Tag Archive | prompter: anke

Beauty-Beast 47: ♪ Thnks fr th Mmrs ♫

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Here’s the third of three chapters of Beauty-Beast thanks to Anke’s commission!  

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Ctirad found that he was smiling at Signy the way he probably hadn’t smiled at a woman in years.  Lifetimes. Generations.  Like a peer.  Like a friend.  It couldn’t last, but he liked the feeling.

Of course, they had more important things than him making friends right now.

“But, uh,” he cleared his throat.  “Maybe when this is done we could set up a time to talk about all that stuff? Keeping, being Kept, being young and ignorant fae? Right now, I think we’re supposed to be talking about – well, important things.”

“This is important!” Signy protested.  Then she looked at Sara Florentia and Timaios. “But I, I see what you mean.  Let’s talk about Ermenrich and this – Nedetaka priest.  Ctirad, you said you saw him, yes?  What can you remember?” Continue reading

Beauty-Beast 46: Clarity Arrives

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Here’s two of three chapters of Beauty-Beast thanks to Anke’s commission!  

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There was a moment of silence.  Not the whole lounge, thank whoever might be listening, just their little corner.  Signy was staring at Ctirad in obvious horror.  Timaios squeezed him tighter to his side, a quick gesture and still clearly affectionate.  Sara Florentia was looking at him as if he’d just gotten interesting.

“Ermenrich liked to make sure I wasn’t going to slip and say anything,” he explained to Signy’s horrified look. “Because I – because he didn’t think I was that bright.” It took effort to phrase it that way, to put it in Ermenrich’s court and not on his own shoulders, but he knew it would make Timaios happy that he hadn’t put himself down, and he thought it might explain things better to Signy. Continue reading

The Pumpkin Witch

The Pumpkin Witch (superimposed over a cinderella-style pumpkin carriage)

This story is the second one to my Squish-Squash, Pumpkins and Gourds Prompt Call. New characters, unknown world. 

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 “They say she only comes out when the pumpkins are ripe.” Harriet tried for a creepy voice but ended up, to her ear, sounding more sick then spooky.

“They say,” Yasmin tried to top her, “she spoke to Charles Shultz, but he tried to banish her by creating the Great Pumpkin.”

“They say she spoke to Matt Groening and he tried to warn the world in his Treehouse of Horror ‘Great Pumpkin,'” Doc countered. Continue reading

Perdition

This is a soulmark AU Supernatural fanfiction set in an unknown time period in Supernatural except that it happens after the beginning of Season 4. 

Spoilers for that – the beginning of season 4/end of season three – and nothing else, and sort of handwave on Supernatural theological logistics, which is fine, because this is a soulmark AU. 

Definition soulmark AU: (see here for a longer take) – an alternative universe version of an extant setting (often otherwise very similar to the canonical universe) where soulmates exist and some or all people have them; all soulmates have a mark of some sort on their bodies that indicate who their soulmate will be. 

This one was prompted by Anke long enough ago that she may have forgotten – sometime in August, I think.  Might be July. 

The soulmarks in this were inspired by the way the story here – although more by my memory of the way they worked (symbolism and language important to the other) than the actual mechanism in that fic.

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Dean had heard of people who had soulmarks of the first words their soulmate had said to them.  Continue reading

The Pibald Player

This is left over from Pi Day.  I had trouble wrapping it up, and in the end, I didn’t… quite get it wrapped up the way I wanted, but here it is. 

It’s in the greater world of Fae Apoc but has none of the standard warnings except – it IS set in a post-apoc and some of the people are kind of shitty people.

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She called “pip-piperelle!” as she walked into the town, singing a wordless tune & strumming a pipa.  She was let in somehow, despite the fact that the town was shut down, not letting anyone in for fear they’d bring disease or pillaging, of which the town had had none but their neighboring towns’d suffered more than a little over the  last months.

(in the small parts of their hearts, in the privacy of their psyche, some of them knew that they had pillaged, and that meant they feared other pillagers even more.)

The world was falling apart; everyone knew that.  People were being assholes everywhere, being small and petty and, well, pillaging.  They were also dying of things that had not been a blip on the radar 2 years ago – plague and famine and fear and malnutrition.

And into this town, this barricaded town with no way in or out, this woman strode.

Her skin was piebald, marked here and there with shapes like clouds, paler than her brown skin, in places pure white.  Her outfit was likewise piebald, a tie-dye tunic flowing down to her thighs and batik-patterned leggings covering her legs.  Her hair was pulled back from her face in two puffball-like pigtails to better show off the markings that speckled her, and the tunic was low-cut and sleeveless.

“I can fix your crops,” she told them.  “I can make them happier; I can make them better.  I can sing to them and they’ll grow.” Continue reading

Other Duties As….

I sort of mushed two of Anke’s prompts together and thus we have this!

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“Call Dr. Takori.  Now, please.”

Dr. Felin’s admin assistant looked up from her work, stifled a mutter about not doing anything at all, of course not, and dialed Dr. Takori with a push of her fingers before handing Dr. Felin the phone. 

“Yal.  Yal, I need you to see this.  No, I’m calm, what are you talking about, I’m not on blues, Yal, that was a decade ago.”  Dr. Felin’s voice dropped to an annoyed hiss. “Come on, Yal, don’t be like this.  I need you to see this – fine.  Fine, Stana, could you come out here, please?  I promise I won’t throw a fit about any belated procurement, not even the Stygian Cheese Powder.”

Stana swallowed another sigh and followed Dr. Felin, suiting up with the skill of someone who had spent the last 5 years on interstellar digs, out the airlock and from there, to the dig. 

At least this rock had nearly breathable atmosphere, so it could be terraformed – and likely would be, and soon, which meant that Felin was in a bit of a hurry.  It also meant that if there was a suit accident, it wouldn’t be quite so immediately fatal and they had a chance of getting inside before they suffocated on sweet air. 

“Dr. Felin-?” Continue reading

Meter Maid

This story was written because Anke posted this toot and I had an idea. 

There’d been a time when Pat’s co-workers had snickered “meter maid” when Pat left for work, but that time – that had been before the city had managed to push through a very obscure translation of a caelo usque ad centrum and managed to make it stick by the sheer tenacity of the city’s lawyers.

Now – now Pat suited up, along with a brigade of other meter maids, grey ghosts, and they strapped onto their jet scooters.

Nobody parked illegally in the city anymore.  There’d been one case, a month ago.  The people nearby had physically moved the car out of the illegal spot and into a fountain several blocks away.  Nobody had listened to the illegal-parker’s complaints.

People fed the meters and the city allowed it, because someone was paying for that spot.  People went out of their way to park tidily.

And Pat and the grey ghosts jetted up into the sky, up out of the atmosphere, and into the parking spots around the asteroid belt and the city’s first space station.   It wasn’t a safe job, not with the Ih(oh)ill bombers still swooping down at seemingly random intervals to hit the stations or the miners, not with the Higun being, well, as Higun as possible in an attempt to counter rumors that them not attacking Earth was a sign of cowardice, not with some of the unknown aliens still trying to test out Earth’s strength on occasion instead of just ignoring their laws and, say, their parking regulations.

But when you could slap a parking ticket and a drive inhibitor on a Higun spacehopper and then very politely explain the city laws, when you dodged an Ih(oh)ill bomber and managed to hit it with an illegal-driving outside of accepted lanes ticket which came with not only the drive inhibitor but also an immediate impound order (self-reinforcing, of course, like the drive inhibitor), when you caught some alien equivalent of a teenager trying to park in the park (which would be “it is free space, no? Then free it should be for any activity.”) and slapped them with just a big enough fine to make them think about pranking some other city next time –

It still wasn’t a safe job, not by a very long shot.  But it was a fun job.

And Pat’s fellow officers saluted when the grey ghosts left and cheered when they came home, and that made it even more fun.

 

Want more?

 

Meter maid (and Wiktionary) and Grey Ghost.

Tinkering

Originally posted on Patreon in Nov 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
Tinkering
New universe, as far as I know.

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The terrarium seemed to have developed a strange mess in the lefthand back corner.  Isidora moved it this way and that – carefully, always carefully; even though it was on a rotating platform, she always made certain to move it very slowly – until she could get a magnifying glass aimed at the corner in question.

Yes.  She frowned at it for a moment.  It seemed to have gotten a ruined building.   Ruined, mostly abandoned, the roof collapsing.

When was the last time she’d looked at that corner?  Maybe last week.  The terrarium was mostly self-sustaining – it needed a little water and a little food every so often and she kept it plugged in to a battery back up to make sure it stayed at about the right temperature and such things, and it had been a busy week.

Still.  She took a series of photos and made a couple notes.  She’d have to keep an eye on that. Continue reading

A Good Life

To Anke’s Prompt.  I found I didn’t want to make it dark this time. 

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The field had been warm, sun-kissed and sheltered from the wind. The soil was rich and the rain was lovely.

Now the air was cold and the Vines were drying up. The pumpkin, and all its siblings and cousins, were full-grown, ready. In two more weeks, maybe four, they would start going back to the soil.

The pumpkin saw its family being taken away, moved on wagons and carts. The ground was cold. The sunlight was thinning and the pumpkin could not reach the nutrients in the earth any more.

“This one! It’s gorgeous, look at it!”

Hands lifted the pumpkin and carried it, brought it into bright light and turned it around and around.

The knife shaped and altered the pumpkin while the voices cooed over it. “Beautiful! Awesome!”

The candle flickered inside the pumpkin and the moonlight shone down on it. Visitors stopped and praised it.

The pumpkin would go back to the earth soon. For now, it was pleased.