Random Ficlet of a semi-erotic nature

Jun1

From kc_obrien‘s prompt “dojo, scarlet, thunderstorm,” and it wants to be the same world as the Foundation and the Library, but pre-apoc. Written in 15 minutes on Write or Die.

The silk sheets were strewn around the dojo like long streaks of blood, bright and shiny and scarlet.

They were not even the first thing she noticed, though; by the time she’d gotten that far, she’d already noticed that the building inside the couryard had no windows, and that the walls were very thick, the doors heavy and with double deadbolts.

She hadn’t walked all this way to turn around now, even if that was the goal of the trappings – intimidate, weed out the weak, weed out those who weren’t suited. But (even if, in the core of her heart, she wasn’t certain she was suited), she was determined not to be weeded out. She had a stake in this, a stake beyond the blisters on her feet, beyond the road dust and the gnawing hunger in her stomach.

She bowed to the tatami. Her feet, blisters or no, were at least clean, as were her hands; the attendant at the first gate had seen to that. She’d also taken all of her possessions and locked them into a storage locker, everything except the clothes on her back.

It had the feel of a pilgrimage, or an imprisonment, and, from what she had been told, it would be a little bit of both and, in the long run, less of either and more of an apprenticeship.

It would be wrong to say that she was either eager or nervous. Both of those emotions had had a long time to work out of her system. She had been walking, after all, for weeks. In that time, every emotion she had about this place had come, and, in the slow repetition of her feet on the dusty road, faded.

Outside, a gong rang, echoed by a thunderclap. Through the door she had left open behind her, she could feel the wind whipping up. A storm was coming. She had known that before she began her journey, though: a storm was coming, and it would wash away levees and dams, villages and cities. What it would leave in its wake, what would be left, remained uncertain.

But what she would have here, in the dojo, would be an education that would serve her in almost any world; there were some things that were nearly universal. What she would have here would prepare her for her future, and so she had come, in lieu of summer school, to learn.

“Strip.” The voice was as loud as the thunder, and so close behind her that she wondered how she could have missed them coming up behind her. “You bring nothing, except your self, into the school.”

Such had the attendant at the gate said, but she still struggled with the blush as she stripped off her dusty pants and sweat-stiffened T-shirt. She almost hesitated at her bra and panties, but the blisters on her feet reminded her that she was already invested. The lavender underwear joined the rest in a tidy pile on the floor.

“Drop to your fours,” the voice commanded. She balked, now, but her knees, after all, and her palms, were less blistered than her feet. She dropped to the mat, arching her back as attractively as she could.

From here, the world looked different. She could see a doorway ahead that only came to the current height of her shoulders, draped in another swath of scarlet. She could see the smooth spots in the mat where others had come before. She could see where she had lain aside her pride, and where she had, in doing so, only reinforced it.

She bent further, and kissed the mat.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/48097.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute ficlet: Slurry

May27

Originally posted here in response to the prompt “slurry.”

A slurry is, in general, a thick suspension of solids in a liquid. So sayeth the great online wikipedia, at least.

I’d seen slurries. In my line of work, they came up now and then, which is to say, all the fucking time. Concrete. Explosives. The gook they used to process ceramics. The stuff they fed us and called meat. Solids suspended in liquid.

And then there was this. Solids, more or less, as much as humans are solid (if meat slurry has solids, then humans count, too), suspended in the water, or at least, we were going to call it water for the moment. Liquid, at least, and people jammed so close together that they really couldn’t drown; there was no room to move downwards, any more than in any other direction.

I was glad I wasn’t in it, I can tell you, that was my absolute first thought there. My second thought was damn, this looks like a bad Simpsons episode. But all the while I was working on problem three – how do I get this mess of people out of the water before their fucked-up surface tension breaks and they all go sloop down the drain like leftovers during a clean-up? Assuming there’s a drain, of course, but this looked like a giant, giant bathtub. Reason said there was, somewhere, a drain.

Pulling the plug would be one solution, but that would mean I’d have to find the plug, and chances were, it was under that mass of bodies, under the human slurry. No, I was going to have to find a way to break their surface tension without sending them all drowning, and yank them all out of the basin.

Never mind how they got in there… I’d worry about that once I got them out. Surface tension. Surface tension. There was a reason my mind kept coming back to that, there had to be. I might be pretty dumb but my brain is pretty smart, after all.

Soap!

Soap, silly string, bubbles, yes, that would work. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the victim of this mess closest to me was a gorgeous brunette wearing not quite enough clothing; thinking about her all slicked down in suds was a fun two seconds of diversion.

Soap. I ran for the tanker truck we’d been using for the really weird plaster cast project. The soap solution there would coat everything it touched, and it wasn’t quickly water-soluble. It would stick to skin like nobody’s business, which is what I wanted for step one.

I sprayed that stuff over the whole mess of them, that’s it, yup, drenched the thousands of them in glycerine solution (thank god for the really powerful sprayer and customers with weird tastes). And while I was doing that, Joe, my foreman, he grabs the girl next to the hot brunette, and pops her out, Pop!, like a cork while he dumps in the readycrete in the spot she vacated.

That stuff hardens in less than five minutes, but it won’t get close to the soap stuff. Before anyone could drown, the whole mess of them were standing on solid ground.

Then all I had to do was track someone down and find out who had turned the middle of the city into a giant bathtub, and what they wanted to do about me having turned their ‘tub into a skate park.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/46830.html. You can comment here or there.

DailyPrompt – Alone together

May19

From dailyprompt: “eight line poem” and “I want to be alone.” Originally, I had put placemarkers in for names to fill in later, but, as the story went on, I liked keeping it that way.

“I want to be alone.” [3] stared down at her notebook, the pencil limp in her hand.

“Now, honey, you know it don’t work that way.” [2] cuddled her briefly.

“It oughta,” she sighed.

“Now don’t let the bosses hear you talking that way,” her teammate scolded. “They’ll start thinking you’re defective, or, worse yet, se-ditty- itious.” She drew the word out like it was sexy, naughty, instead of terrifying.

“I know,” [3] agreed quietly. They all knew what happened to defectives. “It’s just sometimes, I can’t hear myself think.”

“And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be,” [2] nodded firmly. “That’s what we’re for, peachie, to hear your thoughts.”

“But…”

[1] and [4] had remained quiet until now, [4] because, as junior, that was his place; [1], as senior member of their Four, had left girls to girl business but now, when [3] refused to complacently back down, he spoke.

“What do you have that you can’t share with your Four?”

It was a catechism question, a trap for defectives, the root of their training. [3] answered dutifully. “There is nothing I have that I cannot share with you.” Except the burning poems inside her head that kicked and beat at her skull, wanting to get out. Except the whispers of music that went away the minute someone else spoke to her.

That’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. They were too close for her Four to not notice that she was defective, but close enough, loyal enough, that they could keep it quiet as long as she could hold together. And she could, given everyday situations. The problem was days like this, where the pressure of the poetry and the pressure of duty pounded at each other like hammer and anvil, and her in between, soft and squishy like the peach that [2] nicknamed her.

“Come here,” [4] spoke up, startling them all.

The habit of obedience was well-ingrained into all of them, and she was across the room and sitting next to him on their wide, Spartan bed before it had processed that he, of all the people in the world, she didn’t have to obey.

And then, with the gall that only a spoiled, pampered junior member of a well-off Four could manage, he kept giving her orders, in a voice so gentle it was like a recording of the ocean, calm and inexorable, pulling her under. “Lay down with me,” and she did, letting him spoon her. “She’s not alone,” he told their teammates; she barely heard [2] grunt in acknowledgement.

He pulled her against him, one hand on her hip, his chest against her back, his breath warm on her neck. She waited, wondering what he was up to; they all waited, although she could hear, faintly in the background, [2] moving around, picking stuff up.

He said nothing, did nothing. He was there, close as a second skin, close as they were always supposed to be with at least one of their four, but he was junior, with nothing he could make her do. The words stopped rattling haphazardly in her skull and began lining up peaceably, forming themselves into an orderly eight-line poem.

“Write,” [4] murmured, and, at the desk, [2] began writing.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/44148.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute ficlet: Moving In

May18

Originally posted here in response to this image prompt

The planet had been, to all of their sensors, bare of tool-using life. There was nothing there that showed up using anything more complex than a stone axe. No smelting. No radio waves. No large gatherings of populations.

(Not that it really would have mattered. They had nowhere else to go, after all).

They had landed in a place that looked clear, on a body of water their initial survey told them was potable, near some purple and green vegetation that, even if not edible, would be useable in building materials. They had landed… and stared, open-mouthed, at the landscape around them.

They had seen ruined cities. They had seen corpses. All of that, they had left behind. But the ruins on this planet, where nothing was left using tools; the corpses stacked by the side of the city, like someone had been trying to be tidy; the strange architecture, built to fit those strange shapes, those twisted spines… it was like stepping into their own nightmares, twisted into alien forms.

The worst of all wasn’t the vegetation growing over the things that could be houses, the purple flowers that they soon found were flesh-eating and blood-hungry, the buildings that would never quite fit them. The worst was the statues by the waterfront, and the others, tucked in every place where a god might look, the strange and creepy edifices seeming to beg help from gods who, it seemed, had turned a blind eye.

They slept inside the ship that night, but they could not go home, and they had nowhere else to go. The next morning, they began to dig graves for the remaining corpses, to brush out the biggest of the residences, to plan their own statues to gods they hoped had followed them.

I think it’s in the same world as “Dancing for Joy” http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/43474.html and a couple others

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/44030.html. You can comment here or there.

Drabble: Dancing for Joy

May17

From dailyprompt:

They are dancing again.

They dance for the full moon, for the changing seasons, for the first harvest and the last, for the first snow and the last. They dance for weddings and for childbirth, although they do not dance for death.

I cannot fault them; they have, despite that litany, so little to dance for. They came here so naked and unprepared, so bold and brave and completely not ready for what this place was; they came here and they died.

This planet is not a nice place, and they are not the first sentient race that have walked over its shifting skin and been eaten by its trap, frozen by its winters, swept up by its maelstroms. I’ve seen others come, and I’ve watched them all die. The death of these creatures did not surprise me.

What surprised me was their tenacity and their adaptability. They saw that the ground would shudder with no warning, and they built shelters like boats to move with the shifts. They saw that their plants from home were twisted by the soil into something inedible, and they learned how to eat the plants that were here, thay have grown to process the poisons of this place.

They died by the dozen, and they learned with every death. With every adaptation, the planet had to work harder to shake them off its back; and with every shake, their grip dug in tighter.

No other species had lasted through more than two seasons, but these, they were still alive when a year had passed. And now it has been two years, and, while there remains only a tenth of the original population, they die much less frequently now, and they give birth more often than they die.

And they dance. They dance for ever success, every triumph, every survival. At first I thought they were mocking the planet, taunting it for failing to kill them. Then I thought this was part of their grieving ritual, for all those that the planet had succeeded in eliminating. No other race had lived long enough to even bury all its dead, much less construct rituals to mourn them. And these creatures, all these little sentient creatures, are so different from me, from my people. Their rites, all of them, are so mobile.

It took me a while to learn that they called this particular set of gyrations dancing, longer to understand that it was a celebration, a prayer to the higher powers they believe rule them and protect them, a hymn of joy sung with their whole raggle-taggle wiggly bodies. And this thing they did, this dancing, was a thing of joy, not of revenge or of grief.

And I do not begrudge them their joy, because this planet is a hard place, as none know better than I. If they have found, like I have, to take their pleasure where they can, than the better for them.

But I do wish they would learn that the mountain they dance on is my head, and the valley my throat. They’re giving me a terrible headache.

Prompt was “dancing on my head”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/43474.html. You can comment here or there.

15minutefiction: Retaliation

Mar24

Originally posted here, in response to the prompt “retaliation.” It’s a weird’un, but here it is.

“For every one of ours…!” Zay’s voice filled the stone building and echoed back at them from the corners; every man and woman there picked up the call and shouted it back at him.

“For every one of ours, three of theirs. For every three of ours, fifteen of theirs. For every fire, a conflagration. For every bullet, a cannonball!”

Aisa stood in the doorway, not in the hall, not participating, but observing. She was not part of their village, nor part of the neighboring town on which they would call down their vengeance. She would have no part in this, none but to watch. Someone had to bear witness, after all.

“For every daughter of ours,” Zay prompted the crowd,

“Three sons of theirs!” they roared back. It was a wonder they couldn’t be heard from the neighboring hall. Then again, they were probably shouting something similar there.

Aisa, unseen, shook her head. She had heard this before, seen it before, in countless small towns, small feuds blossoming into giant bloodbaths. Some old-time philosopher had said “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Here, it left dead cities, in wastes that couldn’t afford the devastation. It was as if something had turned even more feral, nastier, in the surviving humans, that made them seek bloodshed, perversely, when they could least afford it.

“We will go to their center square!” Zay hollered.

“We will go into their streets, into their bedrooms,” the crowd yelled back.

“We will take their children, three of their for every one of ours.” He raised his fist to the sky. They all raised their fists to the sky.

“And we will raise them as our own,” the village yelled.

“Three of theirs…

“For every one of ours!”

It was amazing they couldn’t hear this all the way to the other coast.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/27567.html. You can comment here or there.

3WW/Dailyprompt Story: Reunion

Mar23

Three Word Wednesday is a once-weekly 3-word writing prompt.

This week’s three words were Dual, Identical, Volley.

dailyprompt is a once-daily writing prompt. Today’s prompt was not a secret any more

Reunion

It’s not a secret anymore, so I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you the whole story. They can’t reclassify stuff, spilt milk and all that, but sometimes they try to contain the mess or mop it up, so if they come after you for me telling you this, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Still want to know? Okay. I’m not Karla Velazquez. I’m not even Hispanic, no, not even on my father’s mother’s father’s side. I’m, man, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten, but I think mostly Greek, with a good dose of French thrown in for good measure.

I couldn’t tell you what my real name was, even if I wanted to. I went so far beyond dual identities that I lost track back before I entered college – although I know, that freshman year, I was not seventeen. I think I was twenty-four.

What? I don’t look thirty-five now, either. I’m small and I hide my age well, what can I say?

I mean, that’s only part of the story. I was in deep cover in college, which, I’ll admit, is weird. But They had their goals – you have to have heard some of it, even if only on the Daily Show – and they’d already owned me for six years, so I went where I was sent and I did what I was told.

The day I managed to buy my contract back was the happiest day of my life. Our lives, our contracts.

What? You didn’t expect this was going to be a one-volley game, did you? I told you it was complicated.

I’m not only not Karla Velazquez, about a third of the time you were talking to Karla, you weren’t talking to me, either.

They spit out five of us, as far as I know, that year. Identical clones, quintuplets I suppose, and we were raised together and everything, so we were pretty much sisters. We split roles between us, usually only two of us on a role, so it was sister-Beta and I being Karla, Beta covering for me while I was also being, oh, man, usually Jennifer Torqueta, I think. Yeah, that Jennifer Torqueta, I know, you always said she looked like me.

Why? Damned if I know. We’re just the grunts. Like I said, we go where we’re sent. Anyway, I wanted to tell you about buying off our contracts.

That’s the dream they sold us. We were bought and paid for before we were ever implanted, but if we did a good job, we could earn enough money to be free agents. Pick a life and live it, just one life, one face, you know, normal people. Well, as normal as you can be when you’re a clone.

I thought it would work, more than that, I thought it’s what I wanted, what all five of us wanted. So we saved our pennies and we did everything we were told, and when we turned thirty-three, we bought off our contracts.

Problem was, we’d gotten used to it, you know? The money, the personas, changing who we were, sharing identities between us. Even in school, we’d traded places all the time. Being pinned down to day jobs that didn’t change, to one name each… it was maddening. We went back to Them.

You asked why we were in deep cover in college. I think you know why, Tammy.

But I lied a little bit about that, too. Gamma was the one who roomed with you most the time, and she and Beta kind of liked you. So this one’s on me – and I’ve never been Karla Velazquez.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/27232.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute ficlet: The desert blinks

Feb17

From Ty’s prompt here, “The desert is awake / Flicks its pale moon eyes.” Unknown setting.

“Oh, good, you’re awake.”

He hadn’t been. He had been happily off in the land of dreams, where things made sense and no-one was trying to kill or kidnap him, where people didn’t jump out of twelfth-story windows with him over their… over their shoulder?

He blinked slowly awake, no longer quite sure where the dream was and where the reality.

She was sitting leaning over him, casting a long shadow, longer than seemed reasonable. Dark, shaggy-short-cut hair, sun-darkened skin, her cheekbones tattooed, her upper and lower lips each pierced twice, t-shirt with the sleeves ripped out, BDU pants, tape-patched combat boots. She looked like a punk, from back when that word had meaning. She didn’t look old enough to remember when counterculture had been a thing.

“Am I?” he croaked. The heat was unbearable, even the ground under him feeling like the inside of a pizza oven. “Am I even alive?”

She blinked at him, her eyes the color of old ash, of the full moon in daytime. “I rescued you,” she reminded him. “You live.”

He stretched tentatively and was surprised to find that nothing hurt, that nothing was broken. “How did you do that? You jumped … we jumped…”

“Shh,” she scolded. “There are things out there that I cannot stop, and they will hear your yowling. But there are things I can stop, and those creatures were on that list.”

“Creatures? The slavers?” He twitched against the memory of chains. “Fuuuck. They branded me. I can’t go anywhere now.” He reached for the spot on his upper back where they’d burnt in their mark, to find the skin smooth and unscarred. “What…?”

She blinked at him again. “There are things I can stop,” she repeated. “They will not bother you.”

He looked around, past her, at the desert that stretched out in all directions, at the dune that shaded him from the deadly sun, then back to the girl with the moonlight eyes staring seriously at some point two inches inside his skull. “You stopped the slavers. You stopped their brand.” He’d heard of the magic ones, but never in terms of rescue, never in terms of salvation. Then again… “How do I get out of here, then?”

The teeth that showed in her smile were like bleached shards of bone. “For that,” she said, sounding like a rattlesnake’s warning, “you have to deal with me.”

Drakeathon 2/19-2/20/11

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/6949.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute Ficlet: Passing

Feb3

Originally posted here, in response to the photo prompt

Passing

They’d gotten out.

Sylvie turned to look one last time at the city. It looked so peaceful and benign in the setting sun, no sign of the hell it had become visible from this distance, nothing but the fence they’d had to get around, the fence that trapped the denizens of the city in there with each other.

She looked up, up, up at the fence, and then back at Jake, sighing softly. If they had gotten out, others would, too. Someone else would be less discreet, and then their captors would know that there were escapees. “We should get going,” she told him. “Before the hunt comes.” They would have to vanish into the world, before they were missed. It was their only hope of salvation, or survival.

He nodded, the ragged mess a gangster had made of his throat having muted him permanently. He took a long look at her paws, all four of them bloody and cracked with the work of digging them out of there, of filling the hole back in, and scooped her up in his arms.

“Ja-ake,” she complained, but she was grateful, and, when he shook his head at her in a silent scold, she fell silent and relaxed in his hold.

The dark had fallen, and nothing human would be within ten miles of the blockaded city. Jake loped off into the dark, Sylvie drowsing in his arms. By the time the sun rose again, they would look like just another couple, somewhere sixty miles away. By the time the jailors started looking for escapees, they’d have become nothing more than two more people out of billions, just a couple of humans in the crowd.

It was a nice dream, at least, and he let her have it, for now, while he ran.

Drake-athon! – Feb. 19th & 20th 2011

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/3780.html. You can comment here or there.

A bit of a story – the Library

Nov6

Clearly a fragment, and, also clearly, going to be too long for a 1,500 word story. Also, the voice of this story is weird.

There had always been something more than a little strange about the library, and not just its nineteen-sixties World Fair-meets-Buckminster-Fuller architecture, all acute angles in a sort of star-like arrangement that looked like it had been drawn by a four-year-old with too much sugar in his system.

No, Catharede Library just seemed to emit a sense of “that place ain’t right:” the lights on at night, in windows that seemed to correspond to no known rooms (though that, too, could have been the architecture); the plants that would not live on the sunny side of the building, and the thick jungle of waxy black plants in its shade; the long shelves of books, whole sections of the stacks, that seemed to eat light bulbs, that (perhaps only because of the perpetual dimness) seemed to discourage browsing or, really, even coming near. Maybe it was just the Librarians – no, everyone knew that Librarians were a little strange, and even if the Catharede librarians seemed a little excessively strange, well, how could you really gauge strangeness?

Still, professors felt that visiting the Library was a requirement to passing their classes, and no amount of clever workarounds would fool them for long – no longer than the fifth week of sophomore year, as it turned out, at least for Kiara and several of her dorm-mates. At that point, their professors had, it seemed, conspired with each other and assigned readings from books on reserve, strange and rare books that couldn’t be found online, nor in an upperclassman’s room, nor in the town public library (which, while it had a pleasantly creepy look to its old-Victorian-house façade, was sunny and cheerful inside and full of nothing more ominous than a complete collection of the town’s newspapers, dating from 1811 to the current day).

So Kiara, and Carrot and Stick from the next room over (everyone had long since forgotten their real names, or pretended to, since they were Jon and John), and Jessica (Red Jessica, not Blueberry Jess or Greenfreak Jess), Amanda, Mike, and Ryan gathered after dinner, banding together for moral support, if not intellectual, and herded over to the library.

But where was the damn reserve desk? There were entrances on all three floors of the irregular building, so the sketchy notes from their professors (“Enter the library and, about 10 feet in, turn left,” and so on) did no good at all. What’s more, though the library didn’t close for another three hours, there was no-one to be found at any of the help desks. Maybe, John/Stick suggested, they just couldn’t get work-study students to work here, so they left the whole place unmanned after their required 9-to-5.

Ryan probably would have argued the point on sheer logistics and the untrustworthiness of humans in general and their fellow students in specific, but Amanda and Red-Jessica sidetracked them with an argument about the word “unmanned,” which Mike promptly took into the gutter.

At that point, Kiara, who really needed an A in History 201, realized that moral support was not going to find the reserves desk for her, and started looking.

The left-hand rule (put your left hand on a wall and follow that around the maze or, in this case, library) should have worked, even in a building as haphazardly laid out as the Library, but, as the voices of her friends faded into the distance even as they rose in argument, Kiara found herself wondering if, perhaps, different rules of geometry ruled in here. She was pretty sure she’d passed the same section of stacks – first the 800’s, then the 900’s – two or three times, and the same outdated magazines (or were they different outdated magazines? Glancing out of the corner of her eye, she’d thought she’d seen a picture of JFK on a Time magazine, but, when she turned to look at it face on, it had turned out to be Bill Clinton instead. And did any building really need that many stairways?

Finally, fed up with the endless 800-to-900 stacks, which were obviously just arranged in a horribly bad manner, Kiara modified her left-hand rule navigation long enough to cross through another bank of magazines to a staircase. As seemed to be the way in Catharede, despite the clear evidence of floors above and below the one she was on, this staircase only offered a way up; so up it was.

At the top of the stairs, she was offered the choice of yet more stacks (100-200), yet more magazines (a charcoal drawing of some old guy)

764 words

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