Sharing the love

Well folks, we're officially caught up on the backlogged journal entries! Norns of the Round Table is now live. To celebrate, I streamed today's session in Discord for a group of friends, who had never heard of Creatures before, with a cheatsheet I'd put together to help them identify my Norns in the corner. To my immense surprise, I actually had a small audience! Unfortunately, the first hour of the show wasn't the most interesting, as it consisted almost entirely of trying to convince Tiberius to eat. It was pretty hilarious, though; everyone was cracking jokes about him being on hunger strike, and there was a small commotion in the call every time he picked up a carrot (and inevitably dropped it moments later).

Julia's life force also slowly waned over the course of the session, so when Tiberius decided to take a nap, I took the opportunity to isolate Julia and convince her to eat some honey. Unlike Tiberius, she only took a little bit of coaxing, and was soon happily munching away. After some time I noticed that Tiberius was still asleep, and his sleepiness drive was still high. I gave him multiple doses of Wake-up Pill to no avail, and sensing a bug, decided to quit and relaunch the game. Unfortunately, at this point, "unsticking" Tiberius led to his immediate death.

At this point, I excitedly dove into genetic analysis of a replacement, only to realize just how much baseline knowledge and understanding of Norn biology I had really built up as I floundered to figure out where to even begin explaining to the folks on Discord what we were looking at.

Atticus, the Norn in question, had three mutations. One was a 1 tucked away safely in a state rule. One was presumably a false-positive or autocorrected because I could see nothing unusual at all about the gene in question. But the last one...

Emitter

Gene 156: Gonadotrophin (F)

Organ: "Creature", Tissue: "Reproductive", Locus: "I am pregnant(egg&sperm ready)". Chemical: "Gonadotrophin". Sample every 40 ticks.
Digital: Output = 64 if Signal > 0.

Organ: "Creature", Tissue: "Somatic", Locus: "Muscle energy used". Chemical: "Gonadotrophin". Sample every 40 ticks.
Digital: Output = 64 if Signal > 0.

This is a female-only gene so would be completely dormant in Atticus, but could be passed on to his descendants. Gonadotrophin is the chemical that is produced during pregnancy to shut down the fertility cycle. This mutation would sever the connection between pregnancy and gonadotrophin production, so for one thing it would not get produced during pregnancy (thus allowing the fertility cycle to continue while already pregnant). For another, it would be incorrectly linked to muscle energy usage. There's very little documentation of what exactly the "muscle energy used" locus measures, or what scale it typically operates on, but in theory, depending on the typical values, this incorrect link could lead to either constant or unpredictable production of gonadotrophin, and thereby cause fertility issues.

The fact that this mutation occurred in a male is particularly dangerous because it doesn't affect him and can therefore be passed silently on to his descendants to cause problems in the population later. Because of this, I have decided not to use Atticus in my world, which is probably for the best considering he would have looked identical to his father, Gaius: Horse Norn head and legs, Banana Norn body, and Pixie Norn arms.

As such, I moved on to the next creature on my list, Cassius! After the parade of Banana Norns I had earlier in this world I never would have guessed I'd be glad to see one, but as the cheatsheet shows, my world was somewhat lacking in diversity at the moment, and I welcomed the reintroduction of the Banana Norn face to the gene pool.

Cassius has two mutations. The first pushed the boundaries of my understanding of Lobe genes.

Lobe

Gene 121: Attention lobe

D1 Dynamics

Relax susceptibility: 0 (max to 0 instantly), Relax STW: 0 (max to 0 instantly).
LTW gain: no
Susceptibility: <undefined>
Reinforcement: <undefined>
Gain: no
Lose: no

Relax susceptibility: 0 (max to 0 instantly), Relax STW: 0 (max to 0 instantly).
LTW gain: no
Susceptibility: 1:
Reinforcement: <undefined>
Gain: no
Lose: no

Alright, so first of all, D1 dendrites in the attention lobe are connected to the noun lobe (type 0 being connected to the stimulus source lobe. This allows the lobe to take both the environment and what the player is saying into account when directing what the creature looks at. The susceptibility determines how strongly reinforcement affects the dendrite. However, since the reinforcement function is itself undefined, and gain and loss are both set to "no," I expect this won't actually have any real effect in practice.

Emitter

Gene 229: 038 immune response

2 Antigen 3 + 4 Glucose = 1 Antibody 3 + 1 Hotness.
Rate: 80 (max to 0 in about 5 min).

2 <187> + 4 Glucose = 1 Antibody 3 + 1 Hotness.
Rate: 80 (max to 0 in about 5 min).

Essentially, Cassius's immune response to Antigen 3 is broken; instead he is allergic to the unused chemical 187. If he catches Antigen 3, he won't produce any of the antibodies. I'm not sure what the implications of this in Creatures 1 are; either this will mean Antigen 3 would be a death sentence for him, or it would make him a Typhoid Mary unaffected by it but capable of spreading it. Either would be a bad thing, but I deemed this risk acceptable and welcomed Cassius into the world!

I immediately set about teaching him his verbs and a few key nouns, then brought him through the teleporter and started teaching him about weeds and herbs. I saw Quintus out of the corner of my eye and thought he was sleeping because I was so focused on Cassius. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Quintus was actually dead, from old age I assume.

I quickly wrapped up teaching Cassius, and then set about bringing another new Norn into the world. Aurelia is the daughter of Julia and Augustus, and marks the celebrated return of the lovely female Horse Norn head! Aurelia has only one mutation, and it's a relatively minor one.

Instinct

Gene 293: verb deac

When... "Verb i/ps" "verb: Deactivate it" ...and you "Deactivate it": +255 Reward.

When... "Drive i/ps" "COLDNESS" ...and you "Deactivate it": +255 Reward.

Normally this instinct tells creatures that following the "stop" command is a good thing. In Aurelia, it will instead cause her to dream that deactivating something will produce a reward when she's cold. As I rarely see my creatures doing anything to regulate their temperatures and I don't think I've ever used the "stop" command, I expect this to have no effect whatsoever.

I taught Aurelia her verbs, but my audience was filtering out and I had some things to attend to away from the computer, so at this point I called it quits for the day.