Jack of Harts

Dawn DeMarco and Jesse retired to Kansas after their trip around the worlds, but there were some things a princess from Camelot could never truly adjust to. Midwest farmers tend to be a stoic and practical lot. Despite centuries of technological progress, it still takes biological humans to maximize the crop yields for the next harvest. AIs can’t match them, and most cybers avoid the field entirely. Farmers wake up each morning, put on some rugged clothing, and then go out into the fields to feed America and the worlds beyond. That old Paul Harvey tribute to the farmer still holds true today. Dawn DeMarco was not raised to live in that kind of world, but she turned that into a virtue rather than a hindrance. She decided it was her mission to bring high fashion and classy parties to a world known for barn raising parties and blue jeans. She is stubborn like that.

Dawn DeMarco made it all the way through The War without dying once, and Jesse kept up with her the whole way. He was the only one that really managed to do that. The rest of us went in and out of her life and plans as The War took us to and fro. But Dawn and Jesse were a matched pair the whole way. She was a royal princess, he was a Kansas farmer, and they never hid that to the people of the Hyades. The only thing they hid was how fond of each other they were growing. From each other, at least. Everyone watching them knew exactly what was going on, and most of us were taking bets on when they’d notice. Then one day they looked at each other and realized the truth. Katy won that bet. The rest of us just smiled and shook our heads as they both retired and walked away from all of the fighting the moment War’s End came. They toured the stars for a while, visiting places they had always wanted to see, and went to Camelot for a time.

Most would-be governors or garrisons in the Hyades Cluster had no concept of how rigid the caste system was, and totally failed to understand the game, or the fact that it wasn’t a game at all to the locals. The Alliance planned to use our status as Deputies of the Tarrant County Sheriff, through more legal shenanigans than I even want to think about, as a group of peacekeepers to hold the disparate castes together. Charles got us to wear business suits and trained us to deal with the small but influential caste of business owners. And Dawn DeMarco and her merry little band of misfits put us in the role of pretend masters over former slaves who could pretend we weren’t overturning every aspect of their lives even as we taught them to do precisely that. We wore three hats in the Hyades, and we absolutely made mistakes. Some of them pretty big. But we navigated that crazy mix of roles and helped an entire cluster of people bootstrap themselves into the modern worlds.