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And now for something completely different at The Bright Empire:
brantley.ubergirls.org/Storie...ns.html
"Companions," posted today to mark my birthday, is the first story of my own to appear since "Twins" May 26 (Another, "The Amulet Of Raja," should be up soon at Supergirls, Inc.; it was written for a contest there.). I think you'll find it worth the wait, for a number of reasons.
To begin with, "Companions" is the first fruit of the new Canonical History of the Supremis that was posted at AU: Other Worlds in September:
velorian.org/auow/au_history.htm
Specifically, it is set during the era of the Companions, Velorian women who were sold to the rich and powerful on other worlds to earn the foreign exchange that was needed to bring to their own world the technology it could not otherwise have afforded. The trade in Companions was a shameful one to our eyes, and yet the stories of the Companions themselves could be inspiring -- wherever they and those they served could see beyond the letter of their indentures.
This is such a story. It is about love and respect and understanding , between Liz'bet and the Molinas who hold her Indenture: Gabriel and his son Esteban. They are men of their time and place, and yet somehow they are able to transcend their time and place through their love of Liz'bet. Not all Companions are as fortunate in their Indentures, as witness Ju'lette. But together, these two Companions save those they have come to cherish as they save the world called Nova Iberia when the Arions come. And Liz'bet, although she may never realize it, will change the course of history….
And don't worry, you'll get your Velorian sex and exhibitionism fix, along with some hot picts -- some from Ultragirl and Redwulf with manips by Shadar.
"Companions" is also my first story to be with the collaboration of Velvet Belle Tree, a writer new to the Aurora Universe and yet already at home in it. It was Velvet who fashioned the image of the Scalantrans for the first time ever in AU fiction. Several other scenes here are her work, in whole or it part, and she has also copyedited the entire story and made a number of invaluable suggestions. It is my fervent hope that she will work her way up to writing stories of her own, as well as contributing to mine.
But the origins of this story go back to long before I knew Velvet, long before Shadar and I collaborated on the Canonical History. They go back to a reference Shadar made in "Alisa's Story," posted July 29, 2003 -- a sequel we wrote to ORDINARY VELORIANS -- before ORDINARY VELORIANS itself had been completed:
<<Alisa Liddell wasn't religious like the Christla -- her record would have flagged that -- but she acted as if she were. Durgin had no problem with that. This mission was to be a first penetration of a new hole, and an anomalous one at that. There wouldn’t be any off hours to play around with once they got close to the singularity. First penetrations were incredibly dangerous.>>
What would a strict religious sect like the Christla be doing on Kelsor 7, a world of science and secular humanism? It was one of those curveballs that Shadar likes to throw at me. In this case, I was thrown for a loss at first. But then I thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian who strove to reconcile Christianity and Evolution:
<<My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him… If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness … there is an absolute direction of growth, to which both our duty and our happiness demand that we should conform. It is [the human] function to complete cosmic evolution … Christ is realized in evolution.>>
Obviously, I couldn't make the Christla followers of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). But the same idea could have inspired them, and I imagined that this would have been the result of a devout Catholic community suddenly exposed to the reality of the cosmos and cosmic evolution -- which could easily happen if a world were settled by the Galen or their Surrogates with abductees from a Catholic country. But these abductees would need to have an intellectual tradition that could accommodate and adjust to the new knowledge thrust upon them. Jordan "Ultragirl" Taylor, who would later supply some of the images for "Companions," had recently studied Thomas Aquinas in college, and that gave me the idea that the intellectual ancestor s of the Christla would have been Thomists.
Yet at this point, I hadn't really thought of a story about them. The whole business of the Thomists was going to be merely part of the background of a story about Alisa Liddell called PASSION PLAY, in which -- although she could never become a convert -- she would be influenced by the Christla philosophy. I had already suggested that there was a spiritual (as opposed to religious) side to her in THRONE OF THE GODS -- this well before I ever heard of the Christla -- in the communion scene where she tells Amsul and his companions that "the dead are not lost to us." That phrase came to me from THE X-FILES, but I later learned that in a literal as opposed to a metaphorical sense it has been used by the Church as reflected in "Companions."
It was only with Shadar's innovation of the Companions that I knew I had the basis of a story that would account for the origin of the Christla. And to make that happen, I knew I had to begin that story in a time and place -- medieval Spain -- that would be compatible with both true intellectual history and the imagined history of the Aurora Universe. I also knew that I would have to do enough on-line research to make the background plausible (Of course, Shadar himself had to make the models for Liz'bet and Ju'lette plausible as true Vels through Photoshop!).
Google proved invaluable in many details, from period Spanish foods and drinks and recipes that survived among the Nova Iberians to models wearing medieval dresses to extracts from the Bible, the works of Thomas Aquinas and Catholic liturgy. Manuel's prayer and homily are derived from the Psalmus Hungaricus, a variation of the 55th Psalm (which, for some reason, is the 54th in the Catholic Douay Bible) used in Hungary after the Ottoman conquest to covertly protest Turkish oppression.
Naturally, "Companions" turned out to be about a lot more than that, but stories grow in the telling, and this one is about people -- about ideas, to be sure, but not in the abstract: only as they move people. It is about Liz'bet and Ju'lette and Gabriel and Esteban and Manuel and Almeida and Alfonso and how their lives come together in a time of crisis that will test all of them.
-- Brantley Thompson Elkins
brantley.ubergirls.org/Storie...ns.html
"Companions," posted today to mark my birthday, is the first story of my own to appear since "Twins" May 26 (Another, "The Amulet Of Raja," should be up soon at Supergirls, Inc.; it was written for a contest there.). I think you'll find it worth the wait, for a number of reasons.
To begin with, "Companions" is the first fruit of the new Canonical History of the Supremis that was posted at AU: Other Worlds in September:
velorian.org/auow/au_history.htm
Specifically, it is set during the era of the Companions, Velorian women who were sold to the rich and powerful on other worlds to earn the foreign exchange that was needed to bring to their own world the technology it could not otherwise have afforded. The trade in Companions was a shameful one to our eyes, and yet the stories of the Companions themselves could be inspiring -- wherever they and those they served could see beyond the letter of their indentures.
This is such a story. It is about love and respect and understanding , between Liz'bet and the Molinas who hold her Indenture: Gabriel and his son Esteban. They are men of their time and place, and yet somehow they are able to transcend their time and place through their love of Liz'bet. Not all Companions are as fortunate in their Indentures, as witness Ju'lette. But together, these two Companions save those they have come to cherish as they save the world called Nova Iberia when the Arions come. And Liz'bet, although she may never realize it, will change the course of history….
And don't worry, you'll get your Velorian sex and exhibitionism fix, along with some hot picts -- some from Ultragirl and Redwulf with manips by Shadar.
"Companions" is also my first story to be with the collaboration of Velvet Belle Tree, a writer new to the Aurora Universe and yet already at home in it. It was Velvet who fashioned the image of the Scalantrans for the first time ever in AU fiction. Several other scenes here are her work, in whole or it part, and she has also copyedited the entire story and made a number of invaluable suggestions. It is my fervent hope that she will work her way up to writing stories of her own, as well as contributing to mine.
But the origins of this story go back to long before I knew Velvet, long before Shadar and I collaborated on the Canonical History. They go back to a reference Shadar made in "Alisa's Story," posted July 29, 2003 -- a sequel we wrote to ORDINARY VELORIANS -- before ORDINARY VELORIANS itself had been completed:
<<Alisa Liddell wasn't religious like the Christla -- her record would have flagged that -- but she acted as if she were. Durgin had no problem with that. This mission was to be a first penetration of a new hole, and an anomalous one at that. There wouldn’t be any off hours to play around with once they got close to the singularity. First penetrations were incredibly dangerous.>>
What would a strict religious sect like the Christla be doing on Kelsor 7, a world of science and secular humanism? It was one of those curveballs that Shadar likes to throw at me. In this case, I was thrown for a loss at first. But then I thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian who strove to reconcile Christianity and Evolution:
<<My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him… If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness … there is an absolute direction of growth, to which both our duty and our happiness demand that we should conform. It is [the human] function to complete cosmic evolution … Christ is realized in evolution.>>
Obviously, I couldn't make the Christla followers of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). But the same idea could have inspired them, and I imagined that this would have been the result of a devout Catholic community suddenly exposed to the reality of the cosmos and cosmic evolution -- which could easily happen if a world were settled by the Galen or their Surrogates with abductees from a Catholic country. But these abductees would need to have an intellectual tradition that could accommodate and adjust to the new knowledge thrust upon them. Jordan "Ultragirl" Taylor, who would later supply some of the images for "Companions," had recently studied Thomas Aquinas in college, and that gave me the idea that the intellectual ancestor s of the Christla would have been Thomists.
Yet at this point, I hadn't really thought of a story about them. The whole business of the Thomists was going to be merely part of the background of a story about Alisa Liddell called PASSION PLAY, in which -- although she could never become a convert -- she would be influenced by the Christla philosophy. I had already suggested that there was a spiritual (as opposed to religious) side to her in THRONE OF THE GODS -- this well before I ever heard of the Christla -- in the communion scene where she tells Amsul and his companions that "the dead are not lost to us." That phrase came to me from THE X-FILES, but I later learned that in a literal as opposed to a metaphorical sense it has been used by the Church as reflected in "Companions."
It was only with Shadar's innovation of the Companions that I knew I had the basis of a story that would account for the origin of the Christla. And to make that happen, I knew I had to begin that story in a time and place -- medieval Spain -- that would be compatible with both true intellectual history and the imagined history of the Aurora Universe. I also knew that I would have to do enough on-line research to make the background plausible (Of course, Shadar himself had to make the models for Liz'bet and Ju'lette plausible as true Vels through Photoshop!).
Google proved invaluable in many details, from period Spanish foods and drinks and recipes that survived among the Nova Iberians to models wearing medieval dresses to extracts from the Bible, the works of Thomas Aquinas and Catholic liturgy. Manuel's prayer and homily are derived from the Psalmus Hungaricus, a variation of the 55th Psalm (which, for some reason, is the 54th in the Catholic Douay Bible) used in Hungary after the Ottoman conquest to covertly protest Turkish oppression.
Naturally, "Companions" turned out to be about a lot more than that, but stories grow in the telling, and this one is about people -- about ideas, to be sure, but not in the abstract: only as they move people. It is about Liz'bet and Ju'lette and Gabriel and Esteban and Manuel and Almeida and Alfonso and how their lives come together in a time of crisis that will test all of them.
-- Brantley Thompson Elkins
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