“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.”

                                                                         – T.S. Elliot

It is only by the grace of Mr. Ray that you’ve been able to read that last ridiculous auto-post. I wanted it deleted, plus it makes me sound like a bloody Yank. Thank god it didn’t upload a voice sample. How embarassing.

Will says it’s important to allow people to see proof that I actually know how to communicate with another human being face to face. His wit is razor-sharp as always.

Feeling a bit better, but have been taking this opportunity to get away from my quarters and explore these places again with William. It’s like doing it for the first time. Will tries to play it off, but I see the sparkle of awe in his eye. The first time he linked to Eder Kemo, the excited look as he struggled to take it all in faster. I remember it all fondly in myself.

Of course, as is usual, I had to take a few minutes to recover from the link. William was chomping at the bit to go, and so I had to force myself through the nausea.

His excitement is infectious. He had never seen anything outside his computer lab, nothing as other-worldly as what we explorers now take for granted. I find fresh energy for my own creations from revisiting these places with a friend.

Auto-Dictation software
© Ray Software 2009

…software version v3.1.1
…configured to user: PGiles
…special character dictation is OFF
…phonetic spelling parser is OFF
…multi-user recording[BETA] is ON
…auto-recording is ON
…auto-recording trigger is AUDIO
…censoring filter is ON
…auto-correct is ON
…auto-upload is ON

Auto-Recording detected trigger, running ADScript…
…
…
Auto-Dictation begun September 18, 2009 @ 16:50 MDT

ID01: [unintelligible][unintelligible][rustling sound] updated the software again. Now it can differentiate between multiple people speaking, although it’s still kind of buggy.

ID02: Yes. Say, let’s go show you the rest of the harbor. [door opening]

……………
…………………………………

Auto-Dictation ended by AutoRecorderTimeout September 18, 2009 @ 16:57 MDT

I could really use some of that free healthcare Obama’s talking about… Father must be fuming right now.

“The problem with Socialism is eventually you run out of other people’s money!”

Short sighted, to say the least…

I’ve been quite ill lately, unable to put pen to paper. I’ve only crawled out of my cot to let you all know I’m not gone. Attempted to dive to the wrecks in the harbour. Accidentally swallowed a mouthful of lake water. I thought I’d get a minor stomach ache, but it was far worse. The DRC definitely downplayed the severity of it…

Please do not worry about me.

William, my bloody computer is still giving me a difficult time. Can you please bring me the supplies I listed for you in the email? Uploading the scans of the pages to the server is fine but I need the originals as well.

Will, your email inbox is bouncing back my emails so my only recourse is to attempt to reach you here. Clean out your bloody mailbox!

I need your help. I’m getting those damned errors again. Do you think it’s the same problem? Technology really aggrivates me sometimes…

If there was one person discussed more than any down here, it was Yeesha. For good reason of course, she was the one who brought us here. She was the one who started us on our journey. She was the one who used us to free the Bahro. She was the one who left us, yet to return.

I knew so little about her, where she came from or how she gained the gifts she struggled to understand and control.

Of course, there were always rumours, the faintest whispers of stories regarding her family. I wondered about her father, a man known as Atrus. Explorers told me many things about him, Atrus, the last son of D’ni, the creator of the Age of Myst, dweller of the cleft. Was he a scientist? An artist? Did he spend weeks agonizing over tiny details in his work? Did he just write and write and write and then visit his Age, with no hesitation in his heart, only a pure exhilaration to see what things that had sprung to life under his hand?

I imagine Atrus as a tall man, proud and strong. I know he endured a great many hardships in his life, and I imagine they made him strong and he passed that strength to Yeesha. In my mind he is a strict teacher, but kind. Perhaps a bit too caught up in the delights of creating his Ages to worry about the details of what he would do with them later.

I wonder, as I sit here, wrestling with words, attempting to create the perfect flora for my Age, how Atrus would have approached the same situation. Writing and checking, revising and re-writing until it was perfect? Taking what he was presented with, manually splicing roots together to create a hybrid? Somehow he does not strike me as a lover of plants. I feel like Atrus was a man of dynamism and mechanical wizardry.

I remember the first time I heard his named mentioned.

One evening, soon after I arrived in the Cavern I overheard some explorers talking about him. One rather short explorer (whose name I later learned was Pendleton) told of an Age written by Atrus that consisted large wooden ship sticking out of a rock.

“He crashed a boat into the rock!?” said another

“No! That’s the strange part. They say he wrote the ship into the Age that way.”

“Impossible, the DRC says the D’ni couldn’t write things like that.”

“Atrus could.”

“So he wrote it so it would be stuck in the middle of a rock?”

“Dunno, he probably didn’t mean for it to be stuck in a rock though.

“So what did he do with it?”

“Nothing, he called it a failure and burned it.”

“Atrus wouldn’t do that to an Age he had written. No way!”

I thought the group were being quite ridiculous and I dismissed such a notion immediately. After some time spent down here though, I began to wonder how far from the truth it was.

Atrus created something by experimenting with the Art. Would that I could see the other strange and wonderful things he has chanced upon creating. This is how legends are born.

Rule 17: A Gentleman always sets a clear path for himself. The path is never straight, nor free of obstacles. A Gentleman recognises that his path may sometimes seem to go in circles, taking him where he has already been.

Rule 18: A Gentleman never allows external forces to alter or halt his progress down the path.

I wish I had known my Great-Grandfather. I feel he and I would have understood each other well. Perhaps he would have been able to share my journey. Perhaps he would have been proud to explore D’ni with me.

Sketches and measurements, maps and charts. Paragraphs and equations.

Why can’t the idea just flow? Why can’t the pen know what I am thinking, and put it down on the page? Why must I continue to struggle to control every aspect? The One Words still mock me. Perhaps it is the uncertainty stemming from my lack of courage to explore them that halts my progress.

My eyes are strained and my head aches. Where am I going?