Archive | August 2016

Whatif…a very AU story

Aug31

What if Boom got expelled from Addergoole their first year? What if they had their minds wiped? What if…

Addergoole AU

Something was missing.

Cynara wasn’t sure what it was. Her father, of course – he’d finally screwed up one time too many, and she’d gotten placed in a foster home near a nice private school. But he wasn’t so much missing as he was gone.

Her new foster parents were decent, attentive – way too attentive, far more than Cya’s father ever had been, far too concerned when Cya stayed out or wandered off. They hardly left her room to think, but there was enough time – when she woke in the middle of the night, when she wandered off to take long, looping walks around the neighborhood – when Cynara could feel at the empty place in her memories and in her emotions.

It felt like a missing tooth. Something had been there, and then it was gone. There had been a – a warmth, a place where she could care about someone. There had been a wall she could lean against. There had been a pleasant wildness to make her feel.

She found the paperwork while looking for something else – she wanted to find her transfer to this school, because she kept getting confused on the date, and that had never happened before. The words at the top of the paper said Addergoole, but it was the wings on the crest that gave her the poke in the gut.

She found the anime while she was looking for something to spark a memory – a blond hero with a big weapon, a tiny girl with a large smile. She took it home and watched five episodes before her foster-parents took it away.

They were angry, and under the anger, they were worried. They grounded Cynara, which fazed her very little. She had no friends here. She’d never had friends anywhere; she moved too much. She’d never stayed in the same school more than…

Her dreams were colored in splatters of blood and the shouting of strange words.

More than a couple weeks…

She woke feeling a warmth just to one side of her, a wildness to the other, the loss deep in her gut.

…she’d never had time to make friends…

She dreamed of the shocked look in someone’s eyes and the cramping feeling of poison in her own veins.

She dreamed of Words that could change the world.

Her foster parents had locked the window and the door, but Cya’s father was a thief, and she’d been his apprentice.

She looked for the best way out of town, and a bus driver took pity on her. She looked for a safe route towards the loss in her chest, and she found a wallet someone had forgotten. She looked for the right train, and slipped on when nobody was watching her.

She didn’t know she was heading to Leo; all she knew was that she was heading home.

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Conlang all year round – Polysemarch/Juneme in August

Aug31

I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day (or so) up to August. We’re back around to Polysemarch…

…Today I get to go in circles!

The entry for the Thorne-Alder has this section on the Arran/West Coast name for the taxonomic definition:

The Alder belongs to the family of spear-leaf trees, adavijamin, where adavi is “spear-blade” and “jamin” is “leaf”. In that family, they belong to the mainer sub-family, “mainer” meaning “grove” or “family group, tribe.”

In typical calenyen fashion, the word mainer has been borrowed and mutilated into Calenyen – raimain.

(it is a common practice, when the letters in a loan word do not quite work for Calenyen, to move letters about or repeat letters. In this case, it likely started as “ramainer” and was shortened).

So… raimain is “grove”.

And it has also come to mean those that stick together clannishly. A raimain is a clique, a tight-knit group that acts similarly.

Okay, I give up on trying to do another one of these for Old Tongue quite yet, and I want to hold off on doing something with DisMayCourse, so ON TO JUNE(me) it is.

(Sh), shenera, which can be down with the modifier -eleg (a curved shape like a sideways lower-case “c”, down on the bottom of the writing to become savera, (s).

The glyph for shenera can also mean child, as the word does, and with the modifier, savera means bastard child.

Linguists theorize that the word savera came from the word savo, birth.

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch
DisMayCourse
Juneme
Julectury
Augovernust
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
✒️

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Summer Weekend

Aug29

I think I got more sun this weekend than I have in the entire summer. Thank god for sunscreen…!

Saturday, T. and I hiked out (okay, “drove” out) to an antique festival in Penn Yan, which is:

1. About an hour from home
2. On one of the tips of Keuka Lake
3. Home to several good Amish/Mennonite-run markets

Which pretty much tells you what our day looked like!

We spent a couple hours at the antique fest and got… one really nice fireplace poker. It’s a really nice fireplace poker, though, with a good long hook at the end, made out of bar stock.

Then we hit two wineries on our side of Keuka that we never make it to, bought a bunch of really tasty wine, and stopped for lunch at a food truck serving bison BBQ (super tasty!)

Somewhere in there, we hit our favorite Amish grocery store for some bulk foods and ridiculously tasty cheese n’ stuff…. Then we came home and napped forever. Good day!

Sunday, we headed out to the nearby Taughannock Creek for our first creekwalk of the season. On the way home, we stopped at a farmstand and bought a jillion things… Um. Well, nearly. Half a peck of peppers and half a bushel of canning tomatoes. Nom!

Side note: Paula Deen’s deep-fried summer squash recipe really is quite good.

It was quite a fun weekend, all things considered. A good couple summer days.

Oh, and I got into bullet journaling but that’s like at least two blog posts on its own…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1165908.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

September Patreon Theme Poll!

Aug29

It’s nearly September, and with the hopefully-dropping mercury around here (does anyone use mercury anymore? Or is it all digital? Or are the digital thermometers mercury? Hrrm, I wonder what they use in Reiassan…)

ANYway

With the hopefully-dropping temperatures comes Yet Another Patreon Poll!

This poll determines the Patreon prompt call (at the $5 patron level), which then determines the stories posted to Patreon (One is always free-for-everyone-to-read).

Want to check out my Patreon? Look here.

Want to check out my settings before voting? Check them out here.

If you don’t have a Dreamwidth account, you can vote in the comments.

This poll will remain open until Friday evening, 9/2/2016.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1165763.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Conlang all year round – Febumantau in August again

Aug27

I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day up to August.

And now we’re on to Febumantau for a second round…

and that means I can do another day! Yay!

If bikbaano is Song-Day, then the second day of the week comes from a deity we haven’t visited yet.

Which means we get to see a new deity.

This one is an old deity, one of the early Ideztozhyuha gods, Oonetoonen, from the roots Oonet, The Mountain, and noonen, climb (or oonen, a sacred climb): Oonetoonen is the deity of climbing mountains, of escape, of necessary things that are hard and painful.

And Oonetoonen’s day is the second day of the week, biknoonen

For Old Tongue I’m going to start with a compound word in English, bondroll –
okay, this one requires a bit of background.

If one is Kept (a magical type of submission), the praise from one’s Keeper (they who Keep you), is heady, pleasurable.

If your Keeper wants, they can get their Kept essentially drunk on praise – roll them with the Keeper-Kept bond…. thus bond-roll.

And in another calque…

Bond is tish, a lock, a seal.
Roll ends up being Otef – ote means wooziness; -ef verbs the noun.

Bond-Roll, translated directly ends up tishotef

(and never mind that there was already a word for that concept in Old Tongue…)

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury
Augovernust
Morphambruary 2
✒️
Polysemarch 2/ Juneme 2

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1165372.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

The Precedent – a story for Patreon Patrons

Aug26

Two lawyers and a judge bent over the paperwork,nearly-identical frowns on their faces.
Outside, in the waiting room, a red-haired manwaited with all appearance of patience. He was wearing a slim goldencollar beneath the open-necked shirt of his expensive suit and a much less slimring on his left ring finger.

“Is it legal?” the left-hand lawyer frowned.

read on…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1165236.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Lady Taisiya’s 4th Husband, Chapter 5 – a fantasy/romance fdomme story

Aug26

Chapter 5 in my answer to the “guy has umpteen wives” trope
Find Chapter 1 here
Chapter 2 is here
Chapter 3 is here
Chapter 4 is here.

Sefton looked around the nursery. The wing was large enough for every child there and then some, the beds stacked bunk-style in four adjacent rooms, the cradles sitting near the incubators. He guessed at the ages between the children — maybe two years, not long enough that you’d ever be done changing diapers, even if the older kids helped out. He stared at the incubators again, and the chairs where the men would spend hours a day singing to their eggs.

He smiled weakly at a young child presenting him a board book. He had spent his teenage years helping teach the younger children, every moment when he wasn’t in school. It wouldn’t be all that strange to keep teaching children.

“Not now, Lorthie. Husband Feltian can read to you tomorrow. Today, he has to go be with Lady Taisiya.” Onter didn’t so much scold as he cajoled.

Lorthie bowed solemnly at Sefton. “‘Morrow,” she lisped. She was barely walking, but already sounded authoritative. He couldn’t help but grin at her in response.

“Tomorrow, yes, little miss. I look forward to it.” He bowed to her deeply, the way he would any Lady, and looked up to Onter. “Lead on,” he said, much more bravely than he felt.

“Here we go.” Onter steered Sefton with a hand on the small of his back again. “Look. She’ll tell you if you do something wrong, and she’ll tell you, she won’t just punish you and expect you to figure it out.”

Sefton nodded quietly. “Okay.”

“She isn’t going to expect any tricks or anything innovative out of you, and if you’ve been experimenting on the side, stay quiet about it. Ladies like their men to be pliable, biddable, and teachable in bed.”

Sefton bobbed his head again. His fathers had told him similar things: know what you’re doing, then keep it behind your teeth and let her tell you what to do.

It was one thing to have heard it. Now… now he had to act on it. He nodded one more time, even though Onter hadn’t said anything else.

The elder husband studied him. He wasn’t that much younger than Sefton’s father; he already had grey in his beard and at his temples. “Remember this. Answer to Feltian. Nothing else you’re likely to do will get you in much trouble today, but if you forget your name — she won’t like it. She’s a stickler for the new names, our Lady. And because she is, you have to be, too.”

Sefton — Feltian — nodded slowly. “Wh—” He closed his lips on the question, and could see Onter approved of that discretion.

“Ask questions after you’ve been here a week or two,” the older man suggested. “That sort of question, at least. Then you’ll know what questions to ask.”

Sefton nodded once more time. “Yes, sir. I… any other advice?”

“Don’t expect her to be rough, don’t get flinchy or nervous. She thinks of herself as a reasonable, right-thinking woman — I’m not saying she isn’t, don’t ever think any of us have said she isn’t — and if you act like she’s out of one of those bad plays, you know, The Cruel Older Wife, she’s going to get temperamental. Being nervous is fine. Try not to be scared.”

Sefton laughed shortly. “I can try not to act scared,” he offered.

“I guess that’ll have to do.” Onter’s voice softened. “She’s not a monster. More importantly — she wanted you. Go with that. And if all else fails, just close your eyes and bite your lip and think about whatever you have to to get you through.”

The older man’s voice had gotten a little rough at the end. Sefton stole a glance at his face but decided whatever Onter was thinking or remembering, it was none of his business. “Yes, sir,” he said instead of asking questions. “Now?”

“Yeah. You’re still clean, you’re still naked, and you’ve got your chains. This way.”

The exit from the men’s ward was a smaller door than the one he’d come in, with no ornamentation. Onter knocked on it three times, and they waited.

Sefton tried not to shift from foot to foot. The door wasn’t locked, was it? No woman would lock her children in, after all, and her men were with her children. They weren’t stuck…

He stomped down the thought the moment it reared its head. Yes, of course they were “stuck;” they were married. They were chained. They were husbands.

The door swung open. Lady Taisiya awaited, in a soft robe so unlike the clothing she had been wearing for their wedding, her hair brushed back. She was smiling. She was beautiful.

Sefton cleared his throat, but Onter spoke before he had to figure out something to say. “My Lady, your newest husband awaits you.”

Oh, no, not more ceremony. Sefton kept his head down and a small smile on his face to cover his growing nerves.

“Come, husband Feltian.” Lady Taisiya’s voice was formal. Sefton stepped forward over the threshold; there was no way he was disobeying that tone.

The lady — his wife, his wife, his lady — put her hands on his shoulders. “Thank you, First Husband. Rest well tonight.”

“Rest well, Lady Taisiya.” Onter’s voice wasn’t formal at all. It was thick and warm and affectionate. He slapped Sefton lightly on the back. “Enjoy this one.”

Taisiya’s chuckle surprised Sefton enough that he risked a glance at her face. She was smiling at Onter over Sefton’s shoulder, clearly amused. “I think I will. He’s a sweet one so far, isn’t he?”

Sefton’s cheeks were growing hot. Onter’s laugh made him even hotter, and there was no-where to hide.

“Oh, my Lady, I think you’ll find this one very sweet indeed. Be good, Feltian.”

Sefton didn’t know whether to be worried or relieved by the sound of the door closing, locking Onter back in husbands’ territory and leaving Sefton all alone with his new wife.

Chapter 6: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1171106.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1164752.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

The Precedent – a Patreon story

Aug26

A story of Tír na Cali

Two lawyers and a judge bent over the paperwork, nearly-identical frowns on their faces.

Outside, in the waiting room, a red-haired man waited with all appearance of patience.  He was wearing a slim golden collar beneath the open-necked shirt of his expensive suit and a much less slim ring on his left ring finger.

“Is it legal?” the left-hand lawyer frowned. She bore a familial resemblance to both of the other women in the room,but her hair was a slightly darker shade of red and it was beginning to be touched with white at the temples.

“She dotted every i and crossed every t,” the second lawyer — younger, her suit slightly better tailored — opined. “She has it signed by all the right people.”

“They have no children?” the judge checked. Continue reading →

Buffy: the Invitation (an Addergoole Crossover), Part XI

Aug25

Buffy: The Invitation

Part I: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1096503.html
Part II: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1100922.html
Part III: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1104619.html#cutid1
Part IV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1108537.html
Part V: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1112216.html
Part VI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1124762.html
Part VII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1134781.html
Part VIII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1139412.html
Part IX: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1146552.html
Part X: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1155478.html

Help! I’d like clever individual titles for these chapters as well – now taking suggestions for 10 and this one!

Luke made a deep growling noise in the back of his throat. “Magnolia, what did I tell you about scaring guests?”

Magnolia made an innocent expression that was ruined by the mischief in her eyes. “Wait until someone else had scared ‘em first?”

“That’s a good start,” he admitted. “Play nice, don’t feed them to any other upperclassmen, and have them back to my office in two hours. Got it.”

“Feed us?” Xander whispered. “Buff, are you…”

Buffy frowned. “Not sure. Things feel hinkey here.”

“Ah, Buffy,” Giles cleared his throat. “Please remember — things here may seem strange in ways that seem familiar. If you are in absolute need of, ah, punching someone, please do come get me before you do anything rash.”

“Got it. No punching without asking the… Librarian first.”

“Oh, ah should introduce you to our librarian. I’m sure she’d like you.” Magnolia’s smile was broad and playful.

“Magnolia,” Luke warned.

“All right, all right. Ah’ll be good. Come on, now, do you want to see the store, the pool, or the arcade first?”

She raised her answers as they all replied at once — with different answers.

“All right, so, we’ll do this in order. Pool is this way, I suppose that means you win, darlin’.” She winked at Xander, who blushed and looked away.

“Would’ve thought you’d had enough of pools,” Willow muttered.

“Hey! I resemble that remark. But, all things considered, I find I like a dip in the water as much as any red-blooded young man…” Xander trailed off to catch up with Magnolia, who was sashaying away. “Hey!”

Buffy had no problem catching up, but trailed a few feet behind to make sure Willow wasn’t getting lost. “Come on, Wills, pay no attention to Xander chasing another demon. I mean, except we probably should pay attention, in case we have to stake someone and why did Giles tell me not to ‘punch’ things? What are we going to run into down here that he had to warn me not once but twice?”

“Well, considering the wards, maybe there’s something down here that’s going to make your … s-girl senses go all wonky,” Willow offered. “And if they already know something’s amiss, maybe they know about… people like, um, like Kendra?” She flailed her hands.

“I don’t like that.” Buffy frowned. “I don’t like being underground to start with, and if I’m underground with a bunch of creepy people who might just know what I can do…” She stopped, because Xander had stopped in the middle of a doorway and was trying to back up, right into them. “Already? Xander, what—”

“D-d-devil,” he muttered, taking another step backwards, dragging Magnolia with him. She, in turn, had an amused smile on her lips and her hand wrapped around Xander’s bicep.

“Come now, that’s no way to talk about Ivette — unless you’ve slept with her.”

“Woah, woah, none of the sleeping with.” Xander put his free hand up in a “stop” gesture. “No matter what anyone’s told you, I’m not the sort of guy to—”

“Oh, come on, Xander, sometimes you are.” Buffy slid between him and the doorway, moving under his upraised arm. “Now what’s this about… oh.” There were a pair of bat wings clearly in her vision; they belonged to someone not wearing anything else, in a tub of people wearing the same thing. “Pardon us…” she slipped right back out, covering her face with her hand. It did nothing to help with the images now seared into her brain. “Was that… Were those…”

“That’s Ivette,” Magnolia purred, “with the wings. And that was Ardell and Anwell with her.” Her voice turned concerned. “That’s nothin’ strange for Addergoole, just some people having fun. The wings don’t bother you, do they?”

“It’s just that,” Buffy blinked a few times. “Okay, sorry, one moment. Wills: black-and-red batlike wings, cute ones, though, not big enough to do much. LIttle devil tail, little horns, same color.”

Willow was flipping through her notebook before Buffy stopped talking. “Skin color?”

“Freckles. White skin.”

Magnolia was looking back and forth between them in bemusement. “Y’all Grigori types or what? No-one else’s ever seen a cy’Linden party and gone ‘what type of wings did she have?’”

“Oh, hey, guys, it’s a party, maybe we should go in.” Xander pivoted and turned towards the door. He made it about half a step before Willow and Buffy grabbed him.

“Xander, Anwell and Ardell were, uh, male. quite male… Oh. Oh, the one had scales on his back, Willow.”

“Nope, nope.” Xander backed off. “Done with scales.”

“…Y’all have an interesting life, don’t you?” Magnolia frowned.

Buffy pointed a glare at her. “You knew they were there, didn’t you? And you wanted to see what we did when we saw — when we saw her wings. And maybe scale-boy’s scales.”

“Well, where did you think I was before I came to show y’all around?” she smirked. “And you should thank me. When you come here, you’ll be a leg up on the rest of ‘em if you’ve already seen it. Most people don’t get a tour.”

“All right.” Buffy paced in front of the pool door. “Wings. The girl had wings. And you were trying to see if we’d freak out.”

“GIles said not to freak, Buffy,” Willow reminded her. “So Giles knows something is going on here.”

“Oh, well, that’s no fun,” Magnolia pouted. “Not even over wings?”

“Not the first winged demon I’ve seen. I mean, usually Xander finds the pretty ones, not me, but that’s about it.” Buffy shrugged. “So you wanted to spook us. Why?”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173922.html

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