Our Cringe Astronomy Date
“Did this… stable boy, stable man, did he ever get into any real violent trouble?”
“Yes, quite often as a youth”
“Why?” I didn’t remember any.
“He would fight bandits for his bread! Very honorable!”
Huh?
Oh… oh haha, the Dove was referring to my memories of getting mugged on a train and being worried I had committed assault for beating a homeless man with a bike lock. Come to think of it, my teenage subway rides and senior year of highschool were a bit on the violent side.
I was living on my own a pedestrian in a big city… and I was crazy enough to try to save money on rent. It happens you know. The opposite of noble really when you walk everywhere, really makes you think about how scary a man and a sword on a horse would be.
It was what got me into cars.
A scrape with the life of an alley cat, not war.
Heh…
“Fighting bandits for my bread indeed.” I chucked out loud.
“Am I wrong?” The Dove looked at me with her beautiful eyes that caught just a hint of fading sunlight.
“No you are right.” I chuckled and lay myself back in the soft spongy mountain grass. A little ephemeral pool of water two hundred meters down reflected orange clouds back at us.
Responding violently to the unhoused probably didn’t qualify as noble combat in the old world.
“What if you swapped the souls O dove?”
“Ewww don’t joke about that!”
Heh… the devil could say something that didn’t stoke my ego.
Ironic that such was good for my ego.
Maybe I was still some kind of human.
We didn’t have a tent but the sun had fallen and without the sun, and the sparse dry air there wasn’t much heat.
The queen made camping easy. I don’t know where she kept her equipment but she conjured us a tent. I amused myself finding flint as if I would start a fire.
No, the queen was ahead of me, magic was her convenient trick. Flame in an instant, easier than lighter fluid and a lighter.
My heavy flint rock was little more than a caveman’s fist.
Luxury camping in the dark ages and here I go complaining.
The spongy grass was dry, pliant, a few little summoned lantern in the tent for light. The little fire on the side of the mountain.
I wondered what a flame said to the people of… I didn’t rightly know the name of this kingdom.
It was a kingdom, or something.
Maybe a cult?
Maybe it would have gone better if I treated it like a cult.
All of this was mundane compared to the stars.
I had done this a few nights before, staring up at the sky as if mesmerized.
Suppose I was. I had only seen the sky in the polluted world of my past life. Normally I was less than a few hours from cities.
Even when I got far away. Well… the faint shades of stars still fascinated me.
But now they were brighter. Presumably there wasn’t a single light bulb in this world.
In defense of shadows and all that…
The queen summoned a telescope. Well actually two. Both over ten feet long. One was almost twenty. Each with its own bipod that anchored itself to the ground automatically.
She had managed to gender telescopes. There was a him and hers. That was their literal label printed on the side of each device.
Horrifying.
Both looked primitive to my eye. Long not wide like the ones I remembered back home.
They were stiff and jiggled when prodded.
“Promise you will be gentle before you touch.” The queen said.
“Of course” I responded.
“I don’t believe you, here let me focus you open the moon. You shall have your bearing set by it!”
She tapped her staff and the telescopes reoriented themselves to face the moon.
She pointed at the telescopes, we’ll have a look!
I didn’t know what she wanted me to see.
Part of me expected a children’s depiction of a man planting a flag painted on one of the lenses.
This felt blasphemous. But it was only as innocent as stars.
I puzzled at dark age optics.
Lenses happened after the renaissance in my world. Or so the stories were.
I stuck my eye into the “his” telescope.
“What is the magnification” I asked unthinkingly.
“Eight times” chirped the queen, “My little one. I suppose she was referring to the “hers” reaches forty times!”
In my old world meeting a women who built her own telescopes meant that you had also met a man.
But this was the devil I was talking to.
I brushed my own too long hair from my face.
The queen liked my long hair, I missed my buzz cut from my youth. But I guess long hair was preferable to the thinning hairline of my old thirties.
I bent over and looked through the scope.
No crude propaganda in the viewing lenses of my telescope, I guess I could assume this wasn’t the modern recreation of an MK ultra experiment.
What was I looking for up on the moon?
It was a waxing gibbous, this world seemed to have the same phases as my old world. Very convenient.
Really I only looked at a bigger moon, if I had a star chart this might be more interesting. I could name stars.
But I had nothing to name them after. So it would just turn into names like…
“Midnight southern angle forty eight two hours three.”
Which somewhat robbed the celestial of its unquestionable divinity if you asked me.
“Do you see the pits? The shadows? Tis what happens if we lose our war!” There was the propaganda. My queen continued. “Each of those strikes is a stone cast from the heavens upon a kingdom cursed from times beyond our imaginings. A kingdom cursed to eternal shadow in absence of light, shame when bare!”
I nodded without understanding and pointed to the little ‘hers’ scope.
“May I try?”
“Tis thy kingdom my Lion, but please be gentle!”
“Of course my Dove!” I was telling the truth, I prefer a gentle world. But the world is not gentle nor is the Dove.
:(
I practically had to kneel to look through the second scope. It was comically small
Forty times, well that was better, well… kind of.
Each odd feature on the moon, while now visible blurred slightly in the overclocked lenses of this little scope, edges were a fuzzy layer cake of rainbow light refracted in the imperfect lenses.
Should I call out my queen on this? It seemed the sort of thing that she… they…?
Whatever it was, gosh do I hate myself, would be self conscious about.
“Forgive me my king! For the nature of reality curses lenses made that powerfully!”
She was aware then.
And the queen made excuses. “Though I polish and polish, and wash and clean and choose only the finest of glasses I cannot remove that effect! Any more power and the moon would be just a formless shape of light diverse!”
I was impressed, she knew of the flaw and admitted it. Was she making her own lenses? I would never have had the patience.
She was smart and diligent. How could I have been so lucky as to end up with her… it… the devil…
I didn’t know the specifics but I assumed her issue was dark age quality glass. Honestly impressive she got it to forty times in the first place.
Perhaps if her glass makers could cool the glass more evenly. Or perhaps their sands were impure.
“Oh and My Lion” she said, I blinked and turned away from the chroma ringed crater of the moon. “Our opponent has moved.”
The little chessboard appeared next to the fire, my queen sat legs crossed businesslike upon a stone that sat only a few feet from our flame.
The dim flickering light illuminated the board. I approached for a better look and stood over the board and my queen and the flame before our oversized tent.
Oversized even for the old American world of excess.
Black knight? That was a second black knight? At C six?