Justin Zyrr-Winton, blind imbecile?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I forget that this encounter occurred before Princess Elizebth became Queen Elizebeth then blossomed into the Wendy Williams look alike who became the favorite pinup of the RMN as well as the RMMC.
Assuming that the RMMC has an annual Birthday Ball, it must have been quite a coup for Justin to take Elizebeth as his date. Ranks right up there with the Marine who asked FLOTUS Trump to dance at one of the innagural balls.

someplace, probably in Landing, is there a Tun Tavern?

runsforcelery wrote:And which point she squealed, got up, charged over to the stage, shoved her finger under my nose and shook it, and proceeded to tell me that only the fact that she loved my books was going to keep me alive that weekend.

It happens, guys. It really does.

Oh, and I autographed every book she had and put her on the first readers list.

At first I thought the woman in question shoved her finger UP your nose, which stuck me as an overly familiar action

Fox2! wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:I forget that this encounter occurred before Princess Elizebth became Queen Elizebeth then blossomed into the Wendy Williams look alike who became the favorite pinup of the RMN as well as the RMMC.
Assuming that the RMMC has an annual Birthday Ball, it must have been quite a coup for Justin to take Elizebeth as his date. Ranks right up there with the Marine who asked FLOTUS Trump to dance at one of the innagural balls.

someplace, probably in Landing, is there a Tun Tavern?

Also a tavern named Conestoga Waggon?

Is this why USMC is renown for drunkeness?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:In I WILL BUILD MY HOUSE OF STEEL, we see how Justin Zyrr first meets Elizebeth Winton. He gets angry with her for screwing up an experiment while getting a private tour of the university.

Question: How could Justin Zyrr not recognize Princess Elizebeth, the heir to the crown. Blindness? Abject stupidity? Obsessive isolation?

Well I guess I would be one of those blind imbeciles. I don't watch TV, or VERY rarely, and when I do, it is not the Propaganda(AKA "news"), nor do I watch "entertainment tonight" crap. I might watch PBS(Propaganda) channel is about as close as I get to people naval gazing. Sci -Fi and that is it.

If any current or previous Movie star walked in front of me I wouldn't know who they are other than they ***might*** look nice. Scarlett Johansen could sit beside me and I would not have a clue who she is.

EDIT: If I had not accidentally clicked on the Author tab of this website I would not have known who DW was before going to a con.

Relax wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:In I WILL BUILD MY HOUSE OF STEEL, we see how Justin Zyrr first meets Elizebeth Winton. He gets angry with her for screwing up an experiment while getting a private tour of the university.

Question: How could Justin Zyrr not recognize Princess Elizebeth, the heir to the crown. Blindness? Abject stupidity? Obsessive isolation?

Well I guess I would be one of those blind imbeciles. I don't watch TV, or VERY rarely, and when I do, it is not the Propaganda(AKA "news"), nor do I watch "entertainment tonight" crap. I might watch PBS(Propaganda) channel is about as close as I get to people naval gazing. Sci -Fi and that is it.

If any current or previous Movie star walked in front of me I wouldn't know who they are other than they ***might*** look nice. Scarlett Johansen could sit beside me and I would not have a clue who she is.

EDIT: If I had not accidentally clicked on the Author tab of this website I would not have known who DW was before going to a con.

Shannon Foraker might well do the same thing. He was intent on his work.

Also, keep in mind that she was part of a group and there might have been a few others and he might not have realized she was the key personage.

Elizabeth and Justin's relationship really seems to point up how much of a society in transition the galaxy has at this point, re: prolong. She was only sixteen when they met, while he had already done a tour with the Marines, gotten out and gotten a position at LUM. Before her father's assassination they were already engaged-- this while she was too young to hold the throne in her own right.

On one hand, given that they're going to live for centuries, the age gap is no big deal; on the other, given that they're going to live for centuries, getting engaged before you're even of age seems to be rushing things a bit? Especially for a crown princess who can expect any divorce of hers to have serious repercussions.

I'm likewise intrigued by Honor and others being able to enlist at seventeen; if these people are going to live for centuries without physically "aging out", why the push to start adult life early?

RFC mentions that part of the scandal around Honor and Hamish was fueled by pre-prolong mentalities, and QEIII herself calls out the RoH's constitution for being a little behind the times re: prolong at the end of UH. But it seems to me that the whole Honorverse is still trying to reset it's defaults in that regard.

NortonIDaughter wrote:Elizabeth and Justin's relationship really seems to point up how much of a society in transition the galaxy has at this point, re: prolong. She was only sixteen when they met, while he had already done a tour with the Marines, gotten out and gotten a position at LUM. Before her father's assassination they were already engaged-- this while she was too young to hold the throne in her own right.

On one hand, given that they're going to live for centuries, the age gap is no big deal; on the other, given that they're going to live for centuries, getting engaged before you're even of age seems to be rushing things a bit? Especially for a crown princess who can expect any divorce of hers to have serious repercussions.

I'm likewise intrigued by Honor and others being able to enlist at seventeen; if these people are going to live for centuries without physically "aging out", why the push to start adult life early?

RFC mentions that part of the scandal around Honor and Hamish was fueled by pre-prolong mentalities, and QEIII herself calls out the RoH's constitution for being a little behind the times re: prolong at the end of UH. But it seems to me that the whole Honorverse is still trying to reset it's defaults in that regard.

To some extent, it's true that the Honorverse in general is trying to reset its default parameters on physical aging.

A couple of points, though.

(1) Honor didn't enlist at 17. She was accepted for Saganami Island at 17, and it's a five-year program, so she would have been 22 when she graduated (and completed her snotty cruise), at which point she would have been an ensign — think Scotty Tremaine from On Basilisk Station. This at a time when, thanks to King Roger, the Royal Manticoran Navy was expanding rapidly. (And, in fact, if she hadn't so obviously been the round peg in the round hole in her chosen tactical track, it's highly probable that she would've been sent on for additional graduate classes before she ever had her first shipboard assignment.)

(2) When Elizabeth became engaged to Justin, don't forget that there was a treecat in the mix. Even before treecats could sign, they could communicate an awful lot of information, including whether or not what someone is saying is honest and the depth of another human being's feelings. Elizabeth was engaged to Justin. Had her father not been killed, she would not have married him before she was of legal age to take the throne in her own right if she had to. There wasn't a whole lot of point in pussyfooting around (you should pardon the reference to the 'cats), when Ariel was involved in the equation and there wasn't a chance in hell that Elizabeth — who was constitutionally required to marry a commoner — was going to marry anybody but Justin.

(3) The Star Kingdom of Manticore is making institutional changes where the implications of prolong are concerned. It's why (absent the war with Haven) Caparelli would have been cycled back to a fleet command, rather than staying put as First Space Lord for the duration. It's why it is becoming/has become the norm, rather than the exception, for someone to have multiple careers. No one is going to force you to have a second career if you like what you're doing and you're good at it, but there are provisions for almost all public entities (and for pretty much any successful private entity) to make room for incoming talent by cycling people out of senior positions — and, quite possibly, back into those positions again.

(4) Political institutions, as opposed to the bureaucracies attached to/overseen by those institutions, are slower to change. Partly that's because no one wants anyone mucking around with the way that the Senate and the House of Representatives are organized or their relationship to the Executive and the Judiciary [or the Honorverse equivalent]. If you're going to make changes in the fundamental institutions of government, then prudence suggests going about it slowly. And, of course, there can be additional complicating factors. For example, there was no provision under the Legislaturalist Constitution requiring any President to ever step down. After all, he was going to be President for Life. The restored Péricard Constitution, dating from well before Prolong became available — and a dead letter even before the Legislaturalist Constitution formally supplanted it. As such, there was absolutely no pressure to amend the term limitation which was created well before the situation in which someone might be president for five or six decades was even remotely possible, far less probable. What's Elizabeth and Honor are talking about at the end of Uncompromising is the fact that Eloise Pritchart has zero intention of modifying the Constitution in any way which might even remotely look like she is planning on following in the Legislaturalist/Committee of Public Safety's footsteps. Mostly that's because she and Tom Theisman are in complete agreement about how absolutely essential it is for the restorers of the Republic to make it obvious that they take the rule of law and the sanctity of the ballot box seriously. And, frankly, another part of it — which she probably hasn't admitted even to herself — is that she's tired. She's been on "active operations" even longer than Honor, and like Honor, she would dearly love to find something else – something peaceful, that doesn't mean killing people or simply being responsible for billions of human beings — in which she can invest herself.

(As an aside, I sometimes find myself wondering if I am going to allow Elizabeth to acknowledge "combat fatigue" and abdicate in favor of her son. It's been done at least once in the Star Kingdom's history, after all, and that was when prolong wasn't a possibility.)

________________________________________



While I'm writing, let me also respond to why Justin didn't recognize Elizabeth when she walked into his lab the first time. A lot of this is already been touched on by other people, and I had put together a post on the subject, just in time to have my Internet go down and the entire draft disappear into cyberspace. I was so ticked off I just threw up my hands and walked away. Very mature of me, I know.

Okay, so why didn't Justin recognize Elizabeth Winton when she walked into his lab.

(1) Elizabeth avoided the camera. Like Honor, she had what she considered to be an "awkward adolescence." In fact, it was nowhere near as bad as Honor's actually was, if only because she didn't have the altitude challenge Honor carried around everywhere with her, but it was enough to make her uncomfortable about casual photography. The Star Kingdom has a short way with paparazzi, as well — especially paparazzi foolish enough to hound someone like a member of the royal family (or Duchess Harrington, for that matter) — so there weren't a lot of pictures of her in a public setting that wasn't formally structured. And in most of those, she was in either formal court dress or haute couture (as appropriate for teenagers).

(2) No one at the University, outside senior members of the faculty and the Administration, had been told that Elizabeth was planning on touring the campus that day. Partly that was a security measure, but it was also because Elizabeth wanted to see the university in normal operation while she considered whether or not she wanted to attend it. So no one had said to Justin, "Hey, better keep an eye out! The Crown Princess is wandering around campus today."

(3) Elizabeth was bad that day. She deliberately gave her security detail the slip so that she could explore on her own, without having an official bodyguard presence alerting everyone in her vicinity that she was a VIP, in which case someone undoubtedly would have recognized Crown Princess Elizabeth. This would have been A Bad Thing,™ in her judgment, since she wanted to see the college as a student would have seen it. It was Not Smart, but she was a teenager. I have three of them. Believe it or not, they don't always do the "smart" thing. Shocking, I know, but there it is.

(4) Elizabeth was definitely not in court dress that day! She was "slopping around" in casual clothing. Now, admittedly, it was very good quality casual dress, but it was definitely not anything that anyone had ever seen many photographs of her in. She also hadn't had the sort of makeup attention that went with the more formal photographs which had been taken of her.

(5) Justin had been working on his research project for a long time, and the experiment was at a sensitive point, when Elizabeth walked straight past the "Lab In Use" notice because she wasn't a student yet, no one had briefed her on SOP, and, frankly, she didn't notice/recognize the notice for what it was.

So, here is Justin, carefully monitoring his experiment, and suddenly the lab door opens, a young woman he's never seen in his life walks through it, screwing up his entire experiment, despite the fact that he turned on the "Keep the Hell Out" notice that should of kept anyone but a moron from disturbing him. She's not accompanied by any bodyguards, she hasn't been "dolled up" for a formal picture, she's in casual clothing, nobody told him that anyone important — far less the heir to the throne — would be touring the campus, and she doesn't instantly respond to his outrage by looking down her nose at him and saying "Look, jackass — do you have any idea who it is you're talking to?!"

It's like meeting her in the 24-hour laundromat at three in the morning, when she's dressed in a ratty sweatshirt and yoga pants, with her hair in curlers.

Trust me, it's not too surprising he didn't instantly say "My God! That's Crown Princess Elizabeth! I'd know her anywhere!"

Just saying.

runsforcelery wrote:

NortonIDaughter wrote:Elizabeth and Justin's relationship really seems to point up how much of a society in transition the galaxy has at this point, re: prolong. She was only sixteen when they met, while he had already done a tour with the Marines, gotten out and gotten a position at LUM. Before her father's assassination they were already engaged-- this while she was too young to hold the throne in her own right.

On one hand, given that they're going to live for centuries, the age gap is no big deal; on the other, given that they're going to live for centuries, getting engaged before you're even of age seems to be rushing things a bit? Especially for a crown princess who can expect any divorce of hers to have serious repercussions.

I'm likewise intrigued by Honor and others being able to enlist at seventeen; if these people are going to live for centuries without physically "aging out", why the push to start adult life early?

RFC mentions that part of the scandal around Honor and Hamish was fueled by pre-prolong mentalities, and QEIII herself calls out the RoH's constitution for being a little behind the times re: prolong at the end of UH. But it seems to me that the whole Honorverse is still trying to reset it's defaults in that regard.

To some extent, it's true that the Honorverse in general is trying to reset its default parameters on physical aging.

A couple of points, though.

(1) Honor didn't enlist at 17. She was accepted for Saganami Island at 17, and it's a five-year program, so she would have been 22 when she graduated (and completed her snotty cruise), at which point she would have been an ensign — think Scotty Tremaine from On Basilisk Station. This at a time when, thanks to King Roger, the Royal Manticoran Navy was expanding rapidly. (And, in fact, if she hadn't so obviously been the round peg in the round hole in her chosen tactical track, it's highly probable that she would've been sent on for additional graduate classes before she ever had her first shipboard assignment.)

(2) When Elizabeth became engaged to Justin, don't forget that there was a treecat in the mix. Even before treecats could sign, they could communicate an awful lot of information, including whether or not what someone is saying is honest and the depth of another human being's feelings. Elizabeth was engaged to Justin. Had her father not been killed, she would not have married him before she was of legal age to take the throne in her own right if she had to. There wasn't a whole lot of point in pussyfooting around (you should pardon the reference to the 'cats), when Ariel was involved in the equation and there wasn't a chance in hell that Elizabeth — who was constitutionally required to marry a commoner — was going to marry anybody but Justin.

(3) The Star Kingdom of Manticore is making institutional changes where the implications of prolong are concerned. It's why (absent the war with Haven) Caparelli would have been cycled back to a fleet command, rather than staying put as First Space Lord for the duration. It's why it is becoming/has become the norm, rather than the exception, for someone to have multiple careers. No one is going to force you to have a second career if you like what you're doing and you're good at it, but there are provisions for almost all public entities (and for pretty much any successful private entity) to make room for incoming talent by cycling people out of senior positions — and, quite possibly, back into those positions again.

(4) Political institutions, as opposed to the bureaucracies attached to/overseen by those institutions, are slower to change. Partly that's because no one wants anyone mucking around with the way that the Senate and the House of Representatives are organized or their relationship to the Executive and the Judiciary [or the Honorverse equivalent]. If you're going to make changes in the fundamental institutions of government, then prudence suggests going about it slowly. And, of course, there can be additional complicating factors. For example, there was no provision under the Legislaturalist Constitution requiring any President to ever step down. After all, he was going to be President for Life. The restored Péricard Constitution, dating from well before Prolong became available — and a dead letter even before the Legislaturalist Constitution formally supplanted it. As such, there was absolutely no pressure to amend the term limitation which was created well before the situation in which someone might be president for five or six decades was even remotely possible, far less probable. What's Elizabeth and Honor are talking about at the end of Uncompromising is the fact that Eloise Pritchart has zero intention of modifying the Constitution in any way which might even remotely look like she is planning on following in the Legislaturalist/Committee of Public Safety's footsteps. Mostly that's because she and Tom Theisman are in complete agreement about how absolutely essential it is for the restorers of the Republic to make it obvious that they take the rule of law and the sanctity of the ballot box seriously. And, frankly, another part of it — which she probably hasn't admitted even to herself — is that she's tired. She's been on "active operations" even longer than Honor, and like Honor, she would dearly love to find something else – something peaceful, that doesn't mean killing people or simply being responsible for billions of human beings — in which she can invest herself.

(As an aside, I sometimes find myself wondering if I am going to allow Elizabeth to acknowledge "combat fatigue" and abdicate in favor of her son. It's been done at least once in the Star Kingdom's history, after all, and that was when prolong wasn't a possibility.)

________________________________________



While I'm writing, let me also respond to why Justin didn't recognize Elizabeth when she walked into his lab the first time. A lot of this is already been touched on by other people, and I had put together a post on the subject, just in time to have my Internet go down and the entire draft disappear into cyberspace. I was so ticked off I just threw up my hands and walked away. Very mature of me, I know.

Okay, so why didn't Justin recognize Elizabeth Winton when she walked into his lab.

(1) Elizabeth avoided the camera. Like Honor, she had what she considered to be an "awkward adolescence." In fact, it was nowhere near as bad as Honor's actually was, if only because she didn't have the altitude challenge Honor carried around everywhere with her, but it was enough to make her uncomfortable about casual photography. The Star Kingdom has a short way with paparazzi, as well — especially paparazzi foolish enough to hound someone like a member of the royal family (or Duchess Harrington, for that matter) — so there weren't a lot of pictures of her in a public setting that wasn't formally structured. And in most of those, she was in either formal court dress or haute couture (as appropriate for teenagers).

(2) No one at the University, outside senior members of the faculty and the Administration, had been told that Elizabeth was planning on touring the campus that day. Partly that was a security measure, but it was also because Elizabeth wanted to see the university in normal operation while she considered whether or not she wanted to attend it. So no one had said to Justin, "Hey, better keep an eye out! The Crown Princess is wandering around campus today."

(3) Elizabeth was bad that day. She deliberately gave her security detail the slip so that she could explore on her own, without having an official bodyguard presence alerting everyone in her vicinity that she was a VIP, in which case someone undoubtedly would have recognized Crown Princess Elizabeth. This would have been A Bad Thing,™ in her judgment, since she wanted to see the college as a student would have seen it. It was Not Smart, but she was a teenager. I have three of them. Believe it or not, they don't always do the "smart" thing. Shocking, I know, but there it is.

(4) Elizabeth was definitely not in court dress that day! She was "slopping around" in casual clothing. Now, admittedly, it was very good quality casual dress, but it was definitely not anything that anyone had ever seen many photographs of her in. She also hadn't had the sort of makeup attention that went with the more formal photographs which had been taken of her.

(5) Justin had been working on his research project for a long time, and the experiment was at a sensitive point, when Elizabeth walked straight past the "Lab In Use" notice because she wasn't a student yet, no one had briefed her on SOP, and, frankly, she didn't notice/recognize the notice for what it was.

So, here is Justin, carefully monitoring his experiment, and suddenly the lab door opens, a young woman he's never seen in his life walks through it, screwing up his entire experiment, despite the fact that he turned on the "Keep the Hell Out" notice that should of kept anyone but a moron from disturbing him. She's not accompanied by any bodyguards, she hasn't been "dolled up" for a formal picture, she's in casual clothing, nobody told him that anyone important — far less the heir to the throne — would be touring the campus, and she doesn't instantly respond to his outrage by looking down her nose at him and saying "Look, jackass — do you have any idea who it is you're talking to?!"

It's like meeting her in the 24-hour laundromat at three in the morning, when she's dressed in a ratty sweatshirt and yoga pants, with her hair in curlers.

Trust me, it's not too surprising he didn't instantly say "My God! That's Crown Princess Elizabeth! I'd know her anywhere!"

Just saying.

It happens people. Lingering embarrassment kept me from posting this. My prodding niece's dare, otoh . . .

I walked up to a girl at the local hangout when I was in high school after seeing this drop-dead gorgeous thing on stilts walk in and up to the counter to order food. I threw my current pickup line at her after confidently sauntering up to her at the counter . . .

"How about we exchange saliva so that we can get down to business."

"Is that business going to lead to a baby in your sister's oven?"

My sisters sitting at the table were laughing their asses off. This was a setup to teach me a lesson. I argued that it was impossible for a girl who a guy had been dating for over a year to change her appearance so a boyfriend wouldn't recognize her. I didn't recognize my own sister who I'd seen in almost every possible light for 17 years. It happens people. It happens. Men can be a little thick sometimes.

And for the record, Tierney, your mother barely wore makeup then, mostly a simple application of lipstick and I'd never seen her in heels and a barely there dress with a mock-up, come hither walk. And she was supposed to be out of the country in college.

runsforcelery wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:In I WILL BUILD MY HOUSE OF STEEL, we see how Justin Zyrr first meets Elizebeth Winton. He gets angry with her for screwing up an experiment while getting a private tour of the university.

Question: How could Justin Zyrr not recognize Princess Elizebeth, the heir to the crown. Blindness? Abject stupidity? Obsessive isolation?

Mainly because (1) she had eluded her security people --- a major no-no, but she was like 17 or 18 at the time --- because she wanted to see the school for herself; (2) the Crown Princess of Manticore, sans any security, was the last person in the universe he expected to see in his lab; (3) Elizabeth avoided the camera as much as she possibly could, so most folks only saw pictures of her from formal occasions where she was in court dress (or similar attire) and wearing a formal expression. She was informally dressed in casual clothes (very nice casual clothes, but still casual) and didn't look at all like the formal shots of her he'd seen; (4) he was a serious researcher and she'd walked into the middle of his experiment without noticing the "LAB IN USE" sign she would have recognized if she'd been an enrolled student and not a high school senior playing truant on her own.

I mean, this is like running into her in a laundromat when her hair's down! I defy almost anyone to recognize even their favorite rock star or actor under those conditions. You're a lot more likely to think, "Gosh, that looks a lot like Taylor Swift" or "Guy looks a lot like Denzel Washington, doesn't he?" than you are to think "Omigod! That's him (or her, as the case may be)!"

The LAB IN USE sign didn't work in a soils lab, it became quite dirty. Only bright red lights flawlessly kept out intruders in a soils lab. A very busy soils lab. Oftentimes I'd just lock the door.

runsforcelery wrote:A lot of this is already been touched on by other people, and I had put together a post on the subject, just in time to have my Internet go down and the entire draft disappear into cyberspace. I was so ticked off I just threw up my hands and walked away. Very mature of me, I know.

It was very mature of you! The immature thing would have been to grab your computer by the nape of the neck and commence to acting out your best Hulk impression. One of my cousins has rehearsed that scene quite a bit.

runsforcelery wrote:

NortonIDaughter wrote:Elizabeth and Justin's relationship really seems to point up how much of a society in transition the galaxy has at this point, re: prolong. She was only sixteen when they met, while he had already done a tour with the Marines, gotten out and gotten a position at LUM. Before her father's assassination they were already engaged-- this while she was too young to hold the throne in her own right.

On one hand, given that they're going to live for centuries, the age gap is no big deal; on the other, given that they're going to live for centuries, getting engaged before you're even of age seems to be rushing things a bit? Especially for a crown princess who can expect any divorce of hers to have serious repercussions.

I'm likewise intrigued by Honor and others being able to enlist at seventeen; if these people are going to live for centuries without physically "aging out", why the push to start adult life early?

RFC mentions that part of the scandal around Honor and Hamish was fueled by pre-prolong mentalities, and QEIII herself calls out the RoH's constitution for being a little behind the times re: prolong at the end of UH. But it seems to me that the whole Honorverse is still trying to reset it's defaults in that regard.

To some extent, it's true that the Honorverse in general is trying to reset its default parameters on physical aging.

A couple of points, though.

(1) Honor didn't enlist at 17. She was accepted for Saganami Island at 17, and it's a five-year program, so she would have been 22 when she graduated (and completed her snotty cruise), at which point she would have been an ensign — think Scotty Tremaine from On Basilisk Station. This at a time when, thanks to King Roger, the Royal Manticoran Navy was expanding rapidly. (And, in fact, if she hadn't so obviously been the round peg in the round hole in her chosen tactical track, it's highly probable that she would've been sent on for additional graduate classes before she ever had her first shipboard assignment.)

(2) When Elizabeth became engaged to Justin, don't forget that there was a treecat in the mix. Even before treecats could sign, they could communicate an awful lot of information, including whether or not what someone is saying is honest and the depth of another human being's feelings. Elizabeth was engaged to Justin. Had her father not been killed, she would not have married him before she was of legal age to take the throne in her own right if she had to. There wasn't a whole lot of point in pussyfooting around (you should pardon the reference to the 'cats), when Ariel was involved in the equation and there wasn't a chance in hell that Elizabeth — who was constitutionally required to marry a commoner — was going to marry anybody but Justin.

(3) The Star Kingdom of Manticore is making institutional changes where the implications of prolong are concerned. It's why (absent the war with Haven) Caparelli would have been cycled back to a fleet command, rather than staying put as First Space Lord for the duration. It's why it is becoming/has become the norm, rather than the exception, for someone to have multiple careers. No one is going to force you to have a second career if you like what you're doing and you're good at it, but there are provisions for almost all public entities (and for pretty much any successful private entity) to make room for incoming talent by cycling people out of senior positions — and, quite possibly, back into those positions again.

(4) Political institutions, as opposed to the bureaucracies attached to/overseen by those institutions, are slower to change. Partly that's because no one wants anyone mucking around with the way that the Senate and the House of Representatives are organized or their relationship to the Executive and the Judiciary [or the Honorverse equivalent]. If you're going to make changes in the fundamental institutions of government, then prudence suggests going about it slowly. And, of course, there can be additional complicating factors. For example, there was no provision under the Legislaturalist Constitution requiring any President to ever step down. After all, he was going to be President for Life. The restored Péricard Constitution, dating from well before Prolong became available — and a dead letter even before the Legislaturalist Constitution formally supplanted it. As such, there was absolutely no pressure to amend the term limitation which was created well before the situation in which someone might be president for five or six decades was even remotely possible, far less probable. What's Elizabeth and Honor are talking about at the end of Uncompromising is the fact that Eloise Pritchart has zero intention of modifying the Constitution in any way which might even remotely look like she is planning on following in the Legislaturalist/Committee of Public Safety's footsteps. Mostly that's because she and Tom Theisman are in complete agreement about how absolutely essential it is for the restorers of the Republic to make it obvious that they take the rule of law and the sanctity of the ballot box seriously. And, frankly, another part of it — which she probably hasn't admitted even to herself — is that she's tired. She's been on "active operations" even longer than Honor, and like Honor, she would dearly love to find something else – something peaceful, that doesn't mean killing people or simply being responsible for billions of human beings — in which she can invest herself.

(As an aside, I sometimes find myself wondering if I am going to allow Elizabeth to acknowledge "combat fatigue" and abdicate in favor of her son. It's been done at least once in the Star Kingdom's history, after all, and that was when prolong wasn't a possibility.)

________________________________________



While I'm writing, let me also respond to why Justin didn't recognize Elizabeth when she walked into his lab the first time. A lot of this is already been touched on by other people, and I had put together a post on the subject, just in time to have my Internet go down and the entire draft disappear into cyberspace. I was so ticked off I just threw up my hands and walked away. Very mature of me, I know.

Okay, so why didn't Justin recognize Elizabeth Winton when she walked into his lab.

(1) Elizabeth avoided the camera. Like Honor, she had what she considered to be an "awkward adolescence." In fact, it was nowhere near as bad as Honor's actually was, if only because she didn't have the altitude challenge Honor carried around everywhere with her, but it was enough to make her uncomfortable about casual photography. The Star Kingdom has a short way with paparazzi, as well — especially paparazzi foolish enough to hound someone like a member of the royal family (or Duchess Harrington, for that matter) — so there weren't a lot of pictures of her in a public setting that wasn't formally structured. And in most of those, she was in either formal court dress or haute couture (as appropriate for teenagers).

(2) No one at the University, outside senior members of the faculty and the Administration, had been told that Elizabeth was planning on touring the campus that day. Partly that was a security measure, but it was also because Elizabeth wanted to see the university in normal operation while she considered whether or not she wanted to attend it. So no one had said to Justin, "Hey, better keep an eye out! The Crown Princess is wandering around campus today."

(3) Elizabeth was bad that day. She deliberately gave her security detail the slip so that she could explore on her own, without having an official bodyguard presence alerting everyone in her vicinity that she was a VIP, in which case someone undoubtedly would have recognized Crown Princess Elizabeth. This would have been A Bad Thing,™ in her judgment, since she wanted to see the college as a student would have seen it. It was Not Smart, but she was a teenager. I have three of them. Believe it or not, they don't always do the "smart" thing. Shocking, I know, but there it is.

(4) Elizabeth was definitely not in court dress that day! She was "slopping around" in casual clothing. Now, admittedly, it was very good quality casual dress, but it was definitely not anything that anyone had ever seen many photographs of her in. She also hadn't had the sort of makeup attention that went with the more formal photographs which had been taken of her.

(5) Justin had been working on his research project for a long time, and the experiment was at a sensitive point, when Elizabeth walked straight past the "Lab In Use" notice because she wasn't a student yet, no one had briefed her on SOP, and, frankly, she didn't notice/recognize the notice for what it was.

So, here is Justin, carefully monitoring his experiment, and suddenly the lab door opens, a young woman he's never seen in his life walks through it, screwing up his entire experiment, despite the fact that he turned on the "Keep the Hell Out" notice that should of kept anyone but a moron from disturbing him. She's not accompanied by any bodyguards, she hasn't been "dolled up" for a formal picture, she's in casual clothing, nobody told him that anyone important — far less the heir to the throne — would be touring the campus, and she doesn't instantly respond to his outrage by looking down her nose at him and saying "Look, jackass — do you have any idea who it is you're talking to?!"

It's like meeting her in the 24-hour laundromat at three in the morning, when she's dressed in a ratty sweatshirt and yoga pants, with her hair in curlers.

Trust me, it's not too surprising he didn't instantly say "My God! That's Crown Princess Elizabeth! I'd know her anywhere!"

Just saying.

Queen Elizebeth in Yoga pants?
Wowsers!