Remnants of the Earth

__________________QUICK STATS
Name Rixxil Brinnelbogg
Age 40
Gender Depends on the day.
Species Murkulisk (plural murkuliska)
Ethnicity N/A
Height 6’ 9”
Occupation Fuel Dealer, Garbage Barge Operator, Smuggler
Residence Flying Swamp

__________________IN-DEPTH STUFF

Physical Description
See GIF at top of page.

Personality

Magic/Abilities
Rixxil can breathe oxygen as well as most toxic gases and fumes, including smog and smoke; can hold their breath for a long time (cannot breathe underwater); is immune to most poisons & diseases, and resistant to the ones they aren’t immune to; and is empathically bonded to the Flying Swamp. They’re a skilled shot with a pistol and an exceptional swimmer. They also have a piecemeal sort of engineering knowledge and are a font of (mostly useless) knowledge in general.

Relationships

History
Ever heard of Murkulix? Nah? Well, not surprising, really…most folks haven’t. It’s a backwater world, both literally and figuratively. It’s got a red dwarf star it orbits; planet itself is massive but only about the central quarter of it’s actually solid. Murkulix is mostly a gas giant, and its core consists mostly of dark swampland. The planet has three moons - Murkulix One, Two, and Three - that orbit the planet. They’re dead moons; no natural resources, no life at all, not even toxic gas; they’re just balls of a green metal called murkulinium that’s almost completely useless. It has one very specific value: when exposed to the extremely toxic atmosphere of Murkulix, a reaction causes it to start producing plants.

Sometimes a chunk of murkulinium breaks off for one reason or another and gets sucked into Murkulix. The growth is very slow, but placing murkulinium in the water on Murkulix’s core radically increases the growth rate. With careful planning and guidance, murkulinium - called murkulite when it’s been organically exposed - can be cultivated into living vessels that can burn Murkulix’s gaseous atmosphere for fuel. However, this just gets the vessels going. Once they’re in space, they can use almost anything - and that has created a spacefaring culture of scavengers and trash collectors.

The murkuliska have most closely been compared by humans to frogs and toads. Their life cycles are very similar but they’re very long-lived under Murkulix’s unique conditions. For this reason, they spend as little time outside their vessels or homeworld as possible. They can shift their gender at will, altering both their physical sex and the resultant mindset, prompting them to use the term gender for both rather than dividing the concepts between biology and psychology as humans do. They reproduce asexually, laying eggs that hatch into tadpoles and ultimately grow into murkuliska. The eggs, once they’ve broken open, provide vital sustenance for hatchlings. There are usually about a dozen hatchlings per birth cycle, and each murkulisk has three birth cycles in their lifetime. The problem is that roughly ten percent of the population are infertile when they mature, and most of the fertile murkuliska remain on Murkulix while many of the infertile leave to explore. The goal is to eventually return to Murkulix in order to share their stories, but this sadly doesn’t always happen.

Rixxil and their twin, Rillix, are both infertile. They went their separate ways in their youth but are always happy to swap stories during their rare but inevitable meet-ups. Rixxil’s vessel serves as a low-cost garbage barge for whoever can pay, and the garbage that isn’t burned for their own fuel is sold off at a much higher price than what they were paid to haul it away in the first place. But Rixxil also acts as a smuggler, hiding cargo aboard their vessel for a time and transporting it to a desired location for a tremendous fee. Organic vessels from Murkulix are notoriously unmappable as they’re constantly growing and shifting, though the growth slows over time, making navigation inside them nigh impossible for anyone but one of the murkuliska themselves. This makes them the perfect smuggling vessels.

Pulled a heist and need to stash the goods until the whole thing blows over? Need to transport them to a safe harbor only you know about? Who better than a murkulisk to take care of your things for a while? They’ll only watch them, don’t worry; they’re not thieves. They don’t see the point in stealing. But they do see the point in trust. Without trust, how can there be a bond between peoples?

Murkuliska love telling stories but they only share their experiences and knowledge with people they trust. For this reason, they’re also considered the perfect keepers of secrets if you need to pass information this way and that. They never tell a secret unless they trust someone completely, even under extreme duress - and they have a very high pain tolerance.

Murkuliska can also breathe the most toxic fumes and smog and smoke you can imagine as easily as humans breathe air - and they can breathe that as well. They’re immune to just about any poison or disease you can come up with, or at least highly resistant. Strangely, fertile murkuliska produce a lethal neurotoxin that is excreted through their skin; it is slick to the touch but quickly hardens like glue when it leaves their skin. Its effects are unpredictable, as even among multiple individuals of the same species, they are rarely the same. But the effects are always deadly in the end, with brief contact being lethal after about ten minutes or so.

Despite their natural defenses and rather hefty knack for survivability, including their longevity, murkuliska are no less mortal than any other species in the universe. They just have a few more advantages than a lot of folks. But ultimately, they’re not bad people. They’re social creatures and their emotions don’t tend to get too extreme very often; some have even called them mellow or easy-going. They can be just as dangerous as any other traveler, of course, but their relatively calm demeanor can seriously put people off their guard. In general, though, most just consider them “friendly”.

So, why don’t you tell ol’ Rixxil a story and we’ll see if we can’t do business, hm?

Flying Swamp
Like all murkuliskan vessels, the Flying Swamp was grown entirely from a chunk of murkulite exposed to the atmospheric conditions of the planet. It has a very squid-like design, several “tentacles” extending from the front of the vessel; they are prehensile and equipped with tactile EMPs, allowing them to shut down any electrical signal or current running through or emitted by ships that they are able to latch onto. The “head” of the vessel houses the bulk of the vessel’s interior. Multiple engines have been grown with exterior ports, allowing each belch out foul and toxic smoke; all of the engines are linked to a refinery housed deep inside the vessel, allowing them to be fed from a single location.

View ports grown along the vessel’s exterior would be murky if not for advanced scanning and sensor integration. Adapting technology into the design of each murkuliskan vessel allows individual vessels to be unique even compared to the similarity in their collective growth process, and the pFlying Swamp is no different. While it is exceedingly hot and humid inside the ship, gases toxic to non-murkuliska also flood the corridors and cabins; this means that there is very little, if any, oxygen to be found aboard a murkuliskan vessel. The exterior also seems to be covered with many varieties of moss and vines in shades of green and brown, and strange mushrooms have been known to grow sporadically along the surface as well; these mushrooms can be stimulated to release huge clouds of deadly spores that block scanners and sensors as well as visual acuity. Hidden in several spots, however, are even deadlier weapons: pulsar cannons of mixed organic and technological design that can punch rather large holes in a hull.

Inside the front of the vessel, at the base of the tentacles, is an accelerator shaft that rapidly and dramatically increases the velocity of outgoing vehicles launched from the hangar connected to it inside the vessel. Cargo is loaded and unloaded from one of two separate side bays. The collection apparatus beneath the vessel consists of large-scale mining equipment, tractor beams, electromagnets, and mechanical claws that can be shut away while in flight.

The living quarters, of course, mimic the enclosed swamp grottos back on Murkulix. Much of the rest of the vessel also mimics Murkulix, with creeping vines and plants and mushrooms growing everywhere; fungus and moss of all sorts line the walls, much of it bioluminescent; and corridors and walkways are constructed of tree trunks and interlocking vines, creating paths thicker than the vessel’s owner and sturdier than an iron asteroid. The vessel is, of course, a living entity and is surprisingly intelligent; it has bonded with its owner and will not respond to anyone but them.

__________________THREAD TRACKER
Current Threads

Complete Threads