaller ones that may have been used to paddle and dig beneath the water.

Once on land, the Gaald began to gather in small herds for warmth and protection. At times, these herds would move underground, using caves as nests or living spaces to avoid the harsh blizzards of Hiera’s deeper winters and to gain easier access to the mineral and ore compounds that were part of their diet. Some species of Gaald became entirely subterranean, while others would shift between the caves and forests of Hiera through the seasons. During this time, many species developed some level of night vision, and their feet evolved powerful, bony claws for digging and scraping.

Gaald populations seem to have risen and fallen quite dramatically over the course of Hiera’s history, suggesting either drastic shifts in climate or natural predators that have since died out. Some of Hiera’s other species do still hunt the Gaald, but many have turned to other prey, as the Gaald have evolved to be quite capable of defending themselves. Shortly before humanity’s arrival, the Gaald were one of the most numerous species on Hiera, but thick forests and the Gaald’s natural subterranean homes meant that it was some time before humanity encountered them.

Pre-Scream (Note: Compiled and Inferred From Available Data)

With the arrival of Constellation Ship Crux and its human colonists, packs of Gaald were killed for food or their leathery hides in the unexpectedly harsh winters of the early years of settlement. Scientists had not yet had a chance to thoroughly examine the Gaald, and it would be several years until the intelligence of the Gaald was fully realized.

As further studies were done, scientists learned of the Gaald’s ability to produce non-toxic gold and other metals through digestion, as well as the possible complexity of Gaald communication. Using the fins along their backs to sense sound vibrations through the air, Gaald produce a startling number of subaural tones that have proven more difficult to understand or translate than any human language. With the revelation of the Gaald’s intelligence and their usefulness in turning less valuable ores and minerals into valuable ones, Crux instituted on ban on killing the Gaald for food or hides until the species could be better understood.

The exact progression from that point is difficult to outline with any certainty based on available data, but at some point it became common practice for the Gaald to be used as laborers and to feed them certain heavy metals and mineral substances to get them to produce more valuable ores and minerals. Gaald were herded into mines and pastures across Hiera, and this practice continued seemingly uninterrupted until the Scream.

Post-Scream

With the chaos of the Scream, keeping the Gaald population controlled proved difficult. Many mines and pastures became abandoned, the Gaald left to their own devices as the people of Hiera attempted to regroup themselves in the planet’s cities. The trade of precious metals and minerals was no longer as useful without reach to other worlds, and the existing food stores of House Crux were kept in or close to many of its major urban centers.

And yet, within only a short time, connection was reestablished with Hiera’s neighbor Gats, both worlds sharing the Ellis system. Members of House Crux set back out towards their mines and pastures to begin collecting metals and minerals with which to supply and trade with House Cygnus. What they found was astonishing.

The Gaald, unaffected by the Scream, had continued to fulfill their tasks at locations abandoned by House Crux: mines, farms, and warehouses. They worked at their own pace, but showed a remarkable collectivism, tasks apparently delegated to certain groups. When humans returned, the Gaald had collected and presented the food and materials they’d gathered, as if they’d known that House Crux would need them. Some have theorized this seeming compassion was simply the Gaald going through the motions that had become part of their daily lives before the Scream, or that the Gaald were collecting materials for themselves to an end that they never achieved. Perhaps the Gaald had developed a religious view of humanity, or they believed that humans were too stupid or incapable to survive on their own. Regardless, the compassion of the Gaald has been the primary narrative accepted by Crux's people.

Word spread rapidly of the Gaald’s seeming efforts to assist their struggling Crucian masters. A consensus was reached that the Gaald needed to be further studied, much of the research having been abandoned or slowed by the Gaald’s forced labor pre-Scream. In addition, a heated debate about how to interact with the Gaald moving forward blazed through the government halls and homes of House Crux, some afraid they would lose their livelihood if things changed and many others clamoring to make working conditions better.

Eventually, it was decided that House Crux would attempt to work more closely with the Gaald, adopting a careful approach to discover if the Gaald would become more hostile or less inclined to work if they were given more freedoms. To the surprise of many, the easing of restrictions on the Gaald only seemed to improve their work ethic and general mood. While not considered equals alongside the humans of House Crux, the Gaald still religiously and legally at the very bottom of the Chain of Being, the treatment of the Gaald has culturally improved. Individuals are encouraged to provide proper feeding, diet, and care for their Gaald, largely framed as "labor efficiency" and "production optimization" rather than improvements for the Gaald as a species. Over the years, the Gaald have developed a surprisingly large vocabulary of human words they seem to understand, though humanity is physically incapable of communicating as the Gaald do with each other.

Gaaldari

The supposed language of the Gaald, Gaaldari is communicated via complex patterns of tones below the hearing range of humans. These tones are felt, not heard, by the Gaald’s primary fin along their backs, which senses the vibrations of the sounds in the air in a fundamentally different way than how human ears work.

Attempts have been made to translate Gaaldari, but many early attempts were lost during the Scream, effectively starting the process over again post-Scream. The language has proven either too complex or too primitive to result in much meaningful translation. As an example, Gaald produce the same pattern when they seem to be referring to the themselves, humanity, a subterranean lake, and a forest. However Gaald have also been recorded producing entirely different patterns for the same things, and as recently as 3200 were observed using a previously-unheard pattern when a human linguist pointed to himself to indicate "human." Humans cannot hear or speak Gaaldari, but with very specifically tuned audio and scientific equipment some patterns can be reproduced or pitch-shifted to a range where humans can at least analyze their forms.

As near as linguists and scientists can tell, the Gaald do not have a sentence structure involving subjects and verbs and combining parts like most human languages. They seem to think and speak entirely conceptually, or perhaps philosophically, sometimes creating new patterns of sounds for new events or interpretations of events that other Gaald somehow implicitly seem to understand.