hope of rescue

All of the southwestern plants had taken root. Her garden is coming along nicely, thought the prince. She has even started writing a monograph on how well they grow in this climate. She must be reconsidering this as some kind of punishment.
Meanwhile she using some of the paper given to her for her monograph to record her despair and plea for help. These secret notes she would float down the creek which went under the castle walls. They were found by a townsman who operated a ferry. He took them home and collected them in a book, which he would open and pore over in his bed at night. When he discovered that a group of her countrymen had secretly entered the town to try and set her free, he tried to think of a way to stop them that wouldn’t also result in her no longer sending the notes.

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costumed

My little brother was a guy who woul go trick or treating at all ties of the year, he would get real excited and say, let’s go trick or treating! and he would think up a costume and put it together and we wouldn’t go out until the costume was ready, which could be weeks, but it didn’t matter to him, he didn’t care about the schedule the rest of the world was on. This started when he was a kid, about 8 or 9. The people in the neighborhood learned to keep a little candy all year just in case. They thought he was “special”, I mean developmentally or mentally disabled. He got great grades though. You might suspect he at least had Asperger’s except he was so gregarious he pulled other people into it in high school.

return

V abdicated the throne to embark on a religious quest, then returned two decades later leading a strange people whose homeland had been destroyed in a natural disaster. But V’s brother, now on the throne, refused to give them sanctuary. r

turning the tables

M recognized the customer as the drifter that had robbed his restaurant two years before. Amazingly the bastard didn’t recognize M or the restaurant. M fed him a tranquilizing drug in his food, which knocked him out, then locked him in the basement and called the police. He tied him to a chair for good measure. Once the police arrived they asked M how he could prove that this was the perpetrator of the robbery two years ago. Did I report that crime? They couldn’t locate their records. Perhaps M had copies? They then arrested M for kidnapping.

opportunity

M’s Negotiations with Lord T were made through a needle merchant whose sister was serving in Lord T’s household. His last message before the attack: “when you see me in battle, if the pole of my banner is bent, i have joined you. if it is not, i am against you.” M’s forces were late to the battle, but he found Lord T with a bent pole. Lord T had actually started the day with a straight banner, but it had become bent in battle. He was almost defeated, and happy to see a new force enter as a friend, though to take advantage of it he had to quickly change his loyalty. He would have to consult his priest for the proper penance.

graffiti artist

He was exiled from the server for hacking the program to change the look of the virtual environment. He called these hacks performances: illuminating the dusktime, giving the wildlife a mechanized look that pulsed on and off. Another user discovered they were actually calling cards, invitations to another server called “interzone”.

power sharing

Two sentient species living side by side adopt a governing strategy in which the two leaders co-reign over the combined population. One leader is hereditary, the other is elected and serves a limited term. The species with the hereditary leader finds itself wrapped up in the election politics of the other.

the death of Pliny the Elder

The Roman author of the world’s first encyclopedia died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. His death is described by his nephew in a letter to Tacitus: His sister called his attention to the large cloud, and he at first set out to investigate it out of curiosity. But he was then contacted by a friend who was requesting help. Pliny was prefect of the navy, and ordered the fleet out to the rescue. The winds that sped them there kept them from sailing away, however, and he was overcome by noxious fumes.

There is some skepticism about this story due to his companions surviving – however the source doesn’t tell us whether anyone else might have succumbed. Suetonius has a different story, leaving out the rescue and having Pliny ask a slave to kill him to end his suffering due to the heat.

The debate opens up our fancy to imagine other stories of his demise – perhaps he was poisoned at an opportune moment by a resentful servant whose former master was purged in Nero’s terror, which Pliny survived through what the murderer viewed as cowardice. Blubberous, asthmatic cowardice.

patriot

He was proud when his son sought exemption as a conscientious objector upon being drafted, but then dismayed when after serving for a while in the civilian corps the young man volunteered for combat ambulance duty. His son tried to explain his decision in letters that quoted Socrates and Ghandi. He replied to his son that if he had joined the larger community of the state then he had left the smaller community of his family, and that he need not come home

building trust

Their marriage ceremony was to walk through a field of thorns laced with oxytocin and then sit together and treat each other’s wounds.