Intermission 8 Page 51
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Ricki makes several purchases, most notably a replacement mule, a dead drop for dealing with the bandits, and a little something for Lohk. Then she, Kamau, Lara, and Botanya follow Paws away from the manor and into the hills.
“Ricki, do you think it’s a good idea to bring Botanya with us?”
“She told me before that she can’t fight. Her body isn’t put together the same as ours. She can’t swing her arms fast enough to use a weapon properly.”
“Yeah, but when I told her where we were going she said she wanted to come along.”
“Why’s that?”
“You should ask her.”
“Ooh, let me.”
“Hey, Tanya!”
“Why do you want to go the tomb with us?”
“Ricki said that this place is full of undead”
“Right…”
“And?”
“and i’m pretty hungry”
Petition for new mule’s name:
Golly (as in, Golly, I hope we don’t blow this one up).
This is good, but I like Marie a little better
I’m just going back through the archives.
If Golly the pack mule dies, will the next one be Folly?
The undead don’t know what’s coming.
Mule name suggestion No.1 :
Hus, short for Humanity Sin
Mule name suggestion No.2 :
Marie
from MRE – Meal, Ready to Eat. it’s type of food ration used by military for example.
Daily reminder that the mule is a male.
Well, late Molly was a male mule. Was there anything said about the new mule yet? Or are all mules male? (Insert confused icon here.)
If we consider the fact that mules are unable to reproduce, such categories as male/female probably don’t apply to them that well.
They still have reproductive organs and sex chromosomes, so male/female applies to them as well as to any other mammal.
Maybe they are trans, fluent, ace, aro or non-binary. Why is it so important to you (sorry, I mean Siv here, not Jeff, but I replied to Jeffs post) to put that poor animal into a box? It’s not like we will ever get to seem them perform in a romantic/erotic setting…
(…unless LSN takes this comment string as inspiration to draw a “romantic/sexual” picture for Ko-Fi of Golly for another 1000$ worth of donations. XD Or a spin-off comic “The romantic endeavours of Golly the Mule”…)
Edit: a word, noticed that I replied to the wrong person’s post and added something to reflect that.
I thought Siv was just stating a biological fact, not trying to “put [Mule #2] in a box” – that is, I thought all mules are male, the same way (almost) all calico cats are female. But then I went and looked it up, and guess what? Siv and I were wrong. Mules are (almost) always infertile, but they can be male or female. I don’t remember what the linking policy is for these comments, but I’ll try to paste the Wikipedia link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule
Of course, that’s the Wikipedia for our world. The mule rules might be different in the world of Dungeoneyes 🙂
I can’t say that I have ever heard of a whole species being just either of the genders* (outside of fiction, e.g. Pokemon; but there different species can breed with one another – within reason – and produce offspring of either of the species iirc), so I have no idea where this thinking of yours (Siv and practik) came from. But thank you ever so much for explaining where the “daily reminder that mule X is male” had its origin. 🙂
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Sidenote: *I have heard of species without gender (e.g. one cellular beings, who procreate by mitosis), species where the individuals are one gender at birth and then switch at some specific point in their life (e.g. reaching a certain age) to the other gender (iirc some kinds of fish do this, some amphibious lifeforms and/or some crustacean; there might be more examples that I am unaware of) and I have also heard of species where every member is both male and female at the same time, but they still meet with one another to procreate, each fertilizing the other individuals female part with their male part (snails).
I could also imagine if the species as a whole was reduced to small numbers (low two digits) by outside factors (e.g. natural catastrophes, human influence, …) that the remainder of that species just happen to all be of the same gender (think of “there goes our last female” from the Dodos in “Ice Age” – while this is fiction, too, something similar might happen IRL and doublessly had happened with countless now extinct species, at the very least once the species is down to their very last individual). But that species would be – unless crossbreeding with other, similar species is successful and does not (like in case with the mules) result in infertile offspring – doomed and not able to survive on its own (iirc mules are not able to sustain themselves as a species, because of the infertility issues, they only continue to exist because the humans perpetuate the situation).
One more interesting tidbit of information: In German there is a distinction between “Muli” and “Maulesel” (
both of which can be translated into “mule” afaik) and the two terms get used depending on which of the parents (male or female) was the horse and which the donkey. (For “Maulesel” the male is the horse and the female the donkey, for Muli the other way around.)EDIT: Oh, right. the distinction is there in the English language, too. Mule is the one with the the male donkey and female horse parents (Muli), the Maulesel equivalent is “hinny”.
Learned something new today, so thanks for the wiki link. 😀
Actually, there are certain reptiles, I think some frogs, that can flip their gender if it turns out that their environment lacks the opposite gender.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-reverse-sex-more-often-than-thought
Mule name suggestion No.3 :
Enfer
from: Emergency Food Rations – EFR
Mule Name Suggestion: Boomer, after what happened to the last one. I think that should be the pattern from now on.
I liked Sick’s mule name suggestion from the last page: Nolly. Nicely fatalistic, plus it reminds me of a paladin who grew up in an orphanage.
This is a good name for our third mule.
No, the third would be Ooly. Or it’d ruin the joke
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY, Lara is still wearing her new outfit. I hope this means that it will become her new “standard” outfit (or she changes after every dungeon, because Ricki got her so many nice clothes).
Lara’s Portrait in the “current party” (updated today for me) also has her new outfit. I’m taking that as evidence that my hopes are somewhat founded. 😀