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The second piece of writing and the first true story for my main and most beloved, Ted, a portly, friendly ouroboros lizard. I really went for the historical essay or academic book style, here, to describe the first aspect of the althistory in the story. Hope you enjoy!
As a quick sidenote, the stories will look a lot better formatted in the .pdf file, but I'll try and make them as readable as possible in the description <3
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Story One:
In which there’s an extremely dry essay on a fake science that is entirely impossible but quite fun.
“Extract from ‘The Origins of Anthromorphism’ by Gerald Tatting, 2006.
Introduction:
In this more modern and enlightened age, one might think that the success and development of anthromorphism has been a constant, but this is not the case. From its conception in the midst of Victorian pseudoscience, to the morally devoid early experiments and illegalisation, and subsequent professionalisation of the field, anthromorphism has been dogged by controversy and criticism, and not without merit.
Section One: Origins.
The roots of anthromorphism are messy, but they are mostly believed to have originated in the mid-19th century during the Victorian interest in pseudoscience. Fields like phrenology, homeopathy and the rise of spiritualism dominated the public consciousness, and novels like Jekyll and Hyde only rooted these beliefs. As such, ridiculous science became a subject of public popularity, of morbid curiosity, and of unfortunately serious scientific inquiry.
There was, however, a scientific background to your subject, with its beginnings coming after the publishing of Gregor Mendel’s 1866 Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden. The paper, which explained what we now recognise as genes and hereditary traits was paid little attention at the time; it is believed that had Darwin used the paper, the accepted modern field of genetics would have evolved much earlier.
Sadly, Mendel’s paper was largely ignored, even criticised by the scientific community, and was not looked at seriously until the 20th century. Only a small community of scientists who had been studying the same material as Mendel and Darwin paid studious attention to Mendel’s work and began developing more extreme hypotheses.
These thinkers believed that, by implanting animal genes into those of a human embryo, they could birth a new species, a combination of man and beast. One of the more prominent thinkers, Raymond Wilhelm Jansson, wrote in his 1873 treatise:
“I propose a new, modern science, much divorced from the rising tides of pseudoscience. Phrenology, iridology, and homeopathy are dead ends with absolutely no basis in scientific principle whatsoever. They are no more than modern-day alchemy. But my new science is rooted in Darwin’s revolutionary theories, in the exciting new findings of Mendel, in pure factual basis! It will be but a simple fusion of man, and animal, with their genes. The best qualities of both combined; who can deny the want for a being as smart as man but as fast as the falcon? One with the sophistication of humanity and the strength of a rhinoceros? A divine science that will truly push the limits of what we, as people, as a distinguished society, know; I call it Anthromorphism.”(1)
Jansson’s treatise gained very little traction in the wider scientific community but was heralded by the smaller community of Anthromorphologists as a seminal work. The discovery of DNA in 1869 only aided their thinking; while the link between DNA and genetic makeup wasn’t discovered until the 20th century, anthromorphologists seemed to be ahead of the curve, with a few surviving writings about the link being written in 1874.
(1) Jansson, Raymond W., Anthromorphism: A Treatise Of A Most Exciting Science, (London: Pibble-Smythe Publishing House, 1873)
Section Two: First Experiments:
It was after this that several leading lights began to experiment with creating anthromorphs, often with methods completely immoral and unethical(2) and producing monstrosity after monstrosity; the first ‘bodily sound anthromorph’ (another term coined by Jansson for the hypothetical manbeast hybrid) was created in 1875 by Felix Rondstrum in Amsterdam. Bodily sound, rather depressingly, simply meant an anthromorph who had the standard number of limbs and facial features and wasn’t a horrifying mess of flesh upon delivery.
Anthromorph One, sardonically nicknamed Lazarus, was a human-dog hybrid, born dead. It had a canine head and tail, with fully dextrous hands that ended in sharper, claw-like nails, and what seemed to be pores that would have grown fur had it survived birth. Lazarus was found to have no internal oddities whatsoever, except for perhaps a throat and mouth structure similar enough to a human’s to possibly create words. Their limbs were also of standard human form, and not digitigrade.
The announcement of Lazarus’ ‘birth’ created much excitement in the anthromorphological community, and disgust and morbid interest in the wider community and society. Several penny horrors were written around these ‘man-beasts’ and their ‘savage’ ways were produced; these often drew unfair comparisons with indigenous groups and racial minorities, whose apparent ‘animal savagery’ was equivalent.
Lazarus’s successful birth is of much mystery, as with most early anthromorph science. Mysterious fires in several leading figures’ labs destroyed most documentation, and this was paired with their often-untimely deaths at the hands of anti-science or pro ‘ethical’ science fanatics. Many conspiracies have arisen as to the mysterious nature of early anthromorphism as a result; demonic rituals, communions with God, alien technology, and time travel to steal modern sciences have all been proposed.
(2) This often involved paying ‘fallen women of good stock’ (in the words of Jansson) to be experimented on. Often these women would die in childbirth during the messy process of what we can only presume to be genetic engineering or let out into the street unpaid.
Section Three: First Steps and the Split in the Field:
What is concrete knowledge is that at the start of the 1880s, anthromorphism was going from strength to strength. Yuri Keller created Katerina in Yekaterinburg in 1881, a woman-bear cross who died after a year of seemingly normal development. Keller’s method, apparently published shortly after Katerina’s birth,(3) was widely used from then on in anthromorphological experiments.
Francis Rossini and Jacques, a man-bird cross born in 1880 won acclaim in Paris after the beaked child spoke his first word, frere, shortly before his death in 1883. It was observed that Jacques spoke like a human; upon dissection it was found he had both an avian syrinx and a human throat and mouth structure that allowed entirely normal speech.
Other experiments by Edouard de Mancino of Rio de Janeiro, Johann Gambolputty-Hautkopf von Ulm of Potsdam and Lionel Miles of Boston all created anthromorphs who survived birth and spoke, allowing unprecedented research into the nature of anthromorphs and to what degree they were hybridised; it was generally agreed they were sapient, and, if engineered correctly, had ‘all the convenience of a human’s insides with the features of an animal’.(4)
Yet the instability of the lifespan of anthromorphs held the field back from being recognised as a true science; indeed, the number of deaths in the pursuit of a pure anthromorph damaged the reputation of the science for a while, more so than the equally harmful and arguably more insidious field of phrenology, or eugenics; their hypothetical nature made them much more acceptable in the scientific and political establishment.
By 1888, however, one anthromorphologist had gotten to grips with anthromorphism, and was about to change the face of the science, and the world forever.
Dieter Ewig-Voss had emigrated from Austria to London in 1863, his socially radical views seeing him chased out of the country by an increasingly nationalistic liberal government. He had become a good friend of Jansson’s and a firm believer in anthromorphism, but had been disgusted with his friend’s careless attitude towards life, going as far to write a scathing rebuttal to Jansson’s treatise. Voss wrote that:
‘As much as I admire my colleague, and friend, his proposed method for performing the birth of an Anthromorph is at best misguided and at worst beastly. We cannot assume this to be an exact science; if we do not, oh, the corpses of child and mother alike!’(5)
Voss spent the next few years honing the methods of anthromorphism to make them altogether stronger in terms of morality and ethics. He used the language of humans; a newly born anthromorph was born, rather than ‘created’, and was a child rather than a ‘creation’. It had a mother rather than the awfully cold ‘producer;’ the scientist in charge of the process was a father. He wrote critically of nearly every successful anthromorph birth, deriding their ‘fathers’ as inhumane when they dissected them, and mourning them; he argued a success would only be possible when an anthromorph lived to a reasonable age.
Not that this mattered; orthodoxists and accelerationists, while writing much of the early principles and discoveries of anthromorphology, never managed to get an anthromorph past the age of six.(6) Come 1891, Voss achieved nothing short of a scientific miracle.
(3) Again, most of the material surrounding Victorian anthromorphism is missing, presumed destroyed; we cannot overstate this point enough. The best we can do is suggest modern genetic techniques having been developed over a century ago, an obviously shaky hypothesis.
(4) Edouard de Mancino, The Anthromorphic Form, trans. by Jane Monteiro, (New York: Tungsten Press, 1988).
(5) Dieter Ewig-Voss, A Moral Anthromorphism, (London: Tinkerer Press, 1873).
(6) Köpek was a Turkish wolf anthromorph, who died at the age of six after a bout of pneumonia.
Section Four: Success.
Voss had studied the Keller method and identified several issues that led to the overall inaccuracy of births, as well as a fragile genetic code that would lead to the deaths of anthromorph children. As such, Voss pioneered what inevitable be known as the Voss method; using a powerful microscope, he was able to seamlessly engineer the DNA of an embryo (taken from a willing participant, another ethical advancement in the field) so that it would both have a much higher chance of surviving birth, but also of living longer.
His first experiment was a risk. Voss implemented the DNA of the recently discovered armadillo lizard (ouroboros cataphractus) into an embryo. Reptile anthromorphs had been born before, but had often died due to the lack of an egg to protect them. Voss’ analysis of the armadillo lizard found that it laid live young, an appealing quality. Where Voss took a risk was implanting tiny amounts of lobster DNA. Voss, somehow, knew the cell-regenerating properties of lobsters and the part of the genome that controlled this. With the aim of giving his progeny the best chance of survival, he implanted this genome.(7)
Despite all odds, it was a massive success. After nine months on 9th November 1888, one Ms. Roxanne Ewig-Voss (at the time Brigham; she married Voss after the experiment) gave birth to a healthy baby boy, a reptile anthromorph named Edward Ewig-Voss. On the date, Dieter wrote:
‘A wonderful day! A successful birth with both mother and child healthy, and happy. No deformities, no illnesses, and he cries heartily! The comet was at it’s apex in the sky, too; truly a portent of joy!’(8)(9)
Edward grew faster than humans, with his reptile features developing at the same rate; he was covered in scales, with plates along his back, taking more of an animal form than a human one but still being bipedal and intelligent.
Unusually, the child had the beginnings of hair poking through the scales on his head, and the worst effect of his genetic cocktail of DNA was a weakness in the eyes, requiring him to wear spectacles. He was, however, healthy and took his first step on clawed feet at the age of six months, and apparently spoke his first word, ‘Heimat’, taught to him by Voss, at the age of two.(10) It made the Austrian weep with joy.
While the lobster DNA was noted to have no direct effect, it must be noted that Edward was the first to break six years; then ten years, then twenty. Records past Edward’s growth are incredibly sketchy, and the simple fact is that we lost him; it is most likely he lost his life in either one of the World Wars, or in the multiple anti-anthromorph riots throughout the century.
No matter the fate of Edward, his birth led to the modernisation of the field, despite the bans that were to come. As anthromorphism entered the 20th century, it found itself split into three fields; Vossian (later Wellsian) progressivism, Janssonite orthodoxism, and the rising tide of Golletian (later Fordist) accelerationism.”
(7) This is perhaps the best example of just how mysterious anthromorphism is. Standard genetic science didn’t evolve whatsoever until the late 20th century, yet a relatively small band of international scientists were leagues ahead; the mysterious lack of written and practical material only adds to this quite irritating mystery.
(8) Dieter Ewig-Voss, Diaries of Morality: Austria and Anthromorphs 1863-1890, (London: Yharnam Publishing Press, 1907).
(9) The Scarlet Augur was at it’s brightest when Edward was born.
(10) In her memoirs Mrs. Ewig-Voss recorded his first word as ‘egg’, at the age of one and a half.
_________________________________
“Pff,” huffs a portly figure, reading the book and leaning against a shelf packed with more books, “’lost’ my ass. Nobody ever bothered looking!” They place the book under their pale blue, scaled arm and walk away slowly, past more groaning bookshelves.
“All that talk about family, my old man wasn’t exactly looking after me,” they continue to grumble as they enter a smaller space. A wooden bar at one end protects a small preparation area equipped with a gleaming silver coffee machine and other paraphernalia a barista would make good use of. There’s also, inexplicably, a very large wooden bowl of mangoes, with a little sign: “Take one, they’re free! <3 :D.” They move an errant sidetail from out behind their gold-rimmed circle frame spectacles, brushing their black mop of hair into a slightly less messy shape.
In front of the bar are chairs and tables, nearly all of them soft armchairs and wooden surfaces that give the feel of a scrappy gentleman’s club rather than a coffee shop; all of them are incredibly old, they note to themselves, and they can remember where they got every single one. Like everywhere in the shop, there are bookshelves lining the walls.
“At least they got the first words right, I suppose. Egg,” they snicker, slightly less grumpily. Their eyes turned to beyond the seating area to the front of the shop, a small entryway next to a wide glass window that gives a view of a quiet main street. The sky is the pale blue of an early autumn morning, and there are a few birds chirping. The town gently hums as it begins to stir to life, the streets not full of shoppers but ruled by morning shift workers and delivery trucks and garbagemen. But that’s outside.
Inside, the entire place smells and tastes like crinkly old paper and warm, rich coffee, it feels cosy and warm; it sets them at ease. They turn towards the bar and begin to wipe it down. A new day has started, and the bell for the door rings.
A dragon enters, less portly than the shop-owner and with more muscle, but still a little soft around the edges, ducking under and squeezing through the doorway. His skin is a deep green hue, like jade…well, not like jade, literal jade, that shines and glints in the warm shop lights. A trench coat covers his wide frame, beating off the autumntime chill. His features appear (are) painted on, and they crack into a smile.
“Ah, hello, Ted.” His painted expression shifts, a pigment eyebrow raising at the sight of what Ted is holding. “Glad you open this early…catching up on some history?”
“Something like that,” smiles Ted weakly as they slide the heavy book clumsily onto an already stacked shelf. Their eyes wander over the dragon…hmm, he must have taken a break from metal and human food for a while. It wouldn’t be long before the emerald dragon was the same size or bigger than they were. “Same as usual, Jade?”
“Mhm!”
“Right away.” Ted gets to work boiling some water and spooning leaves into a slightly chipped mug that would look more at home in a domestic kitchen than a coffee-shop; there wasn’t a single pair of mugs or cups that matched behind the bar. As they work, their mind floats away.
‘Never much liked the name Voss…bit edgy, isn’t it?’…’don’t burn yourself don’t burn yourself don’t burn yourself-‘…’good lord. I’m nearly a hundred and thirty this year’…’I hope I used the right leaves’…’…I could go for a mango.’
They refocus as they finish the cup of steaming tea, placing it on a small plate alongside a biscuit and placing it in front of Jade; he nods appreciatively and starts to drink, his eyes on a book on metallurgy, Ted notes with a small smile. They walk back behind the bar and begin absentmindedly peeling a mango.
They had been settled down here for only a couple of years after over a century of wandering. And they were happy.
As a quick sidenote, the stories will look a lot better formatted in the .pdf file, but I'll try and make them as readable as possible in the description <3
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Story One:
In which there’s an extremely dry essay on a fake science that is entirely impossible but quite fun.
“Extract from ‘The Origins of Anthromorphism’ by Gerald Tatting, 2006.
Introduction:
In this more modern and enlightened age, one might think that the success and development of anthromorphism has been a constant, but this is not the case. From its conception in the midst of Victorian pseudoscience, to the morally devoid early experiments and illegalisation, and subsequent professionalisation of the field, anthromorphism has been dogged by controversy and criticism, and not without merit.
Section One: Origins.
The roots of anthromorphism are messy, but they are mostly believed to have originated in the mid-19th century during the Victorian interest in pseudoscience. Fields like phrenology, homeopathy and the rise of spiritualism dominated the public consciousness, and novels like Jekyll and Hyde only rooted these beliefs. As such, ridiculous science became a subject of public popularity, of morbid curiosity, and of unfortunately serious scientific inquiry.
There was, however, a scientific background to your subject, with its beginnings coming after the publishing of Gregor Mendel’s 1866 Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden. The paper, which explained what we now recognise as genes and hereditary traits was paid little attention at the time; it is believed that had Darwin used the paper, the accepted modern field of genetics would have evolved much earlier.
Sadly, Mendel’s paper was largely ignored, even criticised by the scientific community, and was not looked at seriously until the 20th century. Only a small community of scientists who had been studying the same material as Mendel and Darwin paid studious attention to Mendel’s work and began developing more extreme hypotheses.
These thinkers believed that, by implanting animal genes into those of a human embryo, they could birth a new species, a combination of man and beast. One of the more prominent thinkers, Raymond Wilhelm Jansson, wrote in his 1873 treatise:
“I propose a new, modern science, much divorced from the rising tides of pseudoscience. Phrenology, iridology, and homeopathy are dead ends with absolutely no basis in scientific principle whatsoever. They are no more than modern-day alchemy. But my new science is rooted in Darwin’s revolutionary theories, in the exciting new findings of Mendel, in pure factual basis! It will be but a simple fusion of man, and animal, with their genes. The best qualities of both combined; who can deny the want for a being as smart as man but as fast as the falcon? One with the sophistication of humanity and the strength of a rhinoceros? A divine science that will truly push the limits of what we, as people, as a distinguished society, know; I call it Anthromorphism.”(1)
Jansson’s treatise gained very little traction in the wider scientific community but was heralded by the smaller community of Anthromorphologists as a seminal work. The discovery of DNA in 1869 only aided their thinking; while the link between DNA and genetic makeup wasn’t discovered until the 20th century, anthromorphologists seemed to be ahead of the curve, with a few surviving writings about the link being written in 1874.
(1) Jansson, Raymond W., Anthromorphism: A Treatise Of A Most Exciting Science, (London: Pibble-Smythe Publishing House, 1873)
Section Two: First Experiments:
It was after this that several leading lights began to experiment with creating anthromorphs, often with methods completely immoral and unethical(2) and producing monstrosity after monstrosity; the first ‘bodily sound anthromorph’ (another term coined by Jansson for the hypothetical manbeast hybrid) was created in 1875 by Felix Rondstrum in Amsterdam. Bodily sound, rather depressingly, simply meant an anthromorph who had the standard number of limbs and facial features and wasn’t a horrifying mess of flesh upon delivery.
Anthromorph One, sardonically nicknamed Lazarus, was a human-dog hybrid, born dead. It had a canine head and tail, with fully dextrous hands that ended in sharper, claw-like nails, and what seemed to be pores that would have grown fur had it survived birth. Lazarus was found to have no internal oddities whatsoever, except for perhaps a throat and mouth structure similar enough to a human’s to possibly create words. Their limbs were also of standard human form, and not digitigrade.
The announcement of Lazarus’ ‘birth’ created much excitement in the anthromorphological community, and disgust and morbid interest in the wider community and society. Several penny horrors were written around these ‘man-beasts’ and their ‘savage’ ways were produced; these often drew unfair comparisons with indigenous groups and racial minorities, whose apparent ‘animal savagery’ was equivalent.
Lazarus’s successful birth is of much mystery, as with most early anthromorph science. Mysterious fires in several leading figures’ labs destroyed most documentation, and this was paired with their often-untimely deaths at the hands of anti-science or pro ‘ethical’ science fanatics. Many conspiracies have arisen as to the mysterious nature of early anthromorphism as a result; demonic rituals, communions with God, alien technology, and time travel to steal modern sciences have all been proposed.
(2) This often involved paying ‘fallen women of good stock’ (in the words of Jansson) to be experimented on. Often these women would die in childbirth during the messy process of what we can only presume to be genetic engineering or let out into the street unpaid.
Section Three: First Steps and the Split in the Field:
What is concrete knowledge is that at the start of the 1880s, anthromorphism was going from strength to strength. Yuri Keller created Katerina in Yekaterinburg in 1881, a woman-bear cross who died after a year of seemingly normal development. Keller’s method, apparently published shortly after Katerina’s birth,(3) was widely used from then on in anthromorphological experiments.
Francis Rossini and Jacques, a man-bird cross born in 1880 won acclaim in Paris after the beaked child spoke his first word, frere, shortly before his death in 1883. It was observed that Jacques spoke like a human; upon dissection it was found he had both an avian syrinx and a human throat and mouth structure that allowed entirely normal speech.
Other experiments by Edouard de Mancino of Rio de Janeiro, Johann Gambolputty-Hautkopf von Ulm of Potsdam and Lionel Miles of Boston all created anthromorphs who survived birth and spoke, allowing unprecedented research into the nature of anthromorphs and to what degree they were hybridised; it was generally agreed they were sapient, and, if engineered correctly, had ‘all the convenience of a human’s insides with the features of an animal’.(4)
Yet the instability of the lifespan of anthromorphs held the field back from being recognised as a true science; indeed, the number of deaths in the pursuit of a pure anthromorph damaged the reputation of the science for a while, more so than the equally harmful and arguably more insidious field of phrenology, or eugenics; their hypothetical nature made them much more acceptable in the scientific and political establishment.
By 1888, however, one anthromorphologist had gotten to grips with anthromorphism, and was about to change the face of the science, and the world forever.
Dieter Ewig-Voss had emigrated from Austria to London in 1863, his socially radical views seeing him chased out of the country by an increasingly nationalistic liberal government. He had become a good friend of Jansson’s and a firm believer in anthromorphism, but had been disgusted with his friend’s careless attitude towards life, going as far to write a scathing rebuttal to Jansson’s treatise. Voss wrote that:
‘As much as I admire my colleague, and friend, his proposed method for performing the birth of an Anthromorph is at best misguided and at worst beastly. We cannot assume this to be an exact science; if we do not, oh, the corpses of child and mother alike!’(5)
Voss spent the next few years honing the methods of anthromorphism to make them altogether stronger in terms of morality and ethics. He used the language of humans; a newly born anthromorph was born, rather than ‘created’, and was a child rather than a ‘creation’. It had a mother rather than the awfully cold ‘producer;’ the scientist in charge of the process was a father. He wrote critically of nearly every successful anthromorph birth, deriding their ‘fathers’ as inhumane when they dissected them, and mourning them; he argued a success would only be possible when an anthromorph lived to a reasonable age.
Not that this mattered; orthodoxists and accelerationists, while writing much of the early principles and discoveries of anthromorphology, never managed to get an anthromorph past the age of six.(6) Come 1891, Voss achieved nothing short of a scientific miracle.
(3) Again, most of the material surrounding Victorian anthromorphism is missing, presumed destroyed; we cannot overstate this point enough. The best we can do is suggest modern genetic techniques having been developed over a century ago, an obviously shaky hypothesis.
(4) Edouard de Mancino, The Anthromorphic Form, trans. by Jane Monteiro, (New York: Tungsten Press, 1988).
(5) Dieter Ewig-Voss, A Moral Anthromorphism, (London: Tinkerer Press, 1873).
(6) Köpek was a Turkish wolf anthromorph, who died at the age of six after a bout of pneumonia.
Section Four: Success.
Voss had studied the Keller method and identified several issues that led to the overall inaccuracy of births, as well as a fragile genetic code that would lead to the deaths of anthromorph children. As such, Voss pioneered what inevitable be known as the Voss method; using a powerful microscope, he was able to seamlessly engineer the DNA of an embryo (taken from a willing participant, another ethical advancement in the field) so that it would both have a much higher chance of surviving birth, but also of living longer.
His first experiment was a risk. Voss implemented the DNA of the recently discovered armadillo lizard (ouroboros cataphractus) into an embryo. Reptile anthromorphs had been born before, but had often died due to the lack of an egg to protect them. Voss’ analysis of the armadillo lizard found that it laid live young, an appealing quality. Where Voss took a risk was implanting tiny amounts of lobster DNA. Voss, somehow, knew the cell-regenerating properties of lobsters and the part of the genome that controlled this. With the aim of giving his progeny the best chance of survival, he implanted this genome.(7)
Despite all odds, it was a massive success. After nine months on 9th November 1888, one Ms. Roxanne Ewig-Voss (at the time Brigham; she married Voss after the experiment) gave birth to a healthy baby boy, a reptile anthromorph named Edward Ewig-Voss. On the date, Dieter wrote:
‘A wonderful day! A successful birth with both mother and child healthy, and happy. No deformities, no illnesses, and he cries heartily! The comet was at it’s apex in the sky, too; truly a portent of joy!’(8)(9)
Edward grew faster than humans, with his reptile features developing at the same rate; he was covered in scales, with plates along his back, taking more of an animal form than a human one but still being bipedal and intelligent.
Unusually, the child had the beginnings of hair poking through the scales on his head, and the worst effect of his genetic cocktail of DNA was a weakness in the eyes, requiring him to wear spectacles. He was, however, healthy and took his first step on clawed feet at the age of six months, and apparently spoke his first word, ‘Heimat’, taught to him by Voss, at the age of two.(10) It made the Austrian weep with joy.
While the lobster DNA was noted to have no direct effect, it must be noted that Edward was the first to break six years; then ten years, then twenty. Records past Edward’s growth are incredibly sketchy, and the simple fact is that we lost him; it is most likely he lost his life in either one of the World Wars, or in the multiple anti-anthromorph riots throughout the century.
No matter the fate of Edward, his birth led to the modernisation of the field, despite the bans that were to come. As anthromorphism entered the 20th century, it found itself split into three fields; Vossian (later Wellsian) progressivism, Janssonite orthodoxism, and the rising tide of Golletian (later Fordist) accelerationism.”
(7) This is perhaps the best example of just how mysterious anthromorphism is. Standard genetic science didn’t evolve whatsoever until the late 20th century, yet a relatively small band of international scientists were leagues ahead; the mysterious lack of written and practical material only adds to this quite irritating mystery.
(8) Dieter Ewig-Voss, Diaries of Morality: Austria and Anthromorphs 1863-1890, (London: Yharnam Publishing Press, 1907).
(9) The Scarlet Augur was at it’s brightest when Edward was born.
(10) In her memoirs Mrs. Ewig-Voss recorded his first word as ‘egg’, at the age of one and a half.
_________________________________
“Pff,” huffs a portly figure, reading the book and leaning against a shelf packed with more books, “’lost’ my ass. Nobody ever bothered looking!” They place the book under their pale blue, scaled arm and walk away slowly, past more groaning bookshelves.
“All that talk about family, my old man wasn’t exactly looking after me,” they continue to grumble as they enter a smaller space. A wooden bar at one end protects a small preparation area equipped with a gleaming silver coffee machine and other paraphernalia a barista would make good use of. There’s also, inexplicably, a very large wooden bowl of mangoes, with a little sign: “Take one, they’re free! <3 :D.” They move an errant sidetail from out behind their gold-rimmed circle frame spectacles, brushing their black mop of hair into a slightly less messy shape.
In front of the bar are chairs and tables, nearly all of them soft armchairs and wooden surfaces that give the feel of a scrappy gentleman’s club rather than a coffee shop; all of them are incredibly old, they note to themselves, and they can remember where they got every single one. Like everywhere in the shop, there are bookshelves lining the walls.
“At least they got the first words right, I suppose. Egg,” they snicker, slightly less grumpily. Their eyes turned to beyond the seating area to the front of the shop, a small entryway next to a wide glass window that gives a view of a quiet main street. The sky is the pale blue of an early autumn morning, and there are a few birds chirping. The town gently hums as it begins to stir to life, the streets not full of shoppers but ruled by morning shift workers and delivery trucks and garbagemen. But that’s outside.
Inside, the entire place smells and tastes like crinkly old paper and warm, rich coffee, it feels cosy and warm; it sets them at ease. They turn towards the bar and begin to wipe it down. A new day has started, and the bell for the door rings.
A dragon enters, less portly than the shop-owner and with more muscle, but still a little soft around the edges, ducking under and squeezing through the doorway. His skin is a deep green hue, like jade…well, not like jade, literal jade, that shines and glints in the warm shop lights. A trench coat covers his wide frame, beating off the autumntime chill. His features appear (are) painted on, and they crack into a smile.
“Ah, hello, Ted.” His painted expression shifts, a pigment eyebrow raising at the sight of what Ted is holding. “Glad you open this early…catching up on some history?”
“Something like that,” smiles Ted weakly as they slide the heavy book clumsily onto an already stacked shelf. Their eyes wander over the dragon…hmm, he must have taken a break from metal and human food for a while. It wouldn’t be long before the emerald dragon was the same size or bigger than they were. “Same as usual, Jade?”
“Mhm!”
“Right away.” Ted gets to work boiling some water and spooning leaves into a slightly chipped mug that would look more at home in a domestic kitchen than a coffee-shop; there wasn’t a single pair of mugs or cups that matched behind the bar. As they work, their mind floats away.
‘Never much liked the name Voss…bit edgy, isn’t it?’…’don’t burn yourself don’t burn yourself don’t burn yourself-‘…’good lord. I’m nearly a hundred and thirty this year’…’I hope I used the right leaves’…’…I could go for a mango.’
They refocus as they finish the cup of steaming tea, placing it on a small plate alongside a biscuit and placing it in front of Jade; he nods appreciatively and starts to drink, his eyes on a book on metallurgy, Ted notes with a small smile. They walk back behind the bar and begin absentmindedly peeling a mango.
They had been settled down here for only a couple of years after over a century of wandering. And they were happy.
Category Story / All
Species Lizard
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 395.7 kB
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