Further Exploration Reveals… a story of Vas World for the Giraffe Call

Jan19

To an anonymous prompt.

Vas’ World has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

This comes some short time after Greetings ()

it had been with effort that Paz and Malia had slipped away from their “welcoming committee” who were, after five days, beginning to feel more like benign jailers. Vas was still doing the staring-slack-jawed thing he’d been doing since they encountered the purple girl, and the rest of the team were baby-sitting him, trying to get him to snap out of it. That left the uncomfortable pairing of Paz and Malia, who had in common that they thought Vas was a bit of a jerk, to handle the finding-an-escape route and generally doing the job they’d been sent here to do.

They slipped out between two of the longhouses (it seemed silly to keep thinking “longhouse-like structures”) when the rest of the village was busily chatting via giant-horse-translator with the team. Malia had found a route that was overgrown by about a generation (If these creatures had human lifespans; they were still determining that) of disuse. It wasn’t hard to traverse – the plants here were mostly hardwood, slow-growing, and the vines were, unlike Malia’s last assignment, neither thorny nor poisonous; the trees here, unlike in other parts of this planet, seemed neither sentient nor carnivorous. The hardest part was getting a good hundred feet in without leaving a path. They wanted a chance to really explore before their “hosts” managed to find them.

Once they got past that line, the travelling got easier. At first, Malia thought it was just that they weren’t as worried about where they put their feet, but as they went deeper and deeper into the forest, she realized that the path itself was clearer; the stones under their feet were dry-fitted together and dressed so that barely a weed had grown up between. “Paz, are you seeing this?” she asked, kneeling down to run her hands over the pavers. The village cobblestones were not nearly as tidy.

“No, Mal,” he answered very slowly. “I’m seeing this, though.”

She looked up, wondering what he was talking about. Another moving tree? Some more pavers? “….Oh. Oh, well. What do you think happened to them?”

“I… have no idea. But I think we need to find out.”

They stood together, shoulder to shoulder, needing the touch of someone else they knew was human, as they faced a small city, formed of stone and metal, rising to the sky. One could argue a great deal for coincidence, paralleled construction and evolution, but the “New London City Hall” carved in English gave lie to every theory they’d heard voiced.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/237036.html. You can comment here or there.

Under Scrutiny, a story of Rin & Girey, a Giraffe Call continuation perk

Jan18

From the poll for continuation story from December’s Giraffe Call. This one ran short, so I will also write a bit of something to the runner-up.

This comes after:“Come to Bed” (LJ)
In Bed (LJ), after “Come to Bed” [Beta]
Morning After (LJ) [Access-list only]
Virginity/Celibacy (LJ), a drabble.

Reiassan has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

Arinya found the way her captive was gaping at her to be very strange. She’d known he’d have a reaction, of course, and even if he hadn’t been staring, the warmth of his hand on her hip was a clear giveaway.

“So.” He coughed uncomfortably, and seemed to be trying to bring himself to move away, or at least move his hand. She made it easier for him, pressing her hand down more firmly on his and scooting closer. That just made him cough again, and repeat “so.”

“So,” she echoed, smiling at him.

“So,” he repeated, this time in Bitrani. “I am the reason you have not had a lover since the war ended.”

“That is part of what I said, yes,” she answered in the same language.

“Would you like me to leave, then, so you could find a lover without interference?”

She sighed. Were all Bitrani men this stiff-necked, or was it only this one that she’d brought home with her. “If I wanted you to leave, Girey-whose-mother-didn’t-give-you-enough-name-to-scold-you-with, I would have asked you to leave.”

“I like my name,” he protested. “And you don’t have to scold me.” She could see the moment when the rest of what she’d said sunk in. “So you want me to stay.” There was tension in his voice that she didn’t think she’d ever heard before. “And you want…” His voice cracked. “What do you want from me?”

A very good question. She wished she had an easy answer. Taking him with her had seemed so much more reasonable when they’d been at the front. Now, in her bed, by the light of day… “Roll over.”

“What?” he asked, almost a squeak, hardly befitting his dignity as… well, any of his dignity.

“Roll over, please.” Before she lost her nerve or did something they’d both regret. Staying chaste had seemed like such a wonderful idea when she was young, and it really had been practical in the army, but now, faced with this warm man in her bed… now she was beginning to have her regrets.

He rolled over, perhaps just out of the habit of obedience, because he was moving his hands as if they were still shackled together. “That, I have to note,” he mumbled, until he got his elbows under him to get his face out of the pillow, “is not an answer, not unless you Callenthe have funny ideas about answering… which I guess you do.”

“We do,” she agreed. “It’s part of being raised to diplomatic positions – or the army or priesthood, which are about the same.”

“Heh,” he chuckled, and then again, this time a little strained. “Ah… Rin, Arinya, what are you doing?”

What, indeed? “Straddling your bum, what does it look like?”

“Well, it looks a lot like the linen of your pillow from this position. I know you said you were inexperienced, but…”

She silenced him by pushing his face into the bedding. His hair was greasy; they both still needed a bath, desperately. Well, one foot after another. She pulled the blankets off his shoulders, down to his waist, and studied him.

Wisely, now he said nothing, holding still, cautiously tilting his head to one side and regarding her through a stray curl of hair. In addition to a bath, they both needed a haircut badly.

“Try to breathe naturally,” she murmured. “Relax. I am not the enemy.” He had scars on his chest; she’d seen those before, over their season on the road. But none on his back, nothing but muscle, slightly atrophied, and freckled, mole-dotted skin. Slowly, she set her hands just above his spine.

“If you were the enemy,” he replied, “I’d be in trouble.”

She said nothing to that. She had been his enemy – and now he was her captive, in the heart of her territory. By some lights, he was already in deep, deep trouble. Instead, she felt the energy running through his body, the connection to the small courtyard outside her room, the tree which had been growing there since the palace was built, the feel of the life in both of them.

“What…?” he asked, as she began to sense the energy within him, seeking out imbalances.

“It’s the step before a massage,” she answered, most of her attention on the way his muscles pulled and shifted, the way the tendons were stretched, the hitch in his shoulder from the way he’d held the shackles.

“A…” He turned over, frowning at her. “I’m not asking you to be a…” he trailed off, and muttered, “I don’t know the word in Callenian. It’s not a nice word.”

“Healer?” she asked, knowing that’s not what he meant. “You have pain there, Girey. I can soothe it.”

He flushed, discomfort – and, she thought, a realization of the position he’d just put himself in – making him angry. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I do. But it’s what I meant.” She set her hands on his bare chest, just left of the scar that had damaged his shoulder. “Girey, you have pain, old pain, and pain that I caused. As a healer, I’d like to fix it. As Arinya – I’d like to get my hands on you.” She smiled down at him, wishing her gut wasn’t twisting as she admitted that. He was the enemy, wasn’t he?

“You don’t have to demean yourself…” he tried again.

“Then don’t demean what I’m doing.” She traced the lines of his shoulders, poking gently where she could see the pain flaring up. “Roll over, and let me heal you.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he rolled over. Facing his back, she was able to tell him, “the word you were looking for? It’s ‘bed-warmer’ if you want to be rude, ‘courtesan’ if you’re flattering.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/236734.html. You can comment here or there.

A Growing Plan

Jan18

For skjam‘s prompt.

The Planners have a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

They had a plan when they moved in to the city.

Of course they did; they were the Planners. They had other names – the Seven Families, the Amalgamated Preparation Assembly, or just The Founders – but the one they called themselves, in their private meetings, was The Planners. And what they did was Prepare, Found, and, most of all, Plan.

They’d done this in several other cities already – move in, begin buying up unwanted, abandoned, cheap land in bad neighborhoods, empty warehouse space, anything they could get that was standing vacant. And then They would begin cleaning, stockpiling, restoring, and, in some cases, demolishing to make room for green space.

Bringing at least some food production to within the reach of the cities was their primary goal, although they couched it in different terms depending on the audience: raising property values, making community spaces, teaching the youth of the city about food, creating habitats for wildlife. The Planners had learned how to camouflage their long-term plans, and how to blend in with their environments.

Everything went a little weird when they got to Syracuse, though.

Kerafena knew much of it was her fault. It was her first management job, her first chance to prove herself, and they’d given her the budget they always gave to new-city developers, something with enough zeros to make her eyes water, and expected to see results within three years. She gulped, considered running away to Kalamazoo, changing her name, and becoming a short-order cook, and then shook herself and got on with her business.

She bought properties. She refurbished tolerable buildings, throwing money at contractors until she found a group she liked and doing much of the work herself. She rented out refurbished buildings, started planning some modern apartment space, and broke ground for a Planners headquarters.

Mostly, though, she tore down old, decrepit buildings and planted the resultant lots. She started with three such gardens her first year; by her third, she had enough that she needed to hire day labor to help her maintain them; by her seventh year, she had three property managers, ten full-time workers, day laborers by the truck in planting and harvesting seasons, and four farm stands in the heart of the city.

By the time the Elders came to view her progress, she had a ring of green properties circling the city, corn and wheat and parkland in what had been the most decrepit neighborhoods, a pumpkin field abutting the college, and – and this is where the Elders began to raise eyebrows – her cows had gotten out and were running through the McDonald’s parking lot.

Some inspiration from this song, esp:
“His cows get loose and run right thru the fast food parking lots
And Daddy gets calls from the mini-malls
when they’re downwind from his hogs. “

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/236525.html. You can comment here or there.

Breaking Ground

Jan18

For [personal profile] anke‘s Prompt

The new hospital was going to be the best thing that had happened to the Cayuga Lake region in decades. Stuck in a hospital-dry zone, the state-of-the-art set of buildings would bring more jobs to the area, open up treatment options without having to drive two hours to the nearest bigger city, and, hopefuly, put the old I-wouldn’t-send-my-dog-there hospital on the other side of the lake out of business. Georgie and Gene VanStatler were very proud of themselves for bringing it all together.

When they got the call, barely two days after the ground had first been broke, they didn’t know what to expect. They had surveyed and studied all of the normal hazards of the region – there wasn’t natural gas close to the surface. There were no records of Indian habitation right in this area, although the records were spotty. The bedrock had, in nearby constructions, proven to be far enough down. And it was not, unlike much in the area, a flood-prone zone.

“You’ve got to come down here,” was all that Marty Townsend, the construction boss, would say. So down there they came, in the cold of early April, bundled up and muttering to each other the whole time about how it really couldn’t be THAT bad.

THAT bad depended on your viewpoint. The ground, it seemed, was going to be useless for a hospital. There was no way that anyone would ever let them put new construction, however nice, on top of this.

On the other hand, the VanStatlers owned the land, and if this was genuine, they could make a fortune off of people wanting to see and study this… and put the money into another plot of land and a better hospital somewhere else.

Sticking up in the half-dug hold, you see, like candles in a cake, were the tops of what looked like Roman buildings, buried beneath a thousand years of dirt.

Author’s note: Cayuga Lake is one of the Finger Lakes, in central New York State.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/236049.html. You can comment here or there.

Planning Board Woes, a story of Dragons Next Door for the Giraffe Call

Jan18

For [personal profile] kay_brooke‘s prompt

Dragons Next Door has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

I do enjoy my consulting work, and not just because it gets me out of the house once in a while. Generally, I get to help smooth the interactions between humans and other races, and I almost always get a good story out of it in the process.

Like the situation just last week. I got a call from the City Planning and Zoning board, asking me to come help with a building that a non-human consortium had purchased. It seemed that they weren’t keeping the streetfront up to code.

Because some of the races have strange opinions about aesthetics, it’s generally a good idea to bring in a translator. The City has run into problems before – things like the ogres who used to live next door to us, for example. So now they call me in at the first sign of trouble.

This one, I knew what was going on before I even read the paperwork. There are tell-tale signs that most humans don’t think to look for, and, really, how many humans really study the walls at ankle level that closely, anyway?

The consortium is a business partnership started way back in the ways of the founding of Smokey Knoll to give non-humans a human-looking face for their business interests and, sometimes, to allow them to buy through a front when prejudice rears its ugly head. Their purchases, often through fronts and shell companies, ranged all over the city, suburbs, and surrounding farmland, and were a bureaucratic nightmare to track down, as they’d intended. This time, however, they’d been rather direct.

They’d purchased a parking garage in a part of town that had seen better days, and had then, to common view, let it simply sit there and fester. Since the City offered very generous tax breaks to those who bought land in these neighborhoods, expecting that they would beautify and prettify the area, the Planning Board was understandably a little vexed.

As I said, however, I knew what was going on the moment I stepped onto the property. The bottom foot of the wall was very nicely painted, you see, and someone had installed tiny doors, including a tiny parking gate, into most of the larger doors. They had also, because all the races at some point have to deal with one another, left the large car entryway and the human door to the office intact – so I knocked.

I was unsurprised to not see the person who answered the door, or rather, to see her only when I crouched down. The place had all the classic signs of Tiny habitation.

The Mayor, whose secretary had answered the door, was happy enough to talk to me, once I explained who I was, and, what’s more, she gave me a tour. It was amazing, what they were doing with the place – an entire city within a city was going up on the top floor of the garage, complete with small skyscrapers and lush little parks. They had left a few human-sized walkways, and were in the process of refurbishing the middle layers to allow them to communicate with the larger races.

“This way,” the Mayor of Tiny-ville told me, “we can have sunshine without being overshadowed by the Big People. We’ve lived in the walls for so long, and it’s beginning to be unhealthy for us as a people. We have our own roads, our own police… what could a Biggie policeman do for us, anyway? Or to us?”

There was a lot someone fifty times larger than one could do to them, but that wouldn’t be polite. I praised their growing city – it really was beautiful – stepped carefully into their largest park – there’s nothing to make you feel gangley and clumsy like a Tiny park – and admired their bonsai maples – and then, once I had done the proper things, sat down to talk to the Mayor about hiring a painter.

In the end, it took doing something you only ever due to a small or tiny person with their permission – holding her up at my eye level – to explain the problem, but once I had, she agreed to hire some day labor to paint the place.

And, in addition to my fee, I had the delicious privilege of having been the first Middle Races person to have seen the first Tiny city in over a thousand years.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/235906.html. You can comment here or there.

Giraffe Call Early Wednesday Update

Jan18

The Giraffe Call is Still Open (and on LJ)! It will stay open until this Friday evening, or until I’ve written one prompt to ever prompter, whichever comes first.

Monday morning we reached the $201 goal – our furnace bill is paid for! (also, there will be another single-setting Call near the end of the month) At $211, we are just $29 from reaching the next incentive level, where I will hold a chat session with characters!

Claim your words! If you have donated to this call, or to any call, you can ask for $x100 words continuation on any story posted here!

Back to writing!

Linkback Incentive Story (and ON LJ)
Summary so far:
One-offs
First Steps (LJ) The city remembers
The Dark Places, the Numbered Streets (LJ) – Ance seeks a real adventure. And finds it.
Recovering the City (LJ)
The Tuesday Map (LJ) Life in the BAELZ.
Souvenir (LJ) A little something from every city
Birth of a City (LJ) It started with asteroid miners…
The Cracks
Through the Cracks (LJ)
“China is Here” (LJ)

Unicorn/Factory
Unicorn Chase (LJ)

Dragons
Origins of Smokey Knoll (LJ)

Facets
Underneath (LJ) [Josie[

Shadow Rebellion
Evoloution (LJ)


Donate below

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/235734.html. You can comment here or there.

Radio silence

Jan17

/Amused/ You know you’re online a bit much when….

I was offline for most of today – we were in Rochester, about an hour and a half away getting a remote starter installed in the car. Offline also = off-computer, although I did get 9/10 of an adorable baby hat knit. I apologize for the delay in Giraffing, and will pick it up again tomorrow!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/235413.html. You can comment here or there.

Evolution, a story of the Shadow Rebellion for the Giraffe Call

Jan16

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.

Shadow Rebellion now has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

I didn’t believe my dad at first.

Okay, that’s not really nice of me, but I really didn’t. He liked to make up stories sometimes, to entertain us, and I knew, having spent the last summer living in one during an internship, that the cubes in the middle of the megaplexes can get really creepy if you spend too long there. I could put one and one together and come up with a dad who had gone just a little loopy, without loving him any less, without trusting him any less… just without believing him at all.

I didn’t really even believe him “at second;” when the news reports started coming out of the City, in part because he was quoted on the news. “Hey, Janie, isn’t that your dad?” is really not what you want to hear when you’re studying for an exam.

It wasn’t until we went into the City for the weekend that I really understood, or at least believed, and having begun the process, well, then I had to study it. I’m a college student, aren’t I? So I talked to a professor and he talked to the Dean and the Dean signed the papers and four of my buddies and I now have a grant.

It’s lovely how those things work out, isn’t it?

We started with the statues, figuring they would be easy. I mean, they were Writing, weren’t they?

And they were. Of course, the problem was, they weren’t writing in English. They weren’t writing in any language anyone we could find could recognize. So we hauled in a couple language students, and got them deciphering the super-slow-writing while the rest of us started finding something that could identify the shadows and the ghosts.

It took us a while.

It took us weeks just to determine exactly where to read their signal, and why the daylight lights were making them visible (not the “daylight” function, actually, but the fact that they were a special style of bulb. The light streaming through one of the chemicals in the fluorescent did it). Once we did that, we could follow them, and figure out their patterns. They followed humans, we theorized, out of camouflage; even in the light of those bulbs, they still looked pretty much like a flat shadow.

Running with that theory, we tried to open up communication with them. We tried all different sound frequencies, some different light patterns, even smells. We were on to textures and tastes when the intern we’d put on deciphering the statues came running into the lab.

“There’s a problem!” she screamed, just as we were about to try vanilla-scented sandpaper. “No, stop. They’re tactile. Haptic language, we’re pretty sure.”

“That’s what we’re trying,” I pointed out, as patiently as I could.

“The problem is, you don’t want to talk to them. You really don’t. We deciphered the statue’s language. They’re not statues. They’re… well. They used to be shadows. And, uh, we think that they have a three-stage evolution…”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/234772.html. You can comment here or there.

Birth of a City, a story for the Giraffe Call (@Inventrix)

Jan16

For [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt

It started, as most things do, with a single settlement on a major route.

The route was, in this case, a slip-hole through an asteroid belt, not a long valley or a waterway, and the settlement was a group of seventeen people, miners and their kin, who staked out the best chunk of belt and attached their settlement to the biggest stable land mass.

The first to come was a teacher, someone whose skills lay in education but who had always had what they called “void-fever.” He brought with him a module that attached near the settlement, and the tubing to make a “road.”

After the teacher came some scientists, who were curious in studying – well, they were scientists, they wanted to study everything. Micro-G living on humans. The elements found in the asteroids. Void and zero-G’s effects on just about everything. They brought a company-sponsored seven-level settlement, and triple-wall tubes to connect to the miner’s cubic. Since they also brought children, they attached to the teacher’s module, as well.

And many of them brought spouses, partners, cuddle-friends, which meant that there had to be something for those people to do. Three of them dreamt up a small business, and wrote up a proposal, bringing money, a module, and materials from the grounded cities. They also hired three programmers and a mechanic who could handle micro-G, and, as their business took off, another seven employees, only half of them already on the Rock.

There’s some argument about whether that first company was the tipping point, or the bar-slash-bordello that followed (Angie’s, done in an imitation old-style, complete with swinging saloon doors past its airlock and girls in bright saloon costumes), but, one or the other, people started coming for things other than the mine, the miners, and their children. And once the hydro-farm and distillery came to service the bar, and the gidget factory to support the first building, and the hair salon and massage parlour to support the factory workers… Well, then they needed a water refinery and a toy store (and a “toy store”) and a movie theatre.

The police first formed when the population topped a thousand and, while the city did not have a fire department, quite, it had a leak department, and then a public works bureau, that collected money and used it to reinforce the tubes and, at about ten thousand, build a globe around the whole thing for another layer of protection. And then, of course, they needed someone in charge.

It surprised no-one, except possibly herself, when the first miner, whose idea this had all been, was elected mayor seventeen years after she had first started digging on the rocks.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/234327.html. You can comment here or there.