Tortle

The tortoise-like tortles were engineered by a Permuter in the early decades of the seventeenth-century, with the intention of creating another martial slave-race to be used as frontline units in the army. However, the tortles proved difficult to create and harder to breed, with incubation periods of nearly three years in their eggs, and eventually the project was scrapped. The Permuter who made them, unable to destroy his creations, left nearly two-dozen eggs buried in a southern beach. By the time the tortles were rediscovered in the mid nineteenth-century, they had a small community, with their own language and culture.
Because they had already been deemed useless as slaves, the tortles were nominally placed within the Steel Caste, but they remain so small in numbers, and so peacefully autonomous, that the Empire tends to leave them alone. The number of tortles in existence still numbers less than 5000, and they are a complete novelty when they wander into civilization.

Tortle Names

Tortles have less developed palates than other races, and so their language derives from simple sounds, with a system of tones used to derive meaning. Their names reflect this.
Examples: Anh, Cah, Chau, Nu, Thao