The Selkies

Biology

General

Selkie brains, like those of most of their ilk, are massive organs that effectively function as single cells, with billions of nucleotropes and microteuchs working in concert. Certain microteuchs are constructed entirely based on one memory, or a set of memories, and provide instructions to the body based on set stimuli. There are microteuchs specialized in sensory recognition, in emotional development, in short-term memory, in linguistic communication, and much more. Brains on Ys are surprisingly versatile, and more to the point can be entirely rewritten.

This is not to say that the main brain itself does not change. Rather like a fungus in its fusion of cell membranes, it nevertheless absorbs a great many stem cells into its mass during development. Many of these in turn are provided from the gametes of other beings; the brain and body effectively rewrite themselves to become composite organisms, bacterial "conjugation" on a massive scale.

Adults

Adult forms are the largest, measuring up to 3.5m long from head to tail. Rather like certain species of amphibian on Ajjamah, the back pair of limbs fuses into a long tail with a fluke. The face, which up to that point has been rounded but sharp, takes on a stubbier shape. One key development is that of bulges just above fhe cheeks, which are actually sonar melons that allow them to navigate through murkier waters and indeed communicate across a wide distance. That they still maintain their cheeks after metamorphosis is one particular example of neoteny that defines their species. Their eyes, however, are still perfectly functional, although like juveniles they only see images in two "colours" with varying combinations.

Like juveniles, adult selkies do have chitinous hairlike structures across their bodies. Their hair, unlike youths', has two layers: the soft fur of their younger forms is covered by a darker, barbed fur covering that interlocks to keep in air and heat. Various colours in the fur can be used to mark individuals from a distance, particularly those deemed to be related to one another and thus less likely to travel together. There is a periodic moulting every year, usually during the summer months in either temperate hemisphere, where they travel to rich coastal seas and their young exit the water to live on the surface.

Adults are gregarious, but not as much as their juvenile forms. In prehistoric times many travelled in pods, sharing childcare duties with others of their ilk, and this still makes up the primary "family unit" today.

A Note on Colour Vision

The development of the eye had a slightly different trajectory on Ys. Selkies are technically achromatopsic, seeing only shades of white, black, and grey. They also, however, contain a beam-splitter crystal near the front, which when combined with the polarization-sensitive chromophores on opposite sides of the eye (top and bottom) sends dual signals to the brain which do indeed produce a kind of colour vision.

The five non-monochrome colours described by selkies may be translated roughly as:

• Red (725-850nm, red to infrared)

• Yellow (650-725nm, red)

• Green (600-650nm, orange to red)

• Blue (475-600nm, cyan through green and yellow to orange)

• Purple (300-475nm, near-ultraviolet to purple to blue)

Yes, this does technically make the selkies red-green colour-blind. But only technically.

History

The Age of Silent Sands (132-70kya)

Intelligence first evolved not among the juveniles but the adults. To begin with, the infants were birthed but then largely neglected, given food until of a certain size and then brought to shallow pools to care for themselves. Their parents, say the stories, stood guard, perhaps even played with them; but there was no real sense of teaching, no bond between equal intelligences. The juveniles they grew into were social hunters and occasional browers, living on meats and rich fruits where the infants were largely herbivores. They, too, were hunted; although enough survived to pass on the genes, life was not easy, nor were they equipped to do much about it. They knew a few basic words from the language of their parents, but spoke them almost out of instinct, with no real sense of meaning behind them.

At a certain stage in a juvenile's life, they would feel a call towards the sea. Surrounding themselves in a thick, poisonous chrysalis just off the shore, they would undergo a form of metamorphosis into their adult form. The chemical trails left by the chrysalis would reach the sensitive noses of other adults, who would flock to the area to pick up the new adult. When they emerged, weeks later, they would find themselves grown up, in more ways than one—along with the body had come a brain capable of appreciating the world around them. A lamentable experience only in the sense that they could not act on land as once they did, but what did that matter, when the whole of the sea was open to them and at last, at last, there were true minds to share it with?

Living beneath the waves made it relatively easy to maintain a global language; the attraction of many adults from across the world to meet their new peers made it necessary. The "brain cell", almost a separate organism that can and has been made to live independently of its body, matures quite quickly in adults, giving them a boost from, in the Age of Silent Sands, about the level of brainpower of a four-year-old to that of a sixteen-year-old within the span of a few weeks. Immersion, physical and literal, in a new environment made for something of a break in mental patterns, and part of the great sucess of the selkies was their ability to guide other adults through the process.

Life under the sea was unique from the start. Requiring certain mental abilities to understand the sonar pings they used was a given, as was mapping the complex undersea topography found along their journeys. And yet it was not devoid of company. Often adults swam together in pods, feeding and playing as their younger selves did, and also conversing, which none had really been able to. From their words alone, passed almost unchanged from generation to generation, they wove complex oral histories, stories of past explorations, paeans for the birthing grounds, and laments for the "lost worlds" of their childhoods.

The Age of Brilliance (70-24kya)

All this changed with a group referred to in song and story as the twenty-five Old Souls.

Gerontomorphy, the process by which younger individuals take on adult qualities, is not unknown on Earth. On Ys, this led multiple times to the creation of sapient juveniles, land-dwellers who could change the environment around them. They came to their peers not unthinkingly but in self-awareness, and though they mourned like the rest they had some satisfaction about what they had achieved. But normally they did not meet any quite like them; they mated very little or not at all, not with beings who to them had the minds of children regardless of their similarity in appearance.

But the development of this gerontomorphic sapience in not one, but twenty-five youths would change this. At last, there were those with whom they felt comfortable interacting, developing their own pidgin language to describe their surroundings. They lived; they loved; they changed. And their children, a mix of all twenty-five, were the same, and were placed on the same shores. The Home Island, this is sometimes called in their stories, or the Birthing Isle.

This was the first big change needed. The youths were now capable of interacting with others, and although they did mate with non-sapient youths these became fewer and fewer as time went on. More and more youths learned to carve tools from wood and bone, to create and maintain fire, even to make rafts of vegetation with which to travel out into the seas to speak with their Mothers. And their parents were overjoyed, if a little surprised—and so began the second change: the communion between youths and adults. The global language was now able to spread to the youths, but more importantly the adults now knew they had allies on the land. Allies who could look after their younger siblings when they made the transformation from herbivorous child to carnivorous youth.

The creation of breeding pools—a misnomer; no breeding takes place in the pools, only birthing—was a definite first step forward for the ever-increasing numbers of sapient youths. The parents had a safe place to give birth, and after a certain age the platypus-like offspring could be taken care of by their older brothers instead. Continual contact with their parents meant that linguistically they stayed relatively homogenous; what basic words were taught to the young ones could be built on as juveniles. More to the point, the breeding pools sometimes would accept children from outside, those for whom intelligence was dawning earlier than it might have done otherwise. If they made it to these pools, which were usually built alongside primitive fishing villages, then they could be accepted as part of the family. The twenty-five "lineages", born from the first fortuitous group, came to dominate much of the surface world; although they did not hunt their cousins (for the most part), they tended to be better organized and better-fed, being able to work together in ways the "childlike" juveniles could not. And, in time, they came to replace them altogether.

There were other reasons for this than simple fitness. During an event called the Caorthannach Catastrophe, where a volcanic eruption caused a ten-year winter even beyond the regular cycles. The seas were harmed just as much as the land; the foodstocks which the adults relied on were severely depleted. Those adults who had the breeding pools, however, and those whose children were welcome there, were able to more properly survive the catastrophe. Food was shared communally, adult, youth, and child eating as one family for perhaps the first time in history. At the end of the catastrophe, some 46,000 years ago, the population had bottlenecked at around 50,000 individuals. A tragedy indeed, a loss comprising 80% of the population…and yet the selkies survived. Now the songs that echoed across the seas held a different kind of grief, the grief of those who would live in a world that much quieter…and that much less real. The Laments for the Lost Songs, they are called, and some are the most beautiful works ever to come from Ys.

The Age of Diversity (24-17kya)

This era saw the emergence of various crafting technolgies around the world, most prominently marked in the record by the use of clay and kilns to create pottery.

It also saw the creation of the first underwater gardens, stretching across the continental shelves where the water is at times only ten metres deep. Various sea plants were cultivated, which could be consumed by livestock who would in turn be consumed by the adults.

The Age of Glass (17-14kya)

This era saw a relatively rapid-fire shift to industrialization, from metallurgy and glassblowing all the way to solar energy, tempered by a necessity to maintain the environment so as not to damage the adults and children living under the seas.

The Age of Stardust (14kya-Present Day)

The first interplantary contact was with the selkies who, thousands of years prior, had been brought to Gallaecia to live in large asteroid-worlds. After an unfortunate mishap leading to the destruction of the Llyr 100467, contact was established with a group of selkies in another such ship, the Andium 108203. The name was given after the discovery of a mural on the wall of the inner airlock showing a map of the world with portions of the coastline of the continent of Andium (on the western edge of the Sanddi and Cardans Seas) coloured in, and a message in an unknown writing system that was eventually deciphered as a date. Although the languages had of course changed greatly over the course of millennia's worth of total isolation, they were able to establish communication and confirm that the inhabitants did indeed originally hail from Andium, and that their settlement dated back to nearly elevn thousand years prior, during the Caorthannach Catastrophe. The small population of initial founders had believed themselves the only survivors of a literally world-shaping event. Their modern society, separated from technologies that would have made mass metallurgy possible, had progressed to working with various metals such as copper and silver, but with minimal difference in technology. Trade commenced, slowly at first, and soon for the first time in eleven thousand years a citizen of the Andium 108203 swam across the surface of Ys.

The discovery of this remarkable ark, populated by a large number of plants and animals only slightly different from their modern forms, made the question apparent: who launched the ships? Stories of ancient creator deities and angels had become commonplace among the Andiumites, but was it possible that their ancestors could have built the ark themselves? Even without technology, the possibility remained that some form of magic could have been used to construct an ark of this sort. And yet...other arks were soon discovered, including the most ancient of all, the Llyr 14875. The race of selkies there had developed a strain of intelligent youths on their own accord; their genetic template did not match any living selkie today, nor even more than a tangential relation to one of the Twenty-Five Old Souls. Perhaps just as harrowing was the Gwent 57630; no strain of sapient youths could be found, and although like the selkies on Ys the adults had bred creatures for their own use they had taken the unusual step of domesticating themselves—that is to say, their juvenile forms, who acted as underwater herders, garbage disposal units, and (in times of crisis) as lunch.

The first aliens to contact the selkies were of course the Ark-Builders, who had been their Patrons since before the beginning of the species. Reactions to the face of single-eyed, highly-tentacled race of relatively friendly overseers ranged from declarations of prophetic fulfilment to outright hostility at the Ark-Builders' observations with minimal interference over the millennia of their existence. That they claimed responsibility for the various arks divided poular opinion further.

Nevertheless, in time the general consensus shifted to acommodate this new worldview. The Ark-Builders gave them full responsibility over the Arks in their solar system and their distant cousins within. A universe of life exploded outward, and the necessary advancements in interplanetary communication and transport brought the selkies to a level of technology as of then undreamed-of. In time—a few hundred years only—they were officially permitted to join the Ark-Builders in the Conclave of Worlds as representatives of their species. A little longer, and the selkies were given permission to found their first interstellar colony, on the world whose name best translates to Atlantis, around the star they called Saga.

Today, the selkies have settled nine worlds and fourteen moons across three systems, namely Saga, Ebisu, and their home system of Belenos. These have separated into discreet entities, joined by common trade but otherwise disunited. Those who still live around Belenos, on Ys and seven other worlds (planets and moons), call themselves the Domain of the Sacred World in official communiqués, and are governed by a customs union called the Confraternity with meritocratically-chosen leaders called "echoes". Atlantis and the two inhabited moons of the gas giant Aegir form the Pact of the Oracle, a union ruled from Atlantis by the Holy Council. Finally, the twelve worlds (four planets, including the capital world of Lanka, and eight moons) of the Ebisu system united 2,000 years ago to form the Union of Redemption, a technocracy with an interest in genometry.

Through a combination of birth control hormones (very different in selkie society) and genetic manipulation, births are no longer quite as frequent as once they were.