Archive | June 2014

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Character Profile 16

This is the 16th in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano project – Escape from Rochester.

Thirty-two students & their friends need to get out of Rochester before the gods’-war destroys everything. How will they make it out – and how many of them will survive?

Landing page here.

Kendra Clayton – where’d she come from?

Kendra spends a lot of time at RIT – Oak & Rowan, the gaming club, Interfaith Council, Go club, anime club – for someone who has yet to take a single class at the college and does not show up on the rolls – not only not at RIT, but at any college currently.

Kendra is a ringer, of sorts – she enjoys college life, enjoys college people, but hasn’t, herself, been college-aged since a time when they didn’t allow women into most schools. She has no interest in taking classes, finding the social life to be far more educational.

Kendra isn’t the name she was born with, but it’s the name on all her current paperwork. She has a house near campus, and spends most of her time there, attending clubs and gatherings – she has a job which she works from home, allowing her an excuse for her house-and-income more than actually taking care of the bills.

She’s been at RIT for about 10 years, in the way that she is “at” a school, floating from club group to club group; if the apocalypse had not come when it did, it would have been about time for her to move on.

She’s an average-to-short girl at about 5’4″, slender but athletic in build, with straight chestnut hair cut close and eyes that seem to be almost red in the right light. She’s a halfbreed; she has a fae-like Change that she never, ever shows, and an ability to shift the temperature of a room or area by up to 100 degrees Celsius.

She has found that she’s attached to the Oak and Rowan group, with its misfits, and isn’t quite sure what to do with that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/741795.html. You can comment here or there.

Kicking out unwelcome guests

This is a continuation of Unwelcome Guests, Part the Third for my “More Please” tag.

The girls knew what to do. They had fought to defend their property – their home – before. Hell, they had been fighters long before they met Baram.

The trees knew what to do, but Baram didn’t think too hard about that. He let them grab the woman in the lead, while he went for the guy that was probably their tank. Shit, shit, the second bitch was a fireball-thrower; he moved the tank between him and the thin, ashen girl and kept hitting.

It was a quick fight, Jaelie and Via hitting from the walls, shooting rowan bullets and hawthorn arrows, the trees doing their share of damage, and Baram in the middle of the fight like some sort of bull in a china shop.

The bikers were fae, but they weren’t organized, and they weren’t all that good at being fae – except the ashen one he’d thought was a bitch, the fireball thrower. Baram took her down hard, broke her jaw and pinned her wrists with a hawthorn arrow.

By then, the tree had the leader and her probably-second-in-command, and everyone else except her maybe-a-seer-boy were down. He looked between the three of them, then decided sitting down with his hands on his neck was a good idea.

Baram grunted. “You okay?”

“We’re fine, boss. They’re not all that good at this.”

“No teamwork.” He toed the fireball-thrower. “This one’s interesting, though.”

“So’s the boy.”

“We’re not keeping them.”

“He might be useful.”

“Another… shit, he fainted. Okay.” He walked over to the tree and poked the leader in the stomach. Her eyes and stomach were about all that was visible… that had to hurt. “You.”

She grunted incoherently. Baram poked her again.

“You take your people and you leave. We’re keeping one – or two -”

“-as the fee for having the stupid gall to attack us,” Jaelie filled in.

The tank, who wasn’t quite dead, it seemed, spoke up. “What about our target?”

“Never here.” Baram added a kick to punctuate it. “Got it?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/741304.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Prequil Vignette: Jason

Sixth in a series of stories leading up to my Camp Nano Project – this one, from Raven’s point of view, features Jason.

Landing page here.


It was a warm day, the sort of sandwiched-between-two-rainy-days sort of miracle you get sometimes in early Rochester June, and I didn’t have anything I had to be doing at the moment, or anywhere I really absolutely wanted to be, so I wandered down into the quad with my laptop.

Jason was there, with Craig and Glory Harrington, Jason on the guitar, Craig on the fiddle, and Glory on drums and vocals. I’m not sure what they were singing – an Irish folk tune I wasn’t familiar with – but the whole quad was full of it.

It wasn’t just the song, either. The music was nice, if I closed my eyes and forced away all the other influences and just listened. Glory had a pretty voice, and Craig could play the fiddle to shame the devil /and/ all of Georgia. But Jason wasn’t playing the guitar so much as he was playing the people.

I let it wash over me. It wasn’t anything malicious – everything’s okay and hey, it’s not that big a deal and calm down, you’ll work it out. Not bad music for finals time. And all around them, people were sprawled out, reading their homework and just chilling.

Stuff like that, it can go bad fast if anyone notices. But a couple people playing on a college quad – that was easy enough to hide. And Jason was my friend, so I sprawled out somewhere near Glory’s feet and started singing my own counterpoint to her lovely melody.

I don’t know if Jason knew what I was doing. I don’t know if he even knew what he was doing. Didn’t matter; the point was more that nobody else figure it out than that he do.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/740925.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) – Notes and Characters Landing Page

Escape from Rochester (Camp Nano July ’14 Project)

Character Profiles

Profile 1: Lewis
(and roommate Rob, girl Annelle, Oak & Rowan group, Tuesday night D&D)
Profile 2: Emmett
(and Friday night Shadowrun, Jo & Cadey, Annelle’s Samhain party)
Profile 3: Jennifer Walker
(with Rob & Lewis)
Profile 4: Jordan Taylor (with Anelle, Jo & Cady)
Profile 5: Mary Dorian Smithsen (With Terry, Anelle, Oak & Rowan group)
Profile 6: Jason (with Oak & Rowan, Craig)
Profile 7: Galen (with Emmett, Candy, Ess)
Profile 8: Sophia (With Oak & Rowan, Craig, Jason, Ess, Galen)
Profile 9: Byron (with Dorian)
Profile 10: Kim (w/ Oak&Rowan, Raven)
Profile 11: Douglas (with Aih, Anelle, Jordan, Oak&Rowan, Raven)
Profile 12: Rebecca (With Interfaith Council)
Profile 13: Brendan (With Interfaith, unnamed girl)
Profile 14: Cadens (with Interfaith, Brendan, Rob)
Profile 15: Ric (With Cadens, Interfaith)
Profile 16: Kendra (With Interfaith, Oak & Rowan, etc.)

Prequel Vignettes

Vignette: Lewis (with Blake, Joanne, Carley, Rob, thursday Swamp drinks)
Vignette: Emmett (With DK, Jo-and-Cady)
Vignette: Jennifer (with Raven)
Vignette: Jordan (with Raven)
Vignette: Dorian (with Raven)
Vignette: Jason (with Raven, Craig, Glory)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/731997.html. You can comment here or there.

Bridge…

First: So, Who Are You?.
Previous: Baking Out & Walking In

“For the rest of the school year, Blaecleah, you belong to Niobe cy’Fridmar sh’Aelfgifu.”

“For the rest of the school year, Blaecleah, you Belong to me.” It was like déjà vu, except the rising panic in his chest. Blaecleah nodded, finding that his throat was too tight for him to speak. Niobe looked down at him, a frown creasing her lips. What had he done? “Come with me. Stand up and come with me. Here.” She held out her hand.

Blaecleah stared at the hand for a moment. What was he… oh. He set his hand on top of hers, very carefully, in case that wasn’t the right thing to do.

She clasped his hand, so either it was the right thing, or she was willing to let it pass. Tension slid off of Blacleah’s shoulders. Okay, he’d done something right. Step one.

“We’re going to go to my room. Has Sedge explained anything at all to you?”

“…no?” Was that the right answer?

“I didn’t have all that much time, ‘Obe,” Sedge protested. “I just got him, and then I brought him to you.”

“I know, I know. For your deal. Okay, Sedge, we’ll talk later. Start shopping around, see what you want, all right?”

Shopping… Blaecleah shivered. Right. For a girl, or, theoretically, a guy. Like he’d shopped around for Blaecleah.

“Easy.” Niobe gave his hand a squeeze. “It’s not fun, the first couple days, but it gets easier.”

“I don’t need easy. It’s just new.”

“I know, I know.” She reached over with her free hand to pat him on the shoulder. She was, he realized, not really all that tall, if you discounted the horns. “But there’s no reason for me to make it hard on you, just because Sedge was being… ridiculous.”

“Did he really talk me into a collar just to get you in bed?”

“This is Addergoole, kid. Stranger things have been known to happen.”

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Next: Orientation

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/740737.html. You can comment here or there.

How my “Pick a random Number” Process on Twitter mostly works

On my [twitter.com profile] Thornewrites, I often ask for a random number between 1 and… well, that depends.

[personal profile] anke asked me today how the numbers work:

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And the List

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/740411.html. You can comment here or there.

Last Week in the Apocalypse

The Apoc

In the end of May, 2011, strange things started happening all over the world. Follow along with [personal profile] faeapoclive, [twitter.com profile] faeapoclive, and [tumblr.com profile] faeapoclive as the apocalypse unfolds

June 15-21

tabularose:
The Black Suits Are Coming to Get Me

Okay, this is getting pretty disturbing. Yesterday, the expensive-suit people came back – barged in, really – and dug through all of my roommate’s books again, and all of hew new notes. They mostly missed my stuff because I told them – the truth! – that I was working on a paper on monasteries and similar architectural artifacts.
But now I’m reading books in my closet, in the back room of the library, in the crappy cafe nobody uses. And those monks are pretty frighting. Maybe more so than expensive-suit people.

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GET OVER IT, PEOPLE

EDITORIAL: The world is suddenly awash in news of “portals” and “strange occurrences.” It’s like every time I open the newspaper, there’s something else that looks like the Weekly World News.
Get it together, people. There’s conflict and chaos in the Middle East. There’s financial troubles everywhere. Our own house is none too clean and we can’t get Congress to agree on mashed potatoes or fries for lunch, much less anything important.
There’s some weird stuff in the air? Get over it. There’s always going to be some weird stuff in the air – especially if you’re sniffing the “weird stuff.” There are a lot more important things to worry about.

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SOMETHING IN THE WATER IN JEFFERSON, TEXAS?

JEFFERSON, Texas(AP): In the county seat of Marion County, Texas, all seven hundred three men between the ages of sixteen and forty years old suddenly walked out of town this evening, each of them wearing a glassy smile and appearing to not know where they are.
One man was injured as he walked into oncoming traffic, then further injured as he attempted to get up with a broken leg and continue to walk. No other damage has been reported.

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PORTAL TO THE UNDERWORLD CONTINUES TO KILL

CAIRO, Eqypt: People continue to fall dead near the so-called “portal to the underworld.” This dome-shaped golden light, in the center of Tahrir square, seems to lead to the pyramids. However, any person who steps into the dome has vanished, so the only reports that exist are those from drone-like bomb-sniffing robots.
As days go on, the fatal radius around the dome-portal appears to be growing; at the current rate of growth, it is estimated that within a week, the entire square will be fatal to stand within or even near.
Egyptian authorities could not be reached for comment.

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VOICES FROM ABOVE IN LATVIA

RIGA, Latvia(AP): in the rural areas around Riga, the capital and largest city of Latvia, people report hearing voices coming from the power lines.
Various people – in various areas around the region – report various different types of voice, low, high, loud, very soft, and various phrases, but none of the phrases are in Latvian or, indeed, in any recognized human language. A team of linguists is currently working with the farmers to decipher the words.

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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/740148.html. You can comment here or there.

Escape From Rochester (Camp Nano July’14 project) Character Profile 15

This is the 15th in a series of character profiles for my upcoming July Camp Nano project – Escape from Rochester.

Thirty-two students & their friends need to get out of Rochester before the gods’-war destroys everything. How will they make it out – and how many of them will survive?

Landing page here.

Ric Wilkins, Packaging Science major

Ric found faith late in life, and he found it because he had a particular interest in Cadens.

He had a couple first-year classes with Cadens, and from her found out about Interfaith Council. It sounded like a fun time (to be fair, he’d been smoking quite a bit…) so he went along, to see what it was all alike.

Maybe it was his altered state, maybe it was something in the air, maybe the hand of god really did come down and touch him, but Ric has been devout ever since. Exactly what he’s devout at is up to question, but he appears to be very strong in his faith in… something.

Even when he’s clear-headed – which isn’t often – Ric has a hard time putting into words what it is he believes. He knows that he believes it very strongly, however, and that coupled with his easy-going attitude mean that the rest of the Interfaith Council puts up with him, even when they’d really rather not.

Ric looks like a classic surfer – shaggy, frizzy blonde hair to his shoulders, sun baked skin, blue bloodshot eyes. He’s far skinnier than he has any right to be, all things considered, and slouches such that his already-medium-height of 5’9″ appears to be closer to 5’2″

He likes origami, a lot, as well as any other form of fitting pieces together, and got into Packaging Science because he thought it would be cool – which is has been, at least on good days. He’s not a very good friend – he weasels out of everything – but in the moment, he’s pretty friendly.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/739912.html. You can comment here or there.

Eriko, a story of Boom/Cynara/Boomtown for @inventrix

After Unrepentant. Also and unconnectedly after Fish Gotta Swim


“And your crew? How are they, now?”

“Gone, I suppose. Eriko passed into humanity…”

It sat in Cynara’s mind as the days creaked on. Dysmas was in her city. That was bad enough; he was here, walking around, free to do to anyone what he’d done to her…

…to try, at least. Boom Town looked badly on that sort of thing.

And that made her want to chew on nails and spit out bullets, as her father had been fond of saying, once upon a time. But his presence, his physical existence still on the same plane of being as her… that woke up other memories.

Zita’s Keepers – well, Eris had just been crazy, and Shiva was Gone. Howard’s Magnolia, they all knew where she was. Leo had Kept Gabi; they couldn’t lay that mess at anyone’s feet but their own.

Dysmas and Eriko were different, and now they knew where Dysmas was.

It didn’t take her long to Find the scent. It was what she did, and she’d honed her power on far trickier Finds than this (things like find me a plumber who can lay pipe for a whole city, will work for what I can pay, and is willing to move out here to do so). It took her a little longer to decide to follow the scent, and a little bit longer to actually get in the car and drive.

(She still had a car. It still ran, too, although what it burned for fuel was best not asked after.)

She went alone. She didn’t have a Kept right now, and she didn’t want Boom asking what she was doing until she was sure that she, at least, knew what to tell them. She wouldn’t trouble any of the other men in her life with this one, either – because, at the core of things, it was Boom business. And so she went alone, driving well over what had once been a speed limit down roads she Repaired as she went.

(It had not gone unremarked that roads to Boom Town, Cynapolis, were all in better shape than any road even pre-war. But since Boom was expected it to be “out there,” the remarks stayed quiet. All but the most virulently fae-hating fae-haters were wise enough to not take on that particular target.)

She drove east, which did not surprise her, and north, a day and another day. She drove just past the edges of the Web-Watcher’s Den, but did not stop in: They had worked together on occasion, but they never did so comfortably, and if she could avoid Aviv, she would.

The drive took her past the walls of a small town where she’d never been. Not in the town, then – at least, probably not, and even less likely to be in the WebWatcher’s reach. Good. She didn’t want to have to explain what she was doing to anyone, whether they’d been there or not. People had such narrow-minded viewpoints sometimes.

When she Found that she was stopping, it was at a small cottage, set up on the side of a hill. It would be hard to attack – if she was planning on attacking.

Cya wasn’t the take-things-on-headfirst member of Boom. She parked the car and murmured workings before she even set up the car’s wards, checked her weapons and her Mask twice each, even though the wards and workings would hide one and supersede the other, and leaned back to wait.

She didn’t, exactly, have a plan. It occurred to her, as she leaned the car seat back and sipped on something that resembled coffee, that possibly she might have wanted one.

She didn’t have a plan.

She let that sink in as she watched the pathway and as she let the small sense of Finding hold on to Eriko’s location. She had driven here – driven well over a day’s drive, without telling anyone in her crew or her city – without much more than a strong gut feeling.

She had a moment to wonder if this was what being sane felt like. Then her power sent alarms through her, and she slipped out of the car, no longer worrying about such trivial things as sanity.

The Workings on the car and on her kept her looking non-threatening, not-out-of-the-usual (the Workings for the car had gotten progressively stronger over the years, as cars became more and more of an unusual item). Cya leaned heavily on those Workings, murmuring repeats of the Words as she approached her target. Nothing to see here. Nobody unusual. This is normal. No threats here. No threats here.

The Workings felt like a comfortable old coat on her shoulders, well-used and well-known. They’d protected her before, on Finds far less personal than this one. This time…

This time, they served her as a tiger’s stripes. She was in front of Eriko – between the woman and her front gate – before her quarry even knew she was there.

Eriko had aged, had, probably, allowed herself to age. She looked like a woman in her late forties now, or maybe her late fifties – not that bad, when they both had children who were past that mark themselves, but noticeable, when Cya herself looked maybe twenty-five.

She’d liked twenty-five. It had been a good year.

If her power hadn’t been pushing at her, little alarm bells and Found It! signs blinking in her mind, Cya might have had trouble recognizing Eriko. The expression was the same, but with her Mask up, with the wrinkles and the grey in her hair, Eriko looked like so many other survivors of the war – she looked tired, she looked dirty, and she looked haggard.

Cya looked none of those things. She knew it; she had a mirror – she looked clean, almost too clean. She looked young, just young enough that some might still think she was prey until they actually tried it. She looked well-rested, the sign of affluence and strong, tall walls in this day and age. She looked, she knew, like a relic from a safer time.

Of course, for her, the world had never gotten all that dangerous. She’d considered feeling guilty about that, a time or two, but she knew the price that had been paid for that safety.

It still took Eriko a minute – even after she registered Cya’s presence – to recognize her. And then, she seemed to doubt it. “It can’t be. Dysmas’s girl?”

Cya bit back a snarl and smiled instead, but Eriko was still talking. “No. Maybe one of her children.”

“Only ever had sons, and they don’t look like this.” Cya shifted one hip. “And their daughters don’t particularly look like me, either, though one of my grandsons sort of does. Eriko. It’s been a while.”

“It is you.” Eriko’s wrinkled lips twisted in a frown. “I thought your little group settled in Wyoming.”

“We did. I’m on a field trip.”

“How nice. Enjoy yourself.” She shrugged one hip and one shoulder in clear dismissal. How much of her lack of concern was due to Cya’s Workings – and how much was just her own dismissal of a younger student, even if they were both long past student age?

“I plan to. That your property over there?” Cya gestured at the gate behind her.

“What? Yeah, that’s my house, and my yard. The gate is tougher than it… oh.” Eriko started spitting Workings the minute she noticed Cya’s lips moving, but by then it was too late. Cya threw a shield up to deflect the worst of the damage, sent some of it right back through the older woman, and in a moment had tossed her easiest sedation Working at her target.

Two more Workings followed close after, because you couldn’t trust a Working that was effective on 20-year-old boys to work properly on an 80-year-old adult fae. And then three more, because Cynara knew what protective Workings she had on, and assumed that any adult Fae living alone had at least that many, and maybe twice that.

When she was done, Eriko fell limply to the ground, entirely unconscious, not even dreaming, and completely paralyzed. It if were Cya, that would hold for maybe five minutes.

She worked even faster, then, adding the hawthorn bindings she and Magnolia had come up with, the absolutely nasty gag that stopped nine/tenths of fae they’d encountered from even thinking about doing Workings, and some good old fashioned rope, just in case.

She got the unconscious and very-well-trussed-up Eriko into the hawthorn-and-rowan box in the trunk before she stirred, locked the box twice, and was on the way before anyone noticed she’d been there (if her mind Workings checking the area were any indication).

Workings wouldn’t hold for long in the box, but, then again, in the box, they didn’t need to. Cya drove straight and fast, glad, once again, that speed traps and traffic cops were a thing of the past. (There weren’t many institutions from her childhood and early adulthood that she was glad to give up, but she and police had never really gotten along properly).

It wasn’t her plan – inasmuch as she had a plan – to kill the woman, so she stopped after six hours. By then, Eriko was awake, pissed, and, from the burn marks around her mouth, had discovered exactly what she was gagged with and why trying to do Workings was a bad idea.

“Water, food, stretch, pee, back in the car. Try anything at all remotely funny, and there won’t be another break until we get where we’re going.” Some part of Cya wished that she didn’t have this speech memorized. But they’d dealt with unsavory characters before.

“Why…?” Eriko asked the moment the gag was out, and then slammed her mouth shut, as if fearing that was too much.

“I’m cleaning up old scores, that’s all.” Cya passed her the water bottle.

“That was fifty years ago.

“What can I say? Some wounds take a long time to heal.”

She took the water away, put the gag back in – Eriko barely fought; Cya thought she was in shock – and unwound enough of the restraints that Eriko could use the ancient gas station bathroom and stretch a little.

When she retrieved the woman – Cya would have tried to run, so there were precautions against that, but none of those had been triggered at all – she was waiting quietly, staring at the crumbled remains of a news paper.

The next rest stop was even quieter. Eriko asked no questions. It wasn’t until the fourth stop, home so close that Cya contemplated not stopping at all, that she showed any spark at all.

“I never did anything to you at all, you know. Not like it could have been. Not like it should have been. You were Kept, you got treated like a Kept, and I never understood why you couldn’t just accept that.”

“Why don’t I put a collar around your neck and see how you handle it?” The words snapped out from some old place, some wounded place that Cya had long forgotten about. “Why don’t I treat you like a non-being and see what you do with it? Why don’t I destroy your friends and see how you cope?”

“Do you think I wasn’t collared? Do you think your stupid Dysmas wasn’t collared? Do you think he didn’t suffer, under the collar, when his Change came in? You and your fluffy little friends had it easy.

For a moment, for a brief moment, Cynara had begun to doubt her course of action.

The sneer on Eriko’s face as she spat out easy wiped that doubt away.

“Easy?” Cya shoved the gag back in place, headless of the way it banged against teeth. Teeth could be regrown. “Easy? I’ve got a ten by ten hawthorn cell to show you easy, bitch. We’ll see how long you last. We’ll see if you come out of it sane, when you’re done.”

The other woman made stifled noises against the gag, but Cya was done talking. “Easy.” The word tasted nasty in her mouth – not as nasty as the hawthorn gag probably tasted in Eriko’s, but sour with the residue of a lifetime of memories. “Easy.” She shoved her captive back in the box and slammed the lid and the trunk. “Easy.”

She found she was still muttering the word when she made it into her city. Easy. Decades of watching her friends, never quite knowing if Leo would come back from this hunting trip, never quite knowing if he’d remember a conversation the next day. Easy. Leo talking to Yoshi about Tethys, and the way his face just sort of shifted. Easy. Year after year after year after… She did not break the steering wheel, but it was a close thing.

Cya had built this city – Boom Town, Doom Town, Cynopolis, it didn’t have a name so much as a handwave and a “that place” – she had built it and thus it was prepared for nearly every eventuality. “People who used to collar us” wasn’t even a hard one – not in terms of planning, at least. For Eriko, Cya had a box.

You could have put Dysmas in a box.

It wasn’t Cynara’s way to second-guess herself… but there were times even she acted out of character.

“I could have.” There was nobody in her backroom garage to hear her except the woman in the box. “I could have put him in a box. I sill could.”

If her crew didn’t deal with him.

She took a couple long breaths.

She could have put Dysmas in a box.

She hadn’t put DYsmas in a box.

Maybe she’d sit down and have a long talk with someone about this… later.

Right now, she had a bitch in a coffin and a cell in the basement.

“Easy.” She dropped the box in the lift and cranked the lift into the sub-basement. “Have you ever seen the shattered remains of the mind you left behind? Easy.

She took the stairs down – much easier than the jolting trip down the lift – and pulled the gun out before she opened the box. Bullets might not kill an Ellehemaei – not lead bullets, at least – but they hurt like hell and slowed anything down.

Cya remembered what that felt like. Some mornings she still woke up twitching in remembered pain.

Hopefully, Eriko had learned the same lesson. She opened the box with one hand, the gun aimed steadily with the other. “Out of the box and I’ll take the bindings off.”

The other woman moved stiffly, but she moved. Cya unbound her – gag first, that thing was inhumane, and then the rest – one-handed, watching as the room sank in. “It’s hawthorn.” Eriko licked her lips. “You panelled a room in hawthorn.”

“Several rooms, actually. I call it the box, but it’s more of a small apartment. Bedroom, this room, bathroom. You won’t starve, you won’t die.”

“I’ll go mad. Surrounded by this much poison…” For the first time, she really sounded scared. “It would drive anyone nuts.”

Cya found her lips curling upwards. “That was generally the idea, yes. But no hunger, no threats, no cold – it should be an easy life.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/739688.html. You can comment here or there.