Turning True Blue

[Thunderer]

"A man, or more?"

Elizabeth wrote somewhat of a diary. Not a diary in the full sense of the word, rather a book of confessions. She could not let her womanly emotions impact her career, so before or after dealing with someone burdensome, she would make confessions to the only one who could keep a secret. "A man, or more?" -- the concluding line about Redmond.

"His jaw looks like a very persistent rock spitefully protruding out of a granite quarry", it mentioned, "not at all the part you would want to punch, even if you were a professional boxer. But his words flowed like a river spring -- slow, gentle, could even be political if he had any finer polishing in that art. A man of the earth, made to withstand it, and at least try to understand it. Or more? Maybe I have had the fortune to only see the benign side of this mountain of a person, and have been spared the way it could erupt at an enemy. A man of outstanding quality, afraid of his own strength and for good reasons, or a thick-headed brute doing his best to wage war according to the rules? A man, or more?"

The memories of Chateau d'Or haunted Elizabeth. She had spent the last decade of her life on Gran Canaria, and no more people than in a town lived on the whole planet. Chateau d'Or was not in her confessions as the memory was much older, but she knew very well about it. The wealthy Zoner was an old man, but age had only made him more shrewd. Elizabeth was a client, or rather somewhat of an employee, of a Corsair mobster who worked with him. One night she was a gift to the old man, a depersonalized sold good, a slave in all but word as slavery was illegal for the Corsairs, and had to do all she knew to satisfy his outlandish carnal tastes. It was her luck that Admiral Dagon had been killed in battle before they could have any significant interaction, because that night developed a certain uneasiness at the sight of prosthetics in Elizabeth. But, she was well paid, and she needed to be in order to both survive and afford herself the best education the desolate planet could offer.

She entered the villa not in disgust, but in triumph -- as a conqueror, for that's what she was, and not only of the physical place, but of her past as well. If Redmond had invited her there to give her one of the rooms as her office, she knew very well which to choose, and look the smuggest in.

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