Meet Our New Galactic Neighbors

What Do They Look Like

Imagine, if you will, a new world monkey. A capuchin or a woolly monkey will do nicely. Now, give it the head of a fox, with a wet nose, erect ears, and a whiskery muzzle. Give it four extra thumbs, one next to the pinky of each paw. Speaking of paws, give them dog-like claws and pads, and remove the fur from the tips of the fingers and toes, as well as the palms and soles, revealing grayish-black skin underneath. Make sure the weight is placed on the soles of the feet and not the toes like a dog. Make the tail even longer, as long as the rest of the body, head included. Round things off by making this creature the size of a large dog, 50 to 80 pounds seems about right, and give it a generous vulpine coat of fur in a variety of patterns.

What’s that? It’s still not quite alien enough for you? OK, fine. Look at the front paws, where our index fingers would be. Make the claw flatter, broader, and straighter than the other claws, and make it taper to a point so it looks like the nib of a fountain pen. That’s because it is the nib of a fountain pen. Inside the paw, at the base of the index finger, place an ink sac with a duct leading to the tip of the claw. Fill it with blue-black ink with the earthy smell of thirsty ground after a welcome rain. While we’re on the claws, let’s enrich them with iron and make them nice and sharp, better for defense and climbing.

Well now, they’ve got a mouth for eating and drinking, but what goes in must come out, right? But it seems rather unsymmetrical for both solids and liquids to share an entrance but have separate exits. Let’s give both ladies and gentlemen a cloaca in the usual spot and call it good. Ah, but don’t animals with cloacas lay eggs? Yes, yes they do. Just to be equitable let’s make the guys lay eggs just like the gals. We’ll worry about how they go about making more of themselves later.

Oh, one last thing. Look at those eyes, those fragile slimy wiggling goo-filled orbs. Gross, aren’t they? Let’s fix that. Most eyes work like cameras, and that’s boring. Let’s make their eyes work like radio receivers instead. How? Well, let’s keep the regular eyelids, but underneath give them four pairs of shiny reflective nictitating membranes. These will work like band pass filters, with each set of membranes allowing different wavelengths through. Now, where the eyeballs proper would be, put ground planes covered in billions of tiny nanoscopic antennas These arrays will be really, really good at absorbing whatever light hits them, so they look like they’ve been coated in Vantablack. If the eyelids are fully closed, they look like they might have normal eyes, but when open they look like they have empty eye sockets.

What do They Sound Like

Well, with a muzzle, loosely hanging chops, pointed carnivorous teeth, and a less nimble tongue that takes up more space in the mouth, don’t expect them to speak the king’s English any time soon. Yinrih speech sounds like the quiet yipping and growling made by a dreaming dog. Their languages rely almost exclusively on changes in pitch and volume, as well as the subtle timing of those changes, along with voice quality (whether they’re growling, grunting, or whining). They round things out with a small selection of “consonants”, sighs through the nose, short purrs, and yips.

The good news is we can understand them with enough exposure, and yinrih can likewise pick up on what we’re saying with time and practice. An ideal inter-species conversation occurs in two languages, with each party speaking their own native tongue… Well, yinrih don’t call languages “tongues”, since they don’t use their tongue when speaking. In stead they use the word for “throat”. They don’t use their lips or teeth, either, and can speak just as easily with their tongue lolling out of their open mouth while panting to cool down.

You can gather by the comparison to a dreaming dog that yinrih aren’t terribly loud while talking. If Billy Mayes were a yinrih he’d just about hit a comfortable indoor volume for a human. Yinrih have had to spend a lot of effort making their machines as quiet as possible so they can talk over any running equipment.

Since yinrih rely so heavily on pitch, volume, and timing to convey meaning, they can’t really sing like we can. But hey can howl, rather tunefully, in fact. They can also hiss, which usually expresses various negative emotions like frustration or unwelcome surprise.

What do They Smell Like

The petrichor aroma of their ink has already been mentioned. Their ink evolved from musk used to mark territory, which is why it smells so strong. Yinrih use pheromones to communicate emotion, although humans can’t really pick up on them. These pheromones also communicate things like gender, age, and reproductive status. As sophonts, yinrih have extended this olfactory communication to include elaborate perfumes that advertise things like rank and social status. They use perfumes much the same way humans use clothing. Oh, by the way, yinrih are usually naked. Having fur makes clothing redundant.

Yinrih do shed, and high traffic public areas smell accordingly. The inside of yinrih buildings are said to smell like a vet’s office–clean but somewhat musty. That’s not to say monkey foxes don’t care about personal hygiene. They’re all the more fastidious thanks to their hands also being feet. And we humans don’t exactly smell like a field of flowers to them, either. Our sweat is particularly off-putting to yinrih, at least initially. After a while humans and yinrih tend to grow fond of each other’s unique aroma. Humans love the rainy smell of yinrih ink so much that there’s even a rumor among them that we like to drink it. I wouldn’t advise doing so, as their ink is a bodily excretion. It is sterile, but then again, so is human urine.

And there you go. One yinrih, or monkey fox as humans like to call them.