Table of Contents
Blog
The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace.
Giving Newhome a hook
All the other planets have interesting hooks to them. Hearthside is tidally locked, Sweetwater is an ocean world. Yih has a ring and is the cradle of life at Focus, Welkinstead has cloud cities, and Moonlitter is nearly uninhabitable itself but has a bunch of moons.
But Newhome doesn't have anything other than being the first terraformed planet. Perhaps Newhome's hook is that nearly the entire population lives in a single giant archology that's also a speace elevator. Here's how I see this panning out.
Because Newhome was first, it's also the worst. The tech used to maintain its biosphere is both ancient and hard to replace. Some time in the past, the thought of that infrastructure breaking down caused a demographic crisis as people fled what they thought was an iminant disaster and those that stayed often chose not to have a litter. But much like the population bomb that mid-20th century humans were sure was coming, the collapse never happened, and centuries of low fertility left a permanent mark on Newhome culture. Even in the midst of prosperity, new litters are a rare sight.
Population densities across the planet plummeted, and those that remained gathered in the largest city. This city evolved into a single giant archology built around an existing space elevator. The building is unfathomably massive, stretching miles into the sky and rooted miles under the earth. Because the building was not constructed all at once, it's a hodgepodge of different architectural styles and tech levels mashed together. Some sections are so dense people are packed paw on tail, while other areas are almost or completely abandoned. People, on four legs or two, who love exploring massive indoor areas love poking around the less-traveled sections. The building is so huge that different parts have their own microclimates.
In fact, the building may not be one building but two, with the other located at the antipodes with a tunnel connecting them running through the core of the planet.
Dish storage
Yinrih, especially planetside, may store dishes and cooking utensils in something that washes, dries, and stores the dishes when not in use. The dishes are taken out of storage, used, then put directly back into storage to be washed. This minimizes the need to touch the dishes to move them from a dishwasher to a cabinet.
If they had a separate dishwasher and cabinets, they'd have to wash their paws before moving the dishes from dishwasher to cabinet, and waddle around on their hind feet to transport them so their forepaws don't touch the ground.
In general, cooking employs a lot of the same strategies as surgery, though cooks don't shed their fur the way healers do. In restaurants they may work with glove boxes.
One may be asking why they bother with manual cooking at all if they're a K2 civilization. Canonically, AI hits a hard limit near where it is today on Earth, so fully autonomous robots for complex tasks don't exist. They could use remotely operated robots similar to those seen in telemedicine.
Summoning Smoke
Summoning Smoke is an olfactory method for alerting a large group of people across a wide area. Conceptually, it's like a tornado siren, church bells, and the odorant added to natural gas. Its roots go way back, even before the Theophany, when the shaman of a shire would add more wood to her bonfire, producing a large amount of fragrant smoke. After the Theophany, hearthkeepers developed incense that would be added to the fire to call the shire to liturgy.
Its liturgical use is much less prevalent at the time of First Contact, though it is used during the proclamation of the Gospel of First Meeting when the Dewfall makes contact with humans on Earth.
Different formulations of summoning smoke have been developed to serve secular purposes as well, with different odors and occasionally colors signifying different things, usually to warn of impending natural disaster or industrial accident.
We have no fur and we must pet
I was trying to answer one of Visions' questions by extending the Leasemeat story, and ended up with this overlong character interaction that doesn't really fit, but I wanted to present it anyway.
After a minute of silent travel, she spoke up. «You're a new scent around here. Are you a friend of Micah's?»
“Yeah, we met last year. It's a funny story. I'm guessing you know he's a new dad?” She nodded. “And that the dams in his childermoot insisted they incubate their womb-nest on Terra. Why I have no idea, but there it is.”
«Wouldn't you like to hang out with aliens? It was OUR first contact too. You know how incubation works, yeah? The sires nearly starve themselves guarding the womb-nest and the dams just sit on their tails drumming their digits for 144 days. I'd have hatched my own litter on Terra if we knew about you guys 200 years ago. If I'm going to be stuck somewhere watching my friends waste away, it might as well have lots of new smells and sounds to soak up.»
“Well, I was delivering a pizza to the apartment next to theirs, and knocked on their door by mistake. I had no idea that the tenants were monkey foxes, that they were expecting a litter, or that expectant sires are rather… protective of their womb-nest. Well, he takes one look at me and decides this five-foot four-inch pimply-faced kid armed with nothing but a pizza box was going to devour his precious kits.
“I'll spare you the gory details, but it took three dams to pull him off me. I had to have staples in my arm.” I pulled up my sleeve to reveal a long scarified claw mark running from shoulder to wrist, with a permanent bruise-colored streak where his writing claw had dug into my flesh. “I'd been begging my parents to let me get a tattoo at the time, but having yinrih ink permanently embedded in my skin wasn't what I had in mind.”
«Yeah,» she geckered, «Baby brain will do that. We only get one shot at parenthood, you know, semelparity and all that.»
“Anyway, the next day those same dams show up at the pizza place to apologize and explain what happened. They offer to cover my medical bills, and they even paid for their neighbor's pizza.
“Micah calls the restaurant himself a few days later to apologize in person, or as in person as his preggo brain will permit. His English isn't that great, and my Commonthroat was nonexistent back then, but we get to talking and I find out he's a decent guy, just a bit crazy at the moment.
“So he insists that as soon as his kits hatch and he's not compelled to eviscerate me on sight they're having a pizza party and I'm invited. I wasn't sure if I was going to take him up on it, but in the end I went just to see the kits.”
She adopted an accusatory tone. «You wanted to pet one, didn't you?»
”…Yes… What can I say, we have no fur and we must pet.”
“Anyway, one thing leads to another, and they invite me to the presentation of their litter at the next spring feast, and that's why I'm here.”
More on growing plants in space
OK, seems plants use light and water to guide growth in the absence of gravity. It may be more realistic than I thought to grow a wide variety of veggies in space. Like leasemeat they'd use the same hydroponic gel, but different lighting would be used.