Tag Archive | giraffecall: result
Mrs. Gent’s Lemonade
For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of
🍋
“Lemonade sounds nice, thanks,” Jordan said, and stepped out of my way, finally letting me see the shop. Shop? This place was a space-time warp. This place was unbelievable. This place was…
Okay. Imagine the estate sale of the most obsessive hoarder you can picture. Then imagine this being curated by the most OCD guy you know. There was everything on those shelves, shelves filling up all but the center of the store, and every single thing was labeled. Everything.
There were labels in English, labels in foreign languages, labels in foreign ALPHABETS, labels in bar-code and a few in what I think was binary. There were labels over totally ordinary things – crock pot, circa 1970. Boom Boox, Magnivox, 1980. There were labels over things that belonged in a museum, and over things I’d never heard of or seen before. And, in the center of this archive of… junk. Stuff, we’ll say, because most of it looked useful. In the center of this stuff, there was a table with a ruffled tablecloth, four chairs, and an icy pitcher of lemonade.
“Lemonade sounds great,” I agreed, with feeling. It looked like the best stuff in the world right about then, even with the strange dress-up dance.
“Then come in, sit down, and enjoy some while you wait,” she encouraged us. “I’m Mrs. Gent, by the way, pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Jordan, and this is J.J.,” Jordan took charge again. “Pleased to meet you as well, Mrs. Gent.” I trailed along behind them, reading the labels, looking at the things on the shelf, trying not to be rude but wow, this place was a treasure trove.
Canned SPAM, 1937-1997, about a cubic foot of the stuff, in at least seven languages that I could see, and, yes, one of them looked like the original can (don’t ask me how I know, okay? I have some weird hobbies).
Radios, small was right next to Radios, tiny but three shelves above Radios, large (no mediums). The small ones looked mostly like antiques, although I’m not sure a 1991 Sony Walkman should count. (I had one of those, damnit. Nothing I owned as a kid should count as an antique yet!) On the other hand, the “tiny” category, I might have needed a magnifying glass to really see properly.
“Here, you sit here, and you, dear, sit here.” That set us with our backs to the door, Jordan facing – I checked – Teapots, unusual, which included one shaped like a rooster and another one I would have pegged as a bong, and me facing документы, which appeared to be stacks and stacks of ledger books. Mrs. Gent, in turn, sat facing the front door and poured us lemonade as if it was a high Japanese tea.
“This seems like a very interesting store,” I tried, yes, after saying thank you, I’m not a total jerk.
“Oh, Mr. Ting handles all of the business,” she pooh-poohed. “I just watch the store while he’s out. And make the lemonade.”
That was a hint even I could pick up. “It’s very good lemonade, thanks. It’s just what we needed.”
🍋
- A last post
- Yesterday in history 😉
- Training
- Resources requested
- Blog post : hospitals
- On the Mend
- Eralon’s… Gender
- Eralon Questions
- Eralon Commands
- Small Fry & Broken Wings 2
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/260906.html. You can comment here or there.
Lines of the City, a story of Stranded World for the Giraffe Call
Stranded World has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
Autumn didn’t like the city.
She thought, all in all, it was a fair dislike. The city was noisy, crowded, smelly, loud, and foreign; the traffic impatient, the people worse.
She had grown up near people like those she chose to live with now – people who were sideways-of-normal enough that they didn’t judge, or, at least, when they did, there was someone else to call them on it. Walking into the city was walking back into the normal world, as her mother would say, “Mundania.” It was remembering how to put on a face that felt stiff and uncomfortable, like a suit, like a mask.
There were times, however, when the cities were unavoidable. Paperwork. Downtown craft festivals. Her brother calling. A mysterious message from someone who might be Tattercoats and might not be (The handwriting had been all off, but the wording had been perfect). And so into the city she went.
Craft fair meant she could shirk conventional appearance rules; paperwork meant she could not. Winter meant she had to look nice, but a little odd, to tweak him. Tattercoats meant she had to look pretty. She had spent more time getting dressed today than she normally took in a week, and ended up looking, to the naked eye, quite a bit like Autumn-dressed-down, or perhaps a Victorian Gypsy.
The paperwork people did not notice, which, after all, was the whole idea. She filed her forms, paid her fees, and left poorer and more knotted into the system, but less likely to become far more poor and far tighter knotted. Her father had taught her that: “‘Render unto Caesar,’ honey, means ‘make sure the guards have no reason to look at you.'”
Her father, she pondered, had been more than a bit of a rebel.
Winter had noticed, if only for the many-times-touched lines of her clothing, but had simply said, “you look very nice today, Autumn.” Winter was only a rebel in having gone as smooth and orderly as was humanly possible.
And then she was in the park, waiting for someone who might or might not be Tattercoats, and a man walking by looked at her, looked at her and didn’t say anything, but tipped his hat at her as if it was 1890, and Autumn felt something twist. She reached for the connection to Tattercoats, found it, as always, elusive and uncooperative, and found instead the heartstring of the city.
She was sitting on the bench, reading songs in the heart of the metropolis, when her alarm rang an hour later to remind her of the festival. She left humming, new songs in her heart and a new design for a picture already presenting itself. She might prefer the wild roads, but the city, it seemed, would have its own song for her, too.
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Katydid’s Camp, a story of The Fairy Town for the Giraffe CAll
It had started with Katydid’s Kitchen. That was ambitious enough, strange enough. They’d already started calling her the Loaves-and-Fishes girl, and, Jorge had to admit, it certainly looked miraculous. Since Katydid wasn’t telling her methods, too, people just assumed magic.
In this City, Jorge pondered, everyone was magic-mad.
The crazy thing was, however she was doing it, the girl was pulling out miracles. She was feeding people who’d been starving, weaving blankets, mending tents; this little suburban kid was taking care of an entire Hooverville, and doing so with a level of tact that the social workers just couldn’t hack.
But that wasn’t enough for the girl. She’d done something, he didn’t know what, but she’d shown up one day with a stack of paperwork, and, bam, next thing he knew, she’d moved Katydid’s Kitchen two blocks north. To the factory district. To the old shoe factory, a monument to the days when industry used to be here.
And then, then, like somehow she made sense, she’d rounded up about ten of the most stable of the Hoover-villians, and put them to work. “Go get this,” she’d tell one, “go ask for that,” she’d tell another one. Pallets. Remnant fabric. Dumpstered wood, and dumpstered food. The stuff the Salvation Army threw out. Stuff off the curbs.
“Katlyn-didn’t,” Jorge asked her, when he could get a moment of her time without being sent running like an errand boy, “what in hell are you playing at?”
She looked at him, which was a plus. She hadn’t done that in a few weeks. But the look was odd, like he hadn’t gotten the memo everyone else had.
“I’m building us a house, Jorge,” she told him. “The deep cold is coming. People die out there.”
He shook his head, not understanding, but in awe anyway. When she got like this, he was learning, there was only one thing to say.
“How can I help?”
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Bringing Home History, a continuation of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call (@inventrix)
After
Scrounging for History (LJ)
Digging through History (LJ)
Delving in History (LJ)
Part 3 of ~7.5
Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
At least they knew what to do. Karida nodded to Dor, who began plundering the area quickly.
“My home,” the girl hissed. “Go ‘way.”
“No, it’s not,” Karida answered gently. “There’s not even a blanket. You may have been scrounging here, same as us, but you don’t live here.”
“My home,” she repeated stubbornly. Karida reached out again, but she could find nothing like a nest. Even the most feral of humans made nests.
“No,” she shook her head, and carefully took the girl’s wrists. They were thin and bony, with a bit of firm muscle under the skin. “Do you have a tribe? A village, a town, a family, a people?” She stopped, because with every word, the girl flinched.
“No,” she whimpered. “Did…”
“Aah.” A sole survivor, perhaps, a runaway? Karida lead her gently back into the basement, and from there up the stairs. “Where were your people?”
The girl’s words seemed to be coming more smoothly as she kept at it. “To south,” she gestured.
“In the towers?” Those were giant buildings. They could house a whole colony in one of those, and never need to split up again.
“No, no. No!” She almost shouted the last, pulling at Karida’s grip on her wrists. “No.” Her shoulders slumped. “Further.”
“Not the towers. Okay.” Those would need investigating, probably by the whole company. “Why… oh.”
The girl folded in on herself at they reached the sunlight, but nothing could hide the finely-pointed ears sticking out of her hair, or the faintly golden shimmer of her skin. “They threw you out?” she guessed.
“Guh,” the girl sobbed, pulling her knees to her chin. How long has she been on her own? Well, she wasn’t any longer. Dor had followed them out of the hole; he handed her a length of rope now, and a small bit of bread, and their canteen.
Karida knelt down. “It’s all right. What’s your name?”
“Fiery,” she managed, still flinching down as small as she could get.
“Okay, Fiery. You know this area pretty well?”
“Little.” She was talking into her knees, but it wasn’t the first time Karida had interpreted, and, behind them, Amalie was humming quietly, helping.
“Then here.” She pressed canteen and bread into the girl’s hands. “Eat. Drink. We will feed you and give you water. We will protect you.” And clean her up. “And you will guide us around this place.”
Fiery nodded, and nibbled at the food cautiously, washing it down with long gulps of water. “I can,” she agreed, her mouth full. “Protect?” Her pointed ears perked up at that.
“Protect you,” Dor agreed. He sat down to the other side of the girl, one hand on her shoulders. “Like you were our own.”
“And teach you,” Amalie offered, working it into her tune. “Like a little sister.”
“Like a sister,” Karida agreed. It would remain to see how many words the girl could learn, but that one, it was clear she knew.
“Sister.” She ducked her head to hide a smile. “Yes.”
Continued in Singing down History (LJ)
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Tea with /HER/, a completion
After Tea with HER (beginning) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/381305.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/382107.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation 2) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/385348.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation 3) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/387899.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation 4) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/391025.html”>)
Tea with HER (continuation 5) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/393263.html”>LJ)
It took the Ice Queen a month to have time to see me; a time chosen, I was sure, to give me time to relax, to calm down, to grieve, and to get used to James’ presence. When I finally made it into her parlor for tea, I brought him with me. Leashed. Cuffed. Exactly as she’d left him on my doorstep, including the terrified look.
I’m not a monster. The terrified look was faked; it turned out my new slave could act.
But that was something I knew, and he knew, and the Countess did not, which pleased both of us, almost as much as the look on her face – a split second of un-hidden surprise – pleased us.
“Does your gift not please you, Baroness Treanna?” she asked, cool, chill, and possibly a little irritated.
“He’s raw, new, untrained.” He fell to his knees next to me, his hair falling in his face. “He hardly knows how he’s supposed to act. He can barely make a phone call without supervision.”
“These things are true, yes. I thought perhaps…” She frowned, and I smiled.
“It will be more interesting to work with you, your Ladyship, if you are not pre-anticipating my every move and thought.”
She blinked. “That is not something anyone has ever said to me before.”
“I thought it might not be. And – with Michael in my hands, or me in his, it was easy to know what I would do, no? But this one…” I nearly purred. I was pleased with myself. “This one, you have not trained to train me. I’m very pleased with my gift, Countess. Thank you.”
For the first time, she smiled a true smile, a genuine expression. “My pleasure, Treanna. I think you are right. Working with you will be interesting.”
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From the moment they breathed our air, a story of Bug Invasion for the Giraffe Call
For ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt.
Title adapted from the last bit of War of the Worlds.
Bug Invasion stories before this were:
Staying in the City (LJ)
Spooks vs. Bugs (DW)
The bugs weren’t winning.
This was confusing them to no end.
They were losing because of things they couldn’t understand – ghosts and faeries, monsters and spooks. They had no defense against things that did not exist on the material plane.
They were losing because of things they could understand – rebellion, tenacity, and ingenuity. They had lost to those before, Paula realized, but not so badly, not so quickly. They had never before been stopped like a wall before finishing their first sweep of a world.
They were losing because of things in the air – environmental pollutants, among others, smog and smoke and such – and in the water, most amusingly hormones and flushed pills, and this, they had no defense against. She asked her symbiote, ::has no other place you’ve invaded had such problems?:: but the symbiote was busy being upset by the suffering of the non-bonded and had no answer for her.
Those that bonded seemed to have a better time of it, which meant that the bugs left in their slowly-decreasing area were hurriedly kidnapping those they thought could take it and bonding, being less and less picky just to get in a body, just to survive.
…and then, and Paula had to giggle, even though it wasn’t funny, in their rush to get hosts, they didn’t ask important questions like “How do humans withstand this pollution?” or, more importantly, “are there humans that can’t handle it?”
It wasn’t funny, because the poor girl they got with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities just found her issues doubled by having a symbiote. It was, on the other hand, telling, because Paula got to watch what happened when a host rejected its bug. Which meant she knew it could happen.
Possibly more importantly, it meant the bugs knew it could happen.
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Backstage, a story for the Giraffe Call
Inspired by the_vulture‘s prompt
And there this Lo Pan guy is, flying around like some batshit giant pixie, cutting everyone to shreds, and here’s this redneck cowboy blasting around, this Egg guy fighting Lo Pan like they’re The Last True Mages (who I damn well know died two hundred years ago), pretty girls with green eyes being zombified, mooks and minions flying and bleeding and making a mess of this gorgeous temple, well, never mind that it was a temple to Lo Pan’s Lo Panniness.
And there was me. Green-eyed, sure. But nobody looks twice at the tiny little elf girl when there are these big old hooman girls around to marry and zombify and rescue and what have you. And nobody looks twice at what’s happening behind the curtain, do they, because they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to see the muss and fuss up on stage and ignore those of us back here.
And ignored and back-here and happily hidden, there we were, making sure this one ended the way it was supposed to. Like we do, pulling the strings, making the stories. Telling the stories to themselves, my grandma called it. Telling the road where it goes.
And of course the big lunk messed it up, but that’s all right. We had another story for him. And oh, boy, was that one a doozy!!
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In Mr. Ting’s
For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of Burning Summer Quest (LJ); Part 1 of ?
“Mr. Ting knows what you need.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Okay, no, I know what I was expecting – Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, or Egg Shen from Big Trouble in Little China, or Lu-Tze from Thief of Time. In short, I expected a sterotype.
I know better. But it was really, really hot, and my brain was frying like an egg.
So into Mr. Ting’s we went, feeling a little jittery, a lot sweaty, and a tiny bit hopeful. If he didn’t have what we needed (despite the sign), well, we were down to leaving the fridge open or buying ice in giant bags. Or dousing everyone in water every four minutes. I didn’t think the cats would like that.
The store windows had been covered over with paper, so walking in, we were going in blind, accompanied by the sound of loudly jangling windchimes hitting the back of the door. Jordan headed in first; I took up the rear, nervously-if-ridiculously checking to see if we were observed. We weren’t; nobody else was dumb enough to be out in weather like this.
So at first, all I could see of the store was Jordan’s paused, tense shoulderblades sticking to the thinnest T-shirt possible. I wondered if we were going to have to make a hasty escape, and grabbed the door handle in preparation. I wondered if someone was going to shoot at us. Like I said, my brain was fried and I was feeling rather silly.
Then I noticed that the store was comfortable. Not freezing, like a lot of stores, but a nice pleasant temperature, just cool enough that we weren’t dying. And Jordan still wasn’t moving. We were getting to the shoving stage.
“Come in, come in, kiddos, let me pour you some lemonade. Take a load off your feet.” That was, I presumed, not Mr. Ting. For one, the accent was local. For another, the voice was female, or, at the very least, in a traditionally female register.
“What…” Jordan finally managed, and stumbled forward one step. Not enough for me to do much except look at the floor, which was blue-and-white tiled and prettier than anything else in the neighborhood except, possibly, one of our roommates. But Taylor was a special case. “What…” again. Broken record time; I gave a little shove.
“It’s all right, kids, I know, it’s hotter than hell outside and you’re got to be dehydrated. Here, have a skirt, dear, and here’s a vest for your friend, and there you go.” She bustled around Jordan, and then me, playing dress-up like we were dolls, and I finally got a look at her.
She was maybe late-fifties or a very nicely preserved late-sixties, her hair dyed improbably red, her eyes almost black. She had a lean figure not in keeping with that mother-of-the-world voice, and a lipstick smile the same unbelievable color as her hair. She caught me looking, and winked.
“Mr. Ting is out for a moment, so you two just have a seat, have some lemonade, and wait,” she insisted.
Continued: Mrs. Gent’s Lemonade (LJ)
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Delving in History, a continuation of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call (@inventrix)
For The inventrix‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of Scrounging for History (LJ), and Digging through History (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/391242.html”>LJ) Part 2 of… probably 7.5
Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
The stairs seemed to go on forever. Karida hated places like this, going into the dark, not knowing quite what was there. She couldn’t imagine doing it “blind,” like a normal human, not knowing if the stair under you would crack or not, not knowing where the walls were. She couldn’t imagine doing it at all if she didn’t know if something lurked in the corners. Not knowing what was lurking was hard enough, nightmare enough.
She hit the bottom of the stairs, reaching for her senses to reassure her that Dor was right behind her, Amalie up at the top looking out, or at least there, if not actually watching. And the something was still there, hiding in the back corner. Waiting for them? Aware of their presence at all? She did not have the Words to know, and Amalie’s Workings were too unreliable (like everything about her, except her song). She kept walking, feeling her way, avoiding the detritus on the floor and sweeping what she could out of the way for Dor.
They were not silent. There was no point in silence, and much more point in being safe. They could trip and fall in stealth, and then both their quiet and their tactical position would be ruined. So instead, they moved forward, hoping it was a wild animal, hoping to spook it out instead of spooking it into attacking them.
Three more steps. Four. The something in the back corner hadn’t moved. “Light,” she murmured to Dor, and he lit the lamp with its small share of oil. A door hung half-off its hinges, a small room defined by broken walls, one hung with pegs. Anything that had hung on the pegs had long since been taken, except one tiny wrench hiding in a corner. Karida pocketed that, pocketed the three remaining pegs, and pushed aside the broken door.
It had been – she wasn’t sure. The ancients had rooms for things she, wagon-born and raised, could hardly imagine. Maybe a storage room? Half-broken crates lined the walls, a few of them, near the bottom, looking intact. They would deal with those later. Hiding, nearly in the crates, in the back corner….
The thing hissed and jumped out at them as Dor swung the light towards Karida’s gesture. Thing, no, not a thing, “flat, Dor, flat,” she called, and tried to take the small woman down with her staff. Two quick thumps to non-vital parts, a third and fourth from the flat of Dor’s wakizashi, and their attacker lay sprawled whimpering at their feet.
“Do you think she’s feral?” Dor murmured. If she was, there would be no reasoning with her, no bargaining. The kindness would be to leave her to her wildness.
“Lee-mee-lone,” the woman muttered. Girl, Karida realized, filthy but with some effort to tidy herself. No older than Amalie.
“No,” she answered slowly. “Or… at least not entirely.” It might have been better if she was.
Next: Bringing Home History (LJ)
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