Archives

Hallowe’en in Fae Apoc – a Meta Post for Patreon

Aug11
Speaking of Magical dates…here is the Day of Magic in Fae Apoc!

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In the world of the Faerie Apocalypse – Addergoole, Doomsday, etc. – there is something that is colloquially called The Blindness of the Gods, and something called a Mask.

Actually, I have to back up a step.

There are, in Fae Apoc, three groups of human(oid)s:

* Those who are fae, who have Changed and have magic: Fae, ellehemaei

* Those who are 100% human, or near enough as to make no difference: Humans

* Those who have fae blood but are not fae, have not Changed, and often can only access a little bit of magic, if any: Faded Continue reading →

Imaginary – Bonus Story for Patreon

Aug7
Aug 7, 2017 at 1:59pm

 So the kids down the road are always playing on their bikes in the driveway when I drive by.  And there’s always one bike just… flopped down at the end of the driveway, empty.  And the theme for the month is Magical Dates…

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Eddie had always known there was something different about Claude.

Other kids told him about their friends, sure, but their friends were make-believe.  They were pretend.

Claude was something different.

The grown-ups thought it was the same, and Eddie didn’t care to change their minds.  Lots of kids had imaginary friends, and as long as you “outgrew” them when you ten or eleven or something, the adults didn’t think much about it.

But Claude – Claude actually moved things.  He’d move the bike because he was riding with Eddie  – and, sometimes, in later days, with Eddie’s friends and his kid brother Donnie. He’d move the ball because they were playing soccer.  Eddie had a lot of fun with him, especially those early years when his parents were doting on Baby Donnie and then Baby Eloise.

The thing was, the minute an adult was anywhere in line of sight, Claude vanished.  He wasn’t just invisible to the adults, he was gone.  The bike fell down, the ball went straight through where he’d been to the goal, the Captain’s hat dropped to the ground.  Every time.  They learned to play in the backyard after the third time Eddie got yelled at for the bike at the end of the driveway.

Claude was a lot of fun, even if he did get Eddie in trouble.  He left stuff lying around, he vanished and left Eddie to get yelled at for things he’d done, he sometimes pulled pranks on Donnie or Eloise, which of course Eddie was blamed for. Continue reading →

The Door Opened – Bonus Story for Patreon

Aug6
Aug 6, 2017 at 3:00pm
So, Hob prompted me this prompt from Reddit for his birthday, and… some time later, I actually finished it.  I thought it was going to be Dragons Next Door, but I’m not sure it is. 

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[WP] It’s a normal day, but something feels just a little off kilter. That’s when you notice the doors. Tiny doors, in the strangest places.

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It wasn’t as if Cary  didn’t know that there were strange things in the world.

You saw it on the news sometimes, of course, dragons in the sky or someone really small turning bank thief.

But for the most part, that was an East Coast sort of thing.  It didn’t happen out here.  It definitely didn’t happen in Cary’s city. Continue reading →

People Laugh At Clowns… (a summer tale for Patreon)

Jul20

“No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

🤡

Written to Vedia’s prompt, because I was feeling like I needed to write random things today. 

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It seemed to appear overnight.

It always did – and it always came for the same five days, no matter when in the week it fell. June 19-June 23.

This year that was a M-F, and Annie and all her friends bemoaned all the time they wouldn’t be able to go. Not until Friday, not until classes and chores and work were all done for the week.

Their parents didn’t go, either. They speculated amongst themselves who, exactly, went on weekdays, but the place always seemed full and there was always noises coming from the tent. Continue reading →

Time to Move – a story of Dragons Next Door for Patreon

Jul13
This is set early in the life of Aud and Sage. 👪

So there we were, living in a tiny studio apartment between the artsy district and the tracks, holding our first child, Jin, just an hour after birth.  The midwife had come and gone and we were staring and the faint glow coming off of our first child with a bit of consternation.

“You,” I said, feeling far too calm (it had to be the tea I’d brewed for childbirth), “are not a wizard.”

Sage raised those eyebrows at me.  “You are not a witch.”

We’d both known it for a long time, of course, or at least suspected strongly.  You don’t go into a relationship with someone while they are still in school at a prestigious institution for wizards or witches and not notice a thing or, and if that hadn’t done it,the forms we’d each chosen for the wedding vows might have, or the family members that did and didn’t attend the wedding. Continue reading →

Leave it to the Professionals, a continuation for summer Patreon

Jul9
This is written to @medic‘s very enthusiastic “More, more!” to yesterday’s No Rest on This Beach, a ficlet of summer, beaches, and a kaiju.  😎

 

So there we were, eight-foot Godzilla-like thing on the beach smashing sandcastles and throwing around policemen, and I, at least, had been planning for a nice quiet weekend blending in with the locals and watching the myth of the supernatural from a nice safe place.

I counted heads.  Not five, six of us.  Ten had come here, the ones that get called Amazons in deference to Diana, First of Us (never mind all the myths, she was First in all the ways that count).  The sixth, Youngest Sister, had decided to be Supergirl today.

Well, we all had to have our phases.  I gestured to Leda, she of the cornrow braids, and she stepped forward and pulled a long “prop” sword from her beach bag.

Jitsuko had a golden lasso that happened to be a very nice garrotte.

I had Thor’s hammer, or at least a replica of it.  Thor doesn’t like to part with his actual weapon.

We circled the lizard-thing slowly.

Nzingha spoke.  “Surrender now,” she told the thing.  We always told it to surrender.

They almost never did.  I could pretend I was sad about that, but you probably wouldn’t believe me, and I wouldn’t fault you one bit.

“Ladies,” the cop still standing tried. “I know it’s tempting to try to be Wonder Woman, but let’s leave this to the professionals.”

“Yes.” Sarojini told him.  She was young and proud, her smile a little sharper than those that had gotten a bit worn down, like me.  “Why don’t you leave it to the profes-oh!”

The fight was on.  The thing had grabbed for Jocasta. Jocasta was not that easy to grab, and that sword was no prop.

We did our best to make it look staged.  There was a risk in that – the thing had actually hurt the police officer and a bystander; someone could get angry at the convention.  We still wanted to play it off as a fake if we could. My sisters and I, we prefer to be as quiet as we can.

Even when godzilla shows up on the beach while we’re on vacation.

Godzilla had no intention of going quietly.  He ended up throwing Agaidika across the beach and into the ocean, but Agaidika takes to water like, well, a fish does, and splashed back up in quite a good mood and looking like the goddess that she was rising from the waves.

In the end, it took the replica of Thor’s hammer, the pretend-prop sword, and the garrote, and we ended up with a very subdued monster who was turning a bit grey around the gills.

We all held our breaths.  This is where the police could be a very big problem, if they wanted to.

The oldest officer, a senior who had hurried onto the scene while we fought, took a look at the creature – clearly, by this point, inhuman, and then looked at all of us, superhero swimsuits and prop weapons.

“Well done, sisters.”  She saluted us, and we saluted her back.  It’s always good to have a cousin on the local police force, after all, and there was more than one reason we liked this convention.

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