Longevity

Rodinians are soft immortals, meaning that so long as no one tries to murder them or they aren’t incapacitated in some tragic and catastrophic accident, they theoretically will never die.   Firstly, lets look at ageing. Most mortal creatures throughout the universe are primarily under the duress of time, and eventually die due to the effects and complications of ageing.   But for Rodinians, age is a concept that is entirely foreign to them, as is the idea of inevitability. They hardly ever think about death, what it means, what its repercussions are for one’s own plans and those around them, and what may or may not exist afterwards. They view themselves as permanent, and they all expect to still be around millions of years from now. This isn’t to say that they have no understanding of death, as to the contrary they have a great deal of works on the subject from an academic and philosophical point of view. However that’s all it is: theoretical. No one ever expects to have to deal with it, just like no human expects to deal directly with general relativity in their life.   With the absence of ageing and the ticking clock of inevitability, Rodinians behave very differently from mortals.  

Age is just a Number

  There are Rodinians that have been around since the founding of the Rodinian Empire over three million years ago. There are even many that predate that, from the ages of the gods. There are many Devonians who were alive when the Devonian species of Rodinian discovered quasi-immortality. These beings are millions of years old, with the oldest Devonians being over 300 million years old. There are many ways this changes you, but one of the simplest ways is that you just stop paying attention to that number that increases by one every time Rodinia completes an orbit around Iso-Sol.   It becomes a meaningless number, and generally most Rodinians will stop tracking it a little after they pass the final milestone in their development as young Rodinians. They primarily use age in the early years as a marker to help guide young Rodinians through maturation, laying out the timescales and key milestones in their development. Once they are fully mature however, both in mind and body, there isn’t much use for it. They aren’t going to physically change any more, and their mental maturity will only slowly evolve over vast spans of time as their experiences grow.   Mortals continue to track age following maturation as, fundamentally, they are counting down towards their final year. Age is the implicit way of letting both themselves and others know how long they have left. But Rodinians theoretically have an unlimited lifespan, and so they aren’t implicitly counting down towards anything. Once they are fully mature, age just becomes a number.   There is still a sense however of knowing how old someone is, but Rodinians are less granular about how they communicate it. An Elder Devonian wouldn’t say they are 320 million years old. They would instead say that they were born on Earth, which would immediately tell everyone that they are prehistoric. Others may say that they were born just before the Dromaeosauridians joined the Creatures of Earth, or that they were born just before the madness of Archnadrakian Balaine and the Blood Harvest. From these examples, age is conveyed through reference to well known historical events or periods in Rodinian history.  

Mortals are Fleeting

  For the longest time during the apex of the Rodinian Empire, many tried to convince themselves that they would still care about their mortal friends and protectorates even if everyone they knew would eventually die. It was wishful thinking, revealing that for all their exceptional qualities, Rodinian wisdom was still very much flawed.   Time is relentless, especially if you are immortal. It just keeps taking them from you, over and over again, until every potential friendship is immediately signposted with the thought that you will one day bury them or scatter their ashes amidst a crowd of grieving relatives. You convince yourself that this friendship can be special, but as the list of dead friends grows, so too does the hole that all of them are leaving behind, and it makes future friendships … mean a bit less, as they have so much to fill in for. Nostalgia tends to build up, until entire city skylines change, and even landscapes too. Eventually nothing is even remotely the same as when you first arrived here, and the warmth that you feel when thinking of your first mortal friend here, who lived ten thousand years ago, is now completely separated from what the place is like now. And so, it’s time to move on.   Civilisations themselves would also be subject to the same oppressive march of time, with many destroying themselves through climate instability, nuclear war, failure to transition away from depleting energy sources, biological warfare and weaponised nanotechnology and AI. Rodinians generally did not and could not intervene in such cases, as when a civilisation started destroying itself it was usually too late by the time they arrived. The Great Filter, as they called it, wiped out many civilisations and rendered their own efforts in vain.   Most Rodinians left the mortal realm to return to Rodinia and the Weave to live among their own kind, where time wouldn’t take their friends and loved ones away. Younger Rodinians keen to explore would still venture out or join the Rodinian fleets, but eventually their society’s collective wisdom caught up to them that it was unwise to become too attached to the mortal world. This growing emotional detachment is one of the factors that ate away at the foundations of the Rodinian Empire itself; as people cared less and less about the mortal realm, their motivation to act as the universe’s peacekeepers weakened.   Unfortunately, mostly all Rodinians have little to no care or interest in the affairs of mortals now, and in a lot of cases they are unmoved by any challenges or plights they may face. This antipathy often becomes a feeling that they are ultimately not important enough to be concerned about, even worthless. During the final epochs of the Rodinian Empire, Rodinians became almost completely unconcerned about limiting collateral damage or reigning in their excesses when “disciplining” unruly civilisations. If not for the total collapse of their will to continue intervening in mortal affairs, they were almost certainly on a tyrannical path.  

Every Year, a Year becomes less Valuable

  When you are one year old, a year represents your entire life. If a baby could understand that their next birthday is a year away, then that baby would perhaps feel that their next birthday is a lifetime away.   When you are two years old however, a year becomes half of your entire life.   When you are ten, a year is now only ten percent of your life, and by the time you are one hundred it represents merely one percent.   This is another reason why Rodinians don’t really keep track of age beyond maturation, as any granular unit of time becomes less and less noticeable to them. A year to a Rodinian who is hundreds of thousands of years old is not a long time at all. In hindsight, they may view a year as feeling as long as a week is to us.   It’s also one of the reasons that contributes towards their general antipathy towards mortals, as mortal lifespans feel as though they get shorter and shorter as the Rodinian gets older and older. Eventually, mortals feel as though they are gone in a blip.  

Long plans, and no Plans

  “Do you want to see the supernova of Betelguese when it happens?”   This would be a ridiculous statement to a human, as this event may not happen for many thousands of years, perhaps millions. For Rodinians though, they can make plans for it. There’s no reason why they necessarily won’t be around for it. Rodinians therefore make long term plans that for most mortals seem almost incomprehensible. The Rodinian Empire would create plans to politically restructure entire galaxies over timespans of hundreds of thousands of years, with project leadership only changing a few times.   For less motivated Rodinians though, which is most of them, there is a tendency to simply drift through life with no definite plans at all. With unlimited time on their hands, there is no pressing need to do anything within any particular time frame. Ambitions and self-goals can be indefinitely delayed in pursuit of easier goals and more simplistic ambitions, pleasures and desires. This leads to an issue of personal stagnation among many Rodinians who can spend millennia drifting along unchanged without learning new skills, knowledge or experiences. Missed the Betelgeuse supernova? No worries, you can always catch the next supernova in the Milky Way, in roughly 2.1 million years.  

Love Thy Fellow Rodinian

  With mortals being fleeting, physical objects decaying, breaking, weathering and withering, and even landscapes changing, the world can increasingly feel very transient to a Rodinian. There grows this sense that developing a profound attachment to something is unwise, as it will be gone quite soon from their perspective. The only exception to this are other Rodinians.   Rodinians are very sociable beings amongst each other, not just due to their common evolutionary backgrounds but because they are the only thing that one can expect to still be around as long as they will be. Friendships and relationships form the foundation of their lives because everything else is fleeting, and as such almost everything they do is experienced with other Rodinians.   Some friendships and relationships last an extremely long time, whilst others don’t work out as long. Most Rodinians have one or two close friends though that they have always known.  

Fear of Death

  Recall, Rodinians are what are known as soft immortals. They don’t age, seldom ever get sick or poisoned, and are extremely difficult to mortally wound.   But mortal wounds can happen.   In these circumstances, Rodinians are forced to confront mortality for perhaps the first time in their life. Not only are they forced to think about it, but they are forced to accept that death is probably happening to them.   For a Rodinian that is still aware as they die, this is universally terrifying. They have never had to think about death, never had to deal with it in others, never had to reason with it or rationalise it. They have no way to prepare for it or cope with it. In just a short space of time, they are now coming face-to-face with the prospect that their existence is ending, and that nothing may await on the other side. Many of these otherwise godlike beings spend their final moments in panic and fear, gripped with terror about the end. When facing a situation that could threaten their existence, many Rodinians become fearful and flee.   Rodinians also struggle to deal with the loss of a Rodinian friend or relative, as once again they are being forced to confront something that they never believed would happen; something that they have never had to think about or prepare for: That a person that has been there for many thousands upon thousands of years, and that they believed would always be there, is now gone. The hole that this leaves in a Rodinian’s life is unimaginable.   This is why part of the extensive training that Rodinians get when joining their military is studying the academic and philosophical writings on death, to force them to think about it on a fundamental level and how it could end up relating to them personally.  

Mechanics of Never Ageing

  There are a few noteworthy mechanics and psikinetics that take place within Rodinian bodies that keeps them from ageing. They have effective DNA repair mechanisms that almost never fail, and cells with abnormal changes to their DNA fail certain checks with their immune system. It’s all tightly controlled, and it prevents cumulative DNA damage building up until it results in tissue degradation.   Their immune system also contains additional cell types devoted to removing toxic by-products, dead cells and scar tissue, which helps to keep the cellular environment free from harmful aggregators and inflammation.   Every day too, time reversal psikinetics activate during sleep that literally reverses time on their telomeres, cartilage, eyes and other hard to regenerate tissues, renewing them continuously. The time reversals don’t start until after the age of 35 or so, when growth and maturation is complete. After that point, Rodinian bodies enter into this static state which can seemingly last forever.   Finally, Rodinian regeneration and healing allows them to mend a large variety of wounds and tissue damage. The automated psikinetics that heal Rodinians, the baseline healing rate, would mend a simple bone fracture typically within a day. Small to moderate wounds affecting tissue can heal in hours.   Depending on the psikinetic skill of the Rodinian in question though, they can personally direct and accelerate the healing process by manipulating the matter in their own bodies. This way, they can literally rebuild injured parts of their bodies in real time. Living matter is complex however, especially that of a Rodinian, and so it really does vary. Most Rodinians can accelerate their baseline healing up to a factor of five, but exceptional individuals can accelerate it by orders of magnitude and regrow a lost limb in seconds by converting raw aether into physical matter.