#tirze

end of act 2, the facedancer does a little "pitiful! you don't even know what corpse you're scraped from!" song and dance (i don't have the exact screenshots pulled up rn) and... i'm reviewing the planetologist questline on my second playthrough, since i never finished it properly on my first character, and liet-kynes' gender is Never Stated. they are always referred to in a neutral/non-gendered manner, and all we know about them is that they're pardot kynes' child with a fremen sietch member (presumably from tabr).

and! you get into the first sietch (where you meet ariste) by easily bypassing a fremen blood-keyed lock. hmm. interesting.

if we're assuming that the gholas are all from the same genetic donor, it means that the tlielaxu are more than capable of making these impressions of the Original look nothing like the original - all four of your ""siblings"" look very different from each other, and different from your pc/sleeper as well.

we know liet-kynes is dead too (presumably from fighting the advance of the imperium & their attacks on fremen writ large), and derek is looking for their research (in a way, also trying to find the fremen) to pursue the dream of terraforming arrakis, a dream the fremen seem to share. also, from a design perspective, plantetology is The Odd One Out of the skill groups. you can't start the game with planetologist skills, and the quest progression is more fleshed out and filled with content than the other 'professions'. derek is the only available trainer, rather than the two-trainer system the rest use.

but Why Liet-Kynes? not fully sure yet; i could make a number of half-assed conjectures atp but i mostly just think this would be the funniest of the viable options. i've got a whole custom set-up in my head for my sleeper/pc that leaves more room for her to be her own person outside of the ghola concept (not entirely Free from it, ofc, bc it's juicy and fun), but getting a portion of your genome overwritten sucks a lot and having the donor being a cool planetologist that everyone likes might soothe the sting a bit.