Archive | October 16, 2012

Etchings

Oct16

My Giraffe Call is Open here! Stop in and leave a prompt!

This is to thesilentpoet‘s prompt.

Addergoole has a landing page here

“This is my room.” Speed opened the door and stepped inside, despite the way Gregori was holding his wrist. He liked the way Gregori was holding his wrist – firmly, without pain but with the certain threat of it underneath the surface.

“Invite me in.” He liked that, too. No fucking around; Gregori got right to the point.

“Please come in, Gregori, sir.” He lowered his eyes, making it sound coy, and stepped back into his room, using the bigger boy’s grip on his wrist to reel him in. “Would you like to see my etchings?”

“That’s a line so old it’s petrified.” He seemed pleased. Speed liked that it pleased him.

“I decided to make it new again.” He tilted his head towards his desk, asking permission and pointing all at once. Sell it. Be, be with every muscle, the perfect sub, and see if he bites.

Speed hoped he bit. Unlike some of the other bears around here, Gregori didn’t have rend-and-tear predator teeth. Speed wasn’t certain he’d like quite that much pain.

“You… ha.” Gregori moved that way, allowing Speed enough play to get to his desk. “You did, indeed. Are you using acid?”

“I am.” He picked up his favorite print. “Professor Akatil said he had a set-up for printing, too, down in the basement. I did this one before I came here.”

As a come-on, it left little to the imagination; as a self-portrait, even less.

“You can’t have drawn this from life.” Gregori sounded amused, but he also sounded impressed.

“Photos,” Speed allowed. The etching, one of his best, showed him bound in a complex hogtie, gagged, and blindfolded. he looked through his eyelashes at Gregori. “I could use some new photos to work from…”

Etchings on wikipedia

Next:
Catch (LJ)
Formality (LJ)
Bound (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/408419.html. You can comment here or there.

The Black Unicorns of Cardenborn, a story of Unicorn/Factory for the Giraffe Call

Oct16

My Giraffe Call is Open here! Stop in and leave a prompt!

This is to ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt.

Unicorn/Factory has a landing page here

The word went up and down the water, up and down the silver road. It was whispered, not shouted, murmured, not spoken, alluded to and never written down. Nobody wanted the factories to find out, the Town to find out, but everyone else wanted to know.

The word did go into the Towns, too – the Towns hired any number of Villagers, after all, and, perhaps most especially, the Towns employed women of an age but not an inclination to know better. Sujennia’s mother called them, into her pottage, “no better than they should be.” When it came to Cardenborn, however, the opinion was quickly coming that they were far better than expected. Sujennia and her age-mates certainly thought so.

Cardenborn, a thicket-ringed village near the lake end of a wide stream, had been home to a small family of unicorns for far longer than any other Village in the area; even before the factories had come, the most-downstream places often found themselves with water needing purifying.

They had made their deals, the same as any village. Generation after generation, they had purified their water and given their virgins to the unicorns. Nobody had really noticed – except, Sujennia guessed, unicorns from other villages, who never came too close to Cardenborn – that their unicorns weren’t quite as white. At first, the grandmothers told, the unicorns had just been a little grey. Then they’d been a little greyer, and a little less fussy about the purity of the virgins sent to them.

Sujennia’s great-auntie told of a time when, during her youth, a white unicorn had ventured near Cardenborn. “That thing, let me tell you, sniffed the air once and ran away. And there were our unicorns, laughing the whole time.”

And now? Now the black unicorns of Cardenborn were a whisper, a legend, a sneaky rumor, and every working girl in the seven counties was working their way to the thicket. Because the black unicorns would not touch maids like Sujennia and her age-mates, no. The onyx horns wanted only experienced women.

And the Villagers of Cardenborn were more than willing to pay for a few hours of working girls’ time, because it meant their maids all lived, all intact, to pass their virginity on in a more human manner.

And the waters might shimmer oddly, but they were as pure as any in the seven counties.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/408257.html. You can comment here or there.

Tradeoffs

Oct16

My Giraffe Call is Open here! Stop in and leave a prompt!

This is to kelkyag‘s prompt.

The Space Accountant has a landing page here

Genique woke out of a sound, somewhat drunk sleep in a startled panic. She was back in the box, she was back in the chain, she was choking…

“Genique? Miss Wadevier?” Someone was pounding on her door. Nobody had knocked before. And that wasn’t Basi. “Are you in there?”

The chain… She was laying down. The chain normally pulled her into a sitting position. She touched her neck, wondering what was going on. “Oh!” She’d twisted her bedding around her throat in her sleep.

The night began to come back to her. The beer. The beers. Lots of beers. She pulled herself to her feet and opened the door.

It wasn’t so much that she recognized the woman on the other side of the door, as that she could match the face with splintered memories. “Am I late?”

“Oh, no, the First won’t be calling for you for for at least an hour. Oh, I’m Marist Irio. I’m the Quartermaster.”

She was, Genique noticed, carrying a small box. “How can I help you?”

“I know First’s got you working on some paperwork, but she’ll probably send you to the Pit as soon as you’re done. And I have some numbers I can’t get to line up…”

“Aaah. Come on in.” Her new room wasn’t much more than her old room, but it had a real bed, and a real desk. “What’ve you got?”

Marist pulled a data pad out of her box. “Supply numbers aren’t adding up, here… and here.” She tapped at the lines in question.

“Hrrm.” Supplies had been part of the question in the First’s missing funding. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Basi mentioned you were thinking of taking in your jumpsuits? I’ve got a pocket machine… I can work on your suits while you look at my numbers?”

“Oh, that would be great.” A less-bleary glance at Marist’s uniform showed that it was tailored far better to the dark woman’s curvy figure than the off-the-shelf jumps. “That would be really great.”

This was how things happened, she supposed; half an hour of paperwork while Marist’s hand sewing machine zipped along, trimming Genique’s jumpsuits into something trim and fitted.

“You seem so normal.” That was after half an hour, and six jumps’ worth of sewing, seven months of purchase records studied. “I mean…” Marist flailed a bit. “You seem too ordinary to be here.”

Genique didn’t want to laugh at the woman, she really didn’t, but a little snort escaped anyway. “If my family could hear you say that…”

“It’s just… you’re an accountant. You’re the very definition of white bread, sitting here in the middle of a pirate ship doing the paperwork. It’s surreal.”

“Story of my life.” Genique sighed, and put down the pad. “Why do you think my family didn’t find the money for the ransom? Why do you think I’m sitting here waiting for whatever the Pit is?”

“Normal’s different on a farm planet?”

“Normal’s different everywhere you go, I think. At home… I was the black sheep. Unmarried, at my age. Bookish, not that good at the farm work.” She smiled dryly. “Afraid of bugs. Here…”

“Here,” Marist tossed her the final jumpsuit, “you’re bookish, which we desperately need. Put-together, adult. We’re not a very adult crew, you may have noticed, aside from the First. So… normal-seeming, I guess.”

“The old maid once again.” She highlighted the final error in Marist’s bookkeeping.

“Hardly.” The look the younger woman gave her was surprisingly steamy. “Try that on, would you?” Genique turned her back to comply, and Marist continued. “If we’re going for old-fashioned terms, have you heard of ‘cougars?'”

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