Humans

Humans are the orphan children of the world. No-one knows which god or gods made them, and humans themselves keep no record of their origins, instead focusing on their current endeavours, picking and choosing aspects of their history to support their present positions. The initial population of humans was split by the Cataclysm between southern Yethera – the tribes that would later be subsumed by the Ophionic Empire – and eastern Caino.
Humans are probably the most socially adaptable race in the world, and while they lack the numbers of the Goblins and the sheer resilience of the Orcs, they are as stubborn as hell and capable of considerable social and technological adaptation. Peerless innovators, they create ideas, change societies, and generally transform the concepts on which the world is built, destabilising the static cultures of other races. They have also made a substantial contribution to the bloodlines of the shallow-water Seafolk and Genasi.
There is something in this plasticity of outlook that also makes them uniquely able to interact with the similarly fluid nature of the gods to their advantage. They latch onto the gods and concepts that they need, and they worship hard. Those who adopt druidic or animistic faiths, or even some form of atheism or anti-religious sentiment do so with a similar zeal.
There is no ancient social order uniting all humans, but a multitude of societies adapted to their immediate requirements. While this is in many ways a strength, many humans seek for an ancient heritage to somehow validate their current position. Identity is something of an obsession in humans in a way that is not true of races who on a more intrinsic level know what they are. As it is, humans are social scavengers and usurpers, adopting aspects of the cultures they encounter, integrating themselves into greater cultural blocks, making themselves invaluable until it is their society. They are in many ways a race of civil servants.

Humans and identity

Human identity is a matter of influence as much as anything. Many have inherited a high degree of biological determinism from the early Ophionic Empire, but the influence of the Regime and races like the Gnomes means that many humans have decoupled sex and gender, and in many cases grant their children all liberty and encouragement to chose their own gender identity at or around puberty. Far fewer humans declare aesuri than elves do, but those who do are not considered odd or unusual. Elsewhere, other influences dominate; for example in The Elysian Federation, even humans with no genasi blood will declare an elemental gender which has social primacy over their biological sex.