The last few days have been eventful, but I’ve mostly been watching from the sidelines while I finish up getting the house in order. While Merlin’s idea of having the girls trained as a guard force has some merit, they are not there yet. In the mean time, it may be unwise to have a bunch of nubile young girls and stacks of gold sitting around without some sort of guard. I figured my presence would do until we got something better in place. 

I was about to head up to Flora’s place to ask their recommendation on security and a household manager when I got the news that Flora’s Paris office had been bombed. Fiona and Merlin showed up shortly afterwards to tighten up the magical and pattern security in the house. They looked exhausted, and I was able to coax them into sleeping a good 12 hours with the magic words ‘this is a fast shadow, it won’t take that long”. After a good rest and meal, they were off again. Corwin avoided them while they were here. I had another set of visitors as well. Archi’s sailors had been using pistols in his home shadow, and found that they needed to be trained with crossbows. We set up an archery range in a far section of the grounds, and had pirates rotating through for about a week. Archi stopped by for a visit and to check on his people. He had Tyler with him, yet another relative who had heard about the girls and wanted to stop by for some ogling. Men. While they were here we got a trump call from Bleys. A ship had shown up from Chaos with supplies. He wanted someone to come check it out, as everyone there was busy. The idea of a new and different type of ship really fired up Archi and Tylor. I went along because I was mildly curious and had nothing better to do. When we got there Michael (Flora’s son, for those without scorecards) was there too. Turns out the ship sails the space between shadows a.k.a. the void. We took a short ride and found that any pattern (or logrus) use will kick you out of the void. The building and piloting of such a ship is the family secret of the minor chaos house (house Roc) that was flying it. I left Archi trying to figure out how to get that secret. I wish him luck, but think House Roc has had plenty of practice keeping that one. I had a discussion with Corwin regarding transportation. I had been thinking of getting some horses (as that is transportation appropriate for the shadow), but didn’t know a thing about them. Now THERE is a good combination, a woman with money and no knowledge, and a horse seller. Corwin knows something about horses and said that there are no good ones nearby. He had some in different shadows that he was willing to let us use. I’m not too sure if it is a loan or gift. <shrug> If he wants them back we give them back, but meantime we treat them well and get good use from them. He also decided I needed some horsemanship lessons. I can’t argue with that, but I’m sure glad we heal fast. Saddle sores would be terrible if they had to be endured more than overnight! On our trip to get the horses we stopped by his capitol city of Argent. There were refugees leaving and a great fire burning. After settling me with the horses he decided to go back and fix whatever situation had arisen. I told him to be careful (Merlin gets his ‘charge in without thinking’ trait honestly). He said “of course”, but I really don’t think he knows how. I think I’ll talk to random about the situation and see if he has any objections to me going to help.