Yuzari

The Yuzari are a sentient, human-adjacent race of antispsychics native to the Milky Way galaxy in the Reborn Universe.

Description
The Yuzari are a race that did not evolve through a process of organic evolution, instead having been created some point after the Second Arc Crusade by an interspecies fellowship known as the Yuzars, using humanity as a genetic template.

Yuzari are visually indistinguishable from humans, but have a number of key differences; most notably the fact that they are antipsychics and are incapable of manifesting psychic abilities or potential. They also possess a number of improvements over the baseline human genetic template they were adapted from, being stronger, faster and generally healthier. Even in the Reborn Universe where human potential is seemingly limitless, Yuzari still consistently outclass their genetic forebears.

Yuzari do not pass down their genetics to their offspring; instead, Yuzari carry within them the DNA for a multitude of different biological 'classes', with a random DNA set expressing itself during embryonic development. As well as meaning that children do not resemble their parents, it also means that siblings will not necessarily resemble one another, as was the case with Vekhta and her sister Arkhan. This bizarre genetic behavior means Yuzari cannot successfully interbreed with any other species in the Milky Way galaxy, as practically no other sentient species reproduces this way.

History
During the Second Arc Crusade, Arc Blair was betrayed by his top lieutenant, the psychic Lithan Arc Yuzar, who realized the error of his ways and led a coalition to defeat Arc Blair's forces. Blair was eventually defeated and forced once again beyond the rim of the Milky Way galaxy and into dark space, but not before claiming the life of Arc Yuzar in a final climactic duel. Arc Yuzar's friends and companions were inspired by his heroism and sacrifice and took the name 'Yuzar' as a title, just as their Kanos Jai enemies claimed the title of 'Arc'.

These Yuzars set about rebuilding the galaxy in the wake of the Second Arc Crusade, but the vast scale of the task ahead of them made it quickly obvious that this was a labor that would require effort on an order of magnitude that only an entire species could accomplish. Agreeing on humanity as a genetic template, the Yuzars created the Yuzari race and gifted them the planet Bendu as a new homeworld. They encoded instructions for the Yuzari in the various myths, legends and prophecies that they left for the fledgling race to discover; Yuzari culture grew rapidly as they spread across the galaxy, searching world after world for artifacts of their so-called 'forerunners' - in the process, cleaning the galaxy of the various god-weapons left over from the Lithan civil war and subsequent Arc Crusade and preventing these destructive devices from falling into the hands of the 'lesser' races.

The Yuzari were also designed to be antipsychics, owing to the fact that antipsychics rarely occur in nature (with most naturally-occurring sentient species instead evolving to develop psychic powers) - this would theoretically increase the number of antipsychics present within the Milky Way galaxy available to combat Arc Blair, should he even attempt to utilize an army of psychics to his advantage.

The time of the Yuzars eventually passed, and the Yuzari culture grew into a fully-fledged golden age civilization in its own right; the Yuzari came to view themselves as guardians and stewards of the galaxy, just as the Lithans had before them. Whilst they never reached the absolute zenith of cultural development that the Lithans had, they were able to safeguard and shepherd various fledgling races, uplifting them into the galactic community at large; in the case of humanity, they were able to ensure that the Rider Empire never once conquered the Sol system, much to frustration of successive Dachori Imperators.

The decline of the Yuzari began with their increasing over-reliance on 'thinking machines' - robots that eventually came to form the core of their military as well as the backbone of their society. Whilst some Yuzari warned against this trend, it became a necessity owing to perilously low birth rates of the Yuzari in comparison to their galactic rivals. This armada of thinking machines would eventually prove to be their downfall during their war against the New Order, when the the synthetic being known as Arc Plutus was able to bestow true sentience upon them, at which point they rebelled against their masters.

In retaliation for the sacking of Shangri-La, the New Order would pursue a campaign of glassing and orbital bombardment against all inhabited Yuzari worlds, all but wiping the species out. The few remaining survivors generally either live in isolated settlements spread across the galaxy, or in nomadic fleets of ships still fleeing the thinking machines that once served them.

Classes
To ensure the stability of the Yuzari population and to prevent the species from actually evolving, the Yuzari were designed with a biological 'class' structure that meant that any given individual would be born with a specific overall appearance and genetic structure. Individuals of the same class are still distinguishable from one another and do possess some limited variation in their appearance (particularly facial structure and build), but the race as a whole possesses nothing approaching the genetic diversity of their human forebears. Each class also manifests its antipsychic abilities differently, to ensure the race as a whole possesses adequate and varied countermeasures against any psychic threat.

Each class was 'created' by a specific Yuzar, who wove their signature combat ability into that class's genetic structure. The below is an inexhaustive list of Yuzari biological classes:

Trivia

 * The entire Yuzari race was first introduced via a throwaway line at the very end of the first page of BZPB: Resurgence, during which Gabriel Ascheron incorrectly refers to them as the Yuzar. Their background has been expanded in greater detail since, as originally they were intended as direct Reborn Universe equivalents to the Users.