Archive | January 2012

“China is Here,” a story for the Giraffe Call

Jan15

For [personal profile] the_vulture‘s Prompt.

I think this is a monologue directly after Through the Cracks (LJ), which makes that one a bit more sinister.

For which I apologize. This was intended to be fanciful. O_O

We came with you, you see.

We came with you from England, from Germany, from Poland, from Italy. We came with you from China, from Japan, from Vietnam and Korea. We came from Africa, from the Middle East.

Long before that, we came over on a land bridge, through Russia. Longer still before that, we came out of the trees with you.

We have always been here. We seep in the culture, soaking it in, becoming it, and then we tell it back to you. We become your myths and your stories, and then bring them with you to the new world, your baggage you can never lose, your monkey you will never get off your back. Your roots in your cultural heritage. Your memories of a simpler time (how I love how you do that. As if your nightmare monsters spoke of a “simpler” time. As if your warning stories warned of, what, easier threats?)

Germany is here. Poland is here, China, England, Russia. Every fear and every monster you have ever dreamed up, every explanation for every bump in the night, every silly rhyme to soothe a colicky baby. All of them are here with you, carried like rats in the boats, carried like fleas on the rats, carried like a priceless heirloom in your pocket. We have been following you for millennia.

And now it is our turn to lead.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/233114.html. You can comment here or there.

The Origins of Smokey Knoll, a story of Dragons Next Door for the Giraffe Call (@meeks_P)

Jan14

For [personal profile] meeks‘s prompt

Dragons Next Door has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

“So tell me,” Miss Call-me-Samantha Milligan asked Audrey, over tea on what was becoming their regular Tuesday tea date, “do you know how Smokey Knoll came to be? The neighborhood around it, the Retibya Heights, is a, ah…”

“It’s an affluent upper-class human neighborhood, yes,” Audrey answered easily. “Many of your richest students come from that neighborhood. From all of the Heights, Miss Milligan, which does actually answer your question quite tidily.”

“I’m sorry…?” she blinked uncertainly.

“When… I believe, since I was still in school at the time, that it was not dragons but a family of harpies, actually, and a grouping of centaurs. The Paints… a nice group. They came to the city, as many of the non-humans were beginning to to. They may be primarily magic and not tech users themselves, but they tend to like the conveniences of human technology.”

“Back then,” Miss Milligan mused, “it must have been very hard. Everything was so segregated. There was no accessibility at all – I took a class on that in college,” she added defensively. “These days, the classes beginning to get integrated, especially in the cities, and you have to learn how to teach to all sorts of students.”

“Exactly,” Aud answered soothingly. “They ran into all those problems. Bigotry. Lack of suitable housing. Lack of suitable anything. So, being of two of the most practical races, the Paints and, ah, yes, the harpies were the Rednesses. Their great-grandchildren live down the block from me. The Paints and the Rednesses found a neighborhood where builders were beginning to expand, creating upper-class housing. And they bought a large portion of it.

“Through agents, of course,” she added, smirking. “Through a very nice actor Dweomer who still lives down the street. They thought he was planning a stables and a mews, and thought his tastes were merely eccentric.”

“But when others found out,” Miss Milligan whispered in horror.

“Ah, yes. There were certainly… complaints. But by then the Paints and the Rednesses had pulled in other non-human investors, and they simply bought out anyone who complained. Democratic of the wallet.” She smirked. “It’s a lovely neighborhood. You should visit sometime.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/232501.html. You can comment here or there.

The Tuesday Map

Jan14

For rix_scaedu‘s prompt

Influences included Dark City and the folding apartments for which I can’t currently find links. Also, IKEA, and my fascination with planned communities.

The city moved.

The cluck struck seven p.m., the alarm chimed, and, all over the city, people stopped what they were doing and grabbed on to their hand-holds. Smoothly, on well-oiled tracks and risers, the Bell-Apple Experimental Living Zone, the BAELZ, shifted into its Tuesday position.

Announcements sounded. The following changes to the Zone’s Tuesday arrangement have taken place. The Seventh Ave Diner is now on the corner of Sixth Avenue and J Street. The Hairtisserie is now on the north-west corner of the Zone, above the Butcherie. The City Hall has moved one block north and one block upwards.

J-alpha-7 let go of the handle and picked up her knitting, only to realize she’d run out of yarn. “Darn it,” she swore softly.

“What is it, sweetcheeks?” her partner of the year, H-beta-six, asked, not really paying attention. At least the year was nearly over.

“I need new yarn, and I’m never quite sure where they’ve put the Woolery. How do you get there from here when today is Tuesday?”

“How have you lived in BAELZ your whole life and still not developed a sense of direction?” H complained tiredly. “You can’t get there on Tuesdays, you know that. They’re cleaning First Ave, and that’s in the middle of the Zone tonight.”

She wrinkled her nose. “There’s got to be a way. They can’t just cut off half the city for one day out of ten.”

“They can. They’re the architects, the big Grahams. They can do anything they want.”

“It’s stupid.” She stood up, setting her knitting carefully where H wouldn’t go bothering it. “I’m going to go looking.”

“J, don’t be a ditz. You know you get lost when you go exploring alone.”

“Then come with me,” she challenged, knowing full well what the answer would be.

“I’ve got stuff to do. Honestly, J, you know I can’t just drop everything on your whim.”

“Fine.” She slid on her coat – the Zone’s outdoor regions were kept slightly cooler than the indoor regions, to suggest the need for a home. “Then I’ll go myself.” Thinking to herself, two more weeks until the year is over, and trying to hold the Tuesday map in her head, she left their apartment behind.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/232365.html. You can comment here or there.

Unicorn Chase, a story of Unicorn/Factory for the Giraffe Call

Jan14

For [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith‘s Prompt.

Unicorn Factory has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

There weren’t supposed to be unicorns in the Town.

There weren’t supposed to be unicorns at all, of course – they were a myth, a superstition. But inside the Town? Such things should not even be thought of. Not in the Town, with its rationality, its science, its straight streets and straight walls and rational protections against the myth and credulity of the common Village folk. Not in the Town, with its upright people who worked hard for a day’s living in the Factory, who struggled to live in the faint miasma of Progress. There was no space nor time for unicorns in the Town. They did not belong.

And certainly not in the Factory, the heart of all those things the Town stood for, with its soot-blackened stone and its towering stacks, with its tired but proud workers, with its managers and thinkers and planners who understood how the world was supposed to work. A unicorn, if such things existed, could not survive in the Town, much less in the factory.

But Harah who worked at Gear Station One whispered to Jik, who worked the same station, that she’d seen something out of the corner of her eye. And Jik muttered about it to Tonor, who worked at Gear Station Two, and confirmed that he, too, had seen a glitter of horn, a suggestion of malice.

And Tonor mentioned both sightings to Ura, who passed it on to Pallas at the Inspection Booth, who had the sharpest eyes on the floor. And Pallas kept those eyes peeled, and told Rodder, who carried the big stick, when she’d seen the tell-tale streak of white. And Rodder chased the faintest flash through the factory floor, overturning trays and disrupting the whole processes, only to be told by Infe’s daughter, who was visiting, that she’d seen the thing leave by the shipping dock.

Infe’s daughter went home giggling, remembering the horn glimmering, and the happy face of the Unicorn munching the begonias in the Factory courtyard.

Next: Unicorn-Chased (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/231980.html. You can comment here or there.

Rediscovering the City, a story for the Giraffe Call (@kissofjudas)

Jan14

To starlitdestiny‘s prompt

Safe to say, nobody was expecting a city to pop up between Rochester and Syracuse.

And I don’t mean, “pop up” like one of the small towns there along 5-and-20 got delusions of grandeur, called themselves a city, and got businesses to move in. I mean, right there, just north of the Thruway, bam, in the middle of the morning commute, there was a city.

This caused three accidents and a good deal of confusion, mass drug testing in several factories, and then a state-wide (or at least the important parts of the state, up by the lake) holiday as we all tried to figure out what was going on.

It wasn’t a small city, not by any means, but unlike the ones that had grown up naturally around here, this one was contained. It had a shell, if you will, a tall wall, nearly as high as the buildings, and arching in as it went up, so that it really seemed like most of an egg, with just a couple towers poking out of the jagged top. One gate sat slightly ajar, off if giant hinges. No more inviting than a broken window in an abandoned house, but that will call to some people, I suppose.

The brains from the colleges went in first, and then a few farmers who knew the area, instruments ready, cameras and note pads and that curiosity that makes us human. Some were already muttering about aliens – that sort of thing didn’t just appear, you know, and the architecture looked strange, the lines and the materials nothing we were used to, at least not on first glance.

I’m a stonecutter, though, and I know my blocks. I went in with the second batch – for not other justification than that it was my family’s land the city had settled on, or at least a corner of it – and ran my hands over the pink-and-brown patterns, felt the weather in her joints and the places where decay had set in. She wasn’t a young city, not by far. But we could refurbish her. We could make her live again.

Routes 5-and-20 parallel the NYS Thruway a short distance south of said hiway, both running parallel to Lake Ontario’s coastline across the widest part of the state. The area between cities on these routs is primarily rural/agricultural.

See also this map

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/231725.html. You can comment here or there.

The Dark Places, the numbered streets, a story for the Giraffe Call (@Shutsumon)

Jan13

To @Shutsumon’s prompt.

There were places in the heart of the city even the cops didn’t go, at least not without seven of their buddies and semi-automatic weapons, full body armour and a chopper overhead.

There were places, darker places, where they didn’t go even with that sort of back-up, places where the roads had so fallen into disrepair or intentional sabotage that the large police cruisers could not make it in, where the buildings leaned so close together that flying a chopper in there would be suicide one way or the other. Dark places, everyone said. Scary places. Places where those people lived.

Ance had grown up in a safe locked community, but the safe locked community had overlooked, on one side, the cheap side, Ance’s family’s side, one of those dark places, the place called “the numbered streets.” Since childhood, looking out the bulletproof glass down on the buildings that seemed so much older, so much more dignified, so beautifully scarred, Ance had wondered about the dark places.

He’d contented himself, in his late teens and early twenties, with dating scarred men and dark women, people with Pasts, people with Issues, with urban spelunking in places where the ambulances might still go, with Extreme Sports with a net and a safe helmet. He’d contented himself with courting danger instead of consummating the deal, with buying her flowers and leaving after a kiss.

And he’d contented his journalism career similarly, with “edgy” pieces that were simply rehashed pap, with “investigation journalism” that investigated nothing, with pieces that had a safety net, that the public could accept. He contented himself with pretending to be brave, at least for a while.

At home in his mother’s locked community for a holiday visit, however, looking out from his old room into the Dark Place, Ance could no longer be content with cheap wine and plastic roses, with safety nets and faux edginess. Taking his recorder and telling no-one, he headed into the numbered streets.

At first, he felt like someone would stop him when he reached a certain point, a guard, an ogre (he’d always been a bit fanciful), something. Or that there would be a line telling him where the point of no return was, like on the carefully-groomed mountains he climbed.

There was no line except the rotting remains of an old train track, no guard except a tired-eyed girl in too little clothing who didn’t even proposition him, no ogres except a cartoon drawing in fading spray paint. There was no romance except the cracked and facing facias on buildings that had been expensive a century ago, the old man standing in the store doorway, the tall, tall woman with the red lips staring at him.

No-one stopped him. No-one questioned him. They seemed to know him, which was crazy, or to welcome him, which was crazier. He kept walking, wondering if he had gone mad. Wondering if he would feel the pull of the bungee cord pulling him out of there, if there would be a chance to back out before it really got scary. Wondering why the girl hadn’t bothered to proposition him, although even in the other parts of the city hookers never did. Maybe he wore his poverty on his sleeve. Maybe they knew that the paper barely paid him.

“Hey, stranger.” The voice came faster than he expected, and slower; he was blocks into the numbered streets and still trying to figure out what was so different from the rest of the city, but he hadn’t seen anyone come up behind him. He turned slowly, hands up, no weapon here. Only to see the thug, a kid really, staring at him, jaw dropped.

“Dude.” That was not the thug, but his friend. “Did you bring that with you? Fuck gentrification, man, we’ll take the castle.”

“The what?” Ance turned slowly, his back prickling with the armed kids’ presence behind him, wondering if this was some kind of trick, turned to see a tall silver tower, taller than the skyscrapers in the business district, impossibly narrow, twisting out of a vacant lot, rising towards the clouds, into the clouds. A tall, brutish man – an ogre, really – stood guarding the door.

“No,” he answered slowly, “but I’ll explore it.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/231289.html. You can comment here or there.

First Steps, a story for the Giraffe Call (@Dahob)

Jan13

to @DaHob’s prompt

I do not remember being born. Do you?

I don’t really remember waking up, either, that is, being aware of myself for the first time. Knowing where my “fingers” were, where my edges were. When something hurt me.

That, that is what I remember first and strongest. I remember being hurt. I remember being damaged. The pain shooting through my nerves, making me recoil backwards.

They called it an accidental fire. They almost always do. They can’t fathom, I think, that when I am hurt I must react. And when I am damaged, I have little way to fight back. Earthquakes hurt me as much as they hurt them. But a little fire, a spark here, a twist of a wire…

… I learned the hard way to be careful which portion of my body I set on fire. In some neighborhoods, the people who fill me would come quickly. In others, the hurt would spread, would threaten to damage my core before it was contained.

But I was saying. I don’t remember being born, or my first awakening, but I do remember when I realized that I existed.

Before then, I think there had been vague thoughts, memories and dreams, but nothing, pardon the pun, concrete. Nothing to say “all these things, they are all me.”

But the night where the monsters ran through my streets, killing my people, killing people just because they were different, the night that they streaked my sidewalks with blood, I remember that. I remember that like you’d remember someone jabbing a knife through your hand as a child.

And the day they cleared out the park on Main and South, and erected that statue to the lovely woman who stood up to the thugs, that day, the sun warming my pavement and the cheers echoing across my buildings… that is the day I remember learning what love was.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/230947.html. You can comment here or there.

Giraffe Call is Open!

Jan13

The call for prompts is now OPEN!

I am now taking prompts on the theme of In the City

When Evangaline’s Aunt died, it fell to her to clean out the old house where her Aunt had lived and, before her Aunt Asta, her Aunt’s Aunt Ruan (family history stopped there, but Evangaline felt as if, if she tracked it back far enough, there would be an unbroken line of Aunts back into pre-history). As a childless Aunt herself, she accepted that the house would now become hers, but not that she needed to keep the piles of accumulated auntieness that filled it.

Thus began Heirlooms & Old Lace (LJ), the first story in Aunt Family (LJ) series, from a prompt of “A tarot deck (or seer) that is possessed by demon(s)” See my Landing Page (LJ) for more of my settings.

I will write (over the next week) at least one microfic (150-500 words) to each prompter.

If you have donated, I will write to every prompt you left.

In addition, for each $5 you donate, I will write an additional 500 words to the prompt(s) of your choice.

For every linkback I receive, I will post another 50 words on a story (See the poll for setting here on DW and here on LJ

If I get two new commenters or one new donator, I will write a setting piece (setting chosen by poll).

And, of course, donations are always well-received:

If I reach $35 in donations, I will post an additional 1000-2000-word fic on the subject of the audience’s choice. reached!

If I reach $50, T. and I will have Indian take-out. At this level, anyone who donated $7.50 or more will have a copy of “Alder by Post” mailed to them if they wish reached!

If I reach $65, I will write at least 2 microfics for everyone, whether or not they donated. reached!

If I reach $95, I will write at least 3 microfics for everyone, whether or not they donated. reached!

If I reach $120, I will record a podcast of an audience-choice story and post it for everyone to read. reached!

If I reach $150, I will release an e-book of all of the fiction written to this call and the last one. Also, everyone who tipped will get wordcount-and-a-half reached!

If I reach $201, I will have paid our furnace bill! I will hold a mid-month Call on a single setting of the readers’ choice. reached!

If I reach $240, we’ll get to eat delicious cake! I’ll hold an ask-the-characters chat session. reached!

If I reach $286, after our detour into furnaceland, we will reach giraffe-kingdom! The giraffe carpet will be entirely funded, and I will post a bajillion pictures of the lovely carpet and half-complete room. I will also write another encyclopedia pages for a setting of your choice. A lucky prompter will get, also, their own 1000-word special.

If we reach $300, we’ll have covered the hardware for the bedroom!

For more information on Giraffe Calls, see the landing page.

This Giraffe’s Call’s goal, $201, is to pay for my our recent emergency furnace repair bills.


Donate below

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/230631.html. You can comment here or there.

Giraffe Call:pondering incentives

Jan13

With a Giraffe Call coming tomorrow and a more-urgent-than-usual need for the income, I’ve been pondering the incentive levels.

The current donation incentives are:
Everyone who donates gets 100 words per dollar on their giraffe call of choice.

In addition, there are group-levels based on total donation level:

$35- 1000-2000-word fic on the subject of the audience’s choice. (I always reach this level)

$65- 2 microfics for every prompter (I get here about half the time)

$95- write EVERY prompt (I’ve gotten here once)

$120 – podcast of a story and double wordcount for donors (I never reach this level)

$150 – ebook of fiction for this call & last one (I never reach this level)

There is a linkback-incentive story as well, updated 50-words per linkback, and a new-commentor/donor incentive piece written about the setting.

There’s a poll up from the last giraffe call here and here)

My questions:
Do the current incentives serve to incentivize people?

What might better encourage donation/participation, if anything?

Thanks!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/230397.html. You can comment here or there.