Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Buckbark continued eating his sandwich, unaware–or not caring–how uncomfortable it seemed to make Mujiff.

“The problem is, we usually place a Series 10 with a target for one of two purposes. Intelligence-gathering, or assassination.”

“I don’t need a lecture on your unit’s questionable wetwork,” Mujiff said. “I need a reason for Unit 10-11 going around attached to a real family, one on whom there is no intelligence and no kill order in the databases!”

Another long, leisurely bite followed. “Well, it’s simple. 10-11 has implanted on them,” Buckbark said, mayonnaise dripping from the corners of his mouth. “It was probably subjected to a shock–electrical, physical, magnetic–which rebooted it and allowed it to imprint on whoever found it.”

“I see,” Mujiff said. “And placing these Series 10s…how is that done?”

“It’s the old story about a changeling,” said Buckbark. “We take the target’s biological child, do a quick and dirty brain-dump, and replace them with a Series 10. The child gets a wet-wipe and goes into the foster pipeline, and the Series 10 arranges for itself to be destroyed along with its targets. If it’s an assassination; intelligence-gathering is just a matter of reversing the brain-dump and wet-wipe, of course.”

Mujiff leaned over Buckbark’s desk. “Are you telling me,” he said, “that there’s a Series 10 out there, with a family that may or may not have been targeted, and that it has imprinted on them?”

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Takenaka Akira swung his sword again, a weak, wild blow that Chihiro easily parried with the Unmei no Fuguhiki.

“Always the favorite,” he snarled. “The best apprenticeship, the best skills, the apple of our parents’ eye. And what was left for me? You took even my good-for-nothing son.”

“I am sorry,” Chihiro said. “You must know that my thoughts have ever been with you since our separation.”

“Your thoughts?” Akira lashed out with his blade again, drawing a drop of blood as Chihiro moved the blow aside. “I couldn’t eat your thoughts, brother! I couldn’t hear them! Would it have wounded the great and beloved chef-in-training to send his brother money? Or even a letter?”

“I was busy. With my studies.” With each parrying blow, Chihiro’s grip on the Unmei slackened. “I didn’t think-”

“Finally a bit of truth,” Akira snarled. “You didn’t think. I was just some abstract thing to you, not a real flesh and blood brother! I did what I had to do to survive, while you grew fat on the dishes you made!”

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The northern cardinal’s scientific name is Cardinalis cardinalis. A group of two or more males in called a conclave. Every few years, a very large conclave will gather. The cardinal that wins the election will become the bird pope, and grow a coat of pure white feathers with a crest that is much larger and tinged with gold.

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Pexate and Layyia, the “warring brothers” or “squabbling sisters,” were once both part of the great Crimson Empire. As imperial power crumbled, Pexate was the first to be abandoned, while Layyia was close to the imperial heartlands and remained loyal to the Emperor until the final collapse nearly a thousand years later. That lengthy separation led the two kingdoms, of otherwise similar size and climate, to take sharply divergent paths.

Guarded by the mountains that form its border with Layyia, Pexate developed an independent streak with a great deal of power concentrated in the hands of the nobility. In Layyia, however, the kings were much more successful at imposing their will on their nobles. Perhaps this was because of their (supposedly) direct descent from the last of the Crimson Emperors; in any event, Layyia remained secure under a number of strong kings until the Layyian Plague, which saw five monarchs in five years succumb, including the infamous “year of three kings” in which King Fraen V reigned for only 88 days.

The death of so many senior claimants to the throne, and plague’s privations elsewhere, kept the Layyians from interfering in the affairs of their neighbors for some time–they never attempted to invade during the ten years of Uxbridge’s Anarchy, for instance, nor did they attempt to end the Most Serene Republic of Pexate which followed. Rather than regional barons asserting their authority, the various dukes, marquesses, and earls of Layyia instead backed a variety of candidates to the throne in an ongoing hot-and-cold civil war.

Chroniclers have called these claimants the “Lights of Layyia,” often depicting them as candles in a candelabra. This was both because the claimants represented some of Layyia’s brightest stars, and because they had an unfortunate tendency to be snuffed out.

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The sprouts are here
Bidden by our hand
Stretching out from seed
To sky

Is it vain to hope that
They grow strong and tall
Bearing such fruit
That branches droop

For we have never needed
More urgently than now
Food to spring forth
From a loving earth

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Of all the amh, birds that were neither predator nor prey to the sparrows, the iparral, or cardinals, were the most likely to treat with sparrows and not to fight with them. So long as there was ample food, the cardinals and their brides would suffer the sparrows to be near them and to converse.

So Lwyr sought their counsel, specifically that of Rreko, a cardinal who had lived in the area for many years and had raised three broods a year, like clockwork, with his bride.

“Tell me, please, if you have a moment, what I should do about the nest-intruders, the cowbirds,” Lwyr said. “They have laid their egg in my beloved’s nest, and she is beside herself with worry.”

Rreko cracked an oily seed open with his great orange beak and chewed on the contents, meditatively. “They have bedeviled us more and more,” he said. “But we accept it as a fact of life.”

“What happens with the chicks you raise?” Lwyr pressed. “What happens as they grow?”

“We do our best with them, and they care for us in their fashion, but they always speak in a foreign tongue from the nest, it seems, and when our fledglings scatter they never return, seeking instead their own kind. I suppose all sons and daughters are the same, in that way.”

“What if they could be made to stay, for us that flock?”

“Well, they do flock sometimes, usually in the spring, but they are such rude, garrulous creatures that they would not fit in with a flock so…delicate…as yours.”

“What if they could?”

“I would say that is a fool’s dream,” Rrenko said, cracking another nut. “It is as if asking what if the sun were edible.”

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Like their close cousins, the apoc, the symph are tall and proud, equally at home as farmers or warriors. But unlike the individualistic apoc, who move about singly or in small bands when they are not living as the guests of others, the symph are a mutualistic species–the Sisterhood, as they called themselves.

Building great hive-cities, the symph were ruled by a queen that was mother to nearly the entire population, though some would have co-regent daughters to smooth the transitions between generations. Males were rare, and though they were stronger than females and made excellent warriors, they consumed vital resources while offering little in return and wer therefore only hatched for breeding purposes, sent to other hives to cement alliances and keep inbreeding at bay. The other symph were all sisters–hence “the Sisterhood”–and their close relationship gave them all a degree of mutual empathy bordering on telepathy.

The apoc and others have occasionally accused the symph of being an uncreative hive mind, a mass of interchangeable and faceless clones. This is, however, not true; many symph are passionate and artistic, but their culture does place a great deal of importance on maintaining the unified front of the Sisterhood. Disagreements happen and outliers exist, and it is a culture that values and allows for personal freedom. But the Sisterhood requires that those differences be strictly internal and secret, guarded from all but a few close friends and allies. A remnant of when the wood was a crueler place, perhaps, or before large numbers of apoc began living among the symph as laborers, warriors, and lovers.

Individual symph can and do leave the safety of the hive and the sisterhood, but without the rare males they cannot live anything but a solitary existence. Those who do eke out such a living are not unheard of, though, and the most successful often eventually barter with other symph for males and begin new Sisterhoods of their own.

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Developer: Musjido Team 2
Publisher: Musjido
Platform: Musjido Multi Media System
Release Date:
NA: November 15, 1991
JP: January 21, 1992
EU: May 21, 1992

For this late-system release, the keys to the Subterranoid franchise were handed over to Musjido Team 2, primarily hardware designers, and the result was lambasted at the time as being a tired attempt to wring new life from a worn-out franchise. With Ultra Subterranoid a little more than a year away, many people chose to wait for the newer product, leaving Subterranoid IV: Areolus’s Awakening as one of the rarer games for the MMS.

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“Far from being amh, they are worse than llew, because they kill our young and force us to raise their own. Larger, heavier, they take more food and more care than our own young do. They may not eat us, as llew would, but they devour all the same.” Yn said.

“But surely,” asked Echyd, “surely we can tell the difference. Their eggs would be larger too, yes?”

Yn puffed up, the old sparrow shuddering from wingtips to tail. “Sometimes they are. But the cowbirds will keep a keen watch on their brood, and if you eject their egg, they will descend upon the nest and destroy it–killing all your true young and perhaps even yourself as well. It is the implicit threat they hold over all of us, and they have been growing in numbers every season.”

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To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

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