Today, I offer you dear readers a treat. Christian Schoon, author of Zenn Scarlett is here sharing a guest post for the blog tour! I am so excited to share this with you! :)
ROOM WITH A VIEW…ON MARS
Hi
to Ginny and her readers and thanks for letting me drop in for this leg
of the Zenn Scarlett Blog tour extravaganza! (OK, maybe it’s not
exactly an extravaganza in the full meaning of the word, but it’s still
great to be here.)
I thought
we’d snoop around the room of my heroine, Zenn, and see what we could
find out about her. So, I can tell you this much first: she’s 17, and
studying to be an exoveterinarian at an ancient cloister tucked into a
deep canyon on Mars. The cloister includes both a clinic and a training
facility that takes in a whole range of alien creatures that need
medical attention. Zenn is in her novice year of training, specializing
in very big, sometimes very hazardous-to-your-health animals. Her dorm
room is up on the second story of the calefactory building, basically a
meeting hall.
We pause
outside her door. The hallway is lined with other doors, all closed, all
the other rooms empty except for the ones belonging to Hamish, the
cloister’s new sexton, and Sister Hild, one of Zenn’s instructors. Seems
the cloister school has fallen on hard times since the Rift cut off all
communication and trade between Mars and Earth. So, Zenn is now the
only student left at the school, which is run by her Uncle Otha, the
cloister’s director-abbot.
We nudge
the door open and step inside. It’s a small room, simple, with a narrow
bunk, a desk littered with compu-shards, stacks of v-films and old-style
ink-on-paper books on a dizzying variety of subjects: the molecular
make-up of bloodcarn venom, the care and feeding of mega-fauna like
whalehounds and the brain chemistry of the Lithohippus indra,
vacuum-dwelling animals that have evolved the ability to move starships
between the stars. There’s a pile of what looks like playing cards. You
turn them over; each one appears to have an anatomical term on one
side, and its definition on the other. Flash cards. It sort of looks
like she may have been prepping for a big test of some sort. In any
case, this Zenn girl seems pretty focused on her studies.
The window
on the far wall is open, the scent of blossoming gensoy drifts in from
the cloister’s fields. Beneath the window is a battered, old soft-shell
backpack made of some strange kind of leather. This is Zenn’s vet field
kit; it used to belong to her Uncle Otha, but now it’s hers, and it’s
one of her most prized possessions. We rummage inside it, and find
medical equipment like a portable sedation-field generator, various
medications and bandages, some odd looking cylinders with
“Cryo-Crystalizer” and “Quadrobiotic Spray” printed on the outside.
On the
wall is a bookshelf. Between even more reference books we find a few
odds and ends. In a worn, wooden frame, there’s a faded v-filmloop of
her mother. Mai Scarlett is a tall, slender woman with straight,
jet-black hair and a warm smile. She wears an exovet lab coat and waves
at the person holding the camera. Then she brandishes a rolled scroll,
her diploma. Although there is no sound, we see her laugh, she appears
triumphant and giddy. She’s just graduated from the cloister exovet
school and is on the verge of starting her career. It will not be a
long one. Zenn still misses her, even though she was lost years ago when
Zenn was only nine, during a risky medical procedure on a 700-foot-long
indra.
A corner
of paper catches our eye, protruding from between two books on the
shelf. It’s a note, badly smudged, badly spelled, from Liam Tucker. He’s
a towner boy, Zenn’s age, who has recently started spending a lot of
time at the cloister. He’s full of himself, has a bit of a reputation
regarding both trouble and girls. The paper, which Zenn kept after he
passed it to her several days ago, is a thank you note from Liam; the N
in thank you is written backwards. And it’s not Liam being ironic. Zenn
smiled and shook her head when she saw this. But she wasn’t laughing at
the boy. While most towners are suspicious of the cloister’s alien
animals, Liam has shown himself to be above this, appearing eager to
learn about the creatures Zenn spends most of her days with. The note is
simply thanking her for sharing what she knows with him, and she had to
smile at Liam for even thinking such a note was necessary. While Zenn
really doesn’t have much time for Liam and his questions and jokes, she
feels that his interest in the cloister’s menagerie of animals is a good
thing. Maybe he’ll tell other towners that the alien creatures aren’t
the “diseased, unclean monsters” that everyone in the nearby village of
Arsia City seems to think they are.
A sound
between a snort and a purr suddenly comes from somewhere behind the
desk. We stoop down. A pair of large, gold-green eyes blinks up at us.
It’s Katie, Zenn’s pet rikkaset. After a moment, she comes out into the
open and stretches her cat-sized, violet-and-cream striped body, whips
her long-haired plume-of-a-tail back and forth twice and sits. She’s
got a foxy-lynx-like face and black, raccoon-fingered paws. She’s deaf,
and now speaks to us using the sign language Zenn taught her: ‘Katie
hungry. And very! Have treat for Katie?’ There’s brown paper bag on top
of the bookshelf. You take out a dried grasshopper and offer it. Katie
snatches it quickly from your hand with one dexterous paw, hops up on
Zenn’s bed and crouches over her prize, chewing eagerly.
Another
sound floats in through the open window, a sort of distant honk-growl.
It’s one of the resident Tanduan swamp sloos, a marine mammaloid the
length of a battleship. I ask if you’d like to go visit the sloo in her
treatment pool down at the other end of the cloister compound. You
glance around Zenn’s room and, deciding you’ve begun to understand a bit
about her life her at the cloister, agree that a visit to the sloo
sounds intriguing.
We exit
back out into the empty hall. As you close the door behind you, Katie
signs “Crunch-treat good for Katie!” and we head down the stairs.
Christian Schoon Bio
Born
in the American Midwest, Christian started his writing career in
earnest as an in-house writer at the Walt Disney Company in Burbank,
California. He then became a freelance writer working for various film,
home video and animation studios in Los Angeles. After moving from LA to
a farmstead in Iowa several years ago, he continues to freelance and
also now helps re-hab wildlife and foster abused/neglected horses. He acquired his amateur-vet knowledge, and much of his inspiration for the Zenn Scarlett series of novels, as he learned about - and received an education from - these remarkable animals.
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