[Veltzeh]: 39.Fiend or Foe.Prologue: Who are they?

Final report for the research administrators by researcher Cenral Lekala.
Date: 3465-04-23
Coauthors: researcher Alastair Lekala, researcher Juha Jaarinen, regenian science official Seato-K-Tellane.

Regenians are aliens that are remarkably similar to us. They are obviously carbon-based humanoids who have developed on a planet similar to ours and it is clear that they are a vastly intelligent species. I do not know the stages of their development, but as far as we know, it is safe to think that they have most likely evolved from an animal originating on Regen and there is no reason to assume the previous stage in their evolution was not a some sort of primate. Either way, it is unknown and this assumption is not even a very educated guess.

Regenians do seem to be similar to mammals with the major exception that their basic form is epicene and not female like that of humans. Human females generally need males for fertilization, but one regenian individual can perform both female and male functions. They have only told pratical and general things about their physiology and intend to keep it that way for now. A list of generalities that are currently known follows:
1) Regenians breathe oxygen and can manage well on Earth. They are accustomed to handle a slightly larger amount of carbon dioxide and the oxygen portion of their usual air is only about 16 percent. They have told that a human might survive for some time on Regen and that the main threat to us would be radiation, which suggests that their atmosphere is not sufficient enough in filtering harmful radiation or their sun is slightly different from ours. It was mentioned to me that their eyes seem to react noticeably to ultraviolet, so it is possible they sense some range of wavelengths of that part of the electromagnetic spectrum to some extent, similar to some birds here.
2) On their head, regenians have six protrusions that vaguely resemble tentacles. One such tentacle is called clavedel in the common regenian language which will be called Regenian. It is not yet known what function these clavedels have, but they seem to be quite pressure sensitive.
3) Regenians do not have any kind of a gender or sex system as we have, due to the fact that they all are the same sex and gender with respect to each other. As was mentioned earlier, they can perform both female and male functions, meaning that every regenian can both carry offspring and fertilize other regenians. However, for most of the time regenians are totally sexless since they feature an estrus cycle, similar to seasonal estrus seen on many known mammals. However, the timing of this estrus is not seasonal and is instead timed with similar precision as the menstruation cycle of a human female. Most of the time regenians are without a sex drive, but during what they call the estrus period, they are sexually active. It should be noted that this was only told to give a reason for their two-week vacation every two months – apparently someone had been quite persistent in trying to figure out why a regenian science advisor could not work at a critical time of a project. Nothing more is known about their reproductive system.
4) At least partly due to the facts above, the regenians have serious trouble trying to understand our gender system. They can understand physical differences as they told that on Regen they have lesser animals that have sexes, but anything beyond that seems to be ungraspable for them. They often want to reject the idea of gender and do not even seem to be able to learn languages that imply gender too much. This is why the regenians seem to favor interacting mostly in Finnish.
5) The culture of regenians seems to be very secular and promoting questioning and suspicion. They do not want to talk to very religious people and not one of them has ever mentioned anything about deities or other higher forces. If there is some spiritual side to them, it is likely expressed as respect toward nature since they seem very concerned about what we are doing to our planet and why. They seem to become deeply distressed when things are stated as facts and often counterargue every statement of that nature with questions relating to our certainty and methods – if they bother anymore. Too often the regenians get tired of it and cease listening altogether.
6) The common regenian calendar is as follows: A year is exactly 196,5 days long. They have seven months and their names in Regenian follow: Tekaninoi (beginning of autumn), Sekeninoi (end of autumn), Aikeninoi (beginning of winter), Tyleninoi (end of winter), Seleninoi (beginning of spring), Iileninoi (end of spring) and Naerninoi (summer). It should be noted that there are no translations for the months, as they are primarily just names, much like the names of months in many Germanic languages. Each month has 28 days, with the exception of Naerninoi which has 29 days every other (odd) year. A month is divided into two weeks, and one week has 14 days. Regenians express their dates usually in one of two ways, the first being a "formal" way and the other a "casual" way. The formal way is to merely express a year and a day number – an example of this would be 29253-076. The formal way is mostly used in official records and time-keeping devices. The casual way is to express year, month, week and day: 29253-3-2-06. One day of Regen has 26,02 hours and they have divided that time into 14 hours, making one "hour" (daka) 1,859 hours (111,5 minutes) long. A daka has 100 "minutes" (serni), therefore making a serni 1,115 minutes long. A serni has again 100 "seconds" (tini), making a tini 0,699 seconds long.
7) The regenians are telepathic, meaning that they can influence thinking, read thoughts and sense emotions and presence. It is not yet known to which extent this skill goes, but they are obviously capable of learning languages very quickly with telepathic methods. They do not seem to pick everything that goes through a human mind, but there are several explanations for that: they might not totally understand the way a human mind works, they might merely be courteous toward us since they are aware that we are not telepathic, or they deliberately avoid reading our minds like they claim. Nevertheless, this poses great problem with respect to privacy.

Anything about their history beyond that what they have told us about the way they reached our planet is not yet known. Alastair Lekala, who provided the information, did not tell me everything and ey cannot be acquired, contained and questioned by us since ey was and is, as far as we know, protected by the information department of the law section of the regenian intelligence organization and continues to reside in the space station the regenians established near Titan, a large natural satellite of Saturn.

Regenians sent their first space survey to our planet on 3422-06-28 (Regen year 29183). During the 40 years that the ship was supposed to be traveling, they came up with a way to revolutionalize space travel, that is, to travel faster than the speed of light. There are many theories as to how they achieve it, but we have not yet learned anything conclusive. They sent another ship to meet with the original ship and the two different ships met on 29253-33 (Earth year 3462). The original, old ship took approximately 40,4 years to travel here.

The regenians stayed away from us for a while, and I was told they did that because they wanted to assess us and our situation so that they would not unintentionally scare, destroy or confuse us in a harmful way. They also wanted to protect themselves in the assumed case that we had been far more technologically developed than we were.

The first contact was made on 3463-02-02 at 02:32 UTC (29253-3-2-06 08:92) when researcher Alastair Lekala went missing from a patrol on Mars shortly after the exploration team had landed there. Ey had been taken in custody by the regenians who, using their telepathic abilities, quickly established communications with em and learned what they could of our world as seen by em. They clinically studied em (using some sort of scanners and took a small tissue sample) and thus learned much of our biology. Alastair Lekala assured that ey had allowed all this as soon as they had searched eir mind enough to learn eir language.

After that, we have been in regular contact with the regenians and many have visited the space station they helped us to build in Earth's orbit – some have even been taken to the space station close to Titan. As far as is known, no human has been taken to Regen. Many regenians, however, are on Earth acting as either ambassadors and envoys or science advisors. They are very much protected and all quite illegal attempts to acquire and study one have been quite disastrous due to the fact that they can telepathically influence us. No legislation regarding telepathy and privacy has been formed yet in most of the developed countries, while some developing countries as well as USA and South Africa have aggressively outlawed it and prohibit regenians from being in any contact with them.

We are currently working on a device to counter this telepathy, but it is not going well.

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© by V. E. "Veltzeh" Lehkonen.