Illustrations (The Ido Chronicles)
Opening scene from The One and Only - "The pavement was broken up into pieces along this stretch of old Saint-Denis street – it had been a long time since any maintenance crews had dared come down into this part of the city. Most of the shop windows were gaping holes, some of them covered in cardboard to provide some measure of protection to the squatters inside."
Reactive nemos that figure in both Pinnacle: The First Book of Eng (novel) and Pinnacle, A One Act Opera : "On either side of them hung tufts of nemos, immobile animals which harvested water from the air via their tendril nets."
Jonahs are first encountered in Plenum : The First Book of Deo, but are also found in other volumes of the Chronicles. "The form slowed and turned, and a startled Vanu realized this was a jonah, another of the ancient deep sea creatures of Old Earth that had been adapted to function in the spaces between the stars... the jonahs were once a creature called a "whale". "
An intimate encounter between Vanu, a neutral gendered indiv, and Shosee, a female, in Plenum : The First Book of Deo : "Involuntarily, Vanu reached out and cupped hir hands around Shosee's head. Shosee moved into hir touch, as if expecting it, and drew her own hands up over Vanu’s wrists. Like a blind person who touches the face of a lover, Vanu’s hands traced out the features of her face - the shallow bowls of her eyes, the flaring nostrils, the tremulous lip, the cavities and bumps of her scalp, a tactile landscape that merged into the pulpy softness of hir fingers. Instinctively, Vanu dampened the pleasure response of the nerve endings in hir palms as hir probing pressure became more intense and the codes zhe was reading through hir skin tumbled into the realm of pain."
Scene from Pinnacle : The First Book of Eng - "Oreph led Chill towards a park area near the Overbridge, about halfway to the place where the Great Rift opened out towards the edge of the Enclave - the early afternoon light slanted across the huge tunnel, catching dust particles lazily drifting in the air. The Overbridge loomed above them, a little further south, a delicate-looking structure arching across the Rift about halfway up the giant passageway, more gossamer than stolid. The Overbridge allowed pedestrians and threaders to cross the Rift without needing to descend to its floor or rise above its ceiling."
Scene from Plenum : The First Book of Deo - "A short time later, zhe went outside to look for Jetsu... Here the dramatic colours of the nebula were largely hidden by the bulk of the platform... rimmed by a wide raised lip upon which grew the ubiquitous greenbak that bedecked the hulls of long term space platforms. The presence of geeback here suggested there might be a small leakage of gases from inside the Annex - such leaks couldn't be entirely avoided, and helped support the external ecosystems of the platform. The greenbak was a vacuum-adapted algae that stripped oxygen from gas molecules other than water, and stored the oxygen in small bladder-like fruits that clustered on its outer surfaces. The oggies harvested the oxygen from the bladders."
Scene from Pinnacle : The First Book of Eng - "< We don’t actually have to go back, > Oreph confided in Relliana. < We could use our windplanes to glide back to the city. > He pointed downwards to another ledge, some distance below them. The side of the city consisted of an intricate structure of declivities and promontories, pillars and vines, providing either shelter from the winds, or precarious views, not so much of the planet below as of the cityscape itself, that is, of one of its convoluted vertical faces."
Scene from Gratia : The Second Book of Deo - "Zhe moved on through the silent and solitary landscape. Like the surface platform, there were no signs of any inhabitants, a situation that was beginning to worry Vanu. Whereas the surface port might well be quiescent at times, Vanu could think of no reason why a heavily inhabited residential area of the city should likewise be empty under normal circumstances."