Absentia
Salvation lies in Absentia
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bsentia is the hypothetical home world of the Absents. In theory, it may also be the original home world of all casterways.
The Case For Absentia
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The planet is presumed to exist through a process of basic deduction. Since no one has any memory of such a place, its existence (if it exists at all) must be deduced based on the following factors:
- Someone facilitates the ever-present flow of one-way dropship passengers who are routinely deposited into the Dropship Seia via excilation. While casterways maintain no active memories of those people, it only stands to reason that they exist. That unseen population has been known for millennia, amongst Excilior's inhabitants, as the Absents.
- And if there are, indeed, Absents "up there", somewhere, then that civilization must have some planet that it calls home. Casterways have come to refer to this hypothetical world as Absentia.
- And if the casterways were once part of the Absents' civilization, then Absentia would be the original home world for all casterways as well.
The Case (Not) For Absentia
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s simple as these deductions may be, there are still many - most notably, the cognoscenti - who take great pains to point out that even the simplest of these deductions is not certain and cannot be proven. They take the position that talk of Absentia is, essentially, wish fulfillment, and that it shouldn't be tolerated in educated circles. Their primary points are as follows:
- Assuming that the mythical Absents are, in fact, "up there", there is still no reason to assume that they inhabit a single planet, or that they still think of any single planet as their "home world". In fact, the planet from which they originally spawned may now be destroyed or uninhabitable. If the Absents represent a true, space-faring civilization with the technology to abandon unwanted citizens on a planet of their choosing, then they may be spread across the entire solar system - or even, across the galaxy. They may not even live on any particular planet anymore. They could have transferred their entire population to massive starships. So any insistence on a single planet as the "home of the Absents" is little more than lazy guesswork.
- The idea that the hypothetical world of Absentia is also the ancestral home of the casterways is even flimsier than the original supposition of Absentia's existence. Casterways could have originally been members of the Absents' civilization. But they just as likely could be POWs from an endless war between the Absents and some "other" human civilization. Following this line of thinking even further, the Absents may not even be human.
- Academic rigor does not convey acceptance of a concept merely because it can't be definitively disproven. If Absentia is taken as fact, merely because no one has managed to disprove its existence, then the same argument can be made that gods, and myths, and fairy tales must all be facts as well.
The Case For Allowing People To Dream
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lthough all of the previous points may be true, and academically sound, the cognoscenti's vociferous arguments on this topic tend to alienate most lay-folk. Whether there really is a single civilization that can be associated with the casterway legend of the Absents, and whether they actually claim a single home world (that the casterways would call Absentia), is of little importance to most "average" folk. Like the Absents themselves, Absentia occupies a solid niche in the planet's lore. It is referenced in everything from popular culture to stuffy literary tomes. It serves as rhetorical shorthand for the idea that there are grander things out there in the broader universe. And maybe, if they're lucky, someday some of Excilior's inhabitants might just get a chance to see some of it.
Type
Planet
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