Kelvan

A Kelvan is a race of alien from Kelvah notable as the rulers of the infamous Kelvan Empire of the Andromeda Galaxy.

True Appearance
Though in 2268, when the Kelvans made first contact with humans, they looked very human themselves, this was just a form of artificial skin which they wore when encountering "inferior" races, to hide their true, beautiful forms.

In their "beautiful" forms, the Kelvans were still humanoid in shape, but looked nothing like humans. Gray-skinned, they were bald, and had four, black, beetle-like eyes above a conical mouth filled with shark-like teeth. Their hands were four large tentacles with suction-cups lining the under side. The females had hair of dread-lock-like tentacles, which functioned as part of their reproductive system. Kelvan blood composition is not known, but it is fluorescent, translucent blue when oxygenated and is poisonous to species with copper-based blood such as Vulcans or Romulans.

In the "beautiful" form, the Kelvans wore black plate armor, which could abosrb all levels of phaser fire and could even stop a photon torpedo fired from orbit.

Intergalactic Conquests
According to reports, the Kelvans achieved racial unity on Kelvah some four thousand years ago: this unity was the Kelvan Empire. After its unification, a Kelvan armada was created for one purpose: conquering the Andromeda Galaxy. This was accomplished in three hundred years, after which the Kelvans became an intergalactic empire, spreading throughout the universe. The First Federation, apparently, was the only force of the Milky Way Galaxy that could halt the initial invasion of the Kelvan Empire. During an invasion of the Triangulum Galaxy, the Kelvans first encountered the Relons, the only force to openly defeat them in battle.

The Era of the War of the Four Factions
The returning armada brought back with it an enemy worse than the Relons: alien bacteria. The Kelvans who manned the armada were by now immune to it, but the people of the Andromeda Galaxy were not. The plague devastated thousands, lasting one hundred years. By the end, the Empire had split into four factions. Civil war broke out, each of the factions vying to survive in a dying galaxy. The Faction of True Kelvans, the greatest of the four, won out through the invention of the molecule restructuring matrices imployed onto the buckle of the belts they wore. This allowed them to create paralysis fields - shifting the molecules of air into solids - and to turn living organisms into their base elements.

The Dark Years
With this new technology, the Kelvans eradicated all traces of the traitors. But in doing so, they upset the balance of the Andromeda Galaxy. A mutated form of the plague brought back by the Kelvan armada invaded their galaxy again. The molecule restructuring devices could not stop it, and the Kelvans were dying off. Other races, believed to be inferior by the Kelvans who had built up an immunity to the plague, began to take control of whatever was left of the old Kelvan Empire.

Dispersing Across the Universe
When it became clear that the Kelvan race might become extinct through the plague it brought upon itself through its conflict, the last emperor declared that the best of his people go out into the distant galaxies to colonize and discover new hope for their people.

First Contact with Humans
See | By Any Other Name