City Mouse in the Country

Though no one would be likely to call Rafe a mouse, he’s not a large man, and his background is mostly city life on a populous, very civilized (in its estimation anyway) planet.   He is familiar with, and extremely capable in handling, life on the run, life on a space station, life in a spaceship, typical criminal violence, business tactics, and so on.  But no one knows everything, and there are some things his background has not prepared him for, and that he has carefully avoided.  Because city boy.

And thus, when he has to flee some unexpected trouble in a part of Slotter Key he knows only slightly from maps–on a planet not as densely populated, with fewer than a billion inhabitants–out of line-of-sight from any transmission tower in an area sparsely covered by communications satellites–he gets lost.   In the dark.  And it’s sleeting.  And the hill he’s come over is, on the far side, populated by things that go bump in the night.  Large things.  Things he can’t recognize by smell or feel, even when he’s knocked down and out.

One advantage is that on a planet with fewer people, there are fewer degrees of separation between many of them than there would be on a larger one.   Another is that he was found unconscious, and therefore seemingly less dangerous, so neither the dogs nor the men did him more harm than the things that went bump in the night.

But the conversation is still going on, so I should go write it before I lose it.

Present length: 83,577

11 thoughts on “City Mouse in the Country

      1. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha. After all, it’s that kind of book. Opposite of the Virginia Woolf I’ve been trying to appreciate. We have seen Rafe most in those environments familiar to him, both high and low, but now…(wicked chuckle.) Although, as mentioned, he’s one of the good guys and so far has not put on the Red Shirt of Doom. A couple of other people have, or are about to. (It does no good for the writer to say “Don’t DO that…no…no, not you, you are not the designated hittee in this book” because the characters who paw through the stack of shirts to find a red one either are allowed to put it on, or they promptly turn into the ugliest fake wood/leather/whatever you can imagine. You can sometimes nurse them along to a later volume in the group, but once they’ve done it…the writer has to sigh deeply and look for a place to for it to happen that’s meaningful to that character. They know it will be; they sense it before the writer does.”

        And this writer hates it when they show up for rehearsal wearing it.

    1. Ky is enough into this book that she’s worried about him (naturally) but not showing any signs of fighting her writer. Another Universes scene may reveal what she really thinks but right now I don’t have time to do one.

  1. You wicked person. I might have to stop reading this blog if you keep leaving hints like that, or I’ll die of impatience and curiosity. 🙂

    1. April 2017’s getting closer. Of course that’s for Cold Comfort…now…which book is it in which Rafe is out on a cold hillside? Hmmm.

      No, that’s too mean, even for me. Rafe’s adventure in the dark is in the NEW new book (the second of this group) and the next actual snippets will be from Cold Comfort. Rafe certainly appears in that book, but though he does important things, they’re mostly of the technical nature, which means less obviously exciting. He does get to blow up something, which gives him a happy hour or so.

  2. If you remember your Dickens, one of the hardest things he wrote, and he said so, was the death of the boy in Dombey and Son.

    Jonathan up in NH

    1. I have not read all of Dickens…mea culpa. In college, I found other Victorian writers I enjoyed as much or more, so never went back and finished the rest of the Dickens canon. Maybe I’ll get to it if I ever retire.

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