The shortish black-haired woman steps briskly into the room, the silk of her formal tunic and pants rustling so very softly. The lines of the tunic show off an athletic but womanly figure underneath; the bright colours go beautifully with her dark-tanned skin.
She perches more than sits on the high backed stool. “So,” she smiles. “You want to ask me questions. So ask?”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/255887.html. You can comment here or there.
Kendra, a slim, mousy girl, complete with mouse ears and nose, walks into the room nervously, and settles into the big rocking chair, looking out at the gathered audience. Her hands smooth her blue skirt uncertainly.
“Um, hi?” Her voice is a tiny squeak. “Professor Pelletier said you wanted to ask me questions?”
Kendra is a character in the Addergoole web-serial.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/255364.html. You can comment here or there.
The January Giraffe Call (and on LJ) has reached an unprecedented $241.31!
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
SO!
Tell me what character of mine you want to ask questions of! I will post, over the next few days, a Q-and-A thread for at least the first four characters mentioned (first 2 each LJ & DW).
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/255177.html. You can comment here or there.
The January Giraffe Call (and on LJ) has reached an unprecedented $241.31!
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
This means we’ve reached the ask-the-characters Chat Session donation level!! (hrrm. Now I have to figure out how to do that! 🙂
It also means I get delicious cake (mm cake).
I’m writing like the wind, too, getting through prompts as quickly/reasonably as I can! We may have some backlog… O_O
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/254924.html. You can comment here or there.
After Tea with HER (beginning) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/381305.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/382107.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation 2) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/385348.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation 3) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/387899.html”>LJ)
Tea with HER (continuation 4) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/391025.html”>)
Tea with HER (continuation 5) (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/393263.html”>LJ)
It took the Ice Queen a month to have time to see me; a time chosen, I was sure, to give me time to relax, to calm down, to grieve, and to get used to James’ presence. When I finally made it into her parlor for tea, I brought him with me. Leashed. Cuffed. Exactly as she’d left him on my doorstep, including the terrified look.
I’m not a monster. The terrified look was faked; it turned out my new slave could act.
But that was something I knew, and he knew, and the Countess did not, which pleased both of us, almost as much as the look on her face – a split second of un-hidden surprise – pleased us.
“Does your gift not please you, Baroness Treanna?” she asked, cool, chill, and possibly a little irritated.
“He’s raw, new, untrained.” He fell to his knees next to me, his hair falling in his face. “He hardly knows how he’s supposed to act. He can barely make a phone call without supervision.”
“These things are true, yes. I thought perhaps…” She frowned, and I smiled.
“It will be more interesting to work with you, your Ladyship, if you are not pre-anticipating my every move and thought.”
She blinked. “That is not something anyone has ever said to me before.”
“I thought it might not be. And – with Michael in my hands, or me in his, it was easy to know what I would do, no? But this one…” I nearly purred. I was pleased with myself. “This one, you have not trained to train me. I’m very pleased with my gift, Countess. Thank you.”
For the first time, she smiled a true smile, a genuine expression. “My pleasure, Treanna. I think you are right. Working with you will be interesting.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/254464.html. You can comment here or there.
For ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt.
Title adapted from the last bit of War of the Worlds.
Bug Invasion stories before this were:
Staying in the City (LJ)
Spooks vs. Bugs (DW)
The bugs weren’t winning.
This was confusing them to no end.
They were losing because of things they couldn’t understand – ghosts and faeries, monsters and spooks. They had no defense against things that did not exist on the material plane.
They were losing because of things they could understand – rebellion, tenacity, and ingenuity. They had lost to those before, Paula realized, but not so badly, not so quickly. They had never before been stopped like a wall before finishing their first sweep of a world.
They were losing because of things in the air – environmental pollutants, among others, smog and smoke and such – and in the water, most amusingly hormones and flushed pills, and this, they had no defense against. She asked her symbiote, ::has no other place you’ve invaded had such problems?:: but the symbiote was busy being upset by the suffering of the non-bonded and had no answer for her.
Those that bonded seemed to have a better time of it, which meant that the bugs left in their slowly-decreasing area were hurriedly kidnapping those they thought could take it and bonding, being less and less picky just to get in a body, just to survive.
…and then, and Paula had to giggle, even though it wasn’t funny, in their rush to get hosts, they didn’t ask important questions like “How do humans withstand this pollution?” or, more importantly, “are there humans that can’t handle it?”
It wasn’t funny, because the poor girl they got with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities just found her issues doubled by having a symbiote. It was, on the other hand, telling, because Paula got to watch what happened when a host rejected its bug. Which meant she knew it could happen.
Possibly more importantly, it meant the bugs knew it could happen.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/253905.html. You can comment here or there.
Inspired by the_vulture‘s prompt
And there this Lo Pan guy is, flying around like some batshit giant pixie, cutting everyone to shreds, and here’s this redneck cowboy blasting around, this Egg guy fighting Lo Pan like they’re The Last True Mages (who I damn well know died two hundred years ago), pretty girls with green eyes being zombified, mooks and minions flying and bleeding and making a mess of this gorgeous temple, well, never mind that it was a temple to Lo Pan’s Lo Panniness.
And there was me. Green-eyed, sure. But nobody looks twice at the tiny little elf girl when there are these big old hooman girls around to marry and zombify and rescue and what have you. And nobody looks twice at what’s happening behind the curtain, do they, because they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to see the muss and fuss up on stage and ignore those of us back here.
And ignored and back-here and happily hidden, there we were, making sure this one ended the way it was supposed to. Like we do, pulling the strings, making the stories. Telling the stories to themselves, my grandma called it. Telling the road where it goes.
And of course the big lunk messed it up, but that’s all right. We had another story for him. And oh, boy, was that one a doozy!!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/253210.html. You can comment here or there.
For @inventrix’s commissioned continuation of Burning Summer Quest (LJ); Part 1 of ?
“Mr. Ting knows what you need.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Okay, no, I know what I was expecting – Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, or Egg Shen from Big Trouble in Little China, or Lu-Tze from Thief of Time. In short, I expected a sterotype.
I know better. But it was really, really hot, and my brain was frying like an egg.
So into Mr. Ting’s we went, feeling a little jittery, a lot sweaty, and a tiny bit hopeful. If he didn’t have what we needed (despite the sign), well, we were down to leaving the fridge open or buying ice in giant bags. Or dousing everyone in water every four minutes. I didn’t think the cats would like that.
The store windows had been covered over with paper, so walking in, we were going in blind, accompanied by the sound of loudly jangling windchimes hitting the back of the door. Jordan headed in first; I took up the rear, nervously-if-ridiculously checking to see if we were observed. We weren’t; nobody else was dumb enough to be out in weather like this.
So at first, all I could see of the store was Jordan’s paused, tense shoulderblades sticking to the thinnest T-shirt possible. I wondered if we were going to have to make a hasty escape, and grabbed the door handle in preparation. I wondered if someone was going to shoot at us. Like I said, my brain was fried and I was feeling rather silly.
Then I noticed that the store was comfortable. Not freezing, like a lot of stores, but a nice pleasant temperature, just cool enough that we weren’t dying. And Jordan still wasn’t moving. We were getting to the shoving stage.
“Come in, come in, kiddos, let me pour you some lemonade. Take a load off your feet.” That was, I presumed, not Mr. Ting. For one, the accent was local. For another, the voice was female, or, at the very least, in a traditionally female register.
“What…” Jordan finally managed, and stumbled forward one step. Not enough for me to do much except look at the floor, which was blue-and-white tiled and prettier than anything else in the neighborhood except, possibly, one of our roommates. But Taylor was a special case. “What…” again. Broken record time; I gave a little shove.
“It’s all right, kids, I know, it’s hotter than hell outside and you’re got to be dehydrated. Here, have a skirt, dear, and here’s a vest for your friend, and there you go.” She bustled around Jordan, and then me, playing dress-up like we were dolls, and I finally got a look at her.
She was maybe late-fifties or a very nicely preserved late-sixties, her hair dyed improbably red, her eyes almost black. She had a lean figure not in keeping with that mother-of-the-world voice, and a lipstick smile the same unbelievable color as her hair. She caught me looking, and winked.
“Mr. Ting is out for a moment, so you two just have a seat, have some lemonade, and wait,” she insisted.
Continued: Mrs. Gent’s Lemonade (LJ)
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/252926.html. You can comment here or there.
For The inventrix‘s commissioned prompt, a continuation of Scrounging for History (LJ), and Digging through History (<a
href=”http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/391242.html”>LJ) Part 2 of… probably 7.5
Fae Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
The stairs seemed to go on forever. Karida hated places like this, going into the dark, not knowing quite what was there. She couldn’t imagine doing it “blind,” like a normal human, not knowing if the stair under you would crack or not, not knowing where the walls were. She couldn’t imagine doing it at all if she didn’t know if something lurked in the corners. Not knowing what was lurking was hard enough, nightmare enough.
She hit the bottom of the stairs, reaching for her senses to reassure her that Dor was right behind her, Amalie up at the top looking out, or at least there, if not actually watching. And the something was still there, hiding in the back corner. Waiting for them? Aware of their presence at all? She did not have the Words to know, and Amalie’s Workings were too unreliable (like everything about her, except her song). She kept walking, feeling her way, avoiding the detritus on the floor and sweeping what she could out of the way for Dor.
They were not silent. There was no point in silence, and much more point in being safe. They could trip and fall in stealth, and then both their quiet and their tactical position would be ruined. So instead, they moved forward, hoping it was a wild animal, hoping to spook it out instead of spooking it into attacking them.
Three more steps. Four. The something in the back corner hadn’t moved. “Light,” she murmured to Dor, and he lit the lamp with its small share of oil. A door hung half-off its hinges, a small room defined by broken walls, one hung with pegs. Anything that had hung on the pegs had long since been taken, except one tiny wrench hiding in a corner. Karida pocketed that, pocketed the three remaining pegs, and pushed aside the broken door.
It had been – she wasn’t sure. The ancients had rooms for things she, wagon-born and raised, could hardly imagine. Maybe a storage room? Half-broken crates lined the walls, a few of them, near the bottom, looking intact. They would deal with those later. Hiding, nearly in the crates, in the back corner….
The thing hissed and jumped out at them as Dor swung the light towards Karida’s gesture. Thing, no, not a thing, “flat, Dor, flat,” she called, and tried to take the small woman down with her staff. Two quick thumps to non-vital parts, a third and fourth from the flat of Dor’s wakizashi, and their attacker lay sprawled whimpering at their feet.
“Do you think she’s feral?” Dor murmured. If she was, there would be no reasoning with her, no bargaining. The kindness would be to leave her to her wildness.
“Lee-mee-lone,” the woman muttered. Girl, Karida realized, filthy but with some effort to tidy herself. No older than Amalie.
“No,” she answered slowly. “Or… at least not entirely.” It might have been better if she was.
Next: Bringing Home History (LJ)
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/251765.html. You can comment here or there.
Faerie Apoc has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ
It has a very very rudimentary wiki beginning here
Maggie went through her Change as Marduk declared supremacy over the capital of New York State, presumably because the bigger gods had already invaded New York City and the Polish & Russian gods taking over Buffalo were more than a little terrifying.
She was walking home from classes with her friend ‘Cray when the strafing began, dragons flying low overhead, lighting buildings on fire at seeming random. They started running, feet pounding the pavement, every beat seeming to be not enough not enough, not enough, and as they ran, her ten-inch height advantage over her friend seemed to grow, and her feet were burning, screaming in pain, her heels feeling like they were moving. She kept running – there was something like a dinosaur lumbering down the street, and they had to get off the roads and into a house, preferably a stone house – until she couldn’t walk anymore, and found herself pulled into a building. There, the pain finally took over, and she passed out.
She came back to consciousness a few minutes later to the smell of ‘Cray filling her nose, thick and feline and worried, like a tom-cat ready to kill something, stronger than she’d ever known him. She opened her eyes, slowly, to find him hovering over her, his now-very-pointed ears pointing at her. A low giggle escaped her. “McCrae, I always said you were a tomcat.”
“And I always said you were a fox. I think I was a little off,” he noted. “Dodger says thylacine, and, more importantly, says we need to leave the city before the fighting really starts.”
“Dodger?” The only Dodger she knew was the bum who played violin for spare change.
“Dodger,” a voice behind her agreed; the bum’s voice, but richer, heavier, and more musical. “There’s a lot to explain, including why I was watching over the two of you, but the TL:DR version is this: Marduk has moved into the city with a crew of about seven smaller fae and a double dozen really nasty human and human-like warriors. The good guys are on their way, and they’re going to do their best to stop him, but everyone and everything will be on the lookout for kids like you, Changed but with no sense yet. Don’t promise anyone anything, don’t tell anyone your names, and by all that’s holy, don’t get into any fights with anyone.”
He was standing over Maggie by the time he finished this, revealing himself to be, well, himself, but with a shaggy tail and perky collie ears, and a much cleaner trenchcoat than she normally saw him in. There were gods attacking the city, so she avoided commentary about Crime Dogs, and simply nodded. She was pretty sure he was trying to save their lives.
“Where do we go? And how?”
He pressed a key into her hands, and another one into ‘Cray’s. “There’s a van outside. There’s a map with a route highlighted on it in yellow. Cray drives. You have the cabin key. Wait there for me. If I don’t come in a month… you’re on your own.” He helped her to her feet and gave them a gentle shove. “Go. There’s a war on, and you’re not ready to be enlisted.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/251508.html. You can comment here or there.
