Savage Space XXV: The Fashan

Four left! This time it's the villainous and batrachian Fashan:

The Degenerate Fashan

So hostile that their neighbors, the kokatik, bombed them back to the stone age. So insidious and malevolent that despite this little setback they have still managed to worm their way into the vast interstellar culture of the Federated Commonwealth and its allies, to sew discord and destruction in their wake...

The fashan are inimical to other lifeforms, xenophobic on a level unrivaled by almost every other contemporary alien spacefaring civilization. Despite the destruction of their homeworld's industrial capacity by the kokatik the fashan prosper on remote, hidden colonies; a tough call since they tend to favor the same water worlds that the kokatik do. Fashan are industrious and entrepeneurial, though. They like to infiltrate other alien civilizations, usually through a process of genetic modification to allow themselves to pass as "human" or "fadelik" for a period of time; they have an unusually malleable genetic makeup, which is able to sustain the ruse of another species for weeks or months before rejecting the host genes and reverting to their batrachian visage.

Fashan are driven by a unique imperative: they worship a higher alien species that they refer enigmatically to as the Great Ones, or sometimes (wait for it), the Old Ones. The Old Ones are believed to be a species of no small significance, possibly dating back to the era of the Coreward Expanse Civilization of the ancients; a few ancient ruins of four-million year old colonies in this region suggest that the fashan might be an uplifted species. Evidence of the ominous, monolithic statuary that the fashan decorate their warped cities with suggest that there is more to their strange religion than is evident....

One elder kokatik naval commander, who prefers anonymity, wrote a memoir of the bombing of the fashan homeworld. He recalls great leviathans that rose from the fashan oceans, and swatted the kokatik starships from the sky like flies. The kokatik engaged in a nuclear strike that did not stop until the vast ocean of the world had boiled away. No evidence of the great leviathans was ever found...

Fashan Traits:

Aquatic: Fashan are fully aquatic (2 points), and swim at a Pace of 8.

Low Light Vision: fashan are well adapted to the darkness.

Claws: the sharp talons of the fashan deal STR+1D6 damage.

Major Vow: The fashan are singularly dedicated to their Old Ones, and will do anything they can to further their mysterious, xenocidal cause.

Racial Enemy: the fashan are unable to deal with the kokatik, and vice versa. The fashan have an intense desire to eradicate the kokatik at every chance they can get.

Image captured by rogue privateer ISS Escalation during a raid on the Fahsan Homeworld