The Ageless
Basic Information
Anatomy
Ever since they come from the lake as a new life, until the day of their death around five hundred years later, they will have the body of a human teenager, with the wide variety that that implies, not always sharing traits with their immediate ancestor.
They may change, but will never age.
They are permanently covered by a thin layer of an unidentified liquid. Any scientist of any world that has study it has been unable to find any difference between this substance and water, but there has to be some because they are actually mortally allergic to the latter.
Genetics and Reproduction
For a long time it was thought to be a legend, but the Ageless are born from the transformation of a rock-like fish (they call them simply "fishes" or the equivalent word in other dialects) after it eats the dead body of another Ageless.
The creatures can't survive in any ecosystem out of the Endless Lake, and they are permanently immobile (as far as any observer has seen), moving only once in their lifetimes, when they detect than a specific ageless is drowning in the lake; any other fish remains still as a rock, as only one of them swims towards the person. A legend says that the demeanor of the fish as it swims for the first and last time is a hint of how they are going to behave once they become ageless. Other myth implies that this trip can be interpreted to determine the fate or the life that this new person will have, and some actually make a living as foreseers using their experience to interpret those signs.
It's a horrible thing to look at, but beautiful to the eyes of every culture in the thirteenth world. Some say both creatures turn into one, others think that the fish is the one being eaten: sacrificing its body for the soul of the dying to live again.
Civilization and Culture
Average Technological Level
Most of their civilizations had follow a different path (even if for two of them that path was to steal from others) but achieved more or less the same results. On one country you will see nuclear reactors powering trains, facilitating wired communications, heating ovens and making the night bright as day. Their closest neighbors (a forest away) don't even need a roof over their heads because they had learnt to use their magic to change weather and temperature, to hunt and cook their food on a single gesture, send a message or themselves to whenever they need to, or even to dress up.
Others use rudimentary means to do their daily chores, and a careful distribution of work allows them to have plenty of free time to rest and have fun even when their tools are rudimentary and using their magic is considered rude.
Only one city has electricity, and only some tribes rely on any kind of fuel, but other than that, they have a wide variety of tech, which a couple of cultures have collected to form their own, each equally unique.
History
People from the Thirteen world don't keep a record of their history, probably because they don't need to, maybe because they don't care about the past.
Community's historians had done their best to collect information about their culture by interviewing many of them and trying to find archaeological evidence to solve discrepances. It's a work in progress, and very difficult.
For starts, every interviewed person was born when their civilization was already defined, or in its way there. They all heard that the countries in their world were founded by some ancestors that were either trying to survive or following the orders of a mythical figure (usually related to the lake) and some remember to have lived in settlements that didn't last for one reason or another.
Despite their impressive magic and the ability of carry the memory of several generations along with the skills and flexibility of eternal youth, their history seems to be ordinary. Their progress in technology and civilization was hindered by war and occasional catastrophes, just like it happens in many other worlds.
While there used to be big wars for territory or resources in the past, that stopped as they gained knowledge about the real extension of the Thirteenth World of Grista and the recurrent conflict in the last eight or ten generations is related to ecology: whenever a country wants to expand, sooner or later a species is on risk, because each ecosystem is extremely unique, and there is always one or more civilizations willing to declare war to prevent it.
Despite having varied cultures looking for different goals, they have achieved the same level of progress by different means and they all keep the same respect for the Endless Lake and each other's beliefs around it.
Though some of them had been found travelling.
Scientific Name
Human from the Thirteenth World
| Perception and Sensory Capabilities |
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| Besides the regular human five senses, which can be anything from poor to good, but not usually remarkable, they can perceive the universe through their connection to magic, usually by using spells, but sometimes in the form of intuitive-like emotions and guesses. |
| Naming traditions |
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| Each person chooses their own name. For some cultures, taking the name of an ancestor is considered either bad luck, or a way to promise to live as they did and pursue their same goals. |
| Ideals |
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On body and looks Each of the Ageless civilizations have its own standards (or none at all) and each person and sub-culture has variants of those. Yet, everyone in this world seems to agree in one thing: "the appearance talks of what the person does". Therefore, cultures that give greater value to magic or use of advanced tools, will dislike strong bodies, while those that give great relevance to physical effort will praise those and frown upon any those who look with or collect fat. Scars are beautiful for warriors, hunters who use no magic and groups based on the love for a sport or taking risks. Meanwhile, nothing is as ugly as an scar or fat for those who think that body is a temple. On relationships Some of them have a concept of family and some interactions can be considered romantic, but in most of their cultures there is only different kinds of friendship, and what they expect and give to each is a personal decision. On gender Varies according to culture, but most of them have very clear gender roles, and some of them take transgressions as signs of illness or rebellion. On aging They believe in reincarnation, but that doesn't mean they have all the time in the world, because each new person keeps only the information, not the ideals or emotions from the previous ones. Therefore, most of them feel the need of finishing their own cycle and reaching their goals in their a single lifetime. |
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