Over the eastern mountains! Lately, Sara’s life has been going swimmingly! She’s been enjoying her time in Hydrangea with Nelly and her friends, with no pesky requests from the capital to deal with. However, all this changes when a pair of letters arrive at the Wolverié household from Nelly’s sister Latifah, the wife of a lord in the lands to the east. One letter requests Nelly’s presence, and the other, Sara’s—as it turns out, there’s a new Invited staying with Latifah’s family, and this Invited needs Sara’s help! And so, Sara and the gang head east, planning to take care of an infestation of green grass locusts while they’re there. Will this journey finally be the thing to shake up Sara’s quiet life for good?
What It Means To Be The Last Of My Kind As my nature as Spherit Folk is becoming more difficult to hide, I’m faced with a shocking truth: only one race can produce a Holy Woman that can save the world—and I’m the last remaining descendant of that race! With the human war raging on and traffic to my family’s inn cut off during these tremulous times, I must set off to the Mythical Continent to discover my destiny!
In contemporary India, 12-year-old Asha will journey across the dangerous Himalayas to find her missing father and save her family's home -- guided by a mythical bird and a green-eyed tiger who she believes to be the spirits of her ancestors. This is an incredibly unique debut about loss, family, buried treasure, and hope. Asha lives on a family farm with her mother in rural India in the foothills of the Himalayas. Life would be perfect if her father were with them instead of working at the factory in the faraway city. But she knows they wouldn't be able to afford their home without the money he sends home.When four months go by without a single letter, a ruthless debt collector arrives with a warning, and soon the entire world that Asha has known is threatened. Determined to save her home, Asha and her best friend must swallow their fears and set out on a dangerous journey across the Himalayas to find her father.As desperation turns to peril, Asha will face law enforcement, natural disaster, and the wild dangers of the Himalayas. But with a majestic bird and a green-eyed tiger as her guides, who she believes to be the spirits of her ancestors, she's determined to keep faith in order to save her family.
Who Are My Kind? Since my stepsister, Nakona Ril, has joined the family, I’ve finally settled into a happy life of cooking and potion brewing at the family inn. But the shadow of war looms ahead, with the fate of the world and my own destiny fast approaching. Monsters are coming, bandits seek to steal my potions, and countries set their sights upon the rumor of a talented alchemist. Why won’t they all just leave me alone?!
DON’T JUDGE AN ORC BY HIS ACCOLADES Long ago, as the fires of war raged among the twelve races, one name inspired fear and awe in the heart of every orc—Bash. A living legend to his people, Bash has enjoyed many a blood-soaked victory. But this Hero harbors a shameful secret. Though it is the pride of every orc to match his triumphs in battle with conquests in the bedroom, Bash has been entirely devoted to the former. Thus, he embarks on a journey to face his greatest challenge yet: finding a wife and losing his virginity!
The first book in the New York Times bestselling epic fantasy trilogy by award-winning author Laini Taylor Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?
Just when I thought navigating high school was bad enough, I woke up to a rotting, post-apocalyptic world! I thought that the poisonous swamp surrounding my small island would have protected me from all the drama, but what did I see staggering my way? A nasty, putrid zombie! With nothing left to lose, I shoved it away! To my surprise, it turned into a living, breathing, not-so-dead human! So, I have the power to purify zombies. And now I’m expected to save this undead world from the zombie apocalypse? Great. This is so NOT my problem!
It’s been one crazy thing after another ever since Sara was suddenly thrust into another world as a younger version of herself, but she’s continuing her journey with her friend Allen and her guardian, Nelly the Hunter. They’re headed for Nelly’s hometown, Hydrangea. If Sara wants to avoid any more trouble with the knights from the capital, her best bet is for Nelly’s family to become her guardians officially. Despite Nelly and Allen’s best attempts to lure her into the life of a Hunter, Sara’s started taking an interest in becoming an apothecary. In their travels, they stop at a town called Stock, which is having a major monster problem. In the chaos, they meet a man named Thedias, who turns out to be Nelly’s brother! Will Sara reach a crossroads in her life in her guardian’s hometown?
Even as a working adult, Sarasa Ichinokura suffers from an unshakable fatigue that’s plagued her since childhood. She goes to bed one night, exhausted from her office job, and encounters a goddess(?) who informs her that her perpetual lack of energy is actually due to a deficit of “mana.” Then, without any further explanation or time to process what’s happening to her, Sarasa is thrust into a fantasy world! She awakens in the body of a ten-year-old girl in a strange land filled with flying beasts and oversized wolves. She accordingly prepares for the worst, but a monster hunter named Nelly takes her in. The hitch is...now that Sarasa finally has the energy to do everything she wants to, being cooped up in a cabin is just no fun! She seeks to stand on her own in this scary new world—and that’s going to mean learning magic. It may be slow going, but Sarasa knows what to do—the best way to take her reincarnation is one step at a time!
Paperback version of the 2002 paper published in the journal Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design (PCID). ABSTRACT Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.
