ATWinPC-7

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==Chapter 7 - A Toreel Wizard in Prince Davion's Court==
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===Permission to Depart===
Jumpship Hank Morgan
Euschelus System, Taurian Concordat
October 9th, 3025
"No, absolutely not!" Doug said incredulously.
"You're sending your crew ashore for what you specifically called 'much needed R&R'." L'heo replied. "Unless I misunderstood, this 'rest and recreation' would benefit us as much as your people. Maybe more. We aren't used to space travel."
"But my people are normal!" Doug protested. "You're going to draw attention to yourselves. You're going to stand out, you don't know how to act."
"I've had nothing to do but read about your people for the last two months," Chim chimed up. "And we've been interacting with your crew all this time. They'll just see a man and his two Canopean traveling companions."
Doug could feel the headache building, having a good idea particularly which books Chim would have gotten her idea about 'Canopean girls'. Lonely men and women trapped on spacecraft for months on end didn't exactly bring along anthropology books. "You stand out whenever you open your mouths," he said.
"Oh, that," Chim said. She paused for a moment. "Is this better?"
Doug blinked, surprised. After months of her 'badly dubbed Capellan film' speech patterns, hearing her speaking in (even accented) normal, non magical English was startling. "When did you learn..."
"I have had a LOT of time on my hands," Chim replied. "L'heo speaks it better than I can." 
"I don't like to brag," L'heo said flawlessly. "Just picked it up playing cards with the crew."
Doug rested his head on his hand. "And the other one?"
Chim shook her head. "Celia doesn't speak English, but her Elvish should just seem like a foreign..."
"It's French," Dave the security chief broke into the conversation. "She speaks French."
Doug looked over, surprised, his expression matched by both Chim and L'heo.
"What do you mean?" Chim asked first.
"I've... uh..." Dave looked deeply embarrassed. "I've heard her speak it when we were... umm... talking. Elvish is French."
Chim was shocked. L'heo seemed to be smirking at the idea that they were 'talking'.
Doug felt like his headache was getting a friend. "Dave..."
"We have common interests!" Dave insisted. "Security things!"
Chim reached forward and grabbed Dave, probably trying to pull him down to her eye level, but in the microgravity only managing to pull herself up.
"LaH jIHvaD Dayaj'a'?" she barked out while also clinging to his jumpsuit to keep herself from coasting into the overhead. Dave looked at her in a panic before looking over to the others.
"I don't think he understands you," L'heo said.
"I just speak a little French," Dave said. "That's all!"
Chim seemed to calm down, and with a little help was soon back with her grip shoes planted on the deck. "I have this horrible feeling that God is a lie," she said, her face looking to Doug like someone had taken her favorite stuffed toy away.
(She was never not going to look like a child to him)
There was a moment's pause before L'heo broke the silence. "So," he said. "Can we go?"
Doug shook his head. "Is she going to grab passers by and yell gibberish at them?"
L'heo looked down at Chim and back up at Doug. "Maybe a little?"
"I am so going to regret this," Doug said, then threw up his hands. "If you can promise that cat won't start talking to people..."
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===State of Affairs between the companions===
-Ten minutes later-
"Harumph," Chim said as they drifted into the cabin they'd been assigned aboard the dropship. "They didn't say it'd take five days to get to the planet." 
L'heo secured their bags in the rack before taking a seat in the acceleration couch next to her. "We spent days traveling out to their ship when we left. It's not really a surprise we'd have to do it again."
Chim didn't particularly want to hear it, and gave L'heo a look to indicate as such while Celia took the seat next to them and Polly settled into the Paladin's lap. For Polly it was common sense. Celia simply had more lap for him to sit on, but at the moment it still pissed Chim off.
"So," Chim said, trying to think of something, anything, to take her mind of things. The pause lingered a bit longer before she decided to look at Celia. "You and Dave?"
Celia blushed and looked away. "I would prefer not to talk about it." 
There was another pause, broken up by an announcement over the public address indicating the ship would be detaching, followed by a shudder and a groan that echoed all around them, and soon after followed by the first sensation of gravity that wasn't also slightly nauseating in months as the ship got underway. 
"It's just..." Celia finally said. On the other side, Chim could hear L'heo mutter. "Oh Gods no..."
"I... I thought he saw me as special," Celia continued. "But he was carrying something... propho... provo... I don't know what they were called but they were to protect him from... well... if he were to be... intimate." She seemed to blush harder.
Chim suddenly understood L'heo's reluctance. "I... uh... don't..."
But it was Polly who spoke up, raising his head and opening one eye in annoyance. "That's stupid. You're stupid. Your order doesn't even have a vow of chastity."
"That's different!" Celia protested. "I am... not unwilling. He is very special to me. I would have obtained the necessary protections, but... to just have them on hand like that..."
"Sound convenient to me," Polly said. 
"That's what I mean!" Celia insisted. "Is he the sort of man who treats... that... so lightly?"
L'heo groaned in frustration, "Could one of you render me unconscious until this is over?"
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===Things Returning to Normal?===
Bridge - Jumpship Hank Morgan
"Ship is away," Rick, the acting executive officer, reported.
Doug wasn't certain what he was feeling. On the one hand he felt like he was unleashing chaos on an unsuspecting world. On the other hand he also felt something that felt disturbingly like a burning couch had just been lifted off his shoulders, even if only temporarily.
"Anybody got odds on this being a terrible idea?" Rick asked.
"It'll be fine," Dave said. "They're a bit weird, but they're good folk."
"I'd trust your assessment better if you weren't shtuping one of them."
Dave scowled, grumbling under his breath.
"No bets," Doug said. "We hope for the best, though make sure we've got a plot for a quick jump out if we need it, Rick."
Rick laughed. "Aye sir."
//"Bridge, this is engineering."\\ came the call over the intercoms. //"Boss, we've got a... thing down here."\\
Doug toggled the com at his station. "Engineering, this is the bridge. What sort of thing?"
//"One of the exoskeletons is... umm... walking around."\\
Doug felt confusion and a bit of dread. "What do you mean walking around."
//"I mean walking around sir, without a person. And he says his name is Walter. He, uh... wants to know what he can do to help out."\\
Some of that weight came rushing back.
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===Speaking in Tongues===
Celia left shortly after they were cleared to move about the ship, having decided to find a quiet place to "meditate" on her relationship with Dave. Polly had taken the time to pull the blanket off of one of the bunks and wad it into a comfortable place to nap. That, more or less, left Chim and L'heo alone. L'heo occupied himself on the couch, quietly reading a book with apparently not a care in the world.
Chim had charts and magical fomulai spread out on the desk, absently working on mystical equations. The spell she was working on, the overcharged teleportation spell that might let her cross from world to world, she was making progress on it. She was close, a bit more experimentation, a bit more research and calculations... but to be honest she wasn't really concentrating on her work. She was too anxious, too agitated, and too annoyed that nobody seemed to notice.
"Ugg," she complained. "This is exhausting," she complained. 
"Uh huh," L'heo said from the couch, absently turning a page on his book.
"And why is it so heavy in here?" Chim complained again, feeling her annoyance build.
"Quite heavy," L'heo agreed.
"They should know we just got off months of weak or no gravity," Chim continued. "You'd think they'd accommodate us and avoid going all out."
"Very inconsiderate," L'heo said as he turned another page.
"And this chair needs another cushion," Chim said. "My shoulders already hurt."
"Yep," L'heo said.
That was the last straw for Chim, and she turned around and threw a pen at him. "Are you even listening?" she demanded.
L'heo ignored the pen that sailed past his head, but he closed his book and looked up. "When your great grandmother had your grandmother," he said. "She took me aside and said 'L'heo, You've been a good friend and dear companion for as long as I know you. I know my daughter will always be safe in your care, wherever her adventures might take her. But she's her mother's daughter, so be her friend, be her confidant, and above all, don't take any of her crap."
Chim frowned disapproving.
"Then when your grandmother had your mother," he continued, "she told me, "I know my daughter will always be safe in your care, wherever her adventures might take her. But she's her mother's daughter, so be her friend, be her confidant, and above all, don't take any of her crap."
"And I suppose my mom said the same thing?"
"It was more like 'she's an absolute brat sometimes, so don't let her push you around.'" L'heo said. "But the sentiment was there."
Chim stuck her tongue out at L'heo.
"You ask if I'm listening," L'heo said. "Of course I'm listening. You got something on your mind, we can talk about it. But you need to actually talk about it."
Chim sighed. "Elvish is French," she said. "French, as in of France."
"I'll take your word for it." L'heo said.
"France," Chim continued, "as in a place on their homeworld, an ancient place. The word is literally thousands of years old. It's older than any of our historical records go back."
"Ah," L'heo said. "You think there's a connection. You know, their English is the same way. The common tongue basically anywhere but the Sapphire islands is essentially identical, or at least close enough to be understood." 
 
Chim felt her eyes widen in shock. "It is? And you knew?"
"I was surprised you didn't," L'heo replied casually. "You spoke forty eight languages before we met them. How is it that none of them was the most common one in the entire mortal world?"
Chim's concerns were briefly replaced by embarrassment. "I just never got around to it," she said. "But that's not important! If we're speaking their languages... does that mean we came from them?"
"Would that be so bad?" L'heo asked.
"It's terrifying!" Chim said. "Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I understood..." Her mind was in a frenzy now. "But it makes a terrifying amount of sense, with everything we've learned. If you look at how our two realities are constructed on a fundamental level..."
She took a breath, trying to get her thoughts in order. L'heo waited expectantly.
"I don't know," she said. "The planar structure of their reality is raw chaos. And the physical universe is mostly empty space. Next to that, our reality is so ordered it looks like it was designed. By people like us, for people like us. I mean, think about it. Mortals can survive, at least for short periods, on any plane, and live indefinitely on most of them without much effort. Here, step outside this hull, and you suffocate to death, because very simple physical laws say there's no reason there'd be anything to breath."
L'heo chuckled. "Like you said before, the kind of thinking that gets people set on fire. So you yelled at that poor guy in Draconic because..."
Chim shrugged. "It was the only thing I could think of that might have told me something. If he'd recognized that, well... If something from their reality created ours, Dragonkind would probably be the best option."
"Not the only option," L'heo said.
"No," Chim agreed. "I was too terrified to try speaking Aklo to him. But it's probably the best one." 
L'heo seemed to think for a moment. "It's a lot to think about. But, I think there's another possibility you might be overlooking."
"And that is?" Chim asked. 
"Remember when we first met them?" L'heo said. "You introduced yourself, and half their party started snickering, most of the rest thought we were making fun of them?"
"Ugg," Chim said. "They never told me what was so funny, either." The ship's previous captain, Patrick, had insisted that they refer to her by her shortened common name since then. A practice she'd agreed to, with little resistance. In Vaslen it would be an insult for strangers who weren't her social equals to refer to her by anything but her title and her family name (the McNuggNugg clan was an old and established house). But the ship's crew weren't from Vaslen, and Chim never cared for the trappings of the court. Still, she would have liked to know what the sniggering was all about.
"Celia got the same sort of response over her family name," L'heo said. "My point is that you're looking for some deeper mystery. What if the real answer is that the Gods were lazy and cribbed off of each other? Or they set it up because they thought it would be funny?"
"That's your solution?" Chim asked skeptically. "The Gods thought it would be funny?"
"You live long enough," L'heo said, "you see enough things, you start to realize that's more likely than you might think."
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===Unprepared Destination for Visitors===
Far away, on the other side of the system, a second ship moved through the void. It was a lot closer to the planet, but it was also (or rather would be for most of its journey) moving a lot slower, coasting on inertia to avoid easy detection, having detached from its own parent ship at a Pirate Point much deeper in the system. The people aboard the ship were busying themselves readying weapons, equipment, and Battlemechs. Their intention was simple. Slip in close, drop their forces to cow the locals, and take what they could before any significant resistance could appear. They had every reason to be confident. This world didn't have much to defend itself. Its ability to monitor the space around it was virtually non-existent. The only other contact they could detect was a single Jumpship at the [[[Zenith Jump Point]]. If that ship had business locally, it'd most likely be an ore freighter sending a ship down to pick up a load from the mines on planet, just in time to be a juicy extra prize to nab. The Concordat didn't send troops out this way very often in the best of days. And word out of the Haven was ole Tommy Calderon was having one of his Davion Bogeyman moments right now. 
No way the locals would be able to put up much of a fight.
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