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Save Point: A Placidity Of Kine

Live Stock Pools, Nile River, Khem

Sethkill is hanging out with the kine when they find him.

The kine are large herd animals descended from what Terrowne has dubbed the 'gazelle' side of the strange sethura dual eco-system, based on the species to which Sethkill most frequently compares them. 'Gazelles' all 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.

(Of course this definition completely glosses over all of the extremely important distinctions that really matter, but he imagines Sethkill probably looks at it the same way and could easily miss the finer nuances of local species in the just the same manner. He wonders whether the Dragon still fell from the sky in its vessel of twisted iridium back sixty-five million years ago in the sethura continuity, or maybe whether it was just a really large rock, or nothing at all, and if so whether this has affected the evolution of species, and he makes a mental note to ask more about it, which he then forgets immediately. All of the Dragons are really one Dragon if you go back far enough to the original instantiation, sometimes under other names).

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.

Sethkill is whispering sweet nothings into a kines flicky ear from a short climbing ladder and grooming its body fur when they arrive. He turns around and does the close-mouthed sethura smile at them (no threat, see my fangs are covered, all is happy!).

"I love visiting the kine," he explains. "I know it probably seems a bit crazy to take along some breeding stock on what's essentially a space ship, but it's good to have some familiar creatures along. Very calming. Also quite delicious every occasional once in a while."

The improved hygiene of kines means that they smell much nicer than a cow and Cleo is quite immediately taken by something that looks very delicious, but while the kine have gotten used to human visitors they are not happy with this feline thing that gives off hints of claws and well-used teeth. Because even a very small kine is quite large, she is forced to step back until they calm down a bit.

"We have the kine, a couple of riding jackals with all their reins and saddles and stuff, a small flock of archeopteryi for their eggs, and some skin-shedder lizards of the sort I told you about. That's not counting people's house lizards and snakes and the occasional pet scale-fish. When you're here you can come down and help to feed and care for them, which you wouldn't think would be popular, but they have to make a list. I nearly forgot it was my turn."

Terrowne helps feed the kine while Cleo looks on with an expression he's never seen before and which he realizes must be trepidation. It seems you have to be several tons in weight and and certifiably non-sentient before Cleo is worried about standing next to you.

Since he seems to be enjoying talking about the kine, perhaps because grooming them used to be something he liked to do together with Keselt, they let him ramble on and soon know more about them than any human really needs to. It seems, for example, that there was a sacred rule proclaimed against them by the Blackside in the dryer and more arid countries at the time of the Kith-Rhiannon war, supposedly because they fouled drinkable water supplies. "Which was completely wrong because they're essential to the ecosystem there. The assorted stuff that washes off them helps to keep plant the growth fertile, so the Blackside was basically tripping over their own talons. Less kine actually increased desertification."

The kine are theoretically milkable, but generally the sethura don't, both because it is seen as unkind to the calves to separate them from their mothers, and more importantly because their milk contains a mild narcotic that makes sethura happy and slightly sleepy. This might seem tempting, but the sethura as a species have no trait for digestive tolerance of milk from other species, at least not until they recently engineered it in. As a result the risk reward is low, like drinking really badly made alcohol that will floor you. The chemical involved, as it turns out, is not that hard to synthesize, even though you can't distill it, and mixing it with the ground-up 'stone-powder' mineral blend they use as a cooking ingredient creates 'milk' that is much safer and can be consumed without the same unpleasant side effects.

There's a whole cultural history involving the phrase 'milk-drinker' and lewd insinuations that a male who has successfully gotten his mate pregnant gets to 'drink from the other breasts' as a reward for his sexual prowess. Basically it's the same as humans and booze, with peculiar overtones of oxytocin, which may be the real reason the Blackside got so worked up about it. Sethkill seems to find the whole thing amusingly kitschy and not quite worthy of being up there with proper serious indecency.

The main impression Cleo takes away from the kine is the smell of water, which lingers due to their bathing tank, which they stroll down into every once in a while as the mood takes them, soaking near the edge as they chew on hydroponic greens which can be conveniently lifted straight from their original trays to a waterside rack where they will last until eaten.