Jinni
The Jinn are a race of spirit beings that have dwelled on Kaf since time immemorial. The Jinn have long made their mark on this world, being the first civilization in recorded history. Originally isolationist, they became involved with the affairs of the world and ran one of the most powerful and influential empires of antiquity. However like most civilizations, the Ghulat Wars left their cities barren and much of their culture forgotten. Slowly the jinn began to recover and returned to the physical world to rebuild their legacy in the modern age. Although spiritual entities, the jinn are considered dual dimensional, with the ability to live and operate with corporeal beings in physical reality and lead their own lives in the separate realm of other spirits.
Basic Information
Anatomy
The Jinn exist as "smokeless fire", traditionally explained as bodies are made of burning fire, that never burn out by those in classical times. As time moved forward, more accurately they are described as life forms composed of charged ectoplasm particles.
While this form is imperceptible to everyday senses, jinn have stronger ties to the physical world than most spirits and can interact in a tactile manner with people and objects to a limited degree. They can use their charged particles to attract ambient dust, smoke or ash into a form that can simulate an organic body to manipulate physical materials easier. The nature of their subtle bodies enables them to change their shape, move quickly, fly, and enter conductive materials in either form. The shape a jinni can take can vary wildly from gaseous vapor, wild beasts, various humanoids, or even anthropomorphic creatures. They often retain the color of their particulate make up, so jinn in brown, grey, or other earthly tones tend to be most common.
The most common appearance of jinn is a humanoid form with pointed ears, looking very similar to that of elves or a variation that maintains the humanoid torso but ends in a wispy trail instead of legs.
Biological Traits
Subtle Body: Jinn are lifeforms composed of smokeless fire, an archaic name for electrostatic ectoplasm, which is composed of free flowing ions and electrons like a plasma. In this form they are invisible, and can enter and rest in electrically conductive objects and living creatures. Also unlike most spirits, they can also be affected by the natural world through electric and magnetic fields.
Agelessness: Jinn don't die from natural causes like aging or infectious disease so many can live for centuries and millennia. However they are not deathless and can still be killed by mortal injury or curses, or starvation.
Breathlessness: Jinn do not need to breathe to stay alive or function properly although they are physically capable of doing so.
Regeneration: Jinn can quickly recover from damage in either their incorporeal or physical forms. Composed of charged subtle particles, a plasmic jinn creates a path of ambient charges in the air wherever they go and can absorb the charged particles in the discharged path to maintain their form. This process works more efficiently when inhabiting conductive material like metals. They can also have their physical forms regenerate simply by using their ectoplasm to collect ambient dust particles or reforming their bodies after scattering it. However, even jinn regeneration has its limits; after repeated destruction within a short time frame, more and more energy and concentration is needed to restore or the process can fail for a longer periods of time or completely.
Super Speed and Agility: A jinni can use the electrostatic discharge of their ectoplasm as a medium to achieve speeds nearing that of lightning even when in physical form. In addition, the jinn's reflexes can be enhanced by an increase in the stimulation of the nervous system.
Super Strength: A jinni can increase his or her physical form's electrical activity to speed up the recruitment of motor neurons and the effects of their muscles, granting disproportionately large strength.
Manifestation: Although born as subtle beings, jinn can create physical forms to inhabit. They can use the charges of their ectoplasmic form to directly manifest as an visible ionized gas. Going further, a jinni can charge ambient particles of mineral dust, smoke or ash to self-organize into structures capable of covering their subtle bodies. The result is a solid corporeal body, able to be seen and interact in a tactile manner with people and objects and likewise be acted upon.
This physical body is maintained by the spirit's vitality and the jinni can reuse the same energy to dispel it and regain their subtle form just as easily. However if an outside force causes a jinn's physical body to be disrupted, damaged, or destroyed past the point of being able to regenerate, it will quickly disintegrate and leave behind a weakened ectoplasmic wisp incapable of forming a physical body until it heals and regains energy.
Invisibility: Their subtle bodies are naturally invisible to all creatures that use light to see. Jinn replicate this ability in their physical bodies by bending the light around and through them.
Intangibility: Whereas most spirits pass through matter without interaction, a jinn's subtle body instead disperses around incoming materials, appearing to have the same affect. This can also be done with their corporeal forms as they are also made of particles that can be reassembled. Their corporeal form can even be contained by air-tight spaces and are vulnerable to substances that can alter the particulates of their bodies such as powerful winds, dust collecting fluids, magic, and telekinesis, etc. In either form, they are susceptible to metaphysical forces like Psychokinetic Energy, direct magic power, or applications like Neijing.
Possession: Jinn in their subtle form can enter and take over the body of a corporeal creature by overriding their motor functions and senses to use the body as their own. When a jinni possesses a body, they also have access to the reflexes and passive traits of the body. Alternatively, they can lie dormant in the creature and merely influence their thoughts and actions. However a jinni can be resisted, overpowered or exorcised from the body and forced out by rituals, powerful objects, or strong willed individuals.
Shapeshifting: Jinn have the ability to shape-shift and customize their subtle and physical forms at will. A jinni can potentially have full control over every aspect of their physical make-up, able to stretch, liquefy, and otherwise manipulate their body. The only part that is consistent through their forms is the color scheme of their current form and their biological sex as they are unable to change that.
Flight: Jinn in their subtle forms can naturally defy gravity. To fly in their physical forms, jinn can turn their lower halves into a trail of dust and propel themselves or produce a strong electromagnetic field to push off the ground.
Telekinesis: Jinn are beings flowing with psychokinetic energy which can be used to manipulate physical objects at a distance.
Genetics and Reproduction
Although they are spiritual lifeforms, jinn do not transcend the need or methods of reproduction found in animals. In fact, jinn have two sexes, the jann (males) and jiniri (females) who breed with each other to produce offspring that resemble their parents. Using their corporeal forms, they can even have intercourse with non-jinn beings and have hybrid offspring.
Jiniri will gestate their developing offspring within their bodies for a time (typically 7-10 months) in a manner eerily similar to placental mammals and humanoids.
Growth Rate & Stages
As soon as a baby jinni is born, it sparks with charged particles to sustain its own independent energy for the first time. The parents will nourish the baby with subtle matter or a mother can breast feed the child with her ectoplasm. A jinni is typically considered a child until their first century of life. Adolescence is barely recognized and every society has wildly different ages to consider adulthood from 100 to 500 years or so, when the individual is accepted as a full working adult member. Growing up for many jinn involve gaining a deeper emotional capacity than before.
Ecology and Habitats
Jinn are native to the Malakut, a spiritual realm that overlaps in the same physical space as material beings and objects. Due to the nature of their subtle bodies, they can ignore the majority of physical environmental factors like temperature or humidity. They do tend to live in areas isolated from other humanoids like deserts and within heavily forested areas.
Dietary Needs and Habits
Jinn typically consume subtle matter such as ectoplasm, or ionized gases like cosmic or terrestrial plasma, lightning, or flames. Those jinn who take on a physical form are dependent on eating the same food as organic beings and drinking water when in a solid form. Jinn cuisine all many areas seek out rich flavors, smells, and commonly desire succulent fruits, pungent wines, fine spices, sweet pastries and similar fare.
Additional Information
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Perception and Sensory Capabilities
ESP: Extrasensory Perception is the default set of senses for a jinni to navigate spiritual realms. This includes clairvoyance, which is sight using psychic energy that allows them to perceive the spirit realms and telepathy which allows for distant communication through psychic force.
Electromagnetic Spectrum: Jinn can alter their vision to see most of the major frequencies of light including, radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and x-rays.
Civilization and Culture
Naming Traditions
Jinn typically have a long chain of names, up to five parts. First is a given name, then a family name, a patronymic tribe name, then a descriptive epithet. However most forms of modern identification only use the given and family.
Major Organizations
National Homeland of the Jinn is Jinnistan.
Beauty Ideals
Jinn typically take on the forms of fit and toned humanoids. Jann will often become broad shouldered handsome guys while jiniri find themselves athletic toned or voluptuous and curvy ladies. However individuals and couples have their own tastes and their innate shapeshifting allows them to conform to alternative body types.
Gender Ideals
The long history of jinn includes a long history of gender norms and changes. Essentially males started off with more freedoms and rights then females, especially in prosperity so jann could keep wealth in the tribe as opposed to their sister's husbands. That being said, codes varied from tribe to tribe so there was no single definition of the roles played, and rights held, by jann or jiniri. Also their ability to shapeshift forms has always meant that jinn society was gender fluid to a degree than increased as time passes. The adoption of Suffah by more of jinnkind improved the status of jiniri by instituting rights of property ownership, inheritance, education and divorce equal to than of jann that was adopted into national codes as well.
Courtship Ideals
Courtship between jinn usually varied by their tribe or settlement. Typically the individual with more wealth or status is the one that asks out the recipient.
Sexuality
The jinn developed a sense of sexuality that varies in intensity. There are conservatives who focus on abstaining from sex for long periods of time, or restrict it marriage or forgo it entirely for their original form of reproduction. The other extreme would be those whose hedonistic tendencies and shapeshifting abilities find them getting it on with each other in a variety of forms or with other races. Most jinn find themselves on a spectrum between the two, generally serial monogamy as that is the ideal of their main religion.
Relationship Ideals
Jinn typically form heterosexual pairs for marriage and child rearing, although homosexuality seems to be tolerated if much less common. Nevertheless, parents can put sufficient pressure on their children to arrange their marriage. Traditionally relationships have been restricted to within an ethnic tribe but more intermixing between is becoming more common since their cultural revival.
Average Technological Level
Jinn society essentially runs on artifices, magically powered technology such as flying carpets, holding bags, and crystal balls.
Major Language Groups and Dialects
Darija is the major language of the jinn with dialects depending on region and sometimes even tribe.
Common Etiquette Rules
As a rule, the Jinn do not tend to value physical things as much, but they prize invisible, intangible things quite highly, such as relationships, information, and keeping one’s word or maintaining one’s honor, and they trade in favors.
Common Dress Code
Commonly existing as invisible spirits, jinn generally don't have strong feelings of modesty or shame about their bodies among themselves. They do relish the social impact that their clothing can have on other races and thus design it mainly for that purpose, even using it as a status symbol within their own kind.
As shapeshifters, jinn can change their physical appearance to make it seem like they are wearing clothes, even if it is just an extension of their body. This is often done by those without access to clothes or too poor to afford it. The later commonly do this in front of non-spirits, but their own kind typically won't fall for the ruse.
Various clothing styles clothing styles and costumes that emulate the those of jinn have been emulated by the societies of other races. One is the harem outfit ensemble that usually emphasizes a bare midriff and includes a bra, bustier or tube top. There may be baggy pants, harem pants, loincloth or a long skirt over the legs, as well as possibly a flowing headdress or veil and loose sleeves. Jewelry in the form of earrings, bracelets, necklaces or anklets are common accessories.
Culture and Cultural Heritage
Family
The three-generation extended family is the ideal domestic unit. Although this group, averaging between nine and eleven persons, may have more than one household, the meals are generally taken together. The newly formed nuclear family of husband and wife tends to remain with the larger domestic unit until it has sufficient manpower to survive on its own. On occasion, a combination of brothers or patrilineal cousins will join forces to form a single domestic unit. Property is divided in accordance to Furah precepts: among surviving children, a son receives half, a daughter a quarter, and other near kin the percentage specified in the law.
Contributions
Jinn society also introduced mathematical concepts like the worldwide numerical system, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. In science, they paved the way for the scientific method, optics, astronomy, chemistry, and the theory of evolution. Suffah poetry, art, literature, and architecture still has a profound influence on Dinahlli culture today.
Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals
Socialization
Children and infant jinn are raised by the extended family unit. Parents, older siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all take part in the rearing of the young. Children are taught to show respect for their parents and other adults, and children are given responsibilities at a young age. Girls help their mothers with housework and take care of the younger children. Boys in poorer families are expected to learn a trade early in life, even if this interrupts schooling. Children of wealthier families have the luxury of focusing most of their attention on school.
Magic Use
Jinn have a large number of inherent magical abilities that they use in daily life. Jinn society also has created native artifices like flying carpets throughout history that have made life more convenient.
They are taught to be extremely powerful spell-casters and can master basically every type of magic, from necromancy, to elemental, dark, light, even dimensional magic. However known jinn ethnic groups are known for encouraging specialization with a particular magical element they are associated with and are highly revered in those cultures. And jinn of those cultures are fully capable of magic beyond those particular elements, but cultural mastery of each one serves as as distinction that gives the group a specific identity.
Contrary to popular belief, jinn whether enslaved to grant wishes or not, can not pull things out of nowhere, they can take an object faster than the eye can follow or store those objects on their person at miniature sizes.
When ritual magic was introduced, jinn were originally slow to adopt them, especially the likes of alchemy and summoning magic. Over time, spellcraft became popular due its utility and dependability to the point where it is part of the standard curriculum for magical study.
Common Taboos
Since their currency of choice is itself intangible, bargains are sacred, and if a jinn reneges on a bargain, he/she is found to be without honor and cast out of their clan.
One of the most well-known punishments of jinnkind before the Ghulat Wars was that of slavery, were slaves were called genies. Said genies would often be bound to metallic artifices and sold to others for profit.
History
Antiquity
In ancient times, even before the rise of fey and henge, the jinn ruled their own kingdom called the Empire of Kaf. It was a land located totally in the reverie, surrounded by a mountain ring, called the Emerald Mountains, which kept them isolated from all manner of threats for a very long time. Their own belief system told the story that the world was created by a benevolent god that competes with an opposite malevolent god and that the jinn can do good deeds to tip goodness in their favor.
Despite their isolation, the jinn were eventually forced interactions with other races that began trading in their territory. From that point on, many jinn forsook their self-imposed isolation and became active travelers, traders, and adventurers in the world.
Ghulat Wars
The Ghulat Wars marks the resurgence of the Shaytan, an ancient enemy of the jinn's ancestors. Many battles claimed the period and lead to many jinn sealed with various metallic artifices and eventually led to the collapse of the Empire of Kaf.
Wilderness Era
Jinn essentially became a rare race and became those within their old territory became incredibly insular and isolationist. Those jinn outside of those regions become independent tribal groups that were often nomadic.
Modernity
The Jinn have been aimed at restoring their classical civilization through interacting and investing in other nations worldwide.
Historical Figures
Lost Prophet: Individual that prevent the last scrolls of Suffah from destruction.
Common Myths and Legends
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Until recently in modern times, it was uncommon for other races to encounter a jinn unless they were a genie granting wishes. Ethnic groups among jinn tend to be distinguishable by how they interact outside of their species. Marid tend to impress, Ifrit tend to be boisterous and loyal, Silat tend to be calmly hospitable. Jinn children seem to be very curious about other species, and will often appear as their own kind, or sometimes other creatures prominent in antiquity like elves, dwarves and gnomes.
Romance between jinn and other species has grown increasingly common as jinn found the couplings more acceptable, though most see them as fleeting due to their long lifespans. Jinn hybrids also have varying degrees of acceptance by jinn communities but a tendency of acceptance is growing.
Scientific Name
Jann Al-jinni
Lifespan
Ageless (thousands of years)
Average Height
Variable; Avg: 159 cm (5 ft 2 1⁄2 in) to 170 cm (5 ft 7 in)
Average Weight
Variable; Avg: (61 kg/136 lbs)
Average Physique
Variable; commonly fit and athletics forms
Body Tint, Colouring and Marking
Variable; commonly brown, grey, black, ocher, brown-red, sandy
Geographic Distribution
Related Myths
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