Archive | February 2012

Exterminator

Feb8

For anke‘s prompt

Dragons Next Door has a landing page here.

Unusual calls were the norm in Steve’s line of work.

Ever since the non-human races had started moving into the cities in the mid-twenties, spurred by talk of prosperity and just in time for the Depression, the underbelly of the urban areas had been getting weirder and weirder.

Gone were the days when an exterminator could lay down some poison gas and call it good; gone were the days when cockroaches and rats were the biggest problems. Drets, tiny dragon-like insects, proliferated (and ate cockroaches, and sometimes started fires). Creels, about the size of a large mouse but armored like an armadillo, chewed through wires and ignored rat poison.

The family that called him Tuesday, however, thought they had a mundane infestation of termites. They’d heard scratching in the walls, and noticed some sawdust near an electrical outlet. Steve knew of seventeen things that could be, only two of which were more benign that termites, but if they wanted to insist they had small wood-eating insects, well, he’d come in and pretend he was looking for small wood-eating insects.

The wife hovered. He hated that sort, but what could he do? He set out his kit, ignored her worried fussing (“You won’t need any of that magical stuff. We just have bugs.”), and set to work finding out what was in their walls.

“Do you have to cut into the wall?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is where you said you had the problem?” He already knew it wasn’t termites, but he wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

“Right there, yes, all through this wall. That wallpaper was very expensive.”

“I’ll cut on a seam; it will be easier for the paperer to repair it that way.”

“You don’t…?”

“No, ma’am, that’s all in the contract you signed.” He sighed – they never read it – and went back to sawing into the supremely ugly wallpaper.

“Ey, ey! That’s my wall!” The tinny voice made Steve stop cutting; down by his toes, a tiny man – a Tiny man, to be specific, was shaking a fist at him. Steve grinned.

“Ma’am, I’ve found your problem, and it’s definitely out of my jurisdiction, but I can suggest a good co-habitation counselor.” He carefully picked up the Tiny man so that the client could see him. “You have Tinies.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/262800.html. You can comment here or there.

Icon ponderings!

Feb8

I hear that Djinni may be posting icons late today or tomorrow, which means that another icon day is coming which means…

…I need to pick icons to request.

Thoughts:
Ceinwen
Ahouva (problem: she has no Change)
Timora

Spring or Summer

Someone Cali? (Tricky keeping it sweet-and-innocent)

…something in Fae Apoc, not sure who though.

Telepathic purple Clydesdale

Another member of the Facets team

An Aunt, with a Cat (Caunt?)

Thoughts?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/262587.html. You can comment here or there.

Singing down History, a continuation of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call (@inventrix)

Feb7

After
Scrounging for History (LJ)
Digging through History (LJ)
Delving in History (LJ) and
Bringing Home History (LJ)

Part 4 of ~7.5
Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

The rope seemed rather superfluous, but Karida didn’t want to risk their new… sister… wandering off, so she finished the ritual, giving the girl a little more water and then binding her wrists in front of her, leaving the end of the rope as a leash.

Fiery didn’t even fight the rope, looking at it with an expression Karida thought might be resignation. “Show us what you know of this place?” she asked, to take their minds off of that.

The girl nodded, and looked around for a moment, orienting herself, maybe. Or buying time. Amalie hummed softly, getting the thread of the song back. “This changes the tune. It adds…” she hummed for a moment more, and then sang a quick scale of nonsense sounds. “Ah. A minor note.”

“Sounds like there ought to be a thudding drumbeat,” Dor commented. “Maybe just the walking? Ba-bum, ba-bum.”

“Ba-bum,” Fiery smiled, thudding a beat on her thighs, da-da-da-DUM.

Let them sing the trip. Someone had to actually MAKE the trip for the song to finish. Smiling in exasperation, Karida started walking again.

The buildings nearby were in bad shape, fallen in, collapsed. She went past three without entering, because her sense told her they were death traps, empty of anything useful and full of rotting boards.

Behind her, her little party followed, humming and singing as if they were on parade, Amalia holding Fiery’s lead. They turned down what had to be a road, between the wrecks of two homes, and then down another road, while the music evolved and trailed behind them.

The song, as far as Karida could tell, had taken a detour into their captive’s life, or at least what little she was capable of telling them so far.

“‘Monster,’ they said, who had eyes but no sight,
“‘Monster!’ They threw their kin to the night.
“‘Monster,’ no beast, just a girl with a gift,
“‘Monster,’ their child, set loose and adrift.”

“Monster,” Karida snapped, as her sense told her something was coming, something that had gotten nearly up on her without her knowing. Too big to be a human, too silent to be a normal creature.

“Kar…” Amalie complained, but Karida didn’t have time for that.

“‘Ware danger,” she repeated, reaching out her sense. The damn thing was invisible, wasn’t it, and there it was, almost on top of them and she could smell its breath, like carrion rotting. “There’s a monster.” She swung with her stick and connected, landing on something tender, from the sounds of things. “Dor!”

“On it.” Dor muttered and then yelled, pressing his hands and his power towards the monster, guided by Karida’s swings and the solid thunking noises they made. Something caught her arm, raking a long cut through her sleeve and into her skin, burning and going numb all at once.

She shifted her grip to her other hand, cursing softly, and kept swinging. Any moment now…

“And thud,” Amalie sang with joy, and the ground under the monster opened up in a pit.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/262108.html. You can comment here or there.

Spreading da love: a loving meme

Feb6

Meme stolen from an awesome-sauce person:

Reply to this post, and I will list three things I love, like, and/or appreciate about you. Maybe more than three. Then repost to your own journal and spread the love.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/261809.html. You can comment here or there.

Thinking about Weather

Feb6

I’ve been talking, recently, with people in different climate zones- specifically @dahob and [personal profile] anke most recently – about “winter” and its varying meanings.

I grew up in Rochester, on the northern coast of one of the Great Lakes – http://www.divinglore.com/Genesis/USA/great%20lakes%20map.jpg – Ontario, the easternmost. For comparison, my husband grew up in Buffalo, between Ontario and Erie.

The weather there is snowy, wet, with a long winter normally stretching from late October to early April (it was not uncommon to have snow on Hallowe’en, although it was normally gone by mid-April). According to this chart, Rochester gets less than one inch a year less than Buffalo, although, in my memories, it came more steadily, and with less majors dumps of the stuff.

Still, I remember playing as a child in drifts as tall as I was, and having similar drifts to shovel in blizzards when I lived there – ’98, I think, and sometime around ’04 or ’05. They call it lake affect – the cold weather from Canada grabs all the water off the lake and dumps it on us.

Down in Ithaca, this site confirms that we get less snow. It’s colder down here – no giant lake-heat-and-cold-sink going on – but the worst of the weather seems to bypass us; last year, when the entire Northeast US was being dumped on, we had one small storm.

What does winter look like where you are?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/261192.html. You can comment here or there.

Mrs. Gent’s Lemonade

Feb6

For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of

🍋

“Lemonade sounds nice, thanks,” Jordan said, and stepped out of my way, finally letting me see the shop. Shop? This place was a space-time warp. This place was unbelievable. This place was…

Okay. Imagine the estate sale of the most obsessive hoarder you can picture. Then imagine this being curated by the most OCD guy you know. There was everything on those shelves, shelves filling up all but the center of the store, and every single thing was labeled. Everything.

There were labels in English, labels in foreign languages, labels in foreign ALPHABETS, labels in bar-code and a few in what I think was binary. There were labels over totally ordinary things – crock pot, circa 1970. Boom Boox, Magnivox, 1980. There were labels over things that belonged in a museum, and over things I’d never heard of or seen before. And, in the center of this archive of… junk. Stuff, we’ll say, because most of it looked useful. In the center of this stuff, there was a table with a ruffled tablecloth, four chairs, and an icy pitcher of lemonade.

“Lemonade sounds great,” I agreed, with feeling. It looked like the best stuff in the world right about then, even with the strange dress-up dance.

“Then come in, sit down, and enjoy some while you wait,” she encouraged us. “I’m Mrs. Gent, by the way, pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Jordan, and this is J.J.,” Jordan took charge again. “Pleased to meet you as well, Mrs. Gent.” I trailed along behind them, reading the labels, looking at the things on the shelf, trying not to be rude but wow, this place was a treasure trove.

Canned SPAM, 1937-1997, about a cubic foot of the stuff, in at least seven languages that I could see, and, yes, one of them looked like the original can (don’t ask me how I know, okay? I have some weird hobbies).

Radios, small was right next to Radios, tiny but three shelves above Radios, large (no mediums). The small ones looked mostly like antiques, although I’m not sure a 1991 Sony Walkman should count. (I had one of those, damnit. Nothing I owned as a kid should count as an antique yet!) On the other hand, the “tiny” category, I might have needed a magnifying glass to really see properly.

“Here, you sit here, and you, dear, sit here.” That set us with our backs to the door, Jordan facing – I checked – Teapots, unusual, which included one shaped like a rooster and another one I would have pegged as a bong, and me facing документы, which appeared to be stacks and stacks of ledger books. Mrs. Gent, in turn, sat facing the front door and poured us lemonade as if it was a high Japanese tea.

“This seems like a very interesting store,” I tried, yes, after saying thank you, I’m not a total jerk.

“Oh, Mr. Ting handles all of the business,” she pooh-poohed. “I just watch the store while he’s out. And make the lemonade.”

That was a hint even I could pick up. “It’s very good lemonade, thanks. It’s just what we needed.”

🍋

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/260906.html. You can comment here or there.

Aunt Family Mini-Call Summary!

Feb6

The Aunt Family Mini-Giraffe Call is closed! (LJ)

Over two days, I wrote 9 stories for 9 prompters and earned $20. This week, I will write a second prompt for each donor, and then their continuations.

Prompters who earned a free 500-word continuation are:
Friendly Anon
Rix-Scaedu
(chosen by random.org)

Fated (LJ)
Visiting Aunt Eva (LJ)
In The Attic (LJ)
Engraved Invitation (LJ), Ruan & Johias
Cleaning House (LJ) After What to do about Auntie X (LJ)
Accepting the Welcome (LJ) after Welcome to the Family (LJ)
Kitten Switchen (LJ), After Cleaning House
Visiting an Uncle (LJ) Rosaria, Evangaline
Glass and Steel (LJ) Zenobia!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/260747.html. You can comment here or there.

Glass and Steel, a story of the Aunt Family for the Mini-Giraffee-Call

Feb5

For Friendly Anon’s prompt

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Zenobia is just-after-the-US-Civil-War.
“It should not be nearly this difficult,” Zenobia muttered, staring at the glass furnace. “The principles are sound, the materials are pure…”

“And your hands are shaking.” She paid no heed to the voice; if she turned to look, the darn tomcat would be grooming himself or something. “The caster must be as strong as the casting.”

“You’re not helping,” she snarled. “You’re making me angry.”

“And what is it you are trying to make?” He sounded, today, like a man in his fifties. Sometimes he sounded like a child. He was always rather irritating.

“A tiny, delicate glass horse,” she snapped. “And a glass duck.”

“And why are you making those again?”

“Charms for my sisters’ blasted obnoxious sons,” she snarled.

“So perhaps,” the cat purred, “you could use some anger? Or if not anger, perhaps… steel?”

“Steel.” She reached behind her, grabbed the tom’s whiskers, and pulled out two with a quick yank. “Yes, thank you. Steel.”

The tom yowled and lept to a high rafter to watch her. “You are a cruel woman, Zenobia.”

She dropped the whiskers in the furnace. “I am, of course. I’m the Aunt. And thank you for reminding me of that.” Staring at the furnace, she began drawing out the glass again, twisting it into the shape of a horse. Steel, indeed. And guts. Her nephews could use some of that.

And, she was thinking, so could she. Perhaps she needed to make more than two figures.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/260582.html. You can comment here or there.

Visiting an Uncle

Feb5

For lilfluff‘s prompt.

Evangaline was doing interesting things.

They’d had a feeling she would, of course. She was strong, had always been strong, hadn’t fought the spark, the way some of them do, did, and she was still young. It helped to come into it young.

Rosaria approved. Asta had been an engaging woman, certainly, but she hadn’t been that flexible. They’d felt, not that any of them would have said so, that she was filling the time, filling the place until her successor was ready. And now that Evangaline was there, well…

…she was shaking things up a bit.

She was asking about boys. Rosaria understood, especially with Stone showing more and more of the spark, much as he was trying to hide it. But when she started asking about the boys, they started running into questions that they weren’t certain they wanted to answer. Especially her generation. Especially Ramona.

They would have to tell her eventually. So Rosaria volunteered – the girl trusted her, and she trusted the girl. She visited Evangaline one Sunday, and invited the girl to go driving.

“We’re going visiting,” she told Eva, as she directed her down the old backroads. She got lost, sometimes, on the new highways. The old roads were safer.

“Family? Eva asked. “I thought we’d covered every cousin in a day’s drive by now.”

“We have,” Rosaria assured her, “and we’ll save those further out for next summer, or let them come to us. No, today,” she sighed, “we’re going to visit an Uncle.”

Eva stopped the car. “An Uncle.”

“An Uncle,” Rosaria agreed. “Or someone that could have been. Ramona’s son Willard.”

Eva started the car again. “Ramona only has a daughter, Aunt Rosaria. She had a son?”

“She did,” Rosaria sighed, “but he left the family.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/260324.html. You can comment here or there.