![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Nanophlogiston chapter 38.5: An Intermission
[cw: sexual assault mention]
Up until this point the reader may be excused for feeling like they've been thrown into the deep end with respect to what's going on. I guess this might be as good a time as any to summarize what we know about the Children of the Worthless so far.
First, a bit of crustacean xeno sex ed: they've got male and female and apparently nothing else. We hadn't been able to identify any trans or intersex Worthless or Children thereof: we're dealing with alien minds, so it's entirely possible they somehow have a pure psychoneural dimorphism (though the opacity of the exact criteria by which they seem to arbitrarily smash their own eggs does not rule out a darker explanation). Maybe later research will show these to be horribly broad overgeneralizations on part of this undereducated macho bigoted cis gay white-passing male Christian space marine, but I can only go with what I can observe.
The main way to tell doe from buck is the tail. The males have a long wide lobster-tail fan that can get pretty ornate with age, which they (the villagers, not the Naked or the Worthless) often trim and decorate. The females are more complicated: they start out with a long, flexible scorpion-tail stinger that is constantly growing and needs to be sharpened against some hard rock, and can inject a horrible burning venom that can kill something twice their size in minutes. But if they ever conceive children, this tail fattens and shortens to contain the ootheca before it is laid (which process is totally painless). After this the stinger never returns. Young mothers, especially among the Naked and lower-status women, often experience a sudden growth spurt in upper body strength to compensate, but the stress of this can shorten lifespans by years.
They have no concept of covering their genitals for the sake of decorum. The males keep their testicles under several layers of armour plate (more on this in a bit) and the females' stingers are too handy to keep under wraps.
Mating works as follows: at the base of the woman's tail is a vulval maw, shaped not unlike a bear trap or a Venus flytrap with a second set of jaws inside like an eel's, that pries off or gnaws through the man's protective plates and chews off his testicles, which are then swallowed by this maw and digested and the sperm absorbed. This is exactly as painful as what you, my dear khoïkopithecene reader, might imagine: among people who can telepathically share such experiences, a guarantee that no sane person could ever convincingly lie about paternity. Doing it to an unconscious man is punished with the death of the rapist (and all the resulting offspring if they have yet to hatch); to an unconsenting but conscious man, an offence for which the man may demand satisfaction by means of a duel, to take place forthwith after the eggs are laid.
The testicles (and armour plates) grow back after a few months.
Males are not noticeably larger or smaller overall, but they tend to be slightly shorter with broader upper bodies and more elaborate manes. At sexual maturity (which for their fecund race starts around age six) they have two or more horns on their head while their women typically have one; their carapace also develops two rows of branching, occasionally articulated antler-like structures that can bear many times the man's own weight. They use these antlers for just about anything you can imagine: small children play in them; they carry objects large and small; they hang signs and banners from them; they hold yarn while they knit (an art at which they excel with their needle-like claws), or spread thread as a living loom while another weaves; they mount large projectile weapons on them in battle.
That should be enough anatomical background for the basis of what I will describe next. The Children of the Worthless have many carefully delineated titles and roles for what purpose each serves in society; each person may (and often does) have more than one, but even then they are careful to clarify what role they are acting in the capacity of in all but the most inconsequential or biologically necessary of tasks.
Given the martial nature of this story, we have seen the most so far of the dreaded battle-virgins, the hardened (and often psychologically unstable) combat élite of both the Naked and the villages. This name as I have rendered it may have triggered some genre expectations: I urge the reader therefore to think less "pseudo-Sapphic sword and sorcery" and more "Sister Thérèse beats the children when they do not finish their porridge because they remind her of the war when she was forced to kill five men with a spoon to get half a bowl to her dying father". From the way I've heard the other villagers describe it, finding something for them to do seems to be a significant source of warfare when the Naked are not around.
Next most common that we've seen are the hunters and the seekers. Both of them are often found working together deep in the forests and swamps, the hunters tracking prey and the seekers charting the land and noting any changes, opportunities or threats for the longer term. Junior seekers focus on foraging in better explored areas, while senior ones may begin actively pursuing ways to expand and systematize their village's knowledge.
Which brings us to the meditators. No Child of the Worthless is allowed to even apprentice as a meditator before age twelve (culturally similar to our thirty), and none may take an apprentice who has not already had some years' experience in at least two other roles. Despite the lack of any anatomical (battle-virgin) or legal (warrior) requirement, meditators are overwhelmingly men. Having no coercive legal authority over anyone but their apprentices, the meditators serve to contemplate and digest the knowledge of the village, to counsel hunters and seekers and battle-virgins on difficult decisions in the field, and help the builders and the cooks organize and coordinate matters within the village itself. They also serve as the primary contact point between the village and outsiders - like us, for instance.
As if the sexual inversions weren't enough, their warriors are their primary magic-users. These tend to be the largest, fittest, most agile men with the largest and most glorious displays of antlers, adorned with intricate beadwork and tassles and multilayered capes and braided ropes of crimson and purple and rainbow and gold. Many say their power, not unlike that of the battle-virgins, is greatest if they abstain from sexual relations; I got the distinct impression they had reasons for spreading this idea that were independent of its truth. They - like everyone, even the children - can fight "for keeps" in raids and territorial battles, but their primary training is for ritual tournaments that the villages have from time to time to establish their rankings and to entertain the gods for good hunting and harvest. In a group, their powers can be surprisingly effective, levitating attack units in shrapnel-like living bombardments and chaining fireballs with a ferocity that made me wonder at first if Captain Alvarez had somehow brought the plasma grenade launcher without us knowing.
(The Naked only have simple "burners" for inflicting punishments and defensive scorched-earth strategies, the display of their choking red smoky flames on the battlefield only good for signalling and obfuscation. Cooking is forbidden to them as a sign of gay coloured degeneracy.)
There are other roles within home territory as well - gatherers, herders, weavers, knitters, brewers, distillers, dyers, stepfathers, cooks, witches, builders, the village queen. We did not visit the village this voyage, nor was its location disclosed to us, and so we only learned of these in passing from the various fighters on the march. Most are what you might expect from such titles, though others may require more explanation: stepfather refers to virtually any of the adult men who mill about the village minding and educating the children (though by our standards many of them would be scarcely more than children themselves, or teenagers at best); the witches specialize in herbs and healing and talismans and all the other wonderfully unglamorous parts of the unseen energies that the warriors have no time for, and plan the layout of the huts and fortifications and crops with the builders who are also tasked with keeping their calendars up to date.
The queen has lawful authority over all, except only the chief battle-virgin who merely defers to her as a first between equals. She is the only person the chief meditator must answer to, though she is also expected to defer to his counsel as the chief battle-virgin defers to hers. It is not clear exactly how the queen is selected, and I could not understand the nuances of what Weeping-At-The-City-Gates told me to distinguish it from it simply being the most recent retired chief builder - which he kept insisting it was not, it was "more than that" which no one could put into anything I could grasp enough to put into words here. I do not disbelieve them on this point, however.
Up until this point the reader may be excused for feeling like they've been thrown into the deep end with respect to what's going on. I guess this might be as good a time as any to summarize what we know about the Children of the Worthless so far.
First, a bit of crustacean xeno sex ed: they've got male and female and apparently nothing else. We hadn't been able to identify any trans or intersex Worthless or Children thereof: we're dealing with alien minds, so it's entirely possible they somehow have a pure psychoneural dimorphism (though the opacity of the exact criteria by which they seem to arbitrarily smash their own eggs does not rule out a darker explanation). Maybe later research will show these to be horribly broad overgeneralizations on part of this undereducated macho bigoted cis gay white-passing male Christian space marine, but I can only go with what I can observe.
The main way to tell doe from buck is the tail. The males have a long wide lobster-tail fan that can get pretty ornate with age, which they (the villagers, not the Naked or the Worthless) often trim and decorate. The females are more complicated: they start out with a long, flexible scorpion-tail stinger that is constantly growing and needs to be sharpened against some hard rock, and can inject a horrible burning venom that can kill something twice their size in minutes. But if they ever conceive children, this tail fattens and shortens to contain the ootheca before it is laid (which process is totally painless). After this the stinger never returns. Young mothers, especially among the Naked and lower-status women, often experience a sudden growth spurt in upper body strength to compensate, but the stress of this can shorten lifespans by years.
They have no concept of covering their genitals for the sake of decorum. The males keep their testicles under several layers of armour plate (more on this in a bit) and the females' stingers are too handy to keep under wraps.
Mating works as follows: at the base of the woman's tail is a vulval maw, shaped not unlike a bear trap or a Venus flytrap with a second set of jaws inside like an eel's, that pries off or gnaws through the man's protective plates and chews off his testicles, which are then swallowed by this maw and digested and the sperm absorbed. This is exactly as painful as what you, my dear khoïkopithecene reader, might imagine: among people who can telepathically share such experiences, a guarantee that no sane person could ever convincingly lie about paternity. Doing it to an unconscious man is punished with the death of the rapist (and all the resulting offspring if they have yet to hatch); to an unconsenting but conscious man, an offence for which the man may demand satisfaction by means of a duel, to take place forthwith after the eggs are laid.
The testicles (and armour plates) grow back after a few months.
Males are not noticeably larger or smaller overall, but they tend to be slightly shorter with broader upper bodies and more elaborate manes. At sexual maturity (which for their fecund race starts around age six) they have two or more horns on their head while their women typically have one; their carapace also develops two rows of branching, occasionally articulated antler-like structures that can bear many times the man's own weight. They use these antlers for just about anything you can imagine: small children play in them; they carry objects large and small; they hang signs and banners from them; they hold yarn while they knit (an art at which they excel with their needle-like claws), or spread thread as a living loom while another weaves; they mount large projectile weapons on them in battle.
That should be enough anatomical background for the basis of what I will describe next. The Children of the Worthless have many carefully delineated titles and roles for what purpose each serves in society; each person may (and often does) have more than one, but even then they are careful to clarify what role they are acting in the capacity of in all but the most inconsequential or biologically necessary of tasks.
Given the martial nature of this story, we have seen the most so far of the dreaded battle-virgins, the hardened (and often psychologically unstable) combat élite of both the Naked and the villages. This name as I have rendered it may have triggered some genre expectations: I urge the reader therefore to think less "pseudo-Sapphic sword and sorcery" and more "Sister Thérèse beats the children when they do not finish their porridge because they remind her of the war when she was forced to kill five men with a spoon to get half a bowl to her dying father". From the way I've heard the other villagers describe it, finding something for them to do seems to be a significant source of warfare when the Naked are not around.
Next most common that we've seen are the hunters and the seekers. Both of them are often found working together deep in the forests and swamps, the hunters tracking prey and the seekers charting the land and noting any changes, opportunities or threats for the longer term. Junior seekers focus on foraging in better explored areas, while senior ones may begin actively pursuing ways to expand and systematize their village's knowledge.
Which brings us to the meditators. No Child of the Worthless is allowed to even apprentice as a meditator before age twelve (culturally similar to our thirty), and none may take an apprentice who has not already had some years' experience in at least two other roles. Despite the lack of any anatomical (battle-virgin) or legal (warrior) requirement, meditators are overwhelmingly men. Having no coercive legal authority over anyone but their apprentices, the meditators serve to contemplate and digest the knowledge of the village, to counsel hunters and seekers and battle-virgins on difficult decisions in the field, and help the builders and the cooks organize and coordinate matters within the village itself. They also serve as the primary contact point between the village and outsiders - like us, for instance.
As if the sexual inversions weren't enough, their warriors are their primary magic-users. These tend to be the largest, fittest, most agile men with the largest and most glorious displays of antlers, adorned with intricate beadwork and tassles and multilayered capes and braided ropes of crimson and purple and rainbow and gold. Many say their power, not unlike that of the battle-virgins, is greatest if they abstain from sexual relations; I got the distinct impression they had reasons for spreading this idea that were independent of its truth. They - like everyone, even the children - can fight "for keeps" in raids and territorial battles, but their primary training is for ritual tournaments that the villages have from time to time to establish their rankings and to entertain the gods for good hunting and harvest. In a group, their powers can be surprisingly effective, levitating attack units in shrapnel-like living bombardments and chaining fireballs with a ferocity that made me wonder at first if Captain Alvarez had somehow brought the plasma grenade launcher without us knowing.
(The Naked only have simple "burners" for inflicting punishments and defensive scorched-earth strategies, the display of their choking red smoky flames on the battlefield only good for signalling and obfuscation. Cooking is forbidden to them as a sign of gay coloured degeneracy.)
There are other roles within home territory as well - gatherers, herders, weavers, knitters, brewers, distillers, dyers, stepfathers, cooks, witches, builders, the village queen. We did not visit the village this voyage, nor was its location disclosed to us, and so we only learned of these in passing from the various fighters on the march. Most are what you might expect from such titles, though others may require more explanation: stepfather refers to virtually any of the adult men who mill about the village minding and educating the children (though by our standards many of them would be scarcely more than children themselves, or teenagers at best); the witches specialize in herbs and healing and talismans and all the other wonderfully unglamorous parts of the unseen energies that the warriors have no time for, and plan the layout of the huts and fortifications and crops with the builders who are also tasked with keeping their calendars up to date.
The queen has lawful authority over all, except only the chief battle-virgin who merely defers to her as a first between equals. She is the only person the chief meditator must answer to, though she is also expected to defer to his counsel as the chief battle-virgin defers to hers. It is not clear exactly how the queen is selected, and I could not understand the nuances of what Weeping-At-The-City-Gates told me to distinguish it from it simply being the most recent retired chief builder - which he kept insisting it was not, it was "more than that" which no one could put into anything I could grasp enough to put into words here. I do not disbelieve them on this point, however.
no subject
no subject
...now I regret not going with the cloaca thing, was perfect segue to Scattila the Poo