Setting – A Stolen Heart

This is the layout for Luc's room. For scale, Luc is 6'5" (198 cm) and the bed is big enough for three people. He has plenty of foot room. I used this layout to make sure that when Luc moved around in the room the doors, windows, bed and so on were in the right place. Four-year-old Senth broke into this room while Luc was in the shower, and Pietas portaled into the room and ended up hiding in the shower. The room saw a lot of action!

When Luc went looking for Senth's room in A Stolen Heart, he found it was not a room at all but a closet. Furious that a child would be housed in such a room, he reminded the Grand Master that rules required every child have a room with a window. It's obvious few rooms would have one, but an academy "window" is a virtual screen that has depth and offers changing views, a day and night cycle, and even curtains. The closet housing Senth did not even have a light he could control.

Think fitness tracker/wallet/GPS and you wouldn't be wrong. Luc covers his in precious and semi-precious stones. Most humans have an embedded chip, but immortals cannot - their bodies reject the devices. So that their inability will not draw attention, the immortals made wearing bracelets fashionable, and now humans wear them too. The one shown here has tiny magnetic hooks for charms handed out by businesses. The Tarthian Empire's version of a business card, a charm's chip-data can be tapped against the screen and uploaded instantly, or worn as a dangle on the bracelet. It's fashionable in Tarth City to have dozens of dangles. Each store has a shape representing the company. A shoe for a shoe store, a drink for a bar, and so on.

A portal bracelet is different from a debit bracelet but similar. There are only two working models, both of which are controlled by Pietas. The device permits instantaneous travel between places, a "transporter beam" on steroids. In the distant past, humans used such devices to wage war and devastate entire planets, and Pietas does not trust humanity with the technology. No spoilers, but in A Stolen Heart, an outside group tries to gain the tech, and Pietas, Luc, Dessy, and their androids fight to keep it safe.

The hoversine - or floating "car" Luc uses was top of the line, and customized for him. When I was trying to come up with a name for the company (Lychord Bahon), my assistant, DD, suggested bahon, which was similar to a word in India meaning vehicle. I loved the idea. By the way, this is one of the companies Luc would love to own, just so he could tinker with the design aspect, but he doesn't purchase transportation companies -- just their products. When I commissioned the art for this, I asked Nano-Core to make it instantly recognizable as a vehicle that could float, and that it be long and black. Perfection.

Luc's hoversine hailed from the prestigious Lychord Bahon hover company, the hoversine rode six in comfort and could sleep three. Nano-Core created this to my exact specifications. The middle lifts out to form a sleeping platform. Not that he'd ever used the comfortable pop-up bed for actual sleeping. He kept one of these vehicles on every planet in the Empire. He even had two on Tarth, in different sizes. One with a bed, and one without. There are scenes in one of these hovers in just about any book where you find Luc Saint-Cyr.