Enormous limbless creatures who perceive with the aid of feelers which crown an immobile, tapering ‘head’, the Olimax are a pleasure seeking people who for time immemorial have plumbed the resort worlds of the galactic far-north. Clearly descended from molluscs of some sort, they are slippery, a dull blue or pink and covered all over in roseate spots. Famous for the joy that they take in exploration, an indescribable feeling of boredom randomly washes over them after a few days or weeks spent in one place, along with a compulsion to begin excitedly planning out their next trip. As part of a self-styling effort to identify themselves with adventure, the only thing that compels an Olimax to visit the same region twice is if they forget that they’ve already been. A lot of the time neglecting to properly research a destination, they instead base their view of a place on a few isolated photographs or an artistic interpretation from an old brochure - occasionally even arriving to find that they were looking at information about a different planet. They try not to be dissuaded by this and have a good look around anyway, but quietly most are usually already planning to take off in search of that semi-imaginary vista. A popular jest amongst other species is that the Olimax spend longer thinking about the places they will go than actually visiting them, and with the sluggishness that they move through space this might be more than half true.
Although most of the tools that they use are new, their people were never overly innovative and it is thought that prior to contact with off-worlders it had never even occurred to them that other planets could exist. Supposedly this has figured somehow in their disposition toward travel, which by this point has totally eclipsed whatever cultural leanings they had in the past. Adopting the most sophisticated designs of the day, they got around in vessels that offered them the ability to voyage wherever they saw fit. Today their ships have been eclipsed in efficiency many times over by advances in modern technology, and they are now amongst the few who have yet to make the leap to flying modular spacecraft. Tried for cash and with a lengthy lifespan, they have the ability to sleep off long trips and don’t really see the need to splash out on better engines or sails. Driven by an innate wanderlust and possessed of a dreamy, sometimes semi-absent temperament, it has been many thousands of years since the Olimax could even remember where they first came from, journeying instead to whatever steam embroiled planet they can find to incubate their young.
Reproducing asexually, they live on the whole solitary lives and spend only their dying days with their offspring, who they try to impart with as much knowledge as possible before passing on. Tragically they cannot survive the process of giving birth, and live afterwards for only a few months at the longest, often for the first time in their life being compelled to slow down. By the time they have died, their clutch of children will already be fully mature and rearing to escape from whatever quiet planetoid they were born on and out into the wider cosmos, which they would have heard about only via traipsing recollection. Travelling together for a while, the siblings will eventually purchase ships of their own as soon as they are able, with the oldest of the bunch inheriting the one they were raised in. They lose contact with each other very soon after, and it is usually the eldest who has the best memories of their parent, who despite technically having children that are genetically identical, gives birth to them one at a time over the course of a few weeks. This is part of the reason why the strain of childbirth is so great on their kind, but it is also important to factor in that without a partner, they must impart a sizable portion of their essence to ensure that their offspring will be healthy.
An Olimax’s daydreams are just as vivid as the ones they get while sleeping, and they remember the totality of either kind - at least for a short while. These are often the inspiration for their next port of call, and whether through vague recollection of something they have seen or a sort of inherited memory, their visions of a place are often unerringly precise. Interestingly most of their people are confined to the same small region of space, apparently retracing the footsteps of their parent in a subconscious effort to get to know them a bit better. Perhaps literally bestowed with a part of their predecessor's spirit, they sometimes get glimpses of past experiences that they had in a place, but whether these are truly ancestral visions, or just a result of them forgetting they have already been there is hard to say.