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Put me on a dollar cause I’m who they trust in, Doomsday/Addergoole (@inventrix)

Nov30

I can’t seem to quite put these in smooth sequence, but here by request is a piece after She’s a good sport I can spring her/for a Fin or even a sawbuck.

Bonus points if you can name the sources of lyrics for all three pieces in this series.

“They… they’re certainly doing well for themselves.” Luke flopped into one of Mike’s overstuffed armchairs, for once happy for the ridiculous luxury of his friend’s office. “The school seems stable. They seem to have thought of everything.”

He thought about Nehara saying If there’s one thing everyone knows about Red Doomsday, it’s that she’s prepared for everything and found himself smirking. “Mike, do you know why Drake named her Doomsday?”

“Red Doomsday? Cynara? I always figured she was the calm at the heart of the storm that was Boom. Is Boom.” Mike grimaced. “Who would’ve thought they’d last decades?”

“We’re still together, the three of us.”

“You two are too stubborn to change, and I like you both too much to leave. Besides, there’s the school.” Mike shrugged. “So, they’re doing okay?”

“They’re doing phenomenally. They grew up while we weren’t looking, Mike.”

“Kids do that.” Mike paused in the middle of a flippant hand gesture to study Luke’s face. “You mean it, don’t you? You really expected them to be the same?”

“Some people… some people really don’t change much. Like me.”

“Look, bird brain, if you think you haven’t changed, it’s only because you haven’t been paying attention. And the same thing with the kids – with any of the Students. They grow up after they leave here. All kids do.”

Luke flapped his wings. “When did you become so smart?”

“Somewhere while you were becoming a curmudgeon.”

There was nothing Luke could say that wouldn’t just prove Mike right, so, instead, he passed her crewmate the stack of bills. “They made currency.”

“Hey, they put you on the fifty.”

“Keep going.”

“That’s a good likeness of Howard on the twenty.”

“Keep going.” He found he was grinning. If he was going to be completely knocked off his feet by Boom and Cloverleaf, maybe he could at least get a smirk out of Mike.

“And… ah. Heh.” Mike snorted, then giggled, then guffawed. “The girl has balls, I’ll give her that.”

“I’d say it’s a good likeness of you.”

“And it’s on a booze bill, too. Lookit that.” Mike flipped over the Three-clover bill bearing his likeness to look at the depiction of a foaming mug of beer on the back. “Maybe I’ll have to go spend it.”

“I’m sure they’d be… pleased… to see you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/856519.html. You can comment here or there.

She’s a good sport I can spring her/for a Fin or even a sawbuck (Doomsday, Luke, @inventrix)

Nov30

Directly after Similar Features, with longer hair. Notes:
We finally named the town. It’s Cloverleaf. That makes a lot more things make sense.
The mention of Regine comes from I Have This School
Leofric’s Change is… antlers,etc.

Luke shifted uncomfortably. He was, he noted, doing a lot of that on this visit. It made him feel young again, like he was dealing with Mike, back before he’d hit his first century. “It seems,” he said, trying to sound dry instead of nervous, “like you’re going out of your way to let me know that this place is a threat.”

“A threat?” Cynara raised both her eyebrows. “No. Sir, if we’d wanted to threaten Addergoole, we would have threatened Addergoole. But, as Director Regine so kindly pointed out, our great-grandchildren, and theirs, and so on, are still promised to that place.”

“You’ve made it clear you have no fondness for the place.” He found himself sitting very still, pressing down on the balls of his feet.

“I’ve made it clear that there are people who would rather have children that weren’t promised before they were born to a place they didn’t particularly enjoy.” Cynara was still smiling. Luke found that particularly discomfiting. “Remember, every one of us who went there, our parents – or grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on – signed us up. Not one of us had a choice.”

Luke relaxed fractionally. “I’ve heard that before. It – well, there are reasons, and there are excuses.”

“And those don’t change the facts. There are a good number of students who had a particularly shitty time at Addergoole, and I’ve met a good number that had a pleasant time, even good. Many of your cy’ree, for one.”

HE felt as if he was being thrown a bone, and couldn’t bring himself to pick it up. “And yet you’re populating your school with the children of those who didn’t like Addergoole.”

“Partially, partially. And, really.” She smiled brightly at him. “The ones who did like it send all their kids to Addergoole, or to Addergoole East. Look.” She reached into her desk drawer. Luke tensed again. He could take Cynara Red Doomsday, he was certain of it. But the cost would likely be astronomical.

She pulled out a small piece of paper and slid it across the desk to him. It was blue, about the size of an old American dollar bill… it looked a lot like paper currency, actually, with a complex engraved border. The denomination, he noted, was 50. Fifty whats?

Cloverleaf, the bill read, fifty clovers.

And then he finally got to the picture in the center.

“I think our mint got a pretty good likeness, don’t you?”

Luke flipped the bill over. A lovely picture of a stack of clothing – shoes included – greeted him.

“We call it the jeans, or the pants. The one-clover is still a buck.” She was grinning so widely, she had to be near exploding from not laughing.

Luke turned the bill back to the obverse. There was no denying it was a portrait of him, wings and all. “You’re not hiding your fae blood at all, are you?”

“No. No we’re not.” She was suddenly serious. “Look. That’s you on the fifty. Here’s Drake on the five hundred. And here.” She passed him a rose-colored three-clover bill, from which Mike’s – Michelle’s – smiling face greeted him. “The thing is….” She waited politely while Luke stifled a chuckle at the Mike bill. “The thing is, we had some bad at Addergoole, some of us. But we get it, too. We survived the apocalypse in large part because of what you taught us. We were together because Addergoole put us together. And we want to teach others what we learned, everything that helped us get that far.”

She passed him a small stack of multi-colored bills. The gold-colored “buck,” he noticed, featured Leofric, complete with rack of antlers. “We’re just trying to avoid the rape and mind control, as much as possible. I’d say, building on what you taught us, not threatening it.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/856067.html. You can comment here or there.

Boom Town: Center Street

Aug14

I’ve been working on the map for Boom Town lately…

Boom Town has three Center Streets, down the center of each circle, wider and with broader sidewalks than the side streets.

Walk down any one of them within the first two years of the city’s founding, and it will be strangely Oz-like: here you are, walking down a broad boulevard, waving wheat to one side, then cotton, corn to the other, then hay. Ducks and chickens wander, their coops barely visible as little roofs above the grain.

And straight down the road, you can see the tower, twisting towards the sky, and a tiny cluster of buildings at its feet.

Walk down the roads four or five years after the city’s founding, and it will seem a bit more odd, perhaps. The road still goes straight to the tower, and the buildings near the center still rise up against the walls as if trying to reach that edifice. But the closer you get to the center, the more houses you can see, just a block away from Center Street, gathered in blocks amongst the grain.

An inn greets you at the gate and, across the street, a restaurant. Closer to the tower, merchants clamor for your business. It’s almost alive.

Six, seven years after the city’s founding, it’s harder to walk straight down Center Street. Wagons, horses, foot traffic, and the very rare automobile clog the road and the sidewalk.

Both sides of the road are lined with businesses – store fronts, restaurants, markets, and service providers (massage, hairdressing, sex…) – and down the side streets, one can see houses far more frequently, almost every other block.

Down the road towards the tower, the traffic is thicker, the storefronts fuller, and the noises and sounds of production, machines clanking, can be heard over the crowds. It’s turning into a city.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/775497.html. You can comment here or there.

Tweets: Planning a City

Aug4

I’ve been having fun plowing through ideas on Doomsday/Boom Town today, & I thought I’d share.

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I did some math, decided the circles need to be twice as big in radius, and also remembered apartment buildings, which I imagine will be in groupings near the center tower.

Still working on layout!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/763001.html. You can comment here or there.

Takes a Village to Build a City, a ficlet of Boom Town/Cynara

Aug4

It was a pretty story to say that she’d built the city alone, but Cya wasn’t – wasn’t insane in that manner.

Gaheris and Trenton helped her design the city, with books and plans spread out over her kitchen table. It was Trenton who reminded her to include places for worship, for those who had gods who weren’t murderous dead bastards.

It was Daveon she tracked down first – and it was remembering Daveon, in an old-home reminisce about The Old Days Before the War, that got her thinking about the city in the first place.

She’d met Daveon on the job, back when jobs were something she did to earn money and not to survive, spent a few very-very discreet evenings with him, and then, when the job moved on to another location, they’d remained friends. Finding fae out in the world, fae you could talk to, was rare and to be treasured; finding friends, even rarer.

Back before the world ended, Daveon had been a power plant engineer. When she’d found him, he’d been a bored farmer and a junkyard engineer. Getting him to come work for her was almost no effort at all. Getting back to the site where her city would be, that was trickier: Daveon had been living in Florida.

After she had the base wall up, after she’d built her first block of houses, the electrician was the second one she went looking for.

This time she stretched her power: Find me an electrician, who can do the work I need and is willing to relocate to do it. Find me someone who has the skills and inclination and personality I need.

More than four decades after the end of the world, that wasn’t the easiest thing to find. In the end, she found herself in Texas, making a deal with a fae on his third life since the war, or, rather, making the deal with his wife and their oldest daughter.

The third person she went looking for was a teleporter.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/762773.html. You can comment here or there.