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MicroGreens

Apr4

The Tinies of Dragons Next Door can be found here.  The Tinies are generally around 4-6″ at the tallest, usually shorter, and live in the walls of human (Big) and dweomer (humanoid fae, also Big) dwellings. 

🌱

“They’re called ‘microgreens.’”

Oka looked between her parents, trying to be defiant, feeling defensive, and looking nervous.

“We are – micro.”

Her hands were full of the seeds, which she had gotten when the Big whose house they shared had spilled her groceries.

Wud cleared her throat. “We are, but these are – we don’t grow, Oka.” Continue reading →

Camp NaNoWriMo – Autumn Lightning

Apr3

So, a year and a half ago or so, I wrote this story – Lightning in Autumn – to Inspector Caracal‘s (Cal’s) prompt.

This story features Leofric Lightning-Blade, from Addergoole: Ghost Story (before he was Lightning Blade), the Princess and the Elf AU/Fanfiction, approximately 8 million stories in 7 million AUs on my blog, and probably half that many or more on Cal’s blog. In addition to prominently featuring Leo,  it’s from the point of view of a man named Nathan, who is actually three people in one body – Public Face, Social Face, and The Other (though that doesn’t really come up in that story).

Then I… kept writing the story.  Through the apoc and out the other side and I kept going until it was 100000 words of a gay romance post-apoc travel journal exploration of Addergoole.

For Camp Nano this year, I’m trying to finish it! Continue reading →

Hidden Mall 62: Another Door Opens

Apr1

The ghosts led them past the cracked and melted remains of a Ground Round and a nail salon to a door that, in a normal world, might to go the outside.  To a parking lot. Abby stared at the doors – smoked overs and opaque – and reached for one of the handles.

A ghost caught her wrist with what remained of its hand.  No.  The meaning was clear even if the phantoms made no noise. Continue reading →

Haunted House 43: Buying & Selling

Mar30

First: A story featuring a male keeper and a female Kept.
Previous:  Thieves

🌳

A job.  No matter the discussions, she knew what Jasper was offering Kearney.

Mélanie wanted to protest – this is a kid we’re talking about! –  but no matter how young Kearney looked, they were clearly already getting comfortable with being on their own. She smiled instead, like she thought this was a great idea.

Kearney looked between them, coughed a couple times, and seemed to decide.  “Sure. I can do that. But only because the lady here is nice.”

“She is nice,” Jasper agreed.  “She’s quite nice, and I would suggest you remember that as you deal with her.  Because I’m not the nice one.”

Kearney didn’t shudder, didn’t even look all that impressed, but there was a slight change in their manner as they looked at the booth Jasper had been setting up.  “So, where do I put this? What can I do?” Continue reading →

Running in the Bear Empire 39: Prices and Paranoia

Mar29

First: Running in the Bear Empire
Previous: Loyalty
Next: 40: Spies

🐻

Deline didn’t so much freeze as she tried to strip all tells from her body language and expression.  Where’s your loyalty?  That was a good question.  Did she want the answer?

“My loyalty?”  Carrone sneered at the Haloran spy.  “I’m a bounty hunter. My loyalty is to the highest bidder.”

“Then I’ll pay you more than whoever’s paying you right now!  Come on, you know the Haloran government has deep pockets.”

He turned to look at Deline, raised an eyebrow, and looked back at the bounty hunter.  She held her breath.

“You can’t meet what she’s paying me, I assure you.   And I wouldn’t want you to.”

He turned his back on the woman, who kept shouting.  Deline did not smile.  She held his arm and started walking, hoping he would walk along with her.

You can’t match what she’s paying me. Continue reading →

Recording the Past

Mar28
Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

This story is of Eva, the main protagonist of the Aunt Family, and her nieces and nephews who have some spark or interest in the power.

It references Karen and Billy from Fated and Certain Things Remain (to one), as well as older Aunts in Eva’s family tree. 

Niblings:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/uk/newsid_3667000/3667379.stm ;  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nibling 

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“All right – this is the last of this set.  Our poor OCR is still having a hard time of them, but it’s doing better with Aunt Zenobia’s than it did with Beulah’s.”  Eva smiled at the pile of journals and the scanners taking up most of the dining room table.  “I wish I could hire someone to go through and keyword this all, but it’s going to have to be us —  don’t give me that look, Bellamy, you know I’m going to pay the five of you.  That’s not the problem.”

“The problem,” Beryl declared, with more than a bit of melodrama, “is that our Aunts talked a lot and wrote even more, and this branch has journals going back since before the family came to America.  And there’s only the six of us and Aunt Eva is making more of these as we speak.”

“Actually, I’m working on that,” Eva admitted.  “The ‘making more’ part, at least. Right now, I’m using a digital pen that records everything digitally as it records it on paper. But I don’t think- well, I believe there’s three functions to the journals, and only one of them can really be properly replicated digitally.  Improved on, mind you, at the same time, but that’s just one of the things it has to do.” Continue reading →

The Trouble With…

Mar26

Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

This story is a continuation of The Trouble With Chickens and all other stories in The  Feltenner Chickens section of the Science! universe.  If you haven’t read those, the pertinent points are: the chickens are huge. The size of carriages.  Large parts of the university have been given over to them.  And the Professor Lokeg-Fridelabout  doesn’t mind getting students killed. 

 🐔

“You want to – to convert one of the abandoned buildings into a poorhouse?”   Resklin Tarajirra had never seen Professor Lokeg-Fridelabout look quite so surprised.  Up until now, he hadn’t know the professor had emotions beyond snide, annoyed, and cruelly pleased – although the annoyed had gotten awfully dark last week when Trenner Oujiduie showed up with a Feltenner chicken chick following her around.  “Tarajirra, that seems rather dark for one of your sort – it seems dark even for me,” the professor admitted in a rare moment of self-awareness.  “If you wanted to eliminate the poor, there are kinder ways than feeding them to Feltenner chickens and the Wind Alone knows what else lives in there.  What did Oujiduie’s paper say? Ferrets?”

Ah, a snide sneer.  That was more like it.

“Ferrets, yes, Professor.  You see, I don’t want to feed the poor to the chickens.  Or the ferrets.  My thought is more in the other direction – with the analysis that we’ve been working on, if we could feed the chicken eggs to the poor, we could start a very reasonable work house there, move some of the more tedious research in that direction –”

“That, Tarajirra, is what graduate students are for.”
Continue reading →

Hidden Mall 61: Bad Ideas

Mar25

They turned around.  Abby forced herself to look at the bodies in front of her.

The ghosts.  They weren’t corpses, they might just be illusions.  This place had certainly given them enough of those already – fakes and shames and traps.

The one that looked like Vic was gesturing to them.

“I – Vic doesn’t even like us,” Liv protested.

“But we don’t like her either,” Abby countered, “and that hasn’t stopped us from saving her life.  Or anything else, you know?”

“This can’t be a good idea.” Continue reading →

A scribble and a doodle of a story map

Mar25

Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

So I’m writing a particularly moving-around-heavy portion of a story.

Nathen saw the stairway down between two stoops going upward…. There was a closed and locked door in front of them.  Nathen glared.  Sure, opening it wouldn’t be hard – but it would be obvious.

Oh.  The Social one perked up.  Turn.

Nathen turned to the right.  The door there was almost invisible – no knob, hidden hinges, painted the same color as the wall.  He gave it a careful push.

The door swung open into a narrow hallway.  He pushed the door shut behind him and whispered a dark-sight Working just as the light from the entryway vanished.  Forward….

…He made his way down stairs that were half-gone…

…”You don’t want to go out the front.  This way.”…

…They were out the back door, up another set of stairs, and into a narrow strip of yard quickly after that.  Their guide took a quick look around and headed straight back, towards the next row of yards.  There was a gap in the fence – the Other mended it behind them – and a narrow alleyway between two buildings.

They zig-zagged through three more blocks in quick succession, leaving subtle obstructions where they would seem coincidental, until they reached a semi-collapsed row of brownstones.

So, of course, first I had to figure out this weird layout, which I did during a rather long meeting.

And then, when I started writing them fleeing, well, yes, I Excel’d up a whole set of like 6 city blocks of brownstone-style houses.

And then I figured out how to draw Nathen’s route (and then with Leo) through this neighborhood to the place where they end up.

Which, no, doesn’t have a floor plan yet.

Red dashed line on the Excel map is their route; grey is roads, green is yard and alleyways, black dotted lines are fences, and house-shapes that are in dashed lines are in a state of broken, half-falling-apart, maybe-a-dragon-landed here.

Big dragon.  Small Godzilla.  You know.

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