She left her apron at home; the woman who steps into the interview chamber is coiffed, trench-coated, and pretty; when she hangs up the coat and fedora to sit down, she looks like a 30’s screen siren. Blond-brown hair falls in perfect ringlets. A tea cup comes to hand, and she smiles at the audience over it.
“I hear you have questions of me?”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/257021.html. You can comment here or there.
For Friendly Anonymous’ prompt.
Dragons Next Door has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
Passiansi was going home for the summer, which was just about forever in pixie years, but her mother had insisted, and her father had shaken his fist, and that had been it; Passiansi was packed up and shipped out Home.
Never mind that she had been born in the Big City and lived her whole life in Smokey Knoll, and her parents and their parents before them; never mind that “Home” hadn’t been home for their line of pixies in fifty years or more, sometime around their fifth birthday, the summer before they were officially adults, the family decreed that every young pixie had to visit Home, the pixie city down in the southlands.
The twelve-hour bus ride – the bus driver seemed uncertain about having a pixie on the greyhound, but shrugged and took her full-price ticket. “You paid for a full seat, you get it,” the rotund human – or maybe an ogre – had declared, and Passiansi had rode the twelve-hour drive in absolute luxury – dropped her off at an elaborate gate, huge by pixie standards but, to a girl who’d gone to a human school her whole life, not all that impressive. It wasn’t even as big as the school doors.
But it was where she was going, so she flew through it. So this was Home, then? Tiny, with aspirations to some sort of Big-ness? Hidden off the side of the highway where humans wouldn’t even notice it? A doorway between two stone walls?
She hit the shimmering line of the glamour, and was knocked backwards, nearly falling back out of the doorway. “Woah.” She hovered in place, trying to take it all in. It was a carnival and a madhouse and an explosion all rolled up into one, the buildings climbing up into the sky, stacked on top of each other like Christmas presents, the roadways sometimes just tunnels, sometimes nearly as broad as a human street. And in the streets, in little floating carts – how did they get them to float?! Were they hanging from wires? How did it all work – were pixies of every color selling what looked like just about everything.
Passiansi felt for the pocket-full of pixie cash her grandmother had handed her. “You’ll need this to get down the rue-rue,” she’d told her. “Save the rest for later.” Feeling its hard jingle, seeing the thousand beautiful carts, Passi was sure it wouldn’t be weighing her down long.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/250013.html. You can comment here or there.
This is the comment perk from the December Giraffe Call, a setting piece on Dragons next Door.
When humanity lived apart from the other sentient races of earth, and spent most of its time encountering creatures only on its particular branch of the evolutionary tree, the study of reproduction was a much simpler, more limited thing.
As the magical races, the hidden peoples, and the Secret Ones came out from the shadows and began interacting more and more frequently with humanity, in some situations living next door to them, shopping in the same places, and going to the same schools, human scientists became, as humans are wont to do, curious. Working with the scholars of many of the older races (once they discovered that many of these races had scholars, which took some time), the human leads at Johns Talbot University have begun this Survey of Reproduction Methods.
Possibly the most interesting of the non-human reproduction methods, the dragons, dracon sapiens, have developed a system depending entirely on a second species.
This symbiotic relationship took a great deal of time to explain to scientists of Johns Talbot, who at first believed that the dragons they were speaking with were talking in euphemism – “the stork does it,” is, after all, too close to the human myth we tell our children.
Dragons are, it appears, mono-sexual; all dragons have the same reproductive equipment, both having the ability to lay an egg and the ability to lay the smaller fertilizing seed. It appears that, according to some fossil record recently found, there may have been a time when these two could combine on their own.
The dragons do not speak of such a time, nor do they know how it came to be that their seed and egg would not join on their own. However, the process of fertilization is very well known to them, and that, they are willing to speak of.
A bonded pair of dragons will agree to have a child. One of them will lay an egg, placing it in a specially-prepared bed of gravel (in nesting places outside of their ancestral lands, they will have this particular type and color (coral-red) gravel trucked in for their egg beds). The egg is about the size and shape of an emu egg, although the shell is very thin. The other will place a much smaller seed-egg in the same bed.
Left to their own devices, neither will ripen or join. But with the assistance of a creature they call a stork, which is about one and a half times the size of the storks normally known to humankind and only nominally similar in appearance, the two become one and ripen. The stork places both egg and seed in its brood pouch (similar to a seahorse’s), along with its own eggs. An enzyme in the eggshell reacts with an enzyme in the pouch, and both the stork’s eggs and the dragon’s come to maturity.
Needless to say, the dragons protect the storks fiercely, sheltering them and treating them as sacred animals. Woe to the predator who attacks one!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/239954.html. You can comment here or there.
For ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kay_brooke‘s prompt
Dragons Next Door has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
I do enjoy my consulting work, and not just because it gets me out of the house once in a while. Generally, I get to help smooth the interactions between humans and other races, and I almost always get a good story out of it in the process.
Like the situation just last week. I got a call from the City Planning and Zoning board, asking me to come help with a building that a non-human consortium had purchased. It seemed that they weren’t keeping the streetfront up to code.
Because some of the races have strange opinions about aesthetics, it’s generally a good idea to bring in a translator. The City has run into problems before – things like the ogres who used to live next door to us, for example. So now they call me in at the first sign of trouble.
This one, I knew what was going on before I even read the paperwork. There are tell-tale signs that most humans don’t think to look for, and, really, how many humans really study the walls at ankle level that closely, anyway?
The consortium is a business partnership started way back in the ways of the founding of Smokey Knoll to give non-humans a human-looking face for their business interests and, sometimes, to allow them to buy through a front when prejudice rears its ugly head. Their purchases, often through fronts and shell companies, ranged all over the city, suburbs, and surrounding farmland, and were a bureaucratic nightmare to track down, as they’d intended. This time, however, they’d been rather direct.
They’d purchased a parking garage in a part of town that had seen better days, and had then, to common view, let it simply sit there and fester. Since the City offered very generous tax breaks to those who bought land in these neighborhoods, expecting that they would beautify and prettify the area, the Planning Board was understandably a little vexed.
As I said, however, I knew what was going on the moment I stepped onto the property. The bottom foot of the wall was very nicely painted, you see, and someone had installed tiny doors, including a tiny parking gate, into most of the larger doors. They had also, because all the races at some point have to deal with one another, left the large car entryway and the human door to the office intact – so I knocked.
I was unsurprised to not see the person who answered the door, or rather, to see her only when I crouched down. The place had all the classic signs of Tiny habitation.
The Mayor, whose secretary had answered the door, was happy enough to talk to me, once I explained who I was, and, what’s more, she gave me a tour. It was amazing, what they were doing with the place – an entire city within a city was going up on the top floor of the garage, complete with small skyscrapers and lush little parks. They had left a few human-sized walkways, and were in the process of refurbishing the middle layers to allow them to communicate with the larger races.
“This way,” the Mayor of Tiny-ville told me, “we can have sunshine without being overshadowed by the Big People. We’ve lived in the walls for so long, and it’s beginning to be unhealthy for us as a people. We have our own roads, our own police… what could a Biggie policeman do for us, anyway? Or to us?”
There was a lot someone fifty times larger than one could do to them, but that wouldn’t be polite. I praised their growing city – it really was beautiful – stepped carefully into their largest park – there’s nothing to make you feel gangley and clumsy like a Tiny park – and admired their bonsai maples – and then, once I had done the proper things, sat down to talk to the Mayor about hiring a painter.
In the end, it took doing something you only ever due to a small or tiny person with their permission – holding her up at my eye level – to explain the problem, but once I had, she agreed to hire some day labor to paint the place.
And, in addition to my fee, I had the delicious privilege of having been the first Middle Races person to have seen the first Tiny city in over a thousand years.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/235906.html. You can comment here or there.
Dragons Next Door has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
“So tell me,” Miss Call-me-Samantha Milligan asked Audrey, over tea on what was becoming their regular Tuesday tea date, “do you know how Smokey Knoll came to be? The neighborhood around it, the Retibya Heights, is a, ah…”
“It’s an affluent upper-class human neighborhood, yes,” Audrey answered easily. “Many of your richest students come from that neighborhood. From all of the Heights, Miss Milligan, which does actually answer your question quite tidily.”
“I’m sorry…?” she blinked uncertainly.
“When… I believe, since I was still in school at the time, that it was not dragons but a family of harpies, actually, and a grouping of centaurs. The Paints… a nice group. They came to the city, as many of the non-humans were beginning to to. They may be primarily magic and not tech users themselves, but they tend to like the conveniences of human technology.”
“Back then,” Miss Milligan mused, “it must have been very hard. Everything was so segregated. There was no accessibility at all – I took a class on that in college,” she added defensively. “These days, the classes beginning to get integrated, especially in the cities, and you have to learn how to teach to all sorts of students.”
“Exactly,” Aud answered soothingly. “They ran into all those problems. Bigotry. Lack of suitable housing. Lack of suitable anything. So, being of two of the most practical races, the Paints and, ah, yes, the harpies were the Rednesses. Their great-grandchildren live down the block from me. The Paints and the Rednesses found a neighborhood where builders were beginning to expand, creating upper-class housing. And they bought a large portion of it.
“Through agents, of course,” she added, smirking. “Through a very nice actor Dweomer who still lives down the street. They thought he was planning a stables and a mews, and thought his tastes were merely eccentric.”
“But when others found out,” Miss Milligan whispered in horror.
“Ah, yes. There were certainly… complaints. But by then the Paints and the Rednesses had pulled in other non-human investors, and they simply bought out anyone who complained. Democratic of the wallet.” She smirked. “It’s a lovely neighborhood. You should visit sometime.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/232501.html. You can comment here or there.
This is to lilfluff‘s prompt in the last Dragon Call.
It comes after/during Parent-Teacher Conference (LJ)
“Are you holding on?” Jimmy called back over a shoulder.
“Yes!” Juniper giggled. The wind was whipping past them, so she’d tucked her braid into the back of her shirt, but now she was back to holding on to the handlebar with both hands. The school below looked very small. Even Jin looked small – and Miryam and her friends looked tiny.
“I didn’t know that there were saddles for dragons,” she yelled happily. “I didn’t think people could ride… people.”
“Don’t be silly.” His ear-crests did a funny ripple that they did when dragons were happy. “You ride centaurs, don’t you?”
“I have… but centaurs are half-horse. You’re not half-anything.”
“You’ve ridden on your brother’s shoulders, haven’t you? This is the same thing!”
“Jin doesn’t have a saddle!”
“Jin can’t fly.” The ripple was longer this time, like a laugh. “Are you holding on really, really tight?”
“Real-ll-ll-ly tight,” she assured him, and clutched a little bit more firmly.
“Good! Here we go!” He ducked his head down, and then further down, to the left, his right shoulder rising up, bringing Juniper with it. She had time to start a whooping roller-coaster scream before he went all the way upside down, the straps of the harness pushing against her, holding her on, while she whooped and hollered, and then he was back upright again, his ear-crests open fully. “You liked that?”
“I loved it!” She leaned forward, hugging his neck even as the handle-bar dug into her stomach. “You and Jin are the best big brothers ever!”
She was pretty sure the way his crests wiggled like that was a good thing.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/184835.html. You can comment here or there.
For meeks!
Meeks has posted a sketch (and on LJ) of the beginning of this story.
This is part of a continuation of the series –
Over the Wall (LJ Link),
The Black Tower (LJ Link,
The Pumpkin (LJ Link,
Skeletons (LJ)
Rule Three (DW)
and
Dwimors (LJ)
Zizny lowered its whole body into a crouch, until just its eyes and nostrils were regarding me over the wall. “You’re telling me,” it rumbled, “that your mother’s family are dwimors, and that, as well, that they are poachers.”
I could not meet its eyes at once – its head was simply too big. So I settled for looking it in one eye – and was suddenly thrown by the pronoun I was using to think about this creature, this person, my neighbor. “I’m sorry,” I asked abruptly. “You used ‘cx’za’ as, I believe, a pronoun for Jimmy. What pronoun is appropriate for you?”
The large head lifted, and Zizny showed me more teeth (very clean teeth; the ogres had had horrible dental hygiene) than it-she-Zizney had ever revealed to me before. “You are asking about appropriate grammar?”
“Well,” I shrugged uncomfortably. It would be very nice, right now, to back up, rub away, something. To put more distance between myself and this rather-irritated-seeming dragon. But Zizny was my neighbor. “I’m a student of the relations between the races,” I explained nervously.
“Academic curiosity, then?”
“Not at all! It’s really not academic to want to be polite to other people, is it?” For a moment, my pride was pricked, and I forgot to be nervous. “It’s not some scholarly study when these are the people you deal with every day!”
“‘People.'” Zizny settled back down. “For a grown adult dragon, the pronoun is ‘thez.’ But I do not object to you using ‘she’ for me and ‘he’ for Cthaiden. We have taken on those roles here, after all.”
“Aah.” I smiled ruefully at thez. “Thank you. It seems proper to use, well, the proper terms. It makes me feel more comfortable.” I took a long breath. “And it’s not a comfortable subject, Zizny. I can’t do anything about my grandparents and their family. I can’t do anything about their actions. Because, yes, they were poachers, hunters, and, I’m afraid, probably still are.”
Thez pinned me with a long gaze. “You are angry.”
“I am angry,” I agreed, “and Mortified.”
“Why?”
“I’m mortified that I have family that are… bigots. Worse than bigots. Relatively horrible people. And I’m angry about that, too.”
“And at the perceived assumption that you are like them.”
“And at that,” I agreed, very quietly.
“Anyone who would assume that, Audrey, has obviously not met you.” Thez set a finger on top of the wall, the claw curled around the stones. “If you were, indeed, a ‘monster hunter,’ you would be the most stealthy, hidden one ever. You have friends, as I have seen, with every race you have encountered.”
“Almost everyone.”
“Well, some people make it very hard to be their friends. But I do have a question for you.”
“Yeah? Yes?”
It tapped me on the shoulder very gently with a claw. “You call your family ‘self-hating.’ And you call them dwimors. You, I believe, are a dwimor?”
“I am,” I agreed. “We are.”
“Do you not risk, yourself, becoming a ‘self-hating dwimor,’ with the hatred and anger you are evidencing?”
“I… oh.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/181376.html. You can comment here or there.
This is the follow-up to Rule Two (LJ), which won the poll from October’s Giraffe Call to be continued.
There was a dragon in the school parking lot, between two busses.
This would not normally have surprised or dismayed Juniper. She was used to dragons – not at school, of course; dragons, like most of the very large and very small races, had their own schools. But it was Jimmy, who had been so cranky about Miryam, sitting there on the asphalt looking like a very large decoration. And next to the Smith’s oldest-in-nest, Juniper’s big brother Jin. What was going on?
“Hey, peanut,” Jin called, before Junie could make her escape onto the bus home. “Come over here.”
Peanut. She glared at him, but he was in charge when there wasn’t a parent around. Not that that was in any way fair, but, of course, parents didn’t look at it that way. “I’m going to miss my bus, Jin.”
“It’s all right. Mom and Dad are inside talking to your teacher.”
“To Miss Milligan?” She quailed. “What did I do?”
“Relax, kiddo. It’s not you. I mean… c’mere.” He hugged her suddenly. “Look, I went through the same thing. The parents just don’t pay attention, because things were so much different when they were kids.”
“Oh. My. Gawd.” The voice came from somewhere behind Juniper. Miryam. Miryam, and, from the sounds of the giggles, Ashley and Ally, two of Miryam’s friend. Junie did her best to ignore the girl, but Jimmy was snorting steam clouds. “What. The Hell. Is that?”
Juniper stiffed. “Jimmy…”
“It’s all right,” Jimmy rumbled. “They’re hatchlings. I understand.” The dragon lifted its head to regard the bullies over the top of Juniper. “But your parents said I could give you a ride.”
“A ride?” Miryam and her friends were still behind her, staring at the dragon they swore didn’t exist, but a ride? “In the air? A real ride?” That was more important than being proven right. That was more important than anything in the whole wide world.
“In the air. Not a low-earth-orbit or anything, but a real ride.” Jimmy’s jaw dropped in what only looked like a smile if you knew what you were talking about.
Behind them, Miryam was talking about Juniper being a horrible show-off. But it sounded as if she and the others were backing away, too. Jimmy laughed.
“Hop on, Junie. It’ll be fun, and we won’t even get in trouble.”
She glanced at Jin. He wasn’t going to be sad, was he? Jin was no fun when he was sad.
He was grinning at her, though. Grinning was good. “Go on, Junie. We worked hard to get Mom and Dad to agree to this – don’t waste it. Here, I’ll give you a hand up.” He picked her up like she didn’t weigh anything at all, and set her up on Jimmy’s back, into a sort of leather car-seat-like thing. “Buckle up, here, and here, and here.” He was buckling her in, even as he said it. “And hold on tight, okay, Junes? Don’t let go.”
“I’ll be fine,” she muttered. Miryam was still watching, Miryam and her stupid friends.
“Thinks she’s too good for the busses, silly little trash girl and her trashy friends,” Miryam-the-perfect was sneering. Juniper paid lots of attention to the buckles and handle, so that she wouldn’t cry. Or shout. Miss Milligan got very upset when she shouted.
Jin smacked Jimmy’s flank gently. “She’s all set, bro. Be careful with her.”
“Don’t worry one bit. Hold on tight, Junie.” Jimmy’s wings flapped hard against the air, and he took off. Below them, as the school dwindled away, Juniper could see Jin walking very slowly towards Miryam and her friends.
~~
Audrey and Sage allowed Miss Milligan – “please, call me Samantha” – to lead them into her tiny office and try to seat them before they disabused her of the illusion that she was in charge.
Sage started. He refused, politely, the seat that was offered, preferring to stand, like a retired officer, hands clasped behind his back, between the women and the door. In his long duster, with his long goatee, Audrey imagined he must look rather intimidating.
As she had done more than a few times before, she set out to counter the image, pulling a tea pot and a thermos of hot water from her bag, as well as a tray of cookies. She unwrapped the cookies and, carefully making sure the young teacher could see her hands the whole time, measured the loose-leaf tea into the pot and added the pre-boiled water.
“Tea?” she offered, smiling benignly.
“Ah, yes, I suppose. Mrs…”
“Please, call me Audrey. Audrey and Sage is fine. Cookie?”
“Yes, please. Audrey, then, this is about Juniper. She’s a very bright girl, when she applies herself. But she has a very overactive imagination – these are very good cookies, thank you.”
“An overactive imagination? I’ve never found it excessive when she’s at home.”
“Oh, it can be easy to miss things like this if you’re not trained in it, but when we see her every day, the way a teacher does, it because much more evident. Juniper has been making up stories, making her life seem more interesting than is feasible, for attention.”
“What sort of stories?” That was Sage, in his cool, calm, investigator voice. It clearly ruffled Miss Milligan.
“Stories about eating dinner with ogres, about discussing politics with pixies…”
“You do know,” Audrey interrupted, “that we live in Smokey Knoll?”
“Well, I know Juniper goes home on the Smokey Knoll bus route. But lots of families live in the hills around the Knoll. It’s a big neighborhood.”
“Not around the Knoll,” Sage explained, with quiet precision. “In the Knoll.”
Miss Milligan, in the process of picking up her cup of tea, set it back down again, carefully. Audrey, to encourage her, picked up her own tea and sipped it.
The teacher was still staring at them. Her hands shaking, this time she did sip her tea. And then gulped it.
“Humans don’t live in Smokey Knoll,” she whispered.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/179530.html. You can comment here or there.
This is in the Dragons Next Door setting, which has a landing page here (and on LJ).
It is part of the series that includes:
Over the Wall (LJ Link),
The Black Tower (LJ Link,
The Pumpkin (LJ Link,
Skeletons (LJ)
and
Rule Three (DW)
“A lovely story.” Zizny watched me with one broad eye. “And your Sage seems like a very reasonable man, even when he was still a juvenile.”
“Very reasonable,” I agreed. “He’s a good man, my Sage.”
“But you have been avoiding telling me of your family woes. Perhaps a bargain?”
“A bargain?” I repeated dumbly. “What sort?” I’d been hoping to keep it entertained long enough to distract from the whole family issue at all.
“You clearly do not wish to discuss this, but I confess I am very curious. If you will tell me what it is that so bothers you about your family, I will tell you something, in return, that bothers me.” It paused. “About my kin-group as well, no less.”
That was, on the surface, fair. I nodded slowly. “I can do that.” Please don’t roast me. Zizny was my friend, my neighbor. It wouldn’t hold my ancestors against me, would it?
I took the longest, deepest breath I could, stalling, working up the nerve. “My father’s family are, for the most part, just poor, dirt-poor. Sometimes thieves, sometimes tricksters. There’s a thought there’s some elkin blood way back, and it would explain things, at least some things.”
“Mm. So it sounds as if they are not the ones who bother you?”
“Not really, no. As silly as that sounds.”
“It doesn’t sound silly at all. So your mother’s family? The grandmother who paid for your time at the Pumpkin?”
“Yes,” I sighed. “My mother’s family are what you’d call, or, at least, what people I know might call self-hating dwimors.” I watched Zizny’s expression, wondering if the term would be familiar… yes. Yes, that blink and all those very sharp teeth suggested that it had encountered the term before.
“Monster hunters, I believe they call themselves?”
“Yes,” I sighed. “Yes, yes they do.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/177754.html. You can comment here or there.
This is in the Dragons Next Door setting, which has a landing page here (and on LJ).
I’m pretty sure I know what race(s) mom and dad are, and will reveal it… later
“I’ve been thinking of having another child.”
Andromeda dropped that over breakfast, while their three kids were distracted with the busy work of devouring calories for the day and elbowing each other out of their personal spaces. Her husband studied her, eyes half-lidded, cautious.
It was a trueism that every child was a blessing, but in a mixed-race family, where having a child required magical intervention and a very very careful laying-in time, it was nothing to take lightly. The second of their three had nearly killed her in the second trimester. But now all three were in school, and she was getting broody again.
Alon, whose people did not, generally, mate for life, was more than a little uncertain what to do with his wife’s seemingly insatiable need for children. But over the breakfast table was not the time to discuss it. “Talk to your mother about finding an egg shell, then?” he offered, “if you’re sure….”
“I’m not,” she admitted. “Aloysius, stop bolting your… what are you eating?”
“Grilled oats with steak?” Their oldest looked up from his meal, grinning ear to ear with teeth that had come in sharp as needles. “Coach says I need to gain some weight if I’m going to wrestle.”
“Are they making up a class for you?” his younger sister taunted. “Scrawny nags who bite?”
“Take it back, Anna!” He poked her in the second set of ribs. “Take it back!”
Andromeda sighed, and met her husband’s eyes. “Really not certain,” she repeated, even as she reached out her third arm to tug their older children away from each other. “No biting at the table, kids.” She tugged Agnella to the other side of her. “It’s the clutching instinct, I’m afraid.”
Alon picked up their youngest bodily before he could bite his brother’s foreleg, and held Afram upside down, four legs waving wildly, a hoof nearly missing his father’s chin. “Maybe we could… get a dog?”
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