Tag Archive | giraffecall: result

Teasers for the Friendly Neighborhood Anonymous Prompt/Donor

Jan22

So Anonymous knows I’m working on their commissions from the December call. 😉

Porter stared at the strange girl who had so tidily taken control of their lives – Arundel’s more than his, certainly, but still. Then it hit him. “Right. Come on, Arun.” He dropped to his knees and got a shoulder under his friend’s arm. “Stand up, that’s it.”

“Ow,” Arundel complained weakly.

“Yeah, I know. Those look like they’re gonna hurt worse than a tail and my ears did. But you gotta stand up.”

“Stand up,” Sylvia echoed, and with a muffled whimper, Arundel made it to his feet. “That’s better.” She slid herself under his other arm.

Flying, Arundel was learning, was hard work, and exhausting. Even though Mr. Hawk told him that it wasn’t all in the muscles – “If you were doing this all with physical strength, you’d never get off the ground. Your flight is as much a part of your magic as, well, whatever you innate power is going to be,” – there was certainly a lot of something going on with his body, moving these new, strange, massive wings, keeping himself going.

And, of course, there was the falling. He wasn’t, he discovered, frightened of falling, but it hurt, and he liked to avoid the pain…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/240572.html. You can comment here or there.

Tea with /HER/, a continuation for the Giraffe Call, Tir na Cali (@DaHob)

Jan21

For @daHob’s prompt, in continuation of yesterday’s installement: Tea with HER (beginning) (LJ)

Tir na Cali has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

In today’s installment, our plucky protagonist and her slave get names!

“I should hope he does. I don’t act with the intent of being forgotten.”

I chewed on my lip, and then, immediately, stopped myself. That was a girl’s habit, a childish trait. He’d helped me break myself of it – why was it coming up now? I could see in her eyes that she’d noticed, however, and judged me for it.

“You are, I’d agree, quite unforgettable.” The audacious words were out of my mouth; again, my voice was working without having asked my common sense what I should do. That wasn’t her power, was it? I struggled to recall, and couldn’t. If so, what a masterful use!

But she was smiling. “You have some spark in you, don’t you? I like that.” She gestured, cutting off my objection: she’d snuffed the spark out of him long before she’d discarded him. “Slaves are slaves. A woman who will be ruling part of my territory, that’s a different matter. Do you think we can get along, Treanna?”

“I believe we can work together, your Ladyship.” There, now my brain and my vocal chords were working together. “I believe I can serve very well under you.” Wait, what? Was I flirting with my liege lady? I hated her! I didn’t want to flirt with her!

But her smile was growing. “I believe you would. However, as you’ve noted, when someone serves under me, there is rather less of them to enjoy when I am done. That’s why I sold him, you know.”

“I’m sorry?” I blinked, trying to change gears. What was she doing to me, this Ice Queen? “You sold Michael because…”

“There is a length of time one can serve under me. I kept him longer than I’d intended; he serves so beautifully, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, and he is, himself, so flawless.”

Except the brand. But for her, that, too, could have been part of his perfection. “He is a beautiful man, and a wonderful servant,” I agreed, perhaps more warmly than I should have – but I was in love with him, so painfully so. “But he will not love me.”

“Not will not,” she sighed. “Cannot. I had hoped that, with enough time away, he might recover, but I’m not sure he will. Will he let you remove the brand?”

It should have been illegal, but he might have consented. Probably had consented. And would not consent to me having it smoothed from his skin. “No, your Ladyship.”

She sighed again, deeper. “Well, then, sadly, there is our answer. He doesn’t fail to love you, Treanna, because you are not a beautiful young lady – although you are very young – but because he cannot stop loving me.”

“Can’t you stop it?” I almost wailed. Later, I’d remember this with mortification and humiliation, but being around the Ice Queen opened all of your stops, eliminated all of your self-control. “Can’t you make him love me?”

She shook her head slowly, looking almost sympathetic. I hadn’t thought she had an emotion like sympathy in her. “No. No, I cannot. But I can tell you this. In a year, you will look at him, and you will know that, as much as you love him, you can’t keep him anymore. You can’t look at that face, that face that knows all of your youthful silliness, any longer.” She held up a hand. “I know this, Treanna, because, believe it or not, I was nineteen once, myself. And when this happens… come to me again, and we will talk.” She sipped her tea, her eyes smirking at me. “I’ll enjoy it.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/239537.html. You can comment here or there.

Kirkevaren

Jan21

For flofx‘s prompt, with information from this site.

I do not know how to protect my church from this.

I have been protecting this land for centuries, since they buried me at the front gate of the church-yard. I have warned them of trouble, frightened off vandals, and, on more than one occasion, reminded the good people of the town that there were things beyond the mundane.

I was a lamb, once. Once long before this existence. I can remember, vaguely, the warmth of my mother, the green of the grass, the sweetness of milk. And then there was the dirt, and then this life, this non-life existence, protecting this land.

I was the first buried here, or at least, the first buried in the hallowed ground here. Others who came before me, animals and human, were chased off, pushed off, by the blessing of the land, only their physical remains staying to sweeten the ground and grow the daisies. But others came, human and animal, some lingering, some moving on quickly.

They are all gone, too, every one of them. Nothing but a chipmunk has been buried in my ground in more years than I have ways to count. The people don’t come as often, either, nor as many, to pay homage to the dead, to remember those that have gone. It is harder and harder to make them know me, to chase off thieves and vandals.

And now… now this problem is bigger than I am. Now, this land which has only me and the old priest to protect it is being encroached upon. The city has gotten bigger and bigger, growing from a small town to a behemoth. It has pushed at the edges before, toppling the old stone wall, but always before we could hold it back, him and I. Always before there were others to help.

Now they would dig up the church-yard, they have already begun to dig, to move the remains to cold crypts, to make room for their new building. Now they would take the land from me, and me from the land, and what will i do? Guard a landfill? I am too much of this place to leave it. I am too proud to let them ruin my churchyard.

They say, those who buried me, that one must be buried alive to serve this way. And they have dug such a deep hole, there by the first of the graves. If they could see me, if they could be frightened enough by me…

…then the priest and I would have another to protect the land with us.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/238941.html. You can comment here or there.

Tea with /Her/, a (teaser of a) story of Tir na Cali for the Giraffe Call (@dahob)

Jan20

For @DaHob’s prompt, based on a Cali idea.

Tir na Cali has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

When the Countess called me in for tea, I didn’t know what to think.

I knew why, of course. My mother was ailing, young as she was, and I was her heir. I would be the Countess’s loyal Baroness soon enough, and I was (so I had been told a thousand times), young for the position. She needed to get the measure of me.

The problem was, I had the measure of her already. I had the feel of her hand and the chains she left on a mind – not in person, she wasn’t the sort of liege to do that to her vassals – but in proxy, in the slave who was mine, who had once been hers. I had it in the brand on his hip that I couldn’t avoid, every time I touched him, and the marks in his mind, the way that, even after she’d set him aside, he still loved her.

I went, of course. You do not turn down an invitation from a Countess unless you’re the Queen herself. I put on the proper clothes and the proper smile, mouthed the proper words, and spoke business of her for a while.

But it made me twitch, when I heard phrases from her lips that I’d first heard from his, or, worse, when I found myself echoing one of her phrases, because I’d picked it up from him. He’d been with me for five years, my first sex slave, my first Companion, my first “grown-up” slave, fresh from the market where she’d sold him, the Ice Queen, my Countess. He’s seen every woe and misery, every triumph, held me while I cried and celebrated with me when I succeeded. He knew all my secrets, and all my buttons. And he was still in love with her.

“He remembers you, you know.”

I didn’t realize at first that I’d said it. It was in the middle of a conversation on something banal, trade rights, I think. Important, but not what was on my mind. Nor hers, I think, because she didn’t ask “who,” merely raised an eyebrow, one perfect, impossible eyebrow.

“I should hope he does. I don’t act with the intent of being forgotten.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/238721.html. You can comment here or there.

Road Map to…, a story of Steam!Reiassan for the Giraffe Call

Jan20

For kelkyag‘s prompt

Reiassan has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ; this is a story of Steam!Reiassan, far in the future of the Rin & Girey story

The city had been mapped before.

Everything on the continent had been mapped in one reign or another, the oceans around it charted, the flows of rivers, of aether, called sira now, even the ice movement diagrammed. But as the science grew, so did the methods of charting, mapping, and diagramming, and now, under the Emperor, the entire city of Lannamer was being mapped again.

They picked a corner to start from, drove a deep bronze pole into the ground, surrounded that with a stone compass rose, and settled the whole thing against flood, earthquake, and storm with judicious use of aetheric shifting and quite a bit of praying.

From there, engineers who would otherwise be idle, now that they were in a time of peace, were turned to surveying, measuring with a stick marked off in precise hoof-widths (the hoof in question having been cast in bronze off the original goat some centuries past).

Katyebah, who had joined the Emperor’s engineer team to design weapons of war, was a little disgruntled to find herself measuring buildings and surveying sun- and moon-lines down the streets. But the Army had paid for her education, so the next seven years of her life, whatever her feelings on the matter, belonged to the Emperor, so measure and survey she did. And because her team-mate was a pleasant sort and a grandson of His Majesty, she tried to do so with a smile.

“These old buildings,” Oton told her, “with the sixty degree angles? They were paying homage to the Three. But it certainly makes mapping the streets tricky, with nothing in the old neighborhoods at a right angle…”

“…And everything in the newer neighborhoods all square,” she agreed. She was, at the moment, frowning over a place where one of the oldest neighborhoods met up with a shiny-new set of construction, built on fill over what had been swamp and flood plain. “Pass me the protractor?”

“You think they’re difficult to draw, you should try getting a laden cart around these corners when you’re coming down a hill.” The voice surprised both of them; Oton dropped the brass protractor with a clatter. “Or, worse yet, coming down a hill in winter during the busy time of day when someone’s planted a stand in the middle of the road. If the Emperor wants the city easier to navigate, my lord and lady, he might think of widening the intersections.”

Katyebah had, during this speech, turned to look at their visitor, who appeared to be, from his dress, a carter of some skill and success, with the most astonishing blue eyes she had ever see (to be fair, they were the first blue eyes she had ever seen, as well). She worked her mouth, trying to find the words to tell him that this was just mapping, not decision-making, that she didn’t know if the Emperor even knew he had a traffic problem, that she sympathized with his troubles… But all she could make out, from a throat suddenly dry, was “I’m not a Lady.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/237859.html. You can comment here or there.

Down in Human Town, a story for the Giraffe Call (@lilfluff)

Jan19

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s Prompt, with thanks to @inventrix and fourteen minutes for the names.

The humans hadn’t been the first to Landfall-Etrian, but they hadn’t been latecomers, either.

The lush, Earth-like planet had been discovered in a prime location in a solar system not all that far, as galactic scales went, from Earth; the Fordante had discovered it (at the same time as the Ngedik, and totally ignoring the Exxonoth who were native to the planet).

(Actually, humans could be grateful to the Fordante and Ngedik, because without them “inviting” other races to “their” planet, the potentially-sentient status of the Exxonoth would have precluded their settlement. But that’s another story).

The various races had their own settlements, their own towns, their own desires from this beautiful, resource-rich planet, but in the two main port cities, they all came together, melting into a messy, loud, fragrant salad of multi-culturalism, governed by the Fordante and primarily financed by the Ngedik. And in these port cities, there grew up a human-town, ripe with the flavors of home and all the variations Landfall-Etrian could provide.

“What is this?” The translation program wasn’t perfect yet, but Alukri could get the gist of the Ngediko’s question.

“It’s called sushi.” She stretched the word out, enunciating the sounds the Ngediko’s mouth-parts could handle and not leaning too hard on the susurrations. Most of the Ngedik called it loo-lee, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that. “It’s fish – lina-in-the-sea from the Rion Ocean here in the port – wrapped in rice and seaweed. Try it; it’s a human delicacy.”

“You humans eat the strangest things,” the Ngediko muttered, but it wrapped its mouthparts around the spicy tuna roll, clicking in appreciation. “Wooo! This is almost as attacks-the-mouth as the [5] yll-yoll-loll! You should try some of that, human.”

“After you try our bomber roll. We imported the wasabi roe from Earth. Here, just one…” Alukri smiled wickedly, knowing that the Ngediko would not translated the gesture properly. Tourists were the same wherever you went.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/237531.html. You can comment here or there.

…on my parade, a story for the Giraffe Call

Jan19

For [personal profile] sarah_tv‘s prompt.

No matter how much they tormented him, Eilon insisted to the last that it had not been intentional. With no proof, no Law against it, and a seeming inability to force the truth out of him, the Jiminies had to let him go – but they held a grudge against the narrow-hipped dryad boy as long as their memory held out.

Luckily for Eilon, the length of a Jiminiy’s memory was just barely longer than the next shiny thing, and that meant he only had to lay low (harder than you’d think for a dryad in the city; he spent most the time hiding in penthouse gardens) for a couple months. It did mean he missed Christmas, but that’s what he got, I suppose, for messing with the Macy’s Day Parade.

He shouldn’t have been awake at all, really. Dryad, as I pointed out to him in the time, generally meant “dormant in the winter like a good tree.” And, indeed, he got in more trouble in winter than any three boys or three hundred trees ought to.

But he claimed that, never mind the name that called him an oak tree, he was more of a conifer (hence hiding in someone’s shrubbery for the winter, though I admit I thought that was a euphemism at first), and thus could get away with staying up and out all winter.

And raining on parades. No matter how many times he denied it, no matter how quickly the Jiminies forgot the whole thing, I knew, deep in my heart, that it had to have been Eilon responsible for that spot rainstorm in the midst of the parade. For one, I was busy laying down a flood of rainbows on a political float. For another, no-one else in the city had his skill with rainstorms.

And for a third, no-one but Eilon had the hatred for the Jiminies that he did. And no-one else would else would have the pinecones to do it again the next year, with the scars on his bark still fading.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/237223.html. You can comment here or there.

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.

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.