| Family and Background |
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Coming from a litter of 10 Tohr had a reasonably normal childhood, being trained by her father in solitary hunting, by her mother in 'clanning' and by the clan elders in clan duties. The Margah clan was a sizeable one and therefore maintained an estate the size of an English county on planet Wafahh, which translated as 'Home' in Federation Standard.
During her childhood it was noted by her mother and elders that she possessed a skill which was reasonably uncommon in Dirians in that she was able to work with numbers in her head. This set her apart from the society that numbered things as one, a few, more, many and a lot. Others, all females, had those skills too only not as expertly as Tohr had it. In fact the skill in itself was one of the reasons why the Dirians were so successful, the ability to 'count abstract numbers' made it possible to direct the clan towards fields where there would be more food, an ability to dictate when the best time would be to move on again, especially when taking into consideration things like when the litters were due, when the 'fireball-in-the-sky' was coming over the horizon a lot lower, when it would be best not to have litters for a while etcetera.
All in all, the skill was extremely useful and gave them an edge over the other creatures on Wafahh, making them the dominant species on the planet.
Tohr's ability, however, went a lot further than that and her counting had finally so little to do with Dirian realities that she became a loner. Often other Dirians would not understand the concepts that Tohr talked about. They understood a clump of mud, and even a morsel of mud, if you broke op the clump. But questions like: "How much smaller does mud have to be not to be mud anymore." they could not understand.
Tohr was 'rescued' by an Earth Federation science vessel, when one of the visiting scientists happened to meet her and was able to talk with her about abstract subjects. He had her do some tests on the shuttle and noticed her ability to structure data, place them in seemingly random order to better extract the information from the data.
The scientists contacted the clan elders and tried to come to an agreement with the clan about Tohr joining them. After a lot of negotiating, an agreement was reached that Tohr would go with the scientists as data-analyst under the provision that the Federation would pick up one kala-dech carcass every week for her nourishment. Tohr was of Margah clan and the clan was forever responsible for feeding and looking after clan members. The fact that she would not be on Wafahh anymore had nothing to do with it. Nor the fact that she could get food from the Federation ship. She was not of their clan so it was not their duty. |
