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.:Martina:.

Dr. Martina Bach is a staff member at the Institute and a Cambrian researcher. Though her main interest lies with extinct animals of a more recent vintage, she was unwittingly dragged into the Institute's work when she discovered the lump of faintly glowing jelly-like eggs that would become Bolide. Since Bolide emerged from his cocoon, she has spent most of her time away from the Institute on paleontology expeditions and only recently returned with the Cambrian in tow. Martina isn't very up to date on events in the Institute, and has spent most of her time since her return relaxing on the beach and ignoring Bolide.

Though Martina loves Bolide, keeping him in line over the years has worn her patience more than a little thin. Now that he is an adult -- and at the Institute, with more things to occupy his time than killing her slowy -- she is taking advantage of her new-found freedom.

.:Friends & Enemies:.

Bolide hasn't met too many people at the Institute yet. For now his only friend is his mother, Martina. The only real enemies he knows are the Pikaia's Children.

Snowline: Snowline is quite squishy and purple. She doesn't seem very threatening... or very interesting, either. Altogether too nice for Bolide's tastes.

Faculae: Faculae is another squishy. She's small and kind of slimy looking, like a sea slug. She's pretty, but something in her scent makes Bolide wary of messing with her. She smells like something that would taste nasty -- like, well, some kind of toxic sea slug. Bolide has decided that he likes the little slugaboo.

Almucantar: Yet another squishy, this one along the lines of Snowline. He's very shy and nervous around people -- traits Bolide is a bit disdainful of.

Albedo: A rotten little beastie. He looks like he would make a good snack, though.

Lex: Far too sneaky and foolish for Bolide's tastes, but she seems to have potential. A little bit, anyways.

Krys: If Krys weren't linked to Faculae, Bolide would take great pleasure in stomping her into paste.

Martina: Bolide's adoptive mommy. Even in adulthood he usually strives to follow her rules, but they are a bit unreasonable. Martina tells it like it is, at least where Bolide is concerned, and he regards her with respect -- and of course, affection. Bol's not as dumb as he may appear and he knows that Martina's demands usually help keep him on an even keel in a world that constantly upsets him.

Newton: She seems okay for a human.

Dr. Vrais: Bolide is a bit wary of the big cheese, though he hasn't interacted with her very much.

Bolide's people evolved from tiny critters very similar in appearance to horseshoe crabs. As their world aged, they grew and changed into monstrous aquatic animals somewhere between crabs and Earth's sharks. Like Earth's sharks, the Bellas were streamlined and mighty predators, the top dogs of the seas for uncounted aeons. They survived unchanged for millions of years, while life on land grew and changed.

Though the Bellas made it through several mass extinctions unscathed, a terrible meteor impact many orders of magnitude worse than Earth's K-T event nearly put an end to them. Fire and acid rain swept the globe. Eventually the dust clouds brought about a massive climactic shift, locking almost all of the land and sea in ice. Only a narrow belt around the world's equator remained free of the killing cold and conducive to life.

The great migratory seabeasts that the Bellas fed on were dead. Some smaller Bella species survived, but with their food source gone the giant Bellas were doomed. But one subspecies were accustomed to hunting in the shallows, and they simply moved their focus inland. In the good years, their limbs were small, used only for pushing themselves off of sandbars when the tide ran out and trapped prey close to shore. It was incredibly difficult for these shallow-water Bellas to navigate the actual dry land, but they did. The Bellas made it back from the brink of extinction and to their current level of sapience out of sheer stubborn-ness and refusal to die.

Though today's Bellas are perfectly suited to life on the land, they still retain amphibious characteristics. They have both lungs and gills, though the gills are used primarily to send water or air to the strange hood on their backs. Inside, the hood is a honeycomb structure of small chambers which can be filled either with water or air. The hood functions in the Bellas as a kind of external gas bladder, enabling them to swim easily. When filled with water, the hood can be used squid-style to propel Bellas through the water. On land, the hood is filled with air or gas, making it extremely light-weight. If the hood is punctured or injured, the ruined chambers seal themselves off from the rest of the hood's chambers so that it will not deflate.

To humans, the Bellas may seem a vicious and cruel species. To the Bellas, humans are deceitful and needlessly complicated. If something bothers a Bella, the obvious solution is to kill it. Bellas are creatures of emotional extremes. If you win a Bella's loyalty, they will love you will fierce and undying devotion. If you win a Bella's enmity, you will be looking at the business ends of the Bella's terrifying array of natural weapons.

Bellas are brutally honest and loyal to those they perceive as Friend, but they are also ultimately carnivores. They see the world in black and white, and are not comfortable with any situation until they have identified it postively. There are Threat and Not-Thread, Good and Bad, Friend and Enemy, Food and Not-Food. Though they have very simple morals and are not big on philosophy, Bellas consider themselves and most things in the natural world to be Good. If a Bella identifies anything or anyone to be Bad, or Evil, they will do their damndest to destroy it.

Unlike humans, Bellas have a universal religion. Different populations of Bellas may have different myths or legendary heroes, but they all have the same core beliefs. Bellas aren't big on abstract moralizing, and Martina was astonished to learn that Bolide's people had any concept of spirituality at all. But then, how could any species be truly sapient if it didn't have the ability to think in terms of symbolism?

Bellas have a very nature-oriented view of spirituality. All things that are natural are Good. Bellas are Good. Anything or anyone that goes against nature is Evil. Though Bellas are ferocious and well-acquainted with killing, the thought of killing for pleasure or torturing other beings horrifies them. People that do this are Evil, and must be destroyed. If a Bella decides that something or someone is Evil, they are usually willing to die to destroy that Evil thing.

Bolide's people have no real concept of the afterlife, but they do believe in reincarnation. If anything, their beliefs are most similiar to Buddhism's. Bellas do not live with the goal of attaining Nirvana, but they know that all things must die. Their world and their universe must some day die just like every other being, and when the universe dies then Bellas believe all things will live together in a kind of dream world. When the universe dies, the Bella mythology holds that it too will someday be reborn from the great Star Egg that it came from to begin with.

Bellas believe in a cyclic world, and they consider death a cyclic thing too. Just as Bellas are born out of other Bellas' living bodies, the dead are consumed by their living family and friends. The greatest insult one can bestow upon the dead is to bury or burn them. Not consuming a dead Bella is tantamount to saying that the dead person was Evil, Not-Bella, not a Good thing of the natural world.

There is no strict mating pattern among Bellas. As long as you choose your mate(s) with great honesty, anything you do is Good. For a Bella to cheat or mislead another in mating is disgusting, a terrible sin and an Evil thing. Though Bellas often mate without love when it is their season, Bellas usually end up monogamous. Good Bellas are stubborn in all things, including love, and for Bella pairs to "break up" is incredibly rare.

Though they could potentially build a civilization as great as humanity's, Bellas have never had much inclination to. Most Bellas live along the seashore, in almost every area of their planet. They do some small-scale agriculture, but have never built up in the way that humans have. Tribal warfare is common, but most Bella communities live in peace with one another. Their reproductive rate is much lower than that of humans, and there is no natural urge to kill one another off as a means of population control. War on a large scale is unheard of. Though great warriors, Bellas could never cooperate enough to fight as an army.

Dre*nk*. The Long Winter. It is too cold, too cold, for *gunna's village. The animals have gone, the fruits and plants have gone. The young not-mother females dig for roots and tubers, but their digits freeze and cannot penetrate the icy ground. The seas are wild and strange. *gunna's people are inlanders, and cannot deal with the terrible cold. The beaches are beginning to freeze over, slushy ice piling up as deep as a male's knees. It is too cold.

Northerners, strong and fat from a marine diet, come down along the coast in bands. Their hides are thick and scarred, colored in dead black and white. They are big, much bigger than *gunna's people, but their bands are few in number. The first Northerners are peaceful, though scornful of the townspeople. "Ne, ne, too cold," a huge slate-grey female tells *gunna. Her tongue is thick and strange to *gunna, and she has difficulty speaking the southland language. "Ice," she says, her dark eyes sad. "All sea is ice." She moves on, heading south. Always south.

By the time *gunna's people have grown desperate, so have the refugees from the north. The villagers have never fought seriously amongst themselves. There hasn't been a crime since Ul-han, the netmaker, bit Sah*n the baker over a trade disagreement. But now there is danger. Theft. The villagers hide their few remaining supplies from the raiders. The mayor urges people to simply stay out of the Northerners' way, but people are angry. They want to fight. Mu'lunu'ulu the orchardmaster's daughter is raped, and her mate Hem-la is killed. The townspeople are outraged, but they are also afraid. They do not know how to fight the great fishers from the north. They are hungry and they are cold. This is the time of the Long Winter.

*gunna is angry, angry. His traps in the bay no longer catch fish. There is nothing to catch, nothing but a few strange, foul-tasting north creatures drifting south. Away from the ice. The great pods and herds of edible sea animals have long since passed. *gunna is furious and frustrated. His village is starving while the monstrous refugees steal what little food is left. Good Mu'lunu'ulu and Hem-la have been brutalized and, in the latter case, murdered. *gunna is not a genius, or an artisan, or a poet. But he has a good heart, and he cannot stand by any longer.

"We must leave," *gunna tells the villagers. "There is no food left. The Northerners will kill us." Everyone looks at each other nervously. They are not warriors or nomads. They like to fish and hunt and gather fruit and make bread of pounded hudwil root. They like to gather in the common house and tell stories of O*wele's giant boat and Tu-scha's magic harp. Mu'lunu'ulu, her father, and poor Hem-la's family look at *gunna coldly. Sweet Mu'lunu'ulu baked bread with fresh fruit sauces in the warm months. Now she is as frosty as her father's orchards.

"I will leave, *gunna," she says. She stands and places one frostbitten foreclaw on *gunna's arm. "This is a bad place. There is nothing left for us here." Her father rumbles agreement and a few more people stand.

The mayor is upset. "Where will we go? And how will we get there?" His tail lashes in agitation. "If we go along the coast, the Northerners will kill us." The room falls silent for a moment, eyes flicking to Mu'lunu'ulu and away again.

"We must go," *gunna says firmly. "We will go south, to the warm lands. We know the inland routes, for a ways at least. It will be safer than traveling the coast. Once we reach the end of wel*e, we can start following the coastline like the Northerners." This is the most sensible and complicated plan *gunna has ever devised. He is not a great thinker, but in extremity, he has proved to have a reservoir of cleverness.

*gunna hopes that by the time they reach the end of wel*e (the known world) they will be hardy enough to survive sharing the beaches with the Northerners. Most of the other villagers aren't concerned. Wel*e goes on forever. It is inconceivable that they won't find a new home before reaching the end.

Mu'lunu'ulu has hardened her heart. Perhaps her optimism will return in time, but her outlook for now is grim. If the monstrous people of the far-far-North, more beast than man, have been forced from their frozen kingdoms, then things are bad. Probably nothing short of O*wele and his mythical ark showing up and carting them off to a land of honey will save them. Mu'lunu'ulu is prepared to travel beyond wel*e, and resigned to the knowledge that many of the people she knows and loves will almost assuredly die in the journey.

She smiles at *gunna. There is not much warmth there, but there is approval, and perhaps hope. *gunna returns her smile. The rest of the people are still nervous, chattering away, but Mu'lunu'ulu and a few others are ready to leave. Ul-han the netmaker and Sah*n the baker, participants in the village's legendary fight, are with them. The orchardmaster, the talespinner, the leatherworker and their apprentices gather around. They look to Mu'lunu'ulu, the tragic figure, and *gunna. The rest of the village will reach their conclusion soon enough, but the die has been cast. *gunna's people will be going south.


... ?

-
A soft clicking sound.

'
Soft plosive.

*
Harsh back-of-the-throat clicking noise.

Alt
Old

*bim
Any wild animal hunted for food

Bim-pa
General term for domesticated animal (implies carnivore or potentially dangerous animal)

Brend
Fire

Cora*l
A small boat

Cora*alter
Ship, large boat

Di*
You

Dre
Cold, sorrow

Dre*nk*
The Long Winter, an Ice Age. Slang term for a grudge match, as in 'cold shoulder'.

Dre*wel*
Eternal winter, a more emphatic version of Dre*nk*. A poetic term for death, "He sails Dre*wel*".

Dre*wele*owel*e
The afterlife (or between-life?), a completely frozen world where souls wait to be reborn. Bolide's people don't believe that much goes on in Dre*wele*owel*e other than a kind of stasis for souls, but they enjoy using it in their legends and songs. This mythology is unique to Bolide's people and a few related tribes -- it is very unusual among Bellas in general to have such a complex view of the afterlife.

Eis
Ice

Eis*alter
Glacier

G'en
Warrior

Gruse
Fear

Ha'mu-ne
The ritualistic eating of the dead

Ha'mu*wel*
Rebirth, reincarnation, a renewal of hope, Spring

Hallo
Hello

Heil
Hello!

Hudwil
A starchy tuber.

I*
I, me

I* di* tus
I love you

I* grus
I have the creeps, I'm freaked out, I'm scared

Li-grus
"The willies"

Li-mu
Little one, child

Mu
Birth

Ne
No

Ne*wel
Nothing

O*wele
A folk hero. O*wele saved Bolide's people from the last Long Winter by building a great boat and sailing across the ocean to escape the glaciers.

Pa-bim
Any potentially dangerous wild animal

Pa*man
Husband, strong man, hunter

Pa*grun
Tsunami, tidal wave, destruction

Pa*gun
Anger, rage

See
A bay

See*alter
The sea, the ocean

See*li
A pond or tide pool

See*shu
A lake

Shu
Tame, calm, placid, harmless, serene, a herbivore. Slightly derogatory when used to describe a person.

Shu-bim
General term for domesticated animal (implies herbivore or harmless animal)

Tan
Intelligent, smart one

Tan*wel
Storyteller

Tu
Love

Tu-li
A term of endearment

Tu-scha
Another folk hero, Tu-scha swam through the ice fields to the cold world of the afterlife. The music of her harp melted the glaciers, freeing her dead husband's soul to return to the living world with her.

Unu-li
Wife, beautiful woman

Wel
Has no meaning on its own, but when added to other words usually imparts a feeling of endlessness.

Wel*e
The known world, everything, all that there is.

Wel*e-ne
The end of everything, end of the world, apocalypse, death.

Zi
You (plural)