Jun 25, 2015

I'm a little loopy - I was up past midnight programming light cues, one more night of rehearsal before the show opens and I can crawl back into my writer cave and get back to banging away on Asteroid Made of Dragons. Theatre is a crazy group endeavour - quite looking forward to solitary hermity goodness on the horizon. Though I am kind of in love with this promo shot from The Moonstone play:

Photo: Matt Hardy

It's been a little while since I shared any Xenon stuff with you all - so here's a snippet from one of her chapters. It's becoming an open secret that even though I've wandered with Jonas & Rime before, our scholar-goblin is quickly becoming the character I enjoy writing the most.

“Zee, why aren’t we leaving?” Mercury hissed in her ear. “Mother could wake up...any wandertime!”

“I’m not coming back, Mercy. Not this time. I can’t,” Xenon made her voiced stay calm, even though her heart slammed ceaselessly against her ribcage. She laid her hands on the black chain that was wrapped around the door handles of the shed. It had no lock, the steel links were welded together. It had been this way since her father -- had stopped giving instructions and telling stories.

“Zee. Zee! You can’t!” her sister writhed with panic. “Mother will--Mother will, I don’t even know what Mother will!”

Sorry, Mercury. Let’s see how bad you really want to go. “No turning back,” Xenon got a firm grip of the black chain in both hands and set her feet. She would never be as strong as some goblins, but in a pinch she could bend steel carpenter-nails without wincing. With a sharp exhale she grunted and snapped the chains apart and threw them aside. Both sisters paused and pressed themselves against the shed door in a breathless moment of terror, waiting for the sound of their mother’s approach.

When only the distant sound of the philosophers stumbling further down their street came, Xenon slowly stood and turned her head to look into her sister’s wide eyes. “I told you before. What I found, it’s important and it’s dangerous. And it’s my job to figure it out, I’m not dumping it someone else’s plate. I took the little gold I have left, but if I’m going to figure this out, I need, well, transportation.”

Mercury said nothing, only stared at the shed door with reverential awe. Xenon took a deep breath and flung open the shed doors, where the light of the three moons could fall upon the contents.

It was all curves. It was midnight blue, like the darkest deeps of the sea. It was beautiful and covered with dust.

Xenon swung into saddle and ran her thumbs along the throttle, the starter switches, the display panel that still gave off a faint light, even as the machine slumbered. She shook Mercury off her shoulder until her sister’s bottom was on the seat. A quick wipe with her cloak removed the worst of the dust from the panel and showed that there was plenty of energy still in the reserve. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and let herself listen to the stories underneath her feet. Then her thumb flicked the ignition switch.

An Arkanic sky-cycle?!? It had been beyond her teenaged capacity to preserve even a semblance of calm when her father had touched down in the backyard the first time with it. It had hummed instead of roared, as if floating made it happy. Just like it hummed now, even though it had sat alone in a dirty shed for years, it was ready to fly, like it had been waiting for her. True Precursor technology did not fade, did not break, did not diminish or grow dull. The sky-cycle was powered by an actual aerolith and with careful use and maintenance, the machine would fly for years. Her father had taught her how to operate it with calm, thorough care and now it felt only right to be sitting on the back of this ancient machine on the trail of a mystery that stretched back to when the device had been born. Xenon looked over her shoulder, a final question in her eyes. Mercury had already found goggles from the saddlebags. She blinked once through the smoked glass, then passed another pair to her sister without a word. Xenon pulled them onto her forehead snugly and eased the throttle and let Tobio out into the night.

The Precursor’s machine hummed as quiet as a drifting cloud down the length of the house, both goblins kept an eye on each window, expecting to see the razor silhouette of their mother’s anger. Xenon held her breath and felt Mercury’s fingers dig into her sides. She kept Tobio at his slowest speed until her mother’s house was a diminishing shadow. Then she hammered the throttle and made the midnight blue wonder leap into the sky.

Mercury whooped with delight, pounding on Xenon’s back with her sharp fists. Their part of the city was mostly dark, even with the roaming philosophers -- but other parts shone with lantern-glass warmth. The bright yellow of the theater district, the cool blue of the torches that burned around the Library, the piercing white light that tore into the night sky like a spear that came from the Glass Towers of Vo -- the night wind whipped past and Xenon felt free. Terrified and free and she strongly considered turning the sky-cycle right around and parking it back in the shed.

“Where are we going, Zee?” Mercury demanded.

Xenon folded up her fears and tucked them away in a pocket just over her heart, there to be easily found and consulted at need. “Like you and mother said. Someone smarter than me - or at least someone who knows more about the Precursor civilization.” And not the First Librarian - that old stick would bury this in committees, rhetoric, and old men’s science. If we were lucky the mystery would be solved some fifteen minutes before SHAME arrives. “We’re going to go talk to an old boyfriend.”

“What?!?” Mercury shouted in either glee or pure incomprehension from the wind whipping past.

Two goblins soared across the night sky on a machine older than the city below, leaving a trail of magenta energy behind them like a line of bright ink.