Belly up to a bar next to a Spacer in most any location in the galaxy, and you can expect to be plunged into a brawl, or worse. That's how Spacers are. However, if that bar happened to be located in the StarBoard Café, you might find yourself the involuntary audience to a story. The Café holds a yearly storytelling contest, and Spacers love to tell stories. The individual tales in the contest might reveal that strange happenings are stirring the galaxy-wide civilization. Do they involve that recently-uplifted, disruptive breed known as the Humans from a backwater planet out on the edge? Does it have anything to do with the vanished Wistrani, the highly advanced ancestors of the Amalgam? And just who are the Xirom, the jolly, bucolic race who seem to show up everywhere? Whatever these changes are, they promise to be most prankish!