Athenaeum (The First to be Forgotten)

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Psuvillager

Prehistoric Article This article contains information said to be from Prehistoric Times. The validity of prehistoric content is dubious at best due to poor recordkeeping in the era, and should be considered unreliable, or at best: Legend.

Advents and Laments

The first colony in prehistoric Quelmar was Atheneum, knowledge of whose tragically ephemeral existence has reached us only through divination.

After losing contact with their home world, the settlers perxisted* for a single generation before being overwhelmed by the physical chaos of ancient Quelmar. It is a great irony, given the isolated group's devotion to meticulous record-keeping, that this brief document is all that remains to proclaim their existence.

Let them not be forgotten again.

Connor's Vision

A vision of ancient times fascinated the human diviner Connor. He saw glimpses, from long before recorded history, of Quelmar's first settlers from another world. Seeking to learn who they were and how they had been lost to memory, he devised a powerful divination to let him see firsthand whatever a long-dead individual had experienced during their time in Quelmar.

Unable to harness the new spell's magics alone, Connor attracted a team of diviners to pool their power. Framing the opportunity as "a game about language and how it dies", he assembled the party during the realm-wide worldbuilding conclave known as QuelmarCon 23. His team comprised Nell, Kelsey, Erin, Alexandra, Nick, Cat, and himself -- who would each experience the inner life of one of the doomed settlers.

The Inner Life

In a few short hours, these seven "players" respectively lived out the lives of seven early immigrants to Quelmar -- Jones, Joan, Pythea, Luna, Keeper Horis, Jyn, and Augustus.

Chosen for their expertise in various fields, these settlers had been part of a group of two thousand who traveled to Quelmar from the distant stars. Having established a new home in a settlement they named Athenaeum, they lived and died trying to master prehistoric Quelmar.

By the end, the seven diviners had garnered a valuable glimpse into the colony's evolving culture and language as well as its people and their fate.

Aspects of Athenaeum

Several aspects of the settlement held particular significance to its people. First, their culture put a marked emphasis on documentation and record keeping. The ship's mission was not only to colonize Quelmar, but to document their progress and their experience, to which end they kept a great archive underground to protect this collective knowledge from the elements.

Second, the volatile weather of ancient Quelmar threatened the existence of individuals, of the settlement, and of their hallowed archive. This threat would have a great impact on their thinking and their language.

Third, the people valued expertise since those areas of expertise for which they had each been selected for the mission were essential to their survival and well-being in this new world.

Bad Luck Comes in Threes

Not long after the colonists disassembled their craft to begin constructing their new home, a lightning strike dubbed the zap wreaked havoc on their electronic storage and communications, forcing them to rely on the paper backups of the their existing archive, as well as cutting off all communication with their distant home. The word zap came to be used as an expletive which was eventually displaced by the eupemism "the Z word".

A devastating earthquake that came to be known as the shift caused the first deaths in Athenaeum, wrecked a quarter of the housing, and ruined a small but significant portion of the crops. The word shift came to refer to any event with a negative and long-term impact, but lost significance as the earthquake that originally gave rise to the term came to be only the first of the many environmental disasters that that brought the fledgling colony to its early demise. The oracle Pythea predicted the destruction of the colony resulting from continued environmental devastation, but the zealots hung on to hope, till the end.

Finally, persistent flooding threatened the treasured archive of information, which had been constructed underground to protect it from the elements. Although the settlers never invented any particular words to refer to the flooding, it became a primary cause of the eventual destruction of the colony. Once it began, so did a frantic effort to re-digitize the archive before the paper was also destroyed.

The Splintering of the Settlement

Keeper Horis worked zealously to maintain both the archive and the group's morale and faith in their mission, and most colonists remained engaged, participating in events like Delving Day, an annual celebration of the archive and the work they were doing (and which evolved into a celebration of each other and survival in the face of Quelmar's interminable challenges.) But a growing group of dissidents, beginning with scavengers like Jones, considered the stubborn pursuit of the original mission to be a foolish endeavor given the loss of the original archives and the existential threats they all faced, and they celebrated the wildness of Quelmar instead — for which they came to be known as Thunderheads (a term which had originally referred to a particular whether phenomenon that affected the colony regularly. ) This group, whose members habitually referred to Athenaeum as Paper City rather than by its official name, soon swelled to over ten percent of the remaining colonists, and eventually broke away from the settlement in the hope of finding a more hospitable place to live in Quelmar. Before they left, Jones invited Athenaeum's leader, Joan, to come with them, but she felt a duty to go down with her proverbial ship and instead gave Jones the colony's official book of the dead to carry forth with them into the unknown.

Spirit in the Face of Adversity

The book in which the living would write the names of the dead as part of the process of mourning was known as The Muergo, and the word muergo itself referred to letting go of fellow colonists, coming to terms with their deaths.

The ability of the people of Athenaeum to persist (including literally continuing to exist) despite all they faced spawned the blended word perxistence. The need to convey bad news regularly brought about the use of the hedge word okayso. The need to focus on the importance of individual experiences and treat them as part of a larger whole that would continue no matter what befell the individual led to the use of the word chapter as a term of endearment to one another. (Citizens prefaced this to each other's names, as in "Your ability is uncanny, Chapter Luna"). And once the word home could no longer refer to the dying settlement of Atheneum, it still referred to their original world, but it had gained two new meanings, roughly: heaven and wherever the Thunderheads have gone to live (and hopefully to thrive).