Blender 2.83
Cycles 1024 samples
MakeHuman 1.2.0a4
Texture maps acquired from cc0textures.com and textures.com.
“Love is in the Air”
Scene from a short story in the Diaspora Generations universe.
Planet: Kester 3a A moon of 8000km diameter orbiting a gas giant in the third orbit of a K7 IV star.
Characters from Left to Right
Jin & Adelia
Kailey & Jorden
Kailey and Jordan have been seeing each other over the last two years when Jorden’s ship is in port. Jorden is a senior Navy petty officer on a space going destroyer FS Battle of the Salient (DD1017) as part of the Federal fleet. Kailey is in her last year of nursing school and is slated to start a job as a nurse when she graduates.
Jorden expects that he will be stationed aboard the Salient his entire career given unless he requests transfer or is transferred due to poor performance. Given Jorden is a plankowner aboard the Salient and his fitness reports all have high marks he is likely to spend is entire naval career aboard the Salient. Jorden serves as a Fire Control Technician and is now the lead petty officer for his department.
Kailey’s heritage hails from an archipelago on ancient Gaia some four centuries ago called The Philippines. Her ancestors were first arrivals on this world as colonists and ever since have held professional trades including doctors and nurses. Kailey’s parents are both doctors and tried to encourage Kailey to attend medical school. Kailey felt more compelled towards nursing which reluctantly her parents supported her in.
Jin is a shipmate of Jorden’s and when they arrived in system he asked Jorden if he could fix him up with a date knowing Jorden had many friends on world and had Kailey as his girlfriend. Jin is also very aware of Jorden’s mindset towards Kailey and fully expects Jorden to “pop the question.”
Adelia is Kailey’s room mate in nursing school and plans to be a neonatal nurse in the local hospital when she and Kailey graduate.
Kailey was more than happy to help Jorden fix Jin up with Adelia. In spite of being very pretty and and possessing a wonderful personality Adelia has had the worst luck finding dates to go on. Jorden let Kailey know that his friend Jin is a bit socially awkward around women.
Jin and Adelia hit it off almost as soon as they set eyes on one another. Jorden and Kailey observed that the daylight between them grew smaller as the afternoon progressed. This observation got Kailey’s mind going.
Kailey spent a weekend visiting with her grandmother and asking her advise about what steps to take with Jorden. Jorden and Kailey both tend to be very reserved in their actions. Jorden in the two years they’ve been seeing one another has for the most part acted like the perfect gentleman with her which has begun to frustrate her. “Does he see me as a girlfriend or just a friend?” she’s asked herself silently. They did spend a weekend together the last time his ship was in port but Jorden almost seemed apologetic about this which confused Kailey.
After telling her grandmother all this and the fact that she wanted to marry Jorden and have children by him her eighty seven year old grandmother shocked her by telling her “grab him by the short hairs and tell him that then!” She went on to say that men sometimes “need be told how they feel and not let them guess at it. You have something in mind for him you need to tell him that.”
Kailey reflected you never know what’s going to come out of her “Lola” and the stories of what Lola was like in her youth among the family are legend.
As the two couples walked along Kailey’s grandmother’s words came back to her and she suddenly turned around and put her hands on Jorden’s chest and said “we need to talk about our future. I want to know that I’m going to have you in my life for the rest of our days. Will you marry me?”
Kailey’s home world had a birth rate of five males to eight females typically. Competition among women of marrying age was fierce when it came to finding a husband. Jorden knew this and had been warned (Jorden was not originally from Kester 3a) the women of this world could be very forward if they felt they needed to be so he was surprised but not terribly so.
A wry smile came over his face and before he replied he pulled a small box out of his pocket. He had purchased the contents on another world where his ship had put in a port of call and it cost him six months Navy pay to buy it.
Jorden looked at Kailey with a smile on his face, opened the box and stammered “this token in the box is no where near as pretty or as precious to me as you are. I was planning on us getting alone later and me asking you to be my wife.”
What Kailey did not know is enlisted men in the Navy were required to get permission to marry. Jorden had already gotten the blessing from his command to do so.
Port of call for his ship was scheduled to be six months this time as the ship was going in for a yard period.
“This is going to be a great six months” Jorden thought to himself.
