Archive | July 11, 2011

The Pay Was Good

From kc_obrien‘s prompt: “Can I get a short piece from another perspective of some of the internees/guards in the community featured in Discovery Channel/Invisibles (LJ Link)?

***

The pay was good.

That’s what Dylan told himself when he took the job. It was good pay, better than anything else a washout jock had right to expect. It let him support Kaylee and their baby girl and, a year later, their baby boy, and it was out in the middle of nowhere – just about the safest place to be, if it weren’t for the monsters they were guarding.

Not that they looked like monsters, or acted like monsters, or quacked like ducks in any way. Sure, they looked a little funny, and had a little bit of magic here and there, but that was like calling housecats dangerous because they bore a faint resemblance to tigers.

But the pay was really good. Dylan reminded himself of that when his fellow guards made rude cracks, the sort of stuff that, if it had been any ethnicity and not faeries, El-hee-may as they called themselves, would have gotten them fired, sued, and blacklisted. He reminded himself of new shoes on his baby girl’s feet and the little cottage Kaylee loved so much when a squirmy kid with scales like a snake’s bit him and his hand swelled up for a day and a half.

The day that the teenaged girl with the goaty bits came crying to him (because he was the nice guard) because three of the other assholes had gotten her in a corner and threatened to do worse if she told, he went home and held his family tight for hours, and wondered if any amount of money could really be worth it.

The paychecks stopped coming a week later.

***

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Old Friends? Rin & Girey/Reiassan, from fayanora’s prompt

From fayanora‘s prompt “An unexpected ‘Hello.'”

From Rin & Girey/Reiassan, after In Context (available in Tales for the Sugar Cat).

Speaking of context, the important thing to know here is: Rin’s nation has won the war over Girey’s, and she is bringing him home as her captive across the length of her country. Girey was the prince of the defeated nation, and is in enforced incognito (Girey is a very common name in their country) as the son of a dead Duke.

Rin & Girey have a landing page (LJ Link

Karak and Noni were generous, friendly hosts, and it took Rin little time at all to relax into their company. They’d fought together, after all, Karak and her, and she’d known Noni since they were children (even if, like Rin, the name Noni wore now wasn’t the one she’d worn then).

Even Girey started to relax. He still complained about the colors, but, some of what had to be his royal manners kicking in, not in front of their hosts, and less and less so she found the most muted Callanthe silks she could to dress him in, and a tailor that could actually fit the clothes to him. If his qitari buttoned on the left, well, it would be a while before he figured that one out, and he could complain then. In the meantime, it suited some small petty part of Rin’s soul to keep him in the dark, his clothes marking him as unskilled, if affluent, labor.

And, despite his complaints, he was paying close attention to the crowds as they shopped. There was a shift in his shoulders and his tone of voice since they got to Ossulund, the feeling that he was trying to act of be someone different. He seemed uncomfortable with the idea of Rin having friends, especially male friends that weren’t him. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was jealous.

“Geer?” The voice, high-pitched, excessively feminine, and loud, came from across the marketplace. Rin turned before her prisoner did, uncomfortably curious. “Girey? Geer, hello!”

Now, he turned, though he glanced at Rin and their hosts first, and now all four of them were looking at the woman who was, despite the decorative shackles tinkling on her wrists, waving wildly at them.

“Friend of yours?” Rin murmured softly. If she had been, what she was, now, was a soldier’s war trophy, lovely and fragile in her tight, left-buttoned silk qitari and delicate house slippers, her blonde hair pinned in curls over her head. A decoration.

Girey’s shoulders were tense as he turned back to the belts they were looking at. “She must have the wrong Girey,” he muttered.

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Fiction/Reality juxtaposition

Via Candlemark & Gleam’s twitter feed…

Minimalist, Futuristic Library, although my experience with libraries locally makes me question their shock at OMG! Books!

This library reminds me in part of The Planner’s Library, seen in this icon by [personal profile] meeks.

Original article has more pictures & details.

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Final Exams – Tír na Cali – from Wyld_Dandelyon’s prompt

From Wyld_Dandelyon‘s prompt: “Final Exams.”

This comes after Frying Pan, Fire (LJ Link).

Despite rather constant warning from their teachers: “Don’t bond. Don’t get to close. You will be sold when school is over, and it is exceedingly unlikely you will be sold to the same household,” they had gotten close.

They had been picked up on the same run, Steve, Carl, Debbie, Jill, Jakub, and Seth, and before they’d come to the school, they’d already spent several days together in a cell just big enough for the six of them. By the time their final exams rolled around, they were close enough to know what the others were thinking.

Not that it was hard, right now; they were all thinking variations on the same thing: What happens next? What happens if I don’t do well? What happens if I do do well? Is this really happening to me?

They knew, in theory, what came next: either they passed their exams, or they were sent to work camps. They’d even had a field trip to the fields, to see what it would be like. To scare them into obedience, Seth assumed; the work camps were pretty much exactly what American propaganda said being a slave in California was like: hard, constant, dehumanizing labor.

If they did well, they had been assured they would be placed well in high-ranking households. It rankled, or at least it bugged Seth – they never talked about this part, as it sounded too much like sedition, and sedition had, they’d learned fast, painful consequences – to be working hard to get a position licking someone’s boots. But better licking boots than picking grapes.

“I’m worried about the titles and terms of address in Civics,” he admitted. They were crowded into the dorm room he shared with Carl and Jakub, trying to cram for exams.

“Sommelier and barrista testing,” Steve muttered. “I can never tell the reds apart, and that whipped cream trick…”

“Law,” Jill murmured. “The little nitty gritty laws that change with every Barony.”

“We’ll done fine.” That was Carl, who had nothing to worry about. “Chin up, and just try to sleep tonight. We’ll all do fine.”

“And then what?” Steve muttered. For that, Carl didn’t have an answer. None of them did.



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