the Sidhe lady ordered another martini

Pretty Face, originally uploaded by I Eat Rainbows..

tending bar

in the wee small hours in the lounge on the Human Deck of the vast starliner.....some elder race folk came slumming down from the upper reaches......loud and flashy Dasanei, with their tall stature and golden skin, along with a richly robed Fergal high lord, and a striking beauty of a Sidhe lady.....they had a round, and then decided to try their hand at the pool tables, which are another Human novelty.....the Sidhe was odd girl out from the foursome at the game table, so she stayed at her barstool for another martini.....you know the Sidhe, also called the Fae or Fairy by some ....they look sort of like old Star Trek Vulcans, but don't let them hear you call them that....the actual Vulcans are short fat warty clients of the Greater Trollish Holding....

"Well, Hue-mon" she says to me "I have read that people on your planet think that my kind resemble a race from your legends, who lived close by your reality, sometimes stealing babies, or passing off 'fairy gold', or playing other tricks?" She smiled sweetly, batting those strange lashless eyelids....

"Yes" I brazenly insinuated "Some even say that our two species have interbred from time to time....in the far ancient past, I mean..."

"Would such a thing be possible in this present age, do you imagine?" she purred....

(text has been deleted)

Machine Shop

Birth Machine, originally uploaded by neptune000.

a machine stop

The next planetfall we made was a machine world. A very ancient species had built a bit of an empire spanning five or six star systems, and then had started slowly selling off real estate, retreating towards their original home world.....they concentrated their remaining population, and then transcended in mass to a higher reality, leaving their faithful machine servants behind to oversee the preservation of the planet as a sort of museum or memorial to their race and it's history. I took the shuttle down with a tourist group, and went on the usual tour of impressive old buildings, elaborate gardens, holographic presentations of important past events, etc..... The thing I found most interesting was The Machine Shop.....a carefully preserved factory, where the First Generation machine population had been assembled. It's not often that you get to see the actual cradle of an existing culture, complete with tools and dies.....

going down home

North_LaSagra, originally uploaded by baskill.

towards galactic center

there was some confusion

when they actually opened the Perfect Rib shops in the mall foodcourts on the Coyote home planet....."Perfect" didn't do anything for the local ad writers....they said that "human" was the big buzz-word, so they ended up calling the franchise "Hot Human Ribs".....which conveyed to some the idea that the new species on the block were selling their own ribs for consumption by alien carnivores....the Health Department got involved, and there was a big sort of hilarious stink before everyone got it all figured out....I elected not to stay in the Coyote system....I did invest some in the rib thing, and that has done pretty well over the years I must admit....when the ship was due to head on out further down towards galactic center, I went along for the ride.....