Tag Archive | giraffecall: result

Visit from School

Sep12

First of two I want to write for [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt “Pellinore.”

This Pellinore has appeared in June Again,, Boom, and referenced in Legacy.

As first referenced in Loose Ends and Tying Off (these two stories reference slavery and mistreatment), the Addergoole staff make visits to graduated students to check up on them.

Cynara wasn’t surprised when Professors Drake and Pelletier showed up at her doorstep. By now the staff had to have noticed what she was doing, and, while she had gotten good marks for being one of the more level-headed students in her year, she was, after all, part of Boom. If anyone merited looking-in-on, it was her and her crew.

Pellinore, on the other hand, seemed both startled and upset when he opened the door. “Profe…” He stopped, as if unsure if saying that was giving away some secret. “What?”

“May we come in?” Trust Professor Drake to look over Pellinore’s shoulder like he wasn’t even there and ask Cya. She was glad the kids were with Leo today. She wasn’t sure this wouldn’t get unpleasant.

“Professor Drake, Professor Pelletier. Come on in. Pellinore, take their coats, would you? Can I get you something to drink, Professors?” Pretend everything is normal. Pretend there’s nothing to see here.

The Professors were less interested in pretend than they had been when Cya had been in school. “No drink, thank you. Pellinore, how are you doing?”

He glanced at Cya, then back at the Professor. Cya managed not to roll her eyes. A basic precaution could cover most of what the Professors were looking for. But she had nothing to hide. “Be honest with the Professors, but don’t feel the need to tell them anything you don’t want to.” She headed into the kitchen to get water anyway, giving him the pretense of privacy.

She could still hear them. She listened over the sound of the faucet as Pellinore coughed. “I’m all right. I don’t… I didn’t like getting caught. She trapped me,” he added, more quietly. “Like I was back in school.”

Professor Drake chuckled dryly. “That is what school is supposed to teach you to avoid.”

“Feu Drake.” Professor Pelletier was far less amused. “Does she treat you well, Pellinore?”

“Well, I’m Kept.” She could picture his shrug. “But she’s not a bad sort. Her kids are kinda wild.” He hesitated, and then continued more slowly, “but, ya know, if I was gonna be Kept again… I can live with this.”

“Is that because you believe you have no choice in the matter?”

Cya chose her Mentor’s question as a cue to re-enter, carrying four glasses of water on a tray. It was an interesting question, but she didn’t want them to get comfortable quizzing him.

Pellinore looked at her over his water glass, then glanced back at their former professors. She smiled, but didn’t try to send him any messages.

He coughed. “Way I see it, sir, ma’am, there’s been nothing we’ve done since we were conceived we had much choice in. Cya might be another trap, but she’s a nice one, at least.” He looked over Cya’s shoulder at the adults. “If you see JohnWayne or Pepper-Potts in your ‘visits,’ tell them their daddy says hello.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/401390.html. You can comment here or there.

Commute

Sep10

To [personal profile] anke and [personal profile] eseme‘s prompts

Alinara woke up just before dawn. The snow had been coming down heavily when she went to sleep, and the radio had said it was going to be just below freezing all night.

The chill in the air suggested the radio hadn’t been quite honest. She slid on a spare pair of pants before getting out of bed and dove into her fleece slippers. The cabin, with its thick, thick walls, didn’t lose heat quickly, but a hard freeze could hurt more than just her breath and joints.

She fumbled the matches twice before she managed to light the tinder, and then had to light the tinder three times to get it going. A strong draft kept whistling down the chimney, putting out her little flames.

The pipes hadn’t frozen, at least. She set a kettle on the stove while the fire got itself going, and washed her hair in the sink. She could take a nice hot bath when the drive was shoveled out.

She drank her first mug of tea while she got dressed in outdoor gear. By then, the cabin was starting to warm up, her breath no longer showing in the air. Reluctantly, Alinara stepped into the breezeway, shut the doors firmly behind her, and pulled the exterior door open.

The snow was hard-packed enough that it didn’t come tumbling in, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Wishing for a flamethrower, Alinara climbed to the top of the drift, shut the door behind her, and started shoveling. With luck, she’d be able to clear her way to the bus stop with time left over for a bath. Normal back-to-nature sorts might be able to forgo day jobs, but she still needed to get into the office, rain, shine, or three feet of hard-packed snow.

When she’d gone out into the woods to find herself, she hadn’t imagined that the self she’d find would have quite so much upper-body strength.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/401127.html. You can comment here or there.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy, a story of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe-Bunny-Safari-Call

Aug30

This is set in my Fae Apoc setting, which has a landing page here.

For zianuray‘s prompt.

Forget about how the tiger got his stripes, how the leopard changed his shorts. Today I’m going to tell you a better story, a more epic story: How the Bear Lost his Fuzz.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wasn’t a bear, mind you, not like a grizzly or something, claws, sharp teeth, yadda, yadda, et cetera. Fuzzy-Wuzzy was a bear, still a teenager and already big, cuddly, and all over fur.

He had a name, a real name, I’m sure of it, but the point is, that the Fuzzy was a big man that everyone knew as Fuzzy-Wuzzy. You know what they say about puberty? Voice changes, hair in places you had no hair before, grow taller over night. All that. And then…

…well, you know how the rhyme goes. You knew there had to be an And Then that didn’t involve happily ever after at the local Bachelor Forum.

So, the thing about Fae is (or so I’ve been told), the thing you have to really pity them for is that they get puberty twice. First they get the normal sort, and then, sometime before their body’s all done growing (I’ve heard – I couldn’t tell you myself), they get to Change all over again. And here was Fuzzy Wuzzy, eighteen years old and 6 foot 8, furry as you could be, and…

…here we go with the And Then…

…and then when he was moonlighting at a local strip club as a bouncer (that tall, he had to be over 21, right?)… when trolls attacked.

And that was just about it for Fuzzy Wuzzy. He went to work a bear, and, three hours later, and I’m not saying he fainted, even if any sane person would, but this whole Change thing is like puberty all at once, it hurts (or so I’ve been told). He woke up stark naked, a foot and a half taller…

…and smooth as a baby’s behind. And, of course, because this is the way things happen, purple and with ram horns. But the important part about this…

… you guessed it….

…is that Fuzzy Wuzzy Had No Hair. Not a bit.

But he was still the favorite bear at the Bachelor Forum.

the leopard changing his shorts is a nod to Terry Pratchett. The Bachelor Forum is a gay bar near my old apartment in Rochester, NY.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/397099.html. You can comment here or there.

Delfugiaran Bunnies, a story for the Bunny Safari

Aug29

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt

There were planets where you set down, built the first houses, and spent your four years of prep playing house like you were in the burbs back on Earth.

There were planets where you barely got the house up before the storms the weather satellites hadn’t seen nor predicted blew over you, and you spent four years just trying to survive and get enough built so the colonists coming after you wouldn’t die.

There were places where Murphy’s Law seemed to be in full effect, you lost half the team, but somehow managed to present a colony that looked tidy enough, so tidy the company was left asking “so what was the problem again?”

And then there was Fuge.

The Delfugiara was an M-class planet off the “beaten path,” inaccessible enough that the prep team was given a six-year stint instead of the normal four, Earth-like enough that they were sent down with a double team and livestock in sleepers, enough to get not just a colony but a town ready for the long-termers. It looked to be a Suburb Hop type of stay, what Marcel called Old McDonald’s Farm. They built their houses and their barns, thawed out their animals, and laid their fences.

And then the Taigups showed up.

Taig got to name them, because he brought the first one one, and Taig was three, Marcel and Stiggie’s son from their last stop. It looked sort of like a bunny, but the only place Taig had seen rabbits or hares was in picture files, so it was a Taigup, after, Siggie assumed, his father’s Marciup (an antelope-like creature on Tanner Three).

The Taigup liked the warmth of the house, about five degrees warmer than the surrounding area, which was in early-spring. It turned out it – and then the three others Taig brought home in quick succession – liked not only the warmth, but the lack of natural predators; their three-year-old would stand for them eating any number of things, but not His Pets.

They’d wondered at the lack of other small omnivores or herbivores. There were Taigups in the brush, but not massive numbers – enough to allow for reproduction over the number that were eaten by larger omnivores and the few big carnivores – but no mice-analogs, no dog-analogs, no badger-analogs. Nothing but Taigup.

When they came back to the house after a long day of Terradjusting to find sixteen Taigup where they’d had four, and the same the next three days as they spread them out like Free Kittens in a box, they began to understand.

“We’re going to have to get used to Taigup stew,” Marcel decided, as they pushed a box of the things out into the wilderness for the carnivores to eat. “Or we’re going to be drowning in bunnies.”

“I don’t think we can eat that fast.” Stiggie picked up a Taigup as it split itself into two. “Well, at least we can teach Taig exponential growth.”

(I was going to call it Welsh Taigup, even though that’s cheese, but I decided to go with something that actually involves bunny).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/396804.html. You can comment here or there.

Entering Kitty Town, a story for the Rabbit Safari

Aug29

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s requested continuation of Down in Kitty Town, from then January 2012 Giraffe Call

Irena sank into the cushions of her seat, letting the slow hypnosis take over as a team of Agency cover-preppers worked on her. Her body was already beginning to change. By the time she woke up, her personalty would have been shifted as well. She cursed her supervisor sleepily. She always came back from these missions with a desire to scratch the linoleum and a month of panicked nightmares.

~

Rrrina woke up in a crate. How had she… oh. Her Master. Her stupid, mean, heavy-handed Master had gotten bored with her. “I’m sick of Siamese.” Like she was a slipcover or something. She’d yowled and screamed, so he’d sedated her. Her butt and back hurt; he’d beaten her, too. She wouldn’t be sorry to see the back of him, if only it didn’t mean she was in a crate again.

Where was she going? She touched the bars of the crate cautiously – sometimes they went zzap – and peered out. A cargo hold, hrrm. Next to her, a human slave cried in her pen. On the other side, three dogs slept fitfully.

“Awake, are you?” The man looked wrong somehow, something ill-fitting about his coverall, more so than it should be, something about his hat or his gloves that didn’t look right. Rrrina backed up until she hit the wall of her cage, hissing. “Easy, easy.”

The handler knew what he was doing. Those gloves went all the way up his arms, and he had no qualms about tipping her out of the cage and grabbing her collar from behind. Rrrina wasn’t sure how he got the restraints on her; she was tumbling, she’d been grabbed, and then she was hogtied. “Easy.” He patted her shoulder. “Don’t bite me, kitten, I’m the good guys.”

She showed him lots of teeth but didn’t bite. “Let me loose. I’m housetrained.”

“Not until we’ve gotten you off the plane. Come on.” He picked her up easily. Far too easily for a human. Far too easily for most Tuathan. She fell limp in his arms. There was no way she was getting away from him.

“Where…?”

“Kitty-town. Now stay quiet, and nobody will notice we’re stealing you.”

Kitty-town. Stealing. Rrrina really wanted to fight, she really did, but something, something kept her quiet.

Deep, deep inside her cover personality, Irena wondered if Miles had arranged this. If he had, she was personally going to shit on his face when she got home.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/396563.html. You can comment here or there.

(Pat the Bunny) Stroke the Unicorn, a story of Unicorn/Factory for the Rabbit Safari

Aug28

For [profile] ysabetwordsmit‘s Prompt

Warning: this turned out a bit dark.

“Have you ever stroked a unicorn?”

The tavern wasn’t the sort that catered to women, certainly not to delicate, smooth-skinned women wearing silk reminiscent of a habit or a widow’s weeds. She made the men who drank there uncomfortable, hard-working rough men who drank hard, rough drinks. She made the bartender nervous, a man who kept two knives and a cosh under his bar and had used all three without flinching. She made the boy who ran errands and the girl who waited tables nervous, skinny orphans who had seen more in their lives than the hard men had in spans three or four times as long.

And they didn’t seem to be making her nervous at all.

They’d tried, they really had. Leering, rude jokes. Excessive, sarcastic chivalry. Belching. They didn’t even have to work at the body odor. When all else had failed, they’d just tried ignoring her, and yet, night after night, bad drink after bad drink after worse food, she kept coming back.

Tonight, when they all sat three seats away and tried to ignore her bubble of presence, tonight, when they’d finally managed to actually forget she was there for a bit, tonight, she came up with that one.

The bar fell to silence. They all stared at her, then stared at Jakob. Jakob could answer. He had an answer for everything.

“Stroked a… Lady. Lady, what in the blazing furnaces…!”

It was the answer they would have given. Tavern-goers nodded sagely. What in the blazing furnaces, indeed.

“A unicorn.” She sipped her ale as if it were wine. “Its coat is very soft, you know.”

“No, I haven’t… who in the ground gears pets a unicorn?”

“I wasn’t intending to pet it, you see.” She sipped her ale again. “Barkeep, something a bit stronger, if you please.”

“Lady, I think you’ve had enough.”

“Barkeep.” Her voice had taken on a new edge, an edge of pearl and dagger, an edge that reminded them of the unicorns they were all trying so hard to forget. “I have had hardly sufficient to begin. I ask you again, all of you, have you ever stroked a unicorn?“

It occurred to Jakob just about then that the black of her habit covered a waist that could have been thickened with age, or, perhaps more likely, with bandages. It occurred to him what he had heard of those the unicorns didn’t favor, when the towns and villages sent their women to the water. “Give her what she wants.” His voice was harsh now, too. His daughter had gone to the river. She had come back with a baby. He didn’t think that was what this woman had returned with. “It’s on my tab.”

“No, Lady.” He held the eyes of every man in the bar for one long minute. “None of us have ever touched a unicorn, but we would be honored to hear your story.”

Next:
Unicorn Strokes (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/395035.html. You can comment here or there.

The First Quest

Aug20

For flofx‘s prompt

“I have… forty feet of rope, my camelbak, and a jackknife.” Sancha turned her pockets inside-out. “Also fifty-seven cents and a movie ticket stub.”

“Save it all. We might be able to use it.” Fritz saw her look and correctly interpreted it. “Look, the first quest is always the hardest. you have to equip as you go, and by the time you’re done with this one, you’ll be a lot more ready for the next one.”

She couldn’t help but stare. “This isn’t a video game. This is real life. The really-real world.” Even if the really-real world was going all strange and upside-down lately.

“It’s still a quest. The same rules still apply.” He finished going through his own pockets. “Okay. Lighter. Multi-tool. Gloves. Butterfly knife. Two candy bars.”

“Shouldn’t a quest have a goal or something?”

“We are.” He gestured dramatically. “In a remote creek, having been abandoned by the school bus and everyone else after your little incident. We know which way we came, but also that the rest of the trip probably headed back that way, too. Yesterday, New York City vanished. I’d say our first goal is to find shelter and food, wouldn’t you?”

“My little incident.” She glared at him. “My little incident?” Her voice was rising, which made her lisp around her new teeth all the more obvious.

“Your little incident. Not that it was your fault – it was going to happen sooner or later – but it was definitely your thing.” He patted her head, between the new upwards-pointed ears. “So, our mission.”

She looked down the creek. “One way or another, we’ll get to shelter if we follow the water, right?”

“Right. See, grasshopper? You’ll get this questing thing down in no time.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/393058.html. You can comment here or there.

Captain Fuzzy, a story for the Giraffe Call

Aug19

For moonwolf1988‘s prompt

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

“Look out for Captain Fuzzy.”

As advice went, it wasn’t the best their employer could have given them, but it was something. Something was more than they often got.

So they had a warning, a goal, and a direction – “When you find the wannabees, you’re probably going the right way.”

They’d found the wannabees, or at least a gathering of fuzzy-motive sorts that could definitely have been called that, full of tight clothes and a certain style of make-up that suggested inhumanity. They fit right in, which was funny, as long as nobody looked too closely at their leather, or their prosthetic ears, or the beads in Tinka’s dreads. They looked a little rough around the edges, truth be told, compared to the shining people, but wasn’t that always the case with originals against cheap imitations?

The crowd was surging towards the 51 Cards, bopping along like the world wasn’t ending, Tink and Rube moving with them, smiling and laughing and joking. If they could find the damn Mandrake, they could get out of here before the glow sticks came out and the wannabees started making fools of themselves.

Whoever had told some teenybopper than 51 Cards was a fae bar had a lot to answer for. And whichever teenybopper had then decided that, with Thor and Athena coming out of the woodwork, pretending to be fae was a brilliant idea – she had some pain coming to her, too. It made 51 Cards into a place that no true fae wanted to spend much time. It was like a football game being taken over by tutus.

Orders were orders, and the idea would appeal to Catnip anyway. Their boss liked making them uncomfortable.

They stepped into the club, into the thudding beat and the brightly-hued crowd. It was Real Night, but you can barely tell the unMasked from the made up in the strobe lights; were the DJ’s horns real or prosthetic? Was the bartender that color naturally? In this crowd, Tink and Rube were sparrows among peacocks. They slipped to the bar; there was always information to be had there.

The doors slammed open.

The man in the giant Captain’s hat with the rabbit ears strode in like he owned, not just the place, but the city.

Tink and Rube slipped behind a pillar, only to find their hiding spot already occupied.

To one side of them, somebody muttered something about a Mandrake and Lute. To the other side, a girl looked up, her ears perking.

The rabbit-eared pirate yowled into the music, and the music redoubled its efforts to deafen them all.

They crowded further behind the pillar, trying to dislodge the previous tenant. He, in return, was holding both hands to his ears while trying to curl up on himself. His drink spread forgotten over the floor, red as a pool of blood.

It was staining the smoke that had, presumably, at one time been his feet a sickly mauve.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/392429.html. You can comment here or there.

Rhymes with Rabbit, for the Giraffe Call

Aug19

For wyld_dandelyon‘s prompt (most of them, really)

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

There were better things to do on a Saturday night than follow a neon-lime tart around the clubs. Cary was sure of it. There had to be; even staking out The Most Boring Man in the World was starting to look good after this.

But the boss had said to Follow the Rabbit, and the Rabbit was following the neon-green tart, so Cary and Usha were following her, too, and trying to ignore her ignorance.

The Rabbit, now, she was something else. She was dressed like the main course in an all-you-can-eat-pervert’s buffet: kitten-mittens and fuzzy cuffs, a tall leather collar shaped like the top of a tux and a tiny dress to match. If she weren’t with a pack of girls, she’d have gotten eaten alive in the first club they’d gone into. In the pack, however – the only reason Cary was tolerated was that he appeared to be totally under Usha’s thumb. Other guys didn’t get close.

“Where next?” They hadn’t so much gotten kicked out of the last club as moved gently aside – too young, too out-there, too loud.

“What about the Deck?” That was the Rabbit, voicing an opinion for the first time. “I want to go to the Deck.”

“The Deck is boring.” Lime had opinions. “And kind of skeezy. I want to go to The Briton.

“The Briton’s boring.” Wytton was smitten with the kitten-mittened Rabbit. “How about the place on Leviton?”

“Too much grit. I like the Briton.”

“There’s the vampire club? Bitten?” He didn’t know why Usha was putting in an opinion, but maybe she just wanted to annoy Lime. Maybe she didn’t think their goal was going to be at a stodgy pub. Maybe she just wanted to rhyme with kitten.

Rhyming.
Rabbit.
Jabot?
Sabot.
And rabbet.

“Let’s go to the Dutchman.” He tugged on Usha’s sleeve: two short tugs, one long, and just in case, reached out a hand to the Rabbit. “Come with us? It’s right behind the Deck.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/391712.html. You can comment here or there.

Auntie Kitty, a story for the August Giraffe Call

Aug18

For kelkyag‘s prompt

After Kitten Troubles.

Aunt Family have a landing page here.

The mother cat wouldn’t stop meowing, but neither would she get close enough to Radar to take her kitten back. The kitten, having spoken once, was going back to upset mewling. And Radar looked immensely lost.

“You’ve never fathered a speaking cat before?”

“Never.”

“In all of your unspoken years?”

“Not once. Not until her.”

“Mirrowl.”

“Mirrow-ow-ow-owl.”

Beryl picked up the momma cat, mindful that, as with all cats, she could consist entirely of sharp ends should she wish. “Can you talk to her?”

“She won’t listen to me. She might listen to you.”

“You’re the cat.”

“You’re the Aunt.” He coughed, somehow. “Err. -in-training.”

“Yeah.” She counted that as worry-about-later and looked down at the distressed momma cat now squirming in her lap. “Okay. Radar, put the kitten down on the bed. Kitten, stay on the bed. Talk to your momma. Momma cat, your baby is fine. Weird, but fine.”

She set the cat down carefully, and stroked her behind the ears, thinking soothing thoughts. “Weird but fine. I’m afraid if you’re going to be a mother in this family, you’re going to have to learn to get used to that. Does she have other daughters, at least, Radar?”

“She has other kittens.” Radar set the kitten down carefully, and backed off a few paces. The mother cat went from cautious purring to growling until he backed off more, almost to the edge of the bed. “My daughter is not a Auntie, girl. She is…” He made a very cat noise, a very uncertain noise. “Impossible. But not an Auntie.”

She looked between the momma cat, the kitten, and her magic cat, all three pictures of feline distress, and wondered what she was supposed to do with this.

::You have to wonder,:: the necklace mused, ::why the idea of her being an Aunt bothered him so much.::

Next – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/529730.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/390455.html. You can comment here or there.