Archives

Icon Flash – The Pumpkin – Dragons Next Door

Oct12

New flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today’s icon:

A creepy black pumpkin and a tree, with my name

Icon by dhamphir

Dragons Next Door has a Landing Page

This follows directly after The Black Tower (LJ), which is after Over the Wall (LJ).

Well, indeed. “That was my mother’s generation, mostly,” I stalled. Here I was, a home-maker in the new millennium, a graduate of The Pumpkin. I wasn’t really the one to ask about that.

But I was the one Zizny was asking.

“It’s always surprised me,” it mused, “that you would try for ‘equality.’ Gender is so important to the differentiated species, isn’t it? It’s why Cxaidin and I have always attempted to approximate a bi-gendered couple.”

Ah, so that had been intentional. I took a moment to feel better about our misread, then got back to the crux of the questioning.

“‘Equal’ has never meant ‘the same,’ at least not to me,” I pondered. “It certainly doesn’t, the way it was taught in The Pumpkin.”

“I was under the impression that Lady Cassidy’s Academy taught home-keeping skills?” Zizny waved one claw vaguely. “Cleaning, cooking, that sort of thing?”

“Well, that’s the impression The Pumpkin likes to give,” I said slowly. Zizny wasn’t human; it wasn’t quite the same as telling secrets out of school. Quite. “But this is the modern era, and most of that is automated; it takes up very little time in a day, especially once your children are in school.” Or gone to the Black Tower.

“Hence the impression of outdatedness, yes. But you said it’s a misimpression?”

“Well,” I smiled, fondly remembering a few of my midnight lessons, “there are things that the Black Tower likes to keep to itself. And The Pumpkin has its secrets, too.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/143459.html. You can comment here or there.

The Black Tower

Oct11

New flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today’s icon:

A creepy black tower and a pumpkin, with my user name

Icon by dhamphir

Dragons Next Door has a Landing Page.

This follows directly after Over the Wall (LJ).

“What is the Black Tower?” The dragon cocked its head to the side, narrowly missing knocking over the fence.

I blinked. The Tower has such a reputation among our people that it’s hard to remember it’s not that well known outside of the community. Even most other humans wouldn’t know what I was talking about – and I imagine the dragons handled such things in their own way. “The Black Tower is…” I resisted the impulse to end that with “…the Black Tower.” “It’s an academy of magic, considered highly prestigious but also highly dangerous. Sage attended there.”

“Ah, the Sandborn.” Zizny nodded. “We have heard of that place. On rare occasion, a young dragon will study there.”

“Yes, the Sandborn.” I’d forgotten it had a proper name. “I knew they had a wing catering to the non-humans…” I offered carefully.

“You did not attend there, then?” It raised one eyeridge in another gesture I imagine was adopted from humanoids. I flushed, wishing for a slightly less-perceptive neighbor. Maybe I should have been talking to the brownies, instead.

“No.” It would have been rude not to explain further, so I tried. “I went to the Cottage.” Unwillingly, but wanting to be clear, I elaborated. “The Pumpkin, we called it. But it’s…”

“…Lady Cassidy’s Academy for Young Ladies. Yes, I’ve head of it. I’m surprised, quite frankly, that it’s still around. Aren’t you of the generation that was working on that gender-equality project?” She made it sound like a coffee klatch.

“Well…”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/142562.html. You can comment here or there.

IconFlash – Over the Wall – Dragons Next Door

Oct7

New flash series! I’m going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today’s icon:

Baby Smith

Icon & Art by Djinni

Dragons Next Door has a Landing Page (LJ)

We were having one of those really nice crisp late-October days, with the sun shining and no real wind to speak of, so Zizny Smith and I were talking over the stone wall between our properties while, nearby, Juniper and Baby played, or, at least, Juniper played and Baby gurgled back at her.

“How do you handle it, when your children leave home?” Zizny asked, inadvertently – or perhaps intentionally; the Smiths were very perceptive neighbors (and I was still inwardly cringing over how non-perceptive I’d managed to be) – hitting a nerve I’d been trying to ignore.

“Jimmy?” I asked, rather than answer right away. The dragon nodded, a gesture I was fairly certain they’d adopted for talking to humans. Since her – its! – head was as big as I was, it made for an impressive agreement.

“Not yet, of course,” it continued, “but when they start getting to that size, you start thinking about the day they’ll fly away, don’t you?”

“Is Jimmy your oldest, then?”

A dragon smile is a terrifying thing. “No, oh, no, but it’s been quite a while since Cauzna left the cave. Is Jin your first? I know humans tend to have their children rather close together.”

“We have a shorter breeding period.” No getting around it, then. “Jin is my oldest. It will probably be a few years until he leaves the nest, but it’s been on my mind.”

“Probably?” Zizny saw too much. I bit the bullet and answered.

“The Black Tower has contacted him.”

Edited for naming error: Sage is the narrator’s spouse, Jin her oldest child.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/140450.html. You can comment here or there.

Playing, Dragons Next Door, for morrigans_eve

Aug11

To [personal profile] morrigans_eve‘s prompt “More of Juniper and Baby Smith’s games?” in this flash-fiction meme (LJ).

Dragons Next Door has a landing page (LJ Link)

Juniper rolled her eyes at her parents and headed out the side door to go to the Smith’s place. She knew Baby was still little and pre-lingual. She knew dragons were helpless and nearly mindless until they reached about grown-up-high in length. Cthaiden had explained all of this to her – and, considering some of the stuff her parents had been saying, she’d been listening better than they had.

But they still wanted to explain, when she said “I want to go play with Baby,” either that Baby was a live being and not a pet or a toy, which she knew, or that Baby didn’t really understand the playing yet, yes, she also knew. Baby was a baby. It was fragile and you had to be careful, even if it could poop fire on you, and it really didn’t understand words. Juniper had been there when it had hatched. She knew this all.

She just liked playing with Baby anyway. Baby was small, smaller than Juniper (there weren’t many people she could say that about), and it needed her help to do anything. It was a neat feeling, having another being relying on her.

And, when she wanted to play, Baby didn’t argue or tell her it was a stupid game (although once it had belched on a board game and ruined it). It just crawled over the floor with her, or hit the ball, or slept, and she could tell it all the stories she wanted.

Maybe if she told it enough stories about the princess and the dragon being best friends, when it grew up, it would remember.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/105764.html. You can comment here or there.

Bringing it home

Aug10

This is for @skysailor99’s prompt in my call for prompts: Make up a gender and have a character’s partner learn to understand it.

I’ve never made up a gender before, so I mad-libbed from friends on Twitter nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and, thank you barbary, a gender name:

sloppily
hagadab
Morosely
alpine
geode
yoink

This is in the Dragons Next Door setting, but NOT the narrator family or the smiths. Elkin were going to be elf-kin, but I liked the typo better.

I think it’s fair that I thought Farnah was male.

He was – pardon, zad was – the first elkin I’d had any real experience with, and he – zad – had, when naked, something that really looked like a penis. And functioned like one, as well, or at least close enough. Elkin are far enough from human that I didn’t worry about babies (it takes magic, a stork, and the remnants of a dragon egg to make an elkin-human cross), so I didn’t think, all that much, about the fact that zad didn’t have testes. I aways thought they looked silly on human males, anyway.

We had been together for several months when zad finally explained to me – after the age-old argument about toilet seats, no less, that zad was not male. Zad was hagadab, and, it turned out, the elkin have seven genders.

I, personally, sometimes thought two was more than enough, but I really, really liked Farnah, still do, and so I tried to learn more about my lover and zas gender.

They tend to be sloppy, I learned that first, but only in the nest. In the field, they are meticulous (I already knew this about Farnah. We worked, often, side-by-side, and spent most of our time in my apartment.) They like high spaces (the elkin are, after all, naturally alpine), and, it turns out, are the reason for the kendar myth. Already things I already knew about Farnah; shorter than me by half a foot, zad had picked the tallest chair in my apartment as zas and stacked pillows on it to make it taller.

The hardest part, as we adjusted to our cross-species romance, turned out in the end to be the easiest. The hagadab are the providers of the elkin family group; they hunt, they gather, they bring home Things. Zad didn’t mind that I earned money, but me bringing home things made my poor Farnah bristle every time.

I never liked grocery shopping that much, anyway.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/104980.html. You can comment here or there.

Donor Perk – Dragons Next Door: Ketchup

Aug4

anke requested some more of the “Hostage Situation” drabble (LJ). This takes place immediately after that story.

Dragons Next Door Landing Page (and on LJ)

“It’s a human.”

Staring at my oldest child, I sank down onto the couch. Slowly, as if I was a thousand years old, and carefully, as if I or the couch might shatter at too rough an impact. Blindly, I felt for their hands, all the while chiding myself.

How can I pretend to be this enlightened soul, this all-creatures-in-one-neighborhood advocate, and then be so much more horrified when the monster on TV is of my species?

“Human?” I heard myself say, despite the screaming of my internal censor. “They’re sure?”

“Stands upright, two legs, two arms, generally human-shaped and sized.” My oldest child is not known for tact or empathy; then again, it may simply be that teenagers in general cannot handle these things. “Yeah,” came the clarification, before my aggrieved sigh could become an actual complaint. “Human. As far as the news is telling us, garden-variety white-bread normal sort of human.”

“Normal,” my husband coughed. “There is nothing normal about this.”

Handwave. “You know. Not a Special Projects sort, not a White Tower sort. Doesn’t go zzzapp with his fingers. Just… appears to be holding hostages in case he gets the munchies.”

My husband was, by this point, nearly out of his seat. I sensed the breaking point was close; soon, it would either devolve into a fight, or he would stalk out angrily. With that going on downtown, he’d end up beelining there, retired or no. And this one looked bad.

“All right.” I set one hand on my husband’s knee, one on my child’s. “Start at the beginning.”

Sage took a deep breath, pulling himself back from that place. “It’s been on for about twenty minutes. The first they showed was a scrying of the inside of the bank, and then that went black, and they went to this footage.” He gestured at the TV, where police and reporters loitered around the bank as if waiting for someone to give them orders.

Jin picked up the thread, sounding, for once, almost like a kid again. “The scrying was pretty bad. He had the bank manager stretched over the marble counter, backwards, like an Aztec altar. Everyone else was hogtied, and he’d gotten apples somewhere…”

“There’s no trace of magic about it,” Sage continued. Knowing him, he hadn’t taken the TV’s word for that, either. “No accomplices. One corpse already – the security guard. I used to work with him, when I was on the force.”

“Eviscerated,” Jin murmured, and then, with a note of beginning hysteria, “ketchup.”

I gave Sage a look: do something. There was a time for territorial disputes, and a time to be a parent. With an eyeroll: duh, he moved around me to pull our oldest into a tight hug.

“The police will come up with something,” he murmured reassuringly, “or we will, for them. Someone always does.”

Next: Salt

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/98383.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Sharing Stories – Dragons Next Door – to meeks’ prompt

Jul21

This is a short story in response to [personal profile] meeks‘ commission in my Giraffe Sale: the dragons’ storybooks, as discussed here

Dragons Next Door has a Landing Page – and on LJ.

The neighbor girl Juniper had taken to reading to Baby when she came over to sit with the hatchling, which she was doing with pleasant regularity. While Baby’s brain was not nearly developed enough to comprehend the stories – at this stage of life, a hatchling was primarily an eating-and-growing machine – the Smiths approved of the idea. Even now, the hatchling was learning, collecting information. The more Juniper talked to the child, the more language skills would develop.

They were, however, curious about the stories she read. So many of the stories humans and other small creatures told about dragons were nothing more than echoes of their own fears and flaws. Would some of that seep in to Baby through the reading? Juniper’s family seemed fairly rational beings, for small creatures, but they were still small creatures.

The little thing was a bit intimidated around them – biologically, humans were supposed to be afraid of predators who could eat them in a couple gulps, after all – so they didn’t try to listen in when she was there, in Baby’s nursery, but when she left her storybook behind, they pounced eagerly on the opportunity to peruse it.

The stories they found inside – beautifully illustrated in pastels – were different from the tales they remembered from their own childhood, although, to be fair, those they remembered had been held up as examples of why small creatures could not be trusted. This one portrayed a juvenile dragon (the colors were wrong, but detailed points of biology could be forgiven) and a young human, together with a presumably-also-juvenile pixie (with the tiny races, age could be very hard to determine) on a grand adventure together, searching for some device called the MacGuffin, which appeared to be a plaid ruby.

Turning the pages carefully with their foreclaws, the Smiths agreed that it was a very nice children’s tale, and suitable for Baby, if some of the message was to inadvertently sink in. Wanting to repay the favor Juniper was doing, they searched in their vault for an appropriate story to share in return.

They ended up finding what they wanted in Cxaidin’s hoard of childhood books. Left carefully visible, so-casually set on the human-sized table Juniper’s parents had provided, the tome was nearly as big as the table, a wide, brightly-hued volume with both binding and pages of leather (paper burned) colored with plant and insect dyes.

The story, one which Cxaidin remembered warmly, told of a juvenile dragon (the colors, in this case, were correct) learning how small and tiny creatures were different from dragons, and how best to interact with them. The Smiths noted, a bit ruefully, that the colors on both the human and the pixie seemed a little bit off, and the portrayal of the orc was outdated and stereotypical. The interaction between the young dragon and the young human, however, they deemed worth sharing.

The happy ooh and aaah noises Juniper made when she discovered the book made them very pleased indeed with their choice.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/83050.html. You can comment here or there.

Notes on Dragon Size.

Jul14

kelkyag began asking some questions about dragon size in re. meeks‘ drawing of Diapering Dragons.

kelkyag:
How big are the adult dragons?

aldersprig:
Me, neither 🙂 Um. Large or huge but not gargantuan. Maybe that long (30+feet), but only because rather sinuous. Sort of a xbreed between western and eastern dragons. (like Trex, they probably grow into the legs, too)
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Table:_Creature_Size_and_Scale_(3.5e_Other)

kelkyag:
Hmm. Well, they appear to be small enough that if one licks a human, they can do so at least somewhat delicately, rather than a dragon’s tongue being bigger than a human. And drunken James (who could plausibly be close to full size?) passed out on the lawn is small enough that a broom handle is long enough to poke him in the ribs with (from a safe-from-accidental-clawing distance? Does that make his legs not more than, say, five feet long?), while talking to him at the same time, though a long flexible dragon neck could make the latter easy. I get the impression from that scene that carrying/rolling James home was not a feasible option, though that could be more about flaming or acidic hiccups than about size. And an offering of biscuits and gravy, presumably in reasonable human-home-cook quantities, is tempting, which suggests they don’t eat multiple whole cows at a sitting …

So, is that room big enough for the adults to fit into comfortably? Is the window high enough for them to see out of? Or is the window deliberately baby-scale (perhaps in a corner of an adult-scale room)? It looks like the little fellow could fit out of the open window if he tried, though I don’t know that he’s that agile yet.

Baby there is decidedly not sinuous yet, especially with those whomping huge back feet, but that, too, can be grown into. 🙂

aldersprig:
… I guess you’re just going to have to help me figure out what they look like! 😀

Hrmm. What if length vs. circumference is a function of age?

kelkyag:
Do they grow their whole lives, or do they reach some maximum size and then stop? Do they grow in stages (as with the color change(s)), with major molts in between (like poor Jimmy is going through, or wrapping up), or is it more continuous? Is adolescent Jimmy close to full size?

Could Jimmy, or one of the adults, carry Juniper, her whole family, more? In his claws or on his back? And still fly? Are their wings (and the skeletal structure they’re attached to) big enough for them to fly mundanely, or is there some magic/handwaving involved in that? If they fly mundanely, they’re going to need a huge breastbone/keel for the flight muscles to attach to, and it would make sense to keep everything else as light as possible — which could work with the length/circumference changes. Where do their wings sit/attach relative to their legs? It looks like Baby’s wings are no further forward than his front legs, and could be well behind them, depending on how they fold — and if he’s going to fly mundanely, his wings are going to grow a whole lot relative to the rest of him.

On the ground, do they usually walk on two legs (t-rex?) or four? Can/will they do the other, or is it impossible/undignified (if sufficiently sinuous, walking on two legs could get awkward)? If four, how do they routinely carry things around? If they’re outside/have space, do they prefer to walk or fly?

… I, umm, might think about things by asking questions, which does not work for everyone. Or I could try to ask more story-oriented questions. Juniper is imagining warrior-princess-and-dragon — does she think the “and dragon” is a fellow warrior or a faithful steed? How do they travel? Do her storybooks/imaginings usefully reflect real dragons, or is she going to run into some “but all the stories say …” issues?

aldersprig:
I actually work really well from questions, actually! (laughs at self… actually)

I think they grow in stages.
I think Jimmy is at, say, the middle of 5 stages (baby, child, teen, young adult, old adult).

Jimmy can carry Juniper on his back, and her dolly in his claws (not sure on that one)
Jimmy’s parents could carry both of Juniper’s parents on either of their backs and still fly.

They fly either mundanely or mostly-mundanely.

Perhaps they can’t fly until early adolescence?

Not sure about the two/four. Thinking four, and now I’m picturing a dragon carrying a baby in its jaw like a stork.

They enjoy flying, but locomote comfortably in cities by walking.

Juniper’s and-dragon fell in Telepathic Horse Who Fights when I was imagining the story. They travel by flying, and her imaginings are realistic, sometimes more than the stories, which can get a bit more fanciful.

C/P’ing this to my journal, if you don’t mind.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/78928.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysmeme – Moving Out (Dragons Next Door @inventrix)

Jul8

Day 30 of 30 days of Fiction: “30) Write a scene saying “good bye.”

Dragons Next Door – a prelude.

Stay tuned for the next 30 days Meme!

The ogres next door were moving out.

I should have been happy, I suppose. They were loud, smelly, and messy, and their yard trash not only stank, it attracted wyverns and other strange vermin . Their son, too, tended to throw his “toys” around randomly, and I didn’t really enjoy explaining to my children why there was a rotting leg in the yard.

To say nothing about the threat to my children.

Well, let’s be fair. There’s nothing to say. The ogres would eat human meat when it came to them, hunters and criminals and the like, but they didn’t eat the neighbors and, indeed, had been known to eat the nasty sort of human predator when they spent too much time lurking around. Messy, yes, but they liked their neighborhoods friendly.

And my kids liked them, even my oldest, who was going through one of those phases children go through, where they don’t like anyone or anything. Plus, in this neighborhood, you really, really never know what’s going to move in next to you.

Suffice it to say, their leave-taking was a mixed blessing. We threw them a little party, us and the Brownies across the street. My oldest brought them a cow. I didn’t ask where the money had come from. Cattle thieves run in our family, anyway; we have the rope great-great-grandma was hanged with displayed over our mantle (it didn’t stick, which is good for her progeny). My middle child brought them a voodoo doll; she’d been learning in school. The youngest I kept home; worried about incautious footfalls.

My husband and I made a charm for them, with hopes it would smooth things in their new home. And when they were gone, we stared across the wreckage of their front lawn, wondering who would replace them.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/72243.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysmeme, The Mommy Cases (Dragons Next Door)

Jul1

Day 25 of 30 days of Fiction: “25) Prompt: noir style.”

Dragons Next Door setting

It had been a long, grey, gritty day by the time the little man walked into my office. Cleaning floors is never a fun time, and, let me tell you, cleaning blood off of floors just adds a fine red mist to your entire day. Blood and soccer mud, well, there isn’t a dame in town that won’t tell you that’s the worst.

So there I was, up to my elbows in dirty water, tired of it all, with the stink of blood in my nose, when the little man strode in like he owned the place. My place, I might add.

“Someone stole my truck!” he declared. The boy could put on a sob story with the best of them, let me tell you, alligator tears and wide-eyed innocence. “It was Juniper! You have to stop her!”

It had been a while since I’d had a case, and, right then, I would have done anything to get off my knees and out of the dirt and blood. Especially if I could get someone else to deal with the dirt while I was gone. “Tell you what, little man,” I told him. “Get me my fedora, and I will find your truck.”

Chances his story was on the up and up were pretty slim. I knew his sort, and these sob stories almost always turned out to be song and dance routines to shift the blame. It got me off the floor, though, so I’d take it.

“Okay, Mommy.”

Mommy. That’s the name on my door.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/68044.html. You can comment here or there.