Alicornutopia

Thalassan merpeople favor r-strategy reproduction and Jade has a large number of siblings. Are any of them Stevens?

How literally should we be taking Jade’s fear of being served for dinner, anyway?

No Stevens for Jade are planned at this time. (Also, part of the reason why Jade has such a huge number of siblings is because her father is immortal and has lots of wives. I don't think I intended to imply that merpeople actually do reproduce like fish.)

That would explain why his dad seemed to pay so much attention to him in particular, then. I was wondering.

so I am probably overthinking this outrageously but I thought of it and now I have to ask, how does the torching "set point" interact with hair growth (also fingernail growth but that has a somewhat more obvious default set point), do people just end up with their hair semi-stuck the length it was when they died/got made torchable? Kind of blows if you say got chewing gum stuck in your hair just before you died and had to hack it short. Or died after a long battle with cancer and were bald at time of death.

The torching set point for hair and fingernail length is only very loosely correlated with state at time of death. It may change very slowly over time (at about the same rate that torching smooths out aging effects), and usually settles into a default that is mostly agreeable to the person.

How often does the typical Downsider or Upsider torch? I could see it being more often than the typical death rate (because torching isn’t that much of a negative consequence, and because Downside is dangerous), or less often (because they don’t really get sick).

I'm gonna guess that pre-Bell intervention the answer was "frequently" for Downsiders and "not very" for Upsiders.

Upside it happens very rarely, and I haven't fully developed the worldbuilding on how that all works. Downside, it largely depends on where you hang out and what your hobbies are; some people torch only once in a very long while, and some people multiple times a day.

And still others, like Shell, torch once every approximately 3 days, like clockwork.

Is there anybody who could have redirected Shell to her apartment if Strat hadn’t encountered/remembered her? If she had found her way to the library or decided to brave the vaguely similar rumors about the base of the Tower, would there be somebody who could look her and her rez code up?

If she forgot the number and all the information that could be used to look up the number in the library's records (e.g. her live name or the approximate time of her arrival), it would still technically be possible to retrieve it, but only by asking a judge or <em>maybe</em> a guide. It is Considered Unwise to approach judges for any reason if you're a Downsider, and guides are both less scarce and less scary but still not exactly plentiful.