The Nadir

The Nadir, or Serious Stoners, as other species call them derogatorily. At least, it’s thought to be derogatory. It doesn’t really mean much, and the Nadir, if they ever took pleasure in anything, would enjoy being called as such. But, as far as a truly emotionless species can abhor something, they abhor joy. They also abhor abhorrence. But they abhor it in a completely unemotional way. Other species often find this disconcerting, but most species consider the defining aspects of most other species disconcerting.

However, the Nadirs are not distinguished only by their literally unfeeling hatred for all things not them. They are also distinguished by being the only viable species in The Third World made completely out of stone. It is true that there are some other primitive, unintelligent species made of stone, but they take so long to move and reproduce without assistance, that for all practical purposes they are not life forms. Chief amongst these irrelevant-to-all-things species are the hulking Ben and the minuscule Pebb, neither of which has ever done anything memorable for the history of The Third World. Occasionally in the early development of the more significant and mobile species, the Pebb were used as ammunition for weapons and the Ben were used as parts of houses. After a few centuries of ammunition stores moving a little bit to the left after a decade, or houses suddenly collapsing except for that one, solid wall after a decade which seemed to have moved a little bit to the left, these species began to notice that the Ben and Pebb were actually alive. From then on, nearly every species in The Third World began checking their stones for life before they began using them. They discovered that a good number of the stones that they had access to were actually of the Pebb and Ben species. So excursions began, searching for usable stones (which became a very valuable commodity for a century or so; considering how heavy they were, sea trade became more prone to sinking, and thus less profitable, leading to a century long brand new period of plague for the Forest Sprite Pirates of Magnifico) were launched, which led to, two centuries ago, the first contact in the recorded history of the general populouses of The Third World with the Nadir. The Nadir themselves claim that they had contact with the “outsiders” millennia ago, even prior to the Third Worldwide legend of “Rag ‘n Rock”, the terrible battle of gods that scattered all the peoples, some of whom had not yet been rediscovered, and now were only spoken of in that and a few other legends. The Nadir were for a time thought to be amongst these non-existent pre-historical legendary races, a group that also included the Nores, the Cassions, and the Lanterns. The first modern contact between the Nadir and the rest of the Third World came when, during the great Stone Rush, a team of adventurous Harpies came across a sleeping Nadir. After giving him the standard once over that tested for the life signs of the Ben and Pebb, which are very different than those of every other life form, they became satisfied and began rounding up all the stones in the area. Unfortunately for them, the Nadir awoke while they were gathering nearby stones, and noticing that its land was being encroached on, summoned its comrades. They quickly and systematically eliminated all of the Harpies except for one, who managed to escape by running rather than flying. The Nadir thought it completely illogical for an individual with wings to run, rather than fly away, so they hadn’t even considered the possibility. As the surviving Harpie, Wren Styme, fled from the scene, he noticed that their stony assailants had faces with unchanging, solid expressions, and that they did not say a word to each other, but moved in unison, turning simultaneously after disposing of one Harpie to toss each other at fleeing, airborne Harpies, bringing them down and slaughtering them without so much as a look at each other. Wren delivered this tale to his people, and within a month, the Nadir, known at that point only as Stone Men of Alcabraltr, were the most feared species in The Third World. Armies from many nations formed in order to conquer the Alcabraltr region out of sheer terror and paranoia. This developed into the great Stone Rush War, which will be described in full at a later date. All that must be known at this time is that the Nadir did survive.

The Nadir do not have hearts or lungs as we, or any Third World citizens, would know them. Their biology is very nearly incomprehensible, and to attempt to describe it would be more frightening than describing the implications of C’thulu on multiple 11-dimensional omniverses, so allow it to remain that they have extremely complicated biology. Their brains are distributed evenly throughout their bodies, as are their reproductive organs. They seem to be asexual, but no outsider has ever observed the reproduction of a Nadir; most are under the impression that they wouldn’t want to.

The most important characteristic of the Nadir is that they have, in their recorded history, never had any sort of religion or emotion. There was a rebel, Gruad, three millennia ago, who seemed to have some sort of emotion, but he is rumoured to have not actually been one of the Nadir, and was exiled under mysterious circumstances. The Nadir have never revealed to any outsider what happened to Gruad, but every record they have kept about the event insists that they didn’t kill him. Insists it entirely objectively, of course; it could even be said that they are not even insisting this truth, as insisting implies urgency. The Nadir, unlike nearly every other known species in any of The Five Worlds, do nothing except scientific sorts of things. They have developed equations and laws for nearly every phenomenon in the observable multiverse, and several in the non-observable multiverse, despite the fact that they don’t believe in the non-observable universe. They do not see this as a logical fallacy, a fact which some have considered using as a weapon against them. The opportunity has never presented itself to an enemy of a Nadir.

Perhaps the Nadir’s most astounding accomplishment is their massive acropolis of impossibly rational buildings. Because of their hatred of irrationality, the Nadir developed a process that allows pi to be exactly 3 when constructing circular structures, as well as other irrational numbers, such as phi and e, to be round and rational numbers. This is found by more irrational species to be entirely irrational, and in fact terrifying to moderately mathematically advanced civilizations. Each time someone from one of those civilizations has entered the Rational Acropolis, they have gone mad. The central part of the Rational Acropolis is a circular mausoleum, constructed with the 3 pi value, which not even the Nadir are allowed in, as it houses their most irrational discoveries, including the equation for magic that they developed, their version of the Novelty Theory, and all record that they had ever found of other worlds.

There is no record of the origins of the Nadir. Even they themselves have not determined for sure where they came from. Their historical records stretch back at least fifteen centuries farther than any other sentient records in The Third World, and even those start abruptly sometime after they attained sentience. Mysterious indeed are the Nadir, if only because they emphasize just how mysterious the rest of the Third World is. In their total absence from Third World international politics, they primarily serve to trouble the paranoias of the other races. Prime amongst these paranoids, not just on the subject of the Nadir, but also on all other subjects, are the Coonsks, of the far south Marfki region, who will be the next species profiled in our Species and Societies series.