Rob Osterman's Blog, page 13
June 2, 2012
Short Story: The London Kiss
Again, I used the Weekly Short Story Contest on Goodreads as an excuse to write another bit of backstory for Alongside the Enemy. The topic for this week had been "The London Kiss" with no other description. To this end, I modified the tradition of the first kiss after a tour to fit my world and to provide insight into the relationship between Mercy Lyons and her "friend" Cordelia Leduc. Leduc has gone through more than a few name changes and if you head over to my post on creating cultures you'll see why.
“The London Kiss”
“All hands, this is the Captain.” Commander Bracegirdle’s voice sounded throughout HMS Foxhound. “As you know we are due to dock at Outpost Behn in a few hours where you are to enjoy your well earned three weeks shore leave.”
Midshipman Mercy Lyons lay on her bunk, one hand behind her head, the other holding to a data pad with the day’s gun deck duty roster. Her bunk mate, Midshipman Cordelia Leduc was on the bridge, as she often was when Mercy was not. The two former classmates, while sharing a tiny stateroom, had never been in it at the same time during their entire eight week tour.
“Since the age of sail,” Cmdr. Bracegirdle continued over the ship’s public address, “It has been tradition for one member of the crew to be drawn by lots to be greeted first ashore by his or her sweetheart.”
Mercy knew this speech well, Bracegirdle taking no small pleasure in reciting it before every extended leave. She scanned down the list again, failing to ignore the address, piped into every corner of the ship.
“It was on the station London Six that this first kiss of shore leave was holographically recorded in tri-dee, earning it the title ‘The London Kiss’. Now we not only extend this honor to our enlisted crew, but also to our junior officers.”
Mercy rolled over onto her side, facing the wall and returned to examining the roster. The number five gun still had three relatively green crewman assigned it, and she could not find a way to rotate them out to other guns without creating a similar problem there. The entire task would have been made easier if Crewman Kilrain had not gotten drunk and had not offended every Hartishian on the ship with a half-shouted, half-sung round of “Hoist the Colors, Bugger the Elves”. Most of the gun deck crew had flat out stated they would rather spend the entirety of the next tour in the brig than share a gun station with him.
“The bowl for names of those crew and officers who will have husbands, wives and sweethearts waiting for them has been on the bridge for three duty cycles so I do believe we have all had time to put our names in.”
Mercy had no companion waiting for her, neither at the station nor back on Earth Prime. Thus she had not put her name in and there was no need to listen. She scanned roster for another name to slide next to Crewman Kilrain. She could simply assign a Hartishian to man the gun and force them to get along. Their next tour would not be for several weeks. Perhaps things would settle down, or perhaps Kilrain would be reassigned.
Bracegirdle’s voice paused as he shuffled through the bowl, muttering as he did. “And the honor of the London Kiss shall go first to Able Crewman Michael O’Keefe.” He paused, presumably to confer with another officer. “Yes, Crewman O’Keefe’s wife Vanessa is actually serving on the HMS Niagara which docked last week for its own shore leave. You two kids stay safe.”
The roster situation was irreparable. Mercy rubbed her eyes and stared at the low ceiling over her bunk. The majority of the crew was human. About a tenth were Oresmen, small stocky men and women from the high gravity mining colonies. Mercy had never had a cause to dislike them as race, but their general bawdiness and bluntness often put her on edge. The space elves of the Hartishi worlds made up another tenth of the crew, and counted her bunkmate Leduc among them. While as passionate as Oresman, Hartishians were more private with their indulgences. At least that had always been Mercy’s experience.
“And now for the junior officer,” Bracegirdle announced, his voice betraying a grin. “Not many names here,” he added.
Swinging her legs off the bunk, Mercy sat up, careful to stay slouched over enough so as not to bang her head on the ceiling. She slid down to the floor and regarded herself in the room’s mirror. White skinned with rich green hair, Mercy looked like every other Allusian. She brushed her hair back with a hand, reflecting on how alone she felt most days. Few managed to escape the Allusian slave trade. Fewer still tried to defect to the Royal Commonwealth. Only one had entered Her Majesty’s Space Navy.
“Midshipman Mercy Lyons.”
She blinked. She had not put her name in the bowl. There was no one waiting for her at the outpost. There was no one waiting for her anywhere. She had left behind any semblance of a family when she was was rescued by Royal Marines. Few had been willing to even befriend one of the enemy at the academy. There had been attempts to bed her, of course, but those were not romantic overtures. Nearly to the man they had been nothing but racist efforts to see what kind of pleasure slave she had been prior to her liberation.
Mercy stared back at her reflection, watching her white cheeks take on an ever growing red hue, the skin warming with her embarrassment. Any moment now Bracegirdle would chuckle at the joke and draw the name of another junior officer, the real winner of the London Kiss.
“Well, good on you, Midshipman,” he said instead to the crew. “I expect the two of you in dress uniform at the airlock smartly at 0745 to be the first to disembark. To rest of the crew, as you were. Bracegirdle out.”
He was not going to draw another name. She was expected to arrive in the morning, to cross over into the outpost and meet no one. Meanwhile a dozen junior officers would walk down behind her, some even with people waiting to meet them. How could she stand there while they went to meet with their lovers and spouses?
Mercy put a hand on her bunk to steady herself. She was supposed to go on duty in a few hours. How would she face her fellow officers after this?
That was an option: to arrange to share a kiss with one of them. She was pretty sure that a romance was against regulations but maybe the captain would overlook taht and at least save her from the embarrassment of having no one to kiss. She started to tick through the various officers aboard that she knew. First she mentally cleared those that had shown her open hostility. That was three of the eleven gone. Of those remaining two were married. Then she mentally removed Thompson. Like Leduc, they’d been at the academy together and and there she developed the deep seated hatred for him she quietly carried. That left five, of which three were women, and one of Bracegirdle’s tolerated eccentricities was his disapproval of such a pairing. That left just two other junior officers.
She put her arms on the bunk and laid her cheek on them. She was Allusian; there was no mistaking that. On this tour alone they had engaged three Cartel-sponsored pirates. They had consigned seventeen crewman to the black, and a dozen more had been wounded. None would want to be seen in the embrace of the enemy. None should want to be seen holding one of the ruthless foe close to them in celebration.
The door to the stateroom slid open suddenly. Midshipman Cordelia Leduc stepped into the space. Standing behind Mercy, the two of them occupied all of the standing room in their quarters.
“Thompson.” Her tone was low and annoyed.
Mercy turned around, now face to face with Leduc for the first time since they had brought their trunks into the room eight weeks ago. “Thompson?”
Leduc’s lips peeled back in a sneer, her sharp teeth flashing in the light emanating from under the bunks. “I heard him say he was going to drop your name in for the London Kiss yesterday. She shook her head and squeezed herself down onto her own bed. “I didn’t think he could stoop so low, the maudite ostie.” Her green skinned cheeks showed patches of blue from her frustration.
Mercy regarded her bunkmate. She had not expected this response. The fact that they had never seen each other during this tour was one that Mercy considered a boon, an attitude she was convinced that Leduc had shared. “I appreciate your sympathy,” she ventured diplomatically, still standing against the bunks.
“Oh, this isn’t about you,” Leduc shot back, her enormous eyes narrowing as she glared. “It’s bad enough that he put his name in, but to double the odds that no officer was to win a Kiss? Le petit verre de pisse singe.” She scoffed and shook her head, leaning down to rest her elbows on her knees. Mercy stood awkwardly for a few moments and then twisted her body to try to move past the Hartishian.
“I guess I had better head down to the mess. There’s a small chance Ensign Hanover might be willing to-”
Leduc cut her off. “He was sharing a bunk with Crewman Gulliford.”
“And she was killed-”
Again Leduc cut her off. “In our second engagement with your former friends.”
The words stung. The Allusian Cartel were friends to no one, let alone the women they raised and sold into slavery. Mercy disliked every reference to them that suggested her former life. And in the immediate it also meant that there was no chance Hanover would be her savior. She considered the new facts. She admitted to herself that he had done a good job of hiding his disdain from her, though she now understood why he had never initiated a conversation. “Well, then,” she managed, finally.
Leduc looked up at her, her lips pressing together as she grinned conspiratorially. She held Mercy’s gaze for a second before speaking. “You’re kissing me.”
Mercy froze, her hands on her bunk as she tried to move around the other woman. She stared down at her. “Kiss you? I didn’t even think you liked me.”
The Hartishian chuckled wickedly. “I don’t like you. Frankly I hate just about everything about you.” Mercy blinked, dumbfounded, as she continued. “I hate that I had to score in the top forty percent of all Hartishians just to get an application to the academy, but you, the only Allusian, was granted a seat for the asking. I hate that for every engagement you get called into the briefing to provide some insight that you and I both know you don’t have. I hate that everyone likes to talk about how beautiful pleasure slaves are supposed to be, and what great lovers they make, and I hate that even that oiste de marde Thompson makes no secret he’d take you to bed before he’d dain to consider a ‘space elf’.” She stood up, forcing Mercy to take a step back. She felt the bulkhead behind her as the smaller woman stood before her. “But no matter how much I may hate you, the Kiss is a sacred tradition. It’s bigger than me, you or Thompson, and it’s not a joke, not to those who will be at that airlock looking for someone who’s not coming back from the black.”
Mercy nodded. “That makes sense.” She mulled it all over. “You hate me?”
Leduc took a step back and folded her arms. “For the most part. I respect what you’ve done but it really it doesn’t make me want to like you much.”
“And you want me to kiss you tomorrow morning.” Mercy was starting to smile.
“Yes,” Leduc answered. “We’re going to make a show of it. The London Kiss is a ritual that will be honored, even if it is done with polite formality between two bunk mates. And it’s not like anyone will believe that there’s something between us.”
“Because,” Mercy continued for her, “it’s common knowledge that you hate me.”
“Exactly.” Leduc beamed. “It’s a perfect plan that honors the kiss, shames Thompson, provides the public a quick kiss to see, and then we can go back to pleasantly avoiding each other.”
“And puts you center stage.”
Leduc shrugged off the observation. “Not a downside to me, but not my only motivator.”
Mercy shook her head. “And all I have to do is kiss someone who hates me.” She put her arm up along the bunk. The perfect plan still felt horribly unfair.
“There is that,” Leduc conceded, her voice starting to show a trace of regret. “Think it over. I’m due back on the bridge for the rest of this rotation. Leave me a note when you go on duty so I know if I need to get up and get into my dress uni or not.” The door to the hallway slid open as she stepped back towards it. “And yes, I do hate you, and this won’t change that. But this wasn’t about you, blanche.”
And she was gone, stepping out into hall, and disappearing from sight.
Mercy rested her forehead on the rail of the bunk. There was little question. She was going to have her bunkmate, a woman who hated her, meet her and share a public kiss to celebrate the end of their tour, the London Kiss.
* * * *
Midshipman Mercy Lyons eased along the passway, twisting back and forth to keep the white of her dress uniform from touching any of the bulkheads, or from grazing against the grease of one of the hatches. Her hair was pulled back tightly and knotted low, per regulations and several times she was forced to reach up and hold her white garrison cap in place as she went. Commander Bracegirdle was already at the airlock with Crewman O’Keefe. O’Keefe shifted nervously in the limited room he had to fidget. Space was a luxury on any ship, and the Foxhound was tighter than most.
“Who are you meeting ashore, Miss Lyons?” Bracegirdle’s smile was easy and casual. “A gentlemen we’ve not heard of?”
“No, sir,” she answered coming to attention. “My guest will be along shortly.” She stood opposite the two men in the small area before the hatch. Crew were already starting to file in as well, duffles in hand. They did not crowd the captain or the two honorees.
A few minutes Leduc’s voice filled the tight space. “Make a hole,” she called out down the passageway. Crew grumbled as they pressed themselves to the bulkheads to allow her small slender form to pass through. She took a place next to Mercy and came to attention.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Bracegirdle’s smile vanished. Mercy had known him to be a little radical in his thinking but had hoped he would not embarrass them. She had been mistaken. “You cannot kiss another woman, let alone a Hart-”
Mercy cut in quickly, her voice firm but as polite as she could manage. “Let alone your bunkmate. Fortunately I reviewed the regulations last night and you are correct, romantic liaisons between officers, indeed between any sharing quartering aboard ship, would be violations of Her Majesty’s Rules of Engagement for Crown Ships, that is without special dispensation from the ship’s captain.”
Bracegirdle puffed out his chest and smiled. “Well, that just means we’ll have to find someone else. I’m sure there’s a gentleman or two who would escort you on to the station. I offer you an informal dispensation now if that gentleman will step forward.” He pushed up on his toes to look past Mercy at the ever growing crowd.
“Which is why,” Mercy continued, “I am lucky that Midshipman Leduc and I are not romantic. At my suggestion we both put in our names to be drawn with the plan to share a platonic kiss if we were chosen.”
“Why?” Bracegirdle’s voice pitched up wards with alarm. “I won’t have this tradition made a mockery of, not on my ship.”
“Because as grateful as I am sure Crewman O’Keefe is to see his wife, those of us who have chosen to remain unjoined are equally grateful just to have survived another tour. We are not afraid of our duty, but we,” she nodded towards Leduc, “agree that there is no shame in simply being pleased to live to serve the Crown again.”
The comm next to the airlock crackled to life as the technician on the station side confirmed that they had a good seal and that all docking clamps were secure. Warning lights started to flash as the station opened its hatch to the airlock and the interior pressure stabilized.
“Well, I don’t know,” Bracegirdle grumbled, clutching his hands behind his back and rolling back and forth on his heels. “Tradition says this is an occasion for, well, lovers and sweethearts. And, strictly speaking, no one would confuse you two to be either.”
Mercy felt her cheeks betray her efforts to remain calm. She took a breath. “We meant no offense, Sir,” she mostly lied. “But it was important to both of us to celebrate the tour on behalf of all of us who have no one to meet here.” She licked her lips nervously. “If it matters you may put me on report for this. It was my idea. I suggested it to Midshipman Leduc and convinced her of its merits. Sir.”
“Oh, damnation this isn’t the time.” The light next to the airlock changed from amber to green, and the hatch gave a hiss as the pressure equalized. “Let’s just be done and neither of you speak of it to me again. Understood?”
“Aye, Sir,” the two women answered briskly.
Bracegirdle nodded to O’Keefe. Grinning like a schoolboy, he pulled open the hatch and climbed through quickly to seize his wife in his arms. Mercy gave him a few moments before following. She turned and offered a hand to Leduc to help her through the hatch. They shook hands, and then pressed their lips to each other’s cheeks. Unsure the small crowd watched, quietly. While they had cheered for O’Keefe, none seemed quite prepared for this. Mercy just took Leduc’s hand again, and lifted it high in her own as she smiled at the crowd.
“To living another day in the service of Her Right Majesty Queen Glorianna the Fourth. Long Live the Queen!”
The crowd shouted back in unison, “Long live the Queen!” and the moment of awkwardness was gone. Then the crew began to file into the receiving area, and the time of the London Kiss passed, another completed tradition, followed and forgotten.
“The London Kiss”
“All hands, this is the Captain.” Commander Bracegirdle’s voice sounded throughout HMS Foxhound. “As you know we are due to dock at Outpost Behn in a few hours where you are to enjoy your well earned three weeks shore leave.”
Midshipman Mercy Lyons lay on her bunk, one hand behind her head, the other holding to a data pad with the day’s gun deck duty roster. Her bunk mate, Midshipman Cordelia Leduc was on the bridge, as she often was when Mercy was not. The two former classmates, while sharing a tiny stateroom, had never been in it at the same time during their entire eight week tour.
“Since the age of sail,” Cmdr. Bracegirdle continued over the ship’s public address, “It has been tradition for one member of the crew to be drawn by lots to be greeted first ashore by his or her sweetheart.”
Mercy knew this speech well, Bracegirdle taking no small pleasure in reciting it before every extended leave. She scanned down the list again, failing to ignore the address, piped into every corner of the ship.
“It was on the station London Six that this first kiss of shore leave was holographically recorded in tri-dee, earning it the title ‘The London Kiss’. Now we not only extend this honor to our enlisted crew, but also to our junior officers.”
Mercy rolled over onto her side, facing the wall and returned to examining the roster. The number five gun still had three relatively green crewman assigned it, and she could not find a way to rotate them out to other guns without creating a similar problem there. The entire task would have been made easier if Crewman Kilrain had not gotten drunk and had not offended every Hartishian on the ship with a half-shouted, half-sung round of “Hoist the Colors, Bugger the Elves”. Most of the gun deck crew had flat out stated they would rather spend the entirety of the next tour in the brig than share a gun station with him.
“The bowl for names of those crew and officers who will have husbands, wives and sweethearts waiting for them has been on the bridge for three duty cycles so I do believe we have all had time to put our names in.”
Mercy had no companion waiting for her, neither at the station nor back on Earth Prime. Thus she had not put her name in and there was no need to listen. She scanned roster for another name to slide next to Crewman Kilrain. She could simply assign a Hartishian to man the gun and force them to get along. Their next tour would not be for several weeks. Perhaps things would settle down, or perhaps Kilrain would be reassigned.
Bracegirdle’s voice paused as he shuffled through the bowl, muttering as he did. “And the honor of the London Kiss shall go first to Able Crewman Michael O’Keefe.” He paused, presumably to confer with another officer. “Yes, Crewman O’Keefe’s wife Vanessa is actually serving on the HMS Niagara which docked last week for its own shore leave. You two kids stay safe.”
The roster situation was irreparable. Mercy rubbed her eyes and stared at the low ceiling over her bunk. The majority of the crew was human. About a tenth were Oresmen, small stocky men and women from the high gravity mining colonies. Mercy had never had a cause to dislike them as race, but their general bawdiness and bluntness often put her on edge. The space elves of the Hartishi worlds made up another tenth of the crew, and counted her bunkmate Leduc among them. While as passionate as Oresman, Hartishians were more private with their indulgences. At least that had always been Mercy’s experience.
“And now for the junior officer,” Bracegirdle announced, his voice betraying a grin. “Not many names here,” he added.
Swinging her legs off the bunk, Mercy sat up, careful to stay slouched over enough so as not to bang her head on the ceiling. She slid down to the floor and regarded herself in the room’s mirror. White skinned with rich green hair, Mercy looked like every other Allusian. She brushed her hair back with a hand, reflecting on how alone she felt most days. Few managed to escape the Allusian slave trade. Fewer still tried to defect to the Royal Commonwealth. Only one had entered Her Majesty’s Space Navy.
“Midshipman Mercy Lyons.”
She blinked. She had not put her name in the bowl. There was no one waiting for her at the outpost. There was no one waiting for her anywhere. She had left behind any semblance of a family when she was was rescued by Royal Marines. Few had been willing to even befriend one of the enemy at the academy. There had been attempts to bed her, of course, but those were not romantic overtures. Nearly to the man they had been nothing but racist efforts to see what kind of pleasure slave she had been prior to her liberation.
Mercy stared back at her reflection, watching her white cheeks take on an ever growing red hue, the skin warming with her embarrassment. Any moment now Bracegirdle would chuckle at the joke and draw the name of another junior officer, the real winner of the London Kiss.
“Well, good on you, Midshipman,” he said instead to the crew. “I expect the two of you in dress uniform at the airlock smartly at 0745 to be the first to disembark. To rest of the crew, as you were. Bracegirdle out.”
He was not going to draw another name. She was expected to arrive in the morning, to cross over into the outpost and meet no one. Meanwhile a dozen junior officers would walk down behind her, some even with people waiting to meet them. How could she stand there while they went to meet with their lovers and spouses?
Mercy put a hand on her bunk to steady herself. She was supposed to go on duty in a few hours. How would she face her fellow officers after this?
That was an option: to arrange to share a kiss with one of them. She was pretty sure that a romance was against regulations but maybe the captain would overlook taht and at least save her from the embarrassment of having no one to kiss. She started to tick through the various officers aboard that she knew. First she mentally cleared those that had shown her open hostility. That was three of the eleven gone. Of those remaining two were married. Then she mentally removed Thompson. Like Leduc, they’d been at the academy together and and there she developed the deep seated hatred for him she quietly carried. That left five, of which three were women, and one of Bracegirdle’s tolerated eccentricities was his disapproval of such a pairing. That left just two other junior officers.
She put her arms on the bunk and laid her cheek on them. She was Allusian; there was no mistaking that. On this tour alone they had engaged three Cartel-sponsored pirates. They had consigned seventeen crewman to the black, and a dozen more had been wounded. None would want to be seen in the embrace of the enemy. None should want to be seen holding one of the ruthless foe close to them in celebration.
The door to the stateroom slid open suddenly. Midshipman Cordelia Leduc stepped into the space. Standing behind Mercy, the two of them occupied all of the standing room in their quarters.
“Thompson.” Her tone was low and annoyed.
Mercy turned around, now face to face with Leduc for the first time since they had brought their trunks into the room eight weeks ago. “Thompson?”
Leduc’s lips peeled back in a sneer, her sharp teeth flashing in the light emanating from under the bunks. “I heard him say he was going to drop your name in for the London Kiss yesterday. She shook her head and squeezed herself down onto her own bed. “I didn’t think he could stoop so low, the maudite ostie.” Her green skinned cheeks showed patches of blue from her frustration.
Mercy regarded her bunkmate. She had not expected this response. The fact that they had never seen each other during this tour was one that Mercy considered a boon, an attitude she was convinced that Leduc had shared. “I appreciate your sympathy,” she ventured diplomatically, still standing against the bunks.
“Oh, this isn’t about you,” Leduc shot back, her enormous eyes narrowing as she glared. “It’s bad enough that he put his name in, but to double the odds that no officer was to win a Kiss? Le petit verre de pisse singe.” She scoffed and shook her head, leaning down to rest her elbows on her knees. Mercy stood awkwardly for a few moments and then twisted her body to try to move past the Hartishian.
“I guess I had better head down to the mess. There’s a small chance Ensign Hanover might be willing to-”
Leduc cut her off. “He was sharing a bunk with Crewman Gulliford.”
“And she was killed-”
Again Leduc cut her off. “In our second engagement with your former friends.”
The words stung. The Allusian Cartel were friends to no one, let alone the women they raised and sold into slavery. Mercy disliked every reference to them that suggested her former life. And in the immediate it also meant that there was no chance Hanover would be her savior. She considered the new facts. She admitted to herself that he had done a good job of hiding his disdain from her, though she now understood why he had never initiated a conversation. “Well, then,” she managed, finally.
Leduc looked up at her, her lips pressing together as she grinned conspiratorially. She held Mercy’s gaze for a second before speaking. “You’re kissing me.”
Mercy froze, her hands on her bunk as she tried to move around the other woman. She stared down at her. “Kiss you? I didn’t even think you liked me.”
The Hartishian chuckled wickedly. “I don’t like you. Frankly I hate just about everything about you.” Mercy blinked, dumbfounded, as she continued. “I hate that I had to score in the top forty percent of all Hartishians just to get an application to the academy, but you, the only Allusian, was granted a seat for the asking. I hate that for every engagement you get called into the briefing to provide some insight that you and I both know you don’t have. I hate that everyone likes to talk about how beautiful pleasure slaves are supposed to be, and what great lovers they make, and I hate that even that oiste de marde Thompson makes no secret he’d take you to bed before he’d dain to consider a ‘space elf’.” She stood up, forcing Mercy to take a step back. She felt the bulkhead behind her as the smaller woman stood before her. “But no matter how much I may hate you, the Kiss is a sacred tradition. It’s bigger than me, you or Thompson, and it’s not a joke, not to those who will be at that airlock looking for someone who’s not coming back from the black.”
Mercy nodded. “That makes sense.” She mulled it all over. “You hate me?”
Leduc took a step back and folded her arms. “For the most part. I respect what you’ve done but it really it doesn’t make me want to like you much.”
“And you want me to kiss you tomorrow morning.” Mercy was starting to smile.
“Yes,” Leduc answered. “We’re going to make a show of it. The London Kiss is a ritual that will be honored, even if it is done with polite formality between two bunk mates. And it’s not like anyone will believe that there’s something between us.”
“Because,” Mercy continued for her, “it’s common knowledge that you hate me.”
“Exactly.” Leduc beamed. “It’s a perfect plan that honors the kiss, shames Thompson, provides the public a quick kiss to see, and then we can go back to pleasantly avoiding each other.”
“And puts you center stage.”
Leduc shrugged off the observation. “Not a downside to me, but not my only motivator.”
Mercy shook her head. “And all I have to do is kiss someone who hates me.” She put her arm up along the bunk. The perfect plan still felt horribly unfair.
“There is that,” Leduc conceded, her voice starting to show a trace of regret. “Think it over. I’m due back on the bridge for the rest of this rotation. Leave me a note when you go on duty so I know if I need to get up and get into my dress uni or not.” The door to the hallway slid open as she stepped back towards it. “And yes, I do hate you, and this won’t change that. But this wasn’t about you, blanche.”
And she was gone, stepping out into hall, and disappearing from sight.
Mercy rested her forehead on the rail of the bunk. There was little question. She was going to have her bunkmate, a woman who hated her, meet her and share a public kiss to celebrate the end of their tour, the London Kiss.
* * * *
Midshipman Mercy Lyons eased along the passway, twisting back and forth to keep the white of her dress uniform from touching any of the bulkheads, or from grazing against the grease of one of the hatches. Her hair was pulled back tightly and knotted low, per regulations and several times she was forced to reach up and hold her white garrison cap in place as she went. Commander Bracegirdle was already at the airlock with Crewman O’Keefe. O’Keefe shifted nervously in the limited room he had to fidget. Space was a luxury on any ship, and the Foxhound was tighter than most.
“Who are you meeting ashore, Miss Lyons?” Bracegirdle’s smile was easy and casual. “A gentlemen we’ve not heard of?”
“No, sir,” she answered coming to attention. “My guest will be along shortly.” She stood opposite the two men in the small area before the hatch. Crew were already starting to file in as well, duffles in hand. They did not crowd the captain or the two honorees.
A few minutes Leduc’s voice filled the tight space. “Make a hole,” she called out down the passageway. Crew grumbled as they pressed themselves to the bulkheads to allow her small slender form to pass through. She took a place next to Mercy and came to attention.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Bracegirdle’s smile vanished. Mercy had known him to be a little radical in his thinking but had hoped he would not embarrass them. She had been mistaken. “You cannot kiss another woman, let alone a Hart-”
Mercy cut in quickly, her voice firm but as polite as she could manage. “Let alone your bunkmate. Fortunately I reviewed the regulations last night and you are correct, romantic liaisons between officers, indeed between any sharing quartering aboard ship, would be violations of Her Majesty’s Rules of Engagement for Crown Ships, that is without special dispensation from the ship’s captain.”
Bracegirdle puffed out his chest and smiled. “Well, that just means we’ll have to find someone else. I’m sure there’s a gentleman or two who would escort you on to the station. I offer you an informal dispensation now if that gentleman will step forward.” He pushed up on his toes to look past Mercy at the ever growing crowd.
“Which is why,” Mercy continued, “I am lucky that Midshipman Leduc and I are not romantic. At my suggestion we both put in our names to be drawn with the plan to share a platonic kiss if we were chosen.”
“Why?” Bracegirdle’s voice pitched up wards with alarm. “I won’t have this tradition made a mockery of, not on my ship.”
“Because as grateful as I am sure Crewman O’Keefe is to see his wife, those of us who have chosen to remain unjoined are equally grateful just to have survived another tour. We are not afraid of our duty, but we,” she nodded towards Leduc, “agree that there is no shame in simply being pleased to live to serve the Crown again.”
The comm next to the airlock crackled to life as the technician on the station side confirmed that they had a good seal and that all docking clamps were secure. Warning lights started to flash as the station opened its hatch to the airlock and the interior pressure stabilized.
“Well, I don’t know,” Bracegirdle grumbled, clutching his hands behind his back and rolling back and forth on his heels. “Tradition says this is an occasion for, well, lovers and sweethearts. And, strictly speaking, no one would confuse you two to be either.”
Mercy felt her cheeks betray her efforts to remain calm. She took a breath. “We meant no offense, Sir,” she mostly lied. “But it was important to both of us to celebrate the tour on behalf of all of us who have no one to meet here.” She licked her lips nervously. “If it matters you may put me on report for this. It was my idea. I suggested it to Midshipman Leduc and convinced her of its merits. Sir.”
“Oh, damnation this isn’t the time.” The light next to the airlock changed from amber to green, and the hatch gave a hiss as the pressure equalized. “Let’s just be done and neither of you speak of it to me again. Understood?”
“Aye, Sir,” the two women answered briskly.
Bracegirdle nodded to O’Keefe. Grinning like a schoolboy, he pulled open the hatch and climbed through quickly to seize his wife in his arms. Mercy gave him a few moments before following. She turned and offered a hand to Leduc to help her through the hatch. They shook hands, and then pressed their lips to each other’s cheeks. Unsure the small crowd watched, quietly. While they had cheered for O’Keefe, none seemed quite prepared for this. Mercy just took Leduc’s hand again, and lifted it high in her own as she smiled at the crowd.
“To living another day in the service of Her Right Majesty Queen Glorianna the Fourth. Long Live the Queen!”
The crowd shouted back in unison, “Long live the Queen!” and the moment of awkwardness was gone. Then the crew began to file into the receiving area, and the time of the London Kiss passed, another completed tradition, followed and forgotten.
May 31, 2012
Skyrim vs Dragon Age
So while I’m recovering from some minor surgery I had a day to play my “alternate” game of Skyrim. I broke down a few weeks ago and picked up a copy and started a play-through as a spell caster. This week I started up a sword and board character focusing on heavy armor and direct combat. My magic user on the other hand is all stealth and cloth robes. As an aside, why is it that the super powerful Archmage Robes have to have this dorky hood attached? My mage is rocking out this home enchanted circlet of magicka recovery and it’s hidden in this silly hood.
But as I’m playing through a second time with my warrior (who I have decided looks far better without a helmet than with so screw the armor bonuses for now; if I get in a fight where I think I need that 20% I’ll put one on) I’m left thinking about how these two characters are different.
And I realize why it is that Dragon Age is a superior game in many ways.
May 29, 2012
Dangerous Democracy
A common trope in future sci fi is that Mankind will evolve into a perfect democratic state. There will be a grand Imperial Senate that decides all things in great democratic fashion, or that all the planets of the galaxy will unite to a common pursuit of peace and justice and the Federation Way. The bad guys in all of these scenarios are the totalitarians, the monarchs, the emperors. When power rests all in the hand of a single Supreme Chancellor they are evil, wicked, corrupt or some combination therein. It is the role of the heroes to fight against this tyranny and prove that the individual with his democratic ideals is the true way forward.
Even Firefly, great speculative fiction that was, presented the unifying force as “the black hats” and the rebellious Outer Rim Browncoats as holding true to this democratic ideal. We really don’t know what passed for law and order on these border planets, only that the Alliance wanted to bring them all under one government, presumably a repressive evil one. Never very well pursued on the show, we really don’t know what kind of government the Alliance had. It could have been a democratic republic just like the Union of the 1860’s, forcing its repressive will on the slave states of the South.
But this is where current events start to show the cracks in this ideal, the marks of tarnish at the borders of the otherwise shiny exterior.
For those not following events in the Euro-Zone, the Greek people have elected new officers to their government on a platform of more social spending and more economic relief. The problem, unfortunately, is that the Greek government has no money to pay for these programs. It is extremely heavily leveraged and is borrowing faster than it can spend, it seems. The rest of the Eurozone, their rates tied through the singular currency of the Euro, have offered bailouts but have demanded harsh austerity measures to bring the Greek federal budget more in line with its expenditures.
And the Greek voters have rejected these programs. En masse. The Will of the People, as it were, is to keep borrowing and keep paying benefits, regardless of how they pay for it. Economists, as they often are on politically charged issues are split. Many believe that total collapse of the Greek economy is imminent. The more alarmist are predicting a complete collapse of Europe as a whole. Some are going so are as to suggest that there will be another global financial catastrophe.
I doubt any of this is news to the Greek voters. Or maybe it is. Perhaps they don’t have the information they need to make the governmental choices to keep the world out of another monetary ruin. Or perhaps they do have it, and they simply don’t care. Or they don’t believe it. But one thing is clear: They do not want less government spending and they do not want more government revenue through taxes. They elected people promising to spend more, and tax less.
They elected people promising, in short, to damn the consequences, but to keep the bread and cheese flowing.
And this is the grand danger of any democracy, the dark secret that no one likes to admit to. When events unfold so that voters see Thing X as a thing they want, and politicians promising to give them Thing X, then they tend to vote for that politician, even if Thing X is something that will destroy the country in the process.
The problem is that Democracies work as long as you have an informed and educated voting public. The less the public knows and understands on the issues, the more it has to trust the word of politicians. They themselves have profound pressure to give the best deal to their voters if they want to get reelected. Who wants to run on a platform of raising taxes and cutting benefits? Who wants to try to win public office by saying that they are going to make things rough on the average citizen?
But sometimes that’s what you need to do to move forward. Sometimes there just isn’t the money to buy a new car, or order in pizza every night. Sometimes there just isn’t the incoming tax revenue to provide has had been provided during “Good Times”.
But the rubber has to meet the road somewhere. Someone has to say “look, here’s what we’ve got to work with,” as well as “If we don’t do Y now, Z will happen later and we don’t want Z.”
And often Y is unpopular. Sometimes it’s easier on a state to have someone who doesn’t have to run for office saying that Y is just going to have to happen. And when it does, and Z is avoided, they do appear the hero. Only that requires a long view of history, a willingness to wait several years to see the benefits, something that our relatively short attention span won’t allow.
This is one of the reasons where I envision a future utopia that is more in line with a constitutional monarchy than a grand republic. It’s why Mercy and her crew are willing to shout “God save the Queen!” after a battle, rather than “God, keep the republic.” I won’t go so far as to say that I would prefer a monarchy here on Earth, but I can definitely feel comfortable writing about one favorably.
And in my current plans, the democracy is going to be the villains…
Even Firefly, great speculative fiction that was, presented the unifying force as “the black hats” and the rebellious Outer Rim Browncoats as holding true to this democratic ideal. We really don’t know what passed for law and order on these border planets, only that the Alliance wanted to bring them all under one government, presumably a repressive evil one. Never very well pursued on the show, we really don’t know what kind of government the Alliance had. It could have been a democratic republic just like the Union of the 1860’s, forcing its repressive will on the slave states of the South.
But this is where current events start to show the cracks in this ideal, the marks of tarnish at the borders of the otherwise shiny exterior.
For those not following events in the Euro-Zone, the Greek people have elected new officers to their government on a platform of more social spending and more economic relief. The problem, unfortunately, is that the Greek government has no money to pay for these programs. It is extremely heavily leveraged and is borrowing faster than it can spend, it seems. The rest of the Eurozone, their rates tied through the singular currency of the Euro, have offered bailouts but have demanded harsh austerity measures to bring the Greek federal budget more in line with its expenditures.
And the Greek voters have rejected these programs. En masse. The Will of the People, as it were, is to keep borrowing and keep paying benefits, regardless of how they pay for it. Economists, as they often are on politically charged issues are split. Many believe that total collapse of the Greek economy is imminent. The more alarmist are predicting a complete collapse of Europe as a whole. Some are going so are as to suggest that there will be another global financial catastrophe.
I doubt any of this is news to the Greek voters. Or maybe it is. Perhaps they don’t have the information they need to make the governmental choices to keep the world out of another monetary ruin. Or perhaps they do have it, and they simply don’t care. Or they don’t believe it. But one thing is clear: They do not want less government spending and they do not want more government revenue through taxes. They elected people promising to spend more, and tax less.
They elected people promising, in short, to damn the consequences, but to keep the bread and cheese flowing.
And this is the grand danger of any democracy, the dark secret that no one likes to admit to. When events unfold so that voters see Thing X as a thing they want, and politicians promising to give them Thing X, then they tend to vote for that politician, even if Thing X is something that will destroy the country in the process.
The problem is that Democracies work as long as you have an informed and educated voting public. The less the public knows and understands on the issues, the more it has to trust the word of politicians. They themselves have profound pressure to give the best deal to their voters if they want to get reelected. Who wants to run on a platform of raising taxes and cutting benefits? Who wants to try to win public office by saying that they are going to make things rough on the average citizen?
But sometimes that’s what you need to do to move forward. Sometimes there just isn’t the money to buy a new car, or order in pizza every night. Sometimes there just isn’t the incoming tax revenue to provide has had been provided during “Good Times”.
But the rubber has to meet the road somewhere. Someone has to say “look, here’s what we’ve got to work with,” as well as “If we don’t do Y now, Z will happen later and we don’t want Z.”
And often Y is unpopular. Sometimes it’s easier on a state to have someone who doesn’t have to run for office saying that Y is just going to have to happen. And when it does, and Z is avoided, they do appear the hero. Only that requires a long view of history, a willingness to wait several years to see the benefits, something that our relatively short attention span won’t allow.
This is one of the reasons where I envision a future utopia that is more in line with a constitutional monarchy than a grand republic. It’s why Mercy and her crew are willing to shout “God save the Queen!” after a battle, rather than “God, keep the republic.” I won’t go so far as to say that I would prefer a monarchy here on Earth, but I can definitely feel comfortable writing about one favorably.
And in my current plans, the democracy is going to be the villains…
May 22, 2012
A Lanister always pays his... writers?
One of the challenges with not knowing if I'll be able to find an agent (given how many people are trying to find agents and how few are accepting new submissions) also leaves me with the great debate of how to monetize my writing. I've been doing quite a bit of it in the form of shorts (and the occasional chapter), some for the Queen's Fury series* and just some modern fiction for the practice.
I do plan to publish my shorts in a collection this summer as I finish up a few more stories to round the it out. Ideally I'd like to have 4-6 good modern shorts, and 2-3 short stories set in the Queen's Fury world.
But where I'm a little stuck is on the issue of this website and making these stories available for free.
The first consideration is, of course, that if I do find an agent/ publisher, they want material that's not been published anywhere, including on a website, before. That means the moment the short story hits this page it is un-submit-able to a traditional publisher. On the other hand, as I don't have any publisher at the moment nor any agents, I'm hestitant to panic over this too much.
There is also the consideration that if the stories are available for free here on the blog, can I ethically offer them for sale through other venues? Can I really charge $2.49 for a collection on Amazon when it's all free here? To be true, by having them available outside of Amazon I won't be eligible for the "Kindle Direct Publishing Deal" that gives Amazon exclusive rights to distribute, and with it the heftier royalties (70% vs 30%).
But at the end of the day, the most important thing for me, I think, is buzz. Maybe the stories I write now about Captain Lyons and her crew will never be traditionally sold. but getting people talking about it and commenting on it and thinking about it can't be a bad thing. The most important thing is that they're engaged. To be honest I'd like to make the shorts a "bonus" on the Kindle edition of the book no matter what happens, a "thank you for going paperless" and I believe that having them available for free here won't hurt that.
I also think I'm prepared to defend the "Pay on Amazon/ Free on the web" if the price is low with the defense of "you're really paying for convenience". Sure you can get them there, but for a small fee (and really is $2.49 that much?) you get to have them right on your Kindle rather than having to find the website.
There are still a few stories that might see publication with a friend's imprint so I'm holding those back. And if a story disappears from the site it's because something has happened that requires me to remove them, so I apologize in advance if that's the case. As I am just starting out, it's hard to know what's going to happen when.
So until then look to the top of the page and you'll see tabs. One is specifically for Short Stories, where all of my short stories will be offered. The other is for any and all completed posts related to the Queen's Fury writing.
*I strongly dislike calling it a series given that I've only written the first chapter of the first book. I always found it a little pretentious to say "I'm working on series" before you have the second manuscript in hand. However it seems that the series is a popular model and given where I want the story to go, there will decidedly be room for a sequel or two.
I do plan to publish my shorts in a collection this summer as I finish up a few more stories to round the it out. Ideally I'd like to have 4-6 good modern shorts, and 2-3 short stories set in the Queen's Fury world.
But where I'm a little stuck is on the issue of this website and making these stories available for free.
The first consideration is, of course, that if I do find an agent/ publisher, they want material that's not been published anywhere, including on a website, before. That means the moment the short story hits this page it is un-submit-able to a traditional publisher. On the other hand, as I don't have any publisher at the moment nor any agents, I'm hestitant to panic over this too much.
There is also the consideration that if the stories are available for free here on the blog, can I ethically offer them for sale through other venues? Can I really charge $2.49 for a collection on Amazon when it's all free here? To be true, by having them available outside of Amazon I won't be eligible for the "Kindle Direct Publishing Deal" that gives Amazon exclusive rights to distribute, and with it the heftier royalties (70% vs 30%).
But at the end of the day, the most important thing for me, I think, is buzz. Maybe the stories I write now about Captain Lyons and her crew will never be traditionally sold. but getting people talking about it and commenting on it and thinking about it can't be a bad thing. The most important thing is that they're engaged. To be honest I'd like to make the shorts a "bonus" on the Kindle edition of the book no matter what happens, a "thank you for going paperless" and I believe that having them available for free here won't hurt that.
I also think I'm prepared to defend the "Pay on Amazon/ Free on the web" if the price is low with the defense of "you're really paying for convenience". Sure you can get them there, but for a small fee (and really is $2.49 that much?) you get to have them right on your Kindle rather than having to find the website.
There are still a few stories that might see publication with a friend's imprint so I'm holding those back. And if a story disappears from the site it's because something has happened that requires me to remove them, so I apologize in advance if that's the case. As I am just starting out, it's hard to know what's going to happen when.
So until then look to the top of the page and you'll see tabs. One is specifically for Short Stories, where all of my short stories will be offered. The other is for any and all completed posts related to the Queen's Fury writing.
*I strongly dislike calling it a series given that I've only written the first chapter of the first book. I always found it a little pretentious to say "I'm working on series" before you have the second manuscript in hand. However it seems that the series is a popular model and given where I want the story to go, there will decidedly be room for a sequel or two.
May 21, 2012
It's on the To Read List
Okay, so I know I haven't put out a proper post today. I owe you guys one.
But then this came in the mail today:
It's a little hard to read, I know. Let me clarify:Thank you so much for the nice letter and the book.
I look forward to reading it as soon as I can.
I am swamped right now, but it is on the "To Read" list.
:)
Molly
I dub this moment Squee-worthy.
Short Story: The Next Best Thing
As I work on my next novel I've been doing a lot of short stories to help flesh out the world and the characters. I've debated a lot about posting them here on the website and come down on the "share them" side of the debate."
So here we have a chance to meet the novel's protagonist Mercy Lyons when she was still at the Naval Academy and still just a first year Midshipman. This was originally written for the Good Reads website Weekly Short Story Contest Group.
"The Next Best Thing"
1600 Words
I was in my second year at the Academy.
Alexandria, this beautiful thing from Tyson 4, dumped me that morning because she said she knew her cat better than knew me.
Commander LeGrange had just lit me up in front of my entire Terraforming seminar for missing two equations in my draft term paper.
My roommate was back in our bunk with the Hanover twins, and he let me know that I was not to come home that night.
So there I was, at the junior officer bar, two beers into my charted course to complete inebriation.
Down the bar from me was an Allusian. It’s probably better to say that “Down the bar from me was the Allusian.” Only one I’d ever seen up close. When I did a training tour my first year at the Academy we’d run afoul of one of their raiding parties: three light schooners with more guns then sail. It was a hell of a scrap. We nearly lost the entire bridge crew when integrity fields started to fail. It would have been a lot worse if a merchant hadn’t wormed in just behind one of the raiders. She was lightly armed but it was enough to give them a spook and they left us to lick our wounds. I’d heard a lot about the Allusian Cartel, their domination of the the Union of Independent Systems, and their general disregard for all interstellar law.
She was hard not to look at. You hear stories about the Allusian pleasure girls, that they’re these paragons of sensuality, these avatars of beauty. But what always struck me about the one at the Academy is that she was really rather common. She was pretty, no doubt. One of the prettiest of the class. Thing is it wasn’t the kind of beauty that you really remember why it was beautiful. Honestly, if it weren’t for her green hair and bleached white skin, you could almost swap her out for any of the other pretty girls in our class.
Of course she caught me staring at her. I swear women have a 6th sense for that sort of thing. She had two hands wrapped around a small glass she was taking sips out of when she turned to look my direction.
The moment of truth. Eye Contact.
I wasn’t really drunk enough to try a “come-hither” look, but I was plenty drunk enough that efforts to look confident were going to fail too. As an internal compromise I settled for raising my glass slightly and nodding my head. She smiled, a tiny smile, and raised her glass just off the bar in response.
But she didn’t look away. Neither did I.
* * * * *
She was looking down at me when I woke up. She’d pulled up the sheet to cover her chest, and propped up her head on one hand. Her other hand was tracing a figure eight on my own chest. I understood why her hair was shorter than most; even after sleeping it looked good on her. Everything about her looked good.
First thing in the morning and she even smelled good.
She spoke first. “Good morning.” There was something about her smile when she said it. I couldn’t place it at the time but it seemed off. I didn’t think much of it; I was just glad she hadn’t slipped out in the night.
But then again, we were in her room. That would have been awkward.
“Light sleeper?” I asked. I put a hand behind my head and tried to look casual about everything.
She nodded. She didn’t say anything, just kept watching her finger move over my chest, along the bottom edge of my neck, and then back down towards my navel.
“I guess you kind of had to be, right? Waking up in strange places.”
She nodded again. She didn’t say anything though, just kept tracing idle lines on me. Soon as I’d said it, I realized how much of an ass I had to sound like, bringing up her past.
Then came that horrid silence. I hate silence.
“So, back rub?” It was my standard silence-killer. If we’re not going to say anything at least I could try to win some points by rubbing her back and shoulders.
She looked at me a moment and laid down on her chest, resting her cheek on her hands, looking away from me. It took me a moment to get my bearings. I sat up, and pulled down the sheet to the small of her back to give myself some room to work. Her bare white skin was flawless, almost glowing in the light of the sunrise. I put my fingers to work along her skin and tried, desperately to think of something to say.
“Your back is gorgeous.”
Well at least it was a fairly safe observation.
She sighed out a “Thank you” and left me more or less to my work.
“I mean from what I’ve heard I would have expected some scars or something.”
Once again my foot found that wormhole connected directly to my mouth. Had it been the night before I could have blamed it on the beer. If I’d had more beer I could have blamed it on being hung over. Instead all I could do is blame it on being a moron.
Her eyes were closed still, but she did let out a sigh. “It is very hard to scar a pleasure girl. We are bred to heal almost completely.”
“Oh.” My mind raced with things to say, sympathies to offer, curiosities to explore. Instead I managed a single sound and then froze as thousands of things to say flashed through my mind and were rejected almost instantly. She noticed that I had stopped my massage.
“If you look very closely you can probably see a white line on the left.” She remained still under me. I leaned down and if I looked I could just make out small mark. A long scar, running from her shoulder across the middle of her back. But it was so thin and so light that against the white of her skin I never would have found it without knowing where to start looking.
“Wow,” I said without thought. I really wasn’t thinking much at all that morning.
“No one likes to be reminded when they break their toys,” she said. Her eyes opened and she stared off into the distance. “Scars are reminders that you broke someone. We weren’t allowed to get scars.”
What do you say to that? My mom would give me a good bare hand to the cheek when I mouthed off enough that she’d had it, but that was the worst I’d ever had. I had no point of reference at all for this. I settled for resuming my massage. I was more gentle than I usually was, but I couldn’t find in me to really work at her muscles. She stared off into the distance, as though the point on the wall next to us were miles away.
Accursed silence. My mind was racing. This time I gave up and let my curiosity simply take the bridge and set course. “Is it hard to be with someone after all that?”
“What do you mean?”
It was my turn to sigh in contemplation. What had I meant? “Just, to sleep with someone by choice after so long, you know, not choosing.”
She nodded. “I didn’t think I’d be able to.” I remember how low her voice was, as though she were whispering to someone else. I felt like I was intruding on her as I listened to her talk. “I swore I’d wait until I was loved by someone. I didn’t want to be another pleasure girl again. I wanted someone to love me and I wanted to love them.”
I paused my rubbing for a moment. I wasn’t sure how to say this delicately. “Sure I like you, but this isn’t really love.” Maybe she had gotten bad intel about humans, figured that what had happened between us was our way of showing love. It may be for some but hardly for all.
“I know,” she sighed. “But you don’t hate me like they do.”
“Hate you?” I barely knew her. She was a year behind me and I think I’d seen her twice in the halls. I guess I could have hated her for what her people had done but that was a tough sell for me. Of course I was lucky. I’d lost the occasional shipmate, classmate, to battles with the Allusians. A lot of my class lost a lot more. But I couldn’t blame her.
Or could I? Had I the night before? I thought about the empty stools on either side of her at the bar. The lounge was packed with junior officers and our various “Mating Rituals”. Yet there was one void in the place, a halo of nothing around her where she sat. Maybe I did blame her a little for what her people had done and would continue to do. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t one of us. She was one of “them”.
I stopped rubbing her back and laid down next to her, putting my arm over her, like I could protect her from all of them. “You’re right,” I said, willing it to be true. “I don’t hate you.” I paused. “But you wanted to wait for someone to love you, didn’t you?”
“I did.” She said and pulled my arm tighter to her. I could feel the softness of her bare skin under my fingers. “But right now, this is the next best thing.”
So here we have a chance to meet the novel's protagonist Mercy Lyons when she was still at the Naval Academy and still just a first year Midshipman. This was originally written for the Good Reads website Weekly Short Story Contest Group.
"The Next Best Thing"
1600 Words
I was in my second year at the Academy.
Alexandria, this beautiful thing from Tyson 4, dumped me that morning because she said she knew her cat better than knew me.
Commander LeGrange had just lit me up in front of my entire Terraforming seminar for missing two equations in my draft term paper.
My roommate was back in our bunk with the Hanover twins, and he let me know that I was not to come home that night.
So there I was, at the junior officer bar, two beers into my charted course to complete inebriation.
Down the bar from me was an Allusian. It’s probably better to say that “Down the bar from me was the Allusian.” Only one I’d ever seen up close. When I did a training tour my first year at the Academy we’d run afoul of one of their raiding parties: three light schooners with more guns then sail. It was a hell of a scrap. We nearly lost the entire bridge crew when integrity fields started to fail. It would have been a lot worse if a merchant hadn’t wormed in just behind one of the raiders. She was lightly armed but it was enough to give them a spook and they left us to lick our wounds. I’d heard a lot about the Allusian Cartel, their domination of the the Union of Independent Systems, and their general disregard for all interstellar law.
She was hard not to look at. You hear stories about the Allusian pleasure girls, that they’re these paragons of sensuality, these avatars of beauty. But what always struck me about the one at the Academy is that she was really rather common. She was pretty, no doubt. One of the prettiest of the class. Thing is it wasn’t the kind of beauty that you really remember why it was beautiful. Honestly, if it weren’t for her green hair and bleached white skin, you could almost swap her out for any of the other pretty girls in our class.
Of course she caught me staring at her. I swear women have a 6th sense for that sort of thing. She had two hands wrapped around a small glass she was taking sips out of when she turned to look my direction.
The moment of truth. Eye Contact.
I wasn’t really drunk enough to try a “come-hither” look, but I was plenty drunk enough that efforts to look confident were going to fail too. As an internal compromise I settled for raising my glass slightly and nodding my head. She smiled, a tiny smile, and raised her glass just off the bar in response.
But she didn’t look away. Neither did I.
* * * * *
She was looking down at me when I woke up. She’d pulled up the sheet to cover her chest, and propped up her head on one hand. Her other hand was tracing a figure eight on my own chest. I understood why her hair was shorter than most; even after sleeping it looked good on her. Everything about her looked good.
First thing in the morning and she even smelled good.
She spoke first. “Good morning.” There was something about her smile when she said it. I couldn’t place it at the time but it seemed off. I didn’t think much of it; I was just glad she hadn’t slipped out in the night.
But then again, we were in her room. That would have been awkward.
“Light sleeper?” I asked. I put a hand behind my head and tried to look casual about everything.
She nodded. She didn’t say anything, just kept watching her finger move over my chest, along the bottom edge of my neck, and then back down towards my navel.
“I guess you kind of had to be, right? Waking up in strange places.”
She nodded again. She didn’t say anything though, just kept tracing idle lines on me. Soon as I’d said it, I realized how much of an ass I had to sound like, bringing up her past.
Then came that horrid silence. I hate silence.
“So, back rub?” It was my standard silence-killer. If we’re not going to say anything at least I could try to win some points by rubbing her back and shoulders.
She looked at me a moment and laid down on her chest, resting her cheek on her hands, looking away from me. It took me a moment to get my bearings. I sat up, and pulled down the sheet to the small of her back to give myself some room to work. Her bare white skin was flawless, almost glowing in the light of the sunrise. I put my fingers to work along her skin and tried, desperately to think of something to say.
“Your back is gorgeous.”
Well at least it was a fairly safe observation.
She sighed out a “Thank you” and left me more or less to my work.
“I mean from what I’ve heard I would have expected some scars or something.”
Once again my foot found that wormhole connected directly to my mouth. Had it been the night before I could have blamed it on the beer. If I’d had more beer I could have blamed it on being hung over. Instead all I could do is blame it on being a moron.
Her eyes were closed still, but she did let out a sigh. “It is very hard to scar a pleasure girl. We are bred to heal almost completely.”
“Oh.” My mind raced with things to say, sympathies to offer, curiosities to explore. Instead I managed a single sound and then froze as thousands of things to say flashed through my mind and were rejected almost instantly. She noticed that I had stopped my massage.
“If you look very closely you can probably see a white line on the left.” She remained still under me. I leaned down and if I looked I could just make out small mark. A long scar, running from her shoulder across the middle of her back. But it was so thin and so light that against the white of her skin I never would have found it without knowing where to start looking.
“Wow,” I said without thought. I really wasn’t thinking much at all that morning.
“No one likes to be reminded when they break their toys,” she said. Her eyes opened and she stared off into the distance. “Scars are reminders that you broke someone. We weren’t allowed to get scars.”
What do you say to that? My mom would give me a good bare hand to the cheek when I mouthed off enough that she’d had it, but that was the worst I’d ever had. I had no point of reference at all for this. I settled for resuming my massage. I was more gentle than I usually was, but I couldn’t find in me to really work at her muscles. She stared off into the distance, as though the point on the wall next to us were miles away.
Accursed silence. My mind was racing. This time I gave up and let my curiosity simply take the bridge and set course. “Is it hard to be with someone after all that?”
“What do you mean?”
It was my turn to sigh in contemplation. What had I meant? “Just, to sleep with someone by choice after so long, you know, not choosing.”
She nodded. “I didn’t think I’d be able to.” I remember how low her voice was, as though she were whispering to someone else. I felt like I was intruding on her as I listened to her talk. “I swore I’d wait until I was loved by someone. I didn’t want to be another pleasure girl again. I wanted someone to love me and I wanted to love them.”
I paused my rubbing for a moment. I wasn’t sure how to say this delicately. “Sure I like you, but this isn’t really love.” Maybe she had gotten bad intel about humans, figured that what had happened between us was our way of showing love. It may be for some but hardly for all.
“I know,” she sighed. “But you don’t hate me like they do.”
“Hate you?” I barely knew her. She was a year behind me and I think I’d seen her twice in the halls. I guess I could have hated her for what her people had done but that was a tough sell for me. Of course I was lucky. I’d lost the occasional shipmate, classmate, to battles with the Allusians. A lot of my class lost a lot more. But I couldn’t blame her.
Or could I? Had I the night before? I thought about the empty stools on either side of her at the bar. The lounge was packed with junior officers and our various “Mating Rituals”. Yet there was one void in the place, a halo of nothing around her where she sat. Maybe I did blame her a little for what her people had done and would continue to do. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t one of us. She was one of “them”.
I stopped rubbing her back and laid down next to her, putting my arm over her, like I could protect her from all of them. “You’re right,” I said, willing it to be true. “I don’t hate you.” I paused. “But you wanted to wait for someone to love you, didn’t you?”
“I did.” She said and pulled my arm tighter to her. I could feel the softness of her bare skin under my fingers. “But right now, this is the next best thing.”
May 17, 2012
TV Review: Smash
So what is Smash?
For those who missed this midseason gem, I've described it (I think best) as Glee for Grown Ups. The show follows the Producer, Director, Writers, and Cast as they begin production on a musical about Marilyn Monroe's life (and death). We start with the initial conception, go through the casting, and finally into the off-Broadway previews.
We get treated to the insights of a horrifically narcissistic director, a divorcing producer, and two actresses vying for the staring role as Marilyn herself.
Ivy is a blonde bombshell and Broadway veteran. One of the things I loved about her was that she was a beautiful size 14. You just don't see that muchly on TV any more. She knows the tricks of the trade but there's a dark streak to her that shows how competative she is and how much she wants the role.
Karen, her foil, is talented new face from Iowa. She's come to New York to live the dream. She meets "The Perfect Guy", auditions for every role she can while she waits tables, and eventually gets into the cast for the show.
The primary conflict of the series is which one of them will be Marilyn but that's hardly the start of it. The writers have falling outs. The producer is dealing with her exhusband. The director is sleeping with a star, and is unashamed of how he uses his own sexual energies to motivate and attract others. Karen and her boyfriend have their own issues to work through.
It's often compared to Glee and that's fair. Each week you're treated to two to three musical numbers. Usually one of them is a song from the musical they're producing, and another is a cover song of a modern tune. Over the season we get treated, more or less, to the entire Musical "Bombshell" done piecemeal throughout the weeks.
I want to see Bombshell. I want to buy a ticket, sit in the audience, and enjoy this show. Not the Broadway production of Smash, but the actual musical they made. I'll be honest. I cried. In the season finale they show the final number of the musical, one that was, supposedly, written at the last possible second and it nailed it. That final song pulled together an entire season of hope and heartbreak, drama and divas as well as providing a final close to Marilyn's life.
Glee is, at it's core, a collection of kids singing pop song covers with a plot that provides good excuses and interesting characters. Smash is that with the added maturity of adult characters dealing with problems like adults and moving the overall story in ways that make sense and engage you.
If you haven't seen it, find it. And find it fast.
For those who missed this midseason gem, I've described it (I think best) as Glee for Grown Ups. The show follows the Producer, Director, Writers, and Cast as they begin production on a musical about Marilyn Monroe's life (and death). We start with the initial conception, go through the casting, and finally into the off-Broadway previews.
We get treated to the insights of a horrifically narcissistic director, a divorcing producer, and two actresses vying for the staring role as Marilyn herself.
Ivy is a blonde bombshell and Broadway veteran. One of the things I loved about her was that she was a beautiful size 14. You just don't see that muchly on TV any more. She knows the tricks of the trade but there's a dark streak to her that shows how competative she is and how much she wants the role.
Karen, her foil, is talented new face from Iowa. She's come to New York to live the dream. She meets "The Perfect Guy", auditions for every role she can while she waits tables, and eventually gets into the cast for the show.
The primary conflict of the series is which one of them will be Marilyn but that's hardly the start of it. The writers have falling outs. The producer is dealing with her exhusband. The director is sleeping with a star, and is unashamed of how he uses his own sexual energies to motivate and attract others. Karen and her boyfriend have their own issues to work through.
It's often compared to Glee and that's fair. Each week you're treated to two to three musical numbers. Usually one of them is a song from the musical they're producing, and another is a cover song of a modern tune. Over the season we get treated, more or less, to the entire Musical "Bombshell" done piecemeal throughout the weeks.
I want to see Bombshell. I want to buy a ticket, sit in the audience, and enjoy this show. Not the Broadway production of Smash, but the actual musical they made. I'll be honest. I cried. In the season finale they show the final number of the musical, one that was, supposedly, written at the last possible second and it nailed it. That final song pulled together an entire season of hope and heartbreak, drama and divas as well as providing a final close to Marilyn's life.
Glee is, at it's core, a collection of kids singing pop song covers with a plot that provides good excuses and interesting characters. Smash is that with the added maturity of adult characters dealing with problems like adults and moving the overall story in ways that make sense and engage you.
If you haven't seen it, find it. And find it fast.
May 14, 2012
Where's Chapter 2?
For the weekly short story contest over on Goodreads last week I wrote a story about Mercy Lyons called "The London Kiss." In this story I establish that it's a military tradition with the Royal Space Navy for crew to be drawn at random to go "ashore" first and kiss their sweetheart after a tour of duty. (Because I'm also thinking about having it published it's not posted here, yet.) It's a fun story that shows some character background, allows me to engage in some world building, and see what happens.
But a friend read it for me and then immediately lamented "But I want to read chapter 2! I like the vignettes, and the back story, but when do we see more of the novel? Do you know how hard it is to sleep at night not knowing what happens now that the ship is all but adrift in space with only a handful of officers remaining and no active guns? I wasn't this sleep deprived since I babysat my sisters quintuplets who were all at the age of 2 months."
Okay, so I kind of paraphrased a little there.
I have to admit that finding the time to sit down and actually write chapter 2 has been a bit of a challenge. We're into the last few months of school and things are really ramping up as we try to cram in content, finish off grades, wrap up a year's worth of research (we are always researching better ways to teach and then measuring how we're doing against previous years) and all other manner of pre-June wackiness.
Part of that too is my own sense of procrastination. I know that in the second week of June I'm going to be sitting down and writing full time all day. I'll have my word count goals, my revision goals, and my short story plans. It just feels, now, like it'll be overall easier to get rolling on additional novel writing when I've got this wide open space ahead of me.
Then there's the immediacy of the weekly short story contest. It's a new topic every week so I can't put off writing it. I can opt out of a week (I've only submitted 3 stories in the last 3 months), but if I have a story to tell I can't just keep pushing it back to deal with "other stuff". It's a bit like having that writing deadline hanging over me that I'm planning to mount this summer. Plus with the added "here's your topic" it's almost easier to get going because rather than asking "what happens next?" or "how close am I to the next bullet point on the outline?" I can just down and tell a story.
All that is good but really I think one of the biggest things is that I'm still world building. If I had decided to make this a Star Trek Novel, where I wrote it and then tried to sell it to Paramount as a tie in, I'd have all of my world built for me. I wouldn't have to explain the command structure, or the ships, or the weapons, or FTL technology. But I'm trail blazing so not only do I need to explain these things to the reader, I also have to be able to explain them to myself. I have to be sure that things work together, that protocols make sense, that the history flows in a logical way.
For example, in "The London Kiss" I established (for now) that the Hartishians speak French. I spent a lot of time on this, going between gibberish languages, other dialects, etc. I was asking myself constantly for days "why? Why do they do that?" Finally I think I have answers (which I'll probably blog about later this week). These are all questions that I'd have to answer when I write the novel anyway. I can't not know why or how these things evolved even if I don't explain them directly to the reader. I just need to know that it works so I can craft a believable world.
In some ways these short stories are becoming my character bios and sketches, my plot outlines and my world notes. The next step is to start to package them and get them "out there" to generate some buzz. Here too is where I show my ignorance of "how it's done". Will a potential publisher/ agent love that I've worked to build a following or will they see these "nearly free" short story samples as an undermining of my work?
At any rate there is at least one more story about Mercy that I want to tell before I get back to working on her epic rise to command. The topic was "The Next Best Thing" and I've got some pretty fun thoughts about how the only Allusian in the navy might find herself in a position to have to settle for the "next best thing" when surrounded by hundreds of Midshipmen who don't see her as a classmate but rather as "one of the enemy".
But a friend read it for me and then immediately lamented "But I want to read chapter 2! I like the vignettes, and the back story, but when do we see more of the novel? Do you know how hard it is to sleep at night not knowing what happens now that the ship is all but adrift in space with only a handful of officers remaining and no active guns? I wasn't this sleep deprived since I babysat my sisters quintuplets who were all at the age of 2 months."
Okay, so I kind of paraphrased a little there.
I have to admit that finding the time to sit down and actually write chapter 2 has been a bit of a challenge. We're into the last few months of school and things are really ramping up as we try to cram in content, finish off grades, wrap up a year's worth of research (we are always researching better ways to teach and then measuring how we're doing against previous years) and all other manner of pre-June wackiness.
Part of that too is my own sense of procrastination. I know that in the second week of June I'm going to be sitting down and writing full time all day. I'll have my word count goals, my revision goals, and my short story plans. It just feels, now, like it'll be overall easier to get rolling on additional novel writing when I've got this wide open space ahead of me.
Then there's the immediacy of the weekly short story contest. It's a new topic every week so I can't put off writing it. I can opt out of a week (I've only submitted 3 stories in the last 3 months), but if I have a story to tell I can't just keep pushing it back to deal with "other stuff". It's a bit like having that writing deadline hanging over me that I'm planning to mount this summer. Plus with the added "here's your topic" it's almost easier to get going because rather than asking "what happens next?" or "how close am I to the next bullet point on the outline?" I can just down and tell a story.
All that is good but really I think one of the biggest things is that I'm still world building. If I had decided to make this a Star Trek Novel, where I wrote it and then tried to sell it to Paramount as a tie in, I'd have all of my world built for me. I wouldn't have to explain the command structure, or the ships, or the weapons, or FTL technology. But I'm trail blazing so not only do I need to explain these things to the reader, I also have to be able to explain them to myself. I have to be sure that things work together, that protocols make sense, that the history flows in a logical way.
For example, in "The London Kiss" I established (for now) that the Hartishians speak French. I spent a lot of time on this, going between gibberish languages, other dialects, etc. I was asking myself constantly for days "why? Why do they do that?" Finally I think I have answers (which I'll probably blog about later this week). These are all questions that I'd have to answer when I write the novel anyway. I can't not know why or how these things evolved even if I don't explain them directly to the reader. I just need to know that it works so I can craft a believable world.
In some ways these short stories are becoming my character bios and sketches, my plot outlines and my world notes. The next step is to start to package them and get them "out there" to generate some buzz. Here too is where I show my ignorance of "how it's done". Will a potential publisher/ agent love that I've worked to build a following or will they see these "nearly free" short story samples as an undermining of my work?
At any rate there is at least one more story about Mercy that I want to tell before I get back to working on her epic rise to command. The topic was "The Next Best Thing" and I've got some pretty fun thoughts about how the only Allusian in the navy might find herself in a position to have to settle for the "next best thing" when surrounded by hundreds of Midshipmen who don't see her as a classmate but rather as "one of the enemy".
May 10, 2012
Curse you Joss Whedon, Curse you!
This post contains spoilers for the following movies and TV Shows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, Firefly, The Hunger Games, Dr. Horrible's Sing-along-Blog and The Avengers. If you have not seen any of these and do not wish to be spoiled, then please move along. Otherwise, everything from those is open season.
So, we saw the Avengers this weekend. Going in we were excited because it's a Joss Whedon movie, written and directed, and we've been fans of his writing since Buffy (for which he got an Emmy nomination for the one episode, oddly, that had almost no dialogue).
Of course as we sit down, the wife looks at me and says, "you know that since this is a Whedon movie, everyone's gonna die."
Now that's a little unfair. First, Whedon doesn't kill off every character ever. He does, however like to kill them off, to keep the audience off balance and unsure what's going to happen next. For the pilot episode of Buffy, Xander's friend Jesse is introduced, turned into a vampire and then killed. We met someone who did give off an air of "extra buddy who's not going to live" but it wasn't until he met the stake that we knew for sure.
But what Whedon wanted to do went one step further. He wanted to do an entire title sequence just for that episode that featured Jesse as a main character getting the same billing there as Allyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan, and Sarah Michelle Geller. He wanted us to watch the openning, see Jesse as a main character and then be shocked when in the first episode a main character was killed off.
Why didn't he? He didn't have the budget to edit together two title sequences.
And as you move through the body of Whedon's work, he really does like to see people go down. A major turning point in Serenity was the sudden and rather unexpected death of Wash. One second they had just narrowly missed disaster, and the next moment Wash was dead. In the commentaries, Whedon comments that he did this in order to set up the fact that everyone else lives. He reasoned that a sudden and very obvious death (there was no chance of recovery for Wash) at that point would make all the close calls (which people survived) later in the movie all the more tense. You'd start to wonder who was and was not going to live.
Now there's a problem that Whedon had with Firefly that was unique to that film over many other projects. Firefly had been cancelled and had, really, little to no hope of ever coming back. Through a great deal of fan pressure, Whedon was able to get the movie on the table as what most people believed to be the "final chapter" in the Firefly story. That meant that it was quite possible, even probable, that his direction was going to be to end this show with a massive tragic and epic finale as everyone goes down in a blaze of glory together. For many people watching the movie (or at least for me), that moment was where I checked out and said to myself "Yep, he's gonna kill them all off out of spite."
Maybe not out of spite, but I was quite sure this was it. And because of that, I stopped cheering for them.
I just sat back, sipped my soda, and waited for the reavers to take them all out.
Now this wasn't helped much by the last season and final episodes of Buffy. While it was great that the show ended with a mass awakening of Slayers, there was still a pretty high body count. You could say that it was only logical that not everyone would live to see the end, that people would die in the great battle. But it also goes into that "we're all going to be okay" that many people look to when they look at film. At the time I wrote it off as "the show's over, might as well have some random death".
Which is why when Wash went, not only did I mentally check out, but I've been told that many Browncoats up and walked out of the theater. That was the point of no return, the point where they'd decided there wasn't any hope left in the 'verse and it was time to return to mowing lawns, filing taxes and changing dirty diapers. The escape of the high action movie was over. Life sucked, people died, and babies poop.
Now to contrast this, consider the ending to Dr. Horrible. That story is intended to be a tragedy. In true Shakespearean form, you think you're watching a comedy, perhaps a farce, or even some kind of under-dog hero story. But in the end, it is Dr. Horrible's hubris, his need to be accepted by others that blinds him to the logical risks he imposes on others, and leads to Penny's death. I would have liked Penny to live and for Heroine and Villain to live Happily Ever After, but that would have been a very different film.
To really be true to the theme of the dangers of obsession with acceptance, Penny had to be sacrificed to show Dr. Horrible (Billy) as having paid the highest price he could. Death would have spared him having to live without the thing he thought the most important next to his acceptance into the Evil League of Evil.
Which gets me, as I work my way towards my comments on The Avengers, onto a question that I hinted at when I wrote my response to the Hunger Games.
At what point does a death shift from quality story telling to blatant emotional manipulation?
Collins wanted us to be outraged at the Games when Rue died. It was meant to tap into our anger, and make us root for Katniss just that little bit more. Whedon wanted us (with Jesse) to always be on the edge of our seats as to who might die next, and then he wanted us in the same emotional place when he ran a massive wooden spike through Wash. He wanted us to be off balanced through the ending.
What starts to wear on me is that it feels like this was less about story telling and more about "I know there's a button I can push that will get this reaction so I'm going to push it and push it."
Now I understand the power of conventions and emotional investment. The problem is that when those manipulations become too obvious, or they erode my sense of investment they jar me out of the moment. In the case of Rue, I knew the button was being pushed. There was no subtlety. It was as though there was a big flashing sign that said "You're going to cry for her", followed later by a sign that said "Okay, Cry Now."
Whedon I think is little more circumvent but I fear, for me, it does the same thing. Where it may put more people into the moment and the tension, for me it does the opposite. A sudden random death makes me stop wanting to care because how do I know who's going to be next to get knocked off? I can start cheering for that neat cool character and waiting for them to really kick some butt, and then... wait? They died HOW? Where's my investment after that? Why keep watching? In the hope that the people I ~didn't~ like will avenge them?
It's like watching American Idol for those three people you think are really talented and then asking yourself why you're going to watch the final two episodes after all of them are voted off.
Perhaps it's the result of me getting old. Perhaps I'm not a 20 something who figures that the world has enough happy endings it's fun to engage in some not so happy ones. Perhaps it's seeing more and more real unhappy endings that I turn to movies, TV and video games to escape that reality, to find something more fun to slide into and forget just how bad it is. I can root all I want for a family member with a really bad medical condition, but odds are odds, and often the odds are not good.
So I look to popcorn action movies to help me get past that, to just forget for a while how bad it can be and to cheer for an underdog who is going to knock in the teeth of evil, and quip about fashionable footwear while she does it.
Which takes us, finally, to The Avengers.
We meet Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD in Iron Man. Or I did at any rate. He was a professional if a little awkward agent who had a job to do, and he did it well and he did it without airs. He didn't flash a badge, he didn't demand attention. He showed up, he did his job and he did it well.
We see him do it again in Iron Man 2. We see him do it in Thor. Every time Agent Coulson makes an appearance we're given a guy who has a job, the job's not glamorous, and yet he does it.
I'm still not sure what to mentally do with his own spear through the chest. Unlike Wash (who also died with a gaping chest wound), Coulson gets some final dialogue, indeed some of the best in the movie. "Oh, so that's what it does." And also unlike other Whedon deaths, it gets used as a plot point. It united The Avengers with that final piece they needed. The bonding had always been there. Caps and Thor knew about doing the right thing for the right reasons. Stark and Banner knew about the dangers of science run amok and bonded over what could happen if the portal was opened. Black Widow and Hawkeye had a past. But it was Coulson that was the final glue.
It was a death with Purpose.
Now, to be fair, I had mentally put Coulson in the same box where I kept Wedge Antilles from Star Wars. That punky minor character who gets a handful of lines in each movie and still survives from one fight to the next. You're never quite sure HOW he survives but you root for him anyways. Seeing Coulson go down I was left trying to figure out if they could keep him alive somehow, or if he'd turn into some other character later down the road. But I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that as far as the movie franchise story arcs go, he's dead.
And this time, I kept rooting. Wash's death made me give up. Rue's death annoyed me because I hated the way I was being blatantly played for emotional reaction. Penny? It was a tragedy; I was meant to sit and stare at the screen in quiet respect when that story was over.
But in The Avengers? No, that's a popcorn munching brawl fest where you're supposed to pump your fist in the air and cheer when the good guys break a bus over the bad guy's head. And yet... Phil....
I'm going to miss him in later movies, but I get it. And for the first time in a while I saw a character I cared about in a movie die off in a way that I think was perfect to the story, respectful of me as an audience member, and neither oversold nor undersold the relevance of death.
I don't like it, but respect it the most of all the carnage that's been visited upon characters I cared about.
So, we saw the Avengers this weekend. Going in we were excited because it's a Joss Whedon movie, written and directed, and we've been fans of his writing since Buffy (for which he got an Emmy nomination for the one episode, oddly, that had almost no dialogue).
Of course as we sit down, the wife looks at me and says, "you know that since this is a Whedon movie, everyone's gonna die."
Now that's a little unfair. First, Whedon doesn't kill off every character ever. He does, however like to kill them off, to keep the audience off balance and unsure what's going to happen next. For the pilot episode of Buffy, Xander's friend Jesse is introduced, turned into a vampire and then killed. We met someone who did give off an air of "extra buddy who's not going to live" but it wasn't until he met the stake that we knew for sure.
But what Whedon wanted to do went one step further. He wanted to do an entire title sequence just for that episode that featured Jesse as a main character getting the same billing there as Allyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendan, and Sarah Michelle Geller. He wanted us to watch the openning, see Jesse as a main character and then be shocked when in the first episode a main character was killed off.
Why didn't he? He didn't have the budget to edit together two title sequences.
And as you move through the body of Whedon's work, he really does like to see people go down. A major turning point in Serenity was the sudden and rather unexpected death of Wash. One second they had just narrowly missed disaster, and the next moment Wash was dead. In the commentaries, Whedon comments that he did this in order to set up the fact that everyone else lives. He reasoned that a sudden and very obvious death (there was no chance of recovery for Wash) at that point would make all the close calls (which people survived) later in the movie all the more tense. You'd start to wonder who was and was not going to live.
Now there's a problem that Whedon had with Firefly that was unique to that film over many other projects. Firefly had been cancelled and had, really, little to no hope of ever coming back. Through a great deal of fan pressure, Whedon was able to get the movie on the table as what most people believed to be the "final chapter" in the Firefly story. That meant that it was quite possible, even probable, that his direction was going to be to end this show with a massive tragic and epic finale as everyone goes down in a blaze of glory together. For many people watching the movie (or at least for me), that moment was where I checked out and said to myself "Yep, he's gonna kill them all off out of spite."
Maybe not out of spite, but I was quite sure this was it. And because of that, I stopped cheering for them.
I just sat back, sipped my soda, and waited for the reavers to take them all out.
Now this wasn't helped much by the last season and final episodes of Buffy. While it was great that the show ended with a mass awakening of Slayers, there was still a pretty high body count. You could say that it was only logical that not everyone would live to see the end, that people would die in the great battle. But it also goes into that "we're all going to be okay" that many people look to when they look at film. At the time I wrote it off as "the show's over, might as well have some random death".
Which is why when Wash went, not only did I mentally check out, but I've been told that many Browncoats up and walked out of the theater. That was the point of no return, the point where they'd decided there wasn't any hope left in the 'verse and it was time to return to mowing lawns, filing taxes and changing dirty diapers. The escape of the high action movie was over. Life sucked, people died, and babies poop.
Now to contrast this, consider the ending to Dr. Horrible. That story is intended to be a tragedy. In true Shakespearean form, you think you're watching a comedy, perhaps a farce, or even some kind of under-dog hero story. But in the end, it is Dr. Horrible's hubris, his need to be accepted by others that blinds him to the logical risks he imposes on others, and leads to Penny's death. I would have liked Penny to live and for Heroine and Villain to live Happily Ever After, but that would have been a very different film.
To really be true to the theme of the dangers of obsession with acceptance, Penny had to be sacrificed to show Dr. Horrible (Billy) as having paid the highest price he could. Death would have spared him having to live without the thing he thought the most important next to his acceptance into the Evil League of Evil.
Which gets me, as I work my way towards my comments on The Avengers, onto a question that I hinted at when I wrote my response to the Hunger Games.
At what point does a death shift from quality story telling to blatant emotional manipulation?
Collins wanted us to be outraged at the Games when Rue died. It was meant to tap into our anger, and make us root for Katniss just that little bit more. Whedon wanted us (with Jesse) to always be on the edge of our seats as to who might die next, and then he wanted us in the same emotional place when he ran a massive wooden spike through Wash. He wanted us to be off balanced through the ending.
What starts to wear on me is that it feels like this was less about story telling and more about "I know there's a button I can push that will get this reaction so I'm going to push it and push it."
Now I understand the power of conventions and emotional investment. The problem is that when those manipulations become too obvious, or they erode my sense of investment they jar me out of the moment. In the case of Rue, I knew the button was being pushed. There was no subtlety. It was as though there was a big flashing sign that said "You're going to cry for her", followed later by a sign that said "Okay, Cry Now."
Whedon I think is little more circumvent but I fear, for me, it does the same thing. Where it may put more people into the moment and the tension, for me it does the opposite. A sudden random death makes me stop wanting to care because how do I know who's going to be next to get knocked off? I can start cheering for that neat cool character and waiting for them to really kick some butt, and then... wait? They died HOW? Where's my investment after that? Why keep watching? In the hope that the people I ~didn't~ like will avenge them?
It's like watching American Idol for those three people you think are really talented and then asking yourself why you're going to watch the final two episodes after all of them are voted off.
Perhaps it's the result of me getting old. Perhaps I'm not a 20 something who figures that the world has enough happy endings it's fun to engage in some not so happy ones. Perhaps it's seeing more and more real unhappy endings that I turn to movies, TV and video games to escape that reality, to find something more fun to slide into and forget just how bad it is. I can root all I want for a family member with a really bad medical condition, but odds are odds, and often the odds are not good.
So I look to popcorn action movies to help me get past that, to just forget for a while how bad it can be and to cheer for an underdog who is going to knock in the teeth of evil, and quip about fashionable footwear while she does it.
Which takes us, finally, to The Avengers.
We meet Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD in Iron Man. Or I did at any rate. He was a professional if a little awkward agent who had a job to do, and he did it well and he did it without airs. He didn't flash a badge, he didn't demand attention. He showed up, he did his job and he did it well.
We see him do it again in Iron Man 2. We see him do it in Thor. Every time Agent Coulson makes an appearance we're given a guy who has a job, the job's not glamorous, and yet he does it.
I'm still not sure what to mentally do with his own spear through the chest. Unlike Wash (who also died with a gaping chest wound), Coulson gets some final dialogue, indeed some of the best in the movie. "Oh, so that's what it does." And also unlike other Whedon deaths, it gets used as a plot point. It united The Avengers with that final piece they needed. The bonding had always been there. Caps and Thor knew about doing the right thing for the right reasons. Stark and Banner knew about the dangers of science run amok and bonded over what could happen if the portal was opened. Black Widow and Hawkeye had a past. But it was Coulson that was the final glue.
It was a death with Purpose.
Now, to be fair, I had mentally put Coulson in the same box where I kept Wedge Antilles from Star Wars. That punky minor character who gets a handful of lines in each movie and still survives from one fight to the next. You're never quite sure HOW he survives but you root for him anyways. Seeing Coulson go down I was left trying to figure out if they could keep him alive somehow, or if he'd turn into some other character later down the road. But I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that as far as the movie franchise story arcs go, he's dead.
And this time, I kept rooting. Wash's death made me give up. Rue's death annoyed me because I hated the way I was being blatantly played for emotional reaction. Penny? It was a tragedy; I was meant to sit and stare at the screen in quiet respect when that story was over.
But in The Avengers? No, that's a popcorn munching brawl fest where you're supposed to pump your fist in the air and cheer when the good guys break a bus over the bad guy's head. And yet... Phil....
I'm going to miss him in later movies, but I get it. And for the first time in a while I saw a character I cared about in a movie die off in a way that I think was perfect to the story, respectful of me as an audience member, and neither oversold nor undersold the relevance of death.
I don't like it, but respect it the most of all the carnage that's been visited upon characters I cared about.
May 7, 2012
The Avengers: A Review
This review is Spoiler Free! Though to really comment on some issues I kind of need some spoilers but I'm going save them for another post and another time.
But this weekend we got a sitter, gave Kaylee another bottle, and trekked out to see the 11 AM matinee. This is relevant because my thought was "Who on earth is going to get their backsides out of bed on a Sunday morning to go see a movie?"
Apparently an entire theater of people. For the first time in a long time there were ushers leaning in to ask "are you saving those seats for someone in the theater?" and "Can you please all move in a seat?" What we did not get was the "Okay, this is a full house, so NO SAVING!" announcement. But still every seat got used.
Let's start with expectations:
I expected a movie with a lot of high caliber, high intensity, special effects heavy fights. I expected a lot of zippy dialogue given that the script was written by Joss Whedon. I expected for there to be a lot of inner-team fighting before they got their acts together and gave Loki the butt-kicking he deserves. I expected some stuff about Cap's being a man out of time, about Hawkeye and the Black Widow being non-powered, and lots of Tony Stark being an insufferable snot. Oh, and I expected Thor to sound like Thor.
I got what I expected in spades.
What I love about these movies, even though they're still too action intense for kids, is that they're still getting into what makes the great classic hero stories great: Heroes do the right things at the right time for the right reasons. And at the end of the day, even if they fudge it a little, there are still great evils out there for them to fight. And they do so.
There are no great ethical delimas in The Avengers. A small touch of some greying around the temples, maybe, but really, the good guys are, at their hearts, the good guys, the bad guys are the bad guys, and the good guys are gonna let them have it.
The action was spot on, and the opening scenes with the Black Widow vs 3 Russian thugs, while tied to a chair gave me Buffy Flashbacks. Downy remains perfect as Tony Stark, and no one really phones in a bad performance. Chris Evans is Captain America, the patriotic soldier through and through.
Oh, Agent Hill, played by Cobie Smulders was a solid addition to SHIELD even though I kept waiting for her to make a comment about Canada. Smulders is better known to me as Robin from How I Met Your Mother which we have been following for years. I felt bad because it did take me a moment to recalibrate my brain from Robin to Agent Hill.
Compared to other Marvel stories, The Avengers, so far, isn't about dealing with a world that doesn't want "Mutants". Perhaps part of that is that none of them really are. Caps is a super soldier (and clearly a good guy), Thor's a god (who comes and goes), Black Widow and Hawkeye are just super trained spies, and Ironman/ Tony Stark is just a really well financed playboy. Only The Hulk stands apart as a mutant and his "difference" is clear, but well considered in the story.
What I wanted (and I think most going to see this), the movie delivered. We cheered, we laughed, we froze with horror. It was an experience and throughout the last 10 minutes there were multiple people joining me in pumping my fist in the air in triumph.
It was a good day to stand for Earth.
But this weekend we got a sitter, gave Kaylee another bottle, and trekked out to see the 11 AM matinee. This is relevant because my thought was "Who on earth is going to get their backsides out of bed on a Sunday morning to go see a movie?"
Apparently an entire theater of people. For the first time in a long time there were ushers leaning in to ask "are you saving those seats for someone in the theater?" and "Can you please all move in a seat?" What we did not get was the "Okay, this is a full house, so NO SAVING!" announcement. But still every seat got used.
Let's start with expectations:
I expected a movie with a lot of high caliber, high intensity, special effects heavy fights. I expected a lot of zippy dialogue given that the script was written by Joss Whedon. I expected for there to be a lot of inner-team fighting before they got their acts together and gave Loki the butt-kicking he deserves. I expected some stuff about Cap's being a man out of time, about Hawkeye and the Black Widow being non-powered, and lots of Tony Stark being an insufferable snot. Oh, and I expected Thor to sound like Thor.
I got what I expected in spades.
What I love about these movies, even though they're still too action intense for kids, is that they're still getting into what makes the great classic hero stories great: Heroes do the right things at the right time for the right reasons. And at the end of the day, even if they fudge it a little, there are still great evils out there for them to fight. And they do so.
There are no great ethical delimas in The Avengers. A small touch of some greying around the temples, maybe, but really, the good guys are, at their hearts, the good guys, the bad guys are the bad guys, and the good guys are gonna let them have it.
The action was spot on, and the opening scenes with the Black Widow vs 3 Russian thugs, while tied to a chair gave me Buffy Flashbacks. Downy remains perfect as Tony Stark, and no one really phones in a bad performance. Chris Evans is Captain America, the patriotic soldier through and through.
Oh, Agent Hill, played by Cobie Smulders was a solid addition to SHIELD even though I kept waiting for her to make a comment about Canada. Smulders is better known to me as Robin from How I Met Your Mother which we have been following for years. I felt bad because it did take me a moment to recalibrate my brain from Robin to Agent Hill.
Compared to other Marvel stories, The Avengers, so far, isn't about dealing with a world that doesn't want "Mutants". Perhaps part of that is that none of them really are. Caps is a super soldier (and clearly a good guy), Thor's a god (who comes and goes), Black Widow and Hawkeye are just super trained spies, and Ironman/ Tony Stark is just a really well financed playboy. Only The Hulk stands apart as a mutant and his "difference" is clear, but well considered in the story.
What I wanted (and I think most going to see this), the movie delivered. We cheered, we laughed, we froze with horror. It was an experience and throughout the last 10 minutes there were multiple people joining me in pumping my fist in the air in triumph.
It was a good day to stand for Earth.
