The holy world of Hearthside

There's alien tail syndrome, where the nerve cord connecting a yinrih's main brain in the head and the caudal ganglion at the base of the tail is partially severed, causing the tail to act on its own. A yinrih's tail is longer than the body including the head, lacks bones, making it very flexible, and is strong enough to support a yinrih's weight. An erratic tail poses a hazard to the owner and those around him, so amputation is usually the only recourse. Taillessness is a non-trivial disability when you live in a world designed by and for people with a prehensile tail.

There's also smooth eye, which is where the organic nanoantennas that normally coat the surface of a yinrih's eyes fail to form in utero, rendering the kit blind. Blindness is less disabling for yinrih than it is for humans. Humans rely almost entirely on vision to navigate the world, but yinrih perception is divided more evenly among the senses, with hearing and especially olfaction being very keen. Touch is also prevalent. Even sighted yinrih will brush small objects against their whiskers while sniffing it in order to gain tactile and olfactory information about it, and a tactile labels are used on containers and controls in order to allow manipulation with the rear paws without looking. While sighted yinrih don't use tactile writing for long texts, the means to produce it are far more widely available and consequently cheaper than braille materials on Earth.

While not a malady from the yinrih's perspective, all yinrih are technically face blind. They use odor as the primary means of recognizing individuals, with gross physical features like fur pattern and body shape as a secondary indicator. This explains why yinrih have such domestic-looking fur patterns that vary widely even within a single litter, each kit is born visually distinct from his litter mates to aid identification by parents.

tallstone

Not to be that guy, but it's tailstone. The word is a sort of fourth-wall-ish pun thing. (not sure what else to call it). The original Commonthroat is sKGqrCg, which is a compound of the noun sKGqg (stone) and the verb rC (to flick with the tip of the tail). The in-universe etymology is that when asked how it worked, the inventor wordlessly flicked himself on the side with his tail (as though swatting an annoying inset). This gesture can mean "don't bother me", "go away", but also "don't concern yourself with that" or "never you mind". He didn't want to get into the technical weeds as he wasn't good at communicating complex scientific principles in an understandable way. But, since the gesture is a rough equivalent to a dismissive wave of the hand, the word can be translated "handwavium".

Interesting. There’s no way to “ping” the “network” and - by physics or other means - determine how many other cards are on that “network”?

Protocol-wise yes, there are ping equivalents in YAP (the link layer) and YIP (the network layer). Physics-wise no, you can't know who else is listening unless they speak up.

Also, depending on how difficult it is to create Tallstone, this creates the possibility that there would be “certified secure” tallstone from well-regarded manufacturers, and riskier-but-cheaper options if you don’t care. It also raises the possibility that beyond individual bad actors, governments or criminal groups could set up entire fabs producing batches with access for them.

ding ding ding! The largest supplier of tailstone at the time of First Contact is Partisan Territory, which is on bad terms with pretty much every other polity at Focus. They only continue to exist because they've got their tentacles in almost every supply chain in the system. Partisan labor and raw materials are cheap, but there are accusations of spying on the part of the Partisan government in the manner you describe.

Sol may or may not be full to bursting with untapped sources of tailstone or tailstone precursors (haven't decided if it occurs naturally or must be synthesized). If so, First Contact may be seen by PT as an existential threat (rightly or wrongly). Since mass routers have comparatively tiny mass and volume limits, any tailstone manufactured at Sol would have to be drip-fed to Focus, making it scarce and thus more expensive. But since interspecies relations are a blank slate with no prior grudges to nurse or interests to secure, human-made tailstone would be seen by most yinrih buyers as more secure than PT-sourced tailstone.

The exotic matter required for drives is stupendously expensive. As a result, almost no ships have internal drives, but require a “drive barge” or “FTL barge” to exploit FTL. Despite this, barges are common enough that most families can afford to take an FTL trip if needed.

Like a tugboat or tow plane with a glider. Unique.

In UNHA operations, all drives are legally owned by the government and crewed by a detachment of naval personnel, with explicit orders to scuttle a drive rather than allow it to be misused.

What constitutes "misuse"?

Another thing about mass routers, really more about the Underlay, is that you need tailstone for FTL communication, which the mass routing protocol needs to form neighbor relationships with adjacent routers. Tailstone is manufactured by growing monocrystals and fractioning them into wafers. A tailstone wafer can only communicate with other wafers shaved from the same monocrystal, so Underlay tunnel interface cards are sold in sets (usually pairs) that are hard-linked to one another, containing matching wafers. The ansible links between nodes are therefor much more like hard wire runs in that they can't be easily changed to different endpoints.

This manufacturing process has a lot of cybersecurity implications. A bad actor planted within a tailstone fab could grow larger crystals than a downstream client ordered, then break the crystals up to form multiple normal sized ones, giving the client the expected quantity and keeping the other half. That bad actor could then perform MITM attacks on ansibles or routers using those crystals.

One such attack is route poisoning, which is where a malicious router injects false routes into the system, telling other routers that a particular endpoint is somewhere it isn't, redirecting travelers to a destination of the attacker's choosing.

Refreshing that the defining characteristic of your magic system seems to be that it isn't a system.

It’s important to know these things, because different species or other casters being brought along can have… unexpected reactions to different methods.

I love the trope of fast travel being inherently scary. One idea I had was an inversion of the typical hyperspace is hell concept whereby FTL shunted you through Heaven, the risk wasn't demonic possession but having your face melted off by overwhelming holiness Raiders of the Lost Ark style, meaning special precautions had to be taken to keep people from perceiving the environment outside the ship, even conceptually (via sensor readings, for example).

As for the Lonely Galaxy, there are rumors among the superstitious that the Underlay is in fact the Void (the Claravian version of hell), and that the reason why the Bright Way discourages even negative discussion of demons is that it would make them look bad if the network they invented was routed through the realm of the damned.

Interesting. Some relevant tidbits my story didn't mention:

The yinrih are capable of STL interstellar travel, but because they can't lose consciousness without dying, they can't resort to hypersleep. Instead, they use a technique called metabolic suspension which halts metabolism but uses Science™ to keep the brain and nervous system active. The device that does this is called a suspension capsule (referenced in the story above). The traveler is completely submerged in a fluid matrix called neurogel that acts as a non-invasive brain-computer interface, a liquid ventilation medium (for when your metabolism starts up again but your lungs are still paralyzed), and a shock absorbent.

Since the person is still conscious but their sensory systems don't work, the suspension capsule presents a simulacrum to the traveler in order to keep them from going insane due to lack of sensory input. It also speeds up their subjective time perception to make the trip pass more quickly. The problem with the simulacrum (sim for short) is that the more realistic it is, the more the person is tempted to dissociate, thinking the sim is reality and forgetting their life outside. In order to stave off this madness, Claravian missionaries (the only group to engage in interstellar travel) undertake a rigorous routine of prayer and meditation to keep their minds anchored in reality.

I needn't tell you that the ability to present an arbitrarily realistic simulation to a person is subject to flagrant abuse, and so-called gel-head parlors offer recreational suspension for a price. This abuse prompts Claravian research monasteries to start looking into safer modes of interstellar travel, which is what results in the invention of the mass router.

As for the router itself, there are strict mass and volume limits to what can be sent through the underlay, meaning individual flows are limited to a single person and maybe a small carry-on. Because the mass router is discovered while a team of missionaries is living among humans on Earth, a mass router trunk is able to be established between Sol and Focus immediately. The missionaries construct a working mass router using their ship's fabricator and materials found on Earth.

Hence the "or fast travel" part of the title.

Yes. The countdown also started at 12. Commonthroat uses base 12 but base 24 is also seen in other yinrih languages. Yinrih are six-toed arboreal quadrupeds, meaning they use all four paws for both grasping and movement, and they have 24 digits to count with.

You had me worried I had posted in the wrong comm by mistake. Did you think yinrih were humans? Good thing I didn't mention they lay eggs (both gals and guys) and can have up to 12 biological parents. The yinrih are arboreal quadrupeds with prehensile tails, so not remotely human-looking.

I love mechs :D Yinrih, particularly the Knights of the Sun, also use mechs. They kept making powered armor bigger and bigger until you were piloting a vehicle rather than wearing a suit.

Since mechs have five prehensile extremities to manage (four paws and a prehensile tail) they require a fair amount of training, so a hybrid between mech and conventional armored vehicle was developed called a "jumper" (Commonthroat qFbmg) that has conventional wheels but also has a degree of vertical mobility, able to jump, climb vertical surfaces, and even hover for a short period.

A wiki is probably what you want. I was going to suggest tvtropes, which is great for, say, a list of every superhero with X-ray vision, or every work of fiction containing dwarves, but I'm not sure that fits what you want.

I just checked this out. It's not quite what I'm looking for right now but it does answer my question as asked. I can see it coming in handy later.

For visualization (I hesitate to call it art) I use FOSS programs like InkScape, Blender, and Krita. I was using Obsidian extensively for notetaking and conlanging, but especially with Conlangs where I use one note per lexeme, it can get bogged down when you have hundreds of notes stored remotely.

I'm currently exploring TiddlyWiki as it's much more shareable online. I have several on my neocities page. I also have a (private/self hosted) mediawiki server running, mostly as a personal ego boost so I can say I have a "real" wiki.

Hopefully that's a bit better

Just noticed the entire OP was quoting you. I share your bemusement.

My previous conworld was very similar to yours, an inner surface of a sphere surrounded by rock {plus a visceral embodiment of entropy}. There was a light source at the center that was holy in some way (a god of order or an entity serving the same). The light even provided a negative gravitational field. I was inspired by hollow earth conspiracy theories.

I think they would probably be in awe of human music theory.

They are in fact in awe of human music, but it's more because we can put words to a melody and they can't. Yinrih phonetics relies much less on different qualities of sound and more on timing pitch contours and volume envelopes. They can't sing words because the rhythm and melody would obscure the meaning far more than a human singing Mandarin or Vietnamese, for example. Most of their modes of speaking are also very quiet compared to humans. Imagine this but modulating the pitch and volume of the growls.

This is a messy period admittedly. I've tried to make it a bit more realistic by being vague about when exactly written language emerged, only that sapient yinrih were still being born to nonsapient tree dwellers[^1] when the first extant writings were made. There may have been many generations between the dawn of sapience and the Theophany. The yinrih got really really lucky that they already had presapient behaviors that primed them to discover agriculture (shared food caching) and written language (scent marking). There was also no ice age to impede technological progress.

I'm also being deliberately coy on whether the Theophany was real, as it's important that several historical figures struggle with crises of faith, which would be hard if you had irrefutable evidence of divine intervention.

While never stated explicitly, you are correct that the yinrih lagged in some areas at the expense of others. I should clarify that the dawn of sapience occurred 100 thousand years prior to First Contact, so they've had plenty of time between then and now to figure things out. At first, medicine may have been largely ignored until after the Shakeoff (the schism that formed the Neoshamanists and Atavists). The growing number of martyrs coupled with a lack of progress toward spaceflight is what led to the schism, and the controversy caused the Bright Way to take health and safety more seriously. They had a very "take chances, make mistakes, get messy" approach to engineering.

[^1]: "Tree Dweller" is used to refer to both nonsapient yinrih and the yinrih's extant congeners who live on the northern side of the River. Yinrih traditionally consider themselves to be literally sapient tree dwellers, though the phylogenetic nitpickers will tell you they're technically different species.

In the picture at least, the start is indicated by a dovetail (not sure if that's the right word), and the endpoint with an X. I suppose in practice it could be anything, or be left deliberately ambiguous.

Starting point does matter. If the intended number has no trailing zeros, traversing the path backwards also produces a number with the same magnitude but opposite sign. If there are trailing zeros they become insignificant leading zeros when parsed in reverse. Rotating the path does not affect the number, but flipping either horizontally or vertically will flip the sign of the number.

Yes, they also wash the tail. I'm not sure how they'd handle other conversations going on at the same time. Their chattiness stems from my own profound dislike for bathroom talkers, as well as the tendency of dogs to seek you out while you're pooping, or more specifically the theory that they do this because they know you're vulnerable and want to watch out for you.

That said I think it depends on the circumstances. This social dynamic is most relevant in places such as offices or schools, where the people are familiar with each other. It serves the function of water cooler talk. In very public places like stores I'm not sure they'd be any chattier than they would while waiting in line.

They use the sense of touch more than humans. Commonthroat has words like Fc thermally conductive and cF thermally insulating that describe the sensation of touching materials like metal and glass or wood and plastic. Lmc, the word for equal in the political or moral sense comes from a word denoting the tactile sensation of two surfaces being flush with one another. They even use tactile writing for short labels on containers and controls since they don't always look at what they're handling. They often nuzzle small objects, rubbing their whiskers against them and sniffing them to gain tactile and olfactory info about it.

Xenoergonomics goes way beyond their paws. Yinrih are less dependent on vision than humans are, so aesthetics engages the paws and nose and ears just as much as the eyes. They identify one another and read emotional cues primarily by odor, and supplement their natural musk with perfumes that serve the same communicative function as human clothing.

Their hearing is very keen, but that has made their voices less powerful as a result. They've had to spend a lot of effort making their machines quieter so they can hear one another talking.

They have a weaker sense of taste than humans, so cooking emphasizes mouth feel, aroma, and visual presentation.