The History of Lady Ada Sunshine: The Early Years

This story is inspired by the Steempunk-net game based on the Steem Blockchain and a remark about starshine (yes, not sunshine, but I misread it the first time) in the Discord channel by @ravenruis

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(narrator voice)

Today Lady Ava Sunshine is mostly known for her gun shop “Lady Ava’s Gun Emporium”, so it may surprise many that the Lady didn’t had any interest in guns for quite some time. In fact she had no interest whatsoever in anything military until a certain event that involved her, her favorite pastime, and a young man named Gal Wintersmith who interrupted her in a quite offensive way.

Gal Wintersmith was a rather uninteresting person and apart from his crucial role in young Lady Ava’s life only come to the attention of the society when he died in a horrible accident a week before his 26th birthday.

But this story takes place several years earlier, a few days after Lady Ava’s seventeenth birthday.

At this time it was normal for young woman of rank to be introduced into society at the first occasion after their sixteenth birthday.

But young Lady Ava was not normal. She was shy. She was not only shy but took shyness to the rim of the world and dropped down from there with it, just to not be seen by anyone except the far away stars.
Even with all the friendly pressure of her family, who considered her a beauty and her not-appearance a regretful waste, Lady Ava could not be made to appear in public at the normal time.

The family gave her a year to muster the courage and so, with seventeen, Lady Ava finally made her debut.

Despite what she probably thought of herself, the young men found her quite charming. There is just something in a delicate young Lady, with beautiful blonde hair and downcast eyes, that calls to the oldest instincts in the males of the human species.

But poor Lady Ava felt very much at the wrong place when she found herself in the center of the attention of several young men. Only people who suffer under the same sort of shyness can appreciate the effort and strength Lady Ava summoned up to survive that evening. Is it quite likely, I might even confess I am sure of it, that back at home after the event she jumped straight into her bed, hid under the blanket and wept for hours.

It is therefore no surprise that Lady Ava spend the next few days with her favorite hobby: the growing of beautiful flowers in the glass garden that was her favorite spot, hiding place and source of happiness.

Here, and only here, she would also attend her second hobby: singing. She had a beautiful, if somehow rough voice, that made even the sunlight shining on the flowers seemingly more bright.

All in all, you could say, she was like a vulnerable flower herself, that could bloom to a tremendously beauty under the right circumstances, but also wither easily under the carelessness of one single person.

This person was Gal Wintersmith.

The Wintersmith’s at this time held some moderately important positions in the bureaucracy while Lady Ava’s family was a small one and only had the position of her father to show, a professor in biology.

Therefore her parents where a bit excited when Gal Wintersmith came to make a surprise visit to Lady Ava, despite this lack of etiquette, which they rightfully saw as a proof of how impressed he was by their daughter.

Lady Ava in her garden was a lot less impressed when their maidservant announced the surprise visitor.
She was in the middle of her favorite song

The earth says hello
You twinkle above us

when the girl interrupted her.

Lady Ava did remember a harsh chiseled face on a slender body, but that was all. Her first instinct was to turn Gal Wintersmith down, but the maidservant instructed Lady Ava of her parent’s sincere wish that she should at least talk a few minutes to her visitor. With no alternative left, Lady Ava braced herself for the meeting.

In the middle of the beautiful flower garden and the dizzying smell of all those plants the young Lady Ava must have looked like a figure out of a fairy tale. I can only imagine this invigorating effect to be the reason for what happened a few minutes later.

After a bit of talking, where Lady Ava acted even more shy then before and nearly never said a word, Gal Wintersmith seemed agitated. He gripped the arm of Lady Ava, a faux pas that would have been sufficient to have him escorted out of the house, and raised his voice so much that the maidservant rushed in.

What exactly happened is unknown, but the maid later reported that the young man had touched Lady Ava in an inexcusable way. Lady Ava surely was shaken by this experience. She was in tears and retreated to her rooms immediately, letting not even her parents in, who had allowed Gal to meet her.

What did enter her room, starting after a few days, were packets of books and later containers that held strange pieces of tools and materials.

Her parents were deeply troubled by this development, but out of fear to hurt her daughter even more, did not press the matter as hard as they would have liked to do.

That only ended when they heard sounds of small explosions coming out of Lady Ada’s beloved garden. Fearing for the life of their daughter they ran in, only to find a smug looking girl with a self-made miniature gun that, as she explained, could be hidden in all types of clothes without being in risk of involuntary firing.

You may be able to imagine the shock that was on the faces of her parents, but Lady Ava didn’t care. She had silently vowed that nobody would ever find her in a situation of helplessness again.

It is needless to say that her parents had some trouble with the new side, that her daughter showed to them. More then anything else they feared the young and shy Lady would close herself in even more.

They were greatly surprised therefore to find out that Lady Ava had started a regular correspondence with a young man and even expressed the wish to meet him. They were so surprised, in fact, that they didn’t ask who that man was.

If Lady Ava’s parents had asked, they would have found out that it was a promising young gunsmith her daughter was meeting, and would probably have prevented it. But they didn’t ask, the two young people met, and the rest is, as they say, history.