Wiz - 1.04a - place

Wiz - 1.04a - place

I suppose that I'm writing this for people from my home world.  Even though it's unlikely in the extreme that anyone will ever find it.  (I suppose that statement is ambiguous. Do I mean anyone from here will ever find my home world, or do I mean anyone from my home world will ever find Huf's book and my annotations?  Both seem equally unlikely.)  So I have to suppose that I have to explain place.

The people of this world are consumed by place.  Place is roughly equivalent to status.  Although it's stronger than status; it's more like caste.  Your place is very definitely your place in the pecking order.

But place also means, literally, place.  It is your physical location: the place that you are allowed to be, the place that you own, the place where you reside.  When Huf says that he had no place, that's literally true.  In that sort of situation, it's quite possible that if you were found in a place where you had no permission to be, that anyone who found you could actually kill you with no legal repercussions.  I still can't quite get my head around the legal system that they have here but it definitely seems to be weighted in that direction.  It's mostly a civil law legal system but there are some generic principles and one of them is that you have to have permission to be out of your place and you have to have permission to be in another place.

Oh, and I should note that, no, Huf doesn't mind me reading his book.  Huf is, in fact, quite chuffed that I am willing to read his book.  Well, of course I'm willing to read his book.  It's about my favourite subject: me!  Why shouldn't I want to read his book?

After years of excitement, it is a little bit strange to have time and no disasters to impinge upon it.  We have had evenings that we can spend together, and we have spent them together talking about the book.  He is proud of it, and I've got to say his recall does seem to be quite clear, and he does seem to be able to put it down in an understandable form.  That's not bad for someone whose entire culture seldom has more than about three or four percent literacy rate.  I don't know who else is going to read the book, but I'm certainly enjoying it.

I'm also noticing that Huff's writing style is improving rapidly, particularly after every session that we can spend discussing it.  We can't, of course, discuss it every night, but then again, Huf is handwriting this out, so it does take some time to get a new section, even a new page.

(I wonder if I can build a transcription spell using the elementals.  Water, of course, because of the ink.  Air, of course, because it has to do with information.  And probably fire, since I'll probably have to add some kind of spell checking for him. It's worth some thought ...)

If you, imaginary reader, are considering that this is being dictated into one of my world's artificially intelligent transcription services and is therefore being produced at a very rapid clip, well, you couldn't be more wrong.