Tag Archive | giraffecall: result

Eralon Explains

Jan22

To [personal profile] flofx‘s Commissioned Continuation of The Second Restriction

It had taken a week for the temple to settle down.

In that time, the Lesser High Priest of the Evening had been induced to return the Oracle and the Duty Scribe to their rightful places in the temple, and every priest in the nation, or so it seemed, had gone over their interpretation of the Oracle’s words.

In that time, no Oracle had taken the holy seat, and none had attempted any of the other six methods of contacting the gods. The priests were, although they would never admit it, playing it safe.

Finally, however, tradition and the weight of a holy bureaucracy insisted that they put the girl back on the chair, and call forth Eralon’s voice again.

She rolled her eyes back in her head, and her voice became thick and deep. “You think to question me?”

“Err, blessed light upon the morning, blessed waters we shall not sully, of course we do not question you.” The Higher High Priest of Evening was not going to be outdone by a mere Lesser High Priest; he stepped to the front of the dais to speak, perhaps not entirely mindful enough of the thin line of red tiles, or having forgotten their purpose. “We simply seek clarification as to the Oracle’s words.”

“Are not the Oracle’s words mine? Are her throat and her lips not the vessels you have chosen through which to hear me?”

“Well, yes, oh highest light on the sky…” The Higher High Priest stepped forward again, heedless of others around him stepping back. “But it’s just… it is, to us, strange, to hear you contradict that which you have said before. And are not the restrictions holy and to be kept, regardless of all else?”

“The restrictions and the requirements I gave you are holy and of the highest importance.”

“But, oh brightly shining…” The Higher High Priest got no further. The Lesser High Priest found it promising that he did not burst into flames, but simply sigh and fall to the ground. Three burly acolytes pulled him away from the dais, and, with considerably more caution, the Lesser High Priest of the Evening stepped forward, mindful to keep his toes behind the red line of tile.

“Oh brightly shining beacon in the sky, we thank you for correcting our ignorance. Know that the second restriction shall be stricken from the books, and that none shall be required to build bridges where the path should be passable by foot.”

“Good.” The voice of the god in the oracle sounded sullen. “It’s a silly restriction. There are far better things to spend your money on, your time, and your energy.”

“We thank you, oh sun of the morning. Ah… what about the third requirement?”

The Oracle’s head swiveled until the god’s glance was firmly upon the Lesser High Priest. “That one stays. Know you not why you are required to do so?”

“Ah…” He didn’t dare look down, but he did shuffle backwards as subtly as he could. “No, exalted lord.”

“Well then.” The Oracle crossed her legs and leaned forward. “Get this vessel some water, and get your scribe some more ink. Today, Eralon will educate you.”

The Lesser High Priest of Evening scrambled to do as his god had bade him. He had a feeling this was going to be an interesting evening.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/458750.html. You can comment here or there.

Six Sins and One, a story of Fairy Town for the Giraffe Call

Jan22

For [personal profile] kelkyag‘s Prompt.

This comes after Moving In

I looked up 7 deadly sins on Wikipedia, and this popped out at me. Said I, “that looks like a fanfic.”

So:

Six things you can get away with in Fairy Town, and the One that you Can’t.

Pride

The Lion King stared around the neighborhood his women had bought.

His Women. His Neighborhood. And it was good.

He waved at the barkeep, who waved back. Everyone knew this was his place, and this his place was the best place.

The Lion King smiled, and the world smiled back.

Deceit

He told stories of his upbringing, of their last city, of their real names.

They all did. It was part of their shtick, part of what made them strange and untouchable. They were from the Sahara. They were from Jersey. The zoo. The moon.

And the barkeep just laughed.

Innocent Blood

The Lion King hadn’t meant to kill the kid.

The teenager had challenged him, though, and there was only so much reason left by the time someone was done rubbing against his women and mocking him. And then there was a dead punk, and a deep hole, and nobody spoke.

Wicked Plots

They’d bought three houses before anyone really noticed, five before anyone started to complain, and seven before the barkeep’s wife frowned at them.

“What are you up to?” She made it sound like a gentle scold.

The Lion King just smiled. “We’re plotting world domination. Don’t tell anyone?”

Nobody told.

Mischievous Feet

He liked telling stories like that. It went along with many of his other tricks. Stealing someone’s food and giving it to someone else. Stealing someone’s baby (he only did that once), stealing someone’s luck.

Mostly because he was a Lion, the town tolerated his pranks – and his lies.

Deceitful Witness

Not just little lies, not just the ones about where they were from. He lied on the stand when called to trial. He lied about who stole things (including the baby.) They all did, because he did. It was fun, to loll about making up stories. Nobody seemed to mind.

Sowing Discord

…until the lies and the theft started pitting a couple neighborhood regulars against each other.

The Lion King thought it was funny. Just another prank, right? Get the ogre and the goblins yelling. Get the norms yelling.

Tom Morgan and his wife headed the pack, but the whole town was behind them.

“Stop. Or Get Out.” It might take a troll to take down a lion, but four hundred townspeople were bigger than one troll.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/458015.html. You can comment here or there.

Moving in, A story of Fairy Town for the giraffe Call

Jan21

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.

They came to town in the late autumn, riding in on Harleys, a rumble so loud that it could be heard through the whole city.

They took up residence in Tom Morgan’s, a bar on the west side of town that catered to the rough, the poor, the wild. They simply strode in, looked around, and took over the best corner of the place.

Nobody stopped them. Nothing short of a full-grown troll had a chance, and the city, while it had plenty of the fae blood, did not lend itself to trolls and other Large Creatures.

Tom Morgan himself took one look at them and sent his wife out to deal with them. In his defense, this was not so much out of cowardice as out of prudence: the pride had far more women than it had men, and the men that were not the clear leaders were jittery and nervous around other men.

The last thing Tom wanted was a jittery juvenile lion-soul ripping up his bar, so he sent out his wife to deal with the pride.

Not being a full-grown troll, or a troll of any sort, Rudy Morgan didn’t move the pride. She served them heavy beer and light snacks, and flirted harmlessly with only the oldest of their men and the most pregnant of their woman. And she joked. Rudy Morgan, it had been said, could joke through a hurricane. Joking through a pride of lions was all in a day’s work, for her.

And it would have been fine. It would have been strange, uncomfortable and weird, but they would have adjusted until, like bikers everywhere, the lions moved on. They would have cleaned up the glass, gritted their teeth and smiled, until the lions moved on.

Until they started buying property.

Next: Moving In

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/457580.html. You can comment here or there.

The Best Sin

Jan21

For @Dahob’s prompt.

This comes after Sister’s Keeper

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

Joff came home to find his kitchen full of men.

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

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

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

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

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

“In here, Joffy.”

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

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

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

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

Laziness as an art form

Jan18

For @cluudle’s prompt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…Why?”

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

“Please?” Zuleyma tried.

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

Next:
Laziness X4.

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

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

Jan18

For [personal profile] imaginaryfiend‘s prompt.

Science! has a landing page here

“U…”

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

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

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

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

“We’ve got to call the boss, first.”

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

“Well… all right. Look at this.”

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

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

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

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

“A… sin…”

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

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

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

The Second Restriction

Jan17

For Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt.

Thanks to @Skysailor99 for the country & god names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eralon Explains

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

Falling

Jan17

For [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt

I remember falling.

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

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

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

I’ve never wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what have they told you about the fires?

I remember falling.

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

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

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

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

Jan17

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt.

Tir na Cali has a landing page here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You think you’ve got problems?”

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

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

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

Teaching for the Future, a story for the Giraffe Call

Jan17

To EllenMillion‘s prompt.

The apocalypse was the last thing I was expecting when I went back to school.

Let’s be honest, I really wasn’t expecting much of anything except an escape from reality.

I liked being a student. I was good at it, I enjoyed it, and, unlike the work world, it enjoyed me back. So, when I got sick of grunt jobs, miserably low-paying crap, and all the bullshit that went along with the Real World, I went back to college. No better way to get out of planning for the future, right?

You’d think that being a Perpetual Student would have ill-prepared me for the apocalypse, but, as it turned out, you’d be wrong. I like learning, too, you see. And classes only fill so much of your time. And college campuses are full of people who like to teach you things.

All of which combined to turn me into sort of a post-apocalyptic Jane of All Trades.

Step One: Fail at the Real World. Check.

Step Two: Drop back into college with a vengeance. Check.

Step Three: End of the world. Check.

The Botany department has a cabin out past the edge of the town where they do field studies. By the time the armies overran the town, I was already out there, with two Botany students and a pre-med guy who tagged along.

We did some shopping first, of course, and then some more shopping, afterwards. It’s interesting the things people will leave behind when they’re panic-shopping. It’s interesting how much use you can get out of those things.

Now the four of us are running a school. It amuses me, a little, that I’ve gone from real-world dropout to teacher, but those that remain need a lot of teaching. And they have a lot to teach, too, or they wouldn’t have made it through the first three passes.

Everyone takes turns, teacher and student. And everyone – everyone – takes notes.

We’re planning for the future, here, after all.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/454050.html. You can comment here or there.