#19y/o rene dissolving himself and promising to be reborn centuries from now in the vain hope that jakob will still be there

[mtkanna]

while i'm here: Jakob Ingold Teeth. what's the deal with em

so. none of the narzissenkreuz documents have a specific time frame on them. the closest we get to one is the knowledge that basil elton fought elynas during or immediately after the cataclysm 500 years ago, meaning everyone from the institute was born pre-cataclysm. this also gives us an idea of when the siege of poisson took place (also pre-cataclysm.) seymour says he was dormant for approx. 493 years, so there's roughly seven years between the cataclysm and the explosion within elynas that kills mary-ann and damages seymour.

But What About The Rest. there isn't a single date or even a rough estimate of time passing, and most of the documents are from rene, who we know grew increasingly paranoid and manic as he did his research, so any timeframe he gave would be... confusing, probably.

we don't know when things happened, which is a problem. we also don't know how old anyone is, which is a problem. and it's not like we can just guess.

mary-ann, alain, jakob and rene were all younger than eighteen while they were in the narzissenkreuz institute. alain was a child prodigy and considered able enough to work in a laboratory with an assisstant; though this doesn't tell us much, as we know there are workforce shortages because of the cataclysm. rene and mary-ann are given no identifying features for their age.

But Jakob. jakob. there are a few inferences we can make for him.

at the time of the trip to the vourukasha oasis, jakob only had three adult teeth. if we're to take that at face value, that places him anywhere between eight and ten. but can we really trust that? at this point, he's already been transformed, so we can assume his physiology isn't like a regular human's. rene and jakob have the same bodily composition, and rene has all of his adult teeth. most people have lost their baby teeth by the time they're twelve, but they can last until later.

which begs the question: Do Abyssal Beings Have Teeth?

some do. kind of. one of the rewards for childe's weekly fight is a tooth; this is actually from celestial voyager, but it's abyssal and fully-developed, so even though it's a sea creature we can assume Tooth Development is possible. which means loss and pushing in of new teeth. or they could just regrow their teeth, because if i'm reading into this right jakob's body has a composition kind of similar to elynas', which is similar to durin's, and we can pick up durin's teeth every other day.

so. we can estimate rene and jakob's age, now! rene is anywhere from twelve to fourteen at most, and jakob is likely eight to ten. which is where i throw a spanner in the works--Fucked Up Teeth Genes. while it makes sense for tooth presence to be used to rationalise maturity--nobody in the institute at this point is an adult save for lyris, and rene's very wary of the other adults around him--and be seen as a measure of experience, it is also entirely possible that jakob ingold formerly baker has a family history of just Not Having Enough Teeth, and i for one think that's the funniest option for why we're doing Teeth Measurements for aging.

this doesn't change that we don't have ages for mary-ann or alain. i'd say that alain and rene are around the same age, mary-ann's a year younger than them, and jakob's the youngest of their group. but we just don't know enough to say anything for certain