Fourteen years previously I was a single Firedrake, gainfully employed, bottle born citizen looking for a mate and not having much success. There were a couple of structural issues to be accounted for. Natural-Born and Bottle-Born didn’t form life partnerships, not a legal rule, simply a fact. Social disapproval ran deep on both sides as well as more practical problems regarding children. The number of Natural/Bottle-Born casual relationships between free citizens of both groups, was the biggest single proportion of the entire relationship category, ranging from instant s*x encounters to relationships that lasted more than nine months and less than a year. The number that lasted longer than a year was essentially zero, if there were any no-one was admitting to it.
I was looking for a life
