Mundane Humans
What is it, to be human?
From a biological standpoint, humans were among the most widespread and intelligent species on pre-Arrival Earth, bipedal primates notable for opposable thumbs and for large brains that enabled singularly sophisticated tool use, social organization, and language. After the Arrival, however, their hands and intellects are no longer unique: extraterrestrials, talking fungal colonies, and other hominid species are just as capable with tools, words, and abstract reasoning. How, then, do humans stand apart from these newcomers?
Homo sapiens evolved as pack animals in the grasslands, relying on teamwork, tireless running, and thrown and melee weapons to hunt prey. Before the Arrival, humans were among the best endurance runners on the planet, and so they remain. Furthermore, human shoulders rotate differently than other Earth mammals', allowing them to throw objects with unmatched accuracy and speed, and humans are better throwers than the planet's other sapient peoples, too. That isn't just a consequence of different shoulder structure, either; they have exceptional manual dexterity and better-than-average visual dexterity, in comparison with other pre-Arrival species and with their post-Arrival neighbours. However, human vision drops off dramatically in low light, and their sense of smell is less sensitive than in many other animals, including most other sapient peoples in the Lakelands. Finally, although humans live on nearly every part of the planet's surface, they are not well adapted to many of the climates they inhabit, relying on clothing, structures, and fire or electricity to survive in conditions that other animals can more readily endure.
Biology is not all that determines what it is to be human, of course.
To begin with, there is a matter of nomenclature. Not all humans in the Lakelands are wholly unchanged by the Weird. Some humans have fungal symbionts, and these are called half-nymphs. Geminites are always dicephalic twins, thanks to the Hallowed Instar's experiments. There is some debate about whether new hominids count as human at all, but they are certainly not Homo sapiens. In general, unchanged humans just call themselves "human," but when Lakelanders need to distinguish them as a population from half-nymphs, geminites, and new hominids, they use the phrase mundane humans. Mundane humans are not always perfectly mundane, of course: they have as many occultists among them as anyone else does, and they are just as vulnerable to dreamzones, spectres, and the like.
While in most of the world they go on much as they ever have, mundane humans in North America must respond to the changes brought by the Arrival. Most of them now live in well-defended city-states or small farming settlements. Although they are drawn to their old cities in search of salvage, historical continuity, and cultural prestige, these cities are almost always too dangerous to support a healthy community; the sheer mass of inhabitants during the first years post-Arrival means that dangerous psychic phenomena in cities is both complex and entrenched, producing not just spectres and ghosts but also egregores and the terrible societies egregores tend to create. Any settlement which is associated with a former city is therefore usually built on the city’s periphery, and must be well-defended with guards trained in both arms and abjuration.
In much of North America, mundane human culture has a past-oriented character. Many humans see themselves as trying, on some level, to rebuild their lost civilization with the resources of that civilization’s ruin. Of course, the communities attempting this project remember the lost civilization differently because a group's origins influence which elements it cares to remember and which elements it chooses to forget. But despite the variety of imagined histories and desired futures across the Lakelands, what nearly all mundane human cultures and subcultures have in common is their fierce commitment to preserving their cultural patrimony. In the Lakelands, that almost always means that communities emphasize education in science, technology, and world and local history. Communities often imagine that finding and fixing, or reverse-engineering, pre- and immediately post-Arrival machines is part of the rebuilding process. By no means do all mundane humans attempt to study their history – widely called “antiquity” in North America, to the bafflement of those abroad – or the hard sciences, but those who do study them find they have access to libraries, archives, and mentors that most other sapient species would envy. Even residents of tiny remote villages know of a doctor somewhere that might take on an apprentice, or have a one-shelf collection of textbooks, magazines, and user’s manuals from the old world. If nothing else, they can send their children to the nearest city-state for a more thorough education. Of course, such resources are still paltry compared to those in less Weird parts of the world.
Mundane human folkways have necessarily changed in the face of the Arrival, but they have not changed beyond recognition. Most communities are recognizably descended from their pre-Arrival ancestors who inhabited the region or arrived as refugees from the American heartland, the east coast, or Appalachia.1 In the mass exodus out of the cities, however, some marginalized groups founded their own settlements, organized according to their own cultures and needs. Religious and cultural minorities built enclaves where they could, and some of the area's First Nations reclaimed portions of their ancestral territories. Occasionally, survivors attempted to build communities based on philosophical schools or non-mainstream political systems, such as atheist humanism or anarcho-syndicalism. Not many of these experimental settlements have lasted into the present day, but some have. For this reason, while most mundane human settlements roughly resemble their pre-Arrival counterparts in habits and social mores, throughout North America there are nonetheless some human settlements with significantly different customs and forms of government. Whatever the origin, these groups share one basic challenge: the world around which their culture evolved is no longer the world they face. The fundamental paradox to sustaining the cultures of a lost past in the new world is that those cultures must change if they are to survive. Any group that still exists was willing to do that.2
Sample Mundane Human Communities
Cadillac
Cadillac, Michigan had a population of about 12,000 pre-Arrival. That number more than doubled when refugees from the cities began flooding the small towns and countryside, then dwindled down again during the subsequent collapse; Cadillac is now smaller than it was the day the Unbound came. Despite everything, the town has endured, recognizable if not unchanged. In particular its high school, public library, and town hall have remained open through everything, though they are all in need of repair. Its residents take civic responsibility seriously, and there is never a shortage of candidates for town council, the school board, and various other groups and committees. They are especially proud that they continue the town's traditions, even if the meaning of some traditions, such as the Fourth of July festival, has significantly changed. Visitors are always welcome, so long as they abide by the long list of town ordinances posted throughout the city and annually approved by referendum. Cadillac is not without its problems, however. Its factories, central to the town's economy, struggle to find the materials they need for production and most are now temporarily shut down until they find a solution. Meanwhile, the town is starting to feel squeezed between two nearby growing dreamzones to the north and south. The council has passed measures barring entrance into the dreamzones and creating patrols to deal with anything that comes out of them. Most occult practices were already illegal in Cadillac, but the electors have overwhelmingly voted to increase penalties for any outlawed spellcraft.
Fort Blair
About 500 refugees from Kentucky and West Virginia, around 200 of them from Logan County, settled south of Lake Erie after escaping from one Unbound Empire or another. Comprised of about 160 families, they remained largely rural, surviving on trapping, hunting, and small-scale agriculture, but they established a stockade and village where they could engage in basic commerce and train and equip their militia. They named this village Fort Blair, perhaps after Blair Mountain in West Virginia, perhaps after one of the original settlers, or perhaps after a local point of interest: accounts differ and no records of the matter remain. Today the village is surrounded by redundant defenses – a wooden palisade behind a chain-link fence behind razorwire behind a moat – and continually occupied by a rotating contingent of the volunteer militia, which roughly half of the region's adults have joined. Fort Blair and the surrounding region are fiercely independent, unwilling either to bow to the Unbound or to join any of the growing Lakeland polities. Rochester has offered aid in the form of schools, exorcists, seeds, and trade goods, but the militia has continually turned them down despite increased difficulty with spectre-possession and other Weird threats; they are suspicious of all outsiders, but they particularly distrust the integralists. Some locals even spin conspiracy theories in which Rochester has caused the spectre trouble. Regardless, the volunteer militia, with the help of charismatic Protestant hexworkers and faith healers, have so far defended the region's freedom, and they plan to keep doing just that.
Voyage
In the period immediately post-Arrival, when Weird phenomena in Toronto started to make it uninhabitable, most of the city's Odyssean Wiccans were already on a retreat in Ontario cottage country. They stayed in the retreat centre and surrounding cottages during and after the urban collapse, founding a village that persists to this day. Voyage is overwhelmingly human but it caters to a large population of new hominids of the nomadic fishing culture that roam throughout the region; the village's residents trade fish and furs for services and supplies, and operate fish-packing and fur-processing plants. The town is known for its friendly welcome, always willing to help if asked but otherwise adopting a live-and-let-live attitude. Indeed, although the majority of Voyage still practices Odyssean Wicca and are sincere in their belief, the village nonetheless has built a shrine for the new hominid traditional religion and an interfaith chapel for any other non-Wiccan visitors. Their particular school of Wicca is central to village life, however, as they see the unbroken chain of testing, initiation, and instruction to be both their link to humanity's pre-Arrival cultural heritage and an important guard against Weird threats.
Sample Mundane Human
Clark Sidhu
High Concept: Adventure-Prone Apothecary
Trouble Aspect: Utterly Guileless
Peoples Aspect: Mundane Human
Other: Admired In Hagey
Other: Appreciates A Good Hatchet
Other: Sanguine Outlook
Top Skills: Empathy, Provoke, Rapport
Clark Sidhu grew up in an apartment block in Tricity's Hagey Ward, where he spent many an afternoon with his neighbour's small collection of pre-Arrival popular science books, first aid manuals, and guides to bushcraft. He used what he learned to treat the ailments of the other building residents, and as he grew into an adult he became a popular apothecary in Hagey. His honesty, kindness, and skill also gained him the affection of a wandering spacegnome medic, who left him a bottled meower.3 He ventures far afield for the herbs and minerals he needs for his craft; for whatever reason, he always runs into trouble on these excursions. Despite the serious danger he has faced, he retains a sunny attitude.
Clark is lanky, with light brown skin and curly black hair. As is the custom in Tricity, he wears an apron over his clothes as suits the task; like most Hagey residents, he has only one set of simple, much-mended clothes to wear it over. Most often he can be seen in a burlap apron with many pockets to carry his medicinal pouches, a hatchet and a small sickle dangling from his belt. His bottled meower, which he calls Possum, will either be trailing behind him or strapped to his backpack.
Preview image source: Alexey Turenkov, 2021.
In Colin Woodard's terms, most mundane human communities in the Lakelands are descended either from the Midlands or Yankeedom, but the predecessors of some settlements were refugees from Greater Appalachia, New Netherlands, or Tidewater (in order of descending likelihood). Although Woodard argues that people who move into a region tend to assimilate to their national norms, that wasn't always the case in the Lakelands: many of the American refugees established their own villages or towns, maintaining their regional ethos and passing it on to their children.↩
As a matter of citational ethics I gratefully acknowledge Amod Lele's "Literal conservatism" and "On innovation through conservatism," which have been in the back of mind as I've thought about mundane humans in this setting; this does not mean, of course, that mundane humans are always what we'd call conservative, let alone reactionary.↩
More properly called an mbtl-mrmr, a bottled meower is a small psanzomv-built robot that resembles a cat and purrs at frequencies that significantly aid both physical and mental healing. These minor technological marvels are often the only devices the psanzomv will give to members of other species.↩