#seven moons

You’d likely hear this mercury-bearing lustrous before you see her as she idly plays her flute, adamant in finding the perfect melody for her beloved fellow lustrous.

Myrickite is a patrol gem in… mostly name to be quite honest. She rarely fights, opting to scout out the sunspots and report them to other gems to take down while she hovers in the background, either playing combative music for them or taking notes on the sorts of music played by the lunarians. She takes pride in being able to reconstruct the songs the lunarians play, even if it gets her yelled at by the other lustrous for the near heart attack they have at night. It's unclear why she prefers to stay in the backlines. She's proven herself to be quite adept at fighting, able to swiftly take out sunspots on her own if there's no lustrous to help her. The younger gems insist that it's due to her mercury but she'd rather play a lullaby then answer them.

She’s upbeat, cheery, and very much the "Girl Next Door" archetype in her pep and cheer. Despite her friendliness, she tends to follow around other hazardous gems such as the late Coffinite and Sulfur. She loves making friends with the danger gems on anyone's roster and will happily make songs with them. However, if there's no danger gems around her, she's not about showing off her "Quartz Pride" and bonding with other quartz lustrous.

They have three pairs lower legs (maybe more?  They aren’t called hexadectaurpedes) and three pairs arms, each pair with a different function (fine manipulation, strong grip, half hand-half foot helpful balancey appendages?).  They have eyes all round their buggy little heads, and a couple sets of pedipalps that have lost some of the finer manipulative abilities over the years as hands possessing reach have been being used preferentially.  Despite their buggy appearance, they have an endoskeleton and probably a decently recognizable musculature in addition to their exoskeleton, which is more designed for protection than structure.  The whole body is covered in this thick and insulating integument, meaning the centaurpedes need somewhat less protections for the cold vacuum of space than their animalien friends from other moons.  It’s a subject of intense study by setting engineers in attempts to replicate the structure for effective space insulation.  Their back is covered by a thicker shell-like bit, and centaurpedes being pretty big (10 feet tall?), you could fit like twelve kobolds back there, 0 to a few dragons depending on size, and I dunno, a lot of equipment or something.

Centaurpedes have a wide range of vision, both fieldwise and spectrumwise, due to big and cool eyes all about their heads.  Their antennae provide them with solid hearing as well.  No other senses are particularly notable, other than smell being diminished relative to ancestors and fellows.  Various palp movements add clicks and chitters to a humanlike method of speech via air passing through lungs.  

The “secret” here is that these beings were descended from ancestral centaurpedes, and in fact are a genetically modified subspecies made to be better at small-moon life rather than the planet they were originally from!  Modifications included Improved and Scattered Eyes, the sick integument, specialized hands, and a smaller (!) size than their predecessors.  The civ that created them had oodles of excellent technology, genetic and otherwise, remnants of which litter the larger Bead Ring moons.  Ill-understood behemoths originating from these extraterrestrials pump oxygen into moons’ atmospheres, allowing for the maintenance of terraformed planetlets bursting full of oxygen-using life.  The breakdown of one of these on one planet is causing issues but leading to some belated discoveries on how the old hunks of junk work.  

Ancestral!centaurpede civilization peaked several millennia ago, shortly after the establishment of these colonies, one of several large-scale genemod populations established by a large empire, which may even have arrived from outside the solar system.  Initially starry relationships between the parental empire, providing well for its valuable and hard-to-replace constituents, and colonies which provided it with valuable resources and scientific data, quickly soured.  An out-of-the-way outpost was easy to ignore for politicians trying to curry favor with their closer constituents, and as the Support The Space Troops ethos waned in the homelands, the colonies found themselves short on interstellar resources and consequently on patience, leading to revolution.  The founders of the new state initially tried for economic relations with the estranged empires, but more radical, anti-original fragments of the population preached self-sufficiency, and that made more sense to the people so that won the day; the centaurpedes lost contact with their parent empire and, since nobody’s popped up to check on them, it’s presumable that it’s gone, much less powerful, or they forgot about them too.  Millenia is long.

The revolution came with a tide of anti-intellectualism, at least on the main moon; disdain for political dominants mixed with disdain for the at-home rich upper class in “isolated cities with air conditioned bubbles”, as well as those doing scientific work for an empire that didn’t care for them.  The mostly agrarian population led a second revolution after the first, and some technological and historical records were lost or, in some cases, burned.  The political waters of the Ring have not been still since, and at story present, there exists a very loose confederation of moons with divergent cultures but common technological interests, and a pan-centaurpede-nationalism movement has been emerging in response to discoveries concerning ancestral technology.

Over the years various technologies, often spaceflight related, that were once common became too taken-for-granted to be worth maintaining, then too in disrepair to figure out how to put back together again.  Laser-based mineral purification?  In this economy?  Life on each bead persists with a unique patchwork of old and new technology, and history has become a patchwork quilt, with reports of a properly spacefaring ancestor becoming apocryphal in most places.  Alien life is a pretty common sight in most major cities around the moons, though there are xenophobic backwaters.