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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But no one knows everything, and there are some things his background has not prepared him for, and that he has carefully avoided.\u00a0 Because city boy.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 In the dark.\u00a0 And it’s sleeting.\u00a0 And the hill he’s come over is, on the far side, populated by things that go bump in the night.\u00a0 Large things.\u00a0 Things he can’t recognize by smell or feel, even when he’s knocked down and out.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But the conversation is still going on, so I should go write it before I lose it.<\/p>\n
Present length: 83,577<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0\u00a0 He is familiar with, and extremely capable in handling, life on the run, life on a space station, life in a spaceship, Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}