Tag Archives: Guide 79

Dragon Ship – Chapter 32

Ynsolt’i Approach

In which Ynsolt’i is back off the agenda.

My response to the Department’s claim of being “proper representatives of Liad” is a rude noise, but I wonder how much the Ynsolt’i authorities believe it.

The pilot from Metrose is another addition to the gallery of one-off characters who make an impression in a single brief appearance, the more impressively for appearing only as a voice. (That sentence was slightly trickier to put together than I expected when I began it, because I realised partway through that the pilot also belongs to the set of characters whom the authors have not burdened with gendered pronouns.)

Dragon Ship – Chapter 31

Ynsolt’i Incoming

In which Bechimo finishes with its detour and arrives at Ynsolt’i.

And the narrative jumps forward, so we get no more information directly about what the norbears have to say or ask about Joyita. Whatever it is, it seems like it’s not a mark against Theo or Bechimo, seeing as they’ve been selected to host the Embassy Mobile to Norbears.

I wonder how much actuality there is behind the Embassy Mobile. It seems clear from the way Master Peltzer talks that it was genuinely Hevelin’s own idea to go travelling with Bechimo, but is the Embassy itself just a legal fiction to keep him out of trouble in systems that don’t like norbears, or are there actual formal diplomatic relations between norbears and the Clans of Men? Was the point of meeting Sinaya that the business required the approval of a higher-ranking norbear? It seems kind of unlikely – not, I should say, because I’m in any way doubting the intelligence of norbears, just that they don’t seem temperamentally inclined toward formal structures and hierarchies – but stranger things have happened.