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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 1339120" data-attributes="member: 1025">OK the following is for those of you who like things pureed and spoon fed.If you prefer to do your own reading, please ignore. The Fully Detailed Naked Explanation of what the Heck I was Talking About in Round 3 [spoiler]OK, all three stories are about the perception of the passage of time. Each also has a sub-theme:            The first is about the definition of art.            The second was meant to be about performance, but came out being more about dramatic composition.            I don’t have a good single word for the third, but I think “politics” is as close as I can get. Perhaps "integration." The village is made up of many different peoples, which they celebrate with their many-hued maypole. As I tried to have Miguel explain, the point of the village is not to blend all the cultures into one bland homogenized thing, but rather to celebrate the uniqueness of the individuals. The fungal mind is made up of many, many minds, but they are illithid minds (and a few dwarfs and a halfling). The illithids were setting up a new colony, which means they were far from their original Elder Brain, and ready to form a new one. But since the psi-fungus overloaded from the feedback of being involved in the taste-linked performance eating and ate them, it merged them without properly being able to integrate them into the single personality of a true Elder Brain. (Remember, Illithids don't become petitioners when they die--they merge with their elder brain. There is no other afterlife for an Illithid.) As discussed in the Illithiad, illithids despise partial personalities--their survival and reproduction depends upon it. So they are fundamentally required to try to excise any part of the brain that is trying to exert independent thought. Which, in this case, was all of them. It is likely that the creature would have destroyed much of itself until only one dominant personality was left. At that point it would have become much more like a true Elder Brain (with the accompanying 5 mile radius of psi influence that would surely have eaten much of Berryessa.) Volpe is a true blend of many things: elf, human and halfling. He does not see himself as being made of parts--he is himself, with one unique identity. Problem is, without having peers like himself to associate with, he is anxious about who and what he is, what his purpose in life is, etc. and this anxiety keeps him endlessly on the move, and detached from other people. So his integration is successful, but his self understanding and his ability to connect with other people is not. His other problem is that he is hundreds of years old, and he finds it difficult to connect with shorter lived purebred halflings who come and go so quickly. He wonders what is the point of trying to create anything when he has seen so many things end. As a historian, his is obsessed with uncovering evidence of the ends of things older than himself. Miguel is like him--a mix-breed. Also unfathomably old. If Volpe is hundreds of years old, Miguel is thousands of years old. He has learned to cope with being what he is. He is in the story to give Volpe a chance to see that it is not all futile, just because it is also all endlessly falling in to the sea. Also because, like a certain moderator that I chose to honor, he has the gift of being able to set limits on what is acceptable behavior without doing harm. If Mirabelle learns nothing more from him than how to accept help gracefully when she needs it, she has learned one of the things she needs to know to be able to grow.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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