About Riloks

So I'm nearing completion of the next chapter of "the fermi object" and I felt like I should explain a bit about Riloks, so spoilers because the story is largely about finding out what the hell Riloks even are. You can still keep reading if you care about spoilers just after the break is when you should stop.

Anyways I created Riloks and as best I know they are unique, I didn't base them off of anything, and in the story i've kept them kinda mysterious because I wanted it to be a mystery how one of them got up and walked off after almost a billion years floating through space. This next chapter coming up is going to be the first glimpse into their true nature and I think is a good example of me holding off on something not working out with the way I write chapters. Part of my problem is that I want to keep both the characters and audience ignorant to the same degree as to what the hell these things even are and what they can do. So far I've shown that they have bulletproof scales, excellent eyesight, and some form of a specialized hive/cast structure, but coming up I'm hoping to start delving into them more. I will reveal that they don't have any form of telekinesis or shielding or any other sort of offensive/defensive magic but that's about all I'm going to do for this non spoiler section.

Anyways it should be obvious to anybody who caught that last blog post that I've been having some confidence issues with my writing to put it mildly and quite frankly I'm not sure how far past the completion of the last changeling queen I'm even going to be writing. I'm still going to be keeping comments off because I don't feel like they would be helpful as my stories aren't bad enough to warrant really serious "the tenth time you used you're instead of your really pissed me off" discussions, but not good enough to really merit anything more than a "that was ok" or "I kinda like this" sort of comment means that I won't get anything out of comments as they are and I need to focus on improving myself(if I decide to keep going).

---------------- SPOILERS START HERE ----------------

Now that we're in spoiler land I thought I would talk more in depth about what I'm trying to get at with Riloks. I'm also not putting a direct spoiler tag on all this because I'm not revealing some of the more key aspects of how Riloks will fit into the story.

The main idea behind Riloks is something I don't think has really been explored, they aren't sapient and they don't really think beyond that of an animal intelligence, but they compete with civilizations for territory and I designed them so that they could compete with any normal civilization unwilling to go full scorched earth. I designed them so they could probably hold their ground against most modern militaries and counter in their own primitive way most ways of directly combating them.

For example their scales are made of thick bone and are articulated so they can absorb the impact of bullets and deflect them upwards, they have wedge shaped bodies so that even if you're shooting in the same spot you have to go through quite a bit of scale to actually hit them. The fliers are very accurate at dropping lumps of water they encase in a hardened mucas onto planes and into air intakes. There is a digging variant which can make dirt into something like concrete and excrete that material from their mouths directly into the air intakes of vehicles. They counter artillery by having fast thinking ones with incredibly perceptive eyes watch for incoming shells. etc. and etc.

So what I'm exploring with this story is basically a race that, had it landed on earth, would be competing with the US government for turf even though they likely will never discover something as advanced as fire.

The other thing was I had to basically design them with their own ecology they'd carry around with them, for example those bulbous plants in the last chapter? That's a fungus whose spores circulate throughout their blood constantly, it protects them from things like blood sucking insects by literally eating anything that sucks their blood without the sense to cook it first from the inside out. I even went so far as to design their cell walls to be super saline so that they would kill bacteria on contact, they don't use normal DNA/RNA so viruses aren't a thing, they don't produce sexually and they all just lay eggs.

Basically I've written so many things down about how they work and done a lot of thinking about how they should work(I have not done any actual calculations as to if any of this is possible or not, I just wanted to make sure that most of it was plausible) that I'm not sure if I can fit them all into the story so I thought I would write this down since it's looking like I'll be done with the next chapter sometime soon.