steel-and-toe

[steel-and-toe]

I'm just a lurker but I am still checking the tag and I appreciate your epilogue!

[awww thank you!  ^_^ ]

[steel-and-toe]

Epilogue

Yvalta decontaminates, House by House, in fits and starts.

*** Nachen and her husband visit Ylanta in between shows.  She meets aunts and grandparents and one cousin she never knew she had.  It's somewhat awkward.

*** One of the last holdouts gets new, young, progressive leadership very suddenly, after two conveniently timed heart attacks and one yachting accident claim the old guard.  The other two Houses dragging their feet on decontamination hurriedly reverse course.

*** Even in a national crisis, people still need to eat.  Her husband gets his first permission right on schedule, although her in-laws' fishing fleet somehow winds up with an extra hand or two per boat who spend more time poking around the hold checking for stowaways than they do actually working. *** Myo Talking Spectaculars folds before Nachen can finish the first round of her contract, unable to reconfigure its policies to cope with the brain drain once other countries and planets start accepting immigrants.  Before it collapses, though, she traces a meteoric rise through the dance corps, only partially due to dancers above her in the hierarchy emigrating or switching careers, and the resume boost helps her lands a choice role in a touring company shortly afterward.

*** Butterfly and Reprise host a large and quietly teary potluck.  Two months later, they go on a camping trip and, after a tense couple of weeks, send a goodbye message from the DUS spaceport.

*** Nachen and her husband talk about emigrating some nights, after their daughter is in bed, but idly- there's no urgent need for dancers on colony worlds, and you can't (or at least really shouldn't) put a fishing fleet on a spaceship.  They'd be starting over almost from scratch, and neither of them especially wants to take on a new contract for passage to some unknown quantity of a planet.

*** They get a second permission from her husband's contract; it's not renewed for a third.  They do, however, get another two children by special arrangement under her mother's contract, once she's too old to have her own.

*** Years of pushing her body to its limits start to catch up to Nachen; she has to start taking on fewer shows and waiting longer between them.  By seventeen she’s transitioned to teaching full-time, reasonably gracefully. She dabbles in choreography but never catches the public imagination enough to make a career out of it.  

*** When they're twenty-five and past being troubled by permaspring and the political situation has shaken itself out, Nachen and her husband move offworld to join their oldest daughter, settled down after a short stint as a cosmonaut with two spouses and five children between them.  She takes an intensive physical therapy course before they leave- it's an established colony but still too small to support a full-time dance teacher.

It's a lovely world, all rolling plains and shallow seas, closely orbiting a red dwarf star.   Nachen puts together a solo performance almost as soon as they arrive, sends video home of low-gravity leaps in the eternal sunset- and a longer video for distribution on dance student forums, where she talks frankly about the work that went into setting up the shoot and how often she took breaks between cuts to pace herself. *** She teaches in Valtaz all her life, although her Oahkar gets much better and she eventually picks up some broken Anitami.  She includes little lessons on grey culture with her older students- the colony isn't exactly casteless but it's fairly flexible, and she worries sometimes about what they’re losing.  (She does cut out the Yvaltan history lessons once enough parents complain.  The universities can handle that one better than she can anyway.)

*** When Nachen is thirty-seven, she finds a nice young green to ghostwrite her memoirs.  He has a hard time understanding how anyone didn't realize reds were people.

[steel-and-toe]

so uh

I... might possibly be getting a little half-sibling next year?

turns out House Ylanta is gearing up ahead of schedule and they want pilots badly enough they’re willing to forgive whatever it was Mama did

I didn’t even know we were from Ylanta!

[steel-and-toe]

You should be the first dancer in space! Create the first zero-gravity dance style!

That’s really sweet of you but I’ve actually missed that milestone!  ^_^

check out this historical footage of Adgia be-Faro on the first international station!  (she studied dance for more than a year before taking up piloting, my teacher showed us this clip when we were choosing tracks in primary school)

[Grainy clip with Cenemi captions and terrible sound quality of a short-haired grey in a confined space full of instruments, doing some truly impressive pirouettes and things regardless.  It’s almost more acrobatics than dance, as she switches which surface is the ‘floor’ about every time she touches ‘down’.  The link is to the eight-minute timestamp in a longer video; before and after the dance, other astronauts demonstrate wringing out a washcloth, playing with gyroscopes and toy racecars, brushing teeth, etc.]

[steel-and-toe]

ever onward to the stars

[steel-and-toe]

Since people seem so interested in stabbings–

When we’re training, us police practice on each other, taking it in turns to be the ‘police’ and the ‘criminals’. And we practice things like disarming assailants with knives.

And whenever we finish an exercise, and swap roles, we always put the knife/knife stand in on the ground. Always. We never-ever hand it over.

Why?

Because we used to end exercises by handing the knife over. The thing about these exercises, is they are to build muscle memory and instinct. But sometimes your muscles learn not just the exercise, but what you did immediately after.

…So there was a rash of cops disarming people, and then immediately returning the knife.

And that’s why we always put the knife on the ground.

[steel-and-toe]

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

Frank Herbert (via blackoutlandish)

[steel-and-toe]

[steel-and-toe]

i know we’re all excited about planets and that’s great but please please make responsible decisions when celebrating!! the number of drug overdoses spiked after the announcement and we’re honestly kind of short-staffed. use drugs in safe amounts only! you can’t go to space if you’re dead!

[steel-and-toe]

[steel-and-toe]

[steel-and-toe]

[steel-and-toe]

A children’s book concept: cats mucking about on yarn planets!

What do you all think?

[steel-and-toe]

Experimenting with how I paint portraits, I’m going to be working on a project soon where I’ll be doing a lot more of them! ✧

[steel-and-toe]

[steel-and-toe]

[14 Unread Messages

Butterfly [12 assorted star and planet emoji]

Mama Sorry hon forgot you started your new show already.  nothing bad!  call when you get a chance

Ogma SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACEEEEEEEEEE

Butterfly [sent to group chat: Fossiliferous] TURN ON THE NEWS!!!!!

Mama Are you seeing this?  call me!

Varrik [sent to group chat:  B Company] i literally could not give half a moldy egg what the dance captain thinks even if she was stupid enough to say we still need to rehearse which she’s not

The Incredible Hubster oh whoa.  so THAT’S what anitam is up to

Sorma [sent to group chat:  Fossiliferous] oh my actual stars.  ACTUAL STARS.

Battery 38%]

[steel-and-toe]

Why the fuck do you think you could tell the difference between roughhousing and bullying if you're watching greys you don't even know? You're not some sort of grey expert, you bleach-ridden wannabe.

90% of my friends are grey. This has been true for the last eight years. I expect that I could tell the difference if I saw it, because being immersed in a culture for eight years teaches you things about it.