Ipplagai

In relation to The Farstep Saga

The Ipplagai are enormous space dwelling sentient creatures born from planetoid sized eggs often mistaken as planetary satellites or rogue planets or asteroids. They hatch by breaking apart the thick shells of their egg and consuming the fragments their hatching leaves behind.
Ipplagai are sometimes referred to as “space whales” or “space blanket fish” though neither term does the creatures justice. As they grow they can reach sizes that rival solar systems, their mass gained through the slow process of consuming space dust, gas and debris.
Though their diets would seem insufficient to sustain let alone establish their girth the Ipplagai sport unique digestive tracks that cycle nutrients. The only evidence of excretion is the atmosphere that collects atop their backs and the puddles of fluid that collect in the ridges and furrows of their thick hides.
Ipplagai are large enough to create their own gravitational pull, allowing for their excretions to remain near their own bodies which is how the existence of their many symbiotes is believed to have come into existence. The chemical rich fluids combined with solar radiation through their gas clouds appears to have provided the necessary conditions for life.
While young Ipplagai may lack many of these traits once an Ipplagai grows large enough to maintain its structural integrity within a solar system they will often go through a growth spurt through the acts of consuming large amounts of matter, either the rings of a planet, the solar radiation of a star or cutting paths through oort clouds.
The swaths of empty space Ipplagai create in the wake of their consumption have been advantageous to other species when charting paths through space, reducing the need for advanced shielding at high speeds.
The lifeforms that evolve on the skin of Ipplagai vary from bacteria to flora and fauna of a generous variety depending upon what the Ipplagai eats and what type of radiation is spends time near. By the time lifeforms are self-sustaining the Ipplagai’s natural body temperature and the atmosphere formed by their off gasses allow the lifeforms to survive even when the Ipplagai enters deep space.
The most notable lifeforms of the Ipplagai and perhaps their most symbiotic creations are the Eos. Found on nearly every mature Ipplagai Eos are a species of sentient life that have developed language, culture, familial ties and in some cases religious ideologies. Eos are surprisingly homogenous across Ipplagai with reproduction confirmed as possible across various subsets of Eos regardless of their origin point.
The Eos serve a unique role in the ecosystems housed upon the Ipplagai’s massive backs in that they not only caretake species that may suffer upon changes in radiation levels but they also serve a more general purpose in that their exhalation contains compounds that has been found to have healing properties for the Ipplagai species.
Though Ipplagai lack a natural predator injuries do occur and it has been recorded that an Ipplagai lacking an Eos population will be nearly eight hundred percent more likely to succumb to infection, illness or further injury.
Upon the addition of the Eos into the Coalition they further served the Ipplagai as advocates for the species which lacks any known means of communication with other lifeforms other than the Eos.
While Eos have attempted to find means of translation, recording or otherwise making communication with Ipplagai possible no efforts have resulted in success at this time.