The Temple of the Exploding Head

LADY JUBILEE OF BELMONT-SOUTH TYROL is the mother of Lord Stenstrom the Younger, the hero of LoE Book VI: The Sands of the Solar Empire. She was a key influence in his early life.

Lady Jubilee of Tyrol was a wealthy socialite from the Esther city of Tyrol on the far eastern shores of Kana. She was well-known for wearing her Pewterlock hair (a shiny shade of silver often seen in Tyrol) short with a “swoop” of bangs in the front. She was also well-known for her catty, contentious nature. She often feuded with the various ladies of Esther and elsewhere. Her longest running feud was with Lady Sephla of Cone, a wealthy woman from Remnath. Jubilee and Sephla traded barbs without end, even resorting to stealing each other’s gentlemen, bedding them down and writing about their various sexual attributes in the local posts.

At a Nether Day ball, Jubilee overheard the younger sister of Lady Sephla speaking to her friends about a gentleman she was very keen on. Jubilee decided to steal the man to humiliate her. She marched out onto the dance floor to do her dirty work.

The gentleman in question was Lord Stenstrom of Belmont, an officer in the Stellar Fleet from Zenon. Handsome and black-haired, of all things Jubilee lost her heart to him and, after a torrid romance, she became his lady and bore him thirty children–twenty-nine daughters and one son, Stenstrom the Younger.

The enemies she made that night at the Nether Day ball would follow Jubilee and her children throughout her life.

Lady Jubilee was reputed to be a practitioner of Tyrol Sorcery. She was said to be a master at creating potions, brewing poisons, summoning demons, walking in the shadows and opening locked doors. She was a domineering and very intrusive mother, often disrupting her children’s lives. Many of her children ran away from home, only to be summoned back at her whim via sorcery. Her daughter, Lady Calami, ran away from home a record 4,000 times. Another Belmont daughter, Lady Constance, went Carofab to escape Jubilee’s clutches.

Lady Jubilee appears in The Sands of the Solar Empire, from Loconeal Publishing in June 2012

copyright 2012, Ren Garcia and Eve Ventrue