horse girl of my dreams
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dinkythings https://dinkythings.tumblr.com/post/617319257638895616:
scanners are evil and I don’t trust them so have some low quality pictures of Fresh Morvran Trash from the sketchbook lmao (Your picture was not posted)
sitting
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lol every comment and reply and Discord message is like “MORVRAN BABY 😭” and I want you all to know I feel the exact same way.
(It’s really entertaining, canon absolutely very clearly had a particular archetype in mind for Morvran to be [the books gave us some entertaining hints but W3 was like “no he is old” for some reason], but I looked at canon and said “you are so boring” and instead of connecting the dots as I thought most plausible I thought how else can I connect these dots and this is what we have now, so.)
But I also want him to have a nice day, finally.
So here’s a chunk I wrote to keep myself motivated, and possibly to work toward. I don’t know if it’s going to fit in, either in this story or in a sequel, or if I’ll have to rework it, or if it’ll fit anywhere at all or just have to be discarded. But I wrote it like– right after I read a bit in the books, so it’s directly about events from the books.
Anyway. Just a bit I don’t know if I’ll be able to use, featuring some of the events of Tower of the Swallow, and Horse Girl Morvran.
“Tell you what,” Ciri said. Morvran was still sitting silently, shoulders stiff, miserable. She leaned over and very gently pressed her shoulder against his for a moment, a long count of three, then leaned back up. “I will let you ask one question of me, about anything you want to know, from my past or anything I have special knowledge of, and I’ll answer it truthfully.”
It took a moment, but that got him to respond. “One question?” he said.
“About anything,” she said. “One question.”
Luliana was regarding Morvran with a troubled expression, and glanced over at Ciri, frowning. Ciri winked at her.
“One question,” he said. He was clearly thinking it over. “I’m going to be very specific.” He was speaking with his no-person voice, flat and dull, with no gestures or facial expressions.
But she could tell it had worked; he was less distressed already, his face less frozen. “As specific as you like,” she said.
“Some eight years ago,” he said, “in a shitty little town in Ebbing, a young woman escaped from a bounty hunter and several Nilfgaardian agents, on the back of a horse described as a surpassingly fine black mare.”
Ciri sat up straighter. “Oh,” she said.
“You said any question,” he said, glancing over at her, and it was the first time he’d looked at her in quite some time.
“Yes,” she said. “What’s the question?”
“I’m getting to that,” he said. “As the girl fled on horseback, one of the Nilfgaardians threw a weapon at her, and cut her face quite badly, so that she nearly fell from the horse. But she did not fall.”
It wasn’t a question, so Ciri waited. Luliana had pricked up her ears as well, and was listening keenly.
“I went to this place, a couple of years ago now, and everyone was very eager there to show me this gate, and to explain to me that it settled in a rainstorm, but that at the time of this incident the gate measured seven feet two inches in height,” he said. “They measured it again for me and it was only seven feet, but everyone was very concerned that I should know that it had lost two inches in the intervening time.”
Ciri laughed. “Seven feet two inches,” she said. Well, it sounded plausible.
“So this horse, with this fainting girl on its back, leapt this seven foot two inch gate,” Morvran said.
“This isn’t a question,” Ciri pointed out.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t get to the question yet. Somehow, the horse made it over the gate, with the girl still seated on its back. Seven feet two inches.”
“Yes,” Ciri said, “so you say. What was the question, though?” Was he going to ask if she was the girl? But if so, why draw it out so? Likely, he wanted to ask about the horse, and to answer, she would have to confirm she was the girl. Well, it was worth it.
“I’m getting there,” he said, and there was even a twinkle of amusement in his expression, which was positive progress– one of his eyebrows had moved slightly, there’d been a little bit of inflection on the word getting. Good. “So once the pursuers had mustered themselves, they went out the gate, after the horse, and they followed its footprints, which showed it galloping off down the road a distance. But at the edge of the woods, the tracks vanished. In full flight, without hesitation, the horse simply… stopped touching the ground, and there were no more traces to be had.”
Ciri raised her eyebrows, tilting her head slightly, waiting for the question. Luliana made a startled noise. “Wait,” she said, “what happened to the horse?”
“My question,” Morvran said, holding up his hand, “is this.” Luliana covered her mouth, and waited; Ciri tilted her head even farther. Morvran let it draw out for a moment, and finally asked:
“Could the horse fly?”
Ciri laughed brightly. It was a clever question, really several in one. “No,” she said, “no, Kelpie can’t fly.”
“Can’t,” Morvran said, seizing on the present tense; he was interested now, sharp and attentive.
“Ah,” Luliana said, “but where is she now?”
“Ah, one question,” Morvran said ruefully to her, and shook his head. “Perhaps you can trade on your connections, but I have had my question answered, and I will not presume further.”
He looked much better, much more himself. Ciri leaned over again and pressed her shoulder against his. “Sometime,” she said, “I will take you to meet her.”
This time he had relaxed enough to lean back, just a little bit, and when she glanced over at him he was smiling, even if he couldn’t make eye contact with her yet– he was smiling down at his hands in his lap.
“I would like that,” he said. “Very much.” (Your picture was not posted)
don't know how to get out of superscript italics, parthenogenesis, turkeys, science, long post, brain expansions
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laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666877650868027392/no-apologies-last-time-this-happened-to-me-it-was :
bomberqueen17 https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/666500110198439936/lol-as-one-of-the-people-who-sent-you-that-link-i :
laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666446448501669888/three-people-sent-me-articles-on-parthenogenesis :
three people sent me articles on parthenogenesis in California condors today. you talk about accidental parthenogen baby acquisition through oviposition kink one time and you’re The Parthenogenesis Guy forever!! (I love you all.)
anyways this is a neat new fact and a pretty interesting wrinkle to condor propagation. most likely a problematic one, given that avian parthenogenesis is on the whole somewhat less viable than reptile and fish parthenogenesis, but we’ll see! that said, I’m not really surprised that in such a small and extensively genetically monitored population we would end up finding evidence of parthenogenesis; most of the rarity of parthenogenesis seems to be because except in the extreme cases where females are kept in captivity without contact with males their entire lives, you can’t confirm it without a frankly ridiculous amount of genetic testing. i’m not overly familiar with the situation with avians, but for instance while it’s still (iirc) less than a dozen chondrichthyan species confirmed as parthenogenetic, I expect parthenogenesis is actually extremely widespread amongst chondrichthyans and we just can’t detect it. (it’s never been confirmed in chimaeriforms but I would be absolutely shocked if it turned out that none of an almost entirely deep-water clade were parthenogenetic. ...it would also have super weird phylogenetic implications if that were the case but that’s all hypothetical. anyways.) it’s likely similarly much more widespread than we know of in avians and even non-avian reptiles.
(honestly how many new species have to be confirmed as parthenogenetic before journalists stop breathlessly going “is parthenogenesis far more common than we used to think it was!?” every single time. the answer at this point is conclusively yes, LMFAO.)
however I’m really fascinated by a bit in the Atlantic’s coverage of the condor news—they offhandedly mention that parthenogenesis occurs at different rates in different species (I was aware of this) and it also apparently occurs at different rates between different domestic lines (I was not aware of this):
3 percent in commercial turkeys, to 16.9 percent in Beltsville small white turkeys.
16.9% in Beltsville small whites! almost six times the rate of parthenogenesis in a different line of the same fucking species! what! what!! what is parthenogenesis in turkeys linked to? how the fuck did we accidentally select for that?!
Keep reading https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666446448501669888/three-people-sent-me-articles-on-parthenogenesis
LOL as one of the people who sent you that link I apologize, I should’ve expected others to do so, but I was just really excited because while I haven’t had any time to write in a solid week I’ve also been attempting to mentally outline the parthenogenesis bit of the fic, so it was oddly synchronous…
what we need is parthenogenesis in hogs, because keeping a boar is so damned expensive. RIP Arthur, I will be back in spring to try and dig up your skull…
We’ve never tried to raise turkeys from eggs but if only we could get funding I’d love to try it… I do have a perfectly good incubator sitting right here not getting used…. and we’re stuck raising Broad Breasted Whites which can’t reproduce naturally and are too large for most of our customers…. but you can’t get Beltsville Small Whites anywhere for love or money, so.
god i wish i was good at science
no apologies! last time this happened to me it was because a paper on the mildly obscure clade I was studying came out while I was in the middle of finishing my thesis and I think I got linked to that article by like seven different people, it was hilarious. this time it’s because I have a deeply weird fandom blog! the entrancing experience of being known is that sometimes you get to keep score of how many people look at the same weird thing and go “Socks must hear of this.”
parthenogenesis in hogs
huh. leaving aside that creating mammals that can naturally create parthenogenetic offspring would be a level of genetic fuckery that boggles the mind to contemplate, how much less cost-effective is it to just buy boar semen? or is that infeasible in some other way?
attempt to get BSW turkeys to parthenogate #whatever that word is
parthenogenesis is a word that is rarely verbed but you very occasionally see both “parthenogenerate” and “parthenogeneticize.” as far as I’m concerned, parthenogeneticize is riffing off the wrong root word and it should be parthenogenerate. or “reproduce asexually” though, funnily enough, this is a somewhat controversial description of the process where a female produces offspring without having sex (usually) (okay sometimes you do still need to have the sex to reproduce without sex) (god nature is so fucking weird).
anyways the first thing professors tell you when you say “idk how I would do that though” is always “Have you checked the literature?” because reinventing the experimental design wheel is for suckers. the Beltsville Small White Turkeys (BSWs) study that selected for increased parthenogenesis is M.W. Olsen’s 1965 paper “Twelve Year Summary of Selection for Parthenogenesis in Beltsville Small White Turkeys https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/00071666508415546” and I am pleased to report Dr. Olsen’s paper is fairly thorough and quite readable. A+. we will steal his methodology.
Keep reading https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/666877650868027392/no-apologies-last-time-this-happened-to-me-it-was
oh gosh this is fascinating and also entirely outside of my area of expertise. (I last had a natural sciences class in my junior year of high school.)
Parthenogenerate is my new favorite word. Mammals have an embryo kill-switch what the fuck. well. I mean. yeah. Mammalian reproduction is wacky.
I don’t want to too-closely examine the list of things I get sent by a startling array of people, many of whom I had not thought were paying attention like that. This comes of having had the same URL for ten years, though.
Boar semen is more expensive than you’d think, and then you have to uh. Interface. with the sow. Yourself. And that’s not. Uh. Well it’s a lot easier to do if you are 6-700 lbs, and have tusks. And an improbably-long weirdly independently-animate corkscrew penis, and a penchant for fucking anything you can get to hold still long enough for you to mount. oh would that tumblr’s site search worked so i could find the entry i wrote about how PB the boar fucked a tree.
But, on topic, it’s safe to say, no, you really don’t want to actually breed for parthenogenesis in turkeys. A side note: turkeys lay a lot fewer eggs than chickens. You can sell turkey eggs for kind of a lot of money, for this reason. So that was an expensive-as-hell experiment this guy was running. In his defense they were not at that time endangered heritage birds though, not like they are now. And no if the offspring can only be male that’s a lot less interesting.
I can speak with some authority, despite my lack of scientific education, that no you cannot eat an egg you have been incubating: if an embryo is not growing in it then bacteria is. Also as a long-time chicken keeper who has had a fair share of Egg Surprises, no. (Your picture was not posted)
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