In the Middle Ages, alchemical processes secretly produced tiny creatures prized for their jewel-like excrement. Greed drove them nearly to extinction. In modern times, a self-taught biologist named Dr. Laurent Cole Muller resurrected them, named them livlies, and distributed them to the public as pets in the hope of funding ongoing research. His grandnephew, self-taught chemist Akira Muller, eventually took up the research project with the cooperation of the livlies' new owners and has been building on it ever since.