Vamkala

Half of the answer to a divine question: Is study or experience a better way to learn? The vamkala are a people who hold the pursuit of knowledge through careful study and experimentation paramount.

Basic Information

Anatomy

Vamkala are generally similar to humans with several very notable exceptions.
The first of which and the most noticeable is their pigmentation. Although their skin pigment is similar to human, with a skew toward darker skin, their eye and hair pigmentation is anything but normal. Naturally around 70% of their hair is deep black and the other 30% is every color in the visible spectrum from root to tip. Each individual hair is one solid color that is a distinct hue, but the colors are clustered in streaks making each streak have a slight gradient. No pattern has been determined to the placement of the streaks. Their eyes are equally strange, being that their iris is a multicolored gradient.
Vamkala have two extraordinary capabilities: The first has to do with their hair and skin. In a vamkala's skin cells are special psionic light receptors that redirect dangerous radiation into another set of psionic specialized cells that break up the light and emit it as a safer wavelength. This adaptation allows vamkala to live in high radiation environments with less protection. The second has to do with their eyes. Vamkala eyes can see into the ultraviolet and inferred wavelengths, and thus claim that the hair others see as black are actually within these other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
A few hundred years after their initial creation, all vamkala in a Vamhastra simultaneously underwent "The Revision" which restructured the rest of what is different out them from humans. The changes are as follows:

• Loss of body hair

• Weight redistribution to the lower body increasing muscle, fat, and bone density

• Deactivation of natural reproductive ability (read more below)

Genetics and Reproduction

Due to an overpopulation issue that rose out of the vamkalas' long lives and extensive down time, "the Revision" deactivated vamkala women's menstrual cycles. Ovulation can only be reactivated by way of a surgery that is generally only performed by vamkala doctors.
Despite the lack of their menstrual cycle, vamkala women are not otherwise adversely affected as a human might be, they only lack periods and the ability to bare children.

Additional Information

Average Intelligence

Vamkala have excellent memories and can synthesize information well, but they have troubles with intuition or irrational leaps in logic that are sometimes needed to think outside of the box.

Civilization and Culture

Naming Traditions

Vamkala born in a Vamhastra are given an ID number but not named. They are encouraged to give themselves a name by the age of 5.

History

After a few hundred years a divine event called "The Revision" washed through all of the Vamhastras suddenly restructuring the bodies and DNA of all Vamkala.

Lifespan

250 years

Average Height

1.5 m

Average Weight

80 kg