Introduction
Kinship is a fantasy series – with quirky, bestial characters, in the suburban city of Rancho Duna. It features wholesome, slice of life, light romance and dramatic themes in a contemporary, interspecies world with rich, mythical symbolism, pagan spirituality, and magical, etherium powered devices called phylacteries. It centers on the modest Lotus bookstore in the temenos of a peaceful pagan temple called Wellspring. Rancho Duna is a fictionalized, suburban city in the State of Mojave. Rancho Duna is home to not only the Wellspring temple and the Lotus bookstore, but also a wide variety of restaurants and unique locations that the characters in the Kinship series explore through each story.
Setting
Kinship takes place in a mirror world with widespread augmentation using etherium powered phylacteries. When they come of age, therians choose a beast to model themselves after and become post-human after taking a sabbatical at a therianthropy center of their choosing. Though there are many different kinds of therians, it’s common for therians to choose partners with similar features, but couples with mixed features are also a familiar sight. On Earth, the dominant cultures are pagan in orientation. Polytheistic temples of various types are in all major cities and cultural syncretism is commonplace. Formalized Christianity and Islam have largely been abandoned. Desert mystics, as they are often called, sometimes come into other countries, but since proselytization is illegal, they are mostly just a minor nuisance. The geography and geopolitics in the Kinship – as well as the differences between different therians, are more subtle than pronounced. They are more defined by small differences in culture than anything particularly nationalistic.