Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

coneflower has generalized buildings in a very logical way (artificial, complex, bigger than her, has at least one tree nearby) as well as trying to differentiate them from cars based on new information (not moving, not on road) she's just also incorrect due to ignorance of the broader context of what humans make cars and buildings for. it's interesting to write characters with huge knowledge gaps.

 

she tries harder than any coyote, ever

 

you know, explaining the Werewolf Babies Situation to pancho would be weird and interesting, come to think of it. like the whole Werewolf Babies Situation itself is interesting. like one option is get knocked up in midwinter as a wolf, and have four to eight kids in three months, but you'd better stay put as a wolf past like the first trimester, because turning into a human with octuplets all at once seems like it would put a huge strain on your body and on the fetuses, because humans aren't built to carry more than like two kids at a time, the fetuses stack on top of each other in there. in spring you deliver a litter of puppies without too much fuss, but your batch of kids is going to be pretty wolfish, like erskin. longer exclusion periods, seeing their wolf shape as the default, cognitive limitations.

option two is get knocked up at any point in the year as a human, carry the one or maybe two (or very probably not three) fetuses for nine months, stay out of wolf shape as much as possible, and deliver a human-shape kid that will function just about the same as a turned-werewolf. this process is a lot more painful and stressful and difficult than just having puppies, but turned-werewolves would see it as the normal default option, and mostly go for it, i think. born-human werewolves might go in for both options, and have a human kid as well as a litter or three. born-wolf werewolves would not want to fucking do this at all, and might not actually be able to, due to having to spend something like half of the nine months as a wolf anyway, it could be really futile.

it's possible that without regular influx of turned-werewolves, born werewolves would just generationally degrade back into wolves. possibly this is how it mostly went back before wolves became so endangered.

important science question: when the mother turns from wolf to human, or human to wolf, are the fetuses also pulled from one form to another? whichever shape they were born in, the other shape would still have been gestating too, just in... whatever cojoined pocket dimension/ quantum state the other shape exists in with werewolves. because a human could probably function with eight wolf puppies backed into the same womb space as two human babies, considering wolf puppies are basically burrito size at birth, whereas eight regular-size human babies crammed into one person sounds like a fucking horrorshow. meanwhile the thought of a wolf trying to deliver a human baby, with that head, is also gruesome as shit. either way it's traumatic.

but like carrying a human baby for nine months and then delivering as a wolf at the finish line seems like it would result in most werewolves being delivered as puppies, just from the convenience of it. maybe it's more about conception shape and gestation length that determines how human the offspring are, than the specific last-minute form taken during delivery? maybe the way erskin could sort of push pancho's form around when he was making her a werewolf, newborns are entrained to their mother's shape.

 

additional weird thoughts for werewolf sex ed: male wolves shoot blanks for like 3/4 of the year. maybe a werewolf is correspondingly fertile as a human the whole year, but his kids will only have the werewolf condition passed on to them if conceived inside the window he's also fertile as a wolf. so:

• if a male werewolf and a female human had a kid conceived in july, it would be human with no wolf-shape counterpart, unless infected through a blood-link, wherupon it would get a clonal wolf form from whoever infected it
• if a male werewolf and a female werewolf had a kid conceived in july it would be werewolf through the mother's line only. the child's human shape would have traits from both parents but their wolf-shape would be clonal,
• if a male werewolf and a female human had a kid conceived in march it would be a werewolf through the father's line only, see above
• if a male werewolf and female werewolf had a kid conceived in march it would be a werewolf through both lines, and the child's human and wolf shapes would have traits from both parents

WEREWOLF SCIENCE. man, all the different routs to have clonal offspring would really make werewolf eugenics more similar to breeding fruit than livestock, if you consider infecting new humans to be basically like grafting. a particularly good wolf-shape could be propagated indefinitely across a cohort or down generations. it's entirely possible some families maintain clone stock for centuries, especially after seeing native wolf populations bottleneck repeatedly in the last two hundred years.

WEREWOLF SCIENCE!!!

 

OH NO I JUST FOUND A PICTURE OF RED WOLF SIBLINGS OH NO LOOK THEY ALL HAVE THE CHEEK DOT IT'S TOO CUTE I WILL DIE OH NO

 

okay more woofs that look the same, looking at something the same. help me.

 

that's a really interesting thought. reggie's said a number of his family's been to university, and that's entirely without his genetic input, just his fathering skills as resident patriarch. i think reggie would agree to bring in other males to sire healthy pups, but i can't imagine him stepping back from being the bossman. his code name at the agency is rex. and he was at oxford and values both civil service and a classical education, so i think he'd be really involved in the education of any kids who showed an interest.

as for erskin's matrilineal heritage, i know for certain his grandma is a tough, sharp badass who's been working to keep the family prosperous and healthy for like a hundred years, while the red wolf population bottlenecked down to fourteen specimens. that's some serious shit.

so with erskin, i know his mom is the more insular, retiring, wolfish one of the two sisters. i think erskin's mom had the wolfish kids that mostly bred back into wolf populations across europe, and erskin's aunt, possibly encouraged by reggie to keep being part of the wider world, bred with a range of human-turned werewolves and turned out a lot of extroverted, human-interested kids that have big adventures and work for the agency and go to college and become familiars or mathemagicians.

i wonder if two human-turned werewolves would turn out human-smart offspring regardless of birthing them as puppies, because the human influence is still like 100%. it's probable these things are still rule-of-thumb, not hardcoded mathematics, and also epigenetics count for a lot.

so if erskin's mom had him as a puppy, and denned privately with him, and gave him a regular wolf-style kind of infancy with only other wolf-shape werewolves allowed in to see him, and everyone was so stressed about this one precious child of reggie's that was born alive and let her be as rabidly protective as she wanted, so he didn't start getting human socialization or even coaxed to turn human until basically late toddlerhood, he could very well have missed some critical periods. if a human kid wasn't talked to until age two or three, they'd definitely be lagging behind agemates, and if expected to perform to a regular level, they'd probably be angry and hurt about it. i still think gestating a baby for nine months rather than three would confer a certain advantage, but not socializing wolf-born puppies to a human standard could really be a key factor in why they can't keep up with human-born counterparts.

also, it's not like child education has been that great before recent decades. pretty sure anyone with a learning disability just got dumped in the 'so they're stupid' category for like, centuries, when alternate forms of coaching could have helped them. erskin should never have been forcibly sat down in a chair at a table in a little room and made to do worksheets, there's no universe where he doesn't have too much adhd for that shit.

...goddamn this got long. WEREWOLF SCIENCE IS INTERESTING FOREVER.

 

yeah, good point! bel proposes incremental challenges and then backs off when erskin gets bogged down, which is a lot nicer than hearing 'try harder'. nothing sucks more in school than to hit a wall and be told 'try harder' or 'pay attention' or 'stop screwing around'. so erskin's doing a lot better without even really noticing it.

the kids of erskin's family wouldn't have been forcibly rounded up and shoved through the grades on a set schedule, because so many of them would have cognitive limitations. they'd have been generally allowed to take schooling at a slower pace. but there was still only one route out of the preserve, and that was through demonstrating a traditional level of education according to the set homeschooling package. and whatever teachers they had around would have been pretty traditional educators, too, who would want to mimic a human setting for kids who were going to be taking part in human society.

 

it's important to have a photoset of coyote fights


grr


pow


blammo


whatever this is

 

AAAAAAHHH <3

 

b r o

 

omG BRO