Timeline 9

I’m watching a lot of DS9 right now and reading alternate history and I can’t help but imagine a drama centered around:

Flightless vampire bats from a timeline where South America never connected to North America. The bats built boats and wrapped their world in trade networks, never forgetting their instinct of reciprocity.

Giant tuataras from a timeline with a different pattern of asteroid impacts after the Permian extinction. They have slow basal metabolisms, but by clustering together, they stay warm enough to run consciousness on the brains of the individuals in the middle of the cluster. Tuatara political systems are rather authoritarian.

Human-like mammals descended from tree-dwellers-turned-Savanna-walkers, but their evolution took a turn for the weird when they were infected by a species of Toxoplasmosa, which causes infected individuals to enjoy working late in dangerous environments far from friends. Originally, infected individuals would walk out of camp into the night to be devoured by hyenas, but their utility as diplomats, profits, and harbingers of danger has elevated toxoplasmotics to a revered station in society.

Intelligent glass sponges from a very divergent timeline, where terrestrial life takes the form of amoebas colonizing a “slush” of water and glass spicules. Intelligent sponges grow the tools they need from glass (including arms and legs), and mimicry-of-form is basic to their communication and cognition. Other sapients find the glass sponges’ slushy homunculi to be creepy.

Haven’t figured out what to do with the Bajorans yet. They’re just super boring.

ALSOIMADEPICTURES!