Toren
Man kills man, and torens inherit the Earth.
- Old toren proverb
Uplifted sapient species engineered from Terran raccoons.
Biology
Standing between four and five feet tall, torens walk on two legs and run on all fours. Their heads feature enlarged skulls with high foreheads to accommodate a brain capable of intelligence, and their hands have been reworked to add opposable thumbs. Coloration is similar to domestic cats and dogs in that there is a wide variety of coats and colors, though they retain a black "mask" around their eyes.Psychology
Torens are highly social and extremely adept tool-users, perhaps even more so than humans. They are highly industrious, displaying a knack for scavenging and MacGuyvering up solutions for engineering problems, and frequently manage to thrive in harsh conditions. The toren aptitude for pattern recognition is very acute, fueling their engineering skill and making them excellent mathemeticians, cryptologists, and physicists when engaged in more intellectual lines of work.Civilization and Culture
Average Technological Level
Toren technology basically amounts to whatever they can get their hands on and bash together into some sort of vaguely working contraption. Standardized designs and mass production are all but absent, instead master engineers working in their own styles will build things as needed out of any parts available, and toren creations are designed to be easily taken apart and reconfigured as needed--it is not unusual to see scavengers obtaining a single vehicle and rebuilding it into an airplane, boat, or car. Toren engineering is a careful process of organized chaos, resulting in jumbled patchwork creations which nevertheless have no superfluous components.
History
The second uplift race to be created after the superpigs, torens were originally prototypes in the Ancient American military's project to create animal supersoldiers since the pre-existing dextrous paws of raccoons made them an excellent candidate for trialling the modifications necessary to make an animal body capable of supporting an intelligent brain. Once this part of the project was complete, the Ancient American military cast the them aside. They were rescued by a humanitarian foundation which completed the uplift project and dispersed them prior to the End of Earth.
After civilization rebuilt, torens were a common sight in the second age of Terran interstellar travel as master engineers often seeking to escape anti-nonhuman prejudice back home. As the Starweb emerged their cultures gained many practices such as traveling in large clanships. In the present, there is an enduring divide between torens who have settled on planets and in space habitats as part of a landed society and those who maintain the old lifestyle as mobile scavengers. The former tend to regard the latter as dirty ruffians who give the species a bad name, while the spacers think the planet-dwellers are hypocritical sellouts who have forgotten their origins, often as colonies established in the course of scavenging operations.
After civilization rebuilt, torens were a common sight in the second age of Terran interstellar travel as master engineers often seeking to escape anti-nonhuman prejudice back home. As the Starweb emerged their cultures gained many practices such as traveling in large clanships. In the present, there is an enduring divide between torens who have settled on planets and in space habitats as part of a landed society and those who maintain the old lifestyle as mobile scavengers. The former tend to regard the latter as dirty ruffians who give the species a bad name, while the spacers think the planet-dwellers are hypocritical sellouts who have forgotten their origins, often as colonies established in the course of scavenging operations.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Torens have a reputation as scavengers, beginning with their origins picking over the ruins of post-human Terra. They will often show up after a major disaster or war, sometimes arriving in vast fleets of hundreds of ships at the behest of a powerful Scavlord, and proceed to appropriate abandoned property to salvage anything of value, using the spoils to cobble together all manner of gadgets, vehicles, and structures. For this reason many people of other species regard them as looters, little more than intelligent vermin who profit off the suffering of others, and no shortage of rumors and conspiracy theories have been spread accusing torens of deliberately engineering catastrophes. Most torens reject this categorization, instead considering themselves to be recyclers who try to make something good out of other cultures' failures. They do not like it when two nations go to war, or a planetary society collapses from ecological mismanagement, but so long as fools continue to do foolish things they will have no shortage of interesting junk to make a living from.
Their cultural traits and history of tension with humans makes them deeply skeptical of participating in wars fought by other species, regarding armed conflict as inevitably destructive for all involved. Most torens remain studiously neutral and are in turn ignored by feuding powers, only becoming involved when opportunities for scavenging and settlement open up in the aftermath. There have even been instances of governments encouraging this, ending territorial conflicts by expelling all parties involved from disputed areas which neutral groups of torens are invited to occupy.
Their cultural traits and history of tension with humans makes them deeply skeptical of participating in wars fought by other species, regarding armed conflict as inevitably destructive for all involved. Most torens remain studiously neutral and are in turn ignored by feuding powers, only becoming involved when opportunities for scavenging and settlement open up in the aftermath. There have even been instances of governments encouraging this, ending territorial conflicts by expelling all parties involved from disputed areas which neutral groups of torens are invited to occupy.
Scientific Name
Procyon lotor sapiens
Doomkopfs
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