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A piece of post-apoc fae-apoc that popped into my head

Mar26

The thing was, certain things they’d had to figure out right away. Food, potable water – even in places near a grocery store, the store only had so much stock on hand, and no more was coming in.

Shelter was relatively easy – there were a lot more houses and other buildings than there were people, now, even if you did take into consideration those buildings ruined by the war, of which there were many. But protection from the threats of the world – monsters sentient and not, cold and rain and snow, storms and fire and bears and lions – that took work. And when that was all managed, people worked hard on forming community, on rebuilding society, and stocking up enough food to survive lean times and enough weapons to keep the food.

Clothes were not remotely a priority. Most people in 2011 in the developed world had far more clothes than they needed. If durable clothes were an issue, well, there were stores to raid and, if you weren’t squeamish, or if you were desperate, which was similar, there were the homes of people who were dead or gone.

Eventually the clothes they had wore out, the clothing left in old buildings had rotted away or been eaten by the rodents. And by then, those that had survived had houses and food, security and society. Now… they needed cloth.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/914196.html. You can comment here or there.

Where It All Began – the Zeroth Cohort in Addergoole

Mar20

Written to Kuro_Neko’s commission. The 0th Cohort were a test year before the First Cohort of Addergoole, and, as documented in Addergoole: Year Nine, many things went wrong. This is where things started going south.

“And for your homework tonight, class, be sure to read Chapters Seven and Eight of the History of the Americas text. And start thinking about your mid-term projects – yes, Nyla?”

Nyla’s hand was up. That didn’t seem like a good idea to her. Her hand was up and her lips were moving and how had she let herself get talked into this?

Oh, that was right. Because Professor Valerian liked her. Because she was the one with the leaf-green eyes and the forest-green hair and the tree-professor thought she was cute.

Nyla missed juvie.

She coughed. “Professor Valerian? We heard a rumor that this school has some unusual graduation requirements.”

We heard a rumor was code for Aine slipped through the wall and read the Director’s confidential documents. But it was a rumor now.

The professor frowned over her glasses at Nyla. “That information was to be shared with each of you from your Mentors.”

Which Valerian really wanted to be, for Nyla. Could trees impregnate other trees? How did this fae thing work, anyway?

“So that means the graduation requirements are real?”

“That’s something you’d need to discuss with your Mentor, should you get around to choosing one.”

“Professor?” Nyla was smiling. Why was she smiling? Why was this fun? It shouldn’t be fun… “Have you noticed that neither of us have said what these ‘graduation requirements’ are? For all I know, you’re talking about a GPA of 3.75.”

The class murmured. Addergoole was tough. A 3.75 might be harder than the requirements Nyla was actually talking about.

Professor Valerian’s smile was awfully sharp. Trees didn’t have teeth, no. But, Nyla was realizing, they could have thorns. And they might move slowly, but they could crush rocks nonetheless. “I did notice that, Nyla. Why do you think that might be?”

“Well, on your part, there’s always the chance that the thing I think it is really isn’t what it is – and we’re really talking about that 3.75. Or you don’t know that I know, and you’re avoiding telling me something I’m just hinting around the edges of.”

“You’re doing well so far.”

When had this become a school problem? Well, they were in school and she was asking a teacher. Around her, the rest of the small class sat quiet. For a moment, Nyla hated them all. “And as for me – I seem to have a hard time getting the words out, truth be told.” She pieced it together slowly. “The rumors are all sideways, too.”

“And why do you think that might be?” Now, Valerian’s eyes swept across the room. “Juniper, yes?”

Juniper could have asked the question. Juniper was a tree-girl even more than Nyla was. But noooo, it had to be the juvie-hall girl, ‘cause Nyla was brave.

Nyla’s head was spitting from forcing out the question, and they still didn’t have an answer.

“Is it some sort of aversion?” Juniper rolled her shoulders and took in a long, loud breath. “Like – ah. We don’t call home. That sort of thing?”

“And why do you think there would be that sort of aversion?”

It was Caiside, pretty, pretty Caiside, who answered. “Because someone thinks we’ll freak out – or our parents will freak out.”

What was the professor doing? Nyla looked around the room again, at the slowly dawning comprehension on all her classmate’s faces. It was Melantha that spoke up this time. “So it’s true. This is – this is some sort of breeding school.”

Everyone let out a collective breath. It had been said. Someone had put the words in the open. And Professor Valerian had her lips pressed together very tightly, which had to be saying something.

“Then why bother with classes?” Zetta had risen half out of her chair, her hands clenched into fists. “Why bother with all this, with training, with magic, with the Law, if it’s all for nothing? If this is just to get us knocked up and waddling around with faerie babies?”

It was a good question. The classes were challenging – they were way more in-depth than anything Nyla had had back home, but that could’ve been because of juvie – the magic lessons were exciting, and the combat training was really, really hard. But if this was meant to be a place to make babies…

Professor Valerian coughed. “It may be hard to believe right now, but being parents and being scholars, or being parents and being warriors, these things are not mutually exclusive. Everything in this school is meant to educate you, not to placate you.”

“Except the aversions keeping us from talking about this stuff.” Zetta was on her feet and away from her chair now. “Except the lying to us about it. How is it supposed to happen? Is there some sort of lust Working in the walls, too?”

Professor Valerian looked amused. Amused. Nyla was beginning to feel as irritated as Zetta looked. “Generally, no lust Workings are needed when you have a number of active teenagers in an enclosed space.”

“What happens…” Caiside’s voice was very quiet, but everyone listened. “What happens if we do not have these children?”

Professor Valerian coughed uncomfortably. “I am not given to understand that that’s an option.”

That hung in the air for a moment. Nyla stood up, her chair scraping loudly against the tile. “Well, then.” It was better than Fuck this shit. She walked out of the room, uncertain where she was going.

~

There was no way out of Addergoole. Nyla had tried. Luke had come to get her for class, and she had explained in short words why that wasn’t happening. He’d stared at her for a moment, giving the uncomfortable impression that he was living up to his Name, then nodded curtly. “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow wouldn’t be any better than today, but she could deal with it then. Tonight, tonight she was going to sit in her room and eat cookie dough ice cream and sulk about the unfairness of the world.

“Top-notch education,” she muttered. “Bucolic location. They’ll get you into college even with your arrest record.”

“Are you talking to yourself, Nyla?” Caiside leaned on her door-frame. “You skipped afternoon classes.”

“I was angry.” She glared at him, as if daring him to challenge that. He held up both hands in surrender.

“I am, too.”

You couldn’t tell to look at him. Then again, about all you could tell about Caiside looking at him as that he was beautiful.

And that he was not moving from her doorway. “Come on in,” she offered. “Grab a spoon, if you want. Do you even like girls?”

He blushed! He did even that beautifully. “Why do you ask?”

Nyla raked her eyes up and down Caiside‘s fashionable, pretty form. “Do you really not know?”

His blush darkened, and now, now he managed to step inside her threshold. “Yeah, I’ve heard it before. But I don’t think it matters who I ‘like’, does it? I still need to provide the same children everyone else does.”

Nyla resisted telling him that the way he talked did nothing to quiet thoughts about his interest in boys, girls, or possibly sheep. She stabbed the ice cream with her spoon instead. “Man, the one thing, one thing I could say about myself is that at least I wasn’t a teen mother.”

“Well… how old are you?” Caiside sank gracefully into Nyla’s arm chair.

“Sixteen. Why?”

“Well, if you waited until the very end, you could have a child at twenty – but that’s only one of them, of course. You’d have to stay an extra year, I suppose.”

“There’s also the matter of the rest of my life, you know? This place pays for college; it’s right in the letters. Only way I was ever going to get into a school like that. And then… bang. It’s like it was all some stupid joke.” She ate a mouthful of ice cream and passed it to Caiside.

He reached one ridiculously long arm into her silverware drawer and grabbed a spoon for himself. “On the upside, I suppose, there is the fae thing.”

“But they tell us that’s genetic. I mean, we would have been… oh. Oh, oh, fuck them.” Nyla put her face in her hands. “Oh, fuck them sideways.”

Caiside glanced at the open door. “Are you sure…?”

“What are they going to do?” Her voice was getting louder and she didn’t really care. “Lock me up in a prison until I produce genetic material for them? Oh, wait. They already did them. This is fucking eugenics, Cass. They want pretty fae babies, and they brought pretty fae kids to do it. And then – then what? I mean, maybe we won’t even have to worry about raising the kids, maybe they’ll keep them. Maybe they’re going to raise our kids in tubes or something. I mean, then I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except two pregnancies before I’m twenty and… and…” She caught a sob before it entirely escaped. “And being a prisoner,” she added, far more quietly.

“They say… didn’t they say that our parents enrolled us? That our parents knew where they were sending us? When they started teaching us magic, they said something like that.” Caiside‘s voice was still quiet, but Nyla thought she heard a storm beneath it.

“You can’t mean our parents…” Then again, Nyla’s parents had let her go to juvie without a second thought. “Shit. No help there, then. I mean, even if the mind control let us call them.”

“You sound as if you’re in some distress.” The melodic voice in the doorway made them both jump.

“Ah…” Casside was blushing. “Professor Kairos. Ah. I’m sorry…”

“There’s no need. You two are not the only ones distressed by the arrangements, you understand. Perhaps, if I could come in, I might be able to help you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/910979.html. You can comment here or there.

Brainstorming Time!

Mar11

 Hello my friends!  

I am pondering a short romantic apocalyptic adventure novella for Camp Nano, because everything is better with the end of the world.  The main characters are 2 former Addergoole students – new characters. 

So, apoc = 2011-2012 (Ag years 16-17).  She graduated at the end of Yr 13, 2008, he, in Yr 11, 2006

I can, if I HAVE to, push this 2 years earlier, but I’d rather not. 

Questions:

  • descriptors for both of them?
  • What can she have done in three years to have become very-affluent-to-rich?
  • What was he doing in the meantime?

Cheers~

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/907771.html. You can comment here or there.

International Women’s Day: Fae Apoc Presidents

Mar9

This is an answer to [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s question asked here for International Women’s Day: “Tell me whether there were any woman presidents in the world of fae apoc.”

Fae apoc’s world governments follows the same pattern as our world up to 2011, so there was never a woman president of the US while it was whole. However, in the years after the apocalypse, remnants of the US government held together – first in bunkers and then in a small area of the East Coast, heading up into Ohio. In that time, many of the presidents were women, and continued to be as the decades progressed.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/906423.html. You can comment here or there.

Making Things Work

Mar6

This is a continuation of There Are Always Choices for [personal profile] rix_scaedu as a fiction exchange. It runs to *cough* 2250 words.

It wasn’t often that Alkyone decided to put her foot down about something. It was even rarer that she interfered in Via or Jaelie’s lives. Living in such close quarters, the three of them held certain privacies very dear.

Today, Aly had grabbed Via by one arm, the Kept Rohanna by the other, and physically dragged them out back, to the small bench-and-fountain set-up Jaelie maintained between the trees. “Not work,” she insisted. “Not rules, nothing of the sort. Just… remember what it was like to be collared, Via.”

“I hated it.” She already knew Rohanna hated it; they’d collared her at knifepoint.

“Not that part. We all hated it. What about the rest?”

“The rest…?” But Aly had stalked off, leaving Via staring in confusion at Rohanna.

Who was, to be fair, staring in confusion right back at Viatrix. “So, um…” She swallowed. “What…?”

Via chewed on her lip. The rest. The orders? No. The sex? Aly was unlikely to suggest Via rape her Kept. Even if the touch…

Touch. And if she was talking about the parts that felt good, Aly had probably meant the whole set of good-Kept feelings. Via took a breath. She’d never been good at that part. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Rohanna scooted back a couple inches on the bench. “Okay… what?“

“Okay.” Viatrix took both of the girl’s hands, and tried to hold them gently. “Okay, this is me not being a monster.”

Rohanna squirmed but, notably, didn’t pull her hands out of Via’s loose grip. “Are you going to brand me again?”

Via ran her thumb over the healed mark on the girl’s wrist. “No. Have you – have you been collared before?”

“I lit the last guy on fire who tried.” She’d gone still at the touch on her wrist. Viatrix tried to remember if she’d touched Rohanna since the branding, and couldn’t. No wonder Aly was interfering.

“And yet you took my collar.”

Rohanna’s right hand twitched. Via released it, and the girl touched the thin leather collar around her neck. “I’m pretty sure I can’t survive a hawthorn beheading.”

“Practicality is a good thing. I-” Gentleness was not Viatrix’s stock in trade. She had gotten her reputation for being ruthless. She took a couple breaths while she considered her words. “If you work with me, we can make this not suck.”

“What, if I do what you say, it won’t hurt? I’ve been there, and no, thanks.”

“No, no…” Via couldn’t help smirking. “Not that. I’ve been there, too. It really does suck. No.” She chose her words carefully. “If you will tell me what you want, I can help.”

“But why would you?” Rohanna was staring at their hands. Viatrix had not moved the hand the girl had dropped; now, as if afraid that it would bite her, Rohanna set her hand back on top of Via’s. “I mean, you already have me.”

“Because there’s no reason for this to suck. And…” Her first-year Keeper hadn’t really been a monster. He’d just been an awful Keeper. “And there’s no reason for me to be a lousy Keeper when I can be a good one.”

Rohanna was quiet. Viatrix wondered if the girl was going to laugh at her; she wondered if she was going to flail out, or run away. None of those things were prohibited by her orders, after all. After a while, she shrugged. She was still looking at their hands. “I didn’t know there was such a thing as a good Keeper.”

“Hunh.” Viatrix thought about that one for a while. “Well, you’ve seen Jaelie and Wish, haven’t you?”

“Wish looks lost most of the time.” The edges of Rohanna’s mouth curled upwards.

“Well, that’s because he’s a Returned One. He really is lost.” Bad example, then, but she didn’t have that many good examples to go on. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Rohanna peeked again. “You keep saying that.”

“I’m bad at this, okay?” Via snickered the moment she realized what she’d said, and, by some miracle, Rohanna let herself chuckle, too. “Right. So, you’re miserable.”

“Not miserable. Not miserable all the time. Except that I’m here, and I didn’t want to be here.”

“So, what would make you less miserable?” Viatrix counted to three silently, then mouthed along with Rohanna.

“Not being here. But you knew I was going to say that.”

“Yeah.” Via smirked. “What could make you less miserable being here?”

“I don’t know, maybe if this parasite in my head wasn’t telling me I was horrible all the time.” The answer wasn’t so much snapped out as sidled, like Rohanna had been thinking about it for some time and was testing the waters.

Viatrix closed her eyes. “Right. The bond. Okay, this is going to be weird… but Ro, I think you and I need to be friends.”

~

The boy flinched at everything, and every time he flinched, he reminded Baram of other boys, younger boys (because even he, in this lifetime, was younger than the skinny boy he was Keeping now), who had flinched and winced away.

He couldn’t order the boy not to flinch. He could, but Baram and his girls with him were learning how to not be monsters, and Jaelie had been very firm on that one. Monsters tell you not to look unhappy. Good people help you learn how to be happy.

It was mostly theory, for all of them, reaching in the dark and only knowing that there were sharp edges.

Viatrix could talk to her angry Kept. Jaelie petted her would-be returned god and praised him until he calmed. Baram scared people by his very presence, and he did not talk well.

You do not have weaknesses unless you allow yourself to be weak. Professor Fridmar had said that, more than once, during his lessons. Your weakness can be strengths.

Baram looked at the boy. At Kavan. Kavan winced. Slowly, feeling as if he was swimming through snow, Baram worked through the problem.

The kid was old, nearly fifty, he’d said. He was old, and he’d known pain and ownership and renaming. It made Baram feel awkward, and young, and stupid.

But Baram was both old and young. “Do you-” the boy flinched. He kept going anyway. “Do you know the Words for Mind?”

The boy’s chin came up and his eyes opened wide. “I.. yes. Yes, mas- Baram? I can use Intinn.”

“And know?“ Baram pushed on, despite the way Kavan’s shoulders were trembling.

“…and Idu, yessir.” Kavan had gone pale, even his lips bloodless. “Sir?”

Baram realized his hand was clenching into a fist. It wasn’t Kavan’s fault. It wasn’t even really about Kavan. “R-” Please. Jaelie had pointed that one out, too.

Baram had grumbled; it didn’t make it less of an order.

“It makes it feel more like there’s a choice. And sometimes that’s what matters.”

Baram cleared his throat. “Please read my mind.”

Kavan’s eyes opened wide. “Sir… sir, are you sure?“

“Words… words are hard.” He felt a frustrated rumble in the back of his throat and stifled it. Not quickly enough: the boy flinched again. “It’s hard to talk, easy to see it in my mind.”

“Sir.” Kavan ducked his head. “I… I can.”

“Please.” The word was a hard one. But Baram forced it out yet again. “It’s important.”

Kavan nodded. He did not look, Baram thought, any more comfortable; he kept peeking at Baram rather than looking directly, and his skin was still pale. But his voice didn’t tremble as he did the Working.

Baram focused on the boy. He tried not to think of other terrified Kept he’d known, but he knew they would show up. He tried to remember – tried, and almost succeeded – the cold and wet field he’d woken up in, the moment he’d found himself in this life.

The boy had his eyes closed. Baram could feel his presence in his mind, a gentle touch, simply enough to let Baram know where he was.

“You worry.” Baram kept his voice quiet. “You don’t know me. And I don’t…”

“Show anything,” Kavan offered. There was a bit of wonder in his voice. “You… sorry, sir.”

“S’okay.” Baram closed his eyes. “You can look.”

Kavan’s touch was different than other times Baram’s mind had been read – gentler, more tentative. But even so, Baram could feel old memories coming up, whispering to him in the way that they did.

The boy murmured while he worked. “And then you… And then… oh. Oh dear.” Baram did not blush, was not the sort to do such things, but the oh dear was so prim, and the memory so vulgar, that he dropped his head and looked away, even with his eyes closed.

And then there was a brushing against places that Baram never touched. “This…” He could hear the way the boy swallowed. “May I?”

It was an effort of will to say yes. That spot, those places, they didn’t want to be remembered, even more so than most of Baram’s scrambled history. But the boy had actively asked for something, so… “Yes.”

These memories didn’t really flood. They poked up their heads cautiously, diffidently, much like Kavan. Look at this, do you want to remember it?

No, no, of course he didn’t. But he would.

The field. He was in a field, sprawled out on the dirt, his lungs hurting like he’d fallen. That was where the memories stopped. That was where…

He was falling, tumbling. His chute hadn’t deployed and he was tumbling down, down, every downwards. He was going to land. This was going to hurt. This was going to…

He was in the field, he was laying there staring at the sky. He was panting, whining like an animal, and Kavan was holding him tightly.

“Easy, easy. Easy, si- Boss. I’ve got you.” The boy stroked Baram’s back, and the world righted itself. “I’ve got you, boss.”
~

Jaelie was having a bit of trouble with their “guests.”

Ardell and Delaney had figured out quickly that they couldn’t get out of the trap-basement unless Jaelie – or someone else – let them out. They’d figured out soon after that they couldn’t easily Work out of it, either, and they’d figured out soon after that that Baram wasn’t going to talk to them.

Jaelie didn’t tell them why. She wasn’t entirely certain why herself.

She had told them the conditions of their release. It wasn’t the first time someone had ended up in their “guest house,” and the terms were almost always the same. Ardell had been willing to swear the oaths. The problem was Delaney.

“Fuck you! We’re talking to Baram or nobody, and if you don’t let us out of here soon, you’re going to regret it. I’m going to peel the pretty skin right off of you, you miserable little…”

Jaelie let the door slam shut again. “They can wait another couple hours for the food,” she told Aloysius.

He hesitated. “Do you want me to watch them?”

Jaelie started to shake her head, and then paused herself. “Do you have some reason to think you ought to?”

He was getting more and more hesitant, she noticed. He didn’t deal all that well with the collar. “Something feels wrong, Mistress. They are planning something.”

“I trust your judgement on this one.” Jaelie watched the way his shoulders twitched, and leaned over to kiss both his cheeks. “Good job. Please, do watch the guest house, then.”

He bowed to her. He liked to do that, sometimes. Jaelie found she liked it. “I will do so.” He settled into a tree, the thorns making way for him, seeming content to watch all day if he needed to.

Jaelie reminded herself to check on him before bed time, and went back to those things that could not be neglected forever.

She didn’t have to wait until bedtime. It was just as the sun set that she heard the rumble, the rumble followed by a scream, the scream followed by a startled set of grunts.

They dove into action like they had too many times before. Aly grabbed the kids. Via grabbed her sword. Jaelie was already calling on the trees, who were telling her fire, fire.

And standing in a hole in their yard that had not been there before, the bitch of a visitor was throwing fireballs. At Aloysious. At Jaelie’s Kept, and at her trees.

She was shouting off Workings as she ran, spitting off insults in between the Workings, and, as she doused the entire yard in sudden rainfall, doing her best to get between the “guests” and her Kept. She could stop them. She could stop them, if her trees could just reach them, if – they were backing towards the gate, still throwing off projectiles and force, things rain could stop. There were broken tree limbs everywhere, and they were still throwing off force bolts.

“Let them go.” The boss’s voice came from the doorway. “They’re not worth it.” He followed with a series of Workings, throwing up a shield around Jaelie, and, she noticed gratefully, her trees and her Kept as well. “They’re just strangers we will know not to let in again.”

For the boss, that was a speech. Jaelie leaned against Aloysious and panted as their former guests got away. “Are you okay?”

He wrapped an arm around her ribcage, for once too exhausted to be tentative. “You protected me.”

“Well, yeah.” She craned her neck back to look at him. “And the Boss protected us. That’s… that’s just how it works.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/905521.html. You can comment here or there.

Messy

Mar5

“All right. This could get messy, but if we do it right, it could also be fun.”

Leia was sitting cross-legged on the coffee table in the middle of the suite, studying the group of them. She looked, Saga thought, a bit like their Aunt Ruki. Blonde, of course, and with the feathers on the sides of her head, but it was more in the way she carried herself.

Of course, Saga would never be considering this with Aunt Ruki. Not and be contemplating breathing next week too.

“Messy sounds fun.” The boy named Butler had a cheerful disposition and an aggressively untidy demeanor. Saga wanted to brush him. “How messy are we talking?”

“Well, there’s you, me, Saga, and Aaron.” Aaron, the youngest member of their potential arrangement, was sitting quietly on the floor, carefully not looking at anyone. He hadn’t said anything… ever, as far as Saga could remember. “There’s also the first-year Saga’s interested in, and there’s that fourth-year that’s interested in you, Butler. Probably under the mistaken impression that your name is accurate.”

Butler blushed darkly. It was quite a cute look on him. “Mmm.”

“In terms of romantic relationships, there’s of course also the complications involved in any relationship, times… many. And possibly more many, adding in even more options for envy. To say nothing of what happens as each of us graduate over the next few years.

“And, of course, anyone who’s envious of,” Leia ticked off on her fingers, “our suite, which is the best one, the family relationships here – well, between Saga and I, at least – the impression that Saga and I are hoarding at least two, maybe three underclassmen, or the fact that that two of you are, ah, hoarding Saga and I.”

Saga caught a glimpse of Aaron’s face. He must have thought himself unobserved, because his expression had slipped into something almost creepy. Plotting, she thought; he looked like he was plotting. “Messy,” Saga muttered. Well, she was the daughter of the Black Prince and the Call of the Whirlwind. She could handle one calculating first-year.

One calculating first-year, one aggressively untidy house-elf, her cousin the demon, and possibly a pretty blonde hermaphrodite – all in a four-bedroom polygonal relationship where they were only betting that there’d be more fucking than fighting. Saga found herself smiling. “Messy sounds good to me.”

Her father hadn’t tried to name her Epic for nothing.

Written for Three-Word Wednesday. Today’s words were envious, messy, calculating.

Addergoole has a landing page here.

These characters (parents shown in tags where there is one):

Leia is the daughter of Viðrou (shown in DW icon) and Cybele, who is the daughter of Elfred and Niassa. (Niassa is in Addergoole Year 9 in the Wylie stories; Elfred is in Addergoole Original Series in a bit part.).

Saga is the daughter of Yoshi and Song; Song is the daughter of Akaterina and Agravain (Addergoole Year 9). Yoshi and Viðrou share a mother; Viðrou and Ruki share a father.

Butler is the son of Bailee (Kendra/Werther) and Diarmaid(Mabina/Cassidy) (all four in Addergoole Original Series). And Aaron is the son of Chimera/Sunil, Sunil being the son of Eluned and Olifur from Addergoole Year 9

Phew!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/905345.html. You can comment here or there.

Silenced, a ficlet for #3ww

Feb26

Written to the Three-Word Wednesday Prompt: Docile, Inflict, Whimper.

Includes unkind acts being done to someone apparently willing.

Sparked in part by this post in little-details

He was docile when they put the device on him: he stood still in the harness they’d built for him and did not complain nor struggle.

It looked like the unholy cousin of a neck brace, a muzzle, and a slave collar, and it was built to inflict pain and to silence him. It encased his neck down to his shoulders and his face up to his eyes, and it was not removable without three keys. It looked supremely uncomfortable; it was even less pleasant than that to wear.

And yet he allowed it without fighting. He could have killed them all before they got the first chain on him; he could have stopped them long before they locked the contraption around him, but he stood still, passive. Docile.

It struck in Padma’s craw, watching him. Watching them. Part of her, the animal part, was screaming Trap, trap. Run away! The tiger allowed you that close only because he was getting ready to pounce.

The human part of her was cringing at the cruelty. They could have built the device to be kind, and they had not. They could have attempted surgical means of silencing. Those had not even been brought up as options. They could have – perhaps – asked him to not speak. Padma was uncertain anyone but her had even thought of that.

When the last technician fastened the last lock, only then did their prisoner whimper. It was a tiny sound – small enough that it would not have been audible in Padma’s observation chamber if it hadn’t been for the high-sensitivity mics situated around the subject.

But it was enough to send the technicians running, and, more importantly, it was enough to set off the devices fail-safes. Their prisoner fell to his knees, sweat beading on his forehead.

She should have them turn down the feedback. But Padma pushed the intercom button. “That’s good,” she told the technicians. They had done what they were told. They had risked the prisoner’s killing voice. “Leave him be, now.”

It wasn’t what you’d call living, the existence he’d succumbed to. Why had he done it?

Perhaps, Padma thought, in time she’d be brave enough to ask. For now, she turned off the lights in the observation chamber and walked away.

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Let the Good Times Roll/Forgery, a story of Fae Apoc for Thimbleful Thursday

Feb22

Set in late February, 2012

Carmelita knew a handful of things.

She knew that it was Mardi Gras and she was, by strange coincidence, in New Orleans.

She knew that her hometown was burning, crushed, and flooding, all at once, which was not, to her way of thinking, a very good state of affairs.

She knew that she was twenty-one and, possibly more importantly, that at the moment almost nobody anywhere was going to ask her age.

And she knew that, despite everything, despite everyone, despite the war and the so-called gods and the even-less-likely-called saviors, New Orleans was still running, still partying, still rolling.

She leaned over the edge of the balcony. “Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler!” It wasn’t real French. It didn’t need to be. The burgundy in her glass wasn’t real burgundy, either, no matter how many times the man had told her it was. And it didn’t need to be, either.

“Sweetheart, come back inside.” The man had ideas, of course. He’d bought her the fake burgundy. He’d paid with stolen credit and thought she hadn’t noticed. His accent had changed three times in the four hours they’d been together. “Come back to bed, lovely Carmel.”

Of all the nicknames you could make from her name, she disliked that one, often also used to describe the color of her skin, the most. “It’s not ‘back to,'” she told him, a little more crossly than she might have, under normal circumstances. “I haven’t been there yet.”

“Come to bed, then. There’s more burgundy,” he coaxed her, his voice smooth as the not-really-silk sheets. “There’s Camembert and crackers.”

The streets were calling her. “Eat, drink, and be merry,” Carmelita muttered. The man was less interesting than he had been, once you saw him up close, like any forgery. “I’m not dead yet,” she called over her shoulder, and jumped into the street.

For this week’s Thimbleful Thursday: Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/901781.html. You can comment here or there.

Ideas for post-apoc crews/people wandering around in my brain

Feb13

Outside Help – a crew that bounces from population base to population base, providing jack-of-all-trades outside help (they got their name from a challenge back in school where they provided, as you might guess, outside help).

Historian – a single woman (and perhaps a bodyguard Kept, later), moves a similar circuit, writing down people’s memories of history and, a la Foxfire, everything they can remember about their profession pre-apoc.

Square Miles – a crew decides to rehab a portion of the US in square mile portions, laid out with a grid of walls, one square mile a year (the goal being a 10×10 mile grid when they’re done).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/898228.html. You can comment here or there.