.2a Additional worldbuilding elements
Before going into my latest ideas for the details of the story’s events, I want to explain some of the science-fiction and fantasy elements of this story which I have thought of since deciding it would no longer be related to Harry Potter. I thought of most of these a while ago, so I will explain them in relation to my earlier ideas such as the Republic of Earth. I will later explain how these could fit in with my new ideas. I will also explain the ideas I had for what the force which conquers the world in Part One of the story could be if it is not an evil wizard.
Magic and metaphysics
Even after I had decided the story would no longer be related to Harry Potter, I still liked to imagine the Istarcanor having some kind of magical ability, but I always thought of them as being more like Jedi rather than wizards. As such, I did not want their abilities to be extremely powerful with huge effects. I thought it would be too difficult to realistically explore the implications of such magic. One thing I tried to do with the original idea of the story was mock Harry Potter for failing to do this. I instead wanted something more subtle. Taking inspiration from aspects of the magic system in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series, I decided that the magic in my story would mostly be a kind of telepathy. I did not want to use words for existing ideas such as “telepathy” or “psychic” to describe something which I wanted to be somewhat original, so I wanted a Quenya word for this ability and those who use it, I found “Sanwe-latya” (“thought opening”, used by Tolkien to describe the Valar’s communication) and “Samatir” (“mind-seer”). However, there really is no reason not to use the existing words and I am considering changing every instance of “Sanwe-latya” and “Samatir” in these articles to those.
A Samatir can make contact with other people’s minds, allowing him to perceive their thoughts, experiences, and memories as well as cause those people to perceive his. Learning to this is extremely difficult and there is no consistently reliable way to teach it. Even after one learns how to do this, making contact with another person’s mind is always very difficult and requires immense concentration in most cases. This ability can be used to communicate and to tell if someone is lying. I imagined it might also be possible for a Samatir to create illusions by projecting things he perceives or imagines into a target person's mind or to compel them to act by projecting the commands to his own muscles, but these would be even more difficult to do in addition to the usual limitations. It would be nearly impossible for any perceptions someone tries to project to override his target’s own perceptions, especially if he is projecting something he is only imagining, not himself perceiving. The target would know he is experiencing some kind of hallucination if a Samatir were to attempt to do this. Likewise, there is no way a Samatir could have more control over a target’s body than he does. Only the most skilled Samatiri could come close to doing either these things, or perhaps they could be done if multiple somehow cooperate. However, in order to just disorient an enemy or make him stumble, there is no need to create a perfect illusion or to perfectly compel a particular action. A simple way to use Sanwe-latya offensively is for a Samatir to project any pain he is experiencing onto enemies, perhaps the ones who inflicted that pain, in order to distract them.
This would be the greatest secret of the Istarcanor and the one which they would go to the greatest lengths to keep. During the time of the second part of the story, only a tiny number of them would be trusted to know that these abilities exist and an even smaller number are trusted enough to be taught and are successful in learning them. This might mean that Sanwe-latya would not be studied very much and not everything I explain here would be known during that time. There are several reasons for this secrecy. The real reason is that, even if the effects of the magic are not huge, I was not confident in my ability to imagine what the all the implications could be if more than a small number of were to have these abilities and if it became common knowledge that they exist, not the least of which is the public reaction to the fact that not even people's thoughts are private. These abilities would make some very strange things possible and could greatly change how people relate to each other. It would be possible to perceive what someone experiences right before he dies. It would be possible to discover whether and which non-human animals are sentient. I am not sure what the answer to those questions should be for the purposes of the story. These issues could be explored in the story at an individual level, but imagining how this would change society and the world as a whole would be much more difficult. In the context of the story, the people keeping the secret would not want to deal with these issues either. Sanwe-latya can obviously be abused in all kinds of ways and can also be dangerous to those who often use it as they can lose their identities and become confused as to which thoughts and memories are their own and which came from other people (thinking about this now, it might make more sense for anything a Samatir perceives from another person’s mind to be as difficult to remember as dreams and for similar reasons). The Istarcano Samatiri would be worried that there could be even more dangers dangers which they are not aware of. There could be many I have not thought of. Additionally, they would lose much of their advantage if they were dealing with other Samatiri or even people who simply know their abilities exist.
The connection a Samatir makes another person's mind goes both ways. If he does not want his target to perceive what he is experiencing, he would need to empty his mind to the best of his ability and focus only on the target. It is nearly impossible to prevent the target from feeling something, but he would not be able to distinguish it from his own experience and might barely notice it, unless he knows that perceiving other people’s minds is a possibility and has been taught to recognize them. The target would not need the ability to make the connection in order to be able to do anything to the Samatir which he can do to him, and there are ways the target can break or block the contact. Only those with the greatest skill and mental discipline can successfully use Sanwe-latya offensively against another Samatir without causing a stalemate which leaves them both very confused and disoriented for some time. Even against non-Samatiri, the Istarcano Samatiri would be extremely hesitant to use it offensively at all, so as to not risk revealing their abilities. They would prefer that there not be any more rumors of people having strange experiences when dealing with them than there needs to be. Additionally, it would be difficult for someone to harm someone else if he is able to feel his pain and fear.
When thinking about any of the science-fiction and fantasy elements of this story, I prefer for things to be somewhat realistic. I would eventually articulate a loose general rule that nothing should contradict any known scientific laws, but I can decide the in-story truth about anything which is not known. Of course, the problems are that there are many areas of science I do not understand and the established science could be wrong. Perhaps it could be interesting if theories which are not accepted or scorned by the mainstream are true in this story. In any case, the explanation for all the magical elements of the story is that the fundamental mechanics which underpin reality are totally unknown in the present time. Through these mechanics, phenomena can occur which would be impossible to explain with today’s science. The human mind is not understood by science, so it is the most obvious of such phenomena is and where magical effects can originate. The exact way telepathic contact would work was inspired by the explanations of how ansibles and the Formic’s communication function in Orson Scott Cards’ sequels to Ender’s Game. The transmission of thoughts is instantaneous and not limited by the speed of light. A Samatir’s ability to make contact is not affected by distance; he can theoretically perceive the mind of a person located anywhere in the universe, but actually doing so requires something to focus on. A Samatir needs to know that his target exists. Memories of the target can be enough, but making contact is easiest if he can see, hear, touch, or otherwise perceive his target by mundane means, so in effect, distance does matter. The more closely they interact and the more familiar they are with each other, the easier it is to make contact.
Sanwe-latya might be the explanation for natural human empathy, intuition, and many other social and psychological phenomena. All humans have these abilities and unconsciously use them all the time. Samatiri are only the ones who are fully aware of them and can make much stronger mental contact and intentionally direct what they do with it. The problem is that most of these phenomena have real physical explanations. There are many things people can subconsciously perceive which give them impressions regarding other people, such as body language and voice. I have recently heard a few times that people perceive the electric fields emitted by each other’s bodies and this explains many social phenomena and might even make some kind of telepathy possible. If I wanted to say that instantaneous mind-to-mind communication by supernatural means is the explanation for all these things, then that would break my rule that real explanations should not be contradicted. My solution is to think of the material reality as a manifestation of a deeper reality. The brain is a manifestation of the mind. Mirror neurons could be where the effects of Sanwe-latya are observed. All pieces of communication, no matter the form, whether it is electric fields, body language, signals transmitted by neurons, spoken or written words, or digital data, are manifestations of thoughts in addition to physical phenomena. A word written on a paper by a person is fundamentally different in a real way from some ink which was accidentally spilled on the paper, even if that spilled ink somehow has the exact shape as the intentionally written word. This means a person would not be able to read it, as it does not contain the thoughts of the person who wrote it. This sounds absurd and would be impossible to test because spilled ink would never look exactly a written word, but that is another way of saying the same thing. When a person perceives any kind of communication from someone else, it is this metaphysical psychic component by which he learns the information it conveys, not the physical stimulus, and the psychic component can exist without the physical stimulus.
There are some additional implications of all of this. Because people make at least a tiny amount of mental contact in every interaction and the more someone perceives someone else the more easily contact is made, Samatiri have a chance of becoming aware of when other people direct their attention towards them, even if they are unable to perceive them in any other way, such as if they are being watched by someone in a crowd or is completely hidden. Because there is no separation between material reality and the underlying one where Sanwe-latya functions, being biologically related is another factor which makes mental contact easier, even between people who do not know each other at all. Because the psychic component is not distinct from the piece of communication it is part of, A Samatir would have difficulty understanding the thoughts of someone who speaks a different language than he does. Because all kinds of communication carry a psychic component, including written words, images, recorded or live audio or video, or potentially any human artifact, such media and artifacts allow Samatiri to contact the people who made or are depicted in them, but this would be far more difficult than if they could perceive their targets more directly. This means that it might be possible for Samatiri to perceive some remnant of the consciousnesses of people who have died. Additionally, this is how Sanwe-latya can be used to interact with inanimate matter.
It is always more difficult for a Samatir to do this than it is to contact a person’s mind. Any matter a human has affected has at least a tiny amount of psychic significance. The more something has been affected and the more information it communicates, the greater the significance. A work of art or a book might have the most. Something created by machines or computer programs would have less. The other factors which determine the difficulty of making mental contact with inanimate matter are similar to those of contacting people's minds with the additional factors that a Samatir can most easily make contact with matter which can be understood as a distinct object and with artifacts he made himself. In addition to the difficulty of making contact with inanimate matter is the difficulty of clairvoyantly perceiving anything about it or affecting it using Sanwe-latya. A Samatir is able to perceive what other people experience and project his own experience because people's minds are similar and the activity in one person’s brain can be mirrored in another. An inanimate object cannot perceive or experience anything, so there is little for a Samatir to perceive other than the tenuous connection to the minds of people who have affected it. An inanimate object cannot process the inputs from a Samatir like a person’s mind can. Using Sanwe-latya to perceive inanimate matter requires learning to interpret the impressions received from it. It seems to make sense to me that the easiest quality to perceive this way is temperature. If a Samatir were to mentally contact a hot object, what he would perceive might not seem anything like heat. However, it might be more consistent with what I have written earlier for him to perceive the temperature as what he would feel if he were to touch it. If a Samatir can perceive a quality of an object, then he might be able to change it, but this is much more complicated. I am not sure how exactly doing this would work and what limitations there should be other than the difficulty. Causing any kind of physical change should require energy or else energy would be created from nothing. Of course, affecting the signals in someone’s brain would also require a non-zero amount of energy and would have the same problem.
On a related note, it should be possible to make mental contact with people's bodies instead of their minds, in order to directly heal or harm them. The difficulty of doing this would be greater than that of contacting minds and less than that of contacting inanimate matter. However, perhaps easier than anything else is mental contact with one’s own body. This would be how the brain controls the body and is physically manifested as the nervous system, but it could also be explanation for psychosomatic phenomena and a Samatir’s mastery of it might allow him to achieve exceptional physical feats. One, which is easy to imagine given what I have established here, is being able to react faster than neural transmission speed would allow.
What I have written here is true during the time of Part Two, but ways of overcoming the limitations of Sanwe-latya could be discovered later and it will be possible to do things which could not be done before. The conditions which make it easier to contact inanimate matter will become better understood and In the far future after the second part of the story, it is discovered how to create technological devices which a Samatir can easily interact with. For example, he could make contact with a computer and use any of its functions as if they were his own thoughts and access all the data stored in it as if they were his own memories for as long as he maintains contact. I had this idea when I was reading Ian Douglas’ Star Carrier series in which all people, except for the “primitives” who live outside of technologically advanced society, have computers implanted in their brains when they are very young children. This kind of thing might not uncommon in science-fiction, but this is what I happened to read which made me think about it. Without these in-head computers, people cannot interact with the technology needed to function in 25th century society. It is said that people would not be able to open a door without the implants. With one seemingly big, but ultimately unimportant exception early on, the series portrays all of this as perfectly fine and good. However, I thought it all seemed very wrong and unnecessary. People have been opening doors for thousands of years without anything like this. However, in cases such as fighter pilots fighting advanced aliens which is the focus of the Star Carrier series, a perfect human-machine interface would be vital. Perhaps such technology could only be used in such cases, but I imagined that Sanwe-latya could be an alternative in my story. Thinking about all this made me further realize that I really do not like many science-fiction elements such as artificial intelligence and transhumanism, and I want my story to have fantastical alternatives, but also realistic ones. Artificial intelligence and transhumanism would exist in my story; certainly, the technology I have explained here and those I will explain later have the potential of causing all kinds of issues. Artificial intelligence and transhumanism should be portrayed as ultimately bad. Whatever one believes about these issues in reality, in the context of this story, the rules of Sanwe-latya I have established here could be used to create explanations for why these things are harmful, dangerous, and impossible to truly achieve as their proponents hope.
While writing this, I had another idea for ways the limitations described here could be overcome when I thought that the conscious use of Sanwe-latya might not be anything new. It could be the explanation for reported magical and occult occurrences in reality. Those are often considered evil, especially from a Christian perspective. Perhaps there could be both good and evil ways of using Sanwe-latya which make it possible to exceed the normal limitations. What I have described so far are could just be extensions of natural human abilities and are fundamentally neutral and the morality depends on the purpose it is used for. I am not sure exactly what these good and evil ways could be, but they could reflect the principles I have discussed elsewhere. The good means of enhancing Sanwe-latya requires humility and self-sacrifice and has subtle effects which are great in the long-term, while the evil means involves the sacrifice of innocent victims and has immediate strong effects. The scapegoat mechanism described by Rene Girard could be the most common unconscious use of evil Sanwe-latya. Of course, Sanwe-latya is the underlying explanation for all the mimetic phenomena Girard described.
I have stated what actions are more difficult than others for Samatiri to perform, but I should clarify that there are different kinds of difficulty. Different kinds of skill are needed to do different things. Sanwe-latya generally requires mental discipline and ignoring distractions, but that does not necessarily mean a Samatir will be able to do all of these things well. Some of the distinct skills as well as additional thoughts regarding them are:
Making mental contact with a target person or object. Depending on how well the connection is maintained, the Samatir can perceive everything his target is experiencing and the target can perceive everything he is. This is the main thing a Samatir learns to consciously do which the average person does not. Everything else is mostly relatively ordinary mental activities done while in contact with a target.
Emptying one’s mind in order to prevent the target from becoming aware of him or to prevent other Samatiri from getting any information from him. This might be a way to block contact.
Holding the exact thoughts and perceptions the Samatir wants the minds he is in contact with to perceive for the purposes of communication, illusion, and compulsion. This is all that what I have referred to as “projecting” is.
Breaking contact is as simple as directing one’s attention away from the other person, unless that other person tries to maintain it. Breaking contact with a hostile Samatir who is trying to maintain it might be another extraordinary thing a Samatir needs to learn to do, but based on what I have already established, directing attention away would make maintaining the contact more difficult, as would distracting the enemy.
Being able to do other things while the entirety of one’s attention is directed towards Sanwe-latya.
Being able to recognize when a Samatir has made contact and distinguishing which thoughts and perceptions are one’s own and which are the Samatir’s. Someone who does not know about Sanwe-latya could realize that he is experiencing something unusual, but he would only be able to guess what it is. This would not be very difficult unless the Samatir is good at not being noticed.
Affecting inanimate matter.
I do not know exactly what the process of training Samatiri would involve. The mental skills needed for effective use of Sanwe-latya are useful generally, so the Istarcanor would be trained in these skills even if the secret is not shared with them. However, learning consciously making mental contact is like trying to use a muscle one does not know he has. I have an idea for a two-step method for how they might be taught to do this. The first is for a Samatir to make contact with the trainee when he has been told what is happening so that he would be able to recognize what other minds. Even if the trainee is not able to learn to make contact, he can still learn to interact with and defend against those who do. After the trainee can knows what perceiving other minds is like, he is then put in sensory deprivation so that other minds are the only thing he can perceive. Because the Republic’s Department of War would have activities in space, the Samatir trainees could be suspended in zero gravity in a dark and silent room on a ship or station with air the same temperature as their bodies, so as to eliminate as many sensations as possible. I also had an idea that there could be a character who became blind and deaf when he was very young and was taught Sanwe-latya at a younger age than all others and became the one of the most skilled Samatiri because he depends on it to perceive the world through other people’s senses and is not distracted by his own sight and hearing.
The problem with the first step is that it leaves the question of how the first Samatir gained his ability. I wrote earlier that I just had the idea that Sanwe-latya has been used for a long time, but before that my idea was that the first Samatiri would be Istarcanor so that they would be the ones keeping the secret. I needed some explanation as to how they gained this ability some time around when their organization was established after the end of the first part of the story. To explain how this happened, I will explain another important idea I was developing at the time.
Aliens
While I was watching Star Trek, I got the idea that the third part of the story could take place far in the future and involves interstellar space travel and alien civilizations. When I was reading about faster-than-light travel technologies in science-fiction, I read about the hyperdrive in Star Wars and that the hyperspace routes were mapped by an unknown ancient civilization. I do not remember if it was before or after reading this when I thought my story could be in the same universe as Star Wars and thought about what that unknown ancient civilization could be. I imagined they are the ones who brought early humans to the galaxy where Star Wars takes place. I abandoned the idea of Star Wars being related to my story, but kept the idea of a once-dominant advanced alien civilization which was the first to discover how to travel faster than light and visited Earth, becoming the truth underlying at least some ancient alien theories.
Inspired by Tolkien, I began to create the common language for this alien species, of which their name, Seoaisaoei, is one of the words. This language is probably not important to the story, as I will explain, but I still want these ideas to be written somewhere here. Most of the words in this language are extremely long. Looking at my old notes, it seems the name of the language is “Noaiemauaoheaei Riuaesaoei”. I wanted “Seoaisaoei” to be short because it would be one of the few words which might be commonly used. It seemed to me that the words of many fantasy and science-fiction languages which are meant to be alien to humans consist of many consonants in difficult to pronounce sequences. I decided that the Seoaisaoei language would be the opposite in that the words would have long sequences of vowels. The words are made of morphemes each beginning with one of the few consonants used in the language, followed by at least four vowels. These consonants are “y”, “n”, “m”, “s”, “h”, “w”, and “ng”. Each of the vowel letters in the words I have written here is a separate sound. If I were really committed to this, I would want an accurate and consistent way to represent these phonetically. Perhaps the sounds used by an alien species should be completely different than those used by humans, but I would need to be able to read, write, and say these words. “Saoei” is an example of one of the morphemes composing the words. It might be pronounced something like “si-oh-eh-ee”. It means “person” and is used in the names of all sentient species capable of civilization. My procedure for creating words was to spell the English word I wanted translated backwards, sometimes putting it in Google translate to change it to some other language first, and then remove some of the consonants and replace others with similar ones which can exist in the Seoaisaoei language, and then add more vowels. For example, When I wanted a word for “spaceship”, “ship” became “pihs”, then “mih”, then “miuaiheuaa”. I created word which I thought would be the name of this entire story, “Yeuoanioeia” using this same method on “story”. As funny as it would be to use a name which no one can pronounce, it would probably be better to use something different.
I also made a writing system for this language. It has a phonetic alphabet and it is always written in cursive. As such, it can go in any direction; the reader only needs to follow one letter to the next. The shapes created by the path of the text might have their own meanings. Special characters indicate where the reader should start and finish. There would also be special characters which separate each word and vowel letter, but these are more so that I can tell where one letter begins another ends. They also make the writing look better than it does without them somehow. The consonant letters do not need anything to separate them for several reasons. They never occur consecutively. Their appearance is distinct from vowels in that they are more like zig-zags rather than pretzel-like loops. Additionally, they are written above, below, or to either side of the vowels, depending on which direction the text is going. This picture shows the newest version of the writing system with some older examples below it. Notice how the right end of the first line at the bottom continues to the right end of the second line and all the letters of the second line are backwards. The first line is read left to right and the second is read right to left because that is the path the line follows.
I also created a hexadecimal number system and signs for basic mathematical operations. The symbols I made at first and use in the examples below are similar to those used for vowels, and for that reason I would want to use them for to represent vowels, as there really should be a larger variety in this language. I later created symbols for numbers consisting of up to four small, narrow loops intersecting each other perpendicularly. Each small loop corresponds to a binary digit. At first, I wrote the numbers just like normal ones as series of digits, sometimes enclosed in a circle just so that I can tell where the numbers begin and end. This can be seen in the bottom-left part of the picture below. This might not make sense for a system created by aliens. If they speak with words consisting of series of sounds like humans do, then it makes sense for them to write those words as series of corresponding letters like humans do, but there is no reason for them to write numbers the same way. There is no reason why the 1 in 10 should be to the left of the 0. I do not like my attempt to create a unique way to represent numbers by creating a spiral each loop of which corresponds to a digit and on which the symbols indicating the value of the digit are all in line, as can be seen in the right side of the picture. Additionally, I would want a more interesting, probably more graphical, way to represent operations. The addition sign could be the same. Subtraction could just be addition of a negative number, which could be indicated by being upside down. When all of this can be written in any direction, something can only be upside down in relation the other characters.
Regarding the other aspects of the Seoaisaoei, the hexadecimal number system could be a result of having a total of sixteen digits on their limbs. Their brains must be well-suited for creating and understanding such long and complicated words and writing which can go in any direction. When I still had the idea that the Seoaisaoei would be the ones who mapped the hyperspace routes in Star Wars, I imagined that the planet where Luke Skywalker was hiding in the Force Awakens is where they originated. All that is seen of that planet is an island, so I had though maybe that its surface is mostly water and the Seoaisaoei are aquatic or amphibious. The only time I actually saw Ancient Aliens on the History channel for a few seconds, I heard that serpent-like beings are significant parts of mythologies from many different unrelated cultures, later giving me the idea that the Seoaisaoei have some resemblance to lizards or salamanders.
When I played Skyrim, I briefly had the idea that universe could be part of the story and that the dragons, as well as other powerful beings such as the Aedra, and Daedra, are Seoaisaoei. When I read about the Sload, I thought they could be related to the Seoaisaoei and would be the ones who did not achieve such great power. This was still when I thought they could be the ancient aliens in Star Wars, so the Hutts could be the same. I imagined that materials such as glass and ebony were created by them and other advanced civilizations using their technology. The best weapons and armor are made of dragon bones and scales and the player can smith them like those other materials. This gave me the idea that dragon bones and scales are artificial materials created in similar ways as the others and that the Seoaisaoei do not naturally have hard bones or teeth and this may be part of the reason why there are so few consonants in their language. Perhaps neither do all other animals on their planet(named Moiaoheouawiaea) and when they first traveled to other planets and saw alien lifeforms with hard teeth, horns, scales, and bones they were amazed and some were envious and modified their own bodies and became dragons. Of course, this would have also involved given themselves wings and the ability to fly. Perhaps the idea of flight was also totally alien to them and they were absolutely amazed when they first saw flying animals on other planets. The simplest reason for this is that their planet has much stronger gravity than Earth, making organisms which are tall, can stand upright, or can fly impossible. Even if the planet were not mostly covered in water or some other liquid, the Seoaisaoei and other large animals would prefer to be in water where buoyancy counteracts the gravity. The ideal geography for this species’ civilization is not one which is more covered in water than Earth’s, but one in which a large proportion of land is coastal, consisting of many small islands and continents, and shallow oceans. This might happen if the planet has very little oceanic crust. It might look something like this.
With the gravity of their planet so great, the Seoaisaoei might have been unable to imagine anything leaving the surface of the planet. Even mountains might barely seem real as they would stay near the oceans. The gravity makes it practically impossible to fly and certainly impossible to go into space, but even if this were not the case, I had imagined that their path of scientific and technological development would be very different. They did not make much use of fire, perhaps because the places they live are too wet, the heat would be very bad for them, or there just is not very much oxygen on their planet. They never create the kind of industrial technology humans have. For a very long time they are stuck in an agricultural(or perhaps aquacultural) state. Eventually, perhaps after they have been in this state for much longer than the time between now and the time when humans discovered agriculture, they became very good at it and perfected their selectively bred plants and animals and make great use of biological materials. However, being unable to industrialize, they were limited. Over their long history, they accumulated much knowledge of biology from intuition and trial and error, but their observations were limited to what could be seen with microscopes using drops of water for lenses. Their innovative efforts had to be directed towards philosophy and introspection. This, along with their experience working with life led them to discover Sanwe-latya. This opened up many possibilities for the Seoaisaoei. It was their version of the industrial revolution. Global communication became possible for the first time as sufficiently skilled Samatiri among them could make contact with other individuals anywhere on the planet using only their memories of meeting them or even the memories of others. Perhaps the language I described earlier was developed in order to be well-suited for their telepathic speech.
As time went on, the Seoaisaoei achieved ever greater mastery of Sanwe-latya and pushed the limits of what they could achieve. They eventually managed to perceive the minds of members of other sentient species on other planets. They later discovered how to travel to these other planets using Sanwe-latya. Because there is no great separation between the physical and metaphysical, it is possible for Samatiri to bring their bodies across any distance in the same way they do so with their minds. Seeing other planets and other civilizations led to additional revolutions in the Seoaisaoei’s understanding and way of life. From other civilizations, they learned about science and technology similar to what humans have in the present time. In many ways, these were far inferior to what they have learned achieved using Sanwe-latya, but the gaps in their knowledge were filled. They encountered the idea of flight for the first time in both animals and machines. They learned what space, planets, and stars really are. The greater understanding they gained of physical reality combined with their increasing mastery of Sanwe-latya allowed them to achieve and discover even more. Eventually, their knowledge of the true nature of reality reached a point where they discovered the truth of morality. The saw the true essence of evil and it was so terrible that they named it “Obzgradz”. This word is an inversion of the normal pattern of their language and uses consonants which are normally never used and may be painful for the Seoaisaoei to pronounce. The way they reacted to the horror of this discovery can be described by the paragraph at the beginning of The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
The Seoaisaoei, and perhaps other species which worked with them, split into three factions. One consisted of those who went insane and actively do evil now that they know what it truly is. The other faction saw the first and believed the discovery itself is the source of evil and tried to forget it and annihilate anyone who would not in order to bring about the new dark age, but by doing this they do evil and become like their enemy. If I were to keep my idea of what dragons are, then they are a subgroup of this faction which went even further and decided that everything which led to this discovery must also be forgotten. To do this, they decided to become beasts, but not beasts like the ones on their home planet. In order to separate themselves from their origins, which they believe lead to this crisis, as much as possible, they gave themselves bones, teeth, horns, scales, and wings. The dragons were ultimately unwilling to give up all of their power and kept some of their intelligence and the specific knowledge of Sanwe-latya which would allow them to teleport across any distance, to fly even when they are too heavy, as well as use other powers which might be remembered in human myths as breathing fire. The third and smallest faction is hated by the other two no less than they hate each other and consists of those who kept their sanity, faced the truth with courage, and used the knowledge of the truth of morality to do good and fight evil. At the time when I thought of all of this, I had the idea that this could be some kind of allegory for the present political situation. At its worst, the right is characterized by stubbornness and ignorance, while the left at its worst is insane. There is a minority, at least among the people who dominate the public discourse, who can avoid both of these pitfalls. I think this idea could be worth exploring further, although I might articulate it differently now.
I will try to briefly explain the names with which I would use to refer to the two larger factions. When I was trying to find out more about Tolkien’s languages, I found out about Valarin, the language of the Valar, and thought it was even cooler than Quenya and began to look for ways to use its words for names in my story. What I read noted that Valarin has some similarity to Sauron’s Black Speech, which makes some sense because Sauron is a Maia. I noted that words of both languages happen to be somewhat similar to “Obzgradz”. I also remembered thinking, while reading the beginning of the Silmarilion that Eru Iluvatar did not deal with Melkor very well. Why couldn’t he let Melkor create his own song? Why would that conflict with what he is doing? Of course, this story is probably supposed to be the same as the story of Satan’s rebellion against God, but Satan never tried to create his own thing. At the time I had the thought that, while Melkor is obviously evil, maybe Eru is also. Tolkien existed in the world of my story and there would have been a character who is a fan of his who decided to start using Quenya words, but maybe Tolkien somehow received unconscious knowledge of the Seoaisaoei which inspired his work. Those who wanted to forget the discovery are the Ainur and I refer to them with the Valarin word for such, “Ayanamuz”. I looked at words of the Black Speech for a name for the ones who went insane and actively do evil. With there being so few, the name I decided on was “Burzghash”, meaning “dark fire”. Obviously, this whole idea is ridiculous and these names are now just placeholders.
The massive civil war between these factions destroyed nearly all of the Seoaisaoei civilization as well as most others with which they had any contact. This could be the answer to the Fermi paradox in this story. However, the war never stopped. The survivors of each faction fight whenever they encounter each other, but they mostly hide and build their strength in preparation for the opportunity to achieve a final victory. One place where they hide could be Earth. After I decided the story would no longer be related to Harry Potter, I thought it could be a group of Ayanamuz, not Gryffindor, who have been secretly controlling Earth. I do not remember exactly what my idea was, but the evil force which apparently conquers the world in the Part One could be puppets controlled by the Ayanamuz for the purpose of having the protagonists defeat them as part of their plan. Another possibility was the antagonists of Part One could be the Burzghash, taking the place of Slytherin, trying to seize Earth from the Ayanamuz. Either way, a powerful Samatir made strong mental contact with the main protagonist during the final confrontation. This contact and what he experienced during it made him aware of his own ability to make mental contact. In any case, the Ayanamuz’s plan is to guide the development of human civilization and turn it into a powerful force which would travel through space and make contact with alien civilizations so that the Ayanamuz could take control of them also. Once they have achieved as much power and control over as many advanced civilizations as they could, they would resume their war against their enemies. In Part Three, it appears that humans and their allies are attacked unprovoked by unknown aliens. These aliens are actually the Seoaisaoei who stayed sane and they manage to capture one human ship with the crew unharmed and separate it from the view and control of the Ayanamuz. The crew, who would be the protagonists of Part Three, are then told the truth that they have been subject to both illusions and direct mental compulsion. I should clarify that before this time and maybe even at this time, no human has ever seen a Seoaisaoei. In Part One, everything they did was done at a distance or through humans under compulsion or illusion. Seoaisaoei on Earth were always hidden or in an incorporeal state, although that might be impossible given what I have established here. Thinking about this now, it could be that the Seoaisaoei have never left their home planet and do everything by Sanwe-latya.
This idea of the “Manipulator”, as I came to refer to both Gryffindor and the Ayanamuz remnants on Earth, needs to be reconsidered. It was problematic for the story from the beginning. Powerful beings exerting such great control over people and events means that the characters do not have agency and their actions would be meaningless even if they did, until Part Three. The manipulation could be an explanation to fall back on for anything in the story which does not make sense, but I should not need to do that. Because the Republic of Earth is part of the evil plan, it actually is as bad I now believe anything like it would be, but that was not my intent at the time. The Republic was supposed to be fundamentally good and I never reconciled that contradiction. My new idea for the kind of organization the protagonists of Part Two would be associated with is also supposed to be fundamentally good, or at least not exceptionally evil. I still want Part Three to involve involves interstellar space travel and alien civilizations. The Seoaisaoei should still be the once-dominant species which has visited earth and some remnant of that visit allows humans to discover Sanwe-latya. However, the exact nature of the conflict which ended their dominance could probably be somewhat different.