The nigh-unimaginable, if inevitable, has happened – the party made it into the very heart of the Ever, Evergreenest Forest, and are standing before the Hideyoshi of trees.
Their journey, since we last met them, was fraught with danger, violence and narrow escapes no end. Great deeds were done, and unpublishable swears were uttered. The number of their fallen foes was legion, and the rivers were running with their blood.*
But I decided not to tell that part of the story in great detail, since the ultimate outcome was so obvious from the get-go – after already escaping near-certain death, the party’s chances of getting stopped anywhere between there and their ultimate goal was practically nil, for that would have been very unconventional script-writing. And Nolan doesn’t pay for that kind of thing. So a short flashback had to suffice to tell that part of the story.
Of course, I’d have preferred it if the editor hadn’t just blindly jammed the file named “standard war flashback” in there, because it too clearly alludes to a quite different war. War might never change, but its tools do – and Gnomish ornithopters would have been a much better choice than UH-1 Hueys, in this situation. Buy you can’t expect an editor to have stock footage for such esoteric eventualities on hand…nor can you expect him to waste more than a few minutes with a task like this, especially not at the rate Nolan is paying.
As so often, it’ll have to do. The party has made it to the tree, but from now on the worst dreams that ever they’ll have will be when they hear the surf booming about the coasts of landing zone X-ray, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Tran still ringing in their ears “Me love you long time! Me love you long time!”
More on Monday.
* Don’t worry, they only ‘fell’ because they kept stumbling over tree roots, and the few measly brooks in this part of the forest always have that greenish tint resembling Orc/Troll blood.
For some extremely odd reason, I at first read that as, “… the very LIVER of the Ever, Evergreenest Forest…” and while I immediately caught the mistake; I began wondering why the heart gets all the credit for being “central.” Yes, horizontally speaking it’s in the center, but if you’re talking X, Y coordinates, the pancreas is more in the center of the torso and the urinary bladder more center if you’re including the head and legs. The heart also gets credit for emotions as well.
I think the heart is taking far too much credit for what it does and the other body organs are getting shafted for it (I can only imagine how pissed the urinary bladder is).
At least to a certain degree that seems to be a cultural preference. Not all cultures consider the heart the central organ. Ancient Greeks, for example, did indeed consider the liver the ‘central’ organ and seat of the soul – which is also the reason why Homer’s Odyssey is so full of references to people being “pierced through the liver and died”, for example. That being said, the heart is definitely the most common choice among cultures, and I’m not aware that any cultures considers or considered the urinary bladder (which is always pissed, anyway, since that’s kind of its job) the seat of the soul. So these preferences must somehow form based on experiences regarding the importance of certain organs for human life… but I’m not sure I want to know how primitive cultures evaluated that kind of thing. >_>