Songs without Words

I think that my writing to reading ratio is rather high because it takes only a little bit of reading to send my desire to write clear through the roof.  Reading a few fanfics my girlfriend recommended to me has inspired me a great deal (heehee, I love dating a fellow nerd ;) ).  Incidentally, I have also been inspired by the sheer coolness and manliness of Gurren Lagann, the new Gainax anime that I was hesitant to watch.  It is the polar opposite of Lucky Star, with a focus on action, machines, drills, power, and most importantly, the importance of will and guts.  I highly recommend it – it’s no Evangelion, but it’s better, in my opinion, than This Ugly and Beautiful World and perhaps on par with Furikuri (any Gainax fans out there?).  I think girls would enjoy it, too … the girls I know, anyway.  Just have to look past Yoko’s bursting chest … to see Kamina’s rather nice, muscular topless body ;).

Anyway, I’ve begun writing a story, but I should probably check out of my now-clean room first before they start hounding me down for that key.

The new story will probably not achieve any new ground in terms of deep emotions and lengthy prose.  Almost every line starts with an indent, and I doubt that will be changing.  This is a sequel to the old story “Triumvirate” that I wrote, featuring the same main characters after they return to Catleya.  Patrick and Sonya are the royal children (the country is always unnamed, but it’s taken to be Justinland).  Their mother is Queen Jessica, who is stern and distant (but used to be very spunky and rebellious before she became a widow).  Beya (Belladonna, beautiful woman) is an “alien,” but human, formerly a priestess on the secluded, devout planet of Xishebelle (beautiful flower).  During the golden age, humans settled many planets – that was circa 8000 years ago, and the downfall of humans led to loss of communication with the outer colonies, one of which became subjugated to a fanatical religion – that being Beya’s homeland.  After the defeat of the three false gods, the various convents and monasteries were disbanded and Beya decided to emigrate to Catleya with Patrick, with whom she had fallen in love.

This story picks up right after Beya completes her xenosanitization procedure, which is the modern way of clearing a person of alien pathogens, nucleic-acid based or otherwise.

My mind is in a thousand pieces, recorded on thousands of sheets of paper.  Even though I carry only my present knowledge with me – the knowledge of skills rather than the memories of my past – I know that somewhere among these sheets of papers is my answer.

The answer I have been searching for for so long, so long — I am sure that it is in here.  As I uncover each sheet, I recover another shard of my memories.  Piecing them together, I feel a small flame rekindling inside my heart.

The things that I created, that I explained, that I diagrammed – and then forgot – these things must mean something!  They are all about just one world, one world that I created piece by piece, word by word, drawing by drawing.

I am compiling a grand encyclopedia of my world.  It is probably going to reach about 200 pages in length.  I have written ten so far, and will soon start drawing in the illustrations.

Maybe, finally, everything will come together …

Here is the table of contents:

Section I.  Locale in space and planetary profile

1.      Astronomical Features and Solar System

2.      Environmental Phenomena

3.      Flora and Fauna

Section II.  History

1.      Early Geographic History

2.      The Rise of the Uriments and Anuriments

3.      Arrival of Humans: Aegun, New Aegun, Gonosa, Sonosa, and Corenthan

4.      The Silver Age, the Holy-Human Wars, and the Golden Age

5.      Arrival of Cats and the Dark Ages; Ket’s Kato

6.      Establishment of Modern Society: Conodee, Meow-Meow, Quetzcato, etc.

7.      Recent Events

Section III.  Present Day Katliya

1.      Language and Communication

2.      Science and Technology

3.      Politics and Legislation

4.      Economics

5.      Population Demographics and Statistics

6.      Pop Culture and Sports

7.      Current Issues and Trends

Catleya, of course, has very high technology. Once human technology began to intertwine with that of the gods and demons, it became very easy to go anywhere, whenever. But let’s step back and go through a brief history of how all of this happened:

500 B.C. (before cats) – this marks the beginning of the Golden Age of humans, during which the humans reached their peak and then began to collapse afterwards (making way for the modern era to begin). These humans never quite escaped Catleya, but they did have decent technology – tall skyscrapers, rapid-transit cars, etc.

In the modern era, around 6000 A.C., is when the cats finally surpassed the ancient human technologies by building a space-ship to the specifications of the excavated remains of an alien craft in the ancient sector of West Forest, Kylafrawis. This space-ship was sub-light-speed, though.

continued later

Consider this: in our sci-fi stories, we are obsessed with faster-than-light travel. While it is purportedly possible to travel faster than the speed light, the stars just that far away. Plus, most of them don’t even have planets, not to mention inhabitable ones. So no, the spaceships were not used to travel to distant galaxies.

Instead, as Catleya began to fill up, while space probes were certainly sent far off, the focus of technology was focused on creating new inhabitable satellites of Enifest and of Catleya itself. Certain large mines opened up with the objective of creating smaller outer-space satellites (since it is the surface area and not the mass of the object that defines how many people can inhabit it). The spaceships were relegated to the role of cosmic construction and ferry vehicles, and the first veritable “space travel” traversed shorter distances than to Catleya’s own two moons. While the moons were terraformed, it was much easier to first outfit these custom satellites to specifications.

The first aliens were of course the humans and cats: the humans were experimental travelers from Earth, who were split into several large ships. The idea was to explore the possibility of “effectively faster than light” travel – that is, taking advantage of the fact that you age more slowly (or, from another perspective, the distances are shorter) while traveling at near-light speeds. In essence, these humans forsook their homeland to explore, and the target planet was Catleya, which looked like a very Earth-like planet (which it was). The first humans settled down around 5000 or 6000 B.C., but the endemic viruses and unfamiliar environment forced them very far backwards in terms of technology. Indeed, knowledge was largely lost in favor of survival experience.

One ship strayed far, far off course and had to take a roundabout route to Catleya. This particular ship was the research ship and had many animals in it, used for testing. Note that time passed much more quickly on the planet than on the ship, due to the ship’s traveling speeds. By the time the ship made it back, the humans had conquered the entire planet and in fact had already gone to war with the local sentient beings, the Uriments (aka the “gods”). Although peace had been made, the humans had fallen into decline due to internal warfare and viruses that ravaged the biologically engineered crops. The ship, which had fallen into disrepair, suffered major damage upon entry into Catleya and crashed, killing all the humans on board and only sparing a couple cats that escaped when their cages were destroyed by the impact.

The cats, having the advantage of the best in technology as developed by the researchers during the long flight, not only survived but thrived, eventually forming into hunting packs and then into full-fledged cities. The cats migrated east and west from their crash-landing site, the ailing Kylafrawis.

The rest is history … .

The next alien species to be encountered were not so alien after all: because of reproductive isolation and a new environment, creatures unleashed onto newly terraformed regions rapidly speciated. These new and strange creatures might also be called “aliens.”