Yellow-Vespa courier: the Hal-Stice directive

texture · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, during the conditioning-heavy day's running, before the afternoon match.
• What: "Apparently some higher-up had sent Mary Esther Thode out on her little yellow Vespa with the order for their match; she'd pulled up alongside Stice and Wayne just as they cleared the Hammond golf course," Hal a good half km behind with the galumphers. The order — not a ladder challenge, more like an exhibition, Schtitt inscrutable about the whole thing — produces the match that fills the bleachers as word spreads that this is "something Schtitt had actually dispatched a scooter to order," and puts Hal on court under Helen Steeply's observing eye for a whole set of deLint commentary. The text twice marks the dispatch itself ("when Thode brought Stice and Hal the directive to play") as what made the event official and strange; her own role is pure courier, which is exactly the point — the administration's long arm, motorized.