#bruteball

There’s currently a reward out for the magician that spelled Goatbaby into her currently confusing bipedal, more conscious form. They’re considered a neglectful sire in the eyes of the authorities, given the sort of power they’d have to be throwing around willy-nilly during duels in order to give Goatbaby consciousness like this. And neglectful sires are most definitely hunted down and made to pay support for beings they bring into consciousness like this without any intent of taking in and helping.

There is no concept of humanity in Goatbaby’s world the way there is in ours, partially because there is no majority of beings that we would read as “human”. In addition, a fleshy bipedal being with what we would think are conventionally human features could be any number of things: a fae, a born magician, a seamsinger, and so on. Monsters and magic beings are more common. I’m trying to keep this in mind by referring to Goatbaby in ways that would reflect the fact that “human” features aren’t central to the category of “being” in this world (referring to her as bipedal and so on). It sounds awkward sometimes, and I’m still working on how to smooth it out.

In Goatbaby’s world, there’s social tension between corporal and incorporeal beings, least of all because it’s difficult to tackle or stop somebody who’s essential a gas cloud in contact sports. In fact, some incorporeal beings take umbrage with indefinite pronouns like “everybody” because they don’t feel it represents them in the spectrum of beings (hinging on the question of whether or not they consider themselves to have bodies, which is something that incorporeal beings as a group don’t have a consensus on).

While Goatbaby goes to the equivalent of a high school, the age range of beings there is really wide. During schools’ first day ceremonies, you might have yearling stars of maybe five days’ age seated next to tsukumogami at 120 to 130 years’ age. Because of the sheer diversity of beings in her world, there is a corresponding diversity of expected lifespans. Guardians of established species with expectable lifespans send their children to Goatbaby’s level of schooling when they feel their children are in a stage of adolescence immediately preceding adulthood. Beings without guardians and not in the care of the authorities have to decide for themselves whether or not they are the right age to enroll (if they want to enroll at all). And completely novel beings…well. Yeesh. (Covertly buying alcohol to drink under the bleachers in this universe is amazingly complex.)

While there are beings naturally adept at magic, magic is definitely learnable by anybody in this universe. The range of magical abilities (separate from magic) available to many species and the natural abilities of many species to deflect magic inherently mean that beings that learn magic don’t necessarily have a leg up on beings that don’t, though, and also mean that there isn’t that much pressure to learn magic at all.

Chimerababy (with the cyclops eye) has a cyclops parent and a harpy parent, and she’s not excited about being mixed. She has image issues because she’s short and stumpy, and doesn’t think she’ll ever reflect the beauty of either of her parents – the towering, colossal bulk of her cyclops parent or the blow-dart angled efficiency of her harpy parent. She blows this out in constant hot steam and a whole lot of bruteball trophies. She’s on the bruteball team at school with Candlebaby and Beebaby.

Candlebaby looks like she’s always about to go to sleep, but she’s the unexpected ringer of her trio of friends. The malleability of her body means that she is the strongest linebeing anybody’s seen in years – she just keeps on bending, and bending, and bending, but she’ll never fold or let anybody through. She’s very maternal and calming, and she often has to keep Chimerababy and Beebaby in check.

Beebaby is always giggling and rough-housing, boisterous and buoyant. There is little that Beebaby takes seriously, and Beebaby lacks tact. Beebaby’s afraid of being just another face in the swarm of Beebaby’s hive, and it manifests itself in Beebaby’s recklessness and desire to laugh everything off. Beebaby’s whole hive shows up to games, sometimes, but they at least hover and don’t take up half of the bleacher’s seats.