Preface

When I finished Humasari back then, I was done with Ellyon because Qibbie the quarian became a much more important character to me. I was going through a difficult period of time with my health and came a few times, but still more than I'd like, close to buying the farm. Qibbie kept pace with that, faced with great aversity in her life, she overcame all obstacles and emerged from the other side as a much stronger and ultimately better grounded person than that Ellyon is.

After Ellyon's two years in the Institute for Challenged Asari, she was basically done as she had overcome her obstacles with flying colors, though she really hadn't learned anything apart from how to not be a raging smart-bomb. She isn't Quibbie, and she'll never will be as I set her up as a power-fantasy where the only smart thing that I gave her was the fact that she trades on what she could do as opposed to what she does.

Writing the story was a learning process too, I went from total hack with a semi-fun idea and little notion as to where I should take Ellyon's story to semi-competent story-teller who learned how to get ideas across with structure and cohesion. How much I've grown over the years is evident in my other stories, many of which I've never published and never will.

But Ellyon's story wasn't told yet in full, no matter how vehemently I wrote that I was done on that fateful chapter where Ellyon, sprung free from her cryo-prison by Qibbie, decides to follow the tortured quarian into space instead of returning to where it all begun, Shinobu's and Liara's luxury condo in New London from where you can see the New London Eye and up there in the sky the much hated Citadel.

Ellyon's true love is Mica L'Sidow, the hapless ardat-yahksi so powerful that only Ellyon's counter-biotic have a hope of resisting that destructive primal carnality. Qibbie made a deal with Ellyon, if after fourty years have passed Ellyon still longed after Mica, she would help Ellyon to liberate Mica from whatever monestary she would presently be held.

I think that's as good a place as any to get re-aquainted with the small asari with the weird scalpplates, on eyebrow and untold counter-biotic power.

Shinobu will be over seventy and Liara will have celebrated her bicentennial, Aethyta and Aria will be just older and do whatever it is that they always did. Because ultimately, the story is a coming-of-age stage story where everybody discovers stuff about themselves as they go along. I think that this precise given is what makes the original story 'good' despite it's rocky and very bad start. Even the elusive man learned a thing or two.

I do hope that my sickness yet allows me to write about my favorite mongrelloid asari for a while. The hiata I was forced to inject in the old story frequently really took the momentum out of it and it made blisteringly obvious how I gained confidence in my writing in segmented blocks in a most jarring way. It's great for myself to read it back and see how far I have come despite myself and the way my life unfolds, but it makes for a story that feels as if five different people wrote it, each with their own style and vision.

And in a way, that's the truth of it.

Thanks for reading this new story. I appreciate you more than you know.