Do I Role Play? Ask Rather, Do Ever I Stop? — Part Three (Edge of the Empire)

There is also a game I am playing, which my best friend Mark is running. Yes, it is a STAR WARS EDGE OF THE EMPIRE game.

What is it like to have a published and professional science fiction author as a player? It’s really annoying, because when inspiration strikes, I write an entire 10,000 word short story to describe my character’s background!

Are you curious? Do you have too much time on your hands? Here it is!!

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Rurra Lya’lya, Lady Scoundrel
Something Wrong with Life

Rurra was raised in the lap of luxury on the vast estates of clan Ilya on planet Kothlis, where acres of the legendary singing grasses emit eerie serenades from their crystal flowers beneath the mingled lights of the seven gem-bright geode moons.

The five thousand year old mansion house was acre upon acre in extent, a massive pile of intricately carved ivory, shining silverwood, polished teak and cherry, a blaze of stained glass windows, and each chimney adorned the air with the many perfumes and incense wafts to which the Bothan nose is particularly sensitive.

Beneath the mansion was an older dwelling place, and endless warren of tunnels and buried museums, domiciles, strongrooms and workshops were the vassal clans beholden to Ilya were dormitoried, the lesser clans of Swy and Vwyl, Lal and Llorl and the hereditary assassins beholden to Ilya, the cunning Yroon.

Beyond the groves of singing trees stretch the pampas which Rurra in her youth loved to ride on her pet human, a tall and athletic steeplechaser named Arno, who would carry her on his shoulders as he loped across the plains of this light and low-gravity world.

The pampas were scarred by deep and narrow arroyos in which the lowest class of Bothans made their homes in the fashion of the beastlike burrowing ancestors: half-buried huts whose thatched roofs were flush with the ground, with tunnels leading through soil and roots. Such huts blended into the soil, and the scent of their owners masked by fragrant grasses and herbs, so that one could ride with a stone’s throw of a village of them and suspect nothing.

In these tall grasses the low-caste Bothan nerfherders would herd their nerfs, lumbering beasts like walking whales from whose ambergris and sweetbreads the perfumers of Ilya extracted essences, and the assassins brewed poisons. Of course, being Bothans, the nerfherders spent their time gambling and smuggling and plying each other with tricks and multilayered deceptions, and trying to get someone else to do their chores.

Only infrequently would the nerfherders trample a rival village under the bellies of their wallowing nerfs, or to celebrate those special holidays commemorating ancestral battles and successful acts of treachery.

It was when she was still a kitten of the Third Season, at the age that in a human would be equivalent to a sixteen year old, just at the dawn of womanhood, when Rurra first became aware of something amiss in the galaxy.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.