The Grand OC! [CONTEST XXX: HALLOWEEEEEEEEEEN]

Username: Schaeterwater
Name: Right-Hand-Entire-Eight-Sapphires-Chevroned-And-Turquoise-Cabachon-Fourth-Knuckle
Race: Moralebranche
Gender/Text Color: Painted fingernails

Description: Before the Moralebranche, before First Fall, even, were the children of the god Law. The Marmoral. Standing eight meters tall with skin of marble stone inlaid replete with jewels, they lived quiet lives in city-fortresses carved from mountainsides. To their patron deity of Order and Organisation, He the Machinations, their faith was absolute and damning. Law bid his children record the events of the Praeterwater, and to the Catchers and the Vissel and the Merrfolk this role was accepted and these entities sought out for the more biological races to record their histories.

Come and go First Fall, and the Marmoral were wiped out by some insidious disease of the stone, splintering their bodies and lore-decked halls like pieces of a jigsaw too large for any mindful being left alive to lift. This much is known thanks to the last of the Marmoral, who recorded their race's extinction, faithful to the last.

Terrestrial ecological stability. New life. Moss on the walls, Liggins on the moss. A god amongst the Liggins, making a select few smarter, shifting them from the moss to the pieces of Marmoral that fell with gemstones still embedded. A new race on the Praeterwater.

Biography: Nobody trusts a Moralebranche at the best of times, but you especially shouldn't if one's styling itself as a wandering salesman. Cabochon doesn't seem to mind, but it's very hard to tell with these creatures. Ey, like other Moralebranche, resemble a rather feathery slug, about the size of a duck and with a similar shade of blue to the purely-decorative enamel ey got some painter to dealt to their marble mount's digits. Ey secrete a slime which burns and irritates eyes+mouths+more delicate patches of Seakin skin. Ey have psionic abilities that can only be used in conjunction with the gemstones embedded in the fragments of Marmoral that litter the catacomb-cities these creatures call home.

Cabochon is particularly pleased with their piece of stone-corpse; it's a mostly-intact Marmoral right hand. The eight sapphires in the palm provide a strong enough mental link that Cabochon can almost move the hand like the real thing (even if it does scuttle like a spider). Pieces with fewer gems often have to suffice with being rolled along the ground, or requiring the combined psionic push of multiple Moralebranches. The turquoise on the knuckle is where Cabochon stays suckered on most of the time, maximising eir control over the stone's movements.

The Moralebranche are unnerving to other races, especially the seakin: partly because they're trundling around on chunks of dead people, partly because they may or may not exhibit hive-mind properties or have otherwise-unseen ways of sharing information amongst themselves. It doesn't help that the individuals who do leave the tombhomes and interact with other races (like Cabochon) evade questions about their people, usually in a rather condescending manner. Their naming conventions also seem to place a greater emphasis on whatever hunk of rock you're riding, and they don't actually call each other by name, reserving that for the convenience of other races. The races who bother to seek audience with the gods, like the Tetraul, don't trust them either, seeing as the gods know for sure that Wootz made the Liggins but nobody's owning up to making a subset of them sapient. Popular money's on LamPrey, which is yet another reason to assume there's something duplicit about these folk.

Cabochon makes a living as a passable courier, an occasionally-useful information broker, and a surprisingly-efficient mercenary (the fist of an eight-metre stone giant can do considerable damage on its own, if simple crushing weight doesn't do the trick).