The Interrogation of Wexiset

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Feralan: “Master, this is Wexiset, of whom I have told you some.” Feralan only calls me ‘master’ when he’s trying to emphasize that he’s my apprentice, and that doesn’t happen every year. Wexiset, please to meet Sythyry.

Me: “Welcome to my parlor, Wexiset!”

I have a lot of parlors. I haven’t counted them all, or even visited them all, but it must be thousands at least. This is because I live in my sky-yacht, Strayway, which (from the inside) is a quite large building, or (from the outside) a rather overdone silver candelabra some fifteen feet tall drawn by a pair of three-headed green metallic antelopes. The interior of Strayway, like the interior of Kismirth, was constructed automatically, by a barely-understood magical crystallization procedure, and I didn’t get the blends perfect. I did better — though still not perfectly — for Kismirth. (Sometime I may actually get the hang of the technique. Or perhaps someone else will get the hang of it. Nobody does it quite right yet.)

Wexiset: “Hello!” She was quite nervous. I was too, but fortunately feathers and scales do not show nervousness nearly as much as Rassimel fur does.

hCevian: [materializing suddenly by Feralan's head, in the form of a small spiky black ball.] “Hello, Wexiset! I will not hurt you!”

Wexiset’s tail flicked nervously. She glanced at hCevian with magic sense, in which he appears to be a small but very intense and quite highly structured vortex of space-distortion magics, as if his physical body barely exists and he is largely composed of magic. (In fact, his physical body barely exists and he is composed largely of magic — which is, at the finest level, true of everyone, but most of us have a few layers of reality between that and ourselves. (I have no idea if Wexiset was thinking about this. I certainly wouldn’t have been at the time, in her place. A more ordinary thought on meeting a Locador demon is, By what means shall I escape from this being of pure positionality?, a question whose answer is frequently quite difficult. (Oh, dear. I am babbling, aren’t I?)))

Wexiset: “Hello, hCevian. Where is your triangle?” She has evidently learned the meaning of hCevian’s name.

hCevian: “You three large and living peoples will represent the edges for this cozy social gathering!”

Wexiset: “Why don’t we represent the vertices instead?”

Feralan: “I bet because we’re all too rounded to be points. Wexiset especially.”

Wexiset blushed a bit and smiled a bit. hCevian, who understood the exchange, danced and sparkled like a black star. Feralan … I am going to have to have a talk with Feralan. Two talks probably: one to tell him that he was flirting with her and that she did not seem utterly displeased, and another to tell him what one does when one flirts successfully and wishes to follow up on it. I doubt that one can grow up in Castle Wrong and remain wholly unaware of the advanced forms of the latter topic. It’s the basic forms (e.g., inviting her out for snacks and conversation and a puppet show) that he needs to know — and needs to know he starts with.

Me: “When and why did you come to Kismirth, Wexiset?”

Wexiset: “Four months ago. We’re from Choulano. My mother’s in the Vepri there, she got very involved with them after my father left her and took up with Aunt Frutti. She got them declared to be scluds — and me too. My father’s a smart man, says he can infer the cliff from seeing the mountain, and we’d be better off leaving Choulano before the whole city went off it.”

Me: “I’m sorry, but my Ketherian is a century or two out of date.” It isn’t; I keep up quite well with the latest vocabulary and slang. “What is the Vepri, and what are scluds?”

Wexiset: “The Vepri’s this big important society or club kind of a thing; it’s got departments up and down Craitheia. It stands for Verified Primordeals — it’s all about what generation your first incarnation was. Primordeals are from the first few generations, and the Vepri thinks they’re very important. Scluds are people from late generations who are bad or something. I’m not very clear on all of this. Anyways, people who had been called scluds had been beaten up and lost their jobs and such, and then Aunt Frutti got attacked and had zir left antenna broken off, and we decided to leave for somewhere friendlier and newer. So we’re here.”

Feralan: “Not for being traff?”

Wexiset: “Yes, for being traff, for being an enemy of an important Vepri, for writing anti-Vepri articles, for being a late generation, all sorts of things.”

Me: “Well, that sounds painful and rude and unfortunate and sad. I’m glad we could provide a friendlier place than that! Though I daresay that the bottom of a scorpion pit would be a friendlier place than that.”

Wexiset:[shrugging] “We got the idea they didn’t want us.”

hCevian: “Sythyry, do you dare to stop interrogating Wexiset?”

Me: “Dare I? Why, I have dared far more dangerous and terrible things than that! Such as sitting in a comfortable chair and reading an insipid novel! Which, indeed, I shall do straightaway. “ (But of course hCevian was right.)

Feralan: “We’re going to use the big table in the seventh lab. Is that all right?”

Me: “I don’t see why not!” Indeed, I didn’t.

Comments

[rowyn]

But what were they going to use the big table for?

Wexiset's mother sounds ... atypical. In my world, parents don't usually do vendettas against their own kids because of something their spouse did. o.O

[archadia.livejournal.com]

They don't?

[rowyn]

Not *usually*. It happens, but "try to get the kid on my side" is more common.

[zeeth_kyrah]

It's not usual, but it does happen. There's a word for it: "transference", meaning the emotion is focused on, or perceived as coming from, a target which is more accessible to the person doing it. The cure involves self-awareness and a willingness to acknowledge the true source of the problem.

[archadia.livejournal.com]

Didn't think I was the only one to remember it.
/agree

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

...so you had to find out later, along with everyone else?

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

It's probably more common in religious cults situations, which appears to be what's happening here, as getting the members to denounce the rest of their family is one way of enforcing the social isolation cults thrive on.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I did not know people could tell who their previous incarnations were!... I mean, think about the implications for laws -- if someone commits a horrible crime and does not properly answer for it, can punishment be rightfully visited on their reincarnations?

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It shouldn't be *especially* hard (I'm sure Sythyry could do it in zir sleep if zie wanted to) but it might be hard enough for a cult to fake it instead of doing it for real.

Giving back the memories of the previous incarnations would be harder, but it has to be possible -- nothing can be so thoroughly destroyed that Healoc can't restore it.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Aren't you arguing that Healoc is inherently stronger than Destroc then? :)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It's a law of magic. Healoc > Destroc/Mutoc/Ruloc > Sustenoc

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I see! That makes sense, I think.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

It's quite hard! I don't know that there's a non-ritual spell for it.

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

It's STUPID it doesn't matter what body and mind your spirit was attached to in its previous lives they're not YOU. And nothing is going to turn you into them which is a good thing!

[terrana.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear!

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I don't see how it stops being you just because you don't remember it anymore. Or have the same skills or interests or gender or family or maybe even species.

It's definately stupid to say people are better or worse because their spirits are older though. I mean, unless the gods started getting creative with the newer spirits or recycled extra spirits that used to be Scawn or whatever.

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

My spirit isn't *me*. *I* am the combination of my body, my mind and my spirit. Whatever my spirit does after my body and mind are gone won't be me that's as silly as saying that after Kijji eats your mind and chases off your spirit and puppets your body, your body is still YOU. It's not! It's part of what was used to make you up is all.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Your spirit is the part of you that doesn't change. Your mind mostly grows and your body changes completely all the time! So changing out a new body shouldn't be a big deal and getting a new mind is a bigger deal but I don't think it would wipe you out completely.

Really, though, if you want to disavow your previous lives you're allowed to. If it's as hard to find out about them as Sythyry says then obviously that's what the gods want.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

How does one measure the generation of one's first incarnation?

In this world, many people who believe in reincarnation are trying to detach from that cycle of reincarnation. Is that accurate in your world? And, if so, wouldn't that mean that the remaining Vepri are the ones who got it wrong the most?

[bloofox.livejournal.com]

Is the spirit as changeless as all that? Ferelan's spirit underwent
some violence. If someone on the World Tree were to die and then come
back, would they be identical in the functions handled by the spirit?
(No more or no less capacity for empathy, say?)

Come to that, Ferelan's reaction to his own body seems to suggest that
the spirit has an expectation for what body it should be in. Is this
just gross differences (e.g. limbs 'n such vs. spikey geometry) or
would your spirit change a bit when you're reincarnated to be
comfortable if your next body is much taller or shorter than the
previous one?

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I think the answer to the first paragraph is yes -- that's why they were worried about the solutions that left him with problems that were easily solvable by magic (like not breathing on his own). Because his spirit wouldn't change between incarnations, if his next incarnation didn't have the same spells cast he'd die as a baby, every time.

It can be changed, with magic, because everything can, but it's not supposed to change.

And it was framed as, 'We're hurting *him* in his next lives', not 'we're going to make some random Rassimel woman sad because her baby is stillborn'. There's also talk about people who want to kill Lithia because in her next life she can be happy and not a shifter-hybrid.

[terrana.livejournal.com]

Doesn't Healoc need something to start from? Even if it's only a little something.

[terrana.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, the cycle of death and rebirth is as natural a thing as can be. The gods designed the Prime spirit for it - we know this because Primes have asked them. The Tree isn't like our reality, large parts of which are arguably unknowable. The divine plan is real, tangible and occasionally very, very nasty to people who don't deserve it.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I don't think so, although obviously that would make it a lot easier.

It does need a way to target something; you might need to include tempador to target the thing in the past before it was destroyed, maybe?

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

You have a real gift for this sort of writing, and it has been a pleasure to read your journal all these years.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a challenge...

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

occasionally very, very nasty to people who don't deserve it.

This is why my people ate our gods. With a nice Sangria, and some refried beans.

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

I'm not DISAVOWING them I'm sure they were perfectly good people and they probably have a bunch of stuff in common with me and I don't want anything bad to happen to my spirit that would hurt my future lives but whoever my spirit belongs to next still won't be ME and it's a silly thing to be all obsessed about. It's like going on and on and on about how you were the foot-racing champion of the city at 26 when you're 58 now and don't race any more. So WHAT? You should be thinking about what you're doing NOW.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

You seem to be equating the World Tree spirit with the Western concept of "essence". The impression I got from the source book was something more akin to the Eastern concept of "anatta".

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Thank you! More flattery of that sort and you might well continue to read it for all more years!

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

Making things is hard. Destroying them is easy. But making everything better again takes just a kiss!

[allessindra.livejournal.com]

I never did figure out how chatting with someone about their background can be seen as 'showing a polite interest in someone' (which is good, vs 'talking all about oneself') and at the same time be 'interrogating' them.

Always leaves me at an impasse for conversation. If I talk about things that interest me, I'm being rude and self-centered. If I try to find out what they're interested in, I'm being rude and demanding.

I'll just go sit silently in the corner, now.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I believe that, if observed from an angle with an even number of degrees, it is a polite conversation, and if observed from an angle with an odd number of degrees, it is an interrogation. hCevian, of course, can choose his own angle.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

[hCevian: why do you primes limit yourself to boring real number angles when there's so many interesting imaginary angles to look at things from?]

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

hCevian: "One must make allowances for flat people! After all, they are making allowances for rigid people, and generous ones at that."