Salarian

The second species to join the Citadel Council, the salarians were warm-blooded amphibians native to the planet Sur'Kesh. Possessed of a hyperactive metabolism, they thought, spoke, and moved fast, finding other species sluggish by comparison, though that same metabolic speed left them with a short lifespan, salarians over the age of forty being a rarity. Known for keen observation and non-linear thinking, they excelled at research and espionage, and it was generally accepted that they always knew more than they let on. It was the salarians who uplifted the krogan and, later, engineered the genophage deployed by the turians.

Biology#

Salarians were tall, elongated bipeds whose skeletons were composed of more cartilage than those of other races. Their long, thin heads bore a pair of horns, and their skin ranged from bright reds and greens to the more common blues and greys; their blood was greenish. They were androgynous, with no major facial difference between males and females, and their large oval eyes had thin membranes in place of eyelids, blinking upward rather than down. Their defining trait was a high-speed metabolism that allowed them to function on a single hour of sleep a day and made them seem restless to other species, but which also limited them to a lifespan of roughly forty human years.

The salarians were haplo-diploid egg-layers: unfertilized eggs produced males and fertilized eggs produced females. Social rules permitted only a fraction of each yearly clutch to be fertilized, so about ninety percent of the species was male. They possessed photographic memories and a form of psychological imprinting, tending to defer to those they had known in their youth, a tendency formalized in the solemn hatching ritual overseen by a clan matriarch known as a Dalatrass.

History#

The salarians were well established on Sur'Kesh fifty thousand years before the modern age, albeit in a primitive state, and in time progressed to colonizing other worlds. Their first three interstellar colonies, Aegohr, Mannovai, and Jaëto, remained at the heart of salarian territory ever after. In what became known as the Tecunis Expedition they discovered the Citadel only decades after the asari, making them the second species to do so since the Prothean extinction. They opened relations with the asari at once and became a founding species of the Citadel Council.

The salarians played a decisive role in the rise and fall of the krogan. They provided the krogan with advanced technology and a tranquil new homeworld in order to manipulate them into eradicating the rachni for the Council. The easier life and high birth rate that followed allowed the krogan to spread aggressively through Citadel space, and to end the resulting Krogan Rebellions the salarians engineered the genophage, the biological weapon the turians then deployed. Though their military was unremarkable, the salarians came to be seen as the premier intelligence and information-gathering arm of the Council, respected by most though regarded by some as manipulators.

Culture#

Salarians prized cutting-edge technology, often favoring high performance over reliability, and treated information-gathering and even spying as a simple matter of course, embracing the dictum that "knowledge is power." Their reproductive method left them with no concept of romantic love or sexual attraction; relationships between the rare males and females resembled human friendship, and fertilization followed months of negotiation between clans for political and dynastic purposes. Salarian names were elaborate, encoding homeworld, nation, city, district, clan, and given name in a single string. The species also included the Lystheni offshoot, unwelcome in Council space for reasons that were never made clear, who could be found among the galaxy's outcasts at Omega.

Government and military#

The salarian government, the Salarian Union, was a labyrinthine web of matrilineal bloodlines bound together by political alliance and interbreeding, functioning much like the noble families of medieval Europe, with each region ruled by a single Dalatrass. The rare females were typically cloistered, and the powerful Dalatrasses served as dynasts and political kingpins, while males rose to authority in business, academia, or the military but rarely in politics.

In principle the salarian military resembled the Systems Alliance, a small volunteer force focused on maneuver warfare, but what set it apart were its intelligence services and rules of engagement. The salarians believed a war should be won before it began, and in every conflict they struck first and without warning, finding human notions such as declaring war before prosecuting it naive. Their intelligence network was led by the Special Tasks Group, whose effectiveness during the Krogan Rebellions provided the template for the Council's Spectre program. Biotics were considered too valuable to risk in combat and were assigned to the intelligence services, and the salarians cultivated strong alliances, particularly with the turians, to compensate for their small numbers.