Winged humans who have adapted to desert conditions which cover 50% of their planet’s surface. Their skin is very shimmery with UV-absorbing minerals to protect against dehydration and damage from intense ultraviolet radiation due to Yran’t’s thinner ozone layer. This shimmering occurs during puberty, until which they cannot venture to the surface during daytime. Their wings are soft during childhood but just as their skin becomes shimmered during adolescence, the feathers along the leading edges of their wings as well as their primary feathers become crystal-hard and shine like stained glass in the sun. They dwell in vast underground caverns beneath mesas topped with syanas, large sessile organisms resembling mushrooms that have a wide, dish-like structure that captures the intense rays of the Yran’ti sun, and the energy percolates down through the roots of the mushroom where it is distributed to plants and animals that live in the underground oases. Each mesa is roughly 20 miles apart from each other in any direction. Within their cavernous oases, they live a pastoral/agricultural lifestyle punctuated by telecommunications technology comparable to what’s on Earth. Each cavern is governed by a hereditary matriarchal leader known as a zim’qa. The zim’qas all answer to the Queen. Their average lifespan is roughly a time and a half as Mortals from Earth, about 150 years. They first appear in the episode Thirsty Sands.
Meet the Yran’ti:
