Tag Archive | giraffecall

Engineered

Mar4

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt, combined with [personal profile] wyld_dandelyon‘s prompt.

“I think I’ve figured it out!” Jason looked up from his table excitedly, a “eureka” sort of expression taking over his whole body. “Cara, Alex, check this out!”

Cara, who was knee-deep in bioengineering a slow, undetectable poison that would take ten or fifteen years to kill the target, and Alex, who was trying to come up with the truly irresistible scent, looked up at Jason impatiently. It was Liam, the team’s handler, who came over to Jason’s workstation.

“What is it, Jay?”

“I’ve gotten them to have retractable thorns!” He held up the length of rose stem, showing how, when he ran his hand over it, the thorns slid into the stem. “See: pet it the right way, no prickers. Pet it the wrong way;” he put on a glove and repeated it. “Bleeding all over the place.” The inch-long prickers ripped into the leather of his glove and held onto it; he pulled his hand out and let the roses keep the glove.

“Why not just make them prickerless?” Liam shook his head. Jason had a brilliant mint – one time out of ten. It was just a matter of directing him.

“Anyone can make a rose without thorns. Mine, mine only prick people who don’t know their secret. See?” He pointed to the tall hedge of them, growing around an arbor in his controlled space, the flowers a melange of rainbow colors.

Liam stared. “Jay, those are the fanciest colors I have ever seen on a rose.”

“I know,” the scientist sighed. “That, and sometimes they bite people. I haven’t figured out how to deal with that yet.”

“Forget the biting,” Liam commanded. “Once they’re cut, they won’t be biting, and those colors – we can finance another base with that. Jason, you’re… oW! Your flowers stung me!” He swayed a bit. “Jason, what’s..”

“They don’t like talking about being cut, Liam. And, ah, they’re a little bit venomous, too, but I don’t think it’s fatal. You should be okay in an hour or two.” Jason helped his boss into a chair. “I’m going to go plant these on my island now.”

“Your…”

The mad scientist smiled crookedly. “Well, it’s going to be my island, at least.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/290986.html. You can comment here or there.

Paying the Rent

Mar3

For [personal profile] rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt for more of the Baram-and-his-house-elves story.

Baram and his family appear in:
Monster (LJ)
Memories (LJ)
One Sharp Mother (LJ)
The Life you Make (LJ)
Safe (LJ) and
Cost of Living (LJ)

Addergoole has a landing page here and on LJ

“We’re taking a road trip,” Jaelie told her nervous Kept. “Pack enough clothes for a three-day stay, and then shower and clean yourself up. Trim anything that needs trimming, and make sure you’re well-scrubbed.”

He blanched, and nodded. She grabbed his arm, and clarified, “Clean, that’s all, don’t scrub yourself raw, Wish. I just want you to smell nice.”

“Yes, Mistress.” He didn’t look any less nervous, either heading into the shower or when he returned, half an hour later, so clean he nearly sparkled. It made Jaelie smile in exasperation at him.

“I know you’re not a virgin,” she teased him.

He flushed in return. “Of course not. But there’s a difference between… ah… my life before and serving you, and there’s a much wider difference between that and being hired out.”

She patted his shoulder. “Your job isn’t to please them, it’s just to get them pregnant. We – well, I – get paid by the baby, not by the orgasm.”

That only made him flush deeper. “And what if I don’t? I haven’t had children in… well, that I know about, several centuries.”

“Then we’ll come up with something else. Or test-tube it. Magic can solve almost anything, don’tchaknow?”

He nodded, relaxing a little, and picked up his bag. “Yes, Mistress. This – this woman, she directed the school you all attended?”

“And coordinated our births and, in a matter of speaking, the births of all of our children. Yes. She seems thrilled to have your blood to add to the mix.”

“And this is the school that taught you how to give orders to your Kept?”

“Yes, it is,” she confirmed.

“It seems like an interesting place, to have produced three women as tough and as sharp as you and your, ah, sister-wives?”

She barked out a laugh. “Sister-wives, that’s a new one!

“I hope you don’t mind?”

“No, but you might not want to try that on the others.” She led him out to her car and tossed their bags in the trunk. “Addergoole is… yes, a very interesting place. A crucible of sorts.”

“And the children that this Regine wants me to father, they would be attending this school? And raised by… well, by their mothers, I would assume?”

“If one of the mothers doesn’t want the kid – that happens sometimes – then I might ask for custody. We could handle another kid around the place, and mine are old enough to not need constant attention anymore.”

He studied her in surprise as they got in the car. “You’d raise my child?”

“You’re mine, aren’t you? That means taking care of you where you come from too, doesn’t it?”

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking…” He shook his head. “So I’m to father children for this school. For her breeding program.”

“You sound unhappy about that.” She started the car anyway, and headed out onto the highway. The roads were still mostly clear; after Wish’s people’s first attack had been so clearly rebuffed, many of the monsters had chosen to go elsewhere.

“It’s an interesting thought, to be used as a stud horse, as an aeosthena. I suppose it hammers home how far down I’ve fallen.”

“Careful with that,” she warned him. “Your sense of superiority is going to get you in trouble.”

“Apologies, Mistress.” He shoulders slumped, and he slouched in his seat, looking disconsolate. Jaelie let him sulk for a while, while she drove, and thought about feeding more children into Regine’s grinder.

After a long while, she reached over and set a hand on Wish’s thigh. “We raise our kids good,” she told him, “tough. They won’t be in the position we were, Aly and Viatrix and I, when we went there.”

“And the children I father?” he asked quietly. “They Belong to their mother, of course. But I’ve never fathered a child before, without the mother Belonging to me.”

“Aaah.” She patted his thigh. It didn’t seem kind or useful to point out that that was what he got for trying to kill her family, so she didn’t. “I’m sure you’ll father some very tough children, Wish.”

“Thank you.” He smiled uncomfortably back at her, and then tensed unhappily as they reached the wards around Addergoole. “What the…”

She braced herself. She’d been through this before. “Sit, sit. Don’t move. Close your eyes, it helps.”

He keened deep in the back of his throat, struggling against the order as she drove them, white-knuckled, through the thick defensive wards. She’d never seen it hit anyone this hard, and wondered if it was his returned-gods-ness, his purebloodedness, or his age. “It’s okay,” she croaked. “Wish, it’s okay, I’ve got you. Almost, almost… there.” She relaxed, and felt him do so as well, as they passed the wards. “You can move now.”

“That…” he panted. “That was horrible.”

“And we’re expected. It’s pretty effective, I’ve been told, at keeping out intruders.”

“I can imagine!” He shook his head. “Well, at the very least the school is well-protected.”

“Yeah.” She fell quiet again as she drove the last half a mile. “Wish… can you do this without, without your partners knowing that it’s under duress?”

That got her a crooked, dry smile. “Are you telling me that nobody has ever ordered you to act like you’re happy?”

She winced. “Nobody’s ever whored me out,” she countered, getting a matching wince from him.

“All things considered, I’d rather this than being sold, and rather either than being dead.” He patted her thigh gently. “Mistress, this is not horrible. I’m worried, yes, but, ah, much as I hate to admit it, I’m mostly worried that I’ll let you down somehow.” He winced again, harder this time. “And there you see how far I’ve fallen.”

It didn’t seem fair to scold him for that, so she didn’t. She smiled, instead, and squeezed his hand. “You’re going to to do just fine, Wish. I know you are.” She looked over the Village, trying not to tense up at old memories. “I have faith in you.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/710878.html (Paying, Forward)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/290652.html. You can comment here or there.

Success, a continuation of Tir na Cali for the Feb. Giraffe Call.

Mar3

For moon_fox‘s prompt, after
Second Pressing (LJ)
Planting Future (LJ)

Tir Na Cali has a landing page here.

The end of this didn’t really seem to end for me, but I’m not sure what else to do with it, either

“Fruity, with just a hint of tar.”

Onyx enjoyed the blind taste testings at the smaller competitions the best. She could put on her best part-of-the-furniture expression and simply listen while people talked over her. If her Lord was in the room, of course, people watched their words, minded their descriptions, even around a minor lord like her master.

But when they were facing simply a row of slave vintners, the tasters felt no such need to be careful, mindful, or even polite. And the things one learned when people who had been tasting wine all day stopped being polite were… interesting. Often educational.

“Isn’t this in the fruit wine category?” one younger taster frowned. “I can’t taste anything but oak and ashes.”

“Ah,” an older matron answered, smirking and reaching for the boy’s glass. “I bet I know who that is. They have the same problem every year.”

Onyx didn’t smile, of course, but inwardly, she was giggling. She knew that one, too. Their vintner, a freed slave, was an arrogant punk who never took advice. Next to her, his assistant was trying not to squirm. Maybe she should talk to her Lord about buying the poor girl; she had a good feel for the wine and didn’t deserve her boss.

“Ah!” That was the third taster, sipping the purple wine that was Onyx’s offering from her master’s odd fruit. “This is… interesting.”

It was her turn to try not to squirm. Interesting could mean so many things.

“Interesting,” the woman repeated. “Sweet, with a nice oaky note and… boysenberry, I think. Nice.” She looked up at the three of them waiting, three very nervous slaves whose livelihood depended on her words. She couldn’t know which of them had worked on this wine, but her eyes landed on Onyx anyway. “Nice. Very nice.”

Onyx relaxed, her head bowed to hider her smile, as the others tasted her offering. “Cocoa nibs,” the boy exclaimed, smiling, and, “…campfire?” the older woman exclaimed. As she had expected, the color, and the strange fruit, brought out what they expected to taste: success at last.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/290497.html. You can comment here or there.

Giraffe Poll! Which JANUARY Story do you want to see continued?

Mar2

The list of stories is here on LJ, here on DW.

If you do not have a DW account, please feel free to vote in the comments.

Please let me know if this is an inconvenience for you.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/289993.html. You can comment here or there.

Wine of the Swan Maidens, a story for February’s Giraffe Call

Mar2

For [personal profile] avia‘s Prompt.

It was said that the swan maidens made the best wine.

It was said that the lovely women with the feathered cloaks, the red-heads with the blue eyes and the hard fingernails that were really claws, that they felt no pain.

And not only did they feel no pain, but they had the best feet for trampling the spiny grapes that grew in the highlands, the best hands, long-fingered and slender, for plucking the skins for the finest sweet wines, the strongest arms and backs for carrying the fruit and working the presses.

It was said, too, that the tears of a swan maiden were the sweetest additive you could put in the wine, that their faint saltiness was surpassed only by a single drop of their blood added to a keg, that their suffering transformed a vintage from ordinary to extraordinary as nothing else could.

Much of this was lies. The swan maidens felt pain like anyone else. Their backs were not strong, save in their swan-forms. Their fingers were long, it was true, but they tended to be clumsy.

And all this only added to the tears added to the wine: and that, the tears and the blood, that was true. Which was why the crafty vinters of the highlands spread those other lies, and why they would, on the first clear day of Spring, stalk the banks of every lake in the mountains for the swan-maidens, to steal their cloaks, to force those maids to live with them and make their wine.

They would escape, of course, they always did. But the daughters they left behind would, some day, find cloaks of their own, and the cycle would begin anew.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/289724.html. You can comment here or there.

Briars & Vinegar: Eating the Roses, a story of fae-apoc post apoc for the Giraffe Call (@rix_Scaedu)

Mar2

For Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt, combined with [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt.

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

After:
Briars and Vinegar (LJ)
Briars and Vinegar: Blood on the Snow (LJ)
Briars and Vinegar: For 100 Years (LJ)
Briars and Vinegar: Sharp and Bitter (LJ)

Something kept eating the rosebushes.

This was startling enough on its own – roses weren’t the most palatable thing in the world, and Vin’s roses had thorns the size of small daggers.

But, since Darrel had moved into her cabin, and Keri and Clarence had built their own nearby, since Dame Elena had, herself, come to shelter inside Vin’s large hedge of roses, there was hawthorn planted alongside the rosebushes, twisted in with them, its sharp prickers providing a second layer of defense. And hawthorn was even less palatable than roses.

(Dame Elena, who had been Old Dame Elena as long as anyone could remember, had turned out to have a surprising wealth of information about the old fae. That had made Vin give her a sharp look and pull the old lady aside for a few whispered conversations.

Clarence tried not to mind. It was clear that Vin knew quite a bit she wasn’t sharing, and he didn’t blame her, usually. The war had hurt her quite badly, he thought, blamed for things she could neither have done nor stopped.

But when something started eating the roses and the hawthorn, and Elena and Vin went back into whispered conversations, Clarence had had enough. He pulled the two women aside – gently, very gently, but still.

“Look, you need to tell me what’s going on. Kari and I live here too, you know.”

“And I welcomed you, but you don’t need to stay,” she snapped. Dame Elena’s hand on her arm stopped her, and she sighed.

“There aren’t many things that will eat roses like this, and most of them aren’t natural; they’re constructs of the war or leftover monsters from Ellehem – from faerie-home,” she translated. “And I’ve never encountered anything unnatural that could stomach hawthorn.”

“But I have,” Elena put in. “Not a faerie creature as such, but something they made from creatures already here. Mouth like a meat grinder, could eat anything. Did eat anything. And everyone.”

She frowned at the chewed-upon bushes. “We called it the omnivore.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/289272.html. You can comment here or there.

Out of their minds, a story of Bug Invasion for the (January) Giraffe Call

Mar1

For fflox‘s commissioned continuation of
All in Your Head (LJ), after
From the moment they breathed our air (Lj) after: Staying in the City (LJ) and Spooks vs. Bugs (DW)

“You’re not real. You’re in my imagination.”

“I don’t believe in you.”

“I can live my life without you just fine.”

“Aah-choooo!”

“I’ve never seen this many fair folk. I’ve never seen anything like this many so close to a city.”

“Or ghosts. It’s like everyone who ever died here is back…”

Paula was, generally, a well-grounded, sensible, rational young lady, or so her bosses had said, so her teachers had said, so her friends had believed. She had her feet on the ground and she didn’t, as a general rule, believe in things she couldn’t see.

She was also, and had been for several months now, infested with an alien symbiote that read her mind and sometimes controlled her body.

The bugs had invaded dozens of planets, some successfully, some failures, but none, she was getting the impression, as big a failure as Earth was becoming for them. Their system of bonding with native hosts had, she had been told, served them well even on planets where they couldn’t manage a full-scale invasion. They could sit undetected that way, breed that way, and conquer large parts of the planet from “on the ground.”

They had, she was pretty certain, never faced this sort of resistance, a two-front rebellion from the un-infected outside their walls and from their hosts, the hosts they needed to survive the pollution, in their very homes and bodies.

And Paula, the sensible one, the one who didn’t believe in, say, faeries and was a fan of pharmaceuticals to help the unstable, found herself slipping from host to host, suggesting that they look at the fae, asking how they dealt with the voices in their head, reminding them to forget their allergy meds.

She was too practical and too calm for any of this to really work for her, sadly; she couldn’t really see the fair folk or ghosts that well, and she had never heard another voice in her head before, except her conscience and the echoes of her mother.

But she could help the others. She could sit down with a new friend and talk her through a panic attack, talk her through a dark moment until the friend could look up and say “this isn’t real. That’s not me saying that,” and have control of her head again. She’d done that before, for college friends, bad acid trips or just bad brain chemistry, more than a few times.

She knew it was working the day that three of her friends, all at once, sat down and said “You’re not real. You’re not real. You’re not real.”

And it was, finally, too much for the symbiotes, as all three fled their hosts and lay choking, dying on the ground like so many ant-fish looking things.

“You’re not real,” another friend said, and a fifth said “the ghosts are really thick here. Do you think bugs have ghosts?”

And that was it. AS their non-symbiote family watched helplessly from their controlled-environment ship, well over half the hosted bugs fled their clearly-insane human hosts, as unable to handle the strange brain chemistry as they were the atmosphere.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/288957.html. You can comment here or there.

Planting Future, a continuation of Tir na Cali for the Feb. Giraffe Call.

Mar1

For stryck‘s commissioned continuation of Second Pressing.

Tir Na Cali has a landing page here.

Keri wanted to complain.

Keri liked complaining in general; if Onyx had been feeling less generous, she would be irritated that the girl had been bought with them. But Keri had skill, as she and Taris did, and that was what their new master would need.

He, their new Lord, had, with some advice from Taris, picked the best of the field slaves from their old master’s former staff, the best and those that, while not wonderful, were motivated enough to be trained. He had taken Keri and Onyx shopping with him for equipment, and set all three of them to buying furnishings.

The vineyard he had purchased had been abandoned for almost twenty years, bad dirt and bad business sense driving it bankrupt and bad blood leaving it empty. There was a lot of work to be done to make it tenable again, and for the first couple weeks, that work was all on the shoulders of the three of them and their Lord.

So Keri, of course, wanted to complain. She was a soft thing, not used to hard work, and their former master had spoiled her, right up to when he’d sold them.

Taris and Onyx, on the other hand, were blissful. They had, first and foremost, a second chance to prove themselves, and, secondly, a very light hand on their reins to allow them to do so. The plants their Lord was seeding were fascinating, and his ability to change them once planted opened up a whole world of opportunities to experiment that they’d never before even imagined. It was, in Onyx’s mind, the best world she could have dreamed of, and Taris seemed to agree.

When it became clear that Kari was not of the same mind, when she seemed determined to keep complaining, the two of them took her aside, in the barracks they’d cleaned out and refurbished first as their temporary home.

“Look.” Onyx did the talking. “It’s hard work. It’s a lot of hard work.”

“I thought you said we wouldn’t get sold to be manual laborers,” she cut in.

“No, Taris said that’s what happened if we weren’t lucky. Field work.” She didn’t talk about the other options.

“But you two act like you just won the lotto, and you’re grubbing out in the vines like the lowest field hand. I don’t get it.” She looked down at her chipped and cracked nails. “Why is this better?”

“Because,” Taris cut in, “Lord Karl listens to our advice, and heeds it. Because he’s trying something new, and knows it – if he fails, it will be because it was an experiment. Less taint,” he clarified. “And if he succeeds…”

“If he succeeds, it will color us, too,” Onyx took back over. “These berries;” she picked up a bright-pink grape-thing, “these could make his fortune. And he will remember us when it comes time for rewards.”

Keri chewed on a nail. “So all this digging in the rocks…”

“It’s planting our future along with his,” Onyx agreed. “That’s a comfortable old age we’re fertilizing there, for the Lord and for us, too.”

“Planting our future,” the girl repeated. “I like that.”

Next: Success (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/288380.html. You can comment here or there.

Making Harvest Wreathes, a story of the Unicorn/Factory for the Feb. Giraffe Call

Mar1

For [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt.

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here.

The village was tense as they prepared for the harvest festival, the mothers and the unwed daughters holding themselves as if afraid to hope, the fathers and sons and young children hating the helpless feeling, rattling around slamming into things like an animal gone mad, all of them trying to hard not to remember, not to think about it, not to worry, not to show what they were feeling.

It made fingers tremble, as they hung the garlands. It made hands shake, as they wove the wreaths, twisting grapevines and roses together. It made smiles tense and sharp, and greetings unpleasantly perfunctory.

Orna, weaving the wreaths in the town square, remembered when it had been a joyous occasion, not a tense one. She remembered when the crown with the thorns had been considered a blessing, the Autumn Queen, the charmed one, not a potential death sentence. She remembered when she had worn it, and when she had gone down to the river, all smiles, and received the unicorn’s blessing.

Now, she knew that there would be three crowns with red roses and thorns, three wreaths that would send their wearer down to the river, lip-bitten and trying not to cry. There would be three that she wove that could lead in death, or in a small child with no father to name…

…and one of those crowns could land on her granddaughter’s head. She bit her own lip and did what needed to be done, as they all did, and thought about happier times, when their wreaths had meant a bit of naughty pleasure and nothing more.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/288100.html. You can comment here or there.

Reconsidering Giraffe Incentives and Time Crunching

Mar1

As I struggle to finish January‘s Giraffe Call, I am coming to the conclusion that I have overextended myself on, at the very least, the higher reaches of the call incentive levels and need to rethink them.

So, my question to you, oh my readers:

* What incentives do you really like, that encourage you to participate/donate?
* Which don’t motivate you at all/do you really not care about?
* Would you rather have less in a more timely fashion, or more stretched out over 2-3 months?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/287963.html. You can comment here or there.