Wiz - 1.02a - wiz intro

Wiz - 1.02a - wiz intro

I taught Huf to read because I thought he might enjoy it.  I'd always enjoyed reading.  To be completely honest, I thought he might be useful at times if he knew how to read.  To write down instructions so that he didn't have to check with me all the time.  Now, all these years later, he's writing a book!

So, I'm reading his book.  I'm pretty sure that he doesn't mind. Of course I am Master, so even if he minded me reading it, I could.  But somehow I don't want to read it if it's going to upset him.  I think that he is somewhat proud that I am reading it.

And I get to annotate it.  Of course, the thing is, when I taught him to read and write, I taught him to read in their script.  Even though I am speaking their language, and I can write in their script, I find that I can still write in English if I concentrate.  Huf still writes rather laboriously, and he makes huge letters when he does, so there's plenty of space, particularly since when he starts a new section he tends to turn over two or three pages in his journal.  My handwriting is tiny.  It always has been, so I can put in quite a bit of editorial content here, which Huf, bless him, will never be able to read. It's not that I really want to make nasty comments about Huf.  I mean, after all these years, he is my closest friend, well, second closest, I guess.  No, I don't want to insult him, but I want to be free to be able to write whatever I want without being concerned about how he might feel about it.

I suppose, on my world, my original world, Huf's people would have been called gypsies or tinkers.  Whatever they were called would have been said with a sneer.  I wonder if this is a holdover from the days of fighting between agriculturalists and pastoralists.  The gypsies, the vagrants, the wanderers, the tinkers, I suppose, are the remnants of the pastoralists.  Given that the agriculturalists have taken over the land, nailed down the land by building fences on it and cities on it, and making rules and laws to the advantage of a farming and manufacturing culture, leaving no room for those who wander.

But I suppose that that is an editorial comment too far.

Anyway, I'm sure that Huf will, as he tells the stories, create opportunities for me to commentate on his world.  I remember the summoning: oh boy, do I remember the summoning!  I still say that it was a bit of cheek for the wizards here to decide to summon a wizard from another world.  Of course, they had absolutely no idea what kind of a wizard they got.  I suppose that they should have specified, except that they didn't know that there were multiple kinds of wizards.  They don't have computers or any technology.

So they got themselves a security wizard.

They were never very clear to me, even when they were supposedly teaching me, what kind of spells or functions or elementals that they used for the summoning.  I think they were afraid that if I understood how the summoning worked, I'd go home.  I'm not really sure whether I would have gone home.  I had no particular life on my world: no place, as they'd say here.  I'd always been a depressive, and that's no fun on any world.

So, no, I don't know whether I would have gone home or stayed had they given me enough information.  It's therefore been difficult, even with my own facility and information, which is much greater than theirs, to figure out what happened.

I have, subsequently, queried the elementals, particularly those of air and fire.  The elementals of air don't go beyond a few hundred miles above the surface of the planet, and the elementals of fire, while they seem to feel a kinship to the stars, don't really have a solid connection.  The feelings and vague inferences that I get from them are of enormous distances.  I have the feeling that it might not be merely interstellar but actually intergalactic.  Since they know nothing about the distances between stars or about galaxies or about intergalactic structures, there is absolutely no way I am ever going to know for sure.

What I do know is that it was very painful.  I know that I didn't have any injuries in the transit, and I doubt that I had any particular damage in getting here.  It was painful for quite some time afterwards, and even after the pain stopped, it took quite a while before I was really able to sit up and take notice, get my energy back, and start communicating.

That, apparently, they had thought about.  I don't know why, since this place is a bit of a monoculture, but they did seem to have some concept that someone might speak differently.  Seems that some of the scrolls and spells in the library are in languages which they no longer understand, or at least in scripts which they no longer understand.  So I guess that was a bit of a clue for them to put something into the spells that meant that the person that they summoned would be able to talk to them.

So I got here, and I was able to speak to them in their language.  Pretty much automatically.  I didn't even realise it until I started to try and figure out what their technology was like, and realised that I was thinking of English words and couldn't say them because this language had no word for that concept.  I think the psycho-linguistics people would have had a field day.