Splintered Reality - part seven

[story]
Splintered Reality By Julie WhiteFeather –

Guilda stretched in the morning sun. Well, it wasn’t the morning sun so much as it was a sun lamp, but it was morning all the same. Guilda actually wasn’t her name, it was simply a moniker that her sister had hung on her some time ago. Following in the tradition of a classical music composer from ancient earth, her real name was an unpronounceable symbol somewhat resembling an angry badger beating frog about the head and shoulders with a rather largish cricket bat. The obscure origin of the symbol itself was lost to her family’s history. The reason for the symbol, however, was not.

It was during the great “Lawyer Wars” - which preceded the committing of the entirety of the galaxies legal body to the asylum and straight jacket that the majority of the galaxy felt it collectively so richly deserved – that the family tradition originated. In the final days of the war, lawyers all over the galaxy entrenched themselves in court houses, city halls and bars (and hence origination of the term “passing the bar” which few lawyers in those days ever did, although through great effort of said legal body the true origin of the phrase has now been hidden). It was during this time that the lawyers began what they called “Tele-bombing” runs. The lawyers formed groups of solicitors from all over the galaxy into crack telemarketing squads which were genetically enhanced to go for weeks without sleep or nourishment, thus enabling them to telemarket for longer periods then was heretofore humanly possible.

It was the simple fact that the solicitors where unable to pronounce her name that saved Guilda from the fate of most of the rest of her kind – that is the brains of thousands of interspecied families suddenly imploding to escape from the unending telemarketing which stretched on ceaselessly for years. The average telephone call began simply, “Is…” followed by a long silence during which the solicitor’s tongue and brain ceased up as both tried to cope with the situation.

Having thus escaped the devastation of the lawyer wars, Guilda and her best friend Rosa emigrated to Minmatar space, there to settle in to what she thought would be a peaceful life of mining. She could not have been more wrong.

Weeks had passed since Guilda and Rosa had first departed Caladari space aboard the SS. Hammered Steel. Guilda watched them pass by, noting that if they minded their own business, she would mind hers. Guilda was, after all, as she commonly asserted, “one tough broad.” This was also something about which she was wrong. What she was, in fact, was egotistical. She had a ego so mountainous that it would have taken a climbing team and a dozen Sherpa guides a week to reach it’s summit. Rather than tough, what she was, was resilient. That, and, in a rather fortunate combination, lucky. She was incredibly lucky. If people are sometimes said to be born under lucky stars, lucky stars are the sort of thing that are commonly thought to be born in the proximity of Guilda. This, in fact, was the real reason she had survived the lawyer wars, but her egotism was so believable (again a sign of her incredible luck) that no one ever dared tell her different.

Guilda was, in short, the luckiest woman, indeed the luckiest being of any sort, in the entire universe.

Oddly enough, she had no idea. Each time her luck saved what would have normally been a disastrous situation, she put it off to her massive intellect, about which, she was also horribly wrong.