Archives

Frying Pan, Fire – Tir na Cali – Lilfluff’s Prompt1

Jul9

I am taking prompts tonight; this is from [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt regarding new Tir na Cali captives

Tir na Cali, and seems to be an intro.

They got pants, at least. And shirts. Well, the girls got skirts, but the idea was there: after what was probably over a week with no clothes, nothing to their names but the ugly plastic collars their captors had locked around their throats, they had pants, shirts, and underwear.

And ugly plastic collars, but Seth, at least, had learned not to complain. Since they had been stolen into California (while, irony of ironies, celebrating their freedom from school), the six of them had been stripped, collared, processed, beaten, starved, and half-drowned – but they’d also been trained. Maybe their training had been harsh enough to make the basic training he and Jakub were (had been) heading to look like a week at the beach, but the lessons had been straight-forward and clear. Lesson one was: don’t complain.

Lesson two was don’t mouth off, of course. Which was why he was keeping his mouth shut as their handler – the third such, the tallest, the oldest, and the sternest so far, passed them each stacks of clothing. Steve hadn’t quite gotten that, yet, but, then again, only Seth and Jakub had been planning on heading somewhere where they barked orders at you all day anyway.

“This looks like a uniform, ma’am.” Jill commented, quietly, politely. Jill had learned how to ask questions without getting hit; she’d been the quickest of them all, at that.

“It is,” the matron agreed. “You will not be the only ones at this training facility. There will be approximately twenty-five other slaves here training with you.”

“Training?” That was Steve. “Like what? Ow!”

The ow was, of course, another thwap with the crop. Steve got a lot of those.

“You know nothing about our world, or our culture. You will be going to school here to learn how to fit in, how to be proper slaves. You will take eight classes a day, and have time in the evenings to complete your homework?”

“Homework!” Seth was mortified to realize that that had been him this time. He quickly added on a “ma’am,” and was grateful when Debbie picked up his slack by filling in with another question.

“Like school, ma’am? Like high school?” She didn’t have to say all over again; they were all thinking that.

“Exactly like a school,” the matron nodded. She seemed to understand; she didn’t thwap them at all for the collective groan.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/73927.html. You can comment here or there.

30DaysMeme: Well, Crap, where am I? (fanfic/Cali/Criminal Minds xover)

Jul6

Day 15 of 30 days of Fiction: “28) Prompt: overhearing a conversation.”

Tir na Cali/Criminal Minds, another scene from that fan fic my brain demanded I write. (Lj Link)…(This was the first one written) (LJ link; this story comes right after this one (LJ Link)).

Reid woke slowly, groggy, and cotton-mouthed, the last of the drug cocktail leaving the world hazy and his stomach uneasy. He was still bound – no, not still, bound again. For one, he was no longer in a chair; his knees were almost at his chest and the floor under him was padded. For another, whatever was holding him now was both less uncomfortable and had less give than the ropes Tobias had tied him with. His hands were behind his back, his ankles together, and he was leaning sideways against something padded. His eyes, when he opened them, were covered, hooded or blindfolded.

When the first voice he heard was male, he almost believed Tobias had sprouted a new personality.

“So, you’ve got him, now what are you going to do with him, then?” His accent had the peculiar combination of Irish and pioneer that suggested Californian working-class. Unlikely to be Tobias, then. All his personalities had Georgian accents.

“What we do when we kidnap someone.” The second voice was female. From the swallowed, lazy consonants, she might be royalty. This wasn’t looking all that good.

“Mor, he’s an American Federal Agent. You can’t just go kidnapping fibbies.”

“I don’t see why not.” And that was a third voice, another female, working-class. So the bleary memories he had of getting snatched from Tobias’ hands were accurate. He wondered what they’d done with his captor. “Ours now, isn’t he?”

That couldn’t be good. He cleared his throat into the moment of silence. “Excuse me,” he croaked. “Could I have some water?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/70222.html. You can comment here or there.

30daysmeme, Fish Story, Tir Na Cali

Jun16

Day 12 of 30 days of Fiction: “12) Write a scene at a sushi bar.” Tir na Cali, and surprised me.

The sushi bar had a mermaid in its fish tank.

I was new in town, having just recently parlayed my experience with the Agency into a cushy consulting gig and my hazard pay into a nice little house, and I’d decided to check out the local eateries in the days before the gig officially started. People had told me the southern cities were a little out there, and I’d believed them, more or less, but this…

I didn’t bother pretending I wasn’t staring. It was okay, she was staring at me, too. She was, frankly, gorgeous, which means I really got the better end of the deal. Her hair was greenish blue, her eyes the same, her tail darker shades of the same hues. Even her nipples were blue, a silly conceit, but still a nice look. And her slave collar was mother-of-pearl. Of course.

I smiled at her, because what else was I going to do, really? She managed to stop staring at me – the royals of Tir na Cali do not accept deformity in their ranks, and I had the eyes to mark me as theirs, and a leg missing from the thigh down that I wasn’t bothering to camouflage at all. It was August in Southern California; pants would have been too damn warm. A bathing suit would have been too warm. I’d earned my hazard pay, damnit, and the regen would take months of visits, maybe years.

She flicked her tail at me, with a little bit of a smile. I wondered if she missed walking, too. I raised what was left of my left leg to her in a salute..

I wasn’t feeling much like sushi anymore. I ordered a bottle of sake, warmed, and two cups, one for me, and one for the mermaid.

The story continues here

My current fund-raising goals:
art for two upcoming e-books, and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.

Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts starting this coming Monday:

Every $4 gets you one month of access.
Drakeathon & other donors previous to this get one free month of access.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/59461.html. You can comment here or there.

30 Days Meme: Guitar (weird)

Jun14

Day 10 of 30 days of Fiction: “10) Write a scene focused around a musical instrument.” Tir na Cali, and a bit weird.

Jolene had never thought that her passable skill with the guitar might end up being her downfall.

Her daddy’d given her that guitar on her sixteenth birthday; it was a very pretty, very expensive instrument, to replace the one he’d tripped over and broken. She cherished, it loved it, and learned to play better than she had ever before, to be close to worth it.

She played in seedy bars and clubs for what money she could earn, doing that as a sideline to stripping in even seedier places, saving up for college, saving up for a real musical education. She wasn’t bad, and she got better every night, but she wasn’t the best, not by a long shot.

So when the handsome man with teeth too smooth and white told her he thought she was the best he’d ever heard, she figured it for a come-on line and didn’t get her hopes up, kept the flirting light and didn’t give him her real number.

That didn’t keep him from drugging her in the alleyway and kidnapping her, of course, but at least she wasn’t disappointed by a fictional record contract.

He dragged her away to a foreign land, locked a collar around her neck, and sold her to a man who demanded that she dance, and demanded that she play for him.

Dance she would do, finding him no more obnoxious and quite a bit cleaner than her former audience, but as for play…

“Not without my guitar.” Beat her, starve her, threaten her, it did not matter. She would not play without her guitar.

“Your instrument is far away, back in America,” her new owner coaxed. “This one is fine, is expensive, cost more than you did” (which was a lie, but she did not know that).

“I won’t play without my guitar,” she insisted. Beaten again, starved more, threatened and cajoled; they could not make her play.

“We will give you your freedom if you will play,” he offered. Another lie, of course, but she did not know that.

“Now without my guitar.” By now, it was a mantra, an echo of the girl she had been, a song of its own.

They looked, then. She hadn’t come cheap, as pretty girls don’t, in Tir na Cali, and she would soon waste to nothing. Pawn shops, music shops, junkyards; they could not find the damn thing. Finally, one of her master’s slaves thought to ask Jolene where she had last seen it, and she laughed, a small and hacking thing.

“In my locker at the club,” she told the hapless servant. There was little left of her; her wounds had become infected. But her master’s agents had finally found her guitar; they paid the club owner fifty dollars for it, and brought the damned thing to the emaciated slave.

“Was it worth it?” her master asked her, as she wrapped around her instrument. She looked up at him with sunken eyes and smiled.

“It’s my guitar,” she told him, and played.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/57792.html. You can comment here or there.