In the Year 13 of the Great Nation of Dhuþchia...

Shiokichi of Trölhoum, Senior Vice-Prelate of the Grand Temple of the Lord of the Waves in Trölhoum, was in the midst of a contentious theological debate with some heathen from the east, a follower of some fire-belching mountain god. The subject of debate was, of course, whose god would win in a fight. As the Lord of the Waves was, as was apparent from His appellation, a god of the great oceans and of water in general, Shiokichi knew that He surely had the type advantage against some silly fire/rock god.

But, after duly destroying the heathen shill with facts and logic, and performing a live demonstration of dumping a pail of water on a stack of inflamed kindling, Shiokichi despaired, as he knew that he, and his heirs and successors, were doomed to repeat this inane display over and over again, as those annointed to the Prelature of the Lord of the Waves were the only ones with sufficient intellect to annihilate the feels of nonbelievers. If only there were some way to record his proofs of his god's superiority, so that he did not have to manually recite them every time some thrall of a lesser deity needed a good verbal smiting. And, Shiokichi realized, there was.

Or rather, there could be. The Lord of the Waves was a god of ambition and daring, and His Prelates sought to emulate their divine master at every turn. So, Shiokichi decided that he needed to devise a Holy Tongue of Permanence, to record the Word of the Lord of the Waves for all eternity. Although the concept of recording holy argumentations was a novel one to Dhuþchia, recording simpler meanings was not. Shiokichi's sister, Raisu, was one of the small but rapidly-growing cadre of farmers in Trölhoum. The farmers, who were much more meticulous in their bookkeeping than the hunters, foragers, and fishers combined, used a simple system of tallies for keeping track of grain stores and whatever.

One of Shiokichi's drinking buddies, Numachi, was one of Trölhoum's Huntsmen-Captains, responsible for tracking and ganking great beasts and harvesting their meat. For these hunts, which often involved long, multi-day treks through the untamed forests and swamps surrounding Trölhoum, the huntsmen had developed a crude system of symbols, usually carved in unusually sturdy trees or prominent rock formations, to indicate basic survival information such as the presence of fresh water, the direction to reliable shelters, or the fact that the local shrooms were the deadly kind, not the dank kind.

Neither of these systems was in any way capable of recording the great treatises of erudition that Shiokichi sought to write. However, Shiokichi, with his brain blessed by the Lord of the Waves, deduced that all he needed to do to record more complex concepts, and statements of concepts, was to add more symbols. If there was a symbol for everything, then Shiokichi could record anything. Simple enough, right?

To be continued... Soon^TM.

Effect: Glorious Dhuþchia begins researching the Major Technology of Writing.