From: li@Data-IO.COM (Phyllis Rostykus)
Subject: A Little Light
Organization: Data I/O Corporation
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 18:50:39 GMT


The fire curls and flickers, leaps and dances.  Another crash, and Blammor
smashes another soapbox and gently feeds the pieces to the fire within the
Place.  He wonders, a little, just how many soapboxes are going to appear
before folks get the idea that they only feed the flames...

They used to speak face to face...

He sighs softly and frowns.   There is a weight in his pocket... he pulls
out a slightly too-heavy semi-sphere.  He studies it with a slightly cocked
head, and then smooths over it with one Dark finger.

The brilliance that shines forth makes him cry out. 

Summer sunshine, heavy and thick with warmth and lazy days, a reminder of
laughter and splashing water.  The kind of heat that can bake a person into
a relaxed puddle without a care in the world other than the next cooling 
swallow of iced liquid.  Heat the kind that makes shorts and big, loose
colorful shirts a must.  A heat and light that make it easier to bask in
their brilliance than just about anything else.

Blammor, though, is flowing under this kind of heat and light... His
Darkness melts as the whiteness of his eyes flow over the core of who he
is... and for a moment, a bird, the color of broken crystal, stands
blinking eyes as Dark as Blammor had been.  A tall bird with pennant wings
and a night of stories in her eyes... and then it shivers and Liralen sits
in Blammmor's place...

A slightly sweating Liralen, in an amazing Hawaiian shirt with birds of
paradise in gold and blues against a green background with a pair of Opihi
Picker shorts in turquoises.  "Oooff." she says.  And, for a long moment,
she rests within the warmth of the Australian sunshine.

Quietly she says, "Hey, DM.  Can you tell me about what the Australian
summer is like now?  I could use a little of it... the days here are now so
short that I wake up when it's dark and don't get home from work until it's
dark, again.  And it's rained for about four days straight... It's only 
going to get worse, in a while."

"Splash?  How are your meters going?  Have you been out with borrowed
equipment at all?"

She listens carefully, to those that answer her requests, and smiles at 
them.  Then, carefully, she gets up, testing her legs for a moment as she
stands up.  The right knee buckles.  She frowns and sits carefully back
down again.  So much care... it makes her feel old.

Mike comes by and hands her a steaming mug.  It's a huge, insulated
plastic mug, an awful neon green, but there, in blue and pink are pictures
of the globe, and under the globes say "It's all we've got!" and "Reduce,
REUSE, Recycle Let's Do Our Part"  She grins and then sips and sighs,
"Perfect, Mike." she says softly.  It is just like Cornerstone's Cafe
Orzata... one shot of espresso, a shot of Orgeat syrup (almond) and a
massive amount of hot milk and it smooths its way into her tied up gut.

She sighs and stretches the tight muscles of her shoulders under the warmth
of the sunlight, and remembers CD's like movement in his cold and lonely 
telling of all the ill-things that were happening to him.

"CD?  If you're listening... all my friends that got laid off in that huge
cut by my old company have found jobs.  Most of them even got jobs that
were more suited to their interests and abilities than their old ones
were.   One of those people is throwing a party this Saturday to celebrate
his job search finally ending... it was almost four months, but he went
from being a simple electrical engineer to the head of a hardware
department.

"The friend that has cancer?  Well, just the other weekend 25+ of the
people that are at work and work with him went to help him and his family
move to a house.  A *huge* crowd of us went and moved them in less than four
hours, stuff that had taken them almost two days to get out of their old
house, before they knew he was sick.  We didn't just move him, we set up
all the furniture, and even spent a couple hours with him and his wife and
kids in making sure that all the pieces were where they could be best used
as he wouldn't be able to move things real soon.  It was cool to see that
many people there, and eventhough he was real still the whole time and
looking almost a fragile as glass, he was smiling the whole time, and I
caught him wiping away a laughing tear when the whole troop of us first 
appeared at his house and asked 'O.K. Boss, where does THIS go?'...

"And we found Fezzik..."  at his name the VR Fezzik turns back towards
Liralen and blinks brown eyes, but he is having more fun with the other
canines in the place and goes back to his play.  "The night before last, we
let him out, like we usually do.  He likes being outside where it's cooler
than in the house, and, at night, he usually sticks real close to the
house.  But, for some reason, he took off and couldn't find his way back.
He didn't come back all night and wasn't around the next morning, either,
like he was the last two times he stayed out all night.  I didn't sleep
real good.  Yesterday afternoon John went back home to oversee the guys
that were texturing the addition to our livingroom and there was a message
on our machine.

"It was a really nice lady who, after John drove out to her house, told him
that Fezzik had spent the night on her porch, and, in the morning she had
gotten his lisence number and called the lisencing people.  They'd given
her our number, and so she'd called us.  Fezzik, in the meantime, had left
her place.  She asked for our address, promising that the next time he
came, she'd walk him home.  John, somewhat embarrassed at all the trouble
that would be, still managed to gracefully thank her, give her our address,
and then John got in the car and wandered up and down her street for a
while and couldn't find Fez.  After a while, he gave up and headed back to
the main road to get to our place, and saw Fezzik on the main road.  He was
headed in the opposite direction of our house, but was happy to see John. 
John took him home and fed him while the guys worked on the house.  Fezzik
then went into his pen, on his own, and went to sleep for the rest of the
day and that evening was really zonked. 

"So, the Pup is home again, and safe.  And I..." says Liralen with a
slightly wry smile and a rub of her smudged eyes, "can sleep..."  She curls
up within the large chair (has it grown even more?) and is soon asleep
under the warmth of the sunshine.  The semi-sphere gradually lessens its
light as she starts to turn pink and, eventually, goes out...

Taldin comes by and gently tuckes a blanket around Liralen and she mumbles
in her sleep and smiles.

[If anyone else needs a dose of sunshine, feel free.  I actually went and
 got a blast of it in a local sun-couch shop and feel a hell of a lot
 better for it.  Was massively depressed over a bunch of things, and am now
 rather better... Thanks, Taldin, for asking.  -LL]

---
Liralen Li
li@Data-IO.com
Newsgroups: alt.callahans