Blips
Blips are the small creatures that live on the Plot — a member's own stretch of the village — and, later, in the Wilds and the Commons. A blip is not a character and not a chatbot: it has a genome (two copies of every gene, one from each parent, the dominant one expressed), a chemistry (a hundred and twenty-eight humours in its blood, organs that make and break them, seventeen drives — hunger of three kinds, thirst, sleepiness, boredom, loneliness, fear, pain, and the rest), and a brain that learns what to do about them. The words it says are the ones it was taught.
The Plot
The first visit plants two seeds in the straw, with a tin of biscuits, a bowl of water, a bowl of beans, a straw bed and a red ball. A seed hatches when there is room. The member is the hand: pat, scold, drop a biscuit, carry, teach a word, ask what? (it answers in its own babble, or in the words it knows) and why? (the drive behind it). The Keeper — a character of the member's own, one of the races of man — comes later and takes the chores; for now the orders are three checkboxes.
The Plot lives at two ticks a second while someone watches and at a tenth of that while nobody does; it catches up when you come back. A blip's life is about nine Plot-days, which is two to four weeks of ordinary visits. Six blips and four seeds at most on a Plot. It can die: of hunger, of injury, of old age, or of eating the wrong thing. It is remembered.
The kinds
The first kind is the Pibbit: round, soft, big-eyed, with feelers that follow its mood. Other kinds come with their sheets. Kinds do not interbreed. Two blips of the same kind that have come to like each other make a seed, and the seed's genome is a shuffle of both parents' with a little mutation — a child can carry a colour neither parent shows, and a line can lose a gene or gain one.
The lineage
The deep story, as far as the record goes: a proto-bipedal several million years back split into the Pibbit's line and the proto-men, from whom the races of man descend — the Orcs on one branch, and on the other the elves, western (the Golden High Elf and the Dark Elf, parted fifty thousand years ago) and eastern (the dwarves, the wood elves and the gnomes). The Pibbit is a cousin of the races of man, not their ancestor: alike in the face and the stance, never an exact match. Which is why a Keeper understands its blips without being one of them. The rest is Theory.