Some of you must have noticed that, if a long series of novels is written about the same ongoing ensemble of characters, the author sometimes gets around to adding short stories which fill in gaps in the saga. To fill in some of the _time_ before I'm ready to start the final (?) Alipang Havens volume, I am going to insert a short story which belongs in the continuity.
In "Possible Future," one of the characters in "the secret army" is a former New York police detective named Danny Alyard. Like Alipang Havens and Josiah Redfern, Danny is a hero who first came into being as a character played by me in text-based roleplay. As a New York City patrolman, he deserved a promotion to detective, but was unjustly blocked from it because he blew the whistle on a corrupt and crooked superior in his precinct. Only after passing the age of forty still in uniform did he get to do some really impressive heroics, which belatedly gained him his detective's badge.
Danny's heroics included getting badly wounded while saving the lives of the children of an African-American single mother named Tashonda, who up till then had had nothing but bad luck with men. But by the time Danny crossed her path, Tashonda had committed her life to Jesus -- which made the _Christian_ policeman all the more a knight in shining armor to her. Completely ignoring both racial difference and age difference, Tashonda relentlessly pursued her hero. Her son and daughter also took to the man who had rescued them from a crossfire, and the sincerity of mother and children awoke in him exactly the response Tashonda was hoping for. So they got married, which delighted Danny's friends on the force, as they knew how long he had _wished_ for a woman who would love him wholeheartedly. Tashonda eventually bore a son to Danny, though Tashonda's _first_ son is the one who appears in "Possible Future" under the name of Jackson Alyard.
The story I will soon be posting takes place in Manhattan in 2009; call it early summer. This is only something like two months after the wedding of Danny and Tashonda; and, as you will see, the action of this story occurs on someone _else's_ wedding day. Note that there will be a reference also to my character Josiah Redfern. For the record, I imagine Danny Alyard as looking like Dan Ackroyd, Josiah Redfern as resembling Kiefer Sutherland, and Tashonda as looking like the singer Mandisa.