Ask A Delene

[Kappa]

Do Religion, Defense, Crafting, and Possibly Traders have names?

What's Defense's personality/approach, and what's their actual job - in other words, what's the practical relevance of the Elarron situation to them and what are they likely to do about him?

[Adelene]

Do Religion, Defense, Crafting, and Possibly Traders have names?

*consults google, throws darts at a list of nature vocabulary*

Brook, Thistle, Dove, and Oryx, respectively.

What's Defense's personality/approach, and what's their actual job - in other words, what's the practical relevance of the Elarron situation to them and what are they likely to do about him?

Thistle's job is to look after the direct and fairly immediate physical safety of the village and its forest. (He's not generally involved in criminal investigation or punishment, that comes under 'religion', though he might be asked to help with forensics on crimes that happen outside the village itself.) He goes with a kind of... I want to say distributed approach? There are several squads like Swiftness's, and each squad leader has a good amount of leeway in deciding what to do and how to do it; this does lead to a fair amount of working at cross purposes, but he doesn't consider that a bad thing, he sees it as a natural sort of way to balance different ideas against each other. (Dusk finds this incredibly annoying when it gets bad, but most of the time it works okay.)

Elarron is mostly not actually Thistle's problem in the current situation, though if the thing with the ring had gone a little worse or River hadn't stepped up, it would have fallen to Thistle to arrange for someone to guard him. Politically, Thistle is inclined to at least look into trade with Elarron's world if they can make that kind of contact, and relatively neutral on letting him stay if he does seem to be stuck in their world. (He'd eventually poll the squad leaders on it, but they need to get this tigerfolk thing dealt with and have a chance to actually meet him and stuff first.)

Who it is that Elarron is their problem is Brook. Elves don't have, like, separation of church and state, or even really a concept that those things could meaningfully be separate; not that Brook is personally in charge of the village or anything, but the questions of 'why are we here' and 'what does it mean to be an elf' and 'what is the right way to live as an elf' lead pretty directly to the questions of 'what help should people get in achieving those goals' and 'what should be done about someone who chooses to do incorrect things', so they consider it obvious that the religion should cover all of those things.

How this shakes out for Elarron in particular is - it's pretty obvious to them that he's a civilized sort of person, and leaving him to make his own way in the wilderness is Incorrect; if he was a human or dwarf they'd be arranging for him to go live with others of his species, but given that he's not, it's not at all obvious what they should be doing with him in the medium to long term. So one thing that's definitely going to happen is Brook talking to Elarron and getting a feel for what he wants and whether staying is a viable option if that's what he wants to do.

[Kappa]

So the next part of the Elarron thread is Elarron meeting with one or more of the council members, and I haven't worked out enough of what the actual deal is there to know how that should go. Ask me questions to help me work out the details?

Here's what I have so far:

• There's five people on the council, plus one person who Dusk thinks is highly relevant to how the council works in practice but that River thinks isn't relevant at all.
• The five people are in charge of five different aspects of the village:
  • Religion
  • Defense
  • Magic (Petal)
  • Crafting
  • Farming (Boll)
  I think the sixth one might be the head of the traders, but I'm not sure.
• Animal husbandry is technically a religious thing, but in practice Boll has taken charge of it.
  • Boll is not actually particularly religious, he's just interested in the practicalities of it, but that's the more useful skill set.
• They're not really super cooperative with each other; this is definitely a collection of individuals with their own agendas. They do all have the village's best interests at heart, though, they just have somewhat different ideas of what that means in practice.
• Boll is the one Dusk convinced to get the council to stop going after the kobolds; he doesn't think they're people, but she pitched it as 'we don't know enough about this species to know what effects wiping them out will have', and that's definitely a line of logic he cares about. He still didn't publicly support it, though, until the whole council was on board with the idea; it was all behind-the-scenes maneuvering up to that point.
• As was mentioned in the thread, Petal is particularly interested in trade.
• The religious leader is very laid back when it comes to the details of how things get done, and pretty friendly/jovial in interpersonal interactions, but doesn't actually back down from the prescribed stance on things where it actually matters according to the religion.

Quoting to get this on the new page.

Okay, so what's Dove's deal/do they have any interest in this situation, and why is Oryx only debatably on the council?

[Adelene]

Dove is somewhat against both trade (on the basis of being concerned about the resources they'd have to devote to producing trade goods) and Elarron staying (mostly for personal/aesthetic reasons but also because she'd be in charge of coming up with whatever things Elarron needs/wants, and that sounds like an annoying project). She might want to talk to him to see just how much of a concern those things actually are.

Oryx is not technically on the council at all, she's just got enough political pull that he fits into the natural category when Dusk thinks about it. I'm not actually sure she's even in the village right now, she might be off with a caravan, but she's their connection to the rest of the country, and not shy about using that leverage. If she is around, she's going to be pulling for Elarron to at least go visit the city, and to establish trade via them rather than through the village.

[Kappa]

What's the city? Who is it a city of?

[Adelene]

The city is Silver Leaf Citadel, as mentioned here - it's an elf city, decently sized, otherwise not very fleshed out at the moment.

[Adelene]

(8:22:19 PM) Adelene: *returns drippily to the internet with Lurker-and-Dusk related shower thoughts*

(8:23:19 PM) Kappa: oo?

(8:23:43 PM) Adelene: Was thinking about the basic timeline where they don't get interrupted by any interdimensional shenanigans, in particular. (Also where Lurker doesn't get any magic; that is actually an attractor, for her, to get something shiny like that, but in the default timeline she doesn't.)

(8:24:08 PM) Kappa: <3
(8:24:17 PM) Kappa: what happen thing?

(8:24:37 PM) Adelene: So, probably the most interesting bit, Lurker herself never meets Dusk in the default timeline.
(8:26:20 PM) Adelene: Lurker lives to about 80 - late 40s in human terms - and dies of some kind of disease that comes through, after surviving a nasty flood in her 60s that kills her brother; there's some noise after the flood about her taking over the tribe, but not much, and one of her niblings ends up doing it.
(8:28:37 PM) Adelene: She does at some point acquire a protege, who is in fact not a speaker in the usual sense; they (they're the usual koboldish sort of agender; anatomically male) have the usual kobold aphasia, but at some point Lurker picks up the idea of sign language and tries teaching that to some people, and they're one of the ones who manages to pick that up.

(8:28:59 PM) Kappa: ooh

(8:29:03 PM) Adelene: *nod*
(8:31:10 PM) Adelene: Also, Lurker continues not interacting with the elves basically at all, but towards the end there there's an uptick in the elves capturing tigerfolk, and she leads a couple raids to get them back, mostly successfully after the initial learning curve.

(8:31:50 PM) Kappa: <3

(8:34:29 PM) Adelene: Sign language is relatively uncommon among the tigerfolk, but not so much so that the protege can't continue Lurker's work, and between that and their help with the raids the tigerfolk start making a point of learning it if they're in the area often (or at least having someone in the tribe who knows it, even if most of them don't bother). It also slowly gains traction among the kobolds, and by the middle of the protege's protege's career there's actually a pretty decent relationship between the two species.

(8:34:46 PM) Kappa: nice!

(8:34:49 PM) Adelene: Yup ^^
(8:37:36 PM) Adelene: Meanwhile, Lurker's /protege/ does in fact meet Dusk - the elves are still capturing tigerfolk on a regular basis, and she makes the effort of talking to them to try to figure out what's going on, and they mostly don't want to tell her about their kobold allies, but eventually she puts it together and, probably after several failed attempts, manages to catch a raiding party in such a way as to get a chance to talk to them.

(8:39:05 PM) Kappa: <3

(8:41:30 PM) Adelene: Now, the thing with kobold aphasia - they can't speak, but they can /understand/ speech just fine if they have enough exposure to it to pick it up, and Lurker's protege has done that. And Dusk by this point knows enough Animalperson to get by as well as she ever does. So they work things out; Dusk leaves the elves and throws in with the tigerfolk-and-kobolds faction. Picks up the sign language, turns out to have much less trouble with that than with spoken. Not entirely sure what she does from there but I suspect she ends up setting herself up with a little outpost or something just on her own.

(8:41:58 PM) Kappa: <3

(8:43:34 PM) Adelene: And Dusk gets to hear all about the path that led to this eventuality, over time - Lurker's protege might not be a speaker in the usual sense, but they're close enough for some purposes, including the history-keeping one - and thinks Lurker was pretty cool. ^^

(8:45:57 PM) Kappa: ^^

[Bluelantern]

Aaaaw :D

[atheistcanuck]

awwwwwww. <3

[Adelene]

Hello everyone!

The no-fourth-wall thread has served its purpose of helping me explain Carp's magic system. That starts here and goes to the end of the thread. Are there any further questions before we wrap it up?