Graybeard wrote:
Slamlander wrote:
To add further interest, I suspect that all Tsuirakuans have some (1/54th) elven blood and the leadership knows it.
(emphasis added)
Yeah, I know, cat girls and all that, but I would
love to hear your explanation of the genetics of that one.
It comes down to one question; "What happenned to the Half-Elven (and potentially Elven) population of Tsuiraku when the city first disappeared?"
Slamlander comes from the "they all hunkered down and laid low throughout the Errant War, appaerently intending from the start to use Tsuiraku as a 'life raft'" school of thought. In that scenario, in the 2000 years since, the half-elven bloodlines have throughly diluted throughout the Tsuirakan gene pool, even allowing for the percentage of half-elves that mate with half-elves, there's been just too many generations (even half-elf generations) for a consistant heratige. Everybody looks human, but it's like the Afrikaaners (who have maybe 10% black ancestry). As for the 1/54 figure, that strikes me as very 'best case'- no where near as dilute as I think it'd be. While half-elves seem to live a lot longer than humans, their age-to-maturation is pretty comparable, and they don't have any problems with fertility. Half-elf generations aren't longer, they'd just have a lot more of them, overlapping.
I actually come from the school of thought of "the human mages then immediately killed all the Elven and Half-Elf mages (or enough of them to make little difference), and ran off with Tsuiraku intending it from the start to be the core of a Human civilization, not giving a damn about the imminent Errant War. And they were the ones that smuggled a cloaking device on board in the first place." My shroedinger humans are purebreds.
We both believe that there's got to be a tier of Tsuirakan culture that isn't as innocent of history as Meji is, and that tier probably starts and ends at the mage high council. (She hasn't even
heard of the Errant War. That's like not ever hearing the term 'The Fall of Rome'. It'd have come up in a pop song at some point, ala 'It's all been done'. The Tsuirakan public knows
shit. To say nothing of anciant criminal conspiracies, the best case being grand larceny of trillions of dollars of infrastructure, and the worst case being that with a healthy dose of murder.)