Unlocking Your Past

With breathless anticipation, you lift the lid of the chest and sigh in disappointment. It holds only a locket in the shape of a heart, made of shining rubyonium.

And yet, trembling, you wrap your fingers around the locket… and your memory returns like a waterfall sluicing down the back of your neck! In a wild rush, you recall your name – Princess Xanastasia Zuera Francel Dorg, youngest child of the Empress and Emperor of the Dorgian Empire – and your purpose on this space station! You had fled your doting parents and loving family and the triple-mooned sky of Riadorf, trying to find yourself, and perhaps the true love that has so blessed all your older siblings.

Yet, as you neared Dashington Station (a fabled centre for luxurious meditation) an attack by mercenaries on your flyer had incapacitated your small craft–! You hit your delicate forehead on the instrument joystick… And then you had woken in the infirmary, with your memory lost!

You quickly slip the locket into your pocket, like an unintentional rhyme slips onto the end of a clause and close the chest again.

Assured of yourself and bolder, you investigate the other doors and find one leads to a weapons room. Immediately you avail yourself of a zathwop bladearm, and return to the main parlour.

It is now occupied by a tall, broad-shouldered stranger! His ivory skin is set off by his jet black curly hair, and the shining dark xarbenian silk patch – a match for your space-pyjamas – that covers one eye. The other eye, equally dark, smoulders with burning intensity like a bag of jgher dog excrement set alight on an unsuspecting neighbour’s doorstep.

“My love!” he declares. “Do you recognize me? It is I, Duke Dashington – your saviour – and fiancé of many years!”

He obviously thinks you are still in the grip of amnesia! However, you are quite sure that an engagement of many years has not slipped your mind, since you were 19 yesterday, and appear to be so today! (This is logic, an art in which you excelled at the Royal Riadorfan Academy For Young Ladies of Quality and Distinction, earning several medals.)

What course of action shall you take?

1) This Dashington is a cad and a bounder! You shoot the kidnapping scoundrel in his faithless heart and escape at once.

2) You are certain the Duke lies, and yet there is something in his single eye that appeals to your sense of mercy. You demand an explanation for his falsehood.

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