They're loose on the ship, but we haven't jumped yet ... right now they're the "gods-be little black things in the corridors ..." I keep thinking of the voles on Deep Space Nine. ;)
I keep thinking of the kif as one of Jim Henson's crazed acid critters, like the Skeksis from the Dark Crystal. Makes 'em even creepier. But I do have one complaint--they describe the ships as all grey because the kif are colorblind. But if you're colorblind, wouldn't you have a variety of things that ARE colored naturally because you never bother to make them grey? For all we know the kif ship looks like Munchkinland.
Granted, that would make things less creepy, and probably nothing in their world is naturally that technicolor, and they DO have weird creepy pinkish lighting but still--it's something that always bugged me about aliens who are color blind. It's like they're grey BECAUSE they're color blind. (It bugged me so much that I've included a mutation in the blind, cave-dwelling fuzzworms so that a few of them are, instead of midnight blue or dark green, a bright Barbie pink. Since none of their natural predators can see that spectrum, it never died out. So THERE.)
Re: *several days later*
I keep thinking of the kif as one of Jim Henson's crazed acid critters, like the Skeksis from the Dark Crystal. Makes 'em even creepier. But I do have one complaint--they describe the ships as all grey because the kif are colorblind. But if you're colorblind, wouldn't you have a variety of things that ARE colored naturally because you never bother to make them grey? For all we know the kif ship looks like Munchkinland.
Granted, that would make things less creepy, and probably nothing in their world is naturally that technicolor, and they DO have weird creepy pinkish lighting but still--it's something that always bugged me about aliens who are color blind. It's like they're grey BECAUSE they're color blind. (It bugged me so much that I've included a mutation in the blind, cave-dwelling fuzzworms so that a few of them are, instead of midnight blue or dark green, a bright Barbie pink. Since none of their natural predators can see that spectrum, it never died out. So THERE.)