Last Updated: Aug 11 2023
Notes:
1) havent read the books yet, have only played myst, riven, exile.
2) in fair part because of that, there will be at least some divergence between canon and what ends up here.
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95.3.14 – Atrus suggests I might want to start a journal, both so that I can have somewhere to write thoughts down and so that he can see another perspective should I allow him to look. It feels weird letting someone else read a journal I'm writing, given how private they generally are where I'm from, but I suppose it makes sense that that taboo(?) wouldn't map 1:1 to them, from such a massively different culture. It's a million miracles at once that they speak the language I do. Not to mention that I had to look through their own journals quite often to get out of the ages - suppose I owe it to him.
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questions:
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95.3.16 -- bring from home:
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95.3.19 – A storm started up a bit ago. Woke me up much earlier than I would have liked - could have gone for another hour or two of sleep - with a clap of thunder that I had assumed was a gunshot or an explosion. Ran out of the room they've let me stay in (again, thank you) and saw Catherine calming the baby. According to her, she and Atrus woke up when the baby did, which was unrelated to the storm, but once she assured him she could lull the baby back to sleep he turned back over and started snoring almost immediately. I believe it, with what I can hear from a floor below.
I doubt I'll be getting back to sleep very easily, might as well make use of the time. Catherine told me his birthday is a month from today - I assume that's ~30 days? I'll keep the paper trail of what it is somewhere else, probably paperclip or tape the more useful bits in afterwards. Journal's less unreadable that way, anyhow.
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95.3.21 – Back in the real world my home-reality for a couple of days. The one upside to being a complete shut-in is that nobody will notice my absence. Save for mom and Anne, but the idea of … parallel universes? I try not to think too much about it myself; if I gave them proof, my mother would either directly or indirectly attract the attention of Uncle Sam, and that would be… bad.
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95.3.24 – Another storm. A bit different; less rain, more wind and hail. In the basement. Catherine is soothing the baby, Atrus is logging the meteorological data… no peace from the storms, no way to continue with the present without Atrus seeing, but it's oddly,,, calming?
They seem to speak in an odd combination of some other language with some English thrown in here and there. The non-English sounds kind of like the language his father spoke in the imager in the Rivenese schoolhouse... I assume it's D'ni?
It feels wrong to be listening in on these conversations, trying to pick up on cadence and patterns and word-order, but I guess it's kind of how anybody learns a language? I think I'll ask her in the morning for help.
[([A piece of paper is tucked between the pages, covered in scribbles - various D'ni letters and IPA equivalents. On the other side of the paper lay small snippets of someone piecing together an understanding of D'ni grammar: things like 'maybe svo?', 'em=>2nd person singular present ending ?', 'you are => kenem you have => sekem;' '109=((25^1)*4)+9' and so on litter the page.])]
another pretty big reason i can forsee a good bit of divergence from canon is that i am american, and i can tell you with absolute certainty that you would have to fundamentally alter the way america has seen itself, presented itself, and pushed itself onto the world stage whether anybody else liked it or not in order for me to believe that the d'ni have any chance of existing after maybe 1950 at the most generous, unless somebody went and burned every last linking book on earth as well as the corporeal forms of anybody capable of writing new Ages.