Thursday, June 16, 2011
No More Teachers!
In honor of today being the last day of school, have a creative prompt. Tell me the story of a character with an imaginary and unlikely academic specialty - an ethnomycologist or a cryptomusicologist or something. Bonus points for convincing me that the specialty is actually real.
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K. A. Boom. Gifted with a probing vision, he overlooks exactly what it is his discipline ought to encompass; his head goes far beyond the clouds. His life is a series of unseen near misses, shots in the outer dark, a crashing and burning in imperceptible media. The career of this parameteorologist has plenty of un- and not-quite downs and ups.
Perhaps no academician has faced such a struggle for acceptance as Milton Barrow, pioneer in necrotheology. Barrow was not satisfied with merely communicating with the dead like other spiritualist of his era; he worked to catalog the faiths and religious beliefs of those spirits in Summerland. Later in life, he even attempted to make contact dead gods (or "theoform tulpa" in his terminology).
Mirages are just optical illusions, right? Not so, says Jakub Keskin, head of the mirageographers' society. That's a common misconception. In fact, mirages are products of warps in spacetime and can be used for greatly accelerated travel to the place they show. The only problem is predicting the appearance of a mirage and that's what the mirageographers are trying to do. It used to be a time-consuming task, with a lot of waiting, but the modern age with the arrival of cameras and videophones everywhere has made it a lot easier.
Jakub inherited his interest in mirages and his spot in the society from his mother Maryam, who was the first to travel the famous and elusive Herðubreið mirage, correctly predicting the exact time and place the mirage appeared. He has concentrated his research on Peru and Chile and has lately come to believe that mirages may allow not only travel in space, but also in time. Jakub has high hopes in the Atacama mirage, which he has already predicted, but not yet travelled, and he is mounting an expedition to do just that. Considering that it may be a one way trip into the distant past, he has had some difficulties finding companions, but he is determined to go. Alone, if he must.
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