Tag Archives: Pimm tel’Jadis

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 11

3 Replies

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.)

Conflict of Honors – Chapter 3

Leave a Reply

Shipyear 32
Tripday 151
First Shift
1.30 hours

In which we meet the second mate, who is a rounder.

A “rounder”, according to the dictionary I consulted, is a “person who makes the rounds of bars, saloons, and similar establishments; figuratively, a debaucher or roué”, which seems like a pretty apt description of Dagmar Collier. (Who, incidentally, also wears too many rings.)

Second Mate Collier adds sexual harrassment to the list of things Priscilla has to put up with on Daxflan. Not only is she not put off by the fact that her advances are unwelcome, that explicitly adds to her enjoyment. It’s worth noting that Collier is depicted as a sexual predator who happens to be of a particular orientation, with the presentation balanced by other characters later in the novel who share the orientation but not the unfriendliness or the disdain for consent. I can think of other works I’ve read which have lacked that diversity of representation, so it’s good to see here.

It’s three days since the previous chapter, and Priscilla’s off-shift has moved from Second Shift to First. If the ship day is a strict rotation of work-rest-work-rest, as implied by Shelly’s rant, that argues for an odd number of shifts in the day. On the other hand, maybe there are an even number of shifts per day and Priscilla had to work a double shift in there somewhere — perhaps while they were in dock at Alcyone, where they’d need the cargo master to remain available. (I dismiss out of hand the possibility that she might have been given a double rest period.) For what it’s worth, the single data point we have on shift numbers in Liaden trade ships, Jethri’s Elthoria, had four shifts per day.