Post by Whim on Oct 7, 2012 3:56:54 GMT -5
The History
On Earth, and other human-colonized planets, a few centuries before anyone thought of going to Pern, humans were at war. They were also capable of vast feats of bioengineering--and inclined to use them. Sometimes, bioengineering was used to help directly in the war; other times, simply to keep people happy, interested, and their moral up. The result was an 'improved' humanity; stronger, faster, and more resilient, and a series of animal-human hybrids, referred to as the Tailed. These hybrids were human subspecies; still able to breed with humans and each other, and still very close to human.
The Tailed have, typically, tails and ears similar to the animal species that was incorporated into them; they may also have eyes or fur/feathers/scales that resemble their animal species, and their teeth may be adapted slightly to more closely resemble their animal species. (If they do have fur or feathers, the fur/feathers will be the same color as their hair.) Otherwise, they are human in appearance and biology, though female Tailed are more likely to have twins or triplets than female humans are. If a Tailed has children with a human, or another Tailed with a different incorporated animal, the children have a 50/50 chance of being either parents' subspecies; there are no hybrids.
When, a few centuries later, a group of human colonists chose to go to Pern to form a reduced-technology utopia, several of the Tailed (that could live on land without technological assistance) came with them. The Tailed were among the colonists who flew to Pern, landed the ships, and build the supertown of Landing; they survived and died in the first Fall of the alien fungal parasite known as Thread, they bonded to firelizards, and they shared their expertise to help form a defense against thread, ultimately resulting in the creation of dragons; 107 original eggs, two hatchings diurnal and one nocturnal, each with slight differences, all of which hatched and Impressed to Tailed and Tailless humans alike. They helped in the migration to the Northern Continent, and the establishment of the Holds and Weyrs.
Now, in the second year of Pern's fifth Pass, the origin of the Tailed and the dragons, and indeed Earth itself, has mostly been forgotten. The names of the Earth animals that were incorporated into them are generally remembered as a name for that category of Tailed, with no knowledge of the Earth animal remaining, and the Tailed, together, make up roughly 60% of Pern's population.