Buffy: the Invitation (an Addergoole Crossover), Part XI

Buffy: The Invitation

Part I: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1096503.html
Part II: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1100922.html
Part III: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1104619.html#cutid1
Part IV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1108537.html
Part V: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1112216.html
Part VI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1124762.html
Part VII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1134781.html
Part VIII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1139412.html
Part IX: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1146552.html
Part X: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1155478.html
Part XI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1164418.html

Help! I’d like clever individual titles for these chapters as well – now taking suggestions for 11 and this one!

Their guide was looking at Buffy as if she had grown a second head.

“Ah just wanted to have a little fun.” She spoke slowly, as if talking to a dangerous animal. That, Xander considered, was probably pretty accurate. “This place, I mean, people are only the new folks once, and if someone spooks ‘em bad, well, that’s not fun. I figured Ivette and Anwell in the hot tub—”

“And Ardell,” Xander interjected, although he couldn’t have told anyone why, “don’t forget Ardell.”

“Yes, but Ardell don’t look like nothing except handsome.”

“..I wasn’t looking that closely,” Xander admitted. “The, uh, wings, yeah, those were a bit of a hang-up.”

“…That’s it, you see, I figured that would be, well, shocking without being terrifying. But y’all ain’t shocked. You ain’t surprised. You’re barely upset at all. Are y’all ringers?”

“Ringers?” Buffy frowned. “Like, bell-ringers? No, we don’t do that, although once I hit a—”

Willow coughed loudly.

“Ah mean,” Magnolia continued, with exaggerated patience, “did y’all know about this stuff before you came here?”

“Well, now,” Xander babbled, “that depends on what you mean by ‘know’ and of course by ‘stuff’ and then there’s ‘before’ and ‘you’… and ‘y’all’…”

“What Xander means to say,” Willow cut him off, “is that there’s a lot of stuff to know about. And it might not be all that related to, ah, demon girls doing — things, doing things — in the hot tub, which ew, unsanitary — and we’re not in the habit of sharing the things we do know with people, and certainly not to see if they freak out!”

“Ah’m sorry, ah’m sorry.” Magnolia ducked her head and offered a smile that she probably meant to be contrite. Xander didn’t buy it, and yet, he rather thought he ought to… anyway. “So you knew about… something here. Demons, hrrm. Usually when we hear people shout ‘demon’, they’re a little less clinical about the whole thing.”

“Well,” Willow explained, “you have to know what sort of demon you’re dealing with. I mean, the difference between little black wings and big blue wings, it can be the difference between—”

“Succubus or Mara?” Magnolia offered.

“What? Succubi are a — oh, I should really stop saying things are myths, shouldn’t I?” Willow’s brow wrinkled worriedly. “And mara, oh, hrrm, those are… Buddhist demons, we haven’t encountered any of those, but they look very dangerous.”

“I’d be careful,” Magnolia said, suddenly looking serious, “about that word, ‘demon.’ I’m not sure what you’re used to, but around here, calling, hrrm, mara demons could get you with some upset people.”

Willow’s frown deepened. “I’ve never heard of a demon that minded being called a demon, I mean, among the sort of demons you can have a conversation with. Oh, dear, is this a school for demons? Because we’re not, you know. We’re — maybe a little strange, but we’re not demons, no…”

“You know,” Magnolia answered slowly, “I’m beginnin’ to think that you three and I have a different definition of the word ‘demon.’ You’re talking like these are, say, people on the street calling themselves demons?”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say people, not about most of them at all,” Xander put in.

“Not helping, Xander,” Buffy frowned. “So, you’re talking about people that look like demons and don’t call themselves that. We’re talking about — oh, man, Giles is gonna kill me, but he knew, didn’t he?” She turned to Willow, who made a sympathetic face. “He had to have known, that’s why with all the lectures on not… ‘punching’ people and all that. Okay.” She turned back to Magnolia. “This is supposed to be totally of the secret, but I’m talking about things from actual different dimensions, most of whom are not fuzzy wuzzy cute girls. Well, some of them are, but they like to eat teenaged boys, too.”

“That was only once!”

“Different dimensions?” Magnolia barely spared Xander a glance. “Oh, this is above my pay grade,” she complained. “Luke didn’t tell me — oh, but I bet he didn’t know, or he’d have put you with a cy’Solomon or something, not little ol’ cy’Linden me…” The despairing face she made was almost certainly fake, but Xander couldn’t help but wonder about the actual distress she’d started the sentence with. “All right, so you know demons. Different demons. Now this is quite interesting — but it’s going to make this whole tour a bit complicated, unfortunately.

“Can we settle for a little uncomplication first?” Xander put in. “I mean, not to distract from the mouth-of-hell problems and the demons, cute and not, but what’s a, um, kie-Solomon?”

“Oh, now, that’s easy.” She relaxed, leaning against the wall. Xander found he liked the way she looked relaxed, all smiling and — he mentally shook himself. “We all have Mentors. They’re teachers who, well, teach you specific stuff outside of classes and help you work out what you’re going to do with school.”

“Oh, kind of like an Advisor in college,” Willow perked up.

“Kind of,” Magnolia agreed. “And a group of students under the same Mentor is called a cy’ree. So, cy’Linden, Student of VanderLInden.”

“Oh!” Buffy smiled brightly. “So, like, we’re all cy’Giles.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1178885.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173922.html. You can comment here or there.

Conlang all year round – SeNTAXember in September

Sep14

Oh no, September is syntactical rules and I’ve already covered the easy bit, sentence order… wait, have I?

I covered Old Tongue’s in JuLECTURary, but not Calenyen’s.

Calenyen is Subject-Object-Verb, with most modifiers being tacked on to the end of words. Tense is added to the beginning of verbs (Goat-red food-low pasttense-Is-Loudly bleating-at).

Old Tongue Also normally adds modifiers after the subject of the modifier, a holdover from their system of diacritical marks in the original ideography.

I think Old Tongue does some funky things with tense, but I’m not sure what yet, or how. And I just learned about Anaphora and think Old Tongue uses this heavily.

Short post! But it doesn’t take many words to say S-O-V, V-S-O. 🙂

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury 1
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
Juneme 2/2.5
AugGOVERNust 2
JuLECTURy 2
✒️

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173456.html. You can comment here or there.

LadiesBingo: Enemies – Cynara and Regine

Sep14

Written for my ladiesbingo card.

2030, approximately 19 years after the end of the world.

Cya had maps.

She had a lot more than maps, actually, enough that she’d ended up building herself another room to store it all. She had reports and charts, headcounts and vulnerability assessments, crop yields and even religious and linguistic demographics, assessing everything she could of their ruined world.

But most of all, she had one big map, and on that map was a circle labelled Addergoole and a carefully-shaded area labelled as Addergoole influence. Outside of that was a rough 50-mile circle that she’d labelled DMZ.

That was where her information stopped. She would walk herself right up to that line — and did, both literally and figuratively — find every piece of information she could, and make sure that she left with a positive relationship whenever possible. She fought monsters — rarely — fed people — far more frequently — and cleaned up roads and fallen buildings right up to two inches shy of that line.

The other side of the line was Regine’s territory, and there she would not tread, not now.

Regine had agents.

Some were former students; some were people she or her crew had helped out in the past, who owed her favors, formal or informal. Some were those who didn’t know who or what they were working for, but liked the steady pay of food, shelter, and barter goods, all rare to find in the disaster of their crumbled world.

Her agents went out into the world, looking for people and things, bringing back information and goods. They brought reports of the ruins of civilization: some places had fallen into disarray and barbarism and even two decades later had not settled into peace. Some had formed tiny city-states, boarded up and unwilling to talk to outsiders, even outsiders bearing rare trade goods. Some had turned their city-states into trade hubs, or into despotic mini-empires, or into quiet imitations of Eden, some more successful than others.

And in Wyoming, the group called Boom and the woman called Cynara were doing a little bit of all of that.

Regine sent only her best agents in that direction — the cleverest, the most subtle, the ones with the best escape abilities. She assumed Cynara did the same. She was not ready to go to war with Boom nor with Cynara herself; if her agent was caught on Boom’s territory, the volatile, explosive group might take it in their heads to start that war prematurely. Thus she drew out a three-quarter circle where she was very nearly blatant, and towards Wyoming she stayed subtle, sneaky… surreptitious.

———

Regine had agents, Cya knew. Every time she found one of them, she marked their position on a map. Some of them were obvious, the sort of people you only sent into territory you were certain of. Some tried to be sneaky. Some… Some Cya found only because she already knew Regine had agents. She was known for her ability to find things and people, after all. Regine should have known better.

When she caught one a mile from the Ranch where her crew lived, Cya decided polite ignoring was no longer the order of the day. She sat down with the woman for a pleasant conversation over scrounged tea and did a series of long and complicated Workings on the woman’s mind, the sort that left nearly no trace and would not be noticed until a specific person — perhaps, the person who had taught Cya Mind magic in the first place — went looking.

Then she sent the woman back to Regine with a very polite note.

I found this. I thought you might want it back.

———

Regine stared at the woman. She stared at the note. She stared back at the woman. “How were you detected?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The woman could no more lie to Regine than she could fly — and flying was not her particular magic skill. “Nobody detected me. I got in, I got out, I came back to report.”

The paper note was proof enough. The fact that the agent was staring at the note with no realization that she had just handed it to Regine was, as the saying went, icing on the cake. Nevertheless, Regine engaged in an invasive search of her agent’s mind.

And there it was. The work was so tidy Regine doubted anyone else could have found it. The girl, she had to admit, was skilled. She’d written in dots and dashes of missing time and changed memories:

Stay off my lawn and I’ll stay off yours

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1172824.html. You can comment here or there.

Conlang all year round – JuLECTURy in September

Sep13

I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember one month a day (or so) until I get bored.

Here is the Julectury (“Write a lecture, lesson or 140 letter pedagogical tweet each day explaining how your language works”) which I wrote last week.

Calenyen is an agglutinating language with a habit of dropping syllables and an immensely casual attitude towards parts of speech (nouning verbs and so on).

It is also a language — like the culture itself — full of borrowing and thus loan-words, which, like most of the things the Calenyena borrows, it puts its own spin and flavor on.

So, for example, learnis see-do, dok, get, doket.

Child is Leroo; plural Leroone.

That makes school Learn-kids, doket-Leroone (and sometimes doket-oone
Or:
heleva is a Bitrani word from the Tabersi goddess Heleviaria, Deity of lines and boundaries. It means a meet and proper boundary, usually a property line, but also the lines between countries.
Teleba is the Calenyen word with the similar concept, agreed-upon border; but tol-tyeleba, toleba, is a border dispute over a bad border, something not allowable in the original Bitrani word.

Sentence Structure.
Old Tongue plays fast and use with sentence structure poetically, although in scholarly documents it tends to stick to one structure for the body of the text.

Most common is [Verb] [Subject] [Object], with modifiers coming directly after the modified object.

It is written from left to right.

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
Juneme 2/2.5
AugGOVERNust 2
✒️
SeNTAXember

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1172726.html. You can comment here or there.

Funfic (of Addergoole post-apoc): A Stalking

Sep13

I’ve been wanting to do this as a roleplay for years but here it is as the beginning of a story.

She had been tracking him since she left Addergoole.

Neither her innate nor her Words led to tracking, so she went by rumor and hearsay, following breadcrumbs. She left her children at Maureen’s and what crew she’d had had crumbled, so it was just her, her and her grudge, moving across the remains of the countryside, chasing hints.

He was moving, too. He’d graduated three years before her; he’d had a lot of time to make trouble. She’d stop at a town and ask: have you seen him? Dark hair, broad shoulders, he always wears this leather jacket? And they’d say, why do you want him?

She’d had to tell one town she wanted to kill him before they’d tell her where he went. Another one, “justice” was enough of an answer.

She’d traded in favours and gone into debt with her former classmates for three items. She didn’t know how she’d pay them back yet, but they were immortal, and she could worry about that once she’d had her revenge.

It took her six months to get close enough to his trail that she could see the wreckage for herself. When she reached an enclave where they flat-out refused to say anything, she knew she was, if not there, very nearly so.

She found him standing on a hillside just outside the enclave, his camp everything she expected of him. His back was to her, but she knew that jacket, the way his hair fell in ragged braids, the set of his feet, as if he owned the whole world.

She snuck up behind him and triggered her first magical item. “You belong to me,” she told him.

“I belong to you,” he agreed, because the magical item compelled him to. His voice sounded strange. She didn’t care.

“Sit down with your hands behind your head and say nothing.”

He’d said the same thing to her, when he’d trapped her. She thought it was fitting.

He turned around as he sat down; she hadn’t told him not to, after all. His hands were behind his head. His eyebrows were lifted.

Her heart was in her throat. He looked almost right… but this wasn’t her guy.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1172477.html. You can comment here or there.

Conlang all year round – Juneme in August

Sep6

I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day (or so) up to September.(?) I’m skipping DismayCourse, shhh.

So I’m in Juneme again… Document or add to your phonetic inventory a phoneme a day, or add a rule to your phonotactics a day, or a Sandhi rule a day

Calenyen Phonatactics:

There will never be two vowel sounds in a row.

When borrowing words from other languages, the Calenyena almost always put another consonant between two vowels: Reiassan becomes reisassan. (ray-uh-san, rey-suh-san). Generally, when doing so, they will repeat a previous or following consonant; Calenyen loves repetition.

Old Tongue Phoneme:

Eron, (e) as in shed

This sound is a minor glyph, one that is often written down on the text line. Its original meaning is remaining, left-behind, and it is often used to indicate those fae that did not leave for Ellehem in the great departure.

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
✒️
Augovernust 2

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1169538.html. You can comment here or there.

Lolipop, a ficlet of Addergoole

Sep5

For B, because I wanted something fun to write.

Set after Ty has left school.

“I think you’re going to like this club.”

“How have you been in this town for a week, and you already know more clubs than I do?” Ty glared at Anise in only-half-feigned sulking.

She, in turn, grinned back at him. “I’m the smooth line, remember? I can always make doors open to me.”

(read on: http://www.addergoole.com/TOS/archives/1394)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1169075.html. You can comment here or there.

Whatif…a very AU story Continued, Continued

Sep2

Goes with this: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1166887.html
and then this: http://inventrix.dreamwidth.org/29367.html
And then this: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1167521.html
and then this: http://inventrix.dreamwidth.org/29645.html

He was handsome. That wasn’t the first thing she noticed; the first thing (after how worn he looked) was ahh. He wasn’t all of what was missing, but he was definitely some of it.

(If only she had any idea who he was).

Then he grabbed her hand and started running. Cynara’s first feeling was one of immense satisfaction: this was right. It was perfect.

Then someone shouted behind them, and she realized they were actually running from something immediate.

They needed a way out. They needed a safe place to talk where nobody would bother them. She needed to know why he was exactly what she’d been looking for and yet not quite right.

“Left!” She yanked them into an alley. She hadn’t known it was there a moment ago, but somehow she knew it was perfect, and… yes. They reached its end and found themselves facing a small back road — with left, right, or an open door as options.

Right seemed the best, so she yanked them that way. He was stronger than her, a lot stronger — and how did she know that? — so she had to trust that he’d come along.

She trusted, and ran. Down another series of crooked streets, through a building — nobody noticed — and then they were at a worn-down little park, where a stone maintenance building waited, its lock long since broken.

“Here.” Inside it was picked clean, nothing but a few unredeemable bottles left. She sank down on the floor and looked at the boy.

“Hi,” she offered, suddenly shy. What if he thought she was crazy? What if she was crazy? “I don’t know you, but I’ve been looking for you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1168324.html. You can comment here or there.

Whatif…a very AU story Continued

Sep1

Goes with this: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1166887.html

and then this: http://inventrix.dreamwidth.org/29367.html

Cynara had been on the move for a week. She’d woken up every morning and tried to figure out where she should go, and for some reason, answers had kept coming to her.

She’d found unattended food and a surprise stop at a sidewalk sale (the clerk was in the alley, making out with her boyfriend), toiletries and even and unlocked motel room. She’d found bus after bus that had a spot open for cheap or a soft spot for the sad look, and money seemed to appear when she really needed some.

She’d also nearly been found by police three times, police who were clearly looking for her. She had run away, she supposed, but neither her foster parents nor her father should’ve expected her to stay put for too long.

She hopped off the latest bus and looked around. The feeling in her gut, the empty hole, tugged, and she looked around.

There. He looked tired and resigned. He looked lost.

She had no idea who he was, but she needed to talk to him.

She crossed against traffic in a bee-line straight for him, not caring how it must look.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1167521.html. You can comment here or there.

Whatif…a very AU story

Aug31

What if Boom got expelled from Addergoole their first year? What if they had their minds wiped? What if…

Addergoole AU

Something was missing.

Cynara wasn’t sure what it was. Her father, of course – he’d finally screwed up one time too many, and she’d gotten placed in a foster home near a nice private school. But he wasn’t so much missing as he was gone.

Her new foster parents were decent, attentive – way too attentive, far more than Cya’s father ever had been, far too concerned when Cya stayed out or wandered off. They hardly left her room to think, but there was enough time – when she woke in the middle of the night, when she wandered off to take long, looping walks around the neighborhood – when Cynara could feel at the empty place in her memories and in her emotions.

It felt like a missing tooth. Something had been there, and then it was gone. There had been a – a warmth, a place where she could care about someone. There had been a wall she could lean against. There had been a pleasant wildness to make her feel.

She found the paperwork while looking for something else – she wanted to find her transfer to this school, because she kept getting confused on the date, and that had never happened before. The words at the top of the paper said Addergoole, but it was the wings on the crest that gave her the poke in the gut.

She found the anime while she was looking for something to spark a memory – a blond hero with a big weapon, a tiny girl with a large smile. She took it home and watched five episodes before her foster-parents took it away.

They were angry, and under the anger, they were worried. They grounded Cynara, which fazed her very little. She had no friends here. She’d never had friends anywhere; she moved too much. She’d never stayed in the same school more than…

Her dreams were colored in splatters of blood and the shouting of strange words.

More than a couple weeks…

She woke feeling a warmth just to one side of her, a wildness to the other, the loss deep in her gut.

…she’d never had time to make friends…

She dreamed of the shocked look in someone’s eyes and the cramping feeling of poison in her own veins.

She dreamed of Words that could change the world.

Her foster parents had locked the window and the door, but Cya’s father was a thief, and she’d been his apprentice.

She looked for the best way out of town, and a bus driver took pity on her. She looked for a safe route towards the loss in her chest, and she found a wallet someone had forgotten. She looked for the right train, and slipped on when nobody was watching her.

She didn’t know she was heading to Leo; all she knew was that she was heading home.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1166887.html. You can comment here or there.

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