I fail at lighthearted little romance
So, The Slash Pile Community is doing a little for-fun anthology with a "travel" theme, and I had this idea about a fellow passing through the city of Boem about a hundred years after the events in The Drummer Boy. It didn't go as planned. It's almost finished now, and it is way different from what I envisioned at first and it is also causing important changes in the novel. The changes in the novel I think are good: they make the world make more sense while also at the same time upping the magic ante. I understand what's going on with the green markings on Yanek and his sister -- I had thought they wdere just green blotches on their bellies that look like trees, but I now understand that they are actual chlorophyll-bearing cells, and that they do photosynthesize at a low level, and also that because of this there has to be markings in more prominent places as well, because it's not really going to help out your metabolism much if it's in an area that people like to keep covered even when it's sunny. So they have Trill-ish spots and stripes on the napes of their neck, because I think the area needs to be concealable, and down their backs some, and they also have the trees.
The mechanism of this -- which I do not think that Yanek's brilliant scientis sister can actually demonstrate in her time period, because of the limitations of contemporary optics and genetics theory -- is that the photosynthesizing organelles are passed from mother to child by fetal graft in the womb, rather than through the parents' chromosomes. However, there needs to be a certain array of genetic switches lined up just so, or the graft doesn't take, and furthermore, there's a certain risk to the process, and a higher rate of miscarriage. Which explains why Yanek's older brothers don't have the green stuff: they just didn't get the switches lined up. Out of eight children, two had the green stuff. That is not a Mendelian 25%, just to be clear. I don't know or care what the probabilities are in the total population. Each of the switches that work together to allow the graft to take has its own separate Mendelian genetics, and then there is the photosynthetic organism itself. I don't know or care how many of these switches are involved, or how chained they are to each other -- by that I mean, how likely it is that someone who has one of them has the others and vice versa. And who knows what's going on with the green dealies' own genetics. What makes them likely to be strong on their end? Don't know.
Meanwhile, the little story? ends up having neo-nazis in it. I don't even know how that happened.
spoiler: they live, they get together, they may have a future together.
The mechanism of this -- which I do not think that Yanek's brilliant scientis sister can actually demonstrate in her time period, because of the limitations of contemporary optics and genetics theory -- is that the photosynthesizing organelles are passed from mother to child by fetal graft in the womb, rather than through the parents' chromosomes. However, there needs to be a certain array of genetic switches lined up just so, or the graft doesn't take, and furthermore, there's a certain risk to the process, and a higher rate of miscarriage. Which explains why Yanek's older brothers don't have the green stuff: they just didn't get the switches lined up. Out of eight children, two had the green stuff. That is not a Mendelian 25%, just to be clear. I don't know or care what the probabilities are in the total population. Each of the switches that work together to allow the graft to take has its own separate Mendelian genetics, and then there is the photosynthetic organism itself. I don't know or care how many of these switches are involved, or how chained they are to each other -- by that I mean, how likely it is that someone who has one of them has the others and vice versa. And who knows what's going on with the green dealies' own genetics. What makes them likely to be strong on their end? Don't know.
Meanwhile, the little story? ends up having neo-nazis in it. I don't even know how that happened.
spoiler: they live, they get together, they may have a future together.