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Breeding Plan

May13

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s Prompt.

Addergoole has a landing page here.

Ambrus brought sandwiches to the table, listening as Regine and her brother pored over her charts and notes.

“The idea, in each case, is to find individuals who are, although half-breeds, exemplary of certain characteristics of each ‘breed.'” Regine pointed at a series of symbols on one page. “Thank you, Ambrus. Falk, don’t forget to eat. So we have, for instance, this gentleman…”

“You can hardly call him that.”

“I need his services. I will call him whatever it suits him to be called. His Name is ‘The Traveling Salesman,’ and it appears that he has made a life and a reputation of, ah…”

“Ah, indeed.” Ambrus might not be able to read much off of his mistress, but her brother was not as blank. He was embarrassed, and mildly titillated.

“Housewife’s helper?” Ambrus offered his former Master’s term.

“Exactly, thank you, Ambrus. Yes. He’s a very popular salesman on his route, I’ve been told.”

“What, exactly, does he sell?” Falk scrambled for safe conversational footing and found quicksand.

“Ah, marital aids, among other things. I’m not certain he bothers with a pitch or a product, these days.”

“And he is…”

“…exemplary of certain Daeva traits.”

“Traits you want to replicate?” Falk was, Ambrus was learning, more than a bit of a prude. He sat down to watch the show with a half a sandwich.

“Well, yes.” Regine deigned to show an emotion – amusement. “I’d say that would be a very useful trait for our project, if it breeds true.”

“And… Jezebel, Regine? I met her last night at Lady Maureen’s. She’s…”

“Exactly what we’re looking for. She will have no problem spreading her legs for money, after all.”

“And so you want to breed the child of a whore and a gigolo.”

“I’d be careful where you use those words. You might offend somebody. Yes. The gigolo and several different women of negotiable virtue, as well as… have you met Aza?”

“Aza?” Falk pursed his lips. Ambrus smiled around his sandwich. He’d met Aza. She was a beautiful, quiet, artistic woman – a florist and a painter. “She seems shy” was Falk’s opinion.

“She is an artist. I believe their child will be something special.” Regine smiled at her charts. “But I believe many of these children will be something very special. I am eager to see how they turn out.”

Edited to add: I meant to put a footnote on here and then I forgot.

Jamian of Addergoole is Aza’s son by the Travelling Salesman. Ivette is his daughter by Lady Maureen; Joff is his son by Jezebel.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/338433.html. You can comment here or there.

Cursed

May12

For rix_scaedu‘s Prompt.

Addergoole has a landing pagehere.

Before Monster.

“Monster.” The witch twisted in Barypos’ arms and spat in his face. “Monster. Cretin. Beast.”

He lay his knife at her throat. “Soldier.” Her language wasn’t his, but they were close enough, and a warrior learned what he had to, fighting in these lands that weren’t home. “Father. Son.” He shrugged in apology. “I fight where I have to.”

“You killed my husband. My son. My baby.”

“They would have killed me. There is a war going on.” He was not very good with words, in any language, but she should understand that. Instead, she clawed at his wrists, trying to get free. “Hold still, and I won’t have to hurt you.”

“Won’t have to hurt me?” She stared at him in naked pain. “You’ve taken everything. What do I care what you do with this body, when you’ve already taken the heart from it?”

“Widows live.” He knew this. “Your people will need their sons and daughters. Stop fighting, and live again. The war will end eventually.”

It did no good. She fought and spat against him and, when that did no good, she began swearing, cursing him. It was only when she had gone deep into her own language that he recognized Words in the curses. By then, it was too late.

“What you have taken, you will lose. What you have stolen, I’ll steal from you.” He dropped her, but he had no Words against this. He hadn’t know this could be done. She was Working against his future. Against his soul. “No love. No kin. No home. No warm memories of fire. No hearth to sleep near. No wife to keep you warm. All this, monster, I take from you. All that you have taken… until you have paid for every life of my people you have stolen.”

She kept speaking, but it was lost on Barypos. Her curse was already twisting his mind, and her words were like the jibbering of beasts to his ears.

“Never more will any man want to call you brother,” she hissed in his unknowing ear, sealing her curse for the millenia.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/337480.html. You can comment here or there.

Derailed, Part 4, a story of #Addergoole Apoc

May7

After Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

“Shit.” He skidded downwards, feet first, plowing towards his sudden and unexpected assailant, hoping to knock her off guard. She fired, the bullet ricocheting off the metal window frame, and swore back at him. In Russian, no less.

In the moment it took her to shift her grip on the gun, Luke dove for her wrist and managed, barely, to grab it. She was fast, violent, and clearly intent on doing him damage. “Damnit, stop that.” He grabbed both of her wrists and tried to bend the bayonet out of her grip with a foot. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I want to hurt you.” Her accent was thicker than Agmund’s, but Luke had figured out worse. “I want to kill you.” She made it sound downright gleeful.

“I don’t want to die, sorry.” He peeled the gun out of her hand, finally. Where was Agmund? He dodged her teeth and a kick aimed at his nuts. He was going to need at least four hands to handle her. “Look, I’m just here to pick up a package.”

“Everything is like that to you. Package. Shipment. You are no better than the rest.” Her teeth caught him on the bicep and went for blood; Luke gritted his teeth and held on tight. If he lost her wrists, she was going to be in the wind.

“Agmund!” He shouted as loud as he could. “Damn it, Bear! I need a hand!”

“You will need two soon.” She was, Luke realized, trying to gnaw off his arm. He wondered idly if she had the ability to do so. Less idly, he wondered where the hell the Bear was.

“Need something?” It wasn’t the Bear, but it was the next best thing right now: Caity popped up behind him. “Oh, you made a friend.” With surprising strength, the tiny woman grabbed the back of the girl’s hair and pulled, muttering Words under her breath as she did so. “Oh!”

The girl’s face was red with Luke’s blood when Caity finally forced it up, but that wasn’t, Luke was pretty sure, why she’d exclaimed. They’d seen those eyes before. “I guess you found her.”
.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/333888.html. You can comment here or there.

Addergoole Sillyfic

May4

“Aw, that’s adorable. Look at those little ears.”

“Adorable, I’ll give you adorable!”

“Shh, don’t talk. It ruins the effect. Man, that’s adorable. Clothes off.”

“mmngg..”

“Oh, come here, I want to pet you. You look adorable, you really doo… and that frown. That’s the cutest frown I’ve ever seen. Maybe a badger Change? Or one of the mystery Changes, I suppose. At least you’re not a skunk or something. Let me pet you. Forget sex, I could just pet you all day…. Ow! What the hell, what did you do to me? Are those… ow! Quills, ow, shit… OW!”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/332969.html. You can comment here or there.

Beer

May4

“I need a beer,” Cya informed her Kept.

“So go get one.” Fafnir had not yet, in the week since Hell Night, adjusted to being Kept; indeed, he was, if anything, adjusting in the other direction. “Better yet, get me one, too.”

He would have to learn. She had. Then again, she’d never required that much correction.

And Dysmas’ hand had been subtle, subtle enough that it had taken her all of last year to work out everything he’d trained into her – and she was still finding pit-traps.

She stared at her Kept for a moment, wondering how she was going to handle him. She didn’t have her former Keeper’s subtlety.

She didn’t have to be subtle, she realized. She didn’t want a pet, and she didn’t want Fafnir cleaning up messes in his brain for the rest of his school time. She hadn’t exactly been tidy with Cabal, after all.

He still talked to her. She couldn’t have done that badly, right?

“What?” She was, she realized, still staring at this Kept. Deciding what to do with him.

“When you are Keeper, you get to tell your Kept what to do. Right now, I’m Keeper. That means I get to tell you what to do.”

“Oh, come on, Cya, don’t…”

She frowned repressively at him, and was mildly surprised to see that it worked. “Do not tell me what to do.”

He jerked a little as the order hit home. “Cy…” The order cut him short and he settled for glaring at her.

“If I need to give you a direct order every time I want you to do something, I will. It is my preference that you learn to anticipate.”

“I’m not your fucking slave!”

“I could release you and go get someone else to Keep.” She didn’t normally snap like that; maybe she should try with someone else.

“Or we could just go back to dating. The dating was nice.”

“This is how things are done in Addergoole. This is dating, for here.” She closed the distance between them, looking down at him. She didn’t want to trade him in; she just wanted him to act like a proper Kept. “Go get me a beer, Fafnir.”

He stood up as if he was on puppet strings. “Goddamnit, Cya, what the hell?”

“And don’t complain about it,” she added, possibly a little vindictively. “If you can manage to not make sullen miserable faces the whole time, you can get yourself a beer as well.”

His shifted his face into a rictus grin and then, after a moment of apparent thought, managed a halfway decent normal expression. “Better?”

She wondered if he’d realized he had to go past her crew to get the beer. “Better. Get yourself one, too, if you want.”

He didn’t say thank you, but she didn’t really blame him. She watched him go, contemplating his tail and the nice ass underneath. Maybe next year she should get someone who didn’t want to fight it the whole time. There were nice subby boys out there, plenty of them at Addergoole, and as a fourth-year student – a fourth-year student in Boom, no less – nobody was going to mess with what she wanted.

But right now she had Fafnir, heading back with two beers and not-quite-a-scowl, and she needed to deal with him. “Thank you.” He’d even remembered which beer she liked.

“Cya…” He paused, with an expression she recognized as finding-the-edges-of-an-order. “Why are you doing this to me?”

It was a fair question. Did she have a fair answer? She ran her hands down his back a few times while she thought about that. Because this is the way it is didn’t quite seem like enough.

“Because I need you to not fight this, to not fight me.” That, at least, was honest. “Because, Fafnir… you are what I get to have for myself, in this place. Next year, if you have your own Kept, you’ll understand, maybe. But this year. This year, I need you to be mine.”

He turned to face her, resting his forehead on her shoulder. “I don’t like it,” he muttered. “But…”

The but, she knew, was when she had him. She fell silent, and let him surrender on his own.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/332485.html. You can comment here or there.

Iridium Hole

May2

After Silent Song

At some point, Porter mused, he’d learn not to step through doors without looking first. His foot went down, and then down further and, surprised, he tumbled through the door, fell, and landed hard some twenty-plus feet below the doorway. A moment later, an invisible something fell on top of him.

“Ow.” He squirmed, trying not to touch the invisible Librarian on top of him. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate groping and wouldn’t take “I couldn’t see what I was touching” as an excuse. “So, ah.” They were, as far as he could tell, in the bottom of a pit, shaded dark blue and black with sparkles in the walls. The floor under them was cold, hard, and uncomfortable, and Porter was pretty sure he’d sprained his tail. “Did I mention ow? So, um, ma’am, I opened your door.”

A sign appeared a moment later. “Thank you.” He wasn’t sure how she managed to get sarcasm across in her tidy handwriting, but it was clearly there.

“Hey, you didn’t have to fall after me. I can open another door if you’ll point to a wall and, sorry, um, get off of me?”

The weight lifted and an arrow appeared. Looking up, and then back down at the wall, it was clear her idea was “keep going forward.”

“I’m never going to make it to my date on time, am I?” he sighed, and opened a Door.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/331210.html. You can comment here or there.

Derailed, Part 3

Apr30

After Part One and Part Two

He barely had time to duck before she hit him with her purse.

Luke ducked and rolled, coming up on his feet on the other side of the aisle, and missed another woman’s purse-swing by a bare inch. “Damnit, ladies,” he muttered, but they were hearing no reason. He ducked a third purse, and grabbed the man tackling him as gently as he could, even as he muttered the strongest, quickest “sit calmly” Working he could come up with.

As he fled the zombie-stares of the first car, he worried he might have gone too far. It would wear off soon – he hoped. He wasn’t all that good at emotion-control.

He had almost lost the thread of his search Working in the meantime. Where was she, where was she… there. Two cars away, he was fairly certain. And here he was faced with…

“Shit.” The gunfire started the moment he opened the car door, one bullet managing to graze his arm before he shouted up a shield. Guns! Damnit, he knew better than to be taken by surprise by these people! He was being clumsy.

No time to beat himself over it now. He plowed forward, using sheer force Workings to push people out of the way. Even if they were shooting him, they were probably normal humans, and he didn’t want to kill them if he didn’t have to. They could, after all, be their enemy’s puppets.

“Abatu kwxe,” gasped out one of the fallen gunmen. Luke whirled, just in time to see the man – woman, actually – pointing a gun at him. A gun with a wooden bayonet.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/329781.html. You can comment here or there.

Welcome to Addergoole

Apr30

For Friendly Anon’s Prompt.

Addergoole has a landing page here.

Directly after Reunion (LJ)

I’ve been trying to write more discrete stories and less trailing-off scenes but this bit refuses to go that way, sorry!

In the end, it was Aelgifu who cleared her throat. “You’re a bit early.” She gentled her voice as much as she could, knowing that behind her, Io and Callie were trying not to panic, and not to scream. “School doesn’t start until September.”

The boy squirmed. She could remember Ib – the nightmare in the back of the dances, the he-always-seemed-so-normal creep in the halls. She could remember Callie’s nightmares. This boy had none of that. He was just a kid, not that much older than their kids. “I know,” he admitted weakly. The small group – it had just gotten bigger, again, Ivette and Joffe from one direction, Kendra and… Uberto? from the other. Worry about that later. – the whole group was staring at him. “What?” If the boy squirmed any more, he’d come out of his skin.

“I’ll be back,” she murmured to Io. She moved forward, putting body-language distance between the growing crowd and herself, putting herself on the same side of the invisible line as the boy. “You look rather like someone we used to know.” She kept her voice both quiet and non-confrontational, and kept walking, encouraging him to walk with her with a hip-turn and a warm smile. “Can I buy you something from the soda machine?”

“What? Uh, no, thanks, I have some cash.” He pulled a few bills out of his pocket. “So, uh, that’s why everyone’s staring? Mom said I had some brothers I’d never met… I’m Vilmar, by the way.” He had the Addergoole-wince at his name down already.

“Aelgifu.” She shook his offered hand. “So you’re here early…?” It was easier than answering his question, at the moment.

“Yeah, uh. My mom.” He frowned, rolling his shoulders forward. “She’s got plans for the summer…?” He sounded as if he was trying it out, to see how it would work. Ayla chose to pretend to believe him, and countered with a cheerful lie of her own.

“Well, I’m sure the Director won’t mind you showing up early. We’re here for the ten-year-reunion,” she added.

Vilmar’s glance, first at her, and then at the other women there. Women who, she realized, had almost universally Masked as their teenaged selves. His grin was nothing like his possibly-brother and entirely like a teenaged boy. “Hunh. I might like this school.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/329723.html. You can comment here or there.

Problem-Solving

Apr19

For wyld_dandelyon‘s Prompt.

Addergoole has a landing page here.

The thing was, Fuchsia liked her Keeper. She’d liked Pepper, in a sort of awkward way all around, even before he’d tricked her into becoming his Kept and turned out to be even shorter than she’d thought, a tiny pixie of a guy, which was sort of unfortunate in any school and really unfortunate in Addergoole.

Most of the time, Pepper was a pretty awesome guy. He was teaching her about Fae stuff, and helping her figure out the magic, but more than that, she just liked talking to him. For having grown up in totally different places, in totally different ways, they seemed to have a lot in common. If they could have just been friends, or even friends-and-maybe-lovers, well, that would have been great. And maybe she could have helped him with his mess a little easier.

But as it was, every time she tried to talk to him about it, she got another order.

“I don’t want to talk about it” wasn’t quite an order, that’s what she got the first morning. So she waited a few days, feeling her way around the edges of it, but she’d say something innocent, like “I like your hair today,” and he’d explode, or, worse yet, cry.

Fuchsia hadn’t seen a guy cry since she was five and she’d punched a boy on the playground for making fun of her name. She didn’t know what to do with it with Pepper. She tried making fun of him for it, but that just made him yell at her and tell her to shut up.

Fuchsia did not like being ordered to silence.

Poking him, or shaking him, or even trying to walk away and give him his space, none of those worked either. “He doesn’t act like any boy I know,” she complained to their mutual Mentor. “I don’t know what to do.” Professor Valerian smirked. “Have you tried treating him like a girl?

“No…” It gave her food for thought. The next time Pepper blew up over something innocent – she tried to brush his hair, missing physical contact with him – she asked him “what’s wrong?” and hugged his shoulders.

That didn’t work either. He curled up away from her. “Don’t ask me that.”

“Maybe your friends…?” She knew he had friends, even if they weren’t very good ones. They sat together at meals, at least.

“No! No, don’t tell them! Don’t ask them, either.”

“Okay, okay.” She tried, over the next few days, a couple other lines of attack. Every time she tried, she got another order. Everything she asked made him angry. Just shutting up and hugging him, that worked sometimes. She did a lot of that.

But he was still having bad dreams, and he was still jumpy about the weirdest things. And she couldn’t tell anyone. She certainly couldn’t tell Mendosa; he’d forbidden her to even think about him near the school psychiatrist. And she still didn’t know what was wrong.

“Don’t ask that. Don’t talk about that.” She was getting so many orders, pretty soon, he was going to end up ordering her not to breathe. And he was miserable and twitchy, and the hugging was working less and less often. She had to do something.

Don’t talk about that. Don’t ask about that. She chewed over it for days, looping around every order in her mind while she waited for an opportunity. Finally, she caught Wix, the closest thing Pepper had to a best bud, at lunch before Pepper showed up.

“Have you talked to Pepper about it?” she asked, putting as much emphasis on “it” as she dared, and hoping that there was an “it” for Wix to know about.

“About Jayline, you mean?”

“Jayline?” She knew the woman, a giant slab of muscle with a blue-jay hairdo, with a group of cronies in place of friends.

“Pep didn’t tell you? She Kept him last year… she’s a real hard case.”

“Jayline?” Burgundy plopped down in her seat next to Wix. “Did he talk to Mendosa like we told him? That bitch is good at leaving brain-booby-traps.”

Fuchsia couldn’t have spoken if she wanted to. She was feeling guilty having gone this far. Pepper clearly didn’t want his friends to know. She shouldn’t have said as much as she had.

“Here he comes now. Don’t worry, Foo, we’ll take care of it.” Burgundy stood back up, grabbing Wix and dragging him along. While Fuchsia watched, fighting against wave after wave of bond-panic, his friends picked Pepper up by his arms – he was a pixie, he weighed almost as little as Fuchsia herself did – and carried him out the door.

Uncomfortable hours later, he slipped into their shared room, looking drained and pale. “Foo…” His wings were drooping. Even his hair was drooping. But he wasn’t yelling.

Silently promising herself that she was going to lace Jayline’s food with poison Ivy, Fuchsia hugged her Keeper, and kept on hugging him. When he whispered “thank you,” she thought maybe everything was going to be okay.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/325303.html. You can comment here or there.