If you won’t give me setting lore I have no choice but to make it myself, Dean.
I dare you to supercede this by releasing that sequel and/or movie. (No, really. Please supercede this by releasing that sequel and/or movie. A spiritual successor to Dust: An Elysian Tail has not appeared and I crave More.)
Right! So! It’s fandom necromancy time! Buckle in, my friends! There’s canon-typical genocide and canon-typical eating people under the cut.
Elysium is a planet that has civilization-ending cataclysms every few thousand years. Last time I was lorecrafting in this fandom, I went with demon apocalypses, but that’s a subject I need to revisit, too, so let’s just leave that mysterious for now. many, many eras ago, there lived a sapient species called humans. Humans possessed the perfect storm of curiosity, innovation, resourcefulness, and defiance of impossibility to propel their civilization to untold heights. They put a mastery of magic and even more mysterious forces that has never been seen before or since at the fingertips even the common people. Given such power, humans did what they had always done: Create.
The Cynthak were one of the first fully-sapient species to be created by bioengineering. They were born when this technology was still simple, and still required advanced skills to understand. Only a few experts worked together on the project, and they did not publicly release the source code used. Thus, the Cynthak are now known as a “closed source” species, and they are the only closed source sapient species known to be extant today.
In those ancient days, humans regarded such acts of creation with great caution, lest the world become unbalanced by their work. They designed the Cynthak reproductive system such that the male and female parts could not be joined directly, but only through a certain ritual which is now among the Cynthak’s most guarded secrets. Furthermore, their eggs had to be incubated in a narrow temperature range for female Cynthak to hatch, making them much rarer than their male counterparts.
But recklessness is also a human trait, and as bioengineering’s barrier for entry dropped, so did humanity’s fear of using it. Although the majority of new bioengineered “species” were crudely-designed partial organisms made for humor and not intended to survive as viable lifeforms, the fruit of a great many true efforts still thrive and mate naturally even now. In this time, great collaborations were undertaken and shared across Elysium, and a number of templates were made publicly available for anyone to use. These templates were called “open source”, and are the origin of most bioengineered species that live on Elysium today. Common sapient “open source” species include Klaix, Totha, and Atopots, all made with the same “anthropomorph” template.
Atopots are short, rounded anthropomorphs inspired by lichen. Their transparent skin takes on the color of the photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria that live in and provide nutrients for them. They traditionally lay their eggs in high-walled clay or mud nests. They’re strict herbivores, but are hardy enough to live just about anywhere. If forced to live underground, they often form additional symbiotic relationships with fungi, letting them put down hyphae and draw nutrients from the soil.
Totha are anthropomorphs based on hooved animals. They can vary greatly in size and species of inspiration, but all have proportionately large heads for their body size, and unguligrade legs with short thighs and long hooves homologous to the human foot. All Totha are ruminants, with multi-chambered stomachs for breaking down cellulose. Male Totha often but do not always have horns. Most have neutral or earthy-toned coats, but many dye themselves other colors. Some Totha have ever-growing wool, and style, clip, or strategically shave it to express themselves, show group membership, or make a sweater.
Klaix, the most currently-prolific sapient species on Elysium, are anthropomorphs based on pawed mammals. They come in a very wide array of colors, sizes, and species of inspiration, though foxes, rabbits, mice, and cats are among the most common. Despite having existed and interbred for many eras, species of inspiration in Klaix remains completely discrete, with each child of a mixed union almost always having one parent’s species of inspiration or the other’s. Hybrids are possible, but rare and usually infertile. Though vast differences in phenotype occur within this species, Klaix almost never eat each other, despite their extreme omnivory giving them no natural inclination against eating the flesh of any other species, with no regard to sapience.
This trait is something their original creators would have considered a “glitch,” a bit of programming that just wasn’t quite right. If the creators of the Klaix had discovered this, they would have changed the source code and distributed a hotfix gene drive to the existing population. Unfortunately for humanity in the long run, this trait is easily masked by legal and cultural penalties for killing other sapient beings and by an abundance of readily-available food, which were both a given in the post-scarcity civilization Klaix were born into.
Then a cataclysm hit, destroying both of those protections in one fell swoop. Humans held on, eking out a less glorious existence in the next era in spite of many bioengineered species now exhibiting unintended behaviours. Klaix were far from the only ones whose design wasn’t doomsday-proofed, just one of the smartest and most adaptable ones. Humanity wouldn’t go extinct until the era after that, and while there were other factors, being hunted by hungry Klaix didn’t exactly help.
There have been many eras since then, and no-one remembers what “closed source” or “open source” originally meant. Most sapient species are still neurologically similar to humans enough that it only takes separating them into categories to fuel “my category is better than your category” behaviour. When combined with cataclysms and the closed source species’ poor fertility, they died out one by one.
The Klaix in the Kingdom of Falana have a particular appetite for buffalo Totha, and have decimated native populations. Only the Kush tribe has remained free by hiding in the Blackmoor Mountains and killing any Klaix that gets too close. General Gaius has had some success in conscripting captured Kush as muscle for his army (they are compensated by not being turned into burger patties), but they swing their war hammers with no regard for the safety of their alleged Klaix comrades. It’s worth it, Gaius thinks, to put an end to the cosmic mistake of the closed source.
