Fic: Spin Recovery, Part 16B
Jan. 16th, 2008 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalThe dinner party is still going to limp along, but at least I got this particular scene finished.
Rufus’ mother raised her eyebrows at this, but went on, introducing her to Aunt Dottie, Bethany and the Swiftfoots. His mother then started making small talk with the Softpaws, mostly to forestall Aunt Dottie from telling them about the pile of bones she’d recently discovered on her latest dig. Rufus edged a little closer to Hazel, who was watching the whole show with an expression that could be politely described as dyspeptic.
“So, enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“Fancier than some of the parties they used to put on at the officer’s club,” she admitted. She looked around the room. “What do three people do in a place this big all day?”
“Live in it, mostly,” he told her. “Remember, this is the seat of the Brushtail lands and the centre of its administration, there are people coming in and out all day on one errand or another. Though I’ll admit it was built for a larger family then ours is currently.” He felt a vague stab of guilt hit him. If Hazel thought it had been empty with three people in it, how must it have felt when just his mother and Bethany were living here all the years he’d been gone?
“I feel like I rattle around in my father’s place, I couldn’t imagine living here.” Her face briefly took on a look of genuine amusement. “Though I suppose it would be handy to have a place big enough for its own hydrotherapy pool.”
“I think that’s the one thing we don’t have.” An idea occurred to him. Turning to her father, he asked, “Do you mind terribly if I borrowed your daughter for a moment?”
“I suppose not,” Sgt. Swiftfoot said.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, as he helped her to her feet. Or “foot”, to be more accurate, he supposed.
“Just downstairs for a moment. Don’t worry, there’s a lift we can use.”
“Rufus, dinner is going to be less than ten minutes,” Bethany warned.
“We’ll be back before then,” he promised. He led Hazel out into the hallway and into his mother’s office. He flipped back a panel that was hidden behind a decorative bit of gingerbread molding, revealing an encoded lock panel. After tapping in a brief series of numbers, the hidden lift panel drew back and they went inside.
“So what is this?” Hazel demanded. The lift began to run downward. There was only one stop possible, so she didn’t have a chance to notice they were descending over 200 meters below the manor.
“My secret lair.”
“What are you going on abo…” Hazel’s voice trailed off as the lift doors opened, revealing a large tactics room. Several communication consoles, their displays and controls covered in plastic sheeting, lined the back wall, while at the center was a tactical holographic display tank worthy of a major orbital fortress. “What in the name of the Holy Den Mother is this place?”
“Officially, its designation is Strategic Defense Coordination Centre #4,” Rufus told her, leading her inside. “When I was a younger cubling, I thought of it as my own secret hideout, where I could fight the Varn invaders should they ever try to take our homeworld again. It was placed here during the reconstruction of the manor, as a backup for the main defense coordination centre in the capitol.”
“Why not put it at the local spaceport?” she asked.
“Too obvious a target. The manor isn’t a major industrial, transport or communication nexus, so the logic was that it wouldn’t be a primary target during any attack on Vulpine Prime. You could coordinate the defense of the whole solar system through this room if you wanted to, though.” He pulled the sheet off of the holographic display and turned on the power. “They used to run a defense exercise here every couple of years here when I was younger, soldiers crawling over the grounds, getting the staff’s way. I thought it was all terribly exciting.”
She looked around, a bit apprehensive. “Should we be down here?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t worry too much, it’s been mothballed for over a decade.” Once the display tank had finished warming up, he tapped in a few commands. A three dimensional image wavered into a view, a real time picture of Brushtail Manor, rendered in sharp black, white and greys from a thermal imaging system. “Here we are.” He tapped in a set of coordinates and the image shifted, centering a round tower home with wind generators, set on a rocky hillside. “And you were. This is a real time feed from the planetary defense network’s satellite monitoring system.”
She gave him a long stare. “You’re playing with our world’s defense scanners to show off to me?”
“No,” he said, then paused. “All right, not entirely. I do have a point to make.” He tapped in another command. The display expanded outward, until it showed the entirety of House Brushtail’s lands, a colored overlay showing the borders of the various towns and districts contained within it. He pulled out a light pen from his pocket, and used it to circle a small, hilly area in the Northeast Sector with a golden band. “That’s your lands, the area that was pledged to your ancestors when we took our world back. That is what you are responsible for.” He swung the light pen in a wide arc, circling the entire image. “This is what House Brushtail, through the Countess Brushtail, is responsible for. Hospitals, schools, civil protection, power, water; the general welfare of everyone inside that circle is my mother’s task to supervise.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is: those items I just mentioned are paid for through the revenues generated by the rents House Brushtail charges and the profits it makes through the House’s various business concerns. The exact amount waxes and wanes, but for our purposes we can consider it fixed. Mining your hills for the sevenium underneath it would mean the House would have more credits, credits that could be used to expand the services available to its subjects. Your hills contain perhaps a few hundred people, correct?”
“Twelve hundred and fifty-nine,” she corrected.
“House Brushtail’s total commoner population is over seventy-three million. I understand your anger at being asked to leave your home, but my mother by necessity must look at the larger picture. Moving the families in those hills is a small price to pay for the increase in revenue.”
“Seventy-three million,” she repeated, leaning over on her crutches to peer into the display. She turned her glance upward, towards the manor above their heads. “Tell you what, you want us to move? We’ll take your place.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I figure we can get at least a dozen nice apartments in the main building if we subdivide, then we can put up some more houses after we tear up the gardens and fields nearby.”
Rufus stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is the Brushtail’s ancestral seat.”
Her ears flicked back and her eyes narrowed. “And my family’s house is my ancestral seat, thank you very much. The original seat, not a reconstruction like this place. Twelve generations have lived there, ever since the end of the Subjugation. The way I figure it, there’s only three of you here anyway. Get yourself a nice apartment in the city. What you pay to keep this place up would probably at least match what you would get from the sevenium deposit.”
His own ears flicked back and he bit back on a few choice replies, responding only with, “You’re being unrealistic.”
“I’m being unrealistic?” she said derisively. “You break into a secured command center and tap into Vulpine Prime’s defense network in order to convince me to be a good little girl and let my liege lady kick me out of the home I grew up in. Meanwhile you sit in this enormous pile of a house, paid for with my taxes and my father’s rents, and try to lecture me about commoner duties. You wouldn’t know what the real world was like if it bit you in the tail!” She turned her back to him and hobbled back into the lift.
“I’ll thank you to take that back,” he growled, following after her. “I know all about the real world. I didn’t earn a missing arm from a grass chaser race, I’ll have you know.” He stepped inside and slapped the Up button. They rode up together in stony silence, Hazel brushing past him as the doors opened. They came out into the hallway, just in time to run into Bethany.
“Oh, there you are. Dinner is about to be served,” she said. “What were you two doing in Mother’s study?”
“Getting some perspective on the situation. Excuse me, milady, but I have to leave.” Hazel raised her voice to a shout. “Da! Get the skimmer, we’re leaving!”
Down the hall, her father poked his head out from the dining room. “What’s the matter, Hazel?” he asked. “We were just sitting down for dinner.”
“I’m sorry, Da, I’m not hungry.”
“What’s the matter, luv? Your leg bothering you?” her father asked, looking worried as he came out into the hallway.
“I just want to go home.” All three of them trailed after Hazel as she did a neat military turn on her right crutch and headed towards the entry hall, her father looking worried and Bethany merely confused.
“Now see here, you can’t just walk out of my mother’s dinner!” Rufus said, stepping ahead of them all and blocking Hazel from going up the stairs to the door. “I invited you here to help you both resolve this situation. Stomping out in a huff is hardly going to help.”
“Well, I certainly can’t see what staying around is going to accomplish. Now kindly get out of the way, my lord,” she hissed.
“This isn’t going to help you at all,” he insisted.
“You’re already going to kick us out of our home, what more can you do? Arrest us?”
“Hazel, dear, that’s our lord you’re talking to…” her father said, looking nervous and apologetic.
“No one is arresting anybody,” Rufus said. “You haven’t done anything warrant that.”
“How’s assault sound?” she said, then with one smooth motion swung the tip of her crutch down on the toes of his right foot. Rufus let out a yell, hopping on one foot, his arm flailing. With only his left arm to aid him, he quickly overbalanced and landed flat on his back. While Bethany and her father gaped, Hazel stepped over her fallen lord, up the stairs and out the door without another word.
“Rufus, are you all right?” Bethany cried out, kneeling down beside him.
Sgt. Swiftfoot looked utterly mortified. “Milord, I'm sorry... Hazel, she can be a bit, er, tetchy since her accident...”
Rufus pushed himself up to a sitting position and rubbed the back of his head where it had bounced off the marble floor. “It's all right, I've had worse done to me. Go and follow her.
Hazel's father backed out the door, still apologizing, before running after his daughter. With Bethany's help, Rufus got up to his feet and started limping back to the dining room, where no doubt the roast kin goose was growing ever colder.
“What was that all about, Rufus? What did you say to her?” Bethany asked, staying close beside him. “I thought the whole point of this dinner was to try and bring Miss Swiftfoot and her neighbors over to way of thinking.”
“That's what I thought too,” he said. “Apparently it's going to be a bit harder than I thought.”
TBC
Rufus’ mother raised her eyebrows at this, but went on, introducing her to Aunt Dottie, Bethany and the Swiftfoots. His mother then started making small talk with the Softpaws, mostly to forestall Aunt Dottie from telling them about the pile of bones she’d recently discovered on her latest dig. Rufus edged a little closer to Hazel, who was watching the whole show with an expression that could be politely described as dyspeptic.
“So, enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“Fancier than some of the parties they used to put on at the officer’s club,” she admitted. She looked around the room. “What do three people do in a place this big all day?”
“Live in it, mostly,” he told her. “Remember, this is the seat of the Brushtail lands and the centre of its administration, there are people coming in and out all day on one errand or another. Though I’ll admit it was built for a larger family then ours is currently.” He felt a vague stab of guilt hit him. If Hazel thought it had been empty with three people in it, how must it have felt when just his mother and Bethany were living here all the years he’d been gone?
“I feel like I rattle around in my father’s place, I couldn’t imagine living here.” Her face briefly took on a look of genuine amusement. “Though I suppose it would be handy to have a place big enough for its own hydrotherapy pool.”
“I think that’s the one thing we don’t have.” An idea occurred to him. Turning to her father, he asked, “Do you mind terribly if I borrowed your daughter for a moment?”
“I suppose not,” Sgt. Swiftfoot said.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, as he helped her to her feet. Or “foot”, to be more accurate, he supposed.
“Just downstairs for a moment. Don’t worry, there’s a lift we can use.”
“Rufus, dinner is going to be less than ten minutes,” Bethany warned.
“We’ll be back before then,” he promised. He led Hazel out into the hallway and into his mother’s office. He flipped back a panel that was hidden behind a decorative bit of gingerbread molding, revealing an encoded lock panel. After tapping in a brief series of numbers, the hidden lift panel drew back and they went inside.
“So what is this?” Hazel demanded. The lift began to run downward. There was only one stop possible, so she didn’t have a chance to notice they were descending over 200 meters below the manor.
“My secret lair.”
“What are you going on abo…” Hazel’s voice trailed off as the lift doors opened, revealing a large tactics room. Several communication consoles, their displays and controls covered in plastic sheeting, lined the back wall, while at the center was a tactical holographic display tank worthy of a major orbital fortress. “What in the name of the Holy Den Mother is this place?”
“Officially, its designation is Strategic Defense Coordination Centre #4,” Rufus told her, leading her inside. “When I was a younger cubling, I thought of it as my own secret hideout, where I could fight the Varn invaders should they ever try to take our homeworld again. It was placed here during the reconstruction of the manor, as a backup for the main defense coordination centre in the capitol.”
“Why not put it at the local spaceport?” she asked.
“Too obvious a target. The manor isn’t a major industrial, transport or communication nexus, so the logic was that it wouldn’t be a primary target during any attack on Vulpine Prime. You could coordinate the defense of the whole solar system through this room if you wanted to, though.” He pulled the sheet off of the holographic display and turned on the power. “They used to run a defense exercise here every couple of years here when I was younger, soldiers crawling over the grounds, getting the staff’s way. I thought it was all terribly exciting.”
She looked around, a bit apprehensive. “Should we be down here?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t worry too much, it’s been mothballed for over a decade.” Once the display tank had finished warming up, he tapped in a few commands. A three dimensional image wavered into a view, a real time picture of Brushtail Manor, rendered in sharp black, white and greys from a thermal imaging system. “Here we are.” He tapped in a set of coordinates and the image shifted, centering a round tower home with wind generators, set on a rocky hillside. “And you were. This is a real time feed from the planetary defense network’s satellite monitoring system.”
She gave him a long stare. “You’re playing with our world’s defense scanners to show off to me?”
“No,” he said, then paused. “All right, not entirely. I do have a point to make.” He tapped in another command. The display expanded outward, until it showed the entirety of House Brushtail’s lands, a colored overlay showing the borders of the various towns and districts contained within it. He pulled out a light pen from his pocket, and used it to circle a small, hilly area in the Northeast Sector with a golden band. “That’s your lands, the area that was pledged to your ancestors when we took our world back. That is what you are responsible for.” He swung the light pen in a wide arc, circling the entire image. “This is what House Brushtail, through the Countess Brushtail, is responsible for. Hospitals, schools, civil protection, power, water; the general welfare of everyone inside that circle is my mother’s task to supervise.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is: those items I just mentioned are paid for through the revenues generated by the rents House Brushtail charges and the profits it makes through the House’s various business concerns. The exact amount waxes and wanes, but for our purposes we can consider it fixed. Mining your hills for the sevenium underneath it would mean the House would have more credits, credits that could be used to expand the services available to its subjects. Your hills contain perhaps a few hundred people, correct?”
“Twelve hundred and fifty-nine,” she corrected.
“House Brushtail’s total commoner population is over seventy-three million. I understand your anger at being asked to leave your home, but my mother by necessity must look at the larger picture. Moving the families in those hills is a small price to pay for the increase in revenue.”
“Seventy-three million,” she repeated, leaning over on her crutches to peer into the display. She turned her glance upward, towards the manor above their heads. “Tell you what, you want us to move? We’ll take your place.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I figure we can get at least a dozen nice apartments in the main building if we subdivide, then we can put up some more houses after we tear up the gardens and fields nearby.”
Rufus stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is the Brushtail’s ancestral seat.”
Her ears flicked back and her eyes narrowed. “And my family’s house is my ancestral seat, thank you very much. The original seat, not a reconstruction like this place. Twelve generations have lived there, ever since the end of the Subjugation. The way I figure it, there’s only three of you here anyway. Get yourself a nice apartment in the city. What you pay to keep this place up would probably at least match what you would get from the sevenium deposit.”
His own ears flicked back and he bit back on a few choice replies, responding only with, “You’re being unrealistic.”
“I’m being unrealistic?” she said derisively. “You break into a secured command center and tap into Vulpine Prime’s defense network in order to convince me to be a good little girl and let my liege lady kick me out of the home I grew up in. Meanwhile you sit in this enormous pile of a house, paid for with my taxes and my father’s rents, and try to lecture me about commoner duties. You wouldn’t know what the real world was like if it bit you in the tail!” She turned her back to him and hobbled back into the lift.
“I’ll thank you to take that back,” he growled, following after her. “I know all about the real world. I didn’t earn a missing arm from a grass chaser race, I’ll have you know.” He stepped inside and slapped the Up button. They rode up together in stony silence, Hazel brushing past him as the doors opened. They came out into the hallway, just in time to run into Bethany.
“Oh, there you are. Dinner is about to be served,” she said. “What were you two doing in Mother’s study?”
“Getting some perspective on the situation. Excuse me, milady, but I have to leave.” Hazel raised her voice to a shout. “Da! Get the skimmer, we’re leaving!”
Down the hall, her father poked his head out from the dining room. “What’s the matter, Hazel?” he asked. “We were just sitting down for dinner.”
“I’m sorry, Da, I’m not hungry.”
“What’s the matter, luv? Your leg bothering you?” her father asked, looking worried as he came out into the hallway.
“I just want to go home.” All three of them trailed after Hazel as she did a neat military turn on her right crutch and headed towards the entry hall, her father looking worried and Bethany merely confused.
“Now see here, you can’t just walk out of my mother’s dinner!” Rufus said, stepping ahead of them all and blocking Hazel from going up the stairs to the door. “I invited you here to help you both resolve this situation. Stomping out in a huff is hardly going to help.”
“Well, I certainly can’t see what staying around is going to accomplish. Now kindly get out of the way, my lord,” she hissed.
“This isn’t going to help you at all,” he insisted.
“You’re already going to kick us out of our home, what more can you do? Arrest us?”
“Hazel, dear, that’s our lord you’re talking to…” her father said, looking nervous and apologetic.
“No one is arresting anybody,” Rufus said. “You haven’t done anything warrant that.”
“How’s assault sound?” she said, then with one smooth motion swung the tip of her crutch down on the toes of his right foot. Rufus let out a yell, hopping on one foot, his arm flailing. With only his left arm to aid him, he quickly overbalanced and landed flat on his back. While Bethany and her father gaped, Hazel stepped over her fallen lord, up the stairs and out the door without another word.
“Rufus, are you all right?” Bethany cried out, kneeling down beside him.
Sgt. Swiftfoot looked utterly mortified. “Milord, I'm sorry... Hazel, she can be a bit, er, tetchy since her accident...”
Rufus pushed himself up to a sitting position and rubbed the back of his head where it had bounced off the marble floor. “It's all right, I've had worse done to me. Go and follow her.
Hazel's father backed out the door, still apologizing, before running after his daughter. With Bethany's help, Rufus got up to his feet and started limping back to the dining room, where no doubt the roast kin goose was growing ever colder.
“What was that all about, Rufus? What did you say to her?” Bethany asked, staying close beside him. “I thought the whole point of this dinner was to try and bring Miss Swiftfoot and her neighbors over to way of thinking.”
“That's what I thought too,” he said. “Apparently it's going to be a bit harder than I thought.”
TBC
