The Val Salian Regional Field Guide, Entry 9: Yinglet Life and Development
Sep14
Been a while since the last Field Guide page! As usual, the info in these is supplemental to the story. They’ll give a lot of info about the details of the setting that won’t necessarily be discussed by the characters, to give readers a better idea of the world setting, to give more context and meaning to things that occur in the story, and possibly give some observant readers hints about what’s really going on with this or that.
However, there won’t be anything buried in them that will be necessary to know in order to follow the main story, partially so that readers can skip them on their first readthrough if they don’t feel like slowing down their pace to read these, and still be able to follow the story just fine.
Found a typo. Under 4 months, you have misspelled “apparently”. Nice bit of info fluff!
Fixed! And yes, lotsa fluff in this page
Also under 3 years you have “asigned”
So would this mean that Kass, having already been a young adult as a human, is now essentially the same as a 3 year old Yinglet?
If that’s the case then Kass would probably have another 20+ years left, which, combined with the years he has already lived, would amount to about the same lifespan as an average human living in an era of pre-industrial medicine (although that’s assuming they don’t have better medical skills in Val Salia). So, all in all, it’s not that bad.
Nah, he’ll still be dying young.
The whole ‘pre-industrial era median age is 30/40’ thing comes from a misunderstanding of the fact that number is very heavily weighted down by a super, super high infant mortality rate before modern medicine and sanitation, and a much, much higher birth rate in those times (for that reason and that children were often economically needed by the impoverished to help with labor/as ‘retirement’ care).
Once you got to adulthood you were expected to live, honestly about the same as you would today. It’s just that so relatively few people managed to make it out of infancy and childhood alive, that the average gets dragged down.
So Kassen, even if we presume he’s at the very start of Yinglet adulthood at ‘3’ years old, and presuming he was in his ’20s’ as a human, is still likely going to be short around 20-30 years of life, sadly to say.
What’s the exact era in the comic? A Greek who made it through early childhood would live on average to a bit under 40, a Roman until a bit under 50, if you trust Wikipedia. Kass is in his 20s, but based on more modern life expectancy curves, getting through his teens would only increase his life expectancy by a few years.
Of course, 25 years sounds like it’s the Yinglet equivalent of a human living to 70+, which would require a pretty high station in life. Kass as a human was a low-ranking soldier, but Kass as a Yinglet is a cherished research subject. Maybe the life expectancy loss from his transformation (if we assume Wiki is right) is offset by his rapid elevation to officer rank plus his influence with Viz.
I’d say this is somewhat earlier, in terms of general knowledge, than early-1800s Boston. Which I mention because a few years ago I found some data on life expectancy by current age in in early-1800s Boston. Basically, anyone under 3 years old was near death, and the longer a child survived the more *remaining* years of life it could expect… up until about age 25 for men, and the average 25-year-old man could expect to live into his mid to late 60s.
(Expected age at death did continue to increase after that, but at a rate of less than one year per year.)
Worth remembering this specific society thinks lead cops are a great idea. That probably counts against the average lifespan of humans, among which knows what else exclusive to this setting.
My theory is playing out. They are either a primitive mammal like a platypus, or they are a rodent somehow evolving into a limbed serpent. Or all of the above!
They are actually
yinglets
Funny thing…I’ve been toying with writing Yinglets into my homebrew RPG setting and came to the conclusion that the creatures they’re most likely related to would be dragons :P.
That is what I’ve been thinking right along. 🐉
Not sure how, but some how.
Yinglets are to dragons like chickens are to tyrannosaurs; the most impressive creatures always seem to leave the most underwhelming descendants.
That’s basically how Kobolds work though.
Though really, you could lift Yinglet biology and give them scales and the whole setup Valsalia has would click right into kobolds in a DnD setting.
This has been bugging me since you floated the idea that the eggs ‘grow’ – where exactly does the extra mass for that expansion come from? Plants grow because they absorb carbon from the atmosphere and water from the ground – but these yinglet eggs are neither sitting in a pool of water nor performing photosynthesis to pull carbon out of the air. They’re a closed system and the amount of mass involved should stay roughly the same. Transformations aside, most of your biology has been rather well grounded so far, so this bit is a little jarring.
well looking at the egg it is quite thick when its just been layed, and it does say it just “stretches out”.
Here’s a conjecture: one way the eggs might be expanding is by an unbalanced gas exchange. If the egg shell is permeable to oxygen or other biologically useful gases, but much less so for waste gases with larger molecules, then pressure could build inside the egg causing it to expand. The increase in pressure inside the egg would decrease the rate at which useful gases could enter, which could be one of the reasons the shell thins over time – to decrease the barrier to entry and possibly to absorb some of the gas and other material that was trapped in the layers of the shell. Eventually, this thinning and pressure build up would cause the egg to rupture, as was common before shell tooth based hatching.
I really like this conjecture. When humans lose fat one of the main ways the weight is removed is through C02. We breath it out. The rest of the mass could be from restructuring of the yolk into a Younglet. The incubation chambers are probably kept at a very high humidity level to help facilitate shell growth and gas exchange. They are probably moved to the hatching chamber so the shell can dry and firm up to make slicing easier in modern yinglets
The yolk could be so calorie dense that the tissues created from it are less dense and take up more space, but it does seem to be a bit.. much of a growth. Stretching the egg wall is one thing but actively having the entire egg grow is a bit much.
I just figured that before the egg was laid the female would have a large stomach bump like a mammal and that nursing would be done from the side of the mouth where there were no teeth/very few teeth. A single wet nurse could serve several young while the other mothers went back to laying. Or cow milk, which isn’t the best solution can be used.
Also mammals don’t actually *need* milk as an infant, it’s just better for them. Dairy cow calves typically aren’t fed milk, because that milk is used by humans.
Yeah; there isn’t any extra mass gained, rather the shell exterior stretches out words and thinner, and the highly compact nutrient material in the placenta-yolk becomes much more spaced out (i.e. “spongy”) as it is weaved into muscle and organ tissue.
Good observation though, I do mean for this setting to be pretty much ecologically/biologically (semi)realistic, so I expect readers to apply this sort of logic to it!
My major concern is that life is generally water-based, and it’s /hard/ to make water-based things have a significantly different density. If these eggs are a closed system, they would have to weigh the same after the expansion as they did before, which means the eggs in their smaller form would need to be compressed and much more dense, somehow. Even if yinglet bodies were more spongey as you suggested, the medium within the egg and subsuming that spongey material is still mostly-water, which is notoriously incompressable. Sugars, fats, proteins, and even skeletal minerals are generally the same density as water or lighter, too, and they’re also generally incompressible. The only thing that /isn’t/ incompressable, for that matter, is air or other gasses, meaning yinglet eggs (and bodies) would need to be an air-based-foam.
Even then, the eggs seem to double in size here, at least. And most of the added space looks to be fluid. Certainly more fluid than was in the egg when it was laid, just by volumetric necessity. The only way this works is if yinglets periodically ‘water’ their eggs like plants to add the extra fluid needed. Not necessarily impossible, but the organic compounds within the egg would need to be quite dried out given this option, and I’m not sure they’d still be life-viable if they were.
I’m not sure which solution is most appealing to you, but if things are going to make logical sense, yinglet eggs necessarily need to be one of the following options;
A) They are periodically watered by the nurses, to add additional fluid.
B) Made mostly of foam.
C) Have some magical component to them, that’s able to compress incompressible things like fluids; which would mean yinglett eggs would not only be inherrently magical, they would also be /bombs/ under immense pressure.
All of these options are amusing to me, to be honest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_water
Perhaps this combined with a salt-rich shell membrane that tends to absorb any humidity it encounters, along with being permeable to oxygen as all eggs tend to be to some degree. I’m reminded of camel sinuses, with snot so briny they can dehumidify their exhales and recover the water vapor.
Eggs, at lest parrot eggs, and other bird eggs, absorb water from the air. Considering the enviroment that yinglets are from, I would not be suprised that thay pick up a fair bit of water over the time before thay hatch. I am not sure, but, it is posable that the eggs are also kept moist by eather resting in a muddy nest, or damp cloth. This would alow them easily to absorb a goodly amount of water to expand.
Another posability, depending on the inner membrain, is that there is a sizable air space inside the egg, alowing the hatchling some movement space. There would have to be some extra space in there, just so they could turn and wiggle around enough to get the shelltooth to puncture the egg from the inside. Also the space needed to move in the shown method of cutting there way out of the egg. Remember, with birds, the egg tooth is on the tip of the beak, not the underside.
They’re yinglets. The answer if foam, since that’s what most of them have in their heads. 😛
If the next page has an eggsplosion in the background from a distant nursery, I will be very happy lol
It’s like Angry Birds with rat-echidna things.
Solution A actually makes a lot of sense. They evolved along coastal and river areas, spending their lives in salt marshes, brackish estuaries, and so on. It’s very easy to imagine a scenario where their living conditions were constantly more-than-damp, with eggs sitting in substrate that was inundated with water(and even where digging a few inches into the sand/soil would leave a hole that water would seep into). Then take into account the leathery and likely water-permeable shells, and osmotic effects between the inner egg and the salt-rich water. So yeah, the notion that the nurses get little pails of salty water and wash it over the eggs repeatedly through the day sounds close enough for government work.
Lol this update is like a response to the comments on the last page. I loved it!
I knew there would be way more questions raised in this part of the story then could be answered in a reasonable pace, so naturally a Field Guide was going to be a part of it : D
“So awkward. Just TERRIBLE!” – The last words spoken to ZOT by his Yinglet brothers.
Such a shame they are elderly by 25. Then again, in this sort of time period most humans likely won’t make it past 35-40 anyhow. Let the inter-species relationships continue!
Their aging does tend to vary wildly, sometimes by a full decade or so in one direction or another; 30’s just the averaged-out number, really!
Poor Kassie she most likely won’t live past her thirtieth year as a Yinglet. Hope she finds a cure, if she still wants one when she finds it.
It’s not how long you live, it’s how fully. (My inner sage is apparently surfacing). I predict a VERY full life for Kass as a Yinglet.
Honestly, living past 40 as a human was considered a pretty full life in this Earth-equivalent era!
And now through the magic of cheap food induced heart disease, diabetes and prohibitively expensive health care in America, 40 has returned as a ripe-old age for humanity!
I assume his body in its prime. He still have 22 years to live until he’s really old.
I wonder what side “benefits” Kass’ transformation has. Extended lifespan, perhaps? It seems to me that there’s a possibility the thing that changed him would have been created to include more to assist in Yinglet survival than the switching of a single individual’s sex(I’m assuming it was created specifically for Yinglet use and the species change was an unintended byproduct of being used on a non-Yinglet species). Unless there are many more hidden out there, originally created for use among a larger number of the populace.
Benefit: is pretty
But not too pretty.
One might say ohsopretty.
@Valsalia I’m curious, I get that these are canonically written by Ran. But when writing them, do you write them how you imagine Ran would write them or do you just write them how you would write them?
This is totally in Ran’s speech; i.e. way more wordy than necessary to express an air of intense scholarly erudition!
After reading that sentence I think you’re lying. Doesn’t feel too wordy to me, but I feel I write in a similar way.
Nice. We finally got an answer to the question of the Yinglet lifespan. It came out close to the edge of the range I predicted of between 10 and 24 years.
The background information on Yinglet biology and evolution is very interesting, and I can see that Ran is just loving all this new data. For some reason, the rest of the literate population of Val Salia just doesn’t get it. Maybe it’s because they don’t know what’s best for them.
OBVIOUSLY
Val, this page is a goddamn nightmare factory.
No that was the last three pages! : O
This is an interesting read, however one question remains that has been bugging me since I found out Yinglets lay eggs: is egg laying dependent on fertilization? Or does it occur at regular intervals like chickens? I thought it is a rather important detail for someone who is writing a female Yinglet character…
So tempted to say “Guess you better keep reading to find out!”
Basically though, their laying cycle doesn’t begin until their first fertilization, after which they produce eggs semi-regularly regardless of fertilization.
Now I finally understand why yinglets have navels despite hatching from eggs! This was vital information. VITAL.
Yup! Eggs with a placenta attached via umbilical cord. Weird stuff.
I have to admit Valsalia i’m just blown away by all the work you are putting into the lore of this fantastic fantasy world and it’s inhabitants you have created
Do you think we could get some backstory on the precious lil’ cupcake that is Isher later?
This is making me want to read ahead for my bio classes just to see how much sense this really makes. Thank you Valsalia, I am being encouraged to be more productive through yinglets.
This brings to mind a rather horrifying thought: Do they lay only after mating or is it like the chicken where they lay regardless of fertility or not?
Most species lay or cycle through eggs regardless of fertilization. Humans included.
Well i ask because Kass could be dealing with a very very VERY uncomfortable issue soon, and I highly doubt he is going to be ok with the idea of laying eggs.
I’m not so sure. Scav hips appear wider, so egg laying may be an easy task. It doesn’t appear to be a bloody ordeal from shedding the uterine wall so she has that going for her. But I could be wrong.
Its not how hard it could be laying eggs that is the problem, its the actual laying of eggs that will have him have a mental breakdown. If I was in his situation the idea that I am going to lay eggs along with all the other insanity that is losing my humanity and becoming a yinglet would AT LEAST make me a little upset.
Everyone is excited for that man.
Man, I’m a man going for an RN degree right now & it’s so much fucking work; what I wouldn’t give to simply be a yinglet maternity nurse. Then again, with their spazzy little brains it might be just as much work to learn all that. Still, I’d trade in a second. A life of protection & reliable meals is better than what I have now.
Remember you’d also apparently need to have some talent at firefighting.
These dossiers are probably my favorite part about this webcomic; worldbuilding is so much FUN and you inspire me with your in-lore research notes!
Wow.
That elder ying looks ruff.
Really enjoyed the read on this one.
Very informative.
During the ‘3 years’ section, is ‘genealcompetency’ meant to be a single word, or is that a typo?
I’m willing to bet it’s from the Yinglet dialect, similar to “ohsopretty”.
I have this rather strong feeling that when Kass does finnaly lay eggs, that her eggs will follow the pattern that the yinglets originaly did. I also have a feeling that yinglets hatched in that manor will have a longer lifespan.
Remember ‘The Great Leader’ basicly shifted yinglet reproduction into the current mass production system as a method of rapidly increasing the number of yinglets. He had two primary objectives. Breed yinglets that would be good in the spear circle, and breed huge numbers of yinglets.
The Great Leader, being both Great and a Leader, very possibly would’ve been intelligent enough to realize that his species was at horrific risk of extermination if they pissed off humanity – a much older, heavily entrenched species with both vastly greater individual capability and vastly superior numbers. The society he created seems designed to ensure that the yinglet species survives, even if that survival comes at the expense of any given ying’s quality of life. By focusing on maximum possible speed of population growth and creating just enough martial capability in his species to make hunting them for sport or exterminating a bothersome enclave generally more trouble than it’s worth, he was trying to give his people the best chance he could at getting their foot in the door and establishing a beachhead they could grow from. After all, the species can always advance from Enclave society once it’s grown entrenched enough to no longer be at risk of extinction from an angered population of Bigs.
…or maybe Great Leader just really liked fighting and sex and wanted to build a society where he could do those things as much as he wanted, and so could his bros.
We’ll never know.
Under perfect conditions, one normal human can live up to 122 or more, under the same perfect conditions, how old can one yinglet live?
is correct to say that 3 years old == 18(as human)?
soooo… if my math is correct
human with 122 years == yinglet with 20 years, lol
sooo one yinglet with 25 == human with 150 years WOAH
if kass turn back to human as 25, he will die by old age, lol
Interspecies age comparison relationships are usually nonlinear. It is commonly thought that, for instance, a medium-sized dog in its first year of life will experience growth roughly equivalent to a human’s first 15 years. However, over the remainder of its life, that dog will typically age around 7 times faster than a human and die around 10-13 years old. If nothing else, this should serve as a relatable example of how a comparison of early-life growth rates cannot be extrapolated to predict adult life expectancy. More generally, however, it hints that the curve describing the relationship between two species’ relative ages is not amenable to a linear approximation over any meaningful timespan.
what about the magic involved? It is non linear, i get it, but for the sake of the comic, how the “conversion” should go in case of transformations?
It’s a magical(?) transformation that’s beyond all known laws of nature in both Val Salia and IRL. We have no flippin’ clue how that’s going to go until Val tells us. Could be that Kass hasn’t lost a single minute of his human lifetime even in ying form and he’s basically an Ageless Immortal to them. Could be that he’s a were-yinglet now and simply stuck in ying form until he figures that out. Could be that he’s a perfectly ordinary yinglady who’s going to have _the worst day_ when it comes time to do his yinglady duties.
VE SHALL HAFF TO SEA
Minor error: there’s no spacing between “general” and “competency” in the paragraph under 3 years.
Delicious, indeed!
I’m just imagining how much that researcher is loving all the information and Kass’ eye doing this neurotic twitch every time Lopin and the researcher talk about it happily. I’ve been binge reading the comic. It’s fun.
What came first, the Yinglet or the egg?
Once again, yinglets gonna yinglet.
I still think Viracroix is doing all this research to see if its probable to bone Vizlet.
The whole “Secret lover ” speaks of scandal, and nothing more scandalous then the trademaster taking a yinglet as his mate, no matter how educated and clever she may be.
Question: Do Yinglets lay unfertilized eggs like chickens? If so the Kass is in for a surprise once his clock starts ticking. Hmmm… on that topic it would make sense for zhat zhing to transform a human into a yinglet at the age where they first start laying to maximize the amount of offspring that can be had.
Humans takes almost twenty years to fully develop; much longer than other animals as a lot of energy goes to our brain development (which takes almost just as long). While Yinglets are generally less intelligent than humans, how are they able to learn speech in just three years (if that is how long it takes them)? If they really did evolve to be more intelligent, why do they not have longer growing periods? And if they do learn at the same rate as humans, I suspect they stay primitive because the oldest members of their society are as wise as a young adult.
Honestly a lot of fantasy races age faster, and some races age really slowly, and often this variable isn’t often looked at as a Physiological thing. Mostly because people who wrote them didn’t think of it/didn’t know how humans developed. It can be assumed that species that actually suffer from a lower IQ (Yinglets, Goblin, Orcs) and have a fast growth rate naturally spend less time on brain development. Where as fast growth rates, yet higher IQ races (Ratfolk, Tengue, Kobalts, Lizardfolk) have a natural variable that allows them to develop at a faster rate with out any intellect loss. As for slower growth races (Elves, Dwarves,Gnomes) it depends on the write and story, some prefer them aging normally and just living longer, while other prefer the age slowly, so depending on the lore they could develop like humans or spend more time as children developing more advanced synapses
“Also,following a succsessful hatching,the nurses eat the placenta”- We need to see Kass reaction to this. (And it would be hilarious if in the scene the nurses trying to share placenta with Kass or just on surprise\shocked Kass face react like “What? Is somzing on my face?”)
The very term “Greater Yinglet” sounds weird & unnatural. Ran should consider revising it.
Also pfhahahahaaaaaaa @ designing the egg-pooper after Kass. Whatta prick. Love ya Val.
The reason they’re called “Greater Yinglets” is because there is a Lesser Yinglet that is essentially an animal.
I know, I’m just pointing out the irony.
This looks honestly like a recipe for a developmentally stagnant society. As it appears there’s no attempt at even written language much less advancement. Whereas the races we have been exposed to so far have some developed comprehension of social order as well as basic technologies as math, literacy, medical, and technological sciences (albeit limited at this stage) far outpace the Yinglets. So they’re going to be what they are now forever, scavengers living on the fringe of more sophisticated societies, or ultimately overrun and enslaved for what little they possess. Sad for such a naturally happy and outgoing race of rat-birds. I still feel badly for them as a whole. No nuclear family and punted from the collective if you have nothing special to offer.
On the contrary they seem like a group that will have plateaus. The combination of the mutation rate, and a society that makes positive mutations a pass to have lots of kids I expect will produce more than it’s share of great people. Vizlet seems like one of those. In contrast the standard yinglet’s flaws make it that much easier for such individuals to end up in charge. Occasionally a great person would rewrite a large amount about the society they are in. In the long run of this setting I’d be betting on the Yinglets ending up both producing most of the leaders in the world in general and the bulk of the underclasses
Vizlet is fronting one of those plateaus I expect, namely borrowing everything she can about humans to apply to Yinglets. I expect what will determine if she is, or if she’s just one of the yinglets that will have a place in history books is whether or not she can apply get literacy teachers applied to the normal yinglet’s childhood
Totally agree, and it’s part of what makes this comic so intriguing going forward. Vislet (and some of the patriarchs) doesn’t seem to lack very much compared to the other races- the capacity for excellence exists in the yinglet population. They also have eugenics baked in to their society, and a huge dispersion of traits to pick from. The powerful rural population represents an opposition… it’s a fantastic set up to explore ideas about culture, identity, eugenics, racism… so many places to go with this world!
if i was a yinglet i would be dead by now.
Look on the bright side- that would mean that you managed not to die from stupidity or disease before then. Which is quite the feat for a Yinglet, it seems.
…spooked and run over by a carriage?
My luck I would be the world’s oldest and most decrepit Yinglet. Pathetic.