Shipyear 65
Tripday 137
First Shift
1.30 hours
In which troubled days make for restless nights.
Priscilla has a nightmare, possibly brought on by Kayzin Ne’Zame’s hostility. (On the other hand, there are indications that nightmares were Priscilla’s default sleep pattern before she came on board the Passage, and this is just a restoration of the status quo.) Lina attempts to comfort her, both by the usual means and with her Healer abilities, but hits an obstacle in the fact that the method of achieving tranquility Priscilla learned in Temple includes a shield to keep out outside influences — which is fine if it’s an outside influence disturbing one’s tranquility, but not so good if the problem is inside the shield with you.
(Incidentally, we get at least part of an answer to what happened after Priscilla kissed Lina a couple of chapters ago. I didn’t comment on that last chapter, because I figured that if they didn’t want to go into details, it wasn’t really any of my business.)
But is this truly only a nightmare? Or is it actually a memory of what happened to her after she turned toward the spaceport, as we were told in the Prologue? I thought it might be a nightmare dredged up from an actual memory/?
It’s presumably modelled on an actual memory, but it’s clearly not simply a faithful repeat of the event as it happened, because it’s got starring roles for Dagmar Collier and Pimm tel’Jadis, and Priscilla didn’t meet either of those people until she joined the crew of Daxflan, years after she left Sintia.
I’m inclined to think that the rest of it, the assault by the stone-throwing mob, is also something that didn’t literally happen to Priscilla, only something that she feared would happen and had seen happen to other people. But I don’t think the story explicitly says either way.
Okay, that makes sense.