telewa_the_blue_jewel epitome of incomprehensibility things_you_wrote_when_you_were_young The title "Telewa: The Blue Jewel" came from when Telewa, Aerz, and Aquezazalia were all different planets, Telewa being the bluest. A blue jewel could also transport you magically between the planets. Telewa came from the letters TLW, which originally stood for Tiny Little World, because on this planet, people were about ten centimetres tall. And they appeared on Earth at about the same time as people from Aerz, who looked entirely human except that they had three eyes, the middle of which they were able to disguise by wearing a narrow band of hair in the centre of their foreheads. But with the lost_innocence of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and puberty, everyone grew to regular human size and the epic fantasy shrunk to the scale of a single planet. At which we could put a CW - Content Warning - for Cultural Weirdness. Also a TW - TLW? - for war, noise torture machines, and attempted rape (though nothing described graphically). The countries: In Telewa, people were generally white and had English-sounding names. The people of Aquezazalia had a Russian/Chinese/Inuit vibe to their names; their skin ranged from light brown to pale, and their hair from brown to black. Wiawiska/Viavizka sounds Slavic, but its native inhabitants had skin in various shades of brown. For a lot of the story it was a backdrop for the Telwains and Aquezazalians. I pictured it as somewhere around Sudan, but with boreal forests. In my sketchbooks from that time, a black-haired, tan-skinned woman with a single drop of blood on one cheek appears several times. This is an imagining of the part where artist-terrorist Nik Zymmith (see from_the_turquoise_sea) becomes obsessed with the woman he failed to kill, so he paints her instead: in mourning, a blood-drop trailing from one eye. This is after young pilot Zyamirel Roblei Halshmekir bravely stands against Melzem Uzgur's decree that the Aquezazalians surprise-attack Telewa: he doesn't think that's fair and he has Telwain friends, such as the Jemelan family next door. He tries to escape on an airplane, but the Aquezazalian Council shoots it down over the country of Wiawiska/Viavizka. He survives and is nursed back to health by Josiah Wayaroit, who speaks in a formal, stilted cadence to show that he's a foreigner. He's a doctor and he doesn't really appear much after that. And guess what, the Jemelan family ends up fleeing to Wiawiska to escape the war, and over time, he starts falling for their daughter Maria, five years his junior, whom he never thought about that way before...but wait, architect Omyta Ylaquez, whom Nik was supposed to kill because she's the daughter of resistance leader Pyotor, is already in love with him! What will Omyta do? Just be sad and design buildings, I guess, in the shadow of her I-swear-not-EXACTLY-Christian-it's-a-fantasy-religion parents. In one version, the way Maria and Zyamirel meet again is because they're both hiding out in a forest, as part of guerilla fighter groups since the war has evidently spread to Wiawiska. When she goes off somewhere by herself in a hooded outfit, his soldiers capture her, thinking she's the terrorist Nik Zymmith (they're both tall and thin, and, hey, it's dark). But it's only a short step from "Hey, I thought I was going to die!" to "Oh yeah, you're the guy I had a crush on when I was 16" (they're around 18 & 23 at this point). In one scene, Zymmith captures Maria and tortures her by putting earphones on her that are attached to a machine emitting an increasingly loud note. But Zyamirel rescues her by crashing through the ceiling of the underground bad-guy complex and slashing the cords of the machine. The last thing Maria sees before they both escape is an old man screaming in a corner that he can't hear anything; he puts one hand to his ear and brings it back covered in blood. I scared myself a little with that scene. Sometimes my imaginings were all trees and flowers and jewels. Other times? Noise machines that rupture people's eardrums! I did bring in the blue jewel from the earlier story - here, where there's no explicit magic, it's just a family heirloom. But the part I remember about it is again morbid: Nik, unable to win Omyta Ylaquez's heart with creepy paintings, finds Zyamirel's young cousin Merissa walking alone in a forest (why do people keep wandering alone in this forest in a war zone??) and knocks her to the ground, intending to rape her. She's fifteen. He's about thirty. Which makes it sound worse to me now, but I came up with this when I was her age or a year younger. Oh yeah, and first he stamps on her wrist to destroy her radio transmission device. But guess who's conveniently there to rescue her? Fyemir Arvuk, who was part of Nik's terrorist group, but has been growing increasingly disillusioned with the guy's behaviour. Nik pulls out a gun and shoots him, but Fyemir and Merissa escape to a secure underground shelter that's somehow been set up in this forest. There he dies of his wound, but not before giving Merissa a necklace with a blue jewel he has in his pocket. It was supposed to go to his daughter, but since he never had one... And then the poor kid wonders whether she should stay there with this dead guy or risk the forest again, but it turns out that the radio device also emits a distress signal when it's destroyed, and Zyamirel's group is able to track her down. So her immediate family decides it's too dangerous to stay there. And there's a scene where she's watching TV with this other kid Paul; Nik shows up on the news and she gets scared and looks away. The boy, who has a crush on her, is like, "He's far away, he won't hurt you," so she holds up her wrist with a cast on it and tells him everything. And that she'll wear the necklace with the blue jewel (which is sort of teardrop-shaped) to show she's not afraid. Oh yeah, and then there's Leiko Amdril. She's Nik Zymmith's girlfriend, and since they're evil, they're living together without being married when he's not off in the forest doing terrorist things. Tsk. At one point she captures Zyamirel and tries to "seduce" him while running water out of a tap that also emits some kind of sleeping gas, which...doesn't affect her somehow. (Besides, past self, if she succeeded, that would ALSO clearly be rape. Just saying.) Or maybe she just tries to brainwash him. But Maria doesn't have to rescue him. He has mental resolve, so he's able to resist her "Join the dark side, I have boobs and I'm also drugging you" stuff. I forget what happens to Leiko. I think she turns against Nik at some point too, possibly making a heroic sacrifice and dying. I don't really remember how a lot of the threads get wrapped up, just that Maria is 21 and Zyamirel 26 when they get married. Mostly this wasn't written down, just imagined, except for a later attempt at greater realism when I was 18, which begins with some of the characters as children playing a board game that involves a fantasy war. Version A shaded into Version B shaded into Version C. 220227 ... e_o_i By chance I discovered I wrote a shorter and slightly different version in blue_jewel. 220308 ... e_o_i I also found a file on my computer, transferred from a grandcomputer or great-grandcomputer (re grandstudent). Dated 2007. Called "namesKemdia." Kemdia aka Maria has a different number of siblings and Dorval is in Vermont now: ... Kemdia Ulon, sixteen years old at the beginning of the story, is more or less the main character. She lives with her father James and her sister June, her mother having passed away three years earlier. They live in the suburbs of Golden Valley, or Vellora, in Vermont. One of their neighbors is Zyamirel Halshmekir, who lives with his aunt and uncle Elya and Veldrin Halshmekir, and his cousins Ilekta, Anya, Xalandir, and Merissa while he isn’t staying downtown with the rest of the Telaquez Council. The year is around 2080, and there are rumors of conflict between the Americans, or Telwyns, and the European, Asian, and African “invaders” the Aquezi. Terms: Telewa, the new name for the United States. Aquezazalia: named after the Kirlani Aquez Azali, or Blue Jewel, referring to the Earth. Kemdia: means “faith” in Kirlani. The “Kemdians” are the “believers”, usually Xians. Back to Zyamirel: he is only 21, the youngest member of the Telaq, but he is mature and responsible, with good leadership skills. No, he isn’t completely perfect, although it seems that way to poor Kemdia, who’s hopelessly in love. He’s had some military training and knows how to fly a helicopter (a useful quality to have in a man, I’m sure) but he decided to join the council instead of the army. 231206 ... raze (i just want to say that you come up with the best names. and now you've got me thinking thoughts about the family trees of computers. or would they be acyclic graphs?) 231206 ... e_o_i Ha! Not much of a process about naming, though, besides "Take known names and change them slightly, or just make up names you think sound cool." of the former: Melissa - Merissa Velasquez - Ylaquez (pronounced ee-LA-quez) Smith - Zymmith (ZIH-mith) Leika - Leiko (lie-EE-ko) of the latter: Zyamirel Halshmekir (pronounced ZYA-mee-rel HAL-shme-keer) - this sounded very romantic and handsome to me at the time. 231207 ... e_o_i but now that I'm on a tangent, character_naming 231207 what's it to you? who go blather from