Initially not very powerful. The movement was most popular among the missionaries (naturally) as well as on the planet Hearthside. The tide turned when a dissolutionist preacher on Hearthside managed to convince half of the Bright Way’s private army (an order of warrior monks called the Knights of the Sun) to join the dissolutionists.

As for how the PD’s were treated by the wider clergy, a lot of them were sent to the Outer Belt to get them out of the way. The Outer Belt was the home of the missionaries (as it’s close to interstellar space) as well as former ecclesiastical slaves both manumitted and runaways, who formed the nucleus of the radical secularists that would become the Partisans.

I summarize things better here, here, and here.

I really like your technical style of worldbuilding. I’m fond of the little details that grand sweeping stories gloss over.

So they do address what the predators in Zootopia eat. I’m blind (literally, I have a guide dog) and I guess there was a visual reference to it somewhere that I missed. I was so irritated that the whole point of the film was about predators not eating prey anymore but it didn’t address what they ate instead.

The Pious Dissolutionists are what you’re looking for. The Bright Way started monetizing the tech they invented in order to fund the missionaries, but that little side hustle turned into all they cared about. The Pious Dissolutionists wanted to purge the organization of its corporate interests. (Incidentally, my avatar is their symbol. The red arch represents an element of Claravian sacred art whereby a golden arch would be drawn behind a saint’s head, analogous to a halo. The usual Bright Way symbol is the bare “star and gear” without the arch.)

While I’m contemplating moving away from hard numbers, my stories say the trip from Focus to Sol takes about 250 years, and 12 days pass for the missionaries in sim. I think that would be way too fast.

Every few sim hours someone ducks into the OS to check on things in realtime. There’s also a leasemind (weak nonsentient AI) that monitors the ships systems and can preemptively pull someone out of sim if it sees a problem developing. There’s also a live mission controller monitoring the ships systems via ansible who can yank one of them out of sim if needed.

Nose Balm

Keeping one’s nose wet is an important part of yinrih grooming. A wet nose helps aid the sense of smell, and a dry chapped nose is uncomfortable. A glistening wet nose is also considered aesthetically pleasing.

In addition to the nose’s natural mucus, wetness is maintained with an occasional lick. In dry climates, however, nose balm is used to prevent the nose from drying out. Unlike human lip balms, which are often mildly flavored, cynoid nose balm is invariably scentless. Indeed, many brands are advertised as having “negative odor”, possessing no smell of their own but enhancing surrounding odors.

This is a bottle of nose balm. It’s fairly representative of pill bottles and other similarly sized containers. The only real curve ball compared to its Terran equivalent is the ring on the cap. The ring serves two main purposes.

For yinrih who live planetside, the ring helps them fish the bottle out of a backpack with their tail. For spacers, the ring is slipped on one of the digits while the bottle is open and in use in order to keep the lid from floating away without having to sacrifice an entire paw just to hold the lid. The outer thumb is used most often for this purpose.

A more subtle feature of these sorts of containers is the texture on the lid. It’s not just there for grip. It also helps the yinrih identify the bottle by touch alone. The texture, together with the overall size, shape, and mass of the bottle, differentiates it from other similar containers nearby.

There are other similar items that a yinrih typically keeps on their person, whether in a wallet around the right foreleg or a larger bag on the chest, back, or belly. Paw wax protects the paw pads against surfaces that are hot or have irritating chemicals. perfumes as well as perfume remover (for when one’s natural musk is deemed more appropriate) are packaged similarly. There are salves for treating minor cuts, which act to both treat the wound and cover it like a bandage.

How many species are sapient? All members of the kingdom animalia including microscopic animals like water bears and face mites?

Oh this is great!

I’d love to learn more about this religion! Does it specifically mandate slavery or is it more of a “the slavers happen to believe in this religion” thing?

The Bright Way is dedicated to finding extraterrestrial intelligence, or as they say bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh. They start out benign, but once they start sending out interstellar missions they realize they can’t fund their work on donations alone. They start monetizing the vast array of tech they’ve invented in order to get to that point, at first to fund mission work, but they gradually lose sight of why they’re making money and concentrate on just making more money.

Slavery in this context is a form of debt servitude one is consigned to if they can’t pay their tithes. Treatment of slaves varied greatly. On the yinrih’s homeworld of Yih, slaves were de facto treated as property. On the planet Hearthside, which was a hotbed of traditionalist movements opposed to the Bright Way’s pecuniary interests, serfdom was treated more like an assistance program to help the disadvantaged gain technical skills. Institutions on Hearthside would even “buy” slaves from Yih (really taking on their debt) in order to save them from harsh treatment on the homeworld, as can be seen in this story.

Regarding the Partisans, they got your typical cult of personality surrounding Firefly the Apostate (their leader), but there’s also a literal cult, which emerged more or less organically without the government’s input, that worships the Great Leader a la the Emperor of Mankind from 40K. The Partisan government goes back and forth between persecuting them as they do religion in general, and cynically promoting the cult as a means of control.

How quickly can a passenger return themselves to a nominal “real-time” experience if the ship, say, detects something notable that is worth slowing down to investigate?

Time perception can be altered more-or-less instantly, though it causes phantom nausea in the process. In the case of womb ships, there is the simulacrum (or just sim), which is the realistic Matrix-like environment designed to keep you sane where time is sped up, and the operating system environment, which is less Matrix and more Tron (I describe it as like being in a synthwave music video). Time passes normally in the OS, and while you do not have to leave the sim to interact with the outside world, events happen so quickly that it’s impossible to process them, so checking the ansible for messages from back home, confirming the ship’s course, controlling micro mechs to do maintenance EVAs, etc, are done in the OS.

Eloi vs Morlocks?

The Mass Router

Kid: “Mom, can we get a star gate?”

Mom: “We have a star gate at home.”

The star gate at home:

Long ago, when we humans were still squatting in a ditch poking berries up our noses, the yinrih discovered subspace, which they called the underlay. They quickly learned how to send information through the underlay faster than light, instantly in fact, but transporting matter proved illusive.

It wasn’t so much putting matter in or taking it out. The problem was momentum. An object egressing the underlay retains all the momentum from its point of ingress. If you ingress the underlay in a space station in low orbit over a planet and egress at the surface, you’ll be traveling at mach 20 relative to your point of egress.

The first thing they figured out was how to flush Newton’s laws of motion down the toilet. This resulted in many technological wonders such as force projectors, which generate a reactionless force normal to their surface when a voltage is applied, and retribution fields, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of incoming projectiles and release that energy in a concentrated blast of concussive force back at the attacker^[1]. But while they had mastered force manipulation of objects in realspace, the same was not so for objects in the underlay.

Approximately one year after First Contact, a group of Claravian research monks perfected the impulse buffer, which absorbs the momentum of objects egressing the underlay. Because there were yinrih on Earth with access to a fabricator, they were able to establish a mass router trunk between Sol and Focus right away, allowing the missionaries to return home, and most importantly, bring their human friends with them.

But there’s one catch: The mass router is a claustrophobic nightmare. There are both mass and volume limits to what can be sent through the underlay, meaning that only one person can be transported at a time. There’s enough room for a person and maybe a few bags depending on how high up the chonk chart the person is. Mass routers look like the unholy offspring of an MRI machine and an iron lung. You have to be sealed in a very small cylindrical space. If in a gravity well, you get a bed to lie on. If in microgravity, you strap into a harness. The sensation of ingressing and egressing the underlay feels like your whole body falling asleep for a split second.

Savvy readers will note the use of the term router and correctly guess its mechanism of operation. It shunts a bubble of realspace containing the person into the underlay, fragmenting that bubble into billions of discreet packets. From the perspective of a hypothetical observer embedded in the underlay, these packets appear discontiguous, and can take separate paths to reach their destination. However, and this is important, from the perspective of a person within one of these packets, the space is still contiguous. If a box containing an ant were to be sent via mass router, the ant could travel from one end of the box to the other without noticing a difference. Or it could if the traversal weren’t instantaneous. There is no ontological question that what exits is the same entity that entered.

“But what happens if a packet is dropped?” I hear you cry. Well, the entire bubble containing your mass, called a flow is harmlessly shunted back into realspace at the router that dropped the packet, provided the router absorbs your momentum correctly.

Where there are routers, there are routing protocols. Mass Routing Protocol (MRP) is used to dynamically build paths from point to point in a mass router network, as well as coordinate mass flows within that network. Firewalls can prevent unwanted intruders from egressing at a particular router, and route poisoning can be used to hijack a person’s mass flow and make it egress somewhere it wasn’t supposed to.

Some people, on four legs or two, harbor misconceptions about how mass routers work. Some people think your body is digitized and sent over the internet. Others, drawing on ancient superstitions regarding demons lurking in the underlay, believe that mass routers may allow demons to invade realspace^[2].

Erickson, TX

Erickson is a small town in central Texas and the site of humanity’s first contact with the yinrih. The town was historically an enclave for Lebanese immigrants arriving in the US via Galveston in the late 1800s. There was an influx of ethnically european Yankies after the proliferation of air conditioning in the mid 20th century, and the town is demographically mixed by the time of First Contact.

The town is large enough to justify the presence of a small institution of higher education, Erickson College, which is most known for its veterinary school. It also hosts a small linguistics program as well as various STEM subjects. The town is served by two churches, Our Lady of the Cedars and Calvary Bible Church.

The town’s citizens welcome the newcomers with open arms, and it’s largely thanks to them and their many, many, many guns, that these alien visitors remain unmolested by state actors.

The six Claravian missionaries aboard the Dewfall elect to remain in Erickson, integrating into the community and preparing them (and by extension humanity) for a more formal delegation from Focus that, as far as they know^[1], will arrive in 250 Earth years. The missionaries are fairly young by yinrih standards (about 150 Earth years), and the average yinrih lifespan is a bit over 7 centuries, they expect to be alive for the arrival of their fellow yinrih. It comes as a sad surprise when they learn their new human friends will be dead and forgotten long before that day comes.

The Star Hearth

A star hearth is a type of fusion reactor used in the Claravian liturgy. The hearth is kept in good repair by the hearthkeeper, a priestess of the Bright Way. The building that houses the star hearth is called a lighthouse, which serves as a house of worship.

In former times, the star hearth powered the homes of the faithful as well as the lighthouse itself. After the War of Dissolution, however, the custom of merely powering the lighthouse while selling the excess electricity back to the municipal power company in order to cover operational costs was imposed across Focus.

Postures and Gaits

One of the two resting positions yinrih can assume while in a gravity well. This is referred to in English as perching, and the piece of furniture is referred to as a perch. Yinrih straddle the perch on the belly as they would the branch of a tree, leaving their paws and tail to hang freely. A desk may be located under the perch, and the user manipulates objects on the desk with the freely hanging paws and tail.

This is the typical seat of a vehicle cockpit, but such an arrangement can also be found as computer workstations. The yinrih lies on his or her back, gripping a keyer in each of the four paws. Paw keyers use chords of simultaneous key presses to input text and other commands. If analog controls are present, they will be located at the base of the chair to be manipulated by the tail.

Yinrih prefer HUD specs (AR goggles or glasses) rather than screens in most cases. A pair of Google Glass-like HUD specs and a single paw keyer, possibly along with a tail gesture ring, are the typical tools that serve as a portable computer or smartphone.

In addition to perching and lying on the back, yinrih can rear up on their hind feet, preferably with the tail wrapped around something for balance. This posture allows the use of the forepaws to manipulate objects, but it is more energy-intensive than perching or lying belly up. They can also “sit” in canine fashion with the palms of all four paws touching the ground.

In microgravity, they an anchor themselves in place by wrapping the tail around a tail bar, leaving all four paws free for grasping and manipulating controls and such.

A yinrih’s rear paws are just as dexterous as their forepaws. Buttons and other controls are designed to be tactilely distinct so they can be used with the rear paws without looking, and a braille-like tactile alphabet is used even by sighted yinrih for labels on controls and small objects so they can be identified by touch alone.

Anatomical Overview

If you’ll forgive the AI-generated horror show, this is the closest I’ve managed to depicting how the yinrih look in my head, with a few discrepancies explained below.

Here are a few of my own artistic attempts at depicting them.

Humans often refer to yinrih as monkey foxes because they appear to have the head of a fox and the body of a new world monkey. They are quadrupeds with prehensile, six-toed paws and a prehensile tail. The body is covered in fur, but the palms, soles, and last joint of the digits are hairless, revealing grayish black skin underneath.

Yinrih are plantigrade, with the palms of the paws bearing their weight. Each paw consists of an inner thumb, four fingers, and an outer thumb. The tips of the digits have sharp, iron-enriched claws used for climbing and defense. There are doglike paw pads on the palms and on the underside of each digit.

They have sharp, carnivorous teeth, a whiskery muzzle with a wet nose, and erect fox-like ears.

The eyes work very differently than those of Terran animals. If human eyes are cameras, yinrih eyes are radio receivers. Each “eye” is an array of millions of nanoscopic antennas sitting on a shared ground plane that couple with ambient electromagnetic radiation like a radio. The surface of the eye is very good at absorbing visible light, making it look like the eyes are coated in Vantablack. Between these nantenna patches and their primary eyelids, there are four pairs of bandpass membranes that filter incoming light. Between these bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, yinrih ‘tune’ to different light spectra. They have a much, much wider visual spectrum than humans, able to see microwaves at the low end and non-ionizing UV radiation at the high end, but they can’t perceive the entire spectrum all at once.

Their senses of smell, hearing, and touch are much more acute than a human’s. They rely more on pheromones then on body language to communicate emotion. You don’t say “I feel happy” you say “I smell happy”. A yinrih’s natural musk identifies things like gender, age, and whether or not they have had children. Yinrih have expanded this olfactory communication to include complex perfumes that serve the communicative and social functions that clothes do for humans.

Having fur means they don’t require clothes for sun or cold protection, and they rely heavily on the tactile information gained through their paws, so yinrih are perennially naked and unshod.

They are arboreal, and move through the trees by brachiating (swinging hand over hand). This arboreal lifestyle dovetails nicely with living in microgravity, and there are orbital colonies of spacers who live permenantly in zero G so they can overcome the limitations of their quadrupedal stance, now having four hands instead of four feet.

One of the secrets to the yinrih’s meteoric rise up the tech tree, achieving spaceflight a mere five thousand Earth years after gaining sapience, is the writing claw. In each forepaw there is an ink sac located near the knuckle of their index finger. A duct leads from the sac to the tip of the claw, which has evolved to look and act like the nib of a fountain pen. Their ink is blue-black and smells strongly of petrichor, and carries the same pheromones as their ambient musk.

AS nonsapient animals the yinrih used this writing claw to mark territory. A written language emerged out of this scent marking behavior in parallel with a spoken language. They have historical records reaching back to the dawn of sapience, with the earliest written records being from “kindled” (sapient) yinrih who were born into otherwise nonsapient litters to nonsapient parents, only discovering their differences after leaving their litters and finding other sapient yinrih.

Paw Morphology

The arrangement of palmar pads on the forepaws is sexually dimorphic.^[1] Males have three large pads, with one pad at the base of each thumb, and another directly under the knuckles. Females have the same two lower pads, but the single upper pad is replaced by several smaller pads in order to make room for a lactation patch. The lactation patch appears as an undifferentiated patch of grayish-black skin, the same as the rest of the furless portion of the paw. When exposed to saliva, the patch begins oozing bluish-white milk.

Vulpithecine ink and milk evolved out of similar excretory structures, which is why they are both located on the forepaws, and why the milk is bluish. The milk has potent antimicrobial properties to account for the fact it’s being excreted from a surface in constant contact with the ground. Lactation is not linked to the reproductive cycle, and may occur at any time after reaching maturity. The on demand nature of lactation evolved in order to make climbing easier. If lactation happened automatically it would make for slippery paws at inopportune times.

Yes, I am talking about Lemmy posts.

Here’s a geopolitical map of Focus, the yinrih’s home star system. As is conventional in a lot of sci-fi, the name of the star can serve as the name of the whole system. Humanity’s home system is referred to as Sol.

Random Facts about Each Body:

Focus

The Bright Way refers to a star hosting sapient life, especially their own, as a hearth star (not to be confused with a star hearth). All yinrih languages have a simple word for sun, but since humans can’t utter vulpithecine speech sounds we decided to give their star a nice classical name. The Latin word focus means hearth, and a star serves as one of the foci of an elliptical orbit, so the word seemed fitting all things considered.

Hearthside

The closest planet to Focus, Hearthside is tidally locked. The region around the substellar point is called The Nightless Desert. The capital city, located directly on the substellar point, is known as the City of Eternal Noon. There is a green belt running along the terminator. The City of Eternal Noon is the center of religious government of the Bright Way. Politically the planet is an ecclesiocratic republic, economically it is destributist (respecting private property while being aggressively anti-corporate). Companies must either be privately owned or cooperatives. There is no public stock market, and citizens are forbidden from holding a stake in a foreign company. Hearthside retains a unique language, but most citizens are proficient Commonthroat speakers as well.

Sweetwater

An ocean planet, Sweetwater is the innermost member of the Allied Worlds. It’s famous for its class disparity. There is a wealthy upper class living in underwater cities, and an underclass of surface-dwellers in roving ships and submarines. Some make a living fishing or mining, while others are pirates. There are a few small fixed islands, but there are also free-floating rafts of vegetation large and dense enough to support entire forests. These mobile islands have no fixed topography, and undulate along with the waves. As such it is nearly impossible to build fixed structures on them, and they are very popular with Atavists and others who seek to live a primitive lifestyle.

Yih

The cradle of the yinrih species, and one of only two planets in the galaxy to naturally give rise to life. The planet is the center of political power of the Allied Worlds. It is also the urheimat of the Commonthroat language. After the formation of the Allied Worlds, regional languages were slowly supplanted by Commonthroat across the AW, but substrate vocabulary remains.

Newhome

The first planet to be terraformed. The first wave of colonists started a machine-worshiping cult.

Welkinstead

The first of the two gas giants (or if you want to be pedantic, the only gas giant with Moonlitter being an ice giant). There are floating cities in the upper atmosphere that mine and refine economically exploitable gasses. There are also a few moons, and their inhabitants, called moonies, are seen as rustic and uncultured. The moony accent of Commonthroat carries many of the same stereotypes as the Southern American accent.

The Inner Belt

The first of the two asteroid belts, and home of the Spacer Confederacy. The SC is a less a unified polity and more a very loose collection of independent city states that group together solely to defend their sovereignty against bigger players. These city-states take the form of orbital colonies that go from asteroid to asteroid mining and selling the minerals in order to keep the lights on. One of these city-states is Wayfarers’ Haven, which started out as a refugee camp of Moonlitter citizens fleeing a Partisan border expansion. The Dewfall departs from Wayfarers’ Haven, making the tiny colony the first nonhuman polity to have diplomatic relations with Earth.

Moonlitter

An ice giant with many moons. Moonlitter is caught in the middle of the cold war between the AW and the Partisans. Its government is notoriously unstable, as both the AW and the Partisans fight for the hearts and minds of its citizens. Border skirmishes between Moonlitter and the Partisans are common. When Moonlitter allowed Welkinstead to establish a military outpost near their border, the Partisans retaliated by glassing the dwarf planet Pilgrims’ Rest. Fortunately the AW peacekeepers evacuated the residents to the inner belt before their home was destroyed, which is how Wayfarers’ Haven was founded.

The Outer Belt

A resource-rich region politically divided between Moonlitter and Partisan Territory. Both polities share a common language, Outlander, but the Partisan dialect is much more conservative thanks to government efforts to stave of encroachment of Allied Worlds media and with it the spread of Commonthroat.

Texan here. We learned Mexican Spanish (seseo, yeismo, ustedes for everyone, etc) It’s been years since I had to use it for my job but IIRC there’s a difference in the subjunctive verbs as well.

There are also distinct varieties of Spanish spoken in the US that differ from Mexican Spanish. As a general rule, if a common word has a similar-sounding English cognate (often false cognate) the cognate will be used. truck = troca instead of camión, concrete (as in cement) = concreto instead of hormigón, carpet = carpeta instead of alfombra, to park (a car) = parquear instead of estacionar, and so on. This is from my years working as a bilingual call center agent.

Much appreciated! Been thinking of looking for a writing community to have my work critiqued. I know I said on the Neocities page I’m not an aspiring author, but it would be nice knowing whether and how much I’ve improved over time.

Can I ask what’s your goal with this work

This is a playground to get lost in while daydreaming.

It feels like a great setting for a really dense wide scope novel

I have some stories set in this world, but the narrative and characters serve the worldbuilding and not the other way around.

How are you organising all your work?

I use Obsidian.

At first I was imagining Firefly as a sort of mystery box character, but they’re more of a one-man panopticon state.

While he does have a degree of direct control over the capital complex, in the vein of a genius loci, the low data rate of the ansible network means he can’t directly observe everything that’s going on in Partisan Territory, though the government would very much like to tell everyone that the Great Leader is always watching. He’s a deliberately ambiguous character. Did he initiate the genocide of Wayfarers, only relenting at the plea of his advisors? Or did the genocide start with the disorganized secularist warlord states that Firefly united under the Partisan banner, and Firefly put a stop to the atrocity after returning to Focus from his failed missionary journey? How did the the other two missionaries die during the time their womb ship was incommunicado? Did Firefly kill them in a nihilistic rage? Or did he make a final prayer to the Uncreated Light to save them as their amnions failed, only turning his back on his faith after the prayer went unanswered? Did he also die along with the other two missionaries, with the Partisans propping up his corpse a la Weekend At Bernie’s in order to have a unifying symbol to rally behind? Did he die some time in the intervening millennia? Surely sheer entropy would get to him eventually, suspended metabolism or not? If he is alive, is he sane, or have the millennia worn away his mind? Is he still a wanderer (apostate) after First Contact, or has he reconsidered his beliefs in light of the existence of other sophonts among the stars, and now wishes to embrace the natural death he’s fled from for 33 millennia? You get the picture.

sounds like you think a lot on ideology and utopias.

The Partisans are just my sink for all my grimdark ideas. The Lonely Galaxy is actually meant to be much more upbeat. The Partisans are mostly in the background. As far as ideologies go, there’s also the hyperlibertarian Spacer Confederacy, the capitalist Allied Worlds (which currently enjoys a degree of cultural and economic hegemony in the system), the unstable middle man between the AW and Partisan Territory that is Moonlitter, and the politically ecclesiocratic and economically distributist planet Hearthside.

The main thrust of this setting is that the yinrih are all alone, just like humanity, crying out into the blind uncaring cosmos. Our First Contact is also their First Contact. Most sci-fi involves a galaxy-spanning meta-civilization of countless alien races. Some works have humans all alone, but none I’m aware of have just one other species, just as surprised to meet us as we are to meet them.

What kinds of stories are you interested in telling with this?

Low stakes slice of life stuff, believe it or not. A human has to negotiate a yinrih bathroom, a yinrih and the human she’s lodging with have to deal with a broken air conditioner, a yinrih tries Texas BBQ for the first time, etc.