Aqualish

Aqualish
Homeworld	Ando
Language	Aqualish
Average Height	1.7 - 2.0 meters
Skin color	orange to brown
Distinctions	Tusks, two sets of eyes:one for night vision, one for daylight, belligerent personalities
Known Members	List of known Aqualish

Biology and Appearance

The Aqualish are a walrus-faced race of bipeds from the planet Ando. There are two castes of Aqualish society. The higher caste has hands which are articulated webs with opposable thumbs, and is known as the Quara. The lower caste has clawed hands, rather than the webbed ones, and is known as the Aquala.

The Aqualish were tusked bipeds from the planet Ando whose appearance combined aspects of arachnids and pinniped aquatic mammals. Aqualish had a reputation for being nasty, crude and aggressive, and generally pursued off-world careers as mercenaries, bounty hunters, and pirates.

The three types of Aqualish, the Aquala, the Ualaq (who were the result of genetic mutation), and the Quara, were distinguished by their hands and eyes. Aquala had finned hands, while the Ualaq and Quara had clawed, fingered hands. The fingered Aqualish also varied in the number of eyes—while the Quara, like the Aquala, had two eyes, the less-common Ualaq had four. While most Ualaq and Quara had claw-like hands with five fingers, some Ualaq had three-fingered hands with very thick digits. Though Ualaq and Quara only made up about ten percent of the Aqualish population, their fingered hands made them more comfortable with technology. Thus, they were the subspecies more commonly found off-world. Because the Aquala saw the Quara as responsible for the image the Aqualish had on the galaxy as thugs, the latter subspecies were considered pariahs on Ando, which had a lower population of Aqualish than the galaxy itself.

Society and Culture

The distinction between levels is very great; webbed Aqualish hold governmental and commercial positions, while the clawed Aqualish are usually left to become bounty hunters and smugglers. They are a belligerent yet technologically advanced race. The Aquala live in vast sailing ships, while the Quara live on the planet's small islands. They have a long history of civil war, and have destroyed Ando's sister planet because of it. The war was initiated by the Aquala, who blamed the Quara for the declining harvests of fish. The war lasted until an exploration ship landed on Ando. The two groups banded together and killed the ship's crew. Eventually, the non-technical Aqualish discovered how to fly the ship, and even learned how to build their own.

The old grudges soon re-surfaced, though, and the two factions took their battle to Ando's sister planet. When the Empire arrived, the war-loving Aqualish tried to overthrow them. The sheer might of the Empire battered the Aqualish into submission, but it instilled a deep hatred in the Aqualish culture.

All three Aqualish subspecies spoke mutually intelligible dialects of the same language. Despite this, the unity between the three groups was shaky, with all three subspecies considering themselves the superior breed. One of the largest and most destructive of the resulting conflicts was the Aqualish Civil War. This war was initially started by the Aquala, who blamed the Quara and Ualaq for the declining harvests of fish.[1]

The war did not end until explorers, believed to be from either Corellia or Duro, arrived on Ando. The races of Ando united to destroy the "invaders", and learned the secret of space travel from the exploratory craft that they destroyed. The Aqualish forces set forth, beginning a series of bloody conflicts with a nearby sister world. They continued on a campaign of conquest, sparking the Aqualish-Republic War. After they were defeated—mainly because of the inferior Aqualish weaponry, limited to what they could scavenge from defeated enemies—their armies were carefully dismantled. As Ando joined the Galactic Republic, the violence became a black mark on the species's reputation, and the Republic initiated several attempts to demilitarize the Aqualish, each ending in conflicts.