jeriendhal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jeriendhal) wrote2012-11-26 08:02 pm
jeriendhal) wrote2012-11-26 08:02 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Legacy of the Red Vixen, cont.
I had a new poll for Planet Crowdsource lined up, but LJ ate it. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime here's the next bit in LotRV.
* * *
Six weeks into her precious Holiday Year later, she and Ashraf touched down at the main spaceport on Greenholm, which was to say the only spaceport on Greenholm. It had been a five week trip out, stuffed into the passenger section of one of Mum's freighters, since no luxury liners came out this way, and Lady Melanie had exclusive shipping rights to Aunt Salli's personal planet. Efficient that.
Ryza's plea that she at least be granted the use of the family yacht to be taken into exile had fallen on deaf ears. Though truth be told her quarters on the freighter hadn't been all that smaller than her room at school, it was just that she'd ended up sharing them with Ashraf. Which hadn't been considered improper, mostly due to the wazagan's weird biology leading to a complete disinterest in mammalian sex. It wasn't even that he was a bad roommate that made her uncomfortable. It was just the poor fellow took up so much damned room that he ended up spending most of his time in the ship's common room, leaving Ryza to mope and play VR games on her pocket comp.
"Is there anything I should know about your aunt before we meet her? Your parents didn't speak of her much," Ashraf asked, as they walked out of the cargo bay and onto the planet. Ryza glanced up. It was cloudy, and looked like rain.
"There are some pretty good reasons for that apparently, not that Mum or Da ever bothered to tell me. Mum has been on the outs with Aunt Salli since before I was born," Ryza told him. "They talk to each other, just because Mum's shipping company handles all the freight that goes here, but they aren't really close. Anyway, there are a couple of things you should be warned about. You know that Aunt Salli and Aunt Alinadar are married, right?"
"Yes. Though I'm not sure how that would work."
Oh, yeah. Same sex love, or even opposite sex love as mammals practiced it, basically didn't exist on Wazaga. Procreation, as she understood it, tended to involve eggs lying in pools of water and a vague explanation from Ashraf of males visiting from outside the clan "providing to the community." At least he'd gotten the hang of interpreting male-female relationships since he'd come to Foxen Prime.
"They make it work. They even have cubs, though that involved a bit of genetic engineering." All of whom were older and either in school or tending to Aunt Salli's off-planet interests, so she wouldn't even have them for company for this benighted year. Joy. "The thing is, before Aunt Ali was Aunt Cree--, er, Aunt Salli's wife, she was her bodyguard. She still is. You want to get stunned real quick, just make a threatening move towards Aunt Salli."
"I wouldn't do that," he said, his heavy tail lashing a moment in offense.
"Well, just don't look like you're going to do it either, okay? Aunt Ali is fun, but she can be twitchy about that sort of thing."
Speaking of whom, there was Aunt Alinadar now at the edge of the tarmac, smiling and waving to them as she stood next to a groundcar. She had unusual coloring by foxen standards, her pelt a mix of black with white paws, and a patch of white running from the center of her forehead and down her neck, disappearing into the collar of her dark gray uniform jacket. Add in her bright golden eyes and she looked a lot like one of Grandmother's imported Terran cats. She was also seriously short, her ears about level with Ryza's nose.
"Ryza sweetie, how are you?" she greeted. They exchanged hugs and cheek rubs, then her aunt stepped back to look over Ashraf, doing her usual threat evaluation.
Ryza made the introductions. "Ash, this is my Aunt Alinadar Darktail. Aunt Ali, this is my friend Ashraf ren Brightsand. He was visiting my parent's manor doing some work for his xenoanthropology degree and decided to tag along."
Ashraf bowed in a fair imitation of a foxen male's act of respect towards an elder vixen. "A pleasure to meet you, er, ma'am." He stumbled over his greeting slightly, looking at Aunt Ali's unfamiliar rank insignia on her uniform. The uniform was gray with a bit of red piping, with a utility belt that held several pouches with useful items, plus a holstered stunner, a heavy plasma pistol, and what was either a large knife or a small sword. The overall effect, even with Aunt Ali's short stature, was fairly intimidating.
"Aunt Ali is Captain of the Guard for Aunt Salli's house, which makes her basically in charge of all the military forces on the planet, with everything in orbit the responsibility of the Navy."
"I thought you said she was your Aunt Sallivera's bodyguard."
"I'm that too," Aunt Ali answered. "Greenholm is a colony world, and still growing, so we all tend to wear more than one sash around here."
"I'll remember that," Ashraf said. "Should I call you Captain or Milady?"
Aunt Ali smiled. "I'm just a Commoner, so if you're going to get all formal you can call me Captain. But since you're Ryza's friend, you can just call me Ali."
"Thanks, Miss Ali."
Aunt Ali made a brief call on her com to make sure Ryza and Ashraf's bags would be delivered properly, then they all piled into the groundcar to head towards her aunts' home.
When they had left the spaceport and swung out onto the main road, Aunt Ali finally asked, "So, how badly did you yank your parents' tails to have them send you out here?"
"Bad enough, I guess," Ryza answered glumly. "They talk to Aunt Salli about it at all?"
"Not that she mentioned to me. She just said we needed to find something to keep you..." Aunt Ali paused, then finished, "...occupied."
"As opposed to 'out of trouble?'"
Ali shrugged. "Something like that." Changing the subject, she asked, "So how are the twins? They're about done their Services tours, right?"
"They were about to muster out just before I left. They're probably on their way home right now." Which was another thing that had burned. She hadn't seen either of her elder siblings except for expensive interstellar vid calls for three years, and now it would be another year before she saw them face to face again, assuming her parents didn't order her to start her Service career by enlisting on Greenholm. Belated, she added, "So how are your cubs?"
Aunt Ali smiled in parental pride. "They're doing well in school. We sent them back to Foxen Prime to get a proper education. Not that the schools we've built here aren't top notch, but it's the homeworld y'know."
As opposed to a sparsely populated colony world, yes. So it appeared she was really going to be stuck with her two aunts and no other family even close to her own age for a full year. Frag it all.
Ryza watched as the groundcar passed by fields of fruit vines, hanging from carefully tended frames. Eventually they entered the capitol proper, the outer rings composed of quickly built ferrocrete buildings, the downtown rapidly being replaced by buildings of more elegant construction that blended into the local landscape, like an onion being peeled in reverse.
At the center was Governor’s Palace. It was in the former category of buildings, a squat, two story concrete structure with a pair of wings that looked afterthoughts, added as the needs of the planetary administration grew. Its replacement was under construction on another part of the palace grounds, a tall steel frame being cladded in a traditional alternating red and white brick pattern.
"That is a seriously ugly building, Aunt Ali," she said. Ashraf was viewing the thing with the sort of look he normally kept reserved for finding dead animals on the side of the road.
"It's hideous," Aunt Ali agreed, grinning. "But it beat living in housing containers the first two years after colonization began. We're all looking forward to moving into the new palace next year."
"I'll bet."
"I'm surprised you kept using it for so long," Ashraf said.
"It served," Aunt Ali explained. "And Salli wanted to make sure the colony's infrastructure base was solid before devoting time to trivial things like the look of the admin buildings."
She parked the groundcar in front of the main entrance, which had glass doors in the manner of a particularly ugly shopping mall. Inside however, the painted fiberboard walls were gentled by handmade paintings and wall hangings from home.
Aunt Ali led them up a set of stairs and towards the back of the palace. There they were buzzed in by a male secretary and they entered Aunt Salli's office. It wasn't very large for the center of a planet's administration, no bigger than Ryza's bedroom back home, without even enough room for a decent sized conversation pit. It did have a very large communications desk however, sitting in front of the floor to ceiling windows that comprised the entire back wall of the room.
Seated at the desk was Aunt Salli, Lady Governor Sallivera Darktail to be more accurate. She was a vixen of late middle age, with dark brown fur the same shade as Ryza's father, dressed in an elegant blue dress with a split skirt and a high formal neckline. Though she was easily as tall as Ryza and her father, the really striking feature was her right eye. It was a plainly electronic replacement for her original, lost in the attack that had left three pale, parallel scars across her face.
Though she could easily have used fur dye to hide the scars and the bionic eye's own camouflage function to disguise its appearance, she never bothered too. Ryza had always figured it was because she just liked creeping people out, until she'd asked Aunt Salli to explain it to her on one of the older vixen's rare visits home. Ryza had only been thirteen at the time, and after hearing the story she'd had nightmares for nearly a month afterward. The visit had ended with Aunt Salli having a tremendous row with Mum about the incident and leaving earlier than she'd planned.
"Here's Ryza, Salli," Aunt Ali announced. "And her friend, Ashraf ren Brightsand."
Aunt Salli rose to greet them, a small smile on her face. "Hello Ryza, it's been too long. Greetings to you as well, Mr. Brightsand." She hugged Ryza briefly, and exchanged a formal bow with Ashraf.
"Need me for anything?" Aunt Ali asked, once the greetings were out of the way.
"Not right now, dear. We'll all get to together for dinner this evening. For now I'd appreciate it if you could show Mr. Brightsand to his room."
Aunt Ali took the hint and led Ashraf off, closing the door behind her. Ryza then flopped into a padded leather chair in front of Aunt Salli's desk at the latter's invitation.
Aunt Salli settled back in her own seat, focusing her unnerving gaze on her niece. "So, you must have seriously screwed up for your parents to send you all the way out here. And on your Holiday Year no less."
"Yah," Ryza said, wishing she'd been offered something from the liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. Looking at Aunt Salli's Eye of Creepiness never failed to raise the hairs on her ruff. "Look, I'll try to keep from stomping on your tail while I'm here, I promise. Just point me towards my room and I'll settle in."
"Have plans, do you?"
"Yes. Try and not be bored to death."
Aunt Salli's smile sharpened slightly. "Oh, I can help you with that."
"Look I don't what Mum told you about what happened, but I don't want to be any trouble."
"Oh, I didn't get the details, but you managed to get your father upset enough that he was actually letting your mother do the talking with me over the vid. A rare event I can assure you. I was informed however, that giving you too much free time while you were here might be ill advised."
Ryza pressed her palm against her forehead. "Come on, Aunt Salli, it's my Holiday Year. You think I'm happy wasting it on this damned backwater?" She snapped her muzzle shut as the smile on her aunt's face disappeared.
"This 'damned backwater' as you so cheerily identify it, is mine, every square meter of it. It isn't an easy job running it, I can assure you, and I can use all the help I can get, whether willing or not. To that end, you will report to your Aunt Alinadar's office in the morning, and apply yourself to whatever tasks she gives you. Is that understood?"
"I don't anything about security!"
"Then this is your chance to learn," Aunt Salli replied. "Besides, there a lot of jobs in a security office that don't involve being a security officer. I strongly suggest you apply yourself to them."
"Or what?" Ryza demanded.
"Or I'll find something else for you to do. Ground level lessons in agronomics, for example."
In other words picking fruit, or worse, cleaning animal stalls, like she was a commoner farmer, or like Mum and Dad during Harvest Week back home. Gah!
"I'll head in tomorrow then," Ryza said quickly. "I'll download a local map so I can find my own way."
"Good," Aunt Salli said, her fractional smile returning. "You pick things up quickly."
"So why does everyone complain that I don't know what I'm doing?" she asked in frustration.
"Well, I suppose you're here to figure that one out."
"Do I get any hints?"
"Only if you bother to listen."
* * *
Six weeks into her precious Holiday Year later, she and Ashraf touched down at the main spaceport on Greenholm, which was to say the only spaceport on Greenholm. It had been a five week trip out, stuffed into the passenger section of one of Mum's freighters, since no luxury liners came out this way, and Lady Melanie had exclusive shipping rights to Aunt Salli's personal planet. Efficient that.
Ryza's plea that she at least be granted the use of the family yacht to be taken into exile had fallen on deaf ears. Though truth be told her quarters on the freighter hadn't been all that smaller than her room at school, it was just that she'd ended up sharing them with Ashraf. Which hadn't been considered improper, mostly due to the wazagan's weird biology leading to a complete disinterest in mammalian sex. It wasn't even that he was a bad roommate that made her uncomfortable. It was just the poor fellow took up so much damned room that he ended up spending most of his time in the ship's common room, leaving Ryza to mope and play VR games on her pocket comp.
"Is there anything I should know about your aunt before we meet her? Your parents didn't speak of her much," Ashraf asked, as they walked out of the cargo bay and onto the planet. Ryza glanced up. It was cloudy, and looked like rain.
"There are some pretty good reasons for that apparently, not that Mum or Da ever bothered to tell me. Mum has been on the outs with Aunt Salli since before I was born," Ryza told him. "They talk to each other, just because Mum's shipping company handles all the freight that goes here, but they aren't really close. Anyway, there are a couple of things you should be warned about. You know that Aunt Salli and Aunt Alinadar are married, right?"
"Yes. Though I'm not sure how that would work."
Oh, yeah. Same sex love, or even opposite sex love as mammals practiced it, basically didn't exist on Wazaga. Procreation, as she understood it, tended to involve eggs lying in pools of water and a vague explanation from Ashraf of males visiting from outside the clan "providing to the community." At least he'd gotten the hang of interpreting male-female relationships since he'd come to Foxen Prime.
"They make it work. They even have cubs, though that involved a bit of genetic engineering." All of whom were older and either in school or tending to Aunt Salli's off-planet interests, so she wouldn't even have them for company for this benighted year. Joy. "The thing is, before Aunt Ali was Aunt Cree--, er, Aunt Salli's wife, she was her bodyguard. She still is. You want to get stunned real quick, just make a threatening move towards Aunt Salli."
"I wouldn't do that," he said, his heavy tail lashing a moment in offense.
"Well, just don't look like you're going to do it either, okay? Aunt Ali is fun, but she can be twitchy about that sort of thing."
Speaking of whom, there was Aunt Alinadar now at the edge of the tarmac, smiling and waving to them as she stood next to a groundcar. She had unusual coloring by foxen standards, her pelt a mix of black with white paws, and a patch of white running from the center of her forehead and down her neck, disappearing into the collar of her dark gray uniform jacket. Add in her bright golden eyes and she looked a lot like one of Grandmother's imported Terran cats. She was also seriously short, her ears about level with Ryza's nose.
"Ryza sweetie, how are you?" she greeted. They exchanged hugs and cheek rubs, then her aunt stepped back to look over Ashraf, doing her usual threat evaluation.
Ryza made the introductions. "Ash, this is my Aunt Alinadar Darktail. Aunt Ali, this is my friend Ashraf ren Brightsand. He was visiting my parent's manor doing some work for his xenoanthropology degree and decided to tag along."
Ashraf bowed in a fair imitation of a foxen male's act of respect towards an elder vixen. "A pleasure to meet you, er, ma'am." He stumbled over his greeting slightly, looking at Aunt Ali's unfamiliar rank insignia on her uniform. The uniform was gray with a bit of red piping, with a utility belt that held several pouches with useful items, plus a holstered stunner, a heavy plasma pistol, and what was either a large knife or a small sword. The overall effect, even with Aunt Ali's short stature, was fairly intimidating.
"Aunt Ali is Captain of the Guard for Aunt Salli's house, which makes her basically in charge of all the military forces on the planet, with everything in orbit the responsibility of the Navy."
"I thought you said she was your Aunt Sallivera's bodyguard."
"I'm that too," Aunt Ali answered. "Greenholm is a colony world, and still growing, so we all tend to wear more than one sash around here."
"I'll remember that," Ashraf said. "Should I call you Captain or Milady?"
Aunt Ali smiled. "I'm just a Commoner, so if you're going to get all formal you can call me Captain. But since you're Ryza's friend, you can just call me Ali."
"Thanks, Miss Ali."
Aunt Ali made a brief call on her com to make sure Ryza and Ashraf's bags would be delivered properly, then they all piled into the groundcar to head towards her aunts' home.
When they had left the spaceport and swung out onto the main road, Aunt Ali finally asked, "So, how badly did you yank your parents' tails to have them send you out here?"
"Bad enough, I guess," Ryza answered glumly. "They talk to Aunt Salli about it at all?"
"Not that she mentioned to me. She just said we needed to find something to keep you..." Aunt Ali paused, then finished, "...occupied."
"As opposed to 'out of trouble?'"
Ali shrugged. "Something like that." Changing the subject, she asked, "So how are the twins? They're about done their Services tours, right?"
"They were about to muster out just before I left. They're probably on their way home right now." Which was another thing that had burned. She hadn't seen either of her elder siblings except for expensive interstellar vid calls for three years, and now it would be another year before she saw them face to face again, assuming her parents didn't order her to start her Service career by enlisting on Greenholm. Belated, she added, "So how are your cubs?"
Aunt Ali smiled in parental pride. "They're doing well in school. We sent them back to Foxen Prime to get a proper education. Not that the schools we've built here aren't top notch, but it's the homeworld y'know."
As opposed to a sparsely populated colony world, yes. So it appeared she was really going to be stuck with her two aunts and no other family even close to her own age for a full year. Frag it all.
Ryza watched as the groundcar passed by fields of fruit vines, hanging from carefully tended frames. Eventually they entered the capitol proper, the outer rings composed of quickly built ferrocrete buildings, the downtown rapidly being replaced by buildings of more elegant construction that blended into the local landscape, like an onion being peeled in reverse.
At the center was Governor’s Palace. It was in the former category of buildings, a squat, two story concrete structure with a pair of wings that looked afterthoughts, added as the needs of the planetary administration grew. Its replacement was under construction on another part of the palace grounds, a tall steel frame being cladded in a traditional alternating red and white brick pattern.
"That is a seriously ugly building, Aunt Ali," she said. Ashraf was viewing the thing with the sort of look he normally kept reserved for finding dead animals on the side of the road.
"It's hideous," Aunt Ali agreed, grinning. "But it beat living in housing containers the first two years after colonization began. We're all looking forward to moving into the new palace next year."
"I'll bet."
"I'm surprised you kept using it for so long," Ashraf said.
"It served," Aunt Ali explained. "And Salli wanted to make sure the colony's infrastructure base was solid before devoting time to trivial things like the look of the admin buildings."
She parked the groundcar in front of the main entrance, which had glass doors in the manner of a particularly ugly shopping mall. Inside however, the painted fiberboard walls were gentled by handmade paintings and wall hangings from home.
Aunt Ali led them up a set of stairs and towards the back of the palace. There they were buzzed in by a male secretary and they entered Aunt Salli's office. It wasn't very large for the center of a planet's administration, no bigger than Ryza's bedroom back home, without even enough room for a decent sized conversation pit. It did have a very large communications desk however, sitting in front of the floor to ceiling windows that comprised the entire back wall of the room.
Seated at the desk was Aunt Salli, Lady Governor Sallivera Darktail to be more accurate. She was a vixen of late middle age, with dark brown fur the same shade as Ryza's father, dressed in an elegant blue dress with a split skirt and a high formal neckline. Though she was easily as tall as Ryza and her father, the really striking feature was her right eye. It was a plainly electronic replacement for her original, lost in the attack that had left three pale, parallel scars across her face.
Though she could easily have used fur dye to hide the scars and the bionic eye's own camouflage function to disguise its appearance, she never bothered too. Ryza had always figured it was because she just liked creeping people out, until she'd asked Aunt Salli to explain it to her on one of the older vixen's rare visits home. Ryza had only been thirteen at the time, and after hearing the story she'd had nightmares for nearly a month afterward. The visit had ended with Aunt Salli having a tremendous row with Mum about the incident and leaving earlier than she'd planned.
"Here's Ryza, Salli," Aunt Ali announced. "And her friend, Ashraf ren Brightsand."
Aunt Salli rose to greet them, a small smile on her face. "Hello Ryza, it's been too long. Greetings to you as well, Mr. Brightsand." She hugged Ryza briefly, and exchanged a formal bow with Ashraf.
"Need me for anything?" Aunt Ali asked, once the greetings were out of the way.
"Not right now, dear. We'll all get to together for dinner this evening. For now I'd appreciate it if you could show Mr. Brightsand to his room."
Aunt Ali took the hint and led Ashraf off, closing the door behind her. Ryza then flopped into a padded leather chair in front of Aunt Salli's desk at the latter's invitation.
Aunt Salli settled back in her own seat, focusing her unnerving gaze on her niece. "So, you must have seriously screwed up for your parents to send you all the way out here. And on your Holiday Year no less."
"Yah," Ryza said, wishing she'd been offered something from the liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. Looking at Aunt Salli's Eye of Creepiness never failed to raise the hairs on her ruff. "Look, I'll try to keep from stomping on your tail while I'm here, I promise. Just point me towards my room and I'll settle in."
"Have plans, do you?"
"Yes. Try and not be bored to death."
Aunt Salli's smile sharpened slightly. "Oh, I can help you with that."
"Look I don't what Mum told you about what happened, but I don't want to be any trouble."
"Oh, I didn't get the details, but you managed to get your father upset enough that he was actually letting your mother do the talking with me over the vid. A rare event I can assure you. I was informed however, that giving you too much free time while you were here might be ill advised."
Ryza pressed her palm against her forehead. "Come on, Aunt Salli, it's my Holiday Year. You think I'm happy wasting it on this damned backwater?" She snapped her muzzle shut as the smile on her aunt's face disappeared.
"This 'damned backwater' as you so cheerily identify it, is mine, every square meter of it. It isn't an easy job running it, I can assure you, and I can use all the help I can get, whether willing or not. To that end, you will report to your Aunt Alinadar's office in the morning, and apply yourself to whatever tasks she gives you. Is that understood?"
"I don't anything about security!"
"Then this is your chance to learn," Aunt Salli replied. "Besides, there a lot of jobs in a security office that don't involve being a security officer. I strongly suggest you apply yourself to them."
"Or what?" Ryza demanded.
"Or I'll find something else for you to do. Ground level lessons in agronomics, for example."
In other words picking fruit, or worse, cleaning animal stalls, like she was a commoner farmer, or like Mum and Dad during Harvest Week back home. Gah!
"I'll head in tomorrow then," Ryza said quickly. "I'll download a local map so I can find my own way."
"Good," Aunt Salli said, her fractional smile returning. "You pick things up quickly."
"So why does everyone complain that I don't know what I'm doing?" she asked in frustration.
"Well, I suppose you're here to figure that one out."
"Do I get any hints?"
"Only if you bother to listen."