The Bellamy, Chapter 5

Feb10

Attention – Read Chapter 4.5 First, Sorry!

She was standing outside the Local History department, considering Eleanor’s directions.

Left did not look like the right direction; she could see the sign for the elevators to the right, but she decided on a whim to trust Eleanor rather than the signs and headed left through an area which looked more like a back room than part of the public collection – there were stacks of books to one side, cataloging cards and notes on the other side, and a little collection of things like cellophane sleeves for books and the labels for the spines. 

Veronika peered at the notations on a couple of labels – that was definitely neither Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress, but aside from that, she couldn’t tell anything about it.  The letters were at least letters and then numbers numbers, but since everyone she’d met so far had spoken English, that seemed like a rather low bar. 

The shortcut did, indeed, lead to a bank of three elevators, looking as old as everything else here in the Bellamy (including possibly the skeletons).   Continue reading →

Purchase Negotiation 34: Not a Drop

Feb8

First: Purchased: Negotiation

💰

It might have been a dumb joke, but Inka giggled, at least.  “Oh! Well, no, girls are jerks too, I don’t think … oh, that’s cute though.”  She giggled a little more, and Leander felt less stupid. Maybe not all Sylviane’s friends would be hard to deal with.  “Oh, no, I’ve utterly lost the thread of the conversation.”

“She does that,” Ripley assured Leander.  “Not just when she’s drinking her weight in tequila, either; watch out, when these two go out drinking, it can get kinda of messy, and not just the way they shut down the boys that are interested. Although that,” he grinned, “that is a murder by burn sort of scene.  Inka burns and Sylvie freezes them out and then they swap out,  it’s amazing.”

Leander found himself smiling back.  “I can’t wait ’till I can see that.”

“Oh, and you will.  Once classes get started, it’s usually every Friday night-“ Continue reading →

Saving the Cult (if not the World), Chapter Five

Feb7

Warning: Discussion of racism

Saving the Cult (If not the World) "It's time." Manfield Lee knew he was good at sounding authoritative even when he didn't know what he was talking about - he'd turned a fortune into a megafortune doing just that, after all, not to mention running the Organization - but right now, he DID know what he was talking about. After all, it was just a date, wasn't it? And if the date turned out to be wrong, well, then he knew exactly what to blame it on, and that blame would fall on the scholars and the psychics, not on him. The other thing Manfield Lee knew how to do was to place the blame in very specific ways that were not him.

“We could all—” Lina flailed her hands, “– be sitting here & die while some other Hill Top is safe?”

“Well, if so, we’ll be in the majority?” His smile was crooked.  “Most people agree that this is the place. That’s why Dylan and Ethan’s fathers are here.  And my mother — my parents — and probably your parents. “

“Dylan said I didn’t belong here,” she muttered. “So did his buddy.”

“Yeah, well, they’re assholes.  You literally held them in the air with the power of your mind.  You belong here. And if they’re stupid about your mother — because that’s probably the problem, between you and me,” he sighed.  He caught himself and huffed. “Sorry, that’s—” He stared at his pizza, attacked it, and was quiet for a moment, mouth full. 

Lina took the chance to take a couple bites of pizza herself, thought about what he was saying and not, and grabbed the soda to wash down the pizza.

“So you’re saying they’re racists.” Continue reading →

Grandpas Never Die (a one-shot)

Feb6

“I have been through seven Grandmas now.”

Grandpa’s voice sounded tired.  He looked  tired.  He didn’t look all that much older than he had back then, but it had been seven grandmas.

It was a good song.  It was clever, it was easy to sing, and it got me on the Billboard top ten.  Raked in the money on iTunes.  Seriously, it made me nice money, got my name out there.

The problem was, I sang it for the wrong person, or maybe in the wrong place, or maybe both.

I’m still not sure which, but what I do know was it that one stage, in Springfield, packed audience but not that big of town.  I got through the end of I Wish and somewhere in the back of the audience a woman stood up. I mean, everybody was already standing, and all of a sudden there she was taller than anyone else like she was standing on their shoulders. At the time, it seemed to  make sense.

And she said – damn I will still remember her face to this day – she said Continue reading →

Thimbleful Thursday: Honored

Feb4

Written to Thursday, Jan 16th’s Thimbleful Thursday Prompt, Do the Honors

At the top limit of the wordcount, 320-330 words. 🙂 (depending on the counter)

🎖️

“Do you want to do the honors?”  Saliked bowed playfully to Viytoj.  “Or shall I?”

“I really think…” Viytoj shifted back and forth.  “I really think this is a bad idea.  It’s – do you know how many things can go wrong with something like this?”

“Viyiy, it was your idea!”  Saliked huffed.  “You said it.  You developed it.  You named it, you even found this place.”

“I did that because I thought you were just trying to see if I’d do it!  I mean, I thought – I didn’t think you’d – really?”  Viytoj stared at the Viewscreen.  “Really?”

“Come on.  What is the absolute worst that can happen?”

“The absolute worst? We trigger a world war down there that wipes out 99% of their population and, while they’re at it, kills us!”

“That’s, ah, that’s, way to go on the pessimism, buddy.”  Saliked took a moment to regroup.  “All right, what’s the worst likely thing that could happen?”

“They bomb us out of the sky?  That’s admittedly only got a 1 in one thousand chance of happening with what we know of their current technology.” Viytoj was bending. Slowly.

Saliked pressed. “Is it even against Galactic Law?”

“Well, not yet, because nobody’s thought to do something like this…”

“Then let’s do it!  Come on, push the button, Viyiy.  We came this far, and it will be the best prank in all of their history!”

Viytoj sighed.  “I… this could go so poorly.”

“But it only has a one in a thousand chance of going horribly!”  Saliked grinned widely.  The grin always worked.

Viytoj pushed the button.  Tiny rockets shot from their ship, hundreds of them.  For every 10 degrees of latitude and longitude where there was land, a rocket would fall apart well above the treeline and drop, with a small parachute, a notice. More of a certificate, honestly.

The rest of the galaxy honors you,
the third planet around your star
For reaching intra-stellar travel
Welcome to the Galaxy!

 

 

Want more?

Life, Love, and a Funeral

Feb4

Warning: the below discusses, among other things, death and funerals. 

Last Monday I got an email from my mother telling me that she & Dad were off to Death Valley for their annual “get Dad away from the cold” trip. (Dad says he doesn’t have Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Pretty sure he’s wrong.)

Three emails into the chain, she tells me my cousin Marilyn has passed away.

Marilyn was my mother’s older cousin (as I track the family tree, I think she was my grandmother’s brother’s daughter), 78 years old, and it turns out she’d been in intensive care for 8 months.

She was also the woman who taught me horseback riding and something of one of my queer icons growing up, long before I actually realized I was bisexual.

I started horseback riding because our Girl Scout leader was horse-mad & her daughter, my nemesis from elementary through middle school (same church, same Girl Scout troop, same school…), got to ride, so I wanted to ride. Continue reading →

The Bellamy, Chapter 4

Feb3

Four: Morale

Veronika was, perhaps, fishing.  “Everyone deserves a break once in a while.  I know such things can really make a difference in morale”. 

 No, no, there was no perhaps about it.  She was, without doubt. 

The thing was, she didn’t think that even if Miss Haas noticed the fishing, she would be all that offended by it.  Not with her weird hint-hint expression and waggle eyebrows and so on. 

“Morale is very important here,” Miss Haas assured her. “We do everything that we can to make certain Bellamy is as happy as possible. It is very important to us that our team at members feel fulfilled in their positions.” Continue reading →

Purchase Negotiation 33: Mars

Feb1

First: Purchased: Negotiation

💰

It was going to take a lot more than an hour to walk around campus.  

It might take more than an hour to get around a single “quad,” the way Sylviane walked, which was to stop and point at something, tell him a story, and then move four feet to something else. 

On the other hand, Leander really didn’t mind.  He was learning about her more than the campus, sure, but she was, in the long run, a lot more important than just a bunch of buildings. 

“Oh, here.”  She flushed. He glanced at her curiously and waited. “Oh-” She noticed he was waiting. “Nothing, it’s just-“

“A bench.”  He read the inscription on the brass plaque – it wasn’t her name, wasn’t anyone whose name he recognized, and they’d been class of 1920, so probably not someone she knew personally – well, not a human she knew personally, he corrected.  Could be a fae. Could even be her mentor. 

“I had my first kiss with – with someone I really liked for a while – right here on this bench.” Continue reading →

Looking at my posting calendar…

Feb1
(cross-posted from Mastodon)
Well, I seem to have burned out on Spoils of War again so I guess I gotta figure out if I’m going to post something else in its place.

Right now I’m posting Purchase Negotiation (Fae Apoc (Fdomme, just pre-apoc)), Saving the Cult (urban fantasy heavily inspired by some of the Marvel shows out last year), and The Bellamy, an English Manor Hellmouth/Library/Archive.

I’ve also got… The Ambassador from the Mists (Fantasy politics), Upstairs/Downstairs (Slave dramas belowstairs), and

Aunt Family Journal Tales (the concept here is a series of stories based on the journals and on Beryl/Eva finding them, but I have no plot yet)  currently in progress, along with The Rubble (Fae Apoc, long post-apoc), the Wilds of Notebook (portal ???), and the possibility of restarting Kael’s tower from an earlier point, which is slightly daunting.

Feedback is welcome with the note that what I feel like I can enjoy writing will probably be the deciding vote – although on that note, good comments make me enjoy writing something more.