Elcenia Spoilers

[DanielH]

And presumably it is on fire as a built-in trait, not a large amount of stuff on fire which will eventually burn out?

[Alicorn]

I haven't actually decided if their sun is finitely on fire.

[jalapeno_dude]

So I'm most of the way done with my re-read of Blood, now, and have a few questions:

-Is Isatei going to show up in future Elcenia novels? (I remember that one of the shorts is about it, but don't recall it playing a major role in anything else so far). It's a really neat concept for a world, and it seems that their universe by itself is rich enough (multiple alien species, interstellar politics, etc.) to be interesting even without the Elcenian connection. (Also, I think "Linnip places a summoning circle in World X" could make for a fun sandbox...)

-In Chapter 33 of Blood, Leekath says that there are almost 200 million vampires in the world. If I assume they make up 5-10% of the total sapients in Elcenia, this gives me a total population of ~2-4 billion. This squares (heh) well with my rough estimate of their magitech as mid-to-late twentieth century equivalent (global travel; good healthcare; but only primitive cell phone equivalents (communication crystals seem to be two-way only); little concept of computers, judging by their description in Isatei in Chapter 26 of Blood; definitely not a post-scarcity society). Is this a correct conclusion?

-On the other hand, Barashi reads to me like a much lower tech equivalent--they have relatively modern, organized states complete with embassies, effective justice systems, etc, but are pre-Industrial revolution, so I'd say late 1700s or early 1800s. And they don't seem to make wide use of kamai to produce food or cure disease, so I'd expect a correspondingly low population, around 1 billion or less. Does that seem right?

[Alicorn]

- I don't have a lot planned for Isatei, but when more of the focus moves from Esmaar to Linnip in later stories it will come up incidentally a bit more, and I like Zinc and Splay and might think of new things to do with them that aren't already defined. Linnip doing exploratory summonses is actually a neat variant on "summoned to Elcenia". Might try it.

- Vampires make up a smaller percentage of the population than that. You can find some places where they approach thirty percent (Rannde) but they concentrate heavily in places where elves are available so you see a disproportionate number of them in Esmaar for squarewide figures, and then there are merfolk and fey, who aren't working with the same real estate or on the same scale respectively. I don't have a population figure for Elcenia but it's probably more than ten billion total counting everybody.

- Barashi has a population of several billion as of storytime. Many of their species remain reproductively viable for centuries after human-comparable childhoods, and they take advantage of that. They're preindustrial, but the planet is also more broadly settled than Earth - kamai is not popular right now in the elf/human/halfblood broader culture for food and only moderately popular for disease, but it's available in emergencies, and has been around long enough to, say, put rivers in places where rivers would be convenient. Barashi has fewer broad tracts of uninhabited wilderness than Earth and the various species niche in different biomes, and trolls, fairies, and goblins like kamai as a practical tool just fine. However, when there are too many people running around the gods throw something heavy at the planet or otherwise wipe out a bunch of the excess population. Barashi is almost due right now.

[DanielH]

I had always imagined the Barashi gods as friendlier than that, or more precisely powerful. Drastically reducing the birthrate for a century sounds like a better way to reduce the population, at least for somebody who employs people with the partial job description “console people who don't get what they ask for”.

[Alicorn]

They do have an afterlife, so it's not quite as much of a dick move as it seems, but the Barashin gods are still huge jerks.

[Bluelantern]

They do have an afterlife, so it's not quite as much of a dick move as it seems, but the Barashin gods are still huge jerks.

I assumed they just didn't give a damn.

What other dragons can "get" from the word "ialdae" without knowing anything else about it?

[Alicorn]

It is, or possibly would-be-if-it-existed, a form of magic.

[DanielH]

I have a lot of questions about violet-group dragonishes.

Do violet-groups not have Dragon SIDS (but perhaps a higher rate of non-hatching eggs)? If that condition results from a complete lack of magic, then it seems violet ones wouldn’t be able to breath underwater at all, and wouldn’t survive to a month.

Do spelter dragonishes not oxidize (assuming rust/patina/etc work the same way in Elcenia as on Earth) because that would be inconvenient when living underwater, and the violet-group magic takes care of that automatically? If my guess is wrong, why don’t they oxidize?

How does firebreathing underwater work? Is it possible?

I’d imagine a lot of violet-group dragons get involved with merpeople, but they presumably have at least a somewhat different culture in regards to childrearing (unless most violet-group dragons just forgo magic names). How does this work out in practice?

[Alicorn]

Violet-group dragons are biologically amphibious (this means their thudias can also breathe underwater in dragon form); their magic is "swimming" in the same way that white groups have "flying" and the skill difference doesn't become particularly marked until a month has gone by because new-hatched infants are never terribly competent at anything. Spelter dragon scales do not oxidize on the dragon (or thudia or shren) but do oxidize off the dragon. They cannot breathe fire underwater, nor for that matter do anything which counts as flying. Merfolk parunias are generally treated more like non-mer-parunias than like merfolk fry.