@bettydicebettydice said: BG3 fic #2 sounds INTERESTING!!! snippet pls
jadesabre301 said: GIVE ME THE GITH HEADCANONS
I regret that there are not, as yet, any actual sentences in this story, just a pile of headcanon and some plot notes that are sitting in a gmail draft because that way I can get at them almost wherever I happen to be.
I will say that a lot of the fic is about family. Daddy Halsin is, of course, in his element with those wagonfuls of orphaned children to love and care for, and all of them adore him. It is not nearly so effortless for Varash, who also has a great deal of ongoing culture shock to deal with on the Prime (and was told by one of the kids, in no uncertain terms, that she is too bony and skinny for cuddling).
It's Oliver, who always wanted a papa and a mama and a dog, who starts calling Varash ghullva'ye one day - much to her surprise, because he pulled the gith for 'chosen parent' right out of her mind. Then a few of the other kids pick it up, and eventually Varash has a smaller number of kids (mostly older) who attach harder to Ghullva'ye than to Daddy Halsin. And many of them are happy to learn gith so they can talk properly with her, and with the hatchling githyanki Lae'zhan (this needs finessing: the fist part is, of course, for Lae'zel, and the latter for Xan, which is what she calls the hatchling, But Lae'xan looks odd to me. zh- feels like a more appropriate githerai spelling, but it doesn't look right either and the connection gets lost. It sounds much better than it looks).
And it's about that time that Gale teleports in, having finally remastered plane shift, and takes Varash, Halsin and Lae'zhan off to Limbo, so that Varash can see her mother (who is shocked to have a githyanki grandson but comes around) and make a full report about the whole Absolute crisis and what the recovery of Prince Orpheus might mean for the githzerai.
I promise, she was going to make that report to Zaerith Menyar-Ag-Gith even before the epilogue!
As for headcanons... I don't want to get too deep into how I decided the egg-laying should work, because I'm not 100% happy with it yet. BUT I can give you some random bits, like:
Githzerai settlements are generally centred around the pools. This is a relic of illithid colonies and their brine pools, but gith eggs still require incubation in warm water at a constant temperature to hatch. Eggs are kept communally, but most parents will chose to raise their own, once hatched.
There is something like a creche system, but the only children raised entirely by creche are those whose parents reproduced solely as a duty to the species. There is no particular stigma attached to this, and often these children will be adopted by other parents anyway. The creche therefore serves more as socialisation and early education.
I was talking about the pools, whoops. So one corner of them is for the eggs, but the rest is available to any gith who wants to come and swim or soak. Githzerai gather there to talk and relax, tend the eggs, meditate, etc. It would be the first place you'd look for a gith who you knew wasn't engaged in any particular work at the time or at home.
