Lore:Kobold
Kobolds |
Other Names: ScampsIt's you! The Hero of Kvatch! |
What is a person?
A miserable pile of sapience.
What is a man? A miserable pile of sapience. Kobolds are little, scaly creatures found in two places: printed from biomass as a dehydrated Kobold Cube to be butchered as meat, and as a fellow crew member. The definition of "Kobold" straddles the edge of sapience, with just a few genetic codons separating critter and coworker.
Not their parents.
What is a person? Not their parents. Kobolds are not a child or larval form of Tizirens and Unathi, but are a distinct species with a "recent" common genetic ancestor. Historically, natural Kobolds are subsapient pest animals from Tizira, capable of comparatively great feats of intelligence for a livestock. The common ancestor of modern Tizirans and Kobolds, mockingly translated to Common as "Salamanderthal," lived deep in the labyrinthian tunnels of Tizira, just above the porous aquifer layer. The tides induced by Atra'Kor's orbit created two valid ecological niches: delving deeper into tighter corridors beneath the water line, and scampering towards the surface into dryer but larger caverns. The two lines of lizardfolk are known as Kor'Taku-kin and Asl'Ton-kin: Those who thrive in the Low Tide, and Those who ride the High Tide, respectively. The Kor'Taku-kin thrived in narrow tunnels, shrinking in all aspects, head size included, whereas the Asl'Ton-kin grew to the size of their environment, at great cost to sustainable population count.
Not what they did not become.
What is a person? Not what they did not become. The Asl'Ton-kin would eventually become modern Tizirans (who would also speciate into Unathi), generally vacating the deepest caverns in favor of surfaceward building, even daring to reside on the surface itself. This left empty room for the Kor'Taku-kin to infest, leading to large packs of small Kobolds skittering about in the damp underchasms of Tizira. With no genetic pressures to grow smarter, and many pressures against growing larger, these Kobolds remained subsapient, clever enough to function but not build massive civilizations.
These two species developed in their respective environments for many years, rarely interacting; one could not possibly fit into the tiny, vent-like tunnels to meet the other, nor could the other particularly survive the surface with its concepts of electricity and commerce. It would take a cataclysm of planet-cracking proportions to even possibly root the little kobolds out.
Not what they must be to survive.
What is a person? Not what they must be to survive. The Death of Atra'Kor cataclysmicly cracked the planet of Tizira in both metaphor and deed. The crashing of a significant chunk of the moon Atra'Kor, alongside countless scuttled warships from both sides, onto the surface of Tizira quite literally cleaved the stable planet into tectonic plates, shearing continents along fault lines and wrecking subterranean havoc. The rapid geologic movements incurred a great deal of friction, thus a great deal of heat, melting large pockets of rock into magma, and otherwise boiling at the aquifers.
In the midst of combat, as massive impacts chunked into the surface, gaping chasms bellowed forth, belching steam, magma, and desperate Kobolds like rats aboard a sinking ship. Were this to happen on Earth, legions of unknown terrors made in God's image but different, shrunken and deformed and vile, scouring their way to the surface in a desperate and frenzied scramble of violence and survival, humanity would deem them Demons, surging from the bowels of hell as prophecy foretold. Tizirans, lacking an Abrahamic background, instead assumed these beasts to be some sort of SolFed bioweapon and fought bravely against the tides of Tiz-like vermin.
Not who they are at their highest.
What is a person? Not who they are at their highest, and not who they are raised to be. In the desperate days to come, they would find these vermin to be edible, if a bit unpalatable. And in the quiet months to come, these subterranean dwellers would find an unsteady equilibrium in surface caves, a terrifying balance between fear and desperation. For these Kobolds, death waited below, in the form of boiling oceans, and death waited above, in the arms of not-Kobolds with impossible tools. In the unsteady years to come, Tizirans would grow to utilize these Kobolds and recognize their shared lineage. Too smart to be used as dumb livestock, and too onery to completely domesticate, these little critters just kind of existed as a vague nuisance, a novel pet and a niche part of the new ecosystems forming from the sociogeologic chaos.
This is where the story of Kobolds would end, as just kind of a monkey-parallel, had conservationists not sought to spread them to the stars, and had sociogeneticists not sought a better way to pack recolonizing ships full of viable life.
Cubism and You: Post-Modern Kobolds
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Sensitive Topic
The author of this page would like to acknowledge that genetics and speciation are a sensitive topic in real life. Bad faith actors attempt to use genetics to justify their prejudices, wrongly claiming that some persons are more evolved than others, and thus inferior and less deserving of rights and personhood. That is not the intention of this document. Writing that a small genetic difference is the difference between personhood and cube is intended to bridge the mechanical realities of an April Fools' joke turned playable species with a plausible lore explanation, and not to reflect on real people or prejudices. |
Folk without an understanding of Epigenetics understand that about half of a human's genome is redundant or junk DNA. Kobolds, by comparison, have around 90% of their DNA as redundant. Anthropologists suggest that earlier in their evolutionary path, most of the DNA was genuinely utilized, but as their niche shrunk and their species specialized, there simply was less of a need for all the uniqueness, but equally wasn't an evolutionary pressure to reduce the amount of DNA, leaving Kobolds with few critical gene sequences and many unimportant ones.
As a result, Kobold DNA is impressively able to be compressed as data, losslessly storing the important codons and procedurally generating viable filler DNA, with minimal loss of function. As a result of that, even the simplest of biogenerators capable of printing a meat substitute can print a Kobold Cube, a dehydrated mass of proteins and enzymes that, when hydrated, react and expand into a complete idiot Kobold. These were intended to serve as organ donors for excursions where the infrastructure to make mechanical prosthetics could not exist... and as meat, of course. After the incident of 2520, these algorithms were tweaked to stymie brain growth, ensuring their cognitive capabilities are on-par with the common Space Monkey.
What is a person? Who they choose to be, through actions and intents.
The Incident of 2520
In creating the algorithms to fold these kobold cubes, one of the results snuck out of its enclosure, crawled through assumed-sealed air vents to sneak behind the researcher, and fiddle with his computer until the shapes on-screen made geometric sense (thus improving the algorithm). This, for lack of a better term, freaked the fuck out of the researcher. Within weeks, this duo isolated the 60-some mutations that disabled the kobold's growth pathway inhibitors: the genes that normally tell a Kobold's brain to stop growing when it's good enough to live in a cave. Later research would find that, instead of strictly encouraging brain growth, the epigenetics involving these mutations facilitated Resonance attachment, fostering proper sapience.
Human ethics and Tiziran ethics differed at the time, and the notion of mass-producing a dumb species when it would be moderately trivial to make them a smart species, while smart members of that species actively exist, did not strike any party involved as wrong or abhorrent. Regardless, further research ensured that kobold cubes would no longer accidentally create a sapient person at an awkward time, and leaving smart Kobolds to just breed through normal pathways.
Ideally, one would consider these two distinct species, cubed kobolds and normal kobolds, but speciation is defined by genetic compatibility, not moral compatibility. In the modern era, resonance research sometimes develops a helmet capable of uplifting a space Monkey into sapience, and that device is equally capable of granting a cubed kobold similar intelligence, but these developments are rare enough to not have a cultural impact on Kobolds as a whole.
Present-day
Kobold Culture
As a relatively recent creation, akin to Slimefolk or Xenofolk, Kobolds don't yet have a unifying culture of their own. They tend to live as citizens of Tiziran cultures, or wherever their travels may take them. Tizira is just as much their home as it is Tizirans', and by 2566 the majority of free Kobolds on Tizira are smart enough to cuss you out in two languages and wise enough to check your hip for a gun first.
Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.
