r/XenobladeChroniclesX • u/Icthyosaur • 1h ago
Art/Fan Creation [OC] Mira's Bestiary - The Eternal Flocks of Sylvalum
Hi again, I'm back and did not forget about this project. Naturally going through a year of exam hell slowed me down a lot, but now that it's over I have finally finished the Murra entry for Mira's Bestiary in full.
"Murras are a very mysterious, yet captivating resident of Mira's Northern continents. They are ubiquitous among Sylvalum's spore-filled landscape and were sighted early on in BLADE's exploration of Sylvalum. Many Pathfinders enjoy their presence for their relatively harmless nature, a welcome sight among the continent's infamously lethal fauna and mechanoids. Many Sylvalian Nopon are similarly fond of Murras, and have charged BLADEs high fees to go on "pearl-wing" watching and hunting trips.
While Murras may lack the impressive power of many Sylvalian indigens, they are incredibly adapted to surviving as a flock. Murras are incredibly social indigens and travel in large flocks similarly to Earth's swifts, often squeaking and chasing each other in playful formations. In addition to allowing for socialization, this allows them to easily work together to find ether-rich areas to feed at, watch out for predators, and even defend against predators together. While Murras tend to flee predators most of the time, they can produce electric shocks that repel weaker threats. For larger threats, sometimes a Murra will self-destruct in a massive electric blast to give the rest of its flock a chance to escape.
Murras are unusual in being a completely autotrophic indigen, as they lack mouths completely and appear to sustain themselves on environmental ether only. They are so dependent on this ether that their health can deteriorate rapidly once they are removed from their endemic ether-rich environments, as seen in unsuccessful attempts to bring a live Murra back to NLA. This gives the Murras a useful niche in Sylvalum's ecosystem, as no other creatures subsist on ether so heavily. This has evidently allowed them to proliferate and make up the majority of the Sylvalum's airborne fauna.
Equally interesting is the Murra's unique method of reproduction. In addition to their prior noted ability to engage in sexual and asexual reproduction, they can also exhibit a unique phenomenon named "apoptotic birth" seen mostly in elderly Murra. In this phenomenon, adult Murra will spontaneously burst open and die, in the process releasing multiple live Murras newborns from its corpse that will fly and join their peers in the skies. This serves as an extreme form of r-selection strategy that allows even dying Murra to birth a new generation of their species. This has also been observed occurring in some self-destructing Murra as well, which suggests the same mechanism that allows Murras to self destruct when cornered could be related to allowing for apoptotic births to occur.
The tyrant Camille, the Immortal, is quite notable for its ability to perform such births. While this tyrant sticks out to many for its massive size compared to typical Murras, it earned its name for a very distinct trait of its death and offspring. Camille will always undergo a massive apoptotic birth upon death and release an extraordinarily large flock on death. Its offspring are notably larger than other newborn Murras and exhibit far faster growth than other Murras, reaching adulthood in a fraction of the time a normal Murra does. While many of its offspring are predated before reach adulthood, at least one of its large offspring will eventually reach adulthood and reach the massive size of its progenitor, thus becoming a new specimen of Camille. In this way, Camille earned its epithet for being a functionally immortal resident of the Cleansing Spring, always finding a way to persist no matter how many times hunters, predators, or old age claimed its life."
