Geron Kees

I can offer one right now

My friend, we would NEVER want to have you committed! Your speculations are as good as anyone's, and often better. What you said above is pretty good, considering what you know of the story thus far. But, I'm sure you know I can't say more! But you keep speculating. That's part of the fun!

Jamie awoke feeling rested. He had had a good night's sleep - amazingly good, considering that they were somewhere very far beneath the earth, in the tunnels of a complex old beyond imagining. The things the ancients had made were of lasting quality, and even extended to such simplicities as the cushion they had slept upon. Even after millennia of time, it still rivaled the beds in Castle Cumberstone for comfort. Jamie had decided to ignore the apparent conflict of age with his surroundings, cho

I heard that Pandora was one of the ancients. That is enough to make me cautious!

If I got rid of all the critters, the silence in the forest would be DULL!

The thing that grabbed Snave grabbed the guy at the back of the group. Maybe dumb, but remember it was dark behind Snave, because he had the light, and these critters don't like light. Pest control? Then there would be no danger at all!

I'm not sure I'd call what they're doing 'child's play'. Not just yet, anyway!

Are you saying you miss Charlie and company? Irik's people are people.

If your patience extends to tomorrow, you'll be fine! Thank you for the kind words.

And that they learn to use them when they need them!

The corridor ended at another circular staircase, this one leading downward into total darkness. The wolf-creature indicated that they should follow, and started down. But it seemed to negotiate the steps with far greater ease than they did themselves, and soon vanished downward around the spiral. Dorf, who was leading the way, seemed unworried about that fact, saying over his shoulder to Jamie that had the creature not been interested in their welfare then it wouldn't have bothered with a rescu

I would think that a science capable of star travel would be more than able to look us over from orbit, without ever having to risk sending explorers to the surface. One good look at the ways humans have dominated the earth, and that would be enough for me not to want to visit it. But we could also be just as far beyond what aliens understood as they could be beyond what we could understand. I can imagine a scenario where aliens arrive, survey the earth, and move on, quoting in their records that a planet was discovered, but that nothing lives there.

Rooby Roo!

Which brings to mind the question so many have asked, 'if there are aliens out there in the universe, where are they?'. We stare outward with a purely human perspective. In our considerations on which of the thousands of exoplanets we've discovered might harbor life, we only really can consider what we know - the type of habitat that will support the type of life we know. We can't help but to limit our seeking by the standards we are familiar with. The term 'alien', by its very meaning, refers to something or someone that is NOT familiar. NOT known. There seems to be no way we can seriously search for other life, if we confine our looking to places we feel familiar with. Even human groups can be so different as to seem wildly alien to each other. As your boat example clearly shows, when something is so unfamiliar to our senses as to be unrecognizable, it ceases to have meaning for us. Even today, with our reasonably advanced technology, if something occurred that was so far beyond what we knew to be possible as to lie outside any frame of reference we might have, there would be more people ready to attribute that happening to magic or divine intervention than there would be to a science that was simply incomprehensible to our senses. Aliens could be all over out there, even waving their equivalent of flags at us, and still we might be unable to see them, because what they were doing was beyond our ability to recognize. Even more interesting is the idea that they could have even visited us, and we simply could not grasp them there among us, because they fell outside every criteria for life we could know or imagine.

To Raven for your review: Thanks for another kind review. I keep responding to your reviews, and save them, and they keep NOT showing up. Maybe magic will intervene at some point, and they'll all appear!

I think that most people envision 'dancing among the stars' as very romantic. There would be some adults present at these dances, but I think elves are less prone to the mishaps of human teens, and so these adults would not have to 'chaperone' nearly as acutely as they would at a human dance.

Response to Raven for your review: Thank you! The system refuses to save my responses to reviews. My skwish must not be strong enough here!

I like this story, too. Merry Christmas!

A 'league' is the same measure that we know here, yes.

Thank you. Happy to have you along for the journey!

I remember reading once about how, during WWII, allied forces landed on Pacific islands that had never seen any other civilizations. The natives were awed by the aircraft, seeing them as mystical or magical artifacts, rather then more advanced technology. As the war wound down and the allies left, and took their planes with them, the natives built mock-ups of the aircraft from bamboo and rushes, and placed them out in open fields, hoping to lure back their visitors from the skies. Perspective is everything. One man's science is another man's magic!

The relationship between science and fantasy has always been clear to me. The blending of the two, science fantasy, has always been one of my favorite genres.

Oh, right. Robert Lynn Asprin's anthology series. Some of my favorite authors contributed to that series. I've also read Asprin's 'Myth' stories. That was some time back, though.

Well, you know how excuses and bosses DON'T mix! 😁

Can you explain that one?