“Uncertain Futures” (a Star Wars snippet)

“Who was on the comm?”

He glanced toward her and the look on his face told her exactly who’d called.  Her brow furrowed for a few seconds and she chewed on her lower lip.  It felt too soon, but he’d been here for nearly two months.  She’d known he wasn’t going to be able to stay forever, that at some point, he’d be recalled—pulled back to the work that was no longer hers.

The fact that it wasn’t her job anymore came as an odd relief, in fact, but she hadn’t admitted to it.  Not yet.

Watching him, she leaned against the corner where the living room wall met the hallway back toward the ‘fresher and bedrooms.  Her hair hung damp round her face, silver locks curling slightly, barely brushing the collar of her jacket.  How long would it take for it to grow back out again, to the rope of a braid she’d worn back when she was still a pilot, back when everything was shaded in many fewer shades of gray.  His gaze searched hers for a few moments.  She smiled wryly, one corner of her mouth kicking upward even as she knew the grief at his impending departure showed in her eyes, in every other curve and line of her face.

“When do you have to go?” she asked softly.

“Wheels up by 0900,” he said quietly, leaning back in his chair.  “They probably would’ve rather I left tonight, but you made reservations.  I wasn’t going to break a date.”

“Bobby, you didn’t have—”

“Yeah, I did.”  He unfolded from the chair, stretching his arms toward the ceiling for a moment before he crossed the space between them.  A knuckle scarred from some long-ago fight brushed against her cheek, lifting hair back from her face.  She smiled at him, reaching up to wrap her hand around his.  His gaze was steady on hers, his smile gentle, not quite sad.  “It’s the least I can do.”

“We both knew that you weren’t going to be able to stay forever,” she said.  “I am honestly shocked that they didn’t call you home sooner.”

He was silent for a second too long.  Her brow lifted.

“How many times did they ask you to come back?”

“Never directly,” he said.  “They never asked me directly to come back, not until just now.  They asked questions like ‘were you able to verify the circumstances’ and ‘is she sure about what happened.’  And then that stopped and they started to hint that they had an actual assignment for me that wasn’t a favor.  That—that wasn’t something I was doing for myself.”

She looked down, down at her stocking feet and the toes of his boots, her stomach twisting into knots.  “You came because Tag asked you.  Because she told you that something happened.”

“She sent me part of the report,” he admitted.  “I guess she thought I should know at least a little bit about what I was walking into.  I don’t know if she or someone else pulled some strings and made it look like an assignment or what, but…but I’m glad.  She asked me to come but as soon as I knew, I think I would’ve come anyway.  I definitely stayed because it was you.”

“Because you owed it to me,” she whispered.

“No,” he said, brow furrowing.  He tucked a knuckle under her chin, lifted her gaze to his.  “No, Kingston, I stayed because I wanted to.  Because I wouldn’t have felt right if I’d just left.”  His lips thinned and he glanced toward the comm for a moment, brow furrowing.  “It still doesn’t feel right to leave.”

“You have a job to do,” she said.  “I’ll be okay, Bobby.  The Empire doesn’t know where I am and no one here’s going to tell them.  If I’m safe anywhere, it’s here.”

He sighed, resting his forehead against hers.  “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.  Tonight, we’ll have dinner, maybe we’ll take a walk, and then in the morning, you’ll go—you’ll report in and go on to the next assignment.  It’s your job.  I know how it goes—it was mine, too.”

“It’s not fair,” he said softly, thumb stroking her cheek, tickling the skin at the corner of her mouth.  She smiled faintly.

“The galaxy isn’t exactly a fair place, is it?  We’ll manage.  You and I will both manage.  I will be fine.  I have to figure out what I’m doing next.  While you’ve been here, I’ve been able to put that off but honestly, I can’t do that forever—and you can’t stop doing what you’re doing.  It’s in your blood.  I see it the same way I see it when I look at Tag.  Pilots once but definitely something else now.”

He choked on a laugh, wrapping both arms around her and drawing her tight against his chest.  “And what about you?”

“A pilot once,” she said, resting her chin on his shoulder.  “Then a spy.  I don’t know.  I guess we’ll see.”

“Guess we will,” he murmured, then kissed her ear.  “What time were reservations?”

“We’ve got another hour before we have to leave.  I have to finish getting ready.”

He squeezed her again, then let go.  “All right.  I’ve got some calls to make, then, I guess.”

She pecked him on the cheek and stepped back.  “Try not to get too involved, huh?”

“Who me?”  He shot her a lopsided grin more suited to a scoundrel than a senator’s son.  “Never.”

She grinned back, swallowing a sudden flash of pain and worry, then turned back down the hallway to get ready for what felt like it might be their last night together for a long, long time.

“In the Grass” (a Star Wars snippet)

“You didn’t come to bed last night.”

She shifted her shoulders, drew the shawl tighter around her shoulders. The yarn was soft against her fingers as she tangled them through the knots of its pattern, the garment smelling of laundry soap, faintly, Dalsuna’s cologne. The patch of grass between the house and the edge of the water was small, but large enough for them to play with their son without too much fear of him toppling over into the canal. She sat in the center of that grass, her bare toes slowly going numb in the morning damp and chill, watching as the sun slowly crept up over the canal and the parkland beyond. It was a rare sight, that much green on the other side of the canal. How her husband had managed to find it, she wasn’t sure—nor had she ever asked.

She was wise enough now to know when to leave things alone.

Sometimes, at least.

“Tag?”

“I took a walk,” she said, patting a spot in the grass next to her. “I couldn’t sleep—wasn’t going to be able to sleep. I’d meant to clear my head and come back, but I ended up at Mickie’s and then I ended up at the school.”

“You went flying.”

She nodded, staring at the sunrise as he settled next to her. Calloused fingers wrapped around hers, squeezed gently. A faint smile curved her lips and she squeezed back, glancing at him. “I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

“Me, worry? Why would I worry? It’s not like my wife isn’t a former intelligence officer who’s probably pissed off more than her share of people on both sides of the not-war-anymore. It’s not like I’ve gotten used to you being there to reassure me when I wake up in a cold sweat at three in the morning after another nightmare.”

She winced. “I’m sorry, Dal.”

He exhaled a long breath, then wrapped his arms around her, resting his cheek against her braided hair as she leaned into his embrace. “It’s okay. It took a couple seconds, but I could still feel you, so that was enough.”

“I should’ve been here,” she murmured into the soft cotton of his shirt. She closed her eyes and breathed in, tension draining from them both with each breath, each beat of their hearts. “I hadn’t meant to be out all night. I thought I was just clearing my head.”

“The old ghosts swam back up, huh?”

She nodded, pressing her face against his shoulder. Her voice came muffled; likely he felt the words more than heard them. “There’s so many. And so much I just—left behind.”

“What brought it on this time? It’s usually not for no reason.”

“A letter from an old friend,” she said softly. “Reassurance that he’s okay. He told me I did the right thing.”

“But you’re still not sure.” He pulled back, peering down at her with a furrowed brow. Those green eyes of his snared her all over again, like they had the first time she’d seen him in the mess hall on a base that didn’t exist anymore a hundred light years away. “Even after all this time.”

“No,” she said slowly. “I did the right thing. But it’s not over. Not yet.”
His frown deepened and he canted his head to one side. “What’s not over?”

“The war,” she whispered, then leaned into his chest again. “We’ve all just stopped fighting for now. But it’s not over. I don’t know if it ever will be.”

“It is for us,” he said, squeezing her tight and burying his nose in his hair. He was quiet for a moment, then added, almost too quietly to hear, “At least for now.”

She nodded. “Yeah. At least for now.”

They sat there together in the grass as Corel cleared the horizon, its light glittering on the water of the canal and off the metal and glass of the city around them.

On nerd love and challenges

I’d meant to write this post yesterday, but instead here I am, in the post-Kenobi glow, writing it at 6:30 in the morning, halfway through a cup of coffee, listening to birds outside, the traffic on 4 Mile and Alpine, and the morning news. After two days of unseasonable heat, the weather’s broken and if I had the wherewithal, I could clean my patio table and chair and work outside for a bit this morning.

It is wherewithal that I do not think I possess this morning, nor would my cats appreciate it very much, since they’ve grown very used to cuddling me while I work.

None of this is what I intended to write about today, of course.
Anyone who has known me for any span of time knows that I am, at least on some level, a nerd, a geeky girl, however you’d like to describe it. I came to it early (thanks Mom, for some long-forgotten day when there was a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon on TV and you were doing my hair for something—I don’t know what it was, but it was at the old house and I remember it) and it kind of evolved from there. Star Trek was definitely my first nerd love, but others came behind it—and, in the case of Star Wars, quickly surpassed it.

I don’t remember seeing Star Wars until I was maybe eleven or twelve years old. We got the boxed set of movies at I think Birch Run one year. I remember sitting on the couch in the house I grew up in, watching it for the first time. I was maybe thirteen, maybe a little older. This was before the special editions, before sequels. It was even the early years of the EU—what’s now become the Star Wars Legends line. The first Star Wars book in our house wasn’t even mine, it was allegedly my brother’s, but you can probably guess where that book is now.
That’s right. On my bookshelf, tattered and worn, the blue-covered trade paperback of Heir to the Empire. After the X-Wing novels, the trilogy that started with that book is probably among the most-read books in my collection.

Star Wars is a nerd love that led me to another, one that defines me as equally as several others—it made me a gamer.

Historian. Writer. Gamer.

Yup, that’s me.

Really, this post was meant to be about gaming less than Star Wars, but understanding that nerd love—my many, many nerd loves, but that one in particular—really helps set up the challenge hinted at in this post’s title.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been considering issuing a challenge to myself with regard to blogging. At first, I thought maybe I’d do a month-long run of writing prompts—I did get a new camera, and it could be fun to do interesting image prompts. Slowly, though, as I continued to think, that idea was discarded, at least for now. It’s not to say I might not do it later, I’m just not going to do it right now.

No, I think that this month, in June, I challenge myself in a different way: playing around with something I’d long abandoned, which is developing things for tabletop RPGs. There was barely a night between 2000 and 2005 when I didn’t have a standing game to either run or play—the only nights excluded were either in the summer or reserved for a club meeting (and even then, sometimes there would be a game after a meeting).

I ran a few campaigns myself over the years. One was a large D&D game in my own homebrewed setting, two Forgotten Realms campaigns that became one, and a Star Wars campaign that lasted for more than a year. Those are probably the games I ran that I look back on the most fondly: Forgotten Realms and Star Wars.

Now, as I prepare to possibly run Star Wars for the first time in forever—and trust me, there is so much about my Star Wars gaming experience that didn’t make it into this post (like the 12 years I spent writing Star Wars online with some folks that I appreciate more and more the older I get, especially because they put up with me back in the day)—I’ve decided to also challenge myself to create characters, to create settings, to write adventures and post them for folks to do with what they will. Some of them, of course, will be set in my various writing worlds. Others will simply exist.

So, wish me luck. I’m getting back to my nerd loves, and challenging myself to try something a little new and a little daring and a lot ambitious.

We’ll see how this turns out.

Oh, by the way. Happy Pride.

Prompt for May 4, 2014 – Day 124

May the Fourth be with you.

I’m not a Star Wars fan.  Not at all.

Prompt Type: Music prompt

Prompt:

Music is “Throne Room and End Title” from Star Wars: A New Hope by John Williams.  Video courtesy of Youtube.


Got an idea for a prompt?  Email me at emklitzke (at) gmail (dot) com.

Prompt for February 18, 2014 – Day 49

Just about everyone’s seen Star Wars (and if you haven’t stop reading this post and go watch episodes IV-VI right now. RIGHT NOW.). Today’s prompt is inspired by the iconic opening scroll from that series.

Prompt Type: Opening Scroll
Prompt: Think of a project you’ve been working on and put together their opening scroll, their tease of history and hint at what’s to come, a la the Star Wars trilogy.

Alternatively, come up with something entirely new, write their opening scroll, and see what happens next!


Got an idea for a prompt? Email me at emklitzke (at) gmail (dot) com.