Gryunjalla

The Gryunjalla, the name being the Jiralhanae word for 'Prospectors,' are an elusive alien race that once held a benevolent relationship with the Jiralhanae. Little is known about them, with not even their native name being recorded. They are assumed to be space-borne nomads and largely inhabit mobile habitats, with what appears to be a cultural aversion toward substantial gravity wells such as those of a planet.

Most known knowledge on the Gryunjalla comes from Covenant and Jiralhanae sources, the latter of which usually include a folkloric filter. In addition, only a single group of Gryunjalla prospectors was ever substantially interacted with, and their place in the Gryunjalla's wider society remains largely unknown. Their practices or technology of this group thus give us a very limited window into the civilization as a whole. Because little is known about the Gryunjalla in spite of the tremendous influence they have had on events within the Orion Arm, people are free to make up their own minds as to the Gryunjalla's motivations, and the resulting debate is often contentious. This is particularly true within Jiralhanae societies, where older generations were more inclined to see the Gryunjalla as well-meaning benefactors, while newer generations see the Gryunjalla's influence as manipulative and corrosive.

The Gryunjalla have some crossover with various suspected Ulterior civilisations known to the Covenant and humanity. Their actions have been propositioned as being the infamous Optem who looted Forerunner reliquaries before even the Covenant achieved spacefaring status. Some have also drawn parallels between the Gryunjalla and the phenomenon of the Hidebehinds.

History
The Gryunjalla encountered the Jiralhanae after the First Immolation in the 1300s. They traded their ore freighters in exchange for the rights to mine the asteroids orbiting Doisac, and would later resettle Jiralhanae laborers on the planets they mined. They abandoned these worlds upon completion of the operation, leaving the Jiralhanae population to their own devices. To limit their expansion, and the numbers of translight vessels that could be called upon by warlords, the Gryunjalla never shared any knowledge on the workings of their slipspace drives, preventing the Jiralhanae from building their own.

The Gryunjalla would be successful in their efforts in curtailing Jiralhanae expansion, until contact with the Covenant was established during the Classical Spinward Migrations. The trade of older Covenant vessels broke the brutes' dependency on their benefactors, whose escalating raids eventually led to the Covenant-Jiralhanae War. Following the conquest of Doisac, a delegation would negotiate for the safe passage of a "very large mobile colony" through Covenant space. This would be the only known face-to-face interaction between the Covenant and the Gryunjalla.

At the end of the Human-Covenant War, Codename: BRICKLAYER speculated that the Gryunjalla conducted mass-abductions of humans living on stations in the Outer Colonies.

Biology
The specifics of Gryunjalla biology are a mystery, as no living or intact specimens are known to have been encountered for centuries. However, all of the individuals encountered by both the Jiralhanae and the Covenant did appear to be part of the same or at least closely-related species.

The species is horizontally-oriented and six-limbed, with the intermediate pair of limbs capable of functioning as both arms or legs. The hind pair of legs are powerful, similar to a grasshopper's, perhaps reflecting their origins on a nearly endless savanna. Their forearms have what appear to be primitive photoreceptor organs just ahead of the elbows, which are capable of looking outward and downward toward their hands; this has been speculated to reflect their origins as both prey and predator species. They do have a head with eyes and a mouth. On their backs is a unique cluster of fins that is both an olfactory sensor and a heat sink.

Over centuries or perhaps millennia of living in space, the species (or at least this faction of the species) has adapted to microgravity, and they are known to have been hesitant to land on all but the smallest planetary bodies, suggesting a physical frailty characteristic of extended microgravity life. This is also commonly assumed to be the reason for their enlisting the much more sturdy Jiralhanae as labor.

Society and culture
Based on Jiralhanae records and the Covenant's brief interactions with a Gryunjalla delegation, the Gryunjalla were exceedingly polite in all their interactions. There is some speculation that the Gryunjalla miners may have enjoyed the Jiralhanae's inter-tribal conflicts as a form of entertainment, though this remains unsubstantiated.

Technology
The Gryunjalla technology encountered by the Jiralhanae and the Covenant exhibits a trend for practicality, modularity and robustness. Its creators seem to have placed considerable value on continued endurance and repairability over time, a logical schema given the prospectors' lack of regular contact with their wider civilization. The technology is variously assumed to be high-end Tier 3 or possibly Tier 2, though without a wider sample, this cannot be known for certain.

Gryunjalla ships are generally built in a stacked-deck configuration, and seemingly use no paragravity systems outside the conventional means of thrust and spin gravity. The Gryunjalla's fusion-based engines are efficient, but seemingly not designed to impart thrust in excess of roughly half g. For combat uses, some of the Jiralhanae warlords would strap native nuclear or chemical rockets on their converted freighters to achieve superior maneuverability. The Gryunjalla did seem to exhibit an interest in Tyrkal, the gravigenic exotic material found on Doisac, and acquired considerable quantities of it from the Jiralhanae in exchange for various technologies and advanced materials.

The most well-known Gryunjalla starships are the ore freighters they sold to the Jiralhanae. These were largely standardized, utilitarian craft somewhat comparable to the standard "pusher" bulk freighters widely utilized in human interstellar commerce in which a comparatively small propulsion unit is used to push a long set of interlinked cargo containers. The ships, while based on the Gryunjalla's native designs, underwent minor modifications to make them more suitable to Jiralhanae use, including atypically high decks and control interfaces adjusted for Jiralhanae operation. The slipspace drives mounted on the Gryunjalla craft were highly precise and efficient, much like those used by the Covenant. Because the drive generated a rupture only wide enough for the ship to pass, the Brutes improvised by adding length rather than width, replacing or armoring cargo containers with native components; as a result, these Jiralhanae-modified freighters were sometimes called "longships". Hundreds if not thousands were in operation at the height of the Jiralhanae-Gryunjalla cooperation. Today, few of these ore freighters survive in working condition, though some have been maintained by Jiralhanae frontier polities. Many of these have been gradually upgraded with Covenant technologies over time, giving them superior engines, armor, and other systems, and they barely resemble the original configurations anymore. The craft were space-only, with separate cargo pods used to transport mined ore from planetary surfaces. Some Jiralhanae clans were known to have modified the freighters with Tyrkal-based antigravity cores and extra propellant tanks to allow them to land on planetary surfaces akin to their traditional rocket-based launch vehicles. The Jiralhanae also frequently added their own native paragravity plates to these ships as they require a higher gravitational pull than most species to prevent muscle and bone loss.

Outside these, the Gryunjalla miners who dealt with the Jiralhanae used larger vessels which served as their bases of operations on the expedition. Little is known about the specifics of these vessels, though they had impressive in-situ resource utilization and fabrication capabilities, and each was unique. Only one Gryunjalla mobile colony has ever been encountered by the Covenant, though never surveyed in detail. However, from the correspondence between the Gryunjalla and the Covenant, it is evident that such large mobile space stations serve as the civilization' main population centers.

Something noted by human scientists after being given access to Covenant records on the Gryunjalla is their understated use of robotics or AI, especially in light of their own physical limitations. The miners encountered by the Jiralhanae had remotely-operated drone platforms, which they seemingly used for most work in the absence of Jiralhanae labor, but that very requirement for biological labor implies a lack of autonomous constructs in such roles. This is speculated to be either for cultural or ideological reasons, as with the Covenant, or may simply be the result of a divergent technological path that never led to the creation of autonomous computers.