Just like last time, these aren't mine, just topics others posted on /r/worldbuilding that I found interesting but were removed by the mods.
I should really just start copy-pasting them here because I've started to get a sense for which topics are likely to be removed despite generating a lot of fruitful discussion.
The coolest idea I read over the last few days was the idea of "living" fire. Not at all uncommon in fantasy but the way the OP described it made it stand out to me. It's not sapient or even clever, rather it's more like a fungus. It can seek out fuel and avoid water. You can "train" it to prefer (or dislike?) certain types of wood. The longer it burns, the more water it takes to extinguish and the less wood it takes to keep it going.
You can "breed" a new fire from an old one by lighting a new fire with an ember from the old. The new fire will inherit some or all of the traits of the old, the hardiness and wood preferences etc.
The first thing I thought of was a pyromaniac breeding fires as attack animals.
FFFIRE! yeah, eheheheheehe! ffffffire! heheheheheehehe!
Another casualty of the mods was someone asking about a language for sapient hyenas, with the understanding that a hyena vocal tract can't produce the same sounds as a human. I just pointed them to my wiki article on Commonthroat hoping it would give them ideas. I love xenolangs and always enjoy seeing others' try to tackle them.
Originally, there was a taboo against giving names to stars and planets. When the planets were assumed to be "stars" in the sense meant by the Great Commandment, it was assumed that they bore sapient life and that the local sophonts would have their own perfectly good names for where they lived. To give them names would be tantamount to unjustly claiming ownership over them. The yinrih would just have to wait and see what those names were.
As astronomy advanced, it became clear that the local planets were lifeless, but cultural inertia kept the taboo in place. After The Shakeoff, the Neoshamanists gave them names as a way of rejecting the Great Commandment, and as the Lifebringers' terraforming tech became more and more feasible, indeed claiming ownership over them. They were drawn from the then-popular genre of planetary romances. In these stories a band of missionaries or party of adventurers would meet the local sophonts and learn their name for their world. It would be like humans deciding to call Venus Paralandra and Mars Barsoom. Most authors didn't give much thought to the etymologies of these names, so most were simply euphonious strings of sounds.
When the Neoshamanists began their terraforming efforts on a neighboring planet, and especially after other groups began staking their own claims to swaths of the planet's surface, it became necessary to refer to it in official documents. The taboo was still somewhat in force, so the Claravian majority gave it the non-name of "Newhome". By the time Newhome became livable, planetary romance had been a dead genre for a few generations, and some of the stories the names were sourced from were seen as painfully out of date if they weren't forgotten altogether.
Eventually, a numeric system was settled on for designating large bodies yet to be terraformed. Hearthside was given the number 1, Sweetwater 2, Yih 3, Newhome 4, Welkinstead 5, and Moonlitter 6. Secondaries to these bodies would be numbered from innermost orbit outward. Welkinstead's innermost moon would be 5-1, the next 5-2, and so on. Bodies such as dwarf planets and asteroids that orbited Focus itself were given serial numbers from a catalog. Whatever group terraformed a given body was given the right to name it and its numeric designation would be retired.
When the technologies to allow crewed interstellar voyages became feasible, about 10 thousand years after the Kindling, the newly founded missionaries came up with a different system for naming prospective habitable worlds. The naming taboo was still relevant to some degree, but they needed a way to refer to specific missions. The numeric system used for naming bodies at Focus had long since been extended to other stars. It's likely that Sol and Earth were given such numbers long long before they were identified as habitable by the missionaries. When a planet was marked for a visit, it would be given a flowery title that, it was hoped, would flatter any local sophonts. Such titles included "Beautiful Country", "Land of the Wise", "Breathtaking Vista" and so on. Earth's title was "Place of Unmet Friends".
Coincidentally, the Dewfall lands in semi-rural Texas. After establishing rudimentary communication with their human hosts, they ask what they call "this place." Of course, "this place" could refer to the room they were currently in, the small community college where the room was located, the town of Erickson where the college was located, etc. They were in fact asking about the name of the planet. Someone responds with "Texas". Then they ask what "Texas" means, and the human says it means "friend." Before they can be corrected they send several messages back home to Focus informing the rest of their species of this "Country of Friends", and the name ends up sticking as the common name for Earth.
Not so fun fact, yinrih cancer is contagious. That means a glob of your cells can just sluff off of you and latch onto some other poor dude to ruin his day.
Good news is yinrih can smell cancer long before it becomes a problem, so they can deal with it quickly.
Maybe not cannon, but a sect of lifebringers experiments on these transmissible tumors and develops a giant teratoma of teeth and limbs and entire heads or something.
I haven't really read much LitRPG, but if I did this is the kind of story I'd like to read 😊
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This is technically a rewrite of another story I posted here, but I changed so much it's basically its own thing.
Canned yinrih. That's what I call the particular odor you smell from the back of a cramped train car. The nose wasn't built to be assaulted by all this olfactory information at the same time. It was the combined musk of a gross of people, men and women, pups and gray-muzzled elders, sires and dams, bachelors and maids, angry, happy, sad, exhausted, all blended together into an overwhelming potpourri. It made my whiskers twitch.
It was all too much for the guy next to me. He had a glob of mentholated nose balm on his rhinarium to dull the combined musk of all those commuters. For as long as I'd been taking this route we had shared these two seats in the back of the train, his snout buried in the same old claw-written notebook and my eyes fixated on the bad news scrolling on my HUD specs. We'd never shared so much as a chuff in greeting, only the silent understanding that neither of us wanted to share this seat but at this point in the route it was the only one left.
A polite voice crackled over the announcement system. «Attention, passengers, the City of Windward meteorological agency has issued an upwelling warning until further notice. All passengers must exit at the next stop. Citizens are urged to take shelter until the city passes over the storm.»
The scent in the air shifted. You could tell who was a native Welkinsteader and who was a tourist based on how they reacted to an upwelling warning. The soup of collective emotions gave way to eleven dozen per gross mild annoyance, and one dozen per gross panic and terror.
A woman in front of me began hyperventilating. «Oh Light, I don't wanna die. Not like this! Please, not like this!»
The fellow next to her attempted some reassurance. «It's just a bit of gas comin' up from the lower atmosphere. Look, none of these other folks has got their tail in a knot. Worse comes to worst ya lose a lung. Ya got three more where that came from.»
«You're not helping!» She barked.
The train came to a stop. The passengers piled out onto the platform and trudged off to find shelter. The woman followed her new minder off the car, leaving the way clear for me. I gave my backpack a quick pat down with my tail to make sure it was still with me.
Mr. notebook hadn't budged. I clicked my claws on the floor. «Hey, dude, come on.»
He started and scented the air. «Oh Light blind me, I missed my stop again.»
«It's an upwelling. We need to get to shelter. Everyone else just got off.»
The two of us disembarked and hopped down the ladder to the tunnels. We were surrounded by the train passengers as well as others who were caught outside when the warning sounded. That same canned yinrih smell assaulted my nostrils.
There was a thunk as the safety door slid closed, then a hiss as the gasket inflated. The positive pressure system engaged, making my ears pop.
Mr. Notebook smelled positively miserable at the prospect of milling around in this tunnel for hours.
«I smell you every day but I don't think we've really met,» I said. «Name's Swift wind.»
«Fire soul,» he grunted. «Say, you usually get off here, know where I can find some water?»
«Nowhere close. This is a residential zone. But you're welcome to come back to my apartment until the storm passes.»
He smelled unsure.
«Don't worry. I promise I'm not gonna murder you.»
His thirst and sense of self preservation waged a brief silent war, then he flicked his ears in resignation and followed me. The smell of the crowd faded as we turned down the tunnel leading to the northern residential block.
We spent a few minutes walking in silence, the only sound the clicking of our claws on the floor. These dreary tunnels dated back to when Windward was one of thousands of gas extraction platforms on Welkinstead, and the atmosphere outside was made of the same noxious gas currently ruining our day. Used to be these tunnels were all there was, with nothing open to the air. But after millennia of all these platforms extracting and refining gas, polluting the atmosphere with oxygen, the air became breathable. Terraforming Welkinstead was never the intent, but a happy industrial accident.
Once it was safe to be outside, they started building on top of the vacuum pontoons keeping the platform afloat, shops, houses, a railway, the stuff you'd expect a normal city would have. Soon Windword looked like any other city on terra firma. You'd never guess we were drifting lazily through the upper atmosphere of an ice giant.
That is if it weren't for the upwellings. Only this layer of the upper atmosphere had the right mixture of gases at the right temperature and pressure, and only along the northern and southern subtropical high pressure belts. Go too far down or drift too far to one side and your lungs would be burned away by the cornerstone of Welkinstead's economy.
Upwellings were normally predicted weeks in advance and timed down to the heartbeat. But especially during the summer there would be one or two surprises when a convective storm lower down in the atmosphere burped up some gas for us to deal with. All the local met agency could do was watch the drop sonde telemetry and lidar to see if anything was brewing downwind of us and give the rest of us a tug on the tail if we needed to hunker down.
But that's why they kept the tunnels. Exactly how accessible they were varied. Cities close to the edges of the breathable belt had entrances in every building. Other cities closer to the middle just had to have a certain number of entrances accessible from anywhere on the surface. Older cities like Windward combined both. Ancient residential blocks like the one we were headed to had direct tunnel connections in every unit in addition to the normal exterior doorway, but newer sections of the city had publicly accessible hatches on street level every block or so.
«Here we are.» I opened the hatch leading up into my apartment.
«Oh Void no,» he muttered. I followed his gaze to the wall of guns visible from the entrance.
«It's OK, dude, they're antiques. The ammo for them hasn't been manufactured in millennia.» I flicked my tail in a beckoning gesture. «Come on up. I promised I wouldn't murder you, remember?»
He didn't move.
«Here, if it makes you feel better, you can bludgeon me with this if you think things are going sour.» I handed him a heavy lump of aggregate with jagged crystals jutting out at odd angles, some byproduct of the gas refining process sold in every shop in town as a dust collector for tourists.
He flicked his ears again and climbed up.
«Water, right? You want ice with that?»
He tilted his muzzle up.
«Take a seat anywhere you like.»
He flopped down into the bowl couch in my den. «What's the attraction?» He was nervously passing the lumpy crystal between his rear paws. «Why do you like collecting them, the old guns I mean. You don't look like an ear notch.»
«Well if you have good firing posture you won’t blow a chunk out of your ear. But no, I’m not a gun nut, well not THAT kind of gun nut. It’s the craftsmanship. I like the leatherwork on the saddles, the paw-forged iron barrels, none of this all-polymerite nonsense. It’s amazing what we were able to make with our own four paws before we invented fabricators.
I handed him the bowl of ice water and he began lapping it up.
«What about you?» I asked. «Got any hobbies?»
He sat the bowl down next to his claw-written notebook sitting on the end table. «Oh, just this and that.»
«This and that?» I probed. «You seem awfully attached to that notebook.»
«Oh, that. It’s nothing.»
«Clearly it’s not nothing. It's practically been glued to your forepaw every time I see you on the train.»
He let out a long sigh. «Those are my worldbuilding notes.»
«Ah!» I yipped. «So you’re a writer!»
«No, well not exactly.» He began running a rear paw through his tail and I smelled nervousness in his musk. «I've got a few stories in here, but it’s just for fun, you know. Pups make up imaginary worlds, and I just started documenting mine as I grew up. The stories are exercises to flesh out the lore, that's all.»
«Tell me about it.»
He hesitated. «Are you SURE?»
«It's either that or awkwardly sit here in silence until the storm clears.»
He started wringing his tail like a towel with both rear paws, and his shyness stank up the den. «So it’s about this race of star folk called.. well we can’t pronounce their language.»
«What do you mean we can’t pronounce their language?»
«Well, they have a very different vocal tract from us; no muzzle, more muscular lips that can form an airtight seal, flatter more crowded teeth, a smaller and much more nimble tongue. They use their tongue to shape the sounds coming out of their mouth to speak.» He had opened his eyes wide and his ears were pinned back. He was clearly excited to have someone to share all this with. «The tongue is so important that many of their languages use the word for tongue to mean language in the same way we use the word for throat.
«So the best I can do to tell you what they call themselves is give you all the sounds one by one. The word starts with a voiceless glottal fricative, then a voiced palatal approximant, close back rounded vowel, voiced bilabial nasal, mid central vowel, and finally a voiced velar nasal.»
I wanted to ask him what in the void a 'voiceless glottal fricative' was but he continued.
«But that's the singular, like if there's only one. If there are more than one you take that word and add a voiced alveolar sibilant fricative to the end to make it plural.»
«You went to all the trouble of designing their ’vocal tract’?»
«Yup. And some of their languages, too.»
By now he was holding his tail in a death grip like it owed him money. «Constructed languages. Honestly sometimes I feel like the languages are the main thing and the world is just there to give them more life.» He opened his notebook to what looked like a table of different word forms in an alien script written left to write. «That word I gave you comes from this language called, well, again we can’t pronounce the name.»
I braced myself for another onslaught of 'nasals' and 'fricatives', but I was mercifully spared.
«Ultimately the name comes from this tribe who lived on this island in the northern hemisphere.» He turned to a page showing an impressive world map and pointed to a large island to the northwest of a massive continent. «So this tribe invades this island after this other empire falls.» He pointed to a peninsula on the southern edge of the continent jutting out into a nearly enclosed sea. Anyway, this tribe becomes an empire in their own right after a few centuries.»
«Centuries? Seems awfully fast.»
«Oh, yeah, they only live a tenth of our lifespan. Makes things move a bit quicker, gives me an excuse to play around with more languages.» Now his rear paw was picking at loose whisps of fur on his tail.
«Anyway, the tribe becomes an empire and they spread their language as they expand. They found some colonies on this other continent.» He pointed to another landmass across an ocean to the west of the first. «And these colonies rebel and found their own country which eventually spreads all the way to the west coast. The tribe become empire is still expanding despite the loss of some territory to these rebels, but after two massive worldwide wars this empire also falls and the rebels turned country become an empire in their own right, with their own variety of that island tribe’s language spreading across the globe in its turn.
He turned back to the table of words. «So this language is spoken by two different empires and becomes a de facto lingua franca around the world. It’s their version of Commonthroat.»
«Sounds like they haven’t terraformed any other planets,» I say.
«No, they achieve spaceflight right before we find them.»
«And besides this ‘vocal tract’ of theirs, what do they look like?»
«Well, they have no tail, and almost no fur except on top of their head, so they weir cloth coverings like a healer. They used to have fur and live in trees just like we did, but they started living in wide open grasslands. Their rear paws lost the ability to grasp.»
«That doesn’t sound like much of an advantage, not being able to grip things with their rear paws, especially given they don’t have a tail.»
«That’s because they walk exclusively on their rear paws. Their hind legs get much longer and more muscular. It’s all so they can run long distances to catch prey. That’s also why they have no fur, it’s because they excrete saline from pores on their skin that evaporates to cool them down.»
I wrinkle my muzzle. «Sounds gross.»
«Oh that’s what the missionaries that find them think at first. It smells really pungent. But eventually they grow to like the odor. They say it smells like a friend.»
«And the wildest thing is they can’t write.»
«What do you mean; you showed me that alien alphabet earlier.»
«Well they can’t write naturally like we can. They don’t evolve it, they have to invent it. So they just speak for tens of thousands of years before finally inventing writing.»
«So no history? How do they preserve information then if they can’t write?»
«Orally at first, passing it down from sires and dams to their pups.»
«Doesn’t sound very reliable.»
«Oh it’s not at all. They spread across the globe long long before inventing writing, and don’t even remember one another until they meet again thousands of years later. At that point the different groups have developed vastly different cultures and languages.»
«More languages to invent?»
«Exactly!» he yipped.
He suddenly smelled embarrassed. «You probably think I’m the crazy one now.»
«Crazy? No. Look, dude, you absolutely stink of nervousness. Don't be. I'll admit I've never heard of someone making up a world for the fun of it and inventing languages, but this isn't something to be ashamed of. Why not post those stories of yours on the internetwork. I'm sure there's a bulletin board out there that'll lap them up.»
«But my stories are terrible.»
«And they'll always be terrible if you don't have the courage to fail. Back in the tunnel you were half sure I was going to shoot you dead, but you not only came in anyway you opened yourself up to me. That takes guts. Now use those guts to open up to others and listen to what they have to say. Besides, are those stories you've got now really that bad if they're worth the time it takes to read them? It's not like there's a law that a story has to have perfect prose and an immaculate plot and ocean-deep characters just to be unironically enjoyable.»
My ears popped again. «Positive pressure system's deactivated. Looks like we're out of the storm.»
He coiled his tail around his notebook and walked to the entry hatch.
«Hey,» I called after him before his head disappeared below the threshold, «I'll be honest, these weird flat-faced furless bipeds may not interest me, but they will be interesting to someone, go find that someone. And if you don't, I sit next to you on the train every day. It'll beat reading bad news. Maybe they'll grow on me.»
I wish I could laugh in completed story... It must be nice 😂
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I've been revisiting my old stories and doing some substantial rewrites.
::: spoiler Are We As Mayflies? Stormlight had always enjoyed people-watching, especially now that the people smelled and looked so different from himself. Here went an older puppy or whatever humans called their offspring, her dry whiskerless nose buried in the screen of one of those glass rectangular communication devices. Next came a man in his prime, thick brown fur covering his upper lip and hanging down from his chin. Then an older woman, head fur white and face wrinkled, hobbling along with a walking stick to support her remaining good leg.
By her scent she could have been seven dozen years old, but Stormlight had a good five dozen on her, and he was still young as monkey foxes reckoned it.
Stormlight turned to Bob, regarding his bald crown and wrinkled face. He grabbed his tail and began running his claws along it as though brushing out a knot.
Bob looked up from his drink and noticed his fidgeting. "Well go on and ask. You do that whenever you're fixing to ask me an awkward question."
«Does it bother you that we live so much longer?»
"If I'm honest, maybe sometimes, but Earth has trees that live for millennia and brainless jellyfish that can live pretty much forever. It's not like humans were breaking longevity records until y'all came along. Besides, we already live twice as long as our closest animal relatives. I'd say that's pretty nice."
Bob took a few sips of soda. "Does it bother you that we don't live nearly as long as you?"
«You're not getting any younger. When you're gone I'll have to find a new human friend, then he'll be gone before I know it. We finally found bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh, but we never counted on that bone and flesh being so ephemeral. It's all like trying to hold water in my paws.»
After a few moments, bob said, "It hurts to say goodbye for the last time, and y'all are going to be saying a lot of last goodbyes as long as you hang around us humans. But think of it this way. You're already a big hit with my grandkids. You can help them grow up, and again with their children, and their children's children. You can tell them all about how their great great great grandpa Bob got to be the first human to shake hands with an alien. You and Iris and Tod and Sunshine and Lodestar and Pascal can be the one constant in their lives, the one thing they can count on to be there no matter what. They'll have to say goodbye to me soon enough, and by and by their parents, too, but not you. Y'all can be the one thing they'll never have to say goodbye to. And after you've said your last goodbye to me, you can pray for the repose of my soul, or speak my name among the living, or do whatever it is you critters do for as long as you feel like doing it, which will sure be longer than any human will remember me.
"But I'm in good health. I've got at least twenty years left in me if my family history is anything to go by. That might not be very long for you, but it's a while yet for me. Don't go mourning me until I'm actually six feet under.
"It's a wonderful day out, if a little hot." Bob added as Stormlight noisily lapped up some soda. "Let's just enjoy the day."
Stormlight tilted his ears back, relaxed his jaw slightly, and let his tail hang loose again. «Thanks, Bob. Sometimes I worry so much about the future that I don't appreciate the present.»
The two looked back at the cars driving down the street and the people walking along the sidewalk. "It sure is a nice present," said Bob. :::
::: spoiler When you gotta go you gotta go I had to chuckle at the mundanity of it. Before First Meeting if I was told I'd be medically examined by aliens, I'd have imagined ominously hovering UFOs, bright lights, and then waking up in a ditch four hours later one or two internal organs lighter. Yet here I was, on my way to do just that, but the atmosphere couldn’t be more… suburban, for lack of a better word.
Food sellers to my left and right barked their best sales pitch at me, most in heavily accented Commonthroat. They assumed a human wouldn't bother learning Hearthsider, but knowing the local language is why I was picked to be the first live volunteer patient. It'd be like an alien landing on Earth asking to learn a human language, and after refusing English and Spanish and Mandarin they said "Nah, I want to learn to speak Icelandic." They'd be laughed at. I certainly was.
I guess all those lectures in a nearly empty classroom paid off, because the clinic that did all the cadaver dissections turned out to be a sleepy little town on Hearthside. Maybe in a hundred years somebody will get a new liver grown from my DNA.
I passed a group of older pups lounging on perches off the main path.
One of them came up to me. It sounds weird calling him a pup; he was old enough to be my father. I could hear his fellows urging him on. “Friend,” he said in heavily accented Commonthroat. I flashed my teeth in a jovial American smile. This apparently is what the lad was looking for. “See!” he barked back at his companions, “I told you. Humans DO have fangs, they’re just really small!”
“yeah sure,” said one of the others, “but how can they eat meat with such small teeth?”
“Only one way to find out.” My interlocutor reared up on his hind feet and reached toward his fellows with a paw. One of them rummaged through a cloth-covered basket and grabbed a morsel of… something, then tossed it at him. He caught it and held it up to me. “Eat, friend!”
I took it before registering what it was. It was small, furry, and dead. It looked a bit like a chipmunk, if chipmunks had blue and yellow fur. I evidently was spending too much time scrutinizing it, as my interlocutor grunted in protest. “You a puppy-gut? Can’t eat a raw zap rat?”
“Not with those teeth,” said the one who tossed him the rodent.
“Are you trying to win a bet?” I sighed in English. He merely continued to stare at me. Do I really want to eat this thing? Raw? I had eaten a nightcrawler on a dare once when I was a kid. This couldn’t be any worse. I glanced over my shoulder at the clinic. I was already going to the doctor. If I got sick they’d probably know what to do, right? Or they better after cutting up all those human cadavers.
I popped the creature in my mouth and swallowed it whole, barely letting it touch my tongue.
“Ha!” said the pup next to me. “They are meat eaters!”
“That doesn’t count,” protested one of his fellows. “He didn’t bite down on it.”
As they argued back and forth, I felt my impromptu snack slither down my throat, then came a jolt as though I had swallowed a 9-volt rather than a dead rat.
My stomach began protesting almost immediately. I glared at the boy and cursed myself for succumbing to peer pressure. He merely flicked an ear in a hasty goodbye then scampered back to his friends, where they continued to debate the finer points of human dentition. I turned and headed to the clinic, my stomach making its displeasure known through noisy gurgles. “I better not need a change of undies,” I thought as I ducked through the door to the healer’s office.
Behind the exterior doors was a sort of mud room. To one side was a shallow pool for washing paws, barely ankle deep. Next to it was a small shelf, a sign hung above it written in perfect English. “Welcome, human visitors! Remember, our hands are also our feet. Please help keep this clinic clean by removing your footwear before entering. --St. Starlight’s House of Healing. 🐾”
I placed my sneakers on the shelf and ducked through the curtain leading to the waiting room. Despite the poster’s exhortation to cleanliness, the musty smell of a kennel hung in the air. That’s not to say the place wasn’t clean, well, as clean as a species with constantly shedding fur can make such a high traffic public area. I didn’t mind the smell at all. It reminded me of the animal shelter where I picked out my first dog when I was little. It smelled like a friend.
Perched next to the wall under a beautifully written icon of the clinic's patron saint were a handful of monkey foxes, a family by the looks of it. Three adults—two sires and a dam, travelling with three of their pups, all girls, much younger than the lads out in the square. All three girls started yipping excitedly upon seeing this hairless ape duck through the doorway. Twelve paws scrabbled on the slick tile to be the first to interact with me.
«Wow, wow,» said one, peering behind me. «Lookie, he really has no tail.»
«See,» said the second, her nose pointed at my stockings. «No thumbs on his rear paws. Is it true you stand on your hind legs all the time, mister?»
«Just that patch of fur on top of your head?» queried the third. «Is that why you wear those covers like a healer?»
«No, look, sis» barked the first, gesturing with her muzzle up at the meager hair covering my arm, «He does have fur, just not a lot of it.»
«Now now, my delights, don’t bother the gentleman,» chided one of their sires. They scampered back to their parents. The sire dipped his head in apology. I smiled and did the same to show I wasn't offended.
My stomach churned. Hearthsiders were an unhurried bunch, even by the standards of other yinrih, a species with all the patience you'd expect from someone who lived over seven centuries on average. I had expected a wait, but didn't account for being hounded by the call of nature.
I strapped my synth to my hand and began fingering the keys like I was playing a guitar.
«How old are they?» warbled a tinny voice from the anemic speaker.
The sire's ears perked up and his eyes opened wide, as near as a monkey fox can get to an excited smile, surprised to hear a human speaking his native throat. «In Terran years? Let's see.» He tilted his head to the side and scratched his ear with a rear paw. «Late teens or early 20s, I think. There's three more where that came from, all boys. They're at the market with our other dam. These three are here for a checkup»
«Six little ones all at once.» I tried to make the synth sound impressed. «That's got to be a lot, even with two moms and dads to spread the load.»
«They're a pawful, alright, especially these three. He looked at his daughters, his ears flattened in disapproval. After being robbed of her strange playmate, one of the girls had begun thumping the wall with her tail, and through the endurance that only youth can provide, would continue her little game despite her father's objections for the remainder of my time waiting.
«But I wouldn't trade this time for the world. Only fifteen more years before adolescence kicks in and they start thinking they know everything and their fur will stop bullets. Right now the world is still new and wonderful. They were just learning about humans in school, and they haven't been able to talk about anything else. I'm sure you'll be the only thing in their ears and out of their throats for the next two weeks.
«You are the first human they've seen. First I've seen, in fact... well first live human, if you'll excuse me.»
I dipped my head to show he was in fact excused. «Yeah, all those cadavers. That's why I'm here, actually. The healers want live human subjects now, and somebody has to get probed for the sake of all mankind.»
He tilted his head trying to process my joke, but decided not to ask for clarification. I had been assured the healers would be doing nothing of the sort, of course. The only clothing I'd be removing was already sitting on that shelf in the entry room.
He sniffed the air. «It's true what they say about the scent of humans. You smell very...» the next word was impossible to translate. The closest thing any of the Hearthsider-English dictionaries I'd ever seen could come was "pleasant but inedible", but that barely scratched the surface. Hearthsider, like all monkey fox languages, had a myriad of ways of describing odors. In any case, the word came out to a compliment.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, trying to ignore the increasingly urgent churning growls coming from my gut. I wouldn't be smelling pleasant for long if I didn't find a bathroom soon.
The heat didn't help matters. Focus hung low on the horizon, its golden rays pouring into the room through the large windows lining the entrance wall, turning the room into a greenhouse. In the time I had been here the shadows cast by the doorframe hadn’t moved an inch, and they never would. On Hearthside, the time of day changed with the latitude. Golden Hour city sat comfortably on the terminator dividing day and night.
If the foul brew festering in my colon and the wicked sun weren't enough, my hand had begun cramping from operating the synth. I removed the device and gave my hand a few shakes.
«Are you OK?» asked the sire.
I decided to be blunt. «Not really. I desperately need to use the bathroom.»
«Please, allow me. You rest your paw.»
He hopped down from his perch with a sharp clack of his claws on the tile and walked up to the counter. Perched behind it was a fawn-coated receptionist, her HUD specs sitting halfway down her muzzle flashing reflected sunlight back in my face.
«Excuse me, ma’am.»
She slid her HUD specs further down her muzzle. She hadn't heard a word we were saying. «I told you folks when you came in that we were having network problems. My paws are tied until it gets fixed.»
«My friend here is looking for--»
She whipped her head to one side and barked «Calmwind, is the network back up yet?!»
Through a curtain dividing an adjoining room a dusty gray snout poked out, twitched a few times, then its owner waddled forward. The white noise of server cooling fans escaped the room as he pushed the curtain aside. He was definitely a fair ways up the chonk chart. I think this was my first time seeing a fat monkey fox. He panted a few times as though the effort of walking ten feet from his little techie cave was too much.
«And I told YOU,» said Calmwind as though he had been part of the conversation from the beginning, «It’s not a network issue. The payment processor is down.»
«I don’t think—» she said, but Calmwind snapped back as though venting years of pent-up frustration.
«Look, It’s not the network, okay? I swear it’s always the network with you people. Broken heat pump fan? Network must be down. Light flickering in the bathroom? Better call Calmwind, it’s the network again. What does he get paid for anyway?»
I made my way up to the front of the room, ducking my head to avoid the ceiling fixtures. This building wasn’t built for someone who stood over 30 inches at the shoulder. The sire gave me an unreadable look which I chose to mean “Is this seriously happening right now?” Then he shot a glance back at the other two members of his childermoot. The remaining sire and dam hopped down from their perches and herded their pups out the front door to spare them this public display of office politics.
Meanwhile, Calmwind had plucked the HUD specs from the receptionist’s muzzle. «See, I told you, you’ve been browsing the internetwork this whole time. It’s not a problem on our end. You need to send a message to the payment processor.»
«I’m a receptionist, not an office manager, I get one paycheck but everyone expects me to do the work of two people!» she hissed.
“Thanks for trying,” I sighed in English, shrugging at the sire standing next to me. He flicked his ears back, returning my shrug with his species’ own gesture of resignation.
A loud grumble issued from my gut, catching the attention of all three yinrih.
«Are you feeling well?» asked Calmwind, out of breath from arguing.
“Are YOU feeling well, big chungus?” I said under my breath in English, then put my synth back on and continued in Hearthsider. «Pardon me, but do you know where the restroom is?»
«It’s a bit down the hall and to the right,» he said, tossing his muzzle to one side indicating the hallway nearby.
I ducked into the hallway and started jogging, I caught one last snatch of conversation from the waiting room before turning the corner. The sire, in an attempt to de-escalate, changed the subject. «Amazing how fast they can run on just those two long hind legs of theirs.»
«I know, right?» answered Calmwind, «and with no tail for balance and as tall as they are, you’d think they’d be falling over all the time.»
I rounded the corner and was met with another long hallway. My gut rumbled in protest again. My jog had made my situation even more dire. I continued at a brisk walk, accumulating a few bruises on my forehead from the fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Finally, I came to another doorway. I could hear running water from behind the thick curtain. I could wait no longer.
I pulled the curtain aside and stuck my head through the doorway. Another washing pool sat to the left of the entrance under a flickering light. Wading amid the water washing her paws was a healer. My face reddened. Before I could make a discrete exit, she turned and noticed me.
«Ah!» she chuffed cheerfully. «Light shine upon you, friend!» She hopped out of the water and trotted up to me, leaving a trail of wet paw prints in her wake. «You must be my human volunteer. My name’s Doctor Shortclaw.» She extended a dripping wet paw to initiate a human handshake.
I hesitated. This wasn’t the response I expected to a man bursting into the women’s bathroom.
She extended her paw further. «This is the right way to do it, yes? Right forepaw, digits extended, palm facing to the side?»
“Yes, ma’am—er doctor,” I said in English before hastily grabbing my synth and repeating my confirmation in Hearthsider. I reluctantly accepted her waterlogged handshake. «I’m so sorry,» I hastily dried my hand on the curtain, «I must have the wrong bathroom.»
She tilted her head in confusion. «Wrong bathroom? This is the only one on this floor.» I slipped back into the hallway. The sign over the door, overlooked in my earlier haste, simply said «WASHROOM», with no qualifiers. Was this a private bathroom? She didn’t seem to object to my presence. Whatever the case, I needed to get her out of there before the chocolate factory had a meltdown.
I brought the rest of my body through the doorway. We were standing in a vestibule, the washing pool was off to the left in an alcove. The wall to the right was adorned with pictures, an air freshener, and a cabinet marked with the universal yinrih symbol for health and medicine, a stylized female paw print. The floor was flagged with tiles of various shapes and textures, designed more to be pleasant to the touch of a yinrih’s bare paws than with an eye to visual congruity. A shallow lip separated the vestibule from the rest of the bathroom shrouded in darkness. The flickering light over the washing pool failed to illuminate the area where the toilet was.
I looked down at the little alien medical professional. The first thing a human normally learns about yinrih is that they're built for living in trees. That's where the monkey in monkey fox comes from, long sinewy prehensile tail, thick limbs and broad back, feet shaped like hands. But the thing about living in trees is you're waging a constant battle with gravity. Every one of those limbs has to be capable of not only supporting the weight of the rest of the body, all 80 pounds of it, but pulling it up as well. All this to say they're absolutely ripped under all that fur. Healers, including the good doctor Shortclaw, shed their fur to maintain hygiene, revealing their swole physique to the world. Grayish-black skin covered her paws and muzzle, becoming ruddy over the rest of her body. I caught a flash of saturated blue as she slid a pair of bandpass membranes over her eyes, scrutinizing my form under light far outside the human visible range.
Another rumbling burble emanated from my gut, causing her large hearthsider ears to perk up. «Fascinating,» she yipped, pulling a notepad from a band around her foreleg.
«Look, I really have to use the restroom,» I explained.
«Even better!» she barked. She flicked her writing claw a few times and began jotting down some notes. «Do you mind if I observe? I was fascinated by the human digestive system while studying your medical cadavers. I’m anxious to see how it operates live.»
“YES I MIND!” I burst out in English, causing her to flinch. «Sorry,» I synthesized, «If you want samples, I’ll give you samples, but I didn’t sign up to be stared at while I poop.»
«I see,» she mused. «That might be a problem.» She crossed the threshold separating the sink area from the rest of the bathroom. Motion-activated lights banished the darkness. For the first time I beheld a yinrih toilet, and I did not like what I saw.
For starters, I was very wrong about it being a private bathroom. Four stalls lined the left wall, though calling them “stalls” was exceedingly generous. They were mere partitions extending up from the floor, not even tall enough to obscure a yinrih’s head. None of them had doors, either. The toilets themselves were simple holes in the floor. What might have been toilet paper dispensers hung above each latrine, positioned to be manipulated by the tail. Most of the floor was lined with more of that mismatched tile, but the area immediately surrounding the latrine itself was coated in a uniform rough texture to tell the user backing into the stall not to plant a rear paw in the hole. There was a noticeable grade to the floor of each stall sloping backward into the toilet, which I assumed was to guide any errant excreta to its proper destination. Sitting in the far corner of the room was a standard yinrih perch, positioned so the user faced the stalls.
«Our bathrooms probably aren’t what you’re used to on Earth,» she said apologetically. «We’re inclined to be chatty while doing our business. We feel vulnerable while eliminating waste, and feel more comfortable when there are other group members watching out for us.
«This is a learning experience for both of us. My partners and I want to make this a human-friendly clinic, and any input you can give will help us make this place comfortable for both species. It sounds like humans need privacy when using the washroom, is that right?»
«Yes, doctor.» I nodded vigorously for emphasis.
«I see, I see,» she whined softly to herself, writing down more notes. «We’re planning to make major renovations to accommodate your height.» She craned her neck upward to look at my head tilted forward to avoid hitting the ceiling. «I’m sure we can install species-appropriate facilities as well.»
I shifted uncomfortably on my feet, which Shortclaw noticed immediately. «But I suppose that’s not going to help you right now, is it? How’s this, I’ll stand outside the door and make sure nobody else comes in. Take as long as you need. Oh, and no need to worry about any samples.»
«Could you?» I answered. «Thank you very much.»
She turned and walked toward the doorway, but stopped at the cabinet on the wall. She took out a case from which she retrieved what looked like a PEZ dispenser. She waddled back to me on her hind feet and held it out toward me, motioning for me to hold out my palm. She pressed a button on top of the device and a silvery gray pill the size of a grain of rice dropped into my hand.
«If you'd be so kind as to swallow this for me. It's for some images I'll be taking.» I did as she asked, then she turned to leave, brushing the curtain aside with her snout. I waited for her long sinewy tail to slither out of sight, then turned to face my destiny.
I took a deep breath. Credit where credit is due, the place was immaculate. Everything from the grout between the tiles to the walls to the floors inside the stalls looked clean enough to eat from, and this room smelled by far the least canine. “OK, you can do this,” I told myself. “You were in the Boy Scouts, you know how to use a latrine, and you don’t even have to bury it this time.”
I entered the furthest stall from the doorway, undid my belt, squatted down, and prepared to restock the pond with corn-speckled brown trout. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. My colon had gone from Mt. St. Hellen to a space station airlock. “No big deal. I just need to relax.”
I let my mind wander as I surveyed my surroundings. There was another icon hanging near the entrance to the toilets, positioned to be visible from the stalls. The saint himself was all white save for a bloody maroon stain on his abdomen. He was reared up on his hind feet, an upturned drinking bowl under his right rear paw, reaching with his foreleg to pull a pup out of what looked like a pond of green sludge. Behind the saint’s head was the gilded arch which served as the Claravian answer to the halo.
I heard Dr. Shortclaw politely ward away one of her conspecifics. «Sorry, our human volunteer is in there.»
«Are you sure he’s OK in there by himself?» asked the interloper.
«He’s got Saint Clearwater looking after him.»
«Fair enough.» The click-clack of his claws had just faded away only to be followed by the sound of four more paws skittering toward the bathroom from the other end of the hall.
«OUT OF MY WAY!» barked an unfamiliar voice. To my horror, the curtain was thrust aside and a scrawny sandy-furred fellow burst into the bathroom. His momentum was checked only briefly as the good doctor’s paw grasped futilely at the tip of his tail, relieving it of a few hairs.
«STOP! There’s a--» Shortclaw barked, but the intruder had already vaulted over the threshold between the sink and the toilets in a stunning display of agility.
«MY TEETH ARE SWIMMING!» he shot back. He took up residence in the stall next to mine, laid his tail across his back, and started putting out a fire. After heaving a contented huff, he turned and became aware of my presence.
«Oh, a human!» He tapped the partition between us with a claw. «My name’s Coolsand. I’m a junior administrator here at the clinic. I think you saw my boss back in the waiting room.»
I suddenly became very interested in that icon hanging on the wall.
«Ah, that’s old Saint Clearwater. They say he watches out for folks who have to use the bathroom alone. Well, that’s what my sires told me growing up, anyway.»
I moved my gaze to the perch in the corner, staring at it as though it held the secrets of the universe, desperately willing my colon to finish the job. Coolsand did not interpret my silence the way I had hoped, and launched into a monologue.
«It’s kind of funny, how Saint Clearwater got associated with bathrooms. We don’t know much about his puppyhood, though I’d wager it wasn’t a happy one, given that the first records we have that mention him are police reports involving bar brawls and public drunkenness. He was an alcoholic, you see, that’s what the drinking bowl in the picture symbolizes.»
«Anyway, he eventually found himself in front of a judge. He was ordered to attend a recovery program hosted at a nearby lighthouse. By all accounts he put his whole gut into it, and seemed to be making progress, but eventually relapsed.
«This cycle would continue, where he’d try to get sober, fail, wander off, then show up at the lighthouse a few decades later seeking absolution. Since he wasn’t getting any better, the hearthkeeper eventually kicked him out altogether, assuming he wasn’t putting in the effort.
«He ended up homeless living in a local park, begging for food and getting his fix from the wild wind fruit bushes that grew in the area. This park became notorious, not just for hosting a perpetually liquored up bum, but also for stinking of raw sewage. Turns out that a sewer main had burst, filling an underground pond with, well--» he slapped the textured edge of the latrine with a rear paw.
«Anyway, one day, a bunch of pups were playing in this park. Some stories say they were a litter, others say it was a school on a field trip, and others say the pups were just local kids. Out of nowhere, this sinkhole opens up, and all the pups just fall into this massive lake of--» he slapped the latrine again.
«Now there were a ton of grownups around. These pups’ childermoot, their teachers, or whoever, but every account says that a bunch of bystanders saw this happen and just stared. They usually get painted as the villains, but you know, I’m not sure what I’d do if I were standing on their paw prints. They always tell you not to dive in after a drowning person, especially when you’re not trained for it, since they’ll pull you down with them and two people will end up dead instead of just one. And, besides--» for a third time the claws of his rear paw clicked against the side of the latrine.
«Anyway, out of nowhere, Clearwater, who’s stinking drunk mind you, runs up and starts pulling the pups out of the hole. He manages to get most of them, but there are still two struggling toward the middle. He dives in after them. Well, the pups are still panicking, so they push him under while trying to climb out. The kids are able to get out, but Clearwater ends up drowning.
«So this naturally makes the news, and Clearwater is hailed as a local hero. The hearthkeeper that kicked him out of the rehab program realizes that he genuinely tried to sober up, but just couldn’t do it. He did keep coming back, after all, and he did seem to try his best, but--»
«He kept falling off the wagon,» I interjected.
Coolsand executed a quizzical head tilt.
«Sorry, it’s a Terran expression.» I repeated the phrase in English and then again in Hearthsider.
«Well,» Coolsand continued, «That hearthkeeper has a change of heart and starts advocating for his canonization. And not just regular canonization, but she wants him declared a martyr. That’s what that blood stain on his belly means.
«So even though it’s a bit controversial calling him a martyr, since he didn’t die while trying to fulfill the Great Commandment, he gets the title anyway. He’s got quite the portfolio, as you can imagine. I suppose it’s pretty obvious, his connection with restrooms, if a little morbid. But you also see little statues of him in bars, as he’s said to help drunk people get sober.»
Coolsand’s hagiography finished, I quickly cleaned myself up and redid my belt, but he insisted on continuing the conversation.
«I’m really into human stuff, and so is Calmwind. We both know English. He’s the one who made that poster in the entry room. If I knew you’d be here I’d have brought my synth so I could practice. I really want to visit Earth some time.»
I walked out of the stall and made a move toward the washing pool. Coolsand quickly finished up and followed. A few seconds after we had vacated the stalls, there was a whirring noise, then a cascade of water smelling mildly of bleach rushed out of a grate spanning the entrance to the previously occupied stalls and rushed down the slope and into the latrine, simultaneously flushing it and sanitizing the floor.
“Well,” I said in English as I squatted in front of the washing pool scrubbing my hands, “Nice meeting you, Coolsand. But let me give you some pointers on men’s room etiquette whenever you visit Earth. Not sure how you’ll negotiate our toilets; I’m sure you’ll figure it out. But whatever you do, remember these words: shut up and stare straight ahead.”
«Wait, humans don’t chat in the restroom?» I could almost feel him blushing behind his khaki fur. «Did I offend you? I’m sorry if I did, It’s just--»
“No, no we do not.”
«So that’s why the old bald-back was guarding the door.»
“Yes… Look, it was nice meeting you, really, don’t sweat it—uh pant it—I mean don’t worry about it. I think these little psychological quirks that we don’t share stick out only because we have so much else in common.”
«I guess that’s what the Great Commandment means by ‘bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh’.»
“Just look out for that doctor next time. By the way, my name’s Greg.” I attempted the yinrih’s traditional greeting, patting myself on the abdomen twice with the left palm, then turned to leave.
Dr. Shortclaw was still standing outside. She looked up at me sheepishly.
«Sorry about that,» she said. «Like I said, we’re talkative in there. That’s why that perch is in the corner.»
«I hope you’re a better doctor than a bouncer,» I said as we walked down the hall to the exam room. :::
::: spoiler The Spacer Confederacy "And you're the interim chief?" asked the federal councilman, his voice echoing throughout the cavernous main axis of the newly constructed colony.
"That's correct." said Graypelt.
"Gentlemen, my dame," the councilman addressed the pair of envoys from the Allied Worlds along with the hearthkeeper floating by their side. "Would you allow Graypelt and I a moment alone?" He moved toward the docking port where a shuttle was stationed, beckoning Graypelt to follow.
Graypelt started as the inside airlock door shut behind him. The federal councilman had floated across the threshold of the airlock separating the colony's hull from his docked shuttle craft.
"Why did you shut--" Graypelt began, but the councilman raised a paw to silence him.
"I hear Wayfarers' Haven is sponsoring an interstellar missionary journey once you get settled."
Graypelt's ears perked up. "Yeah. It's a huge part of our cultural--"
"When will you hearth-lickers give it up already?"
Graypelt's ears wilted. "I'm sorry?"
"The Partisans are right about one thing, at least. The skies really are empty, we really are alone. Face it, your pathetic attempts to find 'fwiendship' among the stars is a fool's errand. And if there really is any kind of supreme being, it doesn't care about you or me or any of your hypothetical starfolk any more than you care about a particular carbon atom at the end of your snout."
Graypelt reached for the lever to open the inner airlock door. "If you're just going to belittle everything I stand for--"
"Two things, actually," said the councilman as graypelt's paw hovered over the lever. "Partisan Territory makes better Outlander stew."
Graypelt wheeled around. "Now you listen here you pile of crap wrapped in fur, you don't put cream in--"
The councilman raised his paw again. "Good, good," he geckered. "Let the hate flow through you. Rule zero of the Spacer Confederacy: everybody hates everybody else, so get used to it.
"What did the envoys from the Allied Worlds tell you about how we do things here?"
Graypelt took a moment to calm down. After heaving a sigh, "The laws are few, but the penalty for transgressing them is severe."
"So far, so good. And what are those laws?"
Graypelt thought for a moment, then began ticking off items on his claws. "Each colony gets one perch on the federal council. The council is responsible for assigning asteroids for colonies to mine. The council levies a tax of twelve per gross on all revenue earned through the sail of the minerals. Colonies may only mine the body they have been assigned. There's a six year mandatory conscription into the federal police for all eligible males upon reaching the age of majority. Any interaction between colonies within the Confederacy must be mediated by the council."
The councilman tilted his muzzle up in affirmation. "Now let me tell you what those greasy-pelted stooges from the AW won't. We get all sorts of kooks coming here to the Inner Belt looking to set up half baked social experiments or off the wall cults."
"We're not--" Graypelt objected, but the councilman raised his paw again and resumed his lecture.
"Everyone comes here for their own reasons. We have about as many world views, ideologies, belief systems, conceptual frameworks, religions, whatever you want to call them, as there are colonies in the Confederacy. But there's one thing we all value. What do you suppose that is?"
"Uh--" Graypelt began, but the councilman cut him off again.
"Freedom!" he barked. "You want to start a gel head parlor? Go ahead. You want to run a tree-dweller baiting ring? Be my guest. Wanna start making mind candy?" He flicked his left ear back, leaned forward, and whispered, "I'll even give you the name of a supplier."
He slapped the inner hull of the colony with a rear paw. "Whatever you do inside these walls is your own business. For all we care you could've killed me for my little comment about Outlander stew. But if you so much as stick a whisker outside with whatever nonsense you get up to, then that becomes our problem." He tossed his muzzle back toward the federal shuttle behind him. "And you do not want the federal police paying you a visit."
"Is that a threat?" Graypelt stammered.
"A warning." The councilman leaned forward, running a claw across a scar on his muzzle.
"I thought this was--" Graypelt once again failed to get a word in edgewise.
"Anarchy? A free for all? A libertarian paradise? Everyone always assumes the Inner Belt is a lawless frontier where they can get away with anything, and you know what? Your roof, your rules, but out there, outside these walls, you're under OUR roof. If you mind your own business, keep your nose prints off of other peoples' windows, you'll be fine. But if you mess around, you will find out.
"Do you think we keep this confederacy together with a bunch of ink on paper?" The councilman made a show of examining the iron-red claws on his left forepaw. "Within a three-day ferry trip from here there are a bunch of Misotheists who would kill every last one of you hearth lickers, pups and all, if they thought they could get away with it. The only reason they won't is that they know exactly what will happen to them if they even try." He pantomimed an explosion with his forepaws.
"You folks wanted freedom, and you've got it, but freedom isn't free."
The councilman pulled the release for the interior airlock door with his tail. He began floating into his shuttle, adopting a cheerful tone for his parting words. "On behalf of the Federal Council, I'd like to welcome you and the citizens of Wayferers' Haven to the Spacer Confederacy." :::
I won't take credit for this idea. It was posted on r/worldbuilding but was nuked by the mods for "asking for content", as usual only after lots of interesting discussion. Anyway...
Unbeatable aliens show up and blow up half the moon as a show of strength. They say that they'll be back in six months to annihilate the Earth. For the next six months humanity lives in the shadow of their inevitable destruction, with all that mindset entails.
Then when the time finally comes, nothing. No earth shattering kaboom, no heroic last stand, the aliens just never show. What happens next? How do you rebuild?
It's like your boss coming to you on 4:45 on Friday afternoon and telling you in a super serious tone "I need you in my office first thing Monday morning." and then completely forgetting about it on Monday.
The large orange structure is a Flanar balloon. The ring and cabling hanging from the underside are part of the extraction rig mining gases deeper in the atmosphere. The weight of the extraction infrastructure helps keep the city stable.
Though the city is open to the air, the individual buildings must be airtight. The gases deeper down are poisonous. Cyclonic storms sometimes cause them to upwell into the layer of breathable air where the cities float, and residents must shelter inside until the storm passes.
Because Welkinstead is a hot Neptune at the same orbital distance as Yih, the cities enjoy the same amount of sunlight that the homeworld receives.
Part of the reason the Allied Worlds is so successful is the arrangement of the planets with respect to one another.
Welkinstead is a hot Neptune. Yih and Newhome are Welkinstead trojans. Sweetwater is at the 3rd Lagrange point of the Focus-Welkinstead system.
The planets of the alliance are at fixed distances from one another, making logistics easier. They're also a celestial extension of a "wide" empire. The theory goes that empires that are "wide", bigger from east to west compared to north to south, are more stable because they consist of a similar range of climates, resulting in similar cultures that are easier to keep together. "Tall" empires, that are bigger north to south, span a wider range of climates, have a less cohesive range of cultures, and are harder to keep together.
Similarly, the four planets in the alliance are all the same distance from Focus, receive the same amount of sunlight, and have the same year length. The two non life-bearing terrestrial planets, Newhome and Sweetwater, can be terraformed using similar techniques.
Mermaid.live doesn't let you download your diagrams without making an account, so I just NFT'ed it.
Here's an update to the YAP frame format. Ansible links are extremely low-bandwidth. No quantitative data rate yet, but let's just say you're limited to text if you want real time communication.
If two ansibles are to communicate, they must have wafers shaved from the same crystal of tailstone, and any ansible with a wafer sourced from the same crystal can listen in. Encryption is handled out of band, with a one time pad shared between the operators of the endpoints before turning the ansible on for the first time. The OTP is used to exchange a symmetric key used to encrypt future frames.
After turning on and establishing a secure connection, other negotiations take place, including frame length and time slot. YAP uses Time division multiple access, so the sender can be known from the time slot when a frame is received. I'd expect a K2 civilization to have sufficiently accurate clocks.
ARF (Aggregation and Reassembly of Frames) handles things like bundling links together for more bandwidth as well as allowing simultaneous transmitting and receiving (full duplex). If you want full duplex, both ansibles need two wafers, one for receive and the other for transmit, and the ARF tag helps keep track of that. It also aids in resuming a communication from an interruption. Data transfers can take a long time, on the order of days to weeks for large files like fabricator schematics, so you want the link to be failure tolerant.
The biggest chunk of the header is the handoff tag. This tells the ansible what the higher layer protocol is. Monkey foxes have been computing for 95 thousand years by the time of first contact, so they have a lot of layer 3 protocols, though YIP (Yinrih Internetworking Protocol) v1 and v3 account for most of the traffic prior to first contact, with Terran IP traffic finding a place afterward.
Last comes a checksum. It's physically impossible for data to be corrupted while traversing the Underlay, but the electronics used to sense the Science™️ going on with the wafer can misread things. There's a persistent superstition that the Underlay is actually Hell, and that the yinrih have been routing their FTL comms through the realm of the damned. Garbled packets are said to be the work of damned shades desperately seeking sensation of any kind. The Bright Way (who incidentally discovered tailstone and the Underlay and originally built out the star system's interplanetary telecom infrastructure) vehemently refuses to discuss the matter and strongly discourages the faithful from bringing the topic up.
Hopefully it's still legible.
