Traveller Vignette 042

“The Aslan was old, grey-maned and dressed in shabby, threadbare coveralls. It didn't fit with the neat stack of bank notes, several thousand credits at least. He handed it to me, bowed and rumbled “T'enk yoo”, obviously sounds carefully learned by rote.

The female next to him was nearly as old, and spoke careful anglic. “My brother was interned after the revolution on Kashan, and was prisoner in the camps there.”

I felt sick. The revolutionary government hadn't even been able to feed their own troops properly in the last years of the war, let alone prisoners. We'd sent what we could, but it hadn't been nearly enough.

“He says relief parcels from your organisation were the difference between hunger and starvation. He thanks you for his life, for which he cannot repay. He gives this for his oath to repay one hundred-fold the cost of each parcel he received, and for his two packmates who died in the camps and cannot redeem their own oaths. He apologises for the time it took him to earn the money, for he is old and sick. We have adjusted for inflation”

(Author's note - It's easy to fall into the "proud warrior" stereotype when writing male Aslan, so I thought it would be interesting to write one who was weak and broken, but still lived by the tenets of Aslan honour. His sister has accompanied him on this trip as Aslan males aren't really up to the complexities of dealing with a money-based imperial society.

In gaming terms, the pair might be encountered as passengers aboard ship, or might be sources of information for something that happened during the revolution - evidence to bring one of the perpetrators to trial, the location of an equipment cache or something similar)