From Introduction:
The Telgiphors are a strange, aristocratic race that resemble — to ignorant Terran eyes — giant, flamboyantly-dressed slugs. Their homeworld is covered in fungoid architectures, lacking deserts and glaciers, and has an over-active psychosphere. The Telgiphors use robots and migrant workers from other alien worlds to mine precious metals for export. Small areas of the planet have been leased to foreign corporations for top secret psychic research.
The Telgiphors themselves are all very rich, but their royal families inhabit an elite social class at the highest end of the galactic spectrum. They also live a fairly sheltered life, dedicating themselves to managing Telgiphor society and resource production, while the lower classes interact with other races, acting as merchants and customs agents. The Telgiphors maintain very strict restrictions on imports because they, and the creatures of their planet's biosphere, are extremely vulnerable to a vast array of flammable chemicals. Only the most powerful corporations leasing land are allowed to import such chemicals.
Sometimes, more impulsive members of the royalty like to get away for a while, so they can actually do things out in the wider world. Lisi, the so-called Space Prince/ss, has left the Telgiphor homeworld in order to experience the adventures so common to human scoundrels and freebooters of other races.
Like other Telgiphors, s/he is a hermaphroditic limbed nematode — sometimes s/he is male, sometimes female, sometimes both. Of course, with no other Telgiphors around, this matters little. Far more disturbing is that Lisi has trouble deciding whether s/he wants to be a hero or a villain, and doesn’t always know what the difference between them is.