Magic Under Construction: TOMU 2-11
May. 2nd, 2011 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted: 4/29/2011
Status: In Progress.
Last Updated: 5:30
Word Count: ~2900
Hours writing: 2
[3 hours in. Near to done. Need to place Two at the table and put a conclusion on the chapter and the day.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there most of the time."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I'd only seen her once before, and that time she'd been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.
"Yeah," Hazel said. "You know her? Guess I shouldn't be too surprised... I guess you're sort of into her scene, aren't you?"
"We've met her in passing," Amaranth said.
"Anyway, she's obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can't say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like," Hazel said.
"So she and Caron are still together, then?" Amaranth said.
"In a manner of speaking," Hazel said. "Obviously Caron can't visit her here... dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if 'water' means 'fire'... and this is men's territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn't seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased."
I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew... or strongly suspected... that the "liberty" in this case was more literal. Nae's education had been previously interrupted by Caron's entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she'd re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.
The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We'd come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible... golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.
With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property... but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren't people.
That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They now had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse... the notion of trying to get animal cruelty laws to apply to intelligent, free-willed beings had been too bitter a pill for many abolitionists to swallow.
There was now a slave welfare movement separate from the abolition one, but the fact was there wasn't a lot of opposition on either front. The changing economic situation meant that slavery had become a plaything for the rich and powerful. Out-and-out slave labor still existed in places where modernization was seen as too expensive, and those places tended to be remote and far removed from the public eye. There was no public face of slavery any more because the public in general rarely had to face up to it.
I'd had plenty of opportunities to think about it in the past year, having been targeted for slavery by Mercy, but for most people it didn't even impinge on their consciousness. It was easy to forget that slaves existed, or to accept their lack of personhood as a matter of actual and not just legal fact.
Even my passing acquaintance with Caron was tied up in the issue... she had tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to trap me in a position where she could sell me to Mercy. She used the Imperium laws on slavery... which allowed shopkeepers with clearly posted signs to take thieves as slaves... to basically enforce her own legal death penalty, since that was what usually happened to people Mercy owned.
She shrugged it off as no more than people who try to steal from her should expect or deserve, but it was impossible for me to think of her as a good or even decent person. That made it difficult for me to know what to think of Nae, at once her victim and loving partner.
It had been Nae's disapproval that had made Caron's efforts to snare me half-hearted, but Nae stayed with her knowing that she was the sort of person who would sell another into bondage and death. She'd accepted her legal slavery as a point of pride until it became inconvenient and then she'd cast it off, an option most slaves didn't have.
The appeal wasn't completely foreign to me... after all, I enjoyed the feeling of being objectified through play. I found it relaxing to yield control. During my first year with Amaranth, I had encountered the idea that what I was doing was disrespectful to the people who really were used as toys and treated as objects under the law.
It had gnawed at me, but I'd come to understand the comparison was false. I hoped one day to have the resources to make a real contribution to the cause of abolition, but for the present time... regardless of what I did or did not do with Amaranth... I wasn't condoning or participating in the institution of slavery. We treated each other with decency, and we tried to do the same for others.
Of course, for all that I condemned Caron, there was the fact that I enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in a country that had been built with slave labor and that still gave cover to atrocities. It was something I'd always known about... well, not always. We were all children once.
My adolescence and what followed had not given me much room to believe that the world was a fluffy place full of bright shining golden lights... I knew there were ugly things in it because I'd been told that I was one of them, and I feared what golden lights there were as things that would only harm me.
My grandmother had always believed the Imperial Republic of Magisteria's was only flawed insofar as all mortal governments are flawed. She'd made it clear that she believed it was the next best thing to governance by the divine hand of Lord Khersis himself. I'd been pretty willing to accept the dichotomies of good versus evil that she had set up for me when they impugned my soul, but to my credit I'd sometimes been less willing to believe her when she started talking about the faults and failings of others.
Oh, sure, I swallowed quite a bit of her prejudiced bullshit... I was nine when she first took me in, and I was taken in as only a child can be. I was still unraveling the assumptions she'd planted in my head after more than a year of freedom. But I'd never been willing to believe that the plight of slaves was something they brought on by themselves, or that it was the will of Khersis.
"Wow, I guess Nae's not very popular," Hazel said, misattributing the sudden silence around the table. While Ian and Steff hadn't been present for our interactions with Caron and Nae, they knew the story. Dee probably did, too. She was the model of discretion, but she was also a telepath and empath with elven hearing who had lived in the room next door to me for my entire freshman year.
"Nae seemed like a sweet girl," Amaranth said. "Or young woman, I suppose. We just don't know her very well."
"Ah, I know what you mean. She's an odd duck," Hazel said. "Wears a collar and sleeps on the floor. It can be hard to get past that sort of thing."
"We should probably just spend more time with her," Amaranth said.
"You're welcome to come over any time," Hazel said. "She seems like she could use a few more friendly faces around... she jumps at everything. Even her own shadow's afraid of its own shadow. Anyway, we've a bit more room for entertaining than you do, I expect."
[2.5 hours in. Going great. Found the "heart" of this chapter.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there most of the time."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I'd only seen her once before, and that time she'd been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.
"Yeah," Hazel said. "You know her? Guess I shouldn't be too surprised... I guess you're sort of into her scene, aren't you?"
"We've met her in passing," Amaranth said.
"Anyway, she's obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can't say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like," Hazel said.
"So she and Caron are still together, then?" Amaranth said.
"In a manner of speaking," Hazel said. "Obviously Caron can't visit her here... dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if 'water' means 'fire'... and this is men's territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn't seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased."
I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew... or strongly suspected... that the "liberty" in this case was more literal. Nae's education had been previously interrupted by Caron's entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she'd re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.
The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We'd come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible... golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.
With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property... but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren't people.
That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They now had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse... the notion of trying to get animal cruelty laws to apply to intelligent, free-willed beings had been too bitter a pill for many abolitionists to swallow.
There was now a slave welfare movement separate from the abolition one, but the fact was there wasn't a lot of opposition on either front. The changing economic situation meant that slavery had become a plaything for the rich and powerful. Out-and-out slave labor still existed in places where modernization was seen as too expensive, and those places tended to be remote and far removed from the public eye. There was no public face of slavery any more because the public in general rarely had to face up to it.
I'd had plenty of opportunities to think about it in the past year, having been targeted for slavery by Mercy, but for most people it didn't even impinge on their consciousness. It was easy to forget that slaves existed, or to accept their lack of personhood as a matter of actual and not just legal fact.
Even my passing acquaintance with Caron was tied up in the issue... she had tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to trap me in a position where she could sell me to Mercy. She used the Imperium laws on slavery... which allowed shopkeepers with clearly posted signs to take thieves as slaves... to basically enforce her own legal death penalty, since that was what usually happened to people Mercy owned.
She shrugged it off as no more than people who try to steal from her should expect or deserve, but it was impossible for me to think of her as a good or even decent person. That made it difficult for me to know what to think of Nae, at once her victim and loving partner.
It had been Nae's disapproval that had made Caron's efforts to snare me half-hearted, but Nae stayed with her knowing that she was the sort of person who would sell another into bondage and death. She'd accepted her legal slavery as a point of pride until it became inconvenient and then she'd cast it off, an option most slaves didn't have.
The appeal wasn't completely foreign to me... after all, I enjoyed the feeling of being objectified through play. I found it relaxing to yield control. During my first year with Amaranth, I had encountered the idea that what I was doing was disrespectful to the people who really were used as toys and treated as objects under the law.
It had gnawed at me, but I'd come to understand the comparison was false. I hoped one day to have the resources to make a real contribution to the cause of abolition, but for the present time... regardless of what I did or did not do with Amaranth... I wasn't condoning or participating in the institution of slavery. We treated each other with decency, and we tried to do the same for others.
Of course, for all that I condemned Caron, there was the fact that I enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in a country that had been built with slave labor and that still gave cover to atrocities. It was something I'd always known about... well, not always. We were all children once.
My adolescence and what followed had not given me much room to believe that the world was a fluffy place full of bright shining golden lights... I knew there were ugly things in it because I'd been told that I was one of them, and I feared what golden lights there were as things that would only harm me.
[2 hours in. More progress now.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there most of the time."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I'd only seen her once before, and that time she'd been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.
"Yeah," Hazel said. "You know her? Guess I shouldn't be too surprised... I guess you're sort of into her scene, aren't you?"
"We've met her in passing," Amaranth said.
"Anyway, she's obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can't say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like," Hazel said.
"So she and Caron are still together, then?" Amaranth said.
"In a manner of speaking," Hazel said. "Obviously Caron can't visit her here... dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if 'water' means 'fire'... and this is men's territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn't seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased."
I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew... or strongly suspected... that the "liberty" in this case was more literal. Nae's education had been previously interrupted by Caron's entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she'd re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.
The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We'd come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible... golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.
With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property... but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren't people.
That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse.
[1.5 hour in. Not a lot of new writing, had to go over the old stuff, edit it, and remove or fix some stuff that's redundant with the published version of chapter 10.
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold had seemed familiar. I'd never actually seen her when she wasn't wearing something like a full-body hood, but her size was pretty distinctive.
[1 hour. This is stuff I wrote for last chapter that got split off.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was... in part... a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
I must have been blushing madly as []
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Ah, fuck those bitches right in their vaginas," Steff said, which was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex wearing shoes on a boat. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their immortal population. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed.
"Let's not give them any further satisfaction," Amaranth said.
"They don't look too satisfied to me," Ian said.
"I meant let's talk about something else," Amaranth clarified.
"Elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law
"Dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I said.
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked her. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold had seemed familiar. I'd never actually seen her when she wasn't wearing something like a full-body hood, but her size was pretty distinctive.
Status: In Progress.
Last Updated: 5:30
Word Count: ~2900
Hours writing: 2
[3 hours in. Near to done. Need to place Two at the table and put a conclusion on the chapter and the day.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there most of the time."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I'd only seen her once before, and that time she'd been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.
"Yeah," Hazel said. "You know her? Guess I shouldn't be too surprised... I guess you're sort of into her scene, aren't you?"
"We've met her in passing," Amaranth said.
"Anyway, she's obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can't say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like," Hazel said.
"So she and Caron are still together, then?" Amaranth said.
"In a manner of speaking," Hazel said. "Obviously Caron can't visit her here... dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if 'water' means 'fire'... and this is men's territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn't seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased."
I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew... or strongly suspected... that the "liberty" in this case was more literal. Nae's education had been previously interrupted by Caron's entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she'd re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.
The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We'd come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible... golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.
With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property... but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren't people.
That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They now had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse... the notion of trying to get animal cruelty laws to apply to intelligent, free-willed beings had been too bitter a pill for many abolitionists to swallow.
There was now a slave welfare movement separate from the abolition one, but the fact was there wasn't a lot of opposition on either front. The changing economic situation meant that slavery had become a plaything for the rich and powerful. Out-and-out slave labor still existed in places where modernization was seen as too expensive, and those places tended to be remote and far removed from the public eye. There was no public face of slavery any more because the public in general rarely had to face up to it.
I'd had plenty of opportunities to think about it in the past year, having been targeted for slavery by Mercy, but for most people it didn't even impinge on their consciousness. It was easy to forget that slaves existed, or to accept their lack of personhood as a matter of actual and not just legal fact.
Even my passing acquaintance with Caron was tied up in the issue... she had tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to trap me in a position where she could sell me to Mercy. She used the Imperium laws on slavery... which allowed shopkeepers with clearly posted signs to take thieves as slaves... to basically enforce her own legal death penalty, since that was what usually happened to people Mercy owned.
She shrugged it off as no more than people who try to steal from her should expect or deserve, but it was impossible for me to think of her as a good or even decent person. That made it difficult for me to know what to think of Nae, at once her victim and loving partner.
It had been Nae's disapproval that had made Caron's efforts to snare me half-hearted, but Nae stayed with her knowing that she was the sort of person who would sell another into bondage and death. She'd accepted her legal slavery as a point of pride until it became inconvenient and then she'd cast it off, an option most slaves didn't have.
The appeal wasn't completely foreign to me... after all, I enjoyed the feeling of being objectified through play. I found it relaxing to yield control. During my first year with Amaranth, I had encountered the idea that what I was doing was disrespectful to the people who really were used as toys and treated as objects under the law.
It had gnawed at me, but I'd come to understand the comparison was false. I hoped one day to have the resources to make a real contribution to the cause of abolition, but for the present time... regardless of what I did or did not do with Amaranth... I wasn't condoning or participating in the institution of slavery. We treated each other with decency, and we tried to do the same for others.
Of course, for all that I condemned Caron, there was the fact that I enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in a country that had been built with slave labor and that still gave cover to atrocities. It was something I'd always known about... well, not always. We were all children once.
My adolescence and what followed had not given me much room to believe that the world was a fluffy place full of bright shining golden lights... I knew there were ugly things in it because I'd been told that I was one of them, and I feared what golden lights there were as things that would only harm me.
My grandmother had always believed the Imperial Republic of Magisteria's was only flawed insofar as all mortal governments are flawed. She'd made it clear that she believed it was the next best thing to governance by the divine hand of Lord Khersis himself. I'd been pretty willing to accept the dichotomies of good versus evil that she had set up for me when they impugned my soul, but to my credit I'd sometimes been less willing to believe her when she started talking about the faults and failings of others.
Oh, sure, I swallowed quite a bit of her prejudiced bullshit... I was nine when she first took me in, and I was taken in as only a child can be. I was still unraveling the assumptions she'd planted in my head after more than a year of freedom. But I'd never been willing to believe that the plight of slaves was something they brought on by themselves, or that it was the will of Khersis.
"Wow, I guess Nae's not very popular," Hazel said, misattributing the sudden silence around the table. While Ian and Steff hadn't been present for our interactions with Caron and Nae, they knew the story. Dee probably did, too. She was the model of discretion, but she was also a telepath and empath with elven hearing who had lived in the room next door to me for my entire freshman year.
"Nae seemed like a sweet girl," Amaranth said. "Or young woman, I suppose. We just don't know her very well."
"Ah, I know what you mean. She's an odd duck," Hazel said. "Wears a collar and sleeps on the floor. It can be hard to get past that sort of thing."
"We should probably just spend more time with her," Amaranth said.
"You're welcome to come over any time," Hazel said. "She seems like she could use a few more friendly faces around... she jumps at everything. Even her own shadow's afraid of its own shadow. Anyway, we've a bit more room for entertaining than you do, I expect."
[2.5 hours in. Going great. Found the "heart" of this chapter.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there most of the time."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I'd only seen her once before, and that time she'd been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.
"Yeah," Hazel said. "You know her? Guess I shouldn't be too surprised... I guess you're sort of into her scene, aren't you?"
"We've met her in passing," Amaranth said.
"Anyway, she's obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can't say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like," Hazel said.
"So she and Caron are still together, then?" Amaranth said.
"In a manner of speaking," Hazel said. "Obviously Caron can't visit her here... dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if 'water' means 'fire'... and this is men's territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn't seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased."
I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew... or strongly suspected... that the "liberty" in this case was more literal. Nae's education had been previously interrupted by Caron's entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she'd re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.
The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We'd come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible... golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.
With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property... but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren't people.
That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They now had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse... the notion of trying to get animal cruelty laws to apply to intelligent, free-willed beings had been too bitter a pill for many abolitionists to swallow.
There was now a slave welfare movement separate from the abolition one, but the fact was there wasn't a lot of opposition on either front. The changing economic situation meant that slavery had become a plaything for the rich and powerful. Out-and-out slave labor still existed in places where modernization was seen as too expensive, and those places tended to be remote and far removed from the public eye. There was no public face of slavery any more because the public in general rarely had to face up to it.
I'd had plenty of opportunities to think about it in the past year, having been targeted for slavery by Mercy, but for most people it didn't even impinge on their consciousness. It was easy to forget that slaves existed, or to accept their lack of personhood as a matter of actual and not just legal fact.
Even my passing acquaintance with Caron was tied up in the issue... she had tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to trap me in a position where she could sell me to Mercy. She used the Imperium laws on slavery... which allowed shopkeepers with clearly posted signs to take thieves as slaves... to basically enforce her own legal death penalty, since that was what usually happened to people Mercy owned.
She shrugged it off as no more than people who try to steal from her should expect or deserve, but it was impossible for me to think of her as a good or even decent person. That made it difficult for me to know what to think of Nae, at once her victim and loving partner.
It had been Nae's disapproval that had made Caron's efforts to snare me half-hearted, but Nae stayed with her knowing that she was the sort of person who would sell another into bondage and death. She'd accepted her legal slavery as a point of pride until it became inconvenient and then she'd cast it off, an option most slaves didn't have.
The appeal wasn't completely foreign to me... after all, I enjoyed the feeling of being objectified through play. I found it relaxing to yield control. During my first year with Amaranth, I had encountered the idea that what I was doing was disrespectful to the people who really were used as toys and treated as objects under the law.
It had gnawed at me, but I'd come to understand the comparison was false. I hoped one day to have the resources to make a real contribution to the cause of abolition, but for the present time... regardless of what I did or did not do with Amaranth... I wasn't condoning or participating in the institution of slavery. We treated each other with decency, and we tried to do the same for others.
Of course, for all that I condemned Caron, there was the fact that I enjoyed the benefits of citizenship in a country that had been built with slave labor and that still gave cover to atrocities. It was something I'd always known about... well, not always. We were all children once.
My adolescence and what followed had not given me much room to believe that the world was a fluffy place full of bright shining golden lights... I knew there were ugly things in it because I'd been told that I was one of them, and I feared what golden lights there were as things that would only harm me.
[2 hours in. More progress now.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there most of the time."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold in my class had seemed slightly familiar. I'd only seen her once before, and that time she'd been fully ensconced in bondage gear, but her size was very distinctive.
"Yeah," Hazel said. "You know her? Guess I shouldn't be too surprised... I guess you're sort of into her scene, aren't you?"
"We've met her in passing," Amaranth said.
"Anyway, she's obviously got nothing to say against dating a dwarf, and as long as she is, then Shiel can't say anything against Andy without it getting all awkward-like," Hazel said.
"So she and Caron are still together, then?" Amaranth said.
"In a manner of speaking," Hazel said. "Obviously Caron can't visit her here... dwarven men and women mix like oil and water, if 'water' means 'fire'... and this is men's territory, in their eyes. Nae said that Caron is letting her have her liberty while she finishes her education, though she doesn't seem to be in any real hurry to chase after anyone, or be chased."
I exchanged a look with Amaranth. We both knew... or strongly suspected... that the "liberty" in this case was more literal. Nae's education had been previously interrupted by Caron's entirely legal enslavement of her, as punishment for trying to steal from her store on a dare. Caron claimed to have offered Nae freedom papers many times since then, but Nae had always torn them up. If she'd re-enrolled in the university it meant she must have finally accepted them.
The realities of slavery in the Imperium were brutal. We'd come all the way up to the point of nearly abolishing the institution about half a century before, when it had become apparent that legally and philosophically an entity could either be a person or property but not both. The improvements in enchantment and automation had helped bring us to that point by making slave labor less economically feasible... golems were expensive, but so were slaves, and golems lasted longer and could be made to fulfill specific purposes better.
With demand for slaves slacking, universal rights activists had pushed for legal abolition. Unfortunately, the entities that were in favor of the status quo wielded more power and influence, and so when the question had come before the Dread Tribunal, they had ruled that yes, a person could not be property... but rather than ruling the institution of slavery untenable, they had ruled that slaves weren't people.
That was the end of any legal protection slaves had enjoyed. They had fewer rights than a hunting dog or a draft horse.
[1.5 hour in. Not a lot of new writing, had to go over the old stuff, edit it, and remove or fix some stuff that's redundant with the published version of chapter 10.
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe that the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was in part a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said, blushing madly.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Why give them the satisfaction of letting them know they can run you off?" Hazel said.
"Hazel's right," Steff said. "Fuck those bitches right in their vaginas."
Across the crowded floor, the elves visibly stiffened, their own sidelong conversations skidding to an abrupt halt. As vulgar as it was to anyone who understood Pax, among elves it was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex on a boat while wearing shoes. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their unaging population.
"That isn't quite what I said," Hazel said.
"Whatever," Steff said. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed and were starting to slink off, giving as much of an impression as they could muster that they were leaving of their own accord, because they had better things to do.
"I'd expect elves to be more grown-up," Hazel said. "Aren't most of those folks in their fifties or so by the time they go off to school?"
"Yeah, but elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law... but their own folks will treat whatever they're doing as a childish hobby, sometimes even after they come of age. Like, 'Oh, you're still playing at being an investment banker?'"
"Ah, see, dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "My Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since, you know, last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I confirmed.
The slaver Mercy had once offered me an almost unfathomable sum of money if I would have a girl with one of her "pet" half-demons, so she could breed even more of them. This was her back-up plan... her own preference was that I sell myself to her. As horrifying as the whole thing was on the surface, it would have potentially required me to have as many children as it took to get a girl one.
"Mother Khaele hears prayers on that score, but it's an area where it's really hard to say if she ever acknowledges them," Amaranth said. "There's definitely no mortal power that can force the matter."
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked Hazel. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold had seemed familiar. I'd never actually seen her when she wasn't wearing something like a full-body hood, but her size was pretty distinctive.
[1 hour. This is stuff I wrote for last chapter that got split off.]
The Arch's dining hall was a smaller domed circle that slightly overlapped the main floor. Where the seating area protruded into the main body of the student life center, it was surrounded by a low wall to keep the open-air feeling.
It seemed more like a restaurant than a cafeteria, at least compared to the one in the student union. It was still buffet style, but more of the food was self-service, kept in heated or cooled trays on islands in the middle of the floor. The line of counters in front of the prep area were only for made-to-order stuff, which had been added to the menu as a solution to the problem of students with more specialized diet needs.
Goblinoids and reptilians can't digest milk and its products. Neither, for that matter, can a lot of mammalian humanoids. Some races have traditionally preferred food that was quite a bit more or less cooked than local human cooking methods traditionally leave it. Vegetarians... whether by nature, divine edict, or inclination... also found themselves with a lot more options at the Arch.
"Would anybody have any objection to eating here more often?" Amaranth asked. She had a grilled eggplant sandwich, on bread that had been certified vegan.
"I confess I find myself conflicted on that score," Dee said. She had the top of some kind of mushroom, as large as a steak and prepared in the same fashion. "While the food here is certainly more palatable... and it is easier to avoid troublesome grains... I do believe the stated goal of fostering a welcoming atmosphere for all, while laudable, has not been met."
I had somewhat naively wondered if the reason she'd pulled her cloak around her and lowered the hood over her face was just because the more open construction left her feeling exposed. Now I realized what I... what most of us... had overlooked. I was so used to seeing Dee and Steff hanging out together that it had never occurred to me how uncomfortable she might be in a place where surface elves gathered, or a place that was... in part... a monument to surface elves and their culture.
I didn't want to be too conspicuous about looking around, but I didn't have to be... a group of five elven girls was lounging around just outside the low wall around the dining area, glaring daggers at our group. They were wearing gowns of gossamer-light material in the style that Steff's more generously cut dress imitated. Two of them had scarves over their mouths, and one had a lacy veil covering her whole face.
"Yeah, I'm not really digging that part of the scenery myself," Steff said. "I mean, there are reasons I lived in Harlowe and not Treehome, even before I met Viktor, you know?" She put her hands under her breasts and gave them a little shake, saying something else about how the bouncing bits didn't help the bouncing bits helping the bouncing...
"Close your mouth, baby, your sandwich is falling out," Amaranth said.
"I wish I could break her that way," Ian said.
"I wish I could break her the other way," Steff said.
I must have been blushing madly as []
"I'm sorry, I guess I was staring a little bit," I said.
"Oh, honey, you weren't doing that, believe me," Steff said.
"There's nothing wrong with honest and open appreciation of your lover's physical form," Amaranth said. "Anyway... I guess I wouldn't want to make you two have to choose between being uncomfortable and dining with us."
"Ah, fuck those bitches right in their vaginas," Steff said, which was a bit like accusing a gnome's mother of having sex wearing shoes on a boat. Even in mixed-sex relationships, elves avoided procreative intercourse as a way of managing their immortal population. "If they're going to glare, that means they're uncomfortable, and if they're uncomfortable they can leave."
"For the present time, I am inclined to agree," Dee said. "I may find that my resolve weakens as my desire to eat in peace grows, but for now I say let them scowl as they will. We are as welcome here as they are."
"You know what would really give them something to scowl at?" Steff asked.
"No, but I greatly fear that I am about to learn," Dee said.
"If you and I just started making out in the middle of the room," Steff said.
Dee gave this suggestion the response she thought it deserved, which is to say that she ignored it completely. Our audience, which could hear every word we were saying, was not as good at controlling its reaction... they all looked a mixture of revolted and embarrassed.
"Let's not give them any further satisfaction," Amaranth said.
"They don't look too satisfied to me," Ian said.
"I meant let's talk about something else," Amaranth clarified.
"Elven kids don't get to join grown-up society until they turn a hundred," Steff said. "It seems pretty awesome for the first decade or so but then you run out of stuff to do. Some of them end up joining human society, since they're technically adults under Imperial law
"Dwarves aren't anything like that," Hazel said. "Andy had to work for a living for better than eleven years before they'd let him come here. Dwarves don't get anything for free. They owe their clan service for every year they're raised. Not a bad system, to my mind. Let kids be kids, let grown-ups be grown-ups, and in between they get plenty of time to find out how the world really works while their noses are to the grindstone."
"Would you really want to do more than a decade of hard labor before you got to do anything you wanted with your life?" I asked.
"Can't say how it would have suited me, since it didn't happen," Hazel said. "But, I mean, it seems like a better way of making sure everyone goes out into the world with her head screwed on straight than what most kinds of folks do. If Andy and I ever do have a kid... and we have given it a fair amount of thought, since last year... I'm not sure I'd mind raising them the dwarven way. At twenty-eight, he'd be just grown-up anyway."
"Really personal question," Ian said.
"Ask it," Hazel said.
"What would happen if you two had a girl?" Ian asked. "A little half-dwarven girl. Would he go all grrr-smash on her when she grows up?"
"Well... that's one of the reasons we're still thinking," Hazel said. "Neither one of us would mind a boy, but so far as I know there isn't any way to work that out in advance."
"There isn't," I said.
"Doesn't dating a dwarf get awkward when you're rooming with a kobold?" Ian asked her. "Or two kobolds, I guess."
"Closer to one and a half," Hazel said. "Granted Shiel's just a bitty slip of a thing of to begin with, but Nae's downright, what do you call it, diminutive. And quiet, too... I could almost forget she was there."
"Did you say Nae?" Amaranth said.
Nae... that was why the tiny kobold had seemed familiar. I'd never actually seen her when she wasn't wearing something like a full-body hood, but her size was pretty distinctive.