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A work in Progress: Labys/nth

Apr7

This is another one from a prompt; the story stands at over 5000 words and is maybe 2/3 done.

The phone call came as Jade was on her way to class. She thought about not answering it – she’d been late already twice this month, and Professor Tannenbaum was getting crankier than normal with her. Long-trained habit made her grab the phone as she danced to get her shoes on. It could, after all, be an emergency, even though it was almost always Taylor with a complaint or Riley with a demand.

“Talk to me,” she greeted whoever-it-was, as she executed a hop-skip maneuver to get her second shoe buckled. Two minutes until she had to be out the door…

“Jade, it’s your mother.” Mom sounded more stressed, more strained, than Jade could ever remember her sounding, at least since… “I’m sorry, it’s time.”

…

“Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum.” The booming voice was louder this time. Closer? Coming her way? There’s always a way through. Holding tight to the straps of her backpack, Jade thought of Professor Tannenbaum choking on a cigarette and walked boldly forward.

“Fee… oh, there you are, little thing.” If the ceiling had still been there, he would have had his head through it, and possibly through the ceiling of the floor above. His legs were like tree trunks, and he only barely fit in the hallway at all; he was standing in the T-intersection with one huge foot facing Jade and the other out of sight. She could have used his shoe as, if not a rowboat, at least a coracle. His thighs, at her eye level, were bare and very hairy, easily as wide around as her waist. And those knees, with wrinkles like a dessert landscape, were coming closer to her as he crouched down.

…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/31596.html. You can comment here or there.

3WW/Dailyprompt – Peculiar Habits

Apr6

Three Word Wednesday is a once-weekly 3-word writing prompt.

This week’s three words were Adamant, Fabricate, Peculiar.

[community profile] dailyprompt is a once-daily writing prompt. March 16th’s prompt was coffee with too much sugar (I got started, and then got stuck).

If there was a word one could use to describe Sasha Carter, it would be “peculiar.”

She drank her coffee sludgy and thick, with too much sugar and enough cream to turn it a pale tannish hue, and she drank it by the gallon. It was her one vice, her one addiction, and her sole source of calories during the work day; she supplemented it with a handful of vitamin pills while she bent over her desk, working ten-hour days regularly and twelve-hour days on Friday.

Her superiors didn’t want to question it – she worked hard, packing more work into a fifty-two-hour work week than her colleagues did into two or three thirty-five-hour weeks – and those colleagues were a little frightened of her, so, rather than bother her with questions that might, they feared, get them stabbed with a .07 mm lead, they kept the fridge well-stocked with cream, the cupboard with sugar, and the pot hot with coffee at all times.

And she? She noticed all of this, and said nothing, unsure what to say, not really aware of the aura of leave-me-alone she gave off but grateful for its results.

The coffee, while her only vice, wasn’t her only peculiarity, any more than her jittery over-caffeinated studiousness was her only social awkwardness. She was consistently adamant in her refusal to fabricate even the most trivial data, spending hours poring over old tomes, microfiche, five-inch-floppies in legacy Commodore machines, to find data points nobody else thought were important.

And “adamant,” as much as “peculiar,” defined Sasha’s work life. She did everything at the office with the same dogged determination, from filling out her time card to creating final presentations for clients (although, more astute than they let on, her supervisors always chose someone more personable to actually present said presentations). She was the sort of woman who, excessively caffeinated or not, was the living embodiment of the phrase ‘dot every I and cross every T.”

Although her colleagues wondered about, and speculated on (when she was down in the archives, perhaps, or somewhere else far out of earshot. .07mm leads were a real threat), Sasha’s personal life, no-one really wanted to be the one to ask, or to otherwise endeavor to find out. They assumed she had one, a home, a life, something outside of the office, but since she was there when they got there in the morning, there when they left at night, they couldn’t be certain. For all they knew, she had grown like a mushroom out of a file down in archives. It would, one colleague said unkindly, explain her personality.

The “adamant” and the “peculiar” combined tidily with her long work hours to make the mushroom theory almost believable, and certainly easier to think about than the images of Sasha going home to a cold, empty apartment where everything was meticulously filed and labeled, or a trailer full of cats, or anything else their rather practical imaginations could come up with. It was easy enough, indeed, that they found themselves almost believing it: Sasha Carter existed in the office, and nowhere else.

All of that made it even stranger when they came in one Monday to find Sasha not there. Her desk had been cleaned and emptied, her latest project was tidily stacked on the supervisor’s desk, and, sitting in her chair inside her favorite coffee mug, a tiny cloth effigy of Sasha sat staring at the world, as if demanding to know where her caffeine was.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/31101.html. You can comment here or there.

Reiassan – Rin-and-Girey question

Apr6

Hey, Rin-and-Girey readers – what do you want to see more of in their story?

I think I need at least three or four more stories along the road, and then one to three more as they move into Lannamer, since just crossing the bridge took two stories. But you tell me! What do you want to see?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/30803.html. You can comment here or there.

A work in progress…

Apr5

This is the beginning of a piece from way back on the B prompts. There’s a few I’ve got hanging out there unfinished, and I thought I’d start to share snippits

Lara woke slowly, fighting off a muzzy feeling, like a hangover without the pain. Her bed was warm and soft and comfortable, three things she didn’t remember her apartment being, the last time she’d been there. She felt like she was engulfed in feathers, which felt very nice, but seemed a little strange, nothing like her cheap polyfill comforter. And she was, under the blankets, completely nude.

She struggled into wakefulness. Where was she? She’d fallen asleep any number of places, some of them nude, but none of them had been this comfortable on waking. Or this fuzzy. She opened her eyes, hesitantly, bracing against the light.

And then blinked hard, again and again, and tugged the comforter up to her chin. She was in a library? It looked that way, at least. Books everywhere, dark wood shelves and spines of old leather like a literary rainbow, floors looking like marble, the whole thing reeking of age and expense and literary cachet. The place had to be huge. And here she was, naked in a pile of duvets. Naked and alone, in a very comfortable pile of duvets, with no clothes anywhere in sight. There wasn’t even anything she could use as clothes, except the blankets themselves; there were books, and a long gold chain trailing off across the floor, leading off in one direction between two bookcases, and in the other seeming to head into the duvets. Suddenly suspicious, Lara wiggled down to the foot of the makeshift bed, and grabbed the chain with both hands.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/30517.html. You can comment here or there.

15 Minute Ficlet: Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Apr4

Originally posted here in response to the lyrics prompt: “The more the light shines through me, I pretend to close my eyes / The more the dark consumes me, I pretend I’m burning, burning bright.”

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Tomorrow stepped onto the platform and faced herself, faced Yesterday. Sometimes it seemed as if her entire life was stepping onto this platform and taking her own hands. Sometimes, because of the nature of things, it _was_ that her entire life was stepping up here and holding her own hand.

She braced herself, although she told herself every day that she wouldn’t. She tensed, feeling herself stiffen across the platform, as the shift change took over her.

When the magic poured through her, there was no moving. There was no feeling, no sensation at all except the shift.

The light poured through her, shoved through her, roared through her. It blinded her, deafened her, made her nothing but a window, a portal to push through. She could not close her eyes, but in the tiny corner of her mind that was still hers, Tomorrow pretended to. The light rushed through her, and the world was lit.

And the dark engulfed her, froze her, took over her every cell. It devoured her, consumed her, until there was almost nothing left; she was vessel to hold it and nothing else, and she was dying of the cold. She couldn’t expel it, but with her tiny bit of self, Yesterday imagined she stood in the middle of a fire, finally warm.

The void passed out of her, and the day passed into Tomorrow.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/29817.html. You can comment here or there.

3WW: Turning, Tables, and Other Things – could be rather triggery all over the place

Apr3

Three Word Wednesday is a once-weekly 3-word writing prompt.

This week’s three words were Loud, Persuasive, Riches.

The naming conventions of the Tuathans in Tir na Cali, where this story is set, are … weird. Suffice it to say, it’s okay that he’s both ap Gwydion and ó Gwydion.

The ap Gwydion boy was loud. Not surprising in a line who had bought their title and position with riches; most ap Gwydions were loud. This one was young, barely an adult (but he was an adult, old enough to be tried; that was important), spoiled rotten, and had no idea how much trouble he was in.

“You have no idea how much trouble you’re in,” he shouted at Sulleigh-who-he-believed-was-Susan. “I don’t know what you were thinking, spilling that tea all over my favorite shirt, but you’re going to pay!”

“I’m sor…”

“Shut up! No-one said you could speak.”

Sulleigh/Susan hid her smile by touching her forehead to the ground. She’d made him lose face in front of a woman he was hoping to marry and a man he was hoping to sleep with. She wasn’t surprised he was angry. If she had truly been what she was pretending to be, if she had even been embedded long-term in the position, she would have been nervous, close to terrified. Tyrion ap Talbot ó Gwydion was known, not just in the household but amongst his peers and the press, as a hothead with a violent temper. He’d already hit Sulleigh more than once, and she’d only been in his mother’s household for a week. For this embarrassment… yes. She dared peek, to see him going for the strap.

“Hold still,” he snarled, “or it will go badly.” That it was going to go badly even if she held still went without saying. She held still. She had to time this properly, and that meant she had to take a little abuse.

He pulled her pants down around her ankles with a rough tug. She listened for the sound she was waiting for, but no, not yet. They’d wait until…

… the strap landed on the back of her thighs with a loud thwap, bringing with it stinging pain. Sulleigh swallowed a whimper; under the noise of the next stroke, she heard the bodyguards walking away.

She let another two strokes land, whimpering under each one. She didn’t have to fake it; the ap Gwydion had a strong arm and practice in dealing out pain efficiently.

“Stop,” she gasped, and he stopped. She could tell by the grunt he made that he was surprised, and by the second grunt that he was offended when she stood and pulled her pants back on.

“Silence,” she commanded, before he could draw a breath to shout. “Did you know,” she added conversationally, “that your bodyguards leave when they hear you start beating the house slaves?”

His eyes grew wide, but the boy couldn’t say anything. Sulleigh continued. “They can’t stand to hear it. I can’t say I blame them. Now, you and I, Tyrion, are going to have a little conversation. But not here.” She opened the drawer he kept his toys in, and dropped a few choice items into a bag. “Don’t attack me,” she added, without turning to face him, and was rewarded with the sound of him stopping abruptly.

“We,” she continued, turning now to look at her erstwhile master, “are going to take a drive. You’re going to drag me out to the car like you did with Judy last week, and we’ll take a little trip.” He was scared now; his eyes wide and his mouth opening and closing like a fish. He shouldn’t have been all that surprised by the word-of-command trick; his mother had a variant of the same power. Perhaps no slave had dared use such things on him before. Of course, Sulleigh wasn’t really a slave.

If he was a little extra-rough in manhandling her out to his car, she couldn’t really blame him; if she kicked him in this shin while fighting him, well, could he blame her for that? Once he’d stuffed her in the back seat and started driving the direction she wanted, she let him talk again.

He was, of course, rather predictable. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

“You’ve been up to some pretty questionable stuff lately, Tyrion ap Gwydion, and my employers want to know exactly how questionable, and with exactly whom.”

She could tell, just from the set of his shoulders, that she’d hit the mark. “I’m not going to tell you anything, you bitch,” he quavered, torn between fear and anger.

“I assure you,” she smiled, “I can be very persuasive.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/29214.html. You can comment here or there.