Storm Chaser: Chapter 47

Chapter 47

Walking to work after so long on the ship felt wonderful to Elena. While she walked much more on board the ship than she did in the normal course of a day often times it was without the benefit of the fresh breeze. Flowers had bloomed in her absence and trees put out new leaves. Spring was beginning to fade into summer. A light breeze teased the ends of her hair as she walked. She pushed the strange dream of the night before aside and enjoyed the moment.

There was much to be done before she once again boarded the Storm Chaser. Much of the gathering of supplies for the planet side trip she had delegated to Benjamin. In exchange for being allowed to visit the planet with them he was more than willing to pick up the needed goods. Elena consoled herself with the fact that the military might be watching her and as she had never really been the sort to spend time camping or hiking it would look strange if she started. There were some things Elena would still need to secure and she had a list tucked into her pocket but most of her time would be occupied in making sure everything earthside was squared away.

Elena ran through her list as she walked. Passing Zoltoy didn’t even dim her good spirits with speculation. In addition to the imports store and Nibbles, she would need to check on the pilots and their progress. She hoped some of them had made some sort of progress towards overcoming the Calling for their sake as well as her own. If they did they could get a version of their old lives back. That would help them and monetarily, as they were now a part of her House, it would help her. From a more practical standpoint she wanted to present the proposal to the council by saying that not only could she go through the channel but other pilots could as well, if they had the Calling.

She smiled, a somewhat fiercer smile than usual. Being able to open new channels would drastically alter trade and it would put the affected pilots who had been treated so shabbily at the forefront of the game. Elena sopped in her tracks as a thought hit her. She had been thinking of the use of the Calling as vindication for the grounded pilots. Somehow she had missed the complete flip of power this would bring. Pilots such as Riko would be forced to make alliances with people like Elena if they wanted their Houses to stay viable. Elena blinked in the sunlight. Pilots like Therese who had never been affected with the Calling would also have to make such alliances or be relegated to running only the old channels.

“Like transport duty,” Elena whispered. She shook her head trying to dislodge the thought. “Therese will kill me.” Elena shook her head again and continued walking towards the stores, pushing the thoughts away in the name of practicality.

A few hours later her brain was spinning with practicality. She dove in eagerly. Both stores were doing well, a fact that sort of amazed her given the current economy. Apparently many people who would normally host a party at a fancy restaurant or other venue had opted for more scaled down versions in their homes. Her wares were exotic enough to seem decadent yet not cost prohibitive.

She found people hosting gatherings also liked to buy one of two new items from the imports store to freshen up their home before the party. All in all business was good. Roger made a few suggestions for supplies based on what was selling and what was selling out. He also asked for Consuelo’s contact information and permission to host a few tasting events in the store. Elena gladly approved and suggested he work not only with Susan for a tie in but with Doug’s Wineshop as they had done at the opening. She hadn’t met the owner for the specialty meats store yet but suggested Roger make that contact and see if they were willing to be brought in. Roger smiled as he began to make plans and Elena got the impression he loved to host parties. She also had the feeling he would do well working with Consuelo.

“The opera singer and the mad chef,” Elena mused, picturing the scene. She chuckled to herself. “That sounds like a really bad reality TV show.”

Once the stores were settled, Elena found herself bouncing around the neighborhood as she spoke with the re-located Pilots. As a group they were much more at ease than they had been when she first met them and they seemed to be forming a group. Some of them had even paired up to be roommates.

“Maybe they are sharing the same salon,” Elena thought. Normally a Pilot’s hair was grown long and pulled into one long braid. Typically this braid ended at the small of the back. The pilots in her little group had all opted for shorter hairdos. Some had trimmed their locks shorter but left it long enough to still tie back in a ponytail. Others had gone with a bob style closer to her style. She wondered if they were just trying to blend or if they felt they had to cut their hair since she did. Elena decided if it were the latter she didn’t want to know.

The haunted desperate look had been erased from their eyes. All of them reported progress in dealing with the Calling, fewer headaches, nightmares turning into vivid dreams to be recorded, and a more calm state of mind.

“Amazing how calm you get when you realize you won’t loose your entire world after all,” she thought. The women she chatted with were no longer frightened and beaten down. They were confident and self composed. “They look like pilot’s again,” Elena thought with a grin. She found it interesting that they each seemed to dream of different Channels waiting to be opened. She wondered if which Channel a person was drawn to had something to do with her personality. It was an odd thought.

Even odder was the respect it was granted when she mentioned it to the three pilots she was having coffee with at the moment. They were sitting at an outdoor table of a neighborhood coffee shop, each sipping from her own choice of beverage when the thought occurred to her. Elena shared it in a musing sort of way, happy to have random conversation with other pilots again, conversation that didn’t have to be completely guarded. They all nodded slowly and thoughtfully at her comment, not as though they agreed with her assessment but rather as if she were a teacher imparting wisdom. Elena decided she would keep her random thoughts for a different venue.

She was pleased to see they had all more or less blended into earthside life. Many of them had chosen to go back to school, most either part time or just one class that interested them. The rational was that students often lived a somewhat erratic life and it was not unheard of for a student to drop out for a semester. This kind of life allowed them the freedom to still work towards becoming full time pilots again.

“And more people are going back to school after being laid off,” Jasmine told her handing Elena the list of classes she was planning to take.

Elena had to admit is was a pretty good plan. The neighborhood Elena had moved to, which she had to admit was rapidly becoming a guild district, was close enough to the university not to excite too much trouble with the cover story and Elena was interested to find that the classes being taken all related to the new kind of pilot life that seemed to be evolving. Like Jasmine, each of the pilots presented her with a list of classes they planned to enroll in when the fall semester began. She reviewed the lists with interest.

Business classes were high on the list, as were general marketing classes which came as very little surprise. It was clear the guild as a whole would need to move out of strictly the supply side of the free market system if they were going to survive. She thought of the man at the guild party for Nibbles and who he was baffled about her partnerships with non-guild members. It seemed things might be changing in more than one way.

What did surprise her was the number of computer classes and graphics classes in the mix. She assumed they would go towards both product design and internet sales of off world goods. A fair number of botany, chemistry and other physical science classes were also involved. Each one of the women she talked with had thought out a basic plan and integrated it with their own existing skill set as well as some of the skills they thought they could use based on their dreams.

Elena was impressed and told each of them that as well. She was surprised by how pleased everyone was that she liked their ideas until the end of the day when she realized why.

Elena finished meeting with everyone and decided to take her reader and notes for proposals to the park to work. Since the reader looked so much like a Kindle she doubted it would attract much notice. She was settling in to one of the picnic tables when it occurred to her why they had been so pleased with her reaction. She nearly slapped her own forehead for her own stupidity.

Most of the pilots had grown up in very restrictive households. Alexandro had been her head of household growing up and while he was strict about certain topics he expected her to learn, in many areas he let her go her own way. Mateo and even Therese had been given the freedom once the required topics were learned where their grandfather was concerned. Therese’s mother cut off a lot of the slack that Mateo and Elena still enjoyed by requiring extra classes in politics. Even then Elena had been aware this was not the case in many houses. Therese’s mother was closer to the norm than Alexandro had been.

“They were waiting for my approval,” Elena thought to herself. She wondered what other duties she was expected to perform that she had missed. She also wondered why anyone ever wanted to be in charge of anything. She made a mental note to spend some more time studying the two small books Alexandro had given her as well as working on her proposal. Considering at least one of the pilots now under the care of her house had come from Riko’s Elena had a feeling her interpretations of House rules were going to be a big change for her fledgling family.

She returned home with much of her potential proposal laid out for both the Council and the potential Alliance with Riko. Kiera was coming in at the same time and told Elena that she would be interested in accepting the contract work and in making the trip with her. Elena gave her a basic list of things she would need for the trip. Kiera’s mouth quirked up at the corners and Elena had a second realization of stupidity.

“You’ve been on sites like this before,” Elena said.

“Yeah,” Kiera responded. “But it is nice to see you have the same expectations as I do.”

“There is that,” Elena said. “Normally we have a fifty pound rule for gear. That is personal gear. If you have work related gear I would prefer it be in a separate bag as we have different weight calculations for that.” Kiera nodded.

“That’s pretty standard as well,” Kiera said. “At least when flying out of country.” They parted at the stair well and Elena went into her apartment feeling like she had kicked a snowball down a mountainside.

“I really hope there isn’t a village in the valley,” She told Spin as she began to pull her own gear together.