What if a pregnant woman was to verse out? Would she deliver the baby? Would she lose the baby? Or would she just stay pregnant forever? If she did have the baby, would it age, or would it stay a baby forever? That would be kinda cool for the baby. Have 3@10 martial arts, but still look like a helpless newborn hahaha.
Stop that. :oP
Hey Osevens, I emailed you back, you still have not replied, what's up?
Sorry. I haven't written any email all week. It's nothing personal, I just don't have much to say. Plus I'm still job hunting and that's both tiring and depressing, so I don't feel that I'm very good company right now.
Understood.
Never having had a pregnant player (at least that I was aware) I've never had to address this issue.
My feeling is that there are magical solutions to such problems that would work. I would probably treat the infant as a zygoted verser associate to the mother, permitting him to continue aging as long as both were in that world, but to stop doing so as soon as they versed out of that world. If that happened while she was still pregnant, I would probably keep the growth going until birth, and then until the next verse-out, and then stop it. It would require magical or psionic or other special means of aging to cause the child verser to grow. (That has happened to a couple of young players at various times; Ryan's and Kyler's characters are both a year or two older now than they were when they entered the verse, in both cases probably due to botches.)
--M. J. Young
You raise an interesting question here MJ. The infant would keep aging until the mother and child versed out. It is certainly possible for them to stay in that world for decades, even centuries. If the child kept aging until they versed out, what if they didn't verse out for 500 years? You would have a child that was older than his mother (in a way) would the child ever stop aging, or would he verse out when he died of old age?
Answer (warning this is freaky): he would not die of old age. If you think about it, that's the whole point of not aging in the first place. What would happen is he would get really really old.
Note that this does not necessarily entail osteoporosis, senility, loss of eyesight, loss of hearing, muscular atrophy, or any of the other ailments commonly associated with extreme old age. Cosmetically, the character would age. Substantively, he would retain his vitality, attributes, and capabilities, without penalty.
Be mindful also that there's a reason you can't pin down someone's exact age by looking at him - not everyone ages the same way or at the same apparent rate. When you guess someone's age, it's exactly that: a guess based on perceptible clues. A verser who lived and aged in the universe where he was born for 500 years before versing out would certainly appear to be very old, but no one in modern New York, say, would guess his age at being any higher than perhaps 100 or 120 years. After all, he's still alive, isn't he? Everyone knows people don't live that long.
Yeah, and who is to say how he would age on that planet? In The Bible, some people lived to be 800-900+. Who is to say how they aged? Maybe at age 500, he would only have the body of a 40 year old.
Scott's answer is good.
Also, this verser has a sort of inverse to the problem most versers have when they stay in a world a long time. Most have the Highlander Immortal problem, that somehow they have to hide the fact that they're not aging and not dying, because people freak when they are faced with someone who does not age or die. This guy has the problem that he ages, and ages, and ages, but does not die--at some point, people are going to get after him about that, trying to find out why that is. The longer he lives, the more trouble it will become. Even if society is very understanding, there's going to be that one nutcase who thinks you're a demon or a witch or something, and that he's the only one who realizes how dangerous you are so he has to kill you.
Dracula might not have been a vampire at all, if Van Helsing discovered that this reclusive verser had been alive for centuries and let his imagination fill in how such an impossible thing might be possible--and a stake through your heart will probably kill a verser, and leave nothing but dust behind.
--M. J. Young