Archive | December 2015

Discovery, Part Fnarg

Dec23

Tangential to but concurrent with Discovery and Discovery Part II.

The miners had found the bones, and at first, nobody had thought anything of it.

They had been following a newly discovered vein of prime silver, accessible only due to new machines and techniques and so heavily loaded with aether that it seemed to vibrate. They’d cracked open a cave and found further veins of silver running down below the cave, and then their first crack at the ground had revealed bones.

It didn’t take a doctor or an anthropologist to determine that the bones were human; when they called in two of each, what they could say was that the bones were very old indeed, female, and they did not know how she’d died. They could also guess that the bones were from a full-grown adult, although she would have only reached the shoulder of most women.

A lone woman dead in a cave nobody had known about was a mystery, but not so strange as to halt digging of aether-rich silver. The miners had let the doctors and scientists take away the bones, and then they’d begun digging again.

That was when they found the second skeleton. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth, sixth… at ten, the miners threw up their hands in frustration.

By that point, the scientists had begun the serious examination of the first set of bones.

next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080795.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1030274.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 22: Paaaar-taaaay

Dec22

[personal profile] rix_scaedu asked for parties!

To begin with, we’ll want the word for party, which comes from lok, meal, and rook, tribe or family group: lok-ryu-rook (meal for the whole tribe), Lokurook. From this word you get Lokook, /lō ‘ko͝ok/ party, as well as lokozh, a grand festival or large meal at a gathering.

(See the post on trade).

Recently, the term lokurdin – from derdin, friends, from diednerdin (obsolete), who who trusts another, from ner, trust – has risen to prominence. A meal-for-friends is a completely social gathering, often with alcoholic drinks featuring heavily.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029847.html. You can comment here or there.

An attempt at First Person

Dec22

I am trying writing in first person by re-writing bits of extant stuff. I couldn’t think of anything to do, so I did part of Monday’s Edally

The dining hall wasn’t silent, but it might as well have been. There was the House Monitor to one side of me, my friends to the other, and a small gang of Bitrani boys in front of me; nothing else in the room mattered at the moment.

“There’s no fight.” Darnio talked around the lie slowly. “We were talking to Saydrie. Things got heated.”

The House Monitor looked doubtful. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why?” No, of course they didn’t.

“He’s a ra-” Maybe they did. But the Bitrani that spoke up was silenced by his friends. Maybe they just liked to touch each other. I didn’t shudder, but I wanted to.

“We were having a political disagreement?” Darnio’s lies were getting less and less believable. “It just got a little out of hand.”

Was the House Monitor really going to believe that? I hadn’t gotten this whole thing right up to the edge of a fight to have her believe his manufactured stories.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029461.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day (20) (Yesterday) – Fancy Pants

Dec21

The Calenyena have two words they use to mean “over done, gaudy, frivolous.”

The first comes from the Tabersi {Bitrani} words for “wide-brim”, fanada lerjo.

Although the Tabersi use broad-brimmed hats for a number of sensible reasons, not the least of them being that they are a cold-weather-adapted race that migrated south and tend to sunburn, they also wear some pretty ridiculous hats, at least by Calenyena lights, and thus “wide brimmed” became a term of disparagement. In Calenyen, this became baanaadaaler /’bän nä ‘dä ler/.

The second term comes from the West-Coasters {Arran}, from the city of Sheburri, which was known for being a fashion hub. To be immensely overdressed for a situation (“silk in the goat pen” is another phrase for it) is to be like someone from Sheburri, zhebburnon.

If you are thinking you have to be pretty overdone for the Calenyen to find you ridiculous… well, that’s not entirely inaccurate.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029201.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember day 21: Grooming

Dec21

Today’s words focus on basic grooming, combing and brushing:

lool, to pull apart

dalool /’da lo͞ol/ a tool for pulling apart, a comb

dalooltez, a goat-hair comb

lurret, to smooth (from lur, smooth, easy)

(-ret is often used to mean “to make this [adjective]”)

Daluret, a tool for smoothing, a brush

Daloolza, to use a comb; dalurretza, to use a brush.

(-za is often used when using a tool)

Hair, human hair, is piem, so you can end up with a sentence like: Taikie piem-ba uveedalurretzaak; Taikie hair-her (pastperfect)-brush-(subject/verb agreement); Taikie had brushed her hair.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028982.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 19: “I made a sentence”

Dec19

[personal profile] thnidu responded to yesterday’s post by asking me to create the sentence “I made a sentence”. So!

laar, I

taar, you, subject

taarte, you two, and so on.

baar, he/she (person pronoun)

baarrte, those two, and so on.

archaic: baan, baante and so on (she, a group of only women).

gaan, it (animal/thing pronoun)

laanaan, me

taannan, you-object (taannante, you two and so on)

baarnan, her/him

gaanran, it-object.

Okay, phew, there’s pronouns, so.

I made a sentence

Make, to create, to craft: Tair (this word, from an old word meaning “skill,” which can also be seen in -tairook, “with care” or “with practiced care. Throwing something together or making something that isn’t perceived as needing skill is died, from diedie, toss, this from the same root as dudiedah, tumble, from the loss post.)

Sentence!

we start with

iekiek, this exists (See also iekiekyent, a known fact.)

tel-, that which voices

teliekiek, that which give voice to an existing thing

telkiek

Need a break for some tea…

(This is the part where I need a punctuation to suggest the beginning of a sentence in my con-script, since I don’t have capitals.)

Laar telkiek ezhtairak: I sentence (past tense)-make-(subject agreement)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028533.html. You can comment here or there.

Such a nice girl…

Dec19

Content warning: mind control, threat of violence, implied non-con, straight out nastiness.

Pls. don’t read if that’s gonna make you need to yell at the characters or the school. I wrote this one just for fun.

“That’s it. Hands behind your head.”

She’d been so nice.

Archimedes put his hands behind his head. Not because he wanted to; at the moment, he really didn’t want to do anything but run away. He was, sadly, already kneeling.

“Keep them there. Stay. Good boy.”

She’d helped him figure out this place, with electricity he barely remembered and food he’d never eaten. She’d gotten between him and some bullies, and if it grated that a girl was in between him and bullies, well, she’d softened that with a kiss.

He shifted his weight from knee to knee. The good boy felt good, but she was holding something that looked like a mop made of leather strips. “I don’t-“

“I know you don’t. But you’ll learn, won’t you?” She dropped down to her knees in front of him, the whip-thing falling to the floor. She was looking in his eyes, her own purple and terrifying.

She’d been so nice. It had felt so good talking to someone who got it, who could show him all the wonders of this place like the miracles they really were.

Archimedes held very still. The whip, the whip-thing had come out because he’d gotten freaked out. She was pretty, she was still pretty, but she was not, definitely not, human.

“Attaboy. That’s good. You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

He didn’t really know what had happened. She’d been holding him. They’d been enjoying the shower together. And then, then…

“Some of us are monsters,” she’d said. That had been the first day.

Archimedes swallowed. “You’re gorgeous. And it feels really good when you touch me.”

She’d told him not to lie, and he’d found that what she told him, he couldn’t disobey. Maybe she’d forgotten that, because she smiled. He focused on those purple eyes and tried to ignore the sharp, sharp teeth.

“That’s a good boy.” Her hand cupped his balls, her claws just barely pricking his skin. “Maybe if you can be very, very good for me, I won’t have to whip you, hrmmm?”

She’d been so nice. And then she’d looked at him, and her voice had dropped down low. “Don’t ever forget the nice guys ruined our planet as much as the bad guys.”

Archimedes nodded slowly. His throat was dry and his skin was crawling. “I can be good for you. You’re so beautiful.” Nobody’d ever said he wasn’t a quick learner.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028265.html. You can comment here or there.

You’d Better Watch Out

Dec18

Evangaline clucked in disapproval at the vaguely-translucent Aunt standing between her and the fireplace; the Aunt, in turn, shook her head at her.

“Who,” Evangaline asked carefully, “thought that this particular tradition was a good idea for our family?” She should have studied more fashion in school, and her only reference on that sort of thing was upstairs. She wasn’t going upstairs right now.

Continue reading →

Discovery, Part two

Dec18

after Discovery

If pressed, the captain would never admit it, but Titrian had always been skeptical about the concept of the Lost Colony. Ships just didn’t go over the Fire Sea.If they were only now figuring out how to safely navigate north of the Fire Sea – and that only by using dirigible technology in tandem with new boat designs – there was no way that that their ancestors more than a millenium in the past had managed to work it out.

So Captain Titrian had always believed. But when the gods and the government paid your salary, there were times that you had to go against your own beliefs.

Since he’d never told anyone that he didn’t believe in the lost colonies, Titrian had nobody but himself to know his uncomfortable shame when they found themselves looking up at a fully-developed city. A garishly-colored city, he noted, with even the cliff face covered in paintings.

His first mate coughed. “That, sir, uh. It doesn’t look like a Tabersi city.”

Titrian had to agree. It didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before. “Signal the admiral. This might be more complicated than we thought.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028023.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 18: “This Barley Grows Here.”

Dec18

Today we get a phrase!

“This barley grows here.”

toppotzhu

barley, toppot
-zhu, -this

here, ikiek

toor, to grow

in- currently, presently

-anan conjugating a verb to a plural useful subject

toppotzhu ikiek intooranan

This means somewhere between “that was then, this is now” and “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” with maybe a bit of “que sera, sera.” The Calenyena, who began life as a herding culture, use this phrase to answer changes in environment that they cannot alter.

It colors their attitude towards food and crops: this is the food we can grow here. It also informs the way they look at gods; these are the gods we have now.

It’s a philosophy, and, of course, not everyone always adheres to it. Sometimes it’s just the phrase a parent uses to answer complaints by a child. “You can’t always have what you want; this barley grows here.”

It’s useful to note that most Calenyena use barley, toppot, to loosely describe all cereal grains.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1027753.html. You can comment here or there.