For MeeksP‘s prompt.

Commenters: 7

Generally, when a call comes in at odd hours from a caller who is stressed, distressed, distraught, and dismayed, they are calling for Sage. He’s the consultant, after all, the Black Tower graduate with a decade on the police force.

But once in a very long while, the call is for me, someone who has an issue, usually with one of the smaller races – they don’t think to call in a mediator so often when it’s a Large Race Problem. They’re just as overwrought, just as hysterical, but usually, when it’s done, I get to laugh a little.

That was the case when the Museum of Natural History downtown called me. They thought they had a problem with brownies or pixies; something was messing up their doorways, all of them, knocking the plaster around and leaving holes in the cornices. They’d had an exterminator in, but they didn’t have bugs, and an exorcist had told them it wasn’t demons. That left, it seemed, me.

I left my youngest at home with Sage and caught the bus downtown, listening to the gossip bouncing back and forth, watching the way the human and mostly-human dealt with the non-humans and the non-even-humanoids – at least the ones that could fit on a bus. There was a lot more interaction than there had been even five years ago; it seemed as if, slow but sure, integration was happening.

Once at the museum, however, it was another story. The staff were human. The visitors were human. There were two brownies serving as janitors, but everyone seemed to ignore them. Even the archeology was primarily human, with “the other races” having one small wing. Integration, it looked like, had no place in natural history. I nearly left right then.

But the money and the reputation gains for consulting are good, and perhaps, I thought, I could do some good for their impression of the non-humans all around them. I studied their dents and holes, listening to their anguished stories while paying more attention to what the brownie janitors were trying to tell me. Not a Small Race. They didn’t know what it was either, but the small races were afraid to come here. Not even the tinies would come in the museum – and the tinies were anywhere they could find a corner.

That was a red flag, but a hard one to explain. Some humans still called exterminators when they found out they had a tiny population in their walls. So it wasn’t the smalls, and it wasn’t the tinies. A Large Race would have left a lot more wreckages – especially if they’d seen the Other Races wing. I wandered off from my handlers when they were busy arguing, and traced the impact lines in their doorways.

They found me, ten minutes later, sitting on the floor in the Africa wing, giggling uncontrollably. When I could finally get control of myself, I managed to explain.

“The giraffe,” I told them, pointing at the skeleton proudly guarding this wing. “Your people… there’s skeletons of three of a race of very small creature wired into his skeleton. There, there, and there. Their ghosts take him riding at night. They must love being so tall!”

I had a hard time getting paid for that call, but it was worth it for the story I got to tell.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/155510.html. You can comment here or there.

For Fayanora‘s prompt.

Commenters: 6

There are words a mother never wants to hear. I’ve got a list of them; I keep it in a notebook which is otherwise filled with very boring accounting. I don’t want to give the kids ideas.

“I only set it a little on fire” was one of the first; that was Jin, who was going through one of those phases at the time. “The neighbors invited me over for dinner” was a touchy one when Juniper came up with it.

But the worst so far, knock on wood, was “Mommy, what’s a Rakshasa?”

I lie. That just prefaced the worst one.

“Why do you ask, honey bun?” Please don’t let the Smiths be moving out. Or the Dungans. I have my limits, the sky above only knows, and that could very well be one of them.

“Our Campfire Scout leader is moving out of town and our new leader says she’s a Manushya-Rakshasi. Some sort of Rakshasa?”

“Oh… wild fates, baby.” A flesh-eating monster for a Scout leader. Not a dragon, not even an ogre, somewhere they had found a rakshasa. “Hold on, sweetie, I’m going to make you some special brownies for your next meeting.” Very special brownies. I had something in my black jars that could stop even a cannibal spirit’s appetite. Rakshasa, indeed. What were the higher-ups thinking?

Of course, they’d probably be able to beat up any other troop…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/152326.html. You can comment here or there.

For kelkyag‘s prompt.

Commenters: 7

Juniper was surprised, when she came to visit Baby Smith one Saturday morning, to find the Smith house in what her mother would call an uproar, although nobody was roaring, and, indeed, there wasn’t even any shouting.

But there was a lot of tail-jerking, and Jimmy’s scales were the wrong color, and the lanky erbiss that they had instead of a dog wouldn’t stop whining. (Dogs, Cxaidin had told her, both could not be trained to deal comfortably with dragons and did not have the suitable skill set. Juniper was still trying to figure that one out, but the erbiss, in the meantime, was adorable, clever, and liked having its fur brushed.)

Both the adults were too upset to tell her what was going on, and Baby and Cthannie were snuffling and making little acid-burbles, so Juniper coaxed Tay-tay, the erbiss, over into the sun where Jimmy was trying to pretend nothing was going wrong, and started brushing Tay-tay. She’d figured out this trick recently with her own older brother; sometimes if she sat quietly doing something normal, sometimes Jin would calm down long enough to talk to her.

(To be fair, she’d figured out Jin was doing it to her, first. But it worked both ways!)

The erbiss had calmed down into the rumble-happy noise that wasn’t really a purr by the time Jimmy said something – but Jimmy’s scales had settled into a nice purple, too. “Cxaidin and Tay-tay caught a poacher last night,” the juvenile dragon muttered.

“A poacher?” Juniper had heard that word in a cartoon, but she didn’t know what it meant. Nothing to do with eggs, she was pretty sure.

“A hunter, a dragon-hunter. He was going after the kids.” Jimmy set its head woefully on its paws and looked at her. “They’re scary,” it admitted very very quietly. “One almost got me when I was a hatchling.” It tilted its head and, under the jaw, Juniper could see where the scales were solid white in a circle, like the scar she had on her knee in reverse. “I don’t want my parents to know I’m scared.”

“It’s all right.” Juniper hugged Jimmy’s long neck. “I won’t tell them.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/150942.html. You can comment here or there.

For Meeksp‘s prompt.

Commenters: 6

“Ever find it weird that we don’t have vampires?”

This, I reminded myself, was what happened when Jin helped in the kitchen. But making tomato sauce was a long and tedious process, and the garden had been very prosperous this year, my younger two were still too small to be much help, and Sage had a bad habit of opening up the black jars into the sauce, Rule Two or not (It makes very good sauce, I’ll admit, but what it did to my mother-in-law that one time, I’ll be making up to her for decades).

Vampires. “Or zombies,” I agreed, “in the classic horror-movie sense of the word. But why ‘weird?'”

“Well, look at it, really. We’re out of their fairy tale books, even if we live in the ‘burbs with them now. Wizards. Witches. We have dragons next door, and brownies. And yet – no vampires. No zombies. I thought the old knock-down place a block over was haunted, but that turned out to be two boggarts and a goblin. And it’s not like we talk about heaven.”

No, although that wasn’t a “we” matter the way he meant it in that sentence – the not-quite-human humans. That was a “we” matter in our household. And that was a matter for another day.

“Hrmm,” I said instead, and tasted the sauce. “Needs more basil, and a pinch of – the medium-large black jar? The tiniest pinch, mind you. Well,” I continued, before Jin got irritated – he was at that irritable stage. I hoped it was a stage, at least. “I’ve never met a vampire, but I’ve seen ghosts. Well, one human ghost. If you’re looking for undead, though, you might go talk to the Elkin.

“The Elkin?” Now he perked up, and I wondered if I’d done the wrong things. The darkest parts of the Black Tower… no. He was my son, and he would not be going White Ops.

“The Elkin,” I agreed. “My sister, your Aunt [*], is dating one. But they have an entire priest class devoted to their undead.” Such as it was.

“Do you think she could help me out, then?” He definitely had that look in his eye.

“I’ll see if I can talk her into it,” I assured him, “If – and only if – you finish that history paper and help me clean up after the sauce.”

I should probably have been more worried at how enthusiastic he was about cleaning, shouldn’t I have?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/148145.html. You can comment here or there.