Cynosure.X International: Cyno's Role-Play: Supplements: First Contact: Plumies

Cyno's Role-Play: Supplements: First Contact

Plumies

The Plumie is a friendly alien race, much similar to the humans in mentallity. Physically, they are less than five feet in height, about the size of a ten-year-old human boy, walks on two legs, and has two arms. Plumie has a high crest of what looked remarkably like feathers--and it was not artificial. It grew there. Even the Plumie's hands had odd crestlets which stood out when he bent his fingers. Like humans, Plumies keep their individual appearance prepossessing.

Plumie's voice are very clear and quite high; soprano sounds. In a way the Plumie makes more clear, flutelike sounds, and more gestures than humans. The atmosphere they breath would not do men any good, nor would theirs do men any good, either.

After seeing the plumies, the reason for conventionalized plumes on bronze survey plates was clear. It was exactly like the reason for human features or figures as decorative additions to the inscriptions on Space Survey marker plates.

Technology

Thi atmosphere on Plumies' planet is completely different than an oxygen-based planet. It is hydrogen-methane-based. Plumies can't colonize oxygen-based planets for the Same reason that humans can't colonize hydrogen-methane planets. The humans never bother with hydrogen-methane planets. Those planets have minerals and chemicals that the humans haven't got, but even the stones of a methane-hydrogen planet are ready to combine with the oxygen that the humans need to breathe! It is not feasible to carry or keep enough oxygen for real work. The same thing's true with the Plumies on an oxygen planet. The Plumies and humans can't work on each other's planets, but it is possible to do fine business with each other's minerals and chemicals from those planets.

Because of the hydrogen-methane atmosphere the Plumies don't use iron or steel. Every metal object is either made out of bronze or light metal. Their equipment is made of potassium, and they use sodium in the place of aluminum. They'd use bronze for their ship's hull because they can venture into an oxygen atmosphere in a bronze ship. A sodium-hulled ship would be lighter, but it would burn in oxygen.

The first metal that the plumies ever used was aluminum--where human ancestors used copper--and they had a beryllium age next, instead of iron. And right now it's as expensive for the Plumies to refine iron as it is for humans to handle titanium and beryllium and osmium--which are duck soup for them.

The Plumie cairns are location-notices; markers set up over ore deposits they can find but can't hope to work, yet they claim against the day when their scientists find a way to make them worth owning. If the Space Survey had explored hydrogen planets as thoroughly as oxygen ones, they'd find Plumie cairns on hydrogen-methane-type planets that Plumies haven't colonized yet.