BY LETTER
Molatov Skulwak
Galactography > Other Major Polities, Empires, and Meta-Empires > Archosaurian Empire
Culture and Society > Personalities > Famous and Historical Non-ascended Sophonts
(b. Jeremanioh Jevesah, 8391 - 9732 AT)Culture and Society > Personalities > Famous and Historical Non-ascended Sophonts
A human artist, cartoonist and satirist in the small Avon system of the Archosaurian Empire; immensely popular with baseline-level humans throughout the region. He is infamous for personifying archailects and godlings in humorous, pseudo-sapient terms that were outrageously irreverent yet not without a hint of admiration (much like Gyzantium Gyzaarno, but simpler). More often than not, the joke was on the sapients under the archailects - yet Skulwak depicted sapients as being comfortable with their stupidity, while the archailects and transapients often acted like frustrated parents or pet-owners.
In his virch play "Fleas Upon Fleas" (9192), he portrays his local godling TrimAura as a towering goddess who seems rather concerned about the habits of her "pet powers" (portrayed as gigantic canines and felines). TrimAura insists that her pets must treat their "fleas" (basic transapients) with respect, and not try to scratch them off. The pet powers insist that the fleas are becoming self-indulgent and are biting too hard, too frequently. In return, the pet powers negotiate with their fleas, asking them to drink their blood in moderation. The fleas insist that they need more blood because the microbes inside them are restless. The fleas negotiate with their microbes (humans and other sapients), insisting that they must settle down. The microbes insist that they must perform religious rituals to appease TrimAura. After all, "it's what she wants". Eventually, it is revealed that the microbe's religion was planted by TrimAura to test her transapient pets, and she leaves it to them to "cure" the microbial antics. They attempt this in several hilarious ways, constantly toying with the mythic archetypes of the microbes' religion and the constants of the fleas' ontological perception, and causing considerable confusion - arguments, fads, revolutions, orgies and wars ensue. The play ends with TrimAura's immortal line: "What has worship got to do with respect?"
Skulwak continued his theme of sapient / transapient relations in his fable "Turtles All the Way Down" (9251), in which a small band of humans living on the back of a giant turtle decide to go digging for gold. The turtle, obviously irritated, joins with his friends in digging for itch-healing crystals ... under the shell of the even larger turtle they are all riding on. When this second toposophic turtle complains to the immense Turtle Goddess he and his friends are riding on, the Turtle Goddess gives him an incredibly complicated, nonsensical, musical "magical incantation" to pass on to the smaller turtles. The middle turtle cannot remember all of it, but speaks it anyway, knowing that it should work. The first turtles try to repeat the complicated verse, but in an even more degraded fashion. Yet when they do, the humans on the first turtle's back stop digging, for in the ridiculously simplified magic verse (a thinly disguised "meme"), they find the gold that they are looking for.
In "Lady, What Fools These Mortals Be!" (9345), a high transapient discusses his hobby of "human collecting" with his drinking mates. His peers encourage him to learn more about humans by spending a year living among them, as one of them, particularly focusing on the "Goolooboodooloo Factor" (which is wisely never explained in the course of the play). The transapient accepts the challenge, disguising himself as an ordinary man living within an ultratech human polity he had helped create centuries earlier. He manipulates several humans, including a politician, a businessman, and a young woman whom he pretends to fall in love with. However, it turns out that this woman is actually a slightly higher transapient in disguise, and she has been manipulating him right from the beginning ...
In 9400, after the Archosaurian Entity had subsumed all smaller archailects and godlings within the Archaipelago Cluster, Skulwak broadcast a cartoon that brazenly parodied the new Imperial Emblem. It depicted a majestic tyrannosaurus sitting on her nest, with several smaller beings barely able to peek out from under her big bottom - a Toh Chi (deinocheirus uplift), a tiger uplift, a vec and three humans. While the beings being sat upon appeared comical, the mother rex herself was a remarkable piece of artwork in her own right; each translucent scale concealed a different landscape or heavenscape to be found in the Archaipelago Cluster (being cleverly selected real-life footage). In one of the ironic twists of his career, Skulwak received a substantial payment from the Toh Chi Lok- Nar to have a gigantic hologram of this Mother Rex fitted inside their Holistic Gallery Habitat.
Fiction relating to the Archaipelago Attacks
Under The Looking GlassRelated Articles
Appears in Topics
Development Notes
Text by Darren Ryding
Initially published on 29 June 2003.
Initially published on 29 June 2003.
