Cillimorphs
a creature-collecting universe
&
field guide
by
Blaine Arcade
What is a cillimorph anyway, huh smart guy??
cilli sampler [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/cilli-sampler.png?w=656]
A cillimorph is an organism created from a combination of organisms, objects, and concepts found on the defunct planet E-A-R-T-H, pronounced ‘urth’ for some reason and not ‘ear-th’, like you’re saying ‘ears’ with a lisp.
Anyway, you can’t just make a cillimorph with hopes, dreams, and sub-light speed engines, which was pretty much all those cave goobers had when they left that planet with a dumb name after absolutely trashing the place in a major rager called consumerism. What you need is a crystal of this stuff, cillium:
cillium [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/cillium.png?w=656]
You find it floating in space, like little awards nobody ever accepted. So sad. Except cillium is not a sad element. It’s a whimsical, mischievous, goofball element with no practical applications whatsoever except for the invention and modification of cillimorphs. When you touch a living thing with cillium, it gets sillier. Let’s break it down. If you’re silly you might be: pliant, resilient, giddy, blissful, oblivious, cute, nonsensical, suddenly present, suddenly absent, bad at math, and, crucially here, not dead.
Mankind found some new planets around a faraway star, all of them equidistant from it and pretty darn habitable. There are six, and each is dominated by one type of biome, convenient! In order to get there, people had to freeze themselves like ice pops, to be thawed thousands of years later when the spaceship voyage was over.
Freezing all the plants and animals too would’ve been too much hassle, so we used cillium to make them silly instead, and easier to preserve, because freezing or starving to death in the vacuum of space isn’t very whimsical. You can also fit in really tight spaces, like balled-up dirty sweaters, when you’re silly.
If you’re wondering why we didn’t make ourselves silly, DON’T. It turns out SO BAD, oh my god. We stress out too much and we’re too evil; it’s not a peanut butter and chocolate combination. More like hot sauce and body wash.
So we did all that and it worked out (skipping over a bit here). When the people got there and unwrapped themselves from the freezing they found all the silly life had slowly transformed into full-on cillimorphs.
Are they like… Gooey, or slimy, or what?
A cillimorph comes from an egg and lays eggs. Their lives have two stages: juvenile and adult. They’re born as juveniles and at some point, for some reason, become adults (look I’m not an expert okay and it’s also my first day and I’ve got one of my chronic headaches and my grandma just died last year).
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
They come in all the shapes and also all of the sizes, and somewhere inside a personality is installed. Some of them look like predators, but that’s just for competing and show. They’re all herbivores; eating each other isn’t silly. Or they’re photosynthetic, so they take pictures of the sun or something, I don’t know.
Cillimorphs are split into eight groups roughly based on the seriously unsilly groups they came from. Cillimorphs don’t have to be the same species to interbreed, they just have to be in the same group. Those groups are: grower, colonial, spineless, segmented, fishy, reptophibian, birdish, and mammalish.
Cillimorphs are very competitive, and enjoy spirited rasslin’ matches. They don’t fight; if it looks like they are they’re just rasslin’. Chill, dude. If you don’t chill, you won’t get any cillimorphs to be your friends and they won’t hang with you. Hanging with them is so fun that we decided not to recreate any Earth animals from stored genetic samples, just plants and stuff. Cillimorphs are way better. If you want a steak or something we’ve got labmeat. If you’re wondering why we don’t eat cillimorphs, DON’T. It turns out SO FREAKING BAD. NIGHTMARES man. Nightmares…
We spread them out on the planets where they would be most comfortable, and now they just live there, as bums. The planet biomes are icy, volcanic desert, wooded, cavernous mountains, water, and urban. Adapted varieties can also be found in outer space and cyberspace. Some are only found on one planet naturally, but lots can be found on two, and others mature into different forms if you take them to different planets. Some have sexes, and sexual dimorphism, and others just really don’t like labels, you know?
Some are gooey and/or slimy.
Can I Make them my Entire Personality?
They won’t really approach you unless they think you’re silly too, so if you want to watch them up close, or have some of yours rassle with wild ones, or just hang, you’ve got to put on your clownface, like these:
clownfaces [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/clownfaces-1.png]
You can design your own, as long as it looks at least a little like a silly clown, duh. If a cillimorph you’ve already befriended rassles and beats a wild one, the wild one will usually become your friend too. Someone who uses cillimorphs to compete in rasslin’ competitions is called a cillikeeper. When you put on your clownface, whichever cillimorphs you’ve bonded with and want to hang with right then will just sort of show up, out of the woodwork, and they’ll leave when you take it off, even if you’ve hopped planets since the last time you saw them!
Yeah, they get old and die just like we do, but they know that’s not very silly, so they leave and do it somewhere else when it’s time. Real animals and people are like fireworks, expiring loud, stunningly, and leaving behind messy debris. Cillimorphs are more like bubbles, here one moment and gone the next, so remember to cherish them.
Hey, who are these Dweebs!?
BrassTacksBuildingCompany [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/brasstacksbuildingcompany.png?w=656]
Oh man, these guys again? That’s the Brass Tacks Building Company. The cillikeeper life is really not about money, and that cheeses them off. Most people who are still obsessed with the stuff wind up working for this interplanetary mega-corporation.
It’s hard to exploit cillimorphs thanks to their extreme goofery, but Brass Tacks found a way. They make all their money with low bids on construction projects, then build everything out of super flimsy and hollow cells and crates. To stabilize them, they capture and trick cillimorphs into stuffing themselves inside, size and mass being more of a suggestion to them. That makes the buildings way more stable, with cillimorph flesh being great at shock absorption.
Of course, when they fail to fill their units or the morphs escape, things come tumbling down and the Tacks blame everyone else. They claim they don’t shove morphs in their goods at all, and leave them to dark claustrophobic misery for years at a time, but everybody knows their pants are on fire. They also have the nerve to claim cillimorphs just put themselves in there on their own, which only happens a tiny portion of the time with the dumbest ones.
Steer clear of these corn nuts, if you know what’s good for you and your morphs. You’ll know them by their colors, brown and brass, with the higher ranks adding red and extra dumb tiers to their tack-hats. Their clownfaces and noses are usually pretty drab, with it all just being a façade to lure in earnest cillimorphs who just want to play.
That’s the gist buddy. If you have any more questions, ask someone else, I’m on break. Bye!!