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It feels wonderful to feel Reiley in sexy lingerie beside me, on our big and nice well washed sleeping pelt and blankets, and we are alone in the hut which also feels wonderful. Xuela loves the balcony, but with a door between and under another roof, the balcony doesn't really feel like the same hut, and this is close to how it was before Xuela and the rest joined us. Not that we won't be happy when Xuela gets her own hut.
This day had a bad morning, but was also a really good day, and Reiley have understood why I was so happy with the toothpaste and small weird brush. Xuela have firmly said 'no thank you' to the toothbrush and toothpaste, and given it to me so I stay healthy. We've gotten a lot of good stuff today, and that red Star Fall was damn nice. Koru's bow is powerful and fast to shoot, but a user need to train that and have the body and muscles to use it, and Koru is frankly far less skilled with a bow than Reiley or Bokyli. The damn crossbow is a fucking scary piece of kit that doesn't take muscles or years to master, which makes me worry that potential enemies got something similar. The bows or other crossbow was bad enough, although it does make some sense in that a crossbow like that is an equalizer to someone who have trained for years and is strong enough to use a really powerful bow. Those that come from cultures where combat with spears, axes, clubs and bows are important and have had lots of training with it, do have a clear advantage against people that didn't. Modern warfare training is not much use here and many won't even have that, but a powerful long range crossbow help. As far as we know neither Lake Camp or King's Camp have crossbows, but there are bows in both camps. We only got the first crossbow after Reiley made one for me, so that might be a DAB rule. Or it might not. I think their rules are more like guidelines and will be over-ruled by 'fun'. Once I understood how the new crossbow worked, I noticed the discrete pressure gauge and according to its scale the internal tank have enough capacity for eight bolts, but the magazine only holds four. Reloading four bolts won't take long and I've already made a quick loading clip holding four arrows, so yeah: A scary piece of kit I have 23 really good bolts for. I really want armour for everyone, and for our heads. It seems like the damn alien bastards reward bad evil behaviour with better weapons and armour, so bad people will have a weapons and armour advantage. The Raiders got a Red Star Fall reward for their raid, but we got far more for our very successful attack and we were up against much harder odds.
Our group is now five with a potential sixth waiting on a cliff along Raider river, and we have gained a strong warrior and weakened King's Camp by loosing four of their best warriors and a powerful red Sky Fall bow. We don't know how many new persons have arrived, so King's camp is 16+ with several wounded, and Lake Camp should be 9+. Everyone in King's Camp isn't a bad person; just need, survival and different cultural norms, although there are a few very rotten eggs. The sample size is too small to really be sure, but from what Reiley and Koru have said about people they know of, there also seems to be a gender imbalance in people here. 10% seems to have no real gender like Koru, but something like 60-70% of the rest are the 'child makers' and the DAB's translation might mess with our words, but they're 'female' as most of people see it, with a whole slew of different biology, cultures, religion and ruling styles piled on top. Just 20-30% are male. From what they know about different people, a 50-50 male-female split isn't the norm, so I guess humans and Xuela's species seem a bit extra alien to them. When it comes to how procreation and sex works? It's all from a single man and woman, to gang bang style orgies all over the range of male-female ratio, to extremely formal, to sex literally killing the male and implant the eggs in the male for their offspring to eat. So yeah, both Reiley and me feel kind of lucky we match very well, so the gender imbalance in Reiley's kind and the weird concept that human men are protective of women and that men fight wars, is hardly worth mentioning.
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That bastard King's species is mostly women and just a few percent are men, and he simply see women as workers and expendable warriors that should bow to his every command, and don't really respect women unless they are really good warriors. There is a hierarchy of males ruling clans with male Lords above them ruling small fiefdoms and then a King at the top. Which honestly sounds a lot like quite a large part of human history, just with fewer men. A son is prized but often end up killing his father or any brothers to take over, unless it's been a few good years with plenty of new women to form his own family from. Women that are mostly siblings or cousins or war conquests.
One thing that we talked about over the evening food, is about oaths and their danger. And I mentioned my idea about oath-bounding one-self to never make another oath. Sure, it's dangerous as hell, as being force to say the words will kill you, but if the enemy haven't thought about it and actually want to keep you alive and for service, they can't force a slave oath or something on you. Koru started laughing as hell and wish she had thought of that, but stopped when she realised she would be dead as we wouldn't have let her live, so there are risks with doing it. But it is possible to pretend to have sworn that oath, and if you really really stick to that story even under torture or maiming, the enemy will have limited options. In the end you will probably be horribly treated or maimed if you survive, but at least you will not be bound by an oath to death, in a 'lesser evil' sort of way. This world suck, and the whole concept of oaths is just broken and stupid. There are so many issues with it.
Koru's new information about all the people in her camp have given me plenty of questions, but top among them are why so many people comes from fairly primitive cultures, but not too primitive cultures. It seems like everyone is from cultures between made their first metal to reached the computor age or made simple space rockets. Sure, if I look at human history, most of it if I count years have been primitive, so just randomly taking a human from say the last 6000 years span makes it most likely they would be 'technologically primitive', with just a 2 percent chance that they're from 1880 or later. And a lot of Earth's people still lived fairly primitive lives back then. Some still do. But it might also be that the damn alien bastards simply avoid taking people from too high tech cultures. Those people will have a better understanding of Visions and that this is another world, and might ruin their fun and the damn alien bastards want to play Gods. Maybe it was the fact that religion is still such a huge thing on Earth that made them take me. Or the DAB's have some limit to what they call 'intelligent', like colonizing another planet, or FTL space travel.
As far as the damn alien bastards are concerned, we might just be non-sentient indigenous fauna before that.