Tag Archive | febcreate

February is World Building Month. Day Eleven: Addergoole

Feb17

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The eleventh question comes from [personal profile] anke and is for Addergoole.

How did the parents of the first generation of Addergoole students justify signing up their daughters for forced pregnancies?

So, I posted this to Twitter in musing about it, and Sky and Cluudle had some possible justifications, which I will post below.

The short version is: It really depends on the parent.

Some of them simply didn’t care, especially some of the men. They were being well-paid to deposit a sperm and walk away after the naming ritual; some of the women were offered better compensation to do something similar after nine months.

Some of them didn’t have a choice; they were collared and had been provided to the project by their Keeper – one example in particular is Ambrus.

Aelfgar, for his case, likes grandkids, and because as far as he’s concerned all his kids are gay (he’s wrong), this seemed like a way of ensuring some grandchildren.

Some of them weren’t thinking about daughters at all, they were thinking about sons.

In a more overarching sense: this was not sold as forced pregnancy. This was sold as any number of things, depending on the target: a program for the education and betterment of half-breeds, in a world which despised them; an experiment in a more targeted form of Mentoring; the foundation blocks for the salvation of the world when the Returned Gods came back. It was easy to sell it as these things, because it was all of them.

And, as is said by one set of parents in a story I need to finish, it’s easier to think in the abstract than when you’re looking at your eleven-year-old daughter. When the child is a concept, that’s one thing. When she’s sixteen and the Director’s letter arrives, that’s something else entirely.

And then there are all the reasons Sky and Cluudle came up with, which I’m willing to agree were probably valid for at least one person each:

“I got pregnant during my Keeping.”

“Didn’t really think about it.”

“I was starving.” [Lyn: This one was rather common. Regine offered a lot of money to the mothers]

“Being pregnant is a beautiful thing.”

“The work is important.”

“I trust these people.”

“Better she have children with our kind now than fall for a human later.”

“It’s not like she needs to raise them. It’s a small price to pay for what they’re offering (money/knowledge/etc.).”

“It’s a small price to pay for years of protection. Have you heard what the Nedetakaei are doing?”

“Our race is dying.” “The apocalypse is coming, I have to do something.” “I was drunk.” “I was mind controlled.” [the latter was very rare, but it did happen, more commonly to fathers than mothers].

“People had kids at this age in my day.” [This is actually part of Regine’s argument, too.

“She’s going to have kids eventually. Better with people that can handle her powers and the children’s.”

“I was on my third kid at that age /and/ I was married.”

“It’s for science.”

“A purebreed is talking to me aaaaaaaaaaaaah I’m so flustered.”

“Maybe this way she can find a Keeper or Kept around her own age. I hate how the older fae prey on the young.”

“It’s not rape if it’s your Keeper.”

And for after-the-fact justifications:

“I can barely handle this kid now. What am I going to do when she Changes? The school can manage better.”

“There’s no other way a half breed like her will find a husband.”

“It’s a half breed, why would I care what happens to it?”

“This is the best a half breed could hope for, a good education and a chance to breed pure.”

“This is the only person who has offered to get her a Mentor.”

“Anything is better than her not Changing at all and dying of old age.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/670384.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Thirteen: Tír na Cali

Feb14

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The sixth question comes from [personal profile] moonwolf and is for Tir na Cali.

Why Cats?

Cats are cool. 🙂

Cats aren’t the only moddies the Agency worked on (and the Agency aren’t the only ones who created moddies); almost every animal-type has been experimented with.

In terms of “skin jobs” (appearance-based modification with no underlying behavioral or physiological changes), in the proper underground markets in Tír na Cali, one can buy a moddie with almost any appearance. Cats sell very well, as do rabbits and other fuzzy things; snakes and lizards are more of a niche market. That’s simple aesthetics; when people are purchasing someone for their “cute” and “attractive” features, they tend to want someone that will look, well, cute.

In terms of full mods, the Agency has discovered that cats are the most versatile of the moddies. The more wild animals tended to lead to behavioral problems, and dogs either went feral in packs or followed their handler around. Cats maintained a level of independence while still being friendly with their handlers or owners.

The most successful moddies in terms of the burgeoning space program were the monkeys. However, while they performed all of their tasks very efficiently, they were too independent-minded, or, rather, they had a similar problem to the dogs but while in space and in control of a ship.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/668335.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding Day 12: Stranded

Feb14

PirateKitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twelfth question comes from clare_dragonfly and is for Stranded World

Was there a first person to discover the strands?

From an earlier question this month:

There are those who believe that, at one time, all humans had this power, but most of them are poo-pooed; studies show that almost every case of a known Strand-Weavers can be traced genealogically to a handful of magically inclined people in approx. 450 AD.

The literature here disagrees, and there is quite a bit of literature.

Not out on the public shelves of the library or your local Barnes & Noble, of course, but if you know where you’re looking, there’s information to be found – texts and treatises and long boring papers and short graphic novels. The Strands tend to attract those of a curious and artistic bent, and that leads to a great deal being written about them.

If you look back at the earliest known material – in the era of the end of the Roman Empire – you are more searching for clues than reading information; many of the books of that era are believed to have been burned in purges through the centuries.

There is a tapestry in a museum in London which shows a woman plucking multi-colored strings out of the clouds; rain falls onto parched crops where she plucks. It’s been dated to approximately the seventh century AD.

Deep in catacombs under Austria, there have been clay tablets found describing the way that threads could be used to bind people together, or to unbind them if the binding was unwanted. They are assumed to be from about 800 AD.

And so on. Common theories suggest that one person found the Strands and taught their friends about them, or that several people in different places around the globe found out about them at about the same time.

When the proper sort of anthropologist has been sent in to newly-discovered isolated communities, in almost all cases the people there have demonstrated neither the ability to manipulate or see the Strands of the knowledge thereof.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/667572.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Ten: Aunt Family

Feb13

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February (or most days), I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The tenth question comes from Kelkyag and is for The Aunt Family

Ruan seems to be in a different genre from the rest of the family, with scientific chemical/alchemical experimentation and enchanted mechanisms (as well as trapped spirits and whatnot else). What changed? (Or have we just not seen more recent Aunts at that sort of work?)

Good question!

Ruan was certainly more scientific-minded than many of her relatives, even in the era in which she lived.

Aunts tend to fall into two camps (truly, it’s more nuanced than that, but this is the short version): Those that accept the power, often those just considered a placeholder until a stronger Aunt can come along, and those that stretch the power to its limit.

However, the Aunts do not live in a vacuum, and what they do – and how they do it – is heavily influenced by the rest of their family, especially their mother, their grandmother, their predecessor, and their successors. So an Aunt who lives in a repressive family is either going to end up quiet and unassuming, not pushing the magic far at all, or, like Zenobia, end up pushing everything as far as she can in hopes of finding new limits and then breaking those.

It is likely that, given a little more time, Evangaline is likely to start exploring the limits of the family power, reading into old notes, and learning what others before her have done before.

(As a side note: Ruan had huge impetus, in what her non-Aunt-aunt had left her; she had to figure out what to do with all those ghosts. So far, nothing quite that big has spurred Eva).

Short answer: the scientific urge runs in the family, but in some cases it is far stronger than others.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/666998.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Nine: Unicorn/Factory

Feb13

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February (or most days), I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The ninth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Unicorn/Factory

What do the factories produce? (Other than pollution …)

The factories in the Unicorn/Factory setting are very early Industrial Era for this world. Whatever ulterior motives the Governors (dun-dun-dun!) or the Administrators have, the Factories were developed and built to provide basic consumable goods in a mass-produced fashion.

Among the things produced in the four Towns and the central capitol are: fabric, clothing, farm tools, machine tools, and weapons.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

Many of these tools are labor-savers, taking time and effort off the shoulders of farmers and laborers who can then do other things.

And if they could come to a more comfortable accord with the Unicorns, the ‘Corns could actually work very effectively as air- and waste-scrubbers. However, that would require not having chained them in the first place….

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/666730.html. You can comment here or there.

February: World-Building Month

Feb10

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The eighth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Dragons Next Door

How do dweomers originate?

There are probably as many theories of the origin of dweomers as there are dweomers – and possibly more than that, as many of the other races have opinions on these not-quite-human-more-than-humans.

What is known is: They rarely but occasionally appear to spontaneously generate; cases where two normal humans give birth to a dweomer are almost entirely the result of one or both humans lying or being misinformed about their own genetics.

There have been dweomers around as long as, say, Dragons and Centaurs and the like have been known – which is to say, at least as long as history has been written, and the dragons have very long histories. Dweomers are crossfertile with humans, they look like humans, they can generally pass as humans as long as blood or genetic tests are not involved, but they are not, in actuality, human.

(If you look at the science of this too hard, I will remind you that this world involves tiny-humanoids in two categories, as well as centaurs and dragons. <3)

One of the favorite theories is that humans themselves are the anomaly: the world grew up with dragons and ogres, centaurs and elkin and such, but at some point humans fell into this world from an alternate reality. They found dragons eggs to be immensely irresistible, and found clever ways to hunt them; they found centaurs to be very tempting mounts, and quickly managed to enslave some.

(This, of course, being a tale told around fires, especially non-human fires, does not say how the humans did such).

The short answer is: the question isn’t so much how did dweomers originate, as how did humans originate.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/663767.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Seven: Stranded

Feb7

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The seventh question comes from Kelkyag and is for Stranded World

Is perceiving and manipulating strands innate or learned? How do people acquire and develop these abilities?

References: Magic in Stranded World
Strand-workers and Strand-Working Organizations

Yes. 🙂

The ability to see or manipulate the Strands is an inheritable innate ability.

There are those who believe that, at one time, all humans had this power, but most of them are poo-pooed; studies show that almost every case of a known Strand-Weavers can be traced genealogically to a handful of magically inclined people in approx. 450 AD.

The innate power comes in a number of different types: not everyone who can work with the Strands can do the same things, and, indeed, the categories barely overlap at all. Thus, Spring’s ability to be a Tangler versus her brother Winter’s ability to smooth and calm the Strands, and so on.

Of course, part of the reason that the known strand-weavers can be traced back to the same people has to do less with insularity of genetics and more with insularity of training, knowledge, and literature.

The innate abilities – any of them – can be problematic without training, and can in some cases lead to abuses of the power, either accidental or purposeful. The organizations that exist to train and educate new strand-weavers can be very harsh with those caught in abuses. (Some say this is because they want to keep all the power controlled, others because they don’t want word to get around that rogue magicians, such as they are, are capable of hurting people and throwing around dangerous “spells.”)

Thus, most people who are “known” to be Strand-Weavers are educated by the same group of people, and thus know the same group of people (and thus, often, marry or at least have children with the same group of people).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/659869.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Six: Tír na Cali

Feb6

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The sixth question comes from [personal profile] clare_dragonfly and is for Tir na Cali.

Does the West Coast being cut off from the US change anything for the way the modern US works?

This is one of those realms in which I am more than open to suggestions, because my worldbuilding in Tír na Cali is admittedly flimsy.

That being said: Yes. The United States in the world of Tír na Cali is more insular, more reactionary, more socially conservative, and did I mention more insular than it is in the world in which we live. Embarrassed by not one but two rebellions, one of which it did not manage to put down, it never became quite the same meddling power-house on the world stage.

That is not to say that Cali-verse US does not have military might – it does – or social/diplomatic clout – it also does – just that it is not as loud, as powerful, as sure.

American tourists walk with care in the world – Americans walk with care anywhere, because the boogeyman of the Californian slaver is behind every bush, even in foreign lands. A Californian might not grab a French citizen, but they won’t hesitate to grab a verifiably American tourist in France.

And the American nuclear program? Never reached full fruition. When you attempt to bomb a neighboring country and the bombs just bounce back onto your land… you look for other ways to be strong, other ways to attack.

This is a rough summary; as I said, I am open to other ideas, too.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/659511.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Five: Vas’ World

Feb5

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The fifth question comes from [personal profile] clare_dragonfly and is for Vas’ World

Are there other colonized planets in this universe?

Yes. 🙂

The feeling I have for Vas’ World is that the team comes from a densely settled grouping of worlds which is engaged in the slow and steady exploration and colonization of worlds further and further away, including engaging in diplomatic relations with other sentient species.

They have been working on colonizing worlds long enough that the original drop team that accidentally landed here has had time to adapt, evolve, and create a new society; at least a century, no matter what Lord of the Flies tells us.

(This might actually go along with my “colony” subcategory of Misc: Space stories).

Vas’ team’s job is to scout out the world for possible colonization; they are the preliminary team. Had everything been normal, a smoothing-and-starting team would have come in, and then, after that, the colonists. The organization they work for has this down to an artform, with procedures and rules for every experienced situation – this is part of the problem; they have never before experienced a lost colony (somehow).

In terms of extant sci-fi universes, this feels like Heinlein, Asimov, Star Trek – humanity started spreading out and just kept spreading out. Losses of a single colony ship here and there were, like losses of a wagon on the Oregon trail, sad but to be expected.

My feel is that Vas’ world is far enough off the beaten path that it was not slated to be explored until many closer planets had been colonized. How the original team ended up there is still a mystery (unless that story floating around about a planet that popped out of nowhere is in this world…)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/657588.html. You can comment here or there.