Alicornutopia

Kappa wrote:If you are turned by a not-Thule sky-kin, you get that not-Thule sky-kin's exact combination of innate magical characteristics - including elemental things, which ordinarily don't transfer.

I need to think of specific examples of sets of visible and magical characteristics one might have as a resident of not-Thule, but first I should go to bed.

If a (regular) hybrid sky-kin tries to turn someone, will they turn into a hybrid? I'd guess so, if the really-hybrid not-Thule people do that, but you said "ordinarily don't transfer" (I assume meaning the elemental thing)?

...Can you rephrase the question? I'm confused about what your understanding is and what you're trying to ask.

Kappa wrote:...Can you rephrase the question? I'm confused about what your understanding is and what you're trying to ask.

I had only really thought about pure sky-kin trying to turn people. Like, for example, a Starspeaker turning a regular human, and then that human becoming a turned Starspeaker.

Since you mentioned how not-Thule people were descendants of a variety of sky-kin, and that they can turn people and "you get that not-Thule sky-kin's exact combination of innate magical characteristics - including elemental things, which ordinarily don't transfer", I wondered about hybrids (e.g. someone who's half-Starspeaker and half-Moonsinger, which I think is possible?) trying to turn people. If someone who was half-Starspeaker and half-Moonsinger, and they tried to turn a regular human, would said human become a turned half-Starspeaker/half-Moonsinger, or would they just somehow pick one of the parts (e.g. they just become a turned Starspeaker), and (I'm not sure if you'll have an answer for this, but) if they're, for example, an Adult, and a half-Starspeaker/half-Moonsinger tries to turn them, will that result in the unknown effect of what happens if you turn someone past the age limit, or will it result in the half-Starspeaker part not having any effect and the person just becoming Moonsinger, or will they be a weak Moonsinger since they got a sort of half-dose, ...?

That's more of a question than I originally had, but yeah. Basically, can hybrid sky-kin (e.g. Moonsinger/Starspeaker) turn humans, and if so, do the humans turn into Moonsingers, Starspeakers, or a cross between them, and are there any obvious scenarios that would affect this?

(Or am I completely wrong and you actually can't get crosses between sky-kin?)

I went into that a bit in the post, or tried to.

Kappa wrote:I think normal sky-kin hybrids mostly tend to wash out to a single recognizable flavour of sky-kin after a couple of generations, with first- and second-generation hybrids able to turn people to their specific combinations but mostly not choosing to do so. But with the unique situation in not-Thule, much like with the elementals, the things that usually wash out didn't.

In other words, a half-Moonsinger half-Starspeaker can turn people, and they'll become turned half-Moonsinger half-Starspeakers, with whatever particular quirks that particular hybrid happened to have. One night-kin (informal term for a Moonsinger/Starspeaker mix) might have starry silver eyes and stop aging at Young Adult and drink blood and turn into a wolf, and another might have silvery black eyes and stop aging at Adult and eat normal food and not turn into a wolf, and when each of them turns somebody, those specific characteristics are what the turned person ends up with. The usual troubles of being turned when you're past the relevant final phase apply where appropriate.

Oh, sorry! So, do they "wash out" into regular humans after a couple of generations (or back into a typical elemental if they've all got that in their ancestry, I suppose)?

Do you have any idea of how these different species came to be about, or even some sort of mysterious-sounding "the fey did it"? I mean, they probably have their own creation myths, but you probably haven't thought that much in-depth about it...

None of these sorts of people was deliberately engineered. But now that I think about it, I suspect they all came from humans originally, and there does seem to have been a definite progression. Following this logic, civilization may be about due for a group of humans somewhere to spontaneously turn into members of a new five-subtype theme group with a more complicated/powerful/specialized variety of innate magic than the last three. This also satisfies my distant urge to have there be something useful about being human: if you don't have any active magical characteristics from an existing theme group, you are a candidate for the spontaneous formation of the next one.

...Great, now Piotr is reversing his stance on his ancestry because he wants his grandchildren to be among the founding members of the new theme group. Piotr, I invented an entire country for you and it's a really cool country. Make up your mind. And if you really want Miles and company to be human so they can turn into the new kind of nonhuman, then you have to convince Cordelia not to be a Tenebrant, figure out how I can give the triplets two more siblings, and come up with a five-subtype theme group for me to inflict on them.

Now that Piotr is too busy grumbling to keep bugging me, I will try to explain what I mean by "wash out".

Let's say you're a Moonsinger and you move to a town full of Starspeakers and marry one, and your descendants stick around and keep marrying into the local population. Your kids are night-kin. Your grandkids are also night-kin, but probably more Starspeaker-like. Your great-grandkids might start to be indistinguishable from ordinary Starspeakers; their hybrid status has "washed out".

Okay, now let's say you're a human and you move to a town full of Tenebrants. Since humans don't have magical characteristics of their own, as long as your descendants keep marrying Tenebrants, they will all effectively be Tenebrants who happen to have more humanlike cosmetic features than usual.

But if you're a Tenebrant who moves to a town full of humans, your kids will be as magical as you are, your grandkids will be somewhat less, and in a few more generations all your magic will have "washed out" and your descendants will be humans with occasionally quirky pigmentation.

If a Moonsinger marries into a family of elementals and their children do the same, then yes, after a while their descendants will be mostly indistinguishable from other local elementals.

It all depends on what the rest of your ancestry is like. Under ordinary circumstances in the wider population, there just aren't enough hybrids around to maintain a bloodline of half this and half that for a large number of successive generations, unless somebody is doing a super weird eugenics project. Most people are unambiguously members of a single species, with maybe a few lingering traces of something else. It took some weird circumstances to get not-Thule into a position where everyone was a hybrid and there was nowhere for it all to wash out to.

*showers kappa with buckets and buckets of validation*

DIfferent chunks keep the same day/night cycle and seasons?

Also, Just wondering, is it offensive trying to start a glowfic based on a world that the author didn't finish yet? No reason, I am just asking for a friend.

So does that mean when a new group of whatever is forming that a whole bunch of humans (significantly more than five) become the thing, or do they have a stronger breeding-true tendency than normal or what?

Ah, that sounds interesting! I'm happy I sort-of-maybe prompted that train of thought then. :P

I was thinking you might have meant that their powers are related to how distantly they are descended from the nearest pure of a specific species, as opposed to what sort of fraction of their "blood" is from that species. So if there were one night-kin and it had children with another night-kin, I thought you might have meant the child would be more human-like than either of the parents, because they're not so closely related to the "purebloods" of the species (i.e. the two original Moonsinger/Starspeaker pairs). I think it makes more typical sense for it to be the percentage of their ancestors or whatever, though (e.g. a Moonsinger X and a Starspeaker Y have a child Z, then Moonsinger A and Starspeaker B have child C, then night-kin C and Z have a child D that's also a half-half night-kin, since they have 50% Moonsinger heritage and 50% Starspeaker heritage), but I just wanted to clarify you didn't mean the "magic disappears the more distantly related to a pure you are" thing.

That sounds really cool, though! I'm curious what the new types will be like.

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Different chunks often have different climates, but rarely have different time zones and almost never have different seasonal cycles. The length of days, lunar months, and solar years is always the same from chunk to chunk.

The method by which different theme groups established their populations isn't necessarily the same. The first Luminants and Tenebrants could easily have come from one person each, and bred true over successive generations as they married into the human population, until there were enough of them that washing out wouldn't stop them; the first sky-kin were transmissible, so if they turned people and then married those people and had kids with them, and then their kids did the same thing, etc., that would've gotten them going just fine. I think the first elementals might've been bigger groups.

If somebody was excited enough about this setting to start playing with it before I'm even done making it up, I certainly couldn't stop them.

I have no idea what the new types are going to be like, and I'm not sure whether Piotr is going to convince me to give up the awesome country I made for him and invent two more Miles siblings (a pair of female twins, maybe?) just to achieve "being the dead grandfather of the progenitors of a new theme group". He is still strangely adamant about this, but he hasn't talked Cordelia into becoming human. He has pointed out to me that if I keep the same not-Thule setup but make everybody human, or at any rate make there be few enough nonhumans that all the magic washes out in the early days, then I don't have the headache of figuring out how to kill off the older generations to promote cultural discontinuity when they aren't dying naturally.