The aliens are named the Sh’thimori or the People of the Water. Before this name was known, the humans knew them as the Blue Newts from the dead bodies they recovered.
They are six limbed amphibious beings that walk on four of them and use the first two limbs as arms with three fingers on each hand. Their heads appear like flat-headed newts with large golden eyes with a mouth full of short sharp teeth. They prefer to eat their food raw. There is a vestigial tail. Their skin is slick and wet that is normally light blue-grey in colour but it can change colour to show their emotional state. It is blue hued when relaxed, more orange when agitated. Communication occurs via low clicks and clucks and the odd use of limited range telepathy by certain individuals with the telepathy gene. They see well in low light, but bright light hurts. On Earth they wear goggles in bright sunlight.
Their home world terrain is a hot, very humid water world with many archipelagos of thousands of islands. It circles a red giant star. They prefer hot, moist climates and prefer to live in marshy, coastal, or swampy areas.
They are a matriarchal society and live in nest communities that can achieve the size of mega cities. Leaders can be either male or female. Nests have many relationships to other nests and nests often specialize in a task or duty. Most of the young do what their families have always done.
They give birth to live young – newtlings. There are usually pairs of infants born to a mother and the children are communally raised. Maturity is long, similar to a human, but some abstract reasoning doesn’t fully develop until they hit puberty in their teens. Sexual activity is governed by cycles and there are pair bonds that develop. The children tend to get into a great deal of mischief when they are young and need to be constantly watched / guarded.
The newts have a caste system that organizes the various nests. All nests are equal in value / rights, but governing decisions are decided by nests that perform important governing functions. There is a great congress that decides on a ruling council. The Sh’thimori do not have raw ambition as a psychological attributes so they naturally put the collective race before their own. They do have feelings of achievement and pride which pushes them forward to advance and promote themselves or their collective. The working toward the greater good can be seen as cold or calculating by humans. They do live in harmony with nature as they evolved and lived at the waters edge. Things like pollution and disturbances in nature affect them quickly.
Some nests are specialized for extremes such as warrior, thinker, mediator, and explorer. They may have minor genetic engineering modifications to enhance their abilities such as intelligence, endurance, speed, strength, and tougher skins. These specialized castes are treated with reverence and are not allowed to interbreed with other nests of a different designation. They are guardians of the pure race – the natural body. All nests work side by side on a mission, and the caste differentiation only applies for the command structure.
It is known that the aliens came from a dying world, are vaguely humanoid amphibians, are blue in color and don’t understand us well at all. Not very much is known about their culture, but it is known they are not part of a hive mind. Their biotech is very advanced and hundreds of years ahead of ours. They don’t really want to exterminate us, but don’t trust us, and needed to weaken us. Their home world was dying, it was from an old red sun. Too hot. World was roasting. The Newts were not the first civilization to originate on their world. They had a forerunner species that was Newtlike but went extinct or left the world. Newts will not use nukes first as they know the world is fragile.
Great Mother Egg, or Shre’lor
Newts have a belief in the Mother Egg or Mother Sea. The egg was lost during the destruction of the Newt mothership at the end of the Alien War and was recovered ten years later from the Kahamba research facility by a CAJUN special forces raid. The artifact now resides at the AO research facility in Edmonton, Canada.
The Shre'lor is an egg shaped crystalline object about ninety centimeters tall and weighs almost a hundred kilos. It is quite dense. It is translucent, with a smooth surface. It glows with a faint amber light and also seems to generate a faint amount of magnetism and heat. It the Newts holiest religious artifact. Faint crystalline lattices can be seen inside the object, as if they were holographically etched. Could be a computing or information storage device, a power source, or something else altogether.
