Lightice wrote:I would call it evidence that Keidrans don't have much in the way of old age. At the point they start to look elderly, they're probably already one foot in the grave. I imagine that most of their life consists of healthy adulthood.
amenon wrote:Keidran could also just preserve well generally. It's a short enough lifespan without the tail-end of it being taken with infirmity.
Besides; if she went white, how would you tell?
Yeah, that's the other possibility, and it isn't necessarily an implausible one either. The thing that always comes to mind for me regarding that is
Flora's interaction with Euchre in this strip. Now, we know that Euchre is lying about his age and is actually magically extending his lifespan somehow. However, *Flora* doesn't know that, and yet she doesn't bat an eye at his statement, which means that she sees no contradiction between Euchre's obvious physical fitness and general lack of infirmity and his being 21. Now, it's an older comic, so one may want to take it with a grain of salt, but it may still be evidence for the 'aging gracefully' view.
And you'd tell by looking at her beautiful red hair, that's how.
amenon wrote:MuonNeutrino wrote:Well, that and Clovis could still have been 10 or even 11, which is young but not quite 'late teens' either.
We have Kat at 10, and Flora at 11. Both still seem rather teenage-y to me.
Still, you have the point. If 7 is just-about-physically-mature, 10 is well into adulthood by lifespan. Mental development is a separate question.
Yeah, I was mostly just referring to physical maturity. *Physically*, if 7 is 'late teens' than 10 has got to be mid-20s at least. As you note, while mental development is related, it's not exactly the same thing.
I too have noted that keidran sometimes seem to act 'young' for their physical maturity, and I think it may partially come from the disconnect between *neurological* development (i.e. the physical maturity of the brain) and the accruing of life experience. By the time a human's brain is finished maturing they've got almost two decades of life experience, but a keidran reaches physical and mental maturity with only half that level of experience at best. They're 'all there', mentally, but they just don't have the same amount of world-wise experience (and hence the sort of 'learned this the hard way' maturity) that a human might - it's a combination of developmental maturity and (lack of) experience that simply doesn't exist for a human growth pattern.
