Kivi

the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.

this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.

therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:

- being a cow

- being an almond

- being a woman

- being a coconut

- being in the omegaverse

- being an oat

(list is exemplary and not finite)

Foxgirls usually just form some kind of small rounded pile. Bunnygirls tile the plane.

Slimegirls just like. Puddle most of the time, mixing, which makes it the most intimate form of cuddling possible.

It's true that you don't see the Voont around anymore, but not for the reasons everyone thinks; humanity, when they pick a side in a war, don't go in to fight. They learned their lessons about that thousands of years ago, when they all still lived on Earth, and nearly turned it into a dead and poisoned world.

No, the survivors of that mess learned from it. They don't fight anymore; every life is precious to them. No one ever gets into a territorial dispute with humans because they pick the most hellish worlds to claim, and they only do it after making sure no one else wants it, including any proto-sophonts living there. And they learned that most species - even the belligerent ones - don't go to war for the sake of it; they do it out of need.

When humans go to war, their massive armored ships show up at every planet you control, and the next thing you know you have offers to help fix things coming in. The climate of your worlds not right? They can help. Medical trouble? They're good with a vast range of biologies. Resource woes? They'll go corral entire massive asteroids laden with whatever you need and park them in orbit for you - or dismantle them and ship them down, if you need it. And they're just so nice about it - never trying to intrude, not trying to be pushy, just there to lend a hand with whatever you need, if you happen to want a hand.

And eventually, because they're evolved from persistence predators, they win you over. You find yourself invited up to their ships so they can show you their culture, and so you can teach them about yourself. And that's where you learn that 'human' stopped being a species designation a long, long time ago. Humans are those persistence predators who learned a hard lesson, yes, but they're also all the uplifted species that adopted themselves into the human race, and the constructs that humans made, realized had developed awareness, and welcomed into the family, and all the others that humans have gone to war with over the millennia.

You won't see a Voont anymore, no. But you'll see humans whose ancestors called themselves Voont, and had the nicest collective species in the galaxy turn up and offer to help with everything, and ended up being adopted into the sprawling label of what it means to be human.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.