Creature:Paroxar

The Paroxar are a race hardened by a difficult past and have become something of a nomadic species, found among a handful of independent settlements and colonies that don't answer to any central authority. There have been some attempts at unifying the species, especially so to stand a better chance at fighting and eventually (although with bleak odds) defeat the Zomborg, their greatest and most personal enemy, with one of the most prominent attempts at unification calling themselves the United Paroxar Defense Initiative.

History
Although the birth planet of the Paroxar species was at first perfectly habitable, and gave rise to its first life forms during a calm period in the planet's history, the star which the planet orbited started behaving rather erroneously, slowly but gradually bathing the planet in more and more harmful radiation as the lifeforms on the planet evolved. For a while, some of the species were able to adapt and evolve to survive or even thrive in this radiation, but this resulted in gnarled and horrific lifeforms which look more like something out of nightmares than a product of natural evolution.

The Paroxar themselves began developing the early stages of civilization during a time when the star was finally starting to catch up to the planet's lifeforms, now often blasting the planet's surface with increasingly powerful coronal ejections. The Paroxar had to restart their civilization several times due to repeated mass extinction events caused by this, and slowly but surely learned to develop their society underground while the surface burned. Slowly but eventually they reached industrial technologies, then developed further, past our present level, and became advanced enough where they could construct suits, augmentations and vehicles to survive the now volatile surface.

Now back on the surface, they discovered that the sun wasn't going to let down. In fact, it was only going to get worse. They predicted that the planet would eventually get destroyed entirely. The race to escape the planet was on, and during that time, various technologies continued developing. Various pockets of the Paroxar started to come into contact with each other again after centuries of isolation, and the result was not pretty. At this most critical hour of their survival, many of these clans devolved into warfare and bloodshed, leaving few to truly focus on the critical problem at hand.

Many of the Paroxar had at this point augmented themselves beyond recognition to allow themselves to traverse the hellscape that was the surface without an environment suit. Soon an entire clan of surface dwellers developed, gnarled to the point of monstrosity by the machinery that kept them going in the sun's unrelenting torrents of fire and destruction. This clan, and eventually clans, were cruel and bloodthirsty, seeing themselves as superior to the "weakling cavedwellers that cowered from the sun". They raided other clans, stole people to conduct augmentation experimens on, and eventually reached the point of forcing them into their service, creating mindless cyborg slaves to their will. This is where the Zomborg started to become recognizable as what they are today.

The rest of the Paroxar were horrified by the what these surface clans were doing, and many of them resolved to unite against what they perceived as a threat to their species as a whole (you know, rather than the big ticking time bomb in the sky). The war's landscape transformed dramatically following this, and it became less of a bloody skirmish between clans and more of a two sided all out world war that threatened to tear the world apart itself. During this war, the surface clans developed new and horrific ways of creating unwilling slave soldiers, and eventually came upon what's now their signature: the iron plague.

Developed as an artificial biomechanical weapon, its effects were the forceful automatic cyborgification of its victims, and the subjugation of their minds to the surface clan's programming. There was no real wireless central command that controlled them, so they were in a sense autonomous, but they were programmed to strictly adhere to the wishes of their masters, which included spreading the plague, plundering any technology they could find, and bring anything of value to their masters. Unfortunately for the surface clans, they had failed to predict the iron plague's adaptability, or the way the sun's relentless radiation might affect it. Soon the plague managed to bypass the immunity systems its creators had put in place to avoid their own infection, and the surface clans suddenly were no more.

In their stead was a now autonimous horde of ever expanding biomechanical monsters, shambling, mindless and merciless. The war turned into a hopeless struggle for survival, a veritable zombie apocalypse, and eventually there were only a handful of surviving Paroxar clans left, fortified underground hoping against hope that they could outlive the horrors of the surface. But there were those that remembered the doomsday prediction, the fact that the sun would eventually destroy the world. Waiting out the apocalypse was no longer an option. They had to escape the planet.

Fortunately, while the war had raged, there had been strides taken in space travel, and there was even a space station in orbit which hid carefully in the planet's shadow, avoiding the unfiltered barrage of the sun. In the end, the Paroxar managed to build several colony ships, and although some of them were downed by the unending hordes of Zomborg, a handful escaped the surface, flying away in the planet's shadow and finally escaping the doomed world that had birthed them.

Unfortunately, the Zomborg now too had their hands on interstellar travel, and went to work on building their own ships from the wreckages of the colony ships they had downed. With knowledge extracted straight out of the captured colony ship engineers, the Zomborg were soon in space themselves, free to spread like the literal plague they are.

Thus is the origin of the Paroxar and the Zomborg.

Characteristics
A notable fact about the Paroxar is that their biology, as a result of their warped evolution on a dying world, is slightly unstable. Many of them find their skin deteriorating, ripping apart at unseen seams which have to be stitched or even stapled back together, giving them a rather unsightly frankensteinean look, which is not helped by the fact that some of them have to replace body parts that literally just fall off or rot away with mechanical implants or prosthetics. They hide their gristly appearance beneath clothing or armour as they can, but a faceless armoured being can be just as offputting as a stitched together cyborg freak.