Goners (3-4 foot tall lizard/velociraptor people)
They got plasma shooty tooties and sharp-toed footies.
Partially derive the idea of these lizard people from memes about lizard people controlling everything, a certain brilliant collection of books by Harry Turtledove (which I learned of from the videos by AlternateHistoryHub and EmperorTigerStar), Kingdom Rush Frontiers, Jackals from Halo, velociraptors from Jurassic Park and the need for an excuse as to why the aliens can eat animals from Earth and breathe human air, from which everything here expanded and I am now writing books set in this world's (galaxy's?) many major events (especially wars).... noooo.... maybe. Anyways I would like to thank my friend's crazy uncle for that time I saw all of his pictures of lizard people in his shed (I had already come up with making the invaders lizards but this was helpful to me realising that these guys need variation amongst themselves), a 3 hour period of looking at google maps to see what would realistically happen if aliens invaded, that time I chipped my tooth on a chicken bone that gave me the idea for Goners getting sick from their food, a GIF of a dancing lizard that reminded me to make sure these things just wanna have fun deep down and the neighbour's cat for believing in me.
These buggers were the first ever alien race to attack humanity and the only one to land an invasion on Earth without being utterly crushed in less than a month. The regular ones are fairly capable but it's the genetically modified ones who one should always be terrified of: seriously the GM Goners are utterly badass.
Currently, all known Goners either exist under the iron hand of the LIR or the reinforced titanium hand of the CHG, with plenty of outlaw stragglers trying to pretend their barely functional space bases count as continuations of their once great empire.
Basic Information
Imagine a 3-4 foot tall lizard person with the head, feet and hands of Velociraptors (shrunk down to scale). Their tails go most of the way down their legs and act as counterbalances for how they lean very far forward when running (which they do very quickly) but go straight down when they're standing straight; a very healthy Goner will have a tail with a tip that almost touches the ground but most suffer from malnutrition and so don't get this luxury. Their claws can grow to inconvenient lengths but most Goners keep this in check. They're skin is generally quite tough, with the GMO Goners having skin comparable to that of crocodiles.
As for their legs; velociraptor. They can technically be a fair bit taller if they fully extend their legs but this would be painful for them.
There are feathered Goners, existing as a result of being genetically modified to make survival on especially cold planets possible, as well. Aside from having a thick white, brown or grey downing everywhere (but less thick around the mouth) and being slightly shorter than regular Goners, they're perfectly normal.
Genetically modified Goners are known to exhibit spikes, colours other than those that usually appear on them (being various shades of green, light blue, greenish/brownish red and some black spots), the ability to see more colours like yellow than regular Goners, decorative/colourful feathers, being taller than regular Goners, serrated teeth and stronger claws and bones than regular Goners. These genetically modified Goners usually aren't themselves genetically modified but inherit modified genes from their parents and are born into an upper class of society that apparently formed as a result of genetically modified soldiers deciding to take over (except for the non-decorative feathered Goners, who exist just to fill in some cold space and are equal to regular Goners).
Well they have lots of internal differences as a result of genetic modification and good old mutation (the former of which is what makes variation in humans... or at least the ones of 2019 and previous) that can be summed up as follows: feathers (still can't fly), quills, spikes, skin thickness and toughness, scale/skin colours, size, lifespan, strength, speed, intelligence (speaking of which all Goners are better at remembering things they've learnt but aren't as good at learning new information or finding inventive ways to apply their knowledge; this is very bad for them whenever they are in new situations without obvious solutions), sensory capabilities, bone and muscle density, facial features and the like.
To sum up Goner genetics is difficult because of how they've genetically modified themselves. Simply put; they are actually descended from the dinosaurs: yes, the ones from Earth. I'd go into that but it'd require a little bit of an info dump that I think I'll place elsewhere in these files.
Meanwhile; reproduction. When a mummy Goner and a daddy Goner love each other very much, they [PG-13 ENFORCED REDACTION]. 4 weeks later, the mummy Goner lays 1-4 eggs (although some genetic modifications have taken this up to 8). Any of the eggs that are fertilised (they usually are about 1/4 of the time) will probably hatch baby Goners within 3 months, except for when they don't... anyway, Goner young often die during childhood due to recessive problematic genes from genetic modifications that weren't done right in their ancestors (or just mutations), diseases which have mutated around the defences Goners try to use and attack the weak baby immune systems or running head first into their deaths because they're both stupid beyond a concept of fear and quite susceptible to things killing them from infected cuts to automobiles.
Imagine having the advantages eggs offer like being able to produce large amounts of young and not being able to produce lots of young due to problems with fertility and most of your kids still dying both despite and because of advanced medical technology.
Anyway; Goners take an average 13 years to fully become adults. At the age of 10 they're usually almost at their size limit, unless they grew up malnourished (in which case they can still grow in this stage), and the next 3 years are spent on development of their "adult traits", which includes both their scale colours and [REDACTED IN THE NAME OF PG-13].
They originally developed in warm, forested areas. Specifically jungles close to the poles of their original habitat. However, once your sticks are pointy enough and the loss of some friends to trying to figure out what is and isn't edible is a risk you're willing to take, your species can go pretty much anywhere on their planet. Then once they get big bits'o'metal in the air then they're on their way to getting on other planets.
They are mostly carnivorous, with exception to some berries and shrooms. They were by no means intrigued by most of Earth's animals, including humans (oh yeah some of them went there), being edible as this is the case on all the other life-infested planets they've conquered, of which only 4 (including Earth) had intelligent life (don't worry there's a reason for this but it has Lord of the Rings multiplied by Game of Thrones levels of backstory to it).
The average Goner lives around 130 years. Yes 90percent of their lives are spent being adults; read it and weep humans who spent a little under 25percent of their lives as children when I'm writing this - or don't because most adults wish they were still kids; oddly enough the same for Goners.
So those first 13 years are spent as kids and after that they're in a moderately quick increase in coolness until the age of 18/19 followed by a slow decline until their death. Normally they'd live to around 60 in the wild but hey, when you've got advanced technology for medical purposes and acquiring enough food you might as well up those numbers. Speaking of which they remain fertile for life, but females have the easiest time at that 18/19... despite the Goner government requiring slightly fascist-flashback-inducing increases to population of its citizens... until it wants the exact opposite because they have a very hard time striking the balance on that one.
Additional Information
In nature, it was a thing of the one that was the best at beating the others into going along with whatever they wanted that got to lead their groups. They eventually got into the mindset of "oh animals do that so let's not do that" and would try and make sure the most intelligent were in charge at some points down the line but whenever [REDACTED] hits the fan they fly straight back into that instinctive mindset.
Yeah like you can ever truly domesticate a fully intelligent creature just as a pet. Wait. No. Crazy rich psychopaths of the UHN and CHG period stop it. You're not being cool I'm pretty sure that's slavery and very sure that's extremely morally wrong.
Their skin is known to be of extremely high value in clothing and bags, but what kind of person wears clothing made from the flesh of a fully sentient, around as intelligent as humans, even has a sense of morality, creature just as a fashion/class statement? Wait. No. Stop it. GOD DAMMIT HUMANITY IN THIS WORLD I HAVE BEEN GOING EASY ON YOU OUT OF BIAS BUT YOU'RE PUSHING YOUR LUCK!
As for those facial features that vary regardless of genetic modification: how sunken their eyes are, how far out their brows stick over their eyes, snout length, tooth arrangement to some degree, nostril size and to some degree shape, how their scale markings are on their faces, eye colour and size, whether or not they have ridges going down the middle of their face and how large these are, wrinkles, scale size and shape.
EVERYWHERE. More populous in areas which are warmer and have more food... for obvious reasons. Yeah it doesn't apply so easily when the species rules everything it lives on.
Better than humans at remembering stuff but worse at learning new info and being inventive. Yes; this is a severe disadvantage for them in combat as they're awful at winging it.
They cannot see the colours yellow or green. Their colour vision is on a sliding scale from red to blue, with each stretching out slightly further in the electromagnetic spectrum than with our vision. For this reason, they bloody love the colour blue. Their eyes are both front facing and able to get a lot of peripheral vision in there, which is something they would have going for them if it didn't require active effort from the Goners to actually look anywhere other than in front of them and them to not be as awful as they apparently are at noticing things when under pressure of all times.
Human hearing is slightly better than that of Goners. Smell is the tiniest bit better for Goners, but not by a degree that offers them any real advantage. Goners are less likely to feel pain from being scratched than a human due to their tough skin.
I mean there's always having stuff living in your gut, which these guys also have. There are creatures about 100th the size of lice that live in their mouths and eat excess food along with killing bacteria, which is pretty helpful for them.
Civilization and Culture
Look, world anvil systems, don't do me like that. I ain't explaining over a dozen millennia of changing naming systems.
But in short; lower classes were named with the current Goner Tongue, usually with "cuter" names that meant things like "bouncy hopper" or "big cute one". Upper classes were named with words from the Old Goner Tongue, from before they went cross-planetary, with more violent/edgy/deep meanings to the names such as "Skull Eater", "Demigod" and "Dark Beauty". This changed after they were conquered to all of them using the upper class naming conventions for their kids, almost like they were trying to compensate for being conquered and humiliated and taking advantage of how your class is technically the upper class if there's no class above yours, even if your class still lives awfully.
Well there used to be the Goner Empire, which had many organisations within itself that make it sound very fascist. Wait... *looks up features of fascist states*... the Goner Empire was super Fascist.
Oh and in case you're curious; they had genetically modified soldiers before they went interstellar and different nations then too (but a common language as a result of an old religion that managed to put every human religion to shame with how quickly it spread) but these genetically modified soldiers basically took over everything and made this Fascist Goner Empire.
In the LIR there's what translates to "Goner Army" which refers to Goner-only military forces.
In the CHG there are Goner special forces and most organisations on the Goner planet are run by Goners (the CHG has been around the longest and used Goners the most, resulting in the Goners having the most rights under them).
Colourful (lots of red and blue). Muscular. Tall. Long tails (short of it actually being a hindrance... oh and not a metaphor, though the metaphor could apply here). Sharp and intact teeth. Well kept claws. Tough skin.
It is literally impossible for Goners to mate unless both parties consent (actually not quite accurate it is possible if their minds say no and their bodies disagree with their minds but their pro-breeding culture means that such a pairing is uncommon). You see the females have muscles around their [REDACTED] that keep it shut to prevent infection and only open for mating and waste removal and the males basically have the same thing except that when it opens up a big [REDACTED] comes out.
They're a slight bit complex; they have rituals where it's like "you and you can only get bizzy with each other" and are expected to get together in that if some fertilised eggs show up at least until the young die in an accident or reach adulthood. Otherwise it's free range.
Plasma, lasers, space ships, terraforming of planets. Basically all the essentials for any sci-fi society.
Well there was this one religion that spread a language across their planet and is used for naming by upper classes and conquered Goners (the latter being a form of self-compensation) but it got slangadangadotcheyed into the Modern Goner Tongue.
Lick the blood off your face before nuzzling anyone.
Militaristic Fascist State means uniforms everywhere. For everything. Or at least under the Goner Empire that was how it was under the LIR they have exactly 4 uniforms and under the humans they've got their first concept of non-uniform clothing outside of when the military is using them as meat shields.
They are a Fascist Empire as a result of a military takeover. Their current culture is very militaristic with the old culture clinging on for dear life in the form of some stories, the upper classes being obsessed with it and old relics.
Remembering to lick the blood off from around their mouths before nuzzling one another. To nuzzle a fellow Goner with a bloody face is an extreme offence and usually a method of challenging one another in fights to the death.
Nuzzling someone when your mouth is still covered in blood from a meal is heresy and punishable by permanent shame.
They started standing upright so they could reach further and climb more easily away from predators at the same time as becoming more intelligent to outwit the things they were the predators to... which were mostly just small lizards, bugs, and big things that were already dead.
However, they grew more and more intelligent with time until they started using basic tools to sharpen or replace their claws and figured out that fire can be used to terrify other animals (yeah they don't need to cook meat) into running in the opposite direction without even realising the other direction is a cliff edge. Things advanced further and further until they were beginning to explore the stars.
Whenever they found a habitable planet, they colonised it. If a planet wasn't habitable, maybe genetic modification of colonists could fix that. If not, then air-tight diamond domes to build large settlements inside of would have to do - except that this eventually advanced to them being able to just make planets habitable and they started doing that instead (which often meant having to displace those in the diamond domes but hey that's nothing a few armed soldiers can't fix). They conquered 3 other intelligent species and got pretty close with humanity.
One of their first challenges came from trying to conquer the Toppers and Claws, a pair of races that shared a ring of planets in the same solar system with portals between them (even they aren't entirely sure why this is the case but I AM: CRAZY WORLD ORIGIN STUFF IS COMING GUYS I SWEAR) that were in a Cold War for the last 94 years before the Goners showed up and had the stockpiles of weapons to show for it and smashed the Goner forces to bits. The Toppers and Claws put aside their differences (of which there are many) and decided to form an anti-Goner alliance. They actively went out of their way to find other intelligent races to bring into their anti-Goner alliance (whether they liked it or not) with the Toppers using their natural intelligence and mastery in the art of turning any situation to their advantage (can we change their nicknames to the Con-Aliens?) to find themselves in charge of pretty much anything in this "League of Intelligent Races" (which isn't a League and includes some races that most wouldn't describe as "intelligent").
After some dozens of wars in which both sides just kept hating the other more and more without making any serious gains on the other because space defence is too much easier than space offence once you remember to keep your space radar up to space date, the 2 sides entered their own Cold War. It was in this time that the Goners noticed Earth and were like "eh cool but it looks like they're wiping themselves out so we can leave it for a bit and swoop in on an easy win later". The Goners and LIR went to war again when both sides accidentally tried to colonise the same planet (things really got out of hand with that one) and it was at this point the Goners saw that Earth's radiation had died down a lot and so deployed a very small portion of their lower end soldiers that were fresh out of training (as in these ones were worse than the other newbie soldiers) to go in and get an easy win on Earth.
That easy win did not occur. The Goners decided to send a much more professional and half a magnitude larger force, which was still a very, very small part of their forces, and still lost. Earth was getting quite annoying and the humans were becoming more of a threat because they'd figured out Goner tech; so the Goners basically had no choice but to try and utterly crush the humans as fast as possible before the humans ended up ruining everything for them. Problem was that in doing so they had to leach too many of their forces out of fighting the LIR, which gave the LIR an easier time attacking them. So they put more soldiers back to fighting the LIR, which made things too easy for the humans. Basically the Goners were getting sandwiched and they'd made both the slices of bread. And so the Goners were conquered by both the LIR and humans.
Under the humans, they were only allowed to live on their planet of origin and even then had a lot of heavy restrictions imposed on them. Under the LIR, they were allowed to keep living on their planets but they were individually treated even worse and other races could settle on their planets too. When the humans and LIR went to war, both sides used Goner troops. In the LIR they eventually managed to earn some respect and so got some improvements to their treatment, especially because of Goner war heroes like the Blue Death making the less capable aliens in the LIR go "wow did you see that? Pretty bad[REDACTED], huh?". With the humans a policy of Goners earning their rights slowly was used, basically meaning "hey if half or so of you guys die fighting for us and do so in a bad[REDACTED] enough fashion then you can get a 1percent improvement to your living conditions" (oh yes and the government legally owned the Goners and the areas they lived in, all businesses there were gov't property so the gov't could lower or increase prices with the Goner-only currency they made depending on how nice they felt like being). To make things worse for them under the humans all their hard work to get half-decent living conditions was reset every time a new regime took over such as the CHG taking over from the UHN (also during the 6 Nations Period they were US(the A was dropped) property).
Ahhh; there's all the prophets of their old religion and major figures within it. Rulers of nations (most of which were autocratic) and famous warriors. Plus there's those GMO Goners who made that fascist state. Also the Blue Death is an example of a major figure after the Goners were conquered, who fought as an LIR soldier and killed a large number of humans before being defeated by Draven at the battle of Newer Berlin.
Lots of stories from the days when the Goners had a religion, plus a mountain of war stories.
"We is superior to everything and everything must be our slaves" - Goners, Circa Days of the Goner Empire, colourised.
"Please can we has more rights?" - Goners, Circa Days After the Goner Empire, Already In Colour
Fun fact: their muscles are usually very dense and so the GMO ones, despite still being smaller than most humans, still weigh more than most humans.
Scientific Name
Xenos Intelligentes lacerta (okay naming systems changed a little with the existence of more known species than the number of latin words to the power of itself)
Origin/Ancestry
Some less clever dinosaurs which only walked on 2 legs because it made climbing and reaching things easier.
Conservation Status
"Hippitty Hoppitty they is our property" - both the LIR and CHG. The CHG only allows them to live on their planet of origin, where most of them are conscripted at adulthood into the military (but still make up a very small minority of any forces) in the "likely to die" roles, meanwhile if they're not conscripted they're subject to harsh rationing.
The LIR has them split up into their different subspecies (which all resulted from them genetically modifying themselves) and has them operate under the same rules as any other non-Topper race. That is that they're a new addition to the LIR and caused the LIR a lot of trouble during enrolment and so get treated like garbage.
Average Height
3-4 feet. The very largest go up to 5'8 but these are basically titans amongst them.
Average Weight
100 pounds
Average Physique
Most ain't got enough flesh between their skin and bones on account of them sliughtly
Body Tint, Colouring and Marking
Blue or red markings, as stripes, spots or others are common as a natural feature. They're skin is otherwise green or brown with varying shades. Some sickly ones have grey scales as a natural warning mechanism to prevent disease spread.
Articles under Goners (3-4 foot tall lizard/velociraptor people)
Do they need specific uniforms for parties?
Also, when you say "Most likely to die" military roles do you mean like diffusing bombs or running headfirst into the enemy with sharp things?
First question: the Goner Empire parties were done in the home uniform (what one wears at home while eating a semi-frosted Bullwrark with the mate and younglings) because of them being parties, but the stuff that nobody talked about (*coughs* orgies and other weird stuff *coughs*) were done in all sorts of, if any, attire, generally provided by the host as nobody is meant to have anything but uniforms. The same applies under the LIR. Second Question: running into the enemy with sharp things, except instead it's with plasma guns and stuff but they're always either in separate groups to humans that are sent into more dangerous situations or in parts of formations where they're more likely to get shot. Bomb diffusing is done by the robotniks because they're far less likely to mess up or have suicidal tendencies (oh yeah that'd be a problem with the enslaved Goners). Also 7-15-14-5-18-19 12-15-22-5 4-18-21-7-19