To Tam

[IamLEAM1983]

I've always wondered something - does Paradise have anything resembling vampires? Natively, I mean. Or, you know, virtually any other creature that was originally of myth and legend.

What I'm getting at is that it took tens of thousands of years for the mortals to get anywhere close to understanding vampirism for what it is, or for the Hopeverse's quantum theories to start to make sense of the connections between Heaven, the Earth and Hell. It took forever for magic to become a serious field of study, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to lead their lives in secret.

What's going bump in the night on Paradise? Has anything stopped going bump and actually walked out of the proverbial closet, after seeing the Vienna Accords succeed on Earth?

[Weirdlet]

"There's stories, of course- people say that you can hear things sometimes, down in the Deeps. Little kids tell stories about 'they found an open pod, and then people started showing up with their eyes torn out' or their heads cut off or some-such other thing. And there's legends among the coders and the repairfolk, about ghosts in the machines, the Dead Man's String of code that you start to see when you've gone too far, too deep for too long. But anything beyond superstitions? Nope. People start showing abilities, we assume it's part of their makeup or they just got a really sweet deal going with some undergrounder to get tech that don't get to anyone else yet. Some folk seem quasi-immortal because they're hooked up with sci's who've got the secrets they cooked up themselves and the cash to keep it flowing. If we don't know their secrets, it's because they want to hang on to their corner for a little longer and got ruthless about it, not because they made deals with anything we couldn't fathom."

[IamLEAM1983]

So what's your take on this whole Vampires are Real shtick, then? Are we just idiots for not noticing stuff that's been staring us in the face forever, or can that be excused?

[Weirdlet]

"....Hey, I'm not gonna tell people what to do with their own planet. It's not like we haven't had new migrant populations slip in every hundred years or so. It was just kinda obvious with the banging on the hull and such."

[IamLEAM1983]

That's... awfully tolerant of you. :D

Any species have a harder time than others fitting in, on the physiological level? Stuff like food requirements, pressure differential, atmosphere compositions... I guess common tolerance levels end up creating dominant climates inside Paradise, right?

[Weirdlet]

"Pretty much. A lot of us are carbon-based, breathe at least *similar* air, prefer a certain temperature range... there's sectors on Paradise where you or I would need a coat, and one, maybe two where it's like stepping off a plane into Miami in a heatwave. People who need a variant mix on breathing gasses usually have a filter-with-additives system, a mask or a suit depending on how incompatible the main mix is for them. If enough of them get together and can get the run of a place to have their particular adjustment made standard to a place, they gotta take it up with the Central Engineers- if they got enough pull with them, they can get their particular mix, gravity, etcetera put in place, with screen-warnings in the 'locks about what you gotta set your equipment to on entering. Usually with an ad for whoever local has the stuff within staggering pace."