Well, I really am on a roll here, here's a WIP of that old pic of a Mirrai mom reading her not-yet-hatched daughter a story to finish up the day :)

Mirrai is one of the larger islands in Huron, the island mostly covered in sweltering rainforest and freshwater swamplands.

The people of Mirrai are an all-female race of salamanders, one of the most unique of sentient species since they are the only sentient amphibians. Mirrai lay soft-shelled eggs that are actually colonian organisms, the semi-permeable membrane allowing algae and nutrients though to create a suitable environment for the developing child. This also means the egg grows, almost doubling in size between laying and hatching. Hatchlings are fully aquatic for several months since they lack the ability to regulate their body moisture; they can swim immediately and have long tails and huge bright eyes for finding their mothers in dark waters. A substantial minority of Mirrai retain bioluminescent patches along their sides; it is assumed this is a trait which would aid their children in finding them.

The great temples are idealised versions of their ancestral swamps, and priestesses look after eggs when their mothers are not present. The oldest is in the cave called the Heart of the World, the entrance to which collapsed in the earthquakes following the impact of Nemesis and saved the Mirrai from extinction as their ancestral spawning pools froze over. They recall the global winter after the comet impact in stories of a nameless evil from across the ocean that turned everything it touched into stone.

Mirrai possess expressive gills on the sides of their heads and retain these for their entire lives, meaning they are just as much at home underwater as on land. Their cities are complex networks of waterways for swimming and carrying water to flow through buildings, carefully structured around the "dry rooms" for services like electricity.

As the Mirrai have great difficulty leaving their island, their power comes mostly from their status as a trading hub and the sale of knowledge; as a species that lives in its own water supply, their knowledge of sanitation was particularly sought by ancient city planners and doubtless saved hundreds of thousands of lives on the Continent over the centuries.

Their tendency to pick up things from other species can be seen in the temple here: the small papers are actually traditional Chiran prayer slips, here used to wish good fortune on the eggs in this pool. The ones on the cord around the egg are blessings and the child's name.

As their civilisation grew, the cave systems where their multi-level cities thrived became crowded, and the first of their above-ground cities was built; surface-level Mirrai cities are built under gargantuan mushroom-shaped megastructures called Fountain Canopies which consist of a central pump tower and a broad rim which pours water into the city below where it flows freely down walls and through rooms. For most other species, Mirrai cities are oppressively humid, and foreigners are mostly housed in the docklands on the coast; historically, the Mirrai chartered other-species crews to ship goods to other countries. A narrow band which isn't too humid for species with fur or too dry for Mirrai is inhabited by mixed families.

The word "Mirrai" is another artifact of the ancient empire of Mir, translating as "our world." Chira initially took it to be the same "rai" as their own word "Shirai" ("soul gate") and therefore some old Chiran maps translate the island's name as "gateway to the world."