Archive | June 4, 2014

Itty Bitty Package, a story for the Giraffe Call

Jun4

I asked for prompts regarding Packages here for The MicroPrompt Giraffe Call. This is written to Kunama_Wolf’s Prompt here.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

Pretza had carried easier things. She had, for one, carried the entire team’s gear up the side of a mountain. She had carried an injured teammate down the side of a mountain. She had once carried a carriage, albeit only for five feet.

She had carried a Edenian tiger “cub” back to its mother – without getting mauled. She had carried Westerosi killer flesh-eating viruses across a lava field. Once, she had carried a bomb through enemy lines, on Narnia, near the Terebinthian front.

All of these things had been easier than this. She was a trained courier; courrying things was what she did. “Easy, easy. You are bouncy, I thought that was just a thing people said.” She adjusted the three layers of Kevlar and wished that the job had been, just this once, not somewhere tropical.

Or that it had come with a bulletproof car. She had never, ever, wanted so badly for her package to not get jostled, and she had carried things that could destroy a planet – if not a solar system – if they were jostled. “Shh, shh. Oh, please, shh. We’re not in safe territory yet.”

She had, once, led three schoolchildren to safety through a mountain range that had no name except Death in any language. That had been nerve-wracking. This, this was harder. “Come on, little one, how about a finger for now? Here, I know it’s not green, but it’ll have to do.”

The Thalassan royalty had paid Pretza very well. They would pay her three times as well if she got her little package across the border and into the Orion Free Territory – well enough that she could, if she chose to, easily retire. If she failed… and Pretza had never failed… they would not need to punish her, because she would already be dead.

“There you go. There you go. Shh, now, that’s a girl. Just a few more miles.”

Next: Courier Duty

Tip Package 😉

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/725609.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Character Profile 10

Jun4

This is the tenth in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

As the gods attack Rochester, a group of R.I.T. students and their friends must get out of the city, before it’s too late.

Kim Cooper – Environmental Science

Kim won’t say that she helped form Oak and Rowan, or that she helped shape it, or anything of the sort – but all of these things are true. Oak and Rowan started when she was a freshman, in part because of a conversation she had with Raven and a few others in a drunken post-gaming-session hangout.

Kim has always been in the background of the sessions – she prefers to listen rather than talk, to suggest rather than demand, to be led rather than to lead – but she has always been there, often ignored but never far from sight.

And the truth is that, while many of the members of Oak and Rowan do have small psychic powers, Kim needed the group far more than others. Her powers woke at puberty, and, while she’s never had a proper Change, neither has she ever had anyone explain any of this to her.

Kim does, as mentioned, play D&D, and – as she’s been friends with Raven since freshman year – she does spend a lot of time hanging out with the Thursday Night Swamp Drink, although she tends to blend into the background – just one of the guys – as she does most places she chooses to be.

She’s average height, just about 5’6″ tall, and slim; her hair hangs perfectly straight down to her shoulders in a line of chestnut brown; most of her is brown – hair, eyes, skin – and she tends to either hunch or, in moments of stress, stand in a very “guard” position: feed shoulder-width apart, shoulders thrown back.

She has never mentioned the feeling of wings that aren’t quite there, but they are always with her; she’s never Changed, but she can flip time back in 30-second intervals in a very small radius.

She’s more comfortable outdoors than in, more comfortable alone than in groups, more comfortable protecting than being protected.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/725416.html. You can comment here or there.

Oh, No, Not Again, a story for the Giraffe Call

Jun4

I asked for prompts regarding Circles here for The MicroPrompt Giraffe Call. This is written to Thnidu’s Prompt here and plays off of this piece of fan art and the quote below

Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why a bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

Oh, no, not again.

The bowl of petunias plummeted towards the ground, no room in what it could pretend, loosely, was a brain for anything except a vague and dissatisfied sense of what, if you were going to translate it into Galactic Book Standard, would sound mostly like not again.

It was very good at falling. It had, as fate would have it, far more practice than any single bowl of petunias had any right to.

Of course, it had been a missile not all that long ago, and missiles are, after all, rather designed for falling at high velocity.

But the thing about this particular missile-cum not like that you silly git-petunia bowl, was that it had been hit with reality trans-changers so very often that it had not only died the coward’s deaths, it had not only fallen to earth (or at least something with a ground that was unpleasant to hurt) more times than any one bowl of petunias – or missile – ever dreamed of (inasmuch as bowls of missiles had dreams), but it had come to remember everything, including the transformation.

Now, neither a missile or a bowl have that much memory to hold on to such thoughts. But what this ~thing~ had, whatever the shape it was in at the moment, was the strongest field of morphic resonance ever attributed to a single fictional creation.

So strong, indeed, was this field, that it was named in another universe, by a creature that did not exist at all where the petunia – who had once been a man (or at least one that some people would call such, but some people will call something anything) – had first been born. Yes, indeed, this bowl of – oh, dear, these pieces of a bowl of petunias – had a trans-universal morphic field.

That wasn’t that bad this time. A foul-tempered one-eyed grey tomcat picked himself off, shook himself, and walked off down the road. Somewhere, there would be milk.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/725040.html. You can comment here or there.

Doeees anyone know if I have determined anywhere in writing~

Jun4

~what Professor Pelletier’s Name is? And, if so, is it somewhere I can easily change it?

Help?

Edit: It’s not in the character: Pelletier tag.
Edit: Or on the wiki

Edited again: Her Name-name, her Adult Name, the way Luca’s is Hunting Hawk and Regine’s is Lady of the Lake

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/724701.html. You can comment here or there.