The Lonely Galaxy Megathread (comments encouraged)

[lurker]

Is this also a good time to ask about Claravian scripture? I imagine it has a long, complicated history, what with its age.

That's another tall order, at least for now. Nothing has been defined yet other than The Great Commandment I detailed at the start of the thread.

Now I would like to know what's up with this.

A good description of how the Bright Way sees where the yinrih and other sophonts fit into the universe is "infinitesimal in scale but infinitely beloved." Mystics meditate on this mystery, gazing into the endless well of stars. It goes back to a time I spent in Monterrey, Mexico. I had decided to sleep on the roof for some reason. This was far away from any light pollution, and for only the second time in my life I really saw the stars. I was overwhelmed by vertigo, and gripped the sides of my bed roll to stop from falling into the infinite sea above me.

This hits hard. I know someone who does exactly this - attend to the elderly, the ill, the dying, the only one who prays for them once they die, who remember them, one of the few who buries them.

My favorite way of describing introversion is "I want to be alone, but I don't want to die alone." This is a reflection of that fear. I like bone keeper since it fits my Anglish translation convention, but I think that implies a wider set of duties, like maintaining the bones as well as initially mounting them. Then again that fits pretty well with the scope of what they do. Perahaps Keeper of the bones of the forgotten?

[WeepingElf]

Wouldn't the ring render space travel difficult? Our concerns about space debris seem puny in comparison.

[Arayaz]

Wouldn't the ring render space travel difficult? Our concerns about space debris seem puny in comparison.

Relevant.

(I believe I've shared this here before.)

[lurker]

Wouldn't the ring render space travel difficult? Our concerns about space debris seem puny in comparison.

Absolutely, but they manage to get it eventually. It helps that the yinrih scientific community has a martyrdom culture. (See above regarding exploding rockets). I've heard elsewhere that a ring would be trivial to avoid for anything with active propulsion, although satellites would be costly and far shorter-lived thanks to the fuel needed to keep them from drifting into the equatorial plane.

[lurker]

The term <HKrqFdqg> /long rising strong growl, chuff, huff, late high weakening whine, huff, short low weak growl/ literally means "ear notch", and is used as a derogatory term for a firearms enthusiast in an analogous manner to the English term "gun nut".

Older yinrih firearms are worn on a saddle mounted on the back, and are fired using a remote trigger wired to the gun assembly and held in the tail or paw. Depending on the length of the gun barrel, it's possible for the user to accidentally lose a chunk from an ear if they don't assume a proper firing posture, hence the nickname "ear notch".

Modern firearms are incorporated into remotely operated drone capsules such as those used as part of most powered armor, and these don't carry the same risk as older back-mounted firearms.

[lurker]

St. Cloudlight* the sensible was a figure who helped with the renewal of the Bright Way after the War of Dissolution. Not much is known of his private life, though he was famous for being a man of some girth, giving rise to quite a few jokes, some of which are thought to have come from his own mouth as a form of humble self deprecation.

"I would have liked to become a steadtree hermit," he once said, "were it not that I would have broken whatever branch I perched upon."

a great many quotations have been attributed to him, some real, some not.

"What healer does not abide among the sick?" being the most well known. It's an admonition against preaching to the choir.

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* Light reflected off the glaciated tops of convective clouds around sunrise or sunset, when most lower objects are still in shadow, sometimes making it appear as though the sun is rising in the west or setting in the east.

[lurker]

Here's a possible resolution to two mutually exclusive taboos:

1. Males may not work in medicine.
2. Females may not be in the military.

So what answer is there for military medics?

The same answer I seem to have for pretty much everything: Mechs!

Medics on the front lines are actually mechs operated remotely by healers. That way, they're not technically in combat. Healers are already experts at piloting mechs remotely since they use micro mechs for non invasive internal surgery.

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Another option is that battlefield medics are a regular position. The people who seek to become medics are all either males who want to learn medicine or females who want to see combat, but the taboos against male healers and female soldiers are so strong that the healers are reluctant to teach the males much medicine and the soldiers are reluctant to teach the females much about combat, so you have either a decent soldier whose bad at medicine, or an excellent doctor who isn't good in a fight.

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Of the two possible solutions, I have to admit the second option opens up more worldbuilding opportunities, but I just can't say no to mechs.

[Arayaz]

Of the two possible solutions, I have to admit the second option opens up more worldbuilding opportunities, but I just can't say no to mechs.

*whispered chanting* both both both both

[Visions1]

I agree. I imagine that 1) at some points, mechs didn't exist, so this provision would have to be made; and 2) even with mechs, at some point you just need a tree pupper.

[lurker]

This symbol is referred to as the "Healer's Paw". It's meant to resemble the distinct pattern of palmar pads on a female yinrih's forepaw. The Healer's Paw is the universal symbol for health and medicine across Focus, serving a similar role as the red cross or the caduceus do on Earth. It's colored maroon to symbolize yinrih blood.

[lurker]

This is a tentative symbol for the Bright Way, or possibly the Knights of the Sun.

The yellow circle symbolizes a star, stars being icons of The Light. The gear represents the Bright Way's scientific and engineering endeavors in pursuit of the Great Commandment, as well as the hearthkeeper's duty to tend the star hearth. It's also reminiscent of a prayer ring.

It's also supposed to give off corporate logo vibes, alluding to the Bright Way's past as a system-spanning megacorp.

Edit: An alternative interpretation of the symbol is that the circle represents a planet, and the gear represents the noosphere that is created when sapience emerges. The Missionaries may have a version where there are two copies of the symbol with the gears meshed together, representing the merging of two noospheres.

[lurker]

Commonthroat, or one of its ancestors, was the principle language of the area around Newmans' Dale (The equatorial river basin where the yinrih first emerged) around the end of the Age of Decadence. As such, it was also the administrative language of the Bright Way.

It was already a prestige language throughout Focus when the secular government on Yih reasserted itself during the War of Dissolution, and was adopted by the newly formed Allied Worlds as their official standard language. Minority languages slowly died out among the Allied Worlds, although regional accents and substrate vocabulary remain.

Hearthside, not being an official AW member state, retains a distinct language, although nearly all its citizens are also proficient in Commonthroat. Moonlitter and Partisan territory likewise share a distinct language, with separate varieties used by each polity. L2 Commonthroat speakers are as abundant on Moonlitter as on Hearthside, but most residents of Partisan Territory are monolingual.

The Spacer Confederacy does not have an official language, in keeping with its hyper libertarian tendencies, but Commonthroat is the de facto lingua franca, and is used by the Federal Council and Federal Police. In fact, there are several city-states within the Confederacy that have developed and speak conlangs unique to them alone in an effort to further assert their independence.

Wayfarer's Haven, being an SC city-state formed by refugees from Moonlitter, speaks a variety of Commonthroat heavily influenced by the language of Moonlitter. Iris, Lodestar, Stormlight, and Pascal all have Moonlitter accents, while Sunshine speaks with a Hearthsider accent, and Tod has a Welkinstead Moony accent.

The Split Horizon, another SC city-state, and the first Human settlement at Focus, speaks English.

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I've been thinking of developing a relex of Commonthroat mapped to Human-pronounceable speech sounds called Monkey Fox Pidgin (or ) that would be spoken by Human residents of Focus. Probably won't get around to it, but it's still rattling around in my head.

[Visions1]

So the liturgical language was basically whoever controlled that place?
Did they have archaic forms that kept getting used (like Latin)?

[lurker]

So the liturgical language was basically whoever controlled that place?
Did they have archaic forms that kept getting used (like Latin)?

I think the proper liturgical/sacred language of the Bright Way would be the latest common stage of the purely written language before the written and spoken languages started to merge. (That is assuming I don't decide they still use a written-only language like the Commonpaw I proposed a while back.

This is the language the canonical scriptures would be written in. It's certainly the language that the accounts of the Theophany and the Great Commandment were written in.

[lurker]

Here's a version of the above symbol that may be used by the missionaries.

[Visions1]

Lots of symbolism here.

[lurker]

Research monasteries are where most of the Bright Way's R&D took place. They emerged during the Golden Age, and most major scientific and technological breakthroughs could be traced back to them. Tailstone, neurogel, fusion power, force projectors, leaseminds, and much more were all invented by ascetics living in research monasteries in an effort to further the Bright Way's goal of finding other sophonts.

This, along with their existing control over the power grid, is where the seeds of Bright Ways corruption from religion to megacorp were planted. You need a lot of money to maintain that kind of research, and the obvious solution was to commercialize the resulting inventions to pay the bills.

In the beginning, the religious character of the monasteries was very apparent. ascetics would spend their days alternately chanting prayers as a community, meditating on the mysteries of Creation (i.e. doing research), and practically applying the insights gained from those meditations. During the Age of Decadence the spiritual component of the monasteries atrophied to the point that they were little more than R&D labs, with the exception of pious enclaves like Hearthside where traditions were maintained.

Research monasteries are much like monasteries on Earth. There's a novitiate where potential new ascetics discern whether they are called to enter into religious life, then vows are taken to forego bearing pups (so as not to distract from their duties), to live in community, and maintain the practice of meditative research. Unlike Earth monasteries, research monasteries aren't separated into male and female orders. Both genders live together in the same community. Other monasteries like those of the Knights of the Sun and orders of healers are gender-locked due to the taboos against male healers and female soldiers.

[lurker]

Lots of symbolism here.

I'm playing with Inkscape. I wish I could embed the SVG files directly rather than linking to them. The nice thing about SVG is that it's just XML markup. Most programs that render HTML, like markdown editors, will display SVG images if you paste them in.

[thethief3]

Gee that's a lot of people who are locked out of reproduction given they can only breed once and with that a 50% surplus. Researchers, Priestesses, Knights of the Sun, Healers.

[lurker]

Gee that's a lot of people who are locked out of reproduction given they can only breed once and with that a 50% surplus. Researchers, Priestesses, Knights of the Sun, Healers.

Healers aren't necessarily part of a religious order. There are secular healers (both in the sense of nonreligious and in the sense of not being a member of an order) who are perfectly free to have pups.

I also suspect there were armies of unpaid interns third orders associated with research monasteries who helped just as much, and who were free to bear young.

There are also other areas of inquiry that don't directly deal with spaceflight or power distribution that weren't dominated by the Bright Way. I've already mentioned that terrestrial logistics were outside their purview. It's just that during the Age of Decadence the Bright Way had the market cornered on the industries that enabled an interplanetary society to exist.