The Gaming Outpost

For my sins, I run the Landsberg Home for Good Girls.  I took a look at my face in the mirror in the vestibule, not as some of the unkind remarkers say, to make sure my wrinkles are covered up by makeup, but to make sure the makeup has faithfully reproduced the imaginary ‘wrinkles’.

After all, I am fifty-seven they say, and I live in a hard universe for the last while.  It would not do to show the unblemished countenance of my twenty-five year old body.  Eyebrows would be raised, questions would be asked, and I would no doubt lose my orphanage.

And no, I am no Countess Bathory.  I am a verser, an interdimensional traveller, a peculiar kind of immortal vulnerable to death’s pangs, but not its chains.  I was born in Florida, and was a third-wave feminist when I met a shocking development.  That is, a cell phone I dropped into the toilet of seventh floor coed bathrooms for the Hunter Office Complex.  That was my unwitting resignation as I was then propelled out of the universe, and into the much more perilous Multiverse of which my home time and place had just been one of an innumerable array of examples.

Straight-backed, I glided, as it might seem, so smooth was my gait, into the long room.  The table was set for a hundred girls on each side, and under my cold eye, they rose, and spoke.

“Good evening, Miss Guthrie.”

I listened, and heard a few off notes.  With that, I walked down the wooden floor on the right side of the dark room, and searched my memory.

Ah. Susan.

“Please repeat yourself, Susan Alyard.” I said with calm menace.

She gulped, and I waited behind her as the whole two hundred waited.  Many of them no doubt prayed that I would die, or that the angel in the front courtyard would animate, and bear me away to some dreadful judgment.  Miss Alyard was a lovely girl, with a kind heart, and sudden surges of sympathy for even the lowest.

“Good morning, Miss Guthrie.” She spoke, and I heard the rough edges in her voice.

“I let you and two dozen other girls out for a night of fun.” Carefully supervised, and chaperoned fun, with them all dressed in modest, but nice apparel they had sewn themselves was the unstated subtext. “And I had a few rules.” By which I meant I had thirty-four rules.

Am I unreasonable? Yes, of course. So too is the world.

“What was number nineteen?”

“We were not to shout at the top of our lungs for the tossballer team of Vingdu, nor were we to shout at all, but smile when others cheered for the opposing…”

“That will be enough, Miss Alyward.” I said.  “Was I in some way unclear?”

“No, Miss Guthrie.” Susan said, her head tilting down.  I grasped her ponytail (all the girls had them in my little industrial factory for good girls), and straightened her head up.

“Good posture, my dear. An extra half hour in the hot tubs for that.” And by that I did not mean the sybaritic pleasures I had enjoyed, but the painfully hot water in tubs we used for scrubbing of dishes we took in from neighbor women.

Everyone looked appropriately worried.  If I slammed Susan for a minor offense, then what would I do for a major offense?  Inside my head, I laughed.  These poor children had not a clue what a major offense was, which was how I wanted it.  If they even thought not about a sin, then they were hardly likely to commit it.

“Ma’am?” Susan asked for permission to speak.  As always, I gave it.

“What matters if I yelled loudly for the Vingdu, or even booed for the Osterlings?”

“A lady keeps her voice pleasant and melodious at all times.” I replied.

“But…” Susan began.

“But me no buts, child. You can sleep in the main hall tonight.” Given that the main hall was not heated, nor had beds nor chairs nor blankets, the poor thing would spend the whole night shivering.

I had to cultivate a certain element of savage unpredictability.  Susan, who was frankly healthy as an aurochs, could handle a few nights in the chill.  But her best friend, Tonya, was a frail creature who might well come down with her death of a cold from such treatment (and I do not speak hyperbolically, or if I do, only a little bit.)  Every winter, there were about a dozen girls I had to keep a special eye on to make sure they did not kill themselves by imagining they could take as much as the rest.

But I cannot let them in on this aspect of my planning.  Such would suggest that I actually cared about them as human beings, and that would never do.

“Yes, ma’am.” Susan Alyward said, and if her voice was perfectly proper, if a bit hoarse from yelling, her body was tense with rebellion.

I went back to my seat, and led them all in a prayer teaching trust in the Almighty.  And then we sat down to eat our simple, but well-cooked meal.  With sufficient skill, even a very basic meal can be extremely tasty.  And I flatly demand such from the girls.

After dinner, I stood up, and shook Lenore Adams hand.  It had been her night to supervise the kitchen, and she had done well.  Tommorrow it would be another girl to run the kitchen.  For I mean to see that every lady in my house can cook well enough to make a five-star chef back in my home reality weep with envy.  Unrealistic to be sure, since the chef has a wide variety of food stuffs he may cook, but we do our best.

Next, we cleared the long room, by stacking benches (good for the posture and cheap and simple enough that the boys in a nearby orphanage could make them), and tables against the wall.  The long room was then set up for the pistol shooting training.

In the piano room, three dozen girls practised choir.

In the parlor, it was poetry and the meaning of such, and in all the hallways there was dance.

This went on for an hour.  Next night, different girls would rotate in to the next session.

After shows, it was showers, and brushing, and my new innovation….flossing.   I checked the teeth of a half-dozen girls on my schedule for cavities, and those who had the very primitive form of steel braces I had caused to be invented here.

To say these braces were horrible is to state the obvious.  In a society where steam engines are high-tech, braces are more than a bit crude.  But the difference they made in a female’s beauty is very important.

Prayers, and Bible reading, and then everone was off to the warm beds that were covered by the quilts they had made, except for Susan.  I myself headed back to my office, closed the door, locked it, and opened my locked desk drawer.

In it rested a lupari, a crude shotgun, a PDA with Tetris loaded, and a bottle of whiskey atop a damming book.  I took out the PDA (thankful once again that I had sprung for the solar powered model), and a shot glass off the top of the whiskey bottle.  I poured myself some, and shut the desk drawer.

Slowly walking over to my vanity, I smeared off the makeup, and by hand found the small bottle of crushed and strained bark of weeping willow, a ‘sovereign remedy against headaches’.  It was not as good as aspirin, but it and the whiskey helped.

One more time, I looked at the Stickup Note on its faded paper.

“We cannot redeem the past by our best efforts. Those we have sinned against will remain that way. Instead, we must place our rest in the Mercy.”  A charming man, another verser, had given me that, back in the days when I saw what I had done, and thought I might go mad as I tried so hard to make it be all right.

I believed. Truly I did, but the whiskey made it easier.  And the aspirin was for my throbbing head.

So I sat back, and sipped, and played Tetris until late in the night.  And then I showered in my own bath, and made my own lonely bed, and fell asleep dreaming of the screams of women.

The sky was on fire.  Heat bloomed from the nearest houses, and then windows exploded out at me.  In the distance, I could hear the cries of terror.  And so I pressed on, my laser pistol in hand, and sought for the Lady Bethany, my friend and supporter.

I went down one street, saw a conquering Mogol who grinned at me cruelly and with great glee as he raised his spear to run me through.  I lased him down like the vile dog he was.

And beyond him, I saw a white coach, chaised with gold and silver, and tipped over on its side.

Suddenly I was next to it, and leaning in.  Inside, I saw Bethany.  Her arms were gone, and she was dead.  So were all her relation in the coach.  The noble family of Hertsprung had been exterminated, no doubt on orders.

And then her eyes sprang open, and she screeched.

“You did this.”

Trembling and panting, I woke, wondering why my old dream had come back to me after so many months away.  And then I realized, that the Lady Bethany and Susan Alyward might have been sisters, so close did they look to each other with their long, black curls spilling down their backs, their straight noses, and firm if amused mouths.

Having nothing better to do, I took another shower, and then set out to work on the accounts.  Due to the rise in taxes, we were having to make do.  Our customers were not wealthy, and we could not pass the tax increase on to them as they had their own taxes to deal with.  And indeed, I expected to lose a couple customers who could not afford our rates after the taxman visited them.

So basically we were having to eat the taxes.  It truly and deeply appalled me, the level of ignorance from the high nobility about economic reality who treated us petit bourgeious as a magic box from which they could withdraw money whenever it suited them.  Every nation has perversity, although how it comes out depends on the nation.

Still, I spent a couple hours juggling the finances, and finally was able to make them balance if I once more used the Mysterious Contributor.  On really dark nights, I had gone and done certain things in the building (mostly on the roof which was terrible or had been) using most non-ladylike skills to good and cheap effect.  I could fix the plumbing by myself (since I had installed it over fifty years ago I rather thought so.)

I got up to check on breakfast, and something seemed odd. There should be some noise from the long room.  Susan should be in there, either gently crying, or whimpering, or shuddering.  Instead that room held only quietness I felt as I stood in the kitchen door looking out that way.

It is a trick I have, to really deeply listen.

A quick check, and I went to see Nurse Banton who made the midnight rounds.  She was still asleep, and would not awake.  I looked about and spotted a glass of wine half-drank.  The good nurse would have poured the wine back if she were not up to drinking it.

I sniffed, and nodded.  Susan had paid entirely too much attention in my class on ‘Doping Your Husband’.  A quick check of the Nurse’s color, heart rate, and breathing affirmed that Susan had done a good, and non-fatal job.

I told the other nurse that we had a runaway, and she was to check in on Nurse Bannon periodically.

And so I got into my travelling clothes, and took my nurse’s big, black bag to put the lupari in it.  As I did so, I noted that the cover of the book on the bottom of the shelf moved wrongly.

Curious, I tapped the book. It felt wrong.

And so I opened it.  Inside I saw that the pages had been cut out, and that a half-full pillowcase of sand had been put in the pages place.

Oh, no.

I should have burned it.

Now I had to get Susan back before she unleashed horror.