Shermadi Storytail

Summary

To pass knowledge down is to grow the mountain of understanding, and it is not an easy task to do when underwater. Early shermadi civilizations had little options outside of oral traditions. The rich, or those with enough time and effort, could chisel their words into solid stone. Or, hire sculptors to create monuments of rememberance. These highly valued works, perhaps scoffed at on the surface, became pillars of long-term record keeping. For everyone else, however, there was the storytail.   Traditionally made out of kelp, fish sinew, and other binding agents, the storytail is a long, central cord. From this cord branch off numerous others, each of them tied at set lengths and positions upon the central cord. These branches are then tied into knots, each knot size having a meaning, as well as the distances between the knots. Smaller sub-branches could potentially be made, but these were rare and often a form of editorial changing after the storytail had been made. So it is, the storytail became the shermadi equivalent of a 'book'. Every aspect of the storytail conveys meaning, and its changeable nature allows it to convey a lot of meaning in a very condensed manner.   To understand this innovation properly is to gaze at the world of the shermadi. Being in the oceans, their architecture, thinking, and way of life is inherently three-dimensional. There is no 'flat surface' they live upon to ground their worldly view. Hence, they have long adapted to look and interact in an extraordinarily detailed and complex environment. The storytail capitalizes on this natural thinking to its utmost degree. At the beginning of the storytail, the 'reader' is guided along, and each branch instructs them on how to start and end their readings. Now, include position, reading direction, and orientation, and a lot of different meanings can be compacted down.   Adoption of the storytail was slow, but its universal nature, as well as a lack of options, pushed it into the mainstream. The various shermadi tribes, clans, and otherwise began innovating on their new story languages, translating oral traditions and writings as needed. Soon the vast usefulness of the innovation exploded across the ocean, and the storytail became a central pillar of their ways. Colors, decorations, and other additions were soon mixed in to help convey even more information.   Guideposts, store signs, message totems, and many more came into being to sport all kinds of storytails. Indeed, land-dwellers who came underwater for one reason or another initially wrote off the storytails as 'decorations'. It became apparent that everyone looking at them wasn't just to admire their looks, though. While the innovation of kelp-paper has ushered in new literary devices, the three-dimensional shermadi are being fussy over a two-dimensional storage method.   Rather than a difficulty in translation for them, it's an issue of perceiving how to store their experiences done in such a blase method. Given how much more useful this is to land-dwellers, the shermadi near coasts or doing active trade bother a lot more with it than others. Ebalatan is the most well-known for trying to push kelp-paper as a new standard, for one reason or another.