Still working on the sketch, sorry to get your hopes up. =P But I had something I wanted to run over real quick before I kept working on my current setting. Should give you guys an idea how ideas come to me, and how I fuse them in and make them work.
I've talked previously about the V'nothrians and what I know of their culture so far, including basic divisions of Packs (including the Aerie, though really the four didn't distinctly split until later, and existed as one Pack) and other small details. But I haven't said anything about their children, and for this item I need to set at least a bit of a backdrop of understanding in that department.
The allamorphs are an inherently magical species, and it is a passive magic; the same stuff that allowed them to first take on human form is the same stuff that exists within them after they had shifted to a more human-like, sedentary culture. But the curious part about the magic in relation to that shift is that any young born initially were the same species as their parents, and parents mated like kind to like kind. As they came to identify more with human culture, allamorphs began to intermarry somewhat more (still keeping relatively enclosed; i.e., no Cat with Wolf or such boundary crossing) and more allamorphs began to give birth as humans—which had a curious consequence. From about a half-century after the first human-birth, and from thereafter without exception (because of the 'interspecial' aspect, if you will), all allamorph children were born as humans from human mothers, and during the latter part of gestation the mother-to-be actually could not shift back to her animal, requiring that she be sequestered and/or protected at all times since she lacked her normal defenses.
Additionally, all children born this way were without animal.
At the time of the sketch involving Drannet, Ami, and Naeir, V'nothrian children don't have an animal of their own until what basically amounts to puberty, and it's a sign of coming of age in the culture. It's referred to as Choosing, and it usually happens somewhere between the ages of ten and thirteen, though there have been a few who have Chosen as early as seven years old. It's a pretty big deal in a kid's life, and there's a fair-sized ceremony about the whole thing, attended by all the immediate family and usually at least one of the clan leaders, which I'll go into in a later sketch. Pretty cool deal.
Because they don't have an animal, though, they are totally without marking. Their hair and their eyes are white until the day they Choose, which adds yet another odd visual to this world of mine. Sure, black pupils, round unless the child is a Cat, but that's about it.
So a while back when I was getting this massive deluge of information about the Cats pouring over me, I started browsing around for images of various cat species to kind of facilitate and guide the process, and each image I saw prompted visuals and concepts about various groups of people and relationships and hierarchies (greater/lesser cats and what), and so on and so forth . . . and then I ran across this image. And when I saw it, I didn't see anything so broad or general or culturally useful.
I saw one person.
Now the reason for the bit about the children should become a bit more clear. I saw a child who had come of age, who was in the middle of Choosing—and was stopped for some reason or other. Their body made almost the full adaptation, but the colors and the eyes didn't quite make it, so this Tiger is forever stuck with part of his childhood coloring. As a human, his hair is almost the same as his markings: tigerish on top, but with no black bands, and fading to white as it goes down, with white eyebrows and eyelashes. Eyes are . . . mixed up. Not sure whether it should realistically be near- or farsighted, but farsighted would make the better metaphor, since I also see the child is an oracle at some point later on. Gist, though, is that his eyesight is terrible.
As far as I know, if he were an oracle, he would be the only V'nothrian to ever have that kind of gift. The magic inherent to the allamorphs is nigh-exclusively physical, though it does allow them to retain their human appearance in kind of a temporary memory pattern or something—which is how they can shift and still be clothed, and they may also retain their sentience as animals via the magic. What I'm suspecting, though, is that something in the magic of the Choosing got fouled up when it was interrupted, and it allowed this allamorph the ability to see beyond.
It might also have affected his lifespan. I'll have to look into that, see if he crops up in the timeline of my black panther—who incidentally is also the only one of his kind. (For the record, black panthers do not actually exist. They are merely cougars or jaguars, or sometimes leopards, who have peculiar pigmentation based on genetics. So here I feel the one-of-a-kind card is justified, much as I do not like to use it.)
But ever since I saw that image, that character has stuck in my mind, and has now solidified himself as actually existing. I think this is a fair example of how my universe kind of helps build itself, while I help it along here and there.
Back to work.
