Notes from D'ni
This is a journal of my exploration of the D'ni city and ages.
--Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
Some recent thoughts
I have been spending a lot more time in the cavern recently. This has been the first opportunity I have had to sit down and reflect a little bit on what has been going on. So many thoughts. It has been difficult finding the time. I hope too much time has not passed between the origin of the thoughts and my writing writing them down.
The removal of the fungus stalks or whatever these things are has taken a lot of time. I knew eventually all this rain was going to be an issue.
I am starting to wonder if the situation here in the cavern has changed.
It is a little different to think about what is going on in the cavern. There is this feeling that there are large swatches of time where nothing is occurring, punctuated by days of intense and, at times, confusing activity.
So many questions left unanswered. So many questions with no apparent way to find an answer.
By now, others have surely written about much that occurred over the last couple of weeks. Changes in the DRC. The task given to Douglas Sharper, and his interpretation of it. The Watcher's Sanctuary and Er'cana. I will leave it to others to discuss the events and their details.
It does feel that something has changed here in the cavern. More than just recent events and their outcome. I feel that maybe something has changed within the community.
Where once Explorers would push the boundaries of barriers in the cavern, we seem to have become content to huddle together in the city, the neighborhood, the pubs while the events unfolding around occur.
“But, Butch, what else is there for us to do?”
When does the Journey end? We started the Journey not knowing where it was going.
I remember the initial panic at realizing that I had linked to an age and I didn't know how I was going to be back to the surface. On the basis of what? The word of a stranger who couldn't even look me in the eye and spoke in riddles and a who knows how old message from someone who could have easily been dead.
Over the course of that Journey I filled that small age (just how big is Relto, really?) with items that have marked my path along the way. I have marveled how Relto reflects what I am thinking, or even what I am feeling (what is suggested by the frigid air and near constant rain?).
I remember the awe (and fright) of what had been come to be called the great linking—Explorers being linked to their Reltos, not only from the cavern, but from the surface. The lattice overloading and finding the KI useless. And Relto appearing to be a much different place.
Of course, the feeling has changed. It feels like a lot of Explorers want to move down the road together, all as one unit, marching in formation. But what is going to happen the first time we come to a fork in the road? I yearn to make my way off the road and into the unknown. Am I alone in this feeling?
I sometimes feel that the Explorers are a turbulent body of water between tides, feeling the pull of everything equally, and only moving on the larger scale, and getting lost in the eddies within the community, groups that at buoyed by and yet feel closed to the currents around them. And others groups that seem to feed without regard to their ability to manage their size, or sustain their growth, lost in the strength of their own current, wiping away the smaller eddies and currents as they mark their own blind progress.
The water flows where it wills. It seeks its own path, uncontrolled, except that it flows downward, always downward . . . .
Some will seek that destination, but you should seek the Journey. . .
I still do not know.
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Reconnecting
It is hard to believe that it has been this long since I have written anything with everything that has been going on. The way I feel about being in the cavern is starting to change. All of spent so long wandering around down here waiting for something, looking for something. And then this happens, Rose and Willow, casualties in others are calling the Bahro v Bahronoir war.
Gone were the delusions of discovering the fate of Phil or Dr. Watson. Gone was delusion of finding Yeesha, of discovering more of the meaning behind the words she left for us. Gone was the idea that the cavern was always going to be safe.
We huddled together listening to each other relaying information from those who could make their way into the city, to those of us who could not. It seems the whole community just connected together, each and every one of us connected to everyone else. I kept waiting to hear there was something we could collectively do to help the situation, but knowing deep down inside that it was happening as it had to, leaving those trained and trusted by the DRC to be the ones with their hands on the problem.
In the aftermath of all this, the feeling of this community has changed. Many who used to be almost ever present in the cavern do not seem to be around any longer. Maybe the surface pulls stronger now that we realize more of the cost of being in the cavern.
32622, 60, -86
I am sitting here now, as I was before all this start, watching, waiting. It is hard to believe that I sat here all this time just watching other Explorers pass by, occasionally stopping to talk about Ages, talk about the weather.
Right before everything happened, the whole community seemed to be a buzz with some kind of TV show or episode that I guess was supposed to air on 19 May. I don't know if it ever did. I was never able to get enough information about it to find it on the Tivo to record it.
I am still sitting in the pub. People still go by, say hello, chat. I try not to say hello till someone actually gets into the pub. There are a lot of Explorers who are in the alley just to see the memorial.
32580, 63, -86
Flowers and wreaths left at the crack in the wall—a fracture in the rock of cavern and the community.
Last night, at one of the parties that regularly happen, was the first time since the events of that week that I have felt that I was able to connect again with the Explorer community. And yet, still I feel the draw to be alone.
57178, 111, -79
Tracing a path through the city, moving from place to place. Trying to renew the connections that were just there in the days, weeks and even years before. I still have to wonder where this will take me next . . . .
?, ?, ?
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Coming to terms . . . Relto
Right now, I am afraid about what I am thinking. But I cannot spend all forever is Eder Tsogahl trying to feel the support of friends. Eventually I was going to have to surface, get on with my life. Deal with the people who still believe that this place is a fiction.
The warmth in Eder Tsogahl had helped. I thought I can deal with linking back to Relto and then on to the surface. And then I linked. I thought I was ready for what I was going to find in Relto. I always think I am going to be ready for that.
I wonder if anyone else has noticed how it almost feels like all of possibility is churning around them as one links. I have seen some very strange things in the instant before reality seems to become solid again (if the mind can every really adjust to such a thing and call it seeing).
The first thing I notice is getting hit if the face, even before I think I am really there. It is the wind. It is raining, hard. I linked in down near the dock. It is raining so hard. I have never seen this place like this before. Looking around, the rain, the wind, the clouds. This cannot be my home!
I turn to run to the hut. I don't even see the butterflies. And looking over my shoulder, off the dock, I see it. I can't believe what I am seeing.
I made my way back down to the dock, trying to judge how to get the best image of what I was seeing.
[g2:299 frame=shadow align=g2_center]
I only was able to get this one shot before I fell. I slipped on a log or stone or just wet wood, and I was falling. I felt like I just wanted to fall, forever.
I closed my eyes, held my breath, and just linked. . .
Relto. Normal rainy Relto, not the hard impossible wind and rain of merely an instant ago. Just the light.
I suddenly feel the need to get back to the city. But first I need some help getting this image out of my KI.
Was that real, or was I dreaming? Was that real?
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Rosette and Willow
I am at a loss for words.
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Just sitting
Sitting on the bench in Relto, looking out over the island and clouds . . .
The sky is surprisingly clear. Watching the butterflies, I find that I lose site of the butterflies as they move around, lost in the orange leaves of the trees. Especially as I get lost in thought. Stopping to think about how different this place is without the constant rain . . .
I had been thinking about Dr. Watson again. Having made my way into the cavern after the first Restoration, I had not had the opportunity to meet him. When DRC had first announced their new funding and the restart of the Restoration, there was a pretty vocal group of Explorers that wanted to know more about Dr. Watson–where he was, had anyone been in contact with him, that sort of thing.
Those voices seemed to quiet down as the Restoration effort began to pick up, and I had not heard much from that group on the forums or in the cavern. That seems to be the route of a number of movements take–a period of growth where a small group of very vocal only to shrink back into the Explorer community under the weight of distraction caused by other groups or the release or discovery of another age, Bahro stone or those other things.
I, myself, had recently been wondering about how Dr. Watson would feel about the current status of things–the opening of the museum and the pods, the new gardens and the new Journeys, the activity of the Bahro.
I imagined that after the first Restoration was canceled, Dr. Watson did not return immediately to the surface. In my mind, I imagined that he had used his position as the head of the DRC to at least pick through parts of the cavern that his position would have given him access that most of us had never seen. I imagined that maybe he discovered something or someplace and he is still in the tunnels, waiting for someone to find him.
I have also imagined that he did return to the surface, and is living quietly and comfortably and trying very hard not to think about D'ni.
And I have imagined that he is uncomfortably sitting sedated in a mental institution in a medically induced haze rambling on to those who have not yet heard the call of the cavern, or do not yet understand that which pulls them there, about people living in a cavern under a volcano who can magically transport themselves across time and space, of a civilization that could create a link between this planet and anything the could describe, via books.
I also imagine, sometimes as if in a dream, that Dr. Watson found something, stumbled upon something in the cavern, either the Bahro or even more evidence of Yeesha and the D'ni. Somehow, taking an understanding only he could develop, he found them, the D'ni, the people, and is with them somewhere. In that dream, Dr. Watson is sitting, listening to Atrus, talking about the journals, hearing about the last link between the cavern and the surface before the rediscovery, before the DRC and the Explorers.
Yesterday, with all these thoughts where running through my head, something happened. A new Bahro stone was discovered. Someone had just stumbled upon the stone amongst a pile of rocks while searching out markers to help calibrate the Great Zero. A stone that linked to someplace very special, a resting place in the middle of the Great Shaft connecting the lower tunnels leading to the cavern and up to the surface.
January 17, 2004 . . . Dr. Watson commits to taking the Journey after three weeks of picking his way through the tunnels and the cavern. The last entry of the journal he kept for himself.
And here I sit, comfortably in Relto, staring out over the pillars of rock that pierce the clouds beneath me. In the back of my mind, I feel the beginning of a thought about the impact that this will have on the community. Here in Relto, I hear the distant rumbling of thunder as it gently starts to rain again, the bulk of the storm still unseen.
I am still not used to how this place mirrors my thoughts and feelings.