GblaRCS Chpt 68

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 68 -==
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"In Ancient Rome the Secret Police were called 'Frumentarii', a word translating literally as 'Grain Collectors', which would be confusing if you didn't know that they started out as men who traveled around gathering supplies for the legions on the march and then branched out into gathering information and passing on secret messages as well. In a similar fashion people not from the Niops Association likely find it inexplicable why operatives of Niops Intelligence are often referred to in Hegemony slang as 'Hash Slingers' or 'Burger Flippers'."Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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===Making Friends at the Doctors===
Gislandune Medical Center – Islington – 2846
Diya Štefánek was extremely glad that she had remembered to bring her noteputer with her this time because they still hadn't changed the magazines in the pediatrics waiting room, and the Tri-Vid screen mounted on the wall was permanently set to kid's television, little kids television with singalongs and stuff, not even decent cartoons.
Her brother had dropped her off at the center straight after school and her father would pick her up later, hopefully in the jeep not the tractor because that had been really embarrassing when he did that once from school as a joke. At first one of her parents had always accompanied her when she attended the clinic but she wasn't a little kid in elementary school anymore and didn't need, or rather want, someone there to hold her hand. More to the point she usually understood what the doctors were saying more than her parents did anyway, you're motivated to read up a lot on kidneys when yours are taken out and replaced with new ones.
Her original kidneys were buried in a hole her father had dug for them on Copernicus. The surgeons were just going to dispose of them like any other medical waste but Diya insisted on them being properly laid to rest because they were still part of her, even if they didn't work properly.
Her brother's suggestion that Diya eat them in a steak and kidney pie instead was gross, especially given that she still wasn't entirely sure if he was joking or not.
The Medical Center in Gislandune City looked nicer from the outside than the hospital on Copernicus had. Like a lot of the buildings on Copernicus the hospital there was just a big concrete box put up in a hurry, while a lot of Gislandune was older and made of red brick instead, including her school. Inside however they were an awful lot alike, all clean white walls and the distinctive smell of disinfectant with only pediatrics having much in the way of color.
Fortunately because her family were some of the first new migrants to Islington they had been able to get some land not too far from the capital, and also not far off the existing road network, so Diya and her siblings could easily attend school there. People that arrived these days had to settle for being granted a homestead further out instead, which meant their kids attending small village schools that weren't nearly as well-resourced and sometimes had children of all ages in the same class.
Even worse, kids that lived way out in the country couldn't come into town to shop in the mall, get their junk food fix at FrancasBurger or see a movie on the big screen in the theater, and if she couldn't do that she might as well have stayed on Cerignola.
Contrary to what some of her city-slicker friends thought, FrancasBurger was just a local franchise that didn't really import all their meat from Francas. On a world like Islington it was much, much cheaper to just use locally sourced beef, pork, chicken and moa instead, although some of the herbs and spices they put on the moa nuggets did come from Alphard and Stafford because they weren't available here yet.
Apart from her friend Katie, who she still kept in touch with via HPG, those moa nuggets had been the thing she had missed most about living on Copernicus. When they finally opened a FrancasBurger here on Islington too Diya had been one of the first customers through the door and why the oversized birds had gone extinct on Terra originally was no mystery to her whatsoever. 
She wasn't addicted though honestly! She didn't have a moa nugget problem, okay? Her only problem was when she couldn't get them!
That recurring dream she had about the plucked and seasoned Thunderbird roasting on a gigantic spit being turned by an industrialmech wasn't weird or concerning at all.
Since Diya only needed a quick check-up the doctor had put her last on the list of patients she was seeing that day and so the girl found herself alone in the waiting room, all the other kids having been seen already except the nervous boy she had briefly talked to on arrival and who was in with the doctor now.
Diya wasn't nervous around doctors, not anymore, they had always been nice to her and she wasn't worried about being told she was sick by one of them because Hegemony medical science could fix most anything and you didn't have to even pay for treatment that would have cost tens of thousands of c-bills in other places, if it was even available at all.
Well, you did have to pay for it, taxes were higher here than they had been back home in the Free Worlds League when you added local planetary taxes in with Hegemony ones, but when people complained about it around him her Dad liked to quote something he had read once, 'Taxation is the membership fee for a civilized society' before adding that at least the taxes weren't getting all used up paying for a war that was never going to end. Diya's father didn't object to the government taking a third of his money, the government had saved his little girl's life with very expensive medical equipment and if pirates came the government would send soldiers armed with very expensive weaponry to fight them.
The Niops Association boasted warships and a whole slew of advanced technologies that only ComStar on Terra could match. While they were generous they did still expect the Hegemony worlds to contribute to what they called the 'common good' because there were plenty of people out there who would prefer to steal rather than pay their fair share. 
Hopefully this would be the last of the routine checkups Diya had to attend to make certain her new kidneys were in tip-top working order and hadn't been rejected. Climbing into an Eligus Medical Diagnoser might have been exciting the first few times but after a couple of years of being occasionally prodded and probed by one of the machines it was just a pain in the butt having to go through it all again.
Fooling her friend at school Jenny, who had never been in one before, that the diagnoser was a literal pain in the butt because one of the things it did was stick a rectal thermometer up your rear end, had been pretty funny at the time. In retrospect however the prank probably made the girl's first doctor's appointment after her family physician got one installed at his office unnecessarily traumatic, and Jenny being really PO'ed about it when she found out Diya had just been yanking her chain was understandable.
When she first moved to Islington some of the technology she had gotten used to seeing routinely on Copernicus had still been rare in her new home, but over the last couple of years or so more and more gadgets like her noteputer and the off-road electric motorbike her big brother was so proud of had become increasingly commonplace. Islington hadn't really been a poor colony, in fact despite being a periphery world it was wealthier than Cerignola where she was born had been, even though Cerignola was part of the Free Worlds League and therefore itself technically part of the Inner Sphere.
Not that some of the tech available to Islington now had even been available to most rich colonies until the Niops Association decided it was time to expand its power and influence, something it preferred to do via the carrot rather than the stick fortunately for its neighbors.
Diya reached into the pocket of her jacket and dug around until she found an old game cartridge for her noteputer, wishing that Com3 would stop delaying the release of Pirate Raiders II because she had been waiting for it to come out for months now. She had played through the original game so often that where the sticker on the cartridge used to say 'Comstock Communications and Computing' under their Com3 logo two of the 'Coms' had worn off due to repeated handling.
Sliding in the game cartridge and waiting for it to boot up Diya remembered being taught at school that originally the only thing they made on Comstock was actual boots, millions of pairs of them every year for the SLDF, and that some of the factories there that made electronics were in the very same buildings where they used to make footwear instead of computer hardware. They did still export shoes too, she had a couple of nice pairs herself, but she figured making a selling electronic gadgets was a lot more profitable, and wondered if kids her age on Comstock got more pocket money than she did.
They probably had to deal with their parents saying stuff like, 'You want pocket money? When I was your age I had nothing to eat but old pieces of boot leather and I was grateful for it' though, which would suck. People had been poor on Cerignola but they had never actually starved like people on Comstock had when the Star League fell. If it wasn't for Francas shipping in what food they could, a lot of it frozen meat, the famine would have been even worse which explained why there was now a tradition that if you were from Comstock and met someone from Francas you should offer to buy them a meal.
Lots of planets had their own local traditions and unusual habits though, Diya knew from experience. On Cerignola spelunking was a major pastime, people competed on how deep they had gone, but hardly anybody on Copernicus or Islington had even heard of it and often thought she was just making the word up. During a visit to a store once she had been talking about spelunking with her sister and a grown up thought she was swearing. It still made her laugh thinking about her mother's sarcastic tone of voice when she rolled her eyes at the woman concerned and told her that, 'Spelunking just means exploring caves, and no that isn't a euphemism for something. Borrow a dictionary and look up the word spelunking if you don't believe me, and while you're expanding your vocabulary I guess you'd better look up what euphemism means too.'
They taught you about other planets and what it was like there at school too of course. It was a compulsory part of the Hegemony's school curriculum by law, that law being based on an edict made by First Lord Ian Cameron way back at the foundation of the Star League called Executive Order 4 which had aimed towards promoting peace and harmony by teaching kids growing up in different parts of the Star League what it was like being a kid in other places, making them seem less 'foreign' and hopefully fostering a sense of unity.
Ian Cameron himself hadn't actually made it compulsory for all schools in the Star League to adopt the curriculum the educators in the Terran Hegemony had come up with in its entirety, although almost all of them did, albeit it with a few tweaks to make it more applicable to local requirements. Naturally the Capellan Confederation had made the most changes in order to fit it in with their system of two-tier citizenship where you had to pass a test in order to be an actual citizen, not just part of the servitor class, while the Draconis Combine went a step further and had simply rejected the recommended Star League school curriculum outright.
From what Diya knew about the Confederation and the Combine, them not wanting to teach their kids too much about what life was like in other places was based solely on the fact that if their people knew how badly they were treated compared to folks elsewhere they'd rise in revolt. The Free Worlds League wasn't really as 'free' as their name made out, but you could criticism the government without being immediately thrown in jail or shot, and that was true in the Federated Suns too.
It used to be true in the Lyran Commonwealth until very recently as well, but it sounded like their new Archon was 'completely out of his gourd', to use her Dad's phrase, and according to NHCOMNET News he was expected to dissolve the Estates General any day, that being their parliament, because some of its members complained about him having people killed for not bowing and scraping enough to him or something.
That had always been a thing in the Draconis Combine, where just not being polite enough to the Coordinator could get your head chopped off, but before Claudius Steiner took over the royal court on Tharkad it was more like the one on Atreus, as in you didn't have to make sure to write your will before criticizing the person in charge.
Being from the Free Worlds League hating the Steiners was par for the course, and Diya's parents were no different from most anyone else on that score, but while you wouldn't want the Lyran Commonwealth on your border they hadn't really oppressed their own people all that much until now, so that was quite the change.
Diya was about to start playing her game when the door opened unexpectedly, she had expected the boy to be down the hall with the doctor at least half an hour but maybe he wasn't as sick as he thought he was, or else was so sick they had decided to admit him?
"If you could take a seat in there for now," someone out in the hall said, "after I've spoken to your father we'll come get you" they continued, Diya now recognizing the voice as belonging to Doctor Jacobs, the Head of Pediatrics, who she had met a couple of times even though she usually saw one of the more junior doctors instead.
"Okay" a little girl replied entering the room. She looked a little surprised to see Diya sitting there as the door was closed behind her. "Hello" she said, greeting the girl already there. "I thought I'd be the only person here."
"They're running late today, and I thought I was the last patient on the list" Diya replied. "Are you seeing Doctor Jacobs?" she asked, noting that the girl was wearing a uniform from that fancy private school in the rich part of town. It might be the best school on the planet but if you had to dress up like a flannel sock to go there it couldn't possibly be worth it.
"Yes" the girl replied.
"I've got a check-up with Doctor Kelly." Diya told her.
"Oh, are you sick?" the girl asked.
"No, it's just a routine follow-up appointment. I had surgery a few years ago and they want to make sure I'm still okay" Diya replied. "Are you sick?"
"No. I'm here to have the first of my anti-agrathic treatments" the girl told her, mangling the word a little she looked to be about nine or so, a couple of years younger than Diya, so she was about the right age for those.
"It's pronounced anti-agathic, not anti-agrathic" Diya corrected her. "I had those when I still lived on Copernicus. I didn't know they'd started giving those out here now too" she added, knowing that some people on Islington, the ones with money, had traveled to Comstock to get them before now. As citizens you were entitled to healthcare anywhere in the Hegemony but not every planet had access to all the best stuff yet, the factories in the Niops system itself where the most advanced machines were made, including gene-sequencers and the like, could only produce so many each year. 
"I think I'm one of the first" the girl replied, taking a seat, putting her hand-bag like satchel down next to her. "Did they hurt?" she asked nervously. "The treatments I mean."
"No, not really, but I was already kinda used to needles by the time I had them so other people might think the injections pinched a little" Diya told her honestly. "They put this slimy gel stuff on your skin first where they're going to stick in the needle which mostly makes it all numb though, so don't worry" she reassured the younger girl.
The girl nodded and then smiled. "You're from Copernicus?" she asked curiously.
"No, I'm originally from Cerignola, but I lived on Copernicus for a while after my family emigrated to the Hegemony" Diya replied.
"Cerignola? That's the planet in the Free Worlds League with all the big caves, right?" the girl asked.
Diya smiled. "Yeah" she confirmed. That was usually the only thing anybody not from Cerignola ever knew about the place, but it was still better than when they'd never heard of it at all.
"My family were originally from the Free Worlds League too, but that was ages ago, like when my grandpa's grandpa was a boy" the girl replied. "I'm Grace, by the way" she introduced herself.
"Diya" the older girl introduced herself in turn.
Grace frowned. "My friend Janey said that one time the doctors mixed up the injections and turned a girl into a mermaid by accident, you know, like the people from Frobisher."
Diya burst out laughing. "The Frobisher people are born like that, they're not injected with something that makes their hair fall out and grow gills" she eventually responded, still giggling.
"They're genetically engineered, that's what the anti-agathics are right? Genetic engineering?"
"There's a big difference between some minor gene-therapy and what they did to make the Frobisher people" Diya told her. 
"How do you know?"
"I read a book about genetic engineering" Diya replied. "Okay, it was only a kid's book about genetic engineering" she admitted, "but I know a little about that stuff. If the doctors had found out my kidneys didn't work properly earlier I could have had gene-therapy to fix them instead of needing them to be taken out and replaced with new ones" she continued before grinning. "Most of me is older than you but my kidneys are younger, they grew them for me in a lab. Dad joked that means I won't be legally allowed to drink alcohol until I'm like twenty-five, my kidneys will still be underage even if my ID card says I'm old enough to buy beer."
Grace giggled. "Did it hurt having your operation?" she asked curiously.
"It was two operations. They did one and made sure that worked before they did the other one a few months later" Diya replied. "I was out cold under anesthetic for both of them so they didn't hurt at the time, but I was really sore afterwards. No cool scars though unfortunately, only these red marks on my skin which faded after a while. They used a robot surgeon with like laser scalpels to cut me open. Niops has like the coolest tech ever" she enthused. "I could have never gotten myself a noteputer this good back on Cerignola." she added, holding it up.
"I got a new one for Christmas but it's at home." Grace replied. "We're not allowed to bring our noteputers to school." she explained.
"You're not?" Diya asked, horrified. "What is this? The Dark Ages?"
"The headmaster says they're a distraction and bad for kid's concentration." Grace explained.
Since Diya knew that she never concentrated as hard on anything as she did when playing games on her noteputer so that was clearly a complete load of Branth crap. Branth crap being the worst kind of crap by far too, because the Branth was really big, and it flew, so it's enormous crap might land right on top of your head.
When she was little the Lopez Branth had been Diya's favourite animal, it was basically a real-life dragon after all and you could actually ride one, but these days she preferred some of the cool animals that lived on McEvedy's Folly instead, even the one that didn't necessarily taste good.
Who wouldn't want a pet Hook Wolf or Sabre-Beaked Toucan-Tiger?
"Do you live in town?" Grace asked.
"No, my parents farm is about half-an-hour away, it is if my father is driving anyway" Diya replied. "It's more like three quarters of an hour away if it's my Mom at the wheel although my brother can do it in like twenty minutes on his motorbike as long as there isn't a cop around" she continued, grinning.
"Your brother must drive like my uncle" Grace replied giggling again. "We live outside of town too, not as far out though" she said. "Your daddy's a farmer?" 
"Yep" Diya confirmed. "Mostly arable but some livestock, chickens and pigs."
"No cows?"
"No, thank God. If we had cows I'd probably have to wake up at dawn to milk them. With pigs you just throw what's left of your breakfast at them before you go to school" Diya replied. "We might be getting some Giant Moas too soon though. We've got a small forest on our land they'll like."
"At least you won't have to milk them" Grace noted.
"Yeah, and the next time my Dad decides to make us huevos rancheros for breakfast it'll be epic!" Diya joked causing the younger girl to giggle again. "What does your Dad do?"
Grace looked at her, eyes twinkling like the answer was kinda funny, or maybe sorta secret, and she was trying not to laugh as a result. "He's an officer in the militia" she replied eventually. "He says when I'm older he'll let me drive his battlemech. I can't reach the controls yet."
"My brother wanted to join the militia when he's old enough, but they won't let him because we weren't born in the Hegemony" Diya told her. "He doesn't think that's fair." 
"I don't think Niops cares if it's fair, they're just worried about spies" Grace replied before pursing her lips looking thoughtful. "Do you want to come to a birthday party next saturday?" she asked suddenly.
Diya raised her eyebrows. "Do you usually invite people you've just met to your birthday parties?" she asked.
"It's not my birthday party, it's someone else's" Grace replied.
"That's… even weirder."
"They don't really have any friends, not that they try to make them, honestly he's kinda hard work so only some of my friends will go, but he's about your age and you seem nice and he's not from Islington either so you can talk about that maybe?" Grace suggested. "You don't need to buy him a birthday present or anything, just show up so it doesn't look so empty."
"Yeah, I'm really not sure" Diya replied dubiously.
"It's at FrancaBurger, we booked the upstairs floor for a private party because he likes the bacon cheeseburgers there, I mean he likes them a lot. His Mom only lets him go sometimes because she's worried he'll get fat. And also she's a snob."
Diya blinked. "FrancaBurger you say?" she asked slowly.
"Yeah, all the food will be paid for. Do you like the food there?"
"It's… okay" Diya replied guardedly, mentally calculating how much she could eat if she starved herself beforehand and made sure not to put on tight pants. "I'm not sure I want to go to a party where I don't know anybody though" she said, thinking that just sitting there eating and not talking to anyone the whole time would suck, even with the moa nuggets.
"You know me."
"I really don't" Diya replied honestly. "You could be a psycho for all I know. Or the birthday boy might be."
"I'm not a psycho" Grace replied, Diya only realising sometime later that she hadn't also strenuously denied the potential psycho-hood of the kid whose birthday it was.
"That's what all the psychos say" Diya replied sagely.
Grace frowned. "You could maybe bring another friend along…"
"Sold" Diya said quickly. She could probably get Jenny to tag along, or even Clarissa, although Clarissa's Mom didn't like her eating junk food so she would have to be a reserve choice if Jenny wasn't available.
Technically Diya should be helping out on the farm Saturday, but if it was a birthday party her parents would probably let her off the hook. She just had to make sure not to tell them it was a party for a friend of someone she only just met.
"So you'll come?"
"That's what I meant by sold" Diya confirmed. "And I definitely don't have to bring a present right, because I don't know this kid and also I've saved up just enough money from my allowance to buy Pirate Raiders II when its released and I can't spare any right now?"
"No present needed, swearsies, hand on heart" Grace told her doing so. "Whatever it was he'd moan more about it not being what he really wanted than he would not getting anything at all."
"What does he want?"
Grace rolled her eyes. "A Battlemaster" she replied.
"He wants a toy battlemech?" Diya queried. She couldn't name all the hundreds of different types battlemechs from memory, not like her brother could, but that one was big and famous enough that she knew what it was. 
"No, he wants a real one" Grace told her. "I wish I was making that up, but I'm not."
Diya looked at her nonplussed. "How spoiled or delusional is this kid?" she asked rhetorically.
"There's a reason why he doesn't have friends." Grace responded with a sigh before reaching into her satchel and pulling out a notepad and pen. "If you write your name and address down on there, I'll have you sent a formal written invitation" she said, passing it over. "I know it seems silly, my friends don't bother for their parties, but my family is like that" she said apologetically.
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===Odd Birthday Party===
"I'm not going to be the only girl there that didn't buy a new dress just for the party am I?" Diya asked, deciding that Grace must be even richer than she already thought she was.
"For a party at FrancasBurger? Where you might get ketchup and mayonnaise and mustard all over it? No" Grace replied honestly.
Okay, that seemed reasonable. Probably best not to show up in jeans, or especially not the overalls she usually wore at the weekend though, Diya decided, writing her details down on the paper.
The door to the waiting room opened and a man entered wearing the uniform of an officer in the Islington militia, the design of his uniform very similar to that the militia on Cerignola had worn, which in itself wasn't surprising given that the people who first settled Islington were from the Free Worlds League. "The Doctor is ready for you Amelia" the man said, Grace immediately standing up. 
The surprising part was that Diya instantly recognised him, mostly from seeing his photograph everywhere and after momentarily freezing her eyes widened and she stared for what must have been an uncomfortable long time before she remembered to blink.
Diya scrambled to her feet. "You're Geoffrey Humphreys" she managed to say.
"I know that" he replied, clearly amused. "Friend of yours Amelia?"
"This is Diya, Papa" Grace introduced her.
"You said your name was Grace" Diya exclaimed.
"It is. Amelia Grace Humphreys. I prefer my middle name" the younger girl explained.
"You don't look anything like your pictures in the newspaper" Diya told her.
"No, my hair isn't really that floofy with all the ringlets unless I've spent an hour getting it styled, and I hate that" Amelia Grace explained. "I invited Diya to Terrens birthday party Papa" she told her father, the heir to the Barony of Islington.
"Terrens?" Diya repeated. "You invited me to Terrens Von Strang's birthday party?" she exclaimed with a mixture of shock and horror.
"Yeah…" Amelia Grace responded awkwardly. "I thought if I explained that before you said yes you wouldn't come" she admitted before snatching the paper Diya had written her name and address on out of her hand. "No backsies!" she declared. 
"Amelia Grace! Really?" her father said her name in a very disapproving tone.
"Tactics Papa, tactics" the girl replied. "You can't back out now, you've already broken proper social etiquette by not curtsying" she told Diya, further cementing in Diya's mind that the girl was not averse to underhanded methods of persuasion.
"I didn't know I was supposed to curtsy, I'm not even sure how to do it properly" Diya defended herself.
Geoffrey Humphrys sighed. "You don't have to come to Terren's birthday party, Diya" he told the girl, before giving his daughter a look of reproach for her obvious scheming.
"But I promised Grandpapa I'd get more kids to attend!" Amelia-Grace replied.
"He didn't want or expect you to trick them into it" her father countered.
Amelia Grace looked at him askance. "What did he want me to do? Magically make Terrens better company?" she asked sarcastically. "The only reason I could get any of my friends to come was because it was at FrancasBurger and Lady Arabella definitely wouldn't be there. He's only obnoxious, she's terrifying."
Her newfound insight into the apparently less-than-idyllic lives of the upper classes aside, money and title apparently didn't feed through into domestic harmony, at least when you've invited a family of infamous war-criminals into your home, Diya Štefánek was now feeling very awkward stood there watching this. "Okay, I'll come to the party" she said, preferring it all just end "but I want it on the record that I'm only there for the moa-nuggets and the strawberry milkshakes" she stated firmly.
"Great!" Amelia Grace enthused. "You might find it easier to get your friend to come along too if you don't mention Terrens" she advised.
"Amelia Grace!" her father chided her again.
"If you do mention him, make sure to tell them he's not really a vampire" the girl continued to offer Diya advice, "Arabella I'm not entirely sure of but he really isn't. I've seen his reflection in mirrors and when I put a load of garlic in his food it didn't make him sick, just gave him bad breath."
Geoffrey Humphreys facepalmed for a few moments before collecting himself once again. "The doctor is waiting for us, we should get going" he said eventually. "You know what your grandfather always says…"
"Punctuality is the politeness of kings" Amelia grace finished for him. "It was very nice to meet you Diya, you should get your party invite tomorrow, and I'll see you again Saturday" she said brightly.
The thought briefly crossing Diya's mind that she hoped the needles for the anti-agathics the girl was about to have were blunt was a little too nasty, and she mentally back-peddled on that while trying to figure out how exactly she was going to talk Jenny into coming too.
If Jenny couldn't or wouldn't, Clarissa would be easy to convince though. She loved reading celebrity gossip magazines so getting her to attend an upper-class soirée would be a piece of cake.
Did it actually qualify as a soirée if it was at FrancasBurger though, and the cake was birthday cake?
At least her parents doubts that she hadn't been making it all up as some kind of weird joke were dispelled when the formal invitation to the party arrived the next day, not in the mail as she had been expecting but when some kind of servant from the Baron's Estate turned up at the farm with a fancy handwritten letter.
Getting dragged into town to buy an entirely unnecessary new dress was a pain in the ass, though at least she managed to convince her mother that the really expensive one she had her eye on would actually be less classy given where the party was being held, because only the 'nouveau riche', as Clarissa called them, overdressed for functions.
Jenny didn't even tell her parents whose party she was going to, figuring they'd never believe her, but at least she'd be there to talk to. Neither of them told Clarissa about it because she'd probably go bananas when she found out and not talk to them for weeks for missing out.
Apparently formally greeting your guests at the door was not a thing if your upper class shindig was being held at a burger joint, and after showing their invitation to the guy checking them before allowing people upstairs Diya and Jenny managed to practically sneak in unnoticed while a bunch of kids that included Amelia Grace were enthusiastically playing some kind of ring toss game.
Managing to order a box of moa nuggets and fries from what seemed to be the manager of the place, he probably wanted to handle these particular clients personally, Diya and Jenny grabbed a table and tried not to look too nervous or out-of-place while they waited for their food.
Eventually Amelia Grace spotted Diya and bounded over, smiling. "You came!" she said happily.
"It's more like I fell for a bait-and-switch" Diya replied drily. "This is my best friend Jenny" she introduced her companion. "Jenny this is the Lady Amelia Humphries, AKA 'Grace'."
"Diya said I didn't have to curtsy? Do I have to stand up and curtsy?" Jenny asked quickly.
"It's not that kind of event" Amelia Grace replied, smiling. "If it was ballgowns and parasols and whatever yes, but not for burgers and party games" she replied before looking around. "Terrens, come here" she called out.
The boy who reluctantly wandered over seemed less than enthused about the party judging by his body language, but as he reached them he straightened up and adopted what Clarissa might have called a 'Patrician air'.
"Terrens this is Diya and this is Jenny" Amelia Grace introduced them in turn. "Diya, Jenny, this is Terrens."
"The Honorable Terrens Von Strang at your service ladies" the boy said, clicking his heels together like some Steiner nobleman, though he'd hate that comparison. "If the setting was more formal, I would of course kiss your hands, but it's not" he continued. "Also, I think I'd get ketchup on you if I did" he added in an all-too serious tone.
"Happy birthday" Diya and Jenny said together.
"Thank you for coming" Terrens said. "Is she really a peasant like you said?" he asked, turning towards Amelia Grace quizzically.
"Diya's father owns a farm, she's not a peasant and I never said she was" Amelia Grace told him, rolling her eyes. "For the last time Terrens we don't even have peasants on Islington."
"If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" Terrens opined, it now becoming very obvious why Amelia Grace had to try and trick people into attending his birthday party. "I didn't call her a serf did I?" he asked rhetorically before turning to Jenny. "Does your family scratch around in the dirt too?" he asked.
"My parents own a bookstore" Jenny replied, feeling somehow like she was being interrogated, and by a real jerk too.
Terrens frowned. "Not something that would have done so well back home" he responded. "We preferred to keep the bulk of the masses illiterate, it helped to maintain order and keep the riff-raff in their place."
Still smarting from being called a peasant, and deciding that all the moa nuggets in the Hegemony weren't worth being condescended to by this twerp, Diya looked him in the eyes. "Back home? You mean Erin right?" she asked sweetly.
"Von Strang's World!" Terrens corrected her sharply.
"Yeah, I think that's what they used to call it" Diya replied. "Before the Star League Defence Force whupped your Daddy that is."
Terrens narrowed his eyes. "If you weren't a guest, and a girl, I would ask you to step outside and make you pay for your insult" he growled.
"If it wasn't your birthday, and you weren't a girl, I'd accept" Diya told him, smirking and thinking that a little application of what her father called 'Percussive Maintenance' might well fix him up nicely, just like it did their old tractor when it wouldn't behave.
After a few seconds during which his expression shifted from annoyance to intrigue Terrens smiled, it was a smile that made Diya somehow wonder if Amelia Grace had been completely thorough in her checks to make sure he wasn't actually a vampire. "You're a challenge. I like a challenge" he told Diya.
"Dude, I'm just here for the moa nuggets" Diya replied, feeling more than a little creeped out.
"That's fair. I was just here for the bacon cheeseburgers" Terrens replied cryptically. "I should attend to some of my other guests, and get some onion rings, do either of you want some onion rings?" he asked Diya and Jenny.
"Not right now" Diya replied, Jenny also shaking her head.
"Very wellm" Terrens said, straightening up and clicking his heels together again before inexplicably bowing and turning away, heading off towards where some of the kids were still playing the ring toss game.
"Okay, that was weird." Amelia Grace said quietly.
"He's a weird kid" Diya agreed.
Amelia Grace shook her head. "No, I mean that was weird for him' she said. "He offered to get you onion rings, after calling you a peasant, not that calling you a peasant was weird for him, but offering to get you the onions rings was… nice."
Jenny whispered something in Diya's ear that Amelia Grace couldn't quite hear. Whatever it was it caused Diya to look appalled.
"You're kidding?" Diya responded to Jenny out loud. "I don't need that in my life, I just came here for the moa nuggets" she said once again, honestly.
Days later, she was still trying to figure out if she should have been nicer or meaner to Terrens Von Strang at the party in order to never have to see him again when NHCOMNET News reported that Archon Claudius Steiner had executed his father, Karl Von Strang, in the throne room on Tharkad, personally, with an axe.
Now she couldn't be horrible to Terrens, although maybe he'd like that? He was a weird kid from a very weird family after all.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The return of Diya Štefánek, youngest daughter of Václav and Anjali Štefánek of Cerignola to the story who we last saw in Part LII (not the throwaway character you may have thought she was, I like to weave this stuff together). The replacement kidneys she had cloned for her on Copernicus before her family emigrated to Islington are working just fine incidentally. FrancasBurger franchises are starting to spring up everywhere in the Hegemony, as are Giant Moa farms, and light industry on Comstock is taking off too with the Com3 company (Comstock Communications and Computing) expanding fast.The reign of Archon Claudius Steiner is not one that is doing the Lyran Commonwealth any favours so far, and it's not been so great for Karl Von Strang either.
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Chapter 68