Teeth

[strange_aeons]

I feel much better now.

I've been having some problems with my appetite lately, i.e., it didn't exist. So I'd go for twenty-four hours — or on one memorable occasion, more like sixty — without eating, and then when I started to feel queasy I would eat something, whereupon I would become ill. If I was lucky I might at least enjoy eating it, but more often no. Anyway, yesterday lilairen pointed out to me that this is fairly standard starvation-response, which I suspected, and that one deals with starvation-response much the same way one deals with flu, which I didn't. Clear liquids, then solids when the stomach agrees to play nice. So I had some chicken soup.

In the last two weeks or so that's the only meal I've had that didn't make me sick.

And eating gave me the fortitude to delete the 879 words I had written day before yesterday, because they were all absolute crap and they didn't get any better when I reread them. The 861 words I wrote yesterday are far superior, and they fixed some problems I was having at the end of chapter three, so it's all good.

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I ran across M.C.A. Hogarth's site a few years ago, bookmarked it, and forgot about it until shaddragon started building Hogarth's creatures in fabric. Then yesterday I spent a perfectly unseemly quantity of time wandering around her site looking at the pretty pictures — I must have found it longer ago than I think, because I recall the art being a lot cruder then — and got to thinking.

Yeah, I know. Shut up.

Hogarth has a race called the Jokka (see more of them here and here), and they're tri-sexed. She calls the sexes 'male', 'female' and 'neuter', so I assume that they aren't triploid — that when they reproduce the genetic material comes from two sources, not three.

No one ever seems to do triploid. The only such creatures I can recall encountering are those glowy things in that art book, and, somewhat more notably, Vonda McIntyre's dreamsnakes. That's what got me thinking, and now I have a species in my head.

What appears to happen is, there are — for want of a better term — males, who drop their genetic information off with members of the third sex, who juggle this information for a bit, add some of their own, and then pass the result on to — also for want — females, who carry the offspring to term. There's some culture right there: if in the Natural Order of Things, males never bump uglies with females, doing so is bound to be taboo in at least some places, if not physically complicated/nominally impossible.

I'm assuming vaguely human sexual practices here, in the sense that sex is used as social glue as well as for purposes of procreation. Which suggests that these creatures are intelligent, social and slippery (see also: dolphins). That, coupled with how they make babies, is all I know about them with any certainty; at the moment I'm, obviously, working on something else, and I'm too close to Hogarth's Jokka, which I find aesthetically pleasing, and never let it be said that my sense of aesthetics doesn't get totally in the way, so I'm trying to back off from the idea a bit for the time being.

Well, mostly. I have indulged in some vague speculation as to their genders (as distinguished from their sexes). Ordinarily one sees, basically, males and females, and then the third sex is sort of neuter and, well, de-sexed (I can't speak for Hogarth's Jokka, as I know nothing about their culture except that there are dresses and pretty fans in it). In this case I think it makes more sense for them to be regarded as sort of, you know, whores, in much the way bisexuals sometimes are in human culture — of course that's a stereotype and probably has fairly little to do with the actual reality. Looking at my list of gender stereotypes I want to inflict upon these people, I guess that would make them the emotional, artistic types, rather than the physically strong, brutish ones or, as I had initially thought they would be, the intellectuals (geek-gendered). It also raises questions of systematic oppression and Controlling the Third-Sex Sex Drive.

Hmm.

Comments

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

gender One and gender Two combined seed and produced a blastocyst-thing, which they then passed on to gender Three, the only one equipped to actually bear children.

I recall reading an Anne McCaffrey novel with some kind of sentient alien squirrel sort of creatures that did that -- and I blame McCaffrey for perpetuating that horrible sie/hir thing in the book in question. Woman can't seem to do anything right. I think I've run across it elsewhere too, but I can't give citations.

I realize belatedly that I was ambiguous: in my scenario when the female recieves the genetic information of the male and the ... middlesex, she doesn't just gestate the offspring, she adds her own information as well, which is why she gets it in the form of bits of DNA with some incidental cytoplasm and stuff rather than as a zygote.

create places for my D&D group to visit

Oh, don't tempt me. I still have the Lost City and that steampunk setting clamoring for my attention.

[tiassa]

I'm fairly certain it wasn't from a McCaffrey novel...which doesn't really do much to narrow it down, but there you have it.

Regarding my D&D group - the game I DM was originally set up to be a once-in-a-while thing, where we could just show up, play for a couple hours, and be done. So, I had them skipping from world to world to "fix things", sort of like Quantum Leap. This meant that, every time we played, I had to make a new world. It wasn't that big of a deal when we only played once every two months, but now it's twice a month and I'm getting tired of having to craft a brand-new world every time we play.

It would be easier if I were lazy and just created a world - no, I have to have the backstory and future story and personal history of every significant NPC and...everything. It's exhausting to do on a regular basis.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Belatedly, that does indeed sound exhausting. Could you stick them in one world for several sequential sessions, or bring them back to the same one repeatedly to right multiple wrongs? Or would they kill and eat you?