From The Setting Piece Poll for the January Giraffe Call new Donor-New Prompter perks. Please vote, if you haven’t, to tie-break for 2nd place, as there will be a second piece.

Hunters

As long as there have been humans with spears, there have been hunters; nay, as long as there have been creatures on this planet, there have been hunters.

For many centuries, the various sentient races on this planet hunted each other with no consideration for the feelings or culture of the others; although it is nice in this modern age to pretend that it was, for instance, only humans doing the hunting, or only ogres, the truth is that there are, in the closets of all thinking races, skeletal remains of other thinking species.

The “hunters” we concern ourselves with in this article, however, are another sort indeed. They cannot, as our ancestors could, hide behind the shelter of ignorance or cultural bias, as flimsy a protection as those offer. Nay, those hunters work in the modern day, and they know exactly what it is they are doing.

Who are they? They come primarily from the medium-sized races, although there have been the occasional report of pixie hunters and one rumor of a dragon hunter. They are human, dweomer, elkin, harpy… and their reasons fall along a wide spectrum, but can generally be divided into the categories: the religious, the profiteering, and the sportsman.

The Religious
There are still sects of religion in almost every race’s temples that say that some other race, or, perhaps, all other races are apostate, evil, demons, minions of chaos, bringers of temptation. And there are knights, champions, sword-bearers, assassins for each of those religions, people of one stripe or another whose violence is sanctioned by their temple, whose life goal is to eliminate threats to their religious purity.

Of the three kinds of hunter, these are the most dangerous. These hunters cannot be bargained with, can rarely be reasoned with, and are very difficult to stop. In addition, they normally have the resources of a large organization behind them: not only are they well-armed and well-financed, but they are usually also well-educated on their targets.

The oft-misquoted “Fear the day you come against an honest man,” could be better phrased, in the world of hunters and hunted, as “Fear the day you come against a foe of faith.” They will kill you without a second’s hesitation nor a moment’s remorse.

The quote I was misquoting: From Here:

“…So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.” ~Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/287242.html. You can comment here or there.

This is the comment perk from the December Giraffe Call, a setting piece on Dragons next Door.

A Survey of Reproduction Methods

When humanity lived apart from the other sentient races of earth, and spent most of its time encountering creatures only on its particular branch of the evolutionary tree, the study of reproduction was a much simpler, more limited thing.

As the magical races, the hidden peoples, and the Secret Ones came out from the shadows and began interacting more and more frequently with humanity, in some situations living next door to them, shopping in the same places, and going to the same schools, human scientists became, as humans are wont to do, curious. Working with the scholars of many of the older races (once they discovered that many of these races had scholars, which took some time), the human leads at Johns Talbot University have begun this Survey of Reproduction Methods.

Part One: Dragons

Possibly the most interesting of the non-human reproduction methods, the dragons, dracon sapiens, have developed a system depending entirely on a second species.

This symbiotic relationship took a great deal of time to explain to scientists of Johns Talbot, who at first believed that the dragons they were speaking with were talking in euphemism – “the stork does it,” is, after all, too close to the human myth we tell our children.

Dragons are, it appears, mono-sexual; all dragons have the same reproductive equipment, both having the ability to lay an egg and the ability to lay the smaller fertilizing seed. It appears that, according to some fossil record recently found, there may have been a time when these two could combine on their own.

The dragons do not speak of such a time, nor do they know how it came to be that their seed and egg would not join on their own. However, the process of fertilization is very well known to them, and that, they are willing to speak of.

A bonded pair of dragons will agree to have a child. One of them will lay an egg, placing it in a specially-prepared bed of gravel (in nesting places outside of their ancestral lands, they will have this particular type and color (coral-red) gravel trucked in for their egg beds). The egg is about the size and shape of an emu egg, although the shell is very thin. The other will place a much smaller seed-egg in the same bed.

Left to their own devices, neither will ripen or join. But with the assistance of a creature they call a stork, which is about one and a half times the size of the storks normally known to humankind and only nominally similar in appearance, the two become one and ripen. The stork places both egg and seed in its brood pouch (similar to a seahorse’s), along with its own eggs. An enzyme in the eggshell reacts with an enzyme in the pouch, and both the stork’s eggs and the dragon’s come to maturity.

Needless to say, the dragons protect the storks fiercely, sheltering them and treating them as sacred animals. Woe to the predator who attacks one!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/239954.html. You can comment here or there.