high-energy physics

[warpfairy]

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

Comments

[lintamande]

"Like, we'll share our magic with you, but we won't fight because that might be courting my fate? That sounds about right."

[warpfairy]

"Huh?"

[subtly_artistic]

"I would be astonished if your fate somehow grabbed you from here. Swords and boats," snorts Bella. "But it's probably still worth being careful about tendencies revealed by the fate, however much I rendered it obsolete in the particulars."

[warpfairy]

"...anyway, any of those words would indicate that we wouldn't fight with people who belonged to the whatever with us," says T'Mir, "and none of them strongly suggest that we wouldn't fight with other people, I'm not aware of a noun in English that does that, we'd have to start prepending adjectives."

[lintamande]

"Or we can just establish ourselves, and eventually our names will be known," he says contentedly.

[warpfairy]

"I don't think the Federation are going to just call it 'that thing Davlia and Isabella T'Mir and her alternate universe double and the Quendi are running', so I'd like to have a name to present to them before they decide to call us the Counter-Federation or something like that."

[lintamande]

"Valinor was called the Blessed Realm. I want something that means - the connotation 'blessed' has of peaceful and safe', but not the connotation of divinely made that way."

[warpfairy]

"Serene? Tranquil? Pacific, but Earthlings will think of the ocean named that."

[lintamande]

"Science fantasy?"

[warpfairy]

"...The phrase doesn't mean anything here. Bella?"

[subtly_artistic]

"It's not very namey. I'd put it in a brochure if I were advertising it to Materians but not the name."

[lintamande]

"Elendilmë or Elendil would be Quenya for 'star-alliance' or 'star-friendship'."

[warpfairy]

"Are we planning on having names in several languages, or just one that transliterates?"

[lintamande]

"The more names the better," Fëanáro says.

[subtly_artistic]

"That sounds confusing!"

[warpfairy]

"I mean, if people can't pronounce the name they'll call us something else, we need to either self-translate preemptively or live with anyone who doesn't get use out of the primary name making something up. That is not quite 'the more names the better', though."

[lintamande]

"'The Elendil' works in English and Pax and Davlia," Fëanáro says.

[warpfairy]

"Yeah, the Federation will call us the Elendil if we introduce ourselves that way. The Ferengi or somebody might not."

[lintamande]

"Ferengi? What's their language?"

[warpfairy]

"I don't know any of it, even the sentences I know in Klingon."

[lintamande]

He bounces in his seat. "We'll go meet them and figure out what to call ourselves with them after we are established."

[warpfairy]

"You might want to put off meeting Ferengi till you have monetary economies more figured out. They're very into trade and commerce."

[lintamande]

"I bet in a Year I'll know enough about that to learn from them, at least."

[warpfairy]

"Monetary economies are useful for a lot of allocation problems if you have a large population. I like the Federation model, really - I like almost everything about the Federation except how unwilling they are to let more things be the Federation. And their genetic engineering policy."

[lintamande]

"What's their genetic engineering policy?"