It won't let me post my image because my image isn't verified even though I linked my other accounts...
So I'll just post the text here because I'm bored.
Olaunt
The Olaunt are a massive and long-lived species, but their slowness belies a mental structure that is deceptively powerful. The Olaunt have a unique capability to fragment their consciousness into multiple independent shards, each capable of independent cognition while remaining connected to the whole. This allows an Olaunt to solve multiple problems at the same time, carry on multiple conversations at once, or control multiple aspects of a ship's subsystems simultaneously. Similarly to their minds, their bodies are fractal-like, with three central limbs which each branch into three smaller jointed limbs, which each have three more digits, each of which has three smaller digits...since any subset of digits may be partitioned off to a shard of consciousness, this gives a single Olaunt almost infinite adaptability.
As a result, Olaunt ships have almost zero processing-level automation. All ship controls are handled by Olaunt sub-processing, sometimes by as little as a few tiny digits the size of hairs.
Because Olaunt naturally fragment their consciousness, they tend to solve individual problems relatively slowly. However, this neglects the fact that they are constantly solving multiple problems at once, sometimes hundreds of them. As such, their society tends to shift slowly but totally, integrating or disregarding multiple entire concepts at once.
The Olaunt fought the Thargoids aeons ago, and unlike other races like the Guardians or Humans, they didn't attempt to find weaknesses in the Thargoid defenses. Rather, they simply continually overpowered their weapons and armor until the Thargoids were unable to adapt.
The Olaunt approach warfare with the same approach as the rest of their lives; slowly, but on every level simultaneously. As such, they tend to progress every aspect of their war machine simultaneously, and tend to reject heroics in favor of overwhelming power in every respect.
Olaunt ships are simply massive, with enormous armoring making them virtually indestructible to anything but the most dangerous of attacks. Their weapons, similarly, are enormous, capital-grade weapons capable of overwhelming defenses even in their point of strength through sheer massive firepower, capable of destroying even thargoid interceptors, normally nearly indestructible to normal damage types, with pure thermal damage. Anything too small to hit with their weapons cannot effectively damage their hulls, and anything large enough to damage their hulls can be obliterated by their weaponry. And unlike other species, which often only advance in the face of dangers, the Olaunt continually upgrade their arms and armor at all times, a virtue of their parallel processing.
However, their primary defense is more manifold. They have created impossibly complex spatial disruptions around their systems, making it impossible to establish a lock on Olaunt systems and jump in. The answer to this problem might seem to be a finely-tuned password, but in reality, the answer is merely to blast through the interference with massive power - but inevitably reveal yourself to be attacked by every single Olaunt ship in range, attacking simultaneously. In the past, Thargoid attempts to attack with Titans has simply been met with the combined force of every single Olaunt ship available, instantly slagging the attacking Titans and preventing further attacks.
The main weakness of the Olaunt is that they ARE slow and ponderous. On a shard level they think slowly, preferring to ruminate and think over all the possibilities - something they're all too good at. They also reproduce slowly, by virtue of their very long lives(a single Olaunt can live for tens of thousands of years, and olaunt medical science is advancing faster than they are aging, so for all intents and purposes, they are immortal). As such, they only expand to a new star system every few hundred years.
This has in the past given other races an unwarranted overconfidence against them, but it wouldn't be wise to ignore their parallel processing capability. While speaking to an Olaunt might make it seem slow, it is ALWAYS processing a thousand other problems at the same time, behind the scenes. As such, surprising an Olaunt is nearly impossible.
I'm not very good at art, sorry. Here's my best depiction of an Olaunt! Imagine something kinda between an Elephant and a living mountain. Size-wise they're pretty huge, 30-40 feet tall. Their ships are big heavy curves, and even the smallest ones are much larger than the biggest human ships.
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Olaunt have some interesting religious beliefs as a consequence of their fragmented reasoning. In essence they believe that much as they are made of many shards, the universe is also made of many shards, and ultimately makes up one greater being attempting to solve some infinitely complex problem which will be revealed at the end of the universe. As such, it is their duty to live their own lives out to its maximal extent so as to best serve their role as shards in this overarching universal narrative. As such, when they talk, especially when a shard is to be re-integrated with their higher self before being remade, they will often use religious nomenclature, like that they pray they will meet you again, and that when they are reformed it will still be them. It's a complex thing to be you and also part of something bigger that controls you but also IS you.
Since Humans repelled the Thargoid attack, the Olaunt have finally begun to notice Humans, and after considering ALL the options, they've decided to extend an Envoy, before humans attempt to break into their permit locked zone... how they will respond to humans in the long term will very much depend on how all of us respond to them.
