Sivyas

Stats vary tremendously.
Wounds: 2-4
Movement: 4-7 swimming, 2-3 land, 3-6 flying
Evade: 15
Endure: 15
Mass: 3
Body Exert, Perceive: 1, 2-3
Mind Exert, Perceive: 1, 1-2
Community Exert, Perceive: 0, 1
2 move actions, 1 attack, 1 support (limited)

Abilities:

Hovering: Can travel over difficult terrain and occupied hexes in a low-gravity environment (such as a typical moon).
Oxygenated Fluids: Can go without air for up to an hour, or 15 minutes of physical activity or flight. Can withstand deep ocean pressure and thin atmospheres.
Complete Silence: Gains Simplify and Stealth 3. Automatically succeeds in stealth checks against any opponent deprived of vision.
Empathy: Unusual for a non-sentient creature, a sivyas has an unusual ability to read social cues. This is reflected by having the Community Perceive trait, but they’re generally able to pick up on moods in the area, particularly if someone is fond of them or wishes to cause them harm.
Empathic Bond: Over time, a sivyas may develop a very close bond with a single person. There are few game effects, but the sivyas will be agitated, tranquil, fearful, restless, or whatever depending on the well-being of their bound person, and can locate them within a hundred meters.

Individuals vary greatly, but a sivyas looks like a stack of three layers of three tendrils each, sometimes branching into twos, threes, or nines, usually trimmed with lacy ruffles or fur. On one side the creature has three dark eyes, somewhat like a dog’s, dark brown or in a gem tone. Other tiny sparkling eye-like dots cluster in threes and sixes between its other tendrils. On the reverse (you can’t really call either side the “top”) it has a small orifice that is reasonably mouthlike. Its surfaces are often covered with downey fur, very fine feathers, or simply smooth skin, as it picks up the color and some of the texture of a creature it’s bonded to. If it’s attached itself to a Cog it usually sparkles with bits of silica or tiny flakes of metal that it sheds like glitter. A given sivyas might be sluggish, hyperactive, nine graceful tendrils or 30 frantic writhing ones, as small as eight inches to up to a yard, tendril tip to tendril tip.

Sivyas move quietly, and “wild” ones use their stealth to hunt small animals (mice, nymphs, things analogous to minnows, that sort of thing.) They will occasionally make a small range of wheezy sounds: size, chuffs, a series of tiny pops and puffs when they’re happy, a high-pitched thready whistle like air escaping from a pinhole when upset.

Most pet sivyas can subsist on a sprinkling of sugar water with trace minerals once or twice a day, supplemented by bits of protein from their owner’s plates or unfortunate small animals (some of them bonded to ASR employees or Cogs tend to nibble on bits of metal and plastic.) They love oxygen flasks, and a puff from one of those is like catnip to a Pulse executive. Pleasant smells like incense or cooking food also draw them, chemical odors tend to drive them off.

Sivyas lay small thick-shelled eggs, but these don’t normally hatch unless a living creature or a Cog incubates them for a month. Wearing an egg as a necklace while it hatches is common among Pnepyjet aficionados. When they hatch they’ll bond to the person who incubated them. Eggs that aren’t incubated by a single person or left alone for more than a few hours here or there are often stillborn, but some of the ones that survive are a muted cream-and-honey color, and generally catlike in personality. Sivyas separated from their owners tend to fade to these colors, as well. Sivyas are dedicated and territorial of their person, very few trainers have managed to have two sivyas at the same time. Much of their personality, likes and dislikes, and so on reflect their owners, at least as interpreted by a clever but nonsentient animal.

Sivyas can’t usually breed in the wild, but there’s a few colonies of feral ones on Ganymede, usually ones that were released when they started reflecting traits that weren’t flattering to their owner. There’s a nest of a few dozen cultivated as a tourist attraction on Phoebe, and many Blueskies maintain colonies of them to provide a little variety and color. A sivyas lives 4-10 Terran years…pampered pets tend to the higher end, fighters and hunters to the lower.

One word of caution: don’t let a child under the age of, say, 10 or 12 bind a sivyas. It will feed on their curiosity, leading to a creature that’s more adaptable, more curious, and with more of a child’s native cruelty and destructiveness. Sivyas lack the physical power to do much harm, but the stories of these creatures turning destructive usually begin with “we gave an egg to our baby…”

Oh. The ones that don’t begin with “So, there was this micro…”