Writings and Literature Works

Subject: Rain Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:27 pm

Rain

The rain, it never stops, not here, not on this world. Whether it’s a rain of tears or the rain of the heavens, water is pouring and it’s everywhere. For the moment it’s the physical kind, the kind that sticks in your fur and makes it soggy and uncomfortable, or if you’re reptilian as is the case with me it slides harmless down your body. Though I prefer it this way, it makes one feel like the sins of their lives are being washed away. And it for this reason alone I love the rain, for I have committed my share of sins. My past is littered with sins, my path to ascension, to power is littered with bodies, broken dreams, shattered families, the blood of an entire species. For what? I really don’t know, they say I’m the most powerful man in existence, who whims dictate the future of the galaxy at large. But I wonder, how much do they really know? Do they wake up with the taste of blood on their jowls? Would their actions, had it been any other time in history would have had them tried for crimes against nature? I suppose not, such things matter little to them. One can only answer that question if someone themselves has had been involved in such things, and the lives of most people uneventful, almost peaceful. It is innocence of the near purest of quality, something that must be protected…and destroyed. There are those with the burdened with destroying their own purity, their own innocence so those that they care about don’t have to. So they are never faced with such a choice, such a dilemma, such horrors…
If by chance you are reading, this…this testament to my past, a list of wrongs I have committed to protect what I hold dear I warn you, this will forever change how you view the world you live in. It may shock you, or it might make you value what you have and respect what I have given to make sure you never face the horrors that I have witnessed, or that I have caused to happen. Its best I start from the beginning, you’ll understand it better that way.

Birth

I was born a long time ago, not so long ago that it makes me ancient mind you. I myself was born at the end of the Apollo era during the final months of the moon race when our species and the humans that we shared our world with made it to our moon. It may have been the end of an era for the world but it was my beginning. I grew up with my peers wondering if we were going to destroyed under the threat nuclear fire, or if I was ever going to make it into space as I had dreamed of doing for so long. Little did I know that I would end up where I was today, had I know I would have though my dreams of that time where foolish, naïve, and short sighted, but then again, hindsight is always twenty-twenty. You see before the time of anti-aging medicines and the powerful medical therapies that have given us the ability to lead nearly limitless lives everyone had finite lives, the idea that you had only so much time on this world scared many people. Even if my species, my people, lived longer than the human by nearly a factor of four we still had to deal with that fact that our lives would end.

This lead too many radical ideas, like the cryogenics of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, odd as it might sound to us now. I know that most people now can’t fathom the idea of living for only seventy years, or for my people closer to three hundred. To this day I see that both species where short lived, and vain. Each one unable to cope with the idea that they could not live forever, instead of accepting this fact they made religions and gods that promised eternal life for those that followed them blindly and without question. It makes wonder if there really was a god though. That by our own actions we killed this deity, whether it was through our sciences or through our own will to be done with that area of past? Does this mean that the people that worshiped these deities are the very devil that their holy texts spoke of?

Whether this idea is shared by anyone or not, it does not matter.

During my youth I was much different from the ivory dragon that many people think they know today. I do find it interesting that humans called us dragons. It was not a name we had ever used for ourselves but it a name that used to represent a mythological beast. Of course the resemblance is merely superficial. We merely look the part, even then only partially. From the human perspective we look similar to anthropomorphic versions of these beasts of legend, hence the label. Of course the name for our species does not translate well into this language. Through it literally means Sky Children, in a less strict sense it means Children of the sky.

Many of the traditions of our ancestors have been lost of the centuries because of the rapid advances in technology and the changes in our culture. It’s something I have personally witnessed, and have helped along at some points. This eroding of our old values has allowed us to expand and evolve. Though some would call it cultural genocide, and that who we are as a people no longer exists. I merely think that we as a people have changed; we have not destroyed ourselves into the process of reaching out into the galaxy. The traditions of the past have no place in a universe, in a time they were not made for. Though there some zealots out there that would raptly attempt to shoot down that theory.
Alas I have drifted from the topic at hand. Though it was during my early years that I committed one of my many sins, it is likely the reason for how I am today.

Exodus

During the late twenty first century, the nations of our world had gone to war. Not a surprise there. The war was coming for years; it was not a race war like so many historians theorize. It was a war over resources, nothing more, and nothing less. I was not in the military at that time, though my sister was. Ariel Cartwright, another of those that have destroyed their own purity to preserve that of others. I was at home; our Ithaca had been untouched by the war, so it was like nothing was happening. It was like the war didn’t exist, like it was a lie made up by the government.
I knew this was not the case. I had during the early days of the war gotten access to the military core of information. Something that could have gotten me the death sentence, but it was here that I learned something. Both sides of war where preparing to use their nuclear arsenals against each other. MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, the entire ideal that had kept our world from using nuclear fire to destroy their enemies, had been ignored. The only question was when one side was going to decide that it had, had enough and pulls the trigger first. History looks back on that day as the beginning of our civilization. I don’t, I see it as one charred irradiated chapter in our long bloody history.
Most people know that the reason they are alive today is because of the exodus program. The life saving ships that brought some of us into orbit, only to watch our homeworld burn under a nuclear induced inferno. I had knowledge of this program, within it contained list of ten million people that where to leave our soon to be burned world. I was not on this list of ten million, at least, not initially. I had access to the list, how I did I will never truly know, all I know is that I had it and could do anything I wanted with it. Save those that I wanted to live, save myself. That’s exactly what I did, not only did I save myself, I saved my mate, and my sister. My parents had been dead for over thirty years and I had no interest in saving a corpse.

In order to avert suspicion I had to break up three families, replace my mate with the mother of one family, myself with the father of another, and my sister as the daughter of another family. Three families, each one of them had no idea that it happened until it was too late. I’m sure if the families knew they would have tried to kill me. They only looked at us with remorse. None of them blamed us for what happened; they blamed the government for such a mishap. To them it wasn’t our fault that their loved ones where left behind. I was content to let them believe that. I had envied them for the chance they had to live to the point where I had taken it from one of their loved one to protect my own loved ones.
By all rights I should have died on that world that day, I didn’t because I made sure that I didn’t. It was the first time I cheated fate to preserve myself and those I cared for, wasn’t the last time either. The flight of tears is what I call the exodus from our worlds, Humans and Dragons together weeping for lost loved ones. I was not one of those weeping. I knew those I cared about where safe, I merely watched as my city was engulfed in the flames of the most power weapons that the nations of my world had at their disposal. It’s a shame really; from orbit those mushroom clouds looked beautiful. Miniature suns spawning into existence for a few seconds leaving behind beautiful clouds of death and destruction, it made me wonder, is this how a grim reaper would feel?

Part of the exodus program included the building of a space station in lunar orbit. Once heads where counted it would be decided what would happen next, the original plan was for the building of lunar colony and for us to start again. That did not happen, this was not of my doing, and it is merely the result of long held tensions. The Sky Children and humans while they got along peaceably enough also had silent and suppressed bias towards each other. It wasn’t strong enough to be called racism, more of an uneasy distrust of each other. On our home world there was more than enough space for us all, even though our populations where getting larger by the day. No one wanted to say it but each side blamed the other for what had happened to their shared world.

What happened after that was pivotal in our history, our civilization. This building distrust between our species had come to a head. It was decided that they would spilt, one species go one way, and one species go the other. There where a few interspecies families aboard the station at that time, I pitied them when I saw the look in their eyes, the mere thought of being spilt up. Our two species could not breed with each other, that was impossible through any natural process, and no one understood enough about genetic engineering to properly hybridize the species to produce a child. These families normally had human and the dragon children either adopted or from pervious relationships. I don’t remember how many families there but it was decided that for these families they would make their own choice about what direction they would go.

What happened was that most of the decided to come go with the dragons, though a few decided to stay with the humans. I not being a part of those interspecies families did not have a choice in the matter.
The next eighty years show how determined both sides where to survive. The death of our homeworld by our own desires, our own instincts, our own need to fight. The fact that we have to fight when we don’t get our way, the fact that we will go to almost any lengths to get what we want. It showed the strengths of our two races, and our short comings, even if neither side would admit it. Humans, with access to experimental terraforming technology started to work on Mars. It was to be their new home for future generations, or so they thought. For the time being though they had gone to Mercury the world closeted to the sun. From here they started to build underground cities, they used an enormous photovoltaic solar array that spanned the equator of the world to power their cities. It worked wonderfully; with their proximity to Sol they had more power than they would ever need.

We on the other hand had traveled to the outer reaches of the system. Setting up around Saturn, I remember the first time I laid eyes on those rings I thought it was the most beautiful sight in existence at the time. We had to cannibalize our ships in order to build a permanent settlement, unlike the humans we stayed in orbit. We had used them and parts from the majority of the ships to construct a crude ring shaped space station. It was ugly, very ugly, but it worked well, and it was home to many of us. The rest of the ships where converted into mining tugs and an ore processing plant to allow us to continue to build. The few metal rich moons around Saturn where soon strip mined for materials which first went into the construction of a newer and larger station which was to be named New California. It took nearly seven years to construct and the people that worked in the construction of the station where a damn proud bunch. In the seven years that it took to produce the station our population had increased by forty percent. There were almost six million of us it was realized that more stations were going to be needed, and some method of population control was in order.
I was one of the last ones to be assigned to New California, I knew that the station was no place of and that helped when I saw the station for myself but I was still a little disappointed by the station itself. Not that I complained about it of course, it was a five star resort compared to the original station. My mate was part of the mining crews around Saturn and had helped build the station. She was a strong woman, and brilliant, before the exodus she was a civil engineer, I myself held a Doctorate in physics and aerospace engineering, I had also taught physics at Cornell University before the Exodus. She was now a mining engineer on one of the moons of Saturn and I was tasked with the job of designing new ships to be built with the materials that we had on hand.

Neither of us liked the time that we were forced to spend apart, and the time that we did get together was brief at best. I was young then, no more than one hundred thirty. Well, it was young for me now, back then I was nearly through half my life. It wouldn’t be for a few decades that things would change greatly. We had continued to expand in space, and the humans had done the same with their world. It wasn’t until some seventy years later that history began to repeat itself.

Subject: Re: Writings and Literature Works Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:28 pm

wow... that's REALLY good, and probably A LOT of work! Good job!

Subject: Re: Writings and Literature Works Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:30 pm

Thanks X3 not done though, not even remotely. Should put up some more teasers I have wrote.

Subject: Re: Writings and Literature Works Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:35 pm

I cheer you on! You should think of writing short stories!

Subject: RULES/SUGGESTIONS Wed Jun 23, 2010 9:36 pm

Here you can post your writings, poetry, short stories, etc.

Anything that has to pertain to literature. Remember to include a title to your work so we know what to adress your work as. Smile

Now, if you have something to share that is considerably long, that is okay, but for those ho want to reply to the consiberaly long writings, here's a tip:

To avoid confusion, quote the passage, remove the content of the passage, but leave the title and orignal author's [ quote ]. It will be easier to track who is conversing with who.

Happy writing!

Subject: Re: Writings and Literature Works Thu Jun 24, 2010 1:50 am

Can we post links to stories and stuff we have written??

Subject: Re: Writings and Literature Works Thu Jun 24, 2010 10:55 am

Excellent works Cartwright! Really enjoyed them. :3

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