The Gaming Outpost

Coming in on the Coastal Rail to New Amsterdam by gempower lets you appreciate how big a planet is.  In other worlds, I’d taken jets, spaceships, even nuke-punched stasis cones, and those deny a fundamental reality. Earth is big.

I left the Pullman Sleeper Car, and passed a chalkist, working on a picture on the Granadian Station wall that showed New Amsterdam, and its famous skyline as half of the Earth.  People laughed, but they nodded as well.  Part of their brain knew better, but the emotions believed it.

A grande dame walked right in front of me, and stopped in my path to better order her men to tote the twenty-seven suitcases, and four steamer trunks to her gem car.  I knew better than to chastise her for she was one of the Four Hundred (that is, the four hundred important people who could fit inside a ballroom at one time), and she was bedecked with a strand of pearls, two bracelets of turquoise alternated with saphire, a choker chain of amethyst, and a plunging lug of crystals.  Her visible jewels stated that she had enough Magick to boil everyone in a fifty foot sphere alive, and walk away unharmed through a hail of bullets.  I did not speculate about hidden resources, but the sort of people the Big Four Oh Oh were, well they always carried a loaded sap in their back pocket if you know what I mean.  I would not be surprised if she had more Magick hidden than visible.

So, I stood there, and fumed, as did the Eyetalian girl with the baby in her arms.  It started to fuss, wanting food I’d think, and I could see the grande dame’s already straight back grow marginally straighter as her outrage at having to hear a baby’s whimper interrupt her making us all wait on her.

Rather than see both mother and baby verbally harrangued, I turned about behind me, and flickered my fingers. Sparks from the Aether jumped between them, and the baby cooed in surprise.  He wiggled his feet in his mother’s arms which was clear baby speak for ‘do it again! do it again!’.

And so I did.  The mother was grateful for what I had done, a young girl, barely seventeen, and she knew she would have been totally outmatched in all ways by the grande dame.  But at the same time, she could see no stones on my hands.  Even the baby had a ring with a one carrat black opal on it, suitable for a Level One protection spell.

The slow loading of the grande dame’s gear continued, and I made faces at the baby, and talked lightly to the young mother who had her own string of tiny pearls, and a necklace with a solitaire diamond of a rather muddy quality.

“Cease your prattling.” I heard the crisp command from behind me, and I resisted attempting to pretend it came from someone else.  I turned, and faced an older lady with hair tightly pulled up, bonnet firmly placed on her scalp, and all of her apparel was either silk or velvet arrayed in gray on gray, in tasteful pateerns.

“Oh, so you wish to entertain the baby?” I found myself saying before I had time to censor myself.

“How impertinent! That thing lacks proper breeding, and should not be allowed in public until it knows how to stay silent.”

I resisted the urge to say ’same to you, evil witch.’, but it was a very near run thing as my temper runs high at times.  It was thus that I was not aware enough to block a sudden thrust of heated air that blew back the young mother a step, and set the baby to crying as we stood there by the train in the narrow space, waiting for Her Majesty to get a move on.

The baby began bawling, and the evil witch raised her voice to yell for security to ‘remove this beastly baby at once’.  One of the chains on my temper snapped.  Just one.

I reached, and found the Pool of Magma from which all lava flows.  And some of this melted rock arrived on the top of the grande dame’s pile of suitcases.  They ignited, and billowing smoke erupted into the air in rapid, rising coils.  All of a sudden the train engineer was hollering for everyone to escape.

We tramped past the burning suitcases, which despite the engineer’s panic, we no danger to anything else.  They were on a metal care, above a stone floor, in between a metal gem powered train, and a stone wall.

In the increasing distance the grande dame hollered, shrieked, demanded recompense from the railroad (but if there was anyone more hardnosed than a member of the Four Hundred, it was the railroad.)  You took what they gave you, and said thank you.

“That was very strange.” The Italian girl said.

“Wasn’t it just?” I agreed.