Author's note: Yes, there are a couple more chapters worth of 'set up' before the romance and all the gymnastics associated with it begins. And with the number of young ladies being introduced, I'd say there will be quite a few gymnastics involved. Also, all previous caveats still apply.
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The narrator of a story enjoys many privileges unknown to the actors in the drama she sets forth. One of these is the existence of currents that shape the fate of her protagonists.
One of these currents was forming in a palace underneath a mountain on the far side of Earth's Moon. If and when the men and women of Earth reached their moon, they would find a fantastic world that would pose more questions than it answered. For in Man's Infancy, when he first left the Garden, the moon was a wondrous place, populated by a people who could be both beautiful and terrible. If ancient man had been able to gaze upon the surface of the moon, he would have found it covered with magnificent purple seas and forests of myriad colors. The cities our ancestors would have seen would have been wondrous and magnificent in their glory, making the Wonders of the Ancient World seem like the crude constructions made by a child on the beach. But in the seventeenth century, when Man first gazed upon the surface of the Moon with his telescope, he found a dead world. And so it was. Even on the far side of the moon, it would appear as a dead world. The remaining descendants of the race that had once made the Moon a world of beauty and delight lived underground in what the participants of the Edison Moon Project would consider marvelous structures, but which the original builders would have considered simple storage and work spaces to hold the tools they used for their true creations.
Not that these tools did their descendants any good. The tools were easy to weld by their ancestors, but for their descendants, they had become idols for veneration or dread, not to be approached lightly. Indeed, there were a few machines that continued running, providing an atmosphere for the few remaining underground 'palaces' and a very thin, barely breathable atmosphere for the moon as a whole, but these machines were slowly dying. In another three hundred years, if Man had not reached his own moon yet, he would find only the ruins of a once great civilization, and would be left to ponder where the inhabitants of the Moon had come from, and where had they gone.
In one of these palaces was a young princess (princess being the closest thing to her title that we have in our language). She was quite tall for her race, standing a good 36 Metuans (or, as James Davidson would measure her, five foot two), which allowed her to look any warrior of her race in the eye. She was a bit bosomy for the tastes of the males of her race, though she was otherwise quite fit. Her skin was a light emerald green, which was considered quite fitting for a cohort coming from her station, and she kept her pinkish green hair long, which was also considered fitting for a female of her class. And our Princess was known to channel an Ancestor.
Before we continue, perhaps it would be best to say something about our Princess and her people. Their word for themselves is 'human', the same as we call ourselves, but in their language, the word 'human' sounds like Toranth, so let us call them that. Although the Toranth once lived in grand cities across our Moon, the remaining few (numbering in the mere tens of thousands) now lived underneath the far side of the moon. Though certain rituals would take them up to the surface of the moon, its barely breathable atmosphere (equivalent of living in the Andes) and the now unregulated rising and cooling of the surface made going to the surface unpalatable at best. Instead, the remaining Toranth lived in enclaves beneath the moon, each enclave separated by forests which were once relaxing gardens but were now dangerous jungles. The Toranth are remarkably similar to humans, save their skin coloration ranges in hues from blue to green, depending on their enclave and their station (the remaining Toranth exist in a highly rigid caste society). They are shorter in stature than us, but their general musculature is roughly the same as ours.
And a few Toranth have the ability to "Channel an Ancestor."
Although most of the machines of the Toranth's ancestors are unusable, in each generation a few Toranth were born with the ability to mentally manipulate one or more of these machines. Of course, the Toranth don't know they were manipulating a machine. They believed they were channeling a spirit of an Ancestor that allows them this gift. Usually the Channeling is something very trivial, such as being able to turn on or off a particular light from a distance. But once in a great while, a Toranth is born who can do more than mentally flip a light switch. Such was the case with our Princess.
Our Princess (whose name is Ilanya, so we can cease referring to her as 'Our Princess') possessed the gift to warp space and manipulate matter, though this was not how the Toranth understood or described it. She could 'shrink' herself to a mere 3 Metuans and move across distances very quickly. When she shrank herself, she also shrank her mass, a fact that she would have not found unusual, but would have befuddled the physicists on Earth. Of course, she was young, being only a mere 239 Luons (roughly 18 Earth Years), so what other skills she might develop (or already possessed but had not revealed) one could only imagine.
What offspring she could produce with another Ancestor Channeller was also a topic for much speculation. Especially by her father.
Ilanya's enclave was close enough to another enclave that travel between the two was not too hazardous. The eldest son of the ruler of the neighboring Enclave was also gifted like Ilanya, but in a different manner. He was also, in Ilanya's opinion, a pig. But the marriage between the two had been arranged by their respective fathers; there was nothing that Ilanya could do to prevent it.
There was one possibility. Toranthian tradition dictated that, before a wedding, the bride went up to the surface an hour before the groom. If she could remained hidden from the groom for the equivalent of an Earth day, the groom would be considered unworthy, and the wedding would be called off. Of course, the bride usually made it ridiculously easy for the groom to find her. Besides, no one really wanted to remain on the surface. And even though Ilanya wanted to escape her groom to be, she knew she had little chance of succeeding. For besides being a pig, her future husband's gift made him the greatest hunter the Toranth had seen in generations.
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As princess Iliyana attempted to steel herself for what she perceived would be a futile chase and tortuous nuptials, other preparations were being made on a small island on the blue and white globe below her.
In the household of Kido Aritomo, the Emperor's representative watched with a stern face as the English seamstress placed the finishing touches on the gown worn by his daughter, Kumiko, making sure it met her fathers standards of modesty. Not that the dress was unseemly, especially by western standards. Still, Aritomo felt a certain protectiveness toward his daughter, especially at a celebration with so many ethernauts in attendance. The ethernauts seemed to take pride in their reputation for possessing voracious sexual appetites. Aritomo did not care to have his daughter to become the conquest of any of these Westerners.
Satisfied that a modicum of modesty had been preserved in his daughter's attire, Aritomo dismissed the seamstress. Walking around his daughter with a stern eye, he said, "So you understand that you are to stay within my sight at all times, Kumiko?"
"Yes, father," Kumiko replied, her eyes cast down.
Aritomo relented slightly, as he added, "And if you feel your skills sufficient, I will arrange a dance for you with the head of the ethernaut corps, James Davidson."
Kumiko looked up, a smile appearing on her face, before she quickly composed herself. Aritomo's face remained stern, but inside he could not help but mentally chuckle. It was something of a joke among the various embassies that James Davidson could have cut a swath among the younger women of the island, if he chose to. But the American had a rough sense of honor that various fathers and older brothers were relieved by. A word with the chief ethernaut would also ensure that Davidson's male cohorts would understand that Kumiko was not to become a target for their amorous adventures.
Aritomo gave his final nod of approval to his daughter and sent Kumiko to her quarters until it was time to leave for the celebration. Aritomo went to his office and closed the door before removing an envelope from the inner pocket of his Western style jacket. Aritomo had read the dispatch as soon as it had arrived this morning, but he wanted to read it once more before destroying it. Not that he needed to read it again. Aritomo had already committed the gist of the dispatch to memory, but Aritomo was nothing if not thorough.
After destroying the letter, Aritomo considered the box that had come with the dispatch. Once Aritomo knew the contents of the box, he almost smiled in public. Almost. He knew exactly the proper time and place to present it. Having it wrapped it in garishly colored paper that was seemingly favored by the Westerners in their celebrations, Aritomo considered it a Divine sign that the package had arrived at such an auspicious moment. Aritomo would deliver it as a birthday present to Davidson, and the interests of the Emperor would be served.
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Not too far from the Kido household, preparations of a different sort were being made. Madame Dubois was adjusting the gown of her charge herself, but her aims were different than those of Ambassador Kido. Madame Dubois was trying to decide how much of her young charge's skin could be exposed without completely offending German and English sensibilities, resulting in Madame Dubois and her young charge being thrown out of the celebration.
The young charge in question, Marie Olivier, was not helping. Whenever Madame Dubois' attention was distracted, Marie would lower a hemline or make her décolletage less revealing. The girl's modest instincts could be maddening at times, and were upsetting Madame Dubois' ultimate goal: gathering enough intelligence to insure herself a prestigious position in whatever government finally took form in France. It was not a game for the meek of heart, Madame Dubois chuckled to herself. Navigating different factions was difficult enough; doing so from thousand of miles away took all of her skills and cunning.
Marie would have been shocked to learn that Madame Dubois had only protected her virtue because it served her long-term goals. But the usefulness of Marie's virtue was quickly coming to a close. Madame Dubois had decided that tonight would be the perfect opportunity to secure the services of one Mssr. James Davidson by sacrificing Marie's virginity. The man affected a bourgeois morality that Madame Dubois could tell was merely a façade. Given the chance of sampling a beauty like Marie Olivier, Madame Dubois was positive the man would allow his manhood to do his thinking for him. And once Madame Dubois had that manhood in her clutches (via her surrogate Marie Olivier), it would be no problem leading the man around by it.
Marie pulled up her bodice again, only to have her hand slapped by Madame Dubois.
"Leave it there, girl. I know what I'm about," Madame Dubois told Marie, as Marie nursed her hand. "We want Mr. Davidson to have a good view when he's looking down your front as the two of you dance. And remember, you pull this thread..." Madame Dubois lightly tugged on a seemingly errant threat at the waist of the dress "when you get Mr. Davidson alone. I'm quite sure he'll appreciate the ... wardrobe malfunction." Wardrobe malfunction, Madame Dubois chuckled to herself. A nice turn of phrase, that.
