Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras
Touchstone: Extras
Andrea K Höst
Gratuitous Epilogue
Touchstone: Extras
© 2011
Andrea K
Höst
. All rights reserved.
Cover Design by:
Andrea K
Hösth
ISBN: 978-0-9871514-6-9
Published by
Andrea K
Hösth
at Smashwords
All characters in this publication
are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
What happens when the plot ends? A
relentless barrage of weddings, babies, and planetary colonisation!
Meandering through the two years following the conclusion of the
Touchstone Trilogy, this self-indulgent collection of family
reminiscence is more saccharine than dramatic, with the most action
to be found in snowball fights.
For those who truly just want to know
what happens next, no matter how mundane, read on for the everyday,
ordinary lives of psychic space ninjas playing house.
December
Home-making
Wow – feels like
forever since I've written. December already. Kaoren asked me to
start a new diary, for all I'm nowhere near finished reading him
even the first one. But he's right that I place less of a filter on
myself in these diaries than I do in any conversation, and we both
look forward to our reading sessions. I'm finding myself with a lot
less time to sit about writing though, so he'll have to make do
with a monthly catch-up.
The past few weeks have
been all about planning our Arcadian house, tweaking and finalising
the rough design we'd blocked out with the program I gave Ys.
Kaoren, with his usual efficiency, had carted out a drone and
obtained a proper topographic scan of the site for the house –
above the waterfall and curving down one side of the little hill.
It was great to see how into the project he was: the kids aren't
the only ones who have been thinking long and hard about just what
they'd like our home to be.
Beyond a shelf built
into the bed, I left our bedroom's design to Kaoren, since he has
the best idea of what his Sights can cope with. I amused myself
with a 'retreat' room – an idea Kaoren liked and promptly copied
for himself. We ended up with a stack of three octagons which
weren't quite sitting directly on top of each other. The bedroom is
in the middle, on what would be the main floor of the building,
with windows above the waterfall. There's a side door to a
stairwell up and down, as well as out to the patio. Kaoren's
retreat will be one floor down, and positioned toward the back,
away from the central body of the house. It will be windowless with
lots of shelving, and a rear exit to what will be a tiny sunken
garden room where he can meditate. All those things in his quarters
back on Tare will end up on the new shelves, presuming we ever open
the way to Tare.
My retreat will be an
eyrie, a kind of rooftop pagoda with windows in every direction, an
excess of window seats to loll about in, and a door to a walkway
across the top of the centre section of the house.
The centre of the
building has the kitchen and the lounge and a workout room, and a
couple of guest bedrooms and laundry and storage area and all that
kind of practical stuff. The very large lounge opens on to a
sprawling, multi-level patio overlooking the waterfall.
The far tier of the
patio connects to the kids' domain, which will be the largest part
of the house. Two stacks of octagons linked by bathrooms. I was
logically thinking of one room for each of them, but this turned
into quite a debate thanks to Sen's insistence that Kaoren and I
fill her life with babies. That isn't going to happen any time
soon, and definitely not in the numbers she would like. But because
it was easy to do, we added another two spare rooms in the kids'
area to appease her and cope with overflow guests.
Rye very definitely
wanted the rear, lower room, opening onto the proposed back yard.
This wasn't simply copying Kaoren – he wants a garden of his own,
to grow vegetables and keep pets. Sen decided she wanted the room
beside his – I suspect that this is all about being closest to the
action in the main lounge room, or perhaps whatever pets Rye
produces. On top of these two rooms is a play room for the kids,
which opens out on the rooftop walkway leading to my retreat, and
also onto the kids' part of the patio, and the two spare bedrooms,
which will overlook the back garden. Sen has decided to lay claim
on these in the interim, 'so they won't be lonely'.
Ys and Lira opted for
the top two rooms, which will be the highest point. The whole house
will be sheltered by the mass of trees on the island, and partially
shielded by the hill on the Pandora side, but with amazing views
across the lake toward the water bird nesting grounds. Ys sectioned
off her room into little roomlets, so that the bed isn't visible,
and there's a sheltered study area – each section with its own set
of windows. Lira, by contrast, didn't want anything interrupting
her ability to see out, and wanted stairs down the outside of the
building to the upper garden.
Sen treats it all as a
joyful game, with her playing princess, but Ys and Rye go through
overwhelmed patches. They're beginning to accept that we mean it
about becoming a family, that we're not going to change our minds,
and that they're important to us and warrant a room of their own,
just the way they want it. Lira's a more confusing case – she
obviously grew up privileged and protected, but also terribly
isolated. And she's been having a bad spate of dreams about fading
out of existence. Sometimes the planning sessions leave her angry
and upset, because she's not sure she'll be here to see the
house.
KOTIS Command has at
least not objected to the idea of us moving. And, despite the
enormous demand for construction professionals, we'll have our
design back from our chosen architect soon and have been able to
tentatively line up construction dates. That's a side-benefit of
being 'Caszandra': something I vacillate between finding convenient
and embarrassing. It's not going to go away, so either I work with
it or I practice my pouting.
At least the
extra-special treatment seems to extend to all of the Setari – is a
way of thanking them for putting their lives on the line. And
there's a lot of prestige for the architect and builders, too. I'm
pleased with the architect, Tel Sevra, because our house plans
haven't appeared on the news. Yet.
I want to make the
house happen sooner rather than later, particularly to give us all
more 'outside' life which doesn't get reported within minutes. One
decision I've yet to make is whether to employ someone to help with
the cleaning – we're going to try on our own at first, but it'll be
a big house and it might be a bit much for the two of us. While I
don't mind the kids having some minor chores to do, I don't want
them scrubbing bathrooms, or any of the other things I've been
fortunate to have KOTIS staff doing for me. Still, we'll have our
own cleaning snot, which is, uh, a good thing, I guess.
Also on the staff
front, Maze tells me I might want to consider some kind of
assistant. On Tare the interface made it impossible for people to
actually
post
things addressed to me. There's a postal rule
set up about unsolicited gifts to the Setari which has covered me
as well – you need a verification code to send anything through the
Taren postal system. The same set-up is in place here, but is a lot
harder to manage, and the KOTIS support staff have had to deal with
people just walking up as close to the building as they can get
before greensuits intercept them, and leaving packages and presents
for all of us. I'd never actually thought that through in detail,
but of course Raiten's fan club alone could probably fill a room
each month. The island and Setari guards will make it harder for
people to do that, but non-KOTIS staff are becoming more mobile and
will eventually have their own boats and flyers. The presents are
just people trying to be nice, but I guess if we started accepting
them we'd need a house twice as big to put it all in. And KOTIS is
still blocking random mail and invitations and things, which is
convenient, if impolite. But hiring someone to deal with that means
less privacy.
Among the pile of
things I'd like to keep private is the treatment Ys and Rye have
been going through to remove the scarring from their backs. We
celebrated its conclusion by going to the island for a swim (Maze
and Alay as our escorts this time), and even though Ys and Rye
still wore the same shorts and shirt ensemble, I noticed a certain
air of freedom which I think may be because now there's no risk of
anyone seeing the scars through their wet clothes.
As we grow to
understand Nuran culture better, we're beginning to see why they
wanted so much to hide it – a whipping which scarred was an extreme
punishment, suited for some deep and heinous crime. The scarring
marked them not as victims, but as monsters. For eavesdropping on a
lesson. The expression on Rye's face when the blue bandages were
taken off for the last time and they showed him an image of his
back was enough to have me hiding tears, and Kaoren went incredibly
quiet. He and Maze had a discussion about it afterwards, and
neither of them could properly speak they were so angry. Not many
people know about the scars, fortunately, and I mean to keep it
that way.
My bones have knit
obediently, nanotech speeding the process enough that yesterday I
was finally allowed to ditch the sling. Kaoren and I took immediate
advantage of that, which we're not strictly supposed to do yet, but
I've been not-ravishing him for way too long.
And today, at long
last, we went into the Ena (four squads and Tsur Selkie) and I did
visualisations of Tare and Kolar. Tsur Selkie had me project his
office first, where I discovered a large whiteboard-type panel of
actual physical writing. Tsur Selkie's a forward-thinking type of
guy, and set up quite a few contingencies, including this
collection of details of what had happened on Tare since we blew
the marbles. The same set-up had been made at the KOTIS
headquarters on Kolar, except with a bunch of distinctive items in
the room to make it easier for me to visualise.
News was not completely
good. Fourteenth had been in the Ena when the marbles were blown,
and were listed as out of commission recovering from injuries.
Third is back on duty as a seven-person squad.
It was stupid of me to
hope that Eeli would somehow have recovered.
With Fourteenth down,
there's only five active squads on Tare, but thankfully Ionoth
numbers are significantly down on all planets, and they've observed
the same sort of relaxing in the tension on the tears into
real-space, so the Taren and Kolaren squads are coping. Having
vastly more non-Setari manpower, they've made some progress in
charting a path through deep-space, but estimates for completion
are still in the months range.
Kolar's news was
unequivocally good. Their major Ionoth problem has long been
middle-sized roamers, the number of which have practically dropped
to nil since the disruption. They're also making moderate progress
on the complicated process of charting safe passage through the
tides of deep-space. There was a Kolaren in the room with that
whiteboard, and Tsur Selkie had a brief formal conversation with
him which was very funny because the Kolaren realised he had to be
a projection, and was so distracted by that he kept not listening
to Tsur Selkie.
Then I fell asleep, of
course, and woke in bed to find Kaoren curled around me, deeply
asleep. I'm so glad not to be all broken and wincey any more,
because there's few things nicer than waking wrapped in
Kaoren.
I've been reading the
news while debating waking him up. All the Tarens and Kolarens on
Muina have been very anxious for me to recover enough to check the
situation on their home worlds, and KOTIS sent out a press release
with the good news straight away. I've been managing otherwise to
keep out of the news the last couple of weeks, for the most part by
staying in and keeping my head down. I've been following a lot of
the debates about the laws being drafted, but have gotten a bit
tired of it.
Most of the other news
is about who has been granted various bits of land, and the
progress at Mesiath. The first 'New Muinan' baby was born a few
days ago. They called her 'Caszandra', and when I grimaced at that
Kaoren informed me that she was hardly the first baby lumbered with
my name, and certainly wouldn't be the last. 'Kaoren' has become a
lot more popular for boys, too, apparently.