Dragon’s Lair

If you’re into winter sports and visit the Stellar Queen, you’ll want to teleport to South Point. Located in the Southern Mountains, South Point is at ten thousand feet (“So close, you can almost touch the sun,” the inhabitants claim – not true) and offers the ship’s best skiing, snow boarding and snow mobile adventures. Painting itself as the Stellar Queen’s Aspen, after Earth’s famous resort, South Point even has an annual film festival, Stardance, to convince you of their bonafide intentions.

Three miles from South Point (seconds via ship teleport) is Trudy’s Valley. Trudy, one of the ship’s original settlers, is long departed from the ship. She re-married (her fifth, although just her second male husband, but her second marriage since becoming a woman again) and moved with her husband back to his home world, where they opened an art gallery that features the Stellar Queen’s artists.  Trudy’s grandson remains in Trudy’s Valley, though. Rei’s awesome baked goods are considered the ship’s best, and many establishments in the cities and towns around the Stellar Queen promote Baked Delights from Trudy’s Valley. Rei offers savory and sweet goods. I’d kill for one of his dark chocolate drizzled raspberry croissants right now.

Also within spitting distance of South Point and worth a visit is Dragon’s Lair. Located on the Stellar Queen’s second highest peak, Petyr McSweeney’s original intention was to introduce dragons to the Queen. Dragons were big as part of the genetic creations movement sweeping the galaxies back then. But in a rare move, Her Lady exercised her veto powers. With sharply unambiguous verbiage, she clarified that the Stellar Queen would not be home to dragons or other fantasy creatures, declaring, “This isn’t a fantasy ship.” She does, however, allow unicorns to wander Her Lady’s Forest on her estate (the ship’s largest private holding).

Undeterred by that setback, Petyr instead established a brewery. Dragon’s Lair Imperial Porter is chocolate and vanilla infused. Powerful, smooth and heady, I can attest its worth imbibing from a perch in the Stellar Queen’s high, snowy mountains. Visit after sundown and gaze upon the stars.

Tell them I sent you and say hello to Petyr for me, but beware. Petyr used to terraform planets for human settlement and has a million and one stories, and will not hesitate to tell them. Still, he’ll keep your cup filled, as long as you’re willing to listen.

 

Homage to the Stellar Queen

Two miles and 43 minutes, the coffee shop walk allows a surfeit of thinking. Today, with summer starting in the northern hemisphere, I thought of the Stellar Queen.

She’s old. I haven’t thought of her in a while. She’s so ancient in my relative life, that her original Word Perfect, PowerPoint and Paint files reside on five and a quarter floppy disks. They were transferred to three and a half inch disks, and then to a hard drive when I bought a tower Dell, in 1999.

The Stellar Queen was my first foray into science fiction. Orson Scott Card told how he liked drawing maps to stimulate his creativity. I designed cars as a child and planned to be an architect (or a rock star) so I took up designing the Stellar Queen on computer.

She was originally built by a patron of the arts who traveled the galaxies. The Lady (never named, and very mysterious) lives in an estate along the edge between the Central Plain and the Northern Mountains. A bio-dome hybrid class ship, the Queen’s bio portion is sixty-seven miles long by fourteen miles wide. Thinking in threes, she had three cities, three towns and three villages, three major climate zones (with many micro climes), and three rivers that flowed down into the Starry Sea, on the ship’s ‘northwestern’ side. One small town, Half Moon Bay, came to be on the Starry Sea, was based upon Half Moon Bay, California, where I resided for a while. The Queen featured a sun that rose in the ship’s east and set in the west, over the sea. It wasn’t a big sea, just large enough for waves, pleasure craft and some fishing. Just big enough for romance.

Three centers, for government & ship operations, markets, and education, were established, along with three wineries, three breweries, three ranches…et cetera. I began many stories about her. Murder on the Stellar Queen, Death Boards the Stellar Queen, Treason on the Stellar Queen, and so on. None were finished nor submitted. I still have them, though, in notebooks, in boxes, in the garage.

I still smile, thinking about the Stellar Queen, and I easily board her. Half Moon Bay on the Queen is a pleasant place to be, to sip wine or beer and contemplate the ocean and sunshine, marvel about traveling the galaxies, and think about the first day of summer in another year.

Time to go write like crazy.

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