01 November 2005

1200

Or so the NaNoWrimo Counter says. However, my word processor says 1070. Interesting. I saved in .rtf format, perhaps it is artificially inflating the word count.

Today's excerpt:

Suspira
The meeting hut had been disassembled, stored, and the village set aright. There was much curiosity among the curious, and ambivalence among the ambivalent. The active ones were active, the lazy ones were lazy. In short, life went on, as usual. Oh there was some buzz about a Qesting. Most in the tribe had not been born when the last Qesting had occurred. Most knew of it, tribal lore had perpetuated the story. However, tribal lore had been strangely silent on the outcome of the Qesting, and while that did create some buzz, it wasn't enough to be self sustaining. It lacked a catalyst, that being some visual clues that a Qesting was being prepared. But those selected for the journey had completely gone back to business as usual. There was little to talk about, and so, approximately ½ season after the meeting, the last child asked the last parent about it, and the last adult asked the last adult about it, and the subject faded away. As planned.

Sylk was looking for his mentor. Restless, he wondered why nothing had happened. He had broached the subject once with Steropé, but she only set him to some task and did not answer any of his questions. He would not approach the cheesemaker, she always just embarrassed him, asking if he noticed Steropé's supple thighs or some such, and effectively keeping him away from her.

The rest were similarly unapproachable, either because they were unpleasant or uncommunicative. Moaqui was the lone exception, sort of. He was a fountain of information, only none of it seemed to have anything to do with the question at hand. So, Sylk fell into a routine of service in his mother's hut, service to the community, and lately, a certain ferocious service to the talent he was developing. The sensations he was gradually brining to consciousness threatened to overwhelm him at times. A time or two, he lay writhing on the ground in true agony, the feeling of a soft breeze would fall on him like a bruta in full rut charge. These seemed to happen mostly at night, when the normal bombardment of sense was stilled to some degree, and he would respond to the sensory deprivation by expanding his sense of self to include the hut and all it's contents.

“The orientation associative area of your brain, that part that defines the boundaries of your self, at those time when you expand, stop recognizing the hut and your surroundings as being not self and because of that you 'feel' things that most would believe you should not”, was the only comment Moaqui had made to him after several enquiries.

Later dudes.