It was a very nice basket, Yeri had to admit.
It was pretty, well-woven, and tidy, and it was just large enough that he could fit in it. Not particularly a hand-basket, if you were really going to think about the term as such.
Then again, most baskets were not man-sized, most baskets did not have lids, and most of them did not have wheels. Continue reading
I am considering running a slightly-atypical game of Lexicon to fill in all of the gaps in my MRI-created world (lot of time to sit and think, you know), “Curseteroids.” ☄️
(technically, Curse-teorites, but hey)
I would be using the Order Variation Follow the Phantoms and the type variation Codependence.
I’d be open to up to 8 other people, and am holding 4 slots for the people who played with me in Inspector Caracal’s earlier Lexicon game.
Why atypical? Because I already have a novel started in my head for this setting, which requires SLIGHTLY more background than the normal, to quote, “You are all scholars arguing about how the Void Ghost Rebellion led to the overthrow of the theocracy and the establishment of the Third Republic.” I.e., we will all be scholars of some sort working on the Enclopedia, uh Cursteroidia, but I’ve set up the introduction to the world.
Since time immemorial [at least 500 years] the land of Otenysa has been beset by the Curse.
The Curse manifests as flaming rocks from the sky, some as small as a fist, some as large as a city.
Some land with a physical presence; some have only a magical shape, but all of them wreak havoc on the world around them.
A Curse Rock has a range of effect normally in proportion with its size; within that range of effect, buildings are destroyed or simply changed — melted, their material altered, turned upside down. Animals are killed or changed, shrunk or grown, their colors changed and their milk or wool or meat altered. Humans, too, are changed, magic given or taken away, ears and limbs and nose grown or shrunk, added or reduced, skin altered, internal organs broken. Some of the changes are survivable; some or not. Some are beneficial; most are not.
Any given Curse Rock will have the same sorts of effects on everything of a given “type” hit by its wave, leading to Balkanization of groups of mostly-humanoids.
Things I need for plot of The Potential Story:
That’s it. There can be any number of “races” of altered stock of humans, plants, etc. There can be almost any effect you can think of from the curse rocks. There can be almost any level of techno/magic from Stone Age to Approx. Development Of Electricity, and almost any sort of magic that you want. Any governmental system, any utopia or dystopia, and any extant or historical nation from the size of a single city to up to half the continent.
The mass of one land mass has been determined, as well as a broad handwave of the Island of “Elves”, but the rest of the planet is up for grabs, as is geography, climate, where exactly the equator is in re. this land mass…
So! Anyone Interested?
My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!
Written to sauergeek ‘s prompt.
❄️
It seemed like summer had left the door open and autumn was sneaking in. Xarissa threw on a coat and went outside to pull in her plants. The weather ap was calling for a hard frost tonight – never mind that it was mid-September and even this far north, not the sort of time that you got frost. It wasn’t supposed to frost for at least another month!
Tomatoes, peppers – she picked everything that was full-sized, regardless of ripeness. They’d ripen on the counter or they wouldn’t. Cabbage, broccoli – the potatoes could wait. The carrots might be happier for a wait.
The wind was blowing damp and cold in her face. She turned to adjust her coat – and realized it wasn’t just wind, but snow. Heavy snow, the sort that shouldn’t come till maybe early November, coming down so hard she could barely see the house.
With a muttered “screw it” to the rest of the plants, she hurried back to her house, skidding inside with a shove from a wind blast, and turned to look out the window at the weather.
The snow had moved from flying sideways to flying upward.
“That is just not right.”
She pulled on her winter boots, dug out her mittens, found a scarf and a hat and her long winter coat. “By the time I’m dressed,” she muttered, “it’ll be spring again.”
It was still upside-down winter when she stepped back outside, the snow heading at a diagonal up towards the old maple tree. Something was wrong; something was definitely wrong.
She dragged her fire pit out between the two maples, the old and the new, and piled every bit of yard waste she could in there. She wanted smoke more than heat, lots of smoke.
With hands made clumsy by cold and feeling like her face was going to freeze off, she managed to light the fire. The smoke blew upwards with the snow, pushing upwards above the tree.
Xarissa looked at the shape outlined by the smoke. It was big, too big, and it was high up in the air, and all the snow was flying right into it.
“We are going to have to have a talk about your timing,” she muttered, “whatever you are. Shoo! Shoo!”
Startled, the invisible outline seemed to dart further away. The snow subsided, falling back to the ground the way it should.
“’Winter is coming,’ my ass,” Xarissa muttered. “Someone went and summoned winter. Damn kids…”
Want more?
Happy Monday, guys! My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is still going strong:
Here on WordPress and Here on Dreamwidth.
Tell your friends! Tell your enemies, especially if they like fiction! Tell your dog, especially if he has a Paypal account 🙂
Speaking of telling people, the Signal Boost story continues apace. Let me know if you have boosted and I haven’t credited your boosts – and yes, you can boost again, especially if I have written to your prompt.
If I haven’t written to your prompt, I am working my way through the list and will get there soon.
If you haven’t prompted…. go prompt? The theme is Autumn, Autumn, fall, and falling. It’s got a lot of room for interpretation and I encourage you to interpret as broadly or as narrowly as you wish.
The stories written so far include:
and more are coming every day!
Check in, give ‘em a read, and then come back and prompt 🙂
Cheers!
Good morning everyone!
(or good afternoon, good evening, good night)
It’s Day Two of my Giraffe (Zebra) Call, and it’s looking to be a good one!
Check out the Call for prompts, read the stories I’ve already posted, and, if you haven’t left a prompt, go and leave some.
I’ll be here, writing about falling leaves 😀 Continue reading
It’s time for a Zebra Call, which is a special black-and-white and stripey version of a Giraffe Call.
🦒🦓
There’s a longer post about what this call is for [here]. The short version is: We’re redoing our bathroom and the cabinets I really, really want cost $700 more than our budget.
If you’re interested in Giraffe Calls in general, check out the Giraffe Call: Call tag [here].
Leave a prompt (or several), get a short fic written.
Tip and get TWO fics written and 100 words/$1.50 tipped
Join my Patreon and get TWO fics written.
My goal is $500 between new Patreon Patrons and tips (Counting each $1 of Patreon-age as $3)
For every $50 in tips, I will choose a prompter at random and write another story to their prompts (so leave lots of prompts!)
For every multiple of 5 Patreon Patrons we reach (30, 35, 40…) I will do the same. Continue reading
All right, it’s time for a Zebra Call!
🦒🦓
When I first started my Giraffe Calls, they were to help defray the costs of the super-awesome giraffe carpet that I wanted – and got! – for the bedroom of our then-new(-to-us) house. The idea was that we would get the bedroom done “enough” to look finished, and then no matter what else we were working on, we could lay down at night and rest because the bedroom was done.
Hey, it worked, more or less.
Now we’re doing the bathroom! And it’s going to be black, grey, and white, mostly white, and since we already have a giraffe toilet paper holder (because giraffes), we want a zebra shower curtain…
No, I’m not holding a whole prompt call to finance a shower curtain. But it’s nicer than Cabinet Call.
You see, I have fallen in love with a certain door style and the nature of the bathroom dictates a certain (non-particle-board) carcass style and… that ends up $700 over our cabinet budget. I can cover $200 of that on current Patreon rates (3 months, or the length of this renovation).
We ripped out the “linen cabinet” that existed because
a) the face frame & doors went up to the former ceiling, 6’8″, and the cabinet itself went all the way up to the new/oldest ceiling, 8’4″
b) The doors were in bad shape, chipped, and worn.
c) the vent for the toilet was letting out in the top of the cabinet
d) the awful old drywall went under, over, and behind the old cabinet, and it was nailed to it.
And we removed the old (really ugly) vanity and replaced it with a pedestal sink last year, which opened up the place a huge amount, but poof, storage gone.
So we’re going to get two cabinets, one a linen cabinet (full height, to replace the one we ripped out) and one a wall cabinet above the toilet.
And I really, really want the pretty doors with a ( arch at the top to match the door we bought to put in as a bathroom entrance door – which is going to be a pocket door! – but the nice doors only come on the nicer cabinets.
So! Time for a Zebra Call.
There’s this poll Here, and it might be easier to answer if the links were available for the stories. Thanks to Kelkyag for many of the links, for cleaning up the order, and for commenting.
Potentials Suggested But Not On the Poll:
Abbreviations:
Adg: Addergoole
AF: Aunt Family
DnD: Dragons Next Door
R&G: Rin and Girey, the first and longest-running story of Reiassan
TUn: Things Unspoken
UF: Unicorn/Factory
Fae Apoc, Stranded, and Reiassan are their own universes
Originally posted April 29, 2012
✨
If Jean had learned anything in the five years he’d been married to Zoe (and twice that if you included dating), it was that when her family said “tradition,” the best thing to do was to shut up and get out of the way.
📆
The spellbook had been one of the best finds on the planet they had poetically called 17-5-12.
The original population had been something very close to humanoid, as far as the drawings, the records, and the shapes of the buildings showed.
Warning: this one makes me cry to read it. Written on or around December 2010.
🌳
In the Northeast, every city, every town, every blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village has at least one, a grove of trees that will never know the cut of a saw.
The wedding had been a fete to be spoken of for generations; the entire capital city had been invited. The Princess Zsófika was resplendent in her gown of pearls and sapphires, and if anyone noticed that her vows did not allow for the possibility of refusal, no-one mentioned it. She was marrying the Emperor, after all, poor girl. She was marrying the Emperor and tying her natal kingdom finally and entirely into the Empire.
The celebration went on for a week, the Emperor and his new bride at every event, the bride in a shining new dress every day. Later, women who knew who to talk to would fight each other for the rights to this dress or that, as they would only touch the Princess’ body the once, and they were, both literally and in the more common sense, a king’s ransom, every single one of them.
And then the Princess went into the Tower, the Consort’s Tower, the bride’s Tower, the Tallest Tower, and the Emperor went back to the business of ruling a slightly-larger empire. Continue reading