RVA: The Red Vixen at Sea, Part Six
Jul. 27th, 2016 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalAnd now we're finally into the brand new material.
* * *
Before allowing herself to go to sleep, Melanie attached sensor pads to Rolas’ forehead and chest, syncing them with the first aid kit’s monitors. If he would have suffered a seizure or stroke in the night, the alarm would have awakened her and the medical band she wrapped around his upper arm would have injected an anti-coagulant automatically.
Once she was finally assured of his safety, she allowed herself to lay down on the bed beside him, her exhaustion overwhelming her to the point that she never remembered laying her head on the pillow.
When Melanie awakened the sun was already shining brightly through the portholes. She blinked muzzily, focusing on the clock first, which said it was late morning already. She rolled over, to find Rolas’ side of the bed empty, the medical band and monitor pads lying in a pile on a nearby shelf.
Panicking briefly, she tried to push herself up onto her elbows, falling back with a muffled, “Oof!” There was no strength at all in her arms and legs. Even though she’d slept at least ten hours, it felt as if she was as weak as a sick newborn.
“Rolas?” she called out. After a few moments effort she managed to swing her legs over the side of the bed, grabbing the cabin’s bulkhead to steady herself as she rose her feet. From there it was a bit easier. She headed outside to find Rolas on the beach, ankle deep in the sand, trying to dig out the blades of the boat’s propellers with his paws.
“Rolas, are you mad? You should be in bed!” Melanie called out, leaning over aft railing.
“I’ve been up for hours,” he replied, straightening up. “You were still sleeping and I got bored.” Rolas made a half turn and waved at the surf, which was a good five meters behind. “I wanted to see whether we could drag Windskimmer back into the surf and sail for home.”
“With you injured and me with no sailing experience? I don’t think that’s a very good idea!”
“Doesn’t matter anyway.” He clambered back up her, on a folding a ladder mounted on the aft section she hadn’t seen previously. She wished she had before trying shove Rolas back up over the side yesterday. He leaned over the railing and pointed to the surf again. “See that bit about thirty meters away, where the water crests before reaching the beach proper?”
Melanie shaded her eyes with her paw, looking at what appeared to be a bump in the otherwise relatively flat sea, before the waves broke into rollers. “Is there something there? It didn’t affect the ship when it beached yesterday.”
“It’s a coral or rock formation of some sort. The storm surge from yesterday’s gale raised the tide enough to let Windskimmer pass over unscathed, but we’ll need a hover crane to put her back to sea now. Otherwise if we tried to sail out again we’d either get stuck or rip out the bottom of the pontoons, or likely both.”
“So nothing’s changed. We still need to wait.” She took a moment to glare at him. “And you need to get back into bed.”
“Head’s better. Think the swelling is down a bit. Or at least the painkillers I took are working better than yesterday.” Rolas waved her concern down. “If I start getting dizzy or cross-eyed, I’ll let you know. In any case you’re looking a bit under the weather yourself.”
She wished he hadn’t said that. It reminded Melanie that her stomach was turning over and that she had no will to eat, despite the fatigue still clinging to her. “I’ll be fine. I’m still exhausted from spending half of yesterday in a panic.”
“You’re sure? I could make you breakfast. Well, lunch at this point.”
“Rolas, I’m supposed to be fussing over you, remember?” She waved at the cabin door. “Go back inside, please.”
He gave her a very Rolasian grunt of reluctant agreement, following her back into the cabin and sitting on his bunk while she puttered about in the galley until she put together a meal of grass chaser stew for him, and a clear broth with crackers for herself. They both ate dutifully, Melanie allowing Rolas to clean the scant dishes in return for a promise to lie back down afterward.
“It’s going to be a boring few days if all I have to do is sit in bed and wait for rescue,” Rolas noted, once he was settled back in his bunk. “Perhaps we can walk about a little, if I don't’ overdo it.
“We don’t dare go exploring,” Melanie noted. “All the biota on this island is uncatalogued. The survey teams are going to take a century or more just to finish Continent One, never mind every little archipelago on the planet. They haven’t found anything poisonous to foxen life yet, but why take chances?”
He looked at her sourly. “At least around the beach. I’m willing take my chances on getting bitten by a surf crawler. If I have to stay in here all day I’ll go mad.”
“Try that and I’ll tie you to the mast again,” she muttered.
“‘Again?’” Rolas repeated, brow wrinkling. He prodded one wrist with a claw, looking down at it curiously. “I thought it had gotten bruised in the storm somehow.”
Gah! She really was incapable of thinking straight. Damn this lingering fatigue fog on her brain. “It’s not…” she began.
“If you say ‘It’s not important right now’ one more time, I will get upset,” Rolas said firmly.
“Right,” she agreed with a sigh. “All right. I, um, tied you to the mast after you punched me. With your permission I might add, since you were feeling pretty upset with yourself about the incident. We started talking, trying to work things out… and the storm came up…. and I had to cut you out of the ropes pretty quickly, and by the time I’d finished that the boat was being tossed in the waves, and you were hanging onto the mast while I tried to get you a lifejacket. Then the first wave hit and knocked you out, and then the second hit and you went overboard.” She smiled weakly. “I thought you were surely dead. It was only the luck of the Mother Goddess that one of the lifejackets got tossed over with you and you got tangled up with it.”
Rolas took a few moments to process this, then finally said, “You know, despite my memory being shot to hell, I distinctly remember the lectures we got in my school’s health classes about Safe, Sane and Consensual behavior. Somehow we both seem to have forgotten the Safe part. Quite possibly the Sane bit as well.”
“Yes, well…” Melanie cleared her throat noisily. “You, um, weren’t complaining about it at the time.”
“I let you tie me to the mast, on my boat, neither of us wearing lifejackets going by your description.” Rolas looked at her in fury. “What would have happened if you’d fallen overboard? Maybe I could have freed myself eventually by cutting the ropes with my claws, but you would have been dead and I would have been exposed when that storm hit us both!”
“I didn’t know a storm was coming up at the time!” Melanie shot back.
“What difference does that make? It’s called being sensible!”
“Sensible? That’s a laugh coming from you!” She threw up her paws in frustration. “Sensible males don’t go sailing for a month in a self-imposed floating prison. Sensible males don’t protect their captor when the two of them are under fire. Sensible males don’t charging towards a sniper that had just shot me in the head! And a sensible male would never have married me!”
Melanie sat down heavily on the bunk opposite Rolas, breathing heavily, trying to control the sob rising in her throat, while he looked at her in bemusement, his anger deflating as suddenly as it had arrived.
“When did I charge a sniper?” he asked
“In front of my manor’s driveway, just after I returned from conducting some business offworld,” she said. “In your defense it was raining at the time, and he wasn’t a very good shot.”
“And why was he shooting at you?”
“Well, he wasn’t. Shooting at me I mean. He was aiming for Salli, but he’d gotten his targets mixed up because she’d let me borrow her shawl to keep off the rain.”
“Why would anyone want to shoot Salli?” he demanded
“Er…” She cleared her throat uneasily. “Are you certain you don’t remember anything else about the Highgliders?”
His brow furrowed, and he got that achy-head look again. “It’s… I don’t know. It’s like I know there’s something there, something important, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Let me show you an image.” She dug into her travel bag and pulled out her palm comp. With the loss of the com antenna she didn’t have access to her online files, but the comp’s internal files were still extensive. After a few moments of searching, she found the files she needed. “Here,” she said, handing over her comp. “These pictures are from our wedding.”
Rolas began flipping through them, he face once again showing no sign any of the images looked familiar. Then he stopped abruptly, jaw going slack with surprise. “That’s Salli,” he exclaimed. “What happened to her right eye?”
Melanie moved to sit down beside him, looking at the picture he’d brought up, of Salli entering the Circle of Witnesses to observe the ceremony, while Rolas, she and Countess Darktail stood in the center naked, in a show of piety towards the Mother Goddess during the ceremony. Salli’s cybernetic eye, as was her custom at the time, was a mere black camera lens, without any sort of camouflaging, drawing attention to both it and the three scars crossing her face diagonally over it. Fortunately Salli had grown out of enjoying the shock her appearance made, and had gone back to using her cyber eye’s camouflage to make it look more normal, though she still showed off the scars.
“Salli married Lord Kevinaugh Highglider about six years ago,” Melanie told him. “She divorced him two years later, after enduring a cycle of abuse that ended with him clawing out her eye. For that, the Council of Countesses sentenced him to be permanently incarcerated in a mental health institution, where he was soon joined by his mother after she attempted to take her revenge on your family by undermining your domain and finally trying to assassinate Salli. They both committed suicide about a year later, and good riddance to them.”
“Abuse? As in spousal abuse? A foxen male abusing a vixen?” he said, looking shocked. “Foxen do not do this.”
“Sane foxen do not,” she agreed. “Kev Highglider wasn’t sane, and neither was his mother. He beat Salli bad enough that she had be taken to hospital at least twice, and his mother used her influence to cover up the incidents, until finally Salli lost her eye, and even the most dimwitted countess could see what had happened.”
“Wait, but if they’re both dead as you say, who is Countess Highglider now?” he asked, looking like he was still trying to process these revelations.
“Your mother was promoted to the title of Countess, taking over Highglider’s holdings. Evelina’s personal lands are now being administered by one of her grand-nieces, who apparently is doing her level best not to imitate her late aunt’s governing style.”
“So I’m actually a viscount now,” Rolas stated, looking as nonplussed as he had when she’d told him they were married.
“Yes,” Melanie confirmed.
“Which would make Salli a viscountess, and Heir to the entire district.”
“Yes.” She paused for a moment, watching him carefully. “How does that make you feel?”
“She’s my mother’s eldest daughter; only daughter, actually. Of course she’s the Heir,” he said, then repeated with more than a trace of bitterness, “Of course.”
* * *
Before allowing herself to go to sleep, Melanie attached sensor pads to Rolas’ forehead and chest, syncing them with the first aid kit’s monitors. If he would have suffered a seizure or stroke in the night, the alarm would have awakened her and the medical band she wrapped around his upper arm would have injected an anti-coagulant automatically.
Once she was finally assured of his safety, she allowed herself to lay down on the bed beside him, her exhaustion overwhelming her to the point that she never remembered laying her head on the pillow.
When Melanie awakened the sun was already shining brightly through the portholes. She blinked muzzily, focusing on the clock first, which said it was late morning already. She rolled over, to find Rolas’ side of the bed empty, the medical band and monitor pads lying in a pile on a nearby shelf.
Panicking briefly, she tried to push herself up onto her elbows, falling back with a muffled, “Oof!” There was no strength at all in her arms and legs. Even though she’d slept at least ten hours, it felt as if she was as weak as a sick newborn.
“Rolas?” she called out. After a few moments effort she managed to swing her legs over the side of the bed, grabbing the cabin’s bulkhead to steady herself as she rose her feet. From there it was a bit easier. She headed outside to find Rolas on the beach, ankle deep in the sand, trying to dig out the blades of the boat’s propellers with his paws.
“Rolas, are you mad? You should be in bed!” Melanie called out, leaning over aft railing.
“I’ve been up for hours,” he replied, straightening up. “You were still sleeping and I got bored.” Rolas made a half turn and waved at the surf, which was a good five meters behind. “I wanted to see whether we could drag Windskimmer back into the surf and sail for home.”
“With you injured and me with no sailing experience? I don’t think that’s a very good idea!”
“Doesn’t matter anyway.” He clambered back up her, on a folding a ladder mounted on the aft section she hadn’t seen previously. She wished she had before trying shove Rolas back up over the side yesterday. He leaned over the railing and pointed to the surf again. “See that bit about thirty meters away, where the water crests before reaching the beach proper?”
Melanie shaded her eyes with her paw, looking at what appeared to be a bump in the otherwise relatively flat sea, before the waves broke into rollers. “Is there something there? It didn’t affect the ship when it beached yesterday.”
“It’s a coral or rock formation of some sort. The storm surge from yesterday’s gale raised the tide enough to let Windskimmer pass over unscathed, but we’ll need a hover crane to put her back to sea now. Otherwise if we tried to sail out again we’d either get stuck or rip out the bottom of the pontoons, or likely both.”
“So nothing’s changed. We still need to wait.” She took a moment to glare at him. “And you need to get back into bed.”
“Head’s better. Think the swelling is down a bit. Or at least the painkillers I took are working better than yesterday.” Rolas waved her concern down. “If I start getting dizzy or cross-eyed, I’ll let you know. In any case you’re looking a bit under the weather yourself.”
She wished he hadn’t said that. It reminded Melanie that her stomach was turning over and that she had no will to eat, despite the fatigue still clinging to her. “I’ll be fine. I’m still exhausted from spending half of yesterday in a panic.”
“You’re sure? I could make you breakfast. Well, lunch at this point.”
“Rolas, I’m supposed to be fussing over you, remember?” She waved at the cabin door. “Go back inside, please.”
He gave her a very Rolasian grunt of reluctant agreement, following her back into the cabin and sitting on his bunk while she puttered about in the galley until she put together a meal of grass chaser stew for him, and a clear broth with crackers for herself. They both ate dutifully, Melanie allowing Rolas to clean the scant dishes in return for a promise to lie back down afterward.
“It’s going to be a boring few days if all I have to do is sit in bed and wait for rescue,” Rolas noted, once he was settled back in his bunk. “Perhaps we can walk about a little, if I don't’ overdo it.
“We don’t dare go exploring,” Melanie noted. “All the biota on this island is uncatalogued. The survey teams are going to take a century or more just to finish Continent One, never mind every little archipelago on the planet. They haven’t found anything poisonous to foxen life yet, but why take chances?”
He looked at her sourly. “At least around the beach. I’m willing take my chances on getting bitten by a surf crawler. If I have to stay in here all day I’ll go mad.”
“Try that and I’ll tie you to the mast again,” she muttered.
“‘Again?’” Rolas repeated, brow wrinkling. He prodded one wrist with a claw, looking down at it curiously. “I thought it had gotten bruised in the storm somehow.”
Gah! She really was incapable of thinking straight. Damn this lingering fatigue fog on her brain. “It’s not…” she began.
“If you say ‘It’s not important right now’ one more time, I will get upset,” Rolas said firmly.
“Right,” she agreed with a sigh. “All right. I, um, tied you to the mast after you punched me. With your permission I might add, since you were feeling pretty upset with yourself about the incident. We started talking, trying to work things out… and the storm came up…. and I had to cut you out of the ropes pretty quickly, and by the time I’d finished that the boat was being tossed in the waves, and you were hanging onto the mast while I tried to get you a lifejacket. Then the first wave hit and knocked you out, and then the second hit and you went overboard.” She smiled weakly. “I thought you were surely dead. It was only the luck of the Mother Goddess that one of the lifejackets got tossed over with you and you got tangled up with it.”
Rolas took a few moments to process this, then finally said, “You know, despite my memory being shot to hell, I distinctly remember the lectures we got in my school’s health classes about Safe, Sane and Consensual behavior. Somehow we both seem to have forgotten the Safe part. Quite possibly the Sane bit as well.”
“Yes, well…” Melanie cleared her throat noisily. “You, um, weren’t complaining about it at the time.”
“I let you tie me to the mast, on my boat, neither of us wearing lifejackets going by your description.” Rolas looked at her in fury. “What would have happened if you’d fallen overboard? Maybe I could have freed myself eventually by cutting the ropes with my claws, but you would have been dead and I would have been exposed when that storm hit us both!”
“I didn’t know a storm was coming up at the time!” Melanie shot back.
“What difference does that make? It’s called being sensible!”
“Sensible? That’s a laugh coming from you!” She threw up her paws in frustration. “Sensible males don’t go sailing for a month in a self-imposed floating prison. Sensible males don’t protect their captor when the two of them are under fire. Sensible males don’t charging towards a sniper that had just shot me in the head! And a sensible male would never have married me!”
Melanie sat down heavily on the bunk opposite Rolas, breathing heavily, trying to control the sob rising in her throat, while he looked at her in bemusement, his anger deflating as suddenly as it had arrived.
“When did I charge a sniper?” he asked
“In front of my manor’s driveway, just after I returned from conducting some business offworld,” she said. “In your defense it was raining at the time, and he wasn’t a very good shot.”
“And why was he shooting at you?”
“Well, he wasn’t. Shooting at me I mean. He was aiming for Salli, but he’d gotten his targets mixed up because she’d let me borrow her shawl to keep off the rain.”
“Why would anyone want to shoot Salli?” he demanded
“Er…” She cleared her throat uneasily. “Are you certain you don’t remember anything else about the Highgliders?”
His brow furrowed, and he got that achy-head look again. “It’s… I don’t know. It’s like I know there’s something there, something important, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Let me show you an image.” She dug into her travel bag and pulled out her palm comp. With the loss of the com antenna she didn’t have access to her online files, but the comp’s internal files were still extensive. After a few moments of searching, she found the files she needed. “Here,” she said, handing over her comp. “These pictures are from our wedding.”
Rolas began flipping through them, he face once again showing no sign any of the images looked familiar. Then he stopped abruptly, jaw going slack with surprise. “That’s Salli,” he exclaimed. “What happened to her right eye?”
Melanie moved to sit down beside him, looking at the picture he’d brought up, of Salli entering the Circle of Witnesses to observe the ceremony, while Rolas, she and Countess Darktail stood in the center naked, in a show of piety towards the Mother Goddess during the ceremony. Salli’s cybernetic eye, as was her custom at the time, was a mere black camera lens, without any sort of camouflaging, drawing attention to both it and the three scars crossing her face diagonally over it. Fortunately Salli had grown out of enjoying the shock her appearance made, and had gone back to using her cyber eye’s camouflage to make it look more normal, though she still showed off the scars.
“Salli married Lord Kevinaugh Highglider about six years ago,” Melanie told him. “She divorced him two years later, after enduring a cycle of abuse that ended with him clawing out her eye. For that, the Council of Countesses sentenced him to be permanently incarcerated in a mental health institution, where he was soon joined by his mother after she attempted to take her revenge on your family by undermining your domain and finally trying to assassinate Salli. They both committed suicide about a year later, and good riddance to them.”
“Abuse? As in spousal abuse? A foxen male abusing a vixen?” he said, looking shocked. “Foxen do not do this.”
“Sane foxen do not,” she agreed. “Kev Highglider wasn’t sane, and neither was his mother. He beat Salli bad enough that she had be taken to hospital at least twice, and his mother used her influence to cover up the incidents, until finally Salli lost her eye, and even the most dimwitted countess could see what had happened.”
“Wait, but if they’re both dead as you say, who is Countess Highglider now?” he asked, looking like he was still trying to process these revelations.
“Your mother was promoted to the title of Countess, taking over Highglider’s holdings. Evelina’s personal lands are now being administered by one of her grand-nieces, who apparently is doing her level best not to imitate her late aunt’s governing style.”
“So I’m actually a viscount now,” Rolas stated, looking as nonplussed as he had when she’d told him they were married.
“Yes,” Melanie confirmed.
“Which would make Salli a viscountess, and Heir to the entire district.”
“Yes.” She paused for a moment, watching him carefully. “How does that make you feel?”
“She’s my mother’s eldest daughter; only daughter, actually. Of course she’s the Heir,” he said, then repeated with more than a trace of bitterness, “Of course.”
