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tamingthemuseTitle: Conventional Wisdom
Fandom: N/A (original)
Prompt: Gossip
Warnings: None
Rating: G/PG
Word Count: 1 207
Summary: Edana's words are always true-- but what good is reality if it's simply a fabrication?
Part of a much, much, much longer piece. And it was going to fit better with the prompt, but I got bored, and decided to do a ridiculous interpretation of it.
Conventional wisdom holds that things are rarely true simply because human beings speak them. Reasoning, deduction, and experimentation must be employed jointly to create empirical truths, and if both those truths and the reasonings behind them can be proven to be utterly free from fallacy or doubt, then a statement made by a human being can become true.
But it also must be noted that conventional wisdom realised early on that it would make very little headway with Edana Aregawi, and thus abandoned her early in her life. It persevered through the storm of flying fish which accompanied her birth; soldiered on in the face of the conversion of her entire village’s crops into a number of somethings that might have been recognised as lollipops in this day and age but were in that time regarded as perverse, brightly-coloured demons who would expel their seed into one’s stomach if consumed, and would cause not only eternal damnation but also moderate to severe diarrhoea (though that was less the fault of the lollipops, and more the fault of the villagers for fertilising their fields with manure); and it even managed to remain steadfast even as all the villagers’ faces were transformed into things that looked, felt, and tasted rather like fava beans with eyes, mouths, noses, and somethings that looked rather like ears around the side. It only occurred to Conventional Wisdom to abandon Edana, and anything within a three-mile radius of her personage, when her mother reached into her daughter’s cradle and discovered a miniature man-eating dragon instead of her daughter. Even the laws of physics had to take a few good, large steps backward, and watched Edana from a safe vantage point even though they rarely found it necessary, or even desirable to interfere in her affairs.
It took her neighbours somewhat longer to realise what conventional wisdom and the laws of physics had seen early on, though, and that was perhaps because humans, unlike the abstract constructs which they create, cannot understand baby talk, but they eventually came to understand this simple fact:
Everything Edana said was true.
This is not to say that she was a particularly insightful or observant child; in fact, she was so used to the world coming up the way she saw it that she had even less reason than the normal child to take note of occurrences around her. No, the words that Edana spoke were invariably true, not because she was psychic, but because the world, for whatever reason, had gotten tired of riding roughshod over human beings and had decided to conform to her will.
When Edana was a young girl, this was not quite so bad: she would say tiny things that would perhaps cause pigs to walk on two legs and very vocally request proper hygienic facilities and tailored waist-coats, or cause all the truffles in the forest to come up chocolate rather than mushroom, but all-in-all they were affairs that either righted themselves in a season, or that simply weren’t all that terrible to begin with. Some of them things she said were downright boons to the village: When she declared to the local alchemist (a man whose hands were blackened and bleeding from his fruitless experiments, and whom the average child would have shied away from) that gold could be made by combining vinegar and sulphur in a three-and-nine-seventeenths-to-thirteen ratio, and then mixing thoroughly in the dried stomach of a pig whose favourite colour was violet. The alchemist laughed, but, in a drunken stupor several nights later, he performed the experiment just as Edana had explained, and he found himself holding a pig’s stomach full of small nuggets of gold.
But this was before people believed that Edana was anything more than a simple child blessed with the gift of foresight. It wasn’t until the day that she declared she could make anything out of water that anyone took any notice of this seemingly dull child.
“I can make anything out of water,” Edana declared one day as she floated into the house (the laws of physics, as has already been noted, never quite applied to the girl, and as a result her feet never quite seemed to touch the ground, and she could often leap up into the air and remain aloft for a good few minutes before the laws of physics very grudgingly allowed her to float gently down to earth).
Her mother, rather used to her daughter’s peculiar statements, simply replied, “That’s wonderful, dear—why don’t you go and make me a few carrots? I seem to have used them all last night for the stew.” She figured this task would keep her daughter occupied until dinner was ready, and perhaps for the next couple of days, so she cheerily sat Edana down at the kitchen table with a cup of water and returned to the stove.
Ten minutes later, Edana said, “How many more would you like, mother?”
And her mother turned around to see a pile of twenty or so perfect carrots sitting on the table.
“That’s... that’s quite enough, dear, thank you,” her mother replied, weakly, scooping up the carrots and noting that the glass of water was not even a quarter empty. Best not to ask with her daughter, she knew. “Why don’t you make something nice for yourself, now?”
The next time her mother turned to check on her daughter, she was confronted by the sight of a miniature herd of rainbow-coloured unicorns galloping from end to end of the table. As she watched, Edana set a tiny droplet of water on the table, stared rather hard at it for a moment, and then smiled broadly as the water twisted and grew into a perfect, tiny tree, which the unicorns immediately rushed to and began examining.
Her mother sighed, and told her daughter, “Edana, please put the unicorns away before dinner.”
“The unicorns aren’t there any more,” she said, and as her mother turned to look yet another time, she realised that the unicorns had disappeared.
With powers such as these, it was only natural for Edana to become a scientist, or something like it. Her hypotheses were always correct—the sun did revolve around the earth, gold could be made of vinegar and sulphur, and a man’s brain was half the size of a woman’s.
And she could still make anything from a droplet of water.
Fandom: N/A (original)
Prompt: Gossip
Warnings: None
Rating: G/PG
Word Count: 1 207
Summary: Edana's words are always true-- but what good is reality if it's simply a fabrication?
Part of a much, much, much longer piece. And it was going to fit better with the prompt, but I got bored, and decided to do a ridiculous interpretation of it.
Conventional wisdom holds that things are rarely true simply because human beings speak them. Reasoning, deduction, and experimentation must be employed jointly to create empirical truths, and if both those truths and the reasonings behind them can be proven to be utterly free from fallacy or doubt, then a statement made by a human being can become true.
But it also must be noted that conventional wisdom realised early on that it would make very little headway with Edana Aregawi, and thus abandoned her early in her life. It persevered through the storm of flying fish which accompanied her birth; soldiered on in the face of the conversion of her entire village’s crops into a number of somethings that might have been recognised as lollipops in this day and age but were in that time regarded as perverse, brightly-coloured demons who would expel their seed into one’s stomach if consumed, and would cause not only eternal damnation but also moderate to severe diarrhoea (though that was less the fault of the lollipops, and more the fault of the villagers for fertilising their fields with manure); and it even managed to remain steadfast even as all the villagers’ faces were transformed into things that looked, felt, and tasted rather like fava beans with eyes, mouths, noses, and somethings that looked rather like ears around the side. It only occurred to Conventional Wisdom to abandon Edana, and anything within a three-mile radius of her personage, when her mother reached into her daughter’s cradle and discovered a miniature man-eating dragon instead of her daughter. Even the laws of physics had to take a few good, large steps backward, and watched Edana from a safe vantage point even though they rarely found it necessary, or even desirable to interfere in her affairs.
It took her neighbours somewhat longer to realise what conventional wisdom and the laws of physics had seen early on, though, and that was perhaps because humans, unlike the abstract constructs which they create, cannot understand baby talk, but they eventually came to understand this simple fact:
Everything Edana said was true.
This is not to say that she was a particularly insightful or observant child; in fact, she was so used to the world coming up the way she saw it that she had even less reason than the normal child to take note of occurrences around her. No, the words that Edana spoke were invariably true, not because she was psychic, but because the world, for whatever reason, had gotten tired of riding roughshod over human beings and had decided to conform to her will.
When Edana was a young girl, this was not quite so bad: she would say tiny things that would perhaps cause pigs to walk on two legs and very vocally request proper hygienic facilities and tailored waist-coats, or cause all the truffles in the forest to come up chocolate rather than mushroom, but all-in-all they were affairs that either righted themselves in a season, or that simply weren’t all that terrible to begin with. Some of them things she said were downright boons to the village: When she declared to the local alchemist (a man whose hands were blackened and bleeding from his fruitless experiments, and whom the average child would have shied away from) that gold could be made by combining vinegar and sulphur in a three-and-nine-seventeenths-to-thirteen ratio, and then mixing thoroughly in the dried stomach of a pig whose favourite colour was violet. The alchemist laughed, but, in a drunken stupor several nights later, he performed the experiment just as Edana had explained, and he found himself holding a pig’s stomach full of small nuggets of gold.
But this was before people believed that Edana was anything more than a simple child blessed with the gift of foresight. It wasn’t until the day that she declared she could make anything out of water that anyone took any notice of this seemingly dull child.
“I can make anything out of water,” Edana declared one day as she floated into the house (the laws of physics, as has already been noted, never quite applied to the girl, and as a result her feet never quite seemed to touch the ground, and she could often leap up into the air and remain aloft for a good few minutes before the laws of physics very grudgingly allowed her to float gently down to earth).
Her mother, rather used to her daughter’s peculiar statements, simply replied, “That’s wonderful, dear—why don’t you go and make me a few carrots? I seem to have used them all last night for the stew.” She figured this task would keep her daughter occupied until dinner was ready, and perhaps for the next couple of days, so she cheerily sat Edana down at the kitchen table with a cup of water and returned to the stove.
Ten minutes later, Edana said, “How many more would you like, mother?”
And her mother turned around to see a pile of twenty or so perfect carrots sitting on the table.
“That’s... that’s quite enough, dear, thank you,” her mother replied, weakly, scooping up the carrots and noting that the glass of water was not even a quarter empty. Best not to ask with her daughter, she knew. “Why don’t you make something nice for yourself, now?”
The next time her mother turned to check on her daughter, she was confronted by the sight of a miniature herd of rainbow-coloured unicorns galloping from end to end of the table. As she watched, Edana set a tiny droplet of water on the table, stared rather hard at it for a moment, and then smiled broadly as the water twisted and grew into a perfect, tiny tree, which the unicorns immediately rushed to and began examining.
Her mother sighed, and told her daughter, “Edana, please put the unicorns away before dinner.”
“The unicorns aren’t there any more,” she said, and as her mother turned to look yet another time, she realised that the unicorns had disappeared.
With powers such as these, it was only natural for Edana to become a scientist, or something like it. Her hypotheses were always correct—the sun did revolve around the earth, gold could be made of vinegar and sulphur, and a man’s brain was half the size of a woman’s.
And she could still make anything from a droplet of water.
