On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Damien Sullivan wrote: >On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 08:48:14AM -0500, Tucker wrote: > >> Demon. Brigitta's parent (can't remember which one, but I think father) >> is/was a demon. I'm fairly certain this is distinct from being an elf >> (Miklos: "You are fully of the blood of Faerie, aren't you?" Devera: >> "Yes.") but could be wrong. > >Potentially distinct, but we also know elfs are sometimes considered >demons. Yes. Let me make my notion clear: The tenuous chain of reasoning derives largely from one line in "Jhereg", where they're speculating about whether Mellar might have fled to the East. Vlad says that a Dragaeran would be considered a demon there. So it may be that in Fenario, Dragaerans to the West of the Mountains of Faerie are called elfs, and a Dragaeran wandering around inside Fenario is called a demon, out of sheer ignorance (Miklos doesn't call Devera a demon because he's neither ignorant nor stupid nor rude). Also, the Necromancer is a Dragaeran who is also a demon as defined by Dragaerans. But a Fenarian demon may be something else entirely which is distinct >from a Dragaeran, yet might be confused with one. Like I said, it's all tenuous. > >I'd lean to 'demon' myself, because I don't believe elfs and humans >crossbreeding until told otherwise -- same genetic stock sure, so >what, we're the same genetic stock as a baboon -- but 'reality' could >go either way. > Fenarian demons may be yet another Jenoine experiment, closer to H. Sapiens stock. However, when Sethra was doing her exposition of the history of species as she knew it (Easterners, Dragaerans, Serioli), she didn't mention any other species that might map to Fenarian demons. On the other hand, she didn't mention cat-centaurs either (which I'm pretty sure are a Jenoine experiment based off Dragaeran stock), no doubt because things were complicated enough without such digressions. One last thought: Perhaps the Dragaeran definition of "demon" is not species-specific, and an Easterner can also learn the trick of multiply-manifesting (and everything else that goes with it). But then why should it matter to Brigitta that that's what her father was? She's still biologically human.