Archive | March 2017

Luke’s Homework

Mar23

So. This came about because of a roleplay conversation between Leo and Luke, sometime… a couple few decades after Coverleaf is built, so in like the 70s, 80s cohorts, IIRC.

But I think it’ll happen in any timeline eventually, once Luke realizes how many assumptions he’s been working on.

“I want you to tell me about being Kept.” Luke had, although he’d deny it if ever asked, practiced that line until it no longer sounded stupid. “What you remember the most, what you hated, anything you liked.”

The student — Denny, a boy born for cy’Linden if there ever had been one, never mind that his mother was cy’Valerian and his father sy’Ginger — raised his eyebrows at LUke. “Do I have to?”

“Your Mentor asked you to cooperate,” Luke reminded him. He would notlet himself get baited. The cy’Linden kids knew how easy it was, and it was practically a sport for them.

Denny had to be thinking the same thing. “Is this punishment for… that thing with the water balloons?”

Despite himself, Luke smiled. The thing with the water balloons had actually been pretty clever. “No. If it helps, you can think of it as homework.”

“…from the gym teacher?” Denny’s body language was far stiller than his facial expressions, which had been made for the stage.

(was there theatre anywhere? DId Cloverleaf have theatre? He should find out… later.)

“Would you rather run laps?” Luke let it be a growl. Denny’s shoulders suggested that he was getting more nervous the more Luke failed to rise to any of his bait.

It worked. Denny looked at him as if he’d asked something particularly foolish. “Well, yeah. Of course.”

“I’d rather be running laps,” Luke admitted. It had the benefit of being completely true. “But this is homework for me, too.”

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Beauty-Beast 4

Mar22

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🔒

There was a moment where Ctirad thought that he’d given the wrong answer, that Sir was going to be irritated with him or, worse, dismissive. Then the arms around him shifted until a hand was patting his shoulder. “You know, Ermenrich sold you far too cheaply. You’re a treasure.”

The praise filled him with warmth, the way it always did. Ctirad let himself stay as he was, leaned against Sir’s chest. It was nice, while it lasted. And it was a drug, but it wasn’t a drug he had any control over, so there was no point in worrying about it. “I’m glad you approve, sir.”

“All right. Keep your eyes closed, and I’m going to lead you out to my car. It’s not that far from here. Tell – no. Can you tell me something about yourself, while we walk?”

Sir moved until his arm was around Ctirad’s waist, and, feeling daring, Ctirad moved his own arm lightly around Sir’s waist. “Well.” He coughed, a little amused despite the situation. “I’m not straight. And I knew that before I got collared. But there’s uh. Something different about it when you’re not pretending for anyone but your Owner, you know?”

“I have some idea. All right, it’s level for a bit here, so we’re just walking forward. Easy, there you go.”

Ctirad’s legs had woken up, but he let himself lean on Sir anyway. It felt warm and easy, and he was going to take it while it lasted.

“So, pretending for your Owner?” Sir’s voice was quiet, kinda thoughtful. “You do a lot of that?”

“…Fuck, don’t order me not to. Please. Sir.” He knew he didn’t sound submissive. He couldn’t make himself sound submissive about that. He cleared his throat and tried for explanation instead. “Orders like that, they fuck with your head.”

Sir’s chuckle was low and warm. “I won’t. But I might ask you, a few times over the first months, if you’re pretending.”

“…In private? Sir.” Ctirad swallowed. The public humiliations had been the worst. The part where he knew he couldn’t go back to being who he was, that was a ship long sailed. But the part where he had to work with those people and he was made to grovel…

“In private.” Sir squeezed Ctirad’s hip lightly. “In public, I’m not going to give you orders. I’m going to treat you as something between a bodyguard, an assistant, and a boyfriend. We’ll worry about the orders for that later. In private – well, in private, you’re mine.”

His voice was warm and throaty. Ctirad thought that Sir was very pleased with the idea. “I’m yours, sir.” At the moment, he thought he was pretty pleased with the notion, too.

🔒

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Worldbuilding Month Day 9: Building Worlds

Mar22

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it! (I need more questions, guys)
🌏
This ninth one is from [twitter.com profile] medicmsh3141: What’s your favorite part of mapmaking?

Oh, no, favorites!

…All of it?

Okay, so when I was working on my first-ever Nanowrimo novel, The Deep Inks, one of the flaws in that book is that I spent like… 3 chapters describing an entirely-useless-to-plot town that the antagonists had built… I don’t even remember why.

But I LOVED that town.

Forget killing my darling lines, when I worldbuild–>write, I have to kill my darling TOWNS.

Okay so.

Map-making.

First, I’m rubbish at visualization, so when I make a map, I can start to actually SEE a place come together.

Second, it’s arts-and-crafts, and I really, REALLY like arts-and-crafts. I get to pull out the lentils/split peas/other pulses and play like I’m finger painting, I get to draw shapes that aren’t going to look “wrong” because, let’s face it, it’s an imaginary world. I get to get out the watercolors and PAINT.

…there’s more than one reason I do all my mapmaking on actual paper with pencil. 🙂

Okay, so there’s the haptic side of it, there’s the visualization side. There’s getting to play with logistics, too: where would they put cities? Roads? Fords/bridges?

I’m gonna put floor-plan making in here too, ‘cause it fills many of the same urges. “How would they cram as many people as possible into this space, to both fill basic needs for shelter AND to encourage them to spread out and build proper houses?”

(That one’s Colonize Earth, which I never did get too far with).

Maps and diagrams are all about questions. How would they do that that is different from how I would do it?

I’m still not one hundred percent sure why Cya built Cloverleaf in a series of circles – but I love it. Might’ve been for the tower in the middle, everything pointing like arrows at the giant thing that, after all, is not actually the school.

Anke prompted me with “treehouse” the other day and I’m still playing with all the details of a post-apocalyptic scrounger’s tree house…

…I considered going into architecture, you know. Sometimes I really regret that I didn’t.

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The Amulet of Good

Mar21

Written to [twitter.com profile] Midnight_Blaze_‘s prompt

“It is an amulet of good.” The woman behind the counter smiled with not nearly enough teeth.

“Good… luck? Good… looks? Good wealth?” Opal raised her eyebrows in question.

“Good.” The woman nodded. “It is of good.” Her accent was thick and seemed to wander around the globe. Her skin was more wrinkle than smooth, more age spot than whatever her original tone had been, and her hair was thin and curly.

And the amulet was $4. Opal paid it out of her pocket and left the remaining $1 in the jar for Children with… something. The label had long since faded. “Have a good day,” she told the woman.

“Good.” The woman nodded firmly at her. “Have good.”

A man on the street smiled at her, so Opal smiled back. She strolled down the street whistling, the amulet tucked neatly under her shirt, and so she did not see how it was glowing – or how the man she smiled at seemed to float a little; how the woman she held the door for seemed to brighten up, how the clerk in the candy store was whistling, too, after she left.

“It’s supposed to be an amulet of ‘good’,” she told her mother. “I like the way it looks. Oh, and I got you some of your favorite candy.”

“Oh, that was nice! You know, I think I’m going to order us pizza tonight…”

The pizza boy was surprised by his large tip but more surprised by the way he felt when Opal’s mom smiled at him, like he actually could do something with his life. His boyfriend, in turn, was surprised by the way the pizza boy brought him home a poem, written on the back of a pizza menu. He called his family and invited them to dinner the next week.

It wasn’t a very big amulet of good, and so it took a while for the effects to add up, but because it also wasn’t a very big town, they had this habit of folding back on themselves. The pizza boy’s boyfriend’s mother went jogging with Opal’s chemistry teacher, and so the Chem teacher, Mrs. Friedland, was humming when she got into class and, by the time she left class with Opal, literally floating a few inches off the ground. The principal – who was married to the woman Opal held the door for – was glowing faintly by the time he finished talked to Mrs. Friedland about their problem students. And those problem students, in turn (who included the boy Opal really wanted not to like and really did like), found themselves the target of a new, friendlier way of handling detention.

The old lady in the tiny antique shop stayed only until she could see that one person in three was glowing, floating, and smiling happily before she packed up her shop into a box far bigger on the inside than the out and moved on to the next place and time.

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Meeting the Neighbor – a story continuation

Mar21

After New kid moves in next door

There were four tall people in the family and one short one, a child, all of them tanned and with their hair unruly and sun-bleached. The tallest one was staring right at Sinclar and Ainsley, looking through the leaves of the potted plant at them.

He raised his eyebrows, smirked, and crossed the distance between their “stoops,” as Ainsley’s parents insisted on calling that little tiled area outside each apartment.

“You’re the Nessons, right? The Biddles are on the other side…?” Up close, he was very tall, but looked not that much older than Sinclair.

Ainsley squeaked. Her sister saved her. “We’re the Nessons. The Biddles have two boys and a very young daughter.” She nodded her head in a polite greeting. “I’m Sinclair Nesson, and this is my sister Ainsley.”

“I’m Ted Jendrock.” He thrust out a hand to them, and then, seeing their confused faces, “what, people don’t shake hands in this place?”

“It carries germs,” Sinclair whispered. Ainsley, feeling brave all of a sudden, held out her hand.

“Oh, what’s a few germs between neighbors? Besides, we went through a whole lot of decontamination before they’d let us in.” He squeezed Ainsley’s hand and moved it up and down a couple times. “Pleased to meet both of you.”

“So you’re-” Ainsley swallowed. Her hand felt weird. “You’re really from the outside? I didn’t think people ever came in.”

“We didn’t think so, either. We also didn’t think people ever left.” His gaze was suddenly sharp, but Ainsley had no idea what he was looking for. “Anyway, we had a skillset that was needed, so here we are.”

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Worldbuilding Month Day 8: Tell Me a Story

Mar21

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
🌏
This eighth one is from [personal profile] sauergeek: You have storytellers in at least three universes: Autumn in Stranded, Tanakae in Calepurn, and Rosaria in Aunt Family. Am I missing others? How do their styles overlap, and how do they differ? What are their goals in storytelling? (Lotsa questions!)

Ooh! I probably do have other storytellers, because I like the trope of the storyteller. I like telling stories within the confines of the story, for one – some day I hope to do an at-least-triple-nested story, like Arabian Nights. Maybe for Camp Nano in July~

Autumn tells stories for two reasons: One, because she is a small-change artist, and engaging your audience by telling stories is a very good way to get their attention and interest them in buying. As a Neil Gaiman story I just read says, people don’t buy the art, they buy the story. (Paraphrase). Two, because she is a dancer on the strands of life, and she has found that sometimes a story is the best way to engage someone, to get them to heal their own strand damage, to create their own connections.

Tanakae tells stories because it’s her career. She started out doing her world’s version of rap battles, and evolved from there into high art – think like Shakespeare having a patron. She likes political satire best, because if you put something into a catchy phrase, it makes people – if not think, let’s be honest – at least remember the phrase. She’s her time’s equivalent of a Facebook meme on a bad day, and on a good day she’s Mark Twain. She likes the way words flow together, and making them fit properly is like a really good puzzle for her.

(Okay, I probably write a lot of storytellers too because I am, by chosen trade, a storyteller.)

Rosaria tells stories because it’s how she sees the future, the past, and the present – it’s a type of divination. It’s also how she engages her family – some too young to be interested in the truth behind the stories, some too involved in their own world, their own lives. It also gives her a chance to talk to her grandchildren and grand-nieces and -nephews and keep an eye on them.

In terms of style, Tanakae’s style is far more elaborate and ornate than either of the others. Tanakae is much more interested in the wordcraft and in showing off her skills. Rosaria’s stories are the most likely to sound like fairy tales, where Autumn’s are the closest to “no shit, there I was…”

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More Cya Date

Mar20

After Cya gets ready for a date and Almost Out the Door for a Date and Trying Again and Blind Dateand Catching Up and Getting to (re-)Know him
and Also Needs a Title.

Cya reached over the table and tapped Manus on the top of the head. “Okay. Rule one. No pouty faces in public.”

“I thought rule one was ‘don’t attack you?’”

“That’s rule one for Kept. This is rule one for boyfriends.”

“Oh, so there’s a completely different – wait, what?”

Cya waited a moment for him to catch up, one eyebrow raised in her best teacher face. A moment later, he smirked slowly. He always had been one of her smarter Kept.

“So, does that mean pouty faces are fine in private?”

She grinned at him. “You’re clever. Yes. Look, the real rule is – if we’re going to consider dating, then we’re dating as adults.”

“So I can’t expect you to tell me what to do?” She thought he might look a little sad about that one.

So she gave him her best toothy grin, the one she’d been getting a lot of practice with lately. “Oh, I didn’t say that. But that’s for private. We date as adults, we can play as adults if that’s what you want, and once in a while I’ll probably tell you what to do. I mean, I am dictator – ah, Mayor – of a city-state. I can be pretty bossy when I want to be.”

He grinned at her, the sadness clearly gone. “I wouldn’t know anything at all about you being bossy, Miz Mayor. Nothing at all. So – you mean it?”

“I mean it. No sulking in public. It’s ridiculous.” She winked at him, because some part of her was still remembering him three decades ago and wearing her collar, and she wanted to make sure he knew she was teasing.

“No. Uh.” He shook his head, looking flustered. Some part of him might be remembering that, too. “I mean. Uh. Dating? You’re interested? I figured once you saw it was one of your former, um. ‘Kept du Jour’ that you’d be gone.”

“Look, you’re doing what? Being judge and ambassador for a nearby city-state? Look, that’s impressive. It’s impressive for people twice your age and, dead gods, I hope that didn’t sound as condescending to you as it sounded from here.” She ducked her head, realizing she was blushing and wishing she could in good conscience burrow through the floor and run away.

He chuckled. “Look, that’s kind of what I’m worried about.”

“…me being condescending? ‘Cause I don’t think I’m usually that bad to my peers.” Then again, her closest peers were a formerly-insane samurai, a currently-insane goblin, and a cowboy with a fidelity issue.

“No. No, ‘cause I mean, you remember the world Before. You’re got a lot more life experience than I do. Why would you have any interest in, well, me?”

Cya looked at him over her glass for a minute. Then she put her glass down and looked at him a little more. “Something I learned – well, far more recently than I ought to have, I think, is that people grow up at wildly different rates. From the sound of things, you grew up. Me, I grew up about when I finished this city. So… we’re pretty close to on par.

“Besides.” She gave him her brightest smile. “You already know all of my sensitive spots and I already know how to make you squirm.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1290746.html

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Beekeeper – in which pennies are discussed

Mar20

First: A beginning of a story which obnoxiously cuts off just before the description,
Previous: In Which There are Second Thoughts – and Third.
🐝

THIS CHAPTER IS NOW DEPRECATED AND IS NOT CANON. 

In Which They Stop Kissing Long Enough to Talk is the last canon chapter before the rewrite begins.

See the rewrite beginning here – http://www.lynthornealder.com/2020/06/26/beekeeper-in-which-they-go-to-bed/

Her eyes were closed. He liked that; it let him watch her face. Her hands were on him like she was trying to pin him down – who was he kidding? She could pin him down without any hands at all – and her expression was somewhere else, somewhere reaching for bliss.

He brushed his lips against hers, then kissed her properly. He was on his back, and she was on top of him and…

He closed his eyes and stopped thinking for a while. She was moving above him and that was, for the moment, all that mattered.

When he opened his eyes, it was to kiss her again. Like this, he could feel the press of her collar against his neck. Her collar. Would it be so bad…?

Not the time to think about such things. He ran his hands up and down her back. He wondered, in a way he hadn’t for a while, what her Change was. He hadn’t Un-Masked for her; wouldn’t have if she had demanded it, might have if she’d asked it. She’d done neither, and her Mask was up, too. He kissed her collarbones, wondering.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she murmured. He grinned at her.

“Pennies, really? Those are pretty valuable now, all that copper.”

For a second, he thought he’d flustered her. Then she stroked his hair – gently, he couldn’t remember anyone being that gentle with him – and smiled.

“So’re your thoughts. Valuable, that is.”

He kissed her, his hand low enough down on her back that it wasn’t holding her and high enough up that she knew what he wanted. And for a while, he didn’t have any thoughts to give, for a penny or for a whole hive of honey.
🐝

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Also Needs a title, Cya’s Date Continued

Mar19

After Cya gets ready for a date and Almost Out the Door for a Date and Trying Again and Blind Dateand Catching Up and Getting to (re-)Know him.

Cya looked at Manus over her water. The waitress was hovering nearby; she gestured the woman over and placed her order, let Manus place his. She ordered wine from the local vineyard because she was proud of it (and because there wasn’t that much other wine to be had, although she’d recently opened up trade with a place a couple days’ travel away). He ordered whisky.

“You get why I built it?”

“I thought I knew back then. I mean, it pisses Regine right off. The school, especially. Kids that go from your school to her school – oh, it makes her mad.” He grinned in that way that shared in the schadenfreude of Regine’s anger.

She smiled back, because she had been trying to piss Regine off, although it had been a tertiary goal.

“But I mean, that’s the school. You could’ve built a shell around it and called it good, but you have like a whole nation here.” He sipped his water. “I get it now. I didn’t, then.”

“Yeah.” She looked out the window. There was a park behind the restaurant, and through a decorative screen of ivy, she could see kids playing. “I wanted to build safety.”

“That’s pretty cool, you know.” He cleared his throat. “So. Warwick, he said you were looking for someone to date. I don’t remember… well, you didn’t date before, did you? I guess I might have missed it…

“I didn’t,” she confirmed. “This is, well. It’s a new thing.”

“And… you probably weren’t looking for old Kept.” He looked down at the table.

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Beauty-Beast 3

Mar19

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🔒

“How long did Ermenrich Keep you? No. Wrong question. How long have you been under a collar?”

Ctirad thought about it. “It’s twenty-ten?”

“June, twenty ten,” Timaios – better get used to thinking of him as Sir, it would make it easier later – Sir confirmed.

“Six years, sir. Ermenrich had me for four.”

“Mmm. Asshole. Him, not you,” he clarified. “I imagine I won’t know for quite a while if you’re going to turn out to be an asshole.”

“I’ve been called one before, sir.” Was he supposed to be one? That would be new.

“I’m not all that surprised. But I’d rather make my own judgement. All right. I’d put this off longer, but I want to get out of here, and I don’t particularly want to lead you out of here blindfolded.”

Ctirad swallowed. “That would be interesting, sir.” He could do it. He could do lots worse than that. But he hated blindfolds. Even having his eyes closed like this was getting nerve-wracking. “Sir? Why do you want to put it off?”

“Because I look like one person with my Mask on and one with my Mask off, and both of them are going to make you have a reaction, if past experience serves. I wanted to know what you were like as much as possible before that.”

Ctirad considered that for a minute. “Sir? I can handle having my eyes closed for a bit longer.”

🔒

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