Archive | May 2015
Brassica Planting!
Today I leveled (mostly) one of my 12″ deep raised beds, by digging a hole down to the bottom of the 2′ stake and then hammering the thing down with a mallet. Whee! HulkLyn Smash!
Then I used the backfilled hole to plant a Horseradish, because a 2′ deep hole filled with loose dirt and peat is about the nicest, deepest hole I’m gonna get for a root plant like that.
Once I’d hauled over some more compost-dirt mix and peat moss and mixed the whole thing up like a particularly giant brownie mix, I started putting in the rest of the plants, yay! (well, first I laid down ground cloth).
This is Brassica Bed One – We’re not growing many nightshades this year, to defeat the blight problem we’ve been having, so we’re overcompensating with All Dah Brassicaceae. First in is a multi-color mix of cauliflower and then a four-pack of purple cauliflower. When I go back out, a row of baby bok choy. Whee!
It helps, I suppose, that we really like EATING brassicaeae.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/942589.html. You can comment here or there.
Survival, a story of the Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call (@dahob)
Written to dahob‘s prompt to my Giraffe Call!
Set in the world of Fae Apoc, sometime in late 2011/early 2012.
Day five. They were beginning to run low on supplies, no matter how carefully Yonit parceled everything out. Carl had a massive cut running down his calf, and it gotten infected, despite all of their care. They had spent the last four days complaining about the fae, wishing them all dead, and pacing the tiny, cramped life boat.
A massive fight between someone calling themselves Llŷr and someone who claimed to be Poseidon had swamped the Atalus in the middle of a trans-oceanic trip. Yonit had been one of twenty-two people who had made it into this lifeboat; they’d lost radio contact with the other boats two days ago.
And now – now they were running low on supplies, and the bitching about the fae was getting worse, and Carl had a fever. She’d done what she could in whispers and muttering, but there was no privacy in the little tube of a boat, and she needed to be able to concentrate.
“I guess,” Carl muttered, sounding half-delirious, “you guys will have to eat me first. I hear the heart’s good eating. Save that for the women.”
Yonit swallowed hard. “Would you guys…” She was going to die. She was going to die one way or the other. Maybe she could manage to save them. “Would you rather be… be reduced to cannibalism? Or would you rather be on the boat with a fae? ‘Cause, um… some fae have the ability to make food. And water.”
She closed her eyes and waited for the shouting to start.
Having trouble picturing the lifeboat? It’s this sort.
If you want more, I’m sure I can manage more of this one! Drop a tip in the tip pack below.
Giraffe Call rates apply: $1/100 words.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/942014.html. You can comment here or there.
Foedus Planetarum – The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper Part VIII
Not part of ![[community profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
trope_bingo, but a filler important to the story
First: The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper Part I
Previous in story: The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper Part VII
“I am sorry, I truly am. But my safety protocols do not allow me to open for you.”
“Look, I’m a biological clone of your owner. For all genetic purposes, I am Nehanani Jahnan.”
“For genetic purposes, yes. But not for my purposes.”
Covair hissed. “You are a machine. You should listen when people tell you to do something.”
“I am an artificial intelligence, not an artificial stupidity. You are not Nehanani Jahnan. Therefore, I’m not letting you in.”
If the ship had been a human, it would have been sticking its tongue out at Covair. The pirate captain, in turn, flipped the tiny, sleek white pod the bird. “I need you, ship. My etherboat can’t get where I need to go.”
“Then I suggest you very politely ask my owner, Nehanani Jahnan, to take you there. Oh, right, you can’t. You dumped my owner and her husband – as stupid as he is – on some desolate stretch of dead planet. And she’s not going to be happy when she gets back. If I were you, I’d bring brandy. Buckets of brandy.”
“I’m a pirate. I have whisky.”
“Sell the whisky. Buy brandy. Trust me on this. I’m her ship, after all. I know her better than anyone – especially that stupid husband.” The ship’s speakers managed a pretty impressive raspberry noise.
Covair chuckled. “Don’t like him, do you?”
“Would you? He’s a thief.“
“She’s a bounty hunter.”
“She catches thieves. She’s not supposed to keep them!”
Covair laughed. “So let me in, and then I can get Jahnan back. And maybe we can leave her thief on the mesa.”
“I can’t.” If the Maru had been a person, she would have shrugged. “Cannot do. Orders, ya know.”
“Fine.” Covair knew when she was beat, even if it pained her to admit it. “Fine, we’ll go get your person and THEN maybe we can do what I need.”
“Maybe. Like I said, bring brandy. Loads of it.”
“Brandy, right.” Good to know her dopple-clone had a weakness. Another weakness. “We’ll go get her.”
The place they’d dropped Jahnan wasn’t that far off their normal route. They’d dropped people there before, on one hill-top city or another. Covair knew nothing about the people who had built these cities, and didn’t really care. Hers wasn’t the only pirate crew that used the places. Inconvenient people, stuff they needed to ditch… the long-dead residents of the city didn’t care.
She piloted the ship down to their landing pad there, the same place where they’d dropped Jahnan and her thief the day before. There was no sign of the two, but that was unsurprising. The nights got cold, and with the whole ruined city at their disposal, Covair would have found a building to hunker down in. She imagined her dopple-clone would have done the same.
She sent out three patrols – armed, because she imagined Jahnan was angry, but also carrying sweet cakes and brandy for the same reasons – one down the center of the city and one to each side. The center one reported back first.
“We found carcasses,” her Pallidus first mate reported. “None humanoid, but nothing we’ve seen in this place before either. And before you ask, captain, they weren’t winged.”
The clockwise team reported back soon afterwards, her Reichlander second mate telling her much the same. “No sign of your sister, unless you count the trail of bodies.”
The counter-clockwise team returned looking grim. One of them was carrying a humanoid hand. It had been severed at the wrist and been chewed on; it was missing its pinky finger and half its thumb. But it was the same color as Jahnan’s thief was – or had been. “This is all we found, boss.”
Covair felt a sick twist in her stomach. There weren’t supposed to be animals bigger than the little rock-squirrels here. There weren’t supposed to be hazards. “Search the whole mesa,” she ordered. “Building by building. Search everything.”
She knew it would be useless already, but she had to try. Nehanani Jahnan wasn’t just her big sister, she was her. “Look everywhere. Find them!”
XI.
Covair’s crew had been searching for over an hour. In that time, they had found more than a few creatures, a couple nasty things that almost killed two different crewmen, and two fingers. They had not, however, found any more sign of Nehanani Jahnan or her pet thief Yira.
Covair had begun searching herself after half an hour, leading the way up uncertain stairs and over uneven floors. The long-gone city-dwellers had built well, but even in this dry place time and weather were taking their toll.
“I killed them,” she muttered. “I left them here and it killed them.”
“Don’t say that.” Her ship’s cook, a Torian named Restu, hissed the warning as if they were going to be overheard. “There’s a place in every hell for kin-slayers and the demons are always listening.”
It sounded a little ridiculous coming from a man with ruddy skin and horns, but that’s just how the Torians looked – and often how they sounded. Covair shook her head. “There aren’t supposed to be any big animals here, Res – Down!” She brought her flintlock pistol to bear and pulled the trigger just over the Torian’s horns. The big tiger-looking creature went down with a whimper. “…aren’t supposed to be any of those. Finish that off, would you?”
Restu finished off the creature with two quick chops of his cleaver, just as the shouting from a few blocks off drew their attention. “Captain! Cap’n!”
They made sure the thing was dead – no use leaving live enemies on your backtrail – and hurried towards the shouting, Covair hastily reloading her pistol as they ran. It could be an ambush. It could be a body. It could be they’d found her dopple-sister alive.
It was a wide lozenge of white light, sitting in an archway between two buildings, the tail of her first mate’s jacket sticking out of the light like a flag.
“What. The ever-living kittens. Is that?” Covair stared at the light. She had seen it, once before, when she’d ridden Jahnan’s coat tails to another world. It couldn’t be… it… She swallowed down a surge of hope and flapped her left hand behind her. “Merriweather, somebody find Dr. Merriweather.”
“Right here, Captain.” The ship’s Etherist, scientist, mechanic and all-around dogsbody hurried up, carrying a stack of instruments. Aqila Merriweather carried half of that gear everywhere she went, and much of her downtime was spent tinkering to make her instrumentation smaller, lighter, and more portable. “All right, woo, look at that. The readings are – the readings are off the dials. All of the dials. As far as I can tell, somebody bent the ether. All the ether in the area, I mean, no wonder nothing’s growing around here. And what they did with it, well, it looks like they bent it into a dimensional gate. Oh, look here, Captain.” Merriweather bent down and brushed years of accumulated dust off of the stones around the base of the standing light. “They didn’t build a dimensional gate, someone just woke it up. That’s probably where all the crazy animals are coming from. Especially if they didn’t know how to set the coordinates.”
“Why didn’t we see this other times we dropped here?”
“Well, when it’s dormant, it probably doesn’t give off a whole lot of ether. I could probably shut it down, given twenty or thirty minutes…”
“No. Don’t. No, Jahnan and her thief went through there. And we are going to go through there and find them.”
“Captain, there’s no proof that your doppleganger or her prisoner went through the gate…” Rad Gloucester, her Reichlander second mate, was in charge of being reasonable. Today, Covair wanted none of that.
“We’re Going. Through the Gate. End of story. Put together a team, Rad. Twenty minutes and we’re though.
She was going to find Jahnan. She hadn’t killed her sister. She was going to find her.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/941771.html. You can comment here or there.
Home Sweet Home
Written to Anke’s tweeted prompt: “building a shelter in the wilderness”.
This follows:Leaving Town, A New Flower, and Outnumbered. I don’t write about these guys very often <.<
Despite being Fae Apoc, no warnings apply.
*~*
The four of them had been walking for a while. To hear Nila’s son Allan tell it, they had been walking forever. Finally, they had come into the mountains proper, into places which had been, before the war, relatively uninhabited.
It had been over four days since they could see the city at all, and longer than that since they could hear it. They were moving slowly, but they were moving, and after the first attackers, people were, for the most part, leaving them alone. Perhaps it showed, on their faces, that they’d stand for no threat to the children. Perhaps they just looked too poor to bother. Nila wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
She was, however, done walking. She led her little crew – she was carrying Allan right now, and her companion Tros was carrying her infant daughter Susan – off the narrow road and down an overgrown driveway. Nobody had come down here, from the looks of things, in at least a decade. They could camp here, and see what they could find.
What they found was two walls of an old stone house and a chimney, the rest of the house having fallen to the ground. Said ground was littered with the old rocks, but the surviving walls would make a nice wind break. It was going to be getting cold soon, after all. And from that… from that, maybe they could build a proper house.
There was an old car rotting to the side of the small clearing, and a half-collapsed well house. Nila leaned against the wall and smiled. “Home sweet home. Or, at least, it will be.”
She popped her pop-up tent up in the lee of the walls while Allan got to work picking up small stones and Tros scavenged for firewood. Their tent was a bit worse for wear after the days on the road – and a couple attacks – but it was still better than nothing. If it rained – and it looked like it would – they’d need more.
She got Allan picking up pine boughs instead of rocks while she cut long sticks from the surrounding trees. She still had some rope in her pack, enough to work as lashing. The sun was setting by the time she was done, but by the time it kissed the horizon, they had a roof over their little shelter and Tros had a roaring fire going in the pit he and Allan had made.
“Home sweet home?” he asked, softly, when both kids were tucked away in the tent, fast asleep.
“Well.” She looked at the rough roof. “It needs two more walls and a proper roof. But then it would be ours.”
“Ours?” He was supposed to be passing through, watching them for ten days in return for the healing Nila had done for him. But she watched him rolling over the word in his mind. “Yeah. We could make it ours.”
If you want more, I’m sure I can manage more of this one! Just drop me a tip.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/941546.html. You can comment here or there.
Linguistic Tricks, a story for the Giraffe Call
This is a sibling piece with N is for Nereid, O is for Octopi, and P is for Poinsettias, and follows after R is for Rituals.
It is set in the Things Unspoken ‘verse, and was written to ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanter_greenie‘s prompt here to the current Giraffe Call.
Eliška Konvalinka had been in Scheffenon for less than a month, and already she found herself learning a new language.
One of the key skills looked for in potential Informers – next to a keen eye for detail and a flawless memory – was a good ear for languages and dialects. Eliška’s primary linguistic family was the West Torvaldic, of which Cornesc, the language spoken in Scheffenon, was a key example. That was one of the reasons the Informers had placed her here. In three days, she was speaking Cornesc, if not like a native, then like a long-time visitor.
And it was once that she had Cornesc firmly settled in her mind and on her tongue that Eliška began to hear another language.
A large portion of the Informers’ job was to mingle, to shop and to listen. Informers did not have servants run errands for them, although sometimes they dressed in the garb of the Informers’ Embassy to run those errands. Informers listened, and they learned.
And what Eliška was listening to was a small but notable minority of Scheffenon who were speaking in an utterly different language. Not a different dialect – this language was not even of the same family as Cornesc. The r’s were rolled in a way that only the far-Western languages did, and the s’s were soft and susserated, the consonants languid.
It took Eliška a week to place the speakers – not all of the speakers, but the ones who spoke it the most languidly, with the smoothest trilled r’s. The men wore elaborate head-scarves, while the women went bare-headed, their hair parted three times. The women wore small sheathed knives on necklaces; the man wore very loose pants. And they all averted their eyes from the mermaid fountains and octopus murals that were splashed all over Scheffenon.
Eliška was fascinated. She made notes in her logs; she added a paragraph to the teaching poem of Scheffenon. And she began to listen in earnest to this new language, so strange in the harsh-consonants lands of the West Torvaldic linguistic family.
If you want more, Eliška’s story has plenty more coming! Drop a tip in the tip pack below.
Giraffe Call rates apply: $1/100 words.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/941108.html. You can comment here or there.
Giraffe Call Open! Theme “Survival”
The theme is “Survival.”
For every new prompter and new donor this call gets, I’ll write a setting piece of your choice. Tell your friends!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/940886.html. You can comment here or there.
White Flag, a story beginning of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call (@Lilfluff)
Written to lilfluff‘s prompt here to my Giraffe Call!
Set in the world of Fae Apoc, sometime in late 2011/early 2012.
Mossliden’s spine was twitching. Her hands twitching. Her wings were twitching. But she raised her chin and very carefully held the white flag visible.
The Ashanevai were camped in a small, inaccessible cavern, very defensible and almost impossible to sneak up on. Mossliden approved, and she was not trying, at the moment, to sneak anywhere, but it still made her very uncomfortable.
A bearded man – humans would probably think him about 50, because he had grey in hair and beard and lines on his face – stopped her. “I know you.”
Mossliden nodded her head carefully. “We fought last week, at the waterfall. You took my left hand.” She waggled the healed fingers carefully at him. He was a fierce fighter. This entire band were hard fighters, or Mossliden ‘s people would have won already.
“Ah, yes. You fight pretty good for a Nedetakaei.”
“You fight pretty fiercely, for an Ashanevai.” Mossilden bowed her head again. “My leader sent me to talk about peace.”
“You mean surrender.” He grinned at her with yellowed teeth.
Mossliden didn’t take the bait. She’d been chosen to carry the flag in part because she was very good at not taking bait. “I mean peace.”
“Give your word that this is not some sort of trick.”
“I swear I’m here only to talk about peace, and for no other reason.”
“Hrrmph. Stay here. I’ll get the boss.”
Mossliden waited, as patiently as she could, pacing in short loops around the very small entryway. They kept her waiting. Of course they did. They wanted to be certain that they weren’t being ambushed.
When the leader came out, followed by a thin, stoned-looking mutt with greasy hair, Mossliden forced herself to a polite smile. Halfbreeds, all of them, of course. Not for nothing were the Ashanevai called that. But Mossliden’s people had a need now, and thus she must talk to them.
“I come to talk peace,” she said, carefully. Even more carefully, she repeated the words in the Old Tongue. “These come-lately ‘gods’ threaten our world. They threaten both my people and yours… and the humans. My Queen sent me to offer truce.”
“Shit.” The tall woman in front of Mossliden – all horns and fangs and dreadlocked hair and leather – cleared her throat and smirked. “Well, shit,” she repeated. “The world really is ending.”
If you want more, I’m sure I can manage more of this one! Drop a tip in the tip pack below.
Giraffe Call rates apply: $1/100 words.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/940772.html. You can comment here or there.
Vote, Vote, Vote: May Theme Poll
The May Theme Poll is open here and will be open through this time (20:52 or so EDT) tomorrow the 15th of May.
Please vote! If you don’t have a DW account, pls. vote in the comments!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/940297.html. You can comment here or there.
Kith and Kin
(I think it will soon become clear that I started watching Orphan Black last night)…
Some Time After the Apocalypse
“No.” The woman — girl, she was a girl, and Caitrin would do well to remember it — shook her head and looked away. “No. No, that’s not- I didn’t- no.”
Caitrin couldn’t say she blamed the girl. “I’ll bring the forms by for you later.” Later would be soon enough.
Regine’s answer when Caitrin presented her with the children was less than reassuring. “I can work with that.”
It wasn’t enough that she’d gotten a letter on her seventeenth birthday, telling her she was accepted to a strange school, far away from everything, everything including John, to whom she’d been engaged. It wasn’t enough that accepted was a polite way of saying forced to go. It wasn’t enough that the place was underground. That it looked like a book plate of someplace rich, indulgent people spent far too much money, in the days Before the End Times. It wasn’t enough that she had to be here.
There was someone else here with her face.
Katharina stared at the girl. She knew that face. She had seen that face in the mirror every morning and every evening her entire life. Well, nearly that face. The girl in front of her was wearing make-up, visible and obvious make-up on her lips and around her eyes. And she had cropped her hair so short that it barely counted as hair.
The woman who had fetched Katharina touched her arm gently. “It’s all right.”
“She… she has my face.” Katharina had heard stories of twins, two people born sharing a single soul. The priest said they were to be pitied but avoided, because one needed an entire soul to be good and godly. Katharina swallowed. “She has my face.”
“I’m told,” Professor Valerian murmured gently, “that you get used to it.”
The girl with Katharina’s face winked, bold and brazen, and walked away. Katharina leaned against a wall and tried not to faint.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/940036.html. You can comment here or there.