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Longonders have stories about being descendants of the stars.
That’s fairly common, all things told. Kloplaxians say the same thing, though they tend to treat it as a spiritual connection rather than a literal one. Gensuitis mean it very literally, to the point that they don’t call their ships exploratory vessels, and object to any translation that does. A very literal translation might be “rejoiners” or “find-agains”. They’ve regarded space as their home rather than their planet for as long as their history goes back, since long before they could escape their gravity well.
Neither of those had any evidence attached. No cultural, linguistic, or technological links to any of the other species; no odd holdovers attached to using local metals and minerals for bits and bobs clearly designed around different available atoms.
The Kloplaxians don’t mind us noting that. They smile and say that we don’t understand how our souls rhyme yet. The Gensuitis do mind that, and so generally one does not say anything of the kind unless one intends to start a bar brawl or an international incident.
Longon is…different. Longonders do not only have the occasional technological quirk, easily dismissed as a different culture discovering things in a different order. They have technology that only makes sense if they’ve studied how physics works in space. And they do not have more than the barest and most recent ability to reach beyond their own world.
The Longonders say that they had that capability once. It’s an oddly cross-cultural habit. For all my handwaving before, there are Klorplaxian religions that disagree with the usual story. There are Gensuitis who call their first planet home. I haven’t checked every pocket of Longon, but I have been to almost every major cultural center I could find. Sometimes they stumbled here into paradise, sometimes they were cast out of it–-those ones are very excited to meet me–-and sometimes they say it was a generational ship and ran out of food.
Generational ship. As near as I can tell, they’ve had that concept since before they had pottery.
There’s a place I haven’t visited before. Enough different groups consider it holy that I wanted to be sure I understood their views before entering. This is another odd point of agreement: there are different rules for how to enter, all of which I’m attempting to follow, but as long as you maintain or expand the pattern, it’s allowed. For some the expansion is a rite of passage, particularly for those who live near--though whether they live near for the rite or developed the rite by living near is anyone’s guess.
There are helpful pamphlets made with maps of the pattern. If I assume it’s been extended in every direction about equally, then I can begin to figure out what the initial pattern might have been. Just looking at the center.
It’s a copy of a copy of a copy. But they were fastidious. And the first people here had reason to write large, clear, and short.
My heart aches.
At the center of their great religious structure is a single word, one that exists in almost every language I know:
HELP