The Mua Research Center

The Mua Research Center is a dedicated library and question receptacle for the world information on the world known as ZEVI-H/i-4 but colloquially referred to as Mua in the earliest Spoken-Written languages of the planet's inhabitants. Come explore one of the greatest post-ascendance wonders of the universe with us. We're always happy to feed new intellects. Sincerely, The Curator.

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The Ullar Pt.2

The Ullar are a native species to Mua who are often described as being superficially feline or ursine in appearance. They have apposable digits on their front and back paws, making them also relatively similar to Primates. While some would point to the various pseudo-humanoid features of the Ullar as evidence of convergent evolution, a quick reference to the anatomy of the Parthi would offer a different perspective on xenobiology and evolution.

However, a subset the scientific community among the M.R.I. have posited the idea that evolution is semi-convergent across the universe, with the caveat that evolution only starts to take on a convergent appearance based on basic constant environmental factors, offering that aquatic life evolves familiar forms based around locomotion and the universal laws of aquadynamics- while mammalian carbon-based land-dwelling life will often follow a wide but terrestrialesque variety of mutations and adaptations, evolving along only a few dozen or nearly a hundred different viable basic body plans with room for long-term variation. And similarly, avian and reptilian life is, in this semi-convergence theory, expected to follow a similar branching tree of earth-centric models for life.

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A Very Out of Character Post of the Current Pre-Mua Timeline

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Of the many factions on Mua, it's the estranged and homeless mutant "True Human" remnants that hold only the highest self-opinion even at the bottom of all dredges of distant non-society.

Hessdr of Nimaesh writes of them only shortly as a conclusion to years of research on the topic- interrogating prisoners of war and the like from the nomadic gatherings of Muties around the regions north of the Gost peninsula. He had only this sparse summary of his findings to offer in his writings...

"Millenia ago, they hunkered down in deep, pitch-colored domes deep within the dunes of Mua's great deserts. And there they discovered life-extending wonders that slowly riddled their bloodline with redundancy and blight.

When avarice proved to be their downfall, their domes collapsed and the few of their ilk to survive the encroaching end to their lineages fled into the fringes of the wastes they called home.

They took Muan wives and husbands regardless of their wills and had many more gene-twisted half-mutie children with them, sacrifice blood "purity" and extensive lifespans for numbers and procreation and their still-dwindling numbers roam the outskirts of the known and populated lands of the world like roaming herds of ghoulish indiscretion made manifest in human form."

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The Gas-Manta

Gas-Mantas are a species of creature native to the gas canyons of Mua. Their defining trait is that they have a body shape which many describe as being short, wide, and spade-shaped in an eerie superficial resemblance to the manta ray when viewed from above. However, they possess a distinct appearance from below, having six stubby, caterpillar-like legs which themselves are covered in highly grippy node-like microstructures. These gripping little legs allow the Gas-Mantas to scale the rocky walls of the vapor canyon and then glide down through the open-air, snatching up insects midair using a dual set of long, sticky, barbed tongues that snake out of a pair of gills on the front end of their flat bodies. They also possess an array of simple sensors along the rim of their head area. While this one long, curved compound-eye doesn't seem to function very well in the dense foggy atmosphere down in the vapor canyons, there is an alternative explanation for how the mantas sense distant prey mid-air or while scaling walls. Researchers believe that much like bats of Old Earth, Mantas may use echolocation to hunt their prey. They may do this by chittering with a series of gills on the underside of the body which chitter and reverberate together like the reed in a flute.

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this current model for the "Parthi" Race was rendered based on compilation evidence and even partial skeletal remains recovered from the miraculously well-preserved remains of a Parthi vessel crash site JUST beneath the surface Jara, Mua's largest moon.

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The Psychedelic Rituals of The Desert Ruby Tail-Toad

The Tail-Toads, despite their superficially identical appearance to toads albeit with tails, are actually a million years separated from their amphibian old-earth counterparts in more than just the temporal sense of the idea. And this is evident through more than just the presence of a stubby tail on their rumps. Tail-toads are on average more predatory and can be considered near-reptilian.

The Desert Ruby in particular spends most of it's time bathing in sunlight throughout the day, hunting in short bursts for grubs and a particularly larva-like sand lizard species which seems to have mutated to fill a very earthworm-like niche in their environment. Tail-toads do this not with a lengthy, sticky tongue but with a dexterous barbed, Aloe leaf-shaped tongue and a row of stubby, pointed, acutely elliptical-based teeth.

The Desert Ruby tail-toads, like a number of many other inland species of Tail-Toad, are Vespertine hunters. This means that they primarily become active around Dusk and do not hunt throughout the nocturnal hours of total darkness. This may be due to the way in which the relatively small animal- though large compared to an Earth toad- defends itself while spending so much of the day-night cycles of inactive. During the hours of activity around dusk which go on into early night, the Desert Ruby undergoes what could be described as a state of physical stress.

All the normally docile nervous functions of the dormant-by-day animal go into a light overdrive state towards the end of the toad's active period, driven by the sudden physical activity of hunting. When the toad finally burrows out a place for itself to sleep during the late night and day hours, it's body begins to secrete a poisonous mucus film that dried into the sand around it, forming a rather weak barrier of crusted-together sands around it's body that seal in what little moisture the toad maintains. But this crusty, clumpy coating is a vastly potent deterrent. When ingested, the poisonous mucus disrupts the digestive functions of the stomach, nullifying the effect stomach stomach acid as it seeps into the stomach lining. Once in the stomach lining, the toxins in the mucus can cause damage to soft internal the tissues, unabated by the destructive corrosion of stomach acids. Combined with a acutely nasty flavor akin to substances of intense bitterness and unpleasant flavor like Bitrex, the poisonous mucus is a great deterrent against being vored by predators.

Humans of Mua, particularly within cultures around the Pashtar Desert region of the Gost Peninsula like those of the nations of Lepkua and Kelekoss, have taken to recreationally stressing the toads in cramps spaces containing irritating aromatic spices and herbs and the urine of predatory species from the toad's environment. When the toad has been put through a rigorous stress-test, it's allowed to become tired before being bandaged against the body on places like the chest, inner thigh, groin, armpit, and neck where the toxins filter into the blood through the skin for a long-lasting slow-burn psychedelic experience similar to those experienced by old-earth psychonauts who'd seek out a similar high from dried Incilius Alvarius toxin.

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Podskates

The four foot long ocean-dwelling podskate is a strange creature which permeates the open seas throughout the world, primarily around the depths beneath roaming schools of deep-ocean plankton that form luminous clouds in seas which at times can be so dense and vast that they can be visible on the night side of Mua from low orbit. They do this by filtering water over the labial baleens visible in their ever-gaping maws. These pink flaps of flesh supported by small arches of bone catch microbes and small organisms. Some believe the podskate is a form of native fauna on Mua, as their strange body plan defies most norms on earth.

Podskates possess a skirt fin like a cuttlefish or squid yet their body shape suggests origins in the Stingray family despite their clear lack of a tail or stinger. Their eyes appear to lack any distinguishing features such as pupils or other complex eye components at first glance yet they appear to be superb at detecting depth and light and even some specific high intensity bands of visible light. Parthian sea life was rarely able to be augmented for life in the more terrestrial seas of Mua, though most Parthian-descended lifeforms in the Muan oceans exist only in deep, alien "Stygian Lagoons" which are similar to the vapor canyons on the surface of Mua where stripes of Parthian Atmosphere sit heavy in deep terrestrial caves, crevasses, and, obviously, canyons. This means that it is highly unlikely that the podskate is of Parthian origins. On the other hand, if the podskate is native to Mua, there's little to no evidence available to suggest knowledge of them throughout Ullari history. To put it simply, if the podskate were native to Mua, it'd be the most alien native fauna on the planet, making the podskate much like the octopus of earth- a alien in even it's most natural environment.

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Bishra, The Second Moon of Mua

The "secondary" satellite orbiting Mua is this orange-yellow rock which orbits further out from Mua than it's larger sister, the great Jara. Bishra possesses a number of massive basins which appear to be the remnants of a period when the satellite possessed a dense but quickly fading atmosphere and oceans of some kind. Now vacant of any kind of fluid, these seabed are blackened with vast deposits of Basalt. Small traces of Cobalt, which is also found in greater concentration but in far less consistency on Jara, are present in the sands of Bishra and give impact sites a slightly bluish tend under the right light, such as when they crest over the horizon as the moon rotates. Early astronomers assumed these faint bluish glitters to be rivers, likening Bishra to the heavenly kingdoms mentioned in the mythologies of the lost Nomadic Kelekossi.

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Pictured above is a vapor canyon known as “Sebesha.” 

The Vapor Canyons are a Mua-Exclusive feature of ancient planetary xenoformation. The canyons contain a dense, pressure-contained atmosphere and wild alien biosphere which few of the world's inhabitants have ever seen. The vapors, which are rather dense and mist-like, are toxic to most surface-dwelling creatures and therefor most of the flora and fauna in the vapor canyons are extremely segregated from surface life on Mua. Few creatures have adapted to survive in both the alien fog and the earth-like surface conditions of Mua. Due to the presence of many life forms of Parthian origin, the canyons are also hotspots for psionic and memetic anomalous activity. Countless people have reported falling through a rock formation on a rather treacherous hike only to find themselves falling back up out of a vapor canyon with skin and lung irritation to show for their strange journey through one of the many pocket dimensions that are said to lay in the crevices and crannies at the deepest parts of these unknown toxic biospheres. Similarly, some have reported gazing deeply into the foggy vapors of the canyons and spotting massive structures, blocky towers with countless shattered and cracked glass scales on every side, echoes and illusions derivative of an older time millions of years gone and countless lightyears away. Strange lights and sounds beyond those made by the many creatures in the mist ring out faintly on the winds from these deep, obscured places. Voices and the clattering low roar of entire cities of the damned and forgotten bounce out of the canyon walls at times, though many mark this up to the vapors effecting the mind and poisoning the body at a distance. Stranger more, many report unnatural lights flaring up in the fog, flashing outwards from the depths and sweeping along the walls. Many more believe that the canyons are gaping cracks between the living world and the afterlife where older times and memories thereof are immortalized as husks of themselves as they had been in actuality. Telepaths, as rare as they come and even rarer do they encounter these gaseous crevasses, often report feeling a connection to the greater forces of the universe when within vicinity of these formations.

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Being of the first of few jacketed round firearms utilized in Muan history, the West Scales Jacket Musket was a weapon in relatively low demand- yet the craft of maintaining, modifying, customizing, and even ripping off the design of the weapon became a pastime among wealthy royals and high ranking game hunters who took pride in leveling the playing field between themselves and the at times dangerous and volatile fauna of the alien world. The West Scales High-Smithery Guild build the first of these weapons at the behest of one Larkin Kathram, estranged member of the Kathram farming dynasty who rose to power and promptly faded into obscurity after the tainting of groundwater in their farmlands ruined their trade. The tainting was caused by way of high concentrations of organic arsenic releasing into the water table after a series of small earthquakes caused by unknown and seemingly unnatural means.

Each Jacket Musket is fixed with a plunge-loader system whereby an ivory knob would serve as the handle on a chamber which could be slide backwards out of the barrel of the gun, priming the firing mechanism and revealing an insertion point for the jacketed round to be loaded into. The plunger could be palmed back into place quickly with some force. In later iterations of the design, the plunger would be spring-loaded as a quality of life improvement on reload speed. Three or four fingers were meant to rest on the trigger, which was designed after contemporary crossbow triggers and would in later designs be trimmed down to a size better for use with just two fingers. A pin would fire off the round and the casing of the jacketed round would eject as the mechanism was primed again upon pulling the plunger loader to reload. On average, a Jacket Musket of the time could be loaded and fired in under 45 seconds. Because of this, Jacket Muskets were made as light as they could afford to be and their rounds were sized up to deal as much ballistic damage as could be reasonably fired from the weapon without harm to the operator. Most persons who could afford a Musket could afford multiple muskets, either two to three for a single operator to use in quick succession of each other or between five and twelve for a group of individuals to carry as part of an armed band. 

Some individuals would soon after begin to manufacture their own weaponry, often with the help of pamphlet guides which could instruct a person on the construction of a makeshift musket or “Pipe Musket” made from common irrigation materials. It was known that at the height of their Dynasty, the Kathram family employed an entire workforce to build and arm their workers and guards at their farming outposts with such impromptu firearms. Though effective enough for temporary use, repeated use of a pipe musket was not ideal. A pipe musket would wear down rapidly if not built from sturdy materials and as such might explode in the user’s hands, potentially causing more harm to the operator of the musket rather than the recipient of a musket’s load.

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The Leviathan Whale

Of all the creatures of behemoth stature and girth on Mua, it’s the Leviathan whale that often comes to mind when one thinks of the largest creatures in the world. While only a few creatures outsize and outclass the Leviathan Whale, few strike fear into the hearts of those who tread it’s domain the same way.

These aquatic megafauna are predators by trade, feeding both on clouds of small shellfish and on larger prey such as other species of whale, dolphine, and porpoise. Some Leviathan Whales are large and tough enough to even consume the hazardous members of Scyphozoa Sinachus, A.K.A. the deadly Muirdris family of “mega-jelly” jellyfish known for luring great seabirds to their death. 

Levithan Whales often go under another name: Bifurcated Leviathans. This name comes from their wide, vertical maws which can easily capsize and crush a fishing vessel capable of housing twelve men crews. Because of their reputation of attacking greater low-tier sea vessels, often due to confusing them for other sea life, Leviathans are feared by fishermen as demons of the deep and are often hunted by fleets of fishermen looking to cull local populations. As a result of this fleet poaching, Leviathans are a rare sight outside of deeper waters.

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Presented here is one of the later recreations of a Parthi, the cave dwelling aliens of the ancient universe believed responsible for bringing ancient humans into their space age. Note the multiple eyes, each with a different evolutionary niche, each set adapted to work in tandem with the others to provide optimal visual input during the being’s endless struggle in the caverns of it’s home world. The mouthparts are muscular tendrils which are tipped with cup-like grabbers capable of rending skin from muscle with ease or pulling plates of shell off an egg to suck out the soft center with the hyperboloid mouth hole featured just behind the being’s facial skull-plate. The dorsal spines allow the creature to remain warm while it crosses channels and lakes deep within it’s subterranean habitat. Seen in the bottom right corner of the images is the top of the creature’s collar-mounted arms used to manipulate objects as well as to climb and grapple prey.

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Kurrals

Kurrals were one of the most revered creatures in all of the Eastern Colonies, especially among the Kelekossi immigrants that quickly made up the majority human population in the eastern regions. They’re reliable, sturdy creatures incapable of flight despite their seemingly avian visage. Kurrals typically lived well into their thirties on average, but the hardiest Kurral lineages boasted lifespans in the fifties. Because of this, Most riders were only gifted long-term Kurral mounts in their 20′s when the Kurrals were just hatched- or in some cases, a Kurral could be given to a rider as an egg to allow for parental imprinting to occur from the Kurral onto it’s rider. Because of the close bond formed between a Kurral and it’s rider, it was customary to put a Kurral to death as a mercy to the creature when it’s rider died as a Kurral could form a harsh, morbid depressive mood upon the rider’s death and would eventually go lame. Some Kurrals have been known to become dangerously volatile, lashing out rather than shrinking into despair. And in even rarer cases, a Kurral might seak out some form of active suicide.

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The Muan Sand-Hog was a species of Carpincho-Like animals that typically lived near oases within the eastern deserts of Mua west of the eastern dividing mountains where meltwater rivers fed into the lush green forests at the range basins. These rodents were herded and cultivated for their meat and fine fur, a single Sand-Hog being able to feed a family of five for three days twice a day. Sand-Hogs could also go weeks without water due to their minimal physical activity and often migrated across hostile sands while subsisting off of the fatty deposit on the tops of their their pelvis. Outside of the farming cultures of the migrant Kelekossi, some wealthier families kept the fine-furred animals not as cattle but as pets, these rodents filling the same social niche as dogs or even pigs within a familial unit for some time. There are not at least seventeen widely recognized varieties of specially bred Sand-Hog in domestication ranging from large, shorthaired hogs to small longhaired hogs. Sang-Hod milk is also collected and turned into an expensive fermented drink enjoyed by kings and landlords for centuries.

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Kelekossi Colonial Homesteads

At some point three thousand years after the fall of the Doruk Age ended, Kelekossi had begun to partake in mass exodus from their homelands during a period of strife known as the “Kelekossi Civil War”. Members of the honorific warrior cultures of Lepkua and Kelekoss over a sudden invasion campaign by the Empire of Joparda (former member nations of the Doruk Empir). These migrants often sailed north along the coast of Mua’s supercontinent to the cool-wet temperate regions inhabited sparsely by Ullar tribes. Another more common route for migration was eastwards across the rough southern coast of the Muan Supercontinent to the savannahs, deserts, and Mediterranean climates where the Ghesh had dwelled for centuries before the first men were made. Here, Kelekossi quickly began to derive their own subculture in the desert, adopting less cerimonial tattooing traditions, partaking in a harvest economy, and coming into first contact with another posthuman species of man called the Novo Potens. The Novo Potens were a hybrid species of humans who derived some level of DNA from the Homo Novo species of posthumans who once lived in highly advanced dome cities within the deserts before rogue artificial intelligences and a failing genetic pool caused their culture to collapse.

Featured above is an image of a home in the style of early Kelekossi Colonialism. This home belonged to a family who farmed the rich silt beneath the red-orange sands of the region up until a period in time when an earthquake caused arsenic and other toxic ground elements to be released into the water table, tainint the lands in the region and killing hundreds of thousands. It was made of a rammed earth barriers caked in a thick later of concrete-like mortar sealant which made the walls strong enough to endure centuries of shifting sands and howling winds in the desert.

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Minimal knowledge exists on the Parthi aside from their general appearance and abilities. They possessed some low level telepathy and telekinetic abilities and were capable long-distance communicators in the right atmospheric or electromagnetic conditions. They possessed a keen empathic sense and were able to survive in a number of hostile environments with the aid of their highly adaptable exosuit technology. Despite rarely having partaken in war before their encounter with Anti-Ascensionist factions within their own ranks as well as human ranks, Parthi technology held a high potential for weaponization and destruction. Parthi were believed to be able to breath within a much thinner, possibly toxic atmosphere while being unable to inhabit their world’s surface without the aid of an exosuit. Highspeed winds, minimal atmospheric pressure, and drastic weather phenomena made the surface of the Parthi homeworld nearly uninhabitable by any living beings. Only some strange silica based life forms inhabited the surface of their homeworld and their strange biology made  the risk of cross-contamination between surface world diseases and the Parthi’s subterranean home environment incredibly dangerous- so dangerous in fact that the Parthi developed interstellar travel in order to escape their planet at a very early period in their industrial age. The Parthi preferred darker, cooler places with high levels of humidity and lower levels of sound with a steady background hum- might like the faint hum of wind and groundwater currents passing the walls of their cave homes or the hum of power surging through the walls of their spacecraft. Parthi subsisted on a diet of slime fungi and animal blood for nutrients, their mouth parts acting like the mandibles of a spider, feeding and rending their food while a nearly featureless orifice full of tongue-like muscular tendrils with spoon-like cups on their ends worked for ingest liquified sustenance. Parthi were covered in a thin, even coating of body hair which resembled felt or velvet. Parthy blood was also mildly bioluminescent and they were able to exhibit a form of visual communication by forcing their glowing blood into sections of thin skin, the resulting patterning serving as a complex visual body language when their telepathic abilities were dampened. Despite some early cultural clashing, Parthi-Human relationships steadily became normalized and a number of interspecies relationships existed even among the human-parthi creators of the Humans and Ghesh of Mua. The Research institute had noted that the Parthi lacked an apparent gender and often procreated through a for of obscure sexual reproduction where multiple parents could donate genes to a single host parent, allowing the species to come back from the bring of extinction using only two or three parents as the basis for a gene pool.

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“Koalatherium” was the working name for a species of massive mammals that roam the temperate northern rainforests and fringe savannahs of Mua, feeding off of a numerous species of leafy greens. While not particularly carnivorous, it’s common knowledge that one should avoid close contact with Koalatherium at all times due to their territorial nature and massive capacity for strength.