...it seems that, for example, an elf with a fire nature such as Aia or Iylaine could not reproduce with an elf with an air nature such as Lar.

I wouldn't rule that out just yet. Osh in particular has to be asking himself that question, since he has a wife with fire nature now. And he does seem set on having more babies.

The more important question is whether it would ever happen (outside of Osh's strange relationship). From what we have seen of Iylaine, at least, she actually isn't all that interested in sex when she isn't fertile, but when she is she's a little tigress. AND desperate to get to water. So perhaps elves are so drawn to their opposites at those times, they simply wouldn't want to get into bed with someone else, so it is never an issue.

The rest of the year, I don't know what they do with each other, really. Imin did tell Rakha (earth nature) he had already seen her naked, once when he found her in bed with Lar, so maybe he had slept with her before too. (Though the khírrón at least don't seem shy about disrobing in front of each other so maybe it was just that.)

Aside from that, the only other clue we have had was young Surr considering that hanging out with Lar would help him get laid, which implies that Lar at least has groupies with water nature. Still, they may not expect to or want to sleep with him, but just want to stare all day at his magnificent profile.

But the point is, they can't get pregnant during the "off seasons", and they don't seem interested in elves with the "wrong" nature when they are fertile, so it doesn't really matter what kind of kids they could have.

Or maybe it does sometimes happen, and it's so taboo they kill the babies...

Or maybe it is just physically impossible and they're just infertile together. In which case... poor Osh.

Elfleda's great great grandmother, Iylaine, was an elf with a fire nature who had a daughter, Elfgiva, with a human man. As could be expected, Elfgiva was a woman, but instead of having a fire nature like her mother, she had a water nature. Elfgiva then had a daughter with a fire nature, who then produced three generations of descendants with a water nature. Would this strange pattern have something to do with the fact that the original Iylaine's parents, Druz and Silea, were twin siblings and/or both of the same nature?

Do you want the story answer, or the storyteller's answer?

The truth is, I introduced the detail of Elfleda's elven ancestry long before I had thought through anything having to do with the elves. I hadn't even thought of "natures" at that time. When she found the elf baby, it was conveniently remembered that her own grandmother's grandmother was supposed to have been an elf.

Now, my problem is that when Elfleda had her christened, she wanted to name her for her grandmother AND *dun dun dun* her grandmother's grandmother, who were both named Iylaine. (The actual name I simply reused from my olden days of RPGs.)

But then by the time Vash came along and explained to Iylaine what her name meant, it was clear that Iylaine was a fire name, and so Elfleda's ancestors must have had fire nature as well.

Long afterwards, when I made the first Iylaine be the descendant of Druze and his twin sister, I think I simply failed to notice that. And now it's too late.

So after that there I was with my duct tape and my tube of caulk, trying to patch that problem up. My current idea is this, and it may be a spoiler for future couples, but here goes:

Two parents with the same nature will have a child with the opposite nature in the first generation. I guess the biological justification for this is that such a pairing would only happen if there weren't any elves of the opposite nature to be found, so having a child of the opposite nature would at least solve that problem, even if it required an incestuous parent+child relationship afterwards to get things going again. Sort of like some simple creatures who are able to reproduce vegetatively or sexually depending on whether they can find a partner or not.

Now, that child will be strange because he will sort of have his parent's nature hiding beneath his own, like a "recessive" nature or something. If he has kids with an elf of the opposite nature, then things would carry on normally. But if he doesn't, then in terms of the "calculations" for his children, he would be treated as if he had the nature of his parents.

So for example, if I put the "recessive" nature in lowercase:

A + A = Ea
Ea + A = F or W
Ea + E = F or W
but Ea + human = A instead of E

The reason why I used Air + Air in my example is because F + F and W + W should technically not work -- the child will die in the womb. That will lead us to the next question...

But if Elgiva's daughter really had fire nature then I think I ought to change that back to water, because otherwise it gets really complicated. I guess it's OK if her name was "wrong" at that point, since the humans did not know what "Iylaine" meant and simply wanted to name the baby after her grandmother.

Did Druz and Silea have similar fears for their fire-nature offspring? Or is it different with two elf parents?

Nimea did explain this to Vash in "Nimea fills in the hole". Nimea had to help Silea carry her baby to term. Vash and the other elves had been lied to -- probably by their own ancestors -- and believed that Nimea had simply intervened to allow an elf lady who was past menopause to conveive a child. But now we know the mysterious child was actually the super-taboo daughter of twin siblings.

And Benedict's "Red Lady" did the same thing to help Cat's baby, and it was a good thing she did since Nimea could not have done it.

But only Fire+Fire and Water+Water couples would have this problem, since fire and water are the only two things that cannot move through each other -- or exist inside each other, properly speaking.

We have seen already that the myths and rituals around Air+Earth and Fire+Water are not symmetrical. The rite by which they are married is quite different (and Vash, I believe, told Egelric at one point that the Air+Earth was the "more ancient rite", and Osh told Flann that it was older and more beautiful). And in the Creation story that Osh told Flann in "Osh is brought beyond such bounds", it was all about Air meeting Earth. The first water, "Vash", was inert, and there was no fire at all.

Also, the elves say that the four natures are united in the living body: earth is the flesh and bones, and air is the breath. Air is also considered to be the nature of life itself -- you can have a dead body, but without life there is no breath, and no breath without life.

Fire and water together are the blood, inseparable. The fire + water aspect seems almost an afterthought, which maybe it is, since the Creation story didn't need them, after all. Even light does not have the nature of fire, but of air.

My point is that there are a few things apparently a little off-kilter with their perceptions of the universe, and not everything is symmetrical in their history, in their myths and religion, or in their biology. And elf-like they really would like to explain them away.

Also, if Paul and Cat are having this problem, shouldn't Malcolm, Iylaine, Aengus, and Lena have all had the same problem? And why did those two couples manage to produce babies with fire natures? Does it just have to do with the genders of the elf and human parents?

So far with the half-elf babies we have had a strange mix of correct natures & correct genders (Gils and Maud), correct natures but incorrect genders (Benedict, Wulf, and Duncan), and WTF???-WRONG! nature and unknown gender (Cat's baby).

By "correct" I mean matching what the elves themselves believed possible if they had children with men. However, this is following the elves' assumption that Aengus, Egelric, Malcolm, Cat, and Gils's mother ARE just ordinary men. And clearly, since some of these babies were "incorrect", then the elves' own assumptions are wrong in some way. Either their "rules" are wrong, or these men aren't ordinary... or aren't men.

Given what we know about Eithne and Flann now, both from what Dante has said and what Baraqiel saw when he visited Flann, and the strange interest the "Red Lady" has shown in Cat and then her baby, it should be clear that AT LEAST Cat is not an ordinary woman. According to Dante she is one of the Sidhe. (Unless Flann and Eithne are changelings! But who would ever call dear Connie ORDINARY?)

Paul has also provided us with plenty of evidence that the Scots (at least the ones he knows, who happen to all come from the same family) have some amount of fire nature, which is quite unusual since most men have earth nature.

Yes, behold! So far, except for Gils's mother (and Gils has the nature and gender of his elven father, as the elves would expect), all of the "human" parents have been cousins of each other.

But -- this is important -- Cat is the *only* one who has come up with a baby of the nature that she would have gotten if she had been an elf herself.

FWIW, Dante has already noticed a difference between Cat, Eithne, Flann, and Magog on the one hand, and Aengus on the other -- he has been absolutely unable to read the thoughts of the first four, but he was at least able to know that Aengus had the hots for Flann.

So, if you just follow a few of those family trees back far enough, I think you will see the pattern here.

But what would the air elves do? How could they bring themselves into closer contact with earth nature than walking through the forest, which they seem to be able to do with little or no difficulty? Do they try to strangle themselves with vines? Snort substances like dirt or pollen? Really, I have absolutely no idea.

They go underground. The elves have caves all over the place, both natural and elf-made, both ancient and new. I guess the equivalent of burning oneself or drowning oneself would be wandering so deep into a cave that you get lost. Ris and Nush both spend a lot of time underground... and Lar lives there...

And perhaps that's one of the things Osh gets out of painting. Paul once thought: "no matter how late he came in, he would often find his father still sitting up, still grinding his ochres and his umbers until they were less powder than air." Not to say it's a sexual thing, but maybe it's somehow satisfying for such an elf to grind and paint with earth pigments like that. Osh does seem to have a thing for earth colors.

Elfleda named Iylaine for her elven ancestor, right? Well, what did the elves call Iylaine before they left her with the Wodeheads? It would be quite the coincidence if both her biological and adoptive parents had given her the same name without even talking to each other about it--but then again, that could be significant.

As I said above, Elfleda named her baby for her grandmother and grandmother's grandmother, who were both named Iylaine. She did not necessarily know what it meant. It could have been a coincidence that the elves (or the Shalla in particular) gave Iylaine the same name as that long-dead baby, but since the Shalla supposedly names the elves for their natures, then unless the Shalla is conspiring with someone (or just seekritly following Nimea's super-seekrit orders) Iylaine simply had the same nature as that elf.

Given that we don't know the exact circumstances that made Nimea tell the elves to give Vash's future wife away to be raised by men, it's hard to say where the coincidence lay, really. Perhaps the whole thing was a plot by Nimea to get a lover for herself in the young elf who would be her student, by getting rid of the wife he ought to have had. Certainly, by the time Iylaine and Vash were nearly old enough to be reunited, she actively plotted to keep them apart.

And too... it does appear that Elfleda had some contact with the Dark Lady, and she could have told her anything.

I suspect that if we ever learn anything more about how all that happened, it will either be from Nimea, Saralla, or the Dark Lady herself. Even Saralla may not be in on it at all.

Anyway, interesting questions... Now I suppose to confirm some of our hypotheses we will just have to get Magog together with Rua and see what kind of babies they have.

OH CRAP!!!!

Fortunately I was able to fix that by switching the natures (and names!) of his mother and grandmother, since the ladies didn't have multiple husbands.

I entered those relationships manually back when I was still using my old family tree software, and of course since that doesn't truly let you track "elven natures" I had to fake it a bit, and lost track sometimes. Fortunately all the thousands of computer-generated elves seem to have the correct natures, proving once again that to err is human...

I'm cool with the first generation babies having the "wrong" nature, and anyway I'm stuck with it now since Cat has her little dew baby on the way. And I am stuck with them reverting back to their parents' nature, too, since Elfleda and Finn had/have water nature. (And Fergus? *dun dun dun*) But yeah, the thing with Sarim was definitely a mistake.

Neat topic. So in the, If you were an elf, what nature would you have? Poll I discovered that I had Air nature. And according to the parings Water + Fire and Air + Earth Right? This explains why I fell so hard for Shósúdín. Shósúdín shirtless now that would be a great avatar.