For Them, To Them
A Multiuniverse Fiction in an Original Setting
Rated T for language and references to violence, among other, currently unknown things
Prologue: Foreword

All throughout this text, I speak of places as if to foreigners or travelers. If you are a native or resident of the setting of my story, I apologize for taking all this time and space to reiterate the traits of the place you’re already familiar with. You can go on ahead to the first chapter, if you’d like.

I do ask, however, that all who are foreigners read and heed my words.

My birth name is not a prized possession of mine. I only let my mother say or write it, even though most of the older villagers know it, and even then she only does it when we’re totally alone. I have even decided to omit it from this entire script, even when she would say it. So call me Gancena, as everyone does.

I am convinced that hardly anyone outside my home or those of our neighbors in Tetherburg and Waterkindle has heard of my town: Σ. It’s pronounced “Sigma,” and, yes, that’s how it’s really written – on signs, in papers and publications, including this one. It’s a Greek letter, if you don’t know. I think it means “sum,” or at least has something to do with sums. I’m certain it can all be verified with the touch of a button or the flip of a book page, but after these turbulent last months, all I think about is recent events, and all I want to do is write them all down, lest we forget, lest we forget!

I love writing. I enjoy just placing words on paper. I love its diverse purposes. And I feel that by conveying these incidents as if it were a great novel, or at least an eye-catching news serial, I can somehow protect all the innocents who have seen what my neighbors have seen, or even been through what my friends and I have been through, both in my town and in the world, even if it tears me down. Oh, the gods know that almost happened several times, in various ways. I must be insane to want to risk it again.

But this is much safer, I suppose.

Our three towns are highly tied together, and more or less self-sufficient. We were once separate from the rest of the world – in fact, up until no more than three years after my birth, only a handful of our neighbors were even aware there was a “rest of the world” at all.

Waterkindle is responsible for the immense import of new technologies and cultural items. Had I been born just a generation or even a decade earlier, I would have been using a typewriter instead of a laptop at work.

Not that I would mind. Hardly anyone does, it seems.

In fact, this period of shocking amount of new things, our “modernization,” gave Waterkindle its current name. Its birth name was Sinclair. But after kindling this cultural diffusion that spread through all three towns like water, it was given “Waterkindle” as a nickname, and it stuck so much that its people decided to change the official name.

Tetherburg is the thread that holds the other towns, Σ and Waterkindle, together. It is the largest city, known for its Theater and Library and recently-finished Heights. Though little of our origins and history were recorded (many frustrated historians insist that our ancestors were careless in this regard), it is widely known that it first connected Σ and Waterkindle. Unfortunately, most of the story of how this happened was warped in the generation-to-generation telling.

I was told, and do believe, that each town became aware of the other when the Great Map was first erected in Tetherburg’s Town Square, displaying all three towns and its surrounding area in one nameless collective region.

Since I’m already talking about the modernization, I might as well acknowledge the opposing movements that rose right around the time Waterkindle connected to what we call The Outside World.

There are the Traditionalists, composed mostly of older residents, who vehemently oppose anything that could bring in the ‘taints’ of The Outside World.

There are the Modernists, the majority of them around my age or younger, who not only enjoy and embrace the new technologies, but want to convert the whole of all three towns to their full use.

I acknowledge both sides, but take none. In fact, I laugh at them. While the movements do exist, they are small. It’s extremely difficult for anyone to find people of either side anywhere in the area, honestly. With the majority of people essentially unaware, it’s all reduced to children squabbling over habits or toys.

I also laugh at the fact that while they fight fervently, the towns and its people, through individual efforts, seemed to conjure a compromise on their own.

The region as a whole retains its quiet, content atmosphere at the same time citizens listen to outside music through radios or portable players, watch television, and learn just how easy it can be to operate a laptop computer. There are cars in our region, but not many – they’re quite expensive, and most people are used to walking or riding bicycles everywhere. Some have even taken to riding the newborn subway system, especially when the destination is another town.

Overall, there is harmony and happiness. I can’t recall a time before the era of my tale where the town newspaper, the Σ Times-Journal Tribune, bore a grim or upsetting headline that wasn't for a death.

I should pray that what I have to say now, and in the pages that follow, will be the only time in the towns’ entire histories when that would be so.