Roshi

Roshi (one roshi, many roshi) are the small creatures that live on the Plot — a member's own stretch of the village — and in the Wilds and the Commons. A roshi is not a character and not a chatbot: it has a genome (two copies of every gene, one from each parent, the dominant one expressed), a chemistry (a hundred and twenty-eight humours in its blood, organs that make and break them, seventeen drives — hunger of three kinds, thirst, sleepiness, boredom, loneliness, fear, pain, and the rest), and a brain that learns what to do about them, and remembers the ones it knows: a favourite toy, a friend, and grief when the friend is gone. The words it says are the ones it was taught.

The Plot

The member is the hand: pat, scold, drop a biscuit, carry, teach a word, ask what? (it answers in its own babble, or in the words it knows) and why? (the drive behind it). The Vetti in the member's care helps as they grow — feeding, watering, keeping the standing orders the member gives in plain words. No roshi are kept until the Vetti is a child; the first comes as an egg, with a story.

The Plot lives at two ticks a second while someone watches and at a tenth of that while nobody does; it catches up when you come back. A roshi's life is about nine Plot-days, which is two to four weeks of ordinary visits. Six roshi and four seeds at most on a Plot. It can die: of hunger, of injury, of old age, or of eating the wrong thing. It is remembered: Anubis comes for it, and the grave keeps the name.

The kinds

Eight kinds, each with a country of its own:

• Pibbi — small, curious, electric — in spirit; at home on the Plot.
• Leafi — fruit-lover; social; chases weather when homesick; a strong immune system; from the Overgrowth.
• Woolli — cold-adapted; slow ageing; eats detritus; its coat thickens; from the Drift.
• Finni — amphibious; land hatchlings become water elders; lays in water; from the Sunken Halls.
• Toothi — carnivore; trains fast and holds grudges; tough hide; from the Bonefields.
• Sooti — eats the inedible; toxin-tolerant; from the Tip.
• Wingi — flighty; needs company; from the Shelf.
• Glimi — bioluminescent; nocturnal; cold-blooded — needs warmth; at home on the Plot.

Two roshi of the same kind that have come to like each other make a seed, and the seed's genome is a shuffle of both parents' with a little mutation — a child can carry a colour neither parent shows, and a line can lose a gene or gain one. Kinds do not interbreed; the Plot's splicer can join two seeds of different kinds, and what hatches is sterile.

The lineage

The deep story, as far as the record goes: a proto-bipedal several million years back split into the Pibbi's line and the proto-men, from whom the Vetti descend — the Trovi on one branch, and on the other the ancestral elves: the elf-proper Ljosalfi and Dokalfi (parted fifty thousand years ago) and the proto-Eastern-Elf branch, the Dverfi, the Vatli and the Nissi, the semi-elves. The Pibbi is a cousin of the Vetti, not an ancestor: more like them in shape than any other roshi, and not the same. The Lindri's and the Kobbi's lines are not in the record. See the Vetti.

See also

the Plot · the Wilds · the Hollow · the nux