Tag Archive | steamcallenta

Goat-riders, Stone-riders, a story of Reiassan for the Jun Giraffe Call (@lilfluff)

Jul2

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt. Reiassan has three seasons: wet, hot, and cold. A dohdehr is essentially a large domesticated weasel.

Lannamer in the short hot season was stinky, crowded, and loud. People lived atop each other in stacked apartments, hardly reaching the land or the síra, hardly spending time with the goats that had been their ancestral cornerstone, with the animals they’d lived beside and with.

Epyena was sick of it. She was tired of the constant politicking and the constant noise, the people everywhere and no place for the gods. She needed to get out of the business-and-Army hustle and bustle, before she became just another cog in the endless machine. She was moving to the mountains.

She got together three of her like-minded compatriots, two cousins and a child of industry from her days at University, spent half of her family-gifted stipend on land and goats, and headed East. They would raise goats and ride them, raise dohdehr and hunt them, raise the short-season crops their ancestors had raised and eat like true goat-riders, and not soft stone-riders.

That was the plan, at least. They moved in the end of the hot season, so there was no planting to be done until the next rainy time. The house on the land was old, decrepit, the roof half fallen-in; they pitched tents inside the walls, making jokes about living the true life of goat-riders. Until the goats started eating the tent-walls.

Then it was time to repair the roof of the stables, a skill none of them had gone to college for, and the roof of the house, even harder. Engineering was a nice theory, but it didn’t do as well getting tiles on the roof.

The day the dohdehr ran off with what little they’d managed for dinner, Epyena broke down crying. Her goat-rider ancestors, she feared, had been horribly stupid. Only the stone-riding made any sense.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/364714.html. You can comment here or there.

Building the Wedding-House, a story of Steam!Callenia for the Giraffe Call

Jul2

To fflox‘s prompt

Soon after Every Gift

The rebuild of their wedding-house was almost complete, which was good, since their wedding was less than a week away. All that was left were the final pieces of the roof.

The problem was, given the tight space of the street, even expanded, and the neighbors to three sides who had had enough of construction, thank you very much, a conventional crane was out of the question. Ropes and pulleys would work, and, indeed, were working, but even with a five-pulley system, the going was slow, hard, and painful. But they were doing it, Katyebah and Larzhal, with the help of a few of their closest friends.

And then Larzhal’s uncle Bantas showed up with a… device, at the same time that Katybah’s aunt Gelah showed up with some sort of contraption, one of them snorting steam and the other one farting smoke, glittering brass and solid iron, both making noises like a boiler that had seen better days.

“Dueling devices?” Katyebah was joking, although she wasn’t sure it was actually a jest. “Larzhal…”

“It’s all right, my lovely Katye.” He kissed her forehead, cheerfully helpful in that manner nobody else would have been allowed to be. “They can’t do much…”

“To our home?” She did not shout, because she did not want to upset the neighbors any further, but it was close.

“How long do your Aunt Gelah’s machines normally work for?”

“Perhaps an hour. Your uncle’s?”

“Perhaps two. So we ask them to take turns.” Larzhal smiled. “Three hours ought to finish the roof, and I’ll call a carter to help them get everything home when they’re done.”

“I knew I was marrying you for a reason.” She kissed him, in full sight of the next-door neighbor. Perhaps they would be gifted with curtains for their wedding.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/364365.html. You can comment here or there.

Goatless, a story of Steam!Reiassan for the Giraffe Call (@dahob)

Jun27

For [personal profile] imaginaryfiend‘s prompt and @dahob’s prompt

“It’s a prototype, of course.” Diryid ran his hands over the long shafts of his new machine. “And I still believe the river-boat was more practical. Our rivers and canals, after all, are smoother than our roads. But this will go, and if you stack the wood properly in the back by the boiler, and if you keep this little pocket here loaded with the proper fire-aether, it will go nearly as long as my river boat. Which is to say, it will get you easily from city to city in less time than a conventional carriage.”

He tightened a nut and burnished a shining piece of brass, smiling all the time at his audience. Finally, Syadaia cleared her throat.

“But what is it? I thought you were working on a dirigible?”

“Oh, that.” The engineer waved his hand in the air. “That is much easier, although its distance is, at the moment, more limited. We do not have a proper way, yet, to contain the most flammable aether. And wood weighs it down, you see. But it will go.”

They all looked over his head, where he was pointing, but they were in his garage, and there was nothing to be seen. It was Syadaia, youngest of the group, who was delegated by eye contact to ask, again.

“Where is the dirigible? And what is this… thing, Diryid? What does it do?”

“This. This is a goatless carriage. It will go, as I said, from Lannamer to the Arran cities in two-thirds the time it will take a two-goat conveyance. And, unlike that monstrosity your other contractor was working on, it will not blow up. Nor will it eat its passengers.”

“It never…!” Tallgua’s denial was only half-feigned. The “other contractor’s” conveyance hadn’t actually eaten anyone. But he’d been using wild aether. Nobody used wild aether in something that close to people!

“But the dirigible?”

“Dirigible, dirigible.” Diryid stomped his foot. “You will have your damn dirigible. But anyone can design one of those. This… this is my masterpiece, and you all will admire it.”

There seemed nothing to do but make the appropriate noises. They needed that dirigible, if their plans were to succeed. And to have the dirigible, it appeared, they needed… this.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/359150.html. You can comment here or there.

Every Gift, a story of Steam!Callenia for the Giraffe Call

Jun27

To fflox‘s prompt

Some time after Road Map

If there was one situation in everyday life where everyone seemed to have a need to get involved it was weddings.

And the problem was, in this case, Katyebah and Larzhal couldn’t find a way to deny any of them.

They were providing the land for their house – not traditional, but when Katyebah and Onton had, with Larzhal’s help, designed a plan to widen Lannamer’s worst traffic intersections, they had necessitated the semi-demolition of several buildings. One of those lots – now holding half of a former Education Bureau facility – had been deeded to Katyebah and Onton for their service.

Onton, in a rare move of complete generosity, had gifted his half to Katyebah and Larzhal as a wedding gift (until then, they hadn’t realized they were getting married, although everyone around them knew it). And the Education Bureau, grateful for the excuse to rebuild, had donated the services of their builder for a week of time.

All that was left were the designs to turn a half a building on a small lot into a full home.

And there, well, everyone had an opinion. Onton, who had given the land, had spent half a day scribbling on plans, adding “improvements.” At least he was an engineer. The happy couple’s parents, who by tradition would have provided the land and the building, had any number of ideas and input, most of which were completely unsuitable.

As the sun set, two days before the builder would arrive, Katyebah and Larzhal stared at the notes, the gifts, and the two pieces of useful input their families had provided.

“Double walls on the windward face.” Larzhal’s uncle Bantas has drawn in the lines with smooth, engineer’s-hand lines. “It’s facing the road, so it will block sound and protect you in the winter.”

“I got an overshipment of these blue tiles. It’s not enough for the whole roof.” Katybah’s aunt Gelah had dropped the cartons with a loud thump. “But you could do some sort of design.”

Katybah’s pencil was wandering, sketching designs suggesting wind and sea. The ancient building had good lines and sturdy walls, those that were left. The double wall would close in the building, and the tiles…

“Block the wind and bless it over with a prayer?” Larzhal smiled. “Always practical.”

“Always using every gift. That’s the tradition, after all.” She leaned against his arms, and considered the turret Onton wanted them to install.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/358516.html. You can comment here or there.

Road Map to…, a story of Steam!Reiassan for the Giraffe Call

Jan20

For kelkyag‘s prompt

Reiassan has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ; this is a story of Steam!Reiassan, far in the future of the Rin & Girey story

The city had been mapped before.

Everything on the continent had been mapped in one reign or another, the oceans around it charted, the flows of rivers, of aether, called sira now, even the ice movement diagrammed. But as the science grew, so did the methods of charting, mapping, and diagramming, and now, under the Emperor, the entire city of Lannamer was being mapped again.

They picked a corner to start from, drove a deep bronze pole into the ground, surrounded that with a stone compass rose, and settled the whole thing against flood, earthquake, and storm with judicious use of aetheric shifting and quite a bit of praying.

From there, engineers who would otherwise be idle, now that they were in a time of peace, were turned to surveying, measuring with a stick marked off in precise hoof-widths (the hoof in question having been cast in bronze off the original goat some centuries past).

Katyebah, who had joined the Emperor’s engineer team to design weapons of war, was a little disgruntled to find herself measuring buildings and surveying sun- and moon-lines down the streets. But the Army had paid for her education, so the next seven years of her life, whatever her feelings on the matter, belonged to the Emperor, so measure and survey she did. And because her team-mate was a pleasant sort and a grandson of His Majesty, she tried to do so with a smile.

“These old buildings,” Oton told her, “with the sixty degree angles? They were paying homage to the Three. But it certainly makes mapping the streets tricky, with nothing in the old neighborhoods at a right angle…”

“…And everything in the newer neighborhoods all square,” she agreed. She was, at the moment, frowning over a place where one of the oldest neighborhoods met up with a shiny-new set of construction, built on fill over what had been swamp and flood plain. “Pass me the protractor?”

“You think they’re difficult to draw, you should try getting a laden cart around these corners when you’re coming down a hill.” The voice surprised both of them; Oton dropped the brass protractor with a clatter. “Or, worse yet, coming down a hill in winter during the busy time of day when someone’s planted a stand in the middle of the road. If the Emperor wants the city easier to navigate, my lord and lady, he might think of widening the intersections.”

Katyebah had, during this speech, turned to look at their visitor, who appeared to be, from his dress, a carter of some skill and success, with the most astonishing blue eyes she had ever see (to be fair, they were the first blue eyes she had ever seen, as well). She worked her mouth, trying to find the words to tell him that this was just mapping, not decision-making, that she didn’t know if the Emperor even knew he had a traffic problem, that she sympathized with his troubles… But all she could make out, from a throat suddenly dry, was “I’m not a Lady.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/237859.html. You can comment here or there.

Steam!Callanthe Story from Prompt

Jan27

Part One: Plans

They hadn’t been meant to hear the news about Little Svon-on-Taba; they hadn’t been intended to be out of their rooms at all when the messenger came. Evanika and Orma were, as they had spent most of their childhoods and into what were nominally their adult years, grounded the week the messenger showed up. But, with a trait that had probably contributed to their state of perpetual confinement, they didn’t let a little thing like maternal disapproval (or the even-less-likely paternal censure) get in the way of their adventures.

So they had been in the back of the Emperor’s receiving room, anonymous among their cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and assorted other dozens of royal relatives, and conveniently camouflaged from discovery by Cousin Illavania’s immense feathered concoction of a hat, when the messenger, hastily cleaned up but still looking very much of the road, battered and scruffy and missing buttons on his jacket, bowed low and impatiently before His Eminence.

“We have found Little Svon-on-Taba, sire,” he’d announced eagerly, with an air of great importance emanating from him. The room had seemed less impressed with his announcement than he himself was, however; he’d gotten only a few gasps and quite a bit of murmured confusion.

Evanika and Orma had been just as lost as the rest of their family, but the Emperor had seemed intrigued enough that, when they’d retreated to Eva’s room, barely dodging detection by their father, they had immediately begun plans to discover more.

It had taken them over a week to research and prepare, their pace slowed by the necessity of hiding from their parents not only their plans, but the fact that they were working together on anything at all more complicated than eating dessert. All the while, several levels away in the huge castle warrens, the Emperor’s exploratory team made their own preparations.

They had to get there first; that was a given. Once they’d discovered what the story was behind Little Svon-on-Tabe, there had been no question if they were going; it became a matter, simply, of how.

Their older brother Iai provided the primary “how,” all unwitting; flitting from project to project in what appeared to be a family trait, he had put aside an small airship three-quarters of the way through building it because of a terminal flaw in the rudder design; he could not get the boat to properly detect nor navigate the air currents without making it too heavy for its air bladders to lift. In the mountainous ridged landscape of northern Callenia, the winds could easily be deadly for a ship with such a flaw; the ponderous, lumbering passenger air barges stuck to the valleys and lowlands, travelling, in many cases, the same paths as the river boats.

Making the boat steer itself was beyond the capabilities of either Orma or Eva, as it had been beyond Iai’s (Eva had held out some hope; together, the two of them could often outwit any one older relative). Eva had found a way to make the steering function manually, however, with the addition of two winglike appendages to the sides of the vessel to serve in lieu of a keel.

Orma had come up with the pièce de résistance, however, for their little expedition: spectacles, the metal-framed sort with the leather side guards that airship pilots wore to protect their eyes, but to these he’d attached a set of interchangeable lenses, pivoting from the sides up or down, to be looked through or not in whatever combination the wearer chose.

The lenses had taken most of the week and a few discrete calling-ins of favors on Orma’s part, while Eva designed and fabricated the wing-fins. Each individual lens, etched with the proper symbols and made of tinted glass, allowed the wearer to see into a different spectrum of what scientists, poo-pooing millennia of religious study, were now calling the aether. With the spectacles and Evanika’s new steering system, they could see the air flows and ride them, like riding the surf in a small sailboat. They could get to Little Svon-on-Taba faster in their tiny, swift aircraft thus than any river boat (going against current as it would have to) or plodding air barge could hope to.

With the questions of transportation and navigation out of the way, provisioning took only a few midnight trips out. They had done this enough times to know exactly what to swipe (and the castle staff, it seemed, had gotten used to their escapades; most of what they needed was already tidily packaged for them and waiting in their common hidey-holes); by the time they’d finished the fabrication of their tools, the ship was packed and ready to fly.

The maps had been the hardest; the castle librarian had gotten in some trouble over one or three of their earlier adventures, and, as such, was disinclined to help them or even let them into her domain. The closest city librarian was of a similar inclination, for similar reasons. They had to sneak all the way down to the West Quarter, a neighborhood that had been, in the days when their research was set, a very fine, up-and-coming place, and was now the sort of place where young royals should probably not be without an armed guard or three.

The very fact that no-one expected there to be royals in the West Quarter (combined with a bit of cleverness in the nicknames they used for each other and in their manner of dress) got them in and out of there safely, with the Allesely-dynasty-era maps of Little Svon-on-Taba, the Taba River, and Large Svon-on-Taba tucked away in Orma’s map case.

Two night before the Emperor’s exploratory party was even ready to leave, the pair floated their improved ship out of Iai’s launch bay. It moved perfectly, even loaded with supplies; the spectacles were amazing; they were actually doing it! Adventure awaited!

The ship glided a few lengths from the castle and jerked to a stop.


There will be more! I promise! But once I got to a stopping point at exactly 1000 words, I liked it so much I had to post it!

From wyld_dandelyon prompt “Strange glasses — not just steampunk-looking, but magical or cool in some mechanical way” and eseme‘s prompt “Also, I like blimps.”