The Melting; a response to Jesse
From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
Date: | Friday, May 23, 2003, 4:30 |
----- Original Message -----
From: "JS Bangs" <jaspax@...>
> Sally Caves sikyal:
>
> > :) On the other hand, I would hate to shut down talk of conculture
> > religions. Many of our invented peoples have religions. Kerno
speakers
> > are I believe mostly Catholic, and the Teonim are largely Orthodox.
>
> Orthodox, as in Eastern Orthodox? This is surprising to me: I was under
> the impression that the Teonim were on a completely separate con-world.
They are and they aren't! It's a little complicated, and I'm bound for
bed, but it goes like this. The Teonim have mastered an art they call the
"melting" (li mermmindo) which means that they exist interdimensionally.
Most of what I know about them is their interactions, over the centuries,
with *this* world, their point of arrival and departure being the Black Sea
where Tsorelai Mundya, their major city, emerges on an island and submerges
again. In this respect, they resemble some of the denizens of what we call
Faerie, except that they have adopted some of our technologies and belief
structures and brought some of their own. They were and are with us, but
they appear and disappear. It's not clear to me yet what happens to their
sense of time when they go back (do we see the same individuals returning
over millennia?), how many humans get "kidnapped," and how many Teonim get
stranded. More about this later, as I have the time. But this would
explain the Latin and Greek borrowings, the Russian Orthodox Church (but
also a thriving Gnostic sect), the Turkish words for some foods, and a
language base that is in other respects not Indo-European. Issytra, my
immanuensis, is a woman who was stranded, and her daughter, Sendl (which
means "dark-haired") has done everything to correct the "flaws" of Teonaht
anatomy. She has had her sixth fingers and toes removed, and she wears
contacts.
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