Creature:Oshim

The Oshim are a small, intelligent race that follow the Shaman archetype, not because they make friends with everyone they meet, but because they don't make enemies. "Eccentric" is the polite way of describing them, but, frankly, they're just flat out weird.

History
The history of the Oshim is a long, convoluted, and twisted one. Almost no one in the entire universe knows the truth behind these strange creatures, and to even begin to understand them, one must start at the beginning.

In the Beginning...
The long tale of the Oshim begins, not with them, but with the species known as the Twitchers, who inhabited the planet, Hubethas. The Twitchers are so named because of their extraordinary ability that every one of their muscles is associated with a cosmic happening- and while there was the usual arm-folding laser bursts and blinking planet destruction, the Twitchers are most well known for, in the intergalactic community, their popular pop rock band Zanzibar and their first single, Farting Rainbows, which was at the top of interstellar charts for a record fifty-three sectons. As it turns out, Twitchers' gastronomical intestines, in addition to creating wonderful displays of flashing colors, also produced a sound like an extended organ, the volume and pitch in accordance to the size of the Twitcher in question and what that Twitcher has been eating. (It is rumored that the lead vocalist of Zanzibar, Jaxafrelnax G'Hurna, ate nothing but onion-banana-carrot stew for five days before recording in order to open with the perfect chord.) Of course, there's a simpler way of saying this, but that can only be read in the adult version.

And fascinating as Farting Rainbows may be, that comes into play much later. The Twitchers' role in the beginning of the Oshim's evolution was when, at a college dance party, someone discovered that by undulating their stomach, they could synthesize single-celled life inside of passing meteorites. Thrilled by the discovery, undulating your stomach while a shooting star passed became the standard thing to do around college campuses, until so many meteorites had landed and deposited their loads onto Hubethas's moon, Beniedor, that it had become T1 and the move was subsequently banned.

The Golden Age
Because Beniedor was new to the whole life thing, it hadn't bought an atmosphere, yet, so a majority of the moon's life was underwater. Here, the Oshim evolved, starting life as single-celled organisms, developing cilia and an electric shocker. As evolution continued, they grew larger and larger until their cilia had become fins and they were multicellular. The shocker remained as a kind of evolutionary souvenir, meaning that it was entirely useless- rubbing socks on the carpet probably made more electricity than the shocker did. Eventually, when Beniedor had started to develop life on land, the Oshim decided to stay put and proceeded to evolve into giant, whale-like creatures with antlers for friendly sparing matches and ate algae and seaweed by the ton, when there was no such thing as taxes and they really didn't care about death. This was, considered by many of the Oshim, the Golden Age of their history.

It was during this time that Farting Rainbows was released, and, upon hearing the epic opening chord that echoed around the system, they decided to mimic the sound, and to this day, the Oshim are well-known for their eerie, haunting songs.

Navigational Problems
The Oshim were still doing quite well in the oceans of Beniedor, now a thriving T3 planet, when Hubethas disintegrated due to two Twitchers who had built up their planet destroying power to nuclear intensity during a staring contest and had accidentally wiped out their entire species. This did not unduly trouble the Oshim, because they had no knowledge of Hubethas or whoever was on it. However, the sheer amount of weird that had been contained on the little planet had nowhere else to go but Beniedor, and that's when the strange things started happening.

Sometime later, an extremely powerful, almost omnipotent empire known as the Stra Cinortcele Empire had come to the conclusion that aquatic life was impossible, probably through some ridiculously bureaucratic process, due to the difficulty of navigating through a volume or three dimensional space. They had then set on a quest to eliminate all aquatic life from the universe, starting with those weird whale-things on Beniedor.

Using a species modifier, the Stra Cinortcele plucked a very reluctant Oshim from the sea, and tried finding a way to evolve legs on the thing. It was too big to fit inside the modifier, so they shrunk it down to a measly two meters. They shifted the fins to the back, and then grabbed the nearest legs they had, which were those of an Arturian Mega Frog-Beetle, before slapping them onto the Oshim, dropping them into the nearest swamp they could find, and then sped off to boil a neighboring planet's ocean. Halfway there, they realized that traveling in a volume was, in fact, possible, because they were doing it, and put a halt on their crusade.

Sentience
Now thoroughly depressed, the Oshim wandered their new swamp, trying to find their purpose in life now that there was no seaweed. Eventually, they found religion. Forming the first tribe of Beniedor, the Oshim got together, started using tools despite the fact that they had no arms, and in the general hullabaloo of knowledge, they managed to push the good times to the back of their heads.

When they had reached the space age, Beniedor had a grand total of five-hundred sixty seven religions and a "one man, one vote" system of government, with the one known as the Tyrant being the man, and having the only vote.

Every attempted colony the Oshim made failed in some shape or form. (The last one lost contact after a fleet of UFOs came down, abducted every CD, DVD, and sound recording device on the planet, played them all, and then destroyed the colony after sending the transmission, "And here we thought you guys had a copy of Farting Rainbows. Stupid whale songs...") Now, the Oshim have invested all their resources into Beniedor, until it has become a veritable fortress, surviving war, civil unrest, and several tax audits.