Hematology of Offspring
From an unpublished manuscript written by Paul Layil, Ph.D.
When the Eleven and the White One became mortal, their incarnate bodies were similar in almost every way to those of humans. Understanding the ways they differed from humans, and therefore the source and nature of their unique abilities, became a focus of study early on.
The most obvious difference was the presence of their relium wings and the stumps remaining after the wings were severed from their bodies. Vestiges of these wings are present in First Born — the children of the Eleven and humans — as extrudable relium spikes in the wing stumps. Typically, these are only visible when the individual is agitated. In Offspring — the children of First Born and humans — only wing stumps are present. These become less pronounced farther down on the lineage from the original progenitor.
As soon as the wings of the the Eleven were severed and reforged by Tamel, it became clear that relium was no ordinary metal. In fact, elemental relium is a responsive biometal. Much as magnets pull toward one another, relium relics respond to and pull toward relium-based metalloproteins carried in the blood of the descendants of the Eleven. The relics also interact with each other.
In the Before, the Eleven and the White One were completely joined and yet also completely unique. Once in mortal forms, they found that they all shared some abilities: strength, speed, extended lifespan, and the ability to sense the presence of each other and their descendants. Each also exhibited unique abilities. For example, Armaros has the ability to manipulate the flow of time. The source of these differences appears to be lineage-specific structural differences in the relium-based metalloproteins synthesized by the Eleven and their descendants.
From a genetic perspective, each of the Eleven and the White One possessed the same number of chromosomes as humans, but they had many new genetic loci, without equivalent in the human genome. These were located in chromosomal regions that contain long expanses of junk DNA in their human counterparts. The vast majority of these new loci code for lineage-specific metalloproteins, which enhance a wide-variety of physiological functions. Each of the Eleven was uniquely homozygous at each of these loci. (Eleven unique allelles = eleven unique metalloproteins that share the molecular signature of all relium relics from the corresponding lineage.)
First Born are 100% heterozygous for these alleles (again uniquely so within each lineage). Offspring are recombinant, with the proportion of angelic genetic material reducing by 50% with each generation.
