Like most of the developed civilizations in the universe, the Manuan race rose up out of the jungles of their home planet, Yortha, through the formation of a society whose members held specialized functions. To put it into plainer terms, some Manuans farmed, some hunted, others worked metal and stone, and some sought and preserved knowledge for the advancement of Manuan civilization.
Now obviously, keeping knowledge is a useful task for the advancement of any primitive civilization. If nothing else, it allows a society to learn which things are good to eat and which things are not. But Manuans valued knowledge for it’s own sake, drawn by insatiable curiosity to store it up in large houses, built solely for holding knowledge, in all of the central cities, next to their stores of grain.
The most direct example of Manuan love of truth and the seeking of it was the existence of their Stargazers, even in times when farming was a novel concept. Until relatively recent times, when off planet travel became possible for Manuans, they had no justification for their Stargazers other than the need to pursue the truth behind the beauty they observed in the world around them. Nevertheless, Stargazers have always been held in high regard in Manuan society, as seekers of knowledge.
You might be wondering what this has to do with the Happy Stone. But I am telling you all this as background, because it was from a Manuan Stargazer that I learned about the Happy Stone, and so their perspective on it is inextricably interwoven with mine.
The Manuans loved it when certain principles repeatedly appeared in their description of and understanding of the universe. Imagine their joy when the combination of the purely invented ‘imaginary number’ with the sinusoidal wave equations naturally predicted the phantom particle trajectories of quantum mechanics. The Happy Stone was a similar jewel in their knowledge troves because of it’s usefulness and poetic and philosophical significance.
An unassuming white substance that can be cut with a knife, Happy Stone is often combined with water by young chemistry-curious Manuans for the resulting dramatic explosion. Like the cause of this entertaining reaction, the Happy Stone’s most obvious usefulness came from its physical properties as a Yortha-lalka metal. In its ionic form, Happy Stone (or Hs), was useful for it’s ability to act as a battery anode, allowing for the technological revolution of small wireless battery powered devices, eventually becoming the battery type for all power storage on Yortha.
Hs+ also had the other curious feature of providing mood stabilizing effects in Manuans with mental imbalances, hence the name ‘Happy Stone.’ It was at this point that some Manuans began to think it peculilar, as a pure element, which with natural combination with the water present in Manuan bodies, could combat both manic and depressive behaviours.
The simplicity of this tiny atom (smaller than everything else except for hydrogen and helium), combined with it’s effectiveness in Manuan life made it seem almost as if designed by gods. Manuans particularly loved these discoveries of great coincidence, in part because the unsolvable conundrum of the existence of god(s) is one that will forever draw them onward, curiosity unsatisfied, like a lover that always keeps the Manuans wanting more.
But it was the Manuan Stargazers, again, that found the least directly useful and most philosophically exciting significance of the Happy Stone. A small amount (less than 1%) of the matter created in the beginning of time was Happy Stone (in addition to the hydrogen and helium that made up almost 100% of the primordial universe). And further, all of the Happy Stone in the universe came from the beginning.
Each and every atom of Hs stood as witness to the universe’s transition into translucency, to those intial millenia of darkness before the first star shone. And each technologically reliant Manuan, and the many who drank the carefully measured Hs droplets to find peace of mind were all accessing this rare substance, created only in the beginning of time.
With this discovery in hand, the Stargazers sought to measure how much of the Happy Stone existed in the universe, to further test their models of universal evolution. And they found that certain stars, in particular, stars like Sola, the star Yortha orbits, contain far less Happy Stone than the rest of their systems, than the rest of the galaxy. And here they discovered something both enlightening and saddening.
The Happy Stone was slowly being consumed to the point of almost nonexistence in the atmospheres of stars, the universe’s life and light givers. Not ones to waste measurements, the Stargazers used this Hs depletion to more accurately model stellar atmospheres, to better understand these life giving giants who had provided all of the higher elements necessary to the formation of Yortha and for life.
But as for Happy Stone, these small droplets of joy, tears from phantom gods of creation, were slowly being eaten up.
Now, obviously, these processes take millions of years, and so Manuans, and universal inhabitants everywhere, still had plenty of time to enjoy the properties of Hs and Hs+.
But to the god-seeking Manuans, everything beautiful that must eventually end is both wonderful and slightly sad. It is to this notion I attribute their ridiculous attention to the cultivation of the exotic and extravagantly colored and petaled plant reproductive organs (flowers) on Yortha. At some points in Manuan history, Manuans sold their families’ entire belongings and means of income for single flowers. But that’s another story entirely.
