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Mystic Ruby Crumble
06e7ca
Pardon for digging up my own thread (if that is a transgression? Possibly not!), but I've been solidifying more data about scellor, and I figured maybe there are still people around who'd be interested. So, moving on from >>44625 , today I'm going to talk about scellor culture. But wait, Jukashi! you say. It has been heavily implied (and outright stated, in ITQ) that scellor do not have much in the way of culture! Which is true.
But they used to.
So let's talk about pre-Undermind scellor.
Before the Undermind was formed, scellor were very different to how they are now. They were biologically the same species - a modern and primitive scellor would be able to reproduce, though the offspring might have health issues without advanced medical conditioning - but a lot has changed. Primitive scellor were not biologically optimized as modern scellor are; though they had few diseases compared to humans, they could develop internal health problems, particularly with age. Scellor women at this stage carried their children to term as placental mammals do; children were born as infants and had to be raised, though they still grew faster than humans did, reaching physical maturity at about 10 years of age. That's terrestrial years - the scellor homeworld's years are more than twice as long, and the ancient scellor usually measured long time periods by how often their pair of binary suns crossed each other in the sky (about once every 5 earth months).
Psychically, primitive scellor were far less developed than their later descendants; most individuals were capable only of empathy (actually pretty similar to Lagotrope's neumono) and basic telepathy with individuals with whom they were "attuned", usually members of the same community. There was a spoken language, several of them in fact, but scellor vocal cords and diaphragm control was always rudimentary (modern scellor are even worse), and the relatively simple sounds they could make to form words had to be augmented with empathic inflection. Beyond that, other psychic powers were rare, but almost all scellor would at least have heard stories about them; for the most part, any serious psychic potential was the domain of hermits, mystics, cultists and occasional rare prodigies. Working in groups was a necessity for any truly impressive psionic feats, again except for rare individuals. Scellor could, as they do now, use psykonium to enhance their psychic abilities, but deposits of psykonium had a tendency to attract various giant monsters and other living dangers. Overall, psychic powers were treated like magic! And relatively low magic. Perhaps some day it'd be interesting to do a "sci-fi fantasy" story set in this time period, but not any time soon. Or perhaps someone else would like to? Hm. Well, let's move on.
The different castes didn't exist. Instead, as described in previous posts, there were three major races - illustrated here from left to right, girls along the top and guys along the bottom. The first, older race might be referred to as pygmy scellor, being small, and who lived in tropical swamps, marshes and waterside forests by preference. Then seafaring scellor, who lived on islands and archipelagoes; and, finally, the giant scellor (actually only about the same height as a normal human), who lived on what you might call their planet's pitiful excuse for continents. The largest continuous landmass is smaller than australia, and even then is a twisty mess of fjords and inland seas, riddled with volcanic activity. Again as previously mentioned, the scellor homeworld has a thinnish crust with smaller and more numerous continental plates than earth, and its extra suns and moons contribute both to the geological activity and chaotic weather. Natural disasters were a problem for all the ancient scellor.
The pygmy scellor (not their proper name, obviously - they didn't even call themselves scellor) were the most reclusive of the three, dwelling in relatively crude treetop villages in secluded corners of their waterlogged homes. They were the least technologically developed, mostly because they had no access to materials that wouldn't rot away in a few years. Occasionally they might get something more advanced from the other races, but the extent of their own development was simple devices of rope and wood, used for hoisting goods into the trees or laying traps for their food animals. They had small boats, of course, and had a particular fondness for nets: aside being their main source of food and essential for carrying things, they would also drape them around their homes to make climbing easier, and endowed them with religious significance, metaphorical for the strands connecting and tying together themselves and all other life in a great web. They liked them so much, wearing them was common, both for decoration and to have them handy to use; most other "clothing" was camouflage, usually involving leaves tied at the extremities to break up the outlines of their bodies and blend colours so as to let them fade into the background of their environment. The pygmy scellor had the most psychics of the three races, partly because of their funeral practices; bodies were moved to "gravegroves" where the bodies, consumed by the kel spores inside them, would become trees or other local plants. On significant days, fruit from these trees would be eaten, allowing the tribe to gain the "strength" of their ancestors (actually the traces of psykonium that had been in their bodies). These gravegroves were pretty sacred! Most of the trees would be marked in some fashion, and decorated in ways the tribe would feel was too dangerous for their own homes. Outsiders visiting and especially interfering with the grove could easily upset them; they were relatively dangerous in and of themselves, with spooky psychic phenomena drifting between the trees, faint echoes of the scellor who had died to produce them. Because of the pygmy scellor's isolated, tight-knit communities, their shaman-like psychics' powers tended towards the sympathetic: telepathy, prognostication and healing powers directed at other individuals. Overall, they were quiet and reserved; making a lot of motion and sound was discouraged, to avoid attracting dangerous predators. However, they were remarkable painters, with access to plenty of natural pigments, and filled the insides of their huts with vibrant colours in order to offset the relative gloom beyond their doors. There was little difference between the sexes.
Sea scellor, while having the most isolated settlements, were ironically also the most well-travelled of the ancient scellor, with a tendency to form vast trading networks. While they were as much at the mercy of the weather and geology as other scellor, their island homes were safe from giant predators (though the oceans were a different matter); with this relative safety, especially when combined with more environmentally secure islands such as as those formed by extinct volcanoes, they were able to develop a stronger sense of their own history and invest in more long-lasting structures, both physical and social. Stone circles designed for various time-telling purposes were common in their early history, leading on up to more elaborate works such as stepped pyramids and buildings carved out of natural rock. Despite having limited land, they made use of natural (and later, artificial) bays and tidal lagoons to develop sea-based agriculture, farming fish and shellfish, seaweed, and a kind of giant sea millipede (that's good eatin'!). A trained sea scellor diver could hold their breath for a bit more than 20 minutes at a time. Having little to fear from predators and an eager interest in showing off to outsiders, sea scellor were keen on decorating themselves, making use of leather, carved bone, stone and wood, leaves, flowers and whatever other sufficiently prestigious materials were at hand; they had little concern for coverings beyond that, especially those that would get in the way in the water, and mostly used crude skirts of leaves and crude rope to keep some of the sunlight at bay. In their spare time, storytelling was a common form of recreation, along with singing and woodwind music that humans would consider quite crude and simplistic. The majority of sea scellor societies disposed of their dead at sea, currents permitting, but a few disreputable cultures practiced cannibalism. This was a dangerous prospect for ancient scellor, as fragments of the dead scellor's personality could impress themselves on whoever ate their body; doing so repeatedly could cause insanity, depending on one's strength of mind. At the same time, however, such individuals developed stronger psychic powers, which sea scellor were otherwise pretty lacklustre with compared to the other two races. Such psychics were most famous (or infamous) for using telepathy to tame giant sea creatures; less immediately impressive, but more dire, was their tendency to develop inauspicious powers of prophecy, which also allowed their most advanced masters to sense the fabric of space-time and become the first scellor to manipulate it. The vast majority of scellor were understandably wary of and often repulsed by these people, but in time, secret cults practicing similar methods would spread through other scellor cultures. Other sea scellor psychics, few though they were, tended to dabble in more agricultural uses of their powers, and in later periods would begin developing crude biotechnology. Typically, female sea scellor mostly tended to the farming, while males went fishing further afield; males were responsible for trading with others, but females were responsible for dealing with traders who came to them.
Giant scellor, finally, were to become the most "civilized" by standard human reckoning. After early years as nomads, the majority would settle into fortified towns designed to fend off dangerous creatures and, later, other giant scellor city-states. They developed proper agriculture, pottery, the wheel, metalsmithing and even the production of glass. However, the scellor homeworld has a significantly lower proportion of metal than earth; iron, in particular, was split with psykonium, leaving it about three times harder to find than terrestrial iron. As already mentioned, psykonium itself, in ore form, attracted the giant beasts that used internal psionic powers to sustain themselves, making it horrendously difficult to mine even when it could be found. Combined with the scellor world being so waterlogged, all metals were valuable commodities, and the history of the giant scellor was rife with conflicts over supplies of the stuff. Warriors used armour crafted from the bones, hide or carapaces of superpredators, and the majority of the population made do with weapons and tools made of bronze when possible, saving more advanced aids for when real necessity required it. The sciences beckoned: natural disasters were still a plague for giant scellor, with tales abounding of settlements wiped from the map or crippled in such a manner that the creatures of the wilderness could finish them off, leaving abandoned towns and ghost castles to tempt foolish explorers. Environmental pressures, then, begged for the scellor to develop systems to analyze and predict the patterns of their world, observing the shaking of the earth, the surge of the tide and the sweep of the suns and moons for signs of disaster. The giant scellor led the way in such advances, though prompted and assisted somewhat by sea scellor, and it was advances in this field that allowed them to chart the stellar cycles that would eventually push the species to its fate (or doom). Wealth permitting, relatively advanced chemistry was available, as well as relatively crude (and expensive) clockwork devices. In contrast to their more nudist cousins, giant scellor wore something closer to what would be considered proper clothing, having developed weaving and its attendant advances. Furs were also common, and jewelry, albeit with gems set much the more often in wood or bone or elaborately woven strands of cloth than into metals, precious or non. Giant scellor enjoyed music and dancing when times were good, with particular favour for string and percussion instruments. Giant scellor settlements had a broad variety of ways of disposing of their dead, but most involved shipping them quite far away, so as to avoid attracting predators. The psychics of this race tended most towards the more blunt, brute-force psionic powers, such as telekinesis and pyrokinesis, and most often put such skills to work for crafting - or, somewhat more rarely, used them to combat monsters and enemy warriors. More rarely because such individuals tended not to live so long. Giant scellor had the most pronounced cultural differences between the sexes, with men as warriors and taking care of the most physically strenuous labour, while women handled more sedate crafts.
All ancient scellor tended towards a certain fatalistic approach, partly from the relatively high probability of unexpected disasters, and partly due to influence from individuals who could genuinely get some sort of feeling for the future, though other scellor tended not to be comfortable around them (stop talking about that vast roar of endless voices screaming at you from centuries yet to come, dude!). There was a strong tendency in the whole species, as there is in modern scellor, to produce as many offspring as possible and send them out to colonize other lands, knowing that if there wasn't anywhere free for settlement, there soon would be. Politically, scellor were relatively varied, though humans would find them unusual in their lack of centralized leadership. By "default", each community would form internal, informal collections of individuals with similar skillsets, who would automatically become leaders when the situation called for their expertise. Within said groups, shifting tides of personality and strength of will would modify leadership every day, with empathic intuition clearing the sense of who was in charge at any particular time. Some communities, especially those who were more "civilized", would be more formal in their politics, with guilds or councils or advisorships or similar, but the basic structure was usually there. Psychics, though powerful in their communities, tended to be more interested in their abilities than in taking charge, a quality responsible for getting them the powers in the first place. It was only in the case of groups of psychics, for example the aforementioned sea scellor cultists, that psychics might tend to dominate a society's decisions. Which is not to say the scellor never had leaders: occasionally, particularly powerful personalities, most often well-respected polymaths (or unscrupulous telepaths) would effectively become chiefs of their communities.
There was art, and philosophy, and politics. Relations between different tribes, different nations, both benevolent and hostile. War, crime, exploration, wonders and treasures and adventure. Music, stories, architecture, history. Culture. So what is left? Perhaps a few stones, piled oddly, covered in vegetation.
All else is buried, sunken in the ocean of endless thought and noise.
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