altorenn

[altorenn]

Time and Life

Work with time long enough and you’re bound to notice funny things. Nothing ever leaves the system; it just gets overwritten. When something never existed, it’s because something else took its place. But there’s always fragments left over, ways you can tell something’s gone different.

Everyone always thinks of wigglers as just young things. They really don’t take long to raise up and ship off to a lusus. But any auxiliatrix will tell you they can’t move between stages without help - eggs don’t hatch, wigglers don’t cocoon, kids don’t pupate. If you left a cave for a decade with enough food inside, you’d come back and find those stupid little things exactly how you left them, no matter what. And it turns out when a wiggler gets lost in the Timehole, no one’s in there pushing them to grow up. So every once in a while, you’ll pull something out and just… know that it’s old.

And it’s kind of a funny thing, how it all plays together. You’d be going about your work and notice over the months something’s wrong. You’re doing your thing, same as normal, but you go to trade your brood at the Timehole and half the wigglers you pull out, you’ve seen before. You saw them a week ago. You saw them with someone else just yesterday. That stinky little face is burned into your mind forever, you’d know those horns in any context. It’s just the same kids again and again, twenty options or something like that, until maybe one day you’re just pulling your own trash and these same little guys again and again. But then all of a sudden, you grab someone new and they’re older than sin.

Did they get lost in the arteries of time for the year or so you’re sure they’ve been alive? Or did the whole trip pass in an instant, and they’d been hatched and abandoned that whole time? The wigglers never seem to know or care. I haven’t heard anyone published a book or a talk or whatever about their infant experience, because something about pupation scrambles your wigglerhood memories. So where do these ancient wigglers come from? Who’s unearthing them after so much time, then passing them on for anyone else to deal with?

I had one friend, always thinking about time ticking along under our feet, who thought these wigglers came from timelines that gave up on existing. The little ones, the variations that stretched out until they just didn’t matter anymore. But time never just ends. It feeds back into itself, and you can find it woven in if you just look hard enough. I don’t think that friend was all right all the time, but she sure had a point even when the details were wrong.

Not that it matters to me. Old babies grow up just fine and make just as much money on pupation. I don’t think anyone that doesn’t work in the brooding caverns even knows this stuff exists. I didn’t get rich teaching civilians after a lusus got to them, and I’m not about to start now. But it does make you wonder what it takes for something like this to happen in the first place.

[altorenn]

In the Future

Thousands of sweeps into the future, a seadweller with pierced fins steps into the brooding caverns to begin work. Rhivar Kondez knows, or strongly assumes, they were sent through the planet’s mysterious Timehole as a grub - if they cannot return to the time they were supposed to live in, as no adult has ever passed through the hole, they still have a goal: flush as many of the planet’s limited grubs down the hole as possible. If they’re unlucky, the grubs will simply be sent to a happier time and place, able to live somewhere other than a depopulated rock. But if they are lucky, they will be able to stop the future they now inhabit.

Rhivar finds almost no other Caretakers in the caverns, but the four they do know are just as miserable as them. They agree, together, to bend the rest of their efforts to the same goal: preventing the rise of the stifling Empress Kendri and the abandonment of Al Torenn. It’s not a goal any of them have much certainty about. But it’s an idea they can all agree on: that this empress has absolutely devastated their planet, and that she is at fault for the final exodus of the local population.

At one point, the Fuschia of the group would have challenged the current empress for power and restored the planet to order through direct politics. But the empress had made herself thoroughly inaccessible, and Trelyn was still recovering from her recent paralysis - even if she had made her way to the empress’s fortress, the fight would have been a gruesome joke. So they gambled together, the five of them, hoping against hope that somewhere in the past, something would change and their lives would never need to have happened in the first place.

There is no guarantee. But Rhivar refuses not to try. It’s all they have left to work with.

[altorenn]

Reproduction

Trollian reproduction has always been an unusually convoluted and indirect process; genetic material is regularly offered to a small, central collection of Mother Grubs, and genetic strength is a factor of the relationships between specific trolls, rather than something innate. Across much of the fragmented Empire, this unintuitive process was still reasonable, but Al Torenn - a cultural, social, and economic backwater - has struggled to achieve the replacement rate, particularly as its citizens flee to more promising planets. And so the residents have adapted to an unusual, single-parent reproductive model.

Genetics has always been an art form more than a science, but under this single-parent system it is especially curious. All the genetic offerings of the planetary are brought to the Mother Grubs together, and yet they refuse to mix with one another unless the parent trolls gave their offerings together. This produces an unusually smooth trace of lineage - and yet the grubs born from this process are shown no ancestors, even when they are the spitting image of a living genetic parent. These children are remarkably symmetrical compared to standard descendant trolls, and this has become the new beauty standard of the planet, even in the modern day of mutant acceptance, which many expected to destabilize this particular cultural cornerstone.

[altorenn]

Kaylin Fengor: Maid of Light. A middle-aged Gold financial analyst contracted through Al Torenn’s planetary government to keep on-planet businesses going as long as possible. Refuses to elaborate on her methods for success; too successful to pressure. Tracks every business she’s ever helped. Seems not to have a life outside of work. The cozy sweater is a disguise.

[altorenn]

The Nature of Time

You know, it's interesting. Everyone has some concept of how time works, as one of the fundamental things that makes the universe keep running, but they always find something to forget in the process. So whatever shape they use to think about how time looks, it doesn't really work.

Take the classic example, trees. One big, stable trunk of the past splitting off into branches in every direction, which get their own branches, different choices leading to different places. Except time doesn't just stop when you reach an end point somewhere - there are no end points. No final moment and then time is just done. It's always moving, always finding somewhere else to go, and if you thought it was gonna hit something else and stall out, boy, do I have news for you.

The best way I’ve figured out to think about it is like circulation. There’s this organ, somewhere in the middle, that’s always pushing something forward, and then all through the universe there are paths time can take. It’s not all one neat loop - the veins split, different things going different ways, but they come back together later to get the blood back to the heart. It’s a closed system with limited inputs, but nothing ever leaves. It’s just cycling around and around until the heart stops moving and the body dies.

Of course, I made my living poking at time to make it work for me. Those Great Holes everyone’s been celebrating - they’re the open valves of time. The auxiliatrices get it; we just call ours the Timehole and move on, because that’s what it is. An open hole into time itself. Put a kid in, get a different kid out. If you’re lucky, the Empress lets you just go fishing for spare kids or chuck extras in without taking any out. But you can find some special possibilities if you know what to look for - kids that come out of the hole over and over and over again, no matter how many times you swear you’ve raised that one. Things that look like fixed points, some kind of constant that will come into the universe no matter how you feel about it; it’s just a question of when.

But everyone has an idea on how time works. I think everyone else’s ideas are incomplete - maybe mine is too. But I think I’m a couple steps ahead of everyone else here. Just like I always was at work. Always ahead of the curve.

[altorenn]

Bloodswaps

For most of its history, bloodswaps were not only highly illegal on Al Torenn, they were highly unethical and highly unsafe. Most wigglers subjected to the practice never made it back off the laboratory table, and those who did often suffered lifelong complications that often saw them culled for being mutants - artificial nature notwithstanding. However, since the opening of the Great Holes across the former empire, the practice has become steadily more common and accordingly more permissible.

This is due to the strange attachment of small, stuffed tokens to certain wigglers on exiting the Great Holes - tokens no one ever puts in, suggesting some force within these places intentionally provides them. These tokens have given rise to one of the oddest schemes in local history: caretakers making bulk purchases of undesirable eggs and providing them with the tokens, then leaving and returning to find each of their wigglers seamlessly transformed into a new caste. Fascinatingly, every recorded instance of these tokens creating a mutant has produced the same shade of bright red blood.

The local governor, Gordal Kemros, does not approve this practice; his public opinion is that it advocates the destabilization of the hemospectrum caste pyramid all of trollian society depends on, encouraging the purchase of lowbloods and penalized royals only to deny them their rightful purpose and twist them into roles they should never have occupied. He also regularly points to statistics showing a correlation between the appearance of the planet’s Great Hole and the sharp rise in mid- and highblood pupations months later, with a corresponding (yet smaller) decrease in lowblood populations.

This has, however, afforded an unusual opportunity for the planet’s mutants: as they have no set place in the caste system, they are encouraged to make up the shortfall of lowblooded laborers, slotting into jobs wherever their talents are best suited. The governor does not approve this practice either, but given the Empress’s policies of mutant acceptance, he does recognize a need to put them to use doing something. And it does solve one of his thornier political problems - one that, given current upwards trends in the use of bloodswap tokens, seems to be going nowhere on its own.

[altorenn]

Omelas Telvin: Mage of Void. A young mutant struggling to find work on Al Torenn, despite having plenty of mechanical talent. Does not stand up for himself unless he’s in immediate danger. Sometimes wishes he’d been born with normal blue blood instead of this crushed-berry variant. Trying not to question too many systems at once. Knows he’ll never get off this planet. Good friends with Aratek Lazere.

[altorenn]

Severe Mutants

It’s strange, working with the Severe Mutants. Their skin feels thick and waxy, and if you press down too hard you leave a dent for a bit, until their blood evens it back out. Their heads are almost perfectly round, or an offset gourdy oval, or wide and pointed. They often have no faces, just a smooth round surface; or else they have only one eye, or their eyes are different shapes and sizes, or there are no eyes but one wide, toothy mouth. They have no legs as wigglers, only a thick, wide, sap-sticky body with two flipper-like undeveloped arms, and so often the shuttles will find two or three that are identical in every way except the color of their mismatched, monocolor horns.

Aratek loves working with Severe Mutants. She loves the blue ones that no one’s ever seen except straight off the shuttles from the Distant Forest, and she loves the dark gray ones that have had cousins on Al Torenn for decades now. The blue ones learn to speak so much faster than normal trolls, raising their flappy little arms and babbling excitedly any time she comes near, and the darker ones scoot their way over to follow her no matter where she moves, sticking to her legs and feet whenever they can. She loves them, and they love her too. No one else loves these strange little wigglers quite as much as she does.

It always feels so lucky that Aratek has an Empress who encourages raising and educating mutants, including these ones. Not many in the brooding caverns will take them in, wanting to stick to normal, proper trolls as much as they can; so the Empress has made exceptions for those caretakers willing to embrace her vision, lifting headcount limitations on those who come to take Severe Mutants off the shuttles and raise them. No other Empress in the confederation’s history has let caretakers raise more than twelve trolls at a time, but Aratek has raised twelve, sixteen, twenty of these all at once, and she’ll do it again with a skip in her step. It’s hard work, but with a skip in her step and a song to help them grow, she can always seem to manage.

It’s easier with the darker ones. One or two toys and they all pile onto one another, bonking heads and smacking arms, running over each other’s tails. Aratek wonders if this is how some of the older caretakers raised their more standard cousins, when they whip each other into an energetic frenzy. Sometimes they start arguing, pushing each other over and away from the toys, and she has to start taking them out of the playpen to take a nap. But they always turn out just right in the end. The blue ones take more toys, more songs, more inquisitive nibbles at her fingers as they try to figure out how a big body works. They’re always so surprised when she spreads her fingers apart and wiggles them one by one, and they always try to do it themselves - they look so silly trying to split their little flippers, and Aratek sometimes laughs when they just keep trying to make it work. But sometimes they get sad or upset, and she has to sit on the floor and hold them for a little while and promise they’ll grow up to have big hands one day with fingers they can wiggle all they want. They’re trusting, so very trusting, and she loves them all the more for it.

Getting them into a cocoon is usually a battle, though. The silk scares them, and much of the time the blue ones try to run away. Aratek will promise them over and over that she’ll be there to help them get out when it’s time, and she holds the ones that cry until they’re ready to be brave. The darker ones are usually easier, but when one of them decides they don’t want to grow up yet they hiss and flail and run away as long as they can. Aratek waits until they’re sleeping, sometimes, if she can’t convince them it’ll be okay. Those ones are usually grumpy when they finish pulling their way out, but they can’t really be mad at her even then. They love her, after all, and they know it’s important for kids to grow up and make a difference in the world.

Aratek never has to look very far to find a lusus for any of her children. A lot of the time, some are waiting outside the caverns when she brings everyone up, like they’ve been waiting to find the right young troll to take care of. She doesn’t know how the lusii always know when it’s time, but she doesn’t think it really matters all that much. Her kids are in capable hands, and she can always count on them to be there for her and her kids. And it makes it so much easier to find the next shuttle for another group of wigglers, however many she can bring back home. There’s always more than she can take, but that’s fine. She’s not the only caretaker working here. Al Torenn has many good caretakers, enough to fuel their great export of paragon trolls. She just loves these little guys the most out of all of them.

[altorenn]

Aratek Lazere

Sylph of Life. One of the new generation of caretakers, grappling with the standards her predecessors set down - and the consequences of their methods. Patient but with endless quiet energy, Aratek specializes in raising Severe Mutants with love and careful attention, doing her best to give them a place in the ruins of the Alternian Empire.

[altorenn]

Corruption: the process of one thing becoming like another.

Much has changed since the Great Holes began appearing. The ancient Alternian Empire has fallen, with individual planets gathering into loose, mistrustful confederations, each ruled by its own personal Empress. Unity across the species is preserved only by time itself, as those born on one planet are distributed across others to be raised and developed. Small-scale wars between confederations are ever more frequent, with none able to exert power over their neighbors for longer than a few years.

The planet of Al Torenn is a small backwater often disregarded by its confederation, its primary export being people - young, capable adults seeking environments more suited to their strong abilities. Most often these trolls are of mid to high blood castes, with the less-regarded lower castes easily finding rewarding work on their home planet, forming one of the finest brute labor forces to be found. The planet has a strong culture of playing one’s assigned role to a tee, led primarily by its enduring Purple governor, Gordal Kemros. The local seadwelling population categorically refuse to challenge his authority on the subject, aside from their own frequent deviations, leaving the landdwellers locked into ever more specified paths of life assigned at pupation. Most find themselves content with their given work. Some, historically, have tried to challenge this system, insisting they had talents better suited to abnormal tasks. The notable few have succeeded. This has rarely provided comfort to anyone.

In modern times, after some decades of life lived around the planet’s Great Hole, excellence remains the standard. Auxiliatrices have become ever more scrutinized, as the only field of work with any engagement with the great red pit, but attempts to regulate the actions of caretakers have been ever more opposed by the local Empress. She welcomes change and mutation, enforcing a policy by which her subjects are meant to learn from those traditionally not included in troll society, encouraging her population to grow and diversify even as the newly grown leave for more suitable locations. After all, these citizens are considered some of the finest in the once-Empire, given suitable circumstances. Whatever processes have enabled such consistent excellence surely deserve to be maintained, whatever incidental costs may be incurred along the way. Time itself is surely in their favor, and would not lead them astray.

The Distant Forest is an even more recent addition to Al Torenn’s history, an otherworldly pseudo-planet drifting through its star system, seeming almost allergic to the pull of gravity. Increasingly severe mutations form across its surface, some bearing resemblance to the dark-skinned paragons of the last few decades, others new and even stranger, often appearing without faces or visible sensory organs of any kind. Many Empresses rail against the grubs found there, issuing orders to cull them on sight, but some are gracious enough to extend them welcome in light of recent mutant contributions. Al Torenn in particular is a haven for these mutants, regularly sending shuttles to collect them in batches for delivery to the brooding caverns. Talent must not be wasted in uncertain times, after all.