Yesterday: 167.6/166.6 (variation over 4 weighings)
Today: 167.4
With Oli-Kitten: 173.8 lbs
Yesterday I
* wrote down all points
* Walked 1.6 miles
* fell over exhausted
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ysabetwordsmit‘s Prompt
Warning: this turned out a bit dark.
“Have you ever stroked a unicorn?”
The tavern wasn’t the sort that catered to women, certainly not to delicate, smooth-skinned women wearing silk reminiscent of a habit or a widow’s weeds. She made the men who drank there uncomfortable, hard-working rough men who drank hard, rough drinks. She made the bartender nervous, a man who kept two knives and a cosh under his bar and had used all three without flinching. She made the boy who ran errands and the girl who waited tables nervous, skinny orphans who had seen more in their lives than the hard men had in spans three or four times as long.
And they didn’t seem to be making her nervous at all.
They’d tried, they really had. Leering, rude jokes. Excessive, sarcastic chivalry. Belching. They didn’t even have to work at the body odor. When all else had failed, they’d just tried ignoring her, and yet, night after night, bad drink after bad drink after worse food, she kept coming back.
Tonight, when they all sat three seats away and tried to ignore her bubble of presence, tonight, when they’d finally managed to actually forget she was there for a bit, tonight, she came up with that one.
The bar fell to silence. They all stared at her, then stared at Jakob. Jakob could answer. He had an answer for everything.
“Stroked a… Lady. Lady, what in the blazing furnaces…!”
It was the answer they would have given. Tavern-goers nodded sagely. What in the blazing furnaces, indeed.
“A unicorn.” She sipped her ale as if it were wine. “Its coat is very soft, you know.”
“No, I haven’t… who in the ground gears pets a unicorn?”
“I wasn’t intending to pet it, you see.” She sipped her ale again. “Barkeep, something a bit stronger, if you please.”
“Lady, I think you’ve had enough.”
“Barkeep.” Her voice had taken on a new edge, an edge of pearl and dagger, an edge that reminded them of the unicorns they were all trying so hard to forget. “I have had hardly sufficient to begin. I ask you again, all of you, have you ever stroked a unicorn?“
It occurred to Jakob just about then that the black of her habit covered a waist that could have been thickened with age, or, perhaps more likely, with bandages. It occurred to him what he had heard of those the unicorns didn’t favor, when the towns and villages sent their women to the water. “Give her what she wants.” His voice was harsh now, too. His daughter had gone to the river. She had come back with a baby. He didn’t think that was what this woman had returned with. “It’s on my tab.”
“No, Lady.” He held the eyes of every man in the bar for one long minute. “None of us have ever touched a unicorn, but we would be honored to hear your story.”
Next:
Unicorn Strokes (LJ)
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I recently saw this quote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM on a bumper sticker: Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
It reminded me of the apocryphal recipe for rabbit stew that starts “first, catch the rabbit.” (link)
By Sagan’s standards, we did not make Saag Paneer from scratch. However, the paneer (cheese) was made from milk, buttermilk, and salt at home, and half the spinach and all the onions were grown in our own garden, so it does meet at least some standards for such (I wonder if one can can saag. I think you should be able to, with a pressure cooker)
It was, by the by, delicious. I’m going to to make more paneer soon. Assuming I still hae more cheesecloth.
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I had a request for stories of children born out of Addergoole after their parents graduate. This is one of at least 2 that I will write.
Bianca is the daughter of Rand and Acacia from Year 4. Harvey and Miliana are Xaviera’s children by Ardell.
There were things Bianca remembered, years later, even when nobody said she should be able to. She’d been too little. Toddlers didn’t know these things. But they did.
Some kids, their moms or dads visited every weeks. Some didn’t even live in the crèche, just spent the days there while Mom and Dad were in school, or at work. Some came for preschool, and lived with an aunt or uncle or gramma in the Village. And then there were kids like Bianca, who might as well not have a Mom or a Dad (she was pretty sure she didn’t, actually. She remembered, very clearly, being two years old and telling another child “I don’t have parents. I came from the cabbage patch.”)
Other kids left after a year, or a couple years, or maybe, like Dora, stayed around but lived with their Moms. Other kids, kids who had parents, went away when their parent graduated. Sometimes their dad and their mom argued about who got to take them.
Bianca, and Harvey, and Miliana, and others like them, they stayed. They moved out of the 3-year-old room with the others, but the others got to leave, and they just moved into big-kid rooms. When Bianca was five, Lady Maureen took her aside, and talked to her about parents. She could have parents, she explained. She was old enough to understand that t was a choice. To stay here, in the Village, with the babies who got to go home with their moms and dads and the other kids who never did, or to go to a foster-family, to parents who would love her as their own.
Other kids took the fake-parents option. She knew that. But for her, it was a no-brainer.
She looked Lady Maureen in the eye, and said, as politely as she could (you were never rude to Lady Maureen), “the Cabbage Patch is my only mom and dad.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_Patch_Kids
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For the 52 days leading up to the 52 weeks of Addergoole: Year 9, I will be posting something Addergoole-related every day.
Today: A vignette of Year 8, from Rix’s prompt.
If you leave a light scenario and a number between 2 & 98, I may write another scene!
Thanksgiving, Year 8
Damaris was in Gregori’s room crying again.
He really wasn’t sure what to do about that, so he left her there. The other Kept had Thanksgiving dinner taken care of without her help, and dragging her out into the living room would just make the rest of the crew jeer at him.
He’d asked Deus about it, about Damie crying all the time. “It means,” his crewmate had told him, “that you’re doing it wrong.”
Doing it right, apparently, wasn’t a lesson Amadeus – or anyone else in the crew – felt like teaching him, so he left Damie in his room, got his own beer, and stared at the football like it still meant something.
“Still doing it wrong?” Even Nessie wanted to hassle him about it now.
“Still doing it wrong.” He finished his beer in one gulp. “Maybe you could…”
“Not that kind of girl, sorry. I’ll get you another beer, though.”
“Thanks.” When he got drunk, they’d discovered last year, he lost control of his tentacles. She wasn’t really being generous, just lining up the entertainment. Maybe he should stop at one.
Maybe Damie should stop crying all the time. Maybe…
A knock at the door broke his thoughts. Clearly still unsure of her role, but eager to please, Gita wiped her hands on her apron and opened the door.
“I’m here to see my daughter for the holidays.”
With that dark hair and that height, she probably wasn’t Nessie’s mom, and she wouldn’t have said that if she was Gita’s. Gregori stood up, not sure this was going to be a good idea. “You’re Damie’s mother?”
“And you must be the scumbag who thinks he’s Keeping her.”
note: Gregori becomes the Kraken from the Black House stories.
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For the 52 days leading up to the 52 weeks of Addergoole: Year 9, I will be posting something Addergoole-related every day.
Today: More character development meme!
Quintus
20.) Does your character have any irrational fears?
Quintus does not like the dark, not one bit.
This is not totally an irrational fear. He had bad experiences as a child with the lights going out, times when his stepmother would crawl in bed with him, times when he’d be locked in his room with the lights out for hours. But this has translated into a straight fear of dark places, the lights being out, being trapped. He sleeps with the lights on at night, and with a flashlight by the bed.
(as a note: that stepmother only lasted a year, before his father found out. But it was a very stressful year.)
Speed
21.) What would your character’s cutie mark be?
Speed’s mark would be a length of chain, or, more likely, a tangle of chain.
He had tendencies in the BD/SM direction before he came to Addergoole – mostly curiosity and a very little bit of experimentation. He fell into being Kept by Gregori more easily than he’d like to admit, and, once Kept, it is not the bondage parts that he really objects to at all.
Wylie
22.) If your character could time travel, where would they go?
Wylie would go everywhere! He’s the sort of guy that would enjoy wandering around watching historical events. He’d bother himself at eight, and at eighty, and, once he learned they could live nigh-on-forever, he’d try a hundred and eight and eight hundred, too. He’d visit his ancestors, and George Washington, and The Severing, and possibly Neanderthal Man.
He’d try to pull a Bill & Ted and pick up a historical girl, too. Maybe try fathering his own ancestor, if he was a bit drunk or feeling very brave.
Chances are, he’d keep travelling until he was stopped or he died, though.
Xanthia
23.) Is your character superstitious?
Only in a completely atheistic non-superstitious manner; Xanthia believes that the world is as the world is, and that’s that.
Addergoole is going to come as a bit of a surprise to her. 😉
You can ask any of these four anything today!
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“I have… forty feet of rope, my camelbak, and a jackknife.” Sancha turned her pockets inside-out. “Also fifty-seven cents and a movie ticket stub.”
“Save it all. We might be able to use it.” Fritz saw her look and correctly interpreted it. “Look, the first quest is always the hardest. you have to equip as you go, and by the time you’re done with this one, you’ll be a lot more ready for the next one.”
She couldn’t help but stare. “This isn’t a video game. This is real life. The really-real world.” Even if the really-real world was going all strange and upside-down lately.
“It’s still a quest. The same rules still apply.” He finished going through his own pockets. “Okay. Lighter. Multi-tool. Gloves. Butterfly knife. Two candy bars.”
“Shouldn’t a quest have a goal or something?”
“We are.” He gestured dramatically. “In a remote creek, having been abandoned by the school bus and everyone else after your little incident. We know which way we came, but also that the rest of the trip probably headed back that way, too. Yesterday, New York City vanished. I’d say our first goal is to find shelter and food, wouldn’t you?”
“My little incident.” She glared at him. “My little incident?” Her voice was rising, which made her lisp around her new teeth all the more obvious.
“Your little incident. Not that it was your fault – it was going to happen sooner or later – but it was definitely your thing.” He patted her head, between the new upwards-pointed ears. “So, our mission.”
She looked down the creek. “One way or another, we’ll get to shelter if we follow the water, right?”
“Right. See, grasshopper? You’ll get this questing thing down in no time.”
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