Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==The Navigators==

With the possible extension in Navigator elder sanity, the relatively more tolerant attitude towards physical deviation, moving shop to the Jovian Orbitals and AdBio attention it could be seen that elder navigators remain active for longer.

The mutations generally result in them looking like a cross between a Stage 2 Guild Navigator from Dune (possibly depicted by H.R. Giger) and a citizen of Innsmouth when the fish genes start to kick in but at least the mutations are more stable now and can be managed. No more constant crippling agony due to body changing shape unstably and no more brain functioning erratically.

Down side is that there is still no cure. The more inbred Navigators also have it worse on the mutations, hence the constant drive to keep getting new blood in to the houses even if it does take the female navigators out of action for the duration of the pregnancy and takes a minimum of 4 generations to produce anything useful.

The high nobility of the Imperium could be quite used to seeing navigator elders on state business, or at least not freak out too hard about their weirdness. Xeno citizens would either just assume that they are human in the same way that the Nova Beastmen are human (because humans are weird) or just assume that they are another type of xeno the Imperium met before them. Either way the Imperium is full of weird, this is not unexpected for them.

Life span for Navigators should be longer than a baseline human. Baring illness or injury possibly as high as 400 years. With rejuvenant drugs and shit this can be extended to 750 years, or the same as the upper limit on baseline humans. Should be higher but the treatments were made for baseliners and the Navigators are weird on ever scale of their biology so they tend not to be too compatible with that shit.

The rejuvenant drugs don't actually do anything to slow down or prevent the onset of the mutations as the mutations are not a sign of aging. If anything it allows an individual longer to live so that they can become more inhuman.

It's also worth noting that there is a school of thought in the AdBio that their inherent longevity is a direct result of the mutations and that outward signs of aging mostly only resemble getting old at an aesthetic level. Nevigators don't in fact get old, they just get more navigatory.

Presumably if one lived to be an estimated 1,200 year old they would have reached the 100% mutation mark, no longer have any human remnants in their biology and would be an entirely new species. Sadly only the medical knowledge of the Dark Age would be enough to get them to last that long.

They also tend to reject cybernetics. All attempts to find a way around this have failed.

Examination of the genes found exclusively in Navigator has proved confusing. They are mostly human, hence the ability to interbreed. A few of the genes are 100% artificial and found only in one other organism (Emperor Oscar) and some of the more odd genes seem to have been grafted from an as of yet undiscovered xeno organism.

The xeno genes also seem to spread in a manner not compliant with normal biology. If left to their own devices in laboratory conditions they subsume and transform the rest of the DNA in whatever cell they are in. They do not change it into copies of themselves but into what is presumably the rest of the code from the species they were extracted from. This is conventionally impossible, but there it is.

Attempts to cultivate and grow the cell samples into a viable organism have thus far failed.

Suggestion of introducing the fully mutated sample into a living Navigator to create a "pure" navigator without any human have been rejected by unanimous vote of the House Elders. Possibly they know what the creature would be or they may have some other reason. Possibly they just don't want to break the exclusivity on their bloodlines.

It is possible, even probable, that the Navigators would gradually become these strange xenos if they lived long enough. Although the nature of these xenos is unknown besides having an extremely close connection to the warp and possibly being aquatic or having originally evolved in an at least semi-aquatic environment. Nemensor Zandrek once remarked that Navigators seemed familiar to him but he couldn't remember why. They made him feel slightly angry, but not at them, but he couldn't remember who. It's quite vexing say what..