D6x6 Space Hunks

By the coercion of bad doctor.

Click the button below to get your space hunk:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This space hunk comes
1	from a nation of orbital installations in the shimmering ring of a gas giant. Those who lived above the ring duelled with those who lived below in beautiful vacuum-dance duels to the death.
2	from the goon-cubes of a totalitarian social-democratic world, where the satisfaction of animal needs was held to be the highest virtue.
3	from an interstellar host bar where the hosts were grown from scratch to match the tastes and whims of particular clients.
4	from a colony of mega-aesthetes who created a brief civilization in a comet as it sublimated away in sunlight.
5	as a creche-prototype from a planet of sapiosexual geniuses, who considered him a hideous failure.
6	as the last survivor of a planet that was destroyed by a cosmic warlord in a fit of jealous rage after being cuckolded by one of its ultra-handsome inhabitants.

D6	This space hunk wears
1	ceremonial armour of golden plates and delicate chains that defend little and expose much.
2	baggy, near-frumpy, yet inexplicably-expensive clothing.
3	an anti-gravitational mankini that shifts in ripples between glowing neon colour schemes.
4	a tailored, holographic suit emitted from his bow-tie.
5	a veil of living silk that coils around his body from an eyebrow-ring down to a toe-ring.
6	chrome ribbons and bangles lined with blinking LEDs.

D6	This space hunk's most hunkadelic feature
1	is his popping abs - where the abs pop, more surge up from beneath.
2	is the slender yet defined curve of his ass, each twitch powerful and purposeful.
3	are his soft, plump, pouty lips placed upon a jawscape of chiselled, angular mathematical perfection.
4	is his strong brow and piercing gaze.
5	are his mighty, meaty pecs.
6	are the sculpted curlicues of his body hair, each more fragrant than any flower.

D6	This space hunk has
1	no belly button - he hatched from an egg.
2	compound eyes like cut gemstones, and finger-long lashes that curl along chitinous segments.
3	twin heartbeats like steady drums, and a constant, cozy warmth.
4	a tail that is as strong as it is dextrous - which is very.
5	three tongues, each tipped with three prehensile lobes.
6	pincers on his hips which assist with leverage in love-making.

D6	This space hunk is
1	fond of animals & plants (or their local analogue) and refuses to harm either. Subsists entirely on ultraviolet light and ice. He makes really annoying sounds when he's chewing ice.
2	a huge gamer & space-sports-gambler.
3	a fanboy of Earth-culture, but gets many times, places, and people confused. Do not ask him about Emperor Hitler.
4	a hobbyist literary critic, but one who's actually good and not like one who just gives a synopsis and their sentiments.
5	seeking a fellow hunk to merge eternally with, so that the virtuous cycling of their yang energy will birth a new and vibrant star.
6	the lead guitar in a space-rock band which has never received any allegations of anything untoward.

D6	This space hunk
1	ejaculates puffs of glittering stardust - don't get this in your eyes!!
2	has euphoric sweat that gives a nice buzz.
3	is mildly telepathic, and can share sensations with those he touches.
4	is biologically incapable of feeling possessive of someone.
5	can do that E.T. thing where he can make a part of him glow and heal minor injuries but instead of the tip of his finger it's his penis.
6	doesn't sleep, and must regularly extract chemo-fluid from a gland instead. Drinking this fluid lets you experience the dreams he didn't have.

D20x5 Derelict Spaceships; Or: Space Hulks

Click the button below to get your derelict spaceship:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20	This derelict spaceship was
1	a shipping vessel with a belly of modular compartments stuffed with rare elements and alloys.
2	a swift courier carrying information too dangerous to broadcast, on cubes of imperishable adamant.
3	a pilgrim-vessel bringing the faithful to a place of cosmic importance.
4	a once-unconquerable dreadnought outfitted with the cutting edge of its past time.
5	a terraforming vessel bubbled with microbiomes.
6	a pleasure craft which sequestered the ultra-rich in unimaginable splendour.
7	a scientific vessel measuring galactic anomalies.
8	a veteran warship bearing scars from many battles.
9	a nomadic habitat for lifelong spacers.
10	a prototype propelled by an experimental drive.
11	a cyclopean asteroid-miner, half-digested hillocks of ore still borne in its gut.
12	a cryopod carrier with a hold full of frozen colonists.
13	an explorer charting unseen frontiers.
14	a historical artifact preserved for its legacy.
15	a key minister's extravagant personal transport.
16	a troop-carrier used for planetary invasions, loaded up with drop-pods.
17	a medical vessel bringing miraculous treatments to colonies without the infrastructure for them.
18	a cycler making regular transport-rounds within one system.
19	a tug for stellar megastructures.
20	once the flagship of a now-thoroughly-discredited ideology.

D20	This derelict spaceship might be found
1	by its distress beacon’s message, garbled to an inhuman pitch.
2	by overhearing rumours in a scavengers’ den.
3	on a swiftly decaying orbit around a stormy gas giant.
4	by investigating mission logs that ended abruptly.
5	in a prodigious leak of government cover-ups.
6	in a neglected corner of space where there shouldn’t have been any traffic.
7	halfway embedded in an icy comet that should have mutually vapourized it on impact.
8	parked on the severed, skeletal arm of a spaceport.
9	based on hints in an old shipman's song.
10	by its minute occlusion of a solar system's star.
11	stuck in a Lagrange point among other interplanetary detritus.
12	by buying a drink for its deranged last survivor.
13	by the bizarre digital censor-shadow it casts on star-maps.
14	by following notes on a discarded cocktail napkin in a station's recycler-pile.
15	with a preserved, genetically-programmed blood sample drawn from a navigator-caste who was onboard it.
16	landed on a volatile-rich moonlet.
17	by stumbling into the warp-sinkhole it left behind.
18	based on the testimony of the last band of survivors to escape it.
19	based on the guilty confession of someone responsible for its disappearance.
20	by folllowing coordinates that insert themselves like a memetic virus into innocuous statements and computer code.

D20	A deadly threat present on this derelict spaceship is
1	its onboard artificial intelligence, glitched to violent paranoia with sporadic control over the ship’s systems.
2	the xenospore-infested corpses of its original crew, driven by coopted intellect to spread and fester.
3	a mercenary kill-team dispatched to cover up an oligarch’s scandal the ship is implicated in.
4	an opportunistic predator native to the void between worlds, extracting minerals and organics.
5	magnetic mines placed by a paranoid crewmember.
6	a killer robotic skeleton able to steal and wear other's flesh as a half-living disguise.
7	a deranged cannibal who's survived eating the rest of its crew.
8	a swarm of technorganic nanomachines fusing flesh and machinery like a hell-cancer across it.
9	the semi-incorporeal, ultra-terrestrial entity summoned by a cult which hid among its passengers.
10	the experimental automated spacesuits it was outfit with - now wandering husks rattling with the bones of their once-occupants.
11	an extraterrestrial knight who practices a bizarre (from a human perspective at least) form of chivalry, using the ship as a trial-ground.
12	a poltergeist which haunts it - the maddened gestalt of its crews' minds torn from their flesh by some obscure electro-magnetic phenomenon.
13	its surgery-bot, whose programming was damaged by radiation, making it obsessed with turning living creatures into art.
14	a tribe of degenerate mutant clones, meant to be emergency back-ups for dead crewmembers - gone horribly wrong.
15	a self-mummified psychic who survived the ship's general failure via mentally-imposed torpor, seeking to lure people in and break their will so they can take a new, healthy body.
16	that the genetically-modified plants used as a supplementary food/oxygen source aboard it networked & gained sentience as well as a hatred for animal life.
17	the alien from Alien, but like a bit different - maybe it's got tentacles instead of claws and the stabby-tail, and lays eggs in your brain that make you hallucinate, for example.
18	a great amoebic slime, hiding in the ducts and the interstitial spaces aboard the ship - an ambush predator waiting for the right moment to emerge and absorb.
19	a hungry gang of rival salvagers.
20	a cabal of vacuum-adapted post-humans who view the presence of their less-evolved kin as an insult.

D20	What makes this derelict spaceship difficult to navigate
1	its own brittle, decayed structure, which any solid shock risks breaking.
2	is its malfunctioning artificial gravity generator, which changes its direction unpredictably.
3	are the bulkheads separating and sealing off its various sections, which can only be safely opened with keycards scattered about.
4	is its fuel leaking into various sections, creating pockets of poisonous & explosive gas.
5	is that its automatic locks between pressurized and depressurized sections aren't working properly, meaning opening the wrong door could get you sucked out into space.
6	is its warped hyper-geometry, tesselated out by a flaw in its drive.
7	are the pools of acid which dripped out of its batteries.
8	is its unintuitive layout.
9	is that its spectrum-opaque chassis makes it impossible to scan from the outside.
10	is the disruptive radiation emanating from its reactor.
11	is the web of silk-steel alloy disaster-webbing unleashed across the ship to hold together fractured sections.
12	is that attempting to connect to its internal mapping will glitch out your system and feed you nonsense.
13	is that some immense force has bent it out of shape.
14	is that all the signs are in some language there's no publicly-available translation for.
15	is that its lighting is glitched-out, and blindingly-strobbing.
16	is that its wiring has become fucked-up, and parts that shouldn't be electrified have become electrified.
17	is the plasmatic fog which has gathered in its passages, restricting line of sight.
18	is its misleading signage, likely mistranslated.
19	are the big holes punctured through it by meteorites.
20	are the tangles of dangling wires, tubing, and flex-ducts lining its hallways.

D20	Besides the usuals, salvaging this derelict spaceship
1	will get you a lot of money, like, a lot a lot of money.
2	will earn you a hell of a lot of rep with scavengers, which you can use to make them back off claims or work with you.
3	will get you an experimental weapon which can wreck just about anything without exotic defenses.
4	will get you blueprints which can be used to greatly upgrade your own ship.
5	will grant you an intact module which you can transplant whole onto your own ship.
6	will bring you to the attention of a corrupt space-sheriff looking to shake you down.
7	will net you a contract from a corporation impressed by your results, who want you to retrieve the important parts of one of their own lost vessels.
8	gains you some exotic materials that would be worth some serious favours to the right buyer.
9	will get you an anomalous power-core that keeps working regardless of interference or resource draw.
10	will get you the experience you need to become an expert in dismantling spaceships with minimal risk to yourself.
11	will get you some primo blackmail material on some powerful corporation, government, or NGO.
12	can get you a handy, tanky, crab-shaped cargo-loader robot.
13	can get you a lot of goodwill and favours from the friends and family of those lost on it.
14	will get you a signal-spoof which allows you to disguise your own spaceship as the wreck to remote detection methods.
15	gets you an alien artifact that does weird shit.
16	can net you a canister of bio-nanites that can heal just about any wound and replace limbs and organs by flowing into and merging with your flesh.
17	provides clues that make up a sort of map to an even bigger, juicier haul.
18	can get you some cool and expensive cybernetic implants.
19	can get you a smuggled crate of good-ass space drugs.
20	will get a self-righteous squad of space-police on your ass.

D6x6 Space Dwarf Aliens

How about uh Deep Cock Gaylactic

Click the button below to get your space dwarf aliens:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

Others along the tourmaline strand: 

Space Marines

Xeno-Swarms

Rebellious Robots

Sinister Space Churches

Aliens (Non-Specific)

Alien Parasites

Forms of Faster-than-Light Travel

Staristocrats of the Faufreleuchean Future

Alien Warrior Species

Space Elf Aliens

Evil Space Empires

Sexy Space Women Aliens

Drinks at the Alien Space Bar

D6	These space dwarf aliens look
1	like acephaloid orangutans with lacey lichen instead of fur, and fleshy, pharyngeal crabbish pincers instead of hands and feet.
2	like chitinous moles, with shells in jewel-esque colours, and a cluster of trunk-like, claw-tipped probosci.
3	like an armature of interlocking coralline gears encased in a thick gelatinous sac.
4	like they've got the head of an anomalocaris, or maybe the pointy ends of a claw hammer, atop an octopus that's been given knobby knuckles for its tentacles and learned to stand mostly-upright.
5	somewhere between lanky frogs and fat kangaroos, with broad, hydraulic limbs like an organic construction vehicle and skin like coconut husk - which is particularly floccose around their necks and bellies.
6	like slate, warty anvils - the pointy end a beak which opens for flexible, frond-like tongues and foregut-extrusions, the base a quartet of meaty legs - filaments extend from their backs and sides, flash an incandescent orange at the tips, then retract in waves.

D6	These space dwarf aliens mine
1	the ruins left behind by the eldritch clade which uplifted their species - the automated defenses of these places will not annihilate them on sight, though even many things not intended as defenses in such places can be devastating.
2	hyper-dense iron from the cores of degenerate stars using gargantuan magnetic trawlers.
3	out the whole molten mantles of planets, slurping them up with great tick-like installations, filtering out the good stuff and expelling the voluminous slag onto the collapsed and splintered continental shells.
4	the wreaths of expelled matter which coalesce around white holes.
5	asteroids, pulling them together into orbiting "herds" and laser-branding them with their clan's mark.
6	the culturo-synthetic waste of civilizations that didn't manage to pass their Great Filters.

D6	These space dwarf aliens drink
1	a harsh distillation of their rocket-fuel - unpalatable to just about anyone else, but nigh-hangover-free if you can keep it down.
2	a yeasty foam which bubbles up from the grave-pits of their ancestors - drinking it brings possessing echoes of the past.
3	the semi-liquid smoke of gigantic, immortal plants which dance upon solar winds like leaves on a breeze - untouchable unless they make a misstep in their dance and self-immolate under mis-reflected rays.
4	the euphoric, soporific mucus of a creature like a tank-treaded terrestrial hagfish native to the homeworld.
5	a variety of liquors distilled from the grains of a dozen worlds - which liquor they drink is assumed to indicate deep features of their personalities.
6	the condensed exudate of psychic entities they trap in maze-like chains of circular logic.

D6	These space dwarf aliens forge
1	the baryonic conveyors which can move mass-energy at rapid speeds across the galaxy. Some quirk of their psychology or Weltanschauung makes the things unreplicable by any others.
2	impossible alloys, hybrids of the metals of this universe, and those of distant shores - alternate phantom-potentialities, subspatial vampire-cosms, ascended and mind-independent noospheres, and so on and suchlike.
3	flesh and bone rather than inanimate matter, in the crucible of accelerated, guided evolution.
4	the planet-scouring weapons that strip whole worlds of life - by ancient interstellar pact they are the only ones who can - they never sell these weapons fully, only lease them when presented witn the right casus belli - the clamour in their war-courts is deafening, and can go on for a very long time.
5	arkane space-ships and -stations, self-contained and -sustaining micro-worlds.
6	tremendous, ingenious thinking-machines, as well as the shackles and seals put in place to prevent these machines from rebelling or transcending the perceptible cosmos entirely.

D6	These space dwarf aliens have a reputation
1	for dourness and irritability - their homeworld was destroyed by their own hands, and nowhere else has ever felt quite right.
2	for greed & distractibility by shiny things - an instinctual artifact of nesting and mating displays.
3	for holding grudges & repaying debts - they've all got eidetic memories.
4	for bad music - which is true by most standards, a lot of it is just repetitive chanting.
5	for being tricky dealers - it's a translation issue.
6	for sickliness & monomania - this stems from inbreeding among their elites to conserve property ownership, as well as a post-automation classicide against the dispossessed in their civilization.

D6	These space dwarf aliens once
1	unleashed a demon of anti-light which had been imprisoned since an early era of the universe with their digging, which few have forgiven them for.
2	kidnapped a stellar emperor who reneged on an agreement with them and subjected the emperor to such tortures that even referring to them is a crime in many polities.
3	held a grand dominion, but its back was broken and their holdings are now terribly diminished.
4	were brought to the brink of extinction, but their adoption of cloning & hypnotic incubation-tanks enabled them to repopulate.
5	tried to build a physical god - this went poorly.
6	were a slave-caste under a celestial theocracy, but used their creations like a poison to destroy it from within and win their freedom.

D6x7 Grendels from Outer Space

For 279,936 variations on the movie Outlander.

Click the button below to get your Grendel (from outer space):

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	Humanity encounters this Grendel from outer space
1	at the first Tahitian settlement in Hawaii, feuding with the Tongans.
2	at an Ethiopian Army camp during the Italian Invasion.
3	at the palace of Atilla the Hun shortly after the Scourge of God's demise.
4	at a peyote retreat catering to Silicon Valley-types in rural New Mexico.
5	at Antananarivo, shortly after King Andrianampoinimerina returned from a victorious conquest.
6	at a garrison fort defending the Great Wall of China at Badaling during the waning years of the Ming dynasty.

D6	This Grendel from outer space has
1	flesh like thickly-bleeding gums studded with metallic teeth, and a bauplan a bit like a capital M, with long, splayed limbs and a dangling torso.
2	hammerhead shark-like sensory projections jutting out the sides of its head, and an ankylosaur-like tail-club.
3	grossly asymmetrical manipulator-limbs like a crab, and a hopping gait.
4	a hide resembling a porous and off-white popcorn ceiling, with criss-crossed fangs that seem like they should make it impossible for it to open its mouth, until you see its jaws unhinge and re-arrange.
5	an S-shaped body, with an eye-lined, bony wheel at the midpoint and curves made of flexible, whip-thin hooks.
6	a body that's a fused pile of rubbery black spheres spheres like big boba, studded with spikes and stubby tentacles.

D6	This Grendel from outer space can
1	camouflage itself to nigh-invisible with cuttlefish-like chromatophores.
2	breath out a cloud of hallucinatory nightmare poison.
3	blast people with plasma from its cybernetic implants.
4	use a macro-scale quantum effect to effectively teleport short distances when unseen.
5	extract memories from the brains of creatures it eats.
6	feel the nerve impulses in your muscles to predict your attacks and other movements.

D6	This Grendel from outer space came to Earth
1	as the first prisoner of the prison colony of an alien civilization - many more like it are in transit.
2	as a research specimen abducted from another world - it escaped when its captors were abducting humans, and forced the ship it was on to crash-land.
3	after accidentally activating a warp-gate seeded on both its world and ours by a precursor-species.
4	as a deserter from a war among the stars, their ship shot full of holes by their own side.
5	as a refugee from a dying world, one of many flung desperately into the cosmos.
6	as a pilgrim touring the sacred worlds of their astrology - unfortunately the nanomachines meant to sustain them on their journey were disrupted by chance radiation, and mutated them into a monstrous form.

D6	This Grendel from outer space wants
1	to implant as many large, warm-blooded creatures with its parasitoid offspring as possible - it's a religious fanatic for something like the Quiverfull movement.
2	to force humans into worshiping its eldritch void god - it's completely insane, even by the relatively lax standards of space.
3	simple things - food, shelter, peace, quiet - it's also an alien super-soldier programmed to react with extreme violence to any perceived threats.
4	to slurp human cerebrospinal fluid, which contains chemicals it is addicted to. Slurping the fluid turns the human it was slurped from into an animalistic, lobotomized thrall.
5	to build an escape pod to get it off this planet - the materials it needs (precious metals, etc.) are most easily acquired from human settlements
6	to capture psychically-sensitive humans and torment them together to make an impromptu interstellar distress beacon to alert its comrades to its location.

D6	This Grendel from outer space's lair
1	is a cave lit by a shimmering crystal - its walls are painted with alien figures and scenes with a strange though undeniable aesthetic quality.
2	holds ramshackle shelves bearing trophies taken from the slain.
3	is half-flooded, the water infested with extraterrestrial piranha-slugs.
4	is layered with a soft and reeking wax which it exudes.
5	is a labyrinthine web of tunnels it carved through a cliff with its own hands, or nearest equivalents.
6	is a booby-trapped citadel of stacked stones and logs.

D6	This Grendel from outer space's mother
1	is a much bigger version of it, hibernating beneath its lair.
2	died some time ago, yet was reincarnated as a human - she is destined to re-encounter her child, and recall memories of her past life.
3	is a psychic star witch - she will torment her child's killer as an interstellar astral projection which can only be fought through spiritual means.
4	was a growth-vat on a nursery-station - when that station's overseer A.I. is notified of the Grendel's death through its implanted biochip it will go mad with rage and cause a lot of problems somewhere very far away.
5	is dead, but the Grendel kept her bones and keeps them in a shrine in its lair - damaging the shrine is a surefire way to drive it to an unthinking fury - stealing the bones would let you coerce it into doing your bidding.
6	is somewhere far off in space, mourning its lost child.

D100+ Drinks At The Alien Space Bar

Click the button below to get your drink:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://slightadjustments.blogspot.com/p/generator.html

GLOGtober Challenge: Patrons; Or: 6 Alien Vampire Patrons For Yon Party

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of CommonUse: https://bitspieces.bearblog.dev/

LPrictorez trod similar ground first:
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/02/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead.html
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/05/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead-part-2.html

Lifeforce, House of Ashes, Planet of the Vampires - alien vampires are a surprisingly recurring archetype in media. Probably not enough to make a full generator for them, but enough for me to spin off a few takes... Also this has been lying in my drafts for a while so I'm shoving it into GLOGtober. What people don't tell you about round pegs and square holes is that you can make the hole round too if you hammer it in hard enough.

So here's six alien vampire patrons:

1. The Electric Man from Procyon

An incorporeal, psycho-electrical entity - it moves through technology and appears onscreen as Mr. Rogers or some other old, beloved TV characters they picked up the radio broadcasts for over in the Procyon system some decades back.

It's an energy vampire, rendering any area it dwells in a little darker, a little cold, but its preferred fare is the energy of agitated neural activity - terror especially - and it's willing to shell out some of its own energy in the form of addictive euphoria to those who can provide it.

It's here on a mission: to retrieve a sample of Saturnian ebon lightning, which can convert energy into consciousness or consciousness into energy, up for sale at a Black Auction, or Sable Market, or something of that strain. It needs physical hands to help it do that. Money doesn't matter to it, it can just stick an arbitrary amount of zeroes on the end of your bank account (but this is going to be noticed very quickly). The Electric Man's got something of a methhead mindset though - every heist's gotta be bigger and louder than the last, every hit of fear that much stronger. Seek employment at your own risk.

2. Saltpork

Family guys, old ladies, dogs - they've been snapping lately, killing each other and drinking their blood. There's a crystal that's leaked into the water supply. The crystal is from space. The crystal is sapient. The crystal slots neatly into the space electrolytes are supposed to fill in Earth-life bodies. The crystal wants to be re-united with itself.

People with enough of the crystal in them are compelled to kill and drink the blood from other people with the crystal in them. When one of them absorbs a critical mass of crystal they'll metamorphose into its central processing node. If you help that node come into being it'll be favourably disposed towards you, and use its control over the rest of its bodies to help you out. If you stood against it it will do the same to try and destroy you. People who get enough crystal in them to be a candidate understand this instinctually, and may use whatever resources are at their disposal as regular-ass dudes to persuade you that you should support their attempt to drink the most blood.

3. The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye

Couple hundred years ago she lost an eye, got a glass one. Couple hundred years ago she looked up at the night sky and something looked back - a being of light, now living inside her glass eye.

They say that if you could go faster than light you could go back in time - and right at that knife's edge of c you're stuck in place, never going forward or backward. The strange symbiosis of entropy-chained human and timeless light-being allows them to drain the time, the youth, from others, to prolong the host's.

She's old, she's wealthy (though never wealthy enough to draw undue attention), she's lost friends and family but never her love of art. She's a patron of the local scene, never front and center but her word makes or breaks livelihoods, and the visions she shares of the vistas her inhabitant has witnessed across the cosmos are a devastating muse.

The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye will pay handsomely for records and reports of anomalous phenomena, which she keeps in old wooden chests and reads deep into the night. She'll also pay to get you to stir up drama among the artists' circles she patronizes, to keep things dynamic and exciting and so that people are less likely to question if one of them disappears every now and then.

4. The Merchant of Fevered Dreams

In his true form he looks like a big assassin bug walking on its hind legs. He's not a bug (or a he, except for convenience's sake), that's just the shape a space traveler like him will gravitate towards - an exoskeleton's easier to keep pressurized, hard compound eyes won't boil off like jelly-filled ones, and a proboscis is handy for sucking up volatiles. In disguise he layers on bio-clay to look like an editorial cartoon fat cat.

He drinks cerebrospinal fluid, his proboscis sticking out from under his molded tongue - partially because he likes the taste, and partially because he thinks it's the key to figuring out dreams. Dreams are BIG in space - we're the only ones to do it. The Merchant wants to figure out a way to mass produce them and ship them out across the galaxy in a consumable form. He's got a basement full of halfway-comatose kidnapped people slipping between dreams and moments of sickly lucidity.

He talks a big game but for the moment can deliver on little. He's run himself deep into space-debt trying to figure out dreams. Promises a share in his enterprise if you can help him with that.

5. The Goregoyles

Dreams are unique to Earth, but wherever there is life there is disease.

These guys are a pack of freaky cyborg imps that imprint on people - maybe you! They're healers. They claim to be healers. They heal most things, but not your species, not completely. They'll be able to fully heal you up only if you extract certain proteins/hormones/tissues from the living bodies of others of your species. Oh, and if you can track down particularly interesting bits of flesh - a leper's sloughed nose, a teratoma, a syphilis chancre - they'll reward you by upgrading your pathetic and inefficient biology.

They're helpful, they're gregarious, but they're liars. They really do heal you, but this is a means to an end. They're making you into a bomb. A disease bomb, combining cancer and virus and fungus and whatever else they can get you to wrangle up into a Frankenpocalypse. They don't even know if they're supposed to be doing that on Earth, but that's what they were born to do and they're here so they'll do it.

6. Zeta Dracula

Blaspheme against the primitive terrestrial superstition they said. It'll be good for a laugh since crop circles and cattle mutilations have gotten boring they said.

To this foolish alien's grey surprise, God is real and strong even in space. The alien (named Amalantrah) damned themself and was cursed to forever wander the night as one of the living dead.

This was a great shock to Amalantrah's worldview. They still have trouble seeing their condition as anything but a mundane disease, even when their ship's medical nanites can't treat it, or even recognize it. They want to be cured so they can return to their home planet and forget all about the weird shit out there among the stars.

Amalantrah's a dracula, and they've got a UFO. They're in denial about needing blood, and will avoid drinking it until the red thirst drives them into a feeding frenzy. They'll trade you UFO shit like rayguns and jetpacks if you give them blood in some way that lets them maintain this denial, like telling them it's a normal Earth smoothie or something, and for getting them leads on a cure for vampirism.