Strange Entities

“Xenomorphs” can be found throughout the Foundation and the Rim. For reasons that have always been the subject of theories and speculation, alien life has always been unusually abundant in this region of space. Though sapient alien life has never been discovered, there are few inhabited systems that don’t have at least some form of native xenobiology.

Even in a universe where alien life has become something mundane and ordinary, though, there is room for the mysterious and the bizarre. There are some beings out there which defy simple explanation, which seem to resonate with something far stranger than mere exotic biology. Some of these lifeforms are little more than urban legends; others are better documented. A few these mysterious beings are described here.

Myriad. A catch-all term for mysterious space-borne aliens that have been known to infest starships. They are highly mutable and take a wide variety of forms, though no individual specimen is ever larger than a housecat. They just keep cropping up despite many attempts to purge affected stations and ships, but they’re usually just a nuisance - damaging wiring and components, stealing food, contaminating vents. Because there are so many strains and each is different, though, you can never be sure you don’t have an aggressive one.

No one knows exactly where the myriad came from originally - the common theory is that they hitched a ride on some interstellar explorer’s ship, and then just spread through spaceports and refuelling stations like rats. Some people claim they manifest spontaneously from otherspace, just like void monarchs, but there’s no evidence to support this.

Void Monarch. These are mysterious beings that can survive the vacuum of space; they are legendary entities, and their existence has never been independently confirmed. They are colossal starship-sized creatures made out of elaborate and delicate membranes that make them resemble enormous jellyfish. They only ever appear when a ship drops out of otherspace, almost as though they were “pulled through” with the ship - some claim that they are drawn to those with psionic potential, and that the appearance of a void monarch means you have a psion onboard.

The reason there are no confirmed reports or good footage isn’t just because these creatures are incredibly rare. They also disrupt sensors and communications in their wake, making it incredibly difficult to collect good data on them, and the delicate structures that make up their bodies are difficult to detect. The details of their ecology, capabilities and levels of intelligence are unknown - as is whatever happened to the specimens that were sighted in the past.