Orcans were a playful lot, prone to slacking and procrastination, and when things went inevitably awry orcans loved to blame their lot on others. This did not mean that they were lazy, however, only that their industriousness would flare at the last possible moment. Nothing spurred an orcan quite like a crisis, and when push came to shove, even the idlest orcan would strive towards their goals with zeal.

  Materialistic, greedy, and vain, orcans took a certain pride in their greed. To the orcan, being greedy was just a lust for life, a desire to live as freely as possible. To the orcan, greed was ambition and hustle. It meant though that the orcan was prone to envy. Orcans had to keep up with their neighbors in status, they were a social creature and cared greatly about their reputation. If a peer flaunted a luxury, the orcan had to have the same, or better. Orcans loved to bask in adoration.

  They were prone to magical thinking and superstition. It was not that the orcan lacked intelligence, indeed orcans were naturally gifted with curiosity and could attain vast cognitive ability if they only sought to try, but the orcan culture had a deep streak of anti-intellectualism. Easily affected by peer pressure, and afraid to hold opinions that were not shared by the group, they always looked for the easiest answers.

  Orcans loved to proselytize. Eager to give advice, whatever worked for an orcan was assumed to work for all the others, and all the others ought to know it immediately. Often indiscrete, an orcan could not wait to share their secrets. Conspirators one and all, they abused advantages and exploited loopholes, but were all too happy to share with friends exactly how it could be done- but never forget which orcan passed along the hookup.

  It was orcan nature to see the self as noble and altruistic, even if such was not the case, and so orcans loved to virtue signal, and challenge each other in contests of claimed good works. This drove the orcan, agreeable by nature, to follow the majority lest they be shunned the immoral pariah.

  Compulsive and easily succumbing to addiction, orcans loved gambling and wild intoxication. Orcans loved to work hard, and orcans loved to play hard.

  Passionate and prideful, they would die for their dearest of friends and yet rouse a furor over the pettiest things to spite their enemies.

  And so, the orcans could not help but turn on each other in small scale village wars, giving the orcan civic life an ever-present sense of danger, for none knew when a skirmish could erupt, and oftentimes for the silliest of reasons.

  In the end, the nature of the orcan could not be changed.

  The nature of the orcan had never changed.

  23:49, Rotation 263 / 365, 232 AE, -67.828734, -69.173516, Reath

  The faint hue of the long dusk cast by the midnight sun seeped across the unending twilight and banished the darkness.

  Githarie Thraxes, this orcan gurl of just about sixteen revolutions, felt like she had been waiting forever for swell. Goosebumps pushed up against the fresh neoprene of Githarie’s wetsuit, hoping to surf, but the tide had not aligned to form a conduit for the waves to surge past the continental shelf. What bumps emerged from the horizon came too soft, and slow, and sluggish to ride, as Githarie had figured out herself with frustrated yet ultimately useless paddling. She squinted through the glare.

  Glad that the sun was edging ever slowly to her left, away from where she gazed hungrily looking to score for waves, Githarie still had to look away to blink the phosphenes away. Swirling her legs to pivot, she looked desperately to find one. Sunlight crept its way past Githarie’s chin length cropped hair, framing her cherubic cheeks, and across the nape of her neck- her skin flushed from mottled brown to dark and vibrant green, rejuvenating her with a much-needed frisson of sugar rush as her chlorophyll photosynthesized sweet glucose for the young orcan.

  If there was only a set! Even just one, no matter how long the lulls, she could be patient. She could be. Sometimes. She cursed her older brothers, the twins, Zholl and Zhon. Those stupid orcs. Oh, it’s going to be so big this rote, said Zholl. It’s gonna be pumping, said Zhon. Zholl and Zhon, Zhon and Zholl, there was scarcely a difference between the two when they were together, and they were practically joined at the hip. And they couldn’t even get their lazy asses up when the swell was supposed to hit.

  She prayed to whatever Gods that may control the oceans to please send her waves.

  She decided to curse them, defy them, thinking that perhaps making the Gods angry would instead get her the result she wanted.

  Neither worked. Another slow roller greeted her, and she sighed as she bobbed up and down on her crude surfboard. She felt along the rails, anxious that she may have dinged it. It was one of her few actual possessions.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  It was just a roughshod block of polyurethane foam, one of many that had brought from the undervillage of Vostok, known for its mazes of branching mineshafts billowing out from its central underground lake where lay Rapture- the heart and core of the village-city of Vostok, Orca’s Forge. It probably took her a fortrote to sand it down, and it was thin, so she hadn’t shaved in much rocker for fear of snapping it. Solid single concave for lift. Careful not to waste precious foam, she shaped a wide and voluminous nose, parallel rails with stinger wing notches, and a crude diamond tail taper chop. Finally, she doused the shape to harden in a shell of epoxy resin. It was an ugly thing. But it was her ugly thing.

  The Mini Simms certainly ripped on smaller swells with a little bit of push. While it was sometimes a struggle to paddle through choppy water, once she popped up it was a zippy little ride. In the larger surf the tail was too wide, and she slid out. Githarie did love that barely in control feeling- nearly losing it but then recovering. But it was no fun getting dunked.

  Githarie bailed so often – it was always to Zholl and Zhon’s amazement that she’d endure so many wipeouts and could still insist on continuing the session – that the twin keel fins finally broke off. She was a good diver. But even if she could find them in the endless depths, and reattach them, they’d just break again.

  So, with Zhak’s help, she had decided to go sans fin, go with something else entirely. And after another agonizing rote-long wait for the resin to dry, she could finally test her brand spanking new secret weapon.

  Before she could finish musing about her beloved surfboard, her peripheral vision picked up telltale signs – far away ocean spray – of what she had been looking for.

  A wave!

  Githarie swirled her legs to pivot into position and paddled furiously, her spine an arced crescent so she could engage the full strength of her whiplike transversal tendons that rocked forward upon the sweet spot.

  One - Two.

  She tipped her weight further forward in synchrony with the wave raising her up, pressing her chest downwards to bring her chin close to the deck. As she did so she subtly dropped her knees to press the tail against the skimming surface of the water.

  Three - Four.

  The sublime lightness of the planing hull lifted her now to defy the grasp of Reath. Now she rolled her body back upon her sternum, pushing up with her arms to arch up to a bhujanga sana, and then deftly sprang forward cat-like into a clean popup.

  Her back knee dropped to buttress her; her arms hung low. Further and further down the drop she went, and the board kept lifting and lifting until finally, with a little kick and a bob, the secret weapon came to life.

  For he had crafted a foil. She had taken a long arc of gryphantene for the front wing. The back wings she shaped herself carefully using basalt fibers she extruded herself in the village maker space. She then used an L-shaped carbon frame – a disposed piece of some other orcan’s project – as the mast and fuselage.

  She gasped when she was lifted much higher than any wave ever had.

  “YAS!”, she barbarously yawped.

  The land of Orca was tilted always too against or too away from the sun, so daylight lasted six lunas and so too did the darkness of night. Thus, these two Orcan seasons of the revolution were themselves called the ‘long day’ and the ‘long night’. During the ‘long day’, further bisected into the ‘long dawn’ and the ‘long dusk’, the sun would skirt along the horizon, but would never fully set until the long night.

  Not for another sixty-seven rotes at least.

  Happy Birth Rote, Githarie!

  From orcan to orcan, the slur was not always a slur at all, but really a term of affection. It could also, of course, just be used too as an insult. It was a very contextual word, orc.

  This was not literal. They were not conjoined. Nor were they Siamese, that would be Vanta. The difference between the two, which will matter, can easily be ascertained- in due time.

  They knew not to come too early. Having skipped far more classes than Githarie, they knew exactly when the tide would be high enough for the wave to make it past the continental shelf.

  Kanaloa / Tangaroa, Ryujin, Poseidon / Neptune, Llyr / Lir, Njord, Varuna, but these names were long forgotten

  Another wondrous material bequeathed by the holy fire. What the elvans called ‘forbidden fire’ was instead known by the orcans as the ‘holy fire’, for without it, they would surely perish in the unforgiving cold of Orca.

  A fortrote was ten rotations. A note about timekeeping- after the Eucatastrophe, the spirits insisted to move to the rote-of-rev system that counted rotations not by the Julian way, in base seven, but rather in the more sensible base ten. This made it much easier to synchronize with the actual astronomical path of Reath, the spirits announcing well in advance exactly how many rotations (~365.25) each revolution would have, thereby eliminating leap seconds. You’re welcome. The five rotations at the end of each rev were called the Golden Half-Fortrote, the celebration the Godlikes called Christmas and New Year’s, and like tradition, was a time of celebration and festivity.

  I’m so glad you brought up volume. Volume is the most important thing you got to get. You got to know your volume. You got to have more volume, more waves, more fun. That’s all I can say. I need to know volume. How much volume do I need? That’s all that matters. Yeah, you don’t need to know anything else. It’s all about volume. That’s all that matters in life right now. I like the word volume. Volume.

  They were asymmetrical, but hey- so was surfing. Perfectionist Githarie spent so long working on it, only to get impatient and rush it, in the end.

  Felis catus, though cryptic, had not yet gone extinct. They were not cryptids yet. Beloved as they were, venerated as divine creatures, there was no way that the spirits would allow them all to perish. Don’t fuck with cats.

  I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.