#Kepekape

[fenmere]

Kepekape, the home world of the Ktletaccete

(this was originally posted in a world building facebook group, but we think you might love reading about it here, too - and have feedback) OK, so. We're working on some world building that's a bit of a challenge for us.

It needs to fit some history we've already written into a series of nine novels. And it needs to serve the story we think we want to write.

We're going to ramble at you here and see if anyone likes our ideas, or has any suggestions or brainstorming to add. But also, we just want a place to write some of this down where someone can read it.

What we've got:

A fairly Earth-like world with life based on two kinds of XNA (it's not compatible with DNA, but works similarly to it). At some point in its past, there was alien contact with life that eventually evolved to be reasonably compatible with the indigenous life. So there are some surprising mixes of lifeforms.

There's been a lot of parallel evolution, so if humans were to visit, they'd see some understandable fundamentals, like vertebrates, arthropods, fish, etc.

The people are evolved from an amphibian-like ambush predator turned omnivorous. They still lay eggs and have a larval form (that looks a lot like a tadpole while still in the egg), and nymph form and adult forms after they hatch. When they reach adolescence, they go through a metamorphosis that is highly adaptable for their environment. To the point where they often look like multiple completely different species as adults.

Now that they've developed a civilization capable of creating a generational starship, their adolescent metamorphosis has become something they can sort of personally control, and neighboring children may grow up to be very different from each other. Personal special interests, economic status, gender roles, family dynamics, and all sorts of other factors of modern stress go into shaping their bodies. And medicine has reached a point where those that can afford it can purposefully induce desired traits.

Also, they're what we think of as hermaphroditic. They can change their functional sex at will, or sometimes the change is induced by stress. Occasionally, someone will end up with one set of dominant sex traits at adolescence and never change after that, even if they want to, but it's rare.

Their family structures are really different from humans, too. But we haven't quite nailed down HOW, yet. We just know that they're not what we think of as nuclear families. Child rearing is very different and fairly hands off. Adults make sure children are fed, but teaching and learning happens much more organically and communally. At least, for most of the countries on the planet. There are, of course, some outlying cultures that have different structures.

Something we want is no capitalism, in the strictest sense of the term, if we can get away with it. Basically, nothing like a stock market.

There are still big social and economic divides, including forms of exploitation. There is, after all, a global government at this point that has the power to focus a great deal of the planet's resources into making a truly huge spaceship for SOME reason. And not everyone is going to agree to that.

So, first big set of questions:

Do we go with some form of communism for the dominant economic structure?

Or is it really a dichotomy like that?

Could there be other forms of major economy besides these two axes that humans have been struggling with for the past couple hundred years?

There are fascism and dictatorship, of course, both of which can use either communism or capitalism for their economic structures. And certainly, there have been that kind of government on this planet, and likely still are. But we kind of want the dominant government to at least SEEM more egalitarian.

These people tend to highly value personal expression and the exploration of skills and arts, almost above all else. It's sort of an instinctual level drive. So whatever social structures they create, they'll at least cater to that drive, if not outright exploit it.

Cooperation and community are obviously important. Partly because we're limited enough that we can't imagine a starship building civilization without it. But also because we LIKE those traits.

One idea that comes to mind is to have an economy that is built on gifting. Where the person who gives the most away gets the most social power. This is not an original thought, though, and is based on what we learned about Pacific Northwest Indigenous cultures in college, so we're feeling a little cautious about that (both because we learned it from anthropologists not the people who've practiced it and because it's not our own culture).

Our goal is to show something that is different and alien SEEMING to most people who've grown up under capitalism or communism, to show that other models can be viable. But we're also very definitely showing that even when you're talking about aliens and other models of social structures, there can be major flaws such as exploitation and oppression.

But, we don't want to say, "See this idea here? This is worse than what we've got now."

We do think the rest of the series of novels does put it into a context that avoids that. But we're hesitant to use a model that's too close to something that's been oppressed here on Earth.

Anyway.

Maybe we could personalize it a bit more? Not gifts, so much as discoveries? The more that someone discovers, the more political, social, and economic power they're awarded?

So, you end up with a whole civilization of people who are trying to one up each other in their respective fields of study and craft.

Now.

Does this society need money?

It could certainly work by using something that is basically money. A note of genius, so to speak. But could it work without it?

Because money does seem to lend itself to stock markets, after all. And if we avoid money, then we avoid the stock market. Maybe we can lampshade it and just say there's no money, that's the way it is, and make it work regardless.

Though, we could just as easily say that there's money but no stock market.

Maybe the idea of a stock market is absolutely repugnant to these people. Basically, "You can't gamble with SCIENCE! And investing introduces bias!"

Hailing Scales. This implies their global government resembles the editorial review board of a scientific journal.

What think you?

[fenmere]

Using blender to start sketching out the planet of Kepekape, so that we can better visualize the setting for Gesetele's Arrow. We positioned the cursor to be right where Hinbeg city is, where the story starts. The heroes are currently on a boat headed to one of the islands slightly north of there, to go camping. The region has a very similar climate to the Pacific Northwest. We haven't placed any rivers yet, but there is one that goes past the city, and has an outlet in the bay there.

[fenmere]

Kepekapean v.s. Ktletaccete (what are these things?)

We've described this before, but it feels good to rewrite it to try to see if we can make it more clear, or update what we've said in the past.

There are two realities here: factual, and our fictional canon.

Factual

The factual definitions of these words are really simple:

Kepekape is our body, our vessel, and a Kepekapean is someone who lives in our vessel.

Ktlettacete means "child of Eh and Jenifer" and describes those of us who are descended from our two eldest.

We have some members who are Kepekapeans but not Ktletaccete: Jenifer, Eh, Phage, and the Outsiders (12 in number). There might a few others who are relatively new, but we haven't met them yet.

And that's it. That's all the words mean in relationship to our system.

Though, us Ktletaccete, and our two parents, have some traits of identity that we've worked into our fictional canon to inspire it. We're shapeshifting autistic dragons, who tend to take a form that reflects our individual special interests. There's more to it than that, but that's for a different kind of post (an upcoming reblog of this one, perhaps?).

Fictional Canon

This goes for the Sunspot Chronicles, and their related series of books.

In this reality, Kepekape is the original home planet of the Ktletaccete. So, in this sense, Kepekapean is used to refer to denizens of that planet, and Ktletaccete is used to refer to both them and their descendants.

But, that's how the words are used by the time of the Sunspot. Prior to that, it was different. There've been so many cultures and civilizations that the uses of these word have been through multiple iterations of change.

Originally, Ktletaccete referred specifically to the children of Eh, the Great One who made the world out of their own body. And they were closer to gods than to any species of life. There were precisely 900,000 of them, and they spoke a language called Fenekere, that is still in use today as the command languages of the Exodus Ships, such as the Sunspot.

And the mortal people of Kepekape called themselves Kepakepo, or Kepekapeans. (Kapekapean is the English translation of Kepakepo). And the thing is, etymologically, Kepakepo refers to all things produced by the planet. But, by the time the first Exodus Ship was built, the language had changed more than enough that there were other words used to refer to life in general.

It's like humans calling themselves Earthlings, really. Because bugs, bears, octopi, whales, birds, trees, fungus, bacteria, and everything other organism of life on this planet are also Earthlings.

But, anyway, the people who were about to become space-faring, who called themselves Kepekapeans, were metamorphic descendants of the six limbed clades of vertibrates.

They hatched from eggs and raised in brood ponds as tadpoles by Brood Guardians, and when they hit metamorphosis (their version of puberty) they would take an adult form that was adapted to their own personal emotional, social, environmental, and behavioral needs.

Most of them had started dropping the third pair of limbs, being four limbed people. And each person would take a shape and form that could be classified by tail type, and given a pronoun accordingly, but that was otherwise extremely unique. Some had feathers, others scales, others hair, and others none of these things but a thick protective mucus membrane. Many had a mix of these traits. Some retained their gills, while others didn't. Configurations of horns varied. Some developed wings and could fly. Others kept fins or developed flippers, and stayed in the water. Most walked on land.

And if a human were to look at any one of them, that human would think they are seeing an amphibian dragon.

Meanwhile, their Ktletaccete deities lived in their collective psyches, and their information network, sometimes manifesting as an incarnation in one body or another in order to shape the direction of civilization and cultivate live.

The Ktletaccete were divided into two camps: those who wished to explore the rest of the universe, and those who wished to focus on the health and safety of life on Kepekape. Sometimes they fought, and there were wars, and the Kepekapeans weren't entirely aware of why.

But eventually, right about when the first Exodus Ship was nearing completion, the Ktletaccete came to an agreement with each other, and with a group of Beshakete (Outsiders) who'd taken refuge on the planet, and with the Kepekapeans, and they formed the Great Alliance.

Which they called the ʔinmara ( @theinmara ).

Some forgotten number of Exodus Ships later, the Sunspot would start to recover some of this history thanks to the memories of Mau (or Phage, @ohthatphage), and start writing books about it. But, when they relearned who they were, they started applying the words a little differently, because they didn't have all the information at first.

From this historic perspective, the denizens of the Sunspot can be called Sunspotians, or ʔetekeyerrinwufni. Though, they've taken to calling themselves Ktletaccete, and have no clue that their former deities still exist and walk amongst them (this may never be revealed in the books).

The reason that the Evolutionary Engines of the Sunspot are so successful at producing such a wide diversity of the populace (who are grown from incubators, and undergo metamorphosis before hatching from their eggs) is that it's based on the original genetics and epigenetics of their Kepekapean ancestors, who were already evolved to be highly adaptable in that way.

Eventually, the Sunspot made contact with Earth through use of the Tunnel Apparatus and a probe placed on the planet 22 million years ago by an ancestor ship that was passing by, and this is why you are reading about it now.

[fenmere]

Näofregbi and Binwen of our WIP Gesetele's Arrow.

They hatched in adjoining brooding ponds around the same time, and became friends before either of them could talk, before their adolescent metamorphosis. Both of them are Kepekapeans (Ktletaccete from their home planet, Kepekape).

During metamorphosis, Kepekapeans take on dramatically different physiological traits in reaction to childhood stimuli from their parents, peers, environment, pathogens, favorite foods, and personal interests. This frequently makes it look like they're from different species, but they're not.

Näofregbi is a loner, a natural recluse, which is common enough that most Kepekapean cultures accept them as they are. Gem lives on gems own tiny plot of land with a wild garden of trees and hedges surrounding a pond and a workshed. Gems Art is pottery.

Binwen hasn't found nem's Art yet, and so dabbles in everything.

Binwen is not a loner, and like most other Kepekapeans prefers to be in the company of at least two or more people. However, nems six arms set nem enough apart from everyone else that nem frequently feels alienated. Fortunately, nem is best friends with Näofregbi, who seems reasonably happy to have Binwen around.

Unfortunately, pairs and couples are what are truly met with suspicion amongst most Kepekapeans. If you don't have a third party to keep you in check, you could be up to something. And this is really what has always set the two apart from the rest of their community.

They're both in their thirties, by Kepekapean years, which makes them around sixty or so Earth years old.

Their story takes place millions of Sunspot years before the Sunspot Chronicles, which also means they predate humanity and possibly most life on Earth, even accounting for astronomical distances. Relativity does some weird shit and makes it hard to calculate.

Their culture is very advanced, though. Their government is building the first Exodus Ship, using construction nanites to harvest and shape mass from various asteroids and comets in their stellar system to build a vessel that is approximately 2,600 kilometers long and capable of carrying billions of people.

They will not be on the ship when it leaves, but their adventures will shape the fate of the Sunspot anyway.

[fenmere]

An introduction to our current novel:

In one of the universes that is in our head, once, long ago, the Great One gave birth to many children. And each of Their children had an Art, a passion or talent, a skill that they could do better than any other. But most of them could not learn what their Arts were until the others had explored theirs enough to invent meaning for them. The Artist of Cars, for instance, could not learn what their Art was until the Artist of Wheels and the Artist of Internal Combustion Engines had created their things. This left many of the Great One's children very vulnerable for a long time, so They created a world for Their children to live on using the bones and flesh of Their own body. And around this world, They wrapped Their hide, scales pointed inward to act as stars, to protect it and Their children. And they called this world Kepekape, meaning "My Body".

But one day, the Artist of Storytelling made a wager with the Artist of Hunting that they could not hit the morning star with their arrow. And when the Artist of Hunting tried, their arrow tore a hole in the sky and let the Outsiders in.

However, this was not like the fall of any humankind, for the Children of the Great One were not humans, and the Outsiders were not evil.

The Outsiders brought with them tales of the Universe without, and eventually the Children of the Great One combined their Arts to create the Great Exodus Ships, to explore the reaches beyond the Hole in the Sky.

And they formed the Inmara, the Great Alliance, with the Outsiders, and set forth to do just that.

And that action would, one day, lead to the writing of this book.