The ayblek come from Instruxofinum, a different planar stack altogether, one of the several that hang in the cosmos apart from Alaria's own. It is a place of billions of planes packed close and held all but still in time, where almost anything can be found by someone willing enough to search for it. A single ayblek was drawn out of that stack into the world by a curious traveling mage, and from that lone individual every ayblek in Pyonokraus has copied itself through their strange asexual reproduction.
With their four arms constantly in motion and minds that process information at bewildering speeds, the ayblek are perpetually understimulated by the comparatively sluggish pace of mortal life. To compensate, they gravitate toward centers of chaos and activity: battlefields, bustling marketplaces, political upheavals, anywhere multiple threads of action converge. They pursue goals that seem arbitrary or nonsensical to other races, following internal logic chains that can span centuries and involve collecting specific grains of sand or counting the number of times a particular word is spoken in their presence.
Though they understand concepts of morality intellectually, empathy remains foreign to their psychology. An ayblek might save a drowning child, but never out of compassion; the rescue serves some incomprehensible personal objective they established decades ago.
The making
Instruxofinum is its own planar stack, not a corner of Alaria's. The cosmos holds several such stacks side by side, each running on its own laws of being, and Instruxofinum is the one built of billions of planes pressed together and held nearly motionless in time. Nothing about it works the way Alaria works. A traveling mage reached across that gap by a working no record kept and the ayblek never thought to ask after, and brought a single one of them back into Pyonokraus. It needed no mate to make more of itself. It produced copies, each one whole and identical, and those copied in their turn, until a whole people descended from one individual that was never born the way anything in Alaria is born. This is the root of the one thing every other race notices about them. An ayblek can follow a chain of reasoning across a century and feel nothing for the people caught inside it, because it did not come from this stack's life and carries none of its attachments. The empathy was never buried or broken. It was simply never part of the thing the mage pulled through, and copying a thing faithfully cannot add what the original never held.
Vitals
- Size: Medium
- Height: 6-7.5 feet
- Weight: 140-200 pounds
Aspects
- Apathetic to mortal concerns
- Eternally solitary
Game mechanics
Two Pairs of Arms
Passive ability.
You have two sets of arms. You may take an additional object interaction each round for free, may wield two two-handed weapons simultaneously, and can grapple up to two creatures at once (requiring at least one hand per grapple). When climbing, your climb speed increases to 15 feet.
Meditative Trance
Passive ability.
You don't need to sleep. Instead, you enter a meditative trance for 4 hours to gain the benefits of a long rest. While in this trance, you remain conscious and aware of your surroundings but have disadvantage on all skill checks and cannot take actions. You automatically succeed on sleeping checks when taking a long rest.