Tag: Avatar Remaindered

Lodestar 66, Scrim vs Avatar Remaindered 23, Sard

After editing Scrim’s Chapter 66 Scrim Meeting Sard went looking for where I’d left Sard in his story. I had a feeling that I was repeating myself. Turns out that Chapter 22 (of Avatar Remaindered) was the last one I’d posted, and that I wrote the unfolding situation from Sard’s point of view in Avatar Remaindered Chapter 23, and from Scrim’s point of view in Lodestar 66.

While I did play with dropping Scrim’s point-of-view chapter and crossing into Sard’s point-of-view just for this chapter in Lodestar, realized that since all the rest of Sard’s story is told in Avatar Remaindered, Chapter 23 belongs there. And so decided to post just Lodestar 66, Scrim Meets Sard here and now.

66. Scrim Meeting SardDownload

Lodestar Over- and Under-Pass, 55.5

There were always going to be a few knotty sections in a mash-up of six novellas as the original plan was to tell the stories of each of the point-of-view characters separately. That intention got shoved to the wayside when Kes fell for Ahni and there threatened to be a lot of interaction. I let it happen, I confess. I wanted to see how the romance would pan out.

One by one the rest of the characters joined the fray. It seemed to go all right. I’m a pantser by nature, the kind of writer who slides by the seat of her pants, without too much planning. Like all pantsers I thought I could write myself out of any problem. ‘Pantser’, by the way, sounds uncomfortably like ‘Pantzer’ which I seem to remember is a type of artillery tank. Lol, one of those writers just pushes their way through! Or they tank in a deep wide trench!

We are now at a place where three viewpoint characters are in play—well, waiting in the wings—with another taking the stage. And he had to. Because if he isn’t at the appointed place at the right time, Srese will fail to be in the right place and time to meet Ahni and Kes.

This is Scrim I’m talking about, of course. He was one of the first characters who stepped into this saga, and that with just the two words at the end of his story. But don’t worry, a lot of new-miles, hours and days will be told before he says them. Most characters jump into their stories with a couple of lines of dialogue relating to their beginnings or middle events. Then it’s up to me to connect them.

Also, Scrim needs to meet up with Rockeater Ridge’s remaindered avatar. Remember him? Some of you may want to catch up with Sard before that happens. Link to Chapter One

There’s advice everywhere for budding novelists about the no-no of writing dialects. And yet, I wanted to try it. I wanted to see if it really would become a chore that readers would rather do without. Let me know if you hate Scrim’s turn of phrase?

Lol—as a reader—I just reviewed a book [link] where that became a chore very fast. My authorial defense for Scrim in Lodestar is that most of Scrim’s words are modern-day English, and it’s just that their combinations need interpreting.

Finally, if you know anything at all about sailors carving leopard seal tusks, and how the products are called scrimshaw, you will have been wondering about Scrim’s name. My lips are sealed. All will be revealed in the goodness of time.

Lodestar, 39.5 … A Crossroad

That is, the writer has arrived at a crossroad in the saga. A place where the forward movement of several characters intersect with consequences good and bad, depending on who they are.

Kes is on his way to rescue Ahni. Srese, the female avatar, is familiarising herself with the world just beyond the door. Her brother Sard, the remaindered avatar, has a hide-out nearby.

Also in the scene are Youk, still trying to best the twins, and half a dozen more people. Though none are expendable extras, they’re not viewpoint-characters in the present.

If you’ve read both The Remaindered Avatar and Lodestar Part 2 up to this point, you may know the problem that needs solving. In the former, it was Sard who rescued Ahni, with all his observations and feelings of what happened in CAVE. (Which is known as Rockeater’s Ridge by the herders.) In the latter, more recently posted story, Srese organises Ahni’s rescue. Same event. Different rescuers.

Which version is the most dramatic? Which version should I disappear?

Both have their merits. But I have to admit, that even as I’m writing this I’m deciding that the version that has Srese setting Ahni’s rescue into motion is the more informative, if not the more dramatic one.

Sard’s version can be shortened toward its end because somewhere along both these time lines, Srese and Sard almost meet.

Meaning that a couple of chapters of Sard’s story need to be rejigged, later, when I resume work on that again. In Srese’s version, Ahni can be left where she’ll be found by Sard after he catches up on what’s happening in CAVE, because Ahni will still need to be in Sard’s hands when she is rescued.

Links to the relevant chapters for your interest:
The Remaindered Avatar 16: Rescuing Ahni
Lodestar 34: What the Implant Did

Continuity in Lodestar

In Part 2 of Lodestar, five of the seven main characters have a part to play, as follows …

Characters and their Roles

  1. Kestrel and his people are traveling from their Party Camp toward ShowTown where they are to undertake their yearly gladiatorial combats in return for winter grazing for their camels.
  2. Srese, the avatar of the game master’s choosing, undergoes her trials and then is encouraged to leave the habitat.
  3. Sard, Srese’s brother and remaindered avatar, hangs around influencing events until he finally accepts his fate.
  4. Ahni will have Srese speaking for her, as she is caught by the game master, and has her voice supressed by the implanted ancestress.
  5. The implant/ancestress breaks out.

Sard Kerr’s story can still be read at Fiction: The Remaindered Avatar, starting back in April 2021.

From the next post, Srese Kerr is the avatar. There will also be more of Kestrel’s adventures, though the two don’t meet in this section.

Preface for Part 2
Though the SkinGifted have used Lagoon Beach as a safe halfway destination for generations, they’ve never seen any evidence of a community living inside the rocky ridge backing the lagoon that they visit. Unfortunately for them, cameras and sensors keep a close watch on their doings.

A digital gamer fanatic—aka Gamester, also called Gammy by the young people in the community—lords it over a community in Rockeater Ridge, running it like a computer game from the past. (Their past is our present.) He even had his brain/mind scanned into a computer. He has an AIs control over his people by way of hundreds of sensors and cameras, and many loyal servants, robotic as well as flesh-and-blood.

For the sake of keeping the community’s human gene-pool healthy, regular input from passers-by is needed. Every generation a boy and girl avatar pair are bred up, to have ready either a male or female lead, whatever is required. By way of sensors and cameras on the beach side of the ridge, the SkinGifted are observed. A plan is set in motion.

For the sake of continuity on this blog, The Storm Event though the first chapter of Part 2, will count forward from the previous chapter.

Fiction: Avatar Remaindered, 22

Sard’s Sky by Rita de Heer, mixed media

The Last Straw

When the life-suit gripped him—like it shrink-wrapped him—how he’d always imagined it might feel—Sard closed his eyes ahead of being forcibly cowled with the mask. The suit expanded again and he relaxed into it. Shrinking. Easing. It was like part of a rhythm. Like breathing.

He shoved up the mask. All he could see was darkness. Not the seven wooden drawers of his boyhood above him. All he could feel, above him—with his hands questing—was rock, a handspan above his face.

Searching down by his left side one-handed he found the rounded curve of the ceiling meeting the back of an overhang. With his other hand he found flat pavement. Exploring upward with that hand, he discovered the ceiling at maybe knee-height. From under the stairs in the limestone house back into the stony overhang atop the plateau … he’d had no sense of the transfer being a journey.

He rolled from under the overhang. A long way above stood the half-sickle moon in the cold night. Stars, too. Pin-pricks of light that he knew were even farther away. Unimaginable distances. Why I like to imagine that they are beads on a net surrounding the ball that we live on. A star in every angle is enough for me.

< Sit up and stare at the rock-edge. >

Oh right. It tells me to sit up and stare at the overhang’s edge in the dark? To what end?

The suit gripped him with its shrinking-lengthways trick. < I am merely elongating this entity’s muscle fibres. It’s a possibility I’m proud of discovering. The first new thing I caused to happen since I being released from my bondage. >

Sard breathed to the limits of his lung capacity. A fraction of what he needed. He wheezed. “Enough.” The image of the suit as a bio-construct was enough to give him the heebie-jeebies. Life-suits were lab-grown human skins? Couldn’t be. What about all the tech they also had? They couldn’t be. He’d lived in a large tech-construct all this life. Couldn’t live in bio-construct and a cramped little one at that.

The suit relaxed, but only a little, obviously expecting resistance.

“Okay. Okay. Sit up you said.” The gap between the two opposite overhangs was double his knee-length. Or make that the length of his whole leg. Plenty wide enough for him to scrabble to his elbow, push on that to sitting. Stare-at-the-rock’s-edge meant sit with crossed legs and turn ninety degrees.

Slouching somewhat, his eyes were level with the rock’s edges which were about as thick as his forearm—he pressed his arm along the ledge—a thick dark line separating the very dark below from the dark sky above. “Staring,” he said. Reporting for action. Yes sir. No sir.

< Close eyes. Wait for light. >

“That’s hours yet. What will I be looking for?”

< Less than an hour. Places where humans bumped up against these edges. Or scraped by. >

“And then what?”

< You will suck the human substance from these places so that I can discover their DNA. If they are my people—runaways—we will overtake them. We will force them to return to the cave habitat where I need them for the entertainments. >

Sard pulled off one of the gloves and rubbed a rock edge with his bare fingers. Granular feel. Like sandstone. He could almost see the group escaping, running for their lives, resting here overnight. Maybe while it rained and their usual roads, the chasms, flooded. And in their hurry to get to safety, some of them scraping up against these rocks hard enough to lose skin and blood.

Then he imagined sucking on the ledges. Why not just licking? He slopped his tongue over a dark place for a try out. Mmm. Could almost be smooth, sinewy and leather-tasting. He whipped off the life-suit’s face mask to see what he tongued.

With the help of the faint pre-dawn light, he made out a dark handprint imprinted on the stone right there in front of his eyes. The sight burned into his brain. Dried blood? He gagged. Spat saliva. Coughed.

Every little thing he knew and remembered about Ahni reeled through his mind. How the bio-construct was cut out of her—and her just abandoned—and about Ahni’s people running for their lives into the right direction to meet up with the clay-faced slavers. What if this hand-print was of someone who got away?

He found scuff marks, half footprints, a place where five small toes had pressed into the thin sand. Where the basket sat …. Saw all this before the dream. And damn it, I know it better now. None of them would want to be caught. Not one will want to return to CAVE.

And neither did he—as a matter of hoity-toity fact—want to deliver anyone, least of all the Sea-people into that bondage. Which means I shouldn’t follow them. Or it means that I shouldn’t take the life-suit to them. He livened up. Yes. That.

A dozen ideas, things to do, things to achieve, things to watch out for, barged into his mind. Plans. I bared my hand and my face. I’ve started already. There’s been no squeak from the life-suit since then. Such peace. He chuckled. Tore loose the chest piece and loosened the tie that gathered the suit edges over his ribs. Shoved the suit down over his shoulders one by one and pulled his arms free. The dawn air on his bare skin like he was in a cool bath. He crawled to the place where he’d stashed the pack.

Unpacked it to discover what he had that’d help him in the journey he planned.

————

But here he still stood at the end off the channel in the stone platform, taking time to think through what’d happen when he developed sores on his shoulders. Dressed in just his outer wear—shirt and pants—the pack’s straps cut into his shoulders. Plus the sun was rising almost dead ahead, give or take a few degrees, and while the sky there was a glory of red and pink, he couldn’t see anything else ahead.
I need a sunhat and I need more padding. About turn. Leaving the life-suit behind is a dumb idea. The chest piece will do me for a hat. The suit itself folded and stuffed under the straps. Now … no more hesitations, hold-ups or hang-ups brought on by stupid impulsivity.

He strode into the grasses.

Repeat of the country that he walked yesterday. Stony channels between islands of tussock, gravel and sand. Here and there a twisted wind-worn shrub. The plateau, what he saw of it, could’ve been an unending plain of tussocks. But he knew—first hand experience—that it was riddled with chasms. Probably with caves underneath. What did he know. Better to stay at the edge.

Walking, he kept his attention on the ground he covered. Safer. And it meant the sun didn’t shine straight into his eyes because he could angle the life-suit’s chest plate just-so, giving himself a shaded outlook. Which got easier because the sun rose.

Some people, apparently, believed that the Earth spun like a top and turned east day and night. Making it seem like both the sun and the moon rose in the east and set in the west. He never got much further studying how they got seasons and all that. No seasons in CAVE apart from the ones the games demanded and the techies organised.

Uh oh. Careful now. A damned chasm across his path. Lost in my thoughts. He evaded what might have been a sticky end by turning south. Saw it just in time. How far would he need to go? He now resented any foray into that direction. Sun shining on his left side.

Finally the end of the crack in the plateau. Wouldn’t he like to have a drink of cool mountain water right now? Don’t have any water. Not wearing the suit. Need to make camp while sun still shining for getting water from plants. Good old Greg, teaching me that.