Character Meme Day Two – Clothing and Appearance (Tairiekie)

Aug11

So, I decided to do a character meme, and this one showed up first on google. Because the theme of the month is Reiassan, I’m starting with Tairiekie.

Day 2:
How do they usually dress? What do they wear to sleep? Do they wear jewelry?

When not wearing a school uniform, Tairiekie prefers durable, comfortable clothing, in bright colors – often in those of the House she ends up in (Peach and Red) as both of her parents favor those colors.

She doesn’t often wear skirts, preferring loose pants, comfortable tunics, nothing that will bind or twist. Fashion is not her primary concern.

To sleep, she wears an under-tunic – an unfitted piece of clothing, sleeveless in summer and sleeved in winter, made out of undyed linen, often very heavily decorated on the hems.

Tairiekie doesn’t wear a lot of jewelry, preferring a few small lapel pins and decorative buttons which her parents and friends have gifted her with over the years.

Is there anything about their appearance they wish they could change?
How would they look as [at?] the opposite sex?
What do they smell like? Why (do they wear the scent or does it occur naturally)?

If anything – Taikie is not all that interested in her appearance – she would prefer that she not have the yellowish undertone to her skin, which is only visible when she is inside for long periods of time, as in a long, cold winter.

She doesn’t have a lot of interest in boys right now – or romantic interest in girls, either – but enjoys spending time with people, socially.

/sniffs her/ She probably smells like grass and clay most of the time, or the goat-milk soap she washes with. She has a small bottle of sandalwood scent she has never used, which her grandfather gave her as a gift.

Do they have an accurate mental picture of their appearance (how they see themselves versus how the world sees them)? Physically, yes, in as much as she cares. Socially, not quite so much.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/770951.html. You can comment here or there.

Rick-(steam)Rolled by Looooove (@korionfray)

Aug11

Haven’t done one of these in a while!

So, the writer in my attic, K Orion Fray, does a weekly writing inspiration, which includes a writing prompt.

A prompt from many weeks ago:

So go ahead. Use the lyrics from “Never Gonna Give You Up” as your inspiration. Like it? Don’t like it? Really honestly stuck? Go to your iTunes or other music playing apparatus and hit shuffle. Use the first song that comes up. You might be surprised.

So this is her fault. 😉

We’re no strangers to love

It was the sort of courtship you snuck between classes and club time, child care and bar-hopping. It was the sort of courtship that looked accidental while being nothing but accidental. It was the sort that started with “hey, you’re in Theatre Club too, aren’t you?”

It wasn’t his first courtship, but it was the first he’d pursued with such intensity.

You know the rules and so do I

She was cautious, of course: she had graduated from Addergoole and, while she didn’t quite recognize him as having done the same, she knew to be cautious, knew to distrust kindness, and knew the buddy system and every other rule of safety far better than most of her companions.

And he was, in turn, just as careful. He knew, if the boys in his dorm didn’t, that a boy could suffer just as badly from incaution as a girl could, that the rules didn’t care about gender, and that one had to know who you friends were – and, more importantly, who your friends weren’t.

A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of
You wouldn’t get this from any other guy

So it took six months before she agreed to his so-casual invitation to go out to dinner, and even then she, suspicious to the last, turned down his offer of shared babysitting. It took eight months until he got her to invite him to her house, and nine until he finally got the nerve up to drop to his knees in front of her.

“I hardly know you,” she protested.

“I’ve been following you, watching you, since my first year of school.”

“But I don’t remember you at all.”

“I know.” He ducked his head and tried not to smile. “You were rather distracted.”

“And you really mean…”

I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling
Gotta make you understand

“I do. I can’t help it, I do. I watched you with them – those boys, those girls. I watched you with your cy’ree. I watched you here, all year.”

She stared at him. “You’re obsessed. Did someone Work you?”

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

“No. I mean, not for that. Not this. This is… just an obsession. But I mean it. I want to go all the way.”

We’ve known each other for so long
Your heart’s been aching, but
You’re too shy to say it
Inside, we both know what’s been going on
We know the game and we’re gonna play it

He offered her his wrists, knowing she was staring at him in disbelief. “I want to treat you better than all of them. I want to do better. I want to show you how it can be.”

“You want to… you don’t want to Keep me?”

“No.”

And if you ask me how I’m feeling
Don’t tell me you’re too blind to see

He shook his head. “No. No. I want you to Keep me. Until it all gets better for you.”

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/770516.html. You can comment here or there.

Please to pick another random number for me

Aug11

Between one and eighteen, to pic the next thing on my writing list

The list, not in order of its numbers, includes:

Landing Page
Demifiction Meme
Inner Circle (outline)
Rion Writing Inspiration
Rion Edits
collate liveblog
Doomsday
Fdomme: Blachalclchel
Clockwork Apoc
Rix Words the second
Kelkyag Words!
Liveblog Summary
Daily Prompt Friday Flash
Summary
character meme via google
Live** the apoc
Submission (find)
Rix Words!

(i.e., if you chose one, it will not be Landing Page. But a number somewhere in the range of 1-18 will be.)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/770126.html. You can comment here or there.

Teaser: Baram’s Elves Piece for Rix

Aug11

“Your target was never here.” Baram punctuated his sentence with a sharp kick to the bikers’ leader’s ribs. The woman grunted, and, on the other side of the field of battle, the nearly-dead tank made a pained noise.

Interesting.

Worry about it later. Baram picked up the boy.

Commissions are open here!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/770029.html. You can comment here or there.

Excerpt/Teaser

Aug11

Here’s an excerpt from an Aunt Family piece I’m writing for Kelkyag:

At the rate she was missing things she should have been anticipating, Eva was thinking she might want to hang up the Aunt hat and let a more capable witch handle things.

And, a bit later:

Eva, whose family used money-spending as a benign weapon, could both understand the feeling and simultaneously be offended by the suggestion that she was doing that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/769500.html. You can comment here or there.

Reiassan Demifiction – History Text involving Rin & Girey

Aug11

Chapter 7
The End of the War

This history of humanity on Reiassan begins with war, and it nearly ended with war.

The Peace Treaty of 758 would likely have ended as all other peace treaties between the Calenyena and the Bitrani had – with betrayal, deception, violence, and war – save for two facts.

The first – that the tacticians of the Calenyen army engineered a decisive blow against the Bitrani, one which left their army dead or demoralized, many of their officers captured, and their people ready to surrender – is discussed in great depth in Chapter 8.

This chapter focuses on the secondary but no less important reason for the lasting peace, a peace that has, as of this writing, held for two hundred and fifty-two years with only very minor skirmishes to mar its record: Prince Girey of Bitrani.

When the heir to the Calenyen throne, Arinyanca, returned home to Lannamer from the front, she brought with her a single captive, the sole surviving claimant to the Bitrani throne. There is a great deal of debate about her motives in doing so, but one piece of her own writing sums it up quite nicely:

    Left where he was, one of three things would quickly happen: he would die as an officer, his identity never known. He would be revealed as a Prince, and die thus to solidify the peace. Or he would escape and foment rebellion.
    I chose to make a fourth option.

With that choice, Arinyanca very likely shifted the history of our world.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/769185.html. You can comment here or there.

The Dead Gods Come Visiting, a story-bit of the FaeApoc

Aug10

This story is set in the late apoc of fae apoc, and follows
Mourning Lost Gods and
The Destruction of the Gods.

We’d gotten – not comfortable – but okay with the quiet, even in the few weeks it had been. We’d started to become accustomed to the lack of aerial fights, to the lack of strange semi-human people attacking us, to the way the world stayed the same – ruined, barely habitable, but the same – from day to day.

And then this half-dead… elf limped into our shelter. She was muttering under her breath, things we could barely tell were magic, and she was bleeding from at least seventeen places. Her stone-like skin was cracked, split, and burned, and underneath, she was bleeding red like the rest of us.

We froze. I froze, at least. Around me, the others shifted, reaching for weapons we no longer kept at hand. The god was barely over five foot tall, a tiny girl, but we had been less terrified of muscle-bound bikers with shotguns.

I saw the minute she noticed us, her tiger’s-eye eyes going wide. She ducked her head in what, in a human, I would have thought was an apology.

“I saw your fire,” she croaked. “I…”

And then she fell over. Sticking from her back was an arrow shaft; they hadn’t even bothered to strip all of the thorns off of the hawthorn before shooting it.

We spent a few minutes arguing. Quite a few of us wanted to dump her off the roof or, preferably, another roof, further away. A couple wanted to cut her head off, just to be sure that she stayed dead.

But Marie and Donald, who had been a paramedic and a school nurse before the world ended, they checked her pulse and found her still among the living, and that made everything more complicated. We didn’t so much talk about it as we shared a twelve-pointed look.

Then Kingfisher pulled out his filleting knife.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/839925.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/768781.html. You can comment here or there.

Robot, a story-test of Clockwork Apoc

Aug9

“You’re a robot,” they’d told him, “an automaton. We made you, we created you. You are a steam-powered device. You have no feelings, you have no emotions. You do what you are told.”

They clothed him in metal until he forgot he had ever had flesh. They told him what he was, and told him nothing else. They fed him a sludge they informed him would lubricate his joints, and they taught him that to fail to obey meant sharp pain – that, in essence, his programming would not allow him to disobey.

“You are our robot,” they told him, and parade him before tin-hat dictators and penny-ante princes. “You are our robot.”

They taught him to be their robot, until one day, he taught them that humans, unlike the robot they’d made him, could die.

This came from a 7th Sanctum prompt: The theme of this story: metaphorical conflict. The main character: neurotic robot. The start of the story: service. The end of the story: education.
It sort of wrote itself from that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/768634.html. You can comment here or there.