Tr'Nee

The jungles of Oyarsa B shelter one sentient species: the Tr'Nee. The Tr'Nee are arboreal marsupials with prehensile tails, long dextrous digits, and large round eyes, similar to Terran lemurs. The average adult male measures 1.3 meters from head to tail, and the females are slightly smaller. Infant Tr'Nee cling to their mother's coats until they are mature enough to travel the branches on their own. Tr'Nee are primarily frugivores, subsisting on the many varieties of fruit and supplementing their diet with captured game. Average lifespan is 155 local years (31 Earth years).

The Tr'Nee have visual and aural acuity which surpass human norms, but their keenest sense is smell. All Tr'Nee possess scent glands on their hands and at the base of their tails, which can produce a wide variety of chemical markers. The Tr'Nee language consists of a complex array of hoots, shrieks, and chirps, with an olfactory component that conveys various nuances and subtle shades of meaning. Universal translators are unable to interpret or duplicate Tr'Nee scents accurately, which might lead to interesting blunders during initial communications.

Socially, the Tr'Nee are organized into bands consisting of several extended family groupings. The bands wander through the jungles in seasonal rounds, moving from food source to food source. Each band is led by a chief who is advised by a council of elders called Hree'tokk (literally, "star watchers"). The Hree'tokk, typically females past their childbearing years, climb to the highest boughs of the jungle, braving the cold and dizziness to watch the stars and keep the count of days.

The Tr'Nee live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle using preindustrial technologies. Clothing is minimal, although hunters and Tr'Nee of status often wear elaborate braided ropes for ornamentation. The Tr'Nee exhibit an aptitude for tool-making, although most tools are quickly discarded after use. They use stones carried from rift walls to crack nuts, gourds to store water, and bone- or thorn-tipped spears to hunt. They catch certain types of game using traps. The Tr'Nee are also adept at using scent to help them hunt or in defense. Adult Tr'Nee can alter the musk produced by their scent glands to imitate the scents of other fauna. Tr'Nee hunters often lure away predators by planting false scents, or might trick predators into attacking their enemies by the same means.

The Tr'Nee have developed a careful understanding of astronomy and rudimentary mathematics, which the Hree'tokk use to calculate the arrival of Hiding Time. During that turbulent season, the bands move to the cliff walls and ride out the season in caves, living on stored food.

The coming of aliens to Oyarsa B has left the Tr'Nee in a state of turmoil. Wondrous as these strange Sky People seem, the destructive tendencies of Greel's pirates have left the natives very suspicious. Once the pirates started poaching and kidnapping Tr'Nee, the local bands put aside their differences and sent out the call for a great moot. Soon more than forty bands will come together to draw battle lines against the Sky People. The Tr'Nee consider hostile any aliens they encounter, and may lure them into an ambush using manipulated predators.

Reference(s)

• Cambias, James, et al. Planets of the UFP: A Guide to Federation Worlds, Last Unicorn Games, 1999. ISBN: 0671040065.