This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace.
Nanosuns
This is a snippet that may be incorporated into a future story. Pilgrims' Rest was the last dwarf planet in the Outer Belt to have a working nanosun (the massive orbital star hearths tended by the sunwrights).
Pilgrims' Rest was known as the oasis of the Outer Belt, the last dwarf planet with a working nanosun, a tiny artificial star orbiting the planet, providing not only enough light and heat to give us a perpetual spring, but a protective magnetosphere to keep our atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind from our distant natural sun.
It stood as a monument to ancient Claravian engineering, as well as ancient Claravian greed. There were once dozens of these colossal orbital fusion reactors dotted across the Outer Belt, making the dwarf planets on the frontier of interstellar space far more hospitable than they are today. The Sunwrights, the ancient clerics of the Bright Way that built and maintained these nanosuns, imposed onerous tithes on their client worlds. They were quick to deprive them of heat and light when they couldn't pay.
The other nanosuns were destroyed during the War of Dissolution, most by the Partisans, militant secularists who wanted to extirpate the Bright Way entirely, the rest by the Preservationists, the ones fighting to maintain the Bright Way's economic grip on the entire star system, and who, when defeat was all but certain, set about destroying as much of their infrastructure as possible in a petty dying tantrum.
This sun alone survived the war, defended against both sides by the Pious Dissolutionists, a small but determined group of religious traditionalists fighting to return the soul of the Bright Way after thirty three millennia squandered in the name of greed.
Yum Dust
Originally an artificial meat flavor added to Leasemeat to make it taste more like real meat, Yum dust is a highly addictive substance for humans. While not harmful on its own, its true addictive potential is unleashed when added to salty or fatty foods like hamburgers or fries. Fast food chains began incorporating yum dust into their recipes soon after the Mass router trunk between Sol and Focus was established.
Being a food additive, yum dust wasn't regulated by Focus's Ludd Laws, and so could be freely exported to Sol. By time its addictiveness was made apparent, it could be found incorporated into quick cheap unhealthy foods from all around the world, accelerating humanity's obesity crisis. It was eventually banned by most Earth governments, but is freely available to humans at Focus.
Scrapped story snippet
I've been stuck trying to finish First Contact, and I think the reason why I can't continue is I was never satisfied with my first attempt, so I'm attempting to rewrite it. In doing so I'm trying to make the missionaries more fleshed out as characters.
Also I watched Project Hail Mary over the weekend and it struck me that I could use a similar story structure. Pascal slowly regains his memory by having flashbacks of him meeting the other missionaries, culminating in him remembering boarding the Dewfall and entering suspension.
My usual writing process involves me mulling over a scene in my head, then writing it down. Then I think of a scene that could come before or after it, then repeat the process. The following dialog ended up not fitting with where I wanted to go, but I still like how it sounds in isolation, so I thought I'd post it. Pascal is in the dry dock where the Dewfall is waiting, having second thoughts about the mission. Sunshine, Tod, and Iris each come to encourage him in their own way. This is Tod's attempt.
Now it was Steadfast Friend's turn. The breeze from the atmospheric circulators carried his musk ahead of him. I could hear him brachiating toward the dry dock from a nearby corridor.
“Howdy!” he barked cheerfully. It took some effort to sift through his Moony accent for the words, far as it was from standard Commonthroat. His constant fidgeting didn't help matters. He had a coin in his left forefoot, which he tossed toward his right, then to his right hind foot, then his left, and then back to his left forefoot, tracing a square circumscribing his torso.
“Just saw Sunshine leaving. Said you were sulkin' around here. I can smell it all over you. Whole colony's going to smell mopey if you don't cheer up.”
“Why are we doing this?” I asked. “Why are we throwing ourselves into a silent indifferent cosmos searching for voices that will never answer?”
“Oof,” he grunted. “Gettin' all philosophical right from the jump. No 'How's it goin', Puke Paws?'”
“Fine. How's it going, Puke Paws?” I imitated his drawl, which made him gecker in amusement.
“Is that what we sound like to Outlanders? That's crazy. I love it! Anyhow, I'm doin' pretty dang great. This is big stuff we're fixin' to do. Real big stuff. We're goin' to find us some star folk. I can feel it.” He sniffed. “But I can smell you don't think the same.
”'Voices that'll never answer', you say? That's not what the faith says. It's a big galaxy. They're out there. We just gotta keep lookin' and hopin'.“
“Hope,” I said. “I lost it decades ago.”
“You're quite a sad sack.”
“You Moonies really are that blunt?”
“We say it when we smell it,” he laughed. “I'm real sorry. I know that's not how y'all do things 'round here.
“You do not often smell happy.” He annunciated the words in the standard accent like a pup in a language lesson, then immediately returned to his bumpkin lilt. “Tell you what, I know I can't give you back hope, not so easy, at least, but I'll hope in your place until you find it.”
“I'm not sure that will help, but thank you,” I said.
“And you called ME blunt,” he huffed. “I can smell I'm botherin' you. I'll stop yip-yappin' and see myself out.” He kicked off from the bulkhead and flew toward the corridor.
“Wait,” I said. He grabbed a paw cable and swung around to face me. “Thank you, really. I know I'm not pleasant to be around. The fact you came to check on me does make me feel a bit better. I'm glad to have you as a friend.”
“That's my name,” he yipped, “Steadfast Friend.” He wheeled back around and rocketed past Iris as she entered.
The Origin of Nonagentivism
According to both the Agentivist Neos and Wayfarers, Nonagentivists are a compromise between the Bright Way and shamanism. It's the Nonagentivists who claim there were pre-Theophany religious reforms that were hijacked by the Beholders, and Nonagentivism represents a reconstruction of those supposed reforms. These claims originate from a single disgruntled research monk upset that his interest in historical cynoidology was not being given due attention (He wasn't wrong there to be fair). He visited Newman's Dale and emerged with texts that supposedly proved the reform was well underway before the Theophany. To date no copies of his texts that can be dated to the period they claim to be from have been found. The earliest manuscripts date from the time of the Shakeoff. From a Claravian view, they appear to be snippets of the Book of Earth padded with then-fashionable heterodox panpsychist ideas.
As stated above, there is a kernel of truth to the idea, as there are texts to the effect of “My shire parties with our ancestors every solstice while those weirdos up the river are scared their ancestors will wither their steadtrees if they aren't appeased. What's up with that?” But it's impossible to disentangle these reforms from the Theophany and the Beholders' rejection of nature worship.
The Agentivists, meanwhile, reject these alleged reforms and seek to recreate animism and nature worship wholesale as it existed prior to the Theophany.
The book of earth
The book of earth, sometimes rendered into English as the Claravian Apocrypha, is a text composed by one of the Beholders (early Claravian preachers who witnessed the Theophany) that consists of a survey of the beliefs and practices of pre-Theophany Animism. Some of the Bright Way's core beliefs are rooted in this text, hence the name, but it is not considered part of the protocanon.
Primitive Animism is surprisingly well-documented thanks to the yinrih's innate literacy. It is not, however, uniform. Rites and beliefs differed from shire to shire. The goal of the book, as stated by its author, was to “find the universal truths hidden in the soul of all those who ask.” The author sought to identify common elements that converged on an underlying universal understanding of the supernatural, and to see what could be reconciled with the revelations given in the Theophany.
Among the beliefs identified in the book as possessing this universality are a belief in two distinct kinds of spirits. First are spirits inhabiting natural things including celestial phenomena like clouds, the sun, and stars; flora and fauna; and features of the land such as rivers and rocks. Notably, celestial spirits were not given cynoidomorhpic features such as gender or family affiliations. It was thus deduced that the Uncreated Light also lacked these features.
The second kind of spirits were the souls of sophonts who had passed on. while presapient yinrih had gone extinct well before the Theophany, the earliest texts written while they were still extant overwhelmingly regarded them as beasts, albeit beasts due special consideration.
The four seasonal feasts as well as the three daily liturgies draw their essential elements from this text as well, though other than times and dates as well as a connection between the shaman's fire and the sun there was little held in common. It was also noted that while most liturgies were performed alone or with a girl or two acting apprenticed to the shaman, every man, woman, and pup in the shire would attend a liturgy on a semi-regular basis, often right before or after their torpor, in order to seek the shaman's aid or blessing.