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Ingame Database: Primary Glossary of Definitions

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(All sethura names and terms are in translation except where easily human-pronounceable)

Ancient Civilization: The most recent, previously occurring non-human civilization in Cleo and Terrownes timeline, founded by a species of tyrannosaurid raptors somewhat taller and stronger than humans. Evidence of their activities is limited to stray fragments of their infrastructure which still exist in various locations (tunnel network under Lacrunta, partial transit station ruins at Crescent Moon Bay, cryo-facility in north Scandinavia, various poorly documented seismically mapped features six miles beneath the Somme). They seem to have been quite technologically adept, and got as far as building parts of a depth train network, and opening small apertures into other universes to tap their energy, before being overrun by an ascension event and transcending.

Colours: To avoid confusion, colors are translated as they would appear to an unmodified human, which misses some of the finer nuances of the shading but helps keep things consistent. Cleo, for example, has tetrachromatic vision with an additional channel that has been modified to pick up infrared, which she perceives as a sort of lighting and shading modifier, allowing her to not just detect but clearly see living creatures at night, with minimal effect in the daytime. However this visual effect is quite difficult to describe, as is the additional information she gains from it, such an idea of the health, exertion status and other vital statistics of living creatures she sees.

The sethura see a somewhat different range of colours than we do, having to do with the fact that their home world has more purplish water, vegetation with a number of different photo-synthetic pigments ranging from black to autumnal reds and yellows, and a generally brighter sky in a range of shades having to do with the local atmospheric composition. Accordingly they have evolved sensitivity in different bandwidths, then further modified this through later enhancement and improvement of their own visual acuity.

Cyclicity: Some of the comments made by Terrowne as the Dragon of Shadow suggest that time is actually cyclical rather than linear, with events repeating again in a similar, but not quite identical manner, under slightly different contexts each time. There does not seem to be a fixed length, with some events cycling more rapidly and others on a longer scale, sort of like the interrelated eddies that comprise a single whirlpool, a conclusion supported by the way that the end of various cycles ultimately sync up. There may also be a correlation to the number of qualified observers, since very little seems to have happened between the transcendence of the Ancient Civilization and the human race subsequently reaching significant numbers.

The idea of history being effectively cyclic is not new (there are any number of sources) but the idea that it might be literally cyclic is a little known one (see 'Timefall' by Kahn). In fact the term 'epicyclic' might be more accurate given that there are a number of cycles overlapping at any given moments. This concept is also seen in Ancient Egyptian philosophy, which specifies Neheh (cyclical time) as distinct to Djet (fixed time).

Cythura: A sethura who has extensively augmented themselves with information technology. This was popular when it first became available, but has since been mostly replaced with 'soft' biologic or nanotechnologic modifications which do not require active maintenance once completed, thus there are not that many hard-core cythura left. The ones who remain have a reputation as hackers and practice a peculiar philosophy that 'information wants to be free'.

Dragon of Shadow: When the Dragon looks into the future, it sees each timelines potential future as a broader, more unbundled structure of possibilities that have yet to be fully reconciled, like the loose unravelled end of a rope. By passing messages between all the closely similar potential versions of its own future selves, it can observe the possible futures and thus effectively choose how the rope is braided back together as the future is reconciled. It has knowledge of the possible future, but still has to implement the required changes to get its own preferred outcome, just like everyone else.

Because every moment is in the future from the point of view of its own past, the Dragon can also exploit timelines that didn't happen in order to create acausal event changes, such as swapping only its own body for a possible alternate form, or recovering the weapon that it might plausibly have been holding. When it does this it is not actually changing history retroactively, rather it is creating a transient variation from the true path of events, which will subsequently be reconciled with the main timeline again as further events occur. They can be considered as though they were small defects in the fibers of which the rope is made, which cease to be very significant once it is woven together along a sufficient length to create a sturdier and more compact strand.

The Dragons powers are mainly limited by its own unwillingness to damage its own carefully assembled history. Like a player in a video game, it can easily go back and mess around with the most recent few saves to try and get a better outcome, using knowledge obtained from what is effectively the future in multiple variant attempts to try and arrange a better outcome. It can even load useful items from other save files if it cares to make the effort, but trying to alter everything from the start would mean playing the entire game again and losing all of the gains made.

Houses of the Demi-Mondaine: Sethura slang for their equivalent to the months of the year, which since they involve three moons on different and sometimes eccentric orbits, are more of an arbitrary division of the year as a whole, which acts as the largest base number. The term originates from an original conception that there are four primary seasons due to the axial tilt of the planet, and further subdivision indicates questionable 'relationships' between the seasonal houses, exemplified by the actions of the moons as they chase one another, are together for a time, drift apart, and so forth.

Although the axial tilt of the sethura homeworld is a little less than that of the earth, the mass of all three moons together is about the same, so their timeline presumably involves some different celestial mechanics occurring early on. Their tides, on average, are less but vary more, producing different sea-life and a more purple color to their ocean, rather than blue.

Having three moons did provide a minor intellectual advantage to the sethura species, since it improved their grasp of the wider universe. 'The moons are to the world as the planets are to the sun," was a famous statement by an early sethura philosopher, and it led them to a more rapid understanding of wider celestial motion, although the complete orbits of the moons were harder to calculate in the long run, since they in fact comprised a multiple body problem of a sort that is difficult to handle with basic mathematics.

Kine Set: The kine are large herd animals descended from the 'gazelle' side of the strange sethura dual eco-system. 'Gazelles' have horns and an elongate gracile body type, even the sethura, while 'lizards' seem to comprise an extensive range of saurian shapes including winged flyers, from an age of dinosaurs that never quite ended, just scaled down and intermingled with the mammals that grew up between their forefeet and caught them by surprise.

Individual kine are very large and placid, with beautiful big eyes and a peaceful manner, this basically meaning that they are waiting until you look away to step on your foot and crush it, or lean against you and squash you flat against a wall. They seem to occupy the same sort of niche as cattle, with a dash of hippopotamus, due to a love of bathing that makes them cleaner than the average cow but complicates their maintenance since they have to have a pool.

Eye Of Wolfmother: The conjunction formed by the three moons of the sethura homeworld. Since all three together have the same collective mass as the single one here, they're collectively smaller and on more far flung orbits. They're also quite strangely identical, despite the fact that the smallest and nearest one is very dense and black, covered in basalt flows, the second is a golden shade produced by solar particle bombardment over the ages, and the largest and most distant is a luminous glowing white, much like the one here, if rather less impressive.

They all each have at least one major impact crater on them, although since they aren't tidally locked like the one here, the relative positions constantly change. They drive planetologists to distraction with ever-increasingly-complex conspiracy theories as to their exact origin, some of which make very little sense.

Otherside: Also known as the Wide, the Elsewhere, or the Beyond, the Otherside is the wider and higher-dimensional space that the various timelines including our own universe reside inside of (for lack of a better descriptive term). The region of topologically distorted space-time the Dragon originates from was a part of our universe coterminous with the Otherside in at least seven local dimensions, making the Dragon effectively a native resident.

Because the Otherside is higher dimensional, it is both larger than our native universe (hence the term 'The Wide' sometimes applied) and useful as a shortcut to enable fast travel instances, both within individual timelines and between them. Moving within the Otherside requires either drive systems that use quantum interaction to gain leverage (they produce nothing but a spray of exotic particles when active in our universe) or other intrinsic observer-based quantum manipulation.

The Otherside actually has an internal ecosystem ranging from lesser creatures of no significant intelligent to highly god-like entities. Attempts to classify these creatures tend to rely heavily on the works of Lewis Carroll or Howard Philips Lovecraft, mainly because they have limbs that most resemble tentacles when extruded into our lower-dimensional universe, and a tendency to slip in and out of local space-time, appearing and disappearing at will.

Pneuma: Actually an Ancient Greek word meaning 'breath of life', the term 'pneuma' is used as the translation here for a sethura internal organ that performs a similar function to the human heart. Small differences in the early evolutionary history of Sethuramandraki mean that the basic design for living things on the planet, whilst bilateral, is derived from an originally hexagonal form (most probably an early starfish). So instead of one dangerously vulnerable heart that pumps, sethura have six 'pneuma' that operate by a mechanism more closely akin to swallowing, giving them very smooth and efficient bloodflow. In a modern sethura, the pneuma are located two in the upper arms, two in the inner torso behind the lungs, and two in the upper thighs. It follows that killing a sethura requires a lot more stabbing than a human.

Sethura 'Birth': Sethura are a species of oviparous mammal that lays soft-shelled membranous eggs which are oxygen permeable. The offspring then grows quickly inside the shell and hatches a short while later, thus avoiding the waste of biological resources associated with being a placental mammal, and the intrinsic size limits to a normal hard-shelled egg (as well as the danger to life and vaginal orifice imposed by birthing an intelligent creature with a large head).

It's an engineered solution, rather that one that arose in nature, and by the time the offspring hatch by stretching their hardened noses against the shell, it has become a thin leathery caul filled with nothing much but a certain amount of oxygen-permeable fluid. The delay associated with the hatching also gives the mother time to start producing milk and get physically and psychologically ready for the childs hungry demands.

Sethura 'Chalice Cups': Despite their muzzles, the sethura can drink from cups (wide shallow ones preferred) by holding the cup on one side of their muzzle and hooking their tongue around it on the other edge to form a seal. They're quite adept at it in fact. They prefer for entertaining a sort of chalice cup with a slight lip around the edge, although they are sometimes known to also use a tall slender champagne glass arrangement that they can literally put inside their mouth like a human doing shots. This creates a peculiar illusion of classiness in werewolf bars, where most of the glasses are flutes but the drinking is as intense as anywhere else.

Sethura 'Higher Physics': The sethura timeline, as well as the one Cleo and Terrowne reside in, share a mostly common set of physics (they are relatively adjacent, and of course some similarity is required for it to be practical to transit between universes, as demonstrated by Dragons abrupt translation to a lower-dimensional space, which rendered it effectively dead for several hundred million years). However, the subtle differences from our own universe begin at the quantum level, where the interactions of fine structure and some of the minor constants vary.

These differences provide what can best be described as a sort of software hook, allowing access to the higher-dimensional physics of the Wide, the enclosing 'space' surrounding the universes. The Wide is at least seven-dimensional 'locally' and may include even more or fewer dimensions further out. A clue to this can be found in the engineering used by the sethura for such devices, as they tend to incorporate a seven-fold rotational symmetry, each component set to manipulate one higher-level 'direction' to create the total effect. The best example is the fixed transit network the sethura use for the major destinations on their home world, though other practical applications include gravity manipulation and energy generation.

The Dragon is itself an example of this approach, incorporating the seven-fold structures into its body rather hosting them externally. Effectively it is an evolved rather than technological solution to the same problem of how to get higher-level stuff to work in a lower-level space, which is why the Dragon was offline for so long when it first arrived (imagine being flattened to the thickness of a thin sheet of paper several times over, but remaining completely intact and in one piece, and this gives some idea of the nature of the technical and engineering challenges to be overcome for it to get everything working again).

Sethura 'Immortality': The sethura are all baseline immortal. There was a certain amount of wrangling about this at first, which ended when some unsporting and still unidentified individual released an immortality plague. Faced with contagious long life and health, somehow everyone managed to accept the consequence. The first officially issued 'patch' for the condition set a social precedent that it was too late to 'fix' the problem and it would need to be dealt with.

Being practical, the sethura simply looked at the options and adjusted their fertility accordingly over a trial period of a couple of hundred years. By adjusting a multitude of factors, such as social perception of overcrowding and its impact on sexuality, genetic and hormonal compatibility and so forth, they regulated the odds of reproduction to match the rate of lives lost. A closer and much more passionate relationship increases the odds, and a poor match reduces them, but often there are unexpected conceptions as sethura who are unexpectedly a perfect match for one another in body if not in shared lifestyle hook up, never to meet again. The children are mostly kept and raised, because the odds of a child are rare and so they are a valuable treasure, a lucky turn of fate. Sethuresses who don't want to raise the child generally give birth anyway and then trade to a couple who haven't been so fortunate yet, because having a child already stimulates maternal instincts and increases the likelihood of that successful conception.

It is considered poor form and inappropriate to cheat the odds by forcing a conception, as it is most generally considered that if your match is really suitable, one should occur eventually. In the meantime you can always adopt. Exceptions are made for various reasons, and once conception happens, all forms of genetic and technological modding are allowed, with the risk of spoiling this lucky event a counter-balance to unrestricted tinkering. Taking genetic samples from friends and family to create a better and more interesting genetic mix is fully encouraged, within the bounds of reason, as is the application of default templates that select against undesirable characteristics and for desirable ones, in a general sort of way. The more blatant and obvious mental disorders have mostly been bred out of sethura society by now, though subtle deviations that are inevitable in something as complex as the mind remain. There has also been a general and widespread increase in intelligence and health, as various factors that would have reduced both have been gradually discarded.

Occasionally someone complains that life has been overly mandated, and the randomness and more creative variation of past ages lost, but then everyone else takes a good hard look at their history and decides that this is better. All-out madness and poor health are hardly desirable, and now those who would have been quite completely lost are at least sane enough to be functional, and can achieve something with their curiously convoluted thoughts. Everyone is watching, after all, because you can't keep secrets when the evidence is there in every trace of sweat and dust, and any attempts to manipulate the health and well-being of society to darker ends fail when you can never guarantee that a sethuress won't decide to throw in the more admirable traits of her older brother, or an unlikely first love, thus completely spoiling the plan. It's a fun idea for a story, wicked plot overcome by better nature, but something that couldn't actually happen in real life.

Sethura 'Sluts': The lifestyle of many free-spirited city-dwelling sethuresses involves essentially living out of a carry-all with the best available male that will have them, getting what is essentially free board and meals for anything from just days to years by providing a decent level of sex and companionship as they try to make their way up the social hierarchy. The scene shades from various levels of prostitution, joyfully embraced, to stylish sethuresses who've been happily living as someone's long term mistress for so many decades now that the only thing missing is the paperwork. Participation at all levels is a purely voluntary thing, due to the peculiar sethura take on an economy, so males are expected to be flexible about it, do their best to attract a better class of company, and provide suitably nice accommodation for their mate of the evening.

Actual prostitutes can be distinguished from enthusiastic young 'sluts' by virtue of the fact that they go bottomless whilst still wearing a top to cover their primary breasts. Since it is perfectly acceptable for both male and female sethura to go topless in public during the normal course of affairs, especially during hot weather, this specific combination indicates that they are available purely in exchange for currency with no additional hospitality expected.

One unusual result of this arrangement is known as a whore-party, a sethura underground club thing where the participants dance bottomless and try to take each other for as much as they can. The result is resembles a cross between a rave party and poker night, often with significant buy-ins. Dancers can demand outrageous sums if they want, but have to put out if their prospective 'client' can match the number offered, making it an exciting way to find sex.

Sethurani (written): As everyone knows, Sethurani is written using two sets of twelve characters (which incidentally makes it handy to sign with your fingers, if you're a sethura). The first of these sets consists exclusively of consonantal sounds, while the second consists of modifiers including vowels, punctuation, intonation and a numerical specifier. The character sets are then combined to form a range of phonemic sounds which can also intrinsically include their own modifiers (for example, querying infrasonic yip, sarcastic ultrasonic yelp, and so on) across a wider range than normal humans are able to hear. Numbers are represented using the numerical modifier and the twelve symbols from the first set, either by writing them sequentially, or in a sort of scientific notation (value symbol, numeric modifier, value symbol).

The consonantal twelve-grouping originated first and earliest and is more primitive, with the second set of modifiers originating as a response as the culture developed, initially with many fewer symbols but inevitably stabilizing on twelve again (the Blackside culture, for example, hung onto an almost entirely consonantal variant with no vowels until relatively recent times).

The sethura don't use typing keyboards much anymore, but where they do they're miraculously compact compared to the human equivalent. While the convention is to represent each phoneme with a given two symbol pair, this is not an absolute and it is acceptable to mix and match certain combinations (for example, 'what the fuck?' in in sethura ends in consonant, startlement modifer, querying modifier as a three symbol cluster indicating that both the startlement and the question are all in relation to the same unexpected sex act).

The second set can be summarized as Statement Grouping Start (Capitalize), Vowels, Startlement (Exclamation), Querying (Question Mark), Hilarious-Ironic-Sarcastic (Irony), Time or Numerical Indicator (Number), Significant Pause (Comma, Dash), Statement Grouping End (Full Stop or Period). This makes for some interesting linguistic takes on phrases like, 'No, I'm not late at all, why do you ask?' with its implicit temporal sarcasm.

Sethura, Sentience Development Of: The sethura seem to have started off as a sort of mid-range plains-dwelling, non-obligate carnivore that lived in a variable pack. Because they could eat meat for energy but also vegetation and fruit in low energy scenarios, they essentially became sentient from the opposite direction from humans (who started out herbivorous and branched into meat).

The horns they shared with the loosely related 'gazelles' they originally hunted (horns which are relatively light and small and streamlined compared to those seen on a true grazing species) seem to have been retained as a defensive measure, protecting sethura in groups from more specialized heavy carnivores that were meat-obligate, and providing the evolutionary pressure required to drive development of intelligence. By using the defensive tactics of a herd dweller, fostering co-operation and social skills, combined with offensive tactics of a pack hunter, requiring complex on-the-fly individual decision making, they successfully resisted this evolutionary pressure from both sides and developed basic tool use.

The structure of the sethura hand reflects this development, having originated as a modification of the basic animal paw to allow them to better grab prey animals that were getting away (since they were not as heavy as a true obligate carnivore, they had to grab onto the target of their hunt en masse and drag it down in order to feed). It turned out that this modification enabled them to also grasp primitive weapons of various kinds, leading to rapid development.

Also a product of this early phase of their species history is the upright pose and elongated neck, and the long digitigrade legs that make a sethura look as though it should have two sets of knees. These developed similarly to the same feature as it is seen in hyenas, the upright pose allowing them to look up over obstacles such as low grasses, and also to look at one another face to face, showing expressions as part of a complex social hierarchy. Although individualism meant that it never quite developed as extensively as with hyenas, the earliest sethura societies were probably loosely matriarchal, family clans centered around female clan matriarchs with the males acting as hunting packs while the females planned things out and managed building and food supplies.

Having the loyalty of their children probably secured the rule of these leaders, and their ancient association with building or construction seems to stem from concepts of rulership over the dens or caves in which they raised and educated their young. Early sethura dwellings were more below the ground than on the surface, with digging out the den being the priority, and bracing the walls and fortifying the entrance becoming a natural correlation when the pack needed to expand and dig out more space, making the tunnels and living spaces bigger.

With sufficient sophistication of building skills, this eventually led to a long era of castles, duns, and assorted fortresses, in which defensive elaborations around the den entrances became ever more complex as a statement of rank and prestige, until it was seen as the privilege of the ruling bloodlines to elevate themselves to living entirely above ground, kept safe by their many subjects. With this development, the rule came to be shared between both males and females, since living fully above ground required not just hunting packs, but defensive forces. An individual might still choose to build his or her home into the hillside, a turf-roofed den with hidden depths under the surface, but to make a showing of rank and importance, one lived above ground as part of a city, that was the extension of a central castle, which was in turn built atop that original den.

Shadow Cabal: A fairly large-scale adult resort and hot springs complex, part of a more extensive geothermal field situated on the nearest volcanic site to the Great City. Named after a minor deity once worshiped there (original sethura name has implications of secret hidden conspiracy, like 'cabal', and of sexually demanding divinity, like 'cybele', hence the translation). Sethkill and Keselt would not normally go somewhere quite so adult-oriented on holiday, but were looking to meet up with the cythura Phrisk. To quote the main sign, "We politely ask that there be no cumming in the hot pools, although of course they're sort-of intrinsically self-cleaning, as it were."

Silva: The most common plant-life analogue on Sethuramandraki to the generic tree. 'A beautiful skinless animal of plant and bone, growing in peaked and pointed interwoven flutes ever upward' as it was once famously described in poetry, the silva is most commonly found in the low forests, its growth acting as a host for various creatures specifically adapted to its ecological niche, and its timber making perfect variably-sized spars for building.

Steelblade: A sethura musical instrument that combines the best points of a violin, an electric guitar and a low-tensile sawblade. When the sethura discovered how to mass-produce steel, an event that happened surprisingly early on in their cultural development, they discovered that you could use various grades of sawblade to produce resonant music with the bow from an existing musical instrument resembling a violin, only with a wider range of pitches (it resembled a viola gamba or cello in certain respects). Development then went the other way, however, as they found a way to replace the stringset on the violin-like instrument with a preset series of blades under variable tension produced by adjustable keys at the end of the grip.

The subsequent electrification of the instrument when basic audio technologies were developed resulted in a new hybrid steelblade that could produce an extraordinary range of sounds. Sethkill seems to have learned to play one at some point in his youth and can do covers of an assortment of ridiculously epic themes for various weave games and interactive dramas that he has seen.

The Great City: The River Srenen winds downward across a low plain, where the sethura first and a very time long ago built a settlement that eventually became 'The Great City' and effectively the sethura world capital. The original founder was named Srenen, although no further information is available and the site of the original settlement is now the Srenen district, upriver from the area known as the Lowgrounds.

At the mouth of the River Srenen, a large and extremely hard igneous intrusion with a weakness running down the middle was subjected to erosion by the river water in geologically recent times, the water eventually cutting a path through and around it even though the surrounding sediment was relatively softer and levelled much more evenly. This has resulted in two enormously tall and not quite symmetrical pointed outcroppings to either side of the main delta, known as the Pillars of Srenen. Because they are tall, pointy and made almost entirely of solid rock, they are difficult to build upon, although historically there have generally been a few structures made of silva-wood frames such as lighthouses, guard and customs posts, and similar. There is also very little foliage or wildlife on the Pillars, with the exception of a few species of low bush and unusual insects that have adapted across long periods of time to this unusual environment.

Because the path between the Pillars is the main navigable waterway up the Srenen River and past the lower delta, a chain used to be run between the Pillars that could be raised to block the access of large-draft vessels such as warships and cargo transports. In the modern day and age, the chain was removed and the Pillars systematically cleaned of all sethura habitation, allowed to go back to nature to restore the original view.

The current name of 'The Great City' arises from a unification event in which the various towns on the lower part of the River Srenen voted to join together and become a single city. Even as late as the Kith Rhiannon war, there was plenty of space on the plains to either side of the river (hence the 'Plain of the Apotheosis') but the communities near the river had almost grown together. To avoid arguments over the name, the proposed entity to be created was listed on the voting forms and other paperwork simply as 'The Greater City', a name which was co-opted by its new citizens after dropping the terminal modifier simply as 'The Great City'. The question of an official name was never in fact resolved, and to this day, every few decades, someone pointlessly tries to revive the debate. Official documents will sometimes go so far as to call it 'The Srenen River Greater City' despite the fact that this was never actually endorsed as the area name.

Timelines: A not strictly-accurate description for the variant histories that co-exist together. Cleo and Terrownes history is mostly similar to our own, but with some minor differences (the United Nations is the Allied Nations, Leonardo de Caprio was in the science fiction film 'Overture', and so forth). The world of Sethuramandraki exists in its own completely different timeline, schismed sometime before the human race even existed (the first changes are seen in early evolutionary history, but remain minor up until the Chicxulub impact missed). The Nation of Azatlan seems to have existed in a separate but moderately adjacent timeline before local history was rewritten by 'the terrible thing' that happened above Crescent Moon Bay, 'the wound in the world'.

The spaces between the timelines are mostly relatively empty, because minor variations tend to collapse back into the main continuities and be overwritten, in the same way that space is mostly empty between stars and planets. It is possible to transit between the timelines through the Wide or Elsewhere of higher-dimensional space.

What exactly causes a timeline to fracture and branch a new variation is uncertain, but it seems to be a response to true higher order spatial events rather than anything so trivial as mere human decisions and activities. A truly irreconcilable change has to occur that cannot be accommodated by the original history. This may explain why the local laws of physics are in some cases slightly different between timelines. If the higher order 'impact event' that causes each branching also slightly deforms the continuity it creates to a greater or lesser degree, there will be spreads with variant laws of physics diverging from or returning towards some given norm.

Weave: Sethura informal name for their equivalent of the internet, although it is much more well developed and is accessed by means of a simple device known as a neural clip that translates the data into a custom format for each users mind. An unlimited, interactive and complete immersion simulation sounds like a guarantee for chaos, but social mores have developed regarding what it is and is not appropriate to do in any given context, just as for any other social activity.

The simulation requires a suspension of disbelief by the user, just as with anything else, and so can be exited by the simple expedient of rejecting what is observed and opening ones eyes. This acts as the ultimate precaution against the misuse of the simulation, in that if it all gets too much too handle, the user will simply start awake as if from a bad dream. Of course, ditching too early is likely to get you mocked by your friends for your lack of personal toughness and bravery.

The system is designed so it can only passively override an existing neurological input, and only read the available output. There is thus a certain knack to lying still and keeping ones mind clear to accept the input, whilst thinking your movements in the simulation into action without actually moving your own body, much as in a dream. Essentially, the weave is a very elaborate video game with controls that conform to actual reality, making it possible to learn skills in it, or take existing experience and use it in weave scenarios.

Weights and Measures: All weights and measures have been translated to the current modern metric or imperial measures used in our own timeline, depending on which of these seemed the more applicable. Occasional exceptions reflect the relevancy of those units in the eras or timelines concerned.

Werewolf Celebrations: The werewolves have their own set of seasonal holidays that derive from a range of traditions including both nature worship, and rough explanations at an early stage of what their ancestor species liked to do based entirely on other peoples recollections. They have four main holidays, which are traditionally held on the nearest full moon to each solstice and share certain commonalities with their human equivalents.

So there is a winter festival after the new year (commonly involving large bonfires, a fixed hunt, and then the disposal of any stray carcass bits in said bonfire to keep it tidy) a spring festival with its fertility overtones about three months in (celebrated mostly separately by males and females, with a sort of 'sacrificial' guest appearance at each by the most sexually attractive members of the other gender, who dance or strip to rile everyone up) a summer festival mid-year to celebrate the warmth and plenty (with much drinking and feasting and an incongruous abundance of colorful ribbons and flowers tucked behind the ears) and finally an autumn festival reminiscent of a sort of memento mori (in which werewolf females parade in almost translucently thin 'ghost' robes carrying lit candles or the skulls and horns of ancestors, and are ceremonially given small gifts of either food or drink by the males as a kind of consolation).

Attendance is non-compulsory but the werewolves always enjoy having any excuse to party, and the nature of the festivals means that they can be effortlessly blended into their matching human equivalent. Food can be borrowed from one for the other, and stray accidents written off as being caused by too much drink or part of the season (a stray ancestor skull as a realistic decoration put together from other remains, or the dancing as a ladies night out at a strip club).

All werewolf festivals inevitably involve lots of drinking and sex, since as an immortal species, at any given time almost all of them are physically adult. Generally the children are allowed to visit the festivals but not take an active part, and are allowed some alcoholic beverages in moderation but not any of the more exotic cocktails involving milk and blood designed to bypass their built-in resistance to drugs and intoxicants. Only once they 'turn' and gain the ability to shapeshift are the children considered old enough to participate in sex and hunting.

The winter festival is associated with the Wolfmother, although the other festivals have long since lost any connotations associated with their ancestor species, developing new quirks of their own (such as 'the huntress will come get you' story told in the autumn, or the dirty 'raised tail song' in the spring). There is no strictly werewolf equivalent of the modern birthday party, although they are perfectly happy to play along and enjoy delicious cake.

There used to be an additional festival designed to force the first shift in young werewolves who had not already exhibited the change after a reasonable length of time (this was usually but not always fifteen years). Where possible it was run alongside the spring fertility festival. The process featured a sort of practical sex education in which the overdue young were provided with a show and tell on how a couple could go about mating in various ways, possibly to try and expose them to various scents and psychological triggers to prime them, and would then complete the ritual with their friends and the assistance of the two trainers by performing a ritual self-incision with a specially designed 'maidenblade' ending in a sharpened disc shaped like the moon. Females took their own virginity with the blade, whilst males cut through the frenulum behind the head of their penis (both described in the relevant sources as very uncomfortable on the initial transformation, as they are each features a werewolf entirely lacks).

The process was simplified by a sacramental drink of uncertain composition that seems to have enhanced circulation, giving the females great excitement and the males painfully stiff erections. It appears that the psychological aspects of overcoming the fear of pain and taking control of ones own body, combined with the intense sexual stimulation and possibly even damage done by this concoction, induced the body to undergo a first transformation as a response. Since a successful first transformation would also heal any damage done after it wore off and they changed back, restoring male connective tissue and any accidental cuts inflicted on the females, the any risk was considered to be worth the reward. It may have been more of a case of education rather than transformation, as having felt how to do it once, the young would then have been able to recall the feelings that they experienced and induce the change without external stimulation.

The first-change festival has died out in recent times, mostly for purely social reasons rather than practical ones. The composition of the sacramental drink was always more a matter of craft than science, as it featured many rare and very poisonous substances, and although the general recipe is known, the exact process to create the right effect has mostly been forgotten though a simple lack of practice. Forcing the first change simply as a method of standardization is also now seen as unwise, given that most werewolves who live in the were community will change eventually anyway, and those who do not may be better off simply staying human and remaining unaware of their differences. Most werewolf packs still have a few ancient, traditionally bronze maidenblades around, and they still see use occasionally as part of de-virginization pacts between small groups of werewolf females, or as discreet preparation by untransformed females who would still like to be able to try sex with their now-transformed male friends.