The OTHER problem with immortality

A long time ago I had a fantasy idea about an immortal prostitute who unintentionally shapes the course of history and then comes back to find out how her seemingly small actions shaped nations.

This idea is a bit smaller in scale: an immortal is having trouble, either because it's getting increasingly hard to find someone to bang who isn't related to them in some way or because their family thinks they're an embarrassment and is tired of their shit.

For example:
1. Back in the day, our immortal protagonist wound up in bed with their great grandchild. Shocked, they swore to never have sex again...that got old after a few years so they switched to only having sex with people they weren't related to. However, as the generations go by, not helped by them occasionally bringing some more offspring into the world, this becomes harder and harder. Do they just decide to say "screw it" and start fucking whoever they want? Or do they try to find some new fuckbuddies they aren't an ancestor of? For extra fun, people have tracked his or her family tree so if they do decide to run and break their oath, their potential partners might not be interested in looping the branches.

2. Sure watching your loved ones die sucks...but you know what's worse? No one ever forgetting what you did and never being able to outlive that. Look, sure you exposed yourself to a royal family and then seduced an entire convent and and some friars, but that was literally ages ago.

A. Family has an ancestor they dread coming for a visit. The ancestor is rich so the family needs their favor, or possibly even divine (imagine if a Greek god was your ancestor). Every generation the ancestor racks up more misdeeds and no matter what the family does, they can't be rid of them.

a. Kids (college age) asked to be excused from meeting their ancestor and their parents agree, not wanting them to meet the hated unkillable relative. Kids have a great time and party and sleep with a wild young woman or man...who turns out to be their ancestor.

b. Ancestor sees it as their duty to take care of their descendants' needs. Only problem is, they don't really have much orf a moral compass anymore. Whether it's seducing a new in law to make sure they can perform marital duties or seeking revenge on anyone who has wronged the family, the ancestor is sure.to do it.

B. Ancestor really wants to be back in their family's good graces. Too bad that only gets harder and harder as their past catches up to them.

For example: ancestor is invited to a wedding...and discovers that their great (however many) grandson is about to marry their illegitimate daughter. Ancestor attempts to find family's estranged members, accidentally ends up sleeping with them. Can they ever really patch things up?

An immortal posing as a garden-variety human will necessarily relocate every couple of decades as everyone around them ages whilst they stay youngish. Folks will notice. Makeup only goes so far.

An immortal whore (if fertile) leaves a generation behind when she makes her next distant move. By the time she returns to a prior homeground, a few generations at least have blended her offspring into the local crowd.

Whether new fuckmates are her descendants is irrelevant and unknowable... unless she has a genetic trait which, if dominant, soon infuses the continental population. For fun, let's say she has a mutated gene removing lactose intolerance in adults. That exact gene.mod let Indo-European adults consume raw cow milk, which nutritional advantage had much to do with global dominance by Euros.

An immortal whore must be wary of seducing monarchs, who sometimes had portraits painted of their consorts and escorts. If she moved from court to court, taking a king here, a duke there, a few prince-archbishops, some popes and emperors, all the usual crowned riff-raff, she wouldn't want to be recognized.

"Why, you look so much like the painting of our king's grandfather's mistress!"

"Only a coincidence, your lordship. Say, is that a zucchini in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

An immortal posing as a garden-variety human will necessarily relocate every couple of decades as everyone around them ages whilst they stay youngish. Folks will notice. Makeup only goes so far.

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That is exactly what Lazarus Long did in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. He also didn't worry one bit about fucking his own descendants. It didn't even bother him to go back in time and fuck his own mother in her Model T while his toddler self was snoozing in the back seat.

Carnevil9 said:

That is exactly what Lazarus Long did in Heinlein's Time Enough for Love. He also didn't worry one bit about fucking his own descendants. It didn't even bother him to go back in time and fuck his own mother in her Model T while his toddler self was snoozing in the back seat.

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RAH wrote TEFL whilst suffering a severe brain injury. Just saying. Anyway, vampires usually relocate regularly too. Cf Yarbro, Rice, and Stoker.

Another twist, in Niven's THE MAGIC RUNS OUT, has an ancient wizard magically APPEAR to be eternally young. That advertises his power. But's it's just an illusion, and when the non-renewable resource of magic runs out, he's doomed. And old.

ObTopic: The immortal whore who, in the background, shapes world history, is a hot idea. Is she a vampire whose bites move monarchs? Is she a naif who blunders across time like Forest Gump? Is she saintly or psycho or a manipulative turd? Is she a male Mel Brooks? (2000-Year-Old Man gags.) I see an almost endless series possible, like Yarbro's St-Germaine books.

In the original thread it was sort of a Forrest Gump situation but in a fantasy setting. She's just immortal and eternally stuck in her early to mid 30s. The only special ability she has is that she's unaffected by the ravages of the environment and no matter how wild of a night she has, she'll be fine the next morning (gets into a bar fight where someone yanks her hair out and she gets a black eye? She'll look immaculate in just a few hours).

So for example, in her wanderlust days, she decided to be the first person to make a cross continent trip by herself and came upon a man in a foreign land who was camping at the top of a mountain. She didn't understand a word he said but she managed to seduce him anyway and then jacked his booze and coin while he slept.

She left, traveled for a couple of centuries, then came back when travel was easier. Turns out she had sex with a guy who was warrior king and had been seeking a vision before an important campaign. So when's a strange beautiful woman snuck into his tent atop a mountain (completely unmarked by the surrounding desert or the arduous climb), gave him pleasure he never knew before while speaking to him in a strange tongue, and then took away his money and alcohol, he thought he had a religious experience, swore off vices save for sex (and even that changed to where all brothels double as temples) and won the campaign.

She's a bit embarrassed, especially when she sees how her statues portray her but ultimately shrugs it off and enjoys work in a temple that is devoted to her despite none of her clients knowing.

2. A newer idea: as she gets used to traveling the world, she picks up things from her clients and then passes them on to other clients when she's making small talk, unintentionally bringing technological developments to places that shouldn't have developed them for some time.

For example, she's getting frustrated with Serfs telling her about their crappy harvests so she tells them about rotation farming, irrigation, and other agricultural developments. She leaves, comes back a decade later and the landscape has changed. She introduces silk from garments she got in the Far East, then, tired of not being able to buy new garments in the west made of silk, she brings silk worms, with no idea about the impact that will have.

A wandering immortal prostitute won't have much social status. So why, especially if she's Forest Gump simple, would anyone listen to her productive ideas? And she'll have a hard time hauling stuff around. But she could be quite good at spreading plagues and genetics.

As a camp follower of raging armies, she spreads diseases that alter battle outcomes. (Pre modern times, about 90% of military deaths were from sickness, not wounds.) Does she fuck an army to death? And her dominant mutant genes change the course of evolution. That mutant lactose-tolerance gene; sickle-cell anemia, which protects against malaria; a tendency to go berserk; resistance to distemper; blondeness and sleek boobs; enlarged genitalia. Do her male descendants have big dicks and egos?