Ok, this has been bugging me and there's not topic that I spotted in a cursory scan of the first two pages sooo...
For purposes of comparison, I'll say humans can live to 100 and Keidrans can live to 25. Few Keidrans live to 25, but then, few humans live to 100. That means one human year is 4 Keidran years.
Flora is 11. Mentally and physically she seems to be, in human term, 18ish and probably not older than 21. On the other hand, she's being offered in an arranged marriage and in many cultures those are generally done much younger, possibly as early as 14 or 15.
Flora is 11. That's nearly halfway through her lifespan--the direct conversion would be 44. Animals that only live to 20 generally mature very quickly--it seems to me that even given that an intelligent being needs more time to mature they can't afford to take more than six or seven years to be fully grown.
I can accept Flora still looking like that at 11, since with such a short lifespan and an inability to give birth to litters (I'm assuming...), even with a shorter gestation period a Keidran female would need a longer period of fertility to keep the race going.
However, if Flora was already several years a full Keidran woman she would definitely be more mentally and emotionally mature than she is. That's just my opinion from a biological point of view, and from the common sense standpoint that no race can afford to spend half its lifespan as a child.
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