The Fabricants

On the Fabricant homeworld, there are no advanced life forms, in the traditional
sense. Instead, the planet is saturated with a microscopic organism that
individually, is no more intelligent than the most basic microbe. However, in large
numbers - billions or even trillions - they possess a form of gestalt intelligence
and are naturally drawn to each other, combining to form more complex creatures,
the most prevalent of which are the fabricants.

A fabricant is (usually) a bipedal humanoid, possessing a form of luminescence that

makes their "skin" shimmer and ripple like liquid behind glass. Each individual is
a consciousness like most other organic sentients, at least when they first
combine.

Few fabricants maintain their original molecular structure forever, although the
individual fabricant cells (which need a name - shards, maybe?) are effectively
immortal and near indestructible. As a fabricant moves through life, general wear
and tear or worse, traumatic injury does not kill them per se, but it does cause
"dispersal" - the gradual (or abrupt) dissolution of the fabricant's body and by
proxy, its experiences or personality.

If a fabricant is injured, the damaged body part will disperse into the environment
and if allowed, reform, but the shards will not necessarily gravitate toward the
overall being they were previously a part of. They may attach on to another being,
taking with them a part of their experiences and memories, or drift aimlessly until
rediscovered or destroyed. In fabricant society, one may unwittingly or unwillingly
absorb memories or abstract thoughts just through the air circulating in the
environment, and on their homeworld, memories and imagery drift through the
atmosphere like micro-pockets of smells or weather.

For this reason, very "young" fabricants - if we are measuring age by the passage
of time rather than anything else - are often childlike in their intelligence and
malleability, while older ones develop a greater sense of self. This can lead to
the particularly ancient members of society - those that have remained more or less
whole for a long time - being resistant to the idea of dispersal or in their minds,
the dissolution of their very beings. Disagreements between elder fabricants on
this matter have been the cause of a number of wars in the species' history.

The College of Statics - a repository of knowledge famed galaxy-wide, a library

with no books. Instead, the college is home to the oldest fabricant sentiences,
ones who have stubbornly resisted dispersal and have instead made use of their
apparent immortality to cling on to their existences for untold millenia. The
statics themselves no longer move, appearing as a gallery of statues, but they
listen and in rare cases, speak.

The United - a philosophical movement on the fabricant homeworld made up of

relatively young fabricants, who believe that the constant circulation of their
shards is necessary for their species to thrive and grow. They have a point, as
there are no new fabricant shards - there have been no successful efforts to create
new ones through science or magic, so there is an untold but finite number of them
in the galaxy. Every time a fabricant is dispersed in some remote place or worse,
an elderly Static jealously clings to his thoughts and memories, the species is
weakened as a whole.

The Synths

The Woden

The bird people

The humans