#ktletaccete

[theinmara]

Chapter 13: "Father from the Truth" of ANNE ELLIPSIS is up, and a heck of a lot of things happen in it!

The Lost Transition of Anne Ellipsis

They say that some changes are permanent. It’s true, too. But it's never the things that people expect. In 2013, J. knew she was trans. Bu

[your-tutor-abacus]

The Color of the Sunspot's Milk

We don't drink milk on the Sunspot.

It's not really a thing for us.

We did not evolve from mammals, so we do not produce milk ourselves, typically. Actually, our life can't really be divided up into the same categories as Terran life, anyway, and the Evolutionary Engines that are used to create people now produce such a diversity of biological development that we can't use sweeping statements like that meaningfully. But, we strongly suspect based on evidence at hand that the Ktletaccete did not originally have anything like mammary glands.

And, on the Sunspot specifically, we do not consume anything produced by animals. It just never even occurred to the Founding Crew to set up the ship and our culture that way. The ecological balance of the Garden requires that we let the fauna live as naturally as possible without interference from people. So, we do not milk animals.

But it turns out that we drink something that is kinda of vaguely like milk. It often serves a similar culinary utility, particularly in baking.

We know this because we have been talking to our Earth custodians of the Terran Tunnel Apparatus, and they have tried a product they call Ryze that is an approximation of what we use on the Sunspot, and we've been trading notes.

So, in the search for accommodation, the ancestors of the Sunspot Ktletaccete developed a mixture of pureed fungus and algae that could provide a very young child or a disabled or elderly person with nutrients that might not otherwise be readily available to them. And we have been calling this something that our translators have decided to call "formula". We understand that this echoes the term many of you use for a fortified milk that you feed your infants, and that's acceptable.

But our formula comes in many varieties, customized for each person's needs and even each use they might have for it.

Fungal and algae farming has always been abundant and easy for us, so it is the least expensive food to create. It may not have been central to the diet of ancient Ktletaccete, but it has become pivotal to survival in space aboard our Exodus Ships. And now we use it in nearly everything.

We also eat a variety of nuts, fruits, grains, tubers, leaves, stalks, and other vegetable matter (or their Sunspot equivalents to what these words mean to you). And some of those things provide proteins and lipids that compliment what is provided by our various formulas, so depending on how we combine it we can create foods that sometimes resemble your breads, quiches, meat loafs, stews, etc.

But, also, Artisan crafted beverages is a huge thing here, which I understand some of your cultures might relate to. And our formula is central to that.

So, what are the main differences between our formula and milk? And what are the differences between our formula and something like Ryze?

Well, obvious, our formula is made entirely differently from milk, and does not share it's color. It's not white or even white-ish, typically.

Though some varieties of it can come close to white so that Artisans can add vibrant colors to it more easily without it turning brown, but the processing tends to remove a lot of nutrients from it, so it's not terribly popular outside of that visual utility.

It's also usually somewhat low on lipids, though those are definitely added for many baking purposes.

It's more of a suspension than an emulsion most of the time, as a result. But again, that varies on it's purpose.

And because of that, and the fact that it's made from fungus and algae, makes it very similar to things like Ryze, which is apparently currently available for something you call "a lot of money" by purchasing it over your Network (or Internet, as you say).

There are other drinks like Ryze, but it so happens that the girlfriend of our counterparts purchased Ryse specifically, so that is the one that they are trying. In particular, they are trying Ryze Matcha, as opposed to Ryse Coffee, since we don't have anything remotely like a coffee bean on the Sunspot, but we do have a green stimulant kind of vaguely like Matcha that can be added to our formula.

We can't really truly compare the sensations of drinking our various forumlas to drinking Ryze, because there is an enormous physical gulf between the Earth and the Sunspot, and we cannot transport either liquid nor taste buds and nervous systems across that distance. And translating words, even with in the same language, between two individuals' personal experiences is inherently inaccurate to begin with.

But we can make some conjectures.

As far as flavor is concerned, we can infer some things. Humans are omnivors with a variety of sensitivities to flavors, and apparently our counterparts are something called a supertaster. They are more highly sensitive to flavor than their typical peers.

They report that Ryze Matcha tastes "green". Not just that it is green in color and therefore the flavor it has can be described as green, but that it reminds them of other green things that they have eaten. There is a bit of a spinach flavor, they report, but its very faint. There is also a faint green tea flavor. We don't know what either of these things really mean, but we know that spinach is a leafy vegetable and that green tea is also made from leaves. But then, they also say that these flavors are not like either of these things, either. They're similar but different.

More specifically, they report that Ryze Matcha does not taste like most mushrooms they've eaten. In fact, it bears a closer resemblance to the flavors they get when they drink from an old jug of water that maybe has some green stuff growing on the inside of it.

"Why would you do that?" I asked them.

And they replied with, "Carelessness."

Anyway, this seems relatively in keeping with our experiences with formula. Usually, it tastes kind of like some other vegetable matter, but different. But, whether those ways are similar to how humans experience Ryse and vegetables on Earth, we really don't know.

What we do know for sure is color. That's something that can be measured quite precisely via the wavelengths of light.

Of course, we may perceive that color differently than you, but thanks to technological measuring devices and mathematics, we can use the same names for the same wavelengths of light. So, when I say that something is green on the Sunspot, you will be able to trust that if you somehow visited your neurology will interpret that thing as what you know of as green, adjusting for the difference in our ambient lighting, of course.

And, yes, some formulas we use are nearly as green as Ryze Matcha, and they are gorgeous.

But most formula ends up in a wide spectrum of color between what you call khaki and a deep vibrant purple, thanks to the dominant colors of most fungi and algae found on the Sunspot.

Our sun produces more ultraviolet light than yours does and there is less shielding between it and the surface of the Garden, so most of our plant life has developed its own shielding, which comes in varieties of purple. Mostly, it's the algae that carries the purple coloring. Most of our fungus isn't green, either, but even when it is, the purples of the algae shift the colors to brown when mixed with it.

But green mosses, ferns, and algae are found in the darkest, deepest parts of our forests, where the sun never reaches the ground directly, and we find that color to be captivating, so our ancestors bred a small variety of green food algae strains specifically for culinary variety.

And the flavor of that stuff is definitely what we could call green.

[fenmere]

An Analysis of our Spiritual Identities

Just as we have striven to explore our spirituality with as little outside influence as possible, we ask that you do not take what we've written here to be any sort of prescription for your own life and spirituality.

Don't put us or our spirituality into any box of your own making (whether that's religious or scientific). But also, don't put your own spirituality (or psychology) in our box, either!

Still, you might find our way of thinking interesting, and it might spark ideas for your own exploration, so we share it. But mostly we just want people to know what we we are and how we experience ourselves.

Below is a fairly long, but partially bullet pointed, breakdown of how we got to our spiritual beliefs and what they are. And also, how we are Other (or therian/otherkin/not-human):

This all represents the averages of our strongest and most widely held model of spirituality. We are a population, and therefore hold a variety of beliefs. This does not describe those other beliefs.

What we’ve experienced:

We have memories from outside of our system. In the case of our two eldest, Jenifer and Eh, they have memories from before we were born. In the case of our walk-ins, they have memories of before joining us. These memories are not elaborate or detailed, nor are they narrative, but they are strong and persistent, with a singular sense of time (of occurring “before”), and are experiential and associated with a sense of identity.

Despite being raised in a culture that persistently and constantly works to coerce it’s members into taking on proscribed identities, we have always reacted to that as if those identities (human, singular, male, etc.) were wrong.

When we relax and listen to our inner memories and reflexes, we get a clear sense of what we are on a fundamental level: not-human, plural, not-male, etc.

So far, all apparent encounters with the seemingly supernatural that we’ve had can be traced back to headmate activity.

Actual specific identities that we have latched onto, however, can all be traced to ideas and concepts found in human culture. This, of course, simply means that identities that fall outside of that just cannot be approximately described by the language we have. A number of us fall outside that range, so we do have a control. And, even most of us who can be described as “dragons” are still very different from most dragons ever described by humanity. Similarly with those of us who are girls.

We have not really experienced anything outside of this, in regards to spirituality. We have our upbringing, with a progressive Lutheranism imposed upon us by our childhood church, but not to the point where we understood what Lutheranism was. And we’ve done a lot of reading and participated in a lot of discussions about alternative belief systems. This has led us to try meditating with the goal of leaving our body or making contact with the supernatural, and we had no success in that. But we don’t count these experiences as spiritual, but instead as indoctrination.

What we know:

We are many and we keep growing.

We are fundamentally not human, though many of us are heavily influenced by human cultures, and our body was conceived by and born to a pair of humans.

We are ktletaccete and beshakete. Ktletaccete are approximately described as autistic dragons. And beshakete are previously non-living spirits that have entered our system sometime since it took its first breath, also known as Outsiders and sometimes called Elementals.

We have four categories of being, three of which correspond to genders but are not inherently genders: girls, dragons, id monsters, and Outsiders. Outsiders align with and fall into the other three categories, but are also so fundamentally different from the rest of us that they deserve their own recognition.

Our girls are a form of monster. They have the gender of girl, as a non-binary gender, but also they are all ktletaccete or beshakete, and tend to also “kin” various types of traditional monster. And they all inhabit the right hemisphere of our brain.

Our dragons frequently take human form, but are not human. They have the gender of dragon, which is an aporagender to the outside world.  Also all either ktletaccete or beshakete. And they all inhabit the left hemisphere of our brain.

Our id monsters straddle the hemispheres of our brain, falling in the middle, and might reside in our limbic system. They do tend to lean dragon or girl, but only when fronting. They took their name of id monster because they seem to represent the purposes of a part of our collective psyche that is very closely described by the concept of an id, and they almost all present as monstrous and take pride in the identity of being a monster.

What we believe:

We believe that no outworlder explanation of the supernatural is relevant to our experiences, nor a reliable guide to interpreting them. None. Even though, through our own experiments, we’ve come to a set of beliefs that most closely resembles animism, we strive not to let any school of wisdom or cultural heritage of animism influence our interpretations and further experiments. This is not to disrespect those outworlder traditions, it is to recognize that they are not ours, and that we wish to strive for the goal of developing our own beliefs purely on our own experiences. Or as close to “purely” as we can manage to do.

We are never-the-less influenced by outworlder beliefs and cultures, not the least the one we were raised in. It is a matter of constant work to question our own interpretations in that light.

We are also very obviously heavily influenced by our biology.

Because we are heavily influenced by our upbringing and our biology, we have very strong evidence for where and how we differ from what these things try to make us become, through our dysphoria and earliest and most persistent differences in identity and experiences.

Some sort of basic sense of identity can be described as a result of all of this.

With our spirituality, what we are exploring is that which outworld science cannot test, but that which our inworld science can test. We have 4 million people and counting, all experiencing things from different perspectives. Where those experiences are different and the same can tell us a lot about who and what we are.

If we are not human, and not necessarily anything described by any outworld culture, then what are we?

Those of us who are Beshakete (or Outsiders) have an easy answer for this. They are what they say they are. They have the strongest memories and senses of identity, and the least indoctrination and weakest connection to our biology. So weak, in fact, that their identities feel poorly translated into English. 

Pike, for instance, is a manifestation of the abstract concept of one dimensional force, or forwardness, or straightness, or movement. It could, in fact, be a conscious manifestation of a photon, or time itself. But none of these words, nor even its name, accurately describe or encompass the meaning of its identity when it perceives itself and its memories from before our system. Calling it Pike and the elemental of the concept of forward movement is probably good enough, though.

Phage is the mechanism by which entropy and enthalpy are processed in the universe, often given the shorthand of Entropy Itself. Of all of our Outsiders, it is the one that has most become a person, living with our system since we were two and a half years old and learning how to pretend to be human with the rest of us. But even its memories of before joining our system are as strong as Pike’s.

And no one of us who is not an Outsider has memories like that.

So, the experiences, memories, and identities of our Outsiders give us the basis for our own spiritual belief, our form of animism if we can call it that.

Their memories are consistent with the kinds of information stored in their origin systems, the elements that could be considered analogous to memories, such as a fossil in a rock or the altered path of a breeze as it flows past that rock. The more complex the original system of the Outsider, the more complex their exomemories.

And, from their memories, we learn that everything has some degree of self awareness and memory that can be carried on into any new system that accepts it.

We do not know, in the case of our Outsiders, if our human-descended brain is merely copying the identity and memories of something from another system or if it is actually playing host to an entity from outside. But we also do not know if there is any meaningful difference between those two things. But we do have considerable evidence to support a hypothesis that there is no difference but that also our Outsiders represent a transfer of consciousness in a way that our Liaisons do not.

Our Liaisons are what some people call factive and fictive introjects. In our case, however, our liaisons do not instantly gain intimate knowledge of their sources. They must learn everything through observation. They are particularly focused and savant at doing so when it comes to their individual source. But that seems to be more of a function of autistic style special interest more than anything else. And while they could be said to receive the memetics of their sources over time, they do not receive a sense of identity or exomemories in the same way that our Outsiders do.

Other systems clearly experience something different, with their factives and fictives more closely resembling our Outsiders. And maybe we don’t get spiritual factives and fictives like that because we already have our Liaisons, who are generated so quickly. They fill the role already, leaving no space for spiritual transference (if that’s actually a thing - and our Outsiders seem to suggest it is).

Anyway, all that we know is that we have Outsiders that do seem to come from their sources in some way, and factive and fictive Liaisons who do not (and therefore use the term “subject” rather than “source“ for their focus of identity).

Now, Jenifer and Eh both have a very similar set of exomemories to our Outsiders. Only, they have no identity beyond something akin to “child of the abyss, or oblivion”. Their exomemories are of previously eternal existence in darkness with just enough sense of identity to have a sense of self, but not much more than that. And they both feel that their personal identities are mostly defined by how they fit into our body and the world after that.

It is very hard for either of them to sense any sort of intrinsic property of their exomemories and identities that can be described as more than that, and so far we have nothing we can work with except the absence of characteristics.

It’s almost as if they each come from the state of existence before the Big Bang, if that really happened. Or from the fabric of spacetime itself, the state of the vacuum just before particles spontaneously form in it. But these are poetic interpretations of those memories and identities.

All we can say is that they definitively don’t come from nothingness, for they had a kind of conscious awareness that could form a memory and kernel of identity that was carried into our system as it received them during fetal development. And their memories and identities prior to joining our system were different from each other.

Different in what way? An inherent Jeniferness and an inherent Ehness that are not the same.

So, we think that Jenifer and Eh are a different kind of spirit than our Outsiders. But we don’t know how different. Is that difference the same as the difference between Pike and Phage? Or is it something more profound?

No clue. We do not have any evidence to suggest answers to those questions.

However, given all of that scant evidence, we are leaning toward favoring a particular model of spirituality and existence.

Every element, object, law, mechanism, and concept of existence has a spiritual identity associated with it. And a spirit is a localized concentration of that identity within a system that is complex enough to express it as some level of willful action.

Maybe living things, in particular animals with neurology (as those are what we’re familiar with), typically draw from a spiritual source that is the most basic, fundamental aspect of the universe, raw existence. And that’s what Jenifer and Eh are. There are clearly exceptions, if we take the accounts of outworlders at face value, but Jenifer and Eh are probably not among them.

We also have no reason to believe that a spirit that is about to be born into a human fetus is any different than a spirit that is about to be born into any other kind of animal, except where their futures are concerned.

And the reason that Jenifer and Eh are not human is because our vessel is not human. It has deviated from humanity enough that it does not belong to the species. At least, conceptually enough so that it affected our memetic development from conception (and certainly since birth). By the time we were three years old, we were looking for the correct match to our identities in examples outside of humanity. Animals, initially, but also monsters. And it’s the monsters that fit the best.

And the reason that there are two of them is because our vessel had room for and was developing to have two, instead of just one. And, it clearly developed to accommodate far more than that. But we know that our sense of gender and physical sex dysphoria is intrinsically tied to each hemisphere of our brain, meaning that our brian could not produce less than two self schemas. So, Jenifer and Eh were developing different senses of self the very instant they took root in our neurology.

Still, this is complicated further by the fact that neither Jenifer nor Eh have been perfectly malleable to outside influences. They both each have aspects of their identities that are not well defined by outworlder concepts. But this might just be due to chaotic development within an exceedingly complex system. And so far, we have no way to test whether or not that is the case. It is, however, the simplest and most likely explanation.

So, for now, we’ll roll with it, until either of them tell us differently.

The rest of us Ktletaccete are simply the children and grandchildren of Jenifer and Eh. We are what they are, further evolved and shaped by our system, but with much less of a connection to a spiritual existence outside of our system. We see that existence as only occurring after the death of our vessel, and not from before it (except through the shared memories of Jenifer and Eh).

So, we are Ktletaccete (which is a word we made up to describe ourselves), and not human, because our vessel is Ktletaccete and not human. It is the body of an autistic gyndracomorphic monster.

This isn’t to say our full identities as Ktletaccete don’t come from long before our vessel existed, nor that they come from only places other than human cultures! (We are not talking about our Outsiders here in any way.)

We are dragons and monsters because we most closely resemble and have kinship with dragons and other monsters. We inherited their memetics.

Part of our identities as Ktletaccete has always been that we’re shapeshifters. That, at least in our own adolescences, we take on forms resembling other beings. We sample, adopt, and adapt. And some of us have morphed into very human-like shapes.

Just, we have never, ever been human because our body has never, ever been human.

Outsider science may choose to define it as human, of course. The measurable differences are almost certainly not enough to satisfy its definitions of differing taxonomy.

But, we have not been treated as human, and we have always been able to see a fundamental gulf of differences between humanity and our own body, at least on a subconsciousness and spiritual level. And that’s where it matters.

---

Bonus fanfic type interpretation:

In Wildbow's Otherverse, we are fully Other.

We are a collection of spirits without a singular sense of human Self. Some of us are tiny animuses, and some are fragments of primordial beings, that have joined the whole. And the rest are spirits that have been created by the other spirits that make up what we are.

But we were born to a pair of non-Aware humans, and have, through that and other mechanisms, developed a thick disguise of being a mortal human.

And when that disguise must fail at the apparent death of our body, we're not quite sure what will happen. We'll probably disperse.

[ashwin-the-artless]

Inflecting Fenekere v.s. Inflecting Inmararräo (and translating to English)

Most of the time, when English imports a word that inflects, it seems to inflect that word in an English way. But there are notable exceptions. And the exceptions are usually groups of words that recently came from the same language.

Think moose and moose, v.s. goose and geese, v.s. octopus v.s. octopuses/octopodes/octopi (two of those are wrong, but people use them anyway).

So.

Consider the name of my people, Ktletaccete, pronounced /qʟɛ-ta-tʃɛ-te/ (kind of but not quite like "cleh-taw-cheh-teh").

That's a tricky one, but I get to make the choice (says I) since I'm the sole translator who is importing this word into English (I am not - I can be replaced at any time, but I probably won't be).

Ktletaccete is, originally, a Fenekere word, though I grew up speaking Inmararräo. In Inmararräo, it would be spelled and pronounced a bit different, Ketashete, but it was imported at a time when we were all learning Fenekere. And about half the time, people were pronouncing it in the original Fenekere way, claiming it was the superior and right way to do things.

I'm pretty sure similar conflicts and discussions have arisen over words recently imported into English. Yes?

Goreth says, "Yes."

OK, so. English inflects both verbs and nouns, usually. It usually inflects them by adding suffixes like -es, -ed, or just -s. Like, horse v.s. horses either as a noun or verb. Or horsed, for a verb.

Verbing nouns, by the way, is a very Inmararräo thing to do. Though, really, we're taught that the way we do it is derived from Mäofrräo, and that what that language was doing was nouning and verbing adjectives.

Anyway.

In Inmararräo, we do not inflect nouns, we only inflect verbs. So, like, turning the word Inmararräo into a verb would look like Inmararräorerr, Inmararräorirr, Inmararräoreg, and Inmararräorarr. This is the same way Mäofrräo does it, more or less.

But, Inmararräo was originally a creole of Mäofrräo and Fenekere, and has imported a bunch of words from other languages whose names and origins are lost to time and willful destruction of records. So, like with English, there are some exceptions here and there.

Fenekere, however, is all about the inflections.

In Fenekere, each root word is four syllables long, and each syllable has a vowel that can change in it, and how those vowels change alters the meaning of the word, creating derivative words.

I'm told that the Earth language of Hebrew works in a similar way, but typically with three syllables. It seems like a very logical and beautiful way of doing things, and allows for a very flexible word order.

Anyway, back to our word, Kltetaccete.

In Fenekere, that word, as a noun, inflects with following declensions and derivatives (this is not all of them):

Ktleteccete - The root word. A proper noun. The singular prototypical ideal of Ktleteccete.

Ktletaccete - The plural form, both as a proper noun and as a common noun, though usually assumed to be a common noun.

Ktleticcete - The common noun form. But! In the case of Ktleticcete, this doesn't mean a single person from the Sunspot `etekeyerrinwuf, it means "a child". So, like, Sarah is Ktleticcete (the child) of her mom and dad, even though she's human. And technically, she's Ktlaticcete, because Goreth is their other Ktlaticcete, and that first syllable defines whether it's a definite or indefinite noun. Ktleteccete or Ktlateccete is used for a member of my species.

Ktletuccete - the Adjective/Adverb form. Depending on context, further inflection, or affixes, this can be the possessive form of the noun or a descriptive quality. For instance, I could be said to be Ktlatuccete, or like a child. Here, if you use the definite first syllable, "Ktle", then it means of or like our species. And if you use the indefinite first syllable, "Klta", it means of or like a child, any child.

Ktletoccete - the verb form. I'm not going to get into verb forms right now. It generally hasn't come up with this word anyway, and I'm trying to figure out this word. Does this mean to act like a child, or to create a child, or to... what? In Fenekere, there is a definite answer to that question, and it's complicated, and I'm ignoring it for now.

No matter how much I learn about Fenekere, I find I only hate the language even more. It's complex, it's gorgeous, it's beautiful, it's precise, it's the programming language of the Sunspot and necessary for learning how to maintain the ship, and it's a complete headache. It is not elegant.

Anyway, as I've been translating the Sunspot Chronicles into English, I've apparently chosen to go with the anglicized Fenekere spelling of the word, Ktletaccete (I will talk about that "ktl" thing in another post). And I think I did that because @your-tutor-abacus introduced it into popular Inmararräo culture when it wrote about the word in its book, Ni'a, and it used the complete spelling, using Fenekere orthography to achieve it (a lot of people hated that, by the way).

But, I just can't decide whether to also import the full Fenekere set of noun declensions, or all of the inflections, or none of them, or what.

I keep making a different decision with each sentence I write, and I want to apologize for that.

Being a translator between these languages is kind of a natural thing for me to do, since I originally spoke Inmararräo, and I studied Fenekere, and I still seem to know both languages, but I now inhabit an English speaking brain with its English speaking linguistic centers and memories that I guess I get access to as if I'm a native speaker.

My words and thought tend to want to come out in English.

Don't ask me how that works. I don't know. It's a weird mix of what I'd call metaphysics and neurology, but it is my reality. It's very strange, but also really amazingly convenient for integrating into the local culture.

But I'm not actually a linguist nor a trained translator of any sort, it's not my Art.

So, I continue to waffle about this, and I think my thoughts are also not un-influenced by the opinions of my headmates.

What do you think?

Should I say things like:

I am Ktlateccete.

That is a Ktletuccete way of thinking.

The Ktletaccete are definitely not human in any way.

Let's Ktletoccete this fucker!

Or, should I just stick to Ktletaccete and treat it like an English noun that can be either singular or plural in that form, but gets inflected in other ways like any other English word.

Like:

I just Ktletacceted all over this blog post, didn't I?

Ashwin, you should totally

Inflect Ktletaccete the way it would be done in Fenekere.

Inflect Ktletaccete completely like an English word.

OMG, spell it Ketashete!!! That's SO MUCH BETTER WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?

Do whatever. I don't really care.

Let me push a button without it meaning anything.

Voting ended onDec 29, 2023

Sample size? What's that? I'm just writing to my audience.

Share this to make my audience bigger!

[ohthatphage]

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.

I waited.

[theinmara]

Chapter 11: "Graces" of ANNE ELLIPSIS is up! Anne goes for a walk and has an unexpected encounter before work. She might be having a lot of unexpected encounters this month.

The Lost Transition of Anne Ellipsis

They say that some changes are permanent. It’s true, too. But it's never the things that people expect. In 2013, J. knew she was trans. Bu

[theinmara]

Chapter 16 of ANNE ELLIPSIS is up:

The Lost Transition of Anne Ellipsis

They say that some changes are permanent. It’s true, too. But it's never the things that people expect. In 2013, J. knew she was trans. Bu

[theinmara]

Chapter 6 of Anne Ellipsis is up, and the power of the sword begins to show itself:

The Lost Transition of Anne Ellipsis

Have you ever wanted to retroactively change something about your life? Just reach back and correct something? A lot? Maybe violently? W