---Simone’s perspective---

---Thursday, 15th of March, 2683 Terran Calendar---

---Southern England---

“Three days you want, Privates?” I ask, my mouth curled as I look down at the requests on my desk in front of me, then up, at the pair that have submitted them.

“Yes, Ma’am.” replies the redhead who, when she first came here, I identified as a slacker and a problem recruit.

Recently though, she’s been born again and now consistently gets toward the tops of the rankings… seems like the problem was one of application!

“You remember me tellin’ you, when you arrived here, that leave of more than two consecutive days would not be approved?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“And what exactly is it that makes you think I’ll make an exception in this case, Privates?”

“Ma’am…?”

I roll my eyes “Make your case!… Why should I allow this, Private?”

“My… my best friend is getting married, Ma’am.”

“Congrats to them!… Is it a three day long ceremony?” I respond, my eyes narrow.

“It’s a one day long ceremony, Ma’am.”

“Then why have you asked for three, Private?” I query, leaning back in my chair.

“She’s… asked me to be the maid of honour, Ma’am… I’d like to go up on the Friday to help with the prep, sleep there, then participate in the ceremony and the reception, sleep there that night as well and come back on the Sunday, Ma’am.”

“And Taylor would be comiiin’…?”

“As my plus one, Ma’am.”

I tap an index finger against my chin while I consider that.

“If I told you I was only gonna give you two days… which days would you pick, Reid?”

“Friday and Saturday, Ma’am.” she answers, instantly.

“Why?”

“I think it’s more important that I pitch in with the prep than get to party late, Ma’am.”

I like that answer…

“If you’d made this request in December, Reid… I’d’ve denied it instantly!… I’d’ve thought that a truculent little sod like you would use three days of leave to desert and disappear… but… I have to say, since you came back from Australia, you’ve really turned yourself around!…You’ve impressed me… and I don’t consider myself to be a woman who impresses easy!”

I let my words hang in the air while I stare down the pair, both looking over my head.

“Take the leave, Privates… Conditional on you continuin’ to impress me, o’course!… And I expect you both back here, bright eyed and bushy tailed, on the Monday mornin’!”

A broad grin breaks over the Scottish girl’s face.

Even her (usually inexpressive) boyfriend cracks a smile.

“We won’t let you down, Ma’am!” declares the girl.

“Not if you know what’s good for you, you won’t, Private! Dismissed…”

---Oskar’s perspective---

---Friday, 11th of May, 2683 Terran Calendar---

---Southwestern Scotland---

We could have been there in 30 minutes if Esme had let me pay for a capsule for us.

She insisted that you don’t pay for what you could have for free at a bare minimum of effort, so we woke at 6:30am, same as always, took a 35 minute monorail to London, a 40 minute one from there to Newcastle, a 35 minute ride to Carlisle and now, finally, we’re on a monorail, streaking over the forested hills approaching her hometown.

It doesn’t sound like that much but, all told, once you factor in all the walking between platforms and waiting for trains, it adds up to nearly three hours it’s taken us to get from Graffham to here!

It’s May and there are still patches of snow on the ground so far north!

Esme squeezes my hand.

I look to where she sits, smiling at me.

She looks… good in her service uniform… it suits her better than combat fatigues… not quite as well as her armour.

“Nervous?” she asks.

“Yes…” I confess.

“Whyyy?” she asks, playfully leaning her bereted head on my shoulder.

“Because… you despised me when we first met… and I’m worried that all these people might do as well…”

She gives a mirthful puff “Think that was really more of a me thing than a Scot thing or a Stranraerarian thing(!)… You’ll be fine!… They’re gonna love you!”

Just as we pass by twin lochs with an ancient, ruined castle and a stunningly colourful garden nestled between them on our right, the town comes into view,

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Stretching away to the north, nestled into a wide valley, is Esme’s hometown.

The train stops at the station and she gives me a nudge.

“Come on… Let’s go, lad…” she smiles.

I grab my overnight bag and we step off the train, onto the platform, then walk down the stairs to street level.

“We’ll need to get a capsule across town… It’d be a bit of a trek to mine, I’m afraid… The station was built during the Reset, when most of Glen Ryan was still ‘Loch Ryan’!… The orphanage was built much more recently, all the way out at the coast, so it’s too inconvenient to walk to…” she says, steering us to a bank of capsule pods, lined up by the station.

I take an exasperated inhale and ask “…So… all that work to not spend money on the journey… and we end up taking a capsule the last few kilometres anyway?”

“Yeaaah…” she frowns, before saying “…but it’s pennies compared to what we would’ve spent to come all the way!” defensively.

I chuckle and say “Fine… lets go and render an entire morning’s worth of travel pointless!”

“Some of us didn’t grow up rich, poshboy(!)” she teases.

“I’m not rich! My family were never ‘rich’!”

We get into a capsule and a robotic voice asks “Please state your destination.”

“Pinehill Residential Children’s Home…” she states, causing the pod to raise above the rooflevel and begin accelerating north. Then she turns back to me and, continuing her tease, says “You sound rich, Oskar(!)”

“Being well spoken does not equal being rich!”

“‘Well spoken’ is something that posh people made up to not have to call themselves ‘posh’, poshboy(!)”

“This is quite a normal, neutral accent in Doggerland!… You are the first person who’s ever called me ‘posh’, Esme.” I smile, exhaustedly.

“To your face, maybe…(!)” she grins.

“We have reached your destination.” states the capsule as it sets us down on a landing pad, a few hundred metres from the sea.

We step off and Esme’s holo *pings*, presumably notifying her of the fare that was just deducted from it.

She leads us up the street to a six storey building made of stone, perched atop a little hillock and visible through an absolutely gorgeous little forest of scots pines.

She opens the gate and gestures up the path.

“You grew up here and you’re teasing me about being posh?” I ask, dryly “This place looks like it’s right out of a faerie tale…(!)”

“Yeah… didn’t own the orphanage, surprising as that might be to hear(!)” she shoots back, smiling crookedly.

We draw near and the door opens.

The man that steps out is a little above average height but built like a Denisovan!

Despite his face telling me he’s no less Sapiens than me or Esme, his shoulders and hips are broad, his limbs are thick and his chest is deep!

He’s got a wild mane of shaggy, medium length, grey hair and a short grey beard.

His fierce eyes are a piercing brown colour!

Seeing Esme, his beard twists into a smile around his mouth.

“Mimi!” he booms.

Mimi?

Esme smiles back and throws out her arms “Rabbie!”

She tosses me her bag without looking to see that I catch it (which I do) and runs at the massive man!

Though he grunts with the force of her impact, the transfer of momentum seems entirely onesided. He’s barely even jostled by the 178cm woman impacting him, simply scooping her off the ground into a bearhug!

“Good to see you, lassie!” he says in a dialect I don’t think an English speaker without fairly extensive exposure to spoken Scots would be able to get more than the gist of!

He puts her down after a few seconds and says “Alright, alright… Let me get a look at you!”

She stands back, beaming at him.

“Wow… a proper little soldier now, aren’t you!?… Give us a twirl…”

She spins around for him.

“That uniform looks like it was made for you to wear it!… And, do my eyes deceive me or are you less skinny than when you left here!”

She blushes “Yeah… I gained some weight… all muscle though!”

He laughs “I’m just glad you don’t resemble a willow branch so much as you did!… I was always trying to get you to eat more!… Turns out, I just needed to run you through multiple hours of exercise every day to fix your appetite(!)”

She nods “That certainly did it!”

At this point, he turns to me “And who might this be, Mimi?”

Esme points to the stocky man and says “Oskar, this is Robert ‘Burns’ Baird… he’s the manager here and one of my favourite people in the world…!”

She gestures to my chest and says “Rabbie, this is Oskar Taylor… my boyfriend…”

I extend my hand “It’s an honour to meet you, Sir.”

He grips my hand in the most crushing handshake I’ve ever been subjected to and says “Pleasure’s all mine, laddie!” while I do my best not to get my metatarsals fractured.

He releases my hand and nods his approval “Good handshake!… Nice and firm!… Can’t stand a limp, dead-fish handshake!”

Turning back to Esme, he asks “He treat you right, lassie?” his tone taking a serious turn.

Melodramatically, she throws the back of her hand to her forehead and says “No, Rabbie(!) He beats me terribly(!)”

“In training!” I correct, hurriedly, not wanting her to say things like that even in jest “When we spar, I usually win!… Outside of training, I’m usually the one who receives the violence!”

His vast chest bounces mirthfully as he observes “That sounds like Mimi alright!”

“Is she here…?!” comes a feminine voice from inside the building, just ahead of a grey furred Felis girl appearing.

Esme and the Felis shriek upon seeing one another and run to embrace eachother.

“I can’t believe you’re actually here, Mimi!”

“I can’t believe you’re actually getting married, Tommie!… If it weren’t for the biological implausibility of it, I’d say that Rex must’ve knocked you up for you to be getting married at 18!”

“Shush now…” the cat girl reproaches “…there’s a War on… The rules are different… No use putting things off till tomorrow when there might not be one, is there!”

The cuddle breaks apart and the Felis turns her amber eyes to me, giving me a brief flash of the tapeta lucida behind her retinae “Who’s this, Mimi…? When you said you were bringing a plus one, I sort of assumed it’d be a girl for some reason… Not a tall, handsome, muscular gentleman!”

The stress that she places on the word ‘muscular’ makes it abundantly clear that she is quite aware of Esme’s proclivities.

“Tommie, this is Oskar Taylor. He’s my boyfriend. Oskar, this is Tamsin Quinn, she’s the one we’re here for.”

“It’s a pleasure, Ms Quinn.” I say, extending my hand for a handshake that, mercifully, isn’t at all bonecrushing!

“Oh…! Such a gentleman!” she says, toning down the Scots considerably upon hearing my accent “I didn’t expect that of you, Ms Reid(!)… Where did you find this one?”

“You don’t have to speak English for him, Tommie… He knows Lallans just fine!” smirks Esme.

“Oh, he does, does he?!” says Quinn, looking at me curiously “Where are you from, Mr Taylor?”

“I’m… from Doggerland but… my mother was from Dunfermline… This is my natural accent, though, as Esme says, I can understand Scots just fine… I just tend not to register shift unless I’m having a problem with communicating myself to a Scots speaker…”

“Oh… how come?” she asks, tilting her head.

“I… worry I might offend whomever I’m talking with… Most Scots understand English perfectly well… If I shift into Scots when it isn’t necessary, I worry that it may be taken as mockery…”

“An… interesting take…” she says, scrutinising me.

There follow a few seconds of silence before Esme interjects “Tommie! We came to help with the prep. You gonna show us what needs doing?”