Foresday, 7th Meluary, 1011. Winter, 5th Year of the Color Draught.
Scribble

For the last five years, the island of Scribble has recieved no rain. No rain means no color. Snow we have a plenty, but that only serves to wash out the landscape even more. Even the skins of we native to this country are muted– where we formally were vibrant shades of every color imaginable, now only shades of gray, black, and white remain. Only the hardy wrought-weed eyerises remain, since nothing kills them. In light of the problem, this humble painter has been commissioned to create a color garden on some cloudspace above Scribble’s boardwalk district. I just need to head off the island for some color seeds, since none remain here.

Lattersday, 10th Meluary, 1011
Managed to snag some red and blue seeds, with yellow on the way. Should be able to crossbreed them for things like orange, purple, and green. Might even be able to fold in some eyeris cuttings to get something approaching a pink. Wrought-weed sprigs are good for soil acidity anyway. Here goes nothing!

Shatterday, 12th Meluary, 1011
Sweet Mother Hue, these things take root fast! The yellow seeds came in yesterday, and the red and blue seeds have already taken root, with a couple tiny sprigs coming up. In a couple days, I should be able to make a cutting for the purple, and then for orange when the yellow sprouts. Not sure if I’ll even need the wrought-weed cuttings after all, just for the grayscale to get pinks, and more muted shades. The uncut hues coming from these color seeds make my eyes hurt, I’ve been too long without color.

Toosday, 15th Meluary, 1011
Got hold of a few sapling cloud trees. They have good roots, should keep this soil in place. Eyerises have already started growing throughout the garden. First splicing of primary colors has yielded a very impressive orange and a deep purple, almost indigo. Should be able to transplant the whole crop tomorrow.

Quaday, 16th Meluary, 1011
Upon transplanting the red into the general soil, the enriched soil, growth exploded! It literally burst out, as I watched, into a runner vine about a meter long. This is proving more successful than we’d thought to hope.

Septday, 18th Meluary, 1011
Successive transplants have proven equally successful. Soil around the redvine has already gained a deep, almost bloody hue. Spliced the purplevine with an eyeris, got a kind of pale violet.

Shatterday, 26th Meluary, 1011
The redvine has exploded! It’s climbing up the wall, sending hue in 8 directions! The orangevine and bluevine have started climbing up a cloud tree and planter, respectively. None of them seem to be showing signs of stoppage.

Foresday, 28th Meluary, 1011
It’s completely out of control. Each of the original transplants have ranged far from the planting spot. If they bleed together too much, I could loose the whole crop. Gonna have to find something to keep them under control.

Toosday, 1st Greyscael, 1011
Tried turpentine on one of my back-up bulbs. It dried out completely and crumbled into a blackish powder. That’s too extreme a solution. I can’t fix this with a chainsaw, I need a scalpel.

Septday, 4th Greyscael, 1011
Gardening supplier few islands over recommended chromavores. These are grazing bubbles, that feed exclusively on color. He gave me a few packets of larva to mature in the small pool here.

Preemptday, 6th Greyscael, 1011
The gestation period of chromavores is, apparently, measured in hours. It would also appear that my supplier lacks the capacity to tell the very subtle difference between “predator” and “symbiont”. The bubbles hatched from the pool, and did indeed gorge themselves on color, but they attack only the hue, not the vine. They eat just enough to keep reproducing, and the colors keep spreading.

Foresday, 14th Greyscael, 1011
We’ve closed off the garden in a cube. Hopefully, I can salvage something from this debacle in a hothouse environment. Meanwhile, I’m going to see what I can do about extracting dyes from these vines, get some color back into Scribble. Hopefully this isn’t a complete loss.

Solar systems are closer together, and the fabric of the galaxies are lousy with tears– wormholes. Given the speed with which travel is possible between planets and systems, the sentient species sail on solar winds and the tides of space/time.

Question is, do I keep humans as one of these sentient cultures– keeping in the trope of human as touchstone and anchor for the audience– or do I do away entirely with us? Focus on what could be called, from our standpoint, older races?

Want to move away from visual stereotypes of space opera. Definitely a Froudian aesthetic. Imagine The Dark Crystal as a space opera, at least visually. Very organic technology, living ships. Space whales. But not Farscape.  More an age of established empires.  Empires of what we call the Old Gods, now simply the Gods.  The Untenables.  The great, unknowable beings of the Cthulhu Mythos.  Likewise probably Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana, and Carcosa ain’t so lost, and the King in Yellow sits enthroned.  Maybe not directly, but certainly inspired.  If Gaiman can get away with a Lovecraft reference in everything he writes, then so can I, doggammit.

Gene-washing and genetic tampering in general have brought other legacies. We have unwittingly unlocked the full capacity of mind-over-matter. Telepathy, telekinesis, psychometry, clairvoyance, and even pre- and post-cognition. These abilities come at a price– overwhelming power and physical illness. Untreatable strains of the old cancers and autoimmune diseases unfailingly accompany these “blessings”. Psychics, like replicants, are considered in many ways anathema. They often exhibit very little control over their abilities, and express symptoms of diseases that remind people far too well of the vicissitudes of the past.

With conflict between governments at a minimum, most violence is at street-level. When one considers that 75% of the population lives well below the poverty line ($150,000/annum after inflation), life at ground-level is harsh, dirty, and mean. Not because the poor are naturally corse and violent, but because resources are in no way plentiful. While healthcare is at an all time peak of availability comparatively, the population spike brings us back to the standards of the late Twentieth Century. Even so, few people die of natural causes any more. The technical average life span is 150 years, but few people at ground level see that.

The super-wealthy .5% live, at the very least, in mile-high tower-cities. 1% of the rich live in sky hooks– incredible sky cities in low orbit, tethered to Earth by space elevators. There’s is the life promised by the most optimistic of the speculative fiction of the last 200 years.