Archive | February 27, 2017

Walrus, a ficlet

Feb27

I asked for a prompt on twitter. [twitter.com profile] medicmsh3141 gave me: “Walruses, and AIs who enjoy LARPing in their free time.”

So… here.

They called him the Walrus, because they needed something to call him, and they were the sort of group that
liked nicknames.

They called him him because they weren’t the sort of people to whom gender ambiguity came comfortably, and because his vocal unit was low-pitched and he had no obvious secondary sexual characteristics.

(Once, once, someone had made the joke that he ran on logic, therefore he must be male. The women in this group were not something to be trifled with, neither the artists nor the engineers nor the waitresses.)

He had strolled into their Saturday-night LARP group and asked to join and they, never one to turn down a new member, had invited him in with open arms. Amy lent him a fedora. Carrie showed him how to make a character. Dylan gave him the walrus mustache that stuck so badly to human skin and so well to the Walrus’ polymer facade.

They were in the science building, after all (It had the best space for wide-spanning live-action games). None of them questioned why there was an AI in the building and, being LARPers through and through, none of them questioned why he’d want to play.

They called him the Walrus, and he played with them every Saturday now.

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MARKED – Ohh, verbal slap down.

Feb27

MARKED – 4.5

Nilien stared down at Ember. “I’m sorry, you can what?”

I can find the person that marked you, Ember repeated patiently. I got the spell’s spoor before the teacher removed it. It’s not difficult.

Nilien blinked at her familiar. “You can — I didn’t know you could do that!”

You didn’t ask. Ember yawned again and put its head down, tail over its nose.

Nilien looked up at Professor Vaudelle. “Ember says that it can find the person who put the tracking mark on me. I didn’t know familiars could do magic.”

read on…

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March is World-Building Month this Year

Feb27

…because why not?
🗺️
here’s a landing page with most of my universes on it.

Here is the 2014 World-Building post

here’s the 2015 post.
🌏
I’ll answer 23 questions – hopefully one/weekday but we’ll see – so ask away. Anything world-building, any of my worlds, ask as many questions as you want. (if, by some amazing luck, I have more than 23 questions, I’ll either choose what to answer or overflow into April).

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Love Meme: Reid and Regine

Feb27

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here is [personal profile] clare_dragonfly‘s third prompt. Reid and Regine are from Addergoole. This was a wee bit tricky~

Reid and Regine

For all of her noble quest to show the value of half-bloods, when Reid met Regine, she still had many of the prejudices of the pure-blooded.

Reid had been dealing with those prejudices for nearly as long as Regine had been having them. He found them irritating on a good day, angering on a bad day, and on his worst days, they tempted him into shouting.

She had a good project, a good plan, and a good point, so he set his jaw and joined her program, and that would have been it – a carefully polite working relationship, line drawn and never budged, colleagues and nothing more.

Except one of those bad days happened through no fault of Regine’s.

There was a phone call. It was a long-distance call, and such things were expensive. It was quiet, it was intense, and nobody but Reid heard it.

And that would’ve been it. He had long experience not blowing his lid, not showing his anger, but Regine chose that day, that exact time when he had just hung up, to ask/demand something in her particularly Grigori way.

And Reid exploded. He snarled and shouted and swore, all of it bloody with the rage that was his birthright and name-right, and informed Regine in no uncertain terms that if she had hired an expert in Mind Workings than she damn well ought to respect his expertise.

And Regine, in a move unprecedented for her, bowed her head and very humbly apologized. And then – and this might have been the kicker – she asked Reid if he would show her the Working she’d been asking about.

It wasn’t a Magic Moment. It didn’t change her forever. But it did allow Reid to talk to her as a colleague and, sometimes, as a friend, and that, in the end, helped more than anything else.

Want More?

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Weekend Blog with Yard-Work and procrastination…

Feb27

Saturday morning, before the weather broke, my husband and I spent probably a half-hour cleaning out our culvert, digging wet leaves and sticks out of the ditch and hauling them to the hedgerow.

It’s achey work, bending-over, digging, lifting, wet work, and at least the weather was still in the fifties. It was necessary work, because in a heavy rain, our culvert fills all the way to the top, and, clogged as it was, it might have overflowed in unfortunate ways. It’s supposed to carry rain away, not keep it in our yard, after all.

There was the nice feeling of having done something physical that was productive was nice, that warm ache. But on the other hand…

So, I hate raking. I really, really hate raking. It goes back to being a child, and I am ridiculous about any number of chores that I had to do as a kid/teenager — but raking really ranks up there.

And we didn’t rake this fall.

And the leaves all blew, like they will, into the culvert.

You see where I’m going?

It reminded me of learning, maybe seven years ago, exactly how bad it could be when Iavoided conflict by not talking about problems or by trying to give in to everyone at once (Answer: everyone ends up mad at you and you end up with even more conflict than you’d originally been trying to avoid).

It’s one of those lessons I have to keep learning over and over again: the more you put something off, the more work it is.

Hopefully, I remember this in fall, when it’s time to rake again. Or the next time something threatens to pile up in my metaphorical culverts.

…kind of like the dishes in the sink…

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