Memory 4: The Peril of Future History

[wontforbidtherain]

Cat is in a dark bedroom with the lights out. Neko gets up to sit on her bed. She asks if Cat is awake — and uses her given name, Aphra. Neko is enjoying travel, not enjoying cold winters, and wishes Aphra’s town had books in English or Japanese. Aphra also names her town: Innsmouth and says ‘we’d have ended up in the camps a decade earlier’ if the people of Innsmouth had been friends with Japanese immigrants for long enough to write books they could read.

Aphra tries to sleep, but has a nightmare of heat and desert-dryness. She gets up, and goes to the dining room where Professor Trumbull is working on things. When Aphra says she’s getting water, Trumbull mentions where the salt is kept. Only Aphra drinks and washes her face with salt water does it occur to her that while this is normal for her, it is not normal behavior for a human host.

She returns to the dining room and gives a ritual greeting in another language (Enochian) that identifies that she recognizes Trumbull as a ‘Great One’ (one of the Yith). Trumbull comments that she should have caught on earlier, and that it’s not unusual for one of the Yith to be on campus at this university. She also addresses Aphra as ‘Water Child’. Aphra does ask what will happen to the original Trumbull when she gets her body back, and the Yith notes that she selected Trumbull both for being smart and resilient, so she wouldn’t stress out in the Yith’s home body, or (presumably) on returning after time has passed.

While Aphra doesn’t ask for an oracle for her future, she does ask why the Yith didn’t warn her people about ‘the raid’. The Yith mentions a similar situation with a group of people called the K’n-yan, who apparently went insane and are now called the Mad Ones under the Earth, and that the last sane one asked her the same question. Aphra comments dryly that if the Yith uses Aphra’s name as an example for the last of another race, the ck’chk’ck, it will not please them.

Things Learned:
• A given name. She is Aphra.
• Her hometown: Innsmouth.
• More ominous details about her backstory, given she mentions ‘camps’ and a raid on her people that was bad enough that it compares to another group of people all going insane, and nightmares of deserts. Note that someone familiar with American 20th century history might be able to piece together that given the clothing/technology (putting this at mid-century) and Neko’s ethnicity, the camps refer to the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. It won’t explain why Aphra and her people are there, as they obviously aren’t Japanese, and didn’t have a close relationship with them prior to this. (Also Spector in a prior memory mentions something that happened in the 1920s, which wouldn’t match up with Japanese-American history.)
• From a later memory, she already knew that Trumbull was possessed by some kind of weird time-traveling scholar. Apparently this is normal enough that her people have ways to ask ‘is this you?’ that are ritualized, and abnormal enough that Aphra hasn’t done this before.
• More groups of people: the K’n-yan, who are apparently insane for some reason, and the ck’chk’ck. Aphra’s last memory mentioned her people know about species that would form civilizations before and after humanity. She may identify the ck’chk’ck as the insect-like species she mentioned in a prior memory.
• What might be interesting to note is that there are Earth people and Water people mentioned here.
• Her own ‘human, but a subspecies’ nature: it has to do with water, and probably the ocean (given salt water[1]). Also her people live a long time, though what that means is not clear, only that the Yith consider it possible that “Water Children’ may be considered adults eventually.
• The Yith might be sort of terrifying (from previous memories Cat has seen), but they also are assholes. Or at least this one is.

[1] And by this time Thyme has probably figured out that if Cat cooks, her ability to season food for other people is trial and error. Cat’s level of ‘acceptable amounts of salt’ is borderline inedible to anyone else. And she will salt everything at least once. (She can learn what other people consider acceptable amounts of salt, but it’s meant asking people to taste things.)