Voxadder

* Preserve materials.

* Adapt and expand to all circumstances.

Vox have space faring ships. They are mostly ramshackle and crude-looking but very quick and very hard to hit. Their weaponry is universally stolen from other species and is generally several years behind the curve. A lot of their technology is traded from the Syndicate or alien species.

The state of Vox science is entirely unknown. No propensity for advanced research has been shown by the Vox specimens captured by NanoTrasen.

The Vox apex are the groves in the arkships. They are in fact colossal organic computers, every single one of them linked via an incredibly sophisticated, several million year old bluespace network. This network hosts the vast majority of Vox communications, technology, culture and science, well outside of prying eyes.

The apex are entirely single-minded (in a figurative sense). They are devoted to preserving the sanctity, purity and continuity of the Vox line their arkship is hosting. They maintain the archives of dead Vox via the cortical stacks, and choose which Vox are to be revived when the time comes for a population hike. They also provide access points and tremendous data processing capacity to the auralis.

The auralis are devoted to transcendence. They desire to leave this Universe behind, or to break through the veil and move on to true reality. They've been working at this for about seven point five million years, and their understanding of theoretical and applied physics, intelligent systems and data processing/analysis is immense. Much of their mentality exists outside of realspace, and is coordinated by the Vox apex and their ceaseless maintenance of the bluespace network. They are also highly, dangerously telepathic, and the parallel processing power and independence from realspace provided by their network means that five hundred psionics can focus their power to pinpoint precision anywhere within a thousand light-years of a single auralis.

The apex are where the biomass of dead Vox is reintegrated, their cortical stacks are removed, and new Vox larvae are spawned. The larvae are bioengineered creatures built wholesale by the trees of the ark, carefully modified and monitored to fit the genetic profile of the arkship.

Larval Vox are generic, genderless slugs until they are chosen to host a cortical stack. The type of stack dictates what the auralis do with the larva and the form that the larva will take.