Archive | June 30, 2011

30Daysmeme, On the Set

Jun30

Day 24 of 30 days of Fiction: “24) Write a scene on a movie set”

In FaeApoc setting, or, at least, meta about the faeapoc setting, specifically the web-serial Addergoole.

Fae Apoc has A Landing Page (LJ Link).

“So, wait, what’s supposed to be going on here? Isn’t this a little unbelievable? Instant lust at first sight?”

Arthur rolled his eyes at Mindy. The actress had the arrogance and the look to play Shahin, but she understood none of the subtlety, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t even bothered to read the script, much less the source material.

The girl they’d gotten to play Kailani was a brilliant actress, but that was the only way she could ever be called brilliant. She didn’t need to be, of course; her lines were all written for her. The guy playing Conrad had the smile down, and that was all he really needed. Olly, playing Jamian, on the other hand, was so impressive at the role that Arthur had yet to figure out if the actor was in actuality a guy or a girl.

And Arthur himself? He stepped up to Mindy, setting a hand on her bare back. “It’s not quite first sight,” he murmured; “they’ve been courting all week. And, of course, there’s the magic to contend with.”

“The magic,” she said flatly, thinking, clearly, that it was a come-on. Yeah, she hadn’t read the script.

“They are made for each other,” he smiled, without a touch of shame. “Almost literally. They are carried away with lust, not because they’re both so damn hot,” he allowed that to be a smirk; both he and Mindy knew they were good looking, after all, “but because the touch of bare skin sends something like electricity through them. They get carried away by the feedback from her power.”

She looked up at him through long eyelashes; they’d even gotten the height right in their casting. “You’re really into this, aren’t you?”

He pressed his hand against her. “I like to know where I stand.”

Yeah, he thought, grinning to himself, they’d cast Emrys right, too.

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Kink Bingo, Stranded World – Love Letters

Jun30

kink_bingo – G-1 – phonesex/epistolary – from my card.

Stranded World; Autumn in a private moment. Stranded has a landing page (LJ Link)
.

The mail drop was hidden in a hole in a tree, twisted around with magic to keep the squirrels from using their letters as nesting, to keep prying eyes from seeing.

One function that Autumn and several other itinerates of her ilk served was as couriers. E-mail could be read, phones tapped, postal mail interrupted. Messages travelling by courier were far less susceptible to tampering or loss; second best were messages left in strand-locked mail drops like this, then moved to the next drop by courier.

There were seven envelopes and one small box in this load; Autumn shuffled through them before sliding them into her backpack. The Tribe in Kansas. The Barony of Thescorre in New York. Autumn, who works the inks.

She’d expected the last one, although not the fine calligraphy in which it was written or the soft rag paper it was written on. He’d been practicing, was leaving her this in lieu of flowers that would die or jewelry she might not wear. She smiled warmly, and hurried back to her camper to read it.

My autumn leaf, my harvest moon, my darkest ink, my brightest day…

She couldn’t help but smile at the hyperbole. He’d played Shakespeare at a couple festivals she worked, and done the Bard one better such that even the lit majors were often fooled. But oh, did he love his overwrought turns of phrase.

I write these words on this paper, because this is the closest I can come, right now, to touching you. If I had my way, instead of dead trees, I would be drawing these words on your skin. I would start just below that tiny scar on your ankle bone, the thin line whose story changes every time I ask…

She’d tripped and fallen on her sister’s doll as a child. But that was secondary to the full, urgent shape of his letters, the way that he’d pressed in heavily on “I would start,” the way that his ink had blotched (he was using a real pen and ink, then) at “scar.”

And, starting there, I would write my love. I would write it in every language I know, twine it into the strands of the ink, whispering as I worked up and around your calf: this flesh, here, this line, this tendon. Let this leg carry you closer to me. Let this knee bend like the willow in the wind. Let this thigh…

Oh, the things I would write on your thighs, my midnight muse. The story of our love, of our lovemaking, spiraling up and up, until my ink ran with your wetness. Until my pen brushed your labia and I was writing around your pretty clitty of our secrets, words I would never utter, words no other soul could take from me.

And there on your sex I would write my love.

She lay on the picnic table, reading his letter again and again, picturing the lines of his calligraphy wrapping around her body, imagining how the pen would feel, scratching ever so lightly into her skin while his breath blew warm and humid, so close. He had sweet breath, she recalled, and sweet sweat.

It was a beautiful gift he had left for her. She picked up her stylus and dipped it in the good ink, the deep indigo she saved for special occasions. Starting just above the scar, she wrote to him:

If I could fold myself into a letter for you, and wait here in a mail drop for your touch, then I would. If I could press my skin through the postman’s slit, stamp my love, scan it and e-mail it, I would. I would become a letter so that you could always carry me.

“Carry me” wrapped around the base of her knee, tickling her, and she giggled, laughing at herself, laughing at the tickling.

But we are people, my love, and so, in lieu of myself, I give you these words on my skin. Your name on my thigh, my highwayman, my poet, my tattercoat bard.

She wrote in lazy spirals, so that “tattercoat” drew across her hip, and “bard” on her smooth mons. The photos would have to do, until she could see him again.

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The Anthropologist’s Journal

Jun30

From [community profile] dailyprompt

Planners’-verse, further in the future.

Beginning of Spring, probably year 317 Post-Conflict

I have been living among the Kaveh for a little over five seasons now. Such was not my original plan, of course; we do not embed anthropologists in the wild tribes any more. Early attempts had a 0% survival rate, and even we – the Tower, that is – are not that mad.

I was not, at the time, even studying the Kaveh, or any of the wild tribes. I was visiting a village along the canal, discussing education plans and a method of marrying-out to nearby settlements that would prevent the excessive inbreeding such places are prone to. Considering what the tribes did to that place, I doubt that is a problem anymore.

Not the Kaveh, however; that was the Kybelii. They raided in numbers and with ferocity that exceeded any report or tale I have ever heard, tearing through the village. They killed the men, and took the women and children prisoner, including, of course, me.

I will not write of my days with the Kybelii. They were a violent and smelly people, and I don’t mourn their demise, except in the loss of their genetic diversity.

Their demise, and my unwilling and accidental embedding among the Kavah, came two and one-half moons after the slaughter of Johnsport, when the Kavah and two other of the wild tribes attacked and killed all of the Kybelii warriors and about half of their domestic population. They split the remainders and the slaves – myself, again – among the three tribes. I, of course, went to the Kavah.

At first, I believed that this would simply be the same unpleasant, odorous captivity with a new set of captors. Our information on the wild tribes didn’t indicate any major variation in behavior: they pillaged, stole, and raped, and as far as we could tell, they did so indiscriminately. Their slaves were treated as chattel, as cattle, bought and sold, bred until they died, often in childbirth.

And perhaps that would have continued to be my fate. The tribe sold many of the slaves they acquired from the Kybelii, and two more died on the long trip from summer pastures to winter camp. I could have been among either group, easily enough.

But a young female warrior-in-training who I believed to be the chief’s daughter, and her brother, slightly older, took a liking to me, and I was moved into the yurt they shared with their mother for the duration of the winter.

By the time that the long, miserable, snow was over and it was time to move back to summer pastures, I was swollen with an unwanted pregnancy from the Kybelli, and had learned to speak the dialect the Kavah used and taught my owners quite a bit of the Scholar’s English I had grown up speaking. I had also befriended my owners’ mother, as well as the two teenagers themselves, and, through them, the chieftain, as well as the man, their lore-speaker, who I had originally thought was the chief.

(Their lore-speaker is the father to my young mistress, the chieftain the husband-to-be of both mistress and master. More on that later).

And it seems that their lore-speaker is intrigued by the way that The City People (that would be yours truly, neveryoumind that I am, in fact a Tower Person) handle their disputes. His children were very miffed to find him taking more and more of my time, but he is, after all, an important person. And he is open to new ideas, even if, between you and I, journal, they are in actuality very old ideas.

We have been working on the idea of justice, recently, he and I. The Kavah, as with, I gather, many of the other wild tribes, have a concept of “revenge” and one of “survival,” but justice has until now been missing from their vocabulary.

During the summer, there is little time for talking, so I talk quite a bit during the long idle periods of winter, and now, as the snow begins to melt, I find myself talking quickly. They will raid again, soon. Perhaps I can bend them, slowly, towards fairness and justice. Perhaps this year there will be less slaughter.

I hope that I can. Their summer pasture, this year, is awfully close to the Tower.

Prompt: “bending towards justice”

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