[This is gonna be a damn novel, like most of my recent creature writeups have been. If you want to skip all the science fictional nonsense, you can just go to the end.]

The planet known to humans as Aether is a smallish world located in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. A bit larger than Mars, it has low gravity and a relatively thick atmosphere, containing higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and chlorine than Earth's atmosphere. The greenhouse affect caused by these gases gives the planet a warmer climate than Earth.
Life is abundant on Aether, but a few tens of millions of years ago there was a catastrophic extinction event. At the same time on Earth, many-toed horses were being preyed upon by creodonts. One group of mud-dwelling invertebrates, resembling hybrids of cuttlefish and sandcrabs, recovered more quickly than other forms of life. This clade has already been conducting tentative experiments in crawling and air-breathing, and with the sudden extinction of most land megafauna, it took over the vacant terrestrial niches quickly. These cuttlecrabs grew large, they grew tall and quick. They grew smart. While Earthly life was discovering the secrets to internal combustion, relativity, genetics, and space travel, the striding, brainy descendants of those original mud-dwellers discovered fire. While humans were growing algae farms on Mars and on the moons of the gas giants, the Aetherians learned how to create enclosures and keep captive herds of their prey animals. While humans remotely instructed their mechanical servants to construct atmospheric plants on the terrestrial planets of Alpha Centauri, the Aetherians were building city-states out of mud bricks. While humans launched weapons at Each other through the gulf of space, a lonely Aetherian traveler camped for the night on a high mountain pass, happened to look up at a momentary break in the clouds, and was the first of her kind to glimpse the stars.

***

Eight thousand years later, seven hundred human beings flee through space, farther from home than any other human has been before.
Humanity has grown, and humanity has changed. The human race occupies a territory over one hundred light years across, and is expanding. Technological advances have transformed life, while genetic augmentations have transformed humanity itself. Humans perform feats of strength, agility, and intellect unimaginable by their ancestors, while their children (if they even bother to have children, since they themselves may live virtually as long as they please) achieve feats even greater. Humanity has been riding the wave of the technological singularity for dozens of centuries.
Some, however, keep to the old ways. They fear these changes, but not as much as they fear what is to come. The radical transformation that humanity has undergone is only a prelude. Humanity approaches a blinding, transcendental revelation. Then, humanity will cease to be human, and will become...something unimaginable. Posthuman would become transposthuman. The ever-increasing pace of cultural change and technological progress dictates that this should be so.
The million or so inhabitants of Nyx find this prospect terrifying. A small world at the lonely outer fringe of the Milky Way, Nyx is one of the few remaining places where unmodified, unaugmented humans can still be found. Feeling for spiritual reasons that humanity has gone too far already, and dreading that humanity will go still further, the Nyxians know that they cannot stop the tide of change. So, they decide to flee it. Boarding hundreds of great ships, the Nyxians send themselves out to the other galaxies, where they feel that even the future transposthumans will not go for a long time yet.
This is eight thousand years after the present age.

***

Twelve thousand years after the present age, the starship Hypnos, with its seven hundred frozen human passengers, coasts to a stop in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. The Nyxians had hoped to travel further, but the intelligent ship had sensed damage in its engines, and stopped at the nearest inhabitable planet. A dozen or so Nyxians, the leaders of their people, were awakened and informed.
The planet they had stopped at was small, with a radius only sixty percent as wide as Earth's. Nyx had been a small planet, though, so the Nyxians were untroubled by that. They were troubled, though, by the world's heavy atmosphere of carbon dioxide and chlorine, poisonous to old-style humans such as themselves. The ship regretfully informed them, however, that the damage to its engines was irreparable, and that it had only a ten percent chance of reaching another livable world before its systems would fail. The ship's scientific and medical facilities were, however, more than capable of altering its passengers' physiologies to survive comfortably on that world.
The Nyxian elders were faced with an insoluble problem. Their beliefs and morals forbade them from changing their genes and bodies to adapt to this new world, yet continuing onward would mean only the failure of the ship's systems and certain doom. It was not a decision any one of them could make for all of the seven hundred passengers on the ship. The only option was to awaken everyone and allow each individual to choose whether they would allow themselves to be altered to survive on this world, or whether they would continue onwards despite the risk. In the end, one hundred and twelve of the passengers decided to submit to being altered. They were modified in such a way that it was sure that their modifications would breed true in their children, and their food crops and animals were also modified to be able to live on this world. A subsection of the ship broke off and landed them on the world, which they named Hestia. The rest of the Nyxians continued onward, and were never heard from again.
There was one more thing that the ship had shown the Nyxians when it awoke them near the little world of Hestia. The ship had traveled faster than light, so the Milky Way visible in the ship's telescopes looked as it always had. Information sent via faster-than-light methods revealed a different picture. The home galaxy had shrunk, reduced to only a few hundred million stars clumped in an irregular, sad-looking bunch. The Nyxians thought they knew the cause of this phenomenon: the second, greater Singularity had occurred, and its effects had been catastrophic. They had done well in fleeing the galaxy.
The Milky Way had been reduced to a pale shadow. Hypnos, the ship, had continued on towards its doubtful fate. The fates of the other ships, traveling faster than light and unreachable by any method of communication, were unknown; they were identical in design to Hypnos, and may well have encountered the same difficulties. It was not unimaginable that the one hundred and twelve inhabitants of Hestia were the last humans in the universe.

***

For three generations, the Hestians prospered. The ship fragment that had taken them to the surface of the planet provided them with all the accumulated wisdom of mankind, as well as antidotes to any strange poisons or diseases they encountered. Their altered bodies worked well in the alien atmosphere of Hestia, and their food plants, algaes, and animals coexisted peacefully with the native lifeforms of Hestia.
Feeling obliged to expand their numbers in case disaster should strike, the great-grandchildren of the original Hestians numbered at nearly 1,500, and lived in a half-dozen colonies along a hundred miles of fertile coastal plains. Their good fortune was not to last, however.
The ship fragment had put into orbit many small satellites to keep watch over the local cosmos. They detected a large mass approaching Hestia. As it neared, it became clear that this large mass could only be artificial in nature, but it was like nothing ever imagined by a human mind. It was a mess of clean plastic spheres and tubes mixed with great masses of gnarled organic material, looking something like a child's modular building toy crashed into a tree. The ship came to a stop a little less than an AU away from Hestia, and soon Hypnos' satellites began detecting radar and other sensory emanations coming from the huge alien craft. Soon the alien ship sent probes, also of a strange design. Hypnos sent communications towards the ship in every manner it could devise, and the aliens answered. For they were truly aliens; besides some utterly basic mathematics, Hypnos could make no sense at all of their communications. They were utterly inhuman. Whether they understood the communications sent to them Hypnos could not say.
For three Hestian lunar cycles this state of affairs continued, with Hypnos and the alien craft fruitlessly probing and questioning each other. The Hestians themselves waited tensely, for humanity had only twice before encountered alien intelligences. In one case, mankind had only discovered the evidence of an extinct species, while in the other case, humanity had carelessly driven the primitive and secretive intelligence to extinction. How would this encounter with an alien intelligence that was both alive and advanced turn out?
The answer came abruptly when the aliens attacked. A wave of small, fast plastic and wood fighters was launched at Hestia. Their first target was Hypnos. However, even though Hestia's Hypnos was only a small subsection of a much greater ship, it proved more than a match for the alien fighters, and defeated them without any loss of life to the Hestians. Hypnos instructed the Hestians in the construction of weapons to fight the hostile aliens. However, the aliens attacked again almost immediately, and in far greater numbers. They attacked from air and from land, and as advanced a craft as Hypnos was, it was not equal to this task. Northmarsh, the northernmost Hestian settlement, was destroyed, the loss of life complete. The mysterious and hostile aliens wanted war.
Under Hypnos' guidance and valiant protection, the Hestians soon had their own army under construction, with energy fields to guard their cities and weapons to fight off the invaders. In the course of the battle a young biologist even succeeded in capturing one of the invaders, and with the help of his fellow scientists succeeded in puzzling out its bizarre language.
The climax in the battle came when the main alien ship knocked an asteroid out of its orbit and sent it hurtling towards Hestia, precisely aimed at the area of human settlement. With only days to work, and fighting off hordes of the ribbonlegs, as the invaders came to be called (their term for themselves had no human translation, and it was as good a name as any), the Hestians relocated the work of three generations. However, at the last moment, the ribbonlegs altered the course of the asteroid yet again, directly towards the Hestians. With no other way to destroy the asteroid, Hypnos crashed into it and self-destructed, reducing it to its constituent subparticles. While Hypnos' knowledge and personality had been transfered and remained intact, the Hestians' greatest weapon had been destroyed, and with the invaders closing in, all seemed lost.
At the critical moment, though, the captive ribbonlegs broke free and met with her kind. In her time with the humans, she had learned many things, and succeeded in convincing her fellows to spare the humans.

***

It seemed that this was not the first time that the ribbonlegs had encountered humans, or some form of human. Centuries before humans came to Hestia, another group of humans had passed through this galaxy. These humans were godlike in power, but irrational and destructive, and had in their careless way inflicted much damage on the various worlds inhabited by the ribbonlegs. Though the Milky Way Galaxy was a shrunken ruin, the transposthumans had survived, and had in fact beaten the Nyxians in the race to the other galaxies. Though powerful beyond imagining, they had done so at the expense of their minds and souls. The Nyxians' worst fears had been realized and then some. The ribbonlegs, victims of the transposthumans, had seen the connection between their godlike destructors and the inhabitants of Hestia, and had acted preemptively, hoping to destroy the Hestians before they could repeat the acts of their godlike brethren.
With that misunderstanding cleared up, hostilities between humans and ribbonlegs came to an end. Though some animosity remained, mostly on the part of the humans, soon an alliance was formed between the two species.
One question still bothered certain Hestians, however. The transposthumans had not lingered in this region of space, but had moved on quickly, albeit destructively. What was their hurry? Were they fleeing something? Had the destruction of most of the stars in the Milky Way been the transposthumans' doing, or had it been done in retaliation, after they'd provoked an even greater power?
There was no way for the Hestians to know. All they could do was point their telescopes in the direction of the Milky Way, and wait for the light of those events to reach them.

*** ***
Species Description
*** ***

The ribbonlegs is a three meter tall, omnivorous, highly-intelligent invertebrate. Having evolved from cephalopod/arthropod-like ancestors, it is native to a warm, low-gravity world with high concentrations of carbon dioxide and chlorine in the atmosphere, and prefers to colonize similar worlds. The rear two thirds of its body, the carapace, contains all of its major organs and is encased in a single hard shell, while the front third consists of three pairs of mandibles. The central pair is the largest and most powerful, while the two lateral pairs are smaller and more precise, and are used to finely process foodstuffs.
Sensitive vibration sensors lie towards the front of the carapace, while the olfactory and respiratory organs are on the posterior side. The eyes lie at the ends of stalks on the dorsal side of the carapace. Three pairs of strong, highly-flexible, ribbon-shapes limbs emerge from between the mandibles and the carapace. Each limb ends in a three-fingered grasper, and each limb can be used as either an arm or a leg. Strong cords of tissue run down each limb, acting as a very flexible endoskeleton. Most ribbonlegs are yellow ochre to lime green in coloration, though bright blue and pale purple and magenta races are not uncommon.
Early in the species' history, the ribbonlegs discovered that it was advantageous to use sound to communicate, they they invented various sound languages, usually accomplished by clicking their lateral mandibles together. However, the way ribbonlegs prefer to communicate, and the way in which their evolutionary ancestors communicated, is through two other means. The first method is through complex color changes. The species' wide eyestalks, normally black, can change instantly to almost any color in the visual spectrum. This visual color language is the primary language of the ribbonlegs. The other method, more intimate and precise, is through the exchange of pheromones and other chemicals, accomplished through the use of modified sexual organs in the feet of the third pair of limbs. This combined with the visual language allows the ribbonlegs to communicate its ideas most completely, though how readily one engages in chemical communication depends on the customs of society and on the comfort level of the individual. Those who take advantage of this chemical communication to initiate copulation are severely reprimanded.
By the time of the events in the above story, the ribbonlegs are an advanced spacefaring race, though not as advanced as humanity, being younger. Since chlorine oxidizes metal, ribbonlegs make minimal use of it, preferring instead to use advanced plastics and synthetic organic materials. They are decades to centuries ahead of 21st century humans in every branch of knowledge, except perhaps for genetic engineering.
Females are naturally the dominant sex in ribbonlegs society, being larger and more agile than males. In ancestral times, they acted as defenders of nest and territory, while the males tended to the young. In recent centuries significant progress has been made in male equality. Ribbonlegs society tends to be more communicative and cooperative than human society, but as in any populous intelligent species there is significant variation in this.
Judging by its proportions and the size of its mandibles, the individual pictured is most likely a female. Dressed for combat in an alien environment, it holds a plastic firearm which fires high energy plasma bursts. Plastic filters and pumps cover its breathing orifices, while additional gas (most likely chlorine) is held in tanks on the underside of its carapace. Take special note of the device attached to the base of its eyestalk. The receiver on the side of its carapace receives information and transmits it to the eyestalk, where it is translated into visual information and fed direction to the visual neurons. In this manner information in the ribbonlegs' main visual language can be sent long distance, which feels more natural to the ribbonlegs and has the advantage of being silent.

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Okay, I didn't plan on writing that much. But, when I start writing about these things, more ideas and stories start coming to me, and I get interested and excited, and I have to write them down. I draw a creature, then I think about that creature's origins and circumstances. Then, since I was thinking "alien invader" with this piece, I started thinking about how it and humans came to encounter each other, and the origins and circumstances of those humans. Then I just toss in whatever other ideas I've had in my head for some extra flavor. Whether you read this stuff or simply look at the artwork is your own decision. If you do read it, I just hope it's interesting and entertaining for you. I know it is for me. I added (a short story) to the title to give everyone a heads up that there is a lot of writing here. I'm toying a bit with turning this story that I wrote into a complete novel. Or perhaps a series of novellas. Maybe.
Anyway, I did this basically just like I did my Narakan Snapper. I had a vague idea, did a quick sketch, and and things flowed smoothly from there to the final rendering. I may post further images about the process and some alternate color schemes. Anyway, this is the best creature rendering I've ever done, and I'm very happy with it. I need to do a bit more rendering on the lower limbs, though. I'll update this when I get to that. I also drew some technology that doesn't completely look like crap, so I'm happy with that too.
Thanks for looking and reading.

UPDATE DEC. 30: I changed the position of one of its feet and did a few other minor touchups on the limbs.