The Shipborn took to the seas long enough ago that their history before this time is unknown to them and the rest of the world. They take a dim view to having children with outsiders, though, so assuming that this has been a custom of theirs from the start then a basic idea of where they come from can be gotten (somewhere in the equator).

The Rookeries

For a people who live their whole lives on ships, they do awfully little shipbuilding of their own. Nearly all of their ships are purchased from others (or stolen after their crews have been slaughtered on the high seas). This is more understandable in light of their desire to stay afloat as much as possible. There's nothing quite wrong with the land, per se, but it doesn't feel right. It doesn't move. It's just... there. It's entirely alien to a man who wasn't allowed to so much as take a single step onto a dockyard until he was fourteen and maybe not even then (most must wait until twenty to get that privilege).

So for most shipborn life begins and ends on the sea (or in the sea, if they get thrown into it prematurely). They call their ships rookeries in common parlance, but there's another word that they use from time to time, one that is full of awe and reverence: little worlds. The shipborn may use others' ships but in short order they are modified as extensively as possible. New rooms are partitioned or torn open, hideaway compartments are carved out, and passageways are obstructed or sealed entirely. The usual rookery is a crazy maze of corridors and rooms that can only be easily navigated by its inhabitants and is riddled with booby traps and ambush points. The only way to successfully assault a rookery with minimal losses is to just set fire to the bloody thing and hope that the crew doesn't have any other tricks up their sleeves (like floating mines or divers who can mess with your ship from below).

The Floating islands

There are between eight and fifteen of them in the world depending on who you talk to. They date back to before the shipborn moved out to the seas. They are why the shipborn moved out to the seas, and without them the shipborn would not be able to maintain their culture. Each floating island supports hundreds of people at a time, not counting an equal number of transients who are based in ships which happen to be docked at the floating island at that moment, and they move from place to place according to a pattern known only to the shipborn. Rookeries regularly dock at the floating islands so that crew members can move between rookeries (and move their genes around, too), trade, and maintain a collective culture which would otherwise surely fragment.

They aren't really islands. They're made out of an unknown metal unlike anything that the shipborn have encountered or learned of. They are capable of submerging themselves miles below the surface for weeks if necessary. Their fuel source is a similarly strange liquid which doesn't seem to have been consumed even slightly over the course of the many centuries that the shipborn have sailed the seas. They are the little worlds of dead gods, not floating islands. The shipborn can even hear their spirits when the dead feel that it is necessary. It was the spirits, who are never seen but still see everything and who speak from behind the walls, who taught and teach the shipborn how to pilot the floating islands, and alert the crews to necessary repairs (which never go beyond minor issues which the spirits can instruct on and the shipborn can acquire the necessary materials for; the little worlds of the dead gods were crafted for the ages).

Religion

The shipborn have a hodgepodge faith built mostly from other religions that they have encountered. As a people they have no real defining religion and instead each rookery picks and chooses from the pieces of other religions. It is only because the exchange of people between rookeries leads to an exchange of ideas too that there are any common elements among their religions at all, and most religious observation is very disorganized anyway.

The shipborn usually worship a single abstract deity who works with a host of created sub-deities that are also worshiped (and usually more often, since it is easier to understand and venerate a being with an established personality and form than to do the same for something which is just as much a general concept as it is an entity). These may be considered to be emanations or aspects of the greater Deity, exalted once-human helpers, or any number of other things, sometimes several of them at once. The gods and heroic figures of other religions usually find their way into this group of beings. One of the widespread traditions of the shipborn is each rookery's possession of a small shrine made from animal bones (the bones usually come from sharks, dolphins, and snakes). This shrine is believed to have divine or at least spiritual qualities and is the target of prayers and sacrifices.

Diet

Preservation is a vital concern for the shipborn for obvious reasons. Fruit is candied with sugar solutions or dried and pickling is common for vegetables and meat. The latter is also salted since the necessary ingredient is in plentiful supply on the open sea. Processing that salt is another matter but the shipborn have taken care of that as well. The floating islands are capable of desalinating water in great quantities at negligible costs (again, there has been no noticeable decrease in the amount of the fluid used to power them) and there are near to a hundred smaller devices which are capable of fitting in and serving a rookery. Most rookeries, though, depend on greenhouse-dependent systems which replicate the normal hydrological cycle. Regardless of the method employed, the main object is acquiring desalinated water for drinking and the gardens.

When in an area where they are plentiful, nets are lowered into the water as the rookery travels along in order to catch fish, which are eaten as is or processed into a sauce to use as a condiment. The shipborn use fish sauce on everything and consume more fish in this form than they do in a more usual (for non-shipborn) fashion. Eel is another common item on the menu. Like those few fish which escape being turned into a delicious sauce their fate is frequently to instead be jellied. Shellfish are not eaten as regularly but still find their way onto the dinner table often enough to bear mention.

Inedibles, regardless of their source, are used to contribute as fertilizer for the small gardens which most shipborn maintain on their rookeries. These are by no means productive enough to make the rookery self-sufficient and most fruits and vegetables must be bought (or stolen; the shipborn do what they must when their cargo has lost value mid-voyage and times are desperate) when the shipborn hit port. But every little bit helps, does it not?

Occupational Fields

Rank, from lowest to highest, consists of boys, ordinaries, ables, and men. Shipborn progress through each of the ranks in turn. Boys begin general work in all jobs to the best of their current capabilities (a five-year-old will obviously be doing different work than an eleven-year-old, even if all of it is still mostly or entirely unskilled). They get shuffled around between different fields doing everything from helping to maintain stock fetching medical supplies until they become ordinaries at the age of fourteen, become assigned to a specific field, and begin to take on more than the least-skilled of work. At twenty they are promoted to the rank of able and begin to specialize in their field. Finally they are promoted to the rank of man at the age of thirty, give or take (based on their progress they can be promoted a year or two earlier or later), and are recognized as being fully proficient in their field. Within each rank and occupational field there is another system based on seniority and individuals are called by their respective positions within this pecking order. The thirdmost senior ordinary in charge of supply would be called the Third Stock-Ordinary, for instance.

There are a great number of different occupational fields (or duties, as they are called by the shipborn) which can be held. While the floating islands of course have all of them and in no small number, their presence elsewhere depends on the habits of individual rookeries. Rookeries which spend an abnormally long time away from the floating islands or regularly go through unusually stressful situations (some rookeries are prone to attacking other ships) will have more than one counsel-man, and arms-men will be more common on rookeries which have reason to expect a lot of hostility (such as the aforementioned pirates).

There are many possible occupational fields, going through arms-men (law enforcement and repair), hospital-men (medical), intelligence-men (shipborn who are actually in charge of selling to outsiders when they make port, translators, those who deal with the representatives of foreign powers), stock-men (supply), and counsel-men (maintaining the crew's mental health, assigning occupational fields to boys on the verge of becoming ordinaries). There are many different jobs within each field. Stock-men, for example, can be cooks, supervisors over the storehouses, pursers, or bookkeepers, and regardless of their specialty they are fully expected to be able to hold their own in any of these jobs should they need to do so.

Next month: Rank, gender, marriage, and interpersonal relations.