Alicornutopia

Is Piotr okay with adoptive siblings? Because if he is, maybe you could add a Matilda to the Not-Vorkosigans and wait for the awesomexplosion

Rewind demonstrates that a template doesn't have to appear only once. There could be some mechanism re-instantiating one or more Vorkosigans, possibly with more siblings than they had the first time around.

For fives and beyond, there might be some inspiration left to squeeze out of simbots and their kin, or unicorns and theirs.

For specifically fives, I was taught as a kid about five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

People sometimes speak of five basic flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. But if spicy belongs with them then that's six.

The senses are good but I was toying with dividing them among the elementals... This is hard. XD

Five phases of matter, if you like the trendy "solid, liquid, gas, plasma, superfluid" or similar. But that might step on the elementals' toes just as much.

Are you confident the elementals should be the four, and not instead the five or six?

Kappa wrote:The issue with shifting chunks is that I do not want it to be even theoretically possible for an inhabited chunk to shift or collapse in a way that would harm the people inside. Because it's not like volcanoes or earthquakes or tornadoes or hurricanes or whatever, there is no place in this universe you can go and not be in a chunk, so if the chunk you're in can up and kill you all of a sudden, the world becomes a lot more inescapably terrifying than I mean it to be.

Maybe chunks don't appear/disappear, or ever change shape/size drastically on human timescales, even though they do slowly (like, tectonic shift slowly) drift around? Or maybe chunks that are inhabited are static? So like, uninhabited chunks *near* ones people live in might change, but once there's people living in them they stick the way they are. Which means occasionally a new chunk will grow/drift next to an inhabited one, and usually it will be empty or inhabitable, but very rarely it will be a filled chunk, and if this happens between two inhabited chunks then they get cut off? Or maybe like, contiguous inhabited chunks are/can be be fixed relative to each other as well as to themselves, but unattached chunks can find themselves separated. So Piotr's chunk could have had an uninhabitable chunk or two between it and the nearest inhabited one, making it so that while *it* was fixed by having inhabitants, the *path* wasn't.

But yeah I see your point that it requires some finicking

How about steal— borrowing from Adventure Time's Graybles themes?

Stages of grief: acceptance, denial, bargaining, anger, depression.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. physiological, safety, love, self-esteem, self-actualization.
Basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami.

I'm not actually serious

I'm confident the elementals should be the four because they're the ones that are based on existing Sims things. I want all the ones that are based on existing Sims things to be the ones that exist now, and the next ones to come up can be not based on any Sims things.

Since the universe itself does not have any reason to be nice to its inhabitants, I was trying to come up with a rule that accomplished the goal without literally being "only uninhabited chunks can shift", and I couldn't think of a good one.

Maaaaaaan where are all the things that come in fives. I guess I could do a Mythical Creature Lineup, but idk idk. Thanks for suggesting things, though, guys! I am sure we will eventually come up with something that my brain likes!

More fives:
fingers on a hand
limbs including the head
who what where when why

MaggieoftheOwls wrote:who what where when why

What, like... a group of prophets / clairvoyants? They're able to answer questions of their group in some way (better than usual, like a gut feeling for the answer to some questions?), or able to ask them better? I'm trying to think of how that could work, since it sounds sort of interesting if they can somehow ask questions "better" or in a magical way (without using something like a compulsion to answer those questions), but I'm not sure I'd be particularly good at thinking of an interesting magical system or setting.

I suppose if you've got two fantastical humanoids, three humanoid mythical creatures, and four elementals, the next five could be some sort of legendary/mythical being that's less humanoid by default, but have been made humanoid to fit into this setting? I really don't know. I doubt I'll think of anything, but I can post if it I do...

I wonder if I could turn the elementals into seasonals... this would sadly destroy my cute nicknames for the elemental hybrids, and would mean I'd need to re-theme some of their powers, but if I made the seasons their primary theme group then I could let them keep the secondary elemental affiliations and make a five-element theme group next.

Dryads would obviously be Spring, maybe Summer.
Mirages I think fit Fall, but Summer wouldn't be too bad.
Sylphs seem most Winterlike to me, but might fit Fall.
Undines might work for Summer, or on the other hand if I went with the ice<->water connection they could be Winter.

Does this hold together? Am I missing anything?