Writing: Deviant Ruusan, Random

   Think of this as an Easter Egg, since it's been a bit since I last posted anything and I feel bad, but I don't have very much to post without some major searching/editing at the moment.

   Life. It eats me alive. And for that, I apologize.

   So, a small blip from the deviant storyline that I scrawled on my laptop this evening as we drove back to Seoul from Osan after we dropped off some friends of ours at the base there.

   As Ruusan will explain but I will point out for understanding's sake prior to your reading the scrawl, this takes place twenty-eight (give or take) hours after Jhidek and Ruusan got married. It cuts off a bit suddenly due to our arriving home.

   Also, please not that Uhric/Uhrician is based off Asia, and I kind of grafted it into a more Japanese type of culture, including the language, which you will see in this bit.

   "Sensei" is probably one of the most well known Japanese honorifics, meaning "teacher", "doctor", or even "writer", on occasion.

   "San" is a more general honorific, similar to "Miss", "Mrs.", or "Mr."

   "Chan" is a suffix most commonly added to female names as an endearment, I believe, although it is usually applied to younger women, so Nanami is being cute by calling Ruusan "Ruu-chan."

   With this in mind, please enjoy!


    She'd delayed as long as possible, hoping to catch Jay for at least a couple of minutes before she'd have to bolt out the door, but in the end she'd had to leave before he'd gotten back.
    Despite that, Ruusan strolls into the Emergency Room of Mercy General Hospital with high spirits and a smile that she can't keep from her face. She goes to the desk to sign in, pleased to see that Nanami Kim, one of the two head nurses for the night shift, was minding the position near the door.
    "Schaefe-sensei, it's great to see you back!" The older woman greets with a bright smile.
    Ruu signs her name on the datapad with the ease of routine as she replies, "I must admit, it's nice to be back." The majority of the talking done in the ER is in Uhrician, but she makes the shift over with ease. "It was a long four weeks on Kahn. Remind me to never make a return to being a student, will you?"
    Nanami's dark gaze narrows as she studies the doctor. "There's something different about you..."
    She puts on her best innocent expression, leaning her forearms against the desk. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Nanami-san."
    Thirty-three years old to her twenty-five years, married for almost seven years and a nurse for eight, Nanami's experience is invaluable to Ruusan, but her knowledge has also afforded her astuteness, and it's coming to the surface now.
    "You're smiling."
    Her brows rise. "I'm always smiling."
    Nanami shakes her head, fingers tapping restlessly on the desk. "No, no, that's your work smile," she insists. "This smile is different."
    It's habit to reach up and push back the curls already escaping from her tightly braided hair, but Ruusan has forgotten about the band around her ring finger that glitters in the white lights of the hospital.
    The nurse gasps when she spots it and Ruu freezes for a moment, unsure of what has startled her but then realizes what is displayed on her hand.
    "You didn't...." She says, and Ruu can't decide if the woman is elated or aghast. "You were gone four weeks!"
    "We'd been seeing each other prior to that," she says, feeling merciful even as a content smile pulls at the corner of her mouth. "Things just came to a head while I was on Kahn."
    Nanami leans back in her chair, shaking her head in amazement. "You actually got married. You, who has brushed off so many prospective suitors without even seeing them."
    Ruu shrugs simply, and a call of her name catches her attention. Turning, she sees Tanaka approaching, a broad grin on his features.
    "Ruusan! You can't imagine how nice it is to see you; the replacement, to be honest, is a pain to work with." His blunt opinion spoke of how long they'd been friends and Ruu freely embraces the man when he nears.
    "It's great to see you too, Tanaka," she greets warmly, pleased to see her coworker again.
    "Don't let her fool you, Tanaka," Nanami cuts in, eyeing the young doctor with a teasing glint in her gaze. "Ruu-chan has news for us."
    His brows rise at the inflection in the nurse's tone, and he glances at Ruusan questioningly.
    She doesn't bother hiding it, holding up her left hand in silent explanation.
    Tanaka blinks in surprise. "You're.... married."
    "I am," Ruusan confirms, smiling. She'd have to start getting her last name changed in the million different places that she's listed as Schaefe....
    "And when was this, my pretty, but very oblivious to male attention, coworker?" He questions, leaning against the counter, his interest piqued.
    Ruu knows they'll have to get to work soon, but obliges their curiosity for the moment, amused with their reactions. "We went to the law office with our families yesterday afternoon."
    "No wedding?" Nanami puts in, her arms crossed over her desk. Her surprise is clear on her face.
    "Nope." Ruu shakes her head once. "Didn't need one, and we only had a short window of opportunity after I got done with the course on Kahn."
    Tanaka seems impressed. "I hope he knows how lucky he is, getting away with no ceremony. Those things are expensive."
    "Exactly the point I brought up, and trust me, he was more than content with the trip to the law office," Ruusan has to rein in her humor, remembering his response when she'd proposed the practical solution.
    Nanami clucks her tongue impatiently. "Enough stalling now, Ruusan. I want a name, a job, and how long you two have known each other."
    The younger woman laughs and doesn't offer even token resistance to the nurse's orders. "His name is Jhidek Vhander, his family works in the private security sector, and I've technically known him since I was a kid, but we just ran into each other again in the past few months." The temptation to edit his occupation is strong, but Ruu knows they'll never believe something so far-fetched as wandering dentist, or landscape artist.
    "So now we have to call you Vhander-sensei instead of Schaefe-sensei. That'll take some getting used to." Tanaka states, a musing note to his voice. "You know, you probably could've taken some time off."
   "I know, but time off doesn't really exist in his world, and I've been gone for so long already that I didn't want to abandon you guys for much longer."


   As for Ruusan putting Jhidek's job as being "private security", Uhric is not known to be welcoming to bounty hunters, which is what Jhidek and his family are, so she purposefully construed his job as different from what it really is; not from a lack of knowledge.

  And don't worry; she will have plenty of fun telling kids at an orphanage that she volunteers at that she's married a free-lance dentist who does horticulture as a hobby.

   With that, I hope you found this brief blip humorous, and I hope that I'll be able to get something more edited/written for you all to peruse at some point in the near future.

   Thank you so much for reading!

   As astra per aspera.
   To the stars, through difficulties.

Writing: An (Original) Family Tree

    In the wake of my massive summary of the three alternate storylines Penny and I have in the Zephron Galaxy (see here), there was some confusion over the families, whose children were whose, and whose children were married to whose children, and who their subsequent children were.

    Even that confused you, didn't it?

    So I decided to take the suggestion of one of my faithful readers, Trinity, and put together a family tree graphic when I should've been doing schoolwork this evening.

    It took a lot longer than I expected, but both my sisters agreed it looked pretty good in the end, so I decided to go ahead and post it before I got back to work.

    Hopefully, this family tree will be helpful in sorting out the Schaefe-Vhander families.

    (Click on the photo for a larger, readable file.)



Note: All Vhanders are Penny's characters, everyone else is mine (Siani).

    Well, that's all from me for the moment. I would like to get some stuff up sometime soon, but schoolwork is eating my life, so we'll see how it goes.

    Thanks for reading!

    Ad astra per aspera.
    To the stars, through difficulties.

A Summary of Storylines

   This post is going to be entirely dedicated to the explaining of three storylines that myself and my best friend, Penny Kearney, have developed over the past six years of our lives. Well, one of them is six years old; the other two are under one.

   There is the Original Storyline, the Steampunk Storyline, and the most recent Deviant Storyline. I've give brief intros to how they each began before each summary.

   Also, there is a great chance these will be really confusing to you guys and I'm incredibly sorry for it, but there were just a million things that went on during all that time, so please just leave a comment if you need clarification on something and I'll get back to you with something more understandable as soon as possible.

  ...And let me warn you that my "summaries", as you will soon see, might as well be novels. I am no good at summarizing, although, in my defense, I am summarizing 20+ years worth of multiple character's lives. At least for the Original Storyline.

    One more thing to note: both the Original and Deviant storylines take place in the Zephron Galaxy, which includes several planets, among them Sinjaro Kahn, Uhric, Norsha'ac, Gogam, Karon, Tigersoon, Tiloon, and Klowdarr.


   Original Storyline:

   Began: Oh, heavens, years ago. Penny and I started talk-gaming (character developing? What do regular writers call that?) with a taciturn Uhrician Elite Force Warrior and a green-eyed intruder who are about as night and day as Penny and I are. I think Sarris and Tara are kind of a testament to our own friendship, in how highly unlikely it is and yet it still happened.

   General Summary: Sarris Nadir (Gogamian, UEF Warrior) and Tara Benson (Norsha'acite, bounty hunter) met under rather unlikely circumstances and became dysfunctional friends, though Sarris didn't admit to it for years. Literally, years.
    Tara met Nuridarr Vhander during a brief, accidental stint on Gogam, which he helped her get through alive and in one piece and then they both were rescued from the planet by Tara's brother, Luke Benson (bounty hunter as well). Immediately after, Tara, Nuridarr, and Luke took a sudden leave of absence from the galaxy for two years, during which time Sarris an acquaintance through Tara by the name of Novarr Schaefe. (My apologies for similarities between Novarr and Nuridarr's names. Mostly accidental, and you never get them mixed up once you know them.)
    After that, Tara and Luke find three of their younger siblings. Their entire family has been missing for several years, and they do find them somewhere between finding Ron, Andro, and Mara and Luke 'dying'. Except he didn't actually die. (Don't ask me, not my characters, and I can't recall anyways.) Following Luke's death by a couple of months, Tara married Nuridarr. Sarris and Novarr are just... living during this time. Not a lot is going on for them.
    Tara and Nur's first daughter, Raina, was born a handful of months later, followed closely by Sarris and Novarr's adopted, newborn daughter, Ruusan. And Jhidek/Jay (Tara and Nur's son) came along a bit after that. (Don't worry, that was the end of the baby boom for seven years.) Sarris, a Ronin in the Uhrician Elite Force's ranking system, went into "the reserves", in a way, during all this that way she could be at home to look after Ruusan.
     There was another kind of blank seven years, where life just went on and the Vhanders and Schaefe's raised their respective children/child. Jaydn and Merri were adopted/born about the same time. Jaydn was five when Novarr whisked her away from an inevitably bad situation after her parents died/were killed. (The details are still kind of sketchy at that part.) In the following eight years, there were a passel more Vhander children, while the Schaefe household remained safely at two. The two families are far from strangers, to the point where the parents are all "aunties" and "uncles" to each other's offspring.
     Jaydn follows in Novarr's footsteps, taking up bounty hunting and eventually turning into something of a loner, which is her downfall in the end. Ruusan, after being lost for a time, decides to become an Emergency Response Transport Paramedic, which means that she's in the ambulance, at the scene of the crash. She attends medical school and takes up a job as an ERTP on Sinjaro Kahn, where her parents live. It's in the hospital that she meets Cameron Armstrong, a fairly average guy who is dying from a non-contagious, but uncurable, disease. When he asks her to marry him, she does.
    Cameron's death ten months later coincides with the birth of their daughter, Vivian. Two months pass, and Sarris works with Tara and Nuridarr to find an apartment near the Vhander home on Norsha'ac for Ruusan and Vivian. Staying on Kahn is only a constant reminder of Cameron for Ruu, and the vote is unaninmous that she needs some time away.
    Over the course of two years and through a series of author-caused events to cause a little heart-pounding anxiety and to strengthen bonds, Ruusan falls in love with childhood friend and never-before-romantic-interest, Jhidek. And he falls in love with Vivi, and Ruu too. (What? Vivian's an angel. Anybody would fall in love with her first.)
    So they get married, and Ellora, the first Ruu/Jay bundle of adorableness, is born fifteen months later. Jaydn dies from her injuries after her ship is shot down by space pirates, much to the trauma of her family.
    Here, I shall end. (Though there is a lot of unaccounted drama, let me assure you.)


   Steampunk Storyline:

   Began: Sometime in early 2012, Penny and I had been curious as to how Jaydn and Nuridarr would get along, as they've both got the same blood running through their veins and all. We couldn't come up with plausible trouble for them to get into in the original storyline, so we picked them up and moved them to Penny's steampunk world (a city named Sanbourne) which she has with a friend of hers, Katana. It really only served to show Jade's true colors.

    General Summary: Nuridarr, now Nathaniel, and Jaydn, shortened to Jade, meet when she's ten-ish and he's eighteen-ish and she's an orphan and he's thrown himself out of his Gogamian crime....syndicate/gang/tribe/thing. Ten years later, and the two of them have, quite successfully, made their living on bounty hunting. Life is good, Jade is happy, and I kind of want her radio that she's got.
     Insert Natasha Bennet, a rather fiery woman they nab, who ends up biting Nathan ("Shikhan, should you take something for rabies?" "I've had worse.") before they take her to meet the person who hired them to find her. It turns out to be a Gogamian that Nathaniel knew back when he was still with them. Also a man that Nathan isn't going to hand Tasha over to, so he sends Jade and Tasha off while he faces their client and his goons.
    To summarize the rest, because this was an incredibly difficult storyline to write and it's hard to capture everything that happens, Nathaniel falls in love with Tasha, and it doesn't go over well with Jade. She moves out, starts working on her own, and goes to great pains to avoid seeing Tasha.
    A lot of things occur in the next year or two.
   Jade locates Tasha's missing family with the help of her contact, Charles, and an ex-assassin-turned-bounty-hunter named Jase Drouais gets mixed up in everything through a former connection to the kidnapper and the disappearance of his brother, Markham. Unfortunately, Jade gets laid up with an injured leg and is out of commission for the actual rescue.
   Later, there is the appearance of a government official bent on killing all lowlifes. He's sees them as a taint upon the clean-blooded people of higher society in Sanbourne. Jade, Nathan, and his daughter with Tasha, are on the hit-list due to their heritage. After a really close call which Jase, the ex-assassin who she now works with, saves her from, they go to make sure that Nathan, Tasha, and Raina are safe and the three of them end up leaving town. Jade, Jase, and Tasha's brother, Lucas (Luke, originally) work together to try and locate, then bring down, the government official, Horace Scott. It is thought for a time that Nathan, Tasha, and Raina perish in a train wreck, which makes life difficult, to say the least.
    After that, Penny and I never actually finished talk-gaming it. And I know it sounds like Jade's perfectly balanced through all those events, but she really isn't, and after it turns out that Nathan, Tasha, and Raina are alive, she skips town for four years, staying away as long as she needs to so she can screw her head on straight again. A lot happens to her while she's gone, including a couple of near-death experiences, a semi-relationship with a guy named Sato, and a friendship with a woman named Kensey during her last year
who ends up dying from sickness. After that, she goes back to Sanbourne to see if she'll be welcomed back after practically abandoning the people there that cared about her. And while things were far from what they'd been years prior, Nathan and Tara were willing to let her back into their lives to start rebuilding what she'd crumbled.


   Deviant Storyline:

   Began: Back in August or thereabouts of 2012, with Penny's curiosity over what would've happened if Luke had been unable to locate Tara on Gogam and save her, and by extension, Nuridarr, from the planet. Initially, I was a spectator, interested in the idea for itself and the effect it would have on Sarris. I didn't really become involved until the characters got their revenge for Penny and I wondering if Jaydn might've been an antagonist all along that we'd been trying to make into a protagonist. The question came up of how Jade might've turned out different had she been raised up with good, strong morals while still on Gogam. If that hard setting that she was born for was where she needed to be in order to be instilled with a good heart. The idea caught on quickly, and thus it began.

   General Summary:
   Tara's transponder is damaged during her initial days on Gogam, so instead of being rescued by Luke, she and Nuridarr are forced to remain on the planet, living on the run from his tribe who've branded him a traitor. She has gives up hope of ever getting off Gogam quickly and they just survive for a year or so. They're negotiating for supplies with an tribe that's an enemy with Nuridarr's old tribe when the tribe is attacked. In the chaos, Tara rescues a three-year-old baby girl named Jaydn after her motherr is killed. (Please don't feel bad, her parents were a far cry from what parents should be.)
   For a small amount of time, the plan is to drop her off with another tribe, but Tara falls in love pretty quickly and while Nur was initially opposed to the idea of keeping her, he gets attached as well and they adopt Jaydn as their own.
   Over the course of the following six years which are spent constantly moving, fighting to survive against both the planet and other Gogamians, Jade is brought up included in every process, being given her own duties and responsibilities, and she's taught that they all protect each other. Not every man for himself, as the rest of Gogam does.
   While Tara gave up on leaving, Jaydn's addition to their family gave Nuridarr a newfound motivation to get Tara and Jade off of Gogam and to a better life out in the rest of Zephron. And he does, joining a pirate gang in order to get them passage on a ship headed off Gogam.
   Jade is nine years old when the time to leave comes, and they realize that Tara is pregnant either while on the ship, or shortly after they escape into the rest of the galaxy.
   While all this has been happening on Gogam, Sarris has spent the six years searching the galaxy for Tara, not even having a place to start, but refusing to quit until she finds Tara, living or dead. Novarr, only an acquaintance at this point, keeps in touch with her and does some of his own searching, while Luke, unable to get to Tara on Gogam, breaks off his efforts early on to continue looking for their missing family.
   After this point, events get fairly fuzzy, as Penny and I haven't even talk-gamed their leaving. But Raina and Jhidek are both born within a couple of years of their getting of Gogam and Jade settles into her role as Imo's (Daddy's) wing mate and big sister with
ease, much to our relief.
   Merri follows seven years after Jhidek, when Jade is seventeen, Raina eight, and Jay seven.
   In the deviant, their focus as hunters is trained much more on the Gogamians who leave their home planet to terrorize the rest of Zephron and either turning them back or finishing them off. The effect on them as a family is a much more trained, orderly, and possibly an even tighter and closer dynamic than the original. They protect each other and carry out their missions together once Raina and Jhidek get older. (Not sure how they worked the Merri angle when she showed up later.)
   Meanwhile, Sarris and Novarr slowly drifted toward each other, Tara's return to their worlds drawing them back together. He's there to help support Sarris as she deals with the guilt she feels over not finding Tara sooner, but eventually it turns to something more.
   Ruusan does not go forgotten either. Sarris helped rescue her from a hostage situation on Sinjaro Kahn when Ruusan was ten and on her way back to Norsha'ac following a failed adoption attempt. Always a decisive thinker, Sarris decided that she didn't want to let Ruu go back to the orphanage and worked with the social service system on Kahn to legally adopt her. I'm not sure what her relationship status was with Novarr at the time, but they might've been on the edge of getting married when Sarris picked up Ruu and that was the turning point.
    For a few years, the Vhander and Schaefe households would get together, so Ruusan wasn't strangers with Raina, Jhidek, and Merri, but when they got older, the visits dropped off some, possibly because the Vhanders, now with the kids of a safer age to aid in the fight, got busier with missions. Not positive on that account either.
    Ruusan headed to med-school on Sinjaro Kahn from Uhric at eighteen, taking a more intensive course and finishing in four and a half years to return to Uhric where her parents and Jensen lived.
   (Sarris became a Grandmaster while Tara was gone, which equates to a general or some such, and Jensen is a Ronin [equivalent = colonel] who works as her aide and was with her when she helped to rescue Ruusan. He started as a trusted aide and friend and was basically adopted into the family after a couple of years. Ruu sees him as an older brother and close confidante.)
   The unintended silence between the two families came to a rather abrupt end when Jhidek, injured in an explosion while he and Raina were on a mission, dropped in, quite literally, to Ruusan's apartment. Things were touch-and-go, but she saved his life and
things just take off from there. I won't bore you with those details, but suffice it to say, after a couple of spontaneous visits, a close encounter with the bad sort of Gogamian for Ruu, a few months of silence to protect her on Jay's part, a tought fight that ended with a "missing, perhaps dead" news report on the Vhanders, and a conniving Tara, Ruusan and Jhidek worked out what they both wanted. Not without a bit of drama, of course, but they were married just under a month later.
    And the rest of the story, as they say, has yet to be told.


   And that's all of it! For the moment, at least. The only really "finished" storyline is the Steampunk storyline. The other two kind of go through stop-again-go-again expanding. Currently, Penny and I are caught up in the Deviant again, although we're at the tail end,
instead of the beginning.

   To clarify that, we're talk-gaming at two points in the storyline. The first point is with Nuridarr, Tara, and Jaydn on Gogam and Jade is currently seven. The second point is twenty-five-some years down the road, with Ruusan and Jhidek, although I don't think we
truly intended to pick it up as agressively as we have. (It's only mostly my fault; I was curious if Ruu and Jay would work out in the Deviant as they did in the Original.)

    Once again, please feel entirely free to either leave a comment here with questions or on my OYAN profile, where I can be found as PenWielder62. These storylines are ones that Penny and I have invested a lot of time and thought into, and they're actually quite
important to me, so I would greatly enjoy helping you clear up whatever it is that I've confused you with.

   And thank you so much, as always, for reading. Knowing that there are people who actually enjoy what I write means a great deal to me.

   Ad astra per aspera.
   To the stars, through difficulties.