Dear materfamilias:
Thank you for the entirely unexpected care package. I suspect few other than you could pull off delivery of uphas fruit considering how quickly it spoils away from its tree and the desert air. I devoured it like a cub while haunches-deep in outlining for my first exams. A taste of home when the stakes and the pressure are so high is a great blessing. But you knew that, which is why you went to an expense as to which I will not speculate to provide it.
Contracts the human way are confusing. At first I thought what they call good faith was what we call honor, but not so, and it has placed me behind where I would like until I sorted it out in my head. The compartmentalization necessary to succeed at this is a taxing endeavor, between our law and theirs, which is so divergent in its philosophies that comparisons are futile. I enjoy civil procedure, unlike my classmates: the words mean what they say, deliberately constructed. Apparently in the human law they are only recently catching up to linguistic precision. Unsurprising, but difficult. The teacher reminds me of my grandmother.
The property professor I had that strange encounter with at the beginning of the semester has been invaluable. Quietly, all the nonhumans and demi-humans in the program end up introduced to each other, often through his ability to connect people with similar interests outside simply being different than the rest. There’s chatter about joining one of the national associations of other-than-human law students and forming a chapter here, but I’ve been too engrossed in my studies to really be involved. I have more in common with a djinn than a half-elf. I seem to have more in common with the human students from our lands and those nearby than with most of the non- and demi-humans. After all, one can’t tell a half-manticore from a human unless one is looking carefully – and as we discussed before I left, there are no families in Magisteria, since it has no desert.
I miss the desert, Mother. I want to sit under the uphas for forty days and nights like the sages when I get home. I understand the families need someone trained in Magisterian law. I understand they want someone who can pass among them instead of working through intermediaries, when it is necessary. But the sand and rocks and uphas fruit fresh . . . being without it is like a flame sputtering against a wind.
The work is difficult, but seemingly less so than for my classmates. How they can live under their system of laws and have to be led through its basic precepts like cubs is — worrisome, at their ages. How do they avoid breaking their law when they do not know the principles it roots upon already?
Their law is so different than ours that it is simply a matter of identifying their precepts, seeing where they followed them and where they deviated. Their results are often absurd, by our standards, but that I knew before I passed the entrance exams. They seem so unhappy. Some of that is the work, but some of that is simply the environment — the divisions among their peoples, the politics, the excessive and absurd procedures they call “red tape.” You were clever to designate me a princess with the Imperium; disgustingly, it smooths all kinds of paths that seem rocky for others.
Perhaps this is the result of not knowing the basis for your social compact and laws from childhood. There’s no real way to tell, I suppose. It’s not that we have no crimes, but since exile can be a death sentence to us unless we can reach the Tree of Safety, assuming such a thing even exists and isn’t the ravings of those whose exile ended before they starved completely, or simply what those who return call a wild uphas when they find them — it is different. To be exiled for three days is an inconvenience. To be exiled for nine years should be a death sentence, but we know some find their way back.
There is a nymph in the class above me. She seems to understand. They are tied to specific fields. We are simply tied to the existence of some uphas, any uphas, and unless you are exiled, no one can refuse you hospitality and sustenance or face exile themselves.
Their law is sprawling and contradictory, like their cities, like their ideas. Full of arguments over these strange ideas of owning the land, And they call us animals.
Through their weave I have found out there’s a thriving underground market in our skins. Perhaps someday we will have the political capital to insist that all our skins be returned. Our teeth, it’s impossible to tell if we sold shed ones or they came from our corpses.
Nonetheless. Exams approach. I am confident in them, as much as one can be. The level of panic around the school is unsettling. I go to the undergraduate commons, where there is still anxiety but not full-on terror.
Give my love to the family. If they agree, some shed uphas bark might be helpful at this time.
Your daughter, about your work,
Dawon
Hello, folks! It’s me again, Pope Lizbet, aka Elizabeth R. McClellan (J.D., Magisterius University). Some of you may remember Dawon from my 2011 guest tale, “A Question of Ownership.” Three years may have gone by for me and a law degree that does allow me to practice in accessible jurisdictions, but Dawon’s still a first year. I hope you enjoyed this old and not-quite-familiar face from the past.
Normal content will resume sometime next week. So you’re not too deprived of excellence by Alexandra Erin until then, though, stop by Microhorror.com to check out her recently accepted story, “The Comedy Without.” Thank you again for all your support.
Evocative stuff, this.
Yes the law can be a mess can’t it. Will we be learning why later?
Have you ever looked at our law? Its the messy coagulation of civilization to date. For example there are multiple laws covering different kinds stealing, but its all just theft.
I find it amusing that she takes offense at Manticore skins, whereas the Manticores themselves won’t even aknowledge humans as people until they jump through arbitrary hoops.
It’s kind of hard to feel sorry for a giant monster full of claws and teeth that sets it’s own precedent.
I think they do acknowledge humans now, it was just back then that they didn’t know what to do about us.
Thats never actually mentioned. Given her reaction in the original OT she sided with the manticore and its motivations 100 percent. There’s no mention that anything’s changed or that Manticores are any more cuddly.
Her crack about Manticores being people extended to the Manticore, but she never questioned if its own actions were justified. After all, it’d never have died if it didn’t force the riddle.
>After all, it’d never have died if it didn’t force the riddle.
What? The guy spent months hunting it down. He was going to try to kill it even if he didn’t have to answer a riddle.
…and the only way he’d ever have a chance is if the Manticore assumed it was food and went through the ritual after the first meeting. We’re explicitly told he had no other alternatives except for a surprise attack at that specific moment. If the manticore just walked up and shook hands whenever he saw another soul there’d be literally no other options.
The entire hunt is based on the correct presumption that the only way a Manticore can see a mortal at default is as a victim. It breaks down the moment that becomes untrue.
If the manticore had walked up and shook hands the hunter would have killed it anyway. Answering the riddle makes the manticore let its guard down, if it had its guard down from the start then there is no difference – accept that the hunter would have an easier time.
I think you’re forgetting the obvious issue.
The Manticore letting it’s guard down wasn’t what killed it, bowing down into a prone position was. That’s the entirity of the opening. If the Manticore greeted it as a person and DIDN’T bow, then there’d literally be no opening to exploit.
When does it say the manticore bows?
I don’t see anything that implies that the manticore does anything that makes it especially vulnerable – just that it doesn’t kill the answerer outright.
Right, I misremembered that passage. However, Dawon’s own dialogue in describing the events betrays the double standard better than I can articulate it:
“…when the manticore was extending you the courtesy of being treated as a thinking being rather than food by not killing and eating you, betray that courtesy by engaging in the spectacular acts of unprovoked violence…”
Personhood must be earned. A threat upon your life by a Manticore does not count as provocation. The manticore is implicity superior to you in that it’s the one that decides if you even count as people.
Remember that the vast variety of people and non-people in this world is far and beyond our own. The manticore doesn’t have the convenience of knowing that “all people shaped things are people” – because “people shaped” for a manticore is “manticore shaped, and maybe ones shaped like things I have already determined are people” – hence the turing test.
Otherwise the manticore would end up either killing lots more people, or always letting its prey go.
Now clearly a riddle isn’t the best test, however this world also has a variety of semi-intelligent creatures that may count as food, but still pass a less challenging test. To quote an unrelated character from an unrelated story “The ability to speak does not make you intelligent”.
Again – insufficient evidence.
…which is still on the onus of the manticore, not any and everyone it meets.
If the manticore presumes it can do as it pleases with anything that isn’t strong or smart enough to best it, then it should presume that anyone that is strong enough can do the same. I think Emberies’s “we are monstrous folk” line fits here quite well. If the manticore lives like a monster that eats people, then it can die as the same.
I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate. If the Manticore had assumed the hunter was a person from the get-go, he still would have killed it. The riddle is the Manticores way of identifying that it has encountered a thinking being, rather than lunch.
The hunter didn’t care if the manticore was or wasn’t a thinking being one way or another – so riddle or not he would have attempted to kill it. Now the manticore could have simply attacked indiscriminately, but that would have given the potentially intelligent and friendly opponent no chance.
The existence of the riddle is the manticores attempt to avoid killing other thinking beings – therefore it can be surmised that the manticore, as a race, respect the rights of other thinking beings to a greater extent than the humans.
You call this an “arbitrary hoop”, however that assumes that the manticore knows and understands what a human is to begin with, but still asks the riddle knowing fully that humans are in fact thinking beings. We don’t actually know that – it’s just as likely that a manticore may have little to no knowledge of humanity (at the time), and would therefore be uncertain of whether the human is a person, or food. Furthermore this assumes human-like thought patterns, that the manticore would naturally be able to identify two individual humans as similar – and imply that if one was intelligent so must the next.
We don’t have enough information to determine that a manticore’s riddle is anything but a sincere attempt to avoid harming other thinking beings. However, we do know that the humans knew full well that a manticore was, at least to some extent, intelligent. And that they used this knowledge to gain and betray the trust of them for profit.
…and literally none of that is relevant. I don’t care what the Manticore’s standard is, what matters is the standards Dawon holds Manticores to and the standard humans are held to by the same person.
Humans must refrain from attacking Manticores. Manticores are free to foist arbitrary trials upon humans and murder them upon failure. That’s ALL that matters.
And don’t give me any excuses about what they do or don’t either. A humanoid with complex metal tools and a language is clearly sentient and the Manticore recognizes this as such. Hence why the riddle is the Manticore opening with dialogue and expecting an answer, then proceeding to make the threat regardless. They KNOW that complex metal tools and language mean sentient, because unless I’ve drastically misread the MUniverse Kobolds and goblins with similar recognizable equipment are native to the same continent and weild directly analogous weapons and use directly analogous tools.
I’m not saying that the manticore are, necessarily, innocent in all of this. However I don’t think that there is enough evidence to say that Dawon is being hypocritical. Dawon clearly supports the actions of the manticore in the case, and abhors the trade in their bodies – and the (now illegal) hunting of their people. However this isn’t an indication that she thinks it’s okay for for manticores to eat people in general, but not for people to sell manticore skins – it only means that she thinks that the manticore living in a time and place where it could be hunted freely, had the right to kill and eat its attackers if they failed the riddle (or betrayed it after succeeding).
That’s exactly what you’re saying, read the OT again.
Dawon isn’t condemning that specific hunter in the statement, she’s condemning anyone who would attack the Manticore in that circumstance, which the Manticore sets the terms of.
The Manticore assumes people are food at default and that’s what causes the terms of engagement to be what they are. If it wasn’t a hunter, but instead a random trader shipping goods through the area, then the manticore would still have used the riddle and still presumed it was food.
As such, the Manticore is one hundred percent to blame for whatever happens to it. If I pulled a gun on what I presumed was an illegal immigrant, then put it away when I saw the mans green card, I wouldn’t expect sympathy when he shot me in retaliation for pulling a gun on him to begin with. The fact that either hunter was prepared or profits is irrelevant to this discussion regarding Manticore conduct.
However the manticore doesn’t necessarily have any reason to assume that the being it encounters is actually intelligent. Hence the turing test of the riddle.
…which is why asking literally any question achieves the exact same result. Because answering the question in anything you’d recognize as language in any way proves personhood.
Not answering it right. Not assuming you were food(and explicitly FOOD. Not an animal and not an object, but something to be killed and eaten and nothing else).
The manticore has no reason to presume that the being is intelligent or worthy of respect. But by that measure it has no reason to presume it’ll be granted the same because the other person passes it’s test.
Is it so strange for her to empathize with her own people?
Did you miss perhaps that she is half manticore?
I think I’d take offense too at the skins of my people being treated like a commodity.
Right. But one can still point out the inherent hypocrisy in such a stance.
The bits about exile and hospitality seem out of place. Why would she need to explain her own society to her mother?
My take is she’s talking about her own predicament. She’s been exiled and her family is spinning it as best they can. She’s going to school to become useful again after a nine year exile is up and she’s a princess to the Imperium.
She isn’t explaining her society to her mother, she’s comparing the society she is dealing with to it.
Starting to read, I’m guessing this is Dawon from the last of your chapters? I’d already been hoping to read more about her.
Also, I wonder if this “uphas” plant is at all related to the Upas from one of R.E. Howard’s poems?
I’m a bit confused why she first speaks of the uphas fruit they sent as as though they were an unexpected treat, and later refers to how vital to her survival they are.
I think she means that they’re tied to the existence of the uphas in that it’s the only natural food source for a wide range in their desert environment, so without it, and without being able to reach an uphas tree, they would starve.
I’m thinking the fresh was the treat part of it, whereas she can survive with other varieties, dried, frozen, canned and so forth, but it sounds to me like she’s getting it as if it were freshly picked.