Far-spire is froglike but not entirely, perhaps fifty pounds, soft-bodied with fragile pencil-thin limbs. A domed skull, no neck or shoulders; a wide face with an even wider mouth, lipless below two tiny nostrils. Lazy lids blink, keeping moist round-pupiled eyes the size of big oranges. Indigo skin, slippery with moisture, pulsing with rapid breaths, and faint haloes of red visible across its back.
Background
Far-spire's 'people' are part of a vast oceanic mind which operates through combinatoric chemistry. Since becoming aware of the Mess, and the spectacular variety of life there, they/it have sent missions to the dryworld to gather more knowledge, altering the genes of several of ther number to create explorers like Far-spire - the opposite of a deep-sea diver, out to visit the harsh environment beyond the water in an amphibious engineered body. All the "technology" Far-spire's people have developed is in the form of biological alterations or enhancements rather than artifacts. In outlook they're generally rather like that of the Neo-Boreals.
While in the Mess, Far-spire tends to stay in the Night Gardens in Topwarp.
Archetypes
(Interesting to observe this pattern emerge: characters who are not only scouts or ambassadors from another culture, but extensions into this dimensions of a single organism or super-being - see also System, Besax.)
- I think this may, in part, an acknowlegement of the character/player pattern on a deeper level than the usual "I must go, the player has to pee". A number of characters are definitely a part of something larger - Twin's dual nature, Beta's function as a network node... human-size-mind avatars of something larger/older/stranger. These characters are pulled from somewhere inside and are just parts rearranged into the appearance of a whole; we're multi-leveled enough by reflex to build this into some of our online selves.
- -Twin