Satisfied and headachey.

Ran Star Wars Scum & Villainy Game for 7 staright hours today, then BSed with friends for another hour+.  In the excitement, forgot to have caffeine.  Or, in fact, to drink anything.  I am now tired, dehydrated, and the lingering ghosts of my cold symptoms are haunting me...

... but on the other hand, I got to watch a Wookiee fistfight a blue-spotted amphibious rancor while standing in an alien lake made of ethanol compounds.  A lake of booze.

Also, I got writing done.  Still stuck on Hellion Prince, and tempted to just post what I have of the chapter so far, but I got 500+ words on A Lightning Tour of Damascus, which appears to be a Lightning Age short story that serves no purpose but to introduce a one-shot I am running next month.

Excerpt:

The entire apparatus of the Carthaginian state was in this train station, at this moment. If the Paramountcy knew, and had agents in Damascus plant a single bomb...

 

“Any threats?” he asked Hasdrubal through suddenly gritted teeth.

 

“Not to us,” Hasdrubal answered, and gestured with two brief flicks of his hand to a pair of well-dressed Egyptians, a man with a trim beard and an amused expression, and a woman with black hair piled on her head in snakelike coils scaled with a proliferation of jewelry. “Caliph's agents. Hunting smugglers. Alyssar will be fine... assuming she got rid of the phosphorous.”

 

“Phosphorous?” Kadmos tried not to stare at the couple, and felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle.

“Yes, say it loudly, that's a good idea,” Hasdrubal dropped his voice to a murmur, bending in so Kadmos could hear him over the crowd. “Before we were separated, she had been collaborating with those British socialist friends of yours. If neither of them could get the Khan's support... there was to be a bomb. They could have held his city hostage. I liked the idea... but the Khan's son liked us, I guess. We got what we came for.”