Wish On the Moon

(A scene from Grismara)

Tenement blocks rose up into the grey evening sky, their facades a repetition of windows and balconies broken up only by clothes lines and curtains. Vadim knew the way each room smelled (of mildew and sweet mold and cabbage and the tang of sewage pipes that leaked but never really broke). He knew how each one felt inside over the winter when the air was sharply cold in the morning and then humid and heavy as the day progressed and bodies awoke and the stove was left on. He could remember the sounds in each tiny box, the muffled cries of infants and the muffled shouts of men and women arguing or making love mingled into a constant low roar interrupted occasionally by the drone of the elevated rail overhead. The hallways smelled of smoke from pipes and cigarettes and the rich smell of tobacco mingled with the acrid scent of Vacorre which was made in gallon jugs from antifreeze and the insides of small batteries and sometimes exploded violently on the aspirant chemist.

A light snow had begun to fall and it disguised the scraggling grass that grew around rusting playground equipment. For a few sweet hours the snow would hide everything and it would sparkle under the lights of the streetlamps with their curious blue glow. It was snowing back on the military base too, it had begun when Vadim had started his leave and would continue (he suspected) until he went back to his medic’s training. 

Standing in front of this building he could see himself as a child walking out into the snowfall. There was a blessed time just before dawn where the night time denizens of the courtyard had either left or fallen asleep in alcoves and gutters but before the working men rose in time to get to their construction sites and kitchens. The lights in the tenement windows were out and the world was asleep. There in that silent world a little boy with dark hair and gloves and boots too big for his skinny frame marched into the snow and dreamt of a quiet place and the peacefulness of a countryside he had seen in books and films and once, distant, beyond the edge of the Enclave Wall from a seat on an elevated rail. 

That same snow would reach the parks in the Enclave’s centre, falling over fountains and lush grass but it wouldn’t cover them. The heating and the lights in those parks kept them safe from winter and made them open greenhouses where it was always springtime. But here by the tenements it was winter and winter was quiet.

“Oi fugite, what are you doing around here?” came a boy’s voice. In the next few hours the boys would cede the courtyards to the older men but now they reigned supreme. A pack of five of them in coats that were far too thin for the weather tramped along in a little knot. One held a bottle Vadim recognised as cider, the cheap stuff he had drunk at their age when you only needed a little sip to approach drunkeness and the calm of incipient oblivion. 

“What do you think your friends are going to do, Volodya, kick me to death?” Vadim asked, squinting behind his glasses at the boy in front. He hitched his shoulder up and the rifle on his back clinked audibly against his backpack. Some of the younger boys shied back. The rifle wasn’t loaded, it was (in fact) never loaded, but it was just the same to be cautious.

“Sure, maybe they will! That’s what we do to fugitea isn’t it lads?” Volodya (who went by Vladimir with his little friends but never at home) asked. The boys gave a mixed reaction as Volodya was not quite the public speaker he dreamed he was. Violence was a part of life but these boys were too young to dish it out just yet. Vadim tucked his hands in his pockets. 

“Suit yourselves,” Vadim said and started to walk toward the building. 

“Hey wait! You can’t go in there!” Volodya said, running away from the boys and coming up beside Vadim. He was tall enough to reach Vadim’s shoulder now, and Vadim expected his brother might outgrow him someday soon. “Pare says you’re not allowed back. He says he’ll knock your teeth out if he sees you around.”

“Does he?” Vadim asked, stopping now. 

“Yeah, because you’re militsiya you’re not one of us anymore,” Volodya said. Vadim felt a sudden pang of guilt for leaving, after all he’d abandoned Volodya to the wolves (or the Big Bad Wolf in this case). Like all of the other boys drinking that bottle of cider Volodya would quit school as soon as he was allowed to work for The Family. He would lay roofs or plaster walls and do a shoddy job of either and then come home to a family he’d started when he was too young to know any better with the first girl he’d ever spoken a full sentence too who wasn’t blood related. 

“I suppose not, but I thought I’d stop by to see Mare anyway. Then I’ll go and Pare never needs to know I was here. Unless you tell him, but why should you?” Vadim reasoned. They were under the overhang now and there was no snow falling here. “What are you? Pare’s little baby? Little Volodya doing whatever Pare tells him to? I thought you were tougher than that.” 

“I… I guess maybe…” 

“Go on, stand up straight if you’re going to fight me. You might as well get a few knocks in before I break your nose in front of your boys. Or you tell them you made me give you all the money in my wallet and you buy them some dinner because you’re in charge here, aren’t you? You’re running the courtyard today and you made a call and got something out of it.” Vadim turned slightly, blocking his view from the boys in the courtyard and slipped a few coins out of his pocket. He held them out to Volodya. “What if Pare finds out you’ve been here?” Volodya asked. He was already taking the coins and pocketing them. “Then you take your knocks if he knocks you,” Vadim said with a shrug. Being here in the doorway made him feel callous and hard. He didn’t like it. He was not himself anymore and he wondered which of those selves he even was. “If he’s in a mood he’ll find something just the same.” “Sure, alright,” Volodya said. He held out a hand to shake Vadim’s. Vadim took it. “Good to see you, granfrè.”

“Good to see you too, tifrè,” Vadim answered. 

He went into the hallways and navigated the narrow stairwells where his people huddled in corners and shuddered at the sound of footsteps. He had grown up on stories of travelling Kometya, wanderers and poets and musicians and traders who went freely about the world in luminous wagons and brightly painted ships. Now they were relegated to these concrete blocks and forgotten but they had not forgotten the open road and dreamed of it.

Lady Starheart existed for a long time before I actually played her and in my head she was Flashheart from Blackadder but with breasts (full stop, end character idea). She was supposed to drift in, fly to Grismara, provide some interesting easter eggs about another character I never intended to introduce, and fly off on her merry way. 

About that.

@aldridge-asset‘s Rook and @wethatkindoforc‘s Jeremy helped me come up with some necessary character interaction for her before she was introduced and... the more I played her, the more she felt right. By the time she was sleeping with Morty (thanks and sorry, @pleasantcowboykid) she had a couple millenia of backstory and plan for development. She has probably been my favorite character to play, incorporating bones from my space pirate Lili and those little aforementioned easter eggs. She even ended up with an arch-nemesis, @eldanseeker. 

Dr. Elenia Volescu was a character I struggled to define at first. I knew a lot about her: I knew she was a doctor, I knew she had been important on Grismara, I knew her husband was dead. I knew all of the facts of her life but she was a struggle for me. I stared at her biography for ages, trying to figure out who she was. The song above helped but what really got me was a line from Reno 911!, where someone refers to Trudy Wiegel’s relationship as cute and she snaps, “Shut up, you don't think it's cute! You think it's funny, and you think it's pathetic And you think it's sad."

Somehow that was it, this whole person opened up. All of the little pieces of her personality, the wistfulness and loneliness, the way she’d sit with @shipsidescuttlebutt  ‘s Rafi and watch old romantic movies... It all fit together around that dumb line from (history’s greatest comedy broadcast program) this dumb comedy show.

My very first character on Wildstar was an aurin named Liliandra, who was a space pirate turned corporate spaceship navigator. She didn't end up fitting in, though I incorporated some elements of her into Lady later, but she was the first character who felt real to me. After that the others fell into place, but she was my first foray into Space Adventures, and this was the song that made her feel Right.

(A short scene from a few weeks ago)

The rose bush had been blooming for the better part of a year, sheltered nicely under the torn apart wing of a ship that served as an outdoor shelter. It got just enough sun and just enough shade, it was safe from the wind but received a pleasant bit of rain. Lady had noticed it a few months after Morty had first started staying there and now, a few days after he had gone, she remembered it.

The flowers were a soft pink; their delicate petals spread out wide and fragrant and caught the sunlight. She sat cross-legged on the grass in front of them and the sight was a memory smeared over space and time. She had seen roses like this a hundred other times, in planter boxes and backyards, in a fenced-in side garden surrounded by low green hills.

Like trying to remember a dream, the roses faded in and out of sight in those distant past-places. She saw them through leaded windows, made wavy by the shape of the glass in the sun, there was a desk by the window covered in papers and beyond the roses, a man was busy in the garden. She turned down and looked at the (schematics? A plane) on the desk and the memory faded again.

Lady brought her datachron onto her lap and looked over the instructions. She didn’t know what a Consulting Master Rosarian was but she figured Tiberius Trupo of the Imperial Illium Gardening Society sounded like he probably knew what he was talking about.

“Alright, Tiberius,” she muttered and reached into the shopping bag next to her. “This better fucking work.”

-------

Lady sat with her chin on her arms, looking at the upside-down jar on the table in front of her. Inside, in a little planter, was a stick with a few green leaves at the top, half-buried in soft potting soil.

She wasn’t going to stay in this hollow, she had decided that last night while she lay in bed. She was going to leave tonight and not set foot in this place again. All of the things that had happened here were over and she would treat them as such.

Except for the roses.