2024-07-17 - Fun Pun in the Sun?

It had been a long while (as near as he could tell these things under his dark darkness) since Sandstone had discovered that the feelings that flowed from his mother had words attached to them. And that said words had meanings that sometimes matched the emotions attached to them.

Of course figuring out what meanings attached to what words took a while to work out, repeating them back to Mother to learn their shapes, but eventually they figured it out. At least enough to understand what Motber meant much of the time.

Then the accidental discovery of the Others stirred up a mix of emotions in the young dragonet. Surprise, fear of the unknown, intrigued by the concept of many others besides themselves and Mother. Of others who seemed to be more like himself than her. He studied the others as best he could, getting a feel for his neighbors as his mind got strong enough to communicate with them and practice using words with those who could talk back to him.

Since then he watched and waited and observed the minds around them, the interactions of his siblings and the talk of the other minds he saw outside with Mother out in the not-darkness. Those minds held puzzles he couldn’t quite figure out from his place in the darkness; the clues he needed were only out there in the not-darkness where he’d never been, and no way to get there from here.

One day they discovered - or perhaps the pieces just fell into place all at once - that the words those in the not-darkness used sometimes had more than one meaning, and that all those meanings could be true at once. Now that was an interesting idea! He listened closer to those his mother talked to, to learn the forms of this puzzle better. He didn’t quite get the joke about the rider and dragon being high, but knew one was good and the other bad, for…reasons. And the only things he could figure about Mother and the mind she preferred was that the mind wanted to talk a lot with her when she wanted to sleep instead. There were nuances there that he saw existed, but didn’t have enough experience to read them yet.

Still, could they try for double meanings himself? Fun, sun, pun, bun. The sun punned in the fun with a bun until it was done. Live and give and jib and Sid went to wear a bib to bib.

Hmmm, this was harder than he thought. He was going to have to think this through some more and easedrop more on the outside minds to figure it out better.