___ __ __ __ //|| //==\\ || || SPECIAL EDITION ONE-SHOT //_|| \\__ ||__|| //==|| ==\\ ||==|| "Undone" // || \\__// || || == == == == == copyright 1997 by Dave Van Domelen ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cover shows a man in Roman garb sitting alone in a vast expanse of grey. His face is mostly in shadow, but bears an expression of regret or sorrow. The laurels on his head have long since wilted and turned brown.] Hello! Do not be afraid, I cannot hurt you. In fact, you are beyond harm now. How did you get here? I am afraid I cannot tell you the details, for I know nothing of the world of life and light now, but this one thing I can tell you: you have been erased from the fabric of time and space. No, you are not dead, not exactly. Nor were you ever alive, either. Something has happened which made your existence a paradox, and nature caught up with you, for it abhors a paradox. My apologies, for I cannot do anything to aid you...for I am also one of the souls erased from reality. But unlike you, I persist. You will slowly fade, an echo of a person who never was. Or perhaps you will be restored to life if the paradox is reversed. I cannot say for certain. Why will I not fade? Ah, that is my special curse, although not my unique curse. I am of the Purebloods, those who mortals have worshipped in the past...or is it future...as gods. I often tell my tale to those poor mortals caught in the wake of nonexistence. I suppose it helps them in a small way to take their minds off their impending fade from even this twilight realm. At the least, it helps me pass the unchanging days. So, you don't believe in the "pagan" gods. Good for you, we have been a blight on reality since we discovered how to step outside it. Free of ordinary constraints of cause and effect, we fought our wars...will fight our wars...do fight our wars...in era after era, not always in "order" as you would understand the term. Once the world was full of magic, and all men could bend nature to their wills. But the Golden Age could not last, and its marks have been all but totally erased through our fighting. Echoes remain...legends of Atlantis, Olympus, Shangri-La, Avalon...mere shades and whispers of the true glory of mankind in the years you reckon as millenia before the first recorded civilization. We were thorough in wiping out each other's power bases and thinning the bloodlines...a full ten millenia passed before Rome, in all her glory, could even begin to suggest the world I was born into. I suppose that was one reason I chose Rome for my new power base, for it reminded me of my old home in the lost halcyon days. You ask my name? Ah, you've studied the Roman mythology, I see. Well, my name would not appear in any of your studies, for like you, I no longer exist. As I said. I positioned myself as the god of politics, a very promising position based on what I knew was coming for Rome...time is just another type of length to us gods, you see. I attracted many followers among the powerful, who gave lip service to Jupiter and Mars but true faith to me. And thus I gained enemies in Jupiter and Mars...and many others, who saw the danger I posed. No, that isn't when they erased me. I knew the dangers, and I was clever, protecting my own origins in so many loops and twists that it rivaled the Gordian Knot in complexity. Even more clever was I, for I forsaw the chance that Jove would attack me through my followers, who were powerful but few in number. They I could not directly protect, and a slight nudge by Mercury at the right time could turn a Senator into a street-sweeper. I had a plan, however. I confess to being surprised that no other gods ever thought of it, but given what happened to me, maybe they did...and were also erased. The plan? Bold and simple, yet effective. I gathered my followers in secret, through dreams and prophecy, and transported a great many of them to a world swinging around another star, out of the reach of the jealous Jupiter. And to further sweeten things, I placed them at a time before even my own birth, so that they would multiply and fill the world with the faithful. In one stroke, I would have more worshippers than all the other gods put together. Of course I expected them to change. Even in two hundred years, the people of Rome underwent significant changes, ten thousand years would allow far more. Normally. But I was clever enough for that, too. I placed a bit of my power within the planet itself, to hold the people to the civilization they knew, to the god they worshipped. That way, in ten thousand years, they would still be essentially the same people as were plucked from Rome. Of a certainty there would be minor changes, and I would release them from my geas once they reached the "present day," that their society might grow with others, but it was not to be. I was too clever. By traveling to a time before my own birth, I exposed a chink in the armor I had built up around my origins, a small gap that a clever Mercury was able to exploit, and I found myself here. Erased and abandoned in a limbo I can never escape, for there is no place for me to escape to. I wonder how my followers fared, sometimes, for I wrought well enough for them that my loss should not have had any effect. They would know my name where none else would, although that would no doubt fade with time. They would stay true to the Roman ways, to ten thousand years and beyond. Without my presence as a linchpin in their reality, they would inevitably forget their origins and come to think they had always lived on the world I gave them. Perhaps that is for the best. With no gods to meddle in their affairs, with no magic in their blood because I took that from them, perhaps they will avoid the mistakes which wrought havoc on poor Earth. Heh. Perhaps they will make new mistakes. Goodbye, sir. You are starting to fade, and I envy you, for perhaps you may go somewhere better than this. You wish my name before you go? I suppose no harm could come of it. I was known as Santarus, my worshippers were to be the Santari, mortal reflections of myself. Farewell.... ============================================================================ Author's Notes: This story has two origins. The content was born a few years ago, in order to provide internal consistency for the Organleggers plot in Academy. The form was born this week as it became obvious that the more I focused on the Santari, the harder it would be for readers to suspend their disbelief unless I spilled some of the beans. I knew that working this information into an ongoing story would be next to impossible, because I wanted the characters themselves to remain in the dark. So I finally settled on a short story just revealing the salient points of the Santari origins. Mind you, there are still secrets left untold, or even totally unexplained. A good rich background will always have information the readers never directly see (partly because it's boring), and it's important when dealing with societies ranging over the millenia to resist the urge to explain *everything*. The later Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey are a good example of explaining too much, at least within the context of a story. Having said that, I'm going to explain a few things outside the context of a story. Specifically, how the worldbuilding of the Santari happened, as an example of how you might build your own worlds. I first created the Santari in an afternoon while working on a campaign world for the roleplaying game I was redesigning. I had already mined a few earlier worlds for some races, like the T!rir, Deltans and Centauri (of which there were only a handful left), but I needed the inevitable "nearly human" race, like Marvel's Kree or DC's Thanagarians or Rannites. I also was in the mood to name a race after Joe Satriani in some fashion, since I was still reading Silver Surfer at the time, and the Skrull empress was Syb'll of Satriani. After a few tries, I settled on Santari, which also suited my warped sense of humor...humans would inevitably mix them up with the Centauri (who were called different things on different worlds, only Terrans called the star system Alpha Centauri). When I started revamping the world for my ASH stories, the Santari got dragged along, having by then assumed a position as the main race in the Planetary Confederation, but very little other detail. The players in my RPG rarely met Santari, usually encountering Deltans, Scytharians, Pranir and so forth. But then I wrote the Pranir organlegging story in Academy. It was very important for character development in the series, but I was bothered by the plausibility of the plot device. After all, Santari only *looked* human, right? If they could transplant human organs into themselves, they could probably also use Pranir or Deltan organs...not to mention, I had already established that the Santari had a really good artificial body parts technology, being able to turn non-humanoid Deltans into something that could pass as human (i.e. Delta Rose). Plus, if it was illegal, yet horribly expensive, how could it be a viable trade? This spat out three results. One: Santari ARE human, explained by the story you just read. But they come from an isolated population, so certain genetic problems have built up, like difficulty in organ rejection within their population. Two: Santari politics aren't unified, but rather there's several Great Houses which compete for influence and often ignore the law when it's convenient, something which has been a plot point in Academy and ASH. Three: Somewhere along the line, some Santari developed a philosophy which forbade the use of artificial replacement parts, so sought out transplants...and humans turned out to (surprise, surprise) be really good donors. But you're not gonna get the origins of the "no artificial parts" dogma unless it becomes necessary to a story. Boom, most of the Santari civilization dropped right out of a need to make a plot device believable, if only to the writer. And the spell of stability just sort of crept into the story later on, because it made sense. So, there you have it. If you work at making sure all your plot devices at least make some kind of sense, you can find an amazing richness building up in your fictional world without having to actually set out and concentrate on it specifically. Answering the question "Why would anyone want human organs?" led to an entire fictional civilization. Not all questions like that will lead to such big payoffs, but it's a good idea to keep in the habit of asking them. And answering them.