Born from the metal that burns in our blood so as to carry our breath within (Mutants and Masterminds)

<PBS voice> This blog is made possible by the generosity of patrons like you! </NPR voice>  Special thanks go out to my patrons Keeper, Dave, Ferny, and Diane.  If this post or any of my others impresses you enough to wish to join their ranks, you can do so at this link. 

"There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk "his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor" on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else."

— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

The planet Mars is a shockingly populous planet, with possibly the second most active and diverse ecosystem among all Sol's planetary children.  From the three-legged blade-footed mollusc-like hematophagous sarmaks to survivors of Atlantis and lost collectives of cube-shaped combining robots, the planet abounds in sentient life.   This is perhaps understandable.  After all, the red-dirt elementals of Mars, cousins to the earth, blood, and rust elementals of Earth, famously gifted several of their own number to the creation of humanity.  Among all of these, however, two species stand out among the others:  the marmar and their advisor species, the vlenti ne.

𒀭𒄊𒀕𒃲, Mars, Αρης, मङ्गल, Angaraka, 𓅃 ~ so many of the gods who focused their attention on the Red Planet have been wargods over the years, and the marmar have been their creation.  Slight humanoids with metallic-green skin and fetish for enhancing themselves with cybernetic antennae who live in tunnels and rooms carved below the Martian surface, the marmar might not seem like the chosen race of a series of divine generals.  Their devotion came in the twin forms of a rigorous dedication to ascetic efficiency and computer-aided mathematical tactics.  Marmar cuisine was reduced to simple pills, light, easy, and without need for attention, which were the general goals in the mechanization of their entire culture; joy, humor, individuality, and most freedoms were excised to allow the troops to focus entirely on achieving their mission objectives.  A very small and select group of marmar known as sages developed  unique and very scientific approach to divination magic, as well, in order to use knowledge of possible futures to ensure marmar victory.

As long as they faced away from Sol's burning shores, these twin virtues ensured marmar victory.  At one point, they were only a moon and couple dozen asteroids away from uniting the entirety of the outer Solar system in one empire.  The problem came after the 1830 Martian Civil War, precipitated by the loss of the frontier to which the marmar had become accustomed.  The victors knew theat their people's martial fervor could not be denied, and so they turned their attention inward, using a 64-Earthyear period of tactical planning as a chance to foster less warlike and more scientific memes in their immortal constituency. 

 "All this trouble over a fat little man in a red suit!"

— Santa Claus Couquers the Martians

They invaded Earth alongside sarmak mechanized tripod infantry in 1894, and were defeated by the inevitable biowarfare of a planet full of microbes.  The sarmak-marmar coalition tried again in 1938, and were beaten back once more by the quickly blooming crowd of Earthling superhumans.  Attempts by the most bloodthirsty among the marmar to understand their chosen enemy by allowing Earth's transmissions to be received by the general populace resulted in marmar children becoming addicted to joyful, cheery Earthling holiday TV, restless and distracted.  The fateful decision was made in 1964 by National Sysadmin-General Kimar to kidnap Santa Claus.

The aftermath of that plot involved Kimar's former servant Dropo being raised to the position of Martian Santa.  The effects have been widespread, multivalent, and unpredictable, as the marmar attempt to weld a newfound crazed addiction to schmaltzy sweetness and incessant humor to their previous militant austerity.  Millennia of repression are bursting forth without rejecting the agent of that repression.

Luckily, the vlenti ne, a species of large black arachnids with bald human faces and eight prehensile hands covered in the same green skin as their heads, exist.  Early on in this process of radical cultural shift, Kimar reached out to these philosophers in their deeper cavernous homes, hoping to enlist their aid in shepherding the marmar through these trying times.  Although Kimar had to enlist Dropo to give them a crash course in humor, they were willing to engage with the cultural conundra plaguing the marmar civilization.

 "Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison, he has found beyond himself not God, who is prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He is not a man. He is not a God either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster"

— Georges Bataille

Extremely peaceful, in counterpoint to traditional marmar militarism, the vlenti ne are quite violent in the earliest stage of their life.  Coming forth from their eggs as nymphs with quite limited intelligence, they receive no nurturance from adults and often turn to fighting each other for resources, with 90% of nymphs dying on their first day of life.  This is seen as a weeding out of the weak to ensure the ability of the community to endure the hardship and paucity of Martian living.  Vlenti ne lack any kind of sexual dimorphism, their reproductive abilities and roles being instead a function of age and pupation.  After a vlenti ne nymph gives birth for somewhere between the first and third time, it will undergo a chrysalis and emerge as an adult with a significantly more developed brain and the capability to sire children rather than bear them.

Vlenti ne adults receive all the nurturance denied to them as nymphs.  Very tall, they are passive and communistic, rejecting the idea not just of personal property, but of possessions themselves.  As a result, despite their magnificent cities clustered around the few underground water sources, their lives seem quite impoverished.  Because water is so rare on Mars, and there are so many sentient competitors for what water there is, the voluntary sharing of water between two vlenti ne marks the deepest and most important relationships in their culture, one marked by a complete and ultimate trust bordering on mutual submission.  Water is so important in their culture that they use the same word for both "to know" and "to drink", and their word for "god" is simply an agent noun formed from that word.

The final stage of vlenti ne life are the ones they simply call "the Old".  Ghosts of dead vlenti ne, the Old are almost incomprehensibly intelligent, spending all of their time in ethereal contemplation.  The Old form the governing class of the vlenti ne, their decisions unquestioned, though they often take a few centuries to be made.  This gives vlenti ne civilization its unique feel, in which individual, material, and even political problems are trivialized in favor of abstract yet logical aesthetic questions.  The vlenti ne pursue knowledge out of a deep, patient enjoyment of it, an intuitive and receptive leisure, rather than the active searching and examination to acquire the power to set definitions and draw conclusions.  They thus reject the scientific method, treating religion, philosophy, and science as the same subject.

 "They — my political adversaries — define ‘other’ as anyone not white, male, cis, abled, and allegedly Christian. Romance [fiction], on the other hand, is and has always been about opening oneself to the risk of the ‘other.’ Whether (from the traditional heroine’s point of view) that ‘other’ is a pirate, a Viking, the lord of a manor, or a war-hardened Navy SEAL, a connection cannot be made without accepting one’s own vulnerability, and opening oneself up to intimacy."

— Suzanne Brockman

It took Dropo Claus some time to explain the nature of the crisis facing the marmar to the vlenti ne, for they also lacked an understanding of humor, just as they, with their contemplative lives, lacked an understanding of surprise or resentment or hurry.  Even the idea of fiction once engendered in the vlenti ne a great and terrible distress.  However, theirs was an intellectual confusion, and when Dropo Claus invoked their inability to hate something without first identifying and sympathizing with it, the idea clicked for them.  However, even to this day, the vlenti ne have trouble with telling jokes; they believe that correct timing is accomplished by the completion of waiting, and that just does not lend itself well to comedy.

To this day, the marmar make pilgrimages to the vlenti ne, both individually and as a collective, for advice and counsel in important decisions and for cultural direction.  The vlenti ne's commentary tends to center a few key ideas developed from considering what they have learned from Dropo Claus, listed here in relative order of importance:

1. Being funny is not a good thing, for it is never funny to the one to which the thing happens.  However, laughter is bravery, and goodness, a sharing against pain and sorrow and defeat.
2. The essence of the discipline is, first, self-awareness, then, self control.
3. Live each golden moment as if it were eternity — without fear, without hope, but with a sybaritic gusto.
4. Every drinking thing is simply your other end, and the universe is just a little thing we whipped up among us the other night for our entertainment before agreeing to forget the gag.
5. You eternally are the action you take at the cusp.

As a final note, Santa Claus has demonstrated that human and marmar biology is compatible enough to cross-breed; the byblow of his affair with Kimar's wife Momar is the superhero known as Silverbelle on Earth.  Indeed, ever since the marmar entered the United Nations in 1996 (thanks to the pioneering work of diplomat Professor Donald Kessler), their ambassador to the UN, Consmar, has been dogged by rumors of incessant indulgence in sex workers and other affairs of the loins.  If you believe the tabloids, he has sired any number of half-Martian bastards throughout New York City.

 "The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."

— John Cage

Physical Appearance:  I can't draw, so I really like providing a few reference pictures and trusting in your imagination to build a good image of the marmar and the vlenti ne.  They each look like some combination of three pictures:
Vlenti Ne Nymph

Vlenti Ne Adult

Marmar

 "There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

— G.K. Chesterton

Marmar Template
PC PL 8 / NPC PL 8 / MR 8 / SR 24
STR -1  INT 11
Powers
Cyberbrain:  Comprehend Languages 5 (read, speak, and understand all languages, speak with machines); Quickness 4, limited to mental tasks; Remote Sensing 4 (auditory and visual), limited to technological sensors; Senses 9 (acute analytical extended radius rapid ranged Detect Wireless, radio, time sense) • 29 points
Cybernetic Antennae:  Selective area rapid subtle 1 radio Communication 4  • 26 points
Long-Lived:  Innate Immunity 1 (aging) • 2 points
Martian Native:  Innate Movement 1 (environmental adaptation: low-gravity); Senses 3 (visual: direction sense, distance sense, low-light vision) • 6 points
Metallic Skin:  Innate Protection 1 • 2 points
Powerful Mind:  Impervious Enhanced Will +6 • 12 points
Advantages
Assessment, Beginner's Luck, Eidetic Memory, Fearless, Jack-of-all-Trades, Second Chance (Deception effects), Second Chance (Intimidation effects), Second Chance (Persuasion effects), Skill Mastery (Technology), Ultimate Effort (Expertise: Science), Ultimate Effort (Expertise: Tactics), Ultimate Effort (Technology), Well-Informed
Skills
Expertise: Science 4, Expertise: Tactics 4, Technology 4
Complications
Weakness:  Disease-related effects have their degree of effect increased by 2 when affecting a marmar.

Abilities 20 + Powers 77 + Advantages 13 + Skills 6 + Defense 0 = 116 points

Vlenti Ne Nymph Template
PC PL 3 / NPC PL 3 / MR 3 / SR 9
STR 0⇰+2 STA 0⇰+2 AGL -1 FGT +3 INT -3 PRE -3

Powers
Bloated:  Permanent innate Growth 2 • 5 points
Chitinous Exoskeleton:  Protection 1 • 1 points
Grub:  Burrowing 2; Movement 3 (slithering, wall-crawling 2) • 8 points
Insectile Sensorium:  Senses 5 (danger sense, darkvision, acute smell, tracking) • 5 points
Mandible:  Binding, dangerous 4, grabbing, impressive Damage 3 • 10 points
Martian Native:  Innate Movement 1 (environmental adaptation: low-gravity); Senses 3 (visual: direction sense, distance sense, low-light vision) • 6 points
Advantages
Fearless, Great Endurance, Trance
Skills
Perception +6
Defenses
Dodge  +2⇰+1
Parry  +2⇰+1
Fortitude  +6

Abilities -8 + Powers 35 + Advantages 3 + Skills 3 + Defense 10 = 43 points

Vlenti Ne Adult Template 

(for an Old, simply use both this template and the ghost template, with all the variation that implies)
PC PL 6 / NPC PL 6 / MR 6 / SR 17
STR 0⇰+4 STA 0⇰+4 AGL -1 FGT +3 INT +4 AWE +2 PRE -1

Powers
Chitinous Exoskeleton:  Protection 3 • 3 points
Discorporation:  Attack Movement 2 (dimensional 2: afterlives; resisted by Dodge) • 4 points
Eight Legs:  Dynamic array (6 points) • 11 points

• Extra Limbs 6 • 7 points
• Leaping 6 (30 feet) • 2 points
• Movement 3 (sure-footed 3) • 2 points

Hands for Feet:  Movement 2 (wall-crawling 2) • 4 points
Insectile Sensorium:  Senses 5 (danger sense, darkvision, acute smell, tracking) • 5 points
Large:  Permanent innate Growth 4 • 9 points
Martian Native:  Innate Movement 1 (environmental adaptation: low-gravity); Senses 3 (visual: direction sense, distance sense, low-light vision) • 6 points
Upon the Completion of Waiting:  Immunity 5 (interaction Skills) • 5 points
Advantages
Eidetic Memory, Fearless, Great Endurance, Second Chance (trip), Trance, Ultimate Effort (Will checks)
Skills
Perception +6
Defenses
Dodge  +2⇰0
Parry  +2⇰0
Fortitude  +6
Will  +5

Abilities 14 + Powers 47 + Advantages 6 + Skills 3 + Defense 15 = 85 points

Half-Marmar Template

PC PL 2 / NPC PL 6 / MR 2 / SR 6
STR -1  INT 9
Advantages
Assessment, Beginner's Luck, Jack-of-all-Trades, Second Chance (Deception effects), Second Chance (Intimidation effects), Second Chance (Persuasion effects), Skill Mastery (Technology), Well-Informed
Skills
Expertise: Science 4, Expertise: Tactics 4, Technology 4
Complications
Weakness:  Disease-related effects have their degree of effect increased by 1 when affecting a half-marmar.

Abilities 16 + Powers 0 + Advantages 8 + Skills 6 + Defense 0 = 30 points