Suko Ryo - Interspeciel Expert - Humanity and the Other Races
Races are capatalised. Written in present tense.
C6 - While humans have an innate capacity for magic, the lack of mana on Earth caused it to be a worthless quality when searching for a mate. This caused a lack of selective breeding over it which over the generations gave individuals greatly varying - near random - arcane talents. This is why so many of us are now restricted to lacklustre magic, while some of our kin utilise unique talents that even the other races cannot replicate.
C9 - Rune engraving is a difficult craft and a near-impossible one for those lacking high perception. Relatively speaking, humans have quite a low base perception, and many choose to spec into other attributes after seeing the marginal gains it provides. All in all, this has led to very few humans making it as master engravers, especially compared to the other major races.
C11 - The most dangerous individuals combine power with intelligence. While many races display both qualities, only a few notable ones do so with the same splendour as humanity.
C21 -In truth, we are not sure if the hordes are made of mutated creatures from Earth, Caen, and Xiivet, or whether they are alien species from elsewhere who just so happen to look familiar to us. Either way, they aim to annihilate their assigned settlement’s inhabitants and destroy its hub crystal. Once they do so, it appears their reward is indefinite stay on Idroa as they become a part of the ecosystem.
C23 - Infighting is apparent in all the civilised races, whether they be the cunning Ratkin, fractured Stingtails, or peculiar Shaerd. It is less clear-cut in the noble Drakkar, even less so in the Order of Tyr, and the least within the Mycelia. On the opposite end is humanity.
C25 - Remarkably, the Ratkin are more similar to us than many of the other races. For one, we share an insatiable greed which causes us to strive ever higher. For another, we place a significance on family which many others find baffling. For a third, our most horrific atrocities have been against ourselves. These similarities can be used to partially explain why some of us defected at a later date.
C31 - Many bridges to peaceful futures were burnt because of paranoid scouting parties. This, in turn, led to endless death and suffering which could have otherwise been easily avoided.
C33 - One of the dominant factions on Caen was the Order of Tyr, a cult revolving around their nearest major star, Tyr. The Order of Tyr is made of several distinct races, however the primary ones are the Ogres, the Ryfin, the Nymphs, and the Satyrs. In addition, there is considerable inter-breeding between the races, creating organisms with features from several races.
The Order is undoubtedly a cult with the majority of a member’s life revolving around the Order itself, worship of Tyr, and reverence of the moons of Caen: Foltrus, Karaes, and Dimas. They believe the moons of Caen are the most blessed and devoted of Tyr’s servants as they eternally follow him, steady in their paths. For this reason, all members of the Order choose a moon to imitate, with the highest-ranked members titled Avatars as they are believed to be literal embodiments of the moons.
C38 - A powerful spell in the Ratkin sorcerer’s arsenal is Infernal Explosion. By squeezing all their available mana into a rapidly shrinking core, they are able to dangerously destabilise the mana. The longer they charge up the spell, the brighter and more dreadful the explosion will be. A fully charged explosion can wipe out tens, if not hundreds, in a clustered army.
C38 - There are significantly more human female casters than male casters, however, such a pattern is not present in the other races. For example, the Drakkar have evenly distributed magic users, and the Ratkin have a greater number of male casters than female. While there are many theories on why there is an arcane distribution disparity between the races, none of them hold significant strength as of writing this book. However, there is one theory more widely subscribed to than the others that I feel compelled to include.
This theory states that those who commonly experience intense emotions, particularly to do with helplessness, develop arcane talents quicker than others. It makes examples of the biological differences between our sexes and explains how these differences in our physicalities must have been highlighted during the Apocalypse, leading to a greater number of females feeling helpless than males.
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However, one look at the other races is enough to show the cracks in this theory. For example, the aforementioned Ratkin have males stronger than females, similar to us, and yet they also have more male sorcerers than female.
Aside from this, many of the casters that I have personally interviewed have expressed that their first steps into the arcane weren’t, in fact, by their own accord due to internal emotions but rather simply because the System offered them an arcane class.
C54 - Many people find this difficult to swallow, but in the same way we view many other races as monstrous, they too see us as demonic entities to be avoided. Humanity’s talent with the arcane, fearsome adaptability, high intelligence, and insatiable greed make us a race to be reckoned with.
C55- In the same way many of our own religions survived the Apocalypse through adapting to make sense of our new circumstances, so did many of the other races’ religions. For example, the Order of Tyr considered Tyr an illuminator to be praised and Themir a fiend to be cursed. Their reasons for the latter were to do with how devastating Themir’s blessings could be to those he touched.
Even after they arrived on Idroa and learnt that this was simply the nature of void magic as the System prescribed and had little to do with the whims of a supposed evil overlord, they altered their tale to fit around the new narrative and continued to associate the two together, shunning those who used it. However, there were a select number of exceptions, the prime being the later-crowned Avatar of Foltrus,…
C61-The other races have peculiar architecture and settlement layouts that can baffle a person until they consider the alternative realities the architects were considering when setting out on their works. Take for example Xiivet, the dark and frozen planet. As the surface temperature there was too low for most organisms to survive, the majority of its inhabitants lived near firecores, which heated the ground and allowed life to flourish. Ironically, this was also where the most life was lost as the various races fought intensely over these geographical features.
C62 - The Shaerd are a peculiar and very unique race for a range of reasons. For one, although their bodies are teeming with the arcane, the vast majority of them cannot use magic. Instead, the mana inside their bodies takes a more passive approach and causes them to become highly resistant to magical attacks while also slightly buffing their physicalities. This evolution likely came about because of the highly arcane nature of Xiivet and would have undoubtedly served them well there as well as it does them here. However, not all Shaerd are equally magic-resistant as it depends on their caste, which is easiest identified by their skin colour.
The browns are the lowest caste with little arcane resistance, and they serve as serfs. Above them are the pinks (free commoners), followed by the blues (nobility), and finally the purples (royalty). In a twist of fate, however, or perhaps to be expected, of the few Shaerd to awaken to magic, almost all of them belong to the browns.
C63 - The Knowing Spirit is whom the Shaerd consider their God. It is said to manifest only once in a person’s life: when you die and it comes to judge you, deciding upon your fate for your next life. As skin colour correlates with magic resistance, they consider this the best sign of fate, and therefore an apt compass on how to treat one another. At the bottom are the browns (cracked) who are deemed near worthless, spending their lives in menial labour in the hope of being reborn better next time. At the top are the purples (royalty) who rule the Shaerd’s core cities with every privilege granted to them.
For what the Shaerd call the Male Sin, the Knowing Spirit judges males more critically, causing them to be distributed lower down the skin scale with their highest skin colour only being blue (nobility). In addition to this, males also tend to be physically smaller and weaker, leading to a completely matriarchal society where male Shaerd have fewer rights and freedoms.
C68 - Compassion is not in the least unique to humanity. Most of the fully sentient creatures display similar behaviours to us for just as complex reasons. Still, just because they have a capacity for compassion does not mean they will treat you kindly since, more often than not, our fellow kin have mistreated them and left them a sour taste of humanity as a whole.
C70 - We all know it’s foolish to march upon enemies that we only have a smattering of information on, but what else are we meant to do when we lack both the time and resources to do any better? Enemies are constantly harrying us - not least the Ratkin - and the System introduces brand new monsters every week to its cruel enjoyment. It doesn’t help that the range of abilities in others’ arsenals have also immensely increased due to the limitless uses of magic.
As such, we have been forced to adopt general guidelines to follow, making great assumptions of every enemy we come across. Because of this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many a hero has died from misreading their opponents.