Kri-kik Split-tail

Kri-kik Split-tail was the most important founder of the Szassar civilisation. They were born 2032 years before the arrival of the Phage, and was remarkably long-lived by szassar standards, having finally succumbed to old age at 521 years of age. They were a bridge between the pre-history of the szassar as a stone-age race of primitive hunter-gatherers and their rapid rise to planetary technological supremacy. It was their example and teachings which drove the development of many of the szassar cultural and technical institutions extant at the time of the Phage, including formalised language, writing, along with the basics of astronomy and mathematics.
As a youngster, they were adventurous, but shy. They did not interact with many other szassar until they approached full adulthood. Their parent died of sepsis after being surprised by the protective mate of a female flo'tark that was in the midst of suckling its young when Kri-kik was only 12 years old. As their parent died, they gripped Kri-kik's shoulder tightly, giving them a profound look of resolute grief that they would not be able to continue their child's training. Along with that, there was a pleading hope that Kri-kik would rise above the adversity of the life of a lone szass and live a long and productive life.
Kri-kik went on to become a formidable hunter. They lost a mid-limb to a careless incident in which they found themselves in the middle of a her'zik stampede set off by another hunter, and their tail-fan was also torn in the same incident (hence the moniker of Split-tail). However, they pulled through, the limb grew back, and they gathered a group of five mates within their first thirty years. While szassar were never a monogamous species, such success in attracting mates by such an early age was considered impressive at the time.
Whether as a result of the resilience required by their parentless upbringing from an early age, or good genetics, Kri-Kik was one of the healthiest Szassar in recorded history. They survived three major pandemics without infection - a major threat to the Szassar species, whose multi-genetic heritage makes them particularly vulnerable to genophagic disease. Late in life they suggested that perhaps their resilience was a result of a childhood infection, which having almost killed them, may have amplified their immune system.
Unusually bright amongst their contemporaries, Kri-Kik identified a number of opportunities for increasing the productivity and success of their species. They were the first of their species to use diagrams to communicate complex concepts, which in turn led to the development of a formal set of symbols and linguistic conventions. While Szassar before Kri-Kik communicated via their frills and primitive hoots, hisses and whistles, Kri-Kik collaborated with her growing family to develop more complex linguistic features such as elongated vowel sounds, percussive consonants and stringing consonants and vowels together as words.
One of the early success stories of Kri-kik's family was the integration of modes of hunting employed by other predators into their own hunting practices. This included:

• Sticky nets that had a similar effect on prey as the webs of sun'tak, clever wasp-like creatures that spun webs at a much smaller scale, drove prey into their webs, then flew down to paralyze trapped prey with a neurotoxin and inject eggs into its flesh.
• Use of primitive polearms with a carving/slashing blade, modelled on, and using the arm-parts of ura'jeth; a species of large mantid arthropods.
• Use of tanned flo'tark hides and ura'jeth shells as armour for hunting particularly savage prey.
• Herding her'zik into pens constructed from ura'jeth arm-blades, where they could be fed, milked, fattened and slaughtered as needed - much as a Szorikan ant species did with a relatively docile beetle species.

In addition to that, Kri-kik inspired the development of a number of agronomic advances, including:

• Weaving stems from cultivated seed-grasses to create bags, belts and bandoliers.Growing vegetables and fruit on large diagonal lattices which spanned the distance between the ground and the lower limbs of home-trees, to allow larger volumes of food to be grown.
• Weaving stems from cultivated seed-grasses to create bags, belts and bandoliers.
• Shaping and laminating woven fireproof bowls and baskets, cured in tree sap, which could be made airtight and used to store perishables, or used as communal serving vessels. The same technology could also be used to create larger structures with multi-layered laminates.
• Creating primitive ploughs from flo-tark tusks, which could be used to sow fields of seed-grasses more efficiently.
• Making use of the discovery that pruning branches strategically in their favoured ahn-kar trees could be used not only as a means to shape boughs for dwellings, but also as a means to collect tree sap for crafting.
• Construction of more permanent village sites, leading to population growth, and construction of facilities such kilns, clay ovens, grain mills, vine pulping presses and so on.

As the settlement grew, other Szassar were welcomed into the growing extended family, taught Kri-kik's clan language (clanguage?) and communication symbols. Writing was originally done on sheets of bark, but the ability to process materials in situ such as vine pulp and woven grasses led to the creation of a rudimentary form of paper, and a dark green ink could be brewed from the bile of her'zik when combined with fermented flo-tark milk. Twigs were used as the first pens, but it was a fast problem-to-answer loop that led to the use of split and shaped bamboo-like mega-grasses carved such that their points resembled the split nibs of fountain pens.
As their extended family grew larger still, Kri-kik started to focus more on leadership activities than actively participating in day-to-day tasks, which others largely refused to allow them to do. They were given the opportunity to cogitate on problem-solution loops (e.g. How we make clay hold together?) and social bonding challenges. From around the age of fifty, Kri-kik started to record their observations on social dynamics, the construction of culture and started to set down precepts for future growth, which came to be codified in the Kri-kik Codex. Over the following eighty years, Kri-kik Split-tail continued to develop this coherent roadmap for social, technological and cultural development.
By their 100th birthday, Kri-kik's settlement had grown to a size of several thousand people, and come to be known as Szor'tek - the people forge. Many Szassar came to Szor'rek to learn the precepts of civilisation and culture from Kri-kik and their descendants and many partners. Many stayed, and many chose to return to their home territories to start their own settlements based on Szor'rek. By their 200th birthday, Szor'rek had become a city of 150,000 souls, sprawling over hundreds of square kilometers. The szassar of Szor'rek remained arborial dwellers, but had mastered the art of sculpting their home trees into comfortable multi-room dwellings. Each home tree maintained its own garden, and local neighbourhoods shared facilities such as forges, kilns and mills. Whilst the Szassar of Szor'rek made their advancements in art, culture, literature, technology and science, they also maintained their local ecology and economy in a balanced equilibrium state. Other cities planned along similar precepts began to trade freely with Szor'rek, and the residential population of the city was in a state of almost permanent flux.
At the age of 250, Kri-kik's interest in the night sky become more profound with the development of glass lenses, which allowed them to spend more and more time understanding the progression of the planets in the Szor system and developing systems of mathematical prediction which would start to approximate the complexities of multi-body orbital mechanics. This study occupied much of their night time hours over a period of some 45 years. By the end of this period, not only had Kri-kik developed a crude predecessor for modern calculus, but they had also mapped the approximate sizes, masses and calculated the number of moons of most of the planetary objects in the Szor system.
By the age of 300, Kri-kik was still relatively active, although had started to hand of many of their administrative responsibilities to others. They had endured the loss of five children, thirty-two grand-children, and one-hundred-and-five great grand-children by the time they had reached this age, and their sorrows over these unfortunate losses were a distraction from the work of maintaining the workings of Szor'rek's administrative functions. A significant amount of time during their fourth century was spent creating busts of lost family members, and creating new artistic mediums through which their spirit and character could be conveyed. This led to an interest in oil pigments, the creation of brushes and the more widespread use of large woven laminate surfaces for two-dimensional paintings. Kri-kik did not create all of these things themselves - they were supported by others whose reverence for her presence made them keen to please and assist. However, as had happened in the past, Kri-kik's innovations led to new trends, which were further developed by others who were influenced by their work.
As they approached the latter half of their fourth century, Kri-kik slowly began to lose vigour. By their 500th cycle, they were sleeping far more time than they were awake. But they were still writing. Still publishing annotations to previous treatises, including their eponymous Codex. By their time of their death, a thriving civil service had sprung into being, along with advanced research and learning institutions. Kri-kik was given a state funeral attended by over 2 million Szass from all over the Szorik pangaea.

Kri-Kik Split-tail is a notable szass who led the unification of the szass as a people and was a significant cultural leader.