White wrote:1) Do Loroi have a war exemption clause for designated persons, ala Mosely. For instance, would any potential Einstein be shielded from battle, if so would this be a restriction of said Einstein's right to fight or an extension of their right to not fight?
There is no formal "exemption from fighting" for a warrior, but good administrators try to put their best people where they can be most effective, and so hopefully a top theoretical physicist would be put in a lab somewhere instead of in the infantry. The Loroi warrior class is responsible for a variety of government and infrastructure jobs that we would consider civilian, so being in the military for the Loroi doesn't necessarily mean fighting on the front line, and even in the fighting specialties there is no shortage of administrative jobs. It is unlikely that a Loroi Einstein would find herself in a foxhole.
White wrote:2) Do Loroi in a warrior or any other cast who show special abilities get moved around? I remember reading that having telekinetic powers gets you a shot at the big time, i.e. being a soldier, but what about movements in the other way? For example, say a Loroi in a warrior caste is discovered to be a complete genius in the sciences, like, whoa, the force is strong with this one, totally equal to mass times acceleration squared. Would said Loroi be shunted away to where they might be more useful, or would their intelligence be seen as an asset to their ability to thrive in the military culture? Vonneuman could have exceed at many things after all. Would a particularly intelligent Loroi in say, a scientist caste, be able to leverage that skill to get into the military?
Some science and engineering jobs are civilian, but many are military. The "scientist caste" is military. Families and administrators try to place children according to their aptitudes, but there is some movement between specialties allowed, if an individual later shows aptitudes for a different specialty. An example of this would be Ashrain, who started as Teidar due to her psychokinetic abilities, but who then switched to Soroin when it was clear that she had aptitudes for ship operation and command. But there is not normally movement allowed between military and civilian disciplines. There are science and engineering jobs in both the military and civilian worlds, so a top scientist could find a place regardless of whether she was a warrior or a worker.
White wrote:3) Has there ever been a mass upheval of Loroi society? Like, where there was a large percentage of the civilian population suddenly becoming warriors due to some reason or another.
Not in recent history. If you go back far enough (to the Deinar Iron Age), such upheavals were common, as civilization was constantly being destroyed and rebuilt. Probably the most recent such upheaval would have been the atomic wars on Perrein [edit: some time before] 800 CE. On Deinar after the Iron Age, a community which lost most of its warriors for whatever reason and had only civilians left would usually be assimilated (or conquered) by a neighboring community that still had warriors.
White wrote:4) What is loroi family life, like. I remember they are raised communally by females and segregated by gender, but..then what. What does a Loroi do when she grows up, I imagine once she goes through the respective right of passage for whatever her caste is she'd move on, but how are friendships and relationships maintained? Are siblings likely to stick together? do they just make new freinds at their new job? Do they have reunions?
In the warrior class, it depends on what kind of service she is in and where she will be assigned. Most military Loroi do not have much choice as to where they go. For many infrastructure, administration or local defense jobs, a warrior may be posted locally and able to stay close to her family. For many fleet jobs, duty may require her to be assigned to a ship or remote base, in which case she may be somewhat isolated from her family, and her co-workers will become her most important circle of friends. Members of the same training bands are often deployed together, so some of her new co-workers may already be friends and family (an example of this is Talon & Spiral, who trained as children together and were deployed to the same squadron). Warriors who are deployed remotely can stay in touch with family by mail and through occasional visits home on furlough.
In the worker class, those children born to civilian mothers tend to stay with the family company or guild. Those born to warrior mothers (who fail dropped out of military training) are usually ostracized by their birth families and must create a new civilian circle of friends. On the positive side, civilian Loroi have more personal choice about where they go and what they do.
Here are some examples from characters in the story:
Tempo was born on Perrein before the war to a Mizol mother of a notable family working in the local intelligence community. She was raised in a family creche, and trained in the Perrein Mizol academy after her diral rites. Upon graduation, she was posted locally and maintained close ties to her family group. She had two daughters, both of whom also enrolled as Mizol. The war started when Tempo was 29, and since then she has been reassigned numerous times, but she has kept in relatively close contact with her family. Because of the nature of her job, Tempo does not form many new close friendships with her co-workers.
Beryl was born aboard a cruiser during the Semoset offensive. As a baby she was taken off the ship at the first port of call (a frontier colony in the Steppes), and her mother died shortly thereafter. Her mother was of no important family, she was taken into state custody and eventually transferred to a Listel community on Mezan, where she did her training and was educated. Beryl had a child while at the academy (it’s common for young warriors to get pregnant from their first sexual experience after passing the diral trials), and then was posted to a starship shortly after graduation. Beryl has been on active duty ever since. Beryl’s young son is currently in a Nedatan creche on Deinar; she has been able to visit him several times since her deployment. Beryl has only briefly met with several of her mother’s relatives, who are scattered around the empire, and she detests Mezan, so she doesn’t really have a “home” outside her current ship.
White wrote:5) Are communes for children segregated by caste/guild affiliation?
If you mean the creches that raise children from birth to about age 6, it varies. Some are run by caste/guild entities, in which case they will be segregated by specialty, but some are run by local communities, governments or even local family groups. Civilian creches are rare, found only on planets where civilian mothers are regularly allowed to reproduce, and where they exist they are always segregated from warrior creches.
The diral training facilities (age 6 to 8) are segregated by caste.
White wrote:6) How do Loroi interact with societies that they move into. For example, if Loroi are moving to a colony do Loroi arrivals travel to said planet with the entire family? Do they keep in contact with the "main" family back home?
In the warrior class, movement is usually the result of military reassignment/deployment, and affects only the individual. Other members of that individual's family have their own duties, and usually cannot move at will. This is part of the reason that children are usually raised communally. Local communities will often have "welcome wagons" to help integrate new arrivals, as I imagine many military barracks towns do today.
White wrote:7) Do loroi have video games? Or animation? Do they have any equivalent to famous people in entertainment?
8) What creative tasks do Loroi take part in? I remember reading that they don't do much fiction and, perhaps wrongly, went away with the impression that they mostly use their sanzai to tell legends and other old stories.
Loroi creative outlets include art and sculpture, dance, athletic competition and the like. Writing is limited to academic or technical works; storytelling is limited to history and legends. Sanzai is truthful, and the Loroi consider fiction to be a form of falsehood. They do not have native equivalents of vocal music, creative writing, movies or dramatic television (though some alien members of the Union do, and so many Loroi will have some exposure to these forms of media). Loroi do play games, including some computer games.
Loroi entertainment mostly involves live performances. There are famous performers, though not to same degree as in our media culture.
White wrote:9) Loroi mental health. I won't ask for too many specifics, but I just wanted to ask if all the workers in the profession were male.
No, most mental health workers are female, though certain specialties are exclusively male.
White wrote:10) If a Loroi dies, who shows up to the funeral, and who would be sad. I think this might just be a more clear distillation of what I was trying to ask with question 4.
It depends very much on the individual and the community. Usually it would be combination of family and friends/co-workers, much as in most human societies.
White wrote:11) How are the communes set up exactly? Would it be normal for a commune of children to be "self sufficient" in terms of child rearing? For example, it would have all the resources and people needed to give said children all the education and care they need, or would it have to outsource to things like schools (both of soft and hard knocks) and playgrounds and the like? And how often would different communes interact, is there any overlap between different communes in terms of their membership? How large is the average commune? I also imagine that a child to an important general would basically be like all the other children except that she doesn't have the advantage of her mother doting on her sometimes. Would this cut down on hereditary positions in the military or are there other mechanisms for advantaging heirs?
In the developmental creches (age 0 to 6) there is no requirement that the children be segregated, and so they may rely on outsourced expertise, and children may move between facilities as needed. There is substantial diversity in how such creches are operated, and how large they are. At this phase, there is no explicit isolation from family or birth mother (some being run by the family itself if it's large enough), and a mother who is local and interested can spend time with the child.
In the diral trial phase (age 6 to 8), the children are sent to training facilities appropriate for their specialty and are explicitly isolated from family and society at large. They are grouped into bands of about 50 children each of similar age; there may be many such groups at a particular facility. The training at this phase is light on "book learning" and mostly about military fitness and temperament training. Most formal education will be conducted in the formal caste academies after graduation from the trials (or in the civilian equivalents for those who fail the trials).
Ideally, all children are treated the same within a band without regard to parentage, though training facilities may be affected in quality by local affluence, and they are not totally immune to the influence of very powerful mothers.