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kirru

Kirru

Description

Kirrus are arboreal creatures with fur colours between green and grey, partly with white accents. Their body size is about 1.5 m when standing up, with a slim, lightweight build making it easy to climb. The kirrus remind of morphic squirrels with their bushy tails and tufted ears. Their forepaws and hindpaws are five-fingered, with two opposable fingers (like thumbs) and three middle fingers. They have prominent whiskers on their muzzles and above the eyes, and live mostly vegetarian, though their teeth allow a pretty universal diet.

Their reproduction is similar to mammals, they raise two or three cubs who are considered adult at the age of ten years, and their typical lifespan is about sixty years, though with good medical care, some can get much older. Female kirrus have pouches, similar to Terran marsupials, and carry their cubs during the first weeks of their lives.

Kirrus live in tree houses in the forested areas of Wildplanet (Jalan), usually without ladders to the ground as they are good at climbing the trees without such (this is a protection from species less adapted to climbing). The tree houses are constructed of wood and ropes made of plant fibres. The usual sleeping place is a hammock somewhere between the branches. Their homes often form small village communities of about 20 to 30 members with an egalitarian organization (no clear leader, though the group often follows the decisions of the one with most experience).

Kirrus are well-known to be very open to other species, always eager to communicate with them and find more lifeforms, so there are a lot of bio-scientists among the kirrus.

The kirrus of Wildplanet usually wear loose clothing made of tree fibres, leaving paws and tail free; in summer it is common and accepted among them to go naked, especially for young cubs. The common outfit for both sexes consists of long trousers (loose, but tight around the ankles) or shorts with a short tailsleeve, a vest (or rarely, for the coldest times of the year, a jacket), but no footwear.

Kirrus have an old spacefaring tradition, though the community living on Wildplanet has given this up centuries ago. Kirru spacesuits have gloves with separate fingers for all four paws, special helmets to accommodate the ears and a generous tail tube. Kirru spaceship crews resemble their living communities in not having a fixed command structure, so their organization might be regarded by other space crews as chaotic.

The kirru story

In the year 1400, aliens arrived on the planet Earth. They were kirru scientists coming from their homeworld, Kirronia, in search of more life in the universe. They landed in the Himalaya and took some specimens of the native wildlife on their spaceship - snow leopards and bharals.

On the way back, the kirru scientists heard that a fundamentalist religious regime had taken over power on their homeworld, regarding space flight as blasphemy and abolishing all of it, destroying the spaceport and spaceships. The best space scientists, so they heard, managed to escape with their spaceship, to unknown destinations. The scientists knew that they couldn't go back to their homeworld.

A technical problem in the drive of their ship sent them to the far-off star system of Felios, where they found Jalan to be habitable. They landed in a desert strip with a flat rock now known as the “landing spot”, released the snow leopards and bharals, who reproduced well and spread into the mountains, and started to settle in the forests themselves. They could not communicate to other regions of space, or take off with their broken spaceship however ….

The next 800 years, forests and mountains of Jalan became sparsely populated with kirrus, bharals and snow leopards, in addition to the wildlife already there. The kirru used the cats to create the irbis species, similar to the way humans created the recoms. Then in the terran year 2201, explorers from Luna came and started a small settlement in the forested area at the east coast of Laurasia, the largest continent of the planet.

During the following years, the legendary spaceship of the kirru explorers, the Queckshiaulriaul, was rediscovered and made spaceworthy again. Kirru scientists are still working on the vast contents of the computer, rediscovering their culture.

The Kirru and their Homeworld are © unci of Furscape. Contact hym for further information about the species, as well as possible TinyPlots around them.

kirru.txt · Last modified: 2010/08/12 01:23 by abiri