Now on Patreon: “If We Shadows”
Worst Play Ever!
The Seventh Street Players’ presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was cancelled after yesterday’s show left five people in a coma.
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Written originally in 2011 – Stranded World, Autumn and Tattercoats in an earlier time.
The content, while not explicitly sexual (there are never 2 people in the same place), is steamy.
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The mail drop was hidden in a hole in a tree, twisted around with magic to keep the squirrels from using their letters as nesting, to keep prying eyes from seeing.
One function that Autumn and several other itinerates of her ilk served was as couriers. E-mail could be read, phones tapped, postal mail interrupted. Messages travelling by courier were far less susceptible to tampering or loss; second best were messages left in strand-locked mail drops like this, then moved to the next drop by courier.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1260277.html. You can comment here or there.
Walrus, a ficlet
I asked for a prompt on twitter. medicmsh3141 gave me: “Walruses, and AIs who enjoy LARPing in their free time.”
So… here.
They called him the Walrus, because they needed something to call him, and they were the sort of group that
liked nicknames.
They called him him because they weren’t the sort of people to whom gender ambiguity came comfortably, and because his vocal unit was low-pitched and he had no obvious secondary sexual characteristics.
(Once, once, someone had made the joke that he ran on logic, therefore he must be male. The women in this group were not something to be trifled with, neither the artists nor the engineers nor the waitresses.)
He had strolled into their Saturday-night LARP group and asked to join and they, never one to turn down a new member, had invited him in with open arms. Amy lent him a fedora. Carrie showed him how to make a character. Dylan gave him the walrus mustache that stuck so badly to human skin and so well to the Walrus’ polymer facade.
They were in the science building, after all (It had the best space for wide-spanning live-action games). None of them questioned why there was an AI in the building and, being LARPers through and through, none of them questioned why he’d want to play.
They called him the Walrus, and he played with them every Saturday now.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1259999.html. You can comment here or there.
March Patreon Theme Poll!
It’s that time again!
Anyone and everyone may vote; if you don’t have a DW account, vote in the comments.
The winning theme will determine the stories for my monthly Patreon rewards.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1259546.html. You can comment here or there.
MARKED – Ohh, verbal slap down.
MARKED – 4.5
Nilien stared down at Ember. “I’m sorry, you can what?”
I can find the person that marked you, Ember repeated patiently. I got the spell’s spoor before the teacher removed it. It’s not difficult.
Nilien blinked at her familiar. “You can — I didn’t know you could do that!”
You didn’t ask. Ember yawned again and put its head down, tail over its nose.
Nilien looked up at Professor Vaudelle. “Ember says that it can find the person who put the tracking mark on me. I didn’t know familiars could do magic.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1259017.html. You can comment here or there.
March is World-Building Month this Year
…because why not?
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here’s a landing page with most of my universes on it.
Here is the 2014 World-Building post
here’s the 2015 post.
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I’ll answer 23 questions – hopefully one/weekday but we’ll see – so ask away. Anything world-building, any of my worlds, ask as many questions as you want. (if, by some amazing luck, I have more than 23 questions, I’ll either choose what to answer or overflow into April).
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1259430.html. You can comment here or there.
Love Meme: Reid and Regine
The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.
Here is ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clare_dragonfly‘s third prompt. Reid and Regine are from Addergoole. This was a wee bit tricky~
Reid and Regine
For all of her noble quest to show the value of half-bloods, when Reid met Regine, she still had many of the prejudices of the pure-blooded.
Reid had been dealing with those prejudices for nearly as long as Regine had been having them. He found them irritating on a good day, angering on a bad day, and on his worst days, they tempted him into shouting.
She had a good project, a good plan, and a good point, so he set his jaw and joined her program, and that would have been it – a carefully polite working relationship, line drawn and never budged, colleagues and nothing more.
Except one of those bad days happened through no fault of Regine’s.
There was a phone call. It was a long-distance call, and such things were expensive. It was quiet, it was intense, and nobody but Reid heard it.
And that would’ve been it. He had long experience not blowing his lid, not showing his anger, but Regine chose that day, that exact time when he had just hung up, to ask/demand something in her particularly Grigori way.
And Reid exploded. He snarled and shouted and swore, all of it bloody with the rage that was his birthright and name-right, and informed Regine in no uncertain terms that if she had hired an expert in Mind Workings than she damn well ought to respect his expertise.
And Regine, in a move unprecedented for her, bowed her head and very humbly apologized. And then – and this might have been the kicker – she asked Reid if he would show her the Working she’d been asking about.
It wasn’t a Magic Moment. It didn’t change her forever. But it did allow Reid to talk to her as a colleague and, sometimes, as a friend, and that, in the end, helped more than anything else.
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Weekend Blog with Yard-Work and procrastination…
Saturday morning, before the weather broke, my husband and I spent probably a half-hour cleaning out our culvert, digging wet leaves and sticks out of the ditch and hauling them to the hedgerow.
It’s achey work, bending-over, digging, lifting, wet work, and at least the weather was still in the fifties. It was necessary work, because in a heavy rain, our culvert fills all the way to the top, and, clogged as it was, it might have overflowed in unfortunate ways. It’s supposed to carry rain away, not keep it in our yard, after all.
There was the nice feeling of having done something physical that was productive was nice, that warm ache. But on the other hand…
So, I hate raking. I really, really hate raking. It goes back to being a child, and I am ridiculous about any number of chores that I had to do as a kid/teenager — but raking really ranks up there.
And we didn’t rake this fall.
And the leaves all blew, like they will, into the culvert.
You see where I’m going?
It reminded me of learning, maybe seven years ago, exactly how bad it could be when Iavoided conflict by not talking about problems or by trying to give in to everyone at once (Answer: everyone ends up mad at you and you end up with even more conflict than you’d originally been trying to avoid).
It’s one of those lessons I have to keep learning over and over again: the more you put something off, the more work it is.
Hopefully, I remember this in fall, when it’s time to rake again. Or the next time something threatens to pile up in my metaphorical culverts.
…kind of like the dishes in the sink…
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1258532.html. You can comment here or there.
Head South
Cya, after the apocalypse but before her kids go to Addergoole
Cya knew she was one of the good guys.
That was: she knew she was one of Boom, and she knew Boom were the good guys.
She knew that was all that kept her from going off the rails most days.
Some days, all it did was remind her how to cover it up.
She looked at the boy – man – the Kept in front of her and sighed. “You’re a mess, darling,” she muttered. He was sleeping. The Working she’d done would keep him that way for a while.
She wrote him a note anyway, because Cya believed in planning ahead. I had to run an errand. If I’m not back by Wednesday night, take this note to Howard and tell him “look South.”
Of course, almost everything was south from the Ranch, except Canada, but she didn’t want her Kept to guess where she was going.
She took her car. It shouldn’t still be running, but at this stage, she wasn’t the only one with a much-repaired vehicle still on the road, and hey, she could turn dirt into gas, which did help matters.
She tried not to hold on too tight to the steering wheel, but there was a small fire of anger deep in her gut. It was, like everything she felt at that point, a cold fire, a lump rather than a storm.
It was going to hurt someone anyway.
The man sleeping in her bed… When she talked to Addergoole, they told her things were better. They were old fae and had old memories, and they meant Things like what happened to Eris will never happen again. They meant, if it was Luke, who had seen it, or Mike, who paid more attention than he was given credit for, they meant we’ll try to make sure what happened to Leo doesn’t happen again. Leo was harder. She knew that, even though she didn’t really forgive it. Leo’s breaking hadn’t been nearly as visible as Eris bleeding in the halls.
They told her things were better, but there was only so far they were willing to go. Some people just weren’t meant to Keep and some people just shouldn’t be Kept, and those mistakes, Addergoole wasn’t going to fix any time soon.
And sometimes people were just too good at hiding their poison; some people were just too good at hiding their wounds. Agi, the man sleeping on her bed – he was one of those. His keeper had been sharp with her knife and careful, and her abuse had been subtle enough that it had never been picked up on. He’d gone through the next three years at Addergoole thinking it’d been his fault.
She knew the story too well. This time, someone was going to pay.
She held onto the steering wheel a little too tightly and whispered Repair Workings at the road ahead of her. There was no reason not to clean up as she went, and if this went south instead of just South, Howard would have a trail to follow.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1258307.html. You can comment here or there.
The Funeral – a beginning of a tale
This started out as something else, but it appears like in addition, it wants to be a murder mystery. Fae apoc, pre-apoc era, possibly 2010.
Senga didn’t believe it until she saw the body. Ellehemaei did not die very often, and they almost never died of natural causes; until she did a very quiet Working on the body itself, she was still working under the assumption that this was some trick of her Great-Aunt Mirabella’s.
The confirmation that it was real took her breath away. She walked past the body again, looking at what her diagnosis told her more than the corpse. Natural causes? Well, hawthorn was natural, she supposed, and her aunt was chock full of it.
“Miss Attenoin? Do please come to my office at noon. There’s the will reading.” The suited man stank of lawyer, and his suit stank of money. No surprise, considering her great-aunt. But…
“The will?” Senga frowned. “Great-Aunt Mirabella and I weren’t all that close…”
“Nevertheless, she has listed you in the will. Noon. It’s quite important that you be there on time.”
He was a pushy little man. Senga gave him her best eats-bullets-for-breakfast smile. “I’ll be there. Now, if you’ll excuse me… my aunt is dead.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
He scurried off, presumably to bother someone else. Senga stared at the body. At least she’d worn black, and something respectful, at that. There’d been this urge to wear something flamboyant, just to show Great-Aunt Mirabella that she wasn’t bothered by all the spectacle.
Some part of her still thought it was a farce of some sort. She muttered the diagnostic again, just to see if she’d missed something. A fake-death working? It would be hard to pull off with all that hawthorn in the blood. But, then again, the hawthorn would mask it.
“It’s real.” The voice came from above her left ear. She looked up nonchalantly to find that one of the other mourners had moved close to her. He’d snuck up on her. It offended her professional pride. “I didn’t believe it either.” And he seemed entirely unaware that he shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on her.
She looked him up and down — with a good deal of up. He was wearing still-black black jeans, a white button-down, and a black vest. Everything looked as if he’d bought it new, everything except the (also black) cowboy boots. His face was so clean-shaven he had to have used a Working for it, and his hair looked like it wasn’t used to being so freshly washed or so tightly ponytailed.
He looked her down in turn. One eyebrow quirked as his gaze slid over her hip — had he noticed the sheath there? if he had, had he noticed the other two? She was fairly confident about the one at the small of her back, at least.
He was wearing — she looked again — at least two weapons.
“It’s real?” she parroted back at him.
“Her. She’s really gone.” He frowned. “I thought she’d outlive us all.”
Senga stepped away from the coffin, tilting her head to invite him to do the same. “You knew her well?” Great-Aunt Mirabella had run a tidy, if stealthy, empire of businesses, many of them legal. Many people had thought that they knew her.
“I did some work for her, now and then.” He followed her invitation towards a corner of the room, and their place at the coffin was replaced by other funeral attendees — Senga hesitated to call them mourners. She was not here to mourn and she doubted this tall man was, either. “And what about you? Were you one of her associates?”
She chose to ignore the suggestion that she might have been one of Mirabella’s employees. “She’s — she was — my father’s aunt. She outlived him, his mother, and their parents.” By having at least one of them killed. Senga had never been sure about the others.
“Ah. Family.” His expression changed. His whole body language changed. He didn’t quite take a step back, but his hand did drop towards his hip.
Senga smirked. “I don’t suppose you’d believe I was the white sheep?” She kept her own hands where they were, holding her ridiculous clutch purse.
He relaxed infinitesimally. “That would explain why I’d never met you.”
“Ah, so you’ve met some of the other family members, then?” As if on cue, her cousin Muirgen entered the room, with entourage, sobbing loudly and unconvincingly.
He winced. “Yes. DId some work for some of them, too.”
“Great-Aunt Mirabella must have been paying you very well.” There were things she could say that he couldn’t, even now. There were things she could say that, as far as she knew, nobody else could. That had been her condolence prize for her father’s untimely death.
“Something like that, yeah.” He shifted his weight. “Damnit, if it weren’t for that will-reading…”
“You must have done very good work for her.” A glance around the funeral home told Senga that about a third of of the mourners were family; she recognized about a quarter of the rest of them as staff, friends of the family, and important people in the city, including two local newscasters and one woman who ran the highest-class brothel in the city out of her East Ave Mansion. There was the chief of police, and there was the current CEO of the Gleason Steel Works.
“I’m the best at what I do. And I go way back with Mirabella. Been working for her since —” He noted the people standing close enough to overhear and modified his original sentence. “—we were both up-and-coming.”
Hundreds of years, then. Senga hopes her own nerves didn’t show on her face. “I see. So you’ve done a lot of work for her.”
“I—” He was cut off by a wail from cousin Eavan.
“I can’t believe she’s really gone! She can’t be! It’s a lie. You’re making this up to get her money, you bastard law-breaker, you no good half-blood!”
She was swinging her designer purse at an exquisitely dressed person — their back was to Senga, but the cut of the suit was impeccable — with a braid of black hair that reached their thighs. The hair, and the specific (and inappropriate for the setting) insults Eavean was throwing told her who it was.
“Alencaustel,” she breathed softly. “This family reunion just got interesting.”
next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1265057.html
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