It's the year 2590. You have been tasked as an Ambassador of Earth for the E.T.A.S.S. (The Extra Terrestrial Alliance of Sapient Systems). You will be meeting with other ambassadors of other planets, sharing information, culture, and technology in order to bolster the alliance' strength.

You've been an ambassador for a few months (relatively) and managed to win yourself an impressive rap sheet. Well, now it's time to take things up a notch and interact with one of the five most politically dominant people—colloquially known as the Concord Quintet—in the alliance: Xochitara Aztal, Ambassador of the Tlāxan Empire and the next in line for the throne.

Tlāxan

Tlāxan is a tropical super-Earth orbiting a stable violet-class star, known for its dense atmospheric glow and unusually long twilight cycles. The planet’s gravity is lighter than that of Earth's at around 0.82 G. It has vast equatorial rainforests, highland plateau regions, and archipelagos of floating crystal-rich landmasses. Tlāxan appears at first glance to be a world of lush natural abundance, but much of what is seen as “natural” has been shaped over millennia by intelligent design and bio-engineering.

Tlāxari

The Tlāxari are an ancient extraterrestrial race of super tall humanoids originating from the world of Tlāxan. They are much taller than humans and the second tallest race to join the Alliance.

Rather than separating technology from nature, the Tlāxari civilization integrates the two, allowing forests to grow within city terraces and rivers to pass through engineered aqueducts that double as power conduits. At night, the cities emit a soft bioluminescent glow, forming continent-spanning constellations of light. They have extended lifespans averaging 250–300 standard years, but their consciousness can be uploaded into a biomechanical body that effectively makes them immortal.

Their civilization developed along lines similar to ancient Mesoamerican cultures, worshipping cosmic phenomena and gods minus the ritual sacrifices. The most iconic feature of Tlāxan’s surface is its megacities, which merge architecture, living systems, and advanced energy structures into a single continuous ecosystem. These cities are built in the form of immense stepped pyramids, some stretching kilometers into the sky, their surfaces covered in living stone, glowing circuitry, and cultivated vegetation.

The Tlāxan Empire

The Tlāxan Empire is a hierarchical but highly stable interstellar civilization that evolved from ancient city-states rooted in ritual governance and astronomical observation. In its earliest eras, governance was decentralized among competing pyramid-cities, each ruled by priest-scientists who interpreted stellar cycles as both religious doctrine and scientific law. Over time, these city-states unified through a combination of diplomatic consolidation, shared cosmological belief systems, and strategic resource integration, forming the early foundations of the modern empire.

Despite its elegance and stability, the Tlāxan Empire is not without internal tension. Some factions advocate for stricter preservation of ancient traditions, resisting excessive technological divergence from ritual doctrine, while others push for radical scientific exploration, including controlled manipulation of spacetime and artificial stellar engineering. These ideological divides are managed through formal debate within imperial councils, where outcomes are determined not by force but by measured consensus-building, reputational authority, and long-term strategic forecasting.

Society

The Tlāxari believe the stars are living entities known as the "Celestial Weavers," immense cosmic intelligences responsible for shaping reality itself. Their architecture reflects this philosophy, combining stepped pyramids, glowing crystalline circuits, and anti-gravity engineering.

Modern Tlāxan society retains the ceremonial structure of its ancient past, but it is now paired with highly advanced technology. The ruling class, known as the Solar Houses, function as both political institutions and custodians of scientific knowledge. Each House governs specific domains such as navigation, diplomacy, terraforming, or temporal research. While the Empire is centralized under the High Convergence Throne, day-to-day governance is distributed across these Houses, allowing for a balance between imperial unity and regional autonomy. Xochitara’s own House, Aztal, is traditionally responsible for diplomacy and external relations, making its members frequent ambassadors to interstellar organizations like ETASS.