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Akibel Mowar is on his way home from the blacksmith's when he spots it. People are shrieking and fleeing from it, which seems reasonable, as it's a fuckoff huge snake with a mirror for a face. A big mirror.
Kib can't so much flee. He can shriek - he can lurch in the direction of the nearest house and try the door - it's locked. He can amble briskly...
He can break into a run when the snake gains on him and fall flat on his face.
And he can get eaten up.
And it's too bright too bright too bright and he flings his arm over his eyes.
secondchance
secondchance
"She lives in Lapis, which is a real place but I've never been so I assume all the architecture is made up. Speaks the common and Harthanic, which is a real language that I don't actually know so I assume that's made up too."
secondchance
"No? Do Elves? Anyway so far I haven't gotten anything claiming to be set in the future or even recently. Recently by human standards."
"Mothers also sometimes get flashes of foresight when naming their children. At a guess, you don't have that one." They've reached his father's house.
"Hello," Fëanáro says a minute later, "come in, Kib, what are you doing Nelyafinwë -"
"Escorting the only human in the world," Maitimo says, "it's a good use of my time."
"No," he says, "it's not, politics is just an appallingly bad one and lowers your standards. Curufinwë can loan you the biology journals if you want to try to catch up with us."
"I don't think I'd stand a chance," says Maitimo agreeably, but he goes off in the direction his father gestured.
"Escorting the only human in the world," Maitimo says, "it's a good use of my time."
"No," he says, "it's not, politics is just an appallingly bad one and lowers your standards. Curufinwë can loan you the biology journals if you want to try to catch up with us."
"I don't think I'd stand a chance," says Maitimo agreeably, but he goes off in the direction his father gestured.
"Professionally so," says his father. "Valinor is a waste of his talents. The good news is that you are made of cells. The bad news is that that means we don't have the equipment yet to learn where aging is happening, biologically, if it is."
"Well, if you weren't made of cells we'd have encountered disaster much sooner, and this would stop being a biology problem insofar as we understand biology. You are not technically a species - you don't reproduce - so anything was possible."
secondchance
"Distinction seems academic. But, like, what is the trait that distinguishes Valar from Maiar from me, if it's not species?"
secondchance
"I could imagine something that was clearly not a human but was not more or less powerful than a human which replenished its population on a non-reproductive model, though."
"Sure, but speciation is a word from biology, at least in Quenya, and is useful for all but your-realm-humans, and the ways it's defined are tied to reproduction for what at least superficially look like very legitimate reasons."
"You have animals that are all one kind, yes? Then something happens - a river changes courses, some of them get blown off to an outlying island - and they live as separate populations and they change sort of the way languages and cultures do, but on a bodily scale, and after long enough they can no longer interbreed and at that point they're considered different species, and that is probably how many kinds of animals came about, Eru probably did not populate the world with billions of them and yet billions there are."
secondchance
"I don't know nearly enough about animals to confirm if they are in my world too, maybe they are. So that makes them not count?"