Worldbuilding

It actually was just a phase.

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Human culture is far more varied compared to Yinrih culture thanks to the fact that we scattered into isolated communities long before inventing writing, and longer still before eventually rediscovering each other and initiating the process of globalization.

Sure, there are Yinrih myths, legends, and stories, but they're nowhere near as diverse. Human culture also changes more rapidly compared to Yinrih culture, meaning we're churning out epics, ballads, lays, and sagas by the dozen at a rate that monkey foxes could only dream of.

Scary obsessive fandoms are just as likely to crop up among yinrih as humans, and human culture has its scary obsessive fans among monkey foxes. Yinrih refer to these people as HrBqMqmg, from HrBqg (nerd) + qMqmg (human) i.e. one who is a nerd regarding humans. The word has a neutral connotation among yinrih, but its most common English translation, terraboo, has all the negative associations you'd expect from such a word.

Terraboos are infamous among humans for a number of things:

• Trying to speak English or other human languages. No, I don't mean learn the language and use a keyer to synthesize it, I mean actually try to utter human speech sounds. The result sounds a lot like a husky trying to have a mid-checkup conversation with his dentist.
• Wearing human clothes, or at least trying to. Our clothing isn't really designed for quadrupeds with tails. Savvy humans can make a killing selling suitably sized pet clothes and passing them off as modified human garments, which they kind of are, but still.
• Some will even try to walk on their hind feet for extended periods. This is horrible for their back. Terraboos will even buy Partisan military surplus powered armor because it has a bipedal locomotion mode, originally to free up the forepaws to hold more guns. It doesn't work very well, by the way, and looks just as creepy and uncanny as you'd expect.
• Using the term "cynoid" to refer to themselves when speaking English, this is especially common among fans of human Sci-Fi.

But the truly obsessed take it so far that even regular Terraboos think they're crazy. These oddballs among oddballs are called 'skinnies', because they shed their fur in an attempt to appear more human.

This is a minor taboo in yinrih society, as shedding ones fur is traditionally associated with healers, and in some jurisdictions is legally protected as such. Skinnies illegally procure the balding drugs used by healers in order to achieve their desired look.

Pictured above is a spacer terraboo that has shed his fur. This is evident by the black skin on his paws and muzzle that would normally be covered by pelage. Note the presence of a plastic solo cup despite the cup being useless in zero-G.

Humans, as I'm sure you know, tend to react negatively to animals that should have fur but don't, so skinnies are avoided even more than their less obsessed terraboo brethren.

The more extreme expressions of terraboo-ism like fur shedding prove to be a passing fad, persisting for a few decades after First Contact, a flash in the pan in vulpithecine terms.

It's not all annoying though. Terraboos immersed themselves in human pop culture, which exposed them to the scandalous reality of neglected and abused human children. The semelparous and non-contact nature of yinrih reproduction makes this a nonissue for monkey fox pups. The idea that one could have kids but not want to raise them is a foreign concept to yinrih. Since raising a human from infancy to adulthood is a comparatively brief commitment vs raising a litter of pups, many terraboos seek to adopt human children, and there are Claravian fostering orders dedicated to raising unwanted humans.

Part 1 in case you missed it.

Fr. Shaheen took a drag of his cigarrette as he stared up at the night sky. A few stars were just bright enough to shine through the gray haze cast by the street lights in town.

Just at the edge of the trailer's porch light sat an old foundation where a sizeable rectory once stood. It had been far too large for a single resident, so he had it torn down and was now living in a much more modest mobile home. At one point a youth center was planned to take its place, but the number of heads devoid of gray hairs that could be found in the pews of Our Lady of the Cedars could be counted on both hands.

Rare was the night where the priest couldn't be found puffing away in front of his trailer. Restful nights were few and far between. Maybe his smoking habit was to blame. His new housemate did comment frequently on his snoring, loud enough to be heard from the other end of the house.

That new housemate was awkwardly lying on the bench across from him, a haphazard jumble of limbs. He was covered wet nose to prehensile tail in black and white fur. He broke the silence with a cough. "Why you cleric breathe that smoke stick?" came a tinny robotic voice from somewhere in the tangle of legs. "That smoke make cough. Smell bad bad." While the little quadruped's English was improving by the day. The intonation was off, with stressed syllables appearing everywhere but where they should.

"We all have our vices," sighed Fr. Shaheen. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

"You cleric friend, ask ask."

"Why'd Iris insist on you staying with me?"

After a long pause, "She iris think you human maybe follow Light more good than us yinrih. Maybe again you cleric make me friend believe."

"I think Dr. Staples has been giving you guys the wrong idea about humanity."

"He doctor show us how strong human, how fast human. Show us beautiful arts. Show us human help other and not think self."

"Yeah, that's what we aspire to be," grunted Fr. Shaheen as he rose to his feet.

"Where you cleric go?" asked the creature as he oozed down from the bench and planted his hexadactyl paws on the wooden porch.

"Come on. We're going to get more cancer sticks." The priest walked to a dust-caked pickup truck parked next to the trailer. After a deep bowing stretch the alien trotted behind him.

"Turn off that synthesizer," said the priest as he turned the ignition. "I need to work on my Commonthroat comprehension."

The alien complied, slipping the small chording keyer from his wrist and placing it in a pocketed band around his right foreleg. His real voice came in quiet melodic whines and growls, as though a dog were trying to speak Mandarin in its sleep. The priest had to strain to discern the subtle shifts in volume that were just as meaningful as the underlying sound.

«When are you going to give me a human name?» the alien grunted.

"Eh? Don't you have a perfectly good Commonthroat name? ring...light, isn't it? So like moonlight, but from a ring around your home planet?"

«Yeah, but I want a name humans can pronounce.»

"What's wrong with translating your name as is?"

«This planet doesn't have a ring, and none of you humans have been on a planet that does. I feel like the name falls flat. I want my name to mean something to those around me, not just to the five other yinrih who are with me.»

After a long pause, "Back there before we left, you said you didn't believe anymore."

The alien hesitated, then tilted his muzzle up, a rough equivalent to an affirmative nod. «I was a devout pup. I went to liturgies daily, poured over hagiographies, could quote scripture as easy as breathing. Faith helped me back then. I was...am--» The next few words were lost on the priest.

"Maybe rephrase that last part, Those are some new words for me."

«Well... I'm not sure if you humans experience this, but some of us have something wrong in our brains, a condition that keeps us from feeling happy. I have that condition.»

"Depression," said the priest. "We've got that over here alright. I struggle with depression, too. A lot of humans do. My faith keeps me afloat. Sounds like it helped you, too. But what happened?"

«I always needed something solid I could stand on, something tangible that vindicated my faith. Through my puppyhood I thought I had that something, but I turned out to be wrong.»

"What was that something?"

«Persistence,» said the alien. «For a hundred thousand years the Bright Way persisted. It survived threats from without and from within. It managed to survive so long despite the often profound stupidity of its leaders. I thought only a divine mandate could keep such a mess from foundering.»

"And...?"

«It was a lot of little things. I noticed other Wayfarers could be just as rude and hateful as anyone else, and that made me wonder if the Bright Way is no better than any other group of people, is it really special? Surely the organization that claims to be the bastion of truth and virtue should be BETTER, right? Not just not any worse.

«But the tipping point was when the High Hearthkeeper tried to shutter the missionaries, the whole purpose for the Bright Way's existence, you know? 'Go, dearest little ones, spread your light to the stars, and ye shall become brighter yourselves.' That's the Great Commandment. That's our most sacred precept, that we're not alone in the universe, that we should seek out the Light's other creatures among the stars. So what? We're just going to abandon it now? Than what are we? What is our reason for being?

«That's when it hit me. If our own leader doesn't care, why should I?»

"You sacrificed a lot. It took you 250 years to get here, and it'll be at least that long before you see others of your kind again. If you think this mission from God, this Great Commandment, of yours is just a fairy tale, than why bother?"

«As for me,» said the alien, «I'm not a very gregarious person. The other missionaries with me, they're all I've got. If I didn't go with them I'd likely never see them again.»

"But still... dropping everything knowing you may never return, that's a heavy choice to make, friends or not."

«Well, you can blame Iris for twisting my ear. She said if I were right, and this is all nonsense, I will have lost nothing by coming with them. It's not like we age while in suspension, and it wasn't like I was pulling up roots by leaving home. But if the Bright Way is right, I will have gained everything by obeying the Great Commandment, so--» He quickly flicked his ears back in a cynoid shrug.

The priest was beaming.

«You're showing your teeth. Is something wrong?»

"Pascal!" the priest proclaimed. "That's your human name!"

«I don't follow.»

"Blaise Pascal, he lived 400 years ago. Most people today know him as a scientist, I'm pretty sure there's a unit of measure named after him, but he also talked a lot about faith. Pascal's wager. What Iris told you. We call that Pascal's wager. Lose nothing or gain everything."

Pascal looked out the window as the pickup pulled into a sprawling parking lot. At its center was an equally sprawling monolithic building.

«So why'd you bring me here, other than to get more of your foul-smelling smoking sticks?»

"I told you what Dr. Staples showed you was what we humans want to be. That's all well and good, but you also need to know what we are." The priest got out of the pickup and Pascal followed.

"You're definitely going to need that synthesizer."

Pascal positioned the keyer in his left forepaw, then looked up at the large illuminated sign above the entrance and attempted to sound out the letters.

"W A L M A R T"

"Hey," the greeter stepped in front of the pair. "No shirt, no shoes, no service," he said pointing down at Pascal.

"But--" Fr. Shaheen protested.

"--Nah, Just kidding, go on in. I've been wanting to say that ever since you little guys landed."

The two entered the store proper. "It'll just be a minute, My cigs are right over there--" Fr. Shaheen gestured toward one of the checkout lanes. A line of shoppers, at least 20 deep, snaked around the surrounding displays.

He swore in Arabic under his breath. "OK, it'll be longer than a few minutes."

"Short-staffed tonight," said the shopper at the end of the line. "Let me guess, Cigarettes? That's what everyone else is here for."

He glanced down at Pascal. "First time at Wally World?"

Pascal bobbed his head up and down in an exaggerated nod.

"He needs to see the other side of humanity," said Fr. Shaheen. "Those ivory tower folks at the college are showing them Olympic athletes and firefighters and renaissance masterpieces, and I want to give them the whole picture."

"Hoo boy you're in for something alright," the shopper chuckled. "Hey between you and me, if you wanna blow up the Earth after this I won't even blame you."

As they talked, a large woman in a scooter rolled up to the end of the line. "Aww!" she cooed between breaths of exertion. "So cute." She reached down and scratched Pascal behind the ears. "Whosagoodboyyesyouare!"

«I'm a person and I have personal space!» Pascal barked, ducking out of her reach.

The shopper glared at the woman. "Seriously, lady? You been living under a rock the last two months? What makes you think that's OK?"

"He's got fur, ain't he? And four legs and a wet nose. If God didn't want us to pet 'em then why'd He make 'em fuzzy?"

"You must be from Austin," said the shopper. "I thought we chased all you weirdos away weeks ago."

The pair's argument gradually increased in volume. The woman rose from her scooter and began gesticulating. Fr. Shaheen stepped between them. "Let's be charitable--"

"Cram it, fish eater!" the woman snapped.

Pascal slipped down an aisle and out of sight, anxious to avoid the melee that was surely brewing.

He stared up at the shelves and scented the air as he walked. Away from his human host everything seemed intimidatingly tall. Suddenly he felt something wet under his right front paw. He looked down at the yellow puddle underfoot and sniffed, the unmistakable odor of human excreta.

An elderly human was waddling around the corner, more of the same odor wafting off of him. "Better clean that up, sonny," he said to a passing employee.

"Clean what up?" A adolescent male voice approached from the other direction. The lad came into view and looked down at the puddle. His face flashed with frustration and then to embarrassment when he noticed Pascal's paw marinading in the mess.

"I heard over the walkie that one of you guys was here." he sighed, pulling a wad of sanitizer wipes from a cleaning cart behind him. "So, ready to nuke us from orbit yet?" he handed the wipes to Pascal. "It's the only way to be sure."

Pascal shook his head as he wrung the towelettes between his forepaws, wiping under his claws and between the pads on his palms.

"No?" The boy said as he mopped up the puddle. "You will be when you get out of here.

"I'll take those," he put the spent wipes in a trash bin on the cart. "All good?"

Pascal jerked his foreleg forward and gave an unpracticed thumbs-up along with an awkward affirmative bob of the head.

"Cool," the lad said. "Name's Jeff, by the way."

"Pascal," he synthesized, patting himself on the belly in greeting.

"Pleased to meet you," Jeff said, copying the gesture. "I'm gonna say sorry on behalf of my entire species for all this." He waved an arm vaguely indicating their surroundings. "Walmart's one heck of an anthropology lesson."

Pascal flicked an ear in goodbye and turned to walk back to the front of the store. He heard more Arabic oaths in the direction of the tills, and judging by the clamor more nicotine-deprived humans had joined the fracas. He did a 180 and trotted past Jeff finishing up his cleaning.

"Wise choice," Jeff said as Pascal turned the corner and headed deeper into the bowels of the store.

He continued walking, nose to the ground making sure not to step in any more surprises, until he heard two more humans approaching.

"Honey, why did you grab so many cans of beans?"

"It's those damn monkey foxes, Dave. I'm tellin' you they're fixin' to invade. And when they do, we'll be prepared."

"With beans?" her husband sighed. "There's only six of them. They don't mean any harm. One of them's even been coming to the radio club meetings. He's been trying to teach some of us a word or two of their language."

"It's all an act, Dave." The couple emerged from around the corner.

"There's one now!" the woman shrieked. Startled, Pascal jumped backward, knocking a few items off the shelf behind him with his tail. After gathering himself, he looked up at the woman, gawking at her spray-on tan and bottle blonde hair.

«I didn't know humans could be orange,» he muttered.

"What was that? Speak up, space coyote!"

Pascal reached into his wallet and pulled out his keyer, but the woman snatched it out of his paw.

"Ha! You're not brain-washing anyone tonight!" She hurled the keyer to the ground. Pascal dove after it just as the woman brought her foot down, intending to smash the keyer but catching Pascal's paw instead.

Pain shot up his foreleg. He stifled a bark and looked up at the male human as he massaged his paw, determined for this inter-species interaction to end peacefully. "You friend smell familiar. From radio club?"

"You got me," Dave smiled.

"Don't talk to the enemy!" his wife said, moving between him and Pascal.

Dave began tugging at her arm. "I'm so sorry," he said with a frown. "She's on some new meds; we're working on the dosage."

"ARE YOU CALLING ME CRAZY?!" the woman yelled, her eyes darting around wildly. "I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO'S NOT CRAZY AROUND HERE!"

"I'm so sorry," Dave repeated, steering her down the aisle and out of sight.

Pascal cocked an ear toward the tills again. The din had only gotten louder. He limped around for a few minutes until he caught the unmistakable smell of sugars and lipids on the air.

"Ma'am, this is a bakery, but not a BAKERY bakery." Another young human, female this time, was being accosted by an older woman. "If you want a premade sheet cake, we got premade sheet cakes. You want me to put 'Happy Birthday' on it? I'd be more than happy to, but we can't bake a cake in the shape of a Stanley cup."

"The Customer is always right!" snapped the woman.

"in matters of taste," the girl muttered under her breath.

"What was that?!"

"I said 'Is there anything else I can help you with?'"

"No! You've just lost yourself a customer."

"oh no..." the girl whispered sarcastically.

The woman spun around, nearly tripping over Pascal's tail, stabbing it with a stiletto in the process.

He yelped in pain but the woman stormed off without looking back. His cry caught the attention of the girl behind the counter. She leaned over to peer down at Pascal. "You OK?"

«Honestly I've been better,» he grunted, probing with a padded finger at the maroon stain spreading over the white pelage of his tail.

"This tail fine," he said via the keyer. "Not much this blood. Hurt worse before."

He stood there for a moment, nursing his tail in silence as the girl looked on.

At last he curled his tail tight against his back and put his paws up on the sneeze guard. "You friend sell what?"

"Cakes and cookies," she said.

"Those C A K E S and those C O O K I E S what?" He drew out the unfamiliar words.

"They're food, you eat them. You want to try a sample?"

"Not want," he wagged his head from side to side. "Might kill me yinrih. maybe that human food this yinrih poison."

"Oh, I hadn't thought of that," she said.

Pascal peeked over the counter. "No chair? What way you friend sit? All day that boss make stand you friend?"

"Yeah," she sighed. "They say it makes us look lazy if we sit. Such is the life of a wage slave. But I guess that's not a thing where you guys are from, huh?"

"We yinrih have," said Pascal. "some place we yinrih go buy this thing or that thing. Some place eat some food. When pup at that place me yinrih work, bring those food, take away those dirty bowl."

"You were a waiter!" The girl said.

"Me W A I T E R," Pascal nodded. He had set his HUD specs on his muzzle and was hastily skimming a poorly organized English lexicon for words he couldn't recall, occasionally jotting down new ones as the conversation unfolded.

"Where we come from, this place call--" he grunted the word in Outlander before finding the correct English translation. "Litter of moons. It call because planet big made of gas, have many moons, they follow planet like pups follow dam."

"That's sweet," said the girl.

"anyway," Pascal continued, "at moonlitter, it part of E D U C A T I O N of pups, they make pup work at store or at R E S T A U R A N T. They say it make pup E M P A T H I Z E with those worker in C U S T O M E R S E R V I C E when grow up."

"Ah, so it's part of your schooling, then? They make you hold down a job?"

"Yes," he nodded. "Teach F I N A N C I A L L I T E R A C Y too."

"I wonder what alien Karens are like," the girl said half to herself.

"K A R E N?" Pascal queried.

"That--" she pointed at the wound on Pascal's tail. "--that woman who stepped on your tail, that was a classic Karen."

"Yes yes," he bobbed his head. "Those we have."

"We call them..." here he paused while digging through the lexicon. "...It hard to say. "My language Outlander have thing English not have. English say 'you' for everyone, but Outlander have different 'you' for different people."

He uttered a few melodic grunts and whines. "That mean, 'you' but only for you sire or dam or litter mate. It called--" he rummaged for an obtuse grammatical term. "--it called F A M I L I A L form."

More growling, "and that mean 'you' but for friend only, That is A M I C A B L E form."

A chuff and some whining, "and that mean 'you' for everyone else. And that called T R A N S A C T I O N A L form."

Recognition dawned on the girl's face. "Ah! English doesn't do that but Spanish does. You say 'Tú' for friends and family but 'Usted' for everyone else."

Pascal flicked an ear in acknowledgement. "yes yes. Like that. When you talk to customer or when customer talk to you, It proper use transactional form. When you worker talk other worker use transactional too, maybe amicable if good good friend. But you never never use familial form at work. It considered V U L G A R."

"That bad?"

"Yes yes." Pascal geckered in amusement. "When foreigner learn Outlander they make this mistake much. Sunshine does this all the time. You see her, yes yes? Other missionary, no fur and big ears, she is from other part of Focus, planet called Hearthside. When Hearthsider learn Outlander, they think familial form mean 'I like you, you like my family, so I call you by that'. But that not right. Well, that not only meaning. Yes it mean 'I think you like family' but it also mean 'I expect you TREAT ME like family. So obey like pup obey sire or dam, or give special treatment like between litter mates. When customer use that form, it make them sound E N T I T L E D. Like you owe them respect, like they are one of your sires or your dams.

"Anyway, These Karens, they like to use familial 'you' to workers, So we have a word, it means 'one who uses familial pronoun'. Long in English but much shorter in Outlander. So I put 'Karen' in our lexicon."

The girl smiled.

"You show your teeth. That is good, yes?"

"Oh yeah, sorry," she said. "Humans show our teeth when we're happy."

"Like this?" Pascal slid his lips back, flashing his fangs.

The girl laughed. "Yeah. You know, I didn't realize how much like us you guys were. We have all these stories about aliens, some want to kill us, some want to loot our planet, sometimes we kill them. Sometimes they're so different from us that we can't even communicate. But it rarely ends well when we meet. But here we are, two veterans of the customer service trenches trading war stories. It makes the universe feel a little less lonely."

Pascal cocked an ear toward the front of the store. "The argument has stopped. I go back."

"Nice meeting you I'm Lupe, And your name?"

"Pascal," He said, rearing up on his hind feet and patting his belly.

"Bye, Pascal, Oh, and your English is great, I think you got better just while we were talking."

"Thank you. I talk more, I get better." He started off toward the front of the store.

"Got my cigs!" Fr. Shaheen, sporting a black eye and fat lip, held the carton of carcinogens aloft like a video game protagonist after acquiring a new item. A few of the other patrons were being hauled off by cops. "The bishop's gonna have some questions for me in the morning. I'm sure this'll end up in a few YouTube videos at least."

"So," he said as they walked back to the pickup, a lit cigarette already between his lips. "You've seen Man the angel and Man the ape, what do you think about us now?"

Pascal took stock of his injuries, his smashed paw and lacerated tail, then slid back his lips and looked up at the priest.

"You're showing your teeth. Is something wrong?" Fr. Shaheen asked.

«No, not at all. I know you can't smell our pheromones, so I thought imitating you're teeth-bearing gesture would let you know I'm happy.»

«I see now that humans can be violent, greedy, disgusting animals.»

"And that makes you happy?"

«Because yinrih are also violent, greedy, disgusting animals. You think these claws are just for climbing trees? I'm not as naive as you think, and neither are the other missionaries. We didn't set out to find perfect creatures to admire on a pedestal. We want others who can walk down the hard road of life together with us. We want friends, and that's what we found.»

This came up on /r/worldbuilding from time to time, mostly "how do races of vastly different size coexist?" but it can be equally interesting considering how very large or very small races would go about things once you at least nod in the direction of the square-cube law.

For example, someone the size of an insect can shrug off falls that would kill a human when scaled to our size. This would naturally effect how they build their buildings. Tall towers could have doors open to the street below, and people could just jump down.

I considered a scene like this when writing this post. Some exhausted clerk working on an upper floor of a building ends his day by jumping out the window. Sunbeam interprets this as him attempting suicide and catches him midair, then gives an impassioned speech about how life is worth living and how he has friends and family who care about him etc, only for him to angrily interrupt her mid-sermon to tell her off for making him late.

Water also acts differently when you're small enough. You see this in movies like A Bug's Life where they don't need cups when drinking liquids because the surface tension holds the liquid in a bead that can be held on its own. I wonder how they'd handle large bodies of water; how boats would work and so on.

Looking in the other direction, a bigger creature has a bigger appetite, which has serious logistics issues if a larger creature has to be housed by smaller ones.

This is addressed in Gulliver's Travels when Gulliver visits Lilliput. He's housed in an old temple, given vast quantities of food, and has attendants who carry away vast cartloads of what's left after the food is digested.

Going back to the issue of fall damage, at a certain size even a trip would be fatal.

As for species of vastly different sizes coexisting, Zootopia comes up a fair amount when this is brought up. When I first watched the movie it occurred to me that the rodents must have a huge financial advantage over larger animals because they have smaller living spaces, eat less food, have lower electricity consumption due to heating and lighting said smaller spaces, etc.

The Mechanists were a group of Neoshamanists who formed the first group of colonists on Newhome. The numerically smaller neoshamanists saw an opportunity to found their own polities far away from the Claravian majority on Yih as planetary colonization became technically and economically feasible.

Neoshamanists subscribe to the belief known as Panpsychism: the idea that consciousness is a latent property of the universe. This is in contrast to the doctrine of the Bright Way, which professes mind-body dualism. Neoshamanists believe that consciousness can manifest in any system of sufficient complexity. In their new home, which they dubbed, uh, Newhome, the usual fonts of consciousness were missing--no living matter, no complex meteorological phenomena, no geological activity. The only complex systems besides the colonists themselves were the machines they brought with them.

Frontier life is hard on both yinrih and machine, and the colonists' equipment frequently broke down. Combine the flakey machinery with the colonists' particular flavor of animism, and it's not hard to see how this little cult got going.

The following are some highlights of their beliefs and practices.

Fabricators were believed to possess particularly temperamental spirits, and it was customary to hold a screwdriver in the right front paw when submitting a print job to the fabricator's leasemind, as a warning to the spirit that consequences would follow should it misbehave.

Small figurines were placed in engine rooms to keep the generators company when engineering personnel weren't on duty.

A brief canticle would be chanted when booting a computer to appease the spirit within, often while a particular key was held down. The key did nothing apparent, but it was believed to make the machine spirit more biddable, or even make it run faster.

Particularly powerful shamans were said to be able to resolve mechanical issues by their mere presence. Lesser techs would toil away at a particular problem, only for the problem to resolve spontaneously when the shaman entered the room.

Red cabling was believed to be spiritually efficacious, probably because the material needed to manufacture the red polymer used in the cable jackets was hard to come by, so only the most important network links were made with red cable. The claimed benefits included less jitter, fewer dropped packets, lower latency, and even increased throughput.

The most sacred of this sect's rites was the sacrament of Percussive Maintenance. It was reserved for those occasions when even the wisest of shamans was unable to get a misbehaving spirit to cooperate. It involved repeated whacks of the errant machine with a ceremonial wrench. These wrenches would often be lavishly decorated, and are prized cultural artifacts today.

As the Mechanists got the terraforming ball rolling, more and more colonists began making their way to Newhome. At first these were people from other minority sects and fringe political ideologies, but eventually, the normies showed up, gradually diluting these odd practices by simple cultural inertia.

The first wave of "mainstream" yinrih to arrive on Newhome largely consisted of military personnel representing governments from the homeworld seeking to establish claims on swaths of virgin territory. Since the Mechanists were still somewhat active at this point, some of their quirky rituals were passed on to the grunts stationed there.

I shall continue posting my nonsense until more people start posting theirs. I should have mentioned this before posting all my stories, but I use Italian quotation marks («») to denote alien speech, whether uttered naturally, written, or synthesized by a human, except in stories where no humans are present in which case I just use regular quotes ("").

---

“I see we’ve got a bigger crowd than usual. Welcome, everyone, to this meeting of the Erickson Amateur Radio Club. I guess word got around that one of our little visitors is going to be giving a presentation about their faster than light communication network. Since most of you here aren’t even members, I’ll just skip the preamble and invite Stormlight to start his presentation.” Bob pushed a yinrih perch in front of the podium and walked back to his chair.

Stormlight approached the podium, removed his backpack and hopped onto the perch.

«OK, how many of you can understand me? Raise your left forepaw.» Stormlight swept his gaze across the crowd of humans sitting in front of him. One or two hands shot up, three or four more hovered indecisively above their owners’ heads, but the majority of the people kept their peace. «Guess it’s the keyer again,» he grunted under his breath. He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a keyer and HUD specs, and continued addressing the people in English with the synth.

“How about now?” Vigorous nods and enthusiastic hand-raising from the assembled humans. “A reminder that Tod is here to give Commonthroat lessens after the meeting.” Stormlight motioned with his muzzle toward the corner of the room, where Tod was sprawled belly-up across three plastic chairs. Tod waved cheerfully in human fashion, chuffing a few times for good measure.

“That noise is their way of smiling.” Whispered a man in the back in response to his wife’s bewildered look.

“Anyway, allow me to introduce myself properly.” Stormlight wrapped his tail around the leg of the table behind him and reared up on his hind feet. He patted his belly twice with his left forepaw. “Light shine upon you, friends. rLPqqBCl--” he gave his name in Commonthroat then clarified using the keyer. “--but you can call me ‘Stormlight’. I’m going to be tossing out a lot of Commonthroat words in this presentation, all the more reason for you to see Tod after the meeting. It takes a fair bit of work to speak using this keyer, and the more humans that can understand us directly, the less we’ll need to use it.” He paused, dramatically shaking out a cramp in his right rear paw before picking up the keyer again and continuing.

“My role as a missionary aboard the Dewfall is rDBsfbrl, In English that literally means ‘farspeaker’, but I suppose the more appropriate human term would be ‘network engineer’. I maintain the comms system that lets us keep in touch with our friends and family back home at Wayfarers’ Haven.”

He reached his tail into his backpack and pulled out a ruler. Raising his tail to show the ruler to the assembly, he continued, “Can I just say that this whole metric system is silly. You were on the right track dividing everything by twelve. Two, three, four, six—so many more factors than a decimal system.” He held up his two forepaws, counting to twelve on his digits. A few patriots in the audience applauded, and a cheer erupted from a particularly enthusiastic woman wearing a tee shirt with the phrase “°F YOU!” emblazoned across the front.

Stormlight continued. “But I’m getting off track.” He held the ruler a bit higher. “It takes about a nanosecond for light to travel this far. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but it starts adding up when your talking about interstellar distances. Our home is about twenty five lightyears from here. Using normal means of communication based around electromagnetic wave propagation, it would take twenty five years for a message to go between Earth and Focus. Who has time for that?”

He placed the ruler back in his backpack and drew out a tailful of other objects. He put them on the table and continued. “The problem is, you can’t go any faster than the speed of light, well, in realspace, anyway, but realspace isn’t the only thing out there.” He went on another digression. “There was a time in our own history that we had finished exploring our homeworld but hadn’t yet developed the means to truly thrive beyond our own atmosphere. Sure we had a few orbital colonies, and a few weirdos even decided it would be a good idea to set up a homestead on the neighboring planet, but the latency imposed by radio communication made a truly interplanetary civilization impossible.

“It looks like we found you guys around the same time in your species’ development. You’ve got a few permanent outposts in low orbit, and you’re fixing to start colonizing a few nearby celestial bodies. The thing is, your imagination has vastly outstripped your technological capacity.” He grabbed something from the table and held it up. It was a paperback copy of Ender’s Game. “Treasure this time. If you’re anything like we were, this is going to be your golden age of speculative fiction. There’s something about this point in history, I think. You’re too late to explore the world, but too early to explore the universe. With nowhere else to go, you make up new worlds to explore. By the way, it’s nice our meeting with you went so much better than in this book.” He let out a few panting chuckles.

“I’ve had to reach into this deep well of mythopoeia to find suitable English words for a lot of stuff that we monkey foxes take for granted.” He coiled his tail around another of the objects on the table and held it aloft to show the audience. It appeared to be a blue circuit board, with gold-plated contacts along one side, and a glass plate in the center. Below the plate was a brilliant magenta wafer of crystalline material. “this, for example, is known in Commonthroat as rFCrMr. The best English equivalent would be ‘ansible’.

“More specifically, this is an Underlay tunnel interface card. This one is a spare I took from the Dewfall’s cargo hold. I’ll pass this one around, but do be careful. We only have so much tailstone to make more if it breaks.” He hopped down from his perch and trotted over to the front row, offering the card coiled in his tail to the person sitting nearest to the podium. The card made its way through the crowd as Stormlight resumed his perch and continued.

“Speaking of tailstone,” he picked up a large unrefined magenta crystal from the table. “This is a raw tailstone crystal. This is what allows us to open tunnels through the underlay. How does it work? I have no idea. I’m not a natural philosopher.” Stormlight flicked his ears back. “But I can tell you how it got the name tailstone. The English word I chose is a little inaccurate, since the Commonthroat word, sGKqrCg, uses the word rC, which literally means ‘to flick with the tail.’” He demonstrated the gesture, swatting his side with the tip of his tail. “This obviously isn’t something you humans can replicate, so I had to make due with a broader English term. I think this is the closest human equivalent.” He executed a shoeing motion with his forepaw. “It means something like ‘It doesn’t matter’ or ‘don’t concern yourself with that’, but it can also mean ‘don’t bother me’ or ‘go away.’ The story goes that tailstone was discovered by a research monastery back home on Yih, just after the first wave of terraformers settled on Newhome, that’s the planet nearest to our homeworld. When the abbot was asked how this crystal was able to access the Underlay, he simply responded with a flick of his tail. It occasionally goes by ‘wonderstone’, as there’s a myth that the monks tried to pass off the material as having miraculous properties. This story was taken to be true for a long time. I even learned it in school as actual history, but the first mention of the event is after the War of Dissolution. That’s a few dozen millennia after the fact. It’s just a story concocted by polemicists seeking to discredit their ideological opponents. My best guess is that the abbot didn’t want to spend hours trying to explain a very complex topic to a layman. Knowing something and knowing how to explain that thing are two different skills, and the abbot was probably lacking in the latter. In any case, it’s not like the means to refine it were ever kept secret.

“While I can’t tell you how it does it, I can tell you what it does. The Underlay is like what you would call subspace, although calling it ‘space’ is a bit misleading. Things in the underlay don’t really have a location, so you can’t travel from one point to another. That’s why information sent via the underlay is transmitted instantly. We do use terminology that imply things ‘travel’ via the underlay, but that’s just a handy way of visualizing a hard to understand concept. When comparing this realm to the underlay,” he traced an arc with his muzzle indicating the space around him, “we use the term ‘realspace.’

“We take this monocrystal and shave off thin wafers like you see embedded in that interface card. Tunnels can only form between two wafers taken from the same crystal. You can shave off multiple wafers from the same crystal, but they all have to share the same communication channel. A single interface can either send or receive information, but it’s only half duplex. You must take turns talking and listening. You can get full duplex communication by taking two monocrystals, shaving off two wafers from each, and putting one wafer from each crystal into two ansibles. In practice, you only see this done on major trunk lines. Terminals like we have aboard The Dewfall only have a single tunnel endpoint because the power required to maintain multiple connections would be too much for a little womb ship.

“While there’s no latency, the throughput is pretty narrow, even compared to current human communication methods. Realtime communication is limited to text, and large files are sent using a store and forward system. It’s not unusual for downloads to take several days. I know a lot of your speculative fiction has things like realtime holographic video comms, but that’s out of the question. We can’t even push voice over an underlay tunnel in real time. Multisensory information has to be saved and sent as a file, and even text is sent this way most of the time.”

Stormlight hopped down again and gave the tailstone crystal to the same person sitting in front, and it made its way through the assembled humans. “This particular chunk of tailstone is taken from a larger supply from the Dewfall’s fabricator. That specimen has a counterpart back at home hewn from the same monocrystal. Like I said with the interface card, please be gentle. This stuff can shatter into very sharp pieces.

“The network topology I have set up here on Earth is pretty simple. We have our own computers connected to a terminal node aboard The Dewfall via microwave radio. This node is connected to an ansible, which has a point-to-point connection with a matching ansible at Wayfarers’ Haven. We get daily updates from mission control back home. It’s mostly letters from parents and litter mates, and a copy of the latest Focus-wide news bulletin. I usually ignore the news, as it’s either too depressing or none of my business, not really that different from how mainstream news does things here on Earth.”

Stormlight produced a homemade cable from his backpack. A male HDMI connector was spliced on one end, with a nest of soldered wires and homemade yinrih circuitry located near the middle. At the other end was a tiny magnetic connector that stormlight attached to the muzzle bridge of his HUD specs. He plugged the HDMI end into the projector near the podium. “You won’t believe how hard it was to make this cable. I had to dig through a dozen BBS’s back home and a few human web forums to get this working. I thought it would be nice to show you some news and letters from Focus.” The projector mirrored the command line interface of Stormlights HUD specs. He entered a few keystrokes, multiplexing the terminal process running the synth with a fresh terminal on the other half of the display. He shifted between the synth and the new terminal as he logged into the Dewfall’s network node. Commonthroat text cascaded down the screen, displaying the node’s welcome message.

“Let’s see. Wow, there’s still a massive download going on. Looks like mission control sent us something big, probably a schematic file judging by its size. They do that every now and then. Our tech is two and a half centuries older than what they have back home, so they sometimes push updated equipment models to us for us to print with the fabricator. It’s almost done downloading, but let’s check out the news we got yesterday while it finishes up, and we’ll find out what that big file is together.” He opened the news bulletin and slowly scrolled through the headlines without paying attention.

«What was that? Go back up! Go back up!» Tod barked. Startled, Stormlight dropped the keyer. The magnetic connector detached from his HUD specs as he bent down to pick it up. As he was repositioning the keyer and reattaching the video cable, he noticed the smell of excitement coming from Tod.

«What was that about?» Stormlight asked.

Stormlight and Tod read the heading plastered across the screen. «First yinrih successfully traverses mass router network.»

Stormlight dropped the keyer again but didn’t bother picking it back up. He dismounted his perch, the cable pulling free from his HUD specs again. He began pacing back and forth, attempting to explain their reaction to the confused assembly of humans, completely forgetting that he was no longer using the synthesizer, making his ravings utterly impenetrable to all but a few humans in the audience. Bob eventually stood up and began relaying what Stormlight was attempting to say.

«OK, OK, OK… yeah. This is big. Really really big. I forgot to mention we’ve been trying to transport matter over the underlay. Been trying for who knows how long. The transporting isn’t the hard part. It’s the momentum. That’s what’s the problem, you know, or I guess you wouldn’t know. Anyway, like, if you’re on a colony orbiting a planet, and want to go to the surface, you’ll still have all the momentum you had while in orbit. That’s a lot of momentum. If it isn’t absorbed before you drop back into realspace, you’ll shoot out of the mass router like a bullet. Hit the wall at Mach 20. No good. But I guess they finally figured it out. I guess mass routers are a thing now. Yeah. Big… really big.»

Stormlight eventually trailed off, but continued pacing. He was panting half out of exhaustion from his energetic explanation, half laughing with glee. He composed himself and perched again, reconnecting the HUD specs and keyer.

“Sorry about that. Thanks, Bob, for bearing with me.” Bob smiled and sat back down. Stormlight gave his head a shake, then continued speaking. “Well, that was sure something. Guess I told you we’d check out that big file. Seems a little anticlimactic now. I’m usually excited to get new schematics, but unless it’s—” He stopped abruptly. For a solid minute, you could practically hear a pin drop. The message that accompanied the file was displayed on the screen.

«May the sun warm your back, Stormlight. You probably read the news yesterday. Bet you think nothing could possibly top that. Oh, but you’re wrong! Here’s a schema for the mass router. I got it straight from the engineers on Yih. Production hasn’t even scaled up yet, but they contacted me with the schematic before I even read the headline, insisting I pass it onto you guys, and said for you to share it with our new friends. They told me you could print the parts no problem with the fabricator aboard the Dewfall. The boys over here are already setting one up. We’ll be connecting it to the P2P tunnel that’s already established between here and Earth. The engineers insisted it’s perfectly safe, but I say we do a few dry runs before sending any sophonts through.

«So yeah, guess we’ll be seeing you and the humans a lot sooner than we thought.

«May The Light illuminate your way.

«--Lightray Lacktail, Dewfall Mission Control»

The aroma of elation coming from Tod and Stormlight was so powerful that the humans could probably smell it.

After a few more seconds, the pair of yinrih shattered the silence with a sonorous howl. They were going home, and their new friends could come with them.

The Bright Way inherited the spring, summer, fall, and winter feasts from primordial animism, along with the role of hearthkeeper as bringer of light and warmth and the practice of using the bones of the dead as architectural adornment.

The Seasonal Feasts are meant to be considered together, as though they are in fact a single discontiguous celebration. They are preceded by a week (12-day period) of fasting and prayer.

The themes present in these celebrations include the passage of time, the nature of the universe as a work wrought by the Creator, and the yinrih's place within that creation, infinitesimal in scale but infinitely beloved. Light is of course a huge part of the Bright Way generally, but it is given special focus on the seasonal feasts. The spring feast rejoices in its return, the summer feast revels in its abundance, the fall feast reflects on its passing, and the winter feast mourns its absence. In addition to the emphasis on light, the seasonal feasts also reflect on the different stages of life, of the joy of birth, the vigor of youth, the melancholy of aging, and the sadness of death.

On the inner planets where seasonality is noticeable, the seasonal feasts are celebrated according to both the local planetary orbit and hemisphere. That is, The northern hemisphere's spring feast is celebrated at the same time as the southern hemisphere's winter feast and so on. Each feast is celebrated on the solstice or equinox that begins that season.

In places further away from focus, or on bodies where seasons aren't meaningfully present, the seasonal feasts are celebrated according to the nearest body that does have seasons. Here the feasts' commemoration of life stages becomes the main focus.

The week (12 days) preceeding each feast is set aside for fasting and meditation. Fasting in the Bright Way means abstaining from solid food. Filling liquids are drunk instead, with fermented steadtree fruit juice being especially popular.

The unique feature of the spring feast is the presentation of new litters, where childermoots who have had their litter over the past year present their kits to the hearthkeeper for blessing.

The summer feast is the most important of the four seasonal feasts. The reason why is fairly straightforward. Light is very important in the Bright Way, and the summer solstice is the day with the most light. Keeping with the secondary theme of life stages, the summer feast celebrates the vigor of youth. It is by far the most rowdy of the feasts. Sure Great Kindling and later First Meeting have plenty of festivities, but merriment is baked into the feast's identity. In that respect I suppose it's a bit like Christmas. You have a happy Thanksgiving and a happy Easter, but you gotta have a MERRY Christmas.

The fall feast focuses on aging. Yinrih do not have grandparents in the cultural sense. Their sires and dams have sires and dams of their own of course, but these are far too numerous to be meaningful. Rather than a celebration of one's elders, the fall feast reflects on the melancholy of aging. New empty nesters mourn the "loss" of their litter, the only litter they will ever have. Young adults mourn the end of their carefree puppyhood, the only puppyhood they will ever have. This song captures the mood of new empty nesters quite nicely.

The winter feast is a time both for mourning the absence of light and looking forward to its return.

This feast also reflects on death. This is the time when the bones decorating the facade and interior of the lighthouse are cleaned and a meticulous inventory taken. Every bone is associated with its owner, and care is taken to avoid desecration of the remains, intentional or accidental.

There is a tradition of giving gifts on the winter feast, although the gifts are meant to be experiential rather than material--things like food, perfumes, or even the performance of a piece of music or telling of a story. The transient nature of these experiences is meant to serve as a momento mori.

There are other Claravian feasts besides these four. In particular the feast of Great Kindling, which celebrates the dawn of sapience. The feast of the Theophany celebrates the revelation of the Uncreated Light to the yinrih, the giving of the Great Commandment, and the beginning of the Bright Way proper. Prior to First Contact the highest holy day is Great Kindling, which, at least on Yih's more populous southern hemisphere, is arbitrarily sandwiched halfway between the fall and winter feasts.

After First Contact, called First Meeting in Claravian circles, that event becomes the preeminent feast, and is fixed according to the Terran Gregorian Calendar, being around Christmas, which is when the Dewfall landed on Earth.

Filling the rest of the calendar are the little feasts dedicated to particular saints and the martyrs who died in pursuit of the Great Commandment to find other sophonts dwelling among the stars.

Standing a mere stone's throw from the Eternal Hearth, the edifice was supposed to be a monument to the friendship between the only two sapient species in the galaxy, and to the yinrih who built it, it was just that, but to most humans visiting the holy world of Hearthside, it was--well--a tower of human skulls.

We had offered a large supply of medical cadavers to our new galactic neighbors so that they might better understand human biology. It was thought that the yinrih, who had terraformed every suitable body in their star system dozens of millennia before we humans put plow to earth for the first time, could bestow upon our primitive species all manner of medical miracles, after, of course, dispelling their ignorance regarding our anatomy. When the human ambassador was asked what ought to be done with the bodies after they had been studied, "Treat them as you would your own dead." seemed to be the culturally appropriate response.

What we didn't know at the time was what exactly they did to their dearly departed. Bury them? Cremate them? Nope, turns out the answer was dissolve the soft tissue with acid, then use the bones to build with. Of course, not every structure had the honor of being made from the remains of your friends and family. In more traditional corners of the system, such architecture was reserved for houses of worship. In more secular parts, this peculiar building style extended to monuments, libraries, halls of learning, and centers of political power. In the most general sense, the best way to make your building scream "this is important!" was to cover it in skulls.

The yinrih healers studying our anatomy had mountains of alien remains to deal with, and also wanted to show us weird flat-faced hairless bipeds that they saw us as friends. Building a library to house the newly acquired medical knowledge in the traditional ossuary style seemed to solve both problems neatly. So there it was, bones bleaching in the perpetual noon of a tidally locked world, containing the musings, anecdotes, theories, and observations of an intelligence that was not our own pondering the peculiarities of the human form.

Aurora sat politely at the door, ready to greet any passing visitors, human and yinrih alike. She always found it interesting how differently the two species reacted to this little library. Her fellow yinrih would hurry inside, passing the facade of grinning alien skulls without comment, but eager to peruse the shelves, learning as much as they could about these large tailless creatures. Humans would stare open-mouthed at the outer walls encrusted with the skulls and bones of their conspecifics with a mixture of disgust and fascination. Or at least that's what she gathered from their comments. The nuances of human body language still escaped her.

There was one memorable exception. He was a cleric, or at least he looked like the pictures Aurora had seen of human clergy. He approached her, teeth exposed in the way humans did to show they were not a threat, extending his arm to grasp her forepaw in a greeting gesture. After quickly remembering not to expose her own teeth, she reared up on her hind legs to better meet his gaze, wrapping her tail around the pillar behind her for balance. She politely refused the handshake. The human was positively drenched in that pungent excretion, "sweat", she thought they called it. The unforgiving heat of the nightless desert apparently did not agree with this alien visitor. It was just a brackish solution used to regulate body temperature, exuded by glands just under the surface of the skin, odorless on its own. It was the bacteria living on the skin that caused the smell. Whatever it was and however it smelled, she was not eager to get it on her pelt.

"Good, uh, morning?" said the human, quickly glancing up at the star perpetually frozen at the zenith. "Sure is hot today."

«Hello,» Aurora yipped. «It's like we say, 'On Hearthside, if you don't like the weather, too bad, it's not going to change.'»

"Quite the monument you've got here. What's it for if you don't mind me asking?"

«Not at all. I'm actually a volunteer here. This is the House of Friendship. It's a little medical library, all books on human biology and medicine.»

"Ah," the cleric responded. "And the skulls are real, then?"

«...yeah,» she hesitated. «It's considered the respectful thing to do here. You guys gave us all these cadavers to study, and we wanted to do right by you when we were done with them.»

"Fascinating."

«You're not offended? Most humans seem to think it's morbid.»

"We build our altars on top of the bones of saints. It's really not all that different, I guess. We even have a few chapels that look just like this. We usually bury our dead first, but after a few hundred years it builds up and we need to make room. The bones get dug up and they need to go somewhere." He gestured at the facade.

«Interesting,» said Aurora, ears tilted forward in attention.

"A lot of us humans still think that stuff is morbid, too. I don't know, I guess it can be, context is everything. But in a way I can see why you find it comforting. Being surrounded by friends and family. Being reminded of one's mortality also keeps your mind on the important things."

«Exactly,» Aurora barked happily, glad to finally see a human recognizing her species' gesture of kindness. «You know we've been searching for other sophonts for so long. It's kind of the whole point of all this.» She waved her paw in the direction of the Eternal Hearth and surrounding religious buildings. "We're just happy we're not alone anymore."

"Thanks," said the human. "We're just as glad as you are."

Orbiting a dwarf planet on the edge of Partisan territory are the remains of a massive megastructure. It looks like the head of a yinrih, wrought in colossal proportions. It was clearly meant to be part of an even larger mechanism, and has been left unfinished rather than having been completed and then dismantled or broken later. Strictly speaking, nobody knows why its there. No records can be found relating to the terraforming or colonization of this particular dwarf planet, but there are records of the planet's existence before the head appeared, so it had to be built by a group of yinrih colonists at some point.

The structure is simply called "the head" by local yinrih, but after First Contact it acquires the human sobriquet of "Yinrihcron".

The lack of records is fertile ground for legends to spring up surrounding the giant mechanical head and its creators. These putative creators are known collectively as The Artificer's Litter, as many of the legends have the colonists lead by a charismatic leader to whom is given the title of Artificer. One such tale serves as a cautionary parable.

---

It came to pass in the time of the decadence of the hearthkeepers that there was a group of colonists who sought a suitable habitation free from the onerous tithes levied by the clergy. They settled a tiny world far from Yih (These were still the days when the clergy had their seat of power on the Homeworld.) Once the people had established themselves in their new home, their leader said to them

"The hearthkeepers say that the Creator dwells outside of time and watches from afar. Why does it stand aloof, speaking only in riddles and visions to corrupt clerics? They tell us to do this and to do that, saying the fate of our immortal souls hangs upon our obedience. Perhaps the Light's Truth is being bent by those crooked hearthkeepers. Come, brethren, now that we are free of those witches and their priestcraft, Let us build a suitable vessel for The Light, that it may vouchsafe to dwell within its creation as one of us, speaking plainly and not hiding its meaning in obscure metaphors."

So they set to work building a great machine, wrought of steel and plastic and silicon, in the likeness of a yinrih. It was said to inspire fear and awe in all who looked up on it, even as it lay unfinished.

The Light saw what they set themselves to do, and said "My little ones, why do ye this? Would ye have me as your slave master? For that is what I would be to you were I to reveal myself as I am. I would say 'do this' or 'go there' and ye would obey in servile fear. I desire not fearful slaves but willing collaborators. I stand apart not out of cold indifference but so that ye might seek me willingly. Know that all that I do is for your benefit, though it may not seem so there within.

"There are yet many righteous clerics who chant the liturgies I have prescribed at the hours I have appointed, neither adding nor omitting a single syllable. They give warmth and light generously to those under their care, Indeed, they glorify me all the more by their quiet labor among this wicked generation. But those bent clerics, that den of usurers, will be laid low at a time I deem fit. As for you, little ones, I will scatter you among the other peoples of Focus, leaving no trace of your habitation. This idol ye have made shall remain as a warning to those who would stand atop your paw prints[^1]."

And so it was as though the colonists never settled there, with only their unfinished machine standing watch over the empty world.

---

This is only one version of the story among many. Another popular telling gives the head the same purpose of acting as a material vessel for the Uncreated Light, but rather than being built as a mechanical messiah, the builders are Misotheist Atavists who seek to trap the Light in a physical form so it can be killed.

[^1]: stand atop one's paw prints to follow in one's footsteps, to be in someone else's shoes, to do or experience the same thing that someone else has in the past.

"I really wish you wouldn't wear that thing on campus," Sarah plucked a sticker from Sunshine's back reading Fur is murder! "Last time I took a whole can of red paint for you."

Sunshine looked at the sticker Sarah had removed from her fur cloak. "I wouldn't be showing the saint proper respect if I let her hame sit around and gather dust."

"Yeah, and that's another thing, most humans don't regard wearing the skin of a dead person to be honoring them."

"But WE do. You'll just have to explain it to them."

"Next time bring your keyer and you can explain it yourself. I'm sick of talking about Claravian funerary rituals to literally everyone that walks by."

Sunshine looked back at the field. The teams were filing out for half time. "This is an interesting game," she said changing the subject. "What's it called again?"

"Football," said Sarah.

"But they aren't using their feet very much, except for all the running."

Sarah shrugged. "Honestly I don't know why we call it that. There's another sport that's also called 'football', well by people from other countries, anyway, that involves a lot more kicking."

"What's THAT!" Sunshine barked, gesturing with her muzzle down at the field.

"Oh that's just the college mascot, the Ericson College Coyote." A man in a coyote costume, wearing a baseball hat and T-shirt with the school's logo on it, was capering around the field.

"And why... is it on its hind feet?" asked Sunshine, a nervous tremor in her voice.

"It's just a guy in a costume. Wait, are you afraid of it?"

"No, it's just... unsettling."

"This coming from the woman wearing a three-thousand year old dead person's pelt as a winter jacket."

"Hay! Don't forget you're as strange to us as we are to you."

"Fair enough," Sarah sighed. "I think I know why you're bothered. We have this thing that happens when we see something that's almost human but not quite. It's a feeling of revulsion we call 'The Uncanny Valley.' Basically, if you take a creature that isn't human and gradually make it more and more human-looking, it gets more and more appealing, but when it's almost but not perfectly human, there's a fear reaction because we think it SHOULD be human but we know it isn't. Maybe you're feeling the yinrih equivalent to the uncanny valley."

"Maybe you're right," said Sunshine, building up the courage to examine the mascot. "So why does his hat not cover his ears? Why cover your head but leave the most sensitive parts exposed? Ears need the most protection from cold and sun." She gestured with her tail at the loose part of the hame wrapped around her ears against the November chill.

"I don't know," Sarah admitted.

"And why is he wearing a shirt if he already has fur to keep him warm? And why isn't he wearing pants, or shoes for that matter? Why cover only the upper body?"

"I told you, it's just a guy in a costume, a guy who goes to the same veterinary pharmacology class as I do. So you know what, Next Monday you come to class with me and you can ask him yourself."

"Maybe I will," Sunshine huffed.

This is by far my weakest attempt at a story, but it gets at the heart of why The Lonely Galaxy exists. Much of this project is my attempt to work through the emotions related to the aging and eventual passing of my retired guide dog, as well as my relationship with my current dog, who inspired the phonetics of yinrih language. This is why the yinrih are canine and why they live so long. As clumsy as this story is, it was extremely cathartic for me to write. I wrote this in 2023 when my late dog was still very much alive but was beginning to show her age.

Anyway, here it is.

---

The hot Texas sun beat down on the two people sitting outside the root beer stand. Only one of them was a human. Bob the human looked to his right at the half wall next to his chair. There, lying on his belly, straddling the wall like a raccoon resting on a tree branch, glossy black pelt shining in the sun, prehensile tail hanging off the opposite side of the wall, was the other person. His six-fingered paw held an ice-cold root beer, which the waitress had thoughtfully poured into a bowl to accommodate this strange patron's canine muzzle.

Stormlight Blackpelt looked down from his perch at the sidewalk, where two elderly humans, who looked about Bob's age, were pushing a wheeled cart containing a human infant. Bob followed his friend's gaze. "Looks like grandma and grandpa are giving mom and dad some time off." Bob said, waving at the couple. They smiled back and continued walking.

Stormlight turned to Bob again, regarding his human friend's bald crown and wrinkled face. He grabbed his tail and began running his claws along it as though brushing out a knot. Bob looked up and noticed the alien's fidgeting. "Well go on and ask." Said Bob. "You do that whenever you're fixing to ask me an awkward question."

«Does it bother you that we live so much longer?» Stormlight asked. «I've been reading a lot of human stories and myths: Fountains that make you young again, stones that grant immortality, things like that.»

"If I'm honest, maybe sometimes," said Bob. "But Earth has trees that live for millennia and brainless jellyfish that can live pretty much forever. It's not like humans were breaking longevity records until y'all came along. Besides, we already live twice as long as our closest animal relatives. I'd say that's pretty nice. And what about you? Don't the yinrih have legends about people living for five thousand years?"

«Of course. We fear our mortality but hope in the hereafter.»

"Don't start getting preachy on me now." Bob chided.

Bob thought for a moment, then asked, "Does it bother you that we don't live nearly as long as you?"

«It'll take at least a year for the High Hearthkeeper to pick the legates who will come after us, and then another two and a half centuries for them to get here. That's a long time even for us, and several of your lifetimes. You aren't getting any younger,» said Stormlight, tilting his muzzle up slightly to point at Bob's balding scalp.

Bob reflected on his friend's concern. Stormlight and his fellow missionaries were around one hundred fifty earth years old, that is if you didn't count the centuries spent in metabolic suspension on the way to Earth. They were already older than every human alive, but still young as the yinrih reckoned it. Bob couldn't even name a single relative of his that was born before the twentieth century. By the time the missionaries would lay eyes on their fellow yinrih, Bob would be just a name on a tombstone, forgotten even by his descendants.

After a few moments, bob said, "It hurts to say goodbye for the last time, and y'all are going to be saying a lot of last goodbyes as long as you hang around us humans. But think of it this way. You're already a big hit with my grandkids. You can help them grow up, and again with their children, and their children's children. You can tell them all about how their great great great grandpa Bob got to be the first human to shake hands with an alien. You and Iris and Tod and Sunshine and the others can be that one constant in their lives, the one thing they can count on to be there no matter what. They'll have to say goodbye to me soon enough, and by and by their parents, too, but not you. Y'all can be the one thing they'll never have to say goodbye to. And after you've said your last goodbye to me, you can pray for the repose of my soul, or speak my name among the living, or do whatever it is you critters do for as long as you feel like doing it, which will sure be longer than any human will remember me.

"Besides, I'm in good health. I've got at least twenty years left in me if my family history is anything to go by. That might not be very long for you, but it's a while yet for me. Don't go mourning me until I'm actually six feet under. It's a wonderful day out... if a little hot." Bob added as the sophont next to him noisily lapped up some soda from the bowl. "Let's just enjoy the day."

Bob looked up at his yinrih friend. Stormlight tilted his ears back, relaxed his jaw slightly, and let his tail hang loose again. «Thanks, Bob. Sometimes I worry so much about the future that I don't appreciate the present.»

The two looked back at the cars driving down the street and the people walking along the sidewalk. "It sure is a nice present," said Bob.

The processes used in terraforming lifeless planets were pioneered not by the Bright Way, but by the Lifebringers, a sect of Neoshamanists. Whereas the Bright Way sought sapient life dwelling among the stars, the Lifebringers attempted to recreate sapient life anew through artificial selection. They never achieved their goal, but did contribute tremendously to the fields of biology, ecology, medicine, and planetology along the way.

Once the other rocky planets of Focus were found to be devoid of life, the Bright Way lost interest in them, leaving the Lifebringers to go to work.

The foundation of the terraforming process is a complex microbiome selectively bred from existing species of extremophiles and chemotrophs on Yih. These come packaged together in something known as "rock eater".

Different strains of microbe have different metabolic processes that contribute ultimately to oxygen formation and (perhaps not yet cannon) soil and water formation. In the early stages, a positive feedback loop is initiated whereby the more oxygen is produced the more certain species within the microbiome flourish, creating even more oxygen, however, other species that the oxygen producers depend on are anaerobic, and die after the partial pressure of O2 reaches breathable levels. This causes the oxygen producers to die in turn, and most of the rest of the microbiome collapses, leaving only the foundation on which natural life can subsist, completing the terraforming process.

How livable conditions are maintained afterward depends on the size of the body and its distance from Focus. Larger bodies can maintain the atmosphere through their own gravity assuming a self-generated magnetosphere is either already present or able to be kickstarted by Science™️ (see the movie The Core for what I'm thinking here).

Smaller bodies require active intervention to maintain these conditions. The Science™️ in this case is generated by orbital infrastructure which requires upkeep. The upside to this is that planet-wide climate control is possible, and the local weather service doesn't predict the weather, they cause it. Moons and dwarf planets in the Outer Belt are nominally able to maintain an ambient temperature that humans would probably find "brisk" or "nippy". (Also tentatively cannon, the populations of these planets have developed thicker fur to compensate, creating a distinct floofy Outlander phenotype.) Penny-pinching politicians sometimes decree that the global thermostat be turned down to "bone-chilling" to save money.

Bodies outside the orbit of Moonlitter are too far away for Focus to provide meaningful illumination, so more orbital infrastructure provides this light along with surface lighting.

Larger bodies can't be actively climate controlled, and have their own more or less naturally evolving atmospheric processes as seen on Earth and Yih. Hearthside has artificial aerosols in its atmosphere that reduce surface insolation to livable levels. (Definitely already cannon is that Hearthsiders have evolved larger ears to dissipate heat.)

It's ambiguous in-universe whether demons are real at all. The Claravian magisterium discourages even discussing them, as they see it as a Morton's fork of "they don't exist so you're wasting your time" or "they do exist and the best thing to do is ignore them".

The closest thing that the Bright Way has to an exorcism is a simple blessing by a hearthkeeper, accompanied by a sprinkling of blessed milk or, if the object is electronic or otherwise not waterproof, an anointing with dielectric chrism. The blessing isn't seen as banishing evil so much as inviting good.

Neoshamanism, however, is brimming with folklore surrounding demons. This is especially true in the more experiential Agentivist branch of Neoshamanism.

Exorcism follows the logic of "if it's intimidating to a yinrih it'll be intimidating to a demon." A cleric sprinkling blessed milk everywhere isn't exactly intimidating, but you know what IS? a ripped gym bro gun nut screaming obscenities with every breath and inflicting property damage. You gotta show that demon you're not bluffing, after all.

Logically from how I've developed them so far the Misotheists should have even more demonology, but I haven't fleshed them out as much.

There is an entire clade of small creatures filling rodent-like niches that have evolved the ability to store an electric charge in capacitor-like organs below their eyes. They can discharge these organs into any would-be predator attempting to eat them. These critters are called sdFrdFg, which (very loosely) translates to "zap rats". Zap rats have even developed aposematic coloration, bearing mostly bright yellow fur with white, black, red, or blue accents being present in varying degrees depending on species. Unfortunately for the zap rats, the yinrih LOVE the mild shock they get from eating them. It's like sticking a 9-volt battery on your tongue. They're either eaten live or, if you don't want to risk them going off in your gut instead of your mouth, you can quickly kill them by holding the animal between your inner and outer thumb and puncturing their dorsal nerve cord with your writing claw.

There are frequent population booms, necessitating regular cullings, with hunting being the preferred method. The zap rats' bright yellow fur makes them trivial to spot.

---

Bonus little story:

I had to chuckle at the mundanity of it. When you think of getting medically examined by aliens, what comes to mind is ominously hovering UFOs, bright lights, and and waking up in a ditch four hours later. Yet here I was, on my way to do just that, but the atmosphere couldn't be more... suburban, for lack of a better word.

Birds, or what sounded like birds, warbled in the trees lining the market square. Food sellers could be heard on either side, barking their best sales pitch at passers-by. A group of older pups was lounging on perches off the main path.

One of them came up to me. It sounds weird calling him a pup; he was old enough to be my father. I could hear his fellows urging him on in Hearthsider. "Friend," he said in heavily accented Commonthroat. I flashed my teeth in a jovial American smile. This apparently is what the lad was looking for. "See!" he barked back at his companions, "I told you. Humans DO have fangs, they're just really small!"

"yeah sure," said one of the others, "but how can they eat meat with such small teeth?"

"Only one way to find out." My interlocutor rearing up on his hind feet and reached toward his fellows with a paw. One of them rummaged through a cloth-covered basket and grabbed a morsel of... something, then tossed it at him. He caught it and held it up to me. "Eat, friend!"

I took it before registering what it was. It was small, furry, and dead. It looked a bit like a chipmunk, if chipmunks had blue and yellow fur. I evidently was spending too much time scrutinizing it, as my interlocutor grunted in protest. "You a puppy-gut? Can't eat a raw zap rat?"

"Not with those teeth," said the one who tossed him the rodent.

"Are you trying to win a bet?" I sighed in English. He merely continued to stare at me. Do I really want to eat this thing? Raw? I had eaten a nightcrawler on a dare once when I was a kid. This couldn't be any worse. I glanced over my shoulder at the clinic that was my ultimate destination. I was already going to the doctor. If I got sick they'd probably know what to do, right? Or they better after cutting up all those human cadavers.

I popped the creature in my mouth and swallowed it whole, barely letting it touch my tongue.

"Ha!" said the pup next to me. "They are meat eaters!"

"That doesn't count," protested one of his fellows. "He didn't bite down on it."

As they argued back and forth, I felt my impromptu snack slither down my throat, then came a jolt as though I had swallowed a 9-volt rather than a dead rat.

My stomach began protesting almost immediately. I glared at the boy and cursed myself for succumbing to peer pressure. He merely flicked an ear in hasty goodbye then scampered back to his friends, where they continued to debate the finer points of human dentition. I turned and headed to the clinic, my stomach making its displeasure known through noisy gurgles. "I better not need a change of undies," I thought as I ducked through the door to the healer's office.

Firefly was hatched on a dwarf planet in the outer belt in the waning centuries of the age of decadence. His sires and dams were active with the missionaries. Although none of them had been selected to go on a mission, they assisted in other ways like mission control and wayfinding (searching for potentially habitable planets to send future missions to.) It was their greatest hope that one of their pups would be selected to go on a mission someday.

By all accounts Firefly's puppyhood was a happy one. He was beloved by his parents and litter mates, and was especially known for his piety. He was seldom seen without a prayer ring, and attended liturgies daily, sometimes more than once a day during important feasts.

In addition to his strong spiritual life, Firefly demonstrated strong leadership skills, even at an early age. He could frequently be seen leading the other pups in his lighthouse in meditative prayers, and he helped run retreats for his fellow youth as he grew older. Even adults were inspired by the fire in his soul.

Surrounded as he was by fervent Wayfarers, he was shielded from both the less exemplary side of the clergy as well as the growing secular antagonism elsewhere in the outer belt. This all changed as he was approaching adulthood.

One peculiar custom seen in some parts of Moonlitter and the Outer Belt, even to this day, is a requirement that pups reaching adulthood must take a public-facing job for some time in order to instill empathy for those working in customer service. Firefly found himself working at the repair desk of an electronics shop. It was here where he was exposed to the "real" world. One thing he noticed right away was how rude the customers could be. He particularly noticed that his fellow Wayfarers, who he had grown up to regard as kinder and more understanding, were just as rude as the secular yinrih who visited the store.

This planted a seed of doubt in his mind. What good was the Bright Way if Wayfarers acted no different than their secular peers? This seed was further nourished by Firefly's first exposure to the rest of the Bright Way, those corrupt clergy whose only interest was maintaining their monopolistic grip over the system.

One day, while seeking absolution, he confessed his doubts to the hearthkeeper of his childhood lighthouse. A patient and gentle confessor, she encouraged him to see these difficulties as an opportunity for growth. "Faith is not a feeling," she said. "You were a very faithful pup, but much of that was your sires' and dams' teaching you how to live. Now's your chance to own that faith as an adult." Yet his doubt lingered even as he continued his outward devotion.

Around this time, the wayfinders discovered perhaps the most promising exoplanet in the history of the missionaries. It was not only overflowing with biosignatures, there were even rumors that long range imaging had picked up city lights on the planet's surface.

Every now and then, the wider clergy liked to parade the missionaries around in order to reinforce their rule by reminding everyone of their divine mandate to find other sophonts. This was one of those times. News of the promising new exoplanet was spread far and wide, to the point that it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would finally make First Contact. Cloudbearer the Heresiarch had made his famous repudiation of the Great Commandment not too long before, and the ruling clergy found their grip on power slipping, but the news that the yinrih might not be alone in the universe after all was the perfect opportunity to remind the public that the clergy were still relevant.

Firefly’s confessor encouraged him to apply to be a missionary to this new world, hoping that it would help him get over his doubts. Prospective missionaries are subjected to a battery of physical and mental health tests to make sure they’re fit for the rigors of long-term suspension. The sensory input generated by the amnion as the nervous system is plugged into the ship's network can be addictive, and some people can be psychologically harmed to the point of madness by the alteration of time perception required by centuries of suspension. Firefly did pass these tests, but only just. The mission directors were all set to turn him down, as they were extra keen to ensure this all-but-guaranteed First Contact went smoothly. Firefly’s confessor urged them to approve him, saying he was a man of great faith who was unlikely to succumb to addiction or madness.

And so Firefly was selected to go on the mission along with two others. His sires and dams were overjoyed that their dream of having one of their litter go on a mission was finally becoming reality. This joy was tempered by the sadness of knowing they would never see their little pup again, as they would be gone before the mission even arrived at this distant world.

As was the ancient custom, a living funeral was held for Firefly and the other missionaries so that their sires, dams, and litter mates could say goodbye to them one last time. A tiny sliver of bone was taken from each missionary and put in a reliquary, which was given a place of honor in the local lighthouse, as it was assumed they would spend the remainder of their lives on an alien planet, and it would be even longer before other Wayfarers would arrive and give their bones proper respect.

So with mingled joy and grief, Firefly’s family and friends bade their last goodbye to him as he climbed into the amnion aboard their little womb ship.

To Firefly and the other two missionaries, the next several centuries passed in a few days. In that time, their sires, dams, and even their litter mates reached the end of their lives, and mission control passed from one set of paws to another as crew grew old and retired.

What happened next is a matter of considerable historical debate, and accounts differ depending if you’re talking to partisan propagandists, Wayfarers, or Allied Worlds historians, but this much is agreed upon. The missionaries arrived in orbit around the planet and were pulled out of suspension, expecting a verdant garden of life, only to be met with yet another barren rock. It was even discovered that the little tidbit about city lights being detected was a crock of cloaca butter churned out by the clergy in a desperate attempt to hold onto power by making the prospect of finding other sophonts seem more likely. The missionaries had given up absolutely everything, and it turned out they were just chasing the end of the ring, just like every mission that had gone before them. On top of everything else, they had been used by a corrupt hierarchy to maintain their stranglehold on Focus.

While all three missionaries were sad at the absence of sophonts to befriend and angry at the clergy for using them, this was the final straw for poor little Firefly. Ever since his miserable experience in that shop as an adolescent, he had been staring into an abyss of nihilism. For years he fought tooth and claw not to fall in. He prayed, he fasted, he meditated, he sought spiritual council, but nothing could remove that doubt gnawing at his gut. He willingly gave up ever seeing his beloved family and friends again, and was all but promised that his difficulties would be put to rest by finally making First Contact. It was a lie.

No, not just the thing about city lights, the whole Bright Way. Those secular agitators were right. It was all a ruse, a deceit concocted by the clergy to gull superstitious masses into submission. That confessor of his was probably in on the whole thing, too, putting on a mask of compassion to manipulate him and the rest of her congregation. Damn her greasy fur! There was no Light, no soul, no free will. From the day you hatched you were just rotting away a little each day until your insane fluke of an existence was snuffed out. The universe would go on reeling forward, shoved inexorably toward heat death by the blind force of entropy as though you never were.

It was in this state of existential turmoil that Firefly had to re-enter suspension for the journey back home.

During the centuries that the missionaries were making their way to the exoplanet, the Outer Belt saw a period of quiet, with the Bright Way regaining control over much of the region. The clergy’s little PR stunt painting First Contact as an inevitability seemed to work. The secular insurgents were holding their collective breath. Perhaps Cloudbearer was wrong after all. The traditionalists within the Bright Way were hoping that First Contact would reorient the wider clergy back toward their original goal of finding and befriending other intelligent species, abandoning their monopoly over the system’s infrastructure that had distracted them for nearly sixty millennia.

But you know what they say, no, not “All toasters toast toast”. “Nobody gets in trouble for lying. They get in trouble for getting caught.” When the missionaries arrived at what turned out to be another lifeless lump of rock, and the news made its way back to Focus through the ansible network that the hierarchy had lied, all hell broke loose in the Outer Belt. The hierarchy lost in mere days what they had spent centuries building back up. Not just the territory in the Outer Belt, but what little good will they had left, even from the traditionalists among the missionaries and on Hearthside. The clergy were expelled from the Outer Belt, and the region balkanized into a patchwork of warlord states consisting of competing secularist factions. The missionaries, hitherto tolerated by the secularists thanks to their shared enmity with the corporate arm of the Bright Way, now found themselves the targets of harassment and violence. The secularists blamed them for being complicit in the hierarchy’s deception, knowingly or not. The missionaries are what gave the hierarchy legitimacy, and their servile obeisance to the hierarchy could only stop with their eradication.

The mission control team managing the now disgraced mission found themselves especially targeted. Protests escalated to death threats, some of which were followed through on. For the next several centuries, the team had to move from safe house to safe house, relocating when their new base of operations was discovered and attacked. Their fellow traditionalists on Hearthside made several offers to give them a place free from persecution where they could monitor the returning womb ship in peace, but Firefly and the others would eventually have to cross the Outer Belt once they entered Focus, and the control team thought it best that they had a safe place to dock upon their return.

This decision would be their undoing. After centuries of dodging bullets both metaphorical and actual, the control team’s latest safe house was raided by a cell of secular insurgents. While the team itself survived the encounter, their management computers and the ansible connecting them to the ship had been stolen. Worst of all, the tailstone monocrystal connected to the womb ship’s own ansible, the single most precious object to the entire mission, was also found and taken. They could lose their management computers, they could lose the ansible itself, but as long as they had more of the tailstone connected to the womb ship they could rebuild. Now they didn’t even have that. The little craft was flying blind.

Here’s where the history slips into speculation, with urban legends, propaganda, and guesswork being the only guideposts. This is the version of events that most historians think is most plausible. With no warm bodies monitoring the logs coming back from the amnions aboard the womb ship, and with years passing in mere seconds for the travelers themselves, system errors and hardware failures slowly built up over the years until two of the three amnions failed, allowing the occupants to slip into unconsciousness, causing brain death. Firefly was the only survivor. Folk history among Wayfarers says that, given system control would have reverted to Firefly on the event that comms with mission control were severed, and knowing he wasn’t in the best headspace going into suspension, he killed the other two missionaries in a nihilistic rage. Partisan propaganda says that he struggled mightily to save his crewmates, making a final plea to The Light to allow them to survive. A plea that went unanswered, convincing Firefly once and for all that religion was a poisonous lie.

Meanwhile, the hierarchy had their paws full trying to hold on to the rest of Focus. The outskirts of the Outer Belt had collapsed completely, with the territory of Moonlitter forming a stagnant battle front between the disorganized secular forces and the considerable might of the Knights of the Sun. This remained the status quo until a few years before Firefly was due to return home.

Firefly found his subjective time perception pulled back into sync with the outside world years before he was supposed to reenter Focus. He was reborn. The fire in his soul was no longer fueled by faith, but by a burning hatred for those that had wronged him. His sires and dams were dead, his littermates were dead. The world he was returning to was utterly unlike the one he left. And all of it was for nothing, for worse than nothing. For some time after his time perception normalized, Firefly had only the monotonous diagnostic data pouring into his mind from the ship’s systems to keep him company, but soon that was joined by the voices of other yinrih. It seems the womb ship’s ansible had regained contact with its twin at Focus. The messages flooding the ansible were not from mission control. The secularists who had stolen the tailstone had used it to manufacture another ansible and reconnect with the ship.

At first the messages were cruel, mocking Firefly for his blind faith, but soon the insurgents discovered that the erstwhile pious missionary had become sympathetic to their cause. For the insurgents, this was a boon of colossal proportions. A former champion of the Bright Way was now one of them. At first they planned to use him as a figurehead, a symbol of everything false and deceptive that was the Bright Way. Firefly was to be a standard bearer around which the fractured secularists could rally to finally push beyond the orbit of Moonlitter. But Firefly proved more than just a figurehead. He used his charisma to climb the ranks of this particular group of insurgents, using his extensive knowledge of the missionaries and the larger Bright Way to strike where they were most vulnerable. He became a trusted leader, first to the little cell that had secured the ansible, and then as those insurgents proved frightfully successful at targeting the Bright Way, other groups of secularists gathered around him until he found himself at the top of an entire movement, and all before crossing into the Outer Belt, indeed without leaving suspension.

By the time he re-entered Focus Firefly had single handedly rallied the previously disorganized secular warlord states behind a single terrifying banner. They were the partisans, and he was their great leader.

It's said that converts are the most zealous, and Firefly was certainly no exception. When he returned to Focus, he began a campaign of extermination against, not only Wayfarers, but anyone not sufficiently godless. Of particular note was his treatment of the Misotheists, whom he pursued with as much hatred as his former coreligionists. To despise The Light was to acknowledge its existence, and Firefly would brook no compromise in that regard.

So ruthless was his persecution that many of his own advisors entreated him to stop. Some were genuinely disgusted by his actions, while others simply realized that the Traditionalists could be a valuable ally against the ruling hierarchy and knew that slaughtering their fellow Wayfarers was unlikely to convince them to render aid. Reluctantly, Firefly took their advice, but not without quietly noting which of these advisors was the quickest to gainsay him.

Meanwhile, the disparate traditionalist movements on Hearthside were beginning to gain momentum, helped considerably by the new influx of refugees on Hearthside fleeing the secular warlord states in the Outer Belt. Two individuals are credited with finally bringing these disorganized movements together, both of whom were moved to act by the scandal of Firefly's apostasy and subsequent rise to power among the secularists.

Iris the Hearthsider was a traditionalist hearthkeeper known for her fiery sermons condemning the hierarchy's acedia and greed. She was the first cleric to call the faithful to take up arms to overthrow the ruling clergy. Many heeded her call, but the war had yet to begin in earnest.

The other figure responsible for lighting this powder keg was Greenleaf the steadtree hermit. Steadtree hermits were mystics who dwelt in the trees along the banks of The River on Yih. Some hermits would gain enough fame to collect a few disciples, who would sit at the base of their tree to hear their wisdom, but most kept to themselves. Greenleaf, moved by righteous anger, descended from his steadtree and confronted the High Hearthkeeper in person, going so far as to call her a heretic, accusing her of abandoning the Great Commandment in the pursuit of worldly power. His show of defiance was the crack that finally caused the dam to burst.

Iris, buoyed by Greenleaf's actions, was able to convince nearly half of the Knights of the Sun to join the Traditionalists against their former brothers in arms defending the Bright Way's worldly possessions. Thus were born the Pious Dissolutionists, who formed a second battle front at Hearthside working outwards, just as the secularists pushed inwards from the Outer Belt. The knights, considerably weakened thanks to the internal schism, were unable to hold the line against the secularists, who were finally able to break through the border of Moonlitter. The War of Dissolution had begun.

Firefly remained in suspension, with his capsule, now called the Eternal Womb, modified to extend his lifespan practically indefinitely, but ultimately at the cost of his sanity. He remained involved in affairs of state for some time after the conclusion of the war, but began to withdraw more and more into the simulacrum as time passed. The government began simply doing things "according to the great Leader's will" whether or not he would have approved.

Eventually even the physical location of the Eternal Womb was lost, as it was deliberately secreted away in some unremarkable corner of the dwarf-planet-spanning capital complex rather than put on display in a lavish throne room, all in order to deter would-be assassins. It worked a little too well.

As such dictatorships are wont to do, a cult of personality developed around Firefly, and he became a sort of Big Brother figure. Over time, this cult of personality developed into a literal cult. The Partisan government constantly flip-flops on whether to promote the cult as a means of control, or to persecute its members as "dulls", a derogatory term that encompasses Wayfarers and other people who profess a religion, including the above-mentioned misotheists.

Suspension is not brain uploading. The suspended person's consciousness is still in their physical body, and the vulpithecine brain isn't equipped to store memories for 33 millennia. Firefly fades in and out of lucidity, and almost never engages with the outside world even when he is sane. Even he doesn't know where his body is anymore.

Firefly's detractors refer to him as the Lichlord. There are many conspiracy theories surrounding him. Some say he actually died on the way back from his mission. When the insurgents reconnected with his womb ship they were hoping to recruit disaffected missionaries, but found out they were all dead. So they pulled a Weekend at Bernie's and propped up this charismatic leader's corpse in this so-called "Eternal Womb" and acted like he was their leader in order to have a unifying symbol to rally around.

A slightly more believable theory is that he simply died in the intervening millennia since the war, and the government has been lying about him still being alive. Suspension prolongs lifespan but even it has limits. Entropy catches up eventually, and many claim that these supposed modifications to his amnion are lies, and that the government pretends he's alive to maintain continuity.

Especially since First Contact, more and more are saying he has repented of his apostasy and wishes to bring and end to his unnaturally prolonged earthly life. But all of these are just rumors.

Are there any strange confluences or patterns in your worldbuilding that arose by chance and you ended up embracing?

I have a few. There's a meme in the Civilization community about immortal leaders. Basically if you pick the Americans lead by George Washington, George will be leading his American empire from the dawn of agriculture into the space age. I wanted to reference that in my conworld. I already established that metabolic suspension exists that both extends lifespan while allowing a degree of interaction with the outside world, so I decided Firefly the Apostate, the leader of the Partisans will be permenantly sealed in a modified suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb, where he's been (nominally) ruling most of the Outer Belt for the past 33 millennia.

Since their inception the Partisans have been more or less space tree doggo commies, so I also wanted to reference the almost literal cult that has arisen in North Korea around the Kim family, especially given that, as a nominally Communist nation, one would expect NK to be officially atheist. So there's a cult of personality surrounding Lichlord Firefly that has developed into a literal cult.

So taken together, Firefly is an immortal, incapacitated, tyrannical atheist leader being worshipped by his subjects. Hmmmmm.

Another coincidence, maybe due to laziness on my part, is the large immigrant population on Hearthside consisting of Sweetwater surface dwellers. Sweetwater was originally terraformed as a sort of planet-wide gated community for the ultra wealthy. The rich live in palatial underwater cities while the descendants of the workers who built those cities eke out a living on the surface in grinding poverty, plying the planet-wide ocean as peaceful fishermen, miners, and traders, or plundering passers-by as pirates.

As with any poor community, many leave to seek a better life elsewhere, and for various reasons Hearthside seems to be their destination of choice. Maybe they resent the Allied Worlds for allowing their poverty to continue so they don't just move to Yih or Newhome which would be easier given Sweetwater is an AW member. Maybe they're just sick and tired of all the water and want to move to Hearthside's nightless desert.

The Doylist explanation is that I had already named the anchoress from the Farspeaker's Apprentice Seabreeze and had to think of why she would have that name, so I made her from a immigrant family. I used that backstory out of laziness for a few other characters as well. Then I came up with the idea that Sweetwater surface dwellers tend to have more body fat because it helps them swim. Yinrih are naturally swole (see pics of hairless chimps for a good idea of what I'm thinking). Monkey foxes are arboreal and need to pull their own weight against gravity. The side effect is they're too dense to swim. But Sweetwater has been around for dozens of millennia, plenty of time for a distinct phenotype to evolve. So now Calmwind, who was otherwise just a portly Hearthsider, is also an immigrant or a descendent of such.

So voila, now there's a distinct ethnic minority living on Hearthside.

All her life, Eiva has only known the life of a thief. For nearly her entire childhood, she has taken what she wanted from others and kept everyone at an arms distance. But, it wasn't her choice. Her father, Josyn, was a notorious member of a criminal organization named Sinder. An organization that had kept her fed, allowed Josyn to give her nice things for her birthday, and gave her more money than she has ever needed. To her, Sinder was a dream come true. She idolized the leader, a woman named Felicia Sinder, as a god amongst the normals that walked the city of Archerus. She grew up not knowing what having friends felt like but it didn't matter to her. All she needed was her father, the money, the expensive things, and Sinder. As she grew, it wasn't long before she started to take scores of her own.

Her first take was a random normal who just happened to pass her one night while out on a stroll in the heart of Archerus. A nice man who gave her an expensive pocket watch, a set of Charm infused earrings that lit up, and about 4000 in Ashe. Altogether, he had given her about 8000 Ashe worth of goods. All out of the kindness of his heart with some motivation from her knife against his throat. She was only 11 years old at the time, but Josyn was definately impressed and it was enough for Felicia Sinder herself to congratulate the young thief and officially induct her as an Agent of Sinder. From then on, her life had improved significantly.

As she went on through her teens, she had developed a knack for 'encouraging' the normals of Archerus to make generous donations to Sinder. Mostly due to her unique set of skills that she had learned from other Agents in Sinder and from Josyn himself. So much so, that Felicia Sinder herself had gifted her a set of Burst Incinerators, mini explosive shotguns painted in her favorite color of Magenta, for her 17th birthday. However, that birthday was what changed her entire view of Sinder and who she was. Not because of any praise she had received for being a great thief, but for letter she had found by accident during a party.

Ever since she was a child, she had always asked Josyn about her mother but she never did get any information out of him. It was as if he was intentionally avoiding any discussion on her. Eiva's earliest memory was seeing a woman holding her in her arms in a dark place. The only thing she can remember of this place was that there was a fire place behind this woman with Magenta colored hair. Then, she heard someone yelling and this woman looking up from her loving stare she was giving Eiva. Then she was gone. Never to be seen again. From then on, it's only been herself and Josyn. She doesn't even know if Josyn is her real dad to begin with. That was until she had found that letter.

During one of Sinder's usual parties, she had to escape from all of the fun and excitement due to a one of the other members of Sinder getting a little bit too confident with her. She had broken this guy's nose three times all the other times he came on to her but he just couldn't take the hint. So, she gave up and hid into a room far away from the party in the mansion that Sinder used as a hideout. Inside, while she sat on a chair at a desk lit up by a single candle, sighing and hoping that the douchebag would leave her alone, she blankly looked at the pieces of parchment scattered in the desk. Most were letters addressed to randoms in Archerus about debts and encouragement for donations. Some were lists of goods stolen, sold, bought. Boring finance stuff. But, one particular parchment caught her eye. It was a letter addressed to someone in Archerus.

"Auvi,

I'd advise you to watch where you walk in Archerus. You came too close today to your darling daughter and, as such for your transgression, we're going to raise the cost of your monthly payments by 25% for the next year.

Please don't make it any harder on yourself and Eiva. Stay in your lane and we'll stay in ours."

That night, after the party had ended, she had laid awake nearly all night in her room thinking about that letter. Auvi. Who was that? Why did the letter mention Eiva and something about this person's daughter? It was nearly dawn when her curiousity finally got the better of her. She had found Josyn in the bar area of the mansion passed out on the pool table. All she wanted was to ask him about this woman named Auvi and why the letter talked about Eiva. A choice she would come to regret.

It was as if he saw a ghost the moment Eiva woke him up and asked him about Auvi. The fear on his face was burned into her mind the moment she mentioned the name. He quickly got up and led her to his room in the mansion and shutting the door behind them.

"Where did you hear that name?! Huh? Where did you learn that?" He shook her by the shoulders. Being of the brash nature and not appreciating being grabbed so aggressively, Eiva pushed Josyn away.

"Forget about that. Who is Auvi?!" Eiva yelled back to him.

"You forget that name. You understand me?"

"Is Auvi my mother?"

"I said forget it. You're pushing your luck, Eve." She couldn't take it anymore. The lack of information that he was giving her had angered her to the point that she pulled out her Burst Incinerator from its holster.

"I'm not asking again, Josyn. Is. Auvi. My. Mother's. Name?" Josyn shook his head slightly and stared daggers into her.

"I don't want to do this, Eve. Don't make me do this." He said as he eyed his own Inceinrator on the shelf beside him.

"Don't make you what? Lie again?! Oh, we both know I don't have to make you do that." Quickly, he reached for the Incinerator and Eiva quickly aimed her Incinerator at him as he picked up what he was reaching for on the shelf. But, it wasn't the Incinerator he grabbed. It was a red scarf. He quickly threw at her and she was just about to pull the trigger being that she thought he was using the scarf as a distraction to reach for his Incernator. But, he didn't move as she caught the red scarf. She didn't move as she looked down at the scarf. This was the one he had always kept tied around his waist when he would go on a run to Archerus.

"I don't want your damn scarf, I want to know who is-"

"That's your mother's." She stopped mid sentence. She looked down once again at the scarf and felt the softness of the material in her hand. This was mom's? Was this actually mom's?

The moment she lowered her gun, Josyn grabbed his Incinerator and pointed it at Eiva who was too flabbergasted to notice.

"Go. Get out of here." He waved his gun to the open window behind her. "I said get out here! You're not welcome here anymore!" She looked up from the scarf to Josyn with red hot anger.

"I always hated you." She mumbled through gritted teeth. She noticed his eyes squinted slightly as the anger on his face changed.

"Go. Don't make me do this." After staring at each other in silent hatred, she quickly turned around and jumped out of the open window leading out to Moregrove Forest. She didn't bother looking back as she clutched the scarf close to her chest and tried to get her breathing under control.

As she walked away into the cold world, away from her home and the life she had lived for her entire life, she wondered who this scarf really belonged to. Was it actually her mother's? The woman named Auvi?

And why did Josyn do that? Why did she tell him she hated him? She didn't but the heat of the moment...he didn't have his finger on the trigger. The safety on the gun was still on as well.

She can think about that later. All she knew was that she needed to find this woman named Auvi and this scarf was all she had to go on. The best place to start looking is Archerus. Maybe if that doesn't work out she would look in the other city on the island, Gildenwood. Surely that'd be the best approach to getting these answers.

Archerus would be Eiva's first location that she'd want to look for information on Auvi. But it's here where she would find that there is actually something that would help her find her mother and get answers of who she is. A story that normals in the taverns called 'The Treasure' that would grant wishes. It's a long shot, but if it means finding mom and finding out who Eiva really is, then it's worth the effort. Maybe this other Treasure Hunter she met there would help her find the treasure and information on mom.

Who knows. The guy looks capable enough.

And...it doesn't hurt that he's easy on the eyes to.

THUMP

I stood next to the wall, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, trying to ignore the increasingly urgent churning growls coming from my gut. There were no chairs in this waiting room, none my butt could sit in, anyway. I took my phone out of my pocket to check the time. The clock was the only thing that worked, no cell towers 25 light years from Earth. I had been standing in this waiting room for nearly an hour with nothing to occupy my mind. For the sixth time I read the large poster written in English hanging on the opposite wall:

“Welcome, human visitors! Remember, our hands are also our feet. Please help keep this clinic clean by removing your footwear before entering: St. Starlight’s House of Healing. 🐾”

THUMP

Focus hung low on the horizon, its golden rays pouring into the room through the large windows lining the entrance wall. In the hour I had been standing here the shadows cast by the doorframe hadn’t moved an inch, and they never would. On Hearthside, the time of day changed with the latitude. Golden Hour city sat comfortably on the terminator dividing day and night.

THUMP

Perched behind a counter on the opposite side of the room was a fawn-coated receptionist, her HUD specs sitting halfway down her muzzle flashing reflected sunlight back in my face.

THUMP

Despite the poster’s exhortation to cleanliness, the musty smell of a kennel hung in the air. That’s not to say the place wasn’t clean, well, as clean as a species with constantly shedding fur can make such a high traffic public area. I didn’t mind the smell, really. It reminded me of the animal shelter where I picked out my first dog when I was little. It smelled like a friend.

THUMP

It had taken a considerable amount of effort to tune out that incessant thumping. I was sharing the waiting room with a handful of monkey foxes, a family by the looks of it. Three adults—two sires and a dam, traveling with three of their pups, all girls, one of whom was the source of the noise. They had already been waiting for a bit when I came in. All three girls started yipping excitedly upon seeing this hairless ape duck through the doorway, all twelve paws scrabbling on the slick tile to be the first to interact with me.

The three pups managed to approach.

«Wow wow,» said one, ducking behind me to look at my backside. «Lookie, they really have no tail.»

«See,» said the second, her nose pointed at my stockings. «No thumbs on their rear paws. Is it true you stand up like that all the time, mister?»

«Just that patch of fur on top of your head?» queried the third. «Is that why you wear those covers like a healer?»

«No, look, sis,» barked the first, gesturing with her muzzle up at the meager hair covering my arm, «they do have fur, just not a lot of it.»

«now now, my delights, don’t bother the gentleman,» chided one of their sires. They scampered back to their parents, and I heaved a sigh of relief. It took every ounce of my willpower not to scoop them up in my arms and give them all ear scritches and snoot boops. Now robbed of their strange playmate, one of the girls began thumping the wall with her tail, and through the endurance that only youth can provide, had managed to keep it up for the past hour. I wasn’t the only one annoyed by the noise. With each thump, the right ear of the receptionist flicked.

Another plaintive gurgle issued from my abdomen. I couldn’t wait any longer. It was time to do what no one else could do for me. I glanced around the room, looking for any signs of where a restroom might be. I was on the verge of walking up to ask the woman behind the counter when one of the sires, the same one who had scolded the girls earlier, hopped down from his perch with a sharp clack of his claws on the tile and walked up to the counter ahead of me.

«Excuse me, ma’am,» he began, «Our appointment time was half an hour ago.»

The woman slid her HUD specs further down her muzzle. «And I told you folks when you came in that we were having network problems. My paws are tied until it gets fixed. She whipped her head to one side and barked «Calmwind, is the network back up yet?!»

Through a curtain dividing an adjoining room a dusty gray snout poked out, twitched a few times, then its owner waddled forward. The white noise of server cooling fans escaped the room as he pushed the curtain aside. He was definitely a fair ways up the chonk chart. I think this was my first time seeing a fat monkey fox. He panted a few times as though the effort of walking ten feet from his little techie cave was too much.

«And I told YOU,» said Calmwind as though he had been part of the conversation from the beginning, «It’s not a network issue. The payment processor is down.»

«I don’t think—» she said, but Calmwind snapped back as though venting years of pent-up frustration.

«Look, It’s not the network, okay? I swear it’s always the network with you people. Noisy heat pump fan? Network must be down. Light flickering in the bathroom? Better call Calmwind, it’s the network again. What does he get paid for anyway?» he mocked.

I made my way up to the front of the room, ducking my head to avoid various ceiling fixtures. This building wasn’t built for someone who stood over 30 inches at the shoulder. The sire gave me an unreadable look which I chose to mean “Is this seriously happening right now?” Then he shot a glance back at the other two members of his childermoot. The remaining sire and dam hopped down from their perches and herded their pups out the front door, doubtless to spare them this public display of office politics.

Meanwhile, Calmwind had plucked the HUD specs from the receptionist’s muzzle. «See, I told you, you’ve been browsing the internetwork this whole time. It’s not a problem on our end. You need to send a message to the payment processor.»

«I’m a receptionist, not an office manager, I get one paycheck but everyone expects me to do the work of two people!» she hissed.

“What can you do.” I said in English, shrugging at the sire standing next to me. He flicked his ears back, returning my shrug with his species’ own gesture of resignation.

A loud grumble issued from my gut, catching the attention of all three yinrih.

«Are you feeling well, human?» asked Calmwind, out of breath from arguing.

“Are YOU feeling well, big chungus?” I said under my breath in English, then pulled out my synth and continued in Commonthroat. «Pardon me, but do you know where the restroom is?»

«It’s a bit down the hall and to the right,» he said, tossing his muzzle to one side indicating the hallway nearby.

I ducked into the hallway and started jogging, I heard one last snatch of conversation from the waiting room before turning the corner. The sire, in an attempt to de-escalate, changed the subject. «Amazing how fast they can run on just those two long hind legs of theirs.»

«I know, right?» answered Calmwind, «and with no tail for balance and as tall as they are, you’d think they’d be falling over all the time.»

I rounded the corner and was met with another long hallway. My gut rumbled in protest again, my jog having made my situation even more dire. I continued at a brisk walk, accumulating a few bruises from the fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Finally, I came to another doorway. I could hear running water from behind the thick curtain. I could wait no longer.

I pulled the curtain aside and stuck my head through the doorway. A washing pool sat to the left of the entrance under a flickering light. Wading amid the water laving her paws was a healer. My face reddened. Before I could make a discrete exit, she turned and noticed me.

«Ah!» she chuffed cheerfully. «Light shine upon you, friend!» She hopped out of the water and trotted up to me, leaving a trail of wet paw prints in her wake. «You must be my human volunteer. My name’s Doctor Shortclaw.» She extended a dripping wet paw to initiate a human handshake.

I hesitated. This wasn’t the response I expected to a man bursting into the women’s bathroom.

She extended her paw further. «This is the right way to do it, yes? Right forepaw, digits extended, palm facing to the side?»

“Yes, ma’am—er doctor,” I said in English before hastily grabbing my synth and repeating my confirmation in Commonthroat. I reluctantly accepted her waterlogged handshake. «I’m so sorry,» I said, hastily drying my hand on the curtain, «I must have the wrong bathroom.»

She tilted her head in confusion. «Wrong bathroom? This is the only one on this floor.» I slipped back into the hallway. The sign over the door, overlooked in my earlier haste, simply said «WASHROOM», with no qualifiers. Was this a private bathroom? She didn’t seem to object to my presence. Whatever the case, I needed to get her out of there before the chocolate factory had a meltdown.

I brought the rest of my body through the doorway. We were standing in a vestibule, the washing pool was off to the left in an alcove. The wall to the right was adorned with the sort of nick-nacks one would expect to see in a Terran bathroom: pictures, a shelf with what I took to be an air freshener. The floor was flagged with tiles of various shapes and textures, designed more to be pleasant to the touch of a yinrih’s bare paws than with an eye to visual congruity. A shallow lip separated the vestibule from the rest of the bathroom, which was currently unlit. The flickering light over the washing pool failed to illuminate the area where the toilet was.

I looked down at the little alien medical professional. She was furless save for her whiskers, as expected of a healer, with gray-black skin on her snout and paws giving way to ruddy flesh over the rest of her body. Her limbs and back were dense with musculature that would normally be hidden by fur. I caught a flash of saturated blue as she slid a pair of bandpass membranes over her eyes, scrutinizing my form under light my feeble human eyes couldn’t hope to see.

Another rumbling burble emanated from my gut, causing doctor Shortclaw’s large hearthsider ears to perk up. «Fascinating,» she yipped, pulling a notepad from a band around her foreleg.

«Look, I really have to use the restroom,» I explained.

«Even better!» she barked. She flicked her writing claw a few times and began jotting down some notes. «Do you mind if I observe? I was fascinated by the human digestive system while studying your medical cadavers. I’m anxious to see how it operates live.»

“Yes I mind!” I burst out in English, causing her to flinch. «Sorry,» I synthesized, «If you want samples, I’ll give you samples, but I didn’t sign up to be stared at while I poop.»

«I see,» she mused. «That might be a problem.» She crossed the threshold separating the sink area from the rest of the bathroom. Motion-activated lights banished the darkness. For the first time I beheld a yinrih toilet, and I did not like what I saw.

For starters, I was very wrong about it being a private bathroom. Four stalls lined the left wall, though calling them “stalls” was exceedingly generous. They were mere partitions extending up from the floor, not even tall enough to obscure a yinrih’s head. None of them had doors, either. The toilets themselves were simple holes in the floor. What might have been toilet paper dispensers hung above each latrine, positioned to be manipulated by the tail. Most of the floor was lined with more of that mismatched tile, but the area immediately surrounding the latrine itself was coated in a uniform rough texture to tell the user backing into the stall not to plant a rear paw in the hole. There was a noticeable grade to the floor of each stall sloping backward into the toilet, which I assumed was to guide any errant excreta to its proper destination. Sitting in the far corner of the room was a standard yinrih perch, positioned so the user faced the stalls.

«Our bathrooms probably aren’t what you’re used to on Earth,» she said apologetically. «We’re inclined to be chatty while doing our business. We feel vulnerable while eliminating waste, and feel more comfortable when there are other group members watching out for us.

«This is a learning experience for both of us. My partners and I want to make this a human-friendly clinic, and any input you can give will help us make this place comfortable for both species. It sounds like humans need privacy when using the washroom, is that right?»

«Yes, doctor,» I said, nodding vigorously for emphasis.

«I see, I see,» she whined softly to herself, writing down more notes. «We’re planning to make major renovations to accommodate your height.» She craned her neck upward to look at my head tilted forward to avoid hitting the ceiling. «I’m sure we can install species-appropriate facilities as well.»

I shifted uncomfortably on my feet, which Shortclaw noticed immediately. «But I suppose that’s not going to help you right now, is it? How’s this, I’ll stand outside the door and make sure nobody else comes in. Take as long as you need. Oh, and no need to worry about any samples.»

«Could you?» I answered. «Thank you very much.»

She turned and walked through the door, brushing the curtain aside with her snout. I waited for her long sinewy tail to slither out of sight, then turned to face my destiny.

I took a deep breath. Credit where credit is due, the place was immaculate. Everything from the grout between the tiles to the walls to the floors inside the stalls looked clean enough to eat from, and this room smelled by far the least canine. “OK, you can do this,” I told myself. “You were in the Boy Scouts, you know how to use a latrine, and you don’t even have to bury it this time.”

I entered the furthest stall from the doorway, undid my belt, squatted down, and prepared to restock the pond with corn-speckled brown trout. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. My colon had gone from Mt. St. Hellen to a space station airlock. “No big deal,” I thought. “I just need to relax.”

I let my mind wander as I surveyed my surroundings. There was an icon hanging near the entrance to the toilets, positioned to be visible from the stalls. Not an unusual sight here on Hearthside. There was an icon of the clinic’s namesake hanging in the waiting room, too. The saint himself was all white save for a dark red stain on his abdomen. He was reared up on his hind feet, an upturned drinking bowl under his right rear paw, reaching with his foreleg to pull a pup out of what looked like a pond of green sludge. Behind the saint’s head was the gilded arch which served as the Claravian answer to the halo.

I heard Dr. Shortclaw politely ward away one of her conspecifics. «Sorry, our human volunteer is in there.»

«Are you sure he’s OK in there by himself?» asked the interloper.

«He’s got Saint Clearwater looking after him,» she answered.

«Fair enough,» said the other. The click-clack of his claws had just faded away only to be replaced by the sound of four more paws skittering toward the bathroom from the other end of the hall.

«OUT OF MY WAY!» barked an unfamiliar voice. To my horror, the curtain was thrust aside and a scrawny sandy-furred fellow burst into the bathroom. His momentum was checked only briefly as the good doctor’s paw grasped futilely at the tip of his tail, relieving it of a few hairs.

«STOP! There’s a--» barked the healer, but the intruder had already vaulted over the threshold between the sink and the toilets in a stunning display of agility.

«MY TEETH ARE SWIMMING!» he shot back. He took up residence in the stall next to mine, laid his tail across his back, and started putting out a fire. After heaving a contented huff, he turned and became aware of my presence.

«Oh, a human!» He tapped the partition between us with a claw. «My name’s Coolsand. I’m a junior administrator here at the clinic. I think you saw my boss back in the waiting room.»

I suddenly became very interested in that icon hanging on the wall.

«Ah, that’s old Saint Clearwater. They say he watches out for folks who have to use the bathroom alone. Well, that’s what my sires told me growing up, anyway.»

I moved my gaze to the perch in the corner, staring at it as though it held the secrets of the universe, desperately willing my colon to finish the job. Coolsand did not interpret my silence the way I had hoped, and launched into a monologue.

«It’s kind of funny, how Saint Clearwater got associated with bathrooms. We don’t know much about his puppyhood, though I’d wager it wasn’t a happy one, given that the first records we have that mention him are police reports involving bar brawls and public drunkenness. He was an alcoholic, you see, that’s what the drinking bowl in the picture symbolizes.»

I uttered a half-interested grunt.

«Anyway, he was a raging alcoholic, like I said, and eventually found himself in front of a judge. He was ordered to attend a recovery program hosted at a nearby lighthouse. By all accounts he put his whole gut into it, and seemed to be making progress, but eventually relapsed.

«This cycle would continue, where he’d try to get sober, fail, wander off, then show up at the lighthouse a few decades later seeking absolution. Since he wasn’t getting any better, the hearthkeeper eventually kicked him out altogether, assuming he wasn’t putting in the effort.

«He ended up homeless living in a local park, begging for food and getting his fix from the wild wind fruit bushes that grew in the area. This park became notorious, not just for hosting a perpetually liquored up bum, but also for stinking of raw sewage. Turns out that a sewer main had burst, filling an underground pond with, well--» he slapped the textured edge of the latrine with a rear paw.

«Anyway, one day, a bunch of pups were playing in this park. Some stories say they were a litter, others say it was a school on a field trip, and others say the pups were just local kids. Out of nowhere, this sinkhole opens up, and all the pups just fall into this massive lake of--» he slapped the latrine again.

«Now there were a ton of grownups around. These pups’ childermoot, their teachers, or whoever, but every account says that a bunch of bystanders saw this happen and just stared. They usually get painted as the villains, but you know, I’m not sure what I’d do if I were standing on their paw prints. They always tell you not to dive in after a drowning person, especially when you’re not trained for it, since they’ll pull you down with them and two people will end up dead instead of just one. And, besides--» for a third time the claws of his rear paw clicked against the side of the latrine.

«Anyway, out of nowhere, Clearwater, who’s stinking drunk mind you, runs up and starts pulling the pups out of the hole. He manages to get most of them, but there are still two struggling toward the middle. He dives in after them. Well, the pups are still panicking, so they push him under while trying to climb out. The kids are able to get out, but Clearwater ends up drowning.

«So this naturally makes the news, and Clearwater is hailed as a local hero. The hearthkeeper that kicked him out of the rehab program realizes that he genuinely tried to sober up, but just couldn’t do it. He did keep coming back, after all, and he did seem to try his best, but--»

«He kept falling off the wagon,» I interjected, now invested in the story.

Coolsand executed a quizzical head tilt.

«Sorry, it’s a Terran expression.» I repeated the phrase in English and then again in Commonthroat.

«Well,» Coolsand continued, «That hearthkeeper has a change of heart and starts advocating for his canonization. And not just regular canonization, but she wants him declared a martyr. That’s what that blood stain on his belly means.

«So even though it’s a bit controversial calling him a martyr, since he didn’t die while trying to fulfill the Great Commandment, he gets the title anyway. He’s got quite the portfolio, as you can imagine. I suppose it’s pretty obvious, his connection with restrooms, if a little morbid. But you also see little statues of him in bars, as he’s said to help drunk people get sober.»

Coolsand’s hagiography finished, I quickly cleaned myself up and redid my belt, but he insisted on continuing the conversation.

«I’m really into human stuff, and so is Calmwind. We both know English. He’s the one who made that poster in the waiting room. If I knew you’d be here I’d have brought my synth so I could practice. I really want to visit Earth some time.»

I walked out of the stall and made a move toward the washing pool. Coolsand quickly finished up and followed. A few seconds after we had vacated the stalls, there was a whirring noise, then a cascade of water smelling mildly of bleach rushed out of a grate spanning the entrance to the previously occupied stalls and rushed down the slope and into the latrine, simultaneously flushing it and sanitizing the floor.

“Well,” I said in English as I squatted in front of the washing pool scrubbing my hands, “Nice meeting you, Coolsand. But let me give you some pointers on men’s room etiquette whenever you visit Earth. Not sure how you’ll negotiate our toilets; I’m sure you’ll figure it out. But whatever you do, remember these words: shut up and stare straight ahead.”

«Wait, humans don’t chat in the restroom?» I could almost feel him blushing behind his khaki fur. «Did I offend you? I’m sorry if I did, It’s just--»

“No, no we do not.”

«So that’s why the old bald-back was guarding the door.»

“Yes… Look, it was nice meeting you, really, don’t sweat it—uh pant it—I mean don’t worry about it. I think these little psychological quirks that we don’t share stick out only because we have so much else in common.”

«I guess that’s what the Great Commandment means by ‘bone not of our bone and flesh not of our flesh’.»

“Just look out for that doctor next time. By the way, my name’s Greg.” I attempted the yinrih’s traditional greeting, patting myself on the abdomen twice with the left palm, then turned to leave.

Dr. Shortclaw was still standing outside. She looked up at me sheepishly.

«Sorry about that,» she said. «Like I said, we’re talkative in there. That’s why that perch is in the corner.»

«I hope you’re a better doctor than a bouncer,» I said as we walked down the hall to the exam room.

Background (imagine this as a Star Wars-esque text crawl):

As the cost of the Bright Way's interstellar missionary efforts began to climb, it became clear that they couldn't fund their efforts on free will tithes alone. Their research monasteries had brought about a great many technological marvels in their quest to fulfill the Great Commandment to find other sophonts dwelling among the stars, and it seemed reasonable to monetize the work of their paws in order to fund the missionaries.

Since time immemorial the shamans, and their Claravian descendents, the hearthkeepers, had been responsible for bringing light and warmth to those around them, with simple fire at first, but as their knowledge grew with the Bright Way's efforts, with hearth and then electricity. This, too, would be made profitable, in the name of fulfilling the Great Commandment, of course.

With time, the original purpose of this "corporatization" was all but forgotten, and the Bright Way mutated into a cyberpunk-esque megacorp monopolizing all the industries that made an interplanetary civilization possible.

Traditional yinrih gender roles assigned spiritual authority to women alone, and worldly authority to men alone, allowing for a degree of separation between the state and the clergy. In practice, however, the clergy's economic stranglehold on the entire star system meant that powerful governments were under the clergy's palms, and the rest that weren't were clients to those that were. At the height of the Bright Way's power, it even pressed into debt slavery those who could not pay their tithes.

Throughout this Age of Decadence, there remained a faithful core of Wayfarers who clung to the Bright Way's original doctrines and saw the organization's monopolies as a distraction from their divine mandate to seek out other sophonts dwelling among the stars. Less populous corners of the system also started attracting former debtor slaves, both manumitted and runaways, who had apostatized and began agitating for the Bright Way to be destroyed, root and branch.

Eventually, a war would erupt, initially between the Preservationists, who wanted to maintain the status quo, and the Dissolutionists, who wanted to break up the Bright Way's monopolies. As a Dissolutionist victory became all but assured, erstwhile allies splintered into two major opposing factions fighting both the remnants of the Preservationists and one another. The Pious Dissolutionists wanted the Bright Way to remain as a religious institution, but the Partisans wanted to blot out the Bright Way entirely.

The story below takes place at the close of this war.

---

The data center was enveloped in uncanny stillness. The hearthkeepers had cut the power to the whole region hours earlier in advance of the enemy's arrival. The backup generators had endured mere minutes before dying in their turn, leaving the anchorite's chamber alone running on a meager auxiliary battery, not that Skywatcher cared. The Preservationists had already lost, and he could only make the aftermath as unpleasant as possible for whichever faction, the Partisans or the Pious Dissolutionists, ended up taking over. The quiet darkness was punctuated by the sound of something slamming repeatedly against the fortified security door. Muffled barks could be heard between the booms, alternating between promises of leniency should the Farspeaker surrender and graphic threats of violence if he continued to resist.

“Take these and toss them in the shredder!” Skywatcher shoved a loose pile of claw-written papers into his slave’s chest.

Whitepaw looked down at the notes hastily thrust at her. A light held in her tail feebly illuminated the text. Network diagrams, node tables, firewall rules. Decades, no, centuries worth of meticulous documentation poured out in the anchorite’s own ink. “This… this is our entire network segment,” she gasped.

“Yeah, now shred it. All of it,” growled Skywatcher. “I already wiped the backup drives. If those scripture-thumping zealots want their precious noosphere they’ll have to work for it.”

“Body,” Whitepaw yipped meekly. “The network is the body of the noosphere, not the noosphere itself.”

Skywatcher wrinkled his muzzle, exposing his fangs. “I KNEW you were one of them. When I was your age, I believed in all that cloaca butter, too. Then I grew up. I swear each new slave I get is more pious than the last. If you’re not going to help me, then get out of my way!” He tore the papers back from her and spun around, his tail striking her in the chest. She toppled backward. Her shoulder hit a half-empty equipment rack stacked precariously with unmounted equipment. Whitepaw landed on her back just as the rack teetered over and fell in turn, burying her in a mound of inert electronics and knocking the wind out of her.

SMASH!

The noise of the collapsing equipment rack was drowned out by the sound of the security door being torn from its hinges. Sunlight streamed through the breach. Mechanical footfalls thumped down the hall and into the office. From her spot on the floor Whitepaw saw the hulking form of a mini mech lope into the room. Its body looked like some prehistoric monster wrought in polymerite and steel. Its torso was too short, and its forelegs were too long. Its forepaws were curled into fists, the knuckles bearing the weight of the mech’s front end rather than its palms. This was no scripture-thumping zealot, no Knight of the Sun. The mech’s right foreleg bore the device of the Partisans, a black paw held palm out in defiance. The Partisans’ credo was scrawled in Outlander below the symbol, “The skies are empty. We are alone.”

Skywatcher stared open-mouthed into the mech’s visor. The pilot’s mouth was half-open, his tongue protruding slightly, but his eyes were closed, and his head flopped seemingly lifeless to one side.

“An Immortal,” Skywatcher stammered. The pilot couldn’t have been older than Whitepaw herself, at least in body. Who knows how long he had been in metabolic suspension plugged into that mech. His fur clung in ragged wet mats to his gaunt expressionless face. It used to be white, but the neurogel he was pickled in turned it yellow. His eyes did not see. His paws did not feel. His heart did not beat. His body was dead, but his brain was frighteningly active, kept alive by the suspension capsule.

Whitepaw had heard stories of these Immortals. They started out as gel heads recruited by the disorganized secularist warlords dotted across the Outer Belt. They were usually terminally addicted teens who couldn’t be unplugged without flatlining. Their suspension capsule would be integrated into a mech, and their nervous system would be connected to the mech’s sensor suite and control system. They say the Partisans found a way to slow down a person’s time perception while in suspension, allowing them to react with lightning speed to what was going on around them. Whether this was true or not, they were legendarily hard to dispatch. After Firefly the Apostate united the secularist warlords under the Partisan banner, he turned these Immortals into his elite shock troops. Oddly fitting given the Great Leader himself never left his own suspension capsule even after returning from his failed missionary journey. Undead soldiers for Litchlord Firefly. The dregs of society proved poorly disciplined soldiers, so he started recruiting otherwise healthy men, using suspension capsules scavenged from unlaunched womb ships abandoned by the missionaries fleeing Firefly's genocide. The device of the missionaries, two enmeshed gears symbolizing the union of two noospheres, was still visible on the side of the capsule. The Partisans deliberately left it uncovered in an act of blasphemous mockery of the faith.

The mech wordlessly strode forward and lifted Skywatcher by the neck. The anchorite let out a few choking gasps, straining with a rear paw to grab some blunt object to toss at the metal brute. He managed to grab the heavy metal head of a loose network cable and send it flying at his attacker. It bounced off the mech’s free forepaw and clattered uselessly to the floor. The pilot’s tongue gave a barely perceptible twitch as though he were laughing at his victim’s futile struggling. The mech’s writing claw and inner thumb moved to grip the sides of the Farspeaker’s head, preparing to twist it off like a bottle cap. Whitepaw bit her tongue to stop herself from yelping. Skywatcher had not been a particularly kind master, but nobody deserved to die like this.

The pilot’s left ear flicked lazily as he processed an unheard order from his handlers waiting outside. He loosened his grip on Skywatcher’s head, then tossed him carelessly over the mech’s back and caught him again in the coils of the mech’s tail. The Immortal turned and plodded out of the room. Skywatcher looked helplessly at the pile of equipment Whitepaw was hiding under. The tail constricting his midsection didn’t keep him from wheezing out desperate prayers, seeking refuge in the faith he had scorned not three minutes earlier.

Whitepaw lay still, forgotten for the moment, at least she prayed so. She heard harsh barking coming from outside. Two more Partisans were questioning the anchorite. Skywatcher uttered a few raspy oaths to please his lightless captors. They didn’t seem impressed.

“You can either give us your network documentation willingly, or we can squeeze it out of you,” one of them growled.

“Please, by the empty sky,” he gasped. “Hard copies. I’ve got hard copies in the office where you found me.”

Whitepaw shuddered. If she hadn’t been seen before they’d surely find her when they came back inside. Apostasy or death, those are the choices they'd give her. It didn't matter that the Pious Dissolutionists were technically the allies of the Partisans against the corporate arm of the Bright Way. At least they used to be allies. Once the Preservationists, the ones fighting to preserve the Bright Way's stranglehold on the system's economy, were driven back to Yih, questions about the future of Focus, about the fate of the Bright Way, the real Bright Way, the faith, not the system-spanning megacorp that wore the faith like an ill-fitting mask only when it suited their needs, began fracturing the fragile alliance. She dug her claws into her palms and shut her eyes tight. “Don’t focus on the pain,” she told herself. “No matter how much it will hurt, at least it will be over quickly. Then I won’t have to worry about the war anymore.” She uttered a final prayer. “O Uncreated Light, please shine upon me, the least of thy little ones.”

THUMP!

A dull tremor shook the floor underneath her.

THUMP!

And then another, and then even more. The two Partisans began shouting incoherently. “A Knight--no there’s three,” one of them barked. There was more yelling, then the shriek of metal on metal as the Immortal engaged the interloping mechs.

---

"Come on, you old rust bucket." Daybreak flicked one of the mech's controls with his outer thumb, pulling up the hull integrity monitor on his HUD visor. His complaint broke the silence otherwise accompanied only by the low thump of the mech's footfalls as it loped across the terrain.

"I don't see anything wrong," said Sunrise, tilting his head back toward the squire seated behind him in the cockpit.

"I'm telling you, you may pilot this mech, but I'm the one patching her up after every sortie. I know every joint, bolt, hose, and wire in this thing. Feel that?," he pressed his palm against the bulkhead in front of him. "That faint rattle every time one of her rear paws goes down. It's her tail. The first joint is coming loose."

Sunrise checked the hull integrity on his own visor. "Everything's at twelve-dozen per gross," he grunted. "I think I have more faith in your repairs than you do."

"Void!" Sunrise swore. He had switched his HUD visor back to the mech's forward vid sensor array. "The Partisans beat us to the data center, and they have an Immortal with them."

"Why would they need an Immortal just to capture a data center held by an old anchorite?" asked Daybreak.

"Because they knew we were coming," Sunrise growled. He pressed a few chords on his own keyers, bringing up a comms channel to the two knights flanking his mech on either side.

"Yeah yeah, we already see him," one of them preempted. "I doubt he'll be much of a problem for--"

"Light blind me, where'd he go!" The other knight barked. "He was just there, and then--"

The Immortal had vanished in the flick of a whisker, leaving a dust cloud in his wake leading between the forelegs of the mech. Daybreak's nimble digits flew across his keyers with the grace of a musician playing an instrument. The mech's tail slammed into the ground, narrowly missing the Immortal as he slid just out from under the mech's chassis.

He grabbed the end of the mech's tail and dug his hind claws into the dirt, arresting the mech's forward stride.

Daybreak cringed at the metallic twang of tearing pseudosinew as the Immortal succeeded in amputating the mech's tail.

"What'd I tell you," said Daybreak.

"Not now, Light blind it!" Sunrise growled, his digits flying across his keyers. The mech reared up on its hind feet and extended its plasma claws, then lunged forward. It slashed empty air where the Immortal had been a few milliseconds earlier.

The mini mech leapt in the path of the other knight, wielding the amputated tail like a club. He brought the hulk of dead metal down on the other mech's head with a crunch, shattering its optics and stripping off the antenna arrays on its muzzle.

The Immortal clambered onto the blinded mech's back, clawing at random spots along the spine. It straddled the mech's shoulders and punched a hole in the polymerite armor covering the umbilical sheath connecting the mech's head-mounted sensor suite to the cockpit and started tearing away cables like an animal rooting through an insect nest.

The blind mech bucked and swerved wildly, trying to dislodge the saboteur. It crashed into the data center, bringing the wall down and causing a section of roof to collapse. The mech bent its legs and leaped into the air, twisting its spine so its back pointed earthward , then slammed down, all its weight concentrated between its shoulders.

The Immortal's suspension capsule popped loose from the frame of the mini mech like a seed from a pod and went rolling until it came to rest near its Partisan handlers hiding behind a standing section of wall.

---

There was an almighty crash as the outer wall and roof of the building crumbled. Sunlight flooded what was left of the office. Whitepaw opened her eyes and saw one of the Knights’ mechs looming over her. It was proportioned much more like a yinrih, with recognizable head, torso, and limbs. Its head turned down to face her. It lifted one of its great metal paws and began deftly removing the debris piled on top of her.

She stood up and shook the dust from her fur. A hatch on the mech’s underbelly lowered, revealing Sunrise and Daybreak within. Sunrise pulled off his HUD visor and jumped out. “Praise the Light, you’re alive! Are you hurt?”

“I think I’m OK,” Whitepaw muttered as she stared at the aftermath of the fight. The two Partisan handlers stood silently beside one of the mechs. All eight paws were shackled together, the mech’s rear paw resting on the chain, anchoring it in place.

One of the squires approached Skywatcher, dipping his head respectfully. “My reverend anchorite, could you show us the documentation for your segment of the network?”

“Choke on it, fundy!” Skywatcher spat. “I wiped the data drives, and good luck finding what’s left of my notes in that rubble.”

“You know, we could have let those Partisans tear you in half," said the squire. "They would have killed you even if you gave them what they wanted.”

“Found ’em!” Whitepaw and Sunrise walked up to the rest of the group. Sunrise had Skywatcher’s notes wrapped in his tail. “This kind young lady showed me where they were.”

“You eggless wretch!” Skywatcher barked.

Sunrise adopted an authoritative tone and addressed Whitepaw. “You are free, and your debt is forgiven.”

“By whose authority?!” growled Skywatcher.

“By the decree of her radiance, high hearthkeeper Iris,” Sunrise responded.

"That weak blunt-fanged pretender!" Skywatcher hissed.

"That weak blunt-fanged pretender just captured your entire network segment," said Daybreak.

“Just get over there.” One of the other knights bound Skywatcher and led him to one of the mechs, far away from his former captors.

“So, what’s going to happen to the Immortal?” asked Whitepaw.

“Well,” said Sunrise pointing his muzzle at the suspension capsule, “He is currently profaning a blessed instrument of our Holy Work. He’s going back to Hearthside with us, and we’ll hand him off to an order of rehabilitators. They’ll try to wean him off the gel, but by the time most of these poor lickers get plugged into those mini mechs their psyche is so integrated into the simulacrum generated by the capsule that they’ll die without it. If that’s the case they’ll get his metabolism running again and he’ll live out his natural life in sim.”

“What about me?” she asked.

“Like I said, you’re free. We can’t make you do anything. I’d suggest that you accompany us back to Hearthside as that’s the furthest away from the front. A lot of freed slaves want nothing to do with their former work, but we can set you up with the Farspeakers there if you wish. You’d be paid justly as an apprentice, depending on your experience you could be made an anchoress.” His voice caught on his next words. “A lot of slaves want nothing to do with the Faith, either. It hurts me that we pushed people away like that, but again, we can’t force you to do anything.”

“But you didn’t do any of that,” Whitepaw interjected. “You saved my life.”

“You’re right,” said Sunrise. “It may not be our fault personally, but it is our responsibility as Wayfarers to fix what the Preservationists broke. The Bright Way singing liturgies on Hearthside is the same Bright Way extorting and enslaving people on Yih.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Whitepaw. “I'll help make things right, too.”

As I prepare for my fifth eye surgery to fix a prosthetic lens, I'm reminded of how dumb elective cybernetic implants, augmentations, or what have you, would be in real life.

I bring this up because in most sci-fi settings I've encountered where cybernetics exist, they go unquestioned as a boon to the individual and society at large. When they are the focus of a work, people who are in favor of baseline humanity are portrayed as luddites or even bigots.

Very quickly, here's why I take a dim view of cybernetics:

1. Society is already stratified into haves and have-nots. The people most likely to get augmented are those who are already in power, the rich and connected, not the huddled masses. So a persecution scenario like that seen in the later Deus Ex games is unrealistic.
2. tech support. Devices eventually need to be serviced or replaced, and that's bad when it involves turning your innards into outards.
3. Following from number 2, planned obsolescence. Your model of brain chip is outmoded? Better get the newest one if you want to keep up.
4. Invasive medical procedures are inherently risky.
5. Do you really want your body to be vulnerable to cyber attacks?
6. Better pony up the dough for the gold subscription if you want to dream in color again.

In my conworld, even though the yinrih have achieved Kardashev II status they don't use cybernetics. Part of this is because they can't lose consciousness, meaning they can't use anesthesia, meaning surgeries have to be as minimally invasive as possible, limiting what sort of stuff can be implanted. The other, more realistic reason, is because wearable tech does most of what you want out of augmentations. Why chop off your legs when you can wear pseudosinew to improve strength? Why get ocular implants when HUD specs do the job? You get the point.

I'm not posting these in any order. This story takes place a few months after First Contact, a few hours before The Tornado.

---

"...another record-breaking afternoon, with temperatures throughout the region surpassing the 90-degree mark. A cold front is set to bring relief to central and southeast Texas later this evening but looks like there may be some severe weather along with the cooler temperatures. The Storm Prediction Center has issued a tornado watch for the region until early tomorrow morning. Now it's time for your local forecast." Sarah let the smooth jazz drifting out of the TV wash over her and sank deeper into the couch cushions. Her eyes stung with sweat rolling down from her forehead. Without looking, she reached over and grabbed a wrinkled shirt from the laundry basket next to the couch and wiped her brow. Her eyes were laser-focused on the wall clock, watching the seconds crawl by. "4:30," she thought. "He was supposed to be here by 4 o'clock." She closed her eyes and tried to relax. The maintenance guy had forsaken her. Only the sweet embrace of unconsciousness could provide respite from the heat now.

She was dragged out of her blissful slide into oblivion by the sharp click-clack of claws on the hard linoleum floor. It was the halting, rhythmless gait of one unaccustomed to walking on two feet. The clicking was replaced by the sound of a tail dragging along the living room rug, desperately trying to prevent its owner from falling backwards.

She looked up at the cause of the disturbance. Two six-toed paws were digging into the carpet, and a prehensile tail was wrapped around one of the legs of the coffee table, all in an effort to keep the creature before her upright. Its lupine maw was agape, purple tongue hanging off to the side, twitching in time with the creature's panting breath. Its wet nose was twitching frantically, soaking up a mélange of odors that Sarah couldn't hope to perceive. Its erect, triangular ears swiveled about, absorbing the soundscape of the room. Wrapped in its forelimbs, clutched tightly to the ruddy flesh of its chest was a ponderous tome. "Great news!" the creature growled cheerfully as it deposited the book onto the coffee table with a thud.

"You figured out how to fix the air conditioner?" Sarah sighed.

With a padded finger the creature tapped the cover, which bore the title 'Comprehensive Introduction to Biochemistry'. «At least according to this book here our food should be safe for human consumption.»

"That's nice, Sunshine."

«You don't smell very excited.»

"It's nearly 95 degrees inside, and it's already half an hour past the window that the leasing office gave me for the maintenance guy to come fix the AC. Forgive me for not being head-over-heels with enthusiasm."

Sunshine flicked her ears back. «What do you want from me. I'm a healer, not a mechanic. But speaking of food, I think I may have a little something that'll help you beat the heat.» Her curiosity piqued, Sarah leaned forward as Sunshine produced a small carton from a pocketed band wrapped around her right foreleg. "This is a little snack from back home on Hearthside. From the carton she produced a small translucent strip which she placed on her pendulous tongue. She drew her tongue back into her mouth for a moment, allowing the strip to dissolve. After a few seconds, Sunshine dropped back onto all fours, shook her head vigorously, then resumed panting. Sarah caught the strong scent of menthol on her breath.

"Just a breath mint?" Sarah inquired, unsuccessfully masking her disappointment. Sunshine came from a desert of eternal noon, a planet perpetually sweltering under the gaze of an unconquerable sun. Her species had subdued their entire solar system dozens of millennia before those naked Savannah apes Sarah called ancestors had even discovered agriculture. They could bridge the yawning gulf between stars, but the best thing they could come up with to cool off was a Listerine strip.

«Oh, it's a little stronger than that. Go on, try one.» Sunshine pinched another strip between her outer thumb and writing claw, flicking the little snack with another digit in a manner Sarah assumed was supposed to be enticing. She paused, her eyes darting between the textbook on the table, the little hairless monkey fox standing in front of her, and the consumable held in her paw. A dialog played out in her mind.

"Are you really going to put that thing in your mouth?"

"It's just a breath strip, why not?"

"An alien breath strip. It could kill you for all you know, slowly and painfully, too."

Sarah regarded Sunshine again. She had been holding that snack out for a good thirty seconds. "Guess when you've got six centuries ahead of you, you can afford to be a bit more patient," She thought.

"She is a licensed medical professional..."

"A licensed alien medical professional."

A bead of sweat rolled down her cheek, reminding her that the air conditioner was still broken and that it likely wouldn't be fixed today. "Eh, YOLO!" Her curiosity had won the day. Sarah plucked the snack from the alien's claws and popped it in her mouth.

The strip quickly dissolved on her tongue, leaving behind a cooling sensation. So far, so mundane. Sarah leaned back into the couch, chuckling to herself as she contemplated how old this stuff had to be, older than the US constitution, at the very least, given how long it took Sunshine and the others to get to Earth from Focus. Maybe she could start a YouTube channel eating ancient alien junk food. Still, though, it didn't really take her mind off the heat.

Just as her disappointment began to set in, the cold feeling in her mouth began to intensify. The sensation had started as though chewing a normal piece of spearmint gum, but had progressed to chewing a particularly potent piece of spearmint gum. After a few seconds, it became chewing a particularly potent piece of spearmint gum while chugging ice water. "OK, now this is getting uncomfortable," Sarah thought. "Well, it is getting my mind off the heat. Now all I can think about is my mouth freezing." The cold feeling cascaded down her chest and into her gut, then began radiating to the rest of her body.

The roof of her mouth started throbbing in pain, which then radiated to her forehead. She tried powering through the pain by sheer force of will. "It isn't real," she thought. "I'm not really cold. It's just a chemical tricking my nerves into thinking I'm cold." Through eyes tearing up in pain she caught a glimpse of the wall clock. It had only been twenty seconds since she had put that cursed strip on her tongue. She no longer felt like she was chugging ice water, now it felt like shoveling Antarctic snow into her mouth.

«Are you OK?» Sunshine whined. Sarah caught the concern in her voice but was too busy writhing in agony to pat herself on the back for achieving this milestone in human-yinrih communication. "I'm... fine..." she gasped. Sarah swore she could see clouds of super-cooled condensation billowing out of her mouth with each syllable.

It wasn't Antarctic snow anymore, now it was liquid nitrogen. She hunched forward in her seat, then collapsed onto the floor between the couch and coffee table. Through cryogenic tears Sarah could see Sunshine's large ears and muzzle hanging over her.

The penny finally dropped. Sunshine whipped around and bolted down the hallway, her claws skittering on the slippery floor. She failed to turn in time and ran bodily into the back wall, then managed to gain enough traction to dart into the erstwhile office that now served as her quarters.

Sarah could hear her frantically barking one of the traditional healer's invocations as she rummaged through her things looking for whatever implements might prove most useful. Sunshine had demonstrated several of these little rituals to her over the time she had been lodging with her. They were remnants of a time when the office of cleric and healer were still one. The particular invocation used largely depended on how severe the situation was. The one Sunshine chose did not buoy Sarah's confidence in her outcome.

«O Creator of the universe, paws and tail hast thou none, yet wield me, wretched whelp that I am, as thy instrument here within, and wrest this least of thy little ones from the jaws of death.»

Sarah was audibly whimpering now. Her vision began to fade. It felt as though her entire digestive tract was filled top to bottom with liquid helium. The blessed embrace of oblivion finally took her, but not before she saw Sunshine scampering back down the hall toward the living room, The end of her tail coiled around the handle of a satchel that was bouncing along the floor behind her.

---

Manny glanced at the clock on the dashboard as he pulled into the parking space. 4:36 PM. He was over half an hour late for his last appointment of the day, and a mere 24 minutes away from the nominal end of his shift. He pulled the key out of the ignition and opened the door, the perspiration-soaked back of his work shirt peeling away from his skin as he moved to exit the truck. The hot Texas air greeted him as he alighted the vehicle, a welcome respite from the even hotter air inside the cab. He shut the door, perhaps a bit more forcefully than necessary. He turned to look at the apartment number written atop the front door. Unit 38. He glanced down at the work order affixed to his clipboard and sighed. "Unit 38: Broken air conditioner". He definitely wasn't clocking out on time today. At least he'd get paid overtime. He tucked the clipboard under his arm and walked up to the door.

---

Sunshine took a deep breath, letting the sharp smell of alcohol fill her nostrils. Sarah's unconscious form was sprawled out on the floor before her, her left arm draped across her chest, rising and falling steadily with each breath. The contents of Sunshine's satchel were strewn across the coffee table: a just-used bottle of paw disinfectant, yellowed only slightly by its two and a half century stowage inside one of the Dewfall's cargo holds, and an electric healer's razor, also none the worse for wear despite its age. The remaining item she had seen fit to include in her impromptu medical bag, a human anatomy text recently borrowed from the college library, lay open on the floor at her side.

«OK, Sunshine, you can do this. Everything's going to be alright. Sarah's going to be alright, alright?» She began a cursory examination of her friend. She slid a pair of azure bandpass membranes over her eyes, shifting her visible spectrum down into the infrared. «Her temperature hasn't changed, and she's still breathing. That's good. First thing's first...» She picked up the razor, only to change her mind and place it back on the coffee table. «No no, that's not right. No fur. Why did I bring this thing anyway?» She began thumbing through the book with her right rear paw. She was greeted by incomprehensible diagrams and labels written in a dead human language she didn't understand. What little confidence she had been able to muster ebbed away with the turn of each page.

«Light blind me!» She kicked the book under the coffee table and crumpled to the ground, heedless of her now contaminated forepaws. «I can't do this by myself. My ignorance got her into this mess. I'll only make things even worse. She needs a human healer.» Just as she rose to her feet, there was a knock at the door.

---

Manny approached the door and knocked. "Maintenance," he declared in his best "How can I help you" voice. He could hear the sound of the tenant's dog skittering its way toward the source of the noise. Without so much as a "down, boy!" from the resident within, the door burst open. Manny braced himself for a physical encounter with yet another pet far too large to be kept in an apartment. When the assault was not forthcoming, he glanced down at the open doorway.

His mood immediately brightened. "One of our little visitors!" He thought. Manny had seen her walking around the neighborhood many times, all wrapped up in a white cloak with only her ebony paws and snout poking out. He had heard through the grape vine that she was some sort of doctor, but didn't know much else. He had always wanted to meet her, but could never find the courage to start a conversation. What do you say to an alien? The mundane happenings of a broke college student who had never even been out of state must seem terribly dull to someone who was born under a different sun. Now he found himself thrust into this little first contact, at a loss for words. He had just settled on a simple "Good afternoon, ma'am" when she wrapped her tail around his forearm and began attempting to drag him inside, yipping and growling frantically. Attempting, but not succeeding. The only way he was getting free of her grip was if she decided to let go, but her claws scrabbled uselessly across the hard floor of the entry way, failing to find purchase against the slick surface.

«By The Light! Another human! Please, sir, I need your help. My friend is in trouble.»

"Hay! Slow down. I don't speak space doggo," Manny protested.

Sunshine stopped her fruitless attempt at pulling Manny inside and glanced down at her empty paw. She had been making her desperate supplications in Commonthroat. Without disengaging her tail from Manny's arm, she reared up and grabbed a keyer and HUD specs that were nestled along with Sarah's keys and wallet in a bowl atop the entry table. She wrapped the keyer in her right front paw and donned the HUD specs, the claws of her left rear paw clicking impatiently against the floor as she waited for the computer to boot.

"Sir," said the keyer held in her paw, "Please, I need your help. My friend is in trouble."

Manny stood back up and attempted to enter the apartment. Sunshine's tail was still constricting his arm like a snake. "OK, what's going on?" he asked. "And can I have my arm back?" Sunshine refused to let go until he had entered and shut the door behind him. Keyer in paw, she knuckle-walked around the breakfast bar and into the living room, Manny following behind.

As he rounded the corner he noticed Sarah lying on the floor. Sunshine kept switching her gaze between Manny and Sarah, as though expecting he would immediately know what to do.

"OK, calm down and tell me what happened," said Manny.

More urgent yipping and huffing from Sunshine. «I... I didn't think it would be a problem. We breathe the same air, drink the same water. This book here,» she pointed at the biochemistry textbook with her muzzle, «says you humans consume proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, sugars, amino acids... all the same stuff we eat. I didn't think it would hurt to share a little snack.» she swept her tail angrily across the corner of the coffee table, knocking off the little carton of cooling bark.

"Mind repeating that in English?" said Manny as he bent down and picked up the carton, turning it over in his hand, examining the alien lettering on the label as though it would provide a solution.

Sunshine repeated her self-recrimination via the synth while Manny took the time to examine Sarah. He noticed her hand resting over her chest, gently rising and falling in regular time with her breathing.

Sunshine's ears perked up in sudden realization. "Don't you have emergency medical transport?" She grabbed Sarah's phone from the arm rest and attempted to unlock it. The gentle tick-tick of her claws on the glass failed to elicit a response from the device. «How do you use this stupid thing?» She had just figured out to touch the glass with the pad of her writing claw when Manny rested the phone from her paws. Sunshine gave voice to a frustrated hiss like an angry goose. «Hay! I was using that!»

"Hold on there," said Manny. "Let's not get the wee-yoo wagon involved if we don't have to."

"What?! Why not? She needs a human doctor," Sunshine said, desperately wishing she could inject more emotion into the tiny synthesizer.

Manny took a few seconds to respond, considering whether now was a good time to introduce Sunshine to the particulars of the American healthcare system. "Well, I'm a human, and you're a doctor. I think we can figure this out between the two of us. Besides," he said as he bent down and checked Sarah's pulse, pressing two fingers against her other wrist sprawled on the floor, "I happen to be an Eagle Scout, and I have the First Aid merit badge." He made this declaration as though that made him a reasonable stand-in for a paramedic. "She's breathing fine, her temperature feels good, and her pulse is normal."

Sunshine's agitation at Manny's lack of urgency began to mount. She started thumping her tail on the floor. Her anxiety caused a momentary lapse in her English proficiency. "What reason you human do nothing? On that floor this my friend die!"

"I'm not 'do nothing'," he said. "I think I know exactly what will fix her right up." He walked over to the kitchen, grabbed a cup from the counter, and began filling it with cold water from the fridge.

---

Sarah floated content in a featureless void, finally free of the extremes of hot and cold. She could stay like this forever. Snatches of English and Commonthroat bubbled up from the abyss. She didn't catch what the voices were saying, but a vague notion of concern tickled the back of her mind. She brushed it aside and continued drifting in this room-temperature sea of beautiful nothingness.

But her repose didn't last. A sudden shock of wet and cold tore her away from the lukewarm void. She came to, sputtering and swearing. The first things she saw were Sunshine's lapis lazuli bandpass membranes staring back at her. She bolted upright, her head barely missing the edge of the coffee table.

Sunshine pressed the top of her skull against Sarah's shoulder. «You're alright! Light shine upon all of us, you're alright! I thought you were dying!»

"Why did you do that? I was finally asleep!" Sarah glanced down at the water dripping onto the collar of her tee shirt.

«That wasn't me.» said Sunshine. She trotted over to Manny and repeated her cranial gesture of gratitude with the knee of his blue jeans.

"Maintenance," Manny repeated. "Sorry I'm late. Your friend let me in. Are you OK?"

"Well, insofar as I'm not dying, yes." She looked at the wall clock. "I wasn't even out for ten minutes."

"Glad to hear it. Now let's see about that air conditioner."

Manny got to work, checking the thermostat and then the compressor outside. Sunshine shadowed him all the while, peppering him with questions about everything he did and every tool he pulled out of his bag.

"I'm surprised you're so interested in what I'm doing," Manny said. "I figured you all think we're cavemen banging rocks together."

"You humans are so fascinating! The way you're built, the fact your forepaws are completely specialized for grasping and your rear paws are optimized for movement, how you've compensated for your lack of an innate ability to write, and how all that effects the tools you use, and how you construct your buildings and vehicles. Plus it's nice to be around people with almost as little fur as me!"

"But, like, there are others, right? Out there? We can't possibly be that interesting," said Manny as he put away his tools.

"Nope." said Sunshine.

"Nope? What do you mean."

"There's nobody else out there. We Wayfarers have been looking for other sophonts for nearly one hundred thousand years. Until we found you we hadn't encountered so much as a microbe."

Manny stood up and brushed the dirt off his pants. "So It's just you monkey foxes and us humans, all alone?"

"Seems that way." she responded.

"That... actually makes me feel kinda lonely."

"Believe me, we know the feeling. But now we can be lonely together!"

Thunder murmured in the distance. Manny looked toward the horizon, where storm clouds were gathering. "I need to let Sarah know I'm done and get out of here before that nasty weather hits.

He knocked on the window behind the compressor. "Is it working?" he asked. Sarah gave a thumbs up. "Awesome. Let the office know if something else happens. I gotta get going." He picked up his bag and started making his way to the truck, with Sunshine trotting behind.

"Listen, it was great to finally meet you, I've seen you walking around in that cloak of yours but I never knew how to say hi. I didn't even know you could speak our language with that computer in your hand."

"I'm happy you came by when you did. Come say hi when I'm out walking, and I can start teaching you Commonthroat." She set the keyer aside and shook a cramp out of her paw. "The more humans that understand Commonthroat, the less I need to use this blasted keyer."

Manny gave a thumbs up and pulled out of the parking space. Sunshine went back inside just as the gust front from the distant squall sighed through the trees.

This was originally going to be a response to the "spare parts" post, but it grew into an afternoon project.

If I have something I like that doesn't fit my conworld's lore, I present it as an urban legend, revisionist history, an ideological schism, or in this case, a bit of in-universe fiction.

The Bright Way has a long tradition of stories and dramas describing First Contact scenarios. These stories always end well, with the yinrih and the newly discovered aliens coming together as friends.

These aliens come in all shapes and sizes, but one popular conception stemming from old folklore is of small insectoid sophonts about the size of a yinrih's thumb. This is one such story.

---

I was sitting atop her head, an arrangement she tolerated as it was the only way I could get a good look at what she was doing without risking getting under paw. In her rear paws she was holding two strands of wire insulated with some sort of tree gum, each strand half as thick around as my thorax. In one forepaw was another length of wire, softer and uncovered, and in the other she wielded a great iron rod fiercely radiating heat. at least it seemed great to me. She likely found its size quite unremarkable. A cable, even more thickly insulated, connected the iron to a large structure--she would have called it a mere box--that I guessed provided the iron's heat.

"What are you doing, great one?" I asked.

"I have a name, remember?" she said, her voice a low rumor like distant thunder. "It's Sunbeam."

A pretty name, but one that hardly matched her appearance. "What are you doing, Sunbeam?" I repeated.

"My job," she rumbled. "I'm building an electric light tower to put at the center of town. Well, I'm assuming it's a tower from your perspective. It's just a wooden dowel not even half the length of my tail, and I'm sticking that little LED array on top." She gestured with her tail toward a flat contrivance covered in intricate little studs--the LEDs she mentioned, as I would find out later.

"Your job?" I asked.

As she spoke, she touched the exposed ends of the insulated wires and twisted them into a single braid, then touched the hot iron to the area where they met. "I'm a hearthkeeper," she said, bringing the end of the softer wire in contact with the exposed copper. "I bring light and warmth, physical and spiritual, to those around me." The soft wire liquified, coating the exposed ends of the other two wires and releasing smoke that smelled like burning tree sap.

"Yes," I said half to myself. "You did say you're a missionary. Why don't you preach, then? You don't think your faith can stand up to scrutiny?"

"I wouldn't have spent hundreds of years travelling the stars to get here if I didn't have the courage of my convictions," she said. "But, well, look at me."

"It's hard to see a building when your standing on top of it," I said.

"Exactly. When we discovered your world we had no idea how... small you were. I'm not even that big, a runt in fact, but to you I'm a giant, a disgusting inside-out giant, if I recall what you said when we first met."

I looked behind me. From four stories up, I could see the moss farm just outside of town. The field still bore a faint indentation in the shape of one of her paws. She had trampled over half the crop in a single step. This was on her first visit to town the day after her skyship landed, before we knew what she was, before she knew what we were.

I had awoke to rumors spread by the town drunk that a star had fallen to the east, half a day's journey from town. I had dismissed them at first until a friend of mine, a fellow merchant who was up late taking inventory in his shop, confirmed that he saw it, too, a star, glowing violet, had fallen to earth. "Didn't make a sound," he had said. "You'd think something that big would make some noise when it landed."

The day went on as normal, other than a few lads trying to drum up a party of adventurers to investigate the fallen star, nobody seemd too bothered. "A great beast has returned!" one of them had said to me as he left my shop. He had purchased a water bladder, "For the adventure," he had told me. "I'm tellin' ya, there's riches beyond your wildest dreams. We just gotta slay the beast and its horde will be ours."

I clicked my mandibles dismissively. "You're chasing fairy tails. There haven't been any great beasts in centuries. We exterminated them all as soon as we figured out how to fire a cannon."

"Where's your sense of wonder?" the lad said as he walked out the door.

I had closed my shop for the afternoon and was chatting with some friends at the inn on the east edge of town, sipping a bead of honeydew. That's when we heard it, a dull, rhythmic tremor sent ripples through the drink on the table.

THUMP

We put our drinks down and looked through the open door to the street outside.

THUMP

I and a few others ventured outside to find the source of the noise.

THUMP

A crowd was gathered near the edge of town.

THUMP

We stared past the moss farm at the crest of the hill behind. That's when we saw her. She bounded over the hill, crushing the moss crop under paw along with the decoy the farmer had placed in the middle of the field to scare away the crow-flies. She turned her head down to look at us all gathered at the edge of town. Her eyes widened and she checked her momentum just before plowing through the city. She dug her iron-red claws into the dirt leaving furrows in their wake.

For a moment we stood there, this great beast and us terrified bugs, staring up at what, to us at least, was every bit the giant horror from the sky described in the old stories. It's hard for me to put into words exactly what I thought I was seeing. Some people say that you don't know what you're looking at until you know what you're looking at. I had always thought that an odd notion until I was staring up at this giant... thing. I didn't know what was paw tail or leg or snout or fang or fur, all things I would only learn much later, so it should be kept in mind that the description that follows is only possible with the benefit of quite a bit of hindsight.

She towered over us, even while sitting with her back end on the ground and all four paws resting flat. I suppose the first thing I noticed was the heat, this calid humidity that seemed to envelope her. I'm not sure what compelled me to do this, maybe it was that same heat. She had this long thick round structure, as long again as the rest of her body, protruding from her back end, a "tail" I would later learn. She had it wrapped around her forefeet. I reached out and touched it, my hand plunging through stiff guard hares then downy undercoat before it was stopped by a pliable, oily surface, her "skin". It was not just warm, it was hot. Not painfully so. I'd compare it to a balmy summer day. Shocked, I drew my hand away.

She pulled her tail away from me and I got a good look at her paws. She had six digits to our three, dug into the earth like tree roots. Each digit was tipped with a sharp iron-red claw. The ends of her digits were furless, the "skin" grayish black. I saw something pulling taught and relaxing at intervals under the bare skin of her paws, tendons and muscles making minute adjustments to maintain her balance. Once again I reached out and touched the exposed skin. It yielded under my hand as I pressed down until I felt something hard underneath, "bone". It was bone that gave structure to her body, and the skin kept her soft viscera from spilling out. Something clicked in my brain and I staggered backward. "It's inside-out," I gasped. "soft on the outside and hard on the inside." I fought the urge to vomit.

Meanwhile, she had shrank back from my touch. When she shifted her paws back I caught a glimpse of their undersides. There were thick soft pads on each digit, with more pads arranged on her palms in the same pattern I saw pressed into the moss field. So ponderously massive was she that she needed cushions to soften the impact of her footfalls. I felt more heat, this time pulsing over me in rhythmic waves. I looked up following her forelegs covered in the same white pelage as her tail, up to her thorax, or what she would later tell me was called her "chest". It was expanding and contracting in time with the waves of humid warmth washing over me. Still further up I saw her mandibles, well, "mandible", singular. Rather than two mobile mouth parts it was fused to form a single structure that could only move up and down. It was hanging lax, revealing the red inside of her great maw. A disgusting red growth, glistening wet and twitching in time with those same heat waves, flopped out of her mouth to one side. This I would come to know was called a "tongue".

The mouth, I discovered, was the source of the hot wet gusts I was feeling. Once again only much later I learned why this was so. Just like us bugs, her body required air to live. We bugs simply took in air passively through spiracles dotted across our carapace. Because of her massive size she required organs dedicated to the purpose. These "lungs" were constantly inflating, drawing in fresh air, and deflating, exhausting spent air. This was why her chest was heaving.

Pointed white protrusions lined both sides of her mouth, "teeth" they were called. Four of these, two below and two above, were larger than the rest, erupting like stalagmites and stalactites in a cave. These were "fangs". Above the mouth were two large spiracles, the only I could detect on her body, unless, I thought at the time, more were hidden under her fur, not the case, as she would explain later. These "nostrils" were surrounded by rugose black skin covered in more clear liquid. The liquid coating the end of her snout was "mucus", that in her mouth and on her tongue "saliva".

Framing the wet tip of her nose were clusters of stiff hairs, much longer than the surrounding fur, "whiskers", tactile sense organs not unlike our antennae, though lacking the faculty of smell. That sense was furnished through the nostrils.

Then came her eyes. Those were the only things about her that didn't make me nauseous to look at. Simple, deep, black. Soulful, I'd come to say with time.

Lastly were her "ears", triangular flaps of skin jutting out from the top of her head. They had been erect when she first crested the hill, but presently were pinned against her head. They were covered in fur, black unlike the snowy pelage across the rest of her body, though she would loudly insist to anyone and everyone they were dark gray.

I must reiterate that none of these details were evident to me at the time. All I knew was horror at this thing, this star beast, mountain-high and radiating uncanny warmth, and the only thing escaping my mandibles was endless gibbering "It's inside-out, gods below it's inside out."

The last thing I saw before I regained sense enough to flee into the nearest building was her mouth, now dripping crimson fluid that dribbled down her jaw and painting her chest, still heaving like bellows with her breathing.

What I say next is still a mystery to me. Sunbeam has explained it to me a hundred times, but I still can't grasp it. I said before we were terrified, and justly so, of this giant monster looming over our town. But, and I can't believe I'm saying this, she was just as terrified of us. We little bugs that she could trample to death in an instant with barely a thought, filled her with a sharp visceral fear digging into her gut and made her want to flee. That's why she retreated from my touch. That's why she merely tolerates my sitting between her ears. "It's how you move," she would say when asked. "The way you skitter around, the way your legs move."

That red fluid dripping from her mouth, it was tears caused by fear.

"You are... quite singular," I said after my long reflection.

"Which is exactly why I have to watch what I say and exactly how I say it." She had slid a black sleave over the two spliced wires and was applying blistering hot air from another of her seemingly endless array of cunning artifices. "A gentle exhortation could be interpreted as the command of a goddess, a warning given out of love as a threat of divine retribution. That's why I'm hesitant to preach. I'm not afraid I won't be compelling, I'm afraid I'll be too compelling. Error barks, the Truth whispers, but how can I whisper when every syllable I utter is a thunderclap? I want you to worship with me, not worship me."

The black sleeve had shrunk tight around the wires, joining them as one. Dazzling white light burst from the LED array, turning the fading evening twilight to mid-day. "You're lucky," she said, pushing the wooden pole into the earth. "Just a little light for little eyes." She tilted her muzzle skyward. I had to grab hold of her ear to keep from loosing my balance. "You can still see the stars."

She rumbled a prayer under her breath. "O icons of the Light, shine upon us little ones."

"US little ones?" I asked. "You call yourself little?"

"We're all little measured against the vastness of Creation," she said. "You may be smaller than my thumb and I may be four stories tall, but we're both not even rounding errors in the grand scheme of things."

"Infinitesimal," I said.

"Yes, infinitesimal in scale, but infinitely loved." She seemed to be gazing in adoration at something beyond even the black behind the stars, and just for an instant I thought I felt someone gaze back.

The main core of the network stretched out before me: rack upon rack of black boxes extending into the distance, their chassis scintillating with link lights blinking softly as packets rushed in and out of each interface. Meticulously bundled cables of various colors spilled forth from the racks and ran here and there along runways above my head. A cold breeze from the heat pump rustled my whiskers. Permeating this cavernous chamber was the rushing white noise of thousands of cooling fans. I turned my muzzle up, taking in the whole scene. This chamber so huge that I couldn't see the far wall, it was all but a tiny ganglion in the vast interplanetary nervous system, the body of the noosphere.

My mind wandered back to my puppyhood, to a catechism class where I was taught about the farspeakers, the ones who labored ceaselessly to maintain this network. They said that the sophonts who dwelt among the stars, whose bone is not of our bone and whose flesh is not of our flesh, that they must have internetworks of their own. Sapience, I was told, is much more likely to arise in a social species with an intrinsic need to communicate among themselves, and so a noosphere must in time fashion a body for itself as the species spreads across its homeworld and hearth star, and these sophonts find themselves needing to cast their thoughts across far flung space and deepest time. It was the Farspeakers' duty to tend to the body of our own noosphere, so that one day they could fulfill the Great Commandment by uniting these alien internetworks with our own. And now, I suppose, it was my duty as well.

I made my way to one side of the room, where a thick curtain separated the anchorite's chamber from the data center. I pushed the curtain aside with my snout just enough to poke my rhinarium into the room. I smelled an older woman. She must have seen at least six centuries by the scent of her. Over top her musk I detected the odor of a strong perfume, the sort that barked "leave me alone!" The roar of the machines outside became muffled by the thick cloth in the doorway as the rest of my head followed my muzzle into the chamber. The anchoress's large Hearthsider ears were silhouetted against the green glow of a terminal. Her right ear flicked as my claws clicked against the raised tile floor, and I detected a slight note of annoyance in her musk.

"You're finally here," she said, not looking away from the display. "So, the hearthkeepers pressed you into their service since you could not pay your tithe to your lighthouse."

I tilted my muzzle upward, though she didn't see my affirmation.

"We bought you," she spat the words with disgust, "for a hefty price off of those witches on Yih. They wonder why so many are wandering from the path. The Outer Belt is filling with apostates scandalized by the clergy's decadence. They blot out The Light's Truth with their sins!" she barked. "Forgive my outburst," she said more softly, "On Hearthside the faith flourishes while the slothful hierarchy allows it to rot across the rest of Focus. The Missionaries who dwell past Moonlitter are the only others who keep the old traditions."

She let out a sigh, and I could smell her trying to calm herself. "If it is any comfort to you, I detest your presence here as much as you do. We anchorites prefer to keep no company. But if our holy work is to continue, we must pass down our knowledge to those whose muzzles are not silvered by age." She at last turned to face me. Her frosted snout contrasted with her sable pelage. She reared up and performed the holy greeting. "Light shine upon you, friend."

"Mistress--" I began, but she cut me off. "That's not my name! And your name isn't 'pup', or so I guess they called you on the homeworld. You will call me Seabreeze, or Breezy if you are not one for formality." I took a breath to speak, but she plucked the words from my throat. "I know, a strange name for a Hearthsider. A few of my dams were from Sweetwater. It is a tediously common name there, but quite refreshing here in the Nightless Desert. And you, sir, what is your name?"

I blinked all four pairs of bandpass membranes in astonishment at her deference. "It's Littlepaw."

She examined me nose to tail. "Littlepaw, eh?" Her earlier harshness had softened into a more maternal tone. "It suits you. The runt of your litter, were you?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Splendid!" she yipped. "A meager frame is an asset for a farspeaker. You'll be crawling through narrow conduit pulling cable in your tail."

My ears wilted. I had hoped that I could leave hard labor behind by becoming a Farspeaker's apprentice. Seabreeze saw my apprehensive expression and took pains to reassure me. "I won't ask of you more than you can give," she said gently. "We're not so mercantile here on Hearthside as they are on Yih. We take time to do things right, and that includes making sure you feel rested and ready. Of course you're not ready yet. You need to be trained first." She reached under the table, and giving voice to a grunt, I guessed for the weight of the machine, she pulled out a black box like the ones fastened to the racks outside. "This is an internetwork node," she said patting its metal chassis with her tail as a dam would a pup she's particularly pleased with. "You need to get comfortable with this before I turn you loose on the nodes out there. I'll give you the honor of turning it on."

I reached forward and depressed the power switch with my writing claw. The machine roared to life like a shuttle taking off. I couldn't help but pin my ears back and open my eyes wide with puppyish glee. The hearthkeepers back home would never have so much as handed me a wrench, but here I was going to be in control of that network node. It was an empowering feeling.

Seabreeze matched my expression, as though she herself were just beginning to uncover the mysteries of the noosphere again. Then she cleared her throat and her face grew solemn, and she began what sounded like a long rehearsed preachment. "The impious accuse us of obscuring plain facts behind a curtain of mysticism. We do no such thing. The noosphere is a complex and many-faceted thing, and its body, which we farspeakers are charged to attend, reflects this complexity. One cannot grasp its wonder in a day, indeed, so intricate are its inner workings that no single farspeaker understands it from nose to tail."

I thought about the endless rows of nodes outside, about the arcane protocols that governed their interactions, about the impossibly complex web of cables and wireless uplinks and Underlay tunnels that connected everything together. The task before me suddenly seemed insurmountable. If no one, not even an anchoress like Seabreeze, could fully grasp the extent of the noosphere, what chance did I have?

Seabreeze smelled my apprehension. She looked at the node now humming quietly, having finished its boot sequence, then back at me. "You're a young pup climbing his first tree. You will fall many times before you reach even the lowest branch. Each time it will hurt, but don't let the pain discourage you. You stand atop my own paw prints. You won't be judged by how many times you fall, but by how many times you pick yourself up, shake the dust from your fur, and start climbing again."