Archive | May 2014

The Destruction of the Gods, a story-bit of the FaeApoc

May15

This is a continuation of a piece chosen by random-date-choice.

It follows Mourning Lost Gods.

February, 2012

We thought the fights had died down.

There were twelve of us, now, refugees every one of us from a world that simply did not exist anymore. We had found a building near the river that still had walls, still had a roof, still had doors that shut and locked, and we had turned it into what we could of a home.

There hadn’t been any GodFights in weeks, not since the last major brawl, but it was February in the Mid-West; maybe even those that would call themselves gods didn’t want to be out in the cold.

From what we could gather – from the radio, from the one tv station that still came through, from the refugees that came and stayed, or came and left – it was the same everywhere. The fights had died down.

They said someone had nuked a god; someone else said they had nuked the doorways. We didn’t care, not as much as we should have. I know I, at least, felt like all my caring had been seared off like burned nerve endings, somewhere in the collapse of everything I’d ever known.

We were like trauma victims, like refugees, like unwilling colonists starting over in the ruins of a civilization. If we thought about the gods at all, we thought to be glad that they had stopped, be glad that, maybe, this building might stand, be glad that we could breathe, and be warm, and move on.

We had found a way to make a proper chimney, and we had pulled together a wood-burning stove. We had found food – you don’t want to know some of what we ate, but there was enough that what we were eating wasn’t each other – and we were beginning to find community.

And then a half-dead god limped into our little haven, muttering words of magic and bleeding on our doorstep.

next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/768781.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/714468.html. You can comment here or there.

The Collar Job, Part XIII

May14

Part I (and on LJ), Part II (and on LJ), Part III (and on LJ), Part IV (and on LJ), Part V (and on LJ), Part VI (and on LJ), Part VII (and on LJ), Part VIII (and on LJ), Part IX (and on LJ), Part X (and on LJ), Part XI (and on LJ), Deleted Scene (and on LJ)
Part XII (and on LJ)

This is … *cough* Tír na Cali/Leverage fanfiction crossover.

It’s been over a month since I wrote on this, but now it’s back!!

Fade in from commercial. Eliot and the lady Anastasia are naked in bed; Eliot is in the process of untying himself and Ana appears to be asleep.

It doesn’t take long, longer than it would normally because he’s trying not to wake her. She stirs at one point; he freezes. She moans quietly and rolls over, and Eliot waits, counting silently but his lips moving, for a count of twenty.

When she makes no more noise, he finishes getting his last ankle and then, moving very slowly and a bit unevenly, he hurries to the bathroom.

Ana’s eyes open as the bathroom door shuts. She stays where she is, as if she hasn’t woken. When the bathroom door opens again, she closes her eyes and stirs, just a bit.

Eliot pauses at the door. He looks at the “sleeping” Lady, and then at the exit. His hand goes to the collar, just brushing it. His sigh is a full-body thing, frustrated and sad.

He lays back in bed as carefully as he got out of it, and begins tying his ankles as they had been.

“Don’t bother.”

Ana’s voice freezes Eliot. “How long have you been awake?”

“Woke up while you were in the bathroom. You could’ve gotten out of the ropes at any point?”

“Well, not during…” He lays down, carefully, next to her, not quite touching her. “Not when you were watching.”

“Not a very good restraint system then, is it?” She rolls over to look at him; if he was looking at her, he’d see that she was smiling.

His eyes are closed, though, and his body tense. “You could use steel.”

“I could. But you came back. Why?”

He touches the collar, carefully, as if afraid it will bite him. “There’s a tracker in here, and I don’t know how to get the thing off without killing myself.”

“A good reason,” she agrees, although her voice is rather flat. “Well, then. If you’re not going to run away – or kill me – and I’m not going to tie you up, we might as well do something entertaining.”

Now, Eliot turns to look at her. “Like what?”

Duchess Charlotte Prentiss’s rooms

“It’s going to take us a few days. This Barony – Baronessy? – they’re not exactly known for being friendly. Not surprising, with the way they’re dropping like flies. I’m working on building everything we need, but it’s not like we can slip in as slaves. They do everything in-house.” Hardison runs a hand over his short-cropped hair. “Still working, Nate.”

“Anything I can help with?” Lord Lorcan walks into the room, all five foot six and one hundred three exquisitely-dressed pounds of him. “It seems like you’re having some trouble with the Alpha Sisters.”

Cut to commercial.

XiV

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/714105.html. You can comment here or there.

“12 days of writing: a subplot” – a writing exercise in Escape from Rochester setting

May13

This is written from an exercise from Writer’s Greenhouse: Why did the protagonist fake those maps?

It is, I believe, a piece of background for Escape from Rochester.

It shouldn’t have been all that important. It was a school project. A project in Civil Engineering; this wasn’t exactly the stuff adventure novels were made of.

But there was something about the way Mr. Cecchini had asked that made Amber nervous. And the more she found in the old records, the more she wanted to hide what she’d found.

Mr. Cecchini wasn’t a proper professor anyway; he was an adjunct, and nobody was quite sure what had happened to Dr. Estrada. That was more than a little problematic for Amber, since Dr. Estrada was her adviser, and Mr. Cecchini seemed to be more than a bit distracted and not very good at the whole advising thing.

Amber thought it was probably the kids. His office was covered in pictures of kids and, while some of them seemed kind of unlikely, genetically, to be his, there was something to be said for adoption, after all. And when he looked at the pictures, he smiled. So, probably his, one way or another, even if there was no mother – or second father – pictured anywhere.

“So, for your project, you’re studying the layout of the entire University,” he said, every time she sat down. “With an eye to, to…”

And, every time, she would remind him, “to both see how it could be improved now, and how I would do differently if I were rebuilding from scratch.”

“And the sources you’re using are…”

And so on, every time. At first, Amber thought he was just a bit scattered, but as he began to pore over her notes, as he began to demand copies of her primary sources, she began to think something was up.

It didn’t seem like a good idea, faking documents for her final project, but, on the other hand, the rooms that she’d found on the oldest maps were kind of terrifying, and the underground roadways were even more so. There was swamp over there, and a river. Why was there a road there?

Was that what Mr. Cecchini was looking for?

And, if so, why?

Amber laid out the maps on her drafting board and, very carefully, began creating edited copies. Nobody needed to know about that road.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/713980.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Character Profile 3

May13

This is the third in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The story follows a group of friends and acquaintances as the faerie apocalypse destroys Rochester, NY – their flight from Rochester and the challenges they meet along the road to someplace safe.

It isn’t like Jennifer Walker likes fights. They just seem to happen around her.

Of course, sometimes she started them on purpose – or sort of suggested that they start and let things take their course. But, like the time where her nose got broken, sometimes she just said something and then all of a sudden there was punching.

Puns can be made about volatile tempers and Chemical Engineering majors.

Jennifer isn’t the sort to end up hanging out with gamers, not really – her hobbies include cooking, casual sports, and poker – but she ended up in a three-way fight with two frat boys on the quarter mile one night, and it was Rob and Lewis on the way to one of Raven’s parties who caught her, helped her staunch the bleeding, and got her out of the scene before Campus Safety came. Since the frat party was clearly a no-go, she ended up drinking with Raven’s friends in the swamp.

Jennifer is cute, though she’d be a lot cuter without the perma-broken nose. She’s got a round and curvy build that she covers with some level of fashion skill, blonde hair in improbable curls to her hips, green eyes, and skin a nice deep honey-brown; she’s been called California Barbie a time or two, although, at a mid-range 5’6″, she doesn’t really have the legs for Barbie.

There is a tiny bit of fae way back in her bloodline, somewhere. She has an uncanny knack for finding clean fluids and people have stopped trying to drug her drinks at parties. It’s what ended up first interesting her in chemistry, back in Jr. High.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/713554.html. You can comment here or there.

Lastborn, a very short story

May12

I asked for prompts to the theme of genesis. This is [personal profile] kelkyag‘s result.

Oshana liked children, or, as her family joked, she liked babies and the having of them. Mostly her oldest two – Jesh and Cory – handled the actual child-rearing parts, with aid from the next two down and so on.

She was one of those women who had a new baby every year, one of those mothers who liked to preside over her ranch of children. By the time Jesh and Cory were old enough to understand that their mother was unusual, they were still young enough to assume that she would go on with a baby a year forever.

When the war came, Oshana was, of course, pregnant. The birth was hard, hiding in a back room while the soldiers prowled the hospital. The child that was born was small, too soon, and very weak.

“Adam,” Oshana whispered. She passed the boy to Jesh. “The lastborn. The genesis.”

It would take them quite some time to understand what she meant.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/713082.html. You can comment here or there.

Filthy, a story(beginning)

May12

I asked for fun Addergoole-related prompts here; this riffed off of [personal profile] wyld_dandelyon‘s prompt.

Year 19 of the Addergoole School

“Look at you, you’re filthy.”

Antonia flinched. She was filthy; she hadn’t had a shower since the gods attacked, unless you counted rainstorms, and hadn’t had a bath in over a year, unless you counted dipping in creeks.

Her clothes were so grimy they stood on their own, but they had held up against weather and road damage, enough that she thought the dirt might be a layer of protection all on its own. Her hair, she’d finally chopped short as the summer came – with a knife, because that’s what she’d had.

They had run when the gods attacked her hometown, ten of them on a school trip. There had only been three when the terrifying winged man had found her; she didn’t know what he’d done with Mella or Steve, and she was scared to ask.

He’d dropped her here, in the halls of what appeared to be the plushest underground bunker ever, and taken off with barely a word. She’d been fighting him the whole time, but now, sitting here with her duffle bag and nothing else, she didn’t have anything to fight.

“You’ve been out in it this whole time, haven’t you?”

She peeked up. That was still the same voice. “Out in… the war?” she offered. “Yeah. I mean, not in the combat. But out there. You haven’t?”

He was clean. Clean the way she hadn’t seen anyone since the gods attacked; his hair fell in perfect red-orange curls around his ears, his skin looked brown, not because of sunburn or dirt, but just because it was his skin tone, and his pants even looked pressed.

Some small part of her mind thought he was also rather handsome, but she ignored that part; she was checking for weapons.

He could be carrying something in the pocket of the khakis, or under the madras-plaid shirt, but his hands were open and empty in front of him.

“I got lucky.” He shrugged, as if to apologize. “I was in a safe place when it hit, and then it wasn’t long before I was supposed to come here. So I never got the worst of it – but over half the students who actually make it here come in looking like you or worse. I’m Raleigh, by the way.”

“Tony… Antonia.” She held out a hand, and then looked at it. “Sorry, I’m filthy.”

“I noticed. Look, come with me. I’m gonna get you a bath, a nice warm meal, and some clean clothes, okay?”

It’s a trap. Her skin itched, reminding her how long it had been since rain, even. “I’ll take it.”

He grabbed the hand she’d offered and pulled her to her feet. “Awesome. My room’s this way.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/712762.html. You can comment here or there.

Sunday’s Dinner: very indicative of the Thorne household shopping

May12

Dinner Sunday was shrimp alfredo with pan-roasted asparagus on the side:

Asparagus and tomato from a local farmstand
Shrimp from the restaurant supply store
Pasta from the Bulk Store
Spices bought online
Alfredo and Parmesan from BJ’s Club
Wine from Six Mile Creek Vineyards, bought during the Cayuga Wine & Herb trail last weekend

And then a pecan quickbread from the same place we bought the tomato & asparagus for dessert (with cream cheese from BJ’s.) Just needed something from Wegmans to fill out our normal shopping. 😉

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/712510.html. You can comment here or there.

“Does this always smell like this,” the adventures of Lyn’s nose, weekend edition

May12

This weekend’s new smells were:

McDonald’s (their milkshakes don’t taste right if you can smell them, apparently)

and

Shrimp (raw)… I was actually worried because it smelled /so fishy/.

Asparagus, on the other hand, tastes a lot better when you can smell it~

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/712446.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Character Profile 2

May11

This is the second in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano Project.

The story follows a group of friends and acquaintances as the faerie apocalypse destroys Rochester, NY

Emmett has never been comfortable anywhere, and R.I.T. was no different when he showed up.

He’s older than the rest of the students, for one – although you wouldn’t know it to look at him – starting at twenty-two instead of finishing there. He chose to live in the dorms anyway, in hopes that he might find some sort of community there, and had some luck, although not quite the way he’d hoped.

The guys down the hall started playing a Shadowrun game on Friday nights in the lounge; the first couple times, they played around Emmett, who was watching TV in the corner and did not really mind. The third time, one of their number was out somewhere else and they invited Emmett to sit in.

Emmett, who hadn’t played any sort of game since Jr. High, found he liked it, and quickly found that there was more of this sort of thing going on on campus. That’s how he met the gaming club, which is how he met Jo and Cadey, which is how he ended up hanging out at Anelle’s Samhain party, the confused date of two avowed lesbians.

Emmett is small and skinny, barely over five foot tall, with straight hair past his shoulders in an unbelievable red, hazel eyes, and skin that freckles if you look at it funny. When he actually pays attention to what he’s doing, he can be very good at swaying a group of people, or, especially, a single person when alone with them, but he rarely tries.

He’s never been particularly strong, nor will he ever be, but he’s robustly healthy. He enjoys spending time hiking when he has the opportunity, and spends a lot of time in the nearby parks and cemeteries.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/712036.html. You can comment here or there.

Balancing Lazy

May9

This is a continuation of a piece chosen by random-date-choice.

It follows

Laziness as an Art Form, Laziness X4, and
Lazy Bidding.

Merton and Zuleyma did not want to be sold. Roanna couldn’t really bring herself to blame them – she didn’t want to be sold either.

But Segenam had grabbed four of them on Hell Night, and four, he thought, was a little too much work. So he’d ordered Ro to auction them off – and she’d found buyers for Merton and Zuleyma.

“She’s nice, Merton. I wouldn’t have said it was a good idea if I didn’t think she was nice.”

“But…” He bit his lip. “I was just getting comfortable here.”

“I know. And you can get comfortable again with Kianna. It’ll be okay, Merton.”

“I guess…”

Zuleyma wouldn’t talk to Roanna at all. She blamed Ro for making the deal – which wasn’t all that fair, since Ro’d been ordered to do it – and sulked in her corner until Segenam dragged her out bodily.

He left Roanna and Tamberlain in the room while he took the other two to the market, as it were. “You, boy,” he pointed, “do cleaning things. Ask Roanna what to do.”

“What should I do?”

“Supervise. And…” Segenam did another strange thing with his face. “Try to relax, if you can.”

Roanna didn’t do “relax,” but she tried, because she’d been ordered to. It helped to sit back on the bed – once Tamberlain had made it, twice – and sip a drink while she directed.

“Why am I doing all this? You’re good at this.”

“Because the boss said so, of course.”

“But you’re good at cleaning, you and Merton.”

“Merton’s gone.”

“So why aren’t you doing the dishes?” He hesitated. “And why are they gone, and not us?”

Roanna wasn’t really feeling kind. “Nobody bid on you, Tam. Do the dishes like a good boy and if they’re all clean I’ll help with the floor.”

“The boss told you to relax.”

“Lucky for you, I find mopping floors very relaxing.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/711901.html. You can comment here or there.