Liner Notes for Judicial Challenges

 

Liner Notes for Judicial Challenges

It’s a fake angel! Welcome to the god-con. Perhaps the most famous version of this is when the tyrant Pisistratus returned to Athens with the goddess Athena in his chariot to prove his rule was divinely sanctioned. However Herodotus tell us his passenger was actually a tall and beautiful young woman named Phye who impersonated the goddess. Were the Athenians fooled? Or did they want to accept her as an incarnation of the goddess?

How much more convincing might she have been if she could strike down her enemies with thunderbolts. Hence the Valkyrie. Yet this is a thought out, long term con. Not plundering the planet for quick bucks. They’re actually trying to rule it, and do a good job of it, hiding what they’re doing behind the progress of the Space Angel. By the time anyone notices they’ll be entrenched in the local culture. Maybe no one will ever notice, assume that old records are wrong and update entries on Fjordland to a theocratic monarchy ruled by a high-tech Valkyrie. It’s their bad luck that their cover story, the Space Angel, is actually interesting enough to investigate. Including by the Daughters Of The Tower, a group possibly less ethical and more ruthless than the Valkyrie plotters.

I’ve done a Norse culture before and I’ll probably do it again. Why not, sometimes the Unknown Powers return to a theme. Cold fjords, stick some Vikings there. The duel is not quite one from Norse records, but that’s okay, this is a culture in flux. And in space.

But yes, the formal fight. I actually put the notes in the text, a bad habit. What if the story explained everything, there would be no Liner Notes. I might have to write something original and non-self referential for once.