Mob Sorcery - The Weird Birdgirl Egg Lore Post

As the title suggests, this is a post about the birdgirls in Mob Sorcery and all the egg laying stuff. If you find that icky and don’t want to learn anything more than you’re forced to in the books themselves, then skip this post.

Every time I release a book, I notice that the egg laying comes up somewhere (often multiple somewhere) and elicits some level of confusion and concern. I don’t go into much detail on the egg stuff, because it often produces comments akin to “ick, why would people eat eggs that come from human-like people,” so I just avoid going into much detail beyond generally using it as a “this is how society is different” in the series. But this also means there are a bunch of holes I’ll be slow to plug, so I’ll try to plug some here.

With that said, time for way too much lore detail on birdgirls, their egg-laying process, the capitalist dystopia they’ve built around themselves (and many humans), and the thinking that went into it all.

Also, fair warning, a significant part of this is far, far more objectifying than most of the rest of what I write. It comes with the territory of “exploitative companies using women for lots of money,” and your mileage may vary on how creepy you find it.

But Why Birdgirls?

Okay, before I go into all the details, I feel I should explain (i.e. defend myself). Especially as there’s a lot of detail here for what is essentially a throwaway aspect of the world.

Mob Sorcery’s world is a hodge podge of various urban fantasy ideas I’ve thought up over the past decade, and one of those is the way birdfolk and artificial birdgirls work. I created the idea several years ago (possibly before I even published Spellblade, but I forget) for fun, and it had a few driving factors in the worldbuilding.

The biggest is that birdgirls rarely have much detail on the egg side of things. It’s often a target of fetishes, for obvious reasons, but if you have a society of birdpeople then they have to reproduce. This is easy for ordinary demihumans, and even reptilian demihumans are often handwaved as laying live young, but avian demihumans frequently are depicted as laying eggs. How does that work?

From a biological perspective, it’s kind of weird for a mammal to lay eggs, but let’s ignore that. One of the first big problems was that actual birds, like pretty much all animals (including humans), lay their eggs on a consistent cycle that is independent of sexual activity. This felt both inefficient and extremely arduous to me. A monthly menstruation cycle is one thing. Laying an egg, or a clutch of eggs, on a regular enough basis to allow children (which would likely also be monthly) would be ridiculous. So I felt that there needed to be a trigger for the ovulation cycle of birdgirls, compared to humans.

When it came to the commercialized egg-laying and consumption part, it gets complicated.

The idea of a cold industry that pumps out huge numbers of birdgirl eggs to meet demand, and that also uses marketing to induce that demand (and has normalized the consumption of it, particularly among the middle-class and wealthier), feels fairly normal to me. Not in a “oh, this is part of a functioning society” as much as “if an entire race of birdgirls emerged tomorrow, this would absolutely be a thing within a few decades because this is what reality is like.” Capitalists gonna capitalize.

The industry itself is intentionally idol-like, which you get hints of in the books but you probably don’t really notice. This is because it merges the factory-farm approach of actual chicken farms with how the entertainment industry works, because that’s deep. Also, when people will buy bathwater of a specific influencer, I’m pretty sure they’ll be down to buy special orders of their eggs, too.

This is where the birdgirl transformatives come in. Especially in Mob’s setting. There simply aren’t enough birdgirls to satisfy demand—and in Mob’s setting, the job is synonymous with being a pornstar and controversial among birdfolk—so humans get drafted/convinced to take special drugs and lay eggs for money. This also ties into the factory farming aesthetic. There’s even special certifications for eggs laid by birdgirls to separate them from artificial birdgirl eggs for the connoisseurs, because provenance is a big deal these days.

Anyway, with the background out of the way (even if I may have weirded you out more than I successful defended myself), let’s talk proper details.

Egg Laying 101

Birdgirls don’t lay eggs ordinarily. They also can’t get pregnant. I’m not going into nitty-gritty about sexual maturity ages or other weirdly detailed stuff, because I haven’t really thought about that (it’s not really relevant to my worldbuilding).

The trigger for egg-laying is having sex, as male semen tells their body to gear up to produce eggs for fertilization. Birdgirls probably still have periods, as I imagine they need to keep their reproductive system going and it’s faster to produce eggs if they have something going at all times.

Once a birdgirl has entered her “egg-laying phase,” she starts forming eggs that can be fertilized by semen. The time it takes to form eggs varies by birdgirl subspecies—smaller species like sparrows and finches lay every day, while mid-sized ones like harpies are weekly, and bigger birbs like penguins or eagles might take a month. Longer laying periods mean more eggs at once, and the birds get big. Different egg sizes, too.

Birdgirls will lay unfertilized eggs if they don’t have reliable sex while laying eggs. Once they stop having sex for a while, their body calms down again and they stop. Again, longer egg-laying periods require more sex for reliable fertilization (although monthly layers could probably chart the period they need to have sex before the clutch has effectively formed, and then slow down afterward—it’s probably rough being the boyfriend of a big birbgirl for the week of fertilization).

Contraception exists to prevent eggs from being fertilized no matter what, however. This means all eggs will be unfertilized, even if the birdgirl continues having sex to remain in an egg-laying phase. You can probably see where this is going.

If a fertilized egg is laid, then there’s a child in there and there’s a whole literal magical process to produce a baby birdfolk (smaller eggs would rapidly swell in size, for instance). I’ll work out the details for this if it ever becomes relevant for Nicki.

That’s the natural process. Nature at work and all that.

Battery Hens

Just like chicken farms spent a long time maximizing egg production by shoving hens in tiny cages and ensuring their eggs were rapidly removed, the same goes for producing eggs with birdgirls.

Birdgirl egg production in Mob’s world is both legal and fairly grim. It requires the people involved to take numerous drugs to speed up the process, ensure all eggs are unfertilized, stop STDs, and probably also to remain sexually aroused.

Hens are paid by the egg, with rates that would vary based on egg type, weight, quality etc. Unless the hen has something special, her quality is probably considered “normal” (i.e. nobody will pay extra for her eggs), although real birdgirls get more than artificial birdgirls (more on them later). This means laying as many eggs as fast as possible is how hens make a living. Hence the reliance on drugs that can induce larger clutch sizes and let a birdgirl lay multiple times a day (or a monthly birdgirl lay in a day at all).

Supply limitations would still take effect, however. Even with the process sped up, it’s harder to get more of the bigger eggs (from the species that lay less often) so they’re worth more. There would also be floor prices thanks to the reliance on drugs, but this can also be handled by the companies just being enforcing horrible working conditions and booting out hens that don’t lay enough.

Basically, if you’re laying ordinary eggs for any big company that then packages, ships them, and sells them (which would be an international business, as many countries don’t have large birdfolk populations), then you’re a battery hen. The pay is good enough to keep you in the job vs just going somewhere else, but nowhere near enough to let you do it for a few years and then pay off your mortgage or college debt (as strippers sometimes do).

Smaller operations like the shady brothels that lay eggs live for customers are different, and would pay premium rates (as it’s way more personal). And there’s also the influencer side of the industry.

But a significant part of why rates are so poor for the birbs is because of…

Artificial Birdgirls

So, in case it wasn’t clear, the fact that birdgirl transformatives are the only stable transformative prior to roughly the year of the book (to the extent Vince is wary of touching any) and they’re connected to a huge industry isn’t a coincidence. There’s money to be made.

There are two sides to the birdgirl transformatives: the fashion side, and the egg-laying side.

The fashion side exists for PR reasons. This might come up in the actual books, but basically, the companies behind the transformatives (and the big birdgirl egg companies) made turning into a birdgirl popular before they used it to make money. This makes it harder to regulate and/or ban, as well as easier to fund media scare campaigns against politicians they don’t like. The PR has stuck, in large part because having pretty wings and feathers for a day is an easy glow-up and popular with celebrities, as well as pushed as a lifestyle change (good for midlife crises).

The egg-laying side is purely economics. If a company can make more from the eggs they get from an artificial birdgirl than they spend on the transformative, they make a profit. This also has a the side-effect of driving down the rates they pay other birdgirls that lay the same size eggs (different transformatives for different species, FYI, although it’s not recommended for humans to lay eggs as a bigger species even with a sped-up process). The company can keep a fixed profit margin per egg, meaning they don’t really lose out, although the usual opportunity cost dynamics start coming into play for the workers.

This is also why there are certifications for real birdgirl eggs, as they effectively act as protection for the rates of birdgirls vs artificial birdgirls. Egg companies aren’t necessarily owned or run by birdfolk, although the companies behind the artificial birdgirls are. So there’s tensions at play there.

Influencer Hens

Finally, the idol aspect of the industry.

While birdgirl eggs are very much a luxury as is, there’s an even higher tier of bougie consumption with specially graded eggs, competitions, awards etc. Rare species of birdgirls would also be popular, particularly those that are harder for artificial birdgirls to replicate or produce eggs of.

Basically, conspicuous consumption in a nutshell. Hens with something special to offer get pulled aside and paid better rates, because there are customers who will pay a lot more. Part of that involves the hens being treated right etc.

Above even that are the influencer hens. If a birdgirl is attractive, photogenic, easy to work with, and ideally has special qualities above, then she can make a name for herself and effectively sell personally branded eggs. It would go beyond eggs, too. They would do sponsorships (e.g. a high-class restaurant specifically partners with a famous hen-or hens), advertisements etc. The dancing birdgirl from the ads in Book 1 is one of these.

Nicki’s sister, Bree, is in-between these levels. Harpies don’t have anything special to offer, but she’s good at what she does and if her eggs can fetch a higher price, that makes her good value to the company. And even if she hasn’t broken out as an influencer so she can sell special runs of eggs at eye-watering prices (which probably take a fucking long time to lay), she would have special orders to fulfill.

There would also be a less public side, like with the brothels. Birdgirls who make a name in the local area for laying eggs, doing house-calls etc. Humans are very good at creating all sorts of seedy stuff, but I won’t go into that as I’d just be making stuff up at this point.

Controversy

So, this is both an icky subject to readers (humanoids laying eggs that are then eaten) but also to the people in-setting. While birdgirl eggs are a popular commodity, not everyone eats them, much like there are popular foods that many people avoid.

More than that, as you can tell from the way Nicki talks about her friends and family that participate in the industry, laying eggs for money isn’t perceived well. The job involves having constant sex to stimulate the birdgirl’s body into laying eggs, plus the innately sexual nature of laying eggs over and over. There’s a reason there are brothels dedicated to it and they pay more than industrialized egg-laying.

I imagine even at the influencer level there’d be a PR stink around them. These are women who make their money through sex, even if that’s only part of the process to lay eggs. Whether backdoor deals happen or not, everyone would believe they do. The industry would have a strong association with porn—or at least, the egg-layers would.

There’s probably a lot of PR to separate the birdgirl eggs from the women who lay them, but I’ll admit I haven’t dove in that far and don’t plan to. Getting into cultural stuff vs “this is a huge weird thing in society” is a big difference, so this is where it ends.

All this is a big part of why a lot of birdgirls would work Wings gigs over laying eggs. They don’t want to sell their bodies for less-than-stellar pay (or at all), and it has a stigma attached to it. That stigma is stronger in birdfolk society than outside it.

I saw some chatter about whether Nicki or Bree was more of a black sheep, or if Nicki’s parents were “proud” of Bree. Nicki certainly copped some shit from her parents at Christmas. She has a rocky family relationship and the fact she doesn’t want to be a harpy is a big part of it. But Bree certainly isn’t the golden child or anything. She makes good money and Nicki loves her, but I chose her to back Nicki in the family dispute more to show that Nicki’s family situation isn’t a complete wreck. If anything, Bree and Nicki are both black sheep and hung out together on Christmas.

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This is easily the weirdest post I’ve made on Patreon, to be honest. I’m curious how many people made it all the way through, or dropped it partway. I’m expected it to have worse stats than most of Messengers posts due to the subject matter.

Beyond the grim exploitation stuff (which is endemic to the setting), the crux is that Mob doesn’t feature a society of weirdos eating birdfolk fetuses in their eggs. Also that my brain sometimes has too much free time.

Anyway, feel free to ask questions if you have them. Or, uh, bring up anything at all.