Chapter I Part III

Chapter I Part III

Anjali really didn’t want an argument with her mother, not tonight, but couldn’t she just do what she wanted to do, it was a free world after all wasn’t it?

Whenever she wanted to do her thing, her mother would go on at her about greater responsibility, about how what she does now will affect her future, about how she should be thinking about this and that, when really all Anjali wanted to think about was engines, and how to escape this life of course, same as every kid her age. Some wanted to go off and join the forces, well in fact most wanted to go off and join the forces, it was just what you did.

Though these days there were a few kids who were thinking that maybe that wasn’t what they wanted to do. Why should they go off and fight in The War, what would they get out of it? No, much more interesting was engines, at least with them Anjali could make something tangible, something more real, something that was actually useful. Which brought her back to going down to her Dad’s workshop and helping Ashmita with his Mono, as old technology as it was, she could do some pretty cool stuff with it, and Ashmita was always tinkering about with it, finding ways to improve the performance of electronics and weapons, he didn’t care too much to the mechanics of the engine.

The thought of getting down to the workshop snapped her back out of thoughts just in time to hear her mother drone on about how “... it was a privilege and a duty to fight for the Makarium in The War …”. Often her mother would seem to switch to automatic mouth pilot and just seem to spout Makarium rhetoric, she even used the same phrases as the Political Posts, so Anjali had found a defense against it, she just zoned out into her thoughts.
Tonight though, she just wanted to get to that workshop, so simply agreed with anything her mother said. That served two purposes, firstly, it reduced the amount of time she had to listen to her mother's drivel, and secondly, almost as an after effect, it gave her mother the illusion that she was actually getting through to her daughter.

Just half an hour later and Anjali was on her hov-scooter on her way to the workshop. Ashmita was already there, and he’d messaged her to ask her for her help, the Mono wasn’t putting out enough power for his latest upgrades.