Chirotar

The Cynopterids are considered to be a nuisance race by the more powerful beings and races that dwell in the astral plane. According to those eldritch sources willing to speak with arcanologists and sorcerers, they are incapable of harnessing arcanotechnology, ritual magic, and summoning. The bat like Cynopterids are however very much capable of planar travel, and harnessing advanced science and basic hypertechnology. As such, they are on a technological level less than humans, but have spread far from their original homeworld.

The basic cynopterid has a light built body, long arms that have long spindly fingered hands and the vestigial remnants of what were once their wings. The face is decidedly canine or even fox-like in appearance, with males appearing more doggish and females more fox like. They average 5 feet in height, and seldom more than 75-80 pounds in weight. They do not echolocate, rather they have an advanced sense of smell, and excellent eyesight. Cynopterids and constant explorers, traders, and surprisingly, vegetarians.

They are also fairly violent.

Chirotar, the Space Bat

Chirotar is much like the rest of her race, but by their standards she is considered to be of at best average appearance, with brendeled fur and moderately protuberant eyes. To humans, the difference is meaningless as most all Cynopterids look the same, being horrific appearing gigantic space bats. She is predominantly brown with some grey spots and striping, and she favors a lavender body suit. She is an explorer of the first order, and one of the first of her race to contact humans.

Equipment:

Huano-Class Personal Craft: This unnamed vessel is a small Cynopterid space/dimensional explorer craft. The ship is barely more than 30 feet long and is little more than a power plant, drive motor, and one room accomodation with about a 1000lb cargo capacity for food, water, and other needs. The ship has a limited short range 'blink' capability to avoid combat, and is unarmed and unarmored. Aside from a few pieces of indescipherable gear, the ship is actually substandard compared to human built craft.

FZ3 Wing Suit: The wing suit functions like light power armor, being composed of a light composite armor shell with a basic powerpack and attached wing assemblies allowing the suit to fly, so long as the motors embedded in the wing roots are fueled and functional. The wingsuit has one hard point on each wing, and can carry a third weapon in the hands.

Typical weapon payload: 1 32mm concussion grenade launcher, 1 assault needler (anti-personel) and 1 particle accelerator rifle. Utility pack, and three plasma grenades

History:

Chirotar is special really only in the fact that she made the first Cynopterid-Human contact. And that contact didn't go well. The first contact between the interdimensional Cynopterids and humanity occured not at one of the distant colonies or near a space habitat, but rather on Earth, well inside several defensive perimeters. Chirotar's ship dimension gated into the atmosphere to explore the strange radio signals that she had been tracking. Rather than finding a primitive race she found a vital, and suddenly hostile humanity. Her ship was struck by two anti-aircraft lasers, and then was forced to the ground by a pair of variable tech interceptor craft. She abandoned the craft, and escaped in her wing suit, leading the other patrol craft on a high speed dizzying chase through sky scrapers, a large arco-plex, and finally ending when she ran out of fuel and crashed into a chemical refinery.

The Cynopterid was eventually captured, after causing a good deal of damage with her weapon systems. While this might have soured relations for the forseeable future, and many proposed that the alien be examined, vivisected, and then sent to Area 51 for probing, calmer heads prevailed. A tenative peace agreement was made. Chirotar was impressed by the capability of human technology and skill, and could imagine the sudden appearance of a human craft above one of their colonies would have excited the same military responce. Already dealing with the alien MiGou infestation in the former Soviet Empire, it was decided that the Eurasian Alliance would assist in repairing her craft (while taking copious notes for reverse engineering) as well as doing the same for her Wing Suit (again, making many notes about the construction for reverse engineering).

Chirotar has since returned to Cynopterid space, bringing to her people knowledge of a simian race that had done quite well, but that wasn't quite ready to leave the planetary nest, a large pile of tree nuts, and some samples of the amazing computers that humans were making.

Writers Note:

It's late, this is bizarre, and probably useless. And, I've been drinking. This is a strange brew of CthulhuTech and the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. There was a figure, Wingnut, who was a bumbling space bat with all sorts of toys and gadgets. I had his toy once, and I wanted to write something serious about his race, so this is it. There are eventually going to be other dimensional beings and races to go along with this one.

More on the Cynopterid Race

The Cynopterids are a prolific race not entirely unlike humanity, nurturing their young, forming into large communal groups, supporting largely democratic ideas, and maintaining amiable relations with most races. They do not have a star spanning empire, and despite their willingness to fight and defend themselves, they are not warlike. Many of their weapons and technologies have come from trading with other races, something they are going to be very interested in doing with humanity. Human weapons, power systems, and computers are superior to theirs, even if humans havent quite figured out how to deal with the problem of relativity and FTL travel. There is going to be great debate among the Cynopterid colonies near Earth over the possibility of establishing trade channels with humans. There is concern over humanity's capacity for warfare, heavy industry, and exploitation of resources.

Centuries ago the Cynopterids devastated their homeworld, stripping it of resources and poisoning it with the efflueva of haphazard industry. Their almost natural ability to navigate between the stars saves them from extermination, and they spread out. Their first ventures were strewn with failed colonies, brushfire wars with each other and a few lesser races they encountered. Time gave them maturity, and allowed their population concentrations to dip to where they weren't burdens where they lived. Rather than building bustling hive worlds and massive space ships, they lived in scattered space stations, and small colonies scattered across hundreds of worlds. Where aliens can comingle the Cynopterids have enclaves, where they tend to be investigators, inspectors, artists, and pilots.