So the thing about Precursors is, they were adaptable and all, but being that volatile sucked sometimes! Genetic diseases became a big problem for them back then, since all sorts of traits were passed around so easily. But also also the beneficial traits that developed could be kind of...short-sighted in practice?

Yeah, like what if your parents survived a freakishly freezing cold winter, and then that meant you got born with super thick fluffy fur to protect from the cold? It might be useful at first, but what if the weather goes back to normal right after that? Especially if it never gets that cold again. It doesn't matter if the conditions for your mutation turn out to be temporary, Precursors weren't shapeshifters! So you'd be stuck like that for life, and you just had to deal with that whether you liked it or not!

The simple fact is, the precursor populations which specialized the most for a specific, stable environment became the most successful in the longrun. And in order to become specialized, it's inevitable that they got gradually less and less...mutatey in the process.

And so... as the theory goes, all of the Precursor populations across the solar system eventually evolved into a new type of more specialized life-forms, called Middlings!

The ones showing on the screen are Dendraloids, Cillioids, and of course Lepatoids! Of all the known types of Middlings, only us Lepatoids have ever been seen alive in modern times. (with the help of science!)

Now, the exact line between Precursors and Middlings is rather thin...which is where the little argument earlier came from. Middlings still mutate a lot just like the Precursors they came from, but middling species have strongly identifiable traits which won't really change even between a lot of generations!

There's all kinds of lepatoids out there! Fangs, claws, extra eyes, stingers, leaves...we can have it all! But we're almost always little 3-feet-tall creatures with colorful stripes and paws-hands, and little cone-shaped ear-antenna things, and fluttery wings...

Hey now, we usually have wings, but some of us are in the 5% of Lepatoids that don't get that luxury!

Oops, my bad!

To be fair, I wish I could breathe underwater and have a bunch of long arms...

In any case, you might be able to figure out what's supposed to have happened to the precursors in the end. First they gradually turned into the still-adaptable but much more specialized Middlings, and then those various Middling populations kept specializing further and further until they eventually became all the different sentient peoples across the Zoincailla System!

It's such a compelling story to me! The Ancient Fairies never went away, they just evolved and became part of everyone! And us Lepatoids are a living snapshot of all peoples' shared heritage! Deep down, everyone's a cute fairy inside on some level! ❤

The weird part is, all the different Precursors and Middlings and stuff have a bunch of similarities and interconnections with each other even though they were...supposed to be living on totally different planets, right? It's as if they somehow had stone age space travel back then or something.

I'm not sure if that's part of the supported theory, but you never know!