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The turbulent waters of Aether are a dangerous place. The higher mass of Aether's moons leads to higher tides, especially as the moons and the sun align. Therefore, it is not uncommon for battered plants and animals to wash up on its shores finding themselves in an alien environment devoid of any familiar life; however, that would not be the case.Â
After the events of a particularly traumatic storm, a squim finds itself washed ashore, exhausted from the current it is in no condition to try and roll itself back to the sea, something that squim find particularly difficult as in most cases they lack the powerful tails of earth fish to fling themselves off of the sand. This poor squim is powerless and unfortunately for them, death will be slow. The high gravity of Aether works against the squim in more ways than one. First, it contributes to the weight the squirm feels attempting to get itself to roll using its bendy cartilaginous fins. Squims have efficient respiratory systems with their gills supported by rings able to resist collapse out of water, combined with the oxygen-dense atmosphere being captured by Aether's high gravity making suffocation a slow process. Thanks to the squim's high field of vision it is able to survey the dusty environment that borders its home. The squim is able to make out changing blurs, something moving, multiple things moving. They were small and looked passive, but it was incapable of fighting off any threats anyway, and as it was too exhausted to resist, it felt them climbing onto its body and after two hours baking in the sun the squim loses consciousness.
Beaches across Aether have enjoyed a steady and quiet assimilation under life's colonization but something changes as beaches are no longer silent. Loogies of microbes cover rocks and patches of algae that have adapted skin to protect from desiccation during low tide have already begun spending more time above the waves. Microbes and plant life have already inhabited Aether's shores for more than 100 million years now. Sprawling plants dip their fronds below the water and the beginning of shrubs are working their way in land Aether's continents.
Until now the washed-up corpses of squim would decay overtime and eventually act to fertilize the beach communities, however with the addition of an scuttling air-breathing scavenging animal that would all change. Rasps, the little creatures that will accelerate the decomposition of the assemblies of washed-up sea life, are bilateral animals that have evolved to a more cephalized body plan from their radial ancestor bouyxanth mimics, because bouyxanths rely on floating on the surface of the water to capture prey they too were vulnerable to beaching overtime becoming more adapted to life on land. They converted five of their tentacles into paddles with two remaining as mobile eyestalks. Their innermost tentacles were previously used from rasping their prey once captured now acted as fangs to strip bite-sized chunks. This new arrangement of facial tentacles also adapted to separate their mouth and anus as having a blind gut presents more issues for animals living on the ground rather than in the ocean. The have overcome the challenge of breathing by reducing in size, taking in oxygen from their skin and co-opting their swim bladders to act as primitive spiracles. Rasps are able to locate beached prey by utilizing their eyestalks to scan the horizon for corpses, occasionally dunking them into the moist cavity in the side of their body to keep them pristine. Rasps aren't particularly social however, when large prey is stranded it can attract many rasps in the days it takes to consume. Having began life on the shore rasps present a new clade of life that will find its way onto land an exploit a variety of niches across a multitude of different environments.
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