[OPEN] observe the month of spring

[tehilim127_1]

Who: Zivia (tehilim127_1) & all comers (with prompt for Degas)
What: Settling in, and scrambling to prepare
When: April, prior to the event (backtagging welcome!)
Where: At home, at work (Town Hall), at the docks, at the Oak & Iron, at wits' end
Warning(s): To be added as relevant

At home
There's a lot of work that goes into making a house one's home, even when one receives it fully furnished. Zivia's resigned herself to doing it in stages, and moreover to those stages happening out of the order she would prefer, since according to the best-approximation calendar she's discussed with Lev-Lyubov and Anzu, Pesach is coming. Which means getting ready for that first.

She's put up a request on the community bulletin board; if it pans out, they'll be able to bake matzah, at least. Cleaning out the house she's been allotted is taking up a good chunk of the rest of her free time, though she might be willing to take a break to talk with a visitor.

At work (Town Hall)
The filing system isn't too hard to learn, it turns out. She takes notes during her brief training, writes up a couple of cheat sheets, and keeps one at her desk and one on her person. The chair and desk aren't particularly ergonomic, but they're sturdy and functional and won't completely ruin her wrists or spine, so she'll call it good.

It's been a while since Zivia's done any purely paper filing, but it's funny how it all comes back to you. Anyone else working there or visiting may overhear her humming to herself as she works.

At the docks (for Degas)
She hasn't forgotten the preacher's offer of help, so he's the one she calls on when she first comes across a task that needs an extra pair of hands. And, she's hoping, a cart or wheelbarrow or something to that effect, to help haul a bunch of items from her house down to the water's edge and back.

At the Oak & Iron
This city isn't the one she's always thought of as hers, but it's hers now, at least for now. She has to remember that. Has to learn that, internalize it until it feels like the truth. And that means, first and foremost, coming to know its people.

So even if she's a little tired most evenings now, Zivia makes a point of coming down to the pub after work at least twice a week, to meet her neighbors. Find her in the common room with a hot tea or a cold beer, looking for familiar faces or new ones.

At wits' end
Wildcard!

Comments

[tehilim127_1]

"Oh, we have debates over a lot of things in my religion," she grins. "We're known for it."

The tea's brewed and doctored by now; Zivia tastes hers and adds a smidge more honey. "Discarded everything from the old world," she repeats, consideringly. "No stories about what things were like before? -- How long ago was that?"

[astrogator]

Tayrey tries her own tea, and smiles in satisfaction. It might not be Cardalek coffee, but then nothing here comes close, and the tea is pleasant enough.

After that first sip, she answers, 'The war ended just over a century ago, as we count in standard years. The oldest of our colonies is almost twice that age, but they went out in cryosleep and were isolated until faster ships reached them. They kept the isolationist tendencies.' Tayrey has never been to Kishar, but the Kisharin spacers she's met have been idiosyncratic in interesting ways. 'I worked out that the oldest fragments of data we have probably date back three centuries or so. Songs, old objects someone escaping tyranny couldn't bear to leave behind. But all our official records date from the beginning of the war, at the earliest.'

[tehilim127_1]

"Huh." More reflective than dismayed, at least outwardly. "Assuming your standard year is anything close to the length of ours, that's not very long at all. And the liberation from tyranny -- do you have any stories about the period you lived under tyranny, or was that left behind too?"

[astrogator]

It had never seemed unusual in the slightest to Tayrey, not until she'd met people who could talk with confidence about what had happened on their homeworld thousands of years ago.

She thinks carefully. 'We have stories about what happened just before, to some of our people. The way our inventors and visionaries were persecuted for standing up to a government that wanted to crush them and steal their work.' Another sip of her tea. 'My great-grandmother was just old enough to fight in the last part of the war, but she never talks about anything from before. I don't think many people ever did - and she's very old now.' Past 120. Cardalek can extend healthy human lifespan to some degree, but there are limits.

[tehilim127_1]

Zivia nods slowly. "It's very rare, from all I've ever heard of, for a whole society to decide to stop telling stories about what happened before. Your people must have felt they had a very strong reason to make that call, for themselves and their descendants."

(She's trying to keep to herself her own feeling that no reason could possibly be good enough.)

"Do you keep records now, for posterity? For those in the future to know what came before them?"

[astrogator]

Tayrey is quick to answer. 'Yes, each colony world keeps its own records. It's ore difficult for spacers, because every ship is independent, but you could certainly find out a lot by reading the mission reports.'

She's still thinking it over, though, and adds, more reflectively. 'I think that after the war people wanted to be more intentional about how they raised children. Trying to do it in a way that would maintain a free society, and help us understand the necessary values to be good citizens, yes? That doesn't look the same on every planet, but everyone's trying.' Company children raised on virtue ethics. Kishar's commitment to equality and direct democracy. Fourth-generation spacers taught to value duty and friendship.

[tehilim127_1]

"There's something to that," Zivia agrees. "People have a lot of different ideas on how to raise kids, and how to give them the kind of values you want them to have ... I think we're all probably still gonna be wrestling with that problem for a long time. It'll never be easy and it'll never look the same to everyone, and maybe that's okay so long as everyone keeps trying."

[astrogator]

She nods. 'Not that it's a field I have any expertise in,' she admits, 'but I think it's better that way. To have that diversity of thought. Cultures set their priorities differently, right? And that's not wrong, raising one value over another, so long as it's a sound value to begin with. That and people are individuals. Adults and children both. It's why group education is inefficient.'

[tehilim127_1]

"Oh, I could talk for hours about education, group and otherwise," says Zivia with a grin, "and I probably will if I'm not careful -- both my parents were educators before they retired, and I picked up a lot. I have, shall we say, Opinions."

[astrogator]

Tayrey laughs lightly. 'If you want to share those opinions, I'll listen,' she says. 'My father always had a lot to say about it. As did my tutors, but that's expected. Not that any of them would approve of how I went about things. I was supposed to be a scientist, not a spacer. Guess I preferred the immediately practical approach.'

Not that there's no practicality in science, but studying it hardly compared to her shipside apprenticeship.