Mirrubani

Mirrubani
Biological classifications
Designation	Marsupials
Subspecies	4
Physical characteristics
Height	0.7m-2.6m
Mass	12kg-160kg
Distinctive traits	Always including: Nursing pouch Full-body fur Omnivore's teeth Sometimes including: Scaly tails
Lifespan	30-90 cycles
Socio‑cultural characteristics
Homeworld	Mirruban
Habitat	Extreme
Diet	Mostly omnivorous
Language	Largely dominated by whoops and chitters

Physical Description

The Mirrubani are a species-complex of four related but widely varying species. All of them feature a nursing pouch of greater or lesser size, as well as a metabolism that features an autonomic toggle between modes of growth and of quasi-hibernation; Mirrubani in conditions of nutritional excess will continue to grow in height throughout their adult lives, albeit usually at a slow rate. While height therefore is not always a sign of age, it is however a sign of plenty and age together. This also means that obesity is a very rare condition for any Mirrubani species.

Mirruban is not precisely dry in climate but has no major oceans, with water being more commonly distributed in a network of lakes and rivers. Because it has a dramatic axial tilt, its seasons are wild climactic extremes. The Mirrubani are social symbionts with one another, and nearly every disparate Mirrubani community in their recent evolutionary history has been composed of more than one of the planet's native sophonts; since each is best adapted for its own season, this was practically a prerequisite for the development of civilization. These communities were traditionally semi-nomadic within large territories of their own, and moved from one biome to another in time with the seasons. This is less the case today with modern climate control, but is still sometimes practiced.

Heritages

Valli: The Valli most closely resemble Terran kangaroos. They naturally grow to be the largest of the Mirrubani species; an average young-adult Valli easily reaches 2m tall, and by middle age is usually closer to 2.5m. The Valli are best adapted for the long and hot summers on Mirruban's central plains, with short, heat-reflective fur and a ruminant ability that allows them to digest grasses and weeds just as well as meat, although traditionally they would spend their summers subsisting purely on plant matter as meat was being preserved.
The Valli are traditionally the hierarchs and historians of the species, stereotyped as even-tempered but authoritative. Although the species became only semi-nomadic over the course of its recent evolutionary history, the Valli have the largest natural range of all Mirrubani, and typically if they feel they aren't sufficiently respected, they tend to isolate themselves either literally or in some personal pursuit until their presence is missed.

Durri: The Durri most closely resemble Terran opossums, raccoons, and gliders. True omnivores with a love of fruits, their height can vary wildly but is the closest to the galactic average at around 160-180 at the age of majority. The Durri are best adapted for Mirruban's spring, and traditionally were most active when a given community of Mirrubani would move into its forests, where in ancient times they would use the abundance of new growth to craft garments from soft new-growth fibers. Prolific as either climbers or diggers, Durri generally still prefer either high places (in the case of glider-like members) or something reminiscent of dens or warrens (in the case of opossum-like members) as their dwellings today.

Durri are traditionally scavengers and craftspeople, and are frequently stereotyped as having short attention spans and a love of novelty or acquisition. They are also seen as notorious gossips.

Rasshi: Most closely resembling Terran Tasmanian devils, the Rasshi are on the larger side of the Mirrubani spectrum but tend to grow stockier and shorter than the Valli. Average height at the age of majority is also around 2m tall, but their height grows more slowly than their breadth and by middle age they're often no taller than 2.2m. While the Rasshi are omnivorous, they're adapted to prefer meat, and with their extremely robust gut biome it doesn't necessarily have to be fresh. They also tend to have a very strong bite force for a sophont. The Rasshi are best adapted for Mirruban's autumns, when its strong seasonal storms and earthquakes give the planet a harsh mortality rate requiring expeditious corpse "removal" and the other species are busy with the harvest. Autumn was the season for them to depart for raids and other forms of warfare, when the Rasshi could operate best as self-sufficient packs in the scrublands between different communities.

Gulthi: Most closely resembling Terran mustelids, the Gulthi are smaller on average than the other Mirrubani species, typically 1.2-1.6m at the age of majority and still often only 2m at best by middle-age. Gulthi have insulated and tightly-growing, oily fur that affords them great resistance to cold and wet. While they traditionally hibernated during the hot summers, in the long and harsh winters of Mirruban they alone could supplement dwindling food supplies by cracking lake or river ice and diving for fish.

Gulthi are traditionally viewed as having a somewhat more artistic bent than the other species. It's a common belief that their culture developed this way in order to fill the long stretches of cold and darkness which made work impossible before artificial light was made economical. This tendency can take many forms and isn't simply limited to professional entertainment, but forms a vital part of Gulthi culture; it's a rare Gulthi who doesn't value the skill of telling jokes or stories, for example.

History

Mirruban's erratic axial tilt has for tens of millions of years created a seasonal cycle with extreme and prolonged summers and winters, and shorter (though still lengthy), drastic springs and autumns. Perhaps because these seasons differ so greatly from those of most other planets, even in Common they are often referred to descriptively as tactile or visual concepts:

• summer is Arid, as the long hours or even days of continuous, baking sunlight evaporate much surface moisture and a band would move into the plains and grasslands of its territory;
• autumn is Wet, as the moisture that had accumulated in the atmosphere during summer returns, often in catastrophic fashion as floods and landslides. Earthquakes are also common at this time of year, as Mirruban's moons pull at its crust, and most bands will move into the highest part of their territory they can;
• winter is Ash, as the earthquakes of autumn result in an increase of volcanism which darkens the skies and precipitously drops the temperature. Most bands seek out areas with large natural cave structures such as mountains, particularly with bodies of water nearby;
• and spring is Green, when the rising temperatures and new growth mean it's often time for a band to move into forest or jungle to utilize the growth.

While the sophonts native to Mirruban evolved as separate species, they have operated in ecological cooperation with one another, it is thought, even before the emergence of speech. It is generally held today that by the time sharpened bone, stick, and rock came into use, a migratory band that utilized members of all four species would have outcompeted monomorph packs by a factor of three or more. It should be noted at this point that when referring to traditional Mirrubani 'migration,' not every member of a given band will move to a different part of its territory. The act of moving typically refers to the passing of overall, day-to-day leadership to the most active and season-adapted species of the band. At this early point in history, a band was not so much a concrete political entity as much as an informal, interspecies cooperation pact. Eg, the Gulthi who hibernate during summer would not move into the sweltering grasslands to hibernate near their band's Valli, but would instead choose to remain in their insulated caves.

Modern archaeology has found that roughly a millennium ago, a particularly harsh and decades-long Ash season devastated surface flora far beyond the usual, and local legends corroborate this with cautionary and celebratory tales of ancient days of starvation when the rivers were without fish and nothing could grow. It's said that in those days, the Durri, who should have been in hibernation until spring, woke and began to grow the fungus that would later develop into the first deliberate agriculture on Mirruban.

Traditional oral histories documents that around this time, the Durri began to organize among themselves into a monomorphal social unit smaller than a full band, in order to jealously protect the secret of agriculture. In these stories, the other species then each are granted discoveries of their own; the Gulthi acquired precious bronze and gold while cracking ice for their dens and smelt it in their winter fires, and they too follow the Durri model to protect their monopoly on metal; this monopoly is broken when the Rasshi discover bog-iron; and just as all the species are at their most insular and mercenary against each other, the wise and placid Valli, as the only ones with no monopoly at all, offer to arbitrate neutrally for the benefit at all, and that all species saw the wisdom in this and agreed.

While these stories are likely truncated and highly symbolic, it is nevertheless true that the development of metallurgy and agriculture occurred in close proximity to one another, and was shortly followed by the establishment of semi-settled civilization. Under this model, each band (which at that time could mean a society of as many as several thousand individuals administrated out of a central city) would be made of a combination of species, but within each band, each species would operate as a separate social unit, which would be in contact with other social units of the same species across different bands to form something like a species guild that spanned multiple city-states. Each local group of Valli, in addition to their active period in the summer would also perform most of the planning for the coming year, and also serve as Arbitrators who would negotiate and oversee transfers of goods and people from one band to another as requested or paid for by the Valli of other bands.

Without any major oceans separating these bands, technological innovation, social or otherwise, was rapid in spreading across Mirruban. This worldwide network of migration and trade saw remarkable success as a social model, and under it rapidly came the advancements of writing, architecture, mathematics, bureaucracy, and even some examples of rudimentary pneumatic and hydraulic machinery when an automated survey drone of The Alganna Eternity entered orbit and began transmitting telemetry to New Alba.

In the Terran year 1747, an exploratory fleet set up its base camp on the second moon of Mirruban and its sociologists began evaluating it for the process of Alighting. They could not have arrived at a more dynamic time, for shortly after the establishment of their research base, loyalty and even love for one's city-state over one's species became the prevailing model. Over the following century, advancements on Mirruban occurred at a breakneck pace. Conflict in the form of raids had already existed, but now war and conquest came, and then concepts not of city-state but of country, and pride in it, and then empire, and pride in that too. As technology advanced commensurately, the scientific method was discovered, and then science fiction, and much of what was written in that genre to some degree resembled the as-yet-unknown reality.

By 1881, the politically-united planet had advanced technologically by leaps and bounds, and the Eternity's observation teams were no longer entirely secret. The central government waged a quiet war against every detected alien craft and team which lasted nearly a decade and consternated the efforts of House Thezhix, leading them to outright broadcast their presence to the public in 1890. The stated hope was that the Mirrubani people, as in much of their science fiction, would be overjoyed to join a cosmopolitan space empire. The reaction was entirely different. The government released evidence of the Eternity's covert observation, as well as the covert strikes it had made in retaliation to interference with that observation; this caused a mass panic and uproar that was only quieted by several years of conquest, and the expensive construction of orbital weapons complexes, the remains of which are still in orbit today. The resistance of Mirruban cost the planet almost ten million lives, as well as a potential place as a Great House. Some cite this as a reason for Mirruban's present reputation for poor living standards.

Society

In more recent times, large-scale climate stabilization was considered but ultimately rejected both for being a prohibitively costly measure, as well as the fact that the Mirrubani were of course adapted for its wild shifts in the first place. The mass implementation of climate controlled interiors, however, was something of a fundamental shift. In the modern day, what was once an independent band of Mirrubani is still administered from a city, usually placed centrally in its administrative territory, and since the coming of the Eternity the Valli no longer hold their old place of hierarchs. A territory's bureaucracy might be run by any number of Mirrubani species, and even the rare alien that isn't scared off by the weather.

Mirruban was incorporated into the Alganna Eternity as one of its Great Houses, and its political landscape is influenced by the hierarchical nature of that empire. Most Alganna Mirrubani, as with most species in the Eternity, hold the political status of serf, though it's rare that this status involves physical labor. There are still those who live according to the old system of bands, but as physical work has largely been completely automated with Eternity technology, the population is ever more urban and professional. The planet is administered top-down from the nobles in orbit to the bureaucrat-serfs who now hold authority in the sprawling city centers, and from then downwards and outwards in a chain-of-command fashion, much like other Eternity worlds.

The modern Mirrubani city is largely subterranean. The massive and clumsy laser bores of the 19th century meant that only limited downward expansion was possible in the early days of galactic integration, but when discohesion technology was mastered in the 20th, it led to a wave of simplified and efficient excavation as members of all Mirrubani species eagerly flocked to the insulated spaces now available. Seasonality has become less vital to the way of life on Mirruban, although the earthquakes of the Wet season can still pose a threat at times. While there is still a large degree of surface activity, every city on the planet now also has a vast sprawl of space-efficient hydroponics, fungiculture, automated factories, and living facilities branching out from the more densely populated administrative city center, which typically boasts both soaring towers and like a mirror image: a 'Root-Hub' (the Tradespeech name for what on other worlds would be called a Central Subterranean Network) that matches or even exceeds the height of those buildings. The central network of a typical Mirrubani city contains just as many amenities, parks, businesses, and living spaces underground as above, if not more. However, the farther-out stretches of tunnel are often bare, rough, or utilitarian, and usually have reputations of poverty and danger, and few people who've known only a CSN would willingly go alone to one of these Far-Roots. The same is true of the deepest areas of a CSN, but while the CSN Far-Roots are dense with ramshackle living spaces and shops, Sprawl Far-Roots are much more dense with industry.

It's more rare today than in the past that a Mirrubani will hibernate of their own will, since the old seasonal indicators are lacking in modern life or aboard a ship. This is handled in several ways. There have been efforts to ceremonialize simulated seasonal indicators with some degree of success, eg. a Valli family might hold a gathering or an informal party to mark the coming of 'winter' as the lights turn the color of Mirruban's ash-greyed skies and the interior temperature is dropped. Alternatively, a ship's captain or station's commander might simply order the Mirrubani quarters (if the vessel in question has one) to simply unsentimentally cycle through simulated seasonality, which some regard as somewhat rude, but might be considered necessary. Some Mirrubani choose to hibernate more than once a year for shorter periods than they would naturally such as a week or two, and some even forsake hibernation at all, considering it an inconvenient biological relic. This last category is not especially large in number but has attracted much attention and debate recently; most Mirrubani hold that forsaking hibernation, though possible, leads to mood and metabolic problems. There is not yet scientific consensus on this one way or the other.

While it's true that physical labor is largely obsolete, and that few people lack their basic physical needs, those who occupy high positions in Mirruban's bureaucracy are vastly wealthier than those below them, and rarely live up to the spirit of noblesse oblige present in much of the rest of the Eternity. With more stability in ecology and a far greater food supply, the Mirrubani, ordinarily constrained by material scarcity, have not handled the post-scarcity age with grace and wisdom. Starvation may not exist, but every city has long and twisting stretches of inhabited tunnels and stations where poverty and crime are rampant. Those who in past ages might have fought over food now fight over status when traditional avenues of success are closed off to them. The population has led to overcrowding, and for the bottom rungs of Mirrubani society, there is no place to find success outside of either a Far-Root gang, or the Eternity navy.

Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behaviors

Mirrubani are, perhaps paradoxically at first glance, somewhat individualistic for a species-complex that evolved with such close cooperation in their culture. This is largely due to the intense selection pressure of the brutal climate; those who could not contribute to society were a weakness, and those who could overcontribute were greater assets than on more placid worlds. Mirrubani culture, like most cultures Alighted by the Eternity, is meritocratic, hierarchical, and broadly progressive. However, a belief pervades in society that personal success is not a reason to be selfish, and that those with wealth and power, though it's right that they should enjoy it, should also create opportunities for others to succeed as they did. Success is not viewed as a zero-sum game, because the ultimate goal of becoming a successful individual is to graduate from the level of individual competition to leading an organization in the competition that occurs on a larger scale. The typical ideal in the mind of the average Mirrubani is some kind of position of benevolent, almost parental authority, guiding those under you to grow into something admirable themselves. When put into practice, this model does not produce the desired results, as described above.

Traditional Mirrubani religion lent itself well to the Eternity's syncretic and semi-agnostic state philosophy, Eternalism. As a planet with such extreme seasons, most Mirrubani societies developed religions with the theme of cycles; a cycle was assigned to plenty and of scarcity, one to the moons and stars, and most certainly one to the seasons. To a devout believer in the Mirrubani branch of Eternalism, the gods represent rulership over these cycles, and supplicating the right one in the right way will lead to a quickening or a slowing of the given cycle; prayers are believed to be answered, eventually, when it's time.