It is tempting to believe we are in the centre of things. In centuries past, the world’s greatest minds believed that the sun went around the earth. Today, children are taught the truth - that the sun stands fixed and it is earth that moves in constant dance around it. Similarly, while it is tempting to believe that in terms of dimensions and planes, we occupy some position of centrality, that too would be false. Centrality itself is a fiction. Every world is a point intersected by many lines. Every world is full of doors. And these doors are constantly used, only occasionally by us. - Pandian, The True Heresy of Unsymmetry.
The Obar call it salvage and we just nod along. We buy it from them even though we don't understand it because the sages are greedy and covetous. In the palaces of kings and the colleges of knowledge, they study this salvage - its ticks, its whirs, its hums, buzzes and strange lights, its sharp shocks, its cracks and its crackling. Their eyes gleam and they begin to mutter under their breaths about how the Obar only share the useless examples, hoarding the best salvage for themselves. They talk of salvage like it is living - with desires and secrets. They are crazy. Just take their money and do not linger. - A trader to his son, overheard in the docks of Ogadhi.
In my time among the mysterious and majestic Obar, I have come to new understandings of the secrets of the universe! I have come to see! Or rather, not to see! Sight is like the muscle on the back of our knees and with the Obar that muscle is cut, the tendon is severed and sight is useless. The world of the Obar is a world of sound, light and electricity or as I would put it - hum, glow and sizzle! Their salvage has something to do with it but even I, who am at least one hundred years ahead of those other fools, am at least one hundred years away from understand the truth of salvage. - former Ambassador Karthika, from her unpublished diaries.
Standard sage texts divide the ocean into three zones: the surface or blue water, the mid-depth or grey water and the true deep or black water. The Obar have a much finer classification which can broadly be seen as having five parts, even though each of these five parts can be further classified. The highest water, they call the sun-kissed. After that is the abundance, then the scavengeance and finally the softrock which is the sea floor. Below the sea floor, in the trenches, they call that water the abyss. They say that from the abyss comes life and death, salvation and terror. No landsperson has ever been into the abyss. We’re going to change that! - Nakhuda Rogay, before his fateful expedition, as recorded in official court documents.