I just really like the image I made for the May 2016 Prompt Call so I’m sharing it – a family gallery wall 🙂
Archives
The Stranded Prompts Are Complete
With the posting of a Summer story a moment ago, the Stranded prompts I opened to a tiny group of people (for reasons; I might try that again some time) are completed.
The list:
The “Festival” series:
A Wink…
Nothing Could Possib-lie Go Wrong (Summer)
Places One Doesn’t Go (Winter)
At Home (Spring)
Sight and Sense (Autumn)
The others:
The Thing About Tangling… (Spring)
The Words of Magic
A Drabble of Summer
I’ll offer continuations at the Giraffe Call rate of $1/100 words for the next week
Tip the Thorne-Author
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1093197.html. You can comment here or there.
A drabble of Summer
More or less to ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eseme‘s prompt and a companion to Character Study: Melinda
Summer was always the last to go to sleep.
She liked the quiet moments at the end of the day, the way she could cuddle with a sleepy Bishop and Mellie until, one and then the other, they headed off to their giant cobbled-together bed. She liked stroking their hair and their backs while they watched TV or studied together – sometimes, despite all advice, both at once. She liked sleepy late-night kisses.
And then she strolled the house alone, listening to the noises the old place made, picking up this and that. Sometimes she would whisper charms for her family, charms for her lovers. Sometimes she’d just stay up studying.
Tonight, she wandered out to the back yard and stared up at the stars. It felt like they were watching, reminding her to be good.
Summer stuck her tongue out at them and went back inside, where the lights were warmer and less distant.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1093006.html. You can comment here or there.
Sight And Sense, a continuation story of Autumn
After/concurrent with Nothing could possib-lie go wrong, Places One Doesn’t Go, At Home, and A Wink.
The man with the eyeball tattoo was looking at Autumn when his eyebrows went up. His gaze slid off of her; Autumn glanced briefly, but he wasn’t looking at anything obvious in the physical world.
She stepped inside her tent while his attention was elsewhere and shifted her own vision Strandward, looking for the disturbance that had clearly caught his attention. Just as she opened her vision, her own Strands yanked at her.
The tug was tangible and sudden, pulling her from three points like an off-balance marionette. She didn’t need to look to know: the cool blue of Winter’s
strand pulled from her right temple, where she’d painted his arrow under her hairline. The green-yellow of Summer’s strand pulled from her breastbone, where she’d painted a mask. The orange-and-blue of Spring’s strand yanked from down lower, where she’d painted the chaos sign just below her navel.
Her family was here, and they were doing… something. Autumn called to the woman in the next booth over to cover her till. Something strange was going on.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1091102.html. You can comment here or there.
At Home, a story of Spring
After/concurrent with Nothing could possib-lie go wrong and Places One Doesn’t Go.
The fest was wild, and Spring and Lance were in the heart of it. A place like this didn’t need too much tangling – so many people here were already quite twisted up, wound in with other people, braided in with their own stories. But it was still fun to watch the tangles and knots, and it was still just a fun place to be, where nobody would look sideways at the girl with chaos tattooed on her chest or the handsome man in the very-well-fit pants and silky shirt who somehow seemed at home in the sea of tie-dye and batik, ripped denim and torn flannel.
“You look perfect,” Lance told her. “You’re aligned exactly with this place, did you know that?”
Spring stretched up, fingers tickling the air. “I know. This place is my place. It’s my people.” She dropped her arms so she could wiggle her fingers at a man covered in black-ink tattoos. “It’s like home, you know, like family? Can’t stand to spend all your time there, but it’s awesome when you go back for a bit.”
“Excuse me.” The voice cut across the cacophony, although it sounded both quiet and calm. “I believe you are mistaken about some important matters.” There was no speaker visible. The sound was coming from the back fence.
Spring grabbed Lance’s hand. “Speaking of family… we need to be over there. Now.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1089751.html. You can comment here or there.
Places One Doesn’t Go, a continuation story, involving Winter
After /concurrent with “Nothing could possib-lie go wrong.”
“Hey, the insurance convention’s down the street!”
Festivals like this one were not exactly Winter’s cup of tea, nor were they his forte, nor were they a place of pleasure for him. They were loud and raucous, chaotic by nature, and crowded. And as much as he disliked them, other people disliked him being there.
“Look, man, I don’t know what they told you at the academy, but that’s just not undercover. Also, I’m not dealing anything illegal here.”
They were, however, the best place to meet other Strand-weavers, if you knew the proper places to look.
“Excuse me.” The woman in the pottery booth looked less likely to dislike him on sight than many. Her strands were calm and her peace was deep and thorough. “Have you seen anyone else who looks grossly out of…”
“Hey, who do you kids think you are! This is a private party!”
“Excuse me.” He nodded politely at the woman. “I think I see who I’m looking for now.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1088595.html. You can comment here or there.
The Words of Magic, a story-bit of Stranded
This is in part to requests for non-Roundtree (Seasonal Siblings) Stranded stories, part in reply to anke‘s rather old request which I could not find if I’d fulfilled or not. And because the discussion around said request involved the Language of magic TV Tropes Page…
📺
“Eye of the blind, open for me.”
Most people, Nilsa knew, didn’t need to do chanting.
“Feet of the crippled, walk forward for me.”
As a matter of fact, in all of her time working with the Strands, she’d only met one other person who did formalized ritual with their Strand-spells (and only one other person who called them spells).
“Mouth of the mute, speak your words only to me.”
She drew the final line in her chalk diagram and settled into the middle of it. She’d talked to several Workers who thought that her teaching had gone awry and that had caused her dependence on spell and ritual, and three who had heard of Strand-weavers who used rituals and chants.
“Windows gone dark, open your curtains to me.”
Which was a lovely thing, in theory. She knew there had been others like her; she knew why, more or less, she was the way she was.
“Clock of the world, show what your hours have seen!”
But until now, she hadn’t had a way to see why her teacher had crippled her Strand-weaving like this. She opened her eyes wide, as the projection began playing on the wall, thousands of Strands working together to make a video of the past.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1087614.html. You can comment here or there.
Nothing could possib-lie go wrong… a story beginning of Summer/Bishop/Mellie
I got lots of prompts for the triad but I’ll call this kiarrith‘s.
Title from this Simpsons quote
“So, this is…” Bishop was usually the calm one, but today, he was nervous. He was’t exactly shifting from foot to foot or anything, but that could be because they were walking rather quickly down Main Street, which didn’t leave him room to fidget. “Well, what exactly is it?”
“Well, exactly…” Summer shot him a cheerful grin. “It’s a bunch of things. It’s a craft festival that the townies and the visiting parents love. It’s a music festival after-hours that the students – and some of the townies – like. And its…” She gestured vaguely with both hands.
Mellie picked it up. “It’s a thing for people like your family, right?”
“If you know the right places and the right people, yeah. There are Strand-workers everywhere.” Summer tapped the wooden fence three times in a triangle, and a door swung open. “Like this place.”
“Are you sure…” Bishop hesitated, his hand on the fence.
“Oh, come on,” Summer coaxed. She had her bright smile on, the one that generally made either him or Mellie go along with her plans. “They’re friendly folks, these people. Strand workers almost always are.”
“Hey, who do you kids think you are! This is a private party!”
Summer’s smile slid off her face.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1086184.html. You can comment here or there.
The Thing about Tangling… (an experimental fic of Spring/Stranded World)
This follows Tangled, Day Job, and Tangling isn’t just a walk in the park.
“Ready to go?”
The thing about being a tangler…
“Hold on, just give me a minute…”
Is that you were touching strands all the time.
“Spring, my love, can you be organized for more than fifty seconds?”
And running your hands through other people’s lines all the time.
“If you wanted someone organized, Lance, you should have bothered someone else’s stars.”
But you couldn’t touch other people’s strands…
“I didn’t want anyone else’s stars. Here’s your left shoe.”
…without getting tangled up yourself.
“Awesome. Now, where’s my purse?”
And the thing about knots was…
“You didn’t leave it on the bus again, did you?”
…they tended to manifest in strange ways when you weren’t paying attention.
“No, no, you brought it home for me. Remember?”
…and when you were distracted, tangled up in someone else, it was easy to not pay attention.
“That’s right… here it is. What would you do without me?”
“Oh, I’d get by. But it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.”
And the thing about being a tangler was…
“Well, I do aim to please.”
…When you got tangled up, you got really tangled up.
“And that’s what I love about you. Well, part of it.”
Close with a kiss, and find yourself even further tangled.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1085749.html. You can comment here or there.
A Wink, a story of Stranded
Written to inventrix‘s prompt to my Very Small Prompt call.
There was a man at the festival with an eye-tattoo that winked.
Autumn hadn’t been sure the first time. There were several beautiful pieces of ink wandering around this ‘fest – it was pushing a hundred degrees out, and everyone was wearing just about as little as they could get away with. And there was this man, topless and wearing short khaki shorts and Birkenstocks, and the eye centered on his spine had a perfectly-shaded iris. And then it was closed. And then there was the pupil again.
It had been a long day already and it was only noon, the first time she saw the tattoo. Autumn’d gotten herself some water, stepped into the shade of her tent, and munched on a nectarine.
The second time the man wandered by, she had a small set of strands laid out over the pathway. Dozens of people had stepped over them without knowing, brushing through them, hardly moving them.
The man with the eye on his back paused. Deliberately, he turned his back to her.
The iris was blue, the ice-hue that always tripped her up. It was looking straight at her.
The eye-tattoo blinked again and was back to a black-and-grey drawing. The man turned around, looking straight at Autumn. Deliberately, and with a sardonic grin, he winked at her.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1084536.html. You can comment here or there.