#Arkady just sort of assigned them they/them and Chet saw no reason at all to deviate from this

[cloud9-77]

Chet: four arms, four fingers, a lot of hair

You might have remembered one of my previous posts about Arkady, the last golem. This is Chet, Arkady’s adopted younger sibling. Go read that post if you want to know more about where they live and how they came to be there, but Chet’s story gives a little more information on top of that.

There is a lot of confusion about Chet in the story. I won’t confirm or deny these facts because that is hugely plot relevant and I can’t say everything. But here are the problems Chet faces:

First of all, how did they end up being raised by the last golems? Golems very much kept to themselves. In fact no one even knew they were still around for the last century at least, they were that good at hiding. So for what reason did the very last group decide to take in Chet, who clearly has no golem ancestry? It couldn’t be to take care of Arkady, because he was a little older. If anything, Chet was a liability to Arkady. They’re always wandering off, wanting to talk to people, and they’re probably one of the most eye catching people you’ve ever seen - so why did this happen?

Secondly, Chet is by no means normal to any race, let alone the golems. They look very nymphoid, but why four arms? One could assume they’re half nymph, half imp. Imps often have bat-like wings, so if Chet had one imp parent, perhaps those wings got confused and ended up as a second pair of arms. It would explain where Chet’s tufted tail comes from too. But four fingers is odd - perhaps just another genetic abnormality. And then you get to the hair and the skin colour - this fantastical gradient of colours is unheard of in a natural sense. Sure you could achieve it with paints or dyes or temporary spells, but this is an inherited trait for Chet - how does that even work? The other, very worrying, possibility, is that Chet is at least partly Paracosmic - as in the extinct, native people of Paracosm. But the three that remain have flat, deer-like noses, and more leaf-shaped ears, with notable spines on their elbows. Despite that, they do have four arms, four fingers, and have the same strange colour patterns. So what is Chet, and if they are somehow paracosmic, how did they end up in this post-apocalyptic prison with the golems?