Making the Best, continued

[avevale_intelligencer]

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen. I nipped up to the fake village and found a jar that sloshed in an intriguing manner, and on broaching it I discovered a very cheeky little vin ordinaire which turned out to have a kick like something with extremely large feet and a foul temper. So one thing led to another, and quite soon I was intriguingly sloshed myself. I'm fairly sure I sang. I believe I challenged the angry ghosts to a game of strip Scrabble. And I know I fell asleep, because when I woke up with a fiendish headache I saw a shape just disappearing behind the pump. I lunged after it, or at least the top half of me did, but the bottom half wasn't playing and the upshot was I fell forward and into a trapdoor that I hadn't noticed in the floor.

I didn't injure myself this time, mainly because the other chap broke my fall. He rolled over under me, and I found myself looking into a very familiar face.

It was me.

Before I could say anything he pushed me off him, opened a book on his belt and linked out. It was a bit like the Relto book I had had when I was working with the DRC, but enough unlike that I could tell the difference. Bigger, for one thing.

At which point I took no further part in the proceedings for a while.

When I came to I was lying in a rough-walled passage lit by what looked like D'ni fire marbles. I pulled myself to my feet and wished I hadn't, but my head was a bit clearer and the wall was nice to lean against. A rope ladder hung from the wall behind the trapdoor, which was shut and resisted all my attempts to push or pull it open. I was stuck.

With nothing else to do I wandered down the passage, which sloped fairly steeply. Channelwood is mostly swamp, apart from this one rocky bit, so I was surprised to find it quite dry underfoot. As I went deeper, there began to be paintings on the walls in the popular Early Primitive style. I saw figures that might have been Atrus, Sirrus and Achenar, or possibly the Archbishop of York and two deep-sea divers with several pairs of arms apiece. I saw the village in the trees, with more deep-sea divers hovering over it on a flying doughnut. I also saw a figure that reminded me strongly of representations of Yeesha I had seen.

At this point it came to me. Nobody ever did live in the village in the trees, at least not this one. It was a cargo-cult thing, a village made for the gods to live in, presumably bringing their own furniture. The natives kept it stocked with food in case the gods ever came back.

But in that case, where did they live? Where did they get the food? And what was all that stuff in Atrus's journal? More fiction? Or did they put on a show for him?

I was at about this point when the passage bottomed out and opened into a round chamber about fifteen feet across, with a central dais about three feet high on which lay the answer to most if not all of my questions. It was a Linking Book, open to the panel. I started towards it, and suddenly found myself over my knees in water, which was seeping in through a crack in the ceiling.

This explained a lot.

Comments

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Er...completely gives away where you work (and is somehow strangely familiar). Isn't there some setting which can be tweaked so that it doesn't do that?

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

This *might* have happened because of a combination of smallship1 closing the lj-cut at the end of the email, and the department's email system inserting the standard footer after he clicked "send".

Try leaving out the "slash - lj-cut" at the end of what you send, Zan. That at least should place all the government spiel behind the cut tag, rather than out front as the visible portion on people's flists. (It works fine in general to use un-closed lj-cuts: An implicit close is done at the end of whatever text is found in the post.)

[hrrunka]

Another possibility is to add the "newline, minus, minus, space, newline" end-of-content marker. I think LJ will then ignore everything that follows it.

Of course, the third way is just to wait til you're able to, and then go edit it. Sometimes, when e-mail posting, this is the simplest... ;)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but the point is that he doesn't have web access from work, which is where he wants to post from...

[hrrunka]

Yeah, that's why I said "wait til you're able to". It's a sub-optimal "if the others don't work" fall-back. My approach to email posting is often (if I know I'm going to have web access soonish) to post the email with "lj-security: private" and then fix it up and mark it public (or whatever) later.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Thank you all for much-needed advice. I should have realised it would do that. hrrunka, how do you spell that "newline"? Just

--

? Or is there more to it?

[occams_pyramid]

That's it. A line consisting only of {hyphen}{hyphen}{space}
(so a new line immediately before and after). (It's been a standard marker for signature blocks on Usenet for some years.)

Make sure you have that single space at the end.

[hrrunka]

No, as occams_pyramid said, that's it. The pedant in me got carried away...