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Originally posted April 29, 2012
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If Jean had learned anything in the five years he’d been married to Zoe (and twice that if you included dating), it was that when her family said “tradition,” the best thing to do was to shut up and get out of the way.
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The spellbook had been one of the best finds on the planet they had poetically called 17-5-12.
The original population had been something very close to humanoid, as far as the drawings, the records, and the shapes of the buildings showed.
Warning: this one makes me cry to read it. Written on or around December 2010.
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In the Northeast, every city, every town, every blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village has at least one, a grove of trees that will never know the cut of a saw.
The Pauper Princess and the Tallest Tower, Introduction
The wedding had been a fete to be spoken of for generations; the entire capital city had been invited. The Princess Zsófika was resplendent in her gown of pearls and sapphires, and if anyone noticed that her vows did not allow for the possibility of refusal, no-one mentioned it. She was marrying the Emperor, after all, poor girl. She was marrying the Emperor and tying her natal kingdom finally and entirely into the Empire.
The celebration went on for a week, the Emperor and his new bride at every event, the bride in a shining new dress every day. Later, women who knew who to talk to would fight each other for the rights to this dress or that, as they would only touch the Princess’ body the once, and they were, both literally and in the more common sense, a king’s ransom, every single one of them.
And then the Princess went into the Tower, the Consort’s Tower, the bride’s Tower, the Tallest Tower, and the Emperor went back to the business of ruling a slightly-larger empire. Continue reading
A New World: Kael-Room
First: A New World
The Kael-room. That was an interesting turn of phrase. Kael knew this tower like the back of her hand; she had been living her for nearly a century before – before she lived here for quite longer in some sort of suspended animation, she supposed. A hundred years. The tower came with a grant. Now that was interesting. Who had provided such a thing? How had the tower’s presence been explained? She was fairly certain much more than a hundred years had passed. Buildings she could see from the windows looked far beyond the current – the current-when-she-slept abilities of normal humans, and there hadn’t been enough wizards in the world to raise so many towers. And yet many of these buildings appeared to be well over a century old, if the aging signs had not changed utterly.
She paused to look out a window. The world around her tower was so much more crowded, and the people in so much more of a hurry, than anything she remembered from before. All those people. Were they heroes? Were they adventurers? Who would come to a seat of the muses that would need to see a Kael – a Kael, not the Kael, and even Kael could recognize the phrase Back Stage. Continue reading
Imaginary – Bonus Story for Patreon
So the kids down the road are always playing on their bikes in the driveway when I drive by. And there’s always one bike just… flopped down at the end of the driveway, empty. And the theme for the month is Magical Dates…
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Eddie had always known there was something different about Claude.
Other kids told him about their friends, sure, but their friends were make-believe. They were pretend.
Claude was something different.
The grown-ups thought it was the same, and Eddie didn’t care to change their minds. Lots of kids had imaginary friends, and as long as you “outgrew” them when you ten or eleven or something, the adults didn’t think much about it.
But Claude – Claude actually moved things. He’d move the bike because he was riding with Eddie – and, sometimes, in later days, with Eddie’s friends and his kid brother Donnie. He’d move the ball because they were playing soccer. Eddie had a lot of fun with him, especially those early years when his parents were doting on Baby Donnie and then Baby Eloise.
The thing was, the minute an adult was anywhere in line of sight, Claude vanished. He wasn’t just invisible to the adults, he was gone. The bike fell down, the ball went straight through where he’d been to the goal, the Captain’s hat dropped to the ground. Every time. They learned to play in the backyard after the third time Eddie got yelled at for the bike at the end of the driveway.
Claude was a lot of fun, even if he did get Eddie in trouble. He left stuff lying around, he vanished and left Eddie to get yelled at for things he’d done, he sometimes pulled pranks on Donnie or Eloise, which of course Eddie was blamed for. Continue reading
The Door Opened – Bonus Story for Patreon
So, Hob prompted me this prompt from Reddit for his birthday, and… some time later, I actually finished it. I thought it was going to be Dragons Next Door, but I’m not sure it is.
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It wasn’t as if Cary didn’t know that there were strange things in the world.
You saw it on the news sometimes, of course, dragons in the sky or someone really small turning bank thief.
But for the most part, that was an East Coast sort of thing. It didn’t happen out here. It definitely didn’t happen in Cary’s city. Continue reading
Kidnapped
Content warning: kidnapping and all that it implies
He was going to fight when he woke up, in all likelihood. They almost always fought.
He hadn’t fought them getting in the car because they’d drugged him. A guy like him, rich father, stupidly influential mother, ought to have known better, but it’d been a closed thing, fraternity gig, and he’d probably thought he was safe among his brothers.
Fraternity parties invited girls.
The sister sorority hadn’t even been hard to join. Cass and Jenn, as they were calling themselves this week, hadn’t had any problem with the initiation rites, and sorority hazing was nothing compared to their actual organization.
He was coming home with them, drugged and happy, and none of his brothers even thought it was strange.
They might find it strange when he didn’t show up tomorrow. They might actually worry the next day.
By then, any reputation he had would be in the process of being destroyed, and the nude pictures Cass and Jenn were going to send the Senator and her husband would leave no question as to what was going on with their darling son.
They had the cabin in the woods already picked out for it. The parents might find him. If they wanted to. If they were inclined to. If they had the resources still after Cass and Jenn and their organization were done with him.
He stirred. Cass twisted to look at him. He was cute, soft lips, an adorable smile. She sort of hoped that his parents didn’t come after him.
The last one, that had been interesting. Congressman Hartford and her doctor husband, their handsome son. The Hartford-Maynards had looked for their son, but Cass was pretty sure they hadn’t looked too hard or too long.
‘They’d been sent the pictures of the corpse. That, of course, had been faked. Their organization was damn good at faking corpses, and if the Hartford-Maynards ever did find the place their son had been kept, they would find enough to convince them they’d found his body.
The son himself, on the other hand, had entered into personal service with Jenn, and was – probably – happily enough in Jenn’s dorm waiting for her right now. Her real dorm, at their real college. He was getting top grades, too.
Jenn pulled off the main road and down a side road that was only very nominally paved. Cass squirmed into the back seat. He was starting to come to, and they were out of the sight of police and random passers-by now.
In a week, there’d be some very compromising pictures sent to the Senator. Jenn and Cass had seven days, then, to have as much fun as they could with the Senator’s son. The pictures could be faked. But it was so much better if they could just get him to agree to play along.
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1356297.html. You can comment here or there.
Chimera-Con
It was Dan’s idea to call it Chimera-Con, a fact which he would never after be allowed to live down.
Their little city wasn’t really big enough for real conventions, so the comic convention, the anime convention, and the furry convention had joined together into one, as Dan put it, three-headed fire-breathing monster of a convention.
Cute. Clever. And it drew enough attention that they actually got some decent guests of honor.
Hadley Storm was a well-known urban fantasy author, the sort of thing that everyone read for a couple years early in college. Nobody had expected her to show up.
Them, maybe. It turned out there was a reason Hadley didn’t do too many cons, and the main reason was that Hadley had a chimera-split personality: that is, there were three people in Hadley, and they didn’t always get along.
On the other hand, one of them liked Dan a lot.
So that was interesting enough, but add onto it the stack of chimera fursuits (both the sort with three heads and, in two creepy cases, the fish) and Chimera cosplays (including the Yu-Gi-Oh! chimera, the My Little Pony Chimera, and a were-hyena, for some reason), and it was beginning to look like they’d been a little too Chimera-leaning in their advertising.
By that point Dan had a headache and Adele was laughing at him, Sean, who was running the thing, was trying to figure out if they needed new panels, and Hadley Storm’s angriest personality had taken over their panel and was happily discussing chimer-ism.
Which is when things got even more interesting.
It turned out they’d missed the first few, because in humans it was almost never visible, but there was a small but growing minority – large enough that they’d scribbled three new panels into the program, saving Sean the work while giving him a headache – of people with chimerism.
At this point Dan curled up in a corner with a plastic bottle of vodka and refused to come out.
Which meant that he missed the group of botanists – one of whom was in a very nice Chimera (Clash of the Titans) cosplay – who set up their own panels down in the unused basement.
Unfortunately, it didn’t mean that he missed perhaps the most interesting guest to the con, because the spirit of the Dreaming that had decided this was a joyful place of chaos and imagination had found the same table to hide under after attempting to prank the Yu-Gi-Oh! cosplayer. This powerful chimerical spirit joined Dan in drinking magically-infused vodka, both of them pretending they couldn’t see the other.
By the time the lion-goat-snake creature breathing fire actually came through the door, nobody even pretended to be surprised.
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1356229.html. You can comment here or there.
A New World: Touring
First: A New World
Kael did not sit for long. It was not in her nature to just sit – or she probably would have had far less trouble with heroes and the like. Instead she stood again and brewed several potions in quick succession.
Her ingredient stores were a bit low. She was going to have to venture out into – into that – and see what she could do about it. But first, first she needed a few things.
A potion of Cloak of the Road coated her in clothing appropriate to her station in this place. She looked down at the sleek, snug clothing and approved. This world, whatever it was, had nice clothes. Better than robes, she thought, or the things that people had worn when she’d first reached adulthood.
Her stairs were covered with dust, too. The whole tower looked as if nobody had touched it in – no. No, there in the dust were footprints. They were covered with their own layer of dust – not new, but not all that old, either.
Interesting. Perhaps the spell had been weakening. Perhaps someone had wanted a potion.
She stepped out into the main foyer of her tower and was surprised to find velvet ropes and, even more surprising, a man in clothing not all that dissimilar from her own. He was wearing a placard over his heart that called his allegiance the Kaelingrade Torrent-Step Black Tower and his name Friedrich Vibius.
Well, Kaelingrade Torrent-Step was her, or close enough for the strange shapes of the letters. And this was her Black Tower. “Friedrich?”
“Mr. Vibius,” he corrected. “Are you the new Kael?”
“That would be me,” she agreed. “What, ah.” No, she didn’t want to ask what is this place. “And you are…?”
“I told you.” He frowned impatiently at her. “I’m Mr. Vibius. I run the museum here.”
Museum. That was interesting. A seat of the muses, here in her Tower? Well, she supposed it had slid itself out of time. “How long has the museum been here?”
“What, are you new to the city?”
“That’s a very good way of putting that, yes.” She lifted her chin and gave him her best You Lousy Person Stop Giving Me Trouble look.
He was completely unfazed. “Don’t try that Kael stuff on me. It might be great for the tourists, but it’s not going to do anything on me. I’ve seen seventeen of you girls come and go, and none of them had the ice to chill me. Nothing chills me, girl.”
Tourist. It couldn’t mean one who turned on a lathe, that was silly. Maybe one who – hrng, she was going to need a potion of languages, she supposed. Everything was close enough to be both comprehend-able and baffling. “I’m new to the city, Mr. Vibius. How long has the Museum been here?”
“A hundred years, give or take a week. It is dedicated to Kaelingrade Torrent-Step, I’m sure you knew that much, and our grant insists on certain things, one of those being that the room below the top of the Tower always have a Kael – that’s why we’ve hired you, not because we like the look – and that the very top of the tower always be off-limits. We don’t even clean it, and don’t even think of going in there. You catch kids trying it, you give them your best Why Are You Bothering Me Pesky Mortals act. Yeah, that look. Room, board, and appropriate robes, all back there back stage. Now get robed up and get up to the Kael-room; we’re about to open.”
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1354211.html. You can comment here or there.
People Laugh At Clowns… (a summer tale for Patreon)
“No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
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Written to Vedia’s prompt, because I was feeling like I needed to write random things today.
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It seemed to appear overnight.
It always did – and it always came for the same five days, no matter when in the week it fell. June 19-June 23.
This year that was a M-F, and Annie and all her friends bemoaned all the time they wouldn’t be able to go. Not until Friday, not until classes and chores and work were all done for the week.
Their parents didn’t go, either. They speculated amongst themselves who, exactly, went on weekdays, but the place always seemed full and there was always noises coming from the tent. Continue reading