On serves, and a draft blackwine serve

This one remains of two minds about serves.  On the one hand, composing a serve is a way for a kajirus to express himself and create something possibly beautiful, humorous, poignant, arousing, or inspiring.  On the other hand, the most successful serves seem to be those that most closely resemble soft-core pr0n, yet stay within genre constraints as arcane as Balinese shadow puppetry.

For example, last week our Master took brother Nic and boy to his homestone, where we briefly toured the Paga tavern and observed a couple of serves.  The kajira there was upbraided for serving a bota, and for not counting out the right number of “beats” (three for her Master, one of another Master) during her presentation.  Neither of these criticisms appear to be accurate from this one’s reading of the scrolls–which may not be too surprising since the Frees didn’t object when the kajira greeted them with “Tal.”

All of which is contributing to this one’s developing notion that a slave’s real duty in Gor is to keep Free People in line–to “lead from behind” while remaining totally subservient.  It’s a tricky undertaking: to eagerly accept sometimes abusive “correction” from the clueless, while trying to subtly guide them past their embarrassing errors.  ((Rather like SL online help, boy supposes.))

None of which matters so much to this boy, if he be practical about it, inasmuchas my Master is surely not among the clueless, and boy has received only the most constructive suggestions for improvement.  And boy has no aspirations to serving in a Paga tavern any time soon.  (Boy can imagine a scenario, though, where he’s walking past a tavern en route to a build site or scripting project and gets waylaid by one of the Clueless Free Persons and forced into duty serving a round of ale.  Boy supposes an engineered client crash might be the best course of action in such an event.)

It has also passed through this one’s small brain that serves have practical utility to Frees, in that they offer abundant excuses to punish a slave in need of that attention ((for whatever reason, hint, hint)).  A serve also fully occupies the attention of all kajirii in earshot, freeing the FPs to chat in private ((IMs)) about whatever topic for which they’re actually meeting.

All of the above a rambling introduction to a serve boy has been composing in the back of his mind for the past few days.  Boy actually has three serves that are interesting (at least to boy) with different “hooks” intended for different audiences: one rather poignant about kajirus mortality, one a thinly veiled excuse to get naked in the servery, and one posing the concept of kajirii as (blood) brothers across generations.

This one’s “hook” is to play on the three “stations” of the service vessel during presentation, each one exposing further loyalty to and ownership by my Master, regardless of who is being served.  Twists:  this will all play out in private in the servery as a revisionist serve ((on the premise that the three stations are nowhere to be found in the Norman books)) so not appropriate for guests to a traditional household–which setting lets the kajirus think about his own Master, even while serving another.  This may confuse or annoy that other Master, but it’s pretty unlikely he’ll complain about a boy’s loyalty to his own Master, unless he’s really looking for a fight.  The premise is that a Master has a kajirus serve a guest as a way of showing off, and what better honors the host Master than a “private” tribute to him during the serve?

Blackwine serve

[[Preceded by the usual tedious and tricky steps to take the FP's order]]

[[Hah!  finally, the grid comes up, just as boy was about to write this serve.  Boy thinks he's never gonna get this done.]]

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