02 Tyche in Friendship and Focus
Added 2020-03-02 20:01:00 +0000 UTCI sat up and opened my eyes. “No secret to it,” I assured him, “I like your tea. You can call me Alessia, you know.”
“And you can call me Thomas,” he agreed placidly.
It was an old dispute with no heat in it. For some reason, I was nearly constitutionally incapable of calling any of the grandmasters who worked here by their given names, preferring their titles as a safe form of address. The thing was, all of them had earned their titles; they had, between them, considerably more than a hundred and fifty years of experience in the martial arts, whereas I had barely thirty years. Treating even the youngest of these paragons of the martial arts community as an equal felt like hubris.
“You’re working late,” I said, changing the subject.
“Josh is holding a tournament this weekend,” Chao said, “so I am practicing my forms in the off-peak hours. I will be officiating and giving several demonstrations to help support my colleague.”
* * * * *
This story has been sitting on my hard drive for more than a year; it was never released, although, properly, it belongs between A First Small Apocalypse Part 01 and A First Small Apocalypse Part 02. I like it because it's a good little slice of life, but it was always too short to stand by itself as a purely textual story, clocking in at only a little over 1300 words, all told.
