I’m in an accepting kind of mood about it all, like I’m starting to be able to let him go.
Saturday, June 28
Fly-over
I spent a nice relaxed morning with Zan and Dess building a snowman and then constructing some snow armchairs and making amateurish snow sculptures. Telekinetics are definitely very handy to have when you’re trying to shift a lot of snow about. Zan’s got a real flair for sculpture, too, and I was pleased that indulging me gave her a chance to do something she obviously enjoyed. Twelfth is going to remain assigned to Muina until further notice – their injuries don’t prevent even Kiste from fighting, and they should be fine so long as they’re not facing large numbers of Ionoth. And, thanks to the strength of her Telekinetic talent, Zan’s got a lot of construction work in her near future.
We’re on the Litara heading back now, having narrowly avoided a bunch of civilians who were off-loaded at Pandora for an overnight visit along with, so far as I could tell, the fittings they’ll be using in the new building that’s been going up. It’s the first time KOTIS has allowed anyone on Muina who was there just to look and exclaim: a one-off PR exercise for a bunch of VIPs, reporters, and contest winners come to experience the home world. There’ll be another group from Kolar in a few days, and no more for a while. Pandora’s getting larger every day, but KOTIS is very reluctant to spend resources on tourists. Maze said there’s a massive disagreement over the question of settling instead of exploring, mainly because of the Ddura. He doesn’t want families, kids, here, but there’s an argument that Muina might soon be the safest place on any of the planets.
I hadn’t known any of this when watching the Litara settling on the lake. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have stayed sitting outside when the shuttle went past on its way to the amphitheatre. KOTIS personnel don’t as a rule point at you and wave. Fortunately Maze came down and collected me before any of them were finished at the platform. I don’t think much of a career as a zoo exhibit.
It’s very weird to me that I think of people as civilians.
Snug
So nice to be back in my own rooms. So nice not to have two people making sure they’re always within twenty feet of me.
Ghost showed up within half an hour of me being back, purring like mad. She missed me, or whatever my enhancement does for her.
It made me wonder about Muina v Tare in terms of home. I guess Muina would be as much home as here if I had my own quarters, not a glorified medical monitoring facility. Given the choice I’d probably live on Muina, just because there’s so much more outside, but I’m feeling very comfy and settled here, curled into my window seat with Ghost purring on my lap.
First and Second Squad are reverting to nightmare watch instead of babysitting, which is fine with me, especially since I’m not having too much trouble at the moment with my dreams. I think the manifestation part of me is still recovering. Tomorrow everyone has a day off, then I’m back on training.
Sunday, June 29
Nice means precise
The Ruuel-not-there sensation has come back, but otherwise non-eventful dreaming. I spent a long time in the bath this morning, looking at my legs and being amazed at how ugly they are, and thinking back over the fifteen seconds or so that it took me to get them in this condition.
It’s really hard to go there. Waking like that scared the hell out of me, and it also hurt worse than anything else I’ve managed to do to myself. But waking aware of Ruuel’s absence really brought it back to me. If I’d been less freaked out, I’d think about that night all the time, since I spent who knows how long with my arms in a death-lock around his waist and my face pressed into his stomach. He kept one hand on my shoulder and the other on the back of my head, and didn’t even wipe the blood off his face until Mara came and he got me to clutch her instead. And it’s only from looking at the log later that I know that he was grey-faced and sweating, battered by the raw terror I was blasting.
Even if it was just because I’m his assignment, I’ll always remember him doing that. And saying my name correctly. I have this increasing collection of special memories of things he’s done, including dropping a snowball on my face, but my accepting attitude seems to be holding. My crush makes his job harder, a job which could easily get him killed, and I think seeing that has given me the impetus I needed to step back.
I also caught up on the latest episode of The Hidden War. It was the confrontation scene, where Lenton discovered Zan wasting her time giving me baby-level training, and all the squads are introduced to me. Looks like Maze didn’t put a word-for-word log of the explanation of my lab rat, which only meant the scriptwriters happily made up a scene where Lastier was quite directly insulting. There was also a scene which I wasn’t present for, where he was being very smug and superior and insulting to the other squad captains, but also brilliantly competent and incisive.
I wonder if that PR person had a thing about Ruuel, or it was just script decisions which are making them put the knife in. Lastier is close enough to be recognisable, but terribly distorted.
Monday, June 30
Irresolution
Just physical training today, and that mainly in the weights room, since my legs aren’t quite up to training which involves impact, and Mara says I need to work on upper body strength anyway. A couple of squads (Eighth, Tenth) passed through during the two long sessions we had, making me feel terribly self-conscious about my scars, since we were in the shorts and singlet arrangement. They were very good about not staring though. The rest of First Squad came and joined us for the session after lunch and demonstrated how much of a wimp I am. By the time Mara was done with me I was a limp noodle.
She’s booked me in for swimming tomorrow morning, which I’m allowed to do alone so long as I don’t dive and are feeling up to it. Tomorrow afternoon after they’re back from rotation, Zee will be resuming my Sights and other-weird-things-Cass-does training. If, that is, I can actually move tomorrow.
There’s a new news frenzy sparked by all the tourists who’ve returned from Muina. Interviews with KOTIS staff and the contest winners and lots of shots of what Pandora looks like right now and tours of the buildings there and talk about making Pandora self-supporting. And KOTIS used their visit to officially release not only news and images of Kalasa, but to take a select few there and to explain the use of the platforms (although not, as yet, exactly how you get to be able to use the platforms). Other than a lot of extreme impatience at the time-frame of more civilians being able to go there, it’s all been pretty joyous and exuberant news.
They’ve named the settlement at Kalasa Kaszandra, which is something I find uncomfortable and highly ironic, given the inescapable doom aspects of my name. And of course the reporters managed to get hold of a whole bunch of anonymous gossip about me while they were talking to people at Pandora, and there’s images of the snowmen and snowchairs Zan, Dess and I had built. And someone told them I’d been injured (mysteriously), and about how protective the Setari were of me (devoted) and whole bunches of embarrassing stuff which is very much not about me at all, but this little mythos which is being built up around me (wise beyond her years). No-one mentions the amount of sulking I get through.