LINKDING

<blockquote>Alix Campbell is not particularly pleased to be on the list of staff for Earth's very first appearance at the Galactic Council.</blockquote> ➤ space bureaucracy! also, one of those stories where you can tell the author is familiar with the career in question, always a delight

<blockquote>1. It was my mother who first discovered the fuel leak. Or at least, that’s what we thought it was then. My grandmother, who was the last of us to have set foot on Earth, had died the month before. We had gathered in the laundry atrium, which was the largest open space without ongoing maintenance work, and made such tribute as we could: this is one of the first things I remember. My mother said it felt like a new era, like we were on our own. Although of course we had been out of radio contact with Earth for many years by then. And then, so soon after: the fuel numbers didn’t quite add up. The guardian angels of the old world gone, and we were on our own. But we had excess fuel against unplanned contingencies. It was the slowest of slow leaks. No big deal.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When Princess Talia was fourteen, her eldest sister was placed in a tower. Princess Adina was eighteen by then, and so of a marriageable age. She had grown quite beautiful, though she was more willful than winsome, and she did not care for the notion of the tower very much at all. Their mother did her best to persuade her on the subject. After all, the queen herself had been eighteen when her own parents had sent her to live in that very same tower, to be safely tucked away until her husband could be chosen, and then ride out to claim her. A tradition going back ages and ages.</blockquote> ➤ Princesses in towers making their own ultimate choices about their fates, actively

<blockquote>Ok, sure, this Starbucks is down a dirt path in a weird forest, and the barista is a little intense, but it’s seriously the best Starbucks Lizzie has ever been in.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Oh, wow, that’s a harsh word,” the dragon said. “I never thought of myself as a hoarder. But, I mean, I guess it’s fair. I mean, it started out simply enough, just collecting shiny things because they caught my eye, and then it just turned a thing I did, and then… well, I hate to say it, but it became what I was. I didn’t own anything, it owned me.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>     You came to me in your cloak made of tatters, with the dog made of bone at your side.             You came to me and demanded to know why—why hadn’t I been there? Why her, and not you?</blockquote> ➤ on how fairy godmothers decide which girls to help and which girls not to

the sequel gives a tidy summary of this one, which is: <blockquote>We were coming up on our three-month anniversary, which meant Ty was about to finish his third full month of being a psychic. I'd given him spectral herpes -- consensually! wholly consensually! -- on our first date, which had not-coincidentally been in a creepy haunted house where we'd needed a combination of my highly contagious paranormal abilities and his in-progress Asian Languages and Cultures undergraduate degree to keep us from being siliconed to death by animated anthropomorphic sex toys.</blockquote> ➤ the sequel is "This Story Is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don't Read It"