Whoever wants to go to the Scholar's Tower should post here.

  Zhouth had meant to go to the Scholar's Tower all along.

  He had meant to arrive on a different day, on a different ship, and under different circumstances, not to mention alone, but circumstances (and a certain princess) had conspired against those plans, putting him in the company of strangers (some stranger than others), on an antique raider, days early, and without most of his luggage.

  He had kept a couple of very important things with him, and the vagaries of space travel meant that 'early' and 'late' were both relative concepts. It was still well within the rough time frame that he'd anticipated when he'd set out from Vanejen.

  None of that changed the fact that he was here to see Scholar Voha, the master of the Tower that, with Zhouth having wound his way from the bazaar and along the causeway, now rose before him at the heart of the university grounds.

  And it wouldn't be their first meeting...

Not surprisingly, Zhouth passes several people on his way to the Tower. They all look at him with a surprised look but otherwise don't seem to find the presence of a Vargr. Still, he's not a noble so they can't help look down on him however slightly.

As he approaches the large arched double doors, one of them opens and a human exits quickly followed by an Aslan!

  There were double doors and they had just exited through one of them, so collision-avoidance was a simple matter of proceeding forward toward the other. His outfit was still the colorful ensemble that he'd worn on Asim, so it wasn't like he could be accused of trying to sneak up on them.

  Zhouth did manage a mildly curious look toward the pair. Who was the human that they were wandering about with a very capable-looking bodyguard? The place was full of nobles, and they generally didn't seem to bother...

  The bodyguard's species was perhaps a little bit unexpected, but not exactly shocking. The unhappy history notwithstanding, Drinax was right on the border of the Hierate, and it wasn't in much of a position to refuse visitors. No doubt that some of the locals would be happy to shoot Aslan on sight; no doubt either that such a policy would swiftly result in another war fleet dropping in to express the Hierate's displeasure.

Zhouth has no difficulty entering the tower, though there is a doorman of sorts--Sir Sweth, but he nods at Zhouth as if he knows him. When Zhouth catches a glimpse of a HUD that Sweth is using, he realizes that he's at least been identified and since he was expected, he has clearance. Oddly, Zhouth is a bit disconcerted that he doesn't spot any weapons on Sweth... makes him wonder what he isn't seeing.

Zhouth is 'handed off' to Lady Eloise Mendelsohn who takes him to the lift, enters the appropriate code on the lift's data pad, and both of them are whisked to an upper level. There, she leads Zhouth down a hallway to a door with a symbol on it that he doesn't recognize, and taps on the door. A moment later, the door opens, and Baron Telva Kaluga is introduced as Voha's amanuensis.

He, in turn, takes you to Voha.

"Master Voha, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Zhouth. Mr. Zhouth, I introduce you to Master Voha."

"Pleased to make your acquaintance finally, Zhouth. Welcome to Drinax, the Floating Palace and the Scholar's Tower!"

When Zhouth hands over the sim card, Voha produces a cell phone-sized device from his pocket and inserts the chip into a slot on it. Zhouth can see that the device appears capable of holding over a dozen such chips.

"Excellent! We've often theorized about many of these practices and tactics, but it is most agreeable to find out that some of them actually work!"

"I always wondered why the Floating Palace was never given a proper name. It always struck me like naming a dog The Dog. It should have been called something grandiose or mysterious, like Shangri-La, El Dorado, Xanadu, Rancho Cucamonga, Hogwart's or Gormenghast. Well, maybe not those exact names, but you get the drift, right?"

Although Voha looks to be in his later 30s to mid 40s, there seem to be a few more wrinkles that those years should account for, and there's clearly an intelligence and wisdom in his eyes far beyond any years.

"Aslan? It really is like cat herding! Although, it's more like leading a donkey around with a carrot on a stick! No, really. Point the Aslan in the direction of some land that they can claim, conquer and piss on, they are happy and content. Unfortunately, at the current time, the only territory that's available belongs to someone else."

"To that end, however, we've often speculated on whether it would be possible to move an entire star system to somewhere they Aslan could get at it. I think, once upon a time, we were close to being able to do that. Nowadays..."

"The other alternate to keeping them from invading everything in sight is genetic resequencing. Possibly develop a nanite that could do that. Take that aggression right out of them. This fits perfectly with most Drinaxians' opinion that the only good Aslan is a dead Aslan."

"Harrier specs? What you want we those? Not a bad ship in its day, but any place that could build you one can probably produce you a better ship. Lot of water under the bridge since the Old Days."

"Well, let's see what we've got. Ah, yes. Harrier-Class Commerce Raider. Wasn't that a joke! As if calling it by a different name kept it from being a pirate ship! Although... I suppose it did keep it one step away from actually declaring war."

"Hmmmm. I see here that there is a notation about variant models, including a Harrier-A, Harrier-B and a Harrier-X. There are, however, no specifications for any of them, not even any indication that they were ever built."

"Water reclamation technology! Now that's something useful. I hear that Hilfer is having problems with their water supply. You could probably help them out with this specs. Not sure if they have the technology to build these, but you're welcome to the data. Normally, of course, we'd sell you the data... but, consider it fair trade for the Zhodani file."

"Have you heard the latest news? Raiders from coreward struck the old Drinaxian worlds of Torpol and Clarke, looting their orbital factories and destroying their system defense boats! These raiders were no desperate brigands – they had the weapons, technology and discipline marking them as dangerous corsairs!"

"The Provosts of Torpol and the Psychopomps of Clarke have put a combined bounty on the heads of those raiders. I doubt if they'd come here--what have we got to raid? Corsairs want loot, not knowledge. Anyway, anyone who brings back proof of the raiders’ death will be showered in lanthanum and gold... or so they say. Though, it does make me wonder where they are getting their lanthanum from."

"Yeah, it's a shame about the Prince. We did the best we could to put him back together. Unfortunately, only time will tell how well we succeeded. Physically, he's functional... maybe 92%. He seems to have the knowledge again that he once had, but his personality is still a work in progress."

  "Everyone's personality is a work in progress!" Zhouth exclaimed as he threw his hands up and out in ta-da! fashion, his ears and whiskers joining the move in the vargr equivalent of a big grin. "Any telepath can tell you that!"

  He brought his hands down, though the levity only lapsed ever so slightly from his features. "Sorry, couldn't resist. But twenty-five years working with spooky mind trick types and you learn all the jokes. Good way to keep them out of your head, right? They don't want to poke around inside and risk finding more of them!"


  He had, of course, passed through the layers of security and screening (the repeated hand-offs were probably more than just a formality) in his usual relaxed way; he was used to far more serious (and serious-faced) protocols from working at Vanejen. Then again, the Scholar's Tower probably didn't run the risk of being at the center of a xenoplague outbreak, inadvertent biochemical weapons test, or psi-induced coulrophobia epidemic if their controls failed...

  Voha had some interesting ideas about how to deal with the Aslan, although the premise of pointing them toward someone else had obvious merit. Nanites? Those were beyond his field of expertise; bioengineering methods, maybe. Viral payload, perhaps? But if you could move a planetary system, why, you could move the entire Hierate somewhere else instead and solve the problem for good! Okay, you'd actually be making it someone else's problem, but as long as it wasn't someone you liked...

  The data files would certainly be useful; moving from theory to practice would take some doing, but "Drinax needs friends, right? Helping out Hilfer would get it one, and maybe others would start thinking they'd like to be too. Better than the Old Days methods or Hierate takeovers, anyway!" But as for the palace name, Zhouth completely agreed with Voha's assessment, and even had one of his own to suggest. "Vultan! No question!"

  Though he wasn't quite sure what had inspired him to come up with it...


  "Showered with lanthanum and gold?" Zhouth's look of mock-horror was plausibly indistinguishable from the real thing. "But that stuff's heavy! They'd be killed by the concussion, if not squashed to death, and they wouldn't even get clean for their trouble! Though I suppose they'd look kind of regal in their last moments?"

  "Good thing I was already past those places when the raiders came by, but maybe we should look up factory schematics? Sounds like those places need to rebuild things too." he continued, putting on a more serious demeanor. "Or they need some good orbital engineers. You don't happen to have any of those lying around among the recent students, do you? Good way to make the Tower popular, and maybe they can dig up some of that lanthanum while they're there!"

"Alas, no, I do not know of any orbital engineers," Voha replies. "While there have been several brilliant students to come through here recently, they are mostly academic types. Worker types can't usually afford our tuition and they can't find work here since we don't have those kinds of facilities."

"Perhaps you could find a few engineers on Hilfer. Give them the specs for the water reclamation facilities in exchange for rebuilding Torpol and Clarke, who, in turn, can then help Hilfer build that water plant."

"Sounds like a plan to me."

  Zhouth smiled again. "Works for everyone! I like that idea, and you won't mind if the Tower gets a gold and lanthanum shower out of it? Though I suppose a thank-you card is more likely. Still, nice to be thought about, right?"

  And then another thought came to him. "Oh, one other thing: anything going on here in the Palace that I should know about? Don't want to do the blind-careen thing into some noble politics that get me in trouble, and with everyone here in the palace being noble somehow, it would be a lot easier to do here than a little lab where all you need to worry about is mind-warping specimens getting loose." The smile came back, but this time it was slightly wan and worried. "They're much less dangerous!"
This message was last edited by the player at 00:28, Wed 04 Dec 2019.

"There are always politics and conspiracies going on in the Floating Palace," Voha answers, "but unless you are Drinaxi or have some sort of power base outside of Drinax, you don't much count towards either of those things."

"Even if one or more nobles rope you into something, inadvertent or not, y"ou aren't even human. Nothing against Vargr, but Drinaxians tend to think of all non-humans as 'other'... specifically those damned Aslan. If you aren't human, you must be one of them."

"Oh, that's not to say that all Drinaxi think that way. If the Vargr Extents were closer, King Oleb would be working you for an alliance of some sort."

"Besides, most of the intrigue on the Floating Palace is jockeying for position in the social hierarchy. You get ahead by climbing on the backs of others. Easy enough to do since there are too damned many people on the palace... more than it was ever meant to support."

"You want influence? Take a third of them away to some colony somewhere. Unfortunately, the majority of them don't work and they'd rather live in squalor than give up their nobility."

  Zhouth let out a brief, contemplative huff, then waved one hand in a loose circle. "They can't be nobles over on Asim? Lots of space there. Unless brown is a forbidden color to nobles for some reason? "

  Something else had caught his attention admist the discussion of plots and rumors. "Drinax doesn't like Aslan. I get that. What was with the big bodyguard one strolling out of here behind the merchant, then?" He hooked a thumb in the direction of the Tower's main entryway. "Some old adopted noble line from before the war, or did the merchant bring him along? Can't imagine he's here on a goodwill visit, what all the species-cursing that goes on in this place!"
This message was last edited by the player at 06:25, Thu 12 Dec 2019.