Okok, now I'm hella curious :D
How did your hospitaller OC Hostilia feel about needing an heir? How many heirs did she end up getting, if any? (´｡• ᵕ •｡`)
yayay hi @fralle-chan !! thank u for the question I was so excited to see this in my inbox (^///^)
Okay so. Part of it comes from watching her family implode in a couple discreet ways - her grandparents, who she never met, struggled for years to conceive and only had one child (her mother) and the amount of treatments and procedures they went through took such a toll it eventually killed them. Her parents, on the other hand, had no struggles conceiving and so Hostilia is the youngest of seven siblings, most of whom she had strained relationships with even before she was sent off to nun school. So having an heir to her is something that is either a) very difficult, requires all eggs in one basket, and will kill you or b) will give you a frankly (to her) unmanagable about of children you cannot properly divide your attention between.
Another part comes from the fact that as the youngest of seven, she had always been fairly certain she was never going to be getting the family writ of trade. Galen, the eldest, was being trained to be Rogue Trader as long as she could remember, and the minute Galen and any of her other siblings started having kids, she starts dropping from seventh in line to like. fourteenth in line very quickly. Also evidenced that her parents felt that it would be better to send her off to become a novitiate than to train her as a back up Rogue Trader. She doesn't need to have kids, which is good because she doesn't really want to have kids or give birth. She can be the cool lesbian aunt with the polycule. Except then her parents die suddenly and all her siblings come down with a terminal case of "blowing up each other and all their holdings" in mad grabs to get the writ, which Hostilia survives mostly by the virtue of being on a tiny planet on the other end of the subsector and no one has seen her in 15 years so they all kind of forgot about her.
And then on top of it she was a Sororitas - and even though the Hospitallers are generally less self sacrificing than other branches, she was still being trained to run directly into dangerous situations to save and protect others. Train to rescue a sister drowning in freezing water in full power armour. Train to run directly into a burning building. Train to dodge or tank shots to get that stimpak to your fallen militant sister. Her loyalty needs to lie with her squad, with the people she's here to help. The people she needs to stay alive for need to be the people around her, not a child waiting back home. Also, she wants to be doing medical shit to others, not having it happen to her.
She ends up having at least one or two, though I haven't quite decided how yet - for reasons involving a custom implant me and my gm (who is also my wife) created she probably can't or at least shouldn't carry an heir to term herself. Hostilia's first suggestion is "the admech already have a bunch of my eggs frozen why don't we just get them to grow me a tube baby. I know they can do that. We can have the baby with nanny's and governess' growing up so I don't have to stop exploring and - oh my god I sound like my mother." Having one of the wives I know she eventually amasses works in theory but then you start getting into some insane politics around how OTHER people view her family based on which partners are giving her heirs in which order.
She's considering adopting a war orphan (there's lots of those rn) or trying to find a baby cousin she can take under her wing and train to be not useless (the main argument for having an heir that she finds compelling is if she dies without one the writ goes to one of her many useless fop cousins).
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