You know how some people seem to permanently have a frown on their face?
I do not know this being's name, but I can say, he – for he is certainly masculine – has a reason to be upset, every time a human or humanoid flies by.
He is worshiped as a god by the humanoids in his own system, but does not want their worship; he sees himself as a mere steward, protecting them and their natural resources. Before the rise of space travel, he benevolently protected his planets from stellar storms at their most violent.
It is known now that he is related to the Ring Admirals – not their real names, but that just happens to be how it transliterated, and it works – and also to the Beamerlings, which is how we found out that he and the Ring Admirals and the Beamerlings and some others are part of a whole family of plasma-based sentient beings, as there are carbon-based and silicon-based families.
The Beamerlings are the quietest and most shy of those beings – we only found them because my dear friend and business partner Rufus Dixon discovered a baby Beamerling held in slavery, and we returned him home. His father paid us by materializing elemental molecular gold from the nearest pile of space dust and putting it in our hold. The baby also left us with the knowledge that the Uppaaimar, in the humanoid branch of the carbon-based branch of sentient life forms, had survived their exile and still existed as a distinct people.
But this is the thing: plasma-based beings don't deal with distance the way that we do. Stars, those huge balls of gas in plasma form, define space and time by their immense gravity – planets and their beings mark time by the planets' orbits around their stars, and even traveling is done by stardates. But that's what happens when you are solid and don't have internal combustion.
Plasma-based beings are just that – primarily plasma, a small star with volition and intellect to go with their size. They interact directly with stars and even tune them, in the case of the Ring Admirals.
You don't want to get on the bad side of a being like that. The Ring Admirals nearly eliminated an entire empire over that.
Their cousin, colloquilly known as the “Fiery Frown” because there is no phonation for his name with lips and cords, is not quite as powerful in that he can grab one fleet and rewire everything built like it within 100,000 light years or so.
What he did was reduce the fleet that invaded his system atomically all the way down to elemental hydrogen and put them into the local star's core to extend its life.
Fleet B came to avenge Fleet A, which is when the protector of this star system first spoke foruniversal translators to pick up.
“Ah. I recognize that you thieves at least recognize the value of a storyteller.”
Fleet C arrived to see all but one ship from Fleet B sitting as a ball of burning hydrogen in the protector's grip, just as the surviving ship from Fleet B had been frantically reporting.
“You have ten minutes to evacuate that ship, thieves.”
At the end of ten minutes, the protector did a demonstration for Fleet C with the last ship from Fleet B, atomically dissolving it in a terrifying display of power.
“Pick ten ships of your third fleet that you wish to spare. Get your thieves on them.”
Fleet C had ten surviving ships. There would be no Fleet D. Word went across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants that the Fiery Frown was not to be messed with.
There is still word that said humiliated empire is trying to figure out how to destroy a plasma-based life form – the problem is similar to blowing apart a star. Even if it can be done, the consequences are not survivable. It certainly cannot be done with light and photon-based weapons anyhow, and that is about the best we carbon-based life forms can work with. Anti-matter weapons might work, but again, even given time to deploy them, an interaction that large would destroy anyone near enough to deploy them.
The Fiery Frown was not pleased with his first three interactions with space-going humanoid life, and so every time any humanoid ship sails by, he appears, flaming plasma coming from what passes from his head, his shoulders, and his hands.
I have passed by him one hundred times, and his vigilance never ceases. I do not expect, given the life span of plasma-based beings being contemporaneous to that of stars, that he will ever stand down his guard until his star dies, and his people have moved on to the rest of the galaxy.
I actually posed the question about that to him, not expecting that he would answer.
He did give me an answer.
“When my work is done, I will stop working and rest. When night comes, no one can work.”
In space, night only comes when your star goes out into a black hole or a planetary nebula. That is to say, he will be there until that happens.
This pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 is a study in how what color you render a fractal on and at what size can make a vast difference in what you see! On white, you meet the Fiery Frown in his serious, near-eternal protective vigilance. On black and at a higher magnification, you get some predatory aliens you have already seen before --
-- the Golden Tooth Chompers from the Chomper Nebula!