The season whispered that it would be wise to trade my Buttercup Rocinante, the steel steed, for the Rattlin' Battle Wagon, so I made the trip to begin the exchange. The morning of my departure carried a warning of colder weather to come. I shivered through the first hundred miles with the Craters of the Moon being the usual scenic high point of that portion of the trip. I did see another guy on a bike coming from the main gate there, and I thought he was headed in my direction, but I never saw him again.
Fortunately, the trip was uneventful--as far as you know. I got to the mowing right away so I could watch a ball game with friends on Saturday morning. The game was more exciting that we cared for, but our team managed to hang on to an early lead. At 4-0, having beaten a ranked team last week, they earned a rank in the top 25 but were still underdogs in the match up against a 2-2 unranked team. Once again they overcame those odd odds to come out on top.
Hoses and filters and vents and such filled the rest of the day--after I lent an expert hand (one finger, actually) to fitting a screen in place for my game-watching hosts.
The big event came after a dinner of chicken wings - which happened to be the same thing I had for lunch - when I conferred with Les Freres Corses over the pinkish-purple (perhaps also known as lavender) game board. Federation men and the anomalous White Wizard beamed down to a village recently put to the torch; one of the buildings was still smoking. The surviving villagers were on the prowl, but a redshirt successfully won their confidence. The captain of the expedition had his face in a tricorder most of the time. It had been damaged by ion interference during beam down and he was determined to fix it. When he finally did get it working, he located the other life forms: Time Pirates (in Klingon garb).
The Time Pirates terminated a villager. This did not endear them to the natives. One headed underground, pursued by several villagers. The other pirate wounded the persuasive redshirt-- who then beamed back to the ship--and met his end on the sword the other redshirt in the landing party. The odds at last caught up with the pirate in the catacombs, and he finally failed a challenge roll, coming face to fang with a nasty beasty in the gloomy corridors. It was a close encounter of the final kind for the pirate.
At that point, even though we had not yet determined who had torched the village, La Mere Corse had sounded the alarm and all Starfleet personnel and their wizard henchmen had to return to the ship to get ready for bed.
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