Archive | March 27, 2014

March Is Women’s History Month – day five: Regine

Mar27

March is Women’s History Month, and so for March I’m doing vignettes about or questions regarding any of my female characters, one/day from the 10th-31st.

The prompt post is here; please add more prompts 😉

This one comes from [Bad username: thnidu,]Addergoole, which also has a landing page here. (Stay tuned for the entirely-new rewrite of Book One of Addergoole, coming soon!)

This is a combination of nature and nurture.

To begin with, the Grigori, the bloodline of which Regine is a member, tend to be very analytic. They’re smart, some would say brilliant, and to them was given the guidance of mankind (some say) in matters of the mind.

This scientific bend tends to lead Grigori into ignoring the social and physical aspects of their development – they have the Mara for physical protection, so need no focus there, and since there is an unspoken disdain within the Grigori for the Daeva, who are those who inspire (and thus very social), social skills are seen as secondary.

Regine’s particular family line – her father, her older brother, herself – are very very science-and-math-focused, to the point where they often have difficulty understanding other people’s emotions (or, on the rare occasion that they notice their having them, their own). Regine’s father in particular discouraged all expressions of emotion as unneeded and a waste of time, so that from a very early age, Regine learned not to express feelings, and, after a time, not to acknowledge them even to herself.

In a crew with a Mara and a Daeva, Regine often feels the need to act even more Grigori-stereotypical; to be sure to show not the faintest shred of bias or emotion, to be as scientific and as analytic as possible, to balance out the often-irrational and hair-trigger-seeming emotions of her friends. This leads – along with an inability to cope with failure – to an even more repressed Regine by the time we reach the books.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/698400.html. You can comment here or there.

“The ** Episodes” Thoughts, and trimmed lists

Mar27

So, I think The Team aren’t straight-out police, they’re extralegal, consultants, whathaveyou.

Episode List, trimmed
Werewolf/Mistaken Identity
The Fae/Something that looks supernatural
Just a limb found/Rock music
Circus/Officer Down
Something from the Past / Buried alive
Ghosts/really gross decomp
Cult/??/Crop circles/?
Fetish Death/ ?
Mental institution/?
High School Sports/Monks
Attack on a member of the team/ Sci-fi convention
Not sure how or what with to pair the ones ending in /?
Season length? 4-10 episodes?

Cast, Trimmed
there’s going to be 5. But.
The Kid Genius (hacker)(female)/the cleric
The hitter/werewulf?
The mentor
The pretty one/fae blood
The secret
the sassy/snarky one
The rude one who gets things done (possibly also hitter)
The NEW One

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/698114.html. You can comment here or there.

A Place Description (@korionfray)

Mar27

So, the writer in my attic, K Orion Fray, sends out a weekly writing inspiration e-mail, which includes a writing prompt.

A prompt from several weeks ago:

Take a ten minute chunk and write something new coming into your scene. If you described a person, make them notice their setting. If you wrote about a place, have someone walk into it. If you described an object, make something interact with it. The trick here is to not duplicate what you did before–so don’t write two people yet! Be sure to keep yourself to ten minutes this time around. Here’s a timer you can use, if you need help with that!

Description in line is something I still need work at. So I kept on from the last description prompt and here we go.

“If you can’t tell me, show me.” Sergeant Allise, again, didn’t seem to change her tone, but her voice still seemed more gentle.

“Yessir, right away, sir.” Kira coughed. The last thing she wanted to do was show… Ket was staring at her. All right. She could do this. “Sir, we have what is clearly an anomalous event happening between South and Main.” She clicked three buttons on her far-too-universal remote and lit up the screen.

Their cramped ready room was not by any means state of the art. They were a small team in a very small precinct, one classically overworked and underfunded. But the projector (and the remote), Kira had paid for out of pocket. It was the best set-up available. It made you feel like you were in the scene.

That was exactly what Kira didn’t want with this scene. She squinted her eyes shut, but she already knew what she was going to see. “Okay, this is what the Mayflower apartment building looked like yesterday. I’m sure you know it -“

“I used to live there.” Ket’s whisper was harsh; he’d never gotten the hang of being quiet.

The Mayflower was a standard downtown apartment building, eight stories tall, with a sandstone facade and a bit of carving over the double-doored entrance to give it that proper feeling. This city being what it was, of course, it didn’t pay to look too closely at the carvings. The apartments were cheap, passably-well-maintained, and almost everyone who’d gone to college here had spent at least a night in one of them.

“Brace yourselves.” She lifted the remote up. “This is the Mayflower today.” Click.

The back half of the Mayflower – which, from the street, they shouldn’t have been able to see anyway – was missing about a third of itself, in a big pac-man style bite that should have (Again with the shoulds, and Kira should know better by now) knocked the building over.

The front had melted, and twisted. In places the sandstone had shifted into dune-like piles of sand. In other places, it had fused into glass – glass that had formed into a disturbingly eye-like shape.

Through that eye, you could see the bite out of the back of the building. You could also see what had happened to some of the people.

A Scene Description
A Place Description
A Deletion

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/697975.html. You can comment here or there.

Addergoole/Criminal Minds Xover, Part IV

Mar27

This began here with a meme; it takes part after Rix’s guest fic here (and click “next” for the second part.)
It continued here and here.

How can you…?

“Magic,” Derek answered. It was going to change everything, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be honest.

“Magic, Morgan, come on…”

“Look, you said you wouldn’t ask how I knew. So don’t ask.” He gestured at the floor. “The dig teams can get the bodies now. Why don’t you and I work on the book?”

“Derek, what do you know about languages?” Reid frowned. “I mean…”

“Well, genius, what I have is a working vocabulary in this language. Which means I can get the easy words and you can use that to figure out the hard words.”

“But what is it?” Spencer was looking at him sideways. “I mean, really. Magic?”

“Look, you’re going to have to take some of this on faith, at least for now. Once we solve this case, I…” Derek paused. “I promise, when we’re back home and this case is over, I’ll explain everything I can to you.”

He’d always wondered a little bit about Spencer Reid. But that expression, that look – if the kid was fae, he didn’t know it. Spencer couldn’t lie that well.

The promise seemed to settle him down at least. “All right. Do you said it’s called ‘Idu a’IduĂŸin?’ ‘To know all there is to know?’ That sounds like a fairly common construction for words about language. For instance…”

“Later. I promise, later. We have a killer to put to rest here.”

“Put to rest? So you think…”

“I think that the male body we found here was the killer, yep. Which means somebody killed him.” Derek frowned. “Which is, of course, its own problem.”

Spencer twitched. “So we might be looking for a serial killer killer, or a victim who somehow got away, after putting the body in bedrock. This case just gets creepier and creepier.”

“The book.” Derek pointed at it. “If we can get through this, we can figure everything else out.”

“I still can’t believe you let me go over this for hours without stopping me.” Reid settled down, still muttering.

“You were having fun. Who am I to stop you when you’re having fun?”

The book was harder than it ought to have been, in part because Dr.-Reid-the-Genius kept taking apart words to understand how they worked, and in part because it had been decades since Derek had actually read Old Tongue. He could talk it with the best of them, of course, but talking a language and reading it were utterly different.

When they were done, the translations and the book itself photographed and sent to Garcia, they both felt a little sick. “Derek, this is – you know this is impossible, right?”

“I know, kid. I know. And I promise you we’ll work it all out.”

“But you know what else, right?”

“Yeah.” The book had detailed every single body down there. Except the male body. “We have a serial-killer killer to go look for.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/718735.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/697664.html. You can comment here or there.

January’s Bingo Card!

Mar27

And now I have this:

B I N G O
a favorite place promises made nightmares outnumbered love at first sight
a cunning plan [knowledge] management hallucinations /visions [honor]
[test/exam] [flirting] [PICK ANYTHING] [youth] innocent
unwelcome guest [fast & loose] betrayal friendship exhaustion
exhausted

exhausting
victim sports & games [a crowd] [gravity] holy place
holy, holy


from [community profile] origfic_bingo

And this is what I’m going to do:

Pick a square, and give me a prompt with that as a theme. I.e., Promises Broken, Junie and her teacher.

First prompt will get written; after that I’m going to go for a Bingo, so prompts that are within a line of the first prompt are more likely to get written.

Squares that have been prompted to will be [bolded and bracketed] (if there’s two prompts, it’ll also be italicized); squares that have been written will have a link. Please feel free to prompt any square, even those filled.

I will post at least the first BINGO.

If you tip, I will write to at least two of your prompts; I will also write you a continuation of your choice at the giraffe call rate of $1/100 Words

For every $20 received in tips, I will post another line of BINGO written.

All the Words!
100 Words $1.00 USD 300 Words $3.00 USD 500 Words $5.00 USD 750 Words $7.50 USD 1000 Words $10.00 USD 1500 Words $14.00 USD 2000 Words $18.00 USD 1750 Words $17.00 USD

(I am likely to write many more of the squares from last month still as well!)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/626957.html. You can comment here or there.

A Start, a story for the Orig-Fic Bingo

Mar27

This is to [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith‘s prompt to this January card for [community profile] origfic_bingo.

It fills the “love at first sight” slot, and is in no established verse – although Holly MIGHT end up being in my Episodes ‘verse

They first ran into each other at a tiny regional sci-fi con. Holly was doing her favorite Bleach cosplay; Grace was wearing an extravagant medium-length dress and a pair of knee-high boots. She had an overcoat atop, the yellow frogs standing out in stark contrast to the black of the rest of her outfit.

They observed each other for a moment between the roleplaying-book booth and the tinted-contacts table. Grace spoke first, a little frown creasing her white-powdered forehead.

“Yoruichi Shihƍin, right? From… Bleach.”

“Right!” Holly found herself grinning.

Grace made the gesture equivalent of a flourish. “My roommate loves anime. And thus, because it is a small room and a loud tv, I have begun to learn to love anime, too. Have you seen Death Note?“

“Have I? Have I…!” And thus, they were off and running. Cons were little pockets of existence away from reality, and so it was easy to talk to a stranger, easy for Holly to invite Grace to breakfast so they could keep talking

IRL was trickier, but there was always gchat and twitter and soon they were talking every night, @GraceFired, what do you think of this idea for the next con; @TheBerry, OMG, I found a new lipstick that mimics the color of corpse lips.

It was late one night, on gchat, 100 times more private than twitter even if Google was reading everything, when Holly finally was brave enough to say “Gray… I think I love you.”

She stared at the words for a moment, and then typed hurriedly below that “I mean, not, not in a … I don’t want to… shit.”

“Chill, Hall. <3 I get it." There was a pause, the little grey line that said "Grace is typing…" And then, as if Grace wanted to whisper it: "I love you too."

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/697566.html. You can comment here or there.

Untangling Knots, a continuation of Stranded World for @Anke

Mar27

This is a continuation of Tangles and Knots commissioned by [personal profile] anke.

It is part of my Stranded World series.

There was a knot sitting on the skein of reality, a heavy knot with complex weaving that spoke of intentional tying and tangling. Winter walked away from the camp of trailers and RV’s, walked to the small town’s corner store, and passed his suit jacket to the old man sitting at the picnic table there.

“That’s a nice coat.”

“Custom tailored. But I don’t need it where I’m going. I need something less obvious.”

The old man’s bleary eyes turned sharp for a moment. “Son, you’re going to have to change more than the coat for that.”

Winter undid his tie and added it to the sportcoat, then pulled the elastic out of his ponytail. He unbuttoned the first two buttons of his shirt and untucked it, so that it hung sloppily over his belt, then ran his hands through his hair until it was no longer tidy.

The old man nodded slowly. “It’s a start, at least.”

Winter nodded. “And a jacket?”

“You wanna borrow mine?”

“Consider the suit coat collateral.”

The old man nodded slowly, and slid out of the old denim-and-flannel, with its even older veteran patches and the three bike sigils. “You run into someone from the old gang…”

“I understand. I won’t claim those false pretenses.” Winter coughed. “That is, I ain’t gonna pretend to be something I’m not.”

The man squinted. “You do that better than you ought. And with your white hair, might ought to be older than you look.”

“Younger, usually. But I thank you. I should be back within the hour.”

Thus armed, Winter bought a 40-oz bottle of beer and tucked it, wrapped in its paper bag, loosely into a pocket. He scuffed his perfect shoes in the mud and carefully removed, as Spring would say, the poker from his ass.

He shuffled into the edge of the trailer camp, his head down and his shoulders hunched. The lines of the strands were twisted here, the rope-work turning into a complicated macramé pattern.

“Hey! What are you doing about here?” Not the Tattered-coat one, at least, probably not. This was a woman, with dishwater-hair and a jaw that spoke of poor dental work, blue jeans and three flannel shirts.

Winter raised his head slowly to her. “Looking for…” He blinked, blearily. There were panhandlers on the street, on the way to his office, back in the clean city where he lived (so far from Autumn’s raucous world). He imitated the oldest of those on a bad day. “Looking for… someone.”

“Well, you ain’t gonna find them around here. Get on with you. Go.”

Winter shuffled forward, took a messy swig from his bottle, and moved closer. “Looking,” he insisted. The strands knotted and twisted around her.

“And they. Ain’t. Here.” She reached out towards Winter.

He grabbed as if reaching for her hand, “missed,” and stroked his hand through her strands. The knots were tight, but he was the one who smoothed chaos lines straight. “Looking for you. Looking for Tattercoats.”

She froze at the name, then shuddered as he found and untied a knot. “Tattercoats isn’t…. isn’t…” She slumped to the ground.

Winter caught her on the way down and set her, carefully, on the stairs. “My apologies.” He had the scent now, though, in the knot he’d unhooked from her agency. “Sleep calmly.”

Winter himself was… not calm. He grabbed the strand he’d untied from the woman, and pulled.

He would be meeting this Tattercoats. Very soon.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/697268.html. You can comment here or there.