Archive | October 2013

Bracken, her second year

Oct22

Thirteenth in a series of character-building vignettes following a bunch of characters through their time at Addergoole & beyond.

“Abatu. Abatu… Eperu.”

A tiny puff of dirt vanished.

“Again, and use the whole working.”

“Abatu Eperu gamma χώμα.” Braken leaned into the Working, pushing all of her energy into it. A pile of dirt the size of her fist disappeared.

“Better. And now we’ll try something a little easier.” DJ had its implacable, patient, never-getting-tired voice on. One of them needed to. “Create water in that hole.”

“Meentik.” Bracken coughed. “Meentik Yaku beta λακκούβα με νερό.” As demanded, a little puddle of water appeared in the hole she’d created.

“Very good. But I still can’t believe this is as far as you got in all of last year.”

“Last year was a bit distracting.”

“Your Workings classes aren’t supposed to be subject to that.”

“Tell that to my former Keeper.” Bracken shrugged. “He wasn’t all that bad or anything, but he was still distracting.”

“I remember. Still, you’re barely beyond basic Workings on anything…”

“Not on anything!” Bracken surprised herself with how vehement that made her. “Come on, there’s a couple things I can do really well!”

Her Mentor paused in its diatribe. “Indeed? Show me.”

Bracken found herself sighing in relief. She grabbed the hem of her shirt and yanked a big tear in it.

“Bracken, what are you…”

“Jasfe Unutu πουκάμισο.” Fix my shirt. She stared at the shirt, and let her smile break out as the shirt mended itself perfectly.

She pointed at a chipped mug on DJ’s desk. “May I?”

“Mm? Oh, yes.”

“Jasfe Unutu κούπα.” The mug looked as good as new, with almost no energy expended. “Jasfe Unutu καρέκλα.” Her chair became much more comfortable. “Jasfe…”

“That’s enough, that’s enough.” DJ looked as if it was trying to smile and frown at the same time. “Very interesting, very interesting. Appears you are… mmm… very specialized.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/586734.html. You can comment here or there.

Character notes for Steam!Reiassan – Instructor Getalréta

Oct21

Instructor Getalréta
Female

The Head of the Diplomacy and Law/Counting & Accounting House, Instructor Getalréta is a leonine woman in her late fourties.

She wears her steel-gray hair in a nine-braid strand (http://www.circleworks.org/hairbraiding.htm) with three side braids at each temple; she keeps beads on the side beads which she uses for abaci; the braids reach to mid-back.

She wears the colors of her House (http://artventrix.tumblr.com/post/64238570666/right-so-based-on-this-post-made-a-loose)- purple, teal, and red – prominently in a skirted outfit like thus (http://artventrix.tumblr.com/post/23457416205/i-am-ambivalent-about-these-colors-oh-well-i); generally the overtop and bottom skirt are red and purple, teal, and variations on those three colors feature in the other layers. She is a tall woman by Calenyena standards, at 5’7″, and has long chosen to simply be taller and wears heeled boots.

She’s gone a bit thick in the waist and a bit thick in the face over the years. Her nose is small and upturned, a classic Calenyena nose, and her mouth is wide and generous.

She teaches Accounting, primarily, although she has taken a hand at teaching all of the classes in her House at once time. She makes a point of teaching the Basics class every year, as well as the Graduating class, and writes all of the exams for all of the Accounting classes.

She’s a cheerful woman, often smiling, generally friendly with all of the new students. She’s not motherly, but can often find an anecdote or a little quest to cheer up homesick first-years.

She had two children of her own early on; one she lost to the war, and the other married a princeling. Her husband himself was a princeling, so she is connected to the royal family, albeit a bit distantly. In her youth, she worked as an accountant and business manager after graduating from the Aneskan Academy in Ossulund. She worked her way to the top of the House by, as she has often put it, simple addition and subtraction.

Her husband is currently in ill health, which makes Getalréta a little less pleasant than she normally is.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/586201.html. You can comment here or there.

Self-Care

Oct21

I am feeling particularly touchy right now about

your protagonists are evil and your setting is evil and this story is evil.

For the next 24 to 48 hours, I will block with impunity people who want to engage in that conversation with me.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/585776.html. You can comment here or there.

On Writing: Swearing

Oct21

How do you handle swearing in your constructed (fantasy, sci-fi, etc) settings?

I’ve run into this more than a few times over the years. Sometimes, I find out something about the setting when I have the characters start swearing.

Gods below… swear men in Tír na Cali, which leads to the question… below what, and why are they below.

Eleven departed gods… people curse in Fae Apoc. Why are there 11? Where did they go?

I’m still trying to decide about curses in Reiassan… Girey blasts things a lot and, coming from a maritime culture, sometimes swears by whirlpools. Rin… doesn’t swear much.

How do you handle swearing? What’s your favorite and/or least favorite ways you’ve read other people handling it ?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/585624.html. You can comment here or there.

A week of Settings – Day Five: Bug Invasion

Oct18

It was an ordinary day when the bugs invaded.

The bugs had swooped in, hitting the early-warning system and landing within hours of that. There was time to sound alarms, but not time to evacuate billions of people to safe places – if, indeed, there would have been safe places for all.

They weren’t truly bugs, of course; they were an alien species with alien biology. But they had segmented bodies and compound ideas, and the term stuck.

Worse than their attack, worse than their alien behavior, was how they succeeded in their attack: they invaded the bodies and minds of humans (not all humans, but a select few) in a symbiotic merger that left them better able to work with and understand the human psyche.

They won the first thrust of the battle.

However, they were not counting on the complexity and strength of the human resistance.

Bug Invasion starts with the invasion. From there it follows the symbiotes and their struggle to deal with the human condition.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/585273.html. You can comment here or there.

I miss my icons -need pd DW account

Oct18

So I will write you words for DW bucks at 10 words/point, up to 700 590 points.

Former title – “and DW doesn’t take paypal (boo DW why not?)” explained below by Recessional

Edit: Thank you, anonymous donor! Pls. claim your 600 words!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/585169.html. You can comment here or there.

Two Years Ago – Badges

Oct18

Two years ago, I wrote Questions for the “Spooks, Creeps, Ghosts, and Ghouls” Giraffe Call. This follows that.

I admit, Juniper joining a Girl Scout troop was not my favorite idea when she broached it.

The troop, like her school, was mixed, which both a point for and against it. Juniper needed more experience dealing with “normal human kids,” on the other hand, dealing with normal human kids sometimes meant she came home crying, because they didn’t live in the same world she did.

Sage and I conferred. Then we debated. Then we bargained. Then Juniper went to Girl Scouts.

First, there was that incident with the Rakshasa. The Girl Scout leadership, you see, is entirely human. They’re entirely human and very, very mundane, and they didn’t know what a Rakshasa was.

I had a talk with them – and a much longer talk with the Rakshasa – and the troop got a second leader. I thought everything was settled. Juniper was having fun. She was even making friends, friends with human girls. She even had her first sleepover – which meant I had a nice long conversation with three human mothers and, in the end, one of of them slept over, too. We braided each other’s hair and watched bad movies; it was like being back at the Pumpkin again.

Things were going well, and the Rakshasa hadn’t eaten anyone (my brownies, she said, helped quite a bit). Then Junie came home with her new friends, crayons, and blank badges. After they’d been working for three or four hours, I thought to ask what they were up to.

Junie looked up at me with her best I’m-innocent-really-Mom expression. “We’re making new badges.” Her friend Mirella was drawing something very very tiny with pen in the middle of her badge.

“New badges?”

Courtney held up her paper, on which, in very careful handwriting, was listed a full description of what had to be the badge Mirella was drawing. “They don’t have enough badges. So we’re making more. This is the pixie furnishings badge.”

Well, at least she was spending time with more girls her age…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/584892.html. You can comment here or there.

Learning the Aether, a setting Fic

Oct18

See also Learning the Sira

This story takes place approx 750 years after the time of Rin & Girey, in the era of the Edalley Academy stories (forthcoming), also known as Steam!Goats era.

I am not wed to the terms for the different sorts of aether – feedback?

“There is more that we do not know about the aether than we know.”

Instructor Posvorrem was a tall, lean man, with ice-and-slate braids down to the back of his knees and the tidiest beard his students had ever seen.

“If we were to put all of the knowledge of the aether that scientists currently hold in a goblet.” The instructor picked up the goblet he used for such demonstrations. “Then everything that we still did not know would fill this tower.

“Still.” He had a habit of pacing up and down the rows of tables. It made his students even more nervous than they already were. “We will attempt to cram into your heads all that the goblet holds, and hope there is room enough.”

A nervous titter filled the room. Posvorrem smiled without humor. “Aether is a function of the way parts of the world rub against other parts. For instance, when you have a geological fault line, you will have deposits of the aether that associates itself with stone and earth, mineraloid aether. When you have a deep current in the ocean, the hydrologic aether likewise deposits-“

“How does it deposit in the ocean?”

Instructor Posvorrem coughed. His gaze fixed on the offending student until they blushed and looked away.

“It leaves small pockets of a semi-solid mass which are carried along, sometimes settling at the bottom of the ocean floor and sometimes being pushed to the surface. A wind current will do something similar, and the push and pull of plants in a forest will create small nodules of biologic aether…”

“What about people?” This was, at least, a different student. Posvorrem didn’t even bother looking at that one.

“There is no such thing as humanic aether. I’d suggest you put it out of your mind.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/584584.html. You can comment here or there.

Rohanna, her Second Year

Oct18

Twelfth in a series of character-building vignettes following a bunch of characters through their time at Addergoole & beyond.

“And what will you do?”

Professor Fridmar was staring at her. Rohanna knew this was supposed to be unnerving, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel anything but a little amused.

“What, you mean ‘now that I’m free?'” She shrugged, and tried not to laugh at the professor. At her Mentor, even if she’d had to growl and grumble to get him to agree. He hadn’t liked her reasons. Neither had Dyfri. That was the point. “It’s not like Dyfri yanked the chain that much.”

“But the chain was there, nonetheless, and now it is gone. Dah, what will you do now that you are free?”

“Same thing I did while I was under the collar.” She didn’t understand what the big deal was. It was a collar. It was a few rules. And then it was gone. She’d been through that before a time or three.

“You are going to wander around seeing how many people you can annoy and how much effort it takes to do so?”

Rohanna felt a grin coming to her face. “Yes, that was part of the idea. Probably continue to sleep with cy’Linden, because that confuses everyone.”

“And your animals?”

Rohanna felt her expression soften. “You’ll let me keep helping, right?”

“And if I say, only if you stop sleeping with all of cy’Linden?”

“Then I say, you are giving me a rule and not a frown, and then I stop sleeping with some of cy’Linden.”

“And if I say, only if you come to my bed?”

She tilted her head. That was a new one. “I say, ‘well, Professor, I didn’t know you cared.'”

“And you do it?”

“With your promise.”

“Animals are a very important thing to you.” He said it like a fact, which it nearly was. Rohanna corrected him.

“The animals are the only thing.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/584248.html. You can comment here or there.