Archive | December 9, 2016

Landing Page: Black Knight (Chess) AU

Dec9

A double-crack alternate universe in which Leo gets an army and then takes over the northwest.

[personal profile] inventrix: Only a Flesh Wound
Black Knight
[personal profile] inventrix: House Arrest
White Queen
White Knight
Red Queen
Domination
Captured Knight
Captured Knight continued
[personal profile] inventrix: Keeping Up Appearances
[personal profile] inventrix: Reversal
[personal profile] inventrix: All According to Plan…?
Chessboard
Other Pieces
Chessmaster
Knocking Over Pieces
[personal profile] inventrix: Uncomfortable Developments
Leash
No Title
Movement
Phase II (and a bonus intro to something later)
[personal profile] inventrix: Chain of Command
Blonde Bishop
[personal profile] inventrix: (no subject)
Flight
Punished
Flightless

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Flightless

Dec9

After Punished
Landing Page: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1202628.html

“Stay here.” Cya walked into another room, only to come back a few moments later, carrying… what looked like sheets of leather and a few buckles. Luke frowned.

“Can you Make things or shape them more easily?”

“Shape, usually.” He looked at the leather in concern. “What am I shaping?”

She ran her hand over a very thin slice of wood and muttered a Working. When she was done, there was a technical drawing in black – char? – on the light wood sheet. “This.”

Luke studied it for a moment. His wings flared out in protest, knocking something off an end table and catching a throw pillow with his bottom wing-claw. “This is for me.”

“It’s for you.”

He picked up the pillow and muttered a Repair Working on it to give himself a moment to think. It was a harness. It was designed for wings like his – designed for his wings in particular, he’d bet – and, when it was buckled on, he wouldn’t be able to get it off without a Working, because the buckles were behind his wings.

It didn’t look like it was meant to be tight, except the cross straps across his chest and down both sides of his back, and the two brace pieces above and below his wing-joins. It was just two loops – one over the top of his wings, one around the bottom of them – that meant he’d have very little range of movement. It wouldn’t be quite like when she’d wrapped him in rope, but it would definitely keep him from flying.

And if it wasn’t rope, he had a feeling she meant him to wear it out. In public.

“Make the leather as close to your wing color as you can. I’ll do the buckles. If we do this right, it should very nearly blend in with your wings.”

He wasn’t sure if that was better or not. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Do I need to order you to do it?”

Did she need to? Luke looked at the plan. She wanted him to do it. She wanted him to make his own restraints. He could do it.

He looked up at her. She knew what she was doing. She knew, damn her. “Yeah.” His voice creaked. He didn’t care. “Make it an order.”

He knew it came out like challenge. If she was someone like his students, the look on his face probably would have led directly to a fight. He could use that right now, the violence, the exercise.

He wasn’t going to get it from her, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to get it from Leo.

She saw it in his expression, he knew she did. She did, and all she did was raise her eyebrows and smirk at him. “This drawing, Luca. Create the harness illustrated thus to fit you. Now,” she added, when he hesitated.

It wasn’t a real hesitation, he wanted to say, but the now took away any pretense that it wasn’t an order and he found himself doing Workings before he’d really thought about about what he was doing.

He didn’t like Working without forethought, and a low whine came out between Words. Damnit. Now she was going to think he was whining about having to make the harness.

You were the one that told her to make it an order, genius.

He twitched his wings at himself and looked at the harness he’d half-created. Another set of Workings made the leather the same color – and nearly the same texture – as his wings, but pretending it wasn’t there was going to be a lost cause. Everyone would be able to see it.

He looked over the thing one more time and made a couple more adjustments, a couple short changes, and, because he was feeling difficult, an embossed pattern on the front of the harness. Cya passed him buckles – each of them exactly the color of the leather – and he Worked them into the thing according to her blueprint.

Mike liked metaphors. He was pretty sure Mike taught at least one book about “forging your own chains.” He wondered what Mike would think about this.

“Good,” she murmured. “Now kneel, so I can put it on you.”

Luke let the order push him so he didn’t have to think about what was going on. He wished, for the first time he could remember wanting an order, that she’d tell him to hold still, too.

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

Dec9


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
Part XII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173922.html
Part XIII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1178885.html
Part XIV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1182860.html
Part XV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1186127.html
Part XVI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1189171.html

“Um.” Xander cleared his throat. “Normally I’m all for vampire slayage, but I should just point out, she’s the Vampire Slayer. Tougher than normal, faster than normal, strong enough to leap… well, mausoleums in a single bound. She’s going to kill him. Correction: she is going to drive a wooden stake through his heart. And if that doesn’t kill him, she is going to probably take his head off. Taking heads off destroys most creatures,” he added with a shrug. “The ones that that doesn’t work for, well, once we had to steal a rocket launcher. Borrow,” he added hastily. “Borrow! The point is, if you don’t want Buffy decapitating this guy- hurry.”

Professor Valerian was staring at him. “You… she… what kind of world do you children live in?”

“Sunnydale,” Willow offered. “Although I don’t think, technically, we count as children anymore. Legally, sure, but I think around your second or third vampire or demon kill, you really stop being a child. And that means – oh, no, just hurry. We have to stop her in case he’s not really a vampire, although,” she caught her breath, grabbed Xander’s hand, and started running. “You know,” she called over her shoulder, as the professor and Magnolia took a moment to process that they were running, “if that makes you not a child, by that standard, Buffy is, like… Methuselah. Or maybe Methuselah’s older brother? Sister, obviously. I mean, really.”

“…Sunnydale.” The professor had caught up and was passing them by; Magnolia was keeping up with them. “That does explain a lot. I wonder why we weren’t warned?”

“Maybe nobody noticed? There’s a lot of nobody-notices going on with Sunnydale.”

“There’s a lot of… what?” The professor almost stopped. Willow and Xander did not. “What did you mean by that?”

“Talk later stop now.” The shout from around the corner made it look like they might already be too late. Buffy was making the little grunting noises she didn’t know she made, the ones that meant she was actually getting a work-out. “Oh, no, there aren’t actually for real monsters, demons, here, are there? Because I didn’t bring any of my kit.”

“Face it, our kit just keeps us from getting killed, Will.” Xander had gotten in a lot better shape this summer; he wasn’t even panting.

“Well, that’s a good place to start, don’t you think?” she snapped. “I like not getting killed. Us not getting ourselves killed, that gives Buffy less to focus on, and that’s good, too. Right?”

He held up his hands, tripped, caught himself on something, noticed that the something was someone, and fell quiet. Willow did, too. The something – someone – was a tiny blonde girl with perfect curls, an outfit out off the cover of Seventeen Magazine’s “All Pink All the Time” issue, and the nastiest smile Willow had seen outside of the Cordettes.

“Oh, did I get in your way?” she asked, as sweetly as one could offer to eviscerate someone.

“Oh, No, I got in my own way. Nice to meet you-”

The girl had already stopped paying attention. “Professor Valerian! This new girl is causing trouble.”

“Aggie,” Professor Valerian muttered. “Why am I not surprised?”

Willow didn’t care. She moved around the short girl and around the corner. Buffy was in trouble, or Buffy was going to get in trouble, and either way… “Oh. Oh my, you’re tall.”

Buffy was in a hand-to-hand fight with two people. One of them looked more like a Transylvanian reject than any Sunnydale vamp. The other was just ridiculously tall. And big. And Buffy was winning – but only just barely. She had her eyes closed, and she was doing a lot of throat shots, which in the case of the giant were spinning jump shots.

“Wow.” Xander leaned against a wall. “Watch her go.” He whispered; he probably didn’t need to. Buffy was pouring everything she had into the fight.

“I know,” the blonde complained. “She’s been at this for nearly a minute. When do you think she’ll give up and realize that she’s outnumbered and outgunned?”

“What, the Buffster?” Xander shook his head. “Not going to happen. And, besides, she’s not outnumbered anymore. I see three of you, three of us. So, what kind of demon are you?”

“I beg your pardon!” she huffed.

“Well, okay, you can beg if you want, but the question still stands. Because you’re cute and you’re talking to me, and that almost always means demon. Or bug-monster. Or hyena-creature, but that was pretty demonic…”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1220972.html

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