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Description

Pictured is an excerpt from an article on the natural and anthropological history of a species of xenosophonts. Despite the great similarities with Terragen life (It's Carbon based, uses water as a solvent, uses nucleic acids to store information, and even has a eukaryotic cell structure), the Legion are still very alien: They are compound organisms like the Portuguese Man'O'War, but with only eight zooids instead of thousands. The zooids themselves resemble Velvet Worms, an animal related to tardigrades and hallucigenia, although this is only convergent evolution. Velvet worms, tardigrades, and hallucigenia are all more closely related to humanity than they are to the Legion. From far away, a Legionary would resemble a cephalopod walking on six flexible legs, which also double as arms for brachiation or grabbing objects. An elongated cephalothorax, actually the organism's apical zooid, acts as a head and neck. The swollen abdomen, slung between the leg zooids, is the gastric zooid, which chews and regurgitates food for the other zooids.

Radio signals from [Down] were misinterpreted as activity from [Up], a superjovian world. It was not until the ACSV(E) "A Shameless Homage to Kirk" arrived in-system to conduct a geological survey that the truth was discovered and first contact made.

Description

Pictured is an excerpt from an article on the natural and anthropological history of a species of xenosophonts. Despite the great similarities with Terragen life (It's Carbon based, uses water as a solvent, uses nucleic acids to store information, and even has a eukaryotic cell structure), the Legion are still very alien: They are compound organisms like the Portuguese Man'O'War, but with only eight zooids instead of thousands. The zooids themselves resemble Velvet Worms, an animal related to tardigrades and hallucigenia, although this is only convergent evolution. Velvet worms, tardigrades, and hallucigenia are all more closely related to humanity than they are to the Legion. From far away, a Legionary would resemble a cephalopod walking on six flexible legs, which also double as arms for brachiation or grabbing objects. An elongated cephalothorax, actually the organism's apical zooid, acts as a head and neck. The swollen abdomen, slung between the leg zooids, is the gastric zooid, which chews and regurgitates food for the other zooids.

Radio signals from [Down] were misinterpreted as activity from [Up], a superjovian world. It was not until the ACSV(E) "A Shameless Homage to Kirk" arrived in-system to conduct a geological survey that the truth was discovered and first contact made.