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Richard Pearman @graptopetalum.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

#WIPSnips October 2 dent The opening of "Tales of Midbar: Poisoned Well" - If you like this, click the link: www.inkitt.com/stories/635659 Is this a good way to start?

Background: A large mansion with lots of trees around it and a pond.

Transcript from Spyglass Pax, Season 1, Episode 2

Close-up of Trindi Gratna's face (she has red skin and wavy, yellow, metallic hair).

Trindi: (Speaking Angrol) Well, I made it through Sendracil City, from the Golden Sands wormhole to the Pax wormhole without mysteriously disappearing as women tend to do there. Now here I am in a whole new universe, so what am I going to do? Well, there's a war raging on this version of Midbar and a messy political situation following a huge terrorist attack recently so, obviously, I'm going to a wedding, but not just any wedding.

Pull out to show a picturesque village with lush vegetation and sapphires in the sky. There's a bus parked near the center of the village with some, mostly brown-skinned, women wearing saris standing near it. Farther out, there's two rather dented buses with some people in grey robes standing around them. The camera quickly pans past them.

Trindi: Pax has an aristocratic class called the High Families, who are supposed to be descended from the first-class passengers on the starship which brought humans to Midbar 15 millennia ago.

Plentari: (Out of shot) I'd have thought everybody in this version of Midbar would be descended from them by now, well, except for a few off-planeters and interdimentionals.

Trindi: Well you'd know all about that. The High Families have patriarchs called Trustees who are supposed to be male-line descendants from the first-class passengers.

Plentari: Although sometimes one only fathers daughters so the next Trustee is a son of one of them.