In the book I am writing, I am the narrator and the... well, antagonist is not really the right word, but it's close. I'm the trickster spirit whose going to learn a valuable lesson while mucking about with mortals.
And there is this mentor of the two lead characters named Boamäo
Boamäo's name means "the meaning of evasion or escape". Rem chose it remself. Also, rem is a sailor.
In the scene we are currently writing, we learn that Boamäo has encountered me before, and resents the results of that interaction, and holds a grudge.
What we haven't figured out is what happened.
The rules work like this:
I am the process of Entropy itself given autonomous spiritual form.
I try to help people.
I have also been very deliberately coaxing the people of Boamäo's world to build their first generational starship, and that's had some unfortunate side effects on their cultures.
I have conscious power over the way that energy moves through my local vicinity. But in order to be conscious, I have to inhabit a sufficiently complex system.
I also cannot do anything to anyone without their subconscious consent. If they consciously revoke that consent, I must leave them alone. Not many people actually know this, however.
In order to be seen or heard, I must at least partially inhabit a person's neural system and cause them to hallucinate me.
In this story, I have a history of successfully convincing people that I want to help them, and coming to some sort of agreement as to how to do so. But then the effects of my efforts are later seen as disastrous.
Except in one set of cases: Any time a child is lost in the dark and I encounter them, I successfully lead them home without harm coming to them in any way.
So, knowing all of this, what would be a good and interesting previous incident between me and Boamäo?
Using blender to start sketching out the planet of Kepekape, so that we can better visualize the setting for Gesetele's Arrow.
We positioned the cursor to be right where Hinbeg city is, where the story starts. The heroes are currently on a boat headed to one of the islands slightly north of there, to go camping.
The region has a very similar climate to the Pacific Northwest.
We haven't placed any rivers yet, but there is one that goes past the city, and has an outlet in the bay there.
here are the most recent lines I've written for Gesetele's Arrow, which is slated to be finished and published after @ashwin-the-artless' trilogy are done. I went back to the most comprehensible line, so it makes some sense. This makes it long. This is me as narrator and a character in the story:
And then there was Boamäo.
I didn’t care about Boamäo.
I had encountered Boamäo before, apparently. And from all of my reactions to rem, I was done with rem.
Which isn’t to say that I felt any ill will toward rem, or even resentment that rem was present. Just that, for the purposes of this particular exercise, rem mattered as much as one of the flying fish that was escorting rems boat across the sound toward the Northern fjords.
But, for some reason, I felt like that shouldn’t be the case. And that little flicker of a doubt might have been an indicator of something.
Was I on the verge of changing my mind about all of this? Or was it something more personal, more reflective of my own growth? Was I beginning to care about mortals on their own terms, somehow? And if the latter was true, what did that bode in regards to my identity and place in the universe?
Even now, was I still me?
And then a really weird question presented itself, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
Did I even like myself?
And as I asked myself that question, the echos of something Näofregbi had said resurfaced in what passed for my own psyche just then.
“In my short lifetime, I’ve seen everything get worse because of that project.”
It was almost as if Näofregbi had found me and uttered the words again to make sure I remembered them.
---
anyway, I am always it, and now I've tagged you.
Yes, you.
I have started the second chapter of my first novel. I don't imagine I'll write many other novels, as this system has a lot of writers in it who should get to write.
But I'm very proud of these words. Here is an excerpt:
---
Being party to two nervous systems gave me enough faculties to do some interesting and fun things.
I have since learned that this would not have been as easy on a new planet with people who are not familiar with me. I had grown up with the Kepekapeans, so I had forgotten how much I’d struggled at first.
As it was then, however, I was able to vibrate the air arbitrarily to form my greeting. And then, following that, I pulled together a confluence of breeze, light from the sun, tree branches and leaves and the shadows they cast, and enough neurons from my two new friends to create the illusion of a shadowy figure standing in the path between them and the city they wanted to return to.
It was half coincidental shadow play and half hallucination.
The reaction I got from either of them was not what I was intending to receive, but it was informative and interesting anyway. If I’d had all of my memories, I would have predicted it before I’d acted. But I wasn’t exactly surprised.
Very little ever surprises me.
Eyes wide, backs arched, they both backed up a step and froze, mouths gaping. Little Näofregbi was in front of towering Binwen, if seen from where my shadow vision lay. And they were framed by the gently swaying leaves and fronds of the foliage around them, with glints of direct sunlight filtering through the indigo trees behind their heads.
I extrapolated that image from the physics around me, but otherwise I was actually seeing things through their eyes.
I decided to nudge them back toward verbal thinking, and continued my greeting.
“I am Mau,” I said, and had my visage twist to demonstrate the lack of a tail, denoting that the pronoun ‘yem’ belonged to me. I could give myself any tail I wanted. I wanted that pronoun, and the connotations it carried.
Also, turning sideways to show your tail was an extreme formality in their culture at the time, treated as deferential and very friendly. During mating season, it would be evocative, of course, but it was not mating season.
Kepekapean v.s. Ktletaccete (what are these things?)
We've described this before, but it feels good to rewrite it to try to see if we can make it more clear, or update what we've said in the past.
There are two realities here: factual, and our fictional canon.
Factual
The factual definitions of these words are really simple:
Kepekape is our body, our vessel, and a Kepekapean is someone who lives in our vessel.
Ktlettacete means "child of Eh and Jenifer" and describes those of us who are descended from our two eldest.
We have some members who are Kepekapeans but not Ktletaccete: Jenifer, Eh, Phage, and the Outsiders (12 in number). There might a few others who are relatively new, but we haven't met them yet.
And that's it. That's all the words mean in relationship to our system.
Though, us Ktletaccete, and our two parents, have some traits of identity that we've worked into our fictional canon to inspire it. We're shapeshifting autistic dragons, who tend to take a form that reflects our individual special interests. There's more to it than that, but that's for a different kind of post (an upcoming reblog of this one, perhaps?).
Fictional Canon
This goes for the Sunspot Chronicles, and their related series of books.
In this reality, Kepekape is the original home planet of the Ktletaccete. So, in this sense, Kepekapean is used to refer to denizens of that planet, and Ktletaccete is used to refer to both them and their descendants.
But, that's how the words are used by the time of the Sunspot. Prior to that, it was different. There've been so many cultures and civilizations that the uses of these word have been through multiple iterations of change.
Originally, Ktletaccete referred specifically to the children of Eh, the Great One who made the world out of their own body. And they were closer to gods than to any species of life. There were precisely 900,000 of them, and they spoke a language called Fenekere, that is still in use today as the command languages of the Exodus Ships, such as the Sunspot.
And the mortal people of Kepekape called themselves Kepakepo, or Kepekapeans. (Kapekapean is the English translation of Kepakepo). And the thing is, etymologically, Kepakepo refers to all things produced by the planet. But, by the time the first Exodus Ship was built, the language had changed more than enough that there were other words used to refer to life in general.
It's like humans calling themselves Earthlings, really. Because bugs, bears, octopi, whales, birds, trees, fungus, bacteria, and everything other organism of life on this planet are also Earthlings.
But, anyway, the people who were about to become space-faring, who called themselves Kepekapeans, were metamorphic descendants of the six limbed clades of vertibrates.
They hatched from eggs and raised in brood ponds as tadpoles by Brood Guardians, and when they hit metamorphosis (their version of puberty) they would take an adult form that was adapted to their own personal emotional, social, environmental, and behavioral needs.
Most of them had started dropping the third pair of limbs, being four limbed people. And each person would take a shape and form that could be classified by tail type, and given a pronoun accordingly, but that was otherwise extremely unique. Some had feathers, others scales, others hair, and others none of these things but a thick protective mucus membrane. Many had a mix of these traits. Some retained their gills, while others didn't. Configurations of horns varied. Some developed wings and could fly. Others kept fins or developed flippers, and stayed in the water. Most walked on land.
And if a human were to look at any one of them, that human would think they are seeing an amphibian dragon.
Meanwhile, their Ktletaccete deities lived in their collective psyches, and their information network, sometimes manifesting as an incarnation in one body or another in order to shape the direction of civilization and cultivate live.
The Ktletaccete were divided into two camps: those who wished to explore the rest of the universe, and those who wished to focus on the health and safety of life on Kepekape. Sometimes they fought, and there were wars, and the Kepekapeans weren't entirely aware of why.
But eventually, right about when the first Exodus Ship was nearing completion, the Ktletaccete came to an agreement with each other, and with a group of Beshakete (Outsiders) who'd taken refuge on the planet, and with the Kepekapeans, and they formed the Great Alliance.
Which they called the ʔinmara ( @theinmara ).
Some forgotten number of Exodus Ships later, the Sunspot would start to recover some of this history thanks to the memories of Mau (or Phage, @ohthatphage), and start writing books about it. But, when they relearned who they were, they started applying the words a little differently, because they didn't have all the information at first.
From this historic perspective, the denizens of the Sunspot can be called Sunspotians, or ʔetekeyerrinwufni. Though, they've taken to calling themselves Ktletaccete, and have no clue that their former deities still exist and walk amongst them (this may never be revealed in the books).
The reason that the Evolutionary Engines of the Sunspot are so successful at producing such a wide diversity of the populace (who are grown from incubators, and undergo metamorphosis before hatching from their eggs) is that it's based on the original genetics and epigenetics of their Kepekapean ancestors, who were already evolved to be highly adaptable in that way.
Eventually, the Sunspot made contact with Earth through use of the Tunnel Apparatus and a probe placed on the planet 22 million years ago by an ancestor ship that was passing by, and this is why you are reading about it now.
They hatched in adjoining brooding ponds around the same time, and became friends before either of them could talk, before their adolescent metamorphosis. Both of them are Kepekapeans (Ktletaccete from their home planet, Kepekape).
During metamorphosis, Kepekapeans take on dramatically different physiological traits in reaction to childhood stimuli from their parents, peers, environment, pathogens, favorite foods, and personal interests. This frequently makes it look like they're from different species, but they're not.
Näofregbi is a loner, a natural recluse, which is common enough that most Kepekapean cultures accept them as they are. Gem lives on gems own tiny plot of land with a wild garden of trees and hedges surrounding a pond and a workshed. Gems Art is pottery.
Binwen hasn't found nem's Art yet, and so dabbles in everything.
Binwen is not a loner, and like most other Kepekapeans prefers to be in the company of at least two or more people. However, nems six arms set nem enough apart from everyone else that nem frequently feels alienated. Fortunately, nem is best friends with Näofregbi, who seems reasonably happy to have Binwen around.
Unfortunately, pairs and couples are what are truly met with suspicion amongst most Kepekapeans. If you don't have a third party to keep you in check, you could be up to something. And this is really what has always set the two apart from the rest of their community.
They're both in their thirties, by Kepekapean years, which makes them around sixty or so Earth years old.
Their story takes place millions of Sunspot years before the Sunspot Chronicles, which also means they predate humanity and possibly most life on Earth, even accounting for astronomical distances. Relativity does some weird shit and makes it hard to calculate.
Their culture is very advanced, though. Their government is building the first Exodus Ship, using construction nanites to harvest and shape mass from various asteroids and comets in their stellar system to build a vessel that is approximately 2,600 kilometers long and capable of carrying billions of people.
They will not be on the ship when it leaves, but their adventures will shape the fate of the Sunspot anyway.
