Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far* and the citizens of Fahali were comfortably into the first month of summer.

Today was the kind of day where it might pay to laze along your front stoop, watching instead of milling in the dense and clamorous crowds. The shouts of the nearby local bazaar were loud and the gossip of the local housewives and old men thick; the air wafting in from the open-air meat stalls moist and rank as usual. The sun glinted off the various pots, pans, clock gears, and machine parts for sale.

Sil had elected to stay in the quieter, tree-shaded area behind her house. She hummed to herself as she sat on the porch and wove flowers for Queen Cinnamon's upcoming birthday gala; she had taken her work home. Most palace servants lived in the palace along with the rest of the household of the royal court. But the Queen was a modern sort and so Sil, chambermaid to one of the ladies-in-waiting, had been able to use up a bit of her small pension to purchase a rather tiny cottage a short distance away from a comparatively rocky strip of the Fahali beach.

It sat on the outskirts of the city, and was quite a distance away from the palace, making the journey to work slightly more difficult. It was tiny, two stories high but squashed in between 2 taller buildings and there were only 4 rooms -- well 2 and 2 halves really. One on the bottom, one on the top with a little wrought-iron balcony, and a tiny closet-like kitchen and bathroom respectively squeezed in. On hot days Sil watered the flowerboxes on the balcony and her kodomo Petrushevskaya enjoyed snoozing in the planter Sil had sprouted him in, a warm squishy blob that shuddered with tiny snores.

Sil had found Tru as an unusual-looking seed lying on her front step one day -- for one thing it was finely furred and about the size of a plum. In any case, Sil knew what it was from the countless broadsheets discussing the discovery of the curious new species that had been named "the kodomo". Finding Tru was unusual, as they had been discovered to be forest dwellers by nature and the majority of Calorian forests were quite far away from Fahali. Even though she had never seen one up close before, she had quite the green thumb and felt entirely comfortable planting the seed deep inside one of the wrought-iron flowerboxes lining her balcony.

(cont.)

* Shoutout.