Archive | March 29, 2016

Plans, a drabble of Cynara

Mar29

a good 30, 60 years after the last-written Doomsday story as of now.

Cya leaned over a list of names with her youngest school-aged descendant. He’d brought the list home home from his first year at Addergoole, every classmate in his year and the two years above him.

She let her finger pause over three names. “These three are not related to you at all, even remotely. And this one is also not related to any of the Boom brood. These two are pretty far distant, but sticking to the ones that aren’t descended from Boom is better.”

Her (great-great-so-many-greats)-grandson glanced over at her. “Why?”

“Oh,” Red Doomsday smiled, “I’m working on a thing. It might not help you, but it’ll help your kids.”

Her grandson – one of Yoshi’s line, with a disturbing resemblance to Yoshi’s father – smiled cautiously. “I trust you. So, these three?”

Trust. Cya did another Find on the list. “This one’s the best. The safest.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1081176.html. You can comment here or there.

Character Study: Melinda

Mar29

So way back here, I said I wanted to get into the heads of two non-Addergoole side characters.

I asked Cal to pick a setting, and Cal picked Stranded. Which doesn’t have a LOT of background characters.

So we have Melinda, who is dating Summer and Bishop.

Melinda woke up early.

She usually did – Summer liked to sleep as if she’d been running marathons one after another, and Bishop didn’t like to go to bed until practically sunrise. That meant Summer got the middle and Bishop got the outside, and Mellie slipped out of bed while the sun was still just thinking about getting up itself.

She snuck out of the bedroom on bare feet, grabbing a robe as she went. Their roommates wouldn’t be up for another hour or two either, which meant that she had the place to herself, just for a bit.

She settled on the back porch with her History of the Americas textbook, a big mug of tea, and her favorite highlighters. Truth be told, this was half of what she liked about waking up early: this was her time, to be shared with nobody.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080899.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery, Part Shnarg

Mar29

after this and written in response to Rix_scaedu‘s comment.

The science of psychometry was still frowned upon by many of Tekemuzh’s colleagues, he knew. They said it was folly and superstition; they said that it was a misuse of the aether if it worked at all, and certainly it wouldn’t really work. Usually, they stopped after he managed to make his “parlour tricks” reveal something about them they would have rather he hadn’t said.

He could have done without Aetherist Ovanobina calling him in to this particular task, however. Bones upon bones upon bones… and the silver vein that had led the miners to this dig.

“Tell us.” Ovanobina pulled Tekemuzh to the first in a long row of skeletons. “I want to know how they died.”

“Well,” Tekemuzh coughed, “there’s the problem, of course, that if they didn’t die with any major trauma or any surge of aeth…” He trailed off as his fingers brushed the first skeleton. “Oh. Oh by the Three.”

He sat back, trying to keep the contents of his stomach where they belonged. She had bled out, slowly and in pain, next to the still-warm corpse of her sister. She had died, bleeding aether into the very rock. “I think…” Tekemuzh swallowed and tried again. “I think it was a ritual.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080795.html. You can comment here or there.

Some more living on an ocean planet

Mar29

After this

Tropical life was weird. Austin was on the building crew, and so he and William and Mable had gotten first dibs on their choice of house.

They’d chosen a shelter on what they were now calling Auswilma Island, an acre-and-a-bit hilly, wooded lot with steep drops to the water on three sides and a nice casual hill down on the side immediately opposite The Big Island. They got there first, so even though they’d have to share it with two or three other houses – two were built, and there was room for a third – they claimed naming rights.

But owning their own island wasn’t the weirdest part, any more than swimming the narrow channel between Auswilma and Big Islands twice a day to get to ‘work’ was, or bedding down to sleep while the weather was so warm they couldn’t stand to touch each other for more than a few minutes.

Weirdest was the wildlife, mainly flighted animals, and the way a couple of them seemed to latch onto each colonist and follow them around. Austin’s were a blue-and-marmalade-patterned thing the size of his hands together and a dark-buff-colored thing whose wingspan was bigger than Austin’s. At night, they roosted on the roof of the house, his and William’s red-and-blue pair and Mable’s trio of mostly-black ones. During the day, they followed them around.

When the big one dove into the water next to Austin and pulled out an eel-thing twice his size, Austin was suddenly very grateful indeed for their company.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080400.html. You can comment here or there.

Freewriting to 7th Sanctum Prompt: Martyr

Mar29

Written to a prompt from this page, which is the first sentence of this storylet.

I will be a noble, with my weapons and my bracelets, and it is disgusting.

I had planned to be a martyr. A martyr was an honorable thing to be, even if it made one’s father weep and one’s cousins nervous. Martyrs’ names were written on the great wall – or so we called it, though it was sun-baked mud and when the rainy season came, the names tended to bleed away down into the gutter. But so did we, and so we pretended it was poetic.

And yet when the fight came, I found myself doing the unthinkable. I saw a noble, a man no more than twenty years old, barely worthy of either the words “noble” or “man” and I threw myself over him, protecting him from the blast. I had meant to die on their soldiers’ bayonets, and instead I lived, and he lived. And worse, he thanked me, thanked me publicly.

I would never be able to show my face in the slums again, and so when his mother offered me a bayonet by the handle and not by the blade, when she offered me the wristlets of service, what could I do? I will be a noble, no matter how disgusting it is, and I will serve this man whose life I saved.

I might have meant to be a martyr, but there is no point in dying at the hands of my own people, and so my sacrifice will have to wait.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080292.html. You can comment here or there.