Part of the Applied Worldbuilding Series
There is a moment, known only to the Volorsky children and a handful of people who have stumbled into the right living room at the right time, when Boris Volorsky — Biology Chair at Brooklyn College, former Mr. Russia, the man whose suits have been tailored to the same exacting standard since 1987 — puts on music and starts to move.
It is not what you would predict.
You would predict a lot of things about Boris from the outside. You would predict the precision. The discipline. The immovable professional standards and the particular way he has of making a lecture hall feel like a place where exactitude is not optional. You might even predict the piano — there is something in the methodical quality of serious musicianship that fits what you can read from the biology professor's surface. But the dancing is something else. The dancing is Boris at full extension: not the professor, not the bodybuilder, not the man in the tailored suit, but something underneath all of that — fluid and committed and genuinely joyful in a way that takes people by surprise every time.
His children, all eight of them, have grown up with this. They are not surprised. It is simply part of what their father is.
The question worth asking — the worldbuilding question, the one that matters — is why.
Two Different Things
Before anything else, it is worth separating two concepts that are easy to collapse into each other.
A species propensity is something that belongs to the whole species. Every Lupenite has endurance. Every Ursinian has a certain settled, unhurried quality that does not experience urgency the way smaller species do. Every Leonite carries a natural authority of presence that enters a room before they do. These are not skills. They are not achievements. They are what the coat comes with — distributed evenly across the species, owned by every member simply by virtue of being that kind of person.
A God-given gift is something different entirely. A gift belongs to the individual. It is not distributed by species. It does not appear in every Lupenite or every Jabutun or every Ursinian — it appears in this Lupenite, this Jabutun, this Ursinian, and not necessarily in the one standing next to them. It is what a specific soul was given, as a specific person, independent of what coat that soul arrived in.
This distinction matters enormously for how you build a world — and for how you write the people in it.
My world runs on the Imago Dei principle: these are people, made in the image of God, with individual souls that carry individual purpose. The soul is not a copy of the species. The gift is not a property of the coat. And the most interesting characters — the ones who feel fully real — are almost always the ones where the gift and the propensity are running in the same body, shaping each other, producing something that could not have come from either one alone.
What Boris Got from the Coat, and What He Didn't
Boris's species gave him the things you can predict: the endurance that made a decades-long training regimen feel like a natural extension of daily life, the group-coordination instinct that makes him an unusually attentive teacher, the physical build that made competitive bodybuilding a reasonable chapter of his biography.
None of that explains the piano.
Boris started playing at six, taught by his maternal grandmother — a woman who had spent decades as a cook in the Kremlin and brought the same demanding perfectionism to the piano bench that she brought to everything else. She was not soft about it. She expected things. And the remarkable part is not that she was demanding — it is that Boris flourished under it. The gift responded to the pressure the way good material responds to good tools: it didn't break. It became what it was always going to be.
His mother, Krystal — born Krystal Rudikov, from a family with roots in the old Rurikid line — had taken formal tap and ballroom dancing when she was young. Her father had been an architect, a man who understood that precision and beauty are not opposites. The gift for making something move correctly, whether a building or a body, ran in that side of the family. That gift went into Boris too — not as a career, not as a plan, but as a physical inheritance waiting to find its moment.
The moment arrived in 1983, when a thirteen-year-old Boris in a three-room Moscow apartment crowded with parents, siblings, and grandparents watched Michael Jackson perform on television and understood, with the clarity that only genuine recognition produces, what was possible.
He taught himself. That is the part people miss. Boris did not take dance lessons. He watched the recordings until he had memorized what he was seeing, and then he went and did it — imperfectly at first, then less imperfectly, then well, then better than well. The endurance that came from his coat meant he could practice longer than most people are willing to. But the gift — the ability to feel music as movement, to translate one into the other — that did not come from the biology. That was Boris's.
His father Gustav, watching his son move across the floor of their small apartment, was reportedly not surprised. Gustav was a carpenter and a weight trainer, a man who had always understood that people are made with specific capacities for specific things, and that the job of a father is to watch for what those things are and then not get in the way of them. What Boris was given to do, Gustav recognized. He let him do it.
Thousands of Jabutuns
Here is the clearest version of the distinction.
Michael Jackson is a Jabutun — Large Grade II, the long, light-limbed build of a cheetah, a species known for being among the fastest on earth. The Jabutun propensity that is most relevant to what Michael does is perceptual: a Jabutun can consciously slow their experience of time, processing the world at a rate that makes everything appear to move in a kind of extended present. It is not always on. It is a tool, available when they choose to reach for it.
This is real, and it is relevant. When Michael Jackson executes a move with that particular precision — the hold at the end of a spin, the placement of a foot that lands exactly where it needs to land — the perceptual ability of his species is part of what makes it possible to perform at that level of exactitude. The coat contributed something.
But there are thousands of Jabutuns. There has always been only one Michael Jackson.
The perceptual ability is what the species gave him. The musicality — the specific gift for understanding exactly how the body should respond to a specific beat at a specific moment — that is what God gave him. The first is distributed across every Jabutun alive. The second was given to one person.
What makes Michael Jackson Michael Jackson is not the coat. It is the gift inside the coat, expressed through the specific capacities the coat provides, in a combination that belongs to no one else.
What Larissa Was Given
Larissa Volorsky models. She is good at it — good in a way that involves more than simply being present in front of a camera, though that is part of it.
The physical gift is real and cannot be dismissed: she is tall at 6'3", with the particular proportions and presence that make a modeling career viable at a professional level. That is something God gave her — not something she chose or trained for, but something she arrived with.
But the physical gift alone does not explain the career.
Larissa is the daughter of a former Moscow mayor. Her mother, Mariska, is a Countess. The access that made modeling a realistic path — the introductions, the doors that opened before she ever had to knock — that did not come from her biology. That came from where God placed her. The circumstances of her birth were themselves a form of gift: a platform she did not earn but was given, through which the physical gifts she did have were able to find their audience.
This is worth naming, because it complicates the account in a useful way. We tend to think of gifts as abilities — things you can do that other people can't. But in the full theological picture, gifting includes circumstance. It includes the family you are born into, the moment you arrive in, the doors that were already standing open before you got there. Larissa's story is not simply “she was beautiful, so she modeled.” It is “God gave her a form, and placed her in a family that had already built access, and both of those things together made her career possible.” The gift was multi-part. She didn't earn either part. She used both.
What the Coat Can't Decide
There is a temptation, in any world where species differences are real and visible, to let the biology do too much of the work — to let the coat explain the person.
My world resists this at every level. Every Lupenite has endurance; not every Lupenite is a scientist. Every Ursinian has steadiness; not every Ursinian ends up in IT security solving problems with a coffee in hand. Every Jabutun has extraordinary speed and an optional perceptual gift; only one of them is Michael Jackson.
The coat shapes what you work with. It gives you the physical substrate — the lung capacity, the build, the natural temperament — through which a gift will eventually find its expression. But it does not give the gift. It does not decide what you are specifically for, or what will light up in you when you encounter the right material, or which particular capacity will become the one that defines you.
That is what the soul is for. And the soul, made in the image of God, is not a copy of the species. It is its own thing: arriving in a coat, shaped by the coat, but not determined by it.
Boris's coat gave him the endurance to practice a thing ten thousand times and not give up. His gift gave him something worth practicing. The coat kept him at the piano. The gift is why the piano meant something.
You need both. But they are not the same, and conflating them produces characters who feel like illustrations of their species rather than people who happen to be wearing one.
The question is always: what did God give this person, to do this thing, in a way that no one else does it quite the same way?
That is the question that makes a character real.
— Eric Flegal
Part of the Applied Worldbuilding Series
What is the gift in one of your characters that has nothing to do with their species — the thing they can do that their biology can't explain? Tell me in the comments.
