A Weird Egg is the progenitor structure from which a Bionoid hatches. Each is a relic of the ancient Astral Elves, who engineered the Bionoids as a created species during their most militarized age. The method by which Weird Eggs were originally produced has been lost, held by no one now living, so every surviving egg is a finite remnant of a craft that cannot be repeated. They are, in equal measure, the seed of a people and an irreplaceable historical artifact.
Nature
A Weird Egg lies dormant until it is bonded, and a dormant egg can persist for a very long time. At its center sits a crystalline structure that clarifies gradually as the Bionoid within matures; Bionoid colonies treat this clarification as the emergence of a soul. Until bonding begins, the egg does not develop on its own.
Bonding and Hatching
A Weird Egg cannot mature past its egg form without a sentient host, and the bond that begins that maturation is formed by touch alone. When a sentient being makes contact with the egg, the connection establishes immediately, with no ritual or ceremony required. The host then carries the developing Bionoid through a cycle measured in months, and the bond shapes both parties over that time (see Bionoid).
Eggs recovered outside a colony do occur, and a Bionoid hatched from one develops without the elder community that would ordinarily shape its early life. Such cases are rare enough that Bionoid scholarship treats them individually rather than as a category.
The Lost Cache
Persistent rumor holds that a dissident cabal, resisting the final order of exile at the close of the last war, secreted away a cache of Weird Eggs rather than let the species end. The cache, if it exists, represents both the continuation of the Bionoids and a historical artifact of immense value, since the knowledge to make new eggs no longer survives.
Accounts place the cache in the Sunken Temple of Tathra beneath Rolara’s oceans. The Solanari Dominion reached that site in 409 TC and held its warded inner chamber for a period, during which Dominion personnel were recovering water-damaged records held there. When the ward failed and the chamber flooded, the cache was lost. The records left the Temple in Dominion hands.