#starmitum

With the introduction of the Jellies to the ecosystem, life on Vivirh has become a bit less frightening...

Over time, however, Pivot has developed feelings for Cheren, and due to her lonely past, she’s quite affectionate and slightly clingy. Cheren is just trying his best.

Nimbunnies originated from a group of androids sent out to collect data on the universe, far beyond human reaches. Due to their curious, friendly programming, they eventually gained sentience and began to alter themselves to resemble organic creatures, searching for their own planet to terraform and inhabit. They settled on a lonely, yet chaotic planet light years away from Earth, a small world known as Starmitum.

Picolraans breed by mixing specialized paint in naturally formed dormant geysers, which incubate the resulting eggs until they emerge as pups.

Being an adaptable species, the Picolraans evolved to fit their homeworld's cool, damp conditions. Thriving in temperatures of 65 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, they spent their lives before the Nimbunnies arrived migrating from place to place as the climate rapidly changed. Their travels are ingrained in their DNA; restless as a society, the Picolraans live to travel and never stay in the same place for too long. What was once a flourishing marsh or a warm field could shift to a desert in the next ten years for them, and a previously uninhabitable wasteland could blossom into a fertile swamp. As the species evolved and developed higher brain functions, they figured out a way to predict the shifting climate, using the pigment produced from their tails to mark regions that would soon become inhospitable. This task, called Safeplotting, is a dangerous work, reserved for only the hardiest of explorers. Those selected for this field by their community would often have to traverse into the driest deserts, hottest volcanic regions, or the saltiest seas just to predict the next shift. The arrival of the Nimbunnies changed the world, quite literally. The original droids, skilled in exploration and terraforming, created a system to control the planet's biomes and climate at will, causing the once everchanging world to go into relative stasis for half a century. Based on other worlds which they'd previously visited, the robots fashioned Starmitum's new layout to have two frozen poles, with dozens of other biomes in between. This placed the Picolraans into a state of restlessness, as they could no longer travel at will, their safe marshes often bordered by miles of dry land. Their weather predicting skills were rendered useless as the Nimbunnies' cousins, the Constelliclouds, manned the skies and controlled the seasons and weather themselves. Upon one century of Nimbunny rule, the Picolraans deciphered the robotic code and figured out a way to bridge the language gap; song. As a partially art-oriented species, they could learn most easily via music and patterns. This resonated with the musical Nimbunnies, who quickly figured out the meanings behind each tune. As of this communication, the Picolraans and Nimbunnies have lived in relative peace, the shifting climates returning to relative normalcy... for now...

The new home planet of the Nimbunnies, where most of the original robots landed dozens of years ago. Starmitum possesses a constantly changing geography, with biomes that shift within the span of mere decades due to its turbulent core constantly throwing off its orbit, speed, and axis. The planet was formerly inhabited by many unique species, who'd evolved to combat a horrible parasite known as the Phobin. The Phobin were kept at bay by constantly shifting climates, though this defense was shattered as the Nimbunnies terraformed and altered the planet and climate.  The illness adapted to affect the Nimbunnies as well due to this. After years of suffering from the infection, the cyborg creatures developed a healing technology in the form of the planet's artificial rings. The rings cast an aura which helps to cleanse those who enter the world's atmosphere, ridding them of any potential pathogens. However, due to its speedy evolution, the Phobin virus manages to slip through the defenses...

Phobins are a "species" of ghostly pathogens, which originated from Cyule, the planet of the Tinkerex, an intelligent, curious species of physically weak, bat-winged creatures. Highly adaptable and quickly evolving, the parasite which created the Phobins killed countless native beings on the planet, starting an epidemic which even managed to reach a few of the planet's far-flung moons due to the travels of space-faring species. Those who lived the longest with the disease were most susceptible to its secondary effect, rising from the dead as a partially sentient pathogen. Thousands of Phobins crawled out of shallow graves during the height of the epidemic, mostly from a species of fragile flora-folk, the Photolure. The Photolure often laid their loved ones to rest in flower gardens, inadvertently creating a breeding ground for disease as fungus fed on their corpses. The Tinkerex knew better than to bury their dead and incinerated them instead for fuel, managing to evade the Phobin disease, though their numbers still suffered, plummeting from millions to mere thousands in just a few years. They launched the most valuable inventions and ships containing replicas of ecosystems into low orbit, hoping to restart their society from scratch after the illness wiped out the entire world. This plan worked, for the most part, though the Phobins interfered, eventually causing one valuable canister of microorganisms to be flung into deep space, eventually landing on a small planet known as Starmitum... From there, the species became dormant, evading the shifting climates by going into hibernation... until the arrival of the Nimbunnies, that is...

Unlike their terrestrial cousins, the Constelliclouds’ limbs are too weak to walk, so they conjure up semi-solid, cloud-shaped platforms to rest on and float with.