A New World, a beginning of a story

Kael drifted off in a haze of fumes.

It hadn’t been exactly what she’d intended to do, but the Blessed Mugwort and the Watery Cress together ought to create a long and dreamless, ageless and still sleep, even if she’d been aiming for more of a quiet watching throughout the ages. Something must have gotten in the mix – probably that last batch of adventurers.

Kael dreamed of a time when such idiots didn’t come traipsing through, just because her tower was black, or just because they’d heard that she was generous with the potions that they needed.

She closed her eyes. This hadn’t been meant to put her to sleep. It really ought to bother her, she thought.

But it was such a nice dreamy sleep. And she couldn’t hear the stupid adventurers anymore.

She woke. She felt stiff and hazy, a little bit lost. It had been a very nice dream, the sort of dream where people came and pounded on her door and couldn’t get in. It was the sort of dream where the elves who had scorned her needed her help yet again, and she wasn’t there, so she didn’t even need to say no. She could just… not help, no guilt, no problem.

She rubbed her eyes and found they were covered with a thick layer of dust. Dust. That had meant to be a nap, even if a long one, not-

Kael sat up. Her tower room was just the same, stones where they belonged, potions covered in a thick layer of dust and grime. Everything was exactly as she had left it, except…

Except the walls were covered in a haze. The window was covered in blue smoke. The doorway was completely obscured.

Well, then. She had done it, if even by accident. She had taken her tower out of time and out of space.

The problem was, she supposed, why had she woken up at all? She had put no end time into the spell, because she had expected to end it herself when she was ready to move on.

She stretched and stood. Her body felt the same. Her robes looked the same – they had not mouldered away, although the dust had worried her for a bit. Imagine sleeping on forever while everything rotted away from her! Imagine rotting away herself while she slept!

She wandered to the windows and door, but the haze wouldn’t clear. Well, she wasn’t a wizard for nothing; she was going to have to clear the spell herself and hope that an unknown-length nap had not rusted away her skills.

Seventeen bottles later, one lit flame, and an incantation that sounded right and felt a little like nails ripping through her throat, she had eliminated the fog. Pleased and yet worried, Kael walked to her window to look over the countryside. She pushed away the heavy, thickly-spelled curtains.

She was greeted with grey and silver, white and black, noise and more noise. Her tower overlooked dozens and dozens of other towers, some of them nearly as tall as her proud and wild Black Tower. There were people everywhere, dressed in strange fashion and moving quickly about.

Kael sat down in her favorite armchair. How long had she slept?


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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1350635.html. You can comment here or there.

Patreon! A Repost and two summer ficlets

Jul11

Originally posted Oct. 28, 2011
🎃
Officially, the Sandborn Institute and Lady Cassidy’s Academy for Young Ladies did not have mixers. There was nothing the Black Tower wanted to hear from the Pumpkin, and nothing the Pumpkin wanted to say to the Tower.
Read on!!

This is just a little story of summertime and beaches, because I wanted to.
😎

At first, we all thought it was some asshole in a particularly good Godzilla costume.

Read on!!

This is written to @medic‘s very enthusiastic “More, more!” to No Rest on This Beach
😎

So there we were, eight-foot Godzilla-like thing on the beach smashing sandcastles and throwing around policemen, and I, at least, had been planning for a nice quiet weekend blending in with the locals and watching the myth of the supernatural from a nice safe place.

Read On!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1348765.html. You can comment here or there.

Leave it to the Professionals, a continuation for summer Patreon

Jul9

This is written to @medic‘s very enthusiastic “More, more!” to yesterday’s No Rest on This Beach, a ficlet of summer, beaches, and a kaiju. 😎

I counted heads. Not five, six of us. Ten had come here, the ones that get called Amazons in deference to Diana, First of Us (never mind all the myths, she was First in all the ways that count). The sixth, Youngest Sister, had decided to be Supergirl today.

Well, we all had to have our phases. I gestured to Leda, she of the cornrow braids, and she stepped forward and pulled a long “prop” sword from her beach bag.

Jitsuko had a golden lasso that happened to be a very nice garrotte.

I had Thor’s hammer, or at least a replica of it. Thor doesn’t like to part with his actual weapon.

We circled the lizard-thing slowly.

Nzingha spoke. “Surrender now,” she told the thing. We always told it to surrender.

They almost never did. I could pretend I was sad about that, but you probably wouldn’t believe me, and I wouldn’t fault you one bit.

“Ladies,” the cop still standing tried. “I know it’s tempting to try to be Wonder Woman, but let’s leave this to the professionals.”

“Yes.” Sarojini told him. She was young and proud, her smile a little sharper than those that had gotten a bit worn down, like me. “Why don’t you leave it to the profes-oh!”

The fight was on. The thing had grabbed for Jocasta. Jocasta was not that easy to grab, and that sword was no prop.

We did our best to make it look staged. There was a risk in that – the thing had actually hurt the police officer and a bystander; someone could get angry at the convention. We still wanted to play it off as a fake if we could. My sisters and I, we prefer to be as quiet as we can.

Even when godzilla shows up on the beach while we’re on vacation.

Godzilla had no intention of going quietly. He ended up throwing Agaidika across the beach and into the ocean, but Agaidika takes to water like, well, a fish does, and splashed back up in quite a good mood and looking like the goddess that she was rising from the waves.

In the end, it took the replica of Thor’s hammer, the pretend-prop sword, and the garrote, and we ended up with a very subdued monster who was turning a bit grey around the gills.

We all held our breaths. This is where the police could be a very big problem, if they wanted to.

The oldest officer, a senior who had hurried onto the scene while we fought, took a look at the creature – clearly, by this point, inhuman, and then looked at all of us, superhero swimsuits and prop weapons.

“Well done, sisters.” She saluted us, and we saluted her back. It’s always good to have a cousin on the local police force, after all, and there was more than one reason we liked this convention.

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No Rest on this Beach, a summer tale for Patreon

Jul8

Part of my continual crosspost/mirroring project, saving all of my Patreon posts to my WordPress site

This is just a little story of summertime and beaches, because I wanted to. 😎

At first, we all thought it was some asshole in a particularly good Godzilla costume.

There was a convention going on, after all, just a couple blocks away, and there were at least three people within sight wearing a Deadpool mask, a matching speedo, and nothing else, to say nothing of the Warhammer angel stoic in her black armor over on the boardwalk. I myself was one of at least five women in Wonder Woman swimsuits getting a little surf-and-sun on in between panels. Continue reading →

Fairy Upside-Down Tale, a bonus fic for Patreon

May25

Because I asked for a prompt on Mastodon, and ran sort of sideways (and long) with it… and also because it sort of fits this month’s theme.👸🏻

They lived happily ever after.

But that’s not the tale, is it? First you have to have the wedding – a posh affair, because he was a prince and she was a…

Well, anyway, he wasn’t all that much of a prince. You could ride across his princedom in a leisurely day, even if you stopped to take a nap around noon, and it was mostly rocks and the wastes of what had once been a fine land. But he was still a prince, son of a king and a queen – and because of the nature of this little area where our story is, both of them had royal blood. He had a cousin who’d been eyeing him speculatively since he’d reached his full growth – but she has her own story.
Continue reading →

The Colony

Apr30

Who knows? This might be the prequel to another setting.
To The Lit-awoo-erry =n.n=‘s prompt.

There were things they hadn’t planned for because they hadn’t known.

There had been people in space before; there had been people on the moon before. But when they built the first lunar colony, they were in a hurry, they had some serious issues to contend with, and they really, really needed to get a breeding population of humans and some core species of animals off the Earth, just in case.

Earth was, as far as the colonists could tell, still there. But the ship had been cannibalized for parts and there would be no going back.

And then there were the Dry Years.

Five years where the colony thrived, the animals thrived, the city grew and they figured out lunar agriculture – and not a single placental mammal carried an infant past the first trimester. None.

Five years of trying everything and nothing, nothing working.

Mira had grown up with this legend. She knew of Earth the way her grandparents had known of the moon: something hanging in the sky, something there were stories about. She knew of the Dry Period much better, because she had been the first child successfully born on Luna.

She stood at the row of incubators, looking at her first egg. The shell was soft, like a platypus’, and it had been platypus eggs that had cued the colonists into their solution.

Earth would probably be very fascinated with the genetic engineering they had come up with in five short years, and everything they had managed in the twenty-one since.

Earth, the lunar colonists said, could ask them about it when Earth sent a ship for them.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1316540.html. You can comment here or there.

Rescue, Rescue

Apr27

Written to some of lilfluff‘s prompts.
The characters uh. Have something to do with wyste‘s ongoing very long fanfic. That is, ah,
are completely original. Really.

Jaime had gotten himself “arrested” by simply being in the wrong (right) place at the wrong (right) time, an occurrence that had been happening far too much lately. A suggestion that he happened to be maybe A Little Bit Magical had gotten him put in the right cells, and then it had taken just four or five mundane tricks to assure that he wasn’t actually stuck in the cell.

It sounded simple if you didn’t think about the weeks of planning and four people worth of preparation that had gone into this, all of which had involved quite a bit of arguing, more than a bit of negotiation, and a tiny bit of blackmail.

Jaime had gotten his mission. Now he just had to get out of it.

And the lock was proving slightly more tricky than he’d expected.

He was swearing quietly at the door when it swung open. He slid his lockpicks up his sleeves and tried to look disgruntled and imprisoned.

“We’ve got to get you out of here.” The blond face on the other side of the door was definitely not a guard. He was also thinner, more drawn, and paler than the last time Jaime had seen him.

“Falco?” He stared at his old enemy, his old ally.

“It’s a good disguise, well done, but the moment they have the seer taste your magic, you’re done for. Come on, you’ve got to leave soon, before someone notices.” Falco shoved a pile of incense-smelling robes at Jaime. “Put these on, nobody will notice one more of them marching out the back way. They all skiv out there for a smoke, anyway.”

“You’ve got to come with me. You’re half the reason I’m in here! Come on.” He grabbed Falco’s arm.

There was hardly anything there, and Falco didn’t even try to pull away. “I…” He closed his eyes and struggled to speak. After a moment, he managed to mouth can’t.

Jaime’s heart went cold. They’d heard the enemy was doing those things, but- “I’m sorry, Falco.” He took the robe, waited until Falco had relaxed.

He didn’t like that he even knew this curse. It was a nasty one, and it left a stain on you just to think about t. But it, unfortunately, had its uses in the rebellion.

When Falco was no longer in control of his own body, Jaime handed him the robes back. “Put these on. You’re a lot less conspicuous that way.”

They got out by the back way, Jaime spelling cell doors open on the way. In the ensuing havoc, they’d have at least an hour before anyone noticed Falco was gone.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1313888.html. You can comment here or there.

Dream, attempted to storify

Apr19

Some of my dreams stick with me. Sometimes they’re my weirdest ones. not sure about this one.

Here it is, though, a dream, attempted to make into fiction. I don’t know it if helps or hinders to imagine the first half of the story the way I dreamed it – as sentient Fisher-Price figures.

If she hadn’t known her three brothers the princes were pretty much useless, coming to the trading town really sent the message home.

At home, when the bandits attacked, her brothers could barely hold them off with their own magic, weak stuff. Here, the oldest of her brothers stepped onto the dock the way he always did – and the bandit ship fled immediately. Looking up, she understood why.

Here, the piggies and the sheepies helped. Here, the whole town worked to send off the raiders. There they were, the rotund row of townspeople standing on the balcony, on all the balconies, glaring their magic at the bandit ship.

She was talking with a rogue with a grubby demeanor and a sweet attitude, trying not to talk about how much of failures her little princedom must be, when the raiders came back in force. Not just one ship, but ship after ship after ship.

The rogue gave her a not-ungentle shove. “Go, try to get on that boat. Just get out of here.” He was pointing toward the river, towards a small craft holding a man and a woman. “Go!”

The raiders were almost there. She didn’t know why she listened, but she dove off the river-dock and swam for the boat.

The trip upriver was hard, and she worked every boat-length of it, as much as the people – Prince’s people, it turned out – who had taken her in. They spoke about the raiders, about her home. About the Prince. About the rogue who’d shoved her towards their boat.

It was only as they were pulling up on another dock that the woman said, in a tone the princess hadn’t heard before, “Haven’t you figured it out by now?”

The rogue was waiting for her, a bit the worse for wear, but still standing, still alive. He pulled off his cloak, shaking his hair, and revealed the Prince below. “I had to know,” he apologized. “It makes sense, right? I mean, if we’re to be wed-”

She was furious.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1309249.html. You can comment here or there.

A Month of Sundays – Tootfiction/Thimbleful Thursday

Apr18

She woke on Sundays.

The world was small, quiet; the landing site nearly self-sustaining, but when she’d slept a month she’d woken to find the smallest robot bumping into walls, so now she woke on Sundays.

Her calendar marked thirty-one Sundays. She woke, X’d the date, took notes, transmitted data, checked the fields.

The robots did most of that. Still, she had to do something.

The calendar had 12 months of Sundays. On “Christmas” she made eggnog. For “New Year’s”, she cried at old songs.

On Leap day, they finally reached her.

Written to Jul 30th’s Thimbleful Thursday prompt as an experiment in tootfiction – 500-character-or-less fic for Mastodon

Actually, in this case, this version is slightly longer to fit in the Thimbleful requirements. The Tootfiction version here – https://tootplanet.space/@aldersprig/34252 was only 80 words.

… and now that this text may be longer than the story…

Oh yeah! Inspired by the Wired comic for Interstellar, which I liked better than the movie.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1308575.html. You can comment here or there.

Tootfiction/Thimbleful Thursday: New Leaf

Apr17

The trees in Haleth Forest were unlike those anywhere else. They had not grown but had been created. In every one of them, broad leaves spread out, waiting for pen.

You could climb the trees to read someone else’s tale unfolded leaf after leaf or you could climb higher to find pages that had not yet been written on.

There, you could write your own story on new leaves, untouched by hand or pen or tale.

Some people used it to gain immortality.

Some used it to gain a fresh start.

Written to Dec 29th’s Thimbleful Thursday prompt as an experiment in tootfiction – 500-character-or-less fic.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1307784.html. You can comment here or there.

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