For Dinner: None
Mood: . Lost and alone.
Written in the Year of our Lord 3580, April  6th, Saturday night.
Location:  At the river  Nebulon, during the Sia festival. I wish I knew more....like exactly where..

    Let me explain how I write this. This is recorded by speaking subvocally, and it's recorded into a small nanorecorder inside my head.

     There is nothing for anyone to steal, it's too small to see. It's a record for my own benefit.
To make me think of the events of my life.

     Or it might serve as an epitaph.

      The next morning, we went out into the festival again, stopping at one place where a storyteller was spinning a story. It evidently was a hero story of one "family" of the Sia struggling against another. There were grins by some listening, but growing anger by others. I was trying to follow the story, trying to build my fluency in Naviscan, but Tiafen was growing nervous. The others had already moved off, but she stayed with me as bodyguard. She was growing increasingly nervous.

     "Let's be off, Redwine. This crowd is getting too excited for my tastes."

     I obediently shrugged and turned....then I heard a cry. I turned back...and one of the listeners had a  knife dyed with the orange blood of a Lokiites, and the storyteller's throat was slit.

     There was dead silence for a second, and then Tiafen grabbed my shoulder. "Come on, Redwine...this is not our fight."

     But within seconds, the fight was everywhere. An old-fashioned feud had erupted with deadly consequences. I heard Tiafen's gun go off, but a sea of battling forms suddenly seperated me from her.  A knife flashed at me, and I felt something blazing hot along my arm. I lashed out like a kickboxer and whoever stabbed me fell. Yet the crowd was sweeping me along. I didn't hear Tiafen's gun anymore. Was she overcome by the numbers and dead? I was jostled off an interconnecting bridge over a canal.

       For one drawn out second I was suspended between earth and sky. Then the water grabbed me.

      Shock from the wound made me feel sleepy. I managed to keep afloat...swimming is one thing I had always been able to do well ever since a child...but the current carried me along.

      I felt a hook on the back of my shirt, minutes later, and I was hauled out of the water by a Sia craft. I heard screams from the river shores, and guessed it had erupted into a full scale riot. Two young females, the equivelent of the late teens, stared at the alien they had fished out of the river.

      They looked at my necklace, which indicated my weregild, and one said, "We don't dare kill it.  The Fel hierarchy would set every assassin on the planet on our heels, with a reward that high for this thing's killer."

      "I can speak, you know," I said.

      They looked at me, and then looked at each other. "Too bad maiming is similarly a subject of reward. I'd like to cut off his tongue as a momento."

      "That thing on his back looks complicated. It might fetch some money...."

     "True."

      They were talking about the nanoprocessor.
 
      The machine that converted Lokiite food to something that wouldn't poison me in the long run.
     I tried to fight, but I was too weak, from the shock of the wound and the cold rushing water.
They lifted it from me easily.

     "Get rid of it," said one.

      I was then kicked off the ship, falling into the water again.

     Miles downstream, I finally washed ashore. I was out of sight of the town where the festival was being held, and could only tell from the direction of the current, which way to go towards it.

      I had a wound in my side which hurts when I walk.
 
      I had no nanoprocessor, which means I can't eat anything I happen across.

     I am lost on a world where most people would as soon kill someone as they would sneeze.
All I had for a steering point was the massize, quickly running Nebulon river. There were no sentients....Lokiite or human....that I could see.

      This world still had large stretches of uncultivated land.

      This is a really stupid way to die, if that's what's going to happen.

 

                             Yesterday | Tomorrow
 
 
 
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