Stanley Opolis

One of the most important human beings who ever lived was someone who was almost completely unknown during his own time. His name was Stanley Opolis and he was a professor of several interesting subjects simultaneously. He could do this because he possessed a Ph.D. in many useful things. And he was, of course, a completely self-taught man.

Dr. Opolis was merely a human. But he was so rigid and robotic in his thinking and mental habits -- traits that many found annoying but were the keys to his success and the reason for his massive productivity -- that many who met him thought that he might not be any sort of human at all. That perhaps he was a machine. And they had plenty of reasons why they thought that. This incredible inflexibility made him effectively invisible to those who were blind in what the Doctor liked to call, "the mind's eye." They had trouble seeing him because they didn't understand him. They didn't understand him because he thought logically and spoke logically too. He spoke with an eerie precision and a lilting cadence as if he were singing a song about facts and numbers and laws of physics rather than lecturing on it. He did not dress well, and often forgot to wash his body, but still, there was something about him, a confidence, and a certain magic in his eyes that seemed to attract the women and they found him most charming when he least expected them to or even desired it at all if he were especially focused on a particular subject.

To understand the man one had to understand that Dr. Opolis extremely liked walking and talking and thinking. And so he often walked and talked and lived in his thoughts. He did these things more frequently and more differently than other people did. Here were some examples of this:

He liked walking backwards on camera, recording it. So he could play it back later in reverse to get a different perspective on how to walk forwards.

He talked to trees often but they never answered back. And this fact didn't matter to him because it was intended to be a one-way conversation, the effect was to exercise his talking on listeners whose patience and understanding were perfect. And the trees, being green, fit the bill quite nicely.

He was a hobbyist scholar. This meant that he consumed mass quantities of information of varying usefulness, and sifted through it and tried to integrate it all into some sort of unified Map of All Things inside his own mind. Understandably, this messed up his hair. And caused him to sometimes forget how to shower and shave.

Often when he was out walking or talking or thinking people would interrupt him and ask him what all the fancy degrees were for but he would never tell them, he would just look at them funny and seem to start thinking about something or another in a distracted manner until they stopped and left him alone.

"Trivial living is a sin," he liked to say to himself often, especially when nobody else was around -- which was most of the time.

Shattered Stars Intro

A long time ago in a galaxy pretty far away, there was an evil galactic empire. It was not only an evil empire, it covered most of it's galaxy, and so it was galactic too. Therefore, it was an evil galactic empire. But despite this, some people rebelled against it. They organized themselves into various factions, each with their own goals and their own axes to grind. But for all of them what they had in common was the desire to tear free from the emperor's control and form their own independent states. Early on, they seemed to succeed, because they broke free and created a rogue's gallery of militant nations. What they could not have known was that they would start a seemingly forever civil war, one fought across the depths of space and in the dying light of shattered stars.

Tales of the Shattered Stars
Protomagellan Publishing House
Archterosphynx, Gamma Quadrant

[this short piece is from the preface text to a computer strategy game named Shattered Stars. More info about which can be found on the Groglogic Diary blog.]