jssangel

[jssangel]

~ Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules

AUTISM? In MY Victorian novel?

Actual things that happen in the 1897 Dracula novel, without context:

A character has ominous nightmares and attributes them to eating too much paprika

Dracula first appears wearing a fake beard

The person he was trying to fool with the fake beard immediately realizes Dracula and Beard Guy are the same man, due to both having really firm handshakes

We are told parrots are immortal unless fatally wounded

A Texan cowboy opens fire on a bat flitting around a window, and lodges a bullet in the wall of an occupied room

A woman is called a polyandrist for receiving blood transfusions from multiple men

An incorrectly addressed telegram leads to two deaths, multiple druggings, and several children being assaulted

Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, takes a lovely trip to the zoo and freaks out the animals so badly that he gets mentioned in a newspaper article

The one character who knows anything about vampires spends a good two-thirds of the book refusing to talk about vampires

Dracula went to Satan's Witchcraft Academy and somehow this is only brought up in two throwaway lines

A character gets stuck inside a circle of communion wafer crumbs

A major plot point of the book is Dracula (who was said to be a brilliant scholar and has the strength of twenty mortal men) realizing he can move boxes without human help

Someone is referred to as "manifestly a prig of the first water"

Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules

A hospital lets a mental patient escape to see what will happen

A character starts vomiting up feathers from eating whole birds

A doctor refuses to give a medical diagnosis and instead makes a speech about growing corn

Dracula impersonates another character just by wearing the same clothes, despite being taller and visibly much older. This deception is successful.

A character "cleans" a room by eating all the insects in it

Suddenly: rats. Thousands of them.

The heroes progress in their efforts through "the wonderful power of money," i.e., bribery

Dracula has three other vampires in his castle. Their relation to him is never explained, nor are any of them named.

A character insists his salvation depends on having a pet cat

Dracula is thwarted by flowers on more than one occasion

A group of vampires stand in the hall outside a man's bedroom, talking loudly about their plans to eat him. When he comes to the door to confront them, they run away laughing

Dracula wears an unfashionable hat and gets roasted for it

A group of Romanians encounter a disheveled, shouting man and, "seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they [give] him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."

A boat crashes due to Dracula having the munchies

A wolf is thrown through a window and immediately runs off, confused and covered in glass

Dracula makes a bed

[jssangel]

When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[jssangel]

A+ parenting

Concept: A gender reveal party but AFTER the kid is born.

Like when the kid is 6 or 12 or 18 or 24. When the kid has decided what their gender is or isn’t.

[jssangel]

[me seeing your trek fic notification] *with the same enthusiasm as the tiger got out poem* YESS. YESSSSS

This is one of my favorite poems so this is the highest of compliments.

[jssangel]

Here’s a video so you can hear the water and the thrushes. I took it for you because you couldn’t be there. <3

[jssangel]

Really fucking fucked up.

if I had a nickel for every time I voted for the potential first female president over trump and trump won I’d had two nickels and it’s really fucking fucked up that it happened twice

[jssangel]

Oh my god hit the reblog so fast. Potatola for Kamala!

[jssangel]

here's what we know so far

[jssangel]

Well, we can talk about it closer to the time!

actually bouncing off this post:

alternate scenario where the rebels continue to think the whole thing is a wacky coincidence and that Darth Vader has mistaken Luke for his actual long-lost son

decide this is too good an opportunity to pass up, send Luke in as an undercover agent

Luke ''''pretending'''' to be Darth Vader's son and faking going along w Vader's attempts to turn him to the dark side like yeah i love anger & hate let's do this. can you show me how you do that move where you throw people in the air with your brain.

he is secretly feeding information back to the rebellion all the time constantly

a number of Vader's underlings are pretty sure Luke is a rebel spy but everyone is too afraid of Vader to argue with him on it

Vader meanwhile is desperately trying to train Luke while keeping Palpatine from finding out his son is still alive. Luke wanders in while he's mid imperial conference call and gets tackled to the ground.

after a couple of months Vader decides Luke has had enough training for the 'we should kill the emperor and rule the galaxy together' speech

Luke (who has in a weird way kind of got to like Vader at this point) radioing the rebellion like guys call me crazy but i think we might be able to get this guy on side

[jssangel]

WIBTA for going to my high school reunion even though the two witches I stripped of magic are going?

(Read for free on Patreon (X))

I (28 witch) was in a coven during high school. Not really even a coven. We weren’t recognized and there wasn’t a clear division of responsibilities. We did have a high priestess but she hadn’t Declared or been Initiated or whatever she believed. Looking back, her learning was all over the place (and a little problematic, honestly. I remember her calling a poppet a Voodoo doll before being called out by another member). Let’s call her Sarah.

Sarah was a year older than the rest of us (still the same grade though) and her mom was a witch so that made her the high priestess. She was the one who would organize all of our rituals and held the power of veto over any proposed spells. While you think that’d mean she’d provide the ingredients, she never did. She did tell us what to buy and, let me tell you, some of those things were expensive for a high schooler. We met in the park behind her house, and she demanded that at least one of us be in every one of her classes. If we weren’t, we’d be “cycled” out of the coven until our parents convinced the school to transfer us in.

Any alt kid knows what I’m talking about because they had a Sarah in their life. If she was angry, we had to be angry (and a little afraid of her). If she was sad, we were expected to ask why. If she was happy, we had to be even more happy. You get the picture.

The problem came when Sarah added Jess (fake name) to the Coven during the start of our junior year. It was the first time Sarah allowed someone else from a witch family to join. Jess was a transfer student from England. She told us all that that made her magic deeper and more powerful because she was a “daughter of the witches you could not burn.” When I pointed out that that statement is historically inaccurate, Jess called me a “pilgrim.” She tried to convince Sarah to blind me (take away my decision-making power in the coven), but I was the only one with reliable access to dried herbs (my mom’s a botanist and didn’t count her stores like Sarah’s mom did), so Sarah said no.

Jess’ dislike of me got worse when I actually did dress like a pilgrim for Halloween that year. And, if I’m honest, I did take it a little far. I was a hot-headed kid. I followed her around the entire day and had kids sign one of two petitions – “Burn” or “Not Burn.” When the Burn Petition won, I could tell I went too far (there were a LOT of signatures).  I tried to make it a joke and told her that now she really was a witch we couldn’t burn.

Jess and I got in our first physical fight. Sarah eventually broke it up, but not before Jess ripped out a good chunk of my hair, and I broke the tiger’s eye bracelet she wore.

 I later heard from another coven member that Jess tried to lay a curse on me that night. Unfortunately for her, I was pretty interested in defensive work and had a fresh witch’s jar buried under my window. Her curse got caught in it and rebounded. Apparently, that’s how Jess got pink eye, not from her younger sister.

We fought like cats and dogs. Any time Jess would talk about England, I’d make fun of her accent. When I brought up what spell I’d like to do, Jess would call me a juvenile pilgrim. Eventually, Jess got smart. She’d text me insults rather than say them to my face so that she’d have a chance to tattle to Sarah before I got the chance to hit back.

Sarah pulled me aside at least three times to “address” the fights. She basically said that I needed to respect Jess more because she came from a witch family, like her. She told me I could learn a lot from Jess if I stopped acting like a human. When I pointed out that we are humans, just humans who have elected to use magic, she got really mad.

And when Sarah got mad, she could make life really difficult.

My spell for luck on midterms got passed over for Jess’ jinx on our English teacher. The jinx worked and Ms. Edel tripped, but guess who still came to class with a broken leg? MS. EDEL. Guess who failed their midterm?

ALL SEVEN OF US.

Damn, I can’t believe I’m still upset by this petty high school drama. Therapy did not work.

So safe to say that Jess and I never became friends. I love magic now and loved it then, but she took it so seriously. I’ve always believed magic should be fun. All the spells she brought to the coven required a spirit element—blood, hair, sacrifice. One of the members was a strict green witch and had to drop out because of it. We missed two full moons until Sarah approved Eileen to rejoin after she woke up from her coma.

(And before anyone freaks out about the coma – we all ended up in comas here and there. We were a bunch of uneducated and untrained baby witches who all had different belief systems. The fact that there wasn’t anything worse than a coma is a miracle. She wasn’t traumatized by it any more than I was by mine.)

Jess and I mostly avoided each other for the rest of the year. We always voted against the other’s spell and I’m fairly certain she tried to trip jinx me in the hall as often as I tried to trip jinx her. Sarah never tried to diffuse the tension between us. She confided in Eileen that she was grateful we kept each other in check.

Things could have continued on that way until we all moved away for college (or repeated the year after failing all those midterms) if it weren’t for the vernal equinox. Or, as we inaccurately called it, the Spring Solstice.

The way it worked was that we all got to propose a ritual during equinoxes. They’re powerful magical events on their own and when you bring intent to the party? They were always our biggest, most successful workings.

Sarah always chose what we did on those days. She pretended like we got to vote, but we all knew she would never choose one of our rituals. My freshman year, she made us all do one for beauty. Because it was a “make real what is in the eye of the beholder” type, some of our transformations were a little…traumatizing. I’m only telling you this so you understand the power an equinox has, okay? I do not think this way anymore. Other members were just as extreme. Eileen went from a Wendy from Wendy’s to a Jessica Rabbit. And I…

Well.

I grew rabbit ears and teeth. That doesn’t make me a furry! Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was super influential on BOTH Eileen and me. I was a kid and didn’t understand my own concept of beauty. It took almost three months before I got the ears to go away entirely.

Suffice it to say, we were all excited and nervous for what ritual Sarah would pick, which is why it was a blow to find out that she had picked a ritual - Jess’ ritual.

A ritual for power.

I didn’t want to do it from day one, okay? My belief is that whatever magic comes to you naturally is what’s okay to take. I think if you rip magic up from the earth or the abyss, it’ll change you. Maybe even corrupt you or change your personality.

But I was a kid and didn’t know how to explain that. Jess and Sarah were both from witch families and they seemed to think it was okay. Even though I didn’t like Jess, I did see her as a more “authentic” witch because of that. I know better now, but as a kid seeing all of her grimoires, I gave her false authority.

Jess explained the ritual to us over the next month. She talked about how we were going to be “tested.” The ritual would pull our spiritual selves from our bodies, and depending on how long we chanted, we’d return to them with more or less magic than when we started. She said that everyone in her family did it when they turned 18.

It wasn’t until three days before the equinox that she told us what would happen if one of us were to be judged unworthy.

“Mostly nothing,” she said. I remember her exact words, how her black hair spun as she soared through the air on the swings. We stood in a half circle before her and Sarah as they swung higher and higher. An audience to their aerial court. She said, “Sometimes people lose some of their magic. When the ritual decides they don’t deserve it.”

Eileen asked, “When the ritual decides? It’s sentient?”

“There’s an overseer we’ll call on,” Sarah said. She’d been the only one allowed to read Jess’ grimoire. Her lip curled and she leaned forward so she could look down over Eileen like an avenging angel as she swung overhead. “An impartial entity.”

“I am not a deity witch,” I said. I had long ago committed that I would never call on a higher being in any ritual. Most of our spells had to be modified for me so that I could swear to the cardinal directions rather than to the Morrigan or Hecate. “You know that.”

“You’re not swearing to anyone,” Sarah said and rolled her eyes.

“Which means no one is swearing to us,” Eileen muttered under her breath. But I could tell she had given up by the slump of her shoulders.

“It’s only the unworthy who lose their magic,” Jess reassured. Her eyes flashed at me. “Scared you’re unworthy?”

Yes. I was scared. I know better now than to think lineage has any place in witchcraft. It’s about the magic, always just the magic. But months of hearing their rhetoric had worn at my self-esteem. It really felt like if I didn’t do the ritual, I was as good as admitting I wasn’t a witch. If I did do the ritual…

Well. Obviously, I did the ritual.

I was a hot-headed teen, okay? I felt challenged. I decided that I would wear extra protections. Tiger’s eye and quartz charged with intention. I picked out a silver locket my mother gave me, filled with belladonna. She told me it symbolized beauty and choice.

Now, here’s where I may be the asshole.

I can’t give you a play-by-play of the ritual. It was ten years ago, and calling on that much magic has a funny way of warping memory. But what I do remember is this:

We gathered in the park before sunrise. Seven of us in new colors – spring green, white, soft yellow and pink. Jess made us get rid of anything with a working on it – crystals, cards, and ladders. She collected them all in a linen bag and threw them into the woods. I couldn’t get away with my tiger’s eye or quartz, but she missed the pendant my mother gave me. It was a warm comfort against my chest as we began.

We lit the fire together, each of us frantically thumbing our lighter to make sure the sparks caught at the same time.

Jess brought the chalice. We all cut our palms and let seven drops fall into it. (No, we didn’t use a clean blade. My cut got infected as hell and it itches like a witch. I know better now!) She bade us drink, and we did.

“Now the magic will see us as equal,” Sarah said while Jess prepared the next step. She licked her lips as if savoring the blood. “It will only be our wills determining the outcome.”

Jess doused us with oil and herbs. It smelled sharp and uneasy. I had provided the herbs and knew all of them were either fresh or dried to perfection. But it was rancid. There was rot in the air, but I couldn’t place it then. I wrinkled my nose and took up the chanting with the others to distract myself from the smell.

If you’ve ever chanted before, you know the stages. First, you’re just talking. You say the words and they mean something, but you don’t feel them. Then your mouth gets tired. You start messing up the timing of the words. You stutter. You stumble. The words lose meaning. Most people stop there. They fall silent and sink into a shallow meditation with heads full of fog.

You’re only a witch if you can reach the next step. You keep saying the words. They become comfortable. You wear the words like clothes and feel your cadence curl through you like a companion. Your body goes on autopilot and your mind relaxes. The chant turns smooth as silk. Depending on the chant, you lose yourself to the sweetness of your coven singing. Sometimes, you sink into the earth with them. Other times, you ride the flow of the magic like waves.

This time, the words pulled us away from our bodies. Jess slowly introduced new words to our chant. Words of summoning.

We called upon the Overseer.

Pressure fell around me like a vice. I couldn’t breathe even as the ritual fell from my lips without breaking. Magic had, at that point, always given me control. This? This was a complete loss of it.

I felt myself compressing. Smaller and smaller in the face of the being that was rising in the middle of the flames. It was not an observer. The moment I “saw” it, its endless form writhing in the space between the smoke, I knew that. It was a judge and jury.

It was a spider.

We chanted. It grew. It pulled us from our bodies like spiderweb and spooled our essences onto its forelimbs. It was not what Jess described and, simultaneously, it was. We were being tested. Our psyches were being tested.

So long as we chanted, the being would be contained. However, the longer it was contained, the more of us it could take. If we let it go, what would it do? Would it return any part of our magic to us? Any part of who we were?

Or would it eat?

This wasn’t a test of magic. It was a test of faith. Faith in each other and faith in the ritual.

For those practitioners out there, you can see the problem. I didn’t enter the ritual with faith. My intent was flawed from the beginning. We’d had spells fail because of lack of belief. I had never been the person who didn’t believe.

Until then

My words wavered. The Overseer turned its eyes to me. I could see my magic like thread before it, shimmering against the backdrop of its maw.

Then another tremor. Eileen dropped a word. The Overseer split and looked at both of us. Someone else faltered. One of the coven – I couldn’t see them – fell and went silent.

The sky yawned overhead, empty and cold. The embers from the fire spun up into it and were lost. The Overseer rippled and I felt our coven shrink in the face of it.

I gasped around the chant and looked across the fire. The light licked Jess’ gleeful face. Her eyes hungered for my failure. I could see it. Through the connection of the Overseer, I could feel it.

Jess and Sarah changed the chant. To this day, I don’t remember if they taught it to the rest of us. There are so many parts of the ritual that I’ve left out or forgotten. But I remember them chanting different words. The circle grew discordant.

“I offer my magic so I may be unspun and woven anew,” they said. The words have imprinted themselves like bitters under my tongue. “I offer my magic so I may—”

Some of the other members tried to pick up the new chant. Their voices grew weaker and the Overseer’s limbs began to extend out towards each one of us.

I wouldn’t offer my magic to that thing. I wouldn’t be unspun.  Eileen was stuttering. I saw her fall to her knees. I was close behind.

I threw my necklace into the flames.

Belladonna. Beautiful and deadly. It has meant choice to many women and many of them have been from my own family. It's extreme and it’s final. An end that doesn’t always make room for a new beginning.

Pretty words that cover up what I meant when I threw it into the Overseer.

My intent was Death.

Entities never die. I’m sure the Overseer didn’t. It howled. The wind kicked up and brought the flames into a spiral ten feet tall. Its forelimbs shattered, and I reeled myself back together greedily.

Not all of us were safe from the Overseer’s desperate struggle against my death curse.

Sarah and Jess were alone in the third phase of the ritual. They had changed the chant. They had offered their magic and asked the entity to do with it what it will. They believed.

And because they believed, the Overseer took their magic with it.

I think it was the first coma Jess ever fell into. Her family certainly acted like it. They whisked her back to the East Coast before the end of the year. I heard from Eileen that she woke up shortly after I left for college.

Magicless.

Sarah too.

I fully own that I was responsible for the ritual failing. I panicked. I’ve gone through every excuse over the years. I didn’t know what the ritual really was. I was just a kid. I took magic too lightly. It was their fault for not letting us read the grimoire for ourselves. But, at the end of the day, the real reason the ritual failed was because I panicked and I let that panic break my belief.

I moved on to college and it felt like running away. I’ve never returned to my hometown. I’m happy with the life I’ve built. My magic summer camp gives me time to travel during the winter months, and I feel like I’m making a real difference in young witches’ lives.

Nowadays I teach young witches to never do a working without full intent. If they have doubts, they don’t do it. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way ten years ago. I tell them it can cost them more than their magic. It can cost them their lives.

Eileen is still back home and she says Sarah rarely comes out of her house. Sometimes she sees our former high priestess wandering the school grounds on nights of the full moon. I hear from other members of the coven that Jess’ family put out a bounty on me a few years ago. However, I never saw an assassin so I think that was just a rumor.

So, knowing that they’re still not over it, would I be the asshole for attending my high school reunion next month? I’ve been craving reconnection with my roots, but I’d be subjecting Sarah and Jess (though Jess marked Maybe on the RSVP) to my presence.

I know they must hold a grudge. If they were still witches, that would be a problem. I don’t think I’d be able to defend myself from one of their workings since I blame myself for what happened. But since they’re not, it’s not really a danger. That’s pretty asshole-ish, right? Ignoring their feelings because they don’t have the magic to back it up?

So WIBTA for attending my high school reunion even though the two girls I stripped of magic will be attending?

-----

Thanks for reading! It looks like I'll have quite a few updates for the anthology! I am still obsessed with this format and can't wait to share some of the updates over the next few weeks.

If you'd like to support me before the anthology, please consider supporting me on Patreon (X)! I post new stories every week and many of my patrons saw the above story a week early.

The current AITA story takes place in the same universe as our former Cryptid (X). About a poor, poor boy who is just proud to be a regional Nightmare. Why is everyone so mad at him?

See y'all next week!

[jssangel]

This reminds me of a post I saw a while ago where the jerk dude monkeys were accidentally poisoned and it only took one generation for acting like a jerk to become completely unacceptable in monkey land and for anyone who acted like a jerk to get driven out.

Interspecies lesbianism

[jssangel]

This this a thousand times this. I’ve had a ton of jobs in a ton of places. In some cases there was institutional care ( really!) in some there was not. But generally, as a human, the day goes by more happily when I notice that the other people are also people. I like my team. We all think we are funny! We get the job done and care for each other.

i totally get that people don’t want to fall into the trap of “family” work environments or whatever but my god i feel like every time i see discussion about office settings everyone has such an insanely cynical negative attitude towards literally everyone they work with. even without most major social media sites i still see this ALL the time online where everyone is like “no one at work cares for you. arrive, do your job, leave. they’re not your friends. don’t be fooled.” or they insist that coworkers making small talk is somehow insidious and they always have ulterior motives omg like….they’re literally just people at their job….they’re literally YOU? sure no one is saying you have to be besties with them but this weird rampant paranoia taking place within social situations in the workplace boggles my mind. also shocking news it makes work easier and less draining if you find a couple people there to joke around with and talk about your day and maybe vent about stress. i promise the mom of 3 who works at the desk next to you is not asking about your day to secretly report back to your boss and trap you in a toxic work environment or whatever like…..she’s just being nice

[jssangel]

[jssangel]

Plus she discovered oral sex. And copper.

So you know Clan of the Cave Bear? It’s a 1980 novel by Jean M Auel about a little girl in Paleolithic Ukraine who is raised by Neanderthals. The Neanderthals call her Ayla, which is their best attempt at pronouncing her birth name, and by the end of the book she seems to have forgotten what it originally was.

We see the disaster that orphaned her in the beginning of the book, but she gets amnesia soon after, and her birth family never appear on the page. We know that she lived with her mother, that her mother was blonde, that at least one other person lived with them, and there’s one line that implies she also lived with her father. And she could swim well, because they had to cross a lot of rivers, and bridges weren’t really a thing yet.

So anyway my not-totally-serious theory is that her family is from the future. Here’s my reasoning, sorted in ascending order by how convincing I think they are!

Note: I refer to modern humans as just “humans” here, because the only other way I can think of to distinguish them from Neanderthals is calling them H. sapiens sapiens, and that takes too long to say, and also sounds pretty clinical. So when I say humans, I specifically mean modern humans, not anything in the Homo genus.

-Ayla has blonde hair and blue eyes thousands of years before those traits seem to have evolved in humans. That argument works really well for the first book, before any other humans have appeared, but it falls apart the second Jondalar appears and the narration won’t shut up about his blue eyes, and to a lesser extent, his blond hair. Giving humans of that time period blond hair and blue eyes probably seemed a lot more plausible in 1980, when the book was published. Still, though. It got me thinking.

-One of the small bits of information we do get about Ayla’s birth family is that after they died, “She had nowhere to go and she had no one who would come and look for her.” Why do they have so little contact with the outside world that the narrator knows nobody will look for them? They live in a lean-to, so there’s not very many of them, so where did they come from, and why don’t they have ties to their parent group anymore? Also, I’m sure I remember reading a line where one of the Neanderthals talks about how humans don’t normally come this far south, although I can’t find it at the moment. Even if I made that up, the closest humans do appear to live several months travel to the north, based on the second and third books. Ayla’s family lived in the middle of nowhere, with no other people to turn to, for no explained reasons.

-Ayla doesn’t have anything to eat after her birth family’s deaths. She tries eating a leaf, but it’s bitter, so she spits it out and doesn’t try anything else in the days she’s wandering alone. I don’t expect a five-year-old to be an expert at foraging or anything, but it’s weird that she doesn’t recognise anything at all as being potentially edible. Did her family never take her on gathering trips, or prepare food where she could see, or give her anything recognisable as something that grew out of the ground? They didn’t have to be actively teaching her or anything, especially since it turns out she’s super smart at foraging when she does start paying attention. It’s almost like she’s never had any reason before to associate the edible plants in the area with food.

-One of the most memorable thing about the later books, other than all the sex, is the way Ayla invents a ridiculous amount of new technology. She invents surgical stitches, the sewing needle (in different books), animal taming, horseback riding, the travois, the spear thrower (with Jondalar), the fire striker, and the idea that sex makes babies. She also has a great memory, allowing her to learn foreign languages and customs very quickly. This is explained as being something she had to develop to keep up with the Neanderthals and their genetic memories, but I have a different theory. Towards the end of the Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla participates in a genetic memory ceremony led by her adoptive father, Creb, who is so good at having genetic memories that he can psychically guide other people through theirs. She obviously has them as well, or it wouldn’t have worked, but she can’t consciously access them like the Neanderthals can. So maybe she invented all those things because her ancestors already knew about them, and what Creb did allowed her to remember on her own sometimes? It’s a stretch, but I still find this more believable than Ayla inventing everything and learning languages in a week because she’s just that amazing.

-When Ayla is five, Creb shows her how to count, something the Neanderthals see as a special magic that only super genius shamans like Creb could grasp. Ayla not only understands immediately, she also does some simple arithmetic. That’s a lot of abstract concepts to understand at once without training, especially for a five-year-old. Modern kids spend so much time learning basic mathematical concepts for a reason. And in the sequel, it’s mentioned that Jondalar’s culture also consider counting to be magic, and usually leave it to their shaman, although Jondalar is also capable of doing some arithmetic with difficulty. Jondalar is twenty-one at this point and used to be in a relationship with the shamaniest shaman in all of Ice Age France, so that makes a little more sense. Who is teaching five-year-olds about arithmetic in Ice Age Ukraine?

-Ayla likes it when her half-Neanderthal son calls her “mama”, because it reminds her of something that makes her want to cry. This implies that she called her own mother “mama”, like in a lot of Indo-European languages, including English. It’s not totally unbelievable, because it’s pretty common for languages to have words for parents that babies can easily say, but it’s still very strange that it was that combination of sounds in particular.  And it doesn’t feel like in the second book when Ayla is learning Zelandonii and it’s rendered as English. It’s just a sound Ayla and Durc make that the Neanderthals don’t, that seems to be the same way she referred to her mother.

-I mentioned the genetic memory ceremony with Creb earlier, but I didn’t go into detail: Basically Ayla took some drugs, (She’d made too much and didn’t know how to safely dispose of it without upsetting the spirits or something), and wandered into the shamanistic ceremony it was meant for. Creb notices her, and uses his psychic powers to give her a mental tour of human evolution. Right at the end, after Creb has had to stop guiding her because they don’t share their more recent genetic memories, she briefly sees the present day. It’s described as accidentally overshooting, but that’s not really consistent with the rest of the book. How can Ayla remember things that haven’t happened yet? There must be a physical basis for the genetic memories, because their accumulation is given as a reason for why the Neanderthals had bigger heads than humans. So it can’t be an entirely spiritual thing. If Ayla saw planes and skyscrapers as part of her genetic memory drug trip, it’s because her ancestors saw it. This could also tie into why Creb was so depressed after this, and what made him so sure the Neanderthals had no future: He’d seen enough of Ayla’s future memories to understand that they basically didn’t, except in the form of hybrids like Ayla’s son.

So here’s what I think happened, based on not very much: A married couple went back in time to study the Neanderthals, which explains why they were in Neanderthal territory, and either had a daughter or took their daughter with them. The earthquake that killed them was not a normal earthquake. Normal earthquakes don’t open up fissures large enough to be described as an abyss, they don’t close again afterwards, and I don’t see any reason for them to smell like rot, or to burp after swallowing people. That was a supernatural event brought on by things existing in a time they weren’t supposed to be in. Probably doesn’t bode well for Ayla, or for Durc or Jonayla.

All this kind of ruins the “Ayla as the future of humanity” theme the Clan of the Cave Bear has running through it, but it’s fun to think about.

[jssangel]