The Best Sin

For @Dahob’s prompt.

This comes after Sister’s Keeper

Content warning: This is a story about a succubus and her half-brother incubus in a magical dom/sub relationship..

Joff came home to find his kitchen full of men.

This was, all things considered, not all that bad. He’d certainly come home to find his kitchen full of less-appealing things, or that many men in other places (once in a closet. In his closet, not even in ‘Vette’s).

They were chatting, laughing, poking each other. It was the happiest group of men he’d ever come home to – and he’d come home to people engaged in group sex more than once.

“Oh, hi, Joffy, here, taste this.” He realized, as someone was sticking a strawberry in his mouth, that he knew this someone, that he’d slept with him, and that being fed a strawberry was every bit as intimate as taking the boy’s cock in his mouth.

“Mmmmff.” He knew food could be good. He liked making delicious food. In this kitchen. “What are we doing?” With my kitchen?

Jervis, bless his heart, caught the tone. “Ivette is throwing a catered party next month, and we’re helping her come up with ideas.”

“In here, Joffy.”

“Ivette…” That’s not my name. He stepped into the dining room, and understood, viscerally, pants-tighteningly, why everyone was bustling quite so eagerly.

“Gluttony is such a fun sin.” Her whisper was for his ears alone. The way she was eating that hors d’oeuvre, on the other hand… licking around the outside, kissing the salt off of it, and then licking the salt off of her lips. The way her fingers pinched the sides of the strawberry, the way her tongue darted out to lick it again, the way her lips pursed when she popped the whole thing between her teeth…

Joff groaned quietly. Behind him, he heard Jervis groaning as well. “The best sin.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/456615.html. You can comment here or there.

Tracking Food Waste

I blogged a year or two ago about a blogger who posted Food Waste Fridays. I can’t find the link right now, but I’ve just found this article from heifer.org.

(Ah, here: Food Waste Friday)

We don’t waste a lot of food, and what we do, we usually compost. But it still bothers me.

Do you have any tricks for minimizing food waste in your house?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/456211.html. You can comment here or there.

Moodles and Noodles and Other Pantry Staples

T. and I have been experimenting, since discovering various canned meats in the grocery store, with variations on tuna-noodle casserole.

Growing up, my mom & grandma called this Toodles and Noodles, and we always omitted the breadcrumbs and sometimes the peas. It is, at its base, a pantry staple: a can of soup, half a bag of egg noodles, and a can of tuna fish, and you have a meal.

It’s served T. & I well over the years (I usually add panko to the top, and we almost always add the frozen peas).

Canned chicken + cream of chicken soup worked pretty well. It was a bit one-note, but I think adding garlic would help with that. Choodles and noodles!

Spurred on by our success, and with a can of corned beef and a can of cream-of-mushroom-with-garlic soup, we moved on to try another casserole. Moodles and noodles! To this one we added sauteed onions and mushrooms, and got something sort of like a beef stroganoff.

I’m not sure what to try next. Tofu and noodles?

What about you? What are your go-to pantry meals? Any fun variations on the classics?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/456008.html. You can comment here or there.

Laziness as an art form

For @cluudle’s prompt

The halls were dark. Something was howling in the distance. Something else was screaming.

Roanna was doing a decent job of holding it together. She’d grabbed the hand of the nearest classmate she could find, and they were moving calmly and meticulously through the darkness. Roanna had a flashlight in her free hand; Tamberlain had a long wooden stick in his off hand.

“Look, the stairs should be right around…” Suddenly, she couldn’t move. Panic, totally inexplicable terror, gripped her and wouldn’t let go.

“Ro? Ro? Shit, Ro, run!” Tamberlain, still gripping her hand, starting following his own advice, and, in the process, dragging her along.

Her frozen legs finally responded, and Roanna started running, too, as fast as she could. Something was wrong. Something was really, really wrong.

They saw the other two kids – Zuleyma and Merton, people they knew from class – running their way, but not in time to stop. They skidded, instead, heels dragging into the carpet.

Something hit their faces, first, and their outstretched free hands, something sticky and grabby. By the time they came to a full stop, their whole bodies were ensnared.

The panic released them as, behind them, someone started chuckling. “Panic trap. I love it.” A hand settled on Roanna’s shoulder. She couldn’t move her face to look, but she could see, in front of her, Zuleyma’s freaked-out expression. Her heart was still pounding, too, like it was trying to claw its way out of her chest.

“What?” The sticky stuff grabbed even at her lips, making speaking tricky.

“Panic trap. It makes you, well, panic.” There was another hand on her ass, very gently resting there. “And then, of course, my web. I hardly have to do any work at all.”

“…Why?”

“You’ll see. Now, all of you, just say the magic words, and I’ll let you go. The web is acidic; it’s already trying to digest you, so I’d talk fast.

“Please?” Zuleyma tried.

“Not those words. ‘I belong to you, Segenam.’ Those words.” The voice was still chuckling. And Roanna’s face was starting to sting.

Next:
Laziness X4.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/455808.html. You can comment here or there.

Shows Promise, a story of Science! for the Giraffe Call

For [personal profile] imaginaryfiend‘s prompt.

Science! has a landing page here

“U…”

“If he says ‘Eureka,’ I’m going to kill him and save the boss the trouble.” Cara’s low mutter only carried as far as her partner’s ears, and he was prone to agree with her. Some people just gave mad science a bad name.

“…guys have got to see this.” Archibald Antipone had promise, at least from Cara and Alex’s point of view. He did good work, reasonably, and didn’t tend to cackle to himself or throw things. He had yet to invent a sentient anything and he could, unlike most of their new hires, actually socialize to save his life.

It might save his life, around her. Usually the guards shot indiscriminately because they were pretty certain none of the scientists were actually human.

“Got to see what?” Cara carefully closed down her workstation and locked her case, leaving her intern Martin to finish his half of the project.

“We’ve got to call the boss, first.”

“No, no.” Alex shook his head. “Let us check things first. Trust me, you don’t want to get the boss involved before his first cup of coffee.”

“Well… all right. Look at this.”

“It looks like…” Cara frowned. “Hrrm. Your degree is in retromechanics, isn’t it?”

“My first doctorate.” He nodded distractedly; he was still tinkering with some long length of copper tubing. “My second is in sociology; it’s how I got this position. And now!” He came up, pointing another long tube at the two of them. The end of it flared into some sort of funnel.

Cara reached for the disintegrator she always carried at her hip; Alex’s fingers danced a warning pattern on his invisible keyboard. “Put the weapon down, Archie. We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Weapon?” He laughed. Not a cackle, thank the formulae. Just a laugh. “No, no. This is no weapon. It’s a sin detector.”

“A… sin…”

“Detector! Yes. See, looking at you, Cara, I can see that you have engaged in…”

Cara and Alex added murder to their sins before he finished the sentence, and swept up the dust before Liam had finished his coffee. “Sin detector.” Alex tch’d. “And I thought he had such potential.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/455540.html. You can comment here or there.

The Second Restriction

For Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt.

Thanks to @Skysailor99 for the country & god names.


“There’s a problem with the second restriction.”

The country of Foros had a lot of gods, and, like any good nation with a lot of gods, it had a lot of priests.

Several dozen of them were, at the moment, staring at their holiest of holy oracles.

The oracles were not supposed to say things like that. They weren’t, for one things, supposed to be capable of that much coherence. The ones who could hear the god Eralon – or any of the gods, but Eralon liked to talk the most – they tended to go mad very quickly. And the rest could be induced to simulate madness with the right smoke.

The Lesser High Priest of the Evening was the first to recover. “Ye who is blessed with the voice of the gods, ye who sees the truth to save us weaker vessels from that which would break us, say again, please?”

The oracle looked at the Lesser High Priest of the Evening. He was a clever man, brighter than his superiors, and did not flinch when he felt the eyes of divinity looking back at him. “The second restriction of Eralon. There is a problem with it.”

Eralon, of all of their myriad gods, had given them the most stringent restrictions and the most elaborate requirements. “Oh voice of the gods, please tell us what the problem is, that we might correct it.”

He had never been all that fond of the second restriction, after all. Several of the others made sense, and, of those that didn’t actively help make Foros a better place, only the second and the seventh seemed to make it worse.

“It’s wrong.” Her eyes rolled back in her head, and when they focused on the Lesser High Priest of the Evening again, the oracle’s gaze – and her voice – were her own again. “It’s not a restriction at all. The girl who relayed it just had an allergy to frogs.”

The temple erupted into shouting. Showing wisdom that would probably save his life on more occasions than this one, the Lesser High Priest of the Evening grabbed the oracle and the duty scribe, and got them both out of the temple before someone could erase this conversation from the records.

Possibly someone with an allergy to frogs. Or someone with a bridge-making business.

Eralon Explains


This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/455232.html. You can comment here or there.

Giraffe Mini-Call Three: 7 Deadly Sins

Today’s Giraffe Call Theme is 7 Deadly Sins

The Call for Prompts is now Open, and will remain so for about an hour!

The call is “closed,” but the first commenter each in DW and LJ after this point can sneak in a prompt! (after me on LJ, after Clare on DW)

Leave one or many prompts, and I will write (over the next week) at least one microfic (150-500 words) to each prompter (prompts may be combined)

Prompts can be related to one of my extant settings (See my landing page-landing page) or they can be for something completely different.

Prompting is free! But Donations are always welcome.

For each $5 you donate, I will write an additional 500 words to the prompt(s) of your choice.

If I get two new prompters or one new donator, I will write a setting piece (setting chosen by poll) explaining something about the prompts.

Because this is a mini-Call, there will be mini-perks!

* For every $15 donated, one prompter chosen at random will get an extra fic written – Got to two!
* For every $30 donated, one random prompter will get a 500-word continuation. – Got to one!

* Every-$60 level open for suggestions!!

Incentives will carry over the three mini-calls in January.


Words
500 $5.00 USD
750 $7.50 USD
1000 $10.00 USD
1250 $12.50 USD
1500 $15.00 USD
1750 $17.50 USD
2000 $20.00 USD

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/454952.html. You can comment here or there.

Mini Giraffe Calls Day Two

Yesterday’s Theme was Transitions, and a little over an hour, I received five prompts:

Falling (LJ) (misc. May be Fairy Town)
Lab Rats (DW) Tír na Cali
Strange Favors (LJ) – from the December Giraffe Call, Addergoole Yr16 (this one doesn’t count, but I wrote it in the last day)
Teaching for the Future (LJ) – unknown Apoc ‘verse
Transfer of Power (DW) Addergoole: the next Generation
Into the Doorway (LJ) – Facets of Dusk

edited to add: An An Unnamed fragment

The last Giraffe Call of this month will be up in about half an hour! Stay Tuned!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/454674.html. You can comment here or there.

Falling

For [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt

I remember falling.

They’ll tell you I can’t have possibly remembered anything. They’ll tell you that I was too young.

They’ll tell you there wasn’t any falling involved. It was a one-story house, and the windows were low to the ground.

But then again, how did a 2-year-old survive when nobody else did?

I’ve never wondered.

They’ll tell you that was because I was too young to have formed attachments. They’ll tell you that’s because I don’t really remember my family.

They’re going to tell you a lot of shit about me. And you’re going to listen, aren’t you? Because you’re the grown-ups. And I’m a kid.

But I remember falling. I remember the first fall. The second fall. I remember every. Single. Time.

They put me on a train at the end of the autumn. Comes this time every year. The families can handle me in the spring, in the summer. But when the leaves start to change, they get nervous.

I can’t say I blame them. All they have to go on is stories, after all. Whispers. The things that they’re told, the lies that they’re fed to comfort them. But even the slimiest grown-up knows, somewhere, when they’re being lied to.

So they put me on a train. City to country. Country to burbs. Burbs to… well, where am I going this time?

And what have they told you about the fires?

I remember falling.

But I remember flying, too. The flying always comes before the falling. And the fire comes in between.

And they’ll tell you I don’t remember anything at all.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/454475.html. You can comment here or there.

Lab Rat, a story of Tir na Cali for the Giraffe Call (@lilfluff)

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt.

Tir na Cali has a landing page here.

“Engage in some scientific experimentation,” the Agency guy had said. “Earn your freedom,” they’d said. “Just two years in our scientific facility, and you can go free,” they’d promised.

They’s strapped Robert and Eric to tables, at which point they’d both started complaining.

“This isn’t what we meant by ‘experimentation.'”

“Weren’t we supposed to be lab assistants?”

“Lab assistants! We’re supposed to be helping you guys!”

The skinny ginger guy had just tightened the straps. “You are helping. Now sleep.”

The drugs had slid into their veins, pushing away the last of the panic and replacing it with sleep.

Robert woke twitching, jittering. He wasn’t tied to a table anymore. He was back in his room, back in the little cell he shared with Eric and two other lab assistants.

Lab assistants, ha. Assist by being a lab rat. What kind of freedom was that, if there wasn’t anything left of him after two years? Cancer? Was that what this was about? AIDS? Something worse?

They were in California, after all. There had to be something worse. Anybody as evil as the Californians had to have come up with some nastier disease.

He looked at his hands. They seemed to be oka… wait. Wait. Had he had that many knuckles before? Had he had white hair, no, not hair, white fur on the back of his hands before?

His ears twitched. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all. And something was moving behind him. He darted, twisted, and…

“Hey!” He pounded on the door to their cell. “Hey, let me out. You got the wrong guy! I wasn’t supposed to be a lab rat! I wasn’t supposed to get a tail!!

“You think you’ve got problems?”

Eric’s voice was wrong. Too high. Nerves? Robert turned around, slowly. He hadn’t seen Eric when he came to. He hadn’t seen…

Erica? “You think you’ve got problems?” His oldest buddy repeated him – her – self. “They just turned you into a rat. They turned me into a girl.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/454306.html. You can comment here or there.