Like a good Neighbor

David Stockhoff · 23 Nov 2011, 20:14 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:14:20 -0500
Subject: (urth) Like a good Neighbor
In-Reply-To: <4ECD49B1.60609 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W11AC05DE44D0ADE5B989DECFC90 at phx.gbl>
	<CAJ8=rtgSpXGAJ93pc4SRc+f82DekbBwGQ1Y76kObLCGWC=xJfA at mail.gmail.com>
	<4ECD45F6.6030905 at gmail.com>
	<CAJ8=rti8wgZWZ85=n9eRXGq5dewNkF9iZioD=iQUQZmesDfDww at mail.gmail.com>
	<4ECD49B1.60609 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4ECD541C.1000609 at verizon.net>

On 11/23/2011 2:29 PM, James Wynn wrote:
>
>> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>> OK, let's see if I can summarize this correctly. You believe that
>>
>> (a) the Neighbors are sentient trees native to Blue, who can astrally
>> project into the form the Narrator meets;
>>
>> (b) the inhumi are not-natively-sentient reptiles or amphibians native
>> to Green, who take on the nature of what they feed on (at least in
>> their offspring);
>>
>> (c) because they fed on Neighbors, who are trees, the inhumi "take on"
>> a sort of tree-ishness and become lianas.
>>
>> Is that correct?
>
> Precisely correct except that "reptile" is an analogy. One should not 
> assume a true reptile nature.
>
> As the Rajan says:
> "These people, like people everywhere here, seem to fear that an 
> inhumu may live on even with its head severed. That is not the case, 
> of course; but I cannot help wondering how the superstition originated 
> and became so widespread. Certainly the inhumi have no bones as we 
> understand them. Possibly their skeletons are cartilage, as those of 
> some sea-creatures are. On Green, Geier maintained that the inhumi are 
> akin to slugs and leeches. No one, I believe, took him seriously; yet 
> it is certain that once dead they decay very quickly, though they are 
> difficult to kill and can survive for weeks and even months without 
> the blood that is their only food. "
> ~ OBW chapter 4

Interestingly, that is much more true of slugs than of most plants and 
plant parts. Even fruits stick around unless they are opened. I have 
always assumed that at base the inhumi were indeed soft parasitic bugs. 
They still could be---the forests of Green are evolutionarily impossible 
without bugs of some kind. You need a long war between predator and prey 
to evolve new forms.

And I think this is thematically possible as well---after all, no one 
knew 2000 years ago that grapes became wine because they have yeast 
bacteria embedded in their skins. Such bugs---slugs---blugs---could have 
merged with plants millennia ago and provided some basic genetic coding 
like the bacteria needed in the gut to break down food. We know a 
species of seaslug contains algae; this is but the reverse.

That was "then." Inhumi could be closer to plants now.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net