Now, however, they were a riot of color, decorated as they were with pictures of happily mated Khanavai males and human females from throughout the Bride Lottery’s history. Prominent among them was an image of Prince Khan and his human bride Princess Ella, the first human-Khanavai pairing in our history.
I slid into the chair across the desk from Vos. “What do you need?”
“I have come up with the most brilliant idea in the history of the Bride Lottery.” Something about Vos’s smug smile put me on edge.
“Tell me about it.” Vos had replaced the small statue of Earth and Khanav Prime connected by Station 21 that had been on his desk when it collapsed. I picked it up and began turning it in my hands as Vos spoke.
“Some background first.” Vos leaned back in his chair.
Vulk. This is going to take a while.
“When I took over the Games Administration position almost twenty-five Earth years ago, the Bride Lottery was already in place. I’ve been doing what I can to increase our ‘ratings,’ as Earthers call them, on both planets ever since.”
I nodded, mentally willing him to hurry through his explanation. None of this was news to anyone.
“I knew the basics of the Bride Alliance,” he continued, “along with the traditional games schedule. We drew brides’ names once every Earth year—roughly twice per Khanav Prime cycle.”
Again, I knew all this. But I simply made an encouraging noise and continued listening.
“According to the Bride Alliance, we are allowed to choose up to a hundred Earth females to mate with Khanavai warriors.”
“Of course,” I murmured.
“We have always taken this to mean that we should draw a hundred names and push for the maximum number of mate-matches possible from that.”
“Mm-hmm.” When will he get to the vulking point?
Vos leaned forward, propping his elbows on his desk and tenting his fingertips together. He rested his chin atop his fingers. “However, I have been re-reading the original Bride Alliance Treaty. And here’s what I discovered. According to the language of the original Bride Alliance as it is written in Earther English, as long as we do not exceed one hundred matches, we are allowed to continue the Bride Games throughout that Earth year.” Vos raised his eyebrows and waited expectantly.
Hold on. “Are you saying we could draw more than a hundred names? We could keep drawing until we had a hundred matches?” I thought about it a micro-moment longer. “We could have more than one set of Bride Games per Earther year.”
Vos grinned widely. “That’s it exactly!” He pointed one finger at me in a very human gesture and stood up, sending his chair spinning behind him as he strode around to the front of his desk. “Earth entertainment, which I have been studying more closely recently, has the concept of seasons.”
I turned the word around my mind, trying to see if my translator might have misinterpreted it.
“As in, different times of the planetary cycle? The Earthers divide it into four, correct?” I tried to remember what they might be. “Winter is the cold one, summer is the hot one, spring is one where plants are most likely to bloom, and the fourth one has something to do with…tumbling downward?”
“You’re thinking of fall, not falling,” Vos corrected me. “Also called autumn. But that’s not the kind of season I’m talking about. In their vid-dramas, the stories are divided out into groupings connected by theme. These groupings are called seasons. Regardless, etymology aside, I have decided to apply this idea of seasons to the Bride Lottery and Games.”
I blinked. It already took most of the year between Bride Games to prepare. The games had to be conceptualized and the various filming areas of Station 21 torn down and rebuilt. We tried to conserve resources by reusing the basic rooms, but occasionally a new set of games meant completely different spaces to compete in. “What will one Bride Games season consist of?”
“That’s the brilliance of it,” Vos replied, leaning on the desk behind him so that he stood closer to me than before. “As long as we run it in the same Earther year, we can have as many Bride Games as we wish, so long as we do not exceed our quota of one hundred Earther female mates for our Khanavai warriors.”
My mind was already spinning, considering how such an extended programming season might work. “How will you introduce this concept to humans?”
“That’s the easy part. They already know what a vid-drama season is. We simply tap into some of those vid-drama traditions and use them in the Lottery and Games.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the tradition of the Holiday Special.”
“What’s that?” My translator didn’t quite know what to do with the term, giving me comparisons such as “lunch special”—but I didn’t think Vos meant a price-reduced version of the Bride Games. Clearly, I needed to watch more human vid-dramas to understand exactly what Vos was getting at.
“Well, to begin with, we are going to have a Christmas holiday special.”
“Christmas?” There were enough human women on Khanav Prime that I had heard the term before. I knew it was some holy day that involved an exchange of gifts and…glitter? Or was glitter a feature of the egg-and-rabbit-eating holiday?
“The details don’t matter now. The point is,” Vos continued, “it is common for the vid-dramas to create special episodes devoted to holiday themes. We are going to do that this year.”
I nodded slowly. “That could work. How long do we have to prepare?”
“One Earth week.” Vos’s grin turned maniacal. “We have one Earth week to get ready.”
“Excuse me?” I felt my eyes go wide as I stared at my obviously insane commanding officer. “How could we possibly make that deadline?”
Vos laughed aloud and pushed off his desk, moving back around behind it to sit down again. “No need to panic, Lieutenant. This is going to be an abbreviated version of the games. But that means we are going to have to choose our candidates more carefully
