Snippet #1304218

The morning light fell on the wall in filtered strips through the drawn but unrolled slatted blinds. The only sound was the whirring of hard disks and the hum of power supplies. At the desk a computer monitor scrolled a screensaver with the line of text, "There are 10 types of people in the light kingdom; those who understand binary and those who don't."

Against the wall under the window, on a worn leather sofa, prince Athanasius Tunid was asleep, fully dressed, his feet up on the chair arm and his spectacles askew on his face.

On the server cabinet, a light turned red, and with a click a disk drive ejected itself, knocking into a long cardboard tube which just happened to be in front of it containing cable ducting. The cardboard tube fell away, and the end of it landed straight onto Athy's face. He woke up with a start.

"Oh, god...what....?" He took his glasses off to rub his eyes, then replaced them and looked around. The light coming through the blins was an indication he'd already slept in too late....not that he'd been in his bedroom at any point in the night. He'd up up until about 3am trying to debug a piece of software he was working on. He hobbled over to the terminal a shook the mouse to get rid of the screensaver...then sighed. Another compile failure.

Oh well, he wasn't going to have any more time to look at it today. He pulled up the blinds and looked out over the city. Today was going to be one of the few occassions in his royal career where he was going to have to interact diplomatically with the other nations. How tedious.

He made his way through the halls to his bedroom. The servants had evidently already been in to serve breakfast, but not finding him there had dressed the room and laid out the clothes the king had picked out for the occassion.

At least Athy wouldn't have to worry about being bothered by the staff again this morning. Most likely they were out and about looking to see where his step-sister princess Orchid had got to. "Mingling" in town no doubt. Athy didn't mind, it deflected a lot of attention from the indifference he showed towards matters of state.