Prismeri Reader of an astrogation guild of Prismere, Full Wings; seconded under the standing compact as an instructor at the Survey Corps' college of the Star Rangers Academy, 2826 UCSD Active

Essarith

prismeri
prismere
iridess-system
federation-of-sentient-beings
full-wings
astrogation
survey-corps
academy
star-rangers
non-humanoid

Essarith is a Prismeri of Prismere, Full Wings, a reader of one of the astrogation guilds that read the sky over Prismere for the Federation and, under the standing material compact, confirm fold-corridor conditions for the Survey Corps. In the record's present, 2826 UCSD, they are off Prismere, on what the people's own posting contracts call a Ranger liaison posting: seconded by their guild under the compact to the Star Rangers Academy, as an instructor at the Survey Corps' college, in the school the Academy's page calls the piloting and navigation track. The record has placed no Prismeri on such a posting before this page, and has said, more than once and in more than one voice, that it did not know what one was. This page says what this one is. Essarith is on the Corps' rolls as the guild's, seconded, and not as a Ranger; holds no rank on the ladder and wears no tab; teaches, and certifies nothing; and will go home.

The name is given as the Federation record gives it, and nothing more is known of it, as nothing more is known of the names of Isserith and Orisseth, the two Prismeri the record named before them. The record renders Essarith as they, the translation default and the people's page's own usage of an individual; no pronoun system is declared for the people, and none is proposed here. Essarith is the third Prismeri the record names, and not Prismere's delegate to the Federation assembly of Nobody Present, who is Full Wings and unnamed and stays so.

Known History

Born on Prismere, in a lumenspire settlement the record does not name, in a year it does not hold. First Wings from birth, as every Prismeri is; what they scouted, apprenticed at or tended in that form, the record does not say.
Entered the Second Emergence at a point the record does not fix and came out Full Wings, and was taken into a guild for what the tendrils read, as every reader is: a guild takes a reader at the Emergence and never before it. Which guild, the record does not name.
A reader since, at the confirmation table and in the haze, for a span the record does not measure. Nothing on record makes Essarith unusual among readers, and the page does not try to.
Seconded by the guild, under the compact's standing contract for off-world postings, to the Survey Corps' college at the Academy, as an instructor. The record does not fix the year the posting began. Off-world Prismeri postings are short by the people's own preference, the people's page says, and the contract will have an end the Archive does not hold.
On that posting in 2826 UCSD, on a deck the record does not place, teaching. The record places them nowhere else, and gives them no earlier posting off Prismere.

The Posting

What a Prismeri on a Ranger liaison posting is on the Corps' rolls was a question the record kept open in three places. The people's page writes the postings into every off-world contract and does not say. Isserith's page says it does not touch the question. Orisseth, asked for a history at a confirmation table, says that the guild has not told them and they have not asked, and the receiving desk marks it as not established. Essarith's page is where the record first needs an answer, and gives one for this posting and no other.

Essarith is not a Ranger. They have taken no oath, hold no rank, were never a Novice and were confirmed as nothing by any college. They are the guild's, lent, and the Corps' rolls carry them as what the contract says they are. The Academy's page says that instruction is a posting held by serving officers, who keep their rank and their branch and go back to the field, and that the colleges staff themselves from people who have been doing the thing lately; Essarith teaches beside officers of that kind and is not one of them. What the Corps takes from outside itself, it takes only here. An outside allegiance has no place on a general operations posting or on a special mission, where it would be a conflict of interest and a breach of the Corps' neutrality, and the Corps does not put one there; a college's instruction is the one place a seconded reader can stand, because a college certifies and does not run a watch, and Rank and the Chain of Command already counts teaching at the Academy as something other than general operations. So the guild's fold-route confirmation for the Survey Corps stays what the people's page says it is, work a guild does under the compact as its own service, at a table on Prismere; and a guild's reader on a Ranger liaison posting is an instructor, on a deck somewhere else.

The contract carries what every off-world Prismeri contract carries: the Prismere light spectrum, and, for a Full Wings reader, some exposure to genuine harmonic-corridor geometry, since prolonged deprivation of either is documented to dull the sense. The Corps mends both. The record does not say where the college sits or what its deck's gravity is set to, and this page does not place it; it holds the posting to what the people's page says of a standard-gravity station and what the readers who have come back say of every posting, in the same order. A Prismeri on such a deck can neither fly nor hang, and a body built to be held by its feet spends the posting on four knuckles, in corridors with nothing overhead to take it. No contract supplies a ceiling worth hanging from, because nothing can be done about it. The contract says what the Corps mends. The ceiling is not in it.

The Work

A Full Wings reader reads corridor geometry directly, through the crystalline tendrils that grow from the skull ridge at the Emergence and that no known instrument matches. None of Essarith's cadets will ever do that, and none of them is being taught to. What a Prismeri instructor can teach a navigation school is what a guild's confirmation is, and what it is not, which is a thing the Survey Corps asks for on every fold along the one sky in charted space that shows its own corridors, and which no Ranger can be taught by another Ranger.

The lesson, as far as the record holds it, has three parts, and each is already on a page. The first is Prismere's: the Lattice is not a thing the instruments cannot measure but a thing the sky shows, so that over one world only a corridor's geometry can be seen as well as reconstructed, and the Survey Corps' own consensus is that Prismere is not unique in having dense fold geometry overhead, only in having a sky that shows it. A cadet who learns to fold anywhere else learns on a sky that shows nothing, and will certify on the instruments, as they must. The second is the guild's, as Orisseth gave it at the table: the Corps reconstructs what is over Prismere, a reader looks at it, and when the two agree the Corps writes down that they agree, and when they do not the Corps writes that down too, in its own hand, and what it does then is the Corps' business. The third is the compact's, and the record holds it in two voices that say the same thing. The confirmation goes one way, toward the Corps, as the compact's words go; the guild has never asked for the other direction. Essarith teaches that as the guild's position, which it is, and the record has no account of them giving a reason for it, which Orisseth did and marked as a reader's and not the guild's.

What the record notes of how the lesson is given is this. A Prismeri addressed on the ground is at a disadvantage and knows it, the people's page says, and a Prismeri hanging above a conversation is not looming, and the courtesy the Federation's contact teams learned first was to hold a meeting somewhere with a beam. Essarith teaches from the deck, below the eye line of every cadet in the room, on folded wings, head carried close and low, and means nothing by it, as a Prismeri answering from above means nothing by that. The record does not say whether the cadets have been told so. It notes, without a reading, that the Academy teaches failures by name, that the Federation survey's two preliminary reports on Prismere are the record's best-known instance of reading a people from the ground, and that whether that case is on any college's syllabus, the record does not say.

Essarith certifies nothing. The Academy's page says a college owns its certification criteria and the examinations against them, and that faculty standing is recognised in certifications and decorations rather than rank; a seconded reader holds none of the Corps' and is examined by no one here. What the guild makes of a teaching posting, whether it counts for anything at the table on Prismere or is simply a thing a reader did for a while off-world, the record does not hold.

What Essarith Cannot Do

Hang, on this posting, or fly. Keep the people's courtesy of a beam, or ask for it, since the people's page says no contract can supply one and the record has no account of a reader asking. Teach a cadet to read the sky, which the tendrils do and nothing else does; teach a cadet what a Prismeri guild keeps of its own history by a year, since the guilds keep none. Stand upright, which the body does not do and would gain nothing by, or sit at a table; be at ease in a room whose ceiling is a hand's breadth over the head. Be talked out of noticing a shape crossing the light above them, which on a deck is a drone, a cadet's hand, a sheet passed overhead, and is noticed every time. Hold rank, take a tab, be promoted, or be dismissed; a secondment is ended, not dismissed, and the record does not say by whom. Choose how long the posting runs, beyond the people's own preference that it be short.

What Is Worn, and What Is Not

The Rangers wear a uniform for the hospital's reason, and every rank and role is in it on duty, liaisons at a Corps posting included, the uniform page says; it binds Rangers, and Essarith is not one. What the Academy asks a seconded instructor to wear, the record does not say. What a Prismeri wears, on Prismere or off it, the record does not say either, and the plates and paintings on the people's page show nothing worn at all: the body is plate, membrane and claw, and nothing on record goes over the wing membrane, which is the flight surface, or the facet band, which reads the light overhead. Essarith wears no rank tab, because a tab marks a rank on the ladder and they hold none, and the quartermaster record, which fits a shell to every body plan the Corps fields, has not been asked by the Archive whether it fits anything to a body the Corps does not field.

The plate is gold and blue because Essarith is Full Wings, and for no other reason. The people's page is plain that the Emergence adds a sense and not a rank, and that Prismeri culture accords no lesser standing to those for whom it never comes; a cadet who reads the gold-and-blue as seniority over a grey-violet First Wings has made the error the Federation's own survey made and corrected, and the record notes that in a navigation school the error has nothing to attach to, there being no First Wings in the room.

Character Notes

The record holds Essarith's manner from the people's page and from the one account of a reader's voice it has, and does not pretend to more. The readers who come back from postings, Orisseth says, say the same three things in the same order and do not talk about it much; Essarith has not come back yet, and the Archive has not asked. What the record has is a reader who was sent, under a contract whose every accommodation is written down except the one that cannot be, to a room with a low ceiling and a floor, to teach people who will never have the sense what the sense is for, and who does it from the floor. The people's page says Prismere's contribution to the compact is expertise because expertise is what the world made cheap. The record notes, without a reading, that this is the first page on which the expertise has had to be carried somewhere the body is dear.

Standing. In the guild Essarith is a reader among readers, and the guild is a body of the able and not a rank above the people; at the Academy they are faculty beside officers and not one, with no rank to be below. The record has no account of either sitting strangely with them. It has no account of the cadets at all: no name, no number, no year of intake, and no word of what any of them made of being taught from the deck by someone who cannot look down at them.

The dusk curfew is written into the body, and a deck has no dusk. Essarith keeps the band's watch on a ceiling that nothing crosses but the ordinary traffic of a room, and the record does not say whether it has grown quieter with the posting or has not. Prismeri postings are short by their own preference, and the page does not say when this one ends.

The record gives Essarith no age in either form, no kin by name, no settlement, no guild by name and no distinction. It places them on a deck at the Survey Corps' college in 2826 UCSD, on four knuckles, under a ceiling, in a room of cadets, teaching what a confirmation is worth, and nowhere else.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Essarith's age in either form, and the natural span of a Prismeri life, which no page gives. The settlement they came from and the guild they read for, neither named. Their kin, whom the people's kinship records hold and the Archive does not. The year the secondment began and the year it ends. Where the Survey Corps' college sits, which the Academy's page does not place, the Academy having never been a single place; what the deck's gravity is set to; and whether any room on it has a beam, which the people's page says no contract can supply and this page does not supply either. What the Corps' light-spectrum and corridor-geometry accommodations come to on this posting, which the contract holds and the Archive does not. The cadets, every one. Whether a seconded instructor examines, or only teaches; this page says only that the college owns its examinations. Whether any Prismeri has ever enlisted in the Corps as a Ranger, under the ordinary ladder, which the record has not established and this page does not settle; a Prismeri on a Corps field posting would be a sworn Ranger, and the record names none. Whether any other Prismeri is on a liaison posting in 2826, and whether any has held one at the Academy before; the people's page gives the postings as a plural and names none but this one. What the guild makes of the posting. The Prismeri language, which the record has not described in any channel. Any chapter. The body, beyond what the people's page gives every Full Wings adult: hardened gold-and-blue plate over a light, long, level-spined frame, wings that are the forelimbs with three free clawed fingers at the leading edge, long-toed prehensile hind feet, two large forward eyes set low and a band of facets along the skull ridge, the long motile crystalline tendrils that grow from that ridge at the Emergence, a short neck and no tail; nothing on record tells one Full Wings Prismeri from another by sight. No portrait is on file; the prompt is written and waits on the desktop.