Trolls (Race)

The Trolls are an ancient race from the north of Europe, widely mythologized.

Overview
Trolls are originally from Norway, and have been heavily mythologized. Actual information about their origins, powers and abilities are so confounded by folklore, mythology, advertising, and misinformation that it is not possible to sort out the actual truths from the fictions. However, there are a few groups of Trolls who have written records going back about a thousand years, and these records give the following facts.

History of the Trolls
The Ancient Trolls -- There is some dispute over the true age of the Troll species. There are legends that the Trolls were always here, and that humans and other races, along with much of the animal and plant species, were recent-comers to their world, which their oldest stories depict as a dark, clouded, cold place with little in the way of plants or animals, and which they brought back to life with their workings. Recent discoveries of asteroid and supervolcano extinction events suggests that they may have been come from some other world or dimension to help bring back the planet after such an event. Pure speculation, of course. The history, told in drum-cadenced tales at their rare gatherings, speak of how humans started coming into the area, different flavors like the red-pelted mammoth and elk hunters, the sneaky ones who made new weapons, the ones who could work gold, and the ones who stayed. Some of them intermarried once or twice into Troll lines, granting the Trolls some flexibility in dealing with the interlopers; this is the same thing they did with other monster races, to gain their power and to come to some form of peaceful coexistence.

The Two Lines -- Trolls have cross-bred occasionally with other humanlike species, most commonly with Jotuns or Aesir or other famous monster races. Most such crossings were with creatures having the same kind and character of magic: that is, inborn, subtle exchange of favors and graces with such places and powers as they run across in normal life; this is characterized by a general tendency to blend into nature as if the Troll were a feature of nature rather than someone held apart from it. When the Humans came, they were unsubtle, noisy, exuberant or desolate, rather like Troll children for their difficult 'teen' years, but the humans never seemed to get out of it. The Troll Elders decided (well before humans had fully developed agriculture) that the humans would become numerous enough that they might endanger the planet, whose life they had so laboriously preserved; they decided to "take in" humanity to have the power to sway its direction if it seemed inescapable. As a result, they preserved the nine Oldest Troll Families by moving them into the wild places and vanishing from the perception of humans, while the remaining trolls, some from each family, were to go among humans and make children who would have both natures.

Where Now We Stand -- After beginning this process, the Trolls operated with somewhat glacial slowness to implement it. The New Line bred more with humans, accepting shorter life-spans sometimes to do so, eventually getting enough Human genes to allow them to breed with most of the northern races. They sent another group south, but it's not known what happened to them.

Old Line and New Line
Old Line -- The Old Line Trolls have sufficient magical nature that they are vulnerable to certain kinds of ritual, and this includes being made uncomfortable and weak by the sound of a blessed bell. There are a relatively small number of Old Line Trolls remaining where people can find them, and they are not going to tell just anyone that they are who they are. As with all Trolls, any magic they possess begins weak and builds in power as they grow older. Old Line Trolls are not particularly sociable, seldom living in a group of more than four or five, and more often being either solo or paired. If forced to be around too many others of their kin, they become murderous and hostile if they cannot drive away the interlopers, except in the case that it would be a risk to the survival of their Lineage. Which is to say, any Trolls who were raised with them, with whom they have created offspring, or who are no more than four 'nodes' away in a family graph. Note that Old Line Trolls are no more tolerant of humans than they are of their own kind, but they tend to simply hide from them and avoid them unless they're an active threat. Note also that while this describes their day to day behavior patterns, these Trolls are still in frequent communication with other Trolls outside their personal territory, and the Troll Elders still exist as a guiding force, as unorganized as they are.

New Line -- The New Line Trolls have equal power of magic to any Old Line troll of their age. However, they can endure many of the human rituals that drive off Old Line Trolls, and take no injury from blessed bell song or most other rituals. They are more sociable than the Old Line, living comfortably alone but also able to live in groups of up to 20 or 30 without developing rage. However, New Line trolls have these abilities because they have human ancestors among their Troll ancestors. The offspring of the union of human and Troll is designated a human-troll cross-breed and very much resembles a normal human baby in every instance, growing up to resemble a taller, stronger, slightly more emotionally aggressive version of a human, unless and until something activates the latent Troll genes in an event referred to as Awakening the Inner Troll. This Awakening comes in three stages: newly awakened, sometimes jokingly called 'zombie' among English-speaking Trolls, then after at least a year, half wakened, also called 'hung over' and 'after-coffee' by snarky young English-speakers. At least a year and usually a decade passes before the half-wakened Troll can reach Full Awakening. Note, it's possible to go faster, but it risks purging the human part completely, along with much of the memory of the pre-wakened life.

Rarely, a New Line Troll couple will have a child after their Full Awakening. (This isn't infertility; all Full Trolls tend to have children only rarely unless they use magic to change this.) Any such child will spontaneously go through the Awakening stages at the ages of six, twelve, and eighteen years of age. Old Line Troll children are born fully trollish and any strong resemblance to a normal human baby is a coincidence.

Troll Glamer -- Almost all the Trolls who reach their second Awakening learn a skill called the Troll Glamer, which allows them to blend into a place as if they were part of it. It's more of an effort to turn it off than to activate. It allows a seven foot tall Troll to seem like an ordinary, if a bit unusually tall, person to a normal human, and allows them to seem to be part of an environment, hard to count or notice. This allows them to mingle among humans for a long time without having the humans panic or freak out. Since Trolls generally don't want to be noticeable, just to protect the life of the planet, they may go unnoticed, as they quietly make things happen. To make a troll break cover means you've done something so unusual or dangerous that you should be afraid.

Troll Biology and Ethnology
In general all Full Awakened Trolls are larger than humans (12 to 15 feet tall and immensely strong, durable, and allegedly tireless), live up to 10 times longer, if they get past childhood, and it's said they have supernatural powers from the onset. Some of them are able to shapeshift to hide their nature, others simply blend with the rock and forest (or whatever scenery they inhabit) and others just move faster than humans can see, in order to hide.

Trolls eat and drink much less than one would expect to maintain bodies of their size and strength, and do not produce much waste at all. They are omnivores in the truest sense, able to survive in an emergency on a diet of brightly lit morning twigs, the dew off a shadow in full moonlight, and other ephemeral things, but they prefer a form of beer made from a variety of grains (not just barley), root vegetables, tree leaves, random weeds, mushrooms, eggs, some kinds of fish, and on rare occasions meat from animals that have grown old. They are hard to poison, once they are out of their childhood. Note that they also like human foods and can learn to be exceptional cooks, but that they themselves prefer not to eat meat that died 'before its time' and they can tell it by its smell.

Trolls, once awakened, are generally infertile, females only coming into 'fertile' season for a few weeks every three to five years. They can breed whenever they like, it just doesn't result in a child unless they're in their fertile season. They take a bit over nine months to carry to term, and the fertile period is generally late autumn. They can alter this by use of certain magics.

Full trolls are able to cross-breed with humans with some problems; if those humans have sufficent of the northern european early-human-branch genomes, Denisovan and Neanderthal specifically, they have only a 40 percent chance of miscarriage in the first two trimesters. For any other human genome, they have a 65 percent chance of a miscarriage in the first two trimesters. However, Troll cross-breeds can breed easily with both full trolls and with other humans (only a 15 percent additional chance of a failure to fertilize, or a miscarriage in the first two trimesters.) This changes when cross-bred trolls are 'woken to their troll nature' because their genome changes itself by propagating the specific 'troll' genes into their systems.

The only trolls that humans are likely to meet are first-stage-awakened human-troll cross-breeds, who look much like regular humans, perhaps a bit coarser featured and more heavily built, and maybe with a slight green cast to their skin. Latent (unawakened) troll-human crossbreeds, since they look like their human crossing would make them look, are unremarkable and in some exceptional cases, don't even know that they're trolls. In general, with their usual natural Troll Glamer after awakening at least Halfway, they simply seem to be "some sort of ethnic thing, like Lapplanders or something."

There is no particular animosity towards them from most other trolls, since it just takes a few draughts of the Old Brew to waken their 'troll nature' -- the Old Brew being a compounded beverage made of herbs and fermented grains with a number of toxic components including fresh troll blood, that activates recessive genes in Trolls, causing them to mutate to partial troll within a few days, and with more extreme changes possible over the course of time. Being a fully awakened Troll grants a cross-breed the same long lifespan as a born-full Troll (from 10 to 15 times that of humans) but being an unawakened or partly awakened troll cross-breed only grants perhaps 1.5 to 2 times a normal human's maximum span.

Typically, Trolls are physically stronger and denser than humans, so they don't swim well, but some of the older ones (two-thirds awakened) claim they can breathe water if they inflate their skin while submerged. They also say that inflating the skin is something you can only do if you're a full troll or you're really desperate not to drown.

Trolls have music (especially complex rhythmic music) and art and craftsmanship, but their color choices are much more limited; they say it's because they see colors differently, which is why they can see better in the dark than regular humans can.

They are not stupid, but because they don't have a great interest in mathematics and the abstract sciences they're often considered stupid by humans.

Troll Colonies
yet-to-be-identified Norwegian colony

yet-to-be-identifed Icelandic colony

yet-to-be-identified Canadian colony

Skyway City Colony -- type: Enclave in regular city. Pop: 2300 Awake, <10,000 Latent

The Trolls of Skyway City are from the Trolltindene mountains in the Romsdalen valley (called the Troll Wall) and settled in the area shortly after the failed Viking attempts to colonize New Vinland. They went further south along the coasts, found the area that would become Skyway City eventually, and found some natural caverns which they enlarged and moved into. When the British colonized, they sent some of their people in with the colonists to legitimize the presence of so many Norse-speaking laborers in this area.

The Troll Ghetto overlaps the Docks, the Underpass and the Downbelow districts of Skyway City, and shares some common style brought by English settlers, with Norwegian 'vernacular style' -- the Trolls basically built to need using local materials and an instinct to harmonize and even blend into local environs. Thus, there are log-frame houses, multi-story stone tenements, and a number of natural caves and caverns in the Underpass neighborhoods which were turned into multi-family generational dwellings, and of course, the Ship-Houses of the Dockside (the old transitional neighborhood where wrecked or too-damaged ships were turned into houses for those who lived and worked at the Harbor, by the simple expedient of hauling them onto land, turning them upside-down, and building one or two story stone and log structures under them.) For the largest part, Trolls living in Skyway are either in the Cavern habitat or in the Troll Ghetto. Those part-Trolls who do are not Awakened, for whatever reasons, may live anywhere in Skyway.

The Troll Kvinner Pensjonat (TKP) -- this is the boarding house complex where most of the Old Trollwives live, the ones who run the "colony." It's actually a series of five brownstone buildings (because they're still Trolls and still hate sharing living space with too many other Trolls) in each of which no more than six Troll women of advanced age live. These buildings are situated in a 'neighborhood' in the most shaded part of the Underpass.

Trolls (Gang) -- In view of the typical difficult adolescence of Troll youth, there is a small "gang" made up of those newly Awakened adolescents who cannot control their instincts well enough to keep from making a spectacle of themselves. So, they act like a street gang, with occasional "rave" parties where many young Trolls get hyper on Dyne and run around the Troll Ghetto yelling, banging on trash cans, throwing boulders at one another in a game of Catch, and eventually settling into a drumming contest that keeps people awake until dawn. While these Trolls are considered a street gang, and therefore illegal, they seldom do anything outside the Troll Ghetto, and their rampages in their own ghetto are almost never prosecuted. There are only two or three "adult Trolls" involved in the gang at any time, generally chosen from those adults too lazy or stupid to work alone or to be able to get into one of the businesses operating from or in Skyway City. Note that the Trolls gang generally consists of five 'packs' of five troll youths, each one pledged to protect one of the houses of the TKP.

Trolls Among Humans
Skyway City Troll Businesses

The main Troll-run business in Skyway is the shipping company Rensky Trojot Rede, aka RBTJR - Regnskymåte By Troll-og-Jotun Rederiet, the "Skyway City Troll-and-Giant Shipping Company." This is a three container ship, two 'cargo' ship, four plane, two dirigible company that has a reputation for being able to ship anything anywhere, for a price. It is part of a larger Troll-run conglomerate.

Grønn-hud Mat og Drikke -- a restaurant and catering firm that has been in business in one form or another since the first Trolls created Liten Landsby Harbor, the original town from which the Docks district sprung, from a swamp that was too unpleasant for the English to live in; the Trolls ignored the mosquitos which died when they bit them.

The third largest business in overall economic terms, but a major employer of Trolls in Skyway, is United Granite Labor Industries, UGLI. A merger of two companies started by twin brothers.

The oldest by seven minutes (filing time for the business license from the Governor General of the Colony) is Granitt-Hånd Gruvedrift og Utgraving, the original mining and excavation company that dug most of the expanded caverns from the gneiss, sandstone, and schist on the hills that began at the west side of the town. This was primarily to prevent regular humans from finding the Old Trolltown cavern before it could have possibly been built.

The other company in the merger, Granitt-Hånd Bygning og Konstruksjon, is a building and construction firm that built not just the old Downtown, Downbelow, and Hightown roads and sewers, but also the highways in and around the area, and many of the bridges and larger buildings in the area. There was a period during the late 1800s and early 1900s when labor unions were becoming a 'problem' for many people in the first age of the Robber Barons. The GH Bygning business became a shelter for union members -- to be an employee you had to be family, even if that meant being adopted into the family -- and they often subcontracted other less Trollish people, and had no objection to union members, which was nearly unheard of. However, they got better contracts by simply offering better benefits and working conditions even if the wages were kept under control, and the unions somehow remained on good terms.

The two businesses combined into "UGLI" when the two original brothers retired in 2003. (Note, yes, full trolls are long-lived, but the brothers were 'unawakened' when they started their businesses.)