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Second Thoughts, Third Thoughts – A Patreon Story

Mar11

A story of going-to-Doomsday-Academy

“Here we are.” Adelaide looked at her three children, then looked back at the gate in front of them. She stole another glance at her kids and sighed.

Ameera had gone to Addergoole two years ago. This would be her third year there, and she looked both worried and eager. Lorccán was going this year. He looked eager. He didn’t really know what he was getting into.

But first, they were going to Doomsday. She wasn’t sure if she was going to tell Addergoole about her third child – and Doomsday started years earlier than Addergoole, anyway. Continue reading →

Soft Target, a drabble of Cloverleaf

Mar9

When the boss told him Cloverleaf was a soft target, Coty should’ve known better.

When the boss said the walls would come down easy with this new earth-caster, Cody really should’ve known better.

When the boss said that the guards at Cloverleaf were glorified paper-checkers and errand-runners and there was no military to speak of, Coty should’ve walked away, whatever the contract said.

When the boss screamed onward instead of retreat, Coty should’ve grabbed the boss and ran.

When the woman asked Coty if he wanted a ten-year jail sentence or a five-year collar…

Maybe he should’ve picked jail time.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1074251.html. You can comment here or there.

Building The Apiary, a ficlet of Cya/Doomsday

Jan21

This time, she didn’t do it by herself.

When she’d built Cloverleaf, she hadn’t been alone, not all the time. Her daughter Mai had “helped”, but Mai had been five years old, and there was only so much help even the most enthusiastic five-year-old could be. She’d brought in specialists, she’d called in favors, and she’d had company.

This time, she started by having cy’Underground survey and archive the area, pulling out anything that might possibly be of use to future generations and documenting the rest. She called in a team of people to break down the remaining bits of buildings, and another team to sort all of the bits into usable pieces.

She levelled the ground and raised the hill herself.

“The Apiary”, Leo had said, and a beehive it would be. But this was Cloverleaf’s project, not Doomsday’s, and that meant she wasn’t working alone.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1051605.html. You can comment here or there.

Cloverleaf Character Study: Tijana the knitter

Jan14

When Tijana Sheffield had been twenty-five, a redheaded woman had walked into her town and walked directly up to Tijana.

She’d been talking to the whole small marketplace, but her eyes never left Tijana in her little knit-goods booth. “Cloverleaf needs craftspeople. It needs farmers. It needs workers. And in return, it has running water, electricity, and tall walls. It has security, and room to grow and change.”

Most of the tiny town of Warm River didn’t want room to grow or to change. They liked their nice, secure place with few bandits and no fairies.

Tijana had left, and Amos the baker’s son. They’d been scolded, fussed at, complained at, and warned, but both of them knew it was better if they left. A town and tight and small as Warm River, strangeness wasn’t wanted or needed. It was better for everyone if they left.

Now Tijana was thirty-five, married, with three children and a thriving business. She’d married an inventor (or, as he called himself, a re-inventor) who had a knack for reading old stories and figuring out a way to duplicate what the ancients had had before the war, for taking old mechanisms and making them go again.

And she’d gone from a small business knitting for Warm River to a thriving shop. The red-haired woman, the Mayor of Cloverleaf, liked sweaters, and thus much of Cloverleaf liked sweaters. She had two apprentices working the knitting machines that her husband had rigged up, and she kept her own hands busy with increasingly complicated patterns on the hems, necklines, and cuffs. She was growing, improving. And you couldn’t walk down Main Street without seeing a couple of her sweaters and a couple more copies.

And now the Mayor wanted to buy two of her sweaters. Tijana picked up her wool and started knitting. She had a couple new ideas, and if anyone would appreciate the innovation, it was going to be the Mayor.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1047002.html. You can comment here or there.

Angelic Visitation

Aug14

This comes after The Storm Prince of Death and @inspectrCaracal’s response here. It is set in the Fae Apoc, at least 60 years after the 2011 apocalypse.  Yoshi is the son of Cynara, often mentioned.  

⚡

Yoshi loved his parents, he really did, but sometimes he just needed to get out into the world and get away from them. The same was true of Dáirine, with whom he had a strange sort of on-again, on-again relationship that neither of them quite understood.

To get away, he’d taken to wandering the world — a family trait, it seemed. There was a lot of world out there to see; Yoshi had a feeling that he could travel for a century and not see half of it. But he made a point of checking in every year or so. There was nothing more embarrassing than having your mother appear out of nowhere because you hadn’t remembered to visit.

It was on the way back “home” — to Cloverleaf, which had never been home but was the place his family lived — that Yoshi encountered the little village. It was friendly to a passing stranger, something not all towns would do in this rough age, but their friendliness had a cautious edge to it. Continue reading →

Cloverleaf: A Basic Write-up of the City

Jul31

Cloverleaf is built approx 50 years after the apocalypse, or about (plus or minus 7 years) 2061.

Notably, it was built almost entirely by magic, and as such the walls show no block marks, no seams.

Built about 14 miles (23 km) northeast of Helena, Montana – to take advantage of the prewar hydroelectric dam there – Cloverleaf takes the shape of three large (approx. 1 mile diameter) walled circles, touching at one edge.

Two of these circles hold farmland; the third holds the city of Cloverleaf, itself taking the shape of three overlapping walled circles with a very tall tower in the center (where the three circles overlap). Three gates pierce the outer wall, one for each inner circle, and from those gates to the Tower in each circle runs a wide “Main Street.”

Each Main street is lined with inns and restaurants close to the gates, stores and shops and light industry (home crafts) in the middle of the circles, and apartment buildings then factories (still rather light industrial – think fabric, grain mills, stuff I haven’t quite figured out yet) closest to the Tower.

On the wide sidewalks on Main Street, street vendors abound, often taking over much of the street as well.

Most traffic is foot or horse-and-carriage; cars are rare although jury-rigged car-to-carriage/wagon set-ups are not uncommon, esp. in traders coming from the outside.

Fae are common, welcome, and visible here. Guards are visible at the front gate — they check in all guests with a level of interest that ranges from “casual hello” to “three-hour interrogation.” They also patrol the city, and so, while there is crime, it is not rampant.

Off Main Street, streets branch to either side in a very regular pattern. There are quite a few parks and green spaces, punctuating neighborhoods of houses, many of which have a certain sameness to them and a very pointedly stone construction: stone buildings with slate roofs, many painted or tinted in brilliant colors. Yards are big by pre-War city standards, big enough that you could, if you want, subdivide each yard and put a second house on it. Houses are small by pre-war Suburban standards but large enough to comfortably house large families.

Every house has running water and electricity; phone is not a thing and neither is TV but there are radios and radio programs. The library is huge and full of a very random, completely un-curated selection of “anything we can find.” There is also an art gallery – similar collection style – and a history museum.

Much of what is available is industrial-era technology, and there are a lot of scrounged and repurposed items, especially metal things.

Fashion is driven by a few very visible people, and has a sort of Turkish-meets-bazaar-meets-medieval feel much of the time. Cotton, linen, and wool are produced in/near Cloverleaf; the dyes are still mostly natural, except those things Meentiked up magically.

The Clover is the unit of currency; a 100-C bill is approx one day’s salary for a basic job.

The political system is a representative democracy under an unelected benign dictator; each circle has (at the beginning) 2 representatives into a council. There is also an appointed Administrator who works much like a VP/Speaker of the House. Economy is lightly taxed capitalism with basic needs for all citizens, the guard system, and maintenance of the city paid for by tax revenue.

Citizens are provided free basic hotel-style housing; there are no homeless in Cloverleaf (unless they want to be. Still working on that). Very basic food/clothing needs are also provided.

Cloverleaf does not, as far as I know, have an army.

It does have a Leo.

edits: Within ~20 years of its founding, Cloverleaf has a weather-moderation system intact. It does not entirely eliminate weather in the city, but what it does is raises the wintertime temperature sufficiently that longer-season crops can be grown, and that the punitive northern winters aren’t nearly as punitive.

Also, a mile away from the city or so on the non-river side, there is a hundred-acre forest butting up against and climbing the side of the foothills. Its trees are arranged in a disturbingly regular grid pattern, but it otherwise gives off the feeling of a very natural forest – plenty of plant diversity, wildlife diversity, undergrowth and such.

As the years go on, the forest is expanded by about a acre a year, with trees that are speed-grown up to the ~40-year-age mark and then allowed to go wild. There are probably also more naturally planted trees, as Cloverleaf citizens are allowed to hunt and farm this woods, but encouraged to maintain it as a long-term resource.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/964849.html. You can comment here or there.

Venison, a rather short story of Cloverleaf (@inspectrcaracal)

Jul24

(This one born out of a dream in a rather different way than the last dream-story)

They didn’t hunt venison in or around Cloverleaf.

Oh, sure, sometimes someone snagged a buck for their table, but they did so on the sly, and they didn’t hang trophies.

There wasn’t a law against it — there were very few laws in Cloverleaf against what you could hunt, sell, or eat in terms of food, and they mostly said “don’t hunt or eat sentient beings” and “don’t sell poison or other non-foods as food.” But early on in the city’s life, someone had shown their founder-and-leader a prize trophy buck.

The proud hunter — and everyone around him — had noted the way Cya Red Doomsday went pale and a little green. And then someone took a long look at Leofric, one day in Autumn when his Mask was down.

Word got around, slowly but surely. And nobody hunted venison around Cloverleaf anymore.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/961058.html. You can comment here or there.

Train-of-Thought Cloverleaf Worldbuilding considerations

Jul21

went like this:

– Cya starts trade routes relatively early on, as soon as she has trade goods in the city
– because of the climate control, Cloverleaf can produce crops not otherwise available that far north.
– Ooh, flour sacks. They have cotton… https://blog.etsy.com/en/2011/feed-sacks-a-sustainable-fabric-history/, http://www.buchanancountyhistory.com/feedsack.php
– (From that thinking about IRL examples skipped to)
– Baby Boxes: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22751415, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_package
– Cya does a lot of basic-standard-of-life stuff, I bet they do this
– there are probably unwanted children. State-run creche/adoption center? Probably
– what about abortion? Oh, bog, abortion.
– “Government cheese” and basic rations? Still thinking about details here
– Free hostel-style housing, free xx months in actual housing – not designed to eliminate poverty but to eliminate some of the horrors of poverty
– booming fabrics market as well as the custom-made fashion set by people like our printing-press guy
– And BOOKS! Entertainment! !!
– Spices, spices are very important
– how much of the means of production does our dictator control? How much does she allow to be controlled by the elected government? (how much of a fascism is she okay with and does she slowly relinquish control?)

Side note: I figured out why she runs it as a dictatorship!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/960419.html. You can comment here or there.

Cya’s Printing Press, a story of Cloverleaf

May21

Johannes enjoyed his new job quite a bit.

The work was rewarding and just challenging enough to be interesting. His co-workers were pleasant, the pay was good, and it left him plenty of time to pursue his primary hobby.

What was more, in Cloverleaf, he and Adella didn’t have to hide. He didn’t have to keep a shop full of fabric and paper just in case someone wanted to see him making something. He didn’t have to Mask if he didn’t want to. He didn’t have to live in fear of a slip-up dooming both him and his sister. In Cloverleaf, people walked around un-Masked all the time. In Cloverleaf, if you said you were fae at the front gate, they asked you what your skills were.

Which was, incidentally, how Johannes had gotten his job. He’d been in the middle of the immigration paperwork when a red-headed woman had grabbed his hand. “You can Create. That’s what you said, right? Create and objects, and you can do cloth? Paper?”

“…yes.” The woman had the most phenomenal mink stole… no, it was her tail, wrapped around her leg.

“Good. I need a printing press. I hope you need a job.”

“…my sister.” he was not normally left this without words.

“We’ll find her a job too. You – you I have an immediate need for.” She’d hesitated for a moment, and then added, “I’ll throw in lodgings, a good two-bedroom house near work. But I really need you.”

Ad thus Johannes had found himself settled in a very nice office in a building called simply The Press, teamed with a woman whose power allowed her to take in the entire contents of a book and whose Words allowed her to download that information into someone else’s mind without utterly overwhelming them. Zayda didn’t talk much, but since she spent large portions of the day in Johannes’ brain, they didn’t need much conversation.

The most interesting part of their job came when the Press got its hands on a book – often borrowed-slash-requisitioned from new immigrants to the city. Zayda would absorb the text, and then Johannes would get the artistic task of reproducing the feel and heft of the book, although often in better shape than the original. There was a craftsmanship to it, and Johannes marked every book with their combined chop with pride and a sense of a job well done. The Press supplied both the Library and a book store, which, Johannes was given to understand, paid most of his salary.

The best part of his job, however, was that it gave him time to pursue his hobby, and it gave him plenty of practice with the Words he needed. In Cloverleaf, nobody thought it strange if he and Adella had a new outfit each day, or if Adella sold copies of their outrageous get-ups in her little shop. Indeed, a small, select group of people might know that he was one of the two people who made Cloverleaf’s money (as well as the city’s books) – but everyone knew him as the guy with the best clothes. And wearing a Johannes original was quickly becoming a status symbol in this little town.

Johannes was enjoying his new life quite a bit. And, on top of everything else, he got to make money.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/944884.html. You can comment here or there.

Dollar bill y’all

Dec1

After Put me on a dollar cause I’m who they trust in.

Luca=Luke (Luca was what he was called when younger)

Mike/Michelle/VanderLinden/Meckil are all the same person.

Akatil Yixox teaches tinkering and “unutu,” worked objects (artifacts?) at Addergoole.

It was just too tempting. Mike left the 3-clover bill on his desk for a week, turning it over and over.

Regine refused to acknowledge that Cloverleaf or Doomsday Academy were anything but the pitiful games of angry children; when DJ had suggested trading with them for goods, the Director had actually thrown the Procurer (and the school’s buying agent; DJ was good at the job) out of her office.

But the currency sitting on Mike’s desk spoke far more loudly than Regine’s chill, snipped answers. It was well-done, for one, with at least three Workings embedded it in. Akatil Yixox had raised both eyebrows, and then said, with some consternation, “this is not the work of my Students. But it’s not the work of yours either, is it?”

It was a good question, and not one Luca had been thinking of, clearly. Luca, bless the bird-brain’s heart, had been too busy flailing his hands and wondering how the children grew up so big.

Considering his wife was the daughter of one of those children, Mike thought perhaps Luca needed to think out his reactions a little bit better. Then again, Luca had a bit of a thing for those far too young for him.

That was far, far beside the point, maddening as it was. The point was, the currency was fascinating. Having a bill with one’s own face on it was absolutely delicious. And having a fifty with Luca‘s face on it… Mike slept with that bill under his pillow, but only when he slept alone.

He had to do it. He had to see this city.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/857503.html. You can comment here or there.