Elf

Basic Information

Anatomy

Elves are bipedal humanoids, walking on two of their five appendages, the legs, with the arms used to interact with the environment, and the head serving as a sensory and communications center.

Genetics and Reproduction

As in Humans, elves reproduce through sexual intercourse between a male and female. Upon conception, which occurs when the egg within the woman's womb is fertilized, the egg becomes a Zygote. The zygote grows from a simple cell into a fetus, and eventually a fully formed infant over the course of roughly five and a half cycles, at which point it is birthed as a fully developed elven infant.

Growth Rate & Stages

Elves are born relatively helpless, requiring the attention of adult elves for some time before being capable of communicating, moving, and gathering their own food. By the age of five, the majority of elves have learned to walk, talk, and should be learning to read and write, a skill taught by the mother in more traditional households if she is capable, though it is not uncommon for more primitive native wood elves to be illiterate. This trend is not shared with their counterparts on Maney, most surprisingly the desert elf populations. This is thought to be a result of greater social equality between the sexes.
Elves become pubescent near the age of 13 and physically mature by the age of 22, ending their growth at a height between 4.75 and 5.25 feet (145 - 160 cm) if female, or 5 to 5.5 feet (152 - 168 cm) if male. As a virtue of being tailored by Livinda, they age far more gracefully than humans, with females entering menopause around the age of 70, becoming postmenopausal at around 80, and both sexes living a total of 120 years on average not considering magical enhancement via proficiency in magic, becoming a lich, vampire, or ghoul, or possessing a soul born immortal.

Ecology and Habitats

The more isolated elven groups, the wood and desert elves, are adapted to survive in hotter biomes, such as rainforests and non-arctic deserts. Common elves, making up roughly 10% of the world's population, have a freedom from such extremes, and are capable of surviving in most places that humans can.
Elves are native to Grenshore, a continent to the west of Maney known for sprawling rainforests and relatively flat terrain. From there, they spread across what is know called Dalera's Channel to reach the tropical western coasts of north Maney. Human expansion up the coast left them with no choice but to cross the mountain range to the east and enter the desert. Livinda wouldn't be there to assist them, so they struggled each day for basic necessities, venturing out into the wastes to find even the smallest number of creatures and cactus fruit before returning to their wandering tribes in search of arable land.
While the majority of them would reach river deltas that provided a stable place to set up communities, many would be captured as slaves. They and their descendants would be sold all over Maney, and are the primary reason for the emergence of the common maney elf, an elf subspecies that looks more human than their descendants did due to interbreeding and the sharing of habitats between humans and elves.

Dietary Needs and Habits

Common and wood elves tend to be more carnivorous than humans, raising, hunting, fishing, and trapping more animals per capita for local consumption in their communities. This is best seen in Grenshore, which is mostly inhabited by wood elves, and in Greater Amazonia, which is the only nation on Maney with majority elven demographics.
Desert elves have a little more variety. Sedentary groups living along rivers use the land to grow crops used to feed only themselves. They do not keep livestock as it is seen as wasteful to use so much grain and land on them, but they do fish, making the majority of them pescetarian. Nomadic groups often take fowl along with them to harvest their eggs, and goats or sheep for their milk. When these animals stopped producing milk or eggs, they would be eaten.

Additional Information

Facial characteristics

Elves and drow have many facial features in common due to common creators, with pointed ears and slender noses, jaws, and chins, however they do not feature upturned eyes. The discovery of wood and desert elves led many humans to believe the drow were simply another variety of elf, leading to the misnomer of "dark elf" and "snow elf" to be created to describe the races of drow in relation to the elves of Grenshore and Maney.

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

As elves were formed from human colonies in Grenshore around BD900, they possess all of the same primary senses as their progenitors. In sight, light perception was diminished, but visual acuity was increased. Their sense of taste was diminished, and the senses of touch, hearing, and smell were enhanced.

Civilization and Culture

History

Creation and Diversification

When humans arrived in the Planar World, they began as a small community of only a few thousand individuals who quickly began expanding, colonizing the various landmasses built and maintained by the immortals Grovoda and Livinda. While Grovoda took action against them in the form of natural disasters and Zinyana, creator of the heavens, created the drow to compete with them, Livinda took a less violent path of resistance by tailoring the humans in some parts of the world to her own ideals. These modified humans are thought to have been created around BD900, and would come to be known as Elves.
They spread across Grenshore and the surrounding islands with a few attempts at spreading to Maney, which were forced northeast into the desert by base humans. A sudden cultural split on Grenshore led to extreme inequality between the sexes, with many women the property of their fathers or husbands, allowed little education, and forced to wear minimal clothing in public to both please the men in their community and to act as a sort of advertisement to the wealth status of her family, promising great social standing and further wealth to any family who took her as their own.
This has unsurprisingly led to a prevalence of sexual abuse, even among members of families. In these cases it is most often young teen males forcing themselves upon their sisters and cousins of similar or younger ages. Due to the way women were treated many young males come to see his sisters as his property and, by extension, his father as an equal. This was often corrected by their fathers reasserting their dominance over their sons by way of severe punishment, ritual combat, or further abuse.
The desert-dwelling variety of elves never experienced the shift towards inequality, instead either entering nomadic cycles between seasonal oases or creating civilizations around river deltas. These civilizations would be conquered by the Irrindal Khanate, only becoming independent much later.
The leading theory as to what caused this shift was an intervention event by Zinyana, similar to that which created the Lamia, Myushi, and Ghoulism.
After desert elf kingdoms were conquered and Grenshore was discovered by humans, they were traded and sold across the world as slaves, leading to the rise of the common elf. These elves are not only the majority of elves found in the world, but a significant portion of individuals across the entire world, with nearly every nation featuring them as a significant minority aside from nations in the far south, who instead have drow as a significant minority, or even a majority.

Rising Favor

Elf and drow slavery was falling out of favor by AD700 in most nations, with many in the south being persecuted for it by the drow states under the leadership of Doren of Exia, and the rebellion of native desert elves in Tekhat and Melkhashtet leading to their independence from the Irrindals in AC610 and their subsequent alliance in AC616. Drow and elves in the south fled to Exia to escape slavery, while elves in the north fled to the newly independent elven nations.
The ghoul attacks and decades of decline between AD776 and AD850 left all races struggling for survival in most parts of the world with only the most isolated or well prepared nations lasting beyond to remain after the God-Queen's age. Among these would be the elven colonies. Now without pressure from Maney-based empires, they could grow and flourish either in spite of or utilizing the abilities granted to them by Ghoulism.
Worldwide, elves would be seen more and more as equals as a necessity of survival. More people meant more work getting done, and whether those hands were elves' hands or not mattered little.
Tekhat and Melkhashtet would remain intact due to hostile terrain and wildlife preventing ghouls from reaching their population centers in addition to those populations being quite small, in turn precluding them from becoming a target of Zinyana's spontaneous generation of new ghouls.
The City-State of Sanctuary, later the capital city of Sterlina, was founded by elven Born Immortal Tsukuda Shino, who has been its leader under the title "Chairman" since its founding in AD887.
A pro-elven matriarchal fascist state called Amazonia was founded in AC988 under the guidance of Sterlina. Their name calls back to the Amazon movements centuries earlier, where elven women in Grenshore fought the males in their communities to escape their poor treatment. This was often met with sale to their colonizers or brutal killings. Their expansion and conquering of all other smaller nations from Irrindal to Utopia and from the Northern Ocean to Sterlina, they rechristened themselves "Greater Amazonia".
Upon the collapse of Montase in AC1187, their colonies in Grenshore would be given military assistance by Greater Amazonia. Under the name "New Amazonia", they either integrated or conquered a massive number of native tribes. While posing as a new nation, they were more similar to a puppet state or colonial territory belonging to Greater Amazonia.

Genetic Ancestor(s)

• Human

Origin/Ancestry

Grenshore, Northwest Maney

Lifespan

120 Years

Average Height

Males 5.25 feet / 160 cm, Females 5 feet / 152 cm

Body Tint, Colouring and Marking

Wood elves have dark tanned skin, blonde hair, and green eyes.
Desert elves have dark skin and hair, with deep black eyelids to prevent excess light from entering the eyes.
Common elves have similar skin tones to the humans they lived with, but will always have blonde or black hair depending on their ancestry. If they had desert elf ancestors, their dark eyelids will persist as well.

Related Ethnicities

• Common Elf
• Desert Elf
• Wood Elf