“Duck!”
Taslin and Lansesh were serving as backup for the six-year Gladiator Rantoness Kallesh-Red in a five-on-three match against another Pit’s lead team. It wasn’t a fair fight. It wasn’t even in the same league as a fair fight. But Taslin was having more fun than she’d had in any match so far.
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Want to read anthologies featuring yours truly?
My story in Shifting Hearts, “Crossing the Line,” follows a feral-hearted woman as she deals with territoriality – and cautious affection.
“Monster Godmother,” in What Follows, is the story of an immortal fae and the humans that hate her, all struggling against an ending world.
“Company,” my story in No Place For Us, is also apocalyptic. Sometimes the best thing to wash up in your nets is companionship.
The Amazon Links are all here.
You can find What Follows on SmashWords, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo here, or on CreateSpace here.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/912775.html. You can comment here or there.
I would like to commission an art from this artist – http://drkarayua.tumblr.com/post/114425161426/drkarayua-hello-friends-i-am-currently-taking
So: Who?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/912548.html. You can comment here or there.
No Place For Us is out! This anthology of post-apocalyptic romance features my short story “Company:” even after the end of the world, people need a bit of company.
And now in paperback!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/912147.html. You can comment here or there.
Stories
Around Elephants, a story for #FridayFlash and Thimbleful Thursday
The Club, for Thimbleful Thursday
Patreon Stories – for Patrons Only
After the Storm, Kailani after the apocalypse
An excerpt from a novel not yet written, Rin & Girey
A Twisty Problem, a story of Dragons Next Door
Serial Stories
Broader Education, a story of Edally
Remembering the Fallen a story of Jumping Rings
Life in Alder Trees
Projects I am Working On Right Now
Why I Won’t Be Doing NaNoWriMo in 2015
Brainstorming for CAMP Nano
Generators and More Generators
Trying Out New Recipes
Greenhorn on Luna Se7vn, a ficlet of Foedus Planetarum for Thimbleful Thursday
Where it All Begins – the Zeroth Cohort in Addergoole
When All Else Fails, Make a Plan (Fanfic for cluudle‘s Superhero world)
Time for Play, a ficlet for #3WW
Making Things Work – more Baram’s House Elves
Messy, a story of Addergoole Year 46 for #3ww
International Women’s Day: Junie
International Women’s Day: Fae Apoc Presidents
Book Covers & other Canva Art
Thimbleful Thursday
The Fires of Gobann and other book covers
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Set in the early days of Earth’s admission into the Foedus Planetarum. To the Thimbleful Thursday prompt for March 19, “Green as Grass.”
The maintenance team on Luna Station 7 were drawing lots. Johanna, Curtis, and Al had rotated back home – or, in Al’s case, onto the space liner he’d been trying to get onto forever. That meant they were getting three new workers, and while two of them were maintenance veterans, none of them had worked Se7en, with its particular peculiarities, before.
“Oh, come on.” Angie stared at the green button. “I do not want the greenhorn again. Every time. Every time.” There were rules about how long you could stay at a particular station. Angie, Clyde, and Taylor had managed to avoid all of those rules, while Emily was coming up on the end of her time and had yet to come up with a suitable workaround. “Why is it always me?”
Clyde wasn’t going to tell her that he’d learned to feel the differences between green, white, and black buttons, and if he wasn’t going to tell her, Emily wasn’t going to point out that they made different sounds. “It’ll be fine, Angie. You’re so good with the new ones. You scare them just enough. And besides, it’s not like this one’s new-to-space.” Emily flipped through the dossiers on her tablet. “Kalienkari Shefor. Last tour of duty as a bureaucrat on Jacoba Two, right at the edge of Earth space. So he-or-she will have their space legs.”
“Well,” Angie grumbled, “better than Curtis, at least. All right, bring them in.”
They cleared the buttons off the table, and Emily, as junior, went to get the newbies. By the time she led them in, she was clearly trying not to laugh.
They knew that other variants than Terran humans worked the stations. Being Luna, however, they’d always gotten Terrans. “Angela Rodriquez, this is Kalienkari Shefor, your new trainee.”
The man, for he was certainly that, had skin the brown of tree bark and hair – and even Angie had trouble not laughing – hair as green as grass.
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This is fanfic of cluudle‘s lovely series of storied titled A Small Mistake (warnings for “abuse of power, teacher/student relationship, piles of mind control for everyone.”) It’s just a beginning, but I was thinking of students watching Kayla, and…</i.
Ayler had never intended to be at a supervillain school. He was suppose to be a hero, the son and grandson of heros.
But after what had happened, none of the hero schools would take him in. He looked too much like his father, sounded too much like his father. And because they all believed that his father had been brilliant, there was no way he could say to them, “look, my dad made a stupid mistake. If he’d survived it, he could have learned from it. I can learn from it, and I’m certainly not going to make the same mistake he did.”
The problem was, nobody thought it was a mistake.
But what he couldn’t say to the heros, he could say to the headmaster of Hero Bridge Academy. They were more than willing to hear that the great hero had been stupid, and they were more than willing to ask him in detail what he would do differently, in his father’s tights.
Ayler knew that the heroing community would take his “defection” as a sign that the blood was bad, that his father must have gone rogue. But Ayler had no siblings and his cousins were well-established already. He wasn’t hurting anyone but himself – and they’d left him no choice.
Ayler knew what he was going to do. He sat in the lunchroom and watched them, the kids of supervillains, the ones who had been kidnapped, the ones who had no choice but to be here. Junior heros did it all the time; he didn’t see why he shouldn’t, too.
He was going to form a team.
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No Place For Us, an anthology of post-apocalyptic romance stories, will be published on Monday 3/23/14. Keep an eye out for my story “Company” – because everything, even romance, is better at the end of the world.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/909123.html. You can comment here or there.
This story comes some time before There Are Lessons You Only Learn in Pain, Chapter 20 of Edally Academy.
It is written in reply to ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inventrix‘s suggestion to this request for questions, after the successful Domain Name Fundraiser.
Kaatetzie watched the problem children – his private name for them, although Pelnyen called them something similar – exit his class, the three of them thick as thieves again. Kaatetzie knew what would happen if he asked them about their tiff: Tairiekie would jut out her chin and tell him “We are supposed to be a team. That is what we were assigned to do.”
Pelnyen hadn’t been the only one to complain. Libkazaari had, as well, presumably taking it up with Kaat because he taught Mechanics. Other teachers had mentioned this trio in particular to him. Kaat found it amusing – and just amusing, because every student, especially every first year student, was trouble in their own special way. Edally was built to foster trouble.
Kaat watched the trio leave, Taikie and Enrie and Saydrie, and watched his own problem trio enter. Kyevtyieptes – Kyev – Lizhvaa, and Opegrikpeggno – Pegpeg. They were laughing. They were always laughing; the problem was that often what they were laughing about was some other student’s misfortune.
“Did you see the way his face squinted up…” Pegpeg twisted his own face up. “Like he’d never even heard of it?”
“Well…” Lizhvaa spoke slowly, carefully. “Coming from the far North, he probably didn’t, I mean, when I-”
“Can it, Liv. Nobody wants to hear it.” Kyev cut their teammate off with the wave of his hand.
“But I do.” Kaat did not normally get involved. Today, he was feeling capricious. “Lizhvaa, what happened?”
Lizh was probably not going to thank him for this. Kaat felt a little bad about that, but the look on Kyev’s face was priceless.
Lizh coughed. “Nothing, sir. Just kids talking.”
Of course it was. Sometimes, the three-teams worked well together. Saydrie, Enrie, and Taikie were an example of the best the system could create. On the other hand, sometimes the three-teams just made everything worse. Pegpeg, Kyev, and Lizh exemplified that far too well.
Kaat considered what they were saying, and then turned to his chalkboard. Lizhvaa didn’t want to speak up, but maybe he could. “When I was a young student, first come to school…”
Some of them were interested. Some were not. Kaat remembered what it had been like, to be their age, to be as sure of everything and as nervous about it all. He brought himself back there as he told them his story: coming down from the far North, where it was always cold. The trees that grew up there, that he missed. The river, and how loud it was. The clothing everyone wore, where everything he owned had fur on it.
Kaat wasn’t going to get through to Pegpeg, nor to Kyev, but either they would grow and change or they would flunk out. It was possible Lizh had potential, and it was to her, and to the other students who listened, that Kaat talked.
It wasn’t anything to do with Basic Mechanics, but that didn’t matter. If there was one thing that Edally focused on, it was a broad base of education. Kaat met Lizh’s eyes, and broadened horizons just a little further.
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