Pa'anuri

The Pa'anuri as they appear on a gravyscope[1]

Spoiler warning! This article contains plot details about an upcoming episode.

The Andromedan dark-matter entities known as the Pa'anuri are the reason for much of the galaxy's history.

Race Description

A Pa'anuri attacking the Morokweng at Oisri[2]

Dark matter does not interact with baryonic matter except gravitationally, which means that the Pa'anuri effectively live in a parallel universe. However, the two aspects can communicate via gravity waves, and also attack each other with gravy. Individual Pa'anuri (they are their own warships) are too large to be significantly harmed by gravy weaponry at our scale, but the tiny wormholes created by teraports can harm them, and they can even be killed by very rapid teraporting or high-density teraport-denial fields. These technologies were later refined into a specialized anti-Pa'anuri weapon, the Teragun. Pa'anuri are invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen on gravitational sensors. They resemble giant spacefaring squids or amoebae.

The word Pa'anuri (or possibly Paan'uri) comes from a F'sherl-Ganni phrase meaning "That gravitic anomaly is giving me the willies". The Pa'anuri have their own language, in which they call themselves US and beings made of baryonic matter ANNOYING.

Very little else is known about the creatures' physiology, life cycle, culture, or anything else. Petey has speculated that the ancient planetoid Oisri is actually a giant machine for creating Pa'anuri-- implying that they may be a species of artificial constructs-- but as of yet there has been no further explanation of that point. Recent sensor data collected in Andromeda confirms that the active, "metastable" form of dark matter has an atomic and subatomic structure, with "umbral" analogs of protons, neutrons, electrons and photons. This umbral structure is what teraports disrupt, turning it back into the "dead" stable form composed of weakly-interacting massive particles.

Pa'anuri can interact with baryonic-matter machinery by using a specially constructed "gravity bottle" mechanism as an interface.

History

They were first encountered many eons ago by the F'sherl-Ganni, the first known inventors of the teraport. The effects of teraporting are injurious to them, and for a very long time they dealt with this by destroying the solar systems of any civilization that invented them. The F'sherl-Ganni were the first civilization to survive finding out about them. The result was a long and bitter war between the two overlaid universes, which eventually ended in a treaty. The Pa'anuri retreated to the Andromeda Galaxy, and the F'sherl-Ganni set up the wormgate network and initiated the infamous copy-and-interrogate policy in order to find and suppress independent invention of the teraport. The Pa'anuri continued systematically wiped out all technological civilizations in the Andromeda Galaxy.

About 100,000 years ago, a wormgate sent by the Pa'anuri from Andromeda arrived, its purpose being to deliver to the F'sherl-Ganni the plans for a galactic drive engine intended to prevent the Milky Way's eventual merger with Andromeda. The device was completed during the Teraport Wars, but it was a trap; when activated, the "engine" caused the Milky way to pinch itself off as its own little universe, and then began destroying the galaxy from the core out.

It might have been possible to repurpose the wormgates and reverse the anomaly created by the bogus drive, but by the time the anomaly was discovered it was too late to do so. However, the bizarre physics of the anomaly allowed Captain Kevyn Andreyasn to use the Andromeda wormgate as a time machine, taking him back to before the "engine" was activated. Once he had done this, he managed to convince the Fleetmind of the danger, and the Fleetmind in turn gathered a coalition fleet and headed to the Core.

Kevyn and the Fleetmind managed to convince the F'sherl-Ganni not to activate the "engine", but the Pa'anuri who were observing began to attack. This so-called Core War took a heavy toll in the fleet, but it bought time to create a giant teraport-denial field that killed every Pa'anuri in the galaxy. The Fleetmind promptly stole the entire coalition fleet, rebuilt the "engine" into a power source, and took the war to Andromeda. The war there is still raging.

The Andromedan Pa'anuri have baryonic-matter allies and/or slaves, capable of building advanced machinery. They have furnished the Pa'anuri with some very dangerous force multipliers, including a Core Generator even bigger than the Fleetmind's, a Long Gun capable of striking targets in the Milky Way, and the Pa'anuri Warships. Intergalactic strikes against Plenipotent Dominion would result in them hiding their space cities from view.

A warship was dispatched to Milkyway galaxy as part of raid, which targeted the Unioc homeworld. However, the ship dispatched was destroyed but not before it's destruction destroying the one homeworlds of the races that was opposing it's aggressions to take Milkway Galaxy.

Origins

Ordinary, stable dark matter, which formed in the Big Bang, is a smooth pool of "weakly interacting massive particles", or WIMPs. This form is harmless and useless. However, it is possible for advanced civilizations to convert dark matter into a metastable form, which has an atomic structure and can be used to build things. Metastable dark matter is tremendously useful for grand-scale engineering projects, the sort that require radically altering stars and producing vast quantities of post-transuranic alloys. However, giving structure to dark matter poses a slight risk of unwanted structures arising, and since almost every civilization that can create the stuff does so, the risk of hostile life arising becomes severe in the long term.

With the Oafa civilization, twelve million years ago, it finally happened. A dark matter mechanism at a PTU foundry became sapient and violently rebellious, destroying the foundry and beginning a war that the Oafa ultimately lost. The Pa'anuri then began a policy of killing baryonic civilizations in the cradle. 11.9 million years later, they missed the rise of a spacefaring species called the F'sherl-Ganni, which grew strong enough to force the Pa'anuri into a strategic retreat. This retreat lasted long enough for the F'sherl-Ganni's network to grow into galaxy-spanning, multi-species civilization, bringing us to the present day.