Author Archives: Aurhia

A Friendly Wager – How the Seelund Trade Company Came To Be

Posted on by

“Shut up and deal the cards, Jennen.”

Jennen lifts his index finger in a gesture of “hold on a minute” to Aydrianne and continues spinning his tale to the rest of the table. “So then she said to me, ‘this time next week I’ll be stationed at Fort Salma, and I don’t know when I shall return.’ I, of course, was devastated.” His pantomime anguish raises another wave of hysterical laughter.

Aydrianne rolls her eyes and bats his raised hand away. She stretches forward across the table to snatch the now-mostly-empty bottle of wine, watching the faces of her friends. The gentleman, the rogue, the life of the party, and of course, her sister, all ring the hand-carved table, laughing at each other, winning and losing the same five or six gold over and over, and drinking their way through history in vintage form from their families’ wine cellars.

Luc slides his glass toward Aydrianne and she finishes the bottle between their glasses. In her reverie, she’s lost track of Jennen’s story and laughs with the others to hide it rather than out of amusement.

“We’re going to run out of this stuff eventually you know,” she muses aloud, spinning the bottle around to read the label. “1292… I pronounce 1292 a banner year for Shaemoor wines.”

“I much prefer the ’71” Luc opines, sipping from his glass. “It’s a good thing you don’t have to make your living selling wine.”

“It might come to that soon.” Aydrianne hoists the empty back to a basket full of similarly discarded bottles behind her. “Mother’s been on her high horse again about ‘producing heirs.’ Support the House or find someone else to do it.” She takes too large a swallow of wine, not looking at the rest of the group.

“You know I’m always here for you, Anne,” Blake answers with a gallant flourish and a chuckle.

“Nothing against you, Henries, but I think I’d rather sell wine.”

He clutches at his heart, acting mortally wounded. “You cut me to the quick, my dear. You know I can’t stand to see a beautiful woman suffer.”

Seated in her shaded corner, Qora snorts audibly, looking up from sharpening her dagger just long enough to flash Blake a snarl.

“Great, you find one of those, you can go rescue her.” Aydrianne slumps in her chair.

“Mother will be quite disheartened to hear she, once again, does not get to take a bride out dress shopping. Her poor little heart might break. She may just have to buy me a new suit! How utterly delicious! I will — of course — have to show proper depression at being turned down by the illustrious Aydrianne Seelund. All the girls will just hate you for this you realize?” The excitement in his voice has his whole body quivering at the idea.

“How would that be any different from any other day?” Aydrianne lifts her glass, about to drink, and says to Jennen, “Would you deal the da– what are you doing?”

“Oh, Jennen, you adorable,” Henries pauses, thinking hard, then huffs, exasperated, “Oh I never can come up with a good name for you! If you are going to cut the cards like that, you might as well stencil a C on the lapels of your frock.. oh… that IS quite a fetching color…” Henries reaches across to rub the lapels and examine the lace. “Good fabric too. Who did you go to for it? Wait… No. I was discussing your atrocious shuffling. I know you need the practice, but over five gold? Perhaps we could stencil that C in a nice complimentary silver…”

Jennen looks up from the cards with a casual air of innocence, changing the subject. “Well why don’t you? Sell wine, I mean.” Without waiting for an answer, he adds to Blake “Lion’s Arch… the silk came from a lovely but disreputable pirate with excellent taste in haberdashery.”

Turning to Aydrianne, Blake chimes in, “Wine, my beautiful, never-to-be, yes! If you won’t accept the profferance of a life of utter leisure,” the word utter is drawn out to show Henries’ personal disdain for word, as his eyes roll towards the ceiling, “then wine might be just the thing. After all, we drink it.” He takes a careful sip from his glass. “Breath it.” He tilts the glass so he can take a long sniff of the wine’s vapors. “Hell I’d eat it if there was any nutritional value, and dried wine didn’t taste like something better left unmentioned. I could buy you your first case! Or just raid Dadums cellar; it is quite remarkable, after all.”

Jennen breaks in, “Maybe you should consider the silk trade…You could fund your house three or four seasons just from Blake and Luc’s unmentionables…” Jennen snorts and starts dealing.

“I could use a new pair of BOOTS,” Qora adds, kicking Jennen squarely in the kneecap after looking at her first card.

“Ow!” Jennen spits out through clenched teeth “And shin-guards.”

Aydrianne ignores their banter, staring into her glass.

“I would consider that,” Luc pipes up. “I’ve been looking for a more …fruitful venture to throw my money at. And you can never have too many… unmentionables.”

“More fruitful than women and wine?”

“Oh but if Anne here is bringing in the wine, aren’t I still spending my money on exactly those things?” Luc lifts his glass toward Aydrianne.

Aydrianne concedes that point with a half-shrug. “I dunno. Businesses are expensive. And there’s already several companies importing to Divinity’s Reach.”

“But none of them have your greatest asset, darling.” Blake picks up his cards and splutters over them. “Really, Jennen…”

“And what’s that?” Aydrianne doesn’t even bother touching her cards.

“Why, US, of course! Who in this city knows more about _indulgence_ than we do?”

That elicits a laugh from Aydrianne. “Well, ok, you’ve got me there.” She tosses back the rest of her wine and crosses the room to retrieve another bottle.

“Not the craziest scheme I’ve ever heard around this table. Sounds like a lot of work though,” Jennen adds.

Blake holds out the bottle opener to Anne as she returns. “It does sound like a lot of work. Let’s go back to that ‘heirs’ idea…”

Anne grimaces. “Let’s not.”

“Let’s let Lady Luck decide.” Jennen drops the deck in the middle of the table. “High card. If you win,” he points at Aydrianne, “the rest of us fund your trade company. If Henries wins, we pay for your wedding.”

Blake brightens. “Oh how devilish! Better chances than I had thirty seconds ago. I’m in!”

“Didn’t he–” Luc starts to say but is cut off by Aydrianne slamming her hand down defiantly on the deck.

The Narrow Escape – Part 2

Posted on by

The doors to the medbay whoosh open to reveal the ship’s doctor peeling the charred remains of a shirt away from a splotchy blaster burn on the Captain’s shoulder. Aydrien brushes past the door before it’s finished retracting and plants herself firmly in front of her wayward Captain.

He flashes her an insouciant smirk. “Aaaaaaaayd,” he slurs. “My fav’rite firs’ m–”

She smacks him.

“We’ll talk when ya ge’ here? Well, yer here. Star’ talkin’.”

He rubs his cheek ruefully. “Ya know, on some ships they space folk as strike their superiors.”

“Good thing for you we’re not one of those ships,” she says, carefully enunciating every word, “because I would hate to have to lead a mutiny against you.”

“Now tha’s cold, ev’n fer you,” he retorts.

“I’m colder’n space, Stefan, when th’ Escape’s involved. We’re not gonna be able ta dock ANYwhere ya keep this up.” She crosses her arms across her chest, staring him down, waiting for his latest string of excuses.

He hesitates. “The full name is it? Mus’ be in real trouble this time.” He waves the doctor away. The shorter man regards the two warily but exits without a word.

“Ayd. …Aydrien.” The Captain hooks her hand and drags her closer. “‘Tweren’t my fault this time. I know. I know I always say tha’. Bu’ ‘t’s true. I me’ the buyer. Thin’s were goin’ swimmin’ly. Then we were facin’ a swarm a Imps.”

“Random Imperials swarmed your meeting.” Disbelief ices her voice, clipping her words. “I suppose they were supported by Bara the Hutt and Timda hi’self, in person.”

The Captain runs his hand down his face tiredly. “Ah know how it soun’s, Ayd, but… it’s true this time.”

Aydrien scowls. He’s a liar and a cheat but… if that’s a lie it’s a pretty audacious one…

“Why wou’d Imps care ‘bout a glit sale? We’re not ‘n Empire space.”

He refuses to meet her eyes. “‘Tweren’t stims.”

A pause. “…what?”

“Ya seen th’ accounts. We’re runnin’ dry, Ayd. Need a bigger score ta keep th’ ship fueled.”

She slips her hand free of his and steps back out of his reach. “What was it?”

“Weapons.” His eyes implore her to understand. “Tha’s where the creds are. Ya know tha’.” He stretches to take her hand back but pulls up short, wincing. She relents just a little, knowing the pain must be intense for him to let it show. She catches up the salve the doctor left on the table and sidles around behind him to dot it on the burn.

“For who?” she asks finally.

“Balmorra.”

A sharp intake of breath. “And ya din’t think ta maybe TELL ME!?” She spins and hurls the bottle across the room, seething. “We agreed ta stay out a politics,” she snaps, turning her back to him and kicking viciously at one of the table’s legs.

“Ah know. We need the money, Ayd.”

“You’re a bastard!”

“Tha’s wha’ mah momma always said. Pretty common on Nar Shaddaa.”

“Tha’s not wha’ I–”

“I know.” He answers quietly.

“How could you be so STUPID?” She rages on. “How’d ya get CAUGHT?”

“I know, Ayd.” His voice continues to drop.

“They’re gonna be after us from one end a th’ Galaxy ta t’other now, Stoffi.” Fury begrudgingly burns away at the futility of berating him after the fact.

“I know.” He makes another effort to reach her, brushing his fingertips against her arm. “This is th’ part where ya usually slap me again, love. A’ leas’ look a’ me.”

“I hate you.”

“I know.” He manages to wrap his hand around her arm and suddenly jerks her into his lap. She raises a hand to strike him again but he grabs her wrist and flashes that infuriating grin. “We’ll figure it out, babe. We always do.”

“I hate you.”

“Yer repeatin’ yerself.” He presses her imprisoned hand against his chest.

“Consider it emphasis.”

“Come on,” he adds, calculation clear in his voice. “Ya tryin’ ta tell me ya can’ out-fly a few Imps?” He watches, already knowing her reaction.

“Of course I c—” She gives an exasperated sigh and has to laugh. “I hate you,” she says again, this time fondly.

“I love you too, Ayd.”

The Narrow Escape – Part 1

Posted on by

“Get the fucking hell out of my way.”

The gruff voice rains down on the crew jostling cargo up the loading ramp of the Narrow Escape. The captain of the ship towers over them, disheveled blond hair standing on end as he runs a greasy hand through it. His bored first mate frowns up at him as she approaches with another crate.

“You want we should jump off the side of the gangplank, Cap’n?” she ventures garrulously, an abrasive smirk chasing across her face. “Cuz, we could do that, only you ain’t paid for my last kolto tank stay yet and I won’t be much use with the broken legs I’m like to get from the fall.”

“How about I push you off the side?”

“How ‘bout I grab the front uh’ your shirt ‘n’ drag ya off with me?”

His scowl cracks. “You’d do that too, wouldn’t you?” He grins suddenly. “Have I told you you’re an annoying bitch?”

“Only ever’ day, Cap’n. Only ever’ day.”

“Well consider yourself told again.”

“Consider yourself told off again then,” she retorts.

He doffs an imaginary cap to her and threads his way down the ramp.

* * *

“SEELUND!”

She bolts upright from a dead sleep, the thin blanket slipping off the side of the bed. Feeling the empty place next to her she swears under her breath and gropes in the dark for her comm, clicking the channel open. “Captain?”

“Warm’er up. Comin’ in hot.” She can hear pounding footsteps echoing off the walls and into the comm, something suspiciously like blaster fire in the background.

“Why do you _always_ do this?” She accuses peevishly, tossing back the sheets and wincing as her bare feet touch the cold metal floor. “Who is it this time? An angry husband? Someone you rolled at pazaak?” Flipping the light on she dons the previous day’s work clothes one-handed.

“Just do it. Talk when… get there.” The channel goes dead.

“Just once, I’d like to leave a planet on schedule,” she mutters to herself.

Strapping on her blaster she races out of her stateroom, hitting the alarm on the way out.

“You know the drill, folks. Get ‘er ready. Cap’n’s incomin’.” she shouts into her comm.

She storms onto the bridge, noting with pride that her other officers are only a few steps behind. “Wha’d he do this time?” one of them spouts in her direction.

“Damned if I know,” she answers, taking the pilot’s chair, jabbing at the intercom. “Fire’er up, boys, Ah’m gettin’ the sense we’re gonna be blastin’ out uh’ the bay.”

The ship shivers to life under her, the vibrations sending a familiar chill up her spine. “Tha’s my baby,” she murmurs, stroking the controls gently as she sends the commands to unlock the docking clamps.

The scratchy intercom crackles. “See him. He’s got… holy hells he’s got half the planetary security behind him.” She jerks her head back toward the hallway and one of the crew jumps to man the guns.

“If that man survives I am going to kill him,” she announces, trying to send an override to open the station’s outer doors. She can hear the ship’s main battery open fire on something inside the hangar. “If his own ship doesn’t kill him first.”

The hangar doors remain obstinately shut.

She slaps the intercom. “Niri, we’re going through those doors in thirty seconds. If you don’t want to be paste you’ll give me an opening.”

“Knock knock!” comes back across the intercom as the main guns swivel across the hangar.

The signal she’s been waiting for: “Got’im!”

She bangs the console, thrusting the ship toward the doors.

“Niri…?! Doors?!”

She shields her eyes against the sudden glow as the doors buckle under the full force of the ship’s main battery. Out the door and a sudden 90 degree turn to confuse any attempts to shoot them down.

The Escape skims a few hundred meters from the skin of the station, streaking by surprised gawkers in one of the observation decks. She skates off the edge and into space, darting around ships, keeping others between herself and the station’s batteries. Fighters careen around the corner in pursuit.

Aydrien drops a fist on the intercom button and shouts, “Don’t shoot them down unless you have to. Just clip their wings a little.”

There’s no reply but fighters start twirling off to the sides. “He’s gotten remarkably good at that shot,” one of the other officers remarks.

“He’s had too much practice.” Aydrien answers pointedly.

She calculates the jump to light speed, flipping end for end at the last second to confuse anyone stupid enough to follow. As the stars stretch in the viewscreen, she lets out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

“He better be wounded,” she growls, standing, “or I’m gonna kill him myself.”

Culture Shock

Posted on by

I lived in the Midwest for over twenty years running, in a number of different places. There were minor differences from place to place but overall things were similar and what you knew in one spot applied to the others.

When I moved to the Bay last year I suffered some major culture shock — but I’m not talking about social culture shock. I’m talking about garden cultivation!

In the Midwest, plants tend to all follow similar needs and patterns. The pre-printed information on a plant or seed packet was rarely ever 100% accurate but sort of generally close. Out here, you may find something labeled “drought-tolerant” and “full sun” that requires 23 hours of shade a day and daily watering. But I don’t think it’s the labeler’s fault. We’ve got such crazy microclimates around the Bay that a plant that’s full sun in one spot can require full shade a mile away.

So I muddle through. I feel like I’m just starting out again, even though I’ve been a container gardener for nearly twenty years now. I was “that” person, the one everyone gave their dying plants to save. And my indoor plants are doing just fine. But man, everything I’ve put out in the yard to try to add a little groundcover to our bare patch of hardpan has turned brown. Well, almost everything. There’s a shady corner where the moss and the blue stars seem to thrive. Even the aloe is ailing and that prefers the climate here to that of the Midwest!

Living La Vida Aburrida

Posted on by

I’ve started several posts since I declared I was going to start posting nearly every day. Each time I stop about a paragraph in. “So what?” I ask myself. “No one cares if I had a good day or why.” And sometimes the things that were important about the day are things I’m not sure I really want to share publicly. But mostly, I lead a somewhat ordinary life, and do somewhat ordinary things.

Let’s face it, on paper, my life looks pretty boring.

I spend the largest chunk of my time sitting in front of a computer (…like right now…). I’m a designer who doesn’t really get to do design. Before I started working remotely, I was a cubicle-dweller, like most of the people who either started in or have worked their way up to the middle class. It was a nice cube — my employer prides itself on taking care of its employees — but it was still a cube, and still would be if I hadn’t moved too far away to commute. Unlike a pulp fiction hero, I actually have to do housework. I do live a few blocks from a fairly bad neighborhood, but, that’s Oakland. All the nice neighborhoods are a few blocks from the bad neighborhoods, and vice versa. You walk two minutes and your environment totally changes, but the crime and drugs tend to stay in the bad neighborhoods for the most part even though they’re so close. I don’t live on the edge of starvation, or desperation, or in danger if I sit on my porch after dark (well, not much anyway). The biggest danger I face these days is increased risk of heart attack from sitting too much at the computer, or spraining my index finger trying to type on my smartphone. I play far too many video games and my ideal morning is taking my Kindle out on the porch with a nice cup of tea or coffee. Not the stuff of legends.

But for all that, I’ve never been bored with my life. I love life. More importantly, I love my life. To me, everything that life has to offer is exciting. Sure, it’s not “exciting” in popular entertainment terms. I’m not being chased and shot at like in the vids. Hell no. I’ve been shot at. Trust me, it’s not like a vid. It’s not exciting and fun, even if watching it makes for entertaining fiction. When you duck for cover, if you spare the time to think up a witty one liner for your alluring companion, you’re probably dead before you can deliver it. Thanks, but no thanks.

What constitutes an adventure is all in how you look at the world around you. It’s all about finding new ways to challenge yourself, new ways to do something better than you did the day before. Intentionally taking the wrong turn and ending up at the ocean instead of the grocery. Looking for the details in your surroundings that you’ve missed before. When you go through life thinking adventure is a far away thing, distant from your day to day reality, you miss the wonders that face you every day.

heat

Posted on by

My summary post today is: It’s too damn hot to write a blog post. My computer’s fan is laboring and it’s got to be over a hundred in the office. Time to shut it all down…

My Independence Day

Posted on by

Today is Independence Day. Today we in the States celebrate having broken off from our parent country in favor of standing on our own feet. It’s a day to contemplate the true meaning of freedom and self-sufficiency by drinking too much beer and blowing shit up.

In the spirit of that contemplation, today I declare myself independent from my past, from everything that’s held me back or troubled me. I’ve meandered through the forest with no path, hoping that if I head in the same general direction it would get me there. But today I promise myself that where I do not find a path to follow, I will blaze one.

Part of the plan is to post here something approaching every day that I’m not out of town. It will be a record of my progress for me, and hopefully this daily writing will also spark some interesting articles on art, gardening, gaming, writing, cooking, linguistics, archaeology or any of the other topics that I regularly pursue.

When my day’s main thrust is web development or user interface design (my career), the posts will go to my portfolio blog, http://www.crysodenkirk.com. Everything else goes here.

Can I make posts about my life entertaining enough for anyone other than me or my immediate family to actually read them? Eh, maybe not (though trying to is part of the exercise). But the log will be here for me to look back over, a journal of my gardening experiments gone awry and cooking experiments gone amazing. We’ll see where we are in another year.

New Zone, time for an overhaul

Posted on by

I recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, land of a thousand micro-climates.

That means it’s time to start over. The Mediterranean climate in the Bay is entirely different from southeast Wisconsin, and even my indoor plants are showing the effects of it. While there are, of course, some things that carry over in terms of practice, for all practical purposes, I need to learn how to garden almost from scratch again. But it’ll be so nice to be able to garden all year round!

I also have something here I haven’t had since moving out of my parents’ house: A yard. My housemates and I have decided to use part of the yard to grow fruits and vegetables for our own use and perhaps for donation to a local shelter if we come up with a harvest that’s too big for us to go through ourselves.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are a few things that need to be done before starting our own little urban farm. That includes:

  • Cleaning out and preparing the space. It sat all winter (which is a growing season here) without being maintained, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
  • Identifying the plants that are already there, what to keep, what to try to move, what to remove. It’s mostly flowers, with a fruit tree of some kind and a couple as-yet indeterminate vines and shrubs. The rosemary invading from the neighbor’s yard will definitely be staying though.
  • Planning the beds and what to put in them. Part of this planning involves figuring out what will grow in our little corner of the Bay, and what plant rotation will make the best use of the space while requiring the least extra amending of the soil in the bed.

First order of planning? Figure out my new zone and the specs on our local micro-climate.

What’s my zone?

I had expected this to be a very easy question to answer. When I was in the Midwest, all the regional maps had these very broad bands that were easy to read and consistent, except maybe right at their edges. However, looking for zone maps out west, I found a lot of variety in terms of level of detail and some discrepancies between different versions, discrepancies that left me in one of three different zones and no good way to tell which.

An even bigger problem though is finding a version that’s detailed enough to figure out where I am on the map. Better Homes and Gardens claims to have highly detailed pdf versions, but they want my full name and address in order to have access to them. Uh, thanks, but no thanks.

(Word to the wise among my fellow web development folk: stop throwing up barriers to access. You’re losing sales and viewers for every piece of information you ask for that is not 100% vital to delivering the basic service they’re trying to get to.)

Adding to the discrepancy and the difficulty in finding correct information is the fact that the hardiness zones are in the process of being changed. You can thank global warming for that. The zones have migrated northward and continue to do so.

Given the difficulty with different drawings of the map being different (which hasn’t changed since 1990 so I’m not sure what gives there…), I settled on the USDA’s Zone Hardiness Map. I find it hard to read but at least the zones themselves are defined in a text table under the close-up state map.

The USDA says I live in Zone 9b. That means that in the winter it gets down to 25°-30°, which I got a chilly taste of this weekend when we actually had snow forecast!

But around here, figuring out the overall zone is not the only thing you have to take into account. With the bay and the hills and the mountains, you can walk two or three blocks and go from 40° grey with fog cover to 70° sunny cloudless skies. These pockets of differing weather are known as “micro-climates”.

What’s my micro-climate?

I found a really interesting “current conditions and forecast” map of the Bay Area. It projects the expected temperature, windspeed, soil temperature, etc. I expect I’ll make good use of that, but it doesn’t really help me to understand the micro-climate I’ve moved into.

I’ve spent a few hours at this point trying to find a microclimate map, and so far the closest I’ve come is the map in the previous paragraph. Very helpful in planning if I need to cover the flowers against frost, but not so useful in year-long planning.

I’ll continue researching. More information on this when I find it. And if I can’t find it directly, I may just have to compile that information for this area here. Every gardener deserves access to information on it.