Tyger Tyger
The Clinging Fire
Illustration by Riyahd Cassiem
Name: Anans'ai Devilhunter Cult
Designation: Sentient
Homeworld: Formerly Charon homeworld in Otherspace (It is nameless, but odds are, it would be Styx or Hades
); currently Korriban with possible sects lightly peppered throughout the Esstran sectorLanguage: Galactic Standard Basic
Average height of adults: 1.95 meters
Skin color: Uses the same color palette as Human, with the added potential for shades of Grey
Hair color: Blond, Brown, Black, Grey, Red, White, and mixes thereof
Breathes: Type 1
Strengths: Force Culture - The Anans'ai are a subculture of Jedi, and as such, maintain a population exclusively of Force-Users. This is not to say that all Anans'ai are BORN Force-Users. However, those who are not frequently experience alienation and anomie (First steps on the road to the Darkside, don't'chaknow) with the rest of the cult/tribe due to their inability to connect to the spiritual "Web" which makes the Anans'ai philosophy so clearly the subjective "Truth." This frequently results in the NFU's departure from the tribe to be claimed by the desert, or their taking on a disposition of "material-worship," warranting their feeding to Durga and readmission to samsara.
It should also be noted that the Anans'ai utilized a very nuanced approach to the Force that is heavily dependent on their Force Philosophy. Because of this regulated way of thinking, the Anans'ai can never develop their Force Mastery to the levels of the Jedi we are used to seeing on stage and screen. Additionally, if an Anans'ai were somehow able to leave Korriban to train among the stars, this broadening of horizons would likely undermine or overwrite their Force Discipline learned in the Anans'ai Cult. In much the same way that a Christian turned Atheist will never be able to find bus money left to him/her by God's providence (instead finding only money "someone must have dropped"), an Anans'ai turned Jedi would lose connection to the Web to join the Living or Unifying Force. One never opens a window without closing a door.
With Great Power - With their spidery genetics, the Anans'ai are exceptional, speedy climbers. While they can grip and hold to even the flattest of rock faces, no, they cannot "stick to walls," though they can stick to and climb their own webs. In the same vein, while they can projectile launch their webbing at an enemy, they cannot use it to webswing through Midtown.
Comes Great Responsibility - Their culture, now shamanic in nature, exists in cycles and stories, but also on the complexity of infinite variables, like the building of a web. It is a natural process that must constantly be tended to, and it will continue to serve the same function over and over again. That said, every web is quite unique, and every strand reliant on the others. The capacity for analogy between the art of web maintenance and the quantum puzzle of the individual life has given birth to a Force Discipline that enables a degree of fortune telling; or, at the very least, a map of the story thus far. An Anans'ai, within its web, can produce the narrative of how the events in the existence of a person or thing has lead them to their current position in life and how all the variables therein hang on each other. With a little combinatory thinking, this offers incredible insight into the detecting and predicting of possible shatterpoints. However, such motivations are sacrilege and philosophically incompatible with the understanding of the Force necessary to perform such a skill. After all, what kind of spider deliberately destroys a web of its own making?
Biological Machines - Before the Anans'ai were Charon, they were Charr Ontee, a sentient species biologically engineered/created by their predecessors, the Kathol, for the purpose of servitude and farming. Their genetic foundation was developed in a manner that was clean, immediately logical, and approachable. Recognizing an error in the structure of their code that would eventually lead to degeneration, following the Charr Ontee's liberation by the Far Star (or, more precisely, their accidental being cast into Otherspace), they would delve into the world of bioengineering to save themselves and adapt to Otherspace. In this, they became the Charon, and their gloomy new galactic position lent them the disposition to be Death Worshipers. Whoops. That said, there were a few still on the side of Life who would become bioscientists, creating biotechnology and performing work on themselves. Cutting to the chase, while the bioscience of the Anans'ai has lost its scientific basis and exists now as "magical rituals," the Anans'ai possess to means to forcibly adapt themselves, speeding up the time requirements necessary to see the fruits of beneficial mutation for desired evolution. This enables the tribe to adapt to effortless existence in any living situation in approximately four generations, provided the forebears can survive that long.
Weaknesses: Regressed Society - The Anans'ai are a society in decline (though an anthropologist would declare that statement ethnocentric and dependent on what virtues you personally have decided society should aspire to "ascend" to). Okay. If success is measured in a society's ability to reach out to the rest of the cosmos, accommodate newcomers, and assert mastery over nature, the Anans'ai is not quite where they were. The understanding of the universe is not *scientifically* complex, and their lives are simple ones. More modern technology would be so alien so as to be unusable.
Niche' group- The Anans'ai are an accidental situation and their population is small. They no longer possess the means for outerspace travel.
Nomadic- As one cannot simply "grow" Sith, the Anans'ai are forced to move around to hunt them. Feast or famine is dependent on the greed and power hunger of Sith graverobbers visiting Korriban. So, yeah -- Famine is rare.
Distinctions: Combination of humanoid and arachnoid features. Typically, this manifests as additional eyes, mandibles at the edges of their human mouths,spinnerets upon their three-fingered hands, and a density of extremity hair unusual among Humans. That said, it is not completely unreasonable to have Anans'ai born with additional limbs of varying functionality.
Average Lifespan: About 55 standard years
Races: Not enough Anans'ai to warrant racial distinction; members are traditionally born with differing degrees of Human and Charon characteristics.
Diet: Their primary diet consists of the spiders born of Durga, She of the Mountain, though they are not above eating the other animals roaming the Korriban wastes.
Communication: Communication is founded around the spoken word of Galactic Standard Basic. The Charon leaving their homeworld to pursue the path of the Jedi. In the first years in their departure, they communicated with said Jedi with the clicking of their mandibles, as was typical of the Charon language. Over the years, this began to decay due to seperation from the base culture in favor of the new Jedi one, as well as the continued metamorphosis of the people which would enable them to eventually actually speak Basic, albeit, a broken, "contact language" variation, as the tribe had spent some time in isolation. For example, much of their learning material with which to educate later generations was derived from a crashed spacecraft, often even the inventory manifest. So, if asked "Yo, you have your stuff?," an Anans'ai might be inclined to respond, "Quant. Suff." if their quantity was sufficient. Additionally, having come from a culture of bioengineered slaves, the Anans'ai tend to forego self-referential pronouns due to a never profoundly developed sense of self. Perhaps paradoxically, if something has a name, they celebrate it, never substituting it out with third-person pronouns. These habits are merely common, and tend to be less true as every new generation moves closer to doing whatever the hell it is they want.
While the mandible clicking has largely gone the way of the dinosaur, it is still utilized for the sake of ambushes, issuing simply, quick commands like "Right," "Left," "Hold," or "Target." The clicking will sometimes manifest at the end of sentences, the movement of the Human mouth triggering a muscle spasm in the mandible. The obstruction also can leave the Anans'ai lingering on an "S," like a snake might. The written form of the language has completely vanished from conscious memory. That said, however, they still understand it intuitively, expressing it in webbing and carving it out on their chitin armor, and while they would not be able to tell you exactly what it is the wavy symbols meant, they might shrug their shoulders and suggest, "For brooding," or "Savagery," like some Chinese pictogram for "Fire" on your ex-girlfriend's ribcage.
Culture: As the Anans'ai became less like Charon and more Human, the racial memory of "being a spider" sank into the realm of the unconscious. The less they were like spiders, the more they dreamed that they were. This aesthetic began to manifest in their art and culture. The Anans'ai are Jedi who mimic spiders. Their Charon forebears were Jedi who just happened to be spiders.
The Anans'ai culture is perhaps best understood as akin to the Bear Worshiping cultures or Hunter cultures here on Earth. The object of the hunt is killed, eaten, every piece of it used, and then the excess worshiped so that the animal may return so that the hunters may repeat the cycle. With the Anans'ai, there's perhaps a few more steps.
The Anans'ai worship a giant spider as a Mother Goddess named Durga, to whom they build a massive forceweb and sacrifice captured Sith to on a semi-regular basis. Durga will then consume these Sith, using their Force energies to refuel itself, then use the organic matter of the Sith to begin a dozen bioengineered and rather large spiders. The Anans'ai eat these spiders, making use of their chitin and silk, typically to build better weapons and armor so as to repeat the process.
Trivia: Though all recognize her to be a giant spider, when translating her to myth, Durga is sometimes described as a many armed woman riding around on a tiger.
While this perhaps sounds kind of dark, it should be understood that the Anans'ai are Lightside Jedi. This tradition hails from a collapsed understanding of the traditions of the Cults of Death and Life from where they had initially sprung, but it has been modified through teaching of the Jedi, specifically everyone's favorite eulogy: "There is no death, there is only the Force." The Anans'ai have resumed the role of the Charon (named for the ferryman on the river Styx) as psychopomp, once more ushering beings through the void to their deaths, but with a new understanding of what occurs because of that. The dark energy of the Sith is repurposed for right, their meat and bones, the same, and their consciousness is given another chance in the realms of samsara.
There is no death, there never was. The Anans'ai have come a long way just to figure that out.
Technology level: Neo-tribal. As mentioned above, the Anans'ai are a regressed society. Once upon a time, they were of high tech, able to directly manipulate their own biology to their whimsy and even live on the edge of a black hole, they have been reduced to the status of nomadic desert devilhunters. Racial and memetic memory remembers these old days, and the ability to manipulate the vestiges of the old world with which they brought with them remain intact, albeit as an intuitive system of mystical rituals and ceremony. In this, the technology cannot be improved upon or resuscitated when lost -- only maintained as it currently exists.
General behavior: The Anans'ai roam the wastes of Korriban in the hunt for roving Sith. Typically, they will develop a base camp not too far from a Dark Lord ruin area, though the chief determinate is the location's ability to conceal Durga, The Turning Wheel, and enable ceremony. At which point, the Anans'ai will construct a Force-web by which to feed her. They can sometimes maintain a single post for several decades.
It is not uncommon that they will send the warriors out to acquire water as well as food sources to supplement the spiders offered by Durga, The Black Mother. They will enter caverns for shyrack or pick off tunk'ata from temples or even sometimes raid the food stores from the Sith Academy depending on whether or not its in operation.
Meanwhile, the spiritual leaders, the Yo'Ssentiss (a degradation of "Bioscientist"), maintain the traditions of the cult. They herd and slaughter the spiders gifted by Durga, She of the Tomb, harvesting their meat, chitin, and silk ) with which they build armor and weapons, make tools, and perform the rituals which act as maintenance to Durga, She From Where All Come Then Go -- the giant spider of DarkStryder technology that began as the spaceship that got them all to Korriban.
Important Note: there is a distinction between silk webbing and Force-Created webbing. They utilize both. Actual Spidersilk comes from the giant spiders, and is used for practical, material purposes. The Force-Webbing comes from the Anans'ai and is only as strong as the creator's will to retain it.
History: For canon basis, see Kathol, Charr Ontee, Lifewell, DarkStryder, Far Star, Halbret, Charon, and Charon Death Cult.
As the Lightside of the Force begat the Darkside, it was only inevitable that the Charon Cult of Death would create the possibility for a Cult of Life. Tired of the horrors and senseless misery of feeding sentient life to the blackholes that dominated Otherspace, the Cult of Life sought a better way so as to pave the ground for a better future utilizing the only example of such a thing they had: The Past.
The past for the Charon was rich in possibility, offering up the means to reach out to the cosmos by way of the Predecessors and their Bioengineering, as well as the Jedi and their teaching of the Force, offering a means to understand everything in a way they had not since the disintegration of Ta-Ree. The Cult of Life would develop hyperspace and depart from Otherspace to make their way in what we know as realspace. However, one group would stay behind -- The Brood of Halbret.
The Brood of Halbret was a subfaction of the Cult of Life much more interested in what the Jedi had to offer concerning the past. They had remained back on the new-Charon homeworld for the purpose of self-sacrifice, acting as a sort of Bodhisattva for their brothers and sisters who saw pointless death as the only way out. Naturally, they were seen as heretics, and over the decades were hunted into hiding until the 400 Year Darkness, when they wound finally utilize the hyperspace capabilities to join the rest of the Cult of Light in realspace.
How the hyperdrive was acquired is unclear, but it is heavily-implied that it had something to do with the previous bearer of the name Tyger Tyger and his/her iteration of the Far Star. The details, however, are unclear due to the secretive nature of Tyger Tyger's existence and even his/her age, as well as the Anans'ai 1) No longer being capable of reading Charon, and 2) their now pre/post-historical slant, seeing life in terms of perpetual cycles rather than a list of individual events. Whatever happened, Tyger Tyger and the Far Star were to be considered fondly by the Brood of Halbret. The aspiring Spider-Jedi find would themselves onboard a bioengineered ship within the Esstran sector of realspace, fighting a private crusade alongside Jedi Sentinels interested in initiating a curious new species as well as bringing the fight straight to Sithspace for their perceived role regarding the Gulag.
Of course, this was a fool's errand, and the craft wound up shot down over Korriban. Jedi forcefields would win the day, and brilliance of Choron bioscientists would ensure not every wound be a mortal one. Unwilling to risk signalling the enemy that surrounded them, the now "Children" of Halbret, lead by Jedi Master Anon Sey, were stranded. The necessity for a common language became essential. The Force inclination of the planet became influential. And as the genepool for the Jedi began to dry up, reproduction became necessity. And so, the bioscientists adapted. The Charon became more Human, and as a result, the Human became more Charon.
And they all became Jedi.
Eventually, the desire to leave Korriban had passed. It was all the current generation knew, these raids on the Sith inventory, these ambush attacks of their wanderers. Life was good, and they moved to become more nomadic in nature. However, they wound not abandon their crashed ship. It was sacrosanct, and as the culture got more mystical, it was thought of as a Mother. After all, it was how they got here. It was Durga, The Womb, Goddess of Good's Triumph Over Evil.
As if on cue, the Far Star would return, bringing with it a diverse arrangement of goods stolen, looted, traded, or bought, depending on one's decision as to the nature of Tyger Tyger. Among these goods was a piece of the thought-sinister DarkStryder tech, specifically a module designed for gifting sentience through consumption of the Ta-Ree energy. The module was applied to Durga and it awoke, but it was starving. The Ta-Ree energy was faulty this far away from Kathol, and the great mother of the Anan'Sey began to die before their very eyes. All eyes fell to Tyger Tyger and she/he was chased out.
Before the evening of the next day, Tyger Tyger would return with a Sith in hand (likely the reason he/she came to Korriban in the first place). The history of the Anan'Sey having mostly consolidated to mythical ideas, they recognized somewhere in their genetic story the desire to throw things into the void. And so it was that the Sith was fed to Durga, and the power of the Darkside was enough for it to survive. The "Byosenseis" assisted Durga in the sprouting of legs so as to become mobile, and the Far Star was celebrated for saving the day again.
Over time, as the Anans'ai became less physically like spiders, the more they outwardly acted like spiders. This, too, was the case with their Goddess Durga, who looked more and more like a spider with every passing day.
The Anans'ai now roam the Korriban wastes, hunting Sith and worshiping a big ol' spider goddess.
Notable Player-Characters: N/A
Intent: To fill the universe with more weird stuff and to build upon the Tyger Tyger storyline with an additional account of the original Tyger Tyger.
