Archive | September 14, 2016

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

Sep14

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
Part XI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1164418.html

Help! I’d like clever individual titles for these chapters as well – now taking suggestions for 11 and this one!

Their guide was looking at Buffy as if she had grown a second head.

“Ah just wanted to have a little fun.” She spoke slowly, as if talking to a dangerous animal. That, Xander considered, was probably pretty accurate. “This place, I mean, people are only the new folks once, and if someone spooks ‘em bad, well, that’s not fun. I figured Ivette and Anwell in the hot tub—”

“And Ardell,” Xander interjected, although he couldn’t have told anyone why, “don’t forget Ardell.”

“Yes, but Ardell don’t look like nothing except handsome.”

“..I wasn’t looking that closely,” Xander admitted. “The, uh, wings, yeah, those were a bit of a hang-up.”

“…That’s it, you see, I figured that would be, well, shocking without being terrifying. But y’all ain’t shocked. You ain’t surprised. You’re barely upset at all. Are y’all ringers?”

“Ringers?” Buffy frowned. “Like, bell-ringers? No, we don’t do that, although once I hit a—”

Willow coughed loudly.

“Ah mean,” Magnolia continued, with exaggerated patience, “did y’all know about this stuff before you came here?”

“Well, now,” Xander babbled, “that depends on what you mean by ‘know’ and of course by ‘stuff’ and then there’s ‘before’ and ‘you’… and ‘y’all’…”

“What Xander means to say,” Willow cut him off, “is that there’s a lot of stuff to know about. And it might not be all that related to, ah, demon girls doing — things, doing things — in the hot tub, which ew, unsanitary — and we’re not in the habit of sharing the things we do know with people, and certainly not to see if they freak out!”

“Ah’m sorry, ah’m sorry.” Magnolia ducked her head and offered a smile that she probably meant to be contrite. Xander didn’t buy it, and yet, he rather thought he ought to… anyway. “So you knew about… something here. Demons, hrrm. Usually when we hear people shout ‘demon’, they’re a little less clinical about the whole thing.”

“Well,” Willow explained, “you have to know what sort of demon you’re dealing with. I mean, the difference between little black wings and big blue wings, it can be the difference between—”

“Succubus or Mara?” Magnolia offered.

“What? Succubi are a — oh, I should really stop saying things are myths, shouldn’t I?” Willow’s brow wrinkled worriedly. “And mara, oh, hrrm, those are… Buddhist demons, we haven’t encountered any of those, but they look very dangerous.”

“I’d be careful,” Magnolia said, suddenly looking serious, “about that word, ‘demon.’ I’m not sure what you’re used to, but around here, calling, hrrm, mara demons could get you with some upset people.”

Willow’s frown deepened. “I’ve never heard of a demon that minded being called a demon, I mean, among the sort of demons you can have a conversation with. Oh, dear, is this a school for demons? Because we’re not, you know. We’re — maybe a little strange, but we’re not demons, no…”

“You know,” Magnolia answered slowly, “I’m beginnin’ to think that you three and I have a different definition of the word ‘demon.’ You’re talking like these are, say, people on the street calling themselves demons?”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say people, not about most of them at all,” Xander put in.

“Not helping, Xander,” Buffy frowned. “So, you’re talking about people that look like demons and don’t call themselves that. We’re talking about — oh, man, Giles is gonna kill me, but he knew, didn’t he?” She turned to Willow, who made a sympathetic face. “He had to have known, that’s why with all the lectures on not… ‘punching’ people and all that. Okay.” She turned back to Magnolia. “This is supposed to be totally of the secret, but I’m talking about things from actual different dimensions, most of whom are not fuzzy wuzzy cute girls. Well, some of them are, but they like to eat teenaged boys, too.”

“That was only once!”

“Different dimensions?” Magnolia barely spared Xander a glance. “Oh, this is above my pay grade,” she complained. “Luke didn’t tell me — oh, but I bet he didn’t know, or he’d have put you with a cy’Solomon or something, not little ol’ cy’Linden me…” The despairing face she made was almost certainly fake, but Xander couldn’t help but wonder about the actual distress she’d started the sentence with. “All right, so you know demons. Different demons. Now this is quite interesting — but it’s going to make this whole tour a bit complicated, unfortunately.

“Can we settle for a little uncomplication first?” Xander put in. “I mean, not to distract from the mouth-of-hell problems and the demons, cute and not, but what’s a, um, kie-Solomon?”

“Oh, now, that’s easy.” She relaxed, leaning against the wall. Xander found he liked the way she looked relaxed, all smiling and — he mentally shook himself. “We all have Mentors. They’re teachers who, well, teach you specific stuff outside of classes and help you work out what you’re going to do with school.”

“Oh, kind of like an Advisor in college,” Willow perked up.

“Kind of,” Magnolia agreed. “And a group of students under the same Mentor is called a cy’ree. So, cy’Linden, Student of VanderLInden.”

“Oh!” Buffy smiled brightly. “So, like, we’re all cy’Giles.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1178885.html

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Conlang all year round – SeNTAXember in September

Sep14

Oh no, September is syntactical rules and I’ve already covered the easy bit, sentence order… wait, have I?

I covered Old Tongue’s in JuLECTURary, but not Calenyen’s.

Calenyen is Subject-Object-Verb, with most modifiers being tacked on to the end of words. Tense is added to the beginning of verbs (Goat-red food-low pasttense-Is-Loudly bleating-at).

Old Tongue Also normally adds modifiers after the subject of the modifier, a holdover from their system of diacritical marks in the original ideography.

I think Old Tongue does some funky things with tense, but I’m not sure what yet, or how. And I just learned about Anaphora and think Old Tongue uses this heavily.

Short post! But it doesn’t take many words to say S-O-V, V-S-O. 🙂

Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch 1
DisMayCourse
Juneme 1
Julectury 1
Augovernust 1
Morphambruary 2
Febmanteau 2
Polysemarch/Juneme2
Juneme 2/2.5
AugGOVERNust 2
JuLECTURy 2
✒️

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Weekend! With Cap and Morn, Sledgehammers and firewood

Sep14

I have to say, I get a kick out of walking in to a hardware store in my girliest outfits and buying, say, a sledgehammer…

It’s been a lot of yardwork and then some more yardwork lately. Moving firewood around, re-organizing the barn to better fit more firewood in there – and to be able to cut large piece of plywood and 2x10x10s, so as to make a bedframe…

And also, I got to smash a toilet to bits. That was fun. 😀

Somewhere in there, though, I drove to Rochester to see [twitter.com profile] capriox_b and [twitter.com profile] psygeek at Capriox’s house! (Also, there were cows, dogs, kitties, and a cow-milking robot!)

It was awesome to see old friends (Cap) and new friends (Psygeek) and to actually meet up with interwebs people. Also, in a nice coincidence, Cap lives just a couple blocks from my parents and my aunt & uncle, so I squeezed in a little extra visitation while I was in town. It made for a very very nice weekend.

Also, I discussed the definition of “necessary shoes” and “ridiculous boots” (https://www.instagram.com/p/BKMBtO3BFqT/), thought about winter wardrobes, and fixed my clothes steamer whilst researching water softeners. Anyone have one they really like?

This weekend, we’re going to The Big E. No idea what to expect, but I hear it’s fun!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173192.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

LadiesBingo: Enemies – Cynara and Regine

Sep14

Written for my [community profile] ladiesbingo card.

2030, approximately 19 years after the end of the world.

Cya had maps.

She had a lot more than maps, actually, enough that she’d ended up building herself another room to store it all. She had reports and charts, headcounts and vulnerability assessments, crop yields and even religious and linguistic demographics, assessing everything she could of their ruined world.

But most of all, she had one big map, and on that map was a circle labelled Addergoole and a carefully-shaded area labelled as Addergoole influence. Outside of that was a rough 50-mile circle that she’d labelled DMZ.

That was where her information stopped. She would walk herself right up to that line — and did, both literally and figuratively — find every piece of information she could, and make sure that she left with a positive relationship whenever possible. She fought monsters — rarely — fed people — far more frequently — and cleaned up roads and fallen buildings right up to two inches shy of that line.

The other side of the line was Regine’s territory, and there she would not tread, not now.

Regine had agents.

Some were former students; some were people she or her crew had helped out in the past, who owed her favors, formal or informal. Some were those who didn’t know who or what they were working for, but liked the steady pay of food, shelter, and barter goods, all rare to find in the disaster of their crumbled world.

Her agents went out into the world, looking for people and things, bringing back information and goods. They brought reports of the ruins of civilization: some places had fallen into disarray and barbarism and even two decades later had not settled into peace. Some had formed tiny city-states, boarded up and unwilling to talk to outsiders, even outsiders bearing rare trade goods. Some had turned their city-states into trade hubs, or into despotic mini-empires, or into quiet imitations of Eden, some more successful than others.

And in Wyoming, the group called Boom and the woman called Cynara were doing a little bit of all of that.

Regine sent only her best agents in that direction — the cleverest, the most subtle, the ones with the best escape abilities. She assumed Cynara did the same. She was not ready to go to war with Boom nor with Cynara herself; if her agent was caught on Boom’s territory, the volatile, explosive group might take it in their heads to start that war prematurely. Thus she drew out a three-quarter circle where she was very nearly blatant, and towards Wyoming she stayed subtle, sneaky… surreptitious.

———

Regine had agents, Cya knew. Every time she found one of them, she marked their position on a map. Some of them were obvious, the sort of people you only sent into territory you were certain of. Some tried to be sneaky. Some… Some Cya found only because she already knew Regine had agents. She was known for her ability to find things and people, after all. Regine should have known better.

When she caught one a mile from the Ranch where her crew lived, Cya decided polite ignoring was no longer the order of the day. She sat down with the woman for a pleasant conversation over scrounged tea and did a series of long and complicated Workings on the woman’s mind, the sort that left nearly no trace and would not be noticed until a specific person — perhaps, the person who had taught Cya Mind magic in the first place — went looking.

Then she sent the woman back to Regine with a very polite note.

I found this. I thought you might want it back.

———

Regine stared at the woman. She stared at the note. She stared back at the woman. “How were you detected?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The woman could no more lie to Regine than she could fly — and flying was not her particular magic skill. “Nobody detected me. I got in, I got out, I came back to report.”

The paper note was proof enough. The fact that the agent was staring at the note with no realization that she had just handed it to Regine was, as the saying went, icing on the cake. Nevertheless, Regine engaged in an invasive search of her agent’s mind.

And there it was. The work was so tidy Regine doubted anyone else could have found it. The girl, she had to admit, was skilled. She’d written in dots and dashes of missing time and changed memories:

Stay off my lawn and I’ll stay off yours

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