Primate -5minutefreewrite, a Chibera Nanowrimo story

For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-381-5-minute-freewrite-monday-prompt-primate

"Hola, fellow primate consciousness," Jan's dream-thought-chemicals didn't use words, but they carried with them a tone that proclaimed louder than words I know who I am and where I am. I have greater status than you, here, though neither of us is less or more native to this state of being

Janice would have been surprised if her tree-self could express surprise that a dreamthoughttonechemical could express such a complex and nuanced attitude. Instead of being surprised, though, she was grateful.

Janice asked, "what is going on?" as best she could, while still indicating she knew it was a dream, but that there was something special.

Suddenly, the part of the tree that was absolutely, definitely Janice was strangled, caught between constricting pressures, as if some other parts of the tree were squeezing a pimple, as if she were a splinter in a tree, like a piece of wood is a splinter in your thumb. Inasmuch as a tree-primate can panic, Janice did. Whatever control over chemical exchanges she had, she lost, and there was nothing but fear and confusion, desperation and worry.

And then it stopped... "Worry?" Jan seemed to ask. "Worry for... a parent. Confusion... bafflement? A telepath should know better, should have a plan, should not be flailing..."

---

Janice opened her eyes, expecting to see her mother. Expecting perhaps to be by her mother's bedside, in an ambulance or in the hospital, but she wasn't. The eyes she looked out of saw trees, but not the world-wrapping trees of the dream... or were they? Too many questions. She saw the trees and she saw hands. Hands that touched her own face, but not her face. Someone else's face.

You're not a telepath, telepath. The voice in her head that was not her head echoed painfully. Janice felt the pain echo deep into the core of her brain, spirit, mind, soul, body. The voice felt the pain, too. And in fact, Janice was not controlling the body, exactly. The body was doing what she expected of it, but not the way she expected it to.

Who are you... we're both here, aren't we? Are you from here? I'm not

Oh. Whoa. Whoa. Yes. This is me. Or, it looks like this is we. And this is not what I was expecting, and I expect we'll continue to have different personalities, and we'll fight about this later, but right now...
Jan's thought-voice trailed off.

photo by me
A moon, larger than the Earth's moon, Janice was sure, even though she was plenty familiar with all the manner of optical illusions that moons can pull, moved fully into a space between the leaves.
The wind brushed leaves across their face. They brushed a hand where the leaf had touched, and it came away wet. Tears, not sobbing or flowing, but gently burning in their eyes tumbled. They let the tears come.
And they sat. Holding their own hands to their face.

---

Looks like it's another falling behind day instead of what I expected, a catching up day. I just don't have it in me when I'm this tired. Tomorrow will again be surely a falling behind day. Perhaps Wednesday, though. I really have to write in the morning and afternoon.

---

No! Second wind! I just watched Amber says what in which Amber says Why? and it killed me. I laughed so hard I'm ready for at least a few more sentences. Let's get back to it.

---

After sitting and crying in the forest for more time than it takes to stalk a mule deer, but less time than it takes a mushroom to grow, Jan and Janice came to some conclusions. Firstly, they agreed that they needn't fight what was clearly happening to them. Their thoughts were becoming one. It was hard for either to tell whether a thought was their own or the others, and so they'd call themselves Jani.
It's possible that this conclusion was not reached consciously, or that this is something that happened with great internal struggles over the course of many days. In fact, it's very likely that they were afraid a rift would drive one or the other mad, and so they made this choice. What is important is that it was a conscious choice. They didn't know how to feel about one another, and they felt themselves becoming subsumed by the other. Jan still was trying to become an arbiter of the forest, and Janice still wanted to go home, to take care of her mother, but neither could force what they wanted to happen more quickly.

So neither of them forced the other out. They shared their thoughts. Janice learned about who she was now. She was Jani, and part of Jani was a young elf girl, young for an elf, though if she had been a human, she would have been dead. Jani had left her home 30 years before, not bothering to say goodbye to family, because that was not the kind of person she was. She wasn't entirely certain if her family missed her or looked for her, but she didn't expect them to. Jani's 30 years had been filled with adventure. There had been the time she'd rescued one of the fungus creatures from a high mountaintop where they had both happened to be exploring, but the fungus creature wasn't suited to the mountaintop and would surely have otherwise died. This changed Jan who is now Jani into someone who cared about the interconnectivity of all creatures. She had previously allowed herself to be aloof, as she had been taught as a young elf. But this fungus creature, Porbe, had been so vulnerable, but so filled with good humor even as he faced what he presumably believed to be his certain death, that she felt grateful to him even as she saved his life. When she'd brought him down the mountain, he led her under the forest, where many fungus creatures dwell and she saw not just how the roots connected, but how the living creatures above were all a part of.... He opened her mind just a crack.
Janice who is now Jani let it be understood by her own mind that she had been visiting Chibera since she was very little, though this intimate relationship was very different than any other way she had experienced it before. Before, she had witnessed a cruel mayor of a town demanding greater production, and had seen... And then she realized Jan was there, and though that mayor had been cruel, Jan had spent several weeks protecting the crops from disease-spreading insects, tall, black-brown bugs that carried little mites that carried some sort of germ that had been infecting the crops and causing a squeeze that had given the mayor his excuse for cruelty. Jan had been there on the other side of the fence, as it were.
But Jan had never been to Janice's world. She had never seen the strip malls or the schools where all the children came to learn together. Schools, organized education, were not a part of the fabric of life in Chibera. Though certainly some education was intentional, it bore a closer resemblance to apprenticeships than to any classroom. And even where there were apprenticeships, it had less to do with master-pupil than with, less-skilled-worker and more-skilled-worker inhabiting the same space.
Jan had likewise never expected a world as broad and vast as her own to seem small in comparison to one she was just coming to discover existed. Though Jan's world had mushroom creatures, tall brown-black bugs and little mites, they had nothing like the ancient and extinct dinosaurs, and there were thousands of insect species, but if Janice's now Jani's memory could be believed, there were millions of species and...millions of people living in single cities with dozens of buildings each larger than the largest fortress in all Chibera.
For both, either seemed impossible and impossible not to be. They gradually stopped thinking as us and them, though, and became Jani, a woman who desired both to be in Chibera, and to be with her mother in another realm and to be an arbiter. And if any of these things could be gotten, she would do it with hesitating to weigh the needs of some other part of her, because she acted as one.