Gratuitous Epilogue

21 - August

August 2

Games

Siame submitted one of her paintings to an anonymous art competition and won second prize, which has annoyed her extremely so far as I can tell. She’s also slowly been resuming her Setari training, attending the talent school at Pandora. Officially she was never dropped from the Setari program, since while Kalrani usually don’t get to take a year off to paint, Sight Sight talents are rare enough and touchy enough that the bluesuits decided that she’d be permitted extended recovery time from being half-gutted by the Cruzatch. Kaoren says she’s returned because she wants to be in the exploration teams working through the ruins outside the Ddura-protected areas.

That includes Kalasa, which is slowly being cleaned as well as studied. They’re learning a lot, having translated the intact books, and those I visualised for them before I went on leave. They’re still having big arguments about whether to completely restore it, or preserve it in its damaged condition. People want to go be tourists there, but it’s still too important. One day, probably, and till then they have incredible virtual tours.

There’s a new interface game starting – being released on Tare and Muina at the same time – and maybe Kolar as well, since the interface is slowly spreading there now Tare has relaxed its restrictions on trade. It’s called Home and it’s based on what is now known of the fall of Muina and the exodus of whole villages through deep-space to find other worlds to live on. Players will take on the roles of junior Lantarens and warriors and have to find a route to a habitable planet and escort hundreds of NPC villagers and explore and settle the planets. Lots of weird deep-space stuff, battles with massives, resting in various spaces accessed on the way, searching for food and supplies, locating planets and checking to see how habitable they are, getting trapped in sprawling zones and having to puzzle a way out.

Battlestar Galactica without the spaceships, basically, but it sounds really different and fun and event-based and I’m definitely going to play a lot. Unlike the online games I’ve played, everyone gets to go through the zones, no matter what level they are, and they just get assigned different tasks according to the skills they’ve built up as the game progresses. I was a bit worried that people would recognise me from my accent, but Nils (who plays lots of online games because he likes battles which don’t have any lives in the balance) told me not to worry, that there’s always plenty of people in games pretending to be Setari, or me, or my kids. He said he sometimes pretends to be someone pretending to be a Setari.

Kaoren says he will play Home with me, and smiled even before I laughed. This is home, and nothing virtual about it.