Shapers -- Cielshade's NaNo

[Shadaras]

Long ago, long long ago, before the people in whose image we were shaped came to the planet we name Earth, there was just the Fae. They didn't call themselves the Fae, of course, not exactly; they were the People, the Planet, born of the world (the motherfather, fathermother, parent -- there is no word in our tongue that can explain what the planet is to them, nor what the sky is, nor the sun or seas) and part of the world.

They were changeable, the Fae were, evershifting their forms to suit themselves. So long as the sun shone, the earth grew, the wind blew, and the waters ran clear and strong, they could be anything they desired.

Then came the Angels. They didn't call themselves the Angels, of course; they called themselves the Hanshim, the People, and they were sailing the stars to find another world to colonize, as they had outgrown their old one. They were masters of biotechnology, changing their world and their flesh to suit their desires, become more than their pale flesh could be with machinery and genetic alterations.

Their ship became the center of the moon, and their scientists sent down first-contact teams to the seemingly uninhabited world below.

They found the Fae.

Or, more accurately, the Fae found them.

These are the stories of what followed that meeting, what happened when the supernatural and the otherworldly meet.

What happens when the Shapers decide to make something that is more than either of them.

We are born of the Shapers, though we know neither now. But this is not our story; this is their story, the story of what happened before the angels fell and the fae faded away into the last reaches of wilderness left in the world.

-=-

Or, in a less poetic way, this story. Which came from rambling to Rikku at midnight-ish, I think? xD Anyway.

I bet legends of demons first came from the fae.
The angels are otherworldly, but they did not fall for a time yet.
There were just the fae and the angels.
And the fae became demonic for their tricksome ways, while the angels were honourable after their fashion.
(...)
See, the word that best describes angelfolk /is/ Otherworldly. Which should, in the best tradition of writerness, be taken literally.
So where'd they come from and why here?
The humanfolk only might've been around when they got here, but the fae sure were.
So where did humankind come from?
The mating of angel and fae?
Evolution?
Something of both?
A bragging contest to create something that lived?
[...]
Who created humankind?
Or was it when a fae and an angel came together and pooled highly advanced tech and incredible natural knowledge together that it /worked/?

-=-

And some more notes:

SPOILER: Click to show

Okay. So Heaven is a spacestation. Or, more accurately, a generation ship turned into a space station. Except it’s not really a generation ship, either; that implies that people bred generations on it. These folk didn’t. They’ve got incredible tech; they just put themselves into stasis. Engineers and astrophysicists and so forth woke up periodically, when the AI keeping track of the ship noticed some need. Or just for a periodic check-up. So those folk got to see more of space, etc., than the ordinary folk.

It also means that they didn’t know until they reached Earth that one of the side effects of deepspace was to make every single person on board sterile. They couldn’t reproduce anymore, not naturally.

So biotech took over and started working out how it might be possible to create new generations, though even on their homeworld that had never been solved; they needed fertile eggs and sperm to make tube babies, and they didn’t have that anymore. They just had their own biomass, their technology, and the planet below.

Said planet below, as discovered when the first explorers went down, was a near-perfect match in terms of biosphere to their homeworld. The AI had done well in choosing this, the scientists thought.

Then they found the fae.

Or, more accurately, the fae found them. Perhaps the only saving grace, for the Hanshim (-shi in singular), was that their technology had advanced so far beyond iron and steel that they did not destroy as they explored; they simply existed, encased in plastic and nanotech unlike anything the fae had seen before. And that newness made the fae curious, and curious fae are fae who entrap, enthrall, and take folk into their land to play with and try to understand.

To the watching Hanshim, however, it just looked like some of their people disappeared without a trace. No readings. Nothing. Just a place where they had been, a footprint never followed by another.

-=-

That’s the other thing about Earth that surprised the Hashim -- the amount of space and nature in it. They were born on space stations or their citygrown planet of Aitze. Unaltered nature doesn’t exist anymore -- the better they got at biotech and bioengineering the more everything was grown to be useful. Even the sea was covered with bioengineered (and normally engineered) structures. The Hanshim were running out of space on Aitze, and so they created their generation ships (of which the Avahn was one) and sent them out, so that the Hanshim would always survive.

-=-

Gah. Hanshim have biotech up the wazoo, right? But they just flat out don’t get the fae; they aren’t used to having genetic structures they don’t understand, and to make it worse, the fae can shapeshift. They need to have a good source of energy to do so -- earth/air/water/light -- but they can. Their intellect is also tied to the amount of mass in their bodies, for the most part -- they are a collective, of sorts, see, with their fathermother/motherfather of Planet providing the base intellect/mass.

This... sort of goes away the more the Hanshim and Humans do to the world, though. The more alien bioware gets into the system, the more disconnected the fae become, the more fixed their forms become. They can still change; they just can’t do so as much, or as easily.

They don’t lose their ability to go out of phase, though. They can’t explain what they’re doing when they disappear from Hanshim sensors; they just disappear, to all appearances and purposes as if they’re in another plane, another world.

That is the faewild.

-=-

I'm writing a series of interconnected short stories this NaNo, if I'm doing Shapers (which I almost certainly am). I figure this is slightly more easier than doing one giant novel-thing, considering the way time works with me. And besides, it's connected short stories written in my style, for me, which means I don't care about ending-beginnings to each, so much; it's just about making sure that it all works to tell the story of the Shapers as a whole.

And technically this is a prequel, by the way. A prequel to the story I want to tell, but need more time/prep for -- Lucifer's Fall. :3

That might give you some idea of where I'm going with this. I might even reach there, in a way, while NaNoing; time can work in funny ways, and I'm basically just writing out the world for NaNo this year anyway; it's not about having anything really complete.

Soyeah. ^_^

This is Shapers. Should be lots of fun.

[Rikku]

Angelfae story yes yes yes! <3 Man, it's fascinating how they interact already, and you haven't even written anything much yet. =D Should indeed be lots of fun. And then more lots.

[Chao]

*has a hard time to pull herself back to reality*
With just the Intro, you managed to pull me completely into this Sci-Fi-Fantasy world which eventually might become the world we know and live on. And the chance that this is only the prequel and leads to Lucifer's Fall... Absolutely fantastic!

[Shadaras]

SPOILER: Click to show

At some point I need to come up with lots of interesting names. Seeing as I have no clue what I'm doing with the fae -- something I need to fix, by the way -- most of the names I need should be vaguely Biblical/Hebrew-ish. Because otherwise things make less sense than they already do. With fae, names are somewhat irrelevant. They know who they are. They also know that they are unstable and shift and take on new names as they please.

This drives the Hanshim crazy, of course, because they are stable things, even if they do shape their bodies with technology. They don't just turn from a cloud to a golden hummingbird into a living flame into a tree, or anything like that. The fae do. The fae tend to have preferences for certain shapes, and thus names with certain sounds in them, or certain words, but really? They aren't defined by their names. They are described by them.

Most fae, so long as they're aware they're being addressed, will respond to anything. A few fae insist upon using certain names. Said names are very very changeable. On occasion, fae will change their names in the middle of a conversation, and get very annoyed with the Hanshim for not being aware of this change -- since fae are all tied through the planet, they can transmit information like this easily, without needing to specifically say anything.

((...this makes me want to write a story set after the Fall, just so that I can have the fae's Fade as well. Blast it. xD the Fade is interesting.))

The Hanshim each have their own names, of course. Generally there's one given name, one caste name, and maybe a marker if they're of some special line, or there's need for a nickname, or something like that.

Have I mentioned the Hanshim's caste system yet? Because they do have one. Or did. It came about before their biotech as essentially a form of eugenics. The main groups were thus: those whose bodies surpassed their minds, those whose minds surpassed their bodies, and special cases.

Within each of these groups, there were subgroups -- people whose minds were particularly adept at math, or logic, or oration, for instance; or those whose bodies were adapted to running or lifting and so forth.

Breeding was generally done within castes, and usually within subcastes, though there was no specific limitation on who anyone could breed with -- it was just strongly encouraged to follow the geneticists' (a particularly high-ranked mental subcaste) recommendations about what bloodlines would work well together.

The geneticists and biologists and so forth had their first breakthrough when they figured out how to breed plants that would do whatever they wanted. This is when they created the first living cities -- cities formed out of still-living plants. Quick-growing, strong, and easily shaped, these GMO-cities gradually replaced those built regularly, primarily because they could be grown and would halt further destruction of the ecosystem (a problem, and also part of the reason for eugenics; overpopulation and overuse of resources were beginning to make the world crumble beneath the Hanshim).

Their second breakthrough was when they figured out how to modify animals to have specific traits. They couldn't create something new, no, but they had figured out the gene sequencing of traits, and eventually could take aspects of certain animals and graft them onto another. Say you wanted a really good guard dog. You'd use a dog as a base, of course, but then you might add in a pit viper's heat-sense, a moth's feelers (for sensitivity to air), and so forth. When they figured out how to breed these GMOs, especially, they rejoiced.

Then someone had the bright idea to try this with Hanshim.

As there were regulations in place, this kind of took a while to get through. And actually happened in secret, just a little.

The original researcher died before the experiment was completed, and it was finished by his assistant. But the gist was this: take twenty test-tube babies and code their genes for short, hairless, and dark-skinned. Everything else is randomised as per normal. But they're evenly split between male and female. They're raised in isolation, grow up fairly normally, etc. Once they're old enough, sperm and egg samples are taken and they're cross-bred with both each other and a random sampling of the general populace. When the genetics bred true, and the second generation had grown to maturity, the experiment was revealed to the public.

This caused a lot of outrage towards the geneticists. The geneticists themselves loved it.

Eventually it boiled down to this: if you can genetically craft what you want your child to be like, you can create whatever you want. So there started being genetically enhanced lines for everything; you couldn't specify a talent in math, but you could make it more likely that they would be good at math. Physical alterations are easier, but still not exact.

...and this is why they have castes and why they're genetic engineers and have biotech and so forth. ^_^

(also I am reconstructing this off the memory of what I figured out a month and a half? ago while talking to myself but never wrote down. which was silly of me. which is why you get the story of genetics and so forth now.)

Also I am happy this seems so much like an awesome idea to everyone. ^_^

[Deleted]

... you always have the coolest ideas. This entire world and the civilizations and their interactions with each other and the whole biotech thing and ahhhhhh everything is so fascinating.