Tag Archive | giraffecall

Picking Grapes

Feb18

For cluudle‘s prompt.

Shiva and Niki are characters in the webserial Addergoole.

Addergoole has a landing page here.

“Niki, stop squirming.” Shiva flicked the back of Niki’s ear with forefinger and thumb in exasperation. “You’d think no-one had ever picked your grapes before.”

“Shiiiiiiiva,” her Kept whined, sitting very still because he had no choice and still managing to give off the impression of wriggling. “It tickles. And you didn’t have to thwap me,” he added, sulking.

“This was your idea,” she pointed out. “You can hold still, or I can tie you down.”

She felt a stillness come over him as he stopped fighting the order. “That could be fun.”

“It could,” she agreed. She leaned forward to breathe against the back of his pointed ear. “And if you’re very good, then we will do that later.”

A tiny moan escaped him, a sound she was pretty sure he didn’t know he was making. “I’ll be good,” he whispered, the words seeming to come from deep inside him, from the person behind the bitchy mask.

“I know you will,” she purred. His ear was right there, so she licked the back of it slowly. “You’re my wonderful, wonderful slave, aren’t you?” And was he in the mood to take that as it was meant, and not act insulted?

The soft groan suggested that he was. “All yours.” Sometimes, sometimes she could remind him why he’d asked her to collar him. It seemed today was one of those days.

“Lay on your stomach for me,” she murmured, “and I’ll finish harvesting this batch of grapes.”

She waited for him to shift around, and then straddled him, one hand on the center of his back pinning him, while she used the other to pick the juicy red grapes that grew, Bacchus-like, from thick vines in his hair.

On the bedstand, a bowl already overflowed with the fruit. “I’m going to make the sweetest wine from you, my beautiful boy,” she whispered, watching him shudders at her breath on his shoulders. “And then we’ll get drunk off you.”

“Yes, Shiva,” he groaned, twitching as she murmured the Words to coax his vines to fruit again.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/274626.html. You can comment here or there.

Late planting

Feb18

For [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s prompt, after Bitter Vintage

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

The Wild Ones are a family line of half-breed Ellehemaei; the lives of three of them are chronicled in my very dark webserial The Wild Ones’ Blood.

The guest at the gate turned out to be female, which set the trio of sisters no more at ease, female, and with pointed, Doberman-like ears. Kin, perhaps? they stood casually, their tails and their ears the only thing showing how tense and fight-ready they were.

The Doberman-woman wasn’t hiding it at all. Her face was set in a snarl. “You have what is mine,” she growled.

“This is our land,” Aglæca answered, her voice lazy, her hand on her knife. “We have only what is ours here.”

“You have what is mine,” the woman repeated, “and I will have it back.”

“Bitch, we don’t have anything of yours,” Cassandra hissed. “Be gone before we cut you into pieces and feed the pieces to our pigs.”

“He came here,” the dog-woman insisted, and now all three of them were listening very, very intently to her. “He came here, I know. he told me it was the last thing he had to do for the Old Man, and so I let him come. And he never came back.”

Aglæca was not certain if the low whining sound of anger came from her throat, her sisters’ throats, or all three, but she knew it was her that spoke. “He. He was your Kept, your possession? You owned that creature?”

A beat, and then Cassandra asked over the rising silence, “You owned our kin?” Because creature, monster, and bastard he might have been, but he’d been a Wild One, too. That was why, in part, he wasn’t dead.

The Doberman snarled. “Own. I Own him. He is my love, and it was the only way to keep him from the Old Man’s grasp. So yes, yes I Own him.”

“Then you should join him,” Angela snarled, and, in a heartbeat, they attacked.

~

They planted the second rose – a red one – and the second grapes near the first pair, so that the two could twine together, and when the time came to make the wine, they mixed fruit and petals from all the plans together. “Let them be together,” Aglæca toasted, with the first glass of the season, “in the only way they deserve.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/274267.html. You can comment here or there.

Bitter Vintage

Feb18

For [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt.

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

The Wild Ones are a family line of half-breed Ellehemaei; the lives of three of them are chronicled in my very dark webserial The Wild Ones’ Blood.

This story has suggestions of violence and rape, but no on-screen either.

“That’s the last of this year’s rose wine.” Aglæca poured the dregs of the jug into two glasses, letting the last of the pinkish liquid drip slowly into the blue vessels. “And a month before it’s time to start on this year’s.”

“We’ll have to make do.” Angela took her glass and breathed in its floral notes. “It always sounds as if it’s singing to me.”

“Maybe it is.” Aglæca stared at her own glass, willing its secrets to her. “It’s always seemed to have a bit of… essence, I guess, in it, hasn’t it?”

“Life,” Angela agreed, and swirled a little in her mouth. “The last bit is always a bit bittersweet, you know?”

“The last we’ll taste of it.” Aglæca took an ungraceful gulp. “Until the next time. Yes, I think I almost heard a song. Or a scream.”

“Mm, screams.” Angela’s smile was sharp and fierce, like the woman herself. “Yes. I know there’s no blood in it, but you can almost taste it, can’t you? Just a little drip of his life, there?”

“You’re a poet, Ang. A bloody poet.” She stroked her sister’s claret-red hair, pushing it behind one tufted ear. “It should have his life in there, the way we’ve got the roots going.”

“Mmm.” That only made her smile wider, and she sipped the wine slowly, savoring it, savoring the essence in it. “Do you think he’s still alive down there?”

“I can’t imagine he can die that easily. And I made damn sure that he couldn’t get out.” She looked out the window, where the trellis of grapes shared space with the thorny roses.

“It must be horrible, having a plant growing into you, not able to move, able to feel everything.” Angela’s eyes clouded with memory, and her sister hugged her tightly.

“And he deserves every moment of it. Drink up. Cass heard something down the road, thinks it might be another one.” Before her sister could twitch, before she could show fear, Aglæca showed her teeth. “We might need to plant another rose bush.”

She was rewarded with a feral smile in return. “This time, let’s plant red ones.”

Continued here

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/273929.html. You can comment here or there.

Tasting

Feb18

For F. Anon’s Prompt.

Note: I have never tasted a $5000 bottle of wine. I have, however, tasted a wide range of $5-$50 bottles.

She’d spent years getting to know suppliers, tasting their wares, sampling them on upcycles and down, knowing their accounting departments and the local gossip about their spouses. She’d worked in every food-industry job she could negotiate her way into over the past decade, getting to know every nuance of the world of cuisine, and, in the evenings, taken culinary classes. She’d hired the best cooks she could find, enlisted the best, most reliable suppliers, and worked with the most consistent PR firm in the state.

Now it was time for Liaza to pick the wines for her restaurant.

The sommelier poured her glass after glass. Riesling. Chardonnay. Niagara. Gewurtztraminer. Merlot. Pinot noir. Cabernet Sauvignon.Shiraz. She sniffed, sipped, swirled, spat.

The red wines were easy. She settled on four within a tasting of the first eight, and had reached a final six by the time she’d sipped sixteen. The whites…

“Boring. Sweet, but bland. Lemonade without the sugar. Not enough flavor. What, is everyone just pissing in a bucket?” Liaza was not normally crude, but she was growing frustrated, more so, because the sommelier just kept smiling.

Finally, he brought out five bottles. “These three,” he told her, “will suffice for most of your audiences. These two,” he set the others aside, “these are for the true connoisseurs.”

He poured one, then the other of the “will suffice,” and she had to agree. They were rich, flavorful wines, with strong notes that were not overwhelming. “And the others?” she asked, already much happier.

“Ah-ha. This one, first. This is a $5500 bottle of wine, from a tiny valley in France where they have been producing this single kind of wine for as long as France has history. It is a rich, storied wine, with a flavor to match.” He poured, she sniffed, smelling the fruity notes and a faint hint of spice. She sipped, tasting a light sweetness over an aged flavor that slid down the throat like ambrosia. This wine, she did not spit.

“Very… Very nice,” she agreed. “And the last?”

“Taste first.” He passed her a couple bland crackers, then a glass of water, and then he poured.

She sniffed, and her nose was overwhelmed. “Pear and… is that mint? How interesting! And something like the breeze over the water.”

“This,” the sommelier told her smugly, “is the most interesting wine in the world.”

“I…” She sipped, carefully, swishing the wine around in her mouth. Notes of pear, of course, and, yes, that faint mintieness and just the faintest sweetness. “This is…”

“…from a vineyard so small, most people don’t even know they exist. On the banks of a tiny New York State Lake. Yes. Fifteen dollars a bottle, although, once they are known…”

“We need a contract.” She sipped again. “And a dish that can stand up to this wine.”

The sommelier smirked. He’d told his brother this was the way to get their name out there. And it had only taken fifteen tries.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/273835.html. You can comment here or there.

Giraffe Call: Wine and (/or) Roses!

Feb18

The call for prompts is now CLOSED! Please come back next month for another call!!

I am now taking prompts on the theme of Wine and/or Roses! Leave one or many prompts, and I will write (over the next month) at least one microfic (150-500 words) to each prompter.

Jordan’s older sisters had all, when they were young, old enough to be maidens but still pure, gone down to the river. Each of them, in turn, had received the unicorn’s bloodly blessing, as did every girl of the village, their village and every hamlet along the Pure River. Their blood blessed the fields, kept the water clean despite the factories upstream, kept the crops coming. Their blood made their bellies rise with unicorn babies; there wasn’t a household along the river that didn’t have a white-haired child in their midst.

Thus began Down the River (LJ), the first story in Unicorn/Factory series, from a prompt of “Female unicorn, male virgin.” See my Landing Page (LJ) for more of my settings.


Prompting is free! But Donations are always welcome.

If you have donated, I will write to every prompt you leave.

In addition, for each $5 you donate, I will write an additional 500 words to the prompt(s) of your choice.

For every linkback I receive, I will post another 50 words on a story (setting poll here and here)

If I get two new prompters or one new donator, I will write a setting piece (setting chosen by poll).

And, of course, donations are always well-received:

At $30 in donations, I will buy T. new boots & myself some seeds to start inside. Reached!

At $40 in donations, I will post an additional 1000-2000-word fic on the subject of the audience’s choice.Reached!

At $50, anyone who donated $7.50 or more will have a copy of “Alder by Post” mailed to them if they wishReached!

At $70, I will write at least 2 microfics for everyone, whether or not they donated. Reached!

At $75, we will buy a wheelbarrow for hauling everything around our yard!Reached!

At $100, I will write at least 3 microfics for everyone, whether or not they donated.

At $130, I will record a podcast of an audience-choice story and post it for everyone to read.

At $150, we will upgrade the wheelbarrow to an awesome cart! Also I will release an e-book of all of the fiction written to this call.

If I reach $200, I will hold a mid-month Call on a single setting of the readers’ choice. Everyone who tipped will get wordcount-and-a-half

If I reach $210, we’ll upgrade the awesome cart to awesome-cart-with-sides and be able to haul EVERYTHING!

For more information on Giraffe Calls, see the landing page.


(Image will be modified when I get home: this is at $80 now!)

Donate below

Art by Inventrix!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/273042.html. You can comment here or there.

Down in Kitty Town, a drabble of Tir na Cali for the Giraffe Call

Feb17

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt.

Tír na Cali has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

“I need you to head up to Oregon City,” Miles told her.

“One of the seventeen people up there causing trouble?” she joked weakly. She’d had plans for the weekend, but Miles had a way of knowing these things and sabotaging them.

“It’s not, technically, Oregon City. Not anymore.” He passed her the data pad with the file. “Baroness Maeve deeded a square of it to a daughter of one of her slaves, a moddie. And her daughter, Baroness Sybil, expanded that to two square miles. Autonomous. Her own law there.”

“She can… yeah. She can do that, can’t she? If the Countess above her doesn’t object, she can call on the Yseult precedent.”

“Exactly. But what I’ve got now is the granddaughter of two moddies – Agency moddies, mind you, not skin jobs – who controls her own territory. And Vrrronica ni Annawrrra – don’t forget the triple R when you talk to her – who has, I’ll note, been ennobled by Baroness Sybil – Lady Vrrronica has set herself up a little moddie town.”

“Moddie town.” Irena stared at the notes. “And you want me to…”

“Put on those cat ears you wear so well and go looking into it. They can’t tell a skinjob from a deep job if the acting is good enough, and I know you can do it. You did really well in the ni Uhura case last year.”

Irena sighed. “All right. Rrrina it is. But Miles… I had hairballs for a month last time.”

“It’s a deep cover operation,” her boss smiled. “It’s good for hazard pay, and I’ll put you in for a week leave someplace with a nice big spot of sun, too.”

She scratched behind one ear. “All right. Since I can’t really say no, anyway.”

“Ain’t government service grand?” Her boss’s grin stretched to downright shit-eating. “Have fun in kitty-town.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/272436.html. You can comment here or there.

Window Shopping, a story of Tír na Cali for the Giraffe Call (@anke)

Feb17

For [personal profile] anke‘s prompt.

Tír na Cali has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

Setting note: Jane’s thought “no ap to the end of his name” means that Andrew does not have a name following royal naming conventions, despite the royal-red hair.

Content warning: this story includes mentions of slavery and nudity.

Jane liked going to the mall, hanging out with her friends there, like most of the people she knew did; like, she was pretty sure, teenagers everywhere did.

So when family moved from a small, middle-class neighborhood in the burbs to an upscale one with her mother’s second promotion in a year, she prevailed on a new friend in her new school, a shy boy named Andrew with a shock of red hair but no ap to the end of his name (immediately giving him and Jane something in common), to show her the mall.

“It’s not going to be the kind of thing you’re used to,” he warned.

Jane scoffed. “I can handle a mall, Andy. It’s not like I grew up in the ghetto or something.” Even though, to the super-rich and royals they went to school with, she might as well have.

“All right. If you flip out…”

“I know. Do so quietly. Geez, Andy. I’m not an American or something.”

He’d only smiled weakly, and agreed to show her around, because, really, what else was he going to do?

Freak out quietly. She wasn’t going to freak out. She wasn’t a country bumpkin. She really wasn’t. But this mall… if mall you could call it…

“Andy, tell me I don’t look like a country bumpkin.”

“You really don’t,” he assured her. “Do you want to put me on a leash? You’d fit in better.”

She eyed him thoughtfully. He looked serious. He sounded serious. And there certainly were any number of people wandering around with collared slaves, some on leashes, some not. She smiled, a slow thing that seemed to start at her toes. The stores were fancier. The floors were fancier. There were naked slaves in a store window right there, practically in front of her nose. Naked! Her family was well-off, but Jane had only ever seen two or three slaves up close, and never quite this close.

She wrapped her arm around Andy’s waist, getting a small smile from him. “I think we’ll do just fine,” she said, feeling it becoming true as she said it. “Let’s just window shop.” The blonde in the window was pretty cute, after all.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/271694.html. You can comment here or there.

Step on my Tail

Feb16

This story contains magic and references to Changes but no slavery, or sex. It does involve references to violence.

For @DaHob’s prompt

This takes place during the apoc, ~2012-2013

~*~

I love that house, you understand?

First house, paid for it right out of college with a fudgie little mortgage I only had to twist a few arms to get. So that’s my house, that’s my pride, my joy, that’s my territory.

And yes, I’m territorial. Find me an Ellehemaei who isn’t. It’s in the Law. It’s in our blood. And those of us with animal Changes… yeah. Snarl, hiss, spray on the corners. It’s our territory, gods-damn-it.

And there is, in that year, one thing I love more than I love my house, and that is my man. My beautiful buddy, my partner. My Tiger. We grew up together. We Changed together. Went to college together. We’d been side by side since we were kits, and we were going to be side by side forever. Tiger was the only person with a permanent invitation into my house.

And then three goddamned gods rip through the walls between the worlds and decide our little city is theirs.

I could forgive them that, live with that. I don’t need to be queen of the land, not me. I don’t need to be queen of anything but my own house.

And Tiger, Tiger isn’t really a King-of-the-Jungle sort, either. He’s content with his bars and his clubs and his dance halls, and me. He’s content being a small-beans king and a sometimes queen. We’re happy.

And then those fucking beasts decide that they wanted to go to the clubs. And they decide they’re kings of the goddamned fucking clubs. Of Tiger’s club. Of my Tiger’s fucking club, do you understand?

And there is one thing my Tiger can’t stand. And one thing I can’t stand. And when they tear out three of my Tiger’s ribs and leave him for dead, not knowing he was fae…

Then I get angry. And that’s why the city burns.

*

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/271577.html. You can comment here or there.

Story of the City, a story of Reiassan for the Giraffe Call (@ellenmillion)

Feb16

For EllenMillion‘s prompt

Reiassan has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

When Sahsyō returned home from the city for the festival of Veignevar, she told her family: “The first thing I thought when I saw Ūnetkabyē? I wondered where they kept the animals.”

This was, as her new friends at University would say, a poetic retelling, and as her grandmother would have said, if she’d known, a steaming load of what came out of the far end of the goat.

Yes, Sahsyō had, after a week or two in the largest place she’d ever seen, wondered where the animals were. She had grown up on her family’s farm, raising barrel-chested milk goats and the biggest chickens in the mountains. There had always been animals around: goats and chickens, mousers and dogs. She had never been away from animals.

But she’d never been around that many people, either. And what she’d first thought when she’d stepped into Ūnetkabyē had been “Loud!” The city was loud in a way that she’d never imagined possible, louder than the ocean had been, louder than anything she’d ever heard. There were people everywhere, crowded up against each other, talking all at once, riding through the streets, carriages and goats and people shoulder to shoulder until there was nowhere safe to move.

Sahsyō had, she known, gapes and gawked. Stared, pressed up against the wall, terrified to move. She had tried to go back inside, but she couldn’t find the door-handle, and when she did, she couldn’t make it work. She had, for one long moment, been absolutely certain that she’d made the wrong decision. University wasn’t for her. Ūnetkabyē certainly wasn’t for her.

But she couldn’t make the door work, so she walked forward, through the carts, through the people, through the noise, to the University.

And when she home for Veignevar’s festival, she could laugh and joke. “I wondered where they put all the animals,” and pretend she’d never been terrified.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/271072.html. You can comment here or there.

The “A” Shelves

Feb16

For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of

📻
The tension in the store was thick and uncomfortable. Jordan was unhappy, and Mrs. Gent was getting back-straight and glowering, like our neighbor down the street that liked to count heads as we left and frown at the number of people who lived in our three-bedroom house.

I didn’t know what to do about it, either. Jordan was in charge of smoothing situations over. I was pretty good at putting my foot in it, but that was about it. Making it better generally involved lots of apologies. I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for, but it was worth a try, wasn’t it?

“I’m sor-”

The floor shook, the items on the shelves rattling. “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Gent frowned. “This is not a very good time.” She turned towards me and Jordan with a careful smile. “If you two could take your lemonade and go into the aisle labelled ‘A,’ please? I think that would be the safest place.”

“Safest?” Jordan snapped, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue anymore. I picked up my tea.

“A is which way?” I asked, talking over whatever Jordan was going to say next.

“That way, thank you,” Mrs. Gent gestured. “Past the radios and behind the coffee makers.”

“Thanks,” I said, laying it on maybe a little thick. “Come on, Jordan, you heard the lady.” Past the radios, that was easy, and we turned left, following her gesture, to find another row of shelves at a right angle to the first set. Candelabras, squiggle-circle-dot-squiggle (looked like fancier, smaller candelabras), 15849(23-09) (looked like long pieces of steel in various shapes and sizes)… there were coffee makers, although they were labelled in French. Close enough!

We headed “behind” that shelf, which meant around, and there indeed was another aisle labelled “A,” appearing to be at right angles to le cafe makier shelf.

“A” seemed to start with a stack of abaci, from bright children’s beaded toys – we should get one of those, I thought, for the beansprout at home – to ancient-looking counting racks with characters painted on the beads. Then were adzes, many of them looking practically stone-age, hung on a rack with their sharp edges dangling free.

The building shook again there, and, as all those cutting edges swayed near us, I wondered a bit at Mrs. Gent’s definition of “safe.” We had, after all, gotten her sort of annoyed.

Jordan seemed barely fazed, staring at a single acorn, packaged as if it were something really expensive, nestled in azure silk in a maple-bole box and placed between stacks of katana. “What is this place?”

“It’s Mr. Ting’s,” I answered helpfully. It wasn’t the altimeters that were getting me, it was the collection of vases labelled “ἀγγείον.” “And they figure the alphabet differently here.”

“They figure lots of alphabets, I’d guess,” she murmured, picking a narrow box off the shelf. It was rusted on the corners, but a pin-up painting of something with more tentacles than body was still clear and bright on its cover. “And… lots of different clients, too.”

📻

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/270460.html. You can comment here or there.