Call for Prompts: Abduction and Rescue! Go!

The call for prompts is now open! For the next 24 hours, I will taking your prompts on the theme of Abduction and Rescue.

I will write (over the next week) at least one microfic (150-300 words) to each prompter. If you donate, I will write to all of your prompts, and write at last 300 additional words for each $5 you donate, to the prompt of your choice.

If I reach $30 in donations today, I will post an additional 2000-word fic on the subject of the audience’s choice. This has been reached!

If I reach $60, I will write at least 2 microfics for everyone, whether or not they donated.

If I reach $90, I will write to every prompt I get in the next 24 hours – if something truly bugs me, I’ll ask you to re-prompt. At this point, please allow up to 2 weeks for the writing to be completed.

If I reach $120, I will record a podcast of an audience-choice story and post it for everyone to read. Also, everyone who tipped will get double wordcount.

If I reach $150, I will release an e-book of all of the fiction written to this call and the last one. At this point, please allow up to 24 weeks for the writing to be completed.




This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/112923.html. You can comment here or there.

74 thoughts on “Call for Prompts: Abduction and Rescue! Go!

    • “I’ll call you Ruffles,” the little girl declared, holding the puppy carefully, the way she had been shown. “Ruffles?” her father laughed. The puppy just nuzzled closer to his new owner, whining for food. “All right, you and… Ruffles… get in the car. I’ve just got some business to take care of.” Once his daughter and the tiny pup, the last of the litter, were safely locked in the car, Gene paced around to the back of the kennel. From the front, it looked clean enough, but back here… He grabbed the shopkeeper by the collar and, before the man could protest, punched him across the jaw. “If I ever,” he murmured, “find that you’ve been keeping dogs again, cats, fish, any animal bigger than a cockroach, I will do to you exactly what you did to that poor puppy’s mother. Do you understand?” “I’m calling the cops,” the man whined. Gene punched him again, then wiped the filth of the man off his hands. “Do that. I’d love to see what they have to say about your business practices.” He made sure he was smiling again by the time he got back to the car. This pup, at least, was safe, and he would teach Amelia how to take good care of her animals.

    • Rod woke from a drugged stupor to find himself naked, staring up at the ceiling of a room he didn’t recognize. A dorm, yes, he could tell that much, but nothing in his building; the paint here was beginning to peel, and the place had a strange, musty smell to it. He was also, it seemed, alone in bed, a situation he was more than a little used to, but not on the rare occasion he woke up in a strange place. He blinked, clearing blurriness from his eyes. Was that a spider dangling above him? He swallowed the urge to scream like a little girl and, instead, reached to swat it. Ropes dug into his wrist, scraping skin off. Ropes? He twitched, to find all four limbs tied down, spread-eagled, to the cheap, creaky, college bed. The ropes dug in further, leaving echoes of burning behind. The spider didn’t move. Spider? He squinted, wondering where his glasses had gone to. No, that was a key. A padlock key, maybe, when he was tied to the bed? He’d been pranked before, but something seemed more sinister about this. He reached up, trying to grab the damn thing with his teeth. Maybe it was, horrid pun, the key to getting out of this situation? Something cold clanked and dug into his throat. A chain? A heavy chain, from the feel of it. He jerked again, pulling against the ropes, against the chain. How the hell was he supposed to get out of this? Where was he? “This will hurt less,” came a voice from under the bed,” if you stop struggling so much.”

            • “This will hurt less,” came a voice from under the bed,” if you stop struggling so much.” Rod stopped, almost laughing at the absurdity of it, and fell back against the bed. There was a sheet on the bed, he realized, not just a plastic mattress. “What will?” he asked, as he craned his head to look around. There was nothing else in the room, not even standard-issue dressers or desks, just the bed. And the voice under it. “This,” the voice chuckled. It sounded a little tinny – a recording, or a phone on speaker? And female. He didn’t remember pissing any girls off lately. “Who are you?” It was worth a try, wasn’t it? He tugged gently on all the restraints. Chain. Ropes. Something clicked near his left hand; he turned to look that way as the voice under the bed chuckled. “Not your friend, I can tell you that much. Susan’s friend, though.” “Susan?” Rod swallowed hard, and looked at the small burn mark on the rope. He tugged gently – and a gout of heat brushed his other wrist, forcing an unwilling yelp from him. “Aah, you found the fun,” the voice gloated. “There’s more, of course, the more you struggle.” “So I’m stuck,” he said, trying to work around the lump in his throat. “And I can’t fight it, or I’ll get crisped.” Susan. Shit. It had been a bad break – but not this bad. “Or you might be able to stand the heat long enough to get free. Sort of a fun game, no?” “No!”

                  • Never saw it all (pun intended). The premise alone squicked me out. Though I’m more worried about how the heck you heat up a rope. Well, first you’d probably need to use a flexible steel cable wrapped with fireproof… Shut up, Tez!

                    • hemp rope burns like cotton… or like hemp, I supppose. But that’s a nice way to do it, too. I’ve only seen about 10 minutes of it. It squicked me pretty badly.

    • Esma and Mark had been on the road for about six hours, and the driving was beginning to wear on her. Mark took his shifts, sure, but, as with everything he did, he carried exactly as little load as he could, driving one hour just to let her drive two or three. He was napping now, so she didn’t feel like she could pull over and wake him, even though she was well into her third hour of driving and desperately needed to pee. It would all be worth it, she told herself, when they got there. When they got to the park, it would be everything she’d hoped for: a weekend, alone with Mark, no distractions, none of his friends, no interruptions. She’d have him all to herself for a little while. The flashing lights behind her caught her by surprise; she checked the speedometer. Okay, she was going a little over, maybe ten miles over the limit, and they WERE the only car on the road this late at night. But it was only ten over… The lights were gaining, not just one car, but three, so she pulled over, put her hands on the wheel, and hoped Mark wasn’t too mad. She’d pay the ticket, and, if she cooperated, this shouldn’t delay them long. “Get out of the car! Ma’am, get out of the car!” The megaphone ruined any chances she might have that Mark wouldn’t wake; wincing, she got out of the car as he began to swear. A man out of the dark grabbed her and threw her to the ground. “Gotcha,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “Miss, you’re safe now.” “Wha…” she twisted to look at him. The officers had popped the trunk and were yelling at Mark to get on the ground on the ground on the ground… One of the policemen pulled a chainsaw from the trunk. “You’re safe now,” the officer repeated, and Esma, blessedly, passed out.

  1. There are lots of stories about rescuing the world out there; can you abduct the world? Or at least a country? 😉 An abductee rescuing themselves when the chance occurs because they do not suffer from Stockholm syndrome like the abductor somehow expected. Someone being rescued but believing they are being abducted. Someone being abducted but believing they are being rescued. Captured by aliens while being unable to understand their language and to read their body language and facial expressions. Rescue of a toy from being thrown or given away (possibly from the perspective of the toy). Being smuggled through some kind of guard post.

    • Author’s note: I kinda want to write all of them. I may return for more. This is set in the Tir na Cali ‘verse, but not with any extant characters. Warning: implied abuse and rape below. I really don’t know what he expected. Okay, that’s not entirely true. He was pretty clear on what he expected, at least in terms of day-to-day behaviour. Obedience, complete and total. Manners, submission, a sweet smile. He wanted me to be his lovely little blow-up doll. He had ways of enforcing his wants. He was in charge, so he could withhold food, if he felt like it, or have me beat, or lock me in a closet, and he did all three of those more than once before I realized I wasn’t going to reach a compromise point with him. There was no option, in his world, in his little castle, but do exactly as he wanted, and smile while doing it. I’m just not sure why he expected me to like it. I slept in his bed. I made the right noises under him during sex, and learned what he liked. I cuddled and made sweet sounds, and thanked him for the little gifts, because the better I behaved, the more he relaxed, the more freedom he gave me. If he was going to use me any way he wanted anyway, I might as well have a comfortable nest and the freedom to wander the castle. (I’ll admit, it was the time that he beat my feet that bent me to obedience. Until then… until then, I thought I had to fight and keep fighting if I wanted to maintain any pride at all. After that, I think I broke a little. I decided I had to stop fighting if I wanted to maintain and SELF.) I think he came to like me, the way you like a favored pet. He’d keep me by his side for days on end, feed me off his own plate, stroke my hair through meetings of state. I’m not sure he remembered that I had a brain. I’d stopped really talking to him at all, by that point. But when the moment arrived, when he was gone on business for a week, I took it. I cut the damn collar off with a smuggled hacksaw, changed into a uniform of his I’d been cutting down and tailoring for months, cut off the hair that he loved so much and bleached it, and slipped out the back door with the rest of the new recruits. I was over the Canadian border before the week was up. I was safely on the East Coast before my postcard reached him. I like to imagine I could hear his confused shout anyway.

  2. Somebody who doesn’t want to be rescued is a pretty standard subversion. What about someone who wants to be rescued, but not by this rescuer?

    • They had chained Cheryl up in a cave. A damp, dank, dark, dull, terrifying cave, with a long chain locked to a shackle around her ankle, the other end locked to a bolt driven in the ground. “We will let you go,” the skinny one told her, “when your father pays the ransom.” She knew he never would; she knew he could barely afford it and, if he could find the money, would be hard-pressed to bring himself to waste it on his useless college-dropout daughter. They hadn’t spoken in over a year before the kidnapping, after all, since she’d made it clear she didn’t want to be heir to his empire. She’d been hoping her friends would find her. They were good friends, good enough, at least, when they needed something, decent when she needed a place to crash. They’d helped her find a job after she’d dropped out, and Carmine had even helped her get her first two promotions. The third, she’d gotten on her own. She was pretty sure, after an unknown time trapped in this cave, that she had probably lost that job. Back from step one. Again. If she ever got out. The skinny one had come every day with food, and a bucket, and, when she didn’t throw things at him, clean clothes and a second bucket for her to wash in. He hadn’t told her his name, but he’d seemed like a nice guy, a decent guy, for all that he was a kidnapper. He ever brought her chocolate, once in a while. She hoped he’d made it out before the cave-in. It had been awfully close, and he’d thrown her in one direction – to safety, it turned out – and run in the other. That had been… long enough ago that thirst was racing to beat hunger to killing her, with suffocation being held off by a thin trickle of air. Maybe her friends would come for her, still? Maybe the rockslide had revealed some crucial clue. Maybe… maybe the ground was rumbling? She cringed in her safe corner and braced for the… sunlight? A hand reached for her. Was it Carmine and Jack? Had they finally found her? She reached for the hand. “I’m here. I’m here, but I’m chained.” “Oh, thank God. I’ll be right there for you, baby girl.” She stared in confused incomprehension at the hand she was holding, at her father’s wedding band and her father’s scarred fingers. Where were her friends?

  3. Oh! A writer wakes in a strange place to find two of their more ‘questionable’ characters arguing. Leaving them to wonder which is their abductor and which is rescuing them.

  4. What happens when the abduction IS the rescue? That is, someone gets kidnapped, or even taken into slavery, and that’s actually an improvement in their circumstances (which may be an appalling shock to the abductor).

  5. A rescue that happens long after the physical need for it has passed. (But it’s just as necessary all the same.)

    • The Kybelii are, as are many of the wild tribes that roamed the wastelands, brutal to their enemies and only slightly kinder to their allies. From a biased standpoint, in studying them from afar, they appear to have abandoned some social traits that we of the Tower consider civilized behavior. Perhaps, to them, they are as useless as the appendix? I wonder, when I can think about such things calmly, what kind of society would render kindness vestigial and dangerous. I can not often think of such things calmly. It has been two years since my sister Annalise was taken by the Kybelii in one of their execrable raids. Two years of worry, two years of surreptitiously tracking the tribe’s movements. Two years of arguing with the Elders of the Tower that this was necessary. Annalise had been embedded as an anthropologist with one of the more pastoral, safe wild tribes, the Monmunt, as had I (the Tower has, since then, cease all such embeddings. Annalise was not the first to be taken, but she will be, they have declared, the last. I am sure this offers her little comfort). The Kybelii raided out of season, in the cold of winter when most tribes hunker down and wait for the snow to melt, raided and took brides, and captives, and livestock, and left slaughter and broken families. And me. I have, finally, these two years later, in the depth of winter, found the Kybelii snow-camp. I have finally found them, bloated and sleepy from their longest-night festival, vulnerable. And I can finally do what I have been waiting all this time for. Annalise did not survive the childbirth they forced on her, and her skull and thighbones rest with the rest of their slaves, set in chains even now, in the back wall of their winter camp. If they are right and their slaves held such serve them even in death, I cannot leave her to that. Nor can I leave the daughter she bore them to be raised a monster. I only hope it’s not too late for my little niece. Author’s note: This piece is part of my “Planners” post-apoc ‘verse, set probably 1-2 generations before the Anthropologist stories http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/tag/archeologist (must redo that tag).

    • The trunk popping had quickly become the most terrifying sound in Konnie’s world, followed up only by the sound of the trunk closing again. When the trunk popped, the lanky, terrifying man who had put her there would pull her out of the trunk again. He would mutter the words that made no sense, and then, for the time she was out of the trunk, her body would be almost a puppet. Un-bound, un-hobbled, but completely unable to make any sound or gesture he didn’t want her to. She couldn’t have thought of a more terrifying situation if she had tried. Adding to the fear: he never spoke a word directly to her, never told her where they were going, never told her what he was going to do with her. He knew her name – he muttered it in the midst of the words that made no sense – but she didn’t know anything at all about him, except that he was kidnapping her. She was pitifully grateful for the trunk, as it meant he didn’t or coudn’t puppet her _all_ the time. The car stopped, and Konnie braced herself. The trunk popped, and the terrifying man came into view. he unlocked her cuffs, beginning to mutter his strange words. “Hey, got a flat?” The cheerful voice called from across the parking lot, out of sight. The man frowned, and shut the trunk, moving away to intercept the stranger. He was in a hurry, not wanting to get caught, she assumed, with his captive. Enough of a hurry that he didn’t notice her shove her sleeve in the trunk, or that the latch hadn’t shut all the way. She waited until she heard him talk, bright and cheerful, so unlike the way he spoke near her, and slid out of the trunk. Silent, that was the goal. Silent and quick. Author’s note: This is in my Faerie Apocalypse (LJ Link) ‘verse, although with new characters. The Words are the way that magic works, in this system.

  6. If I may have a second prompt, an Addergoole student being rescued or assisted in rescuing someone by a teacher or another student whom they fear with good reason.

    • June again. Cynara packed the boys off to school, called the younger’s father to remind him to pick them up afterward, then spent a good couple hours helping Hroderich move into his own apartment. He was a good kid, got along well with her sons, but, well, like his brothers, wasn’t really into girls. Once she had him tucked in, with one last you-were-a-good-Kept hug and a now-be-a-good-man punch in the arm, she double-checked her packing and started driving. It was a ten-hour-drive from Hroderich’s new place to the Village outside of Addergoole. Cya found it meditative, a way of spring-cleaning her brain of the cobwebs and trailed her most recent Kept had left, of sweeping out the dust of former loves and lovers. She slept at a motel halfway there – the old lady winked at her. Didn’t know what she was up to, but after four years of this trip, recognized her. Cya smiled back at her, left her the tray of cookies, and slept. It was late morning on move-out day when she drove into the Village and started waking up her power. If she let it ride most of the time, she could push it, times like this, ask it to Find things that were esoteric and a bit vague. Find me the boy I can take home with me, she asked it. Someone who’ll fall for it, someone who might need it. The tugging in her head was like a compass. This way. Down Main Street and up the hill, to the gate of Maureen’s house. Hunh. A linen shirt and a thatch of auburn, a bit untidy, khakis and no shoes. Leaning against the outside fence, staring in. She leaned up next to him, studying the kid-pack playing there, picking out the girl that was probably his. “She’s lovely,” she murmured. When his attention turned reluctantly to her, she offered a hand. “Cynara.” “Pellinore.” His grip was firmer than his effete look suggested, and she swallowed a smile. Ambrus’ sons were fun.

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