Archive | June 2017

Worldbuilding June Day 2: Geography

Jun6

2. Geography
Desmond’s World
Oops, I already covered a bunch of this in the first post.

The City Desmond lives in (100 words to anyone who names it something that fits with the names that I like and another 100 to someone to name the nation) straddles the river leading to the ocean.

It’s definitely got high ground (High Street), mostly to the north of the river, and lower ground, which sometimes floods, to the south of the river. The river directly to the south is all parkland, designated so 100 years ago when a leader ordered the slums torn down so that the houses on the north side did not have to look at them.

This, of course, just moved the slums a bit more inland, but there’s a nice wall of trees now, and the houses bordering that parkland are high-rent for the area.

The City office and school are on the north side of the river. Desmond grew up on the south side.

Portal Bound
There is already a map for Portal Bound, here.

The main city of needing-a-name is settled into an oxbow in the river of also-needs-a-name. Inspired by the Mississippi, the river has moved several notable times over the centuries since the first buildings were hewn from the forest all around.

(The capital we’re discussing is just on and around about where the left end of the upper wild-rice roads are on the above-linked map.)

The river runs through a flattish forest area, making its way towards the sea. Much of the land in the area is still forested, with small townships growing up among the trees.

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The Hidden Mall Part IV

Jun6

Part I
Part II
Part III

💸 💰 💸 💰 💸

Abigail had her doubts about following the strange person through the back of the spices-and-herbs store, but Liv seemed definitely enchanted by the whole thing.

“Beavers?”

“Well, as I said, not literally. We don’t have any Animals here, not of the sort you’d find in Narnia or Oz. It’s just not the right environment for them, and nobody but the Raccoons and the Magpies really enjoy shopping, anyway. Oh, and the Corvids, of course. Can’t forget them.” The person pushed aside a beaded curtain, opening up a narrow wood-paneled hallway. “This area isn’t open to everyone, but I see that you’ve already met Tinaia, and that gives you some special leeway.”

Abigail shared a look with Liv, or tried to, but Liv was staring down the hallway. So, “leeway?” she asked, and hoped their guide would give some sort of useful answer.

“Oh, there’s always halls within halls, worlds within worlds. You read the tales of Narnia, so I assumed you knew. Everything is like an onion and a TARDIS: More and more, and bigger on the inside.”

That made very little sense, but considering the way they were having, Abigail decided not to complain too much. She kept an eye on Liv instead.

“So where are we going, then?” Liv persisted, even as she stuck close to their guide. “Down another layer of the onion?”

“More, and yet less, less, and yet so much more. Here.” The person swished aside another curtain, this one heavy and velvet. “Here you are. Have fun, and remember me when you come back around.”

That sounded a little ominous to Abigail, but Liv was already darting through the door. She followed, with a hasty and uncertain “thanks” aimed at the spice proprietor.

Liv had stopped a few steps inside the curtain, and Abigail could understand why. The floor was covered in a myriad of carpets; the walls were covered in bookshelves with more bookshelves jutting out at right angles. And in the middle, at a writing desk with a dip pen and a large book, a blue woman was sitting, writing.

She looked up when she noticed Liv and Abigail staring. “Oh, I see. Anto brought me some more company, mmm? Anto likes to do that. Well, then, come on in, don’t linger in the curtain letting in the mundane. You have three choices. You can take a book, make a book, or leave a book. But all three of those are going to have consequences and prices.”

“We don’t…” Abigail touched her bag. “Oh. I have a schoolbook and a copy of Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase. I could leave one, but … there’s a price for leaving something?”

“There’s always a price for leaving something.” The blue woman had gone back to her writing already. “The question is, can you pay it?”

Part 5: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1337419.html

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Weekend Blog: Woodstock, Cabins

Jun6

This past weekend was one of those lovely good-friends good-food good-adventures damn-am-I-tired weekends where we drive to Troy (near Albany, about a 3.5-hour drive because, in NY, you can’t go straightanywhere if you’re below the Thruway. It’s more like — go east-southeast to get to Ithaca, travel southerly with east for a while to go below the lakes, travel around some hills for a bit while heading mostly east, and then head north-northeast for a while on a highway (Expressway? Fast multi-lane divided road with limited access but no tolls).)

In the midst of this lovely weekend — a trip to Woodstock (Which is not where the concert was held but likes to pretend it was, a fun little shopping town that would have seemed like it had a lot of head shops, did I not live in Ithaca), a drive through the Catskills, a quest for forks — we ended up discussing the regional variations on some seasonal-access dwellings.

“Oh, it’s all cute little cottages,” I started — in about the center of the Catskills, as far as the map says, not far from where we saw the World’s Biggest Kaleidoscope a few years back — and was told that around here, they’re called bungalows.

Thus began an interesting circle of discussion: T. and I are from the Great Lakes; K is from the Catskills; E is from Maine. To me, a cottage is a generally seasonal-use privately-owned dwelling on the water. To E., it’s a camping feature. (E calls what I call a cottage a summer home). To K, a bungalow is a seasonal-access rented no-foundation building in the mountains — I’d call that a cabin.

(Add to the mess that log cabin is its own thing, and I spent from 5 years old ‘till I moved out living in a log cabin my parents built from a kit.)

The building I’d originally started this conversation with said cottageto me because of its small but sturdy size, small yard, and cute shutters, by the by. Maintained, clearly, but only used once in a while.

So what about where you’re from? If there’s that much variation within the NE of the US, I’m curious about the broad span of the rest of my readership.

What’s a small home you own but live in or visit part of the year?

What’s a building in a campsite you can stay in rather than tent camping?

How about a rental you stay in for a week or two on vacation?

Does the physical location of these (water, woods, camping, mountains) change the term?

Bonus: what does “log cabin” bring to mind?

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An Adventure, Chapter 1

Jun5

It wasn’t so much that Oxana was trying to get away from something as that she was just trying to get away. It was the first day without rain in a week, her books had all gotten boring, and all of her professors seemed slightly more awful than normal – which was saying something, with the class load she had this semester.

So she went walking. It was threatening to rain any minute, so she took her raincoat and her umbrella, the one book she hadn’t finished reading, and her flashlight, because you never knew.

Her mother loved saying that. You never know. What, exactly, you never knew was left, usually, as an exercise for the observer, but in this case, you never knew if the power was going to go out. At SUNY Edowanda, it was safer to say you could probably bet the power was going out. Oxana and her roommate Giannina had bought camping lanterns, stocked up on rechargeable batteries, and gotten very good at working right down to the last drop of power on their laptop batteries.

That wasn’t today, though. Today, Oxana was going to go spelunking in The Abandoned Dorm. She had her pocket bolt cutters, though she doubted she’d need them, the flashlight and spare batteries. And as long as she could make it across the dorm quad before the skies opened up, she was golden.

Everyone had stories about the The Abandoned Dorm, but nobody had a clear answer. Oxana had done a cursory look in the library, but History of SUNY Edowanda was not a large subject area, taking up only three books and two thesis papers.

What they knew is that there were beds and lamps and some clothes in there, that it was at a slightly skew angle to the rest of the already-hilly campus, and that it was marked clearly with very faded signs, stay off, which everyone, of course, ignored. The doors were bolted, some windows boarded up, but its roofed breezeway was a favorite necking spot and at least one garage band Oxana knew of practiced in the easily-accessible courtyard.

The rain was threatening by the time she got to that courtyard – ducked under a chain, walked through a long arched tunnel, moved three lawn chairs aside – so she went quickly.

She knew which door she was aiming for. The chain on there was already rusted. It was like they had only been pretending to try to keep people out – maybe enough to avoid a lawsuit? It took two hits with a nearby rock to break the chain, the lock cracking and falling with a clatter to the cracked pavers below.
She really didn’t think anyone would try to prosecute her for trespassing, signs to that end notwithstanding, but still, she was wearing gloves. She slipped in through the door, pushed it closed behind her, thinking as she did

He jumped in and shut the door, forgetting what a very foolish thing this is to do.

On the other hand, leaving a door ajar would definitely signal anyone looking that she was in here. So she pulled it shut and looked around.

SUNY Edowanda was not known for spending a lot of money on its students, so Oxana wasn’t too surprised to find that the entryway looked not all that different from the courtyard in her dorm, nor that there were still signs up advertising a dance from probably-1999, by the “party like it’s the end of the world” theme and the awful fonts.

There were coats in the lost-and found; there was a can of cola still on the table in the lounge, and the TV there was still playing static that looked, if you squinted, like Highlander. “Ghost town,” Oxana murmured, just to hear a voice. The way it echoed, she immediately wished she hadn’t.

The dorm rooms were mostly closed, but a peek into one unlocked one looked as if its inhabitants had left in a hurry. There were still blankets on the bed, still books on the shelves, and there were clothes strewn all over the place. Hurried packing – or, if Oxana’s freshman-year roommate had been any indication, just an ordinary day.

The rooms you could see from the courtyard windows did not look this inhabited. They looked like they had held people at one time, not like that one time had been an hour ago.
She picked a book off the shelf, not recognizing the title, and flipped through it. Psych text, from the looks of things, and from a far more psychedelic era than 1999.

She stuck it in her bag. Maybe she’d give it a read later. Sometimes those old texts were good for a laugh, and sometimes they just had better information than the new books. There was a layer of dust on the book – on everything in the room – despite that people-just-left feeling. She doubted the owner was coming back for the book.

The next three rooms she looked in were much the same – a mess of clothes strewn everywhere, books still on the shelves, dust covering everything. One of them had a dress that had to be from the fifties sitting over an ancient typewriter. Another one had clothes that were maybe ten years out of style.

She pulled out her phone to take pictures, but it was reading no signal and no battery. Edowanda was hard on phones; she stuck it back in her pocket. Next time, she’d bring a film camera.

She wondered how she already knew there’d be a next time. Was she going to bring Giannina? Somehow she knew that was a no, the way she knew she’d be here again and again and that Giannina was never going to believe her about exactly how strange this was.

She picked one more room at random and caught her breath. It could’ve been her room. The clothes, well, maybe a couple years out of fashion, but not that much. The blanket, the poster – it all looked modern.
She was pretty sure The Abandoned Dorm had been abandoned for decades. At least for years. None of this should have been here, not the mp3 player on the floor, not the exact same textbook she had for intro to psych.

The room that looked like the 1920’s hadn’t freaked her out. This did. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even picture how she’d explain it to Giannina. Look, clearly this place was abandoned a long time ago. That made sense. I’m not sure about the 70’s-feeling room, that was pretty odd. And the 1999 posters. But something that could’ve come from our room? How does that make any sense at all?

Oxana had a feeling she ought to have been freaked out sooner, but she supposed everyone had their threshold. She backed out of the room, closed the door, and went looking for something less creepy.

The dorm building was three stories tall, like a large portion of the older dorms on campus. The newer ones – the ones with elevators – were all ten, fifteen stories, more compact, but the old ones had been built on cheap swampland and sprawled in long wings.

She didn’t want to look at more dorm rooms. She was pretty sure she wanted to look at anything but dorm rooms.

The stairs at the end of the wing she was in went down as well as up. That was new; the stairs in her dorm only went down in one locked stairwell by the RA corral. Well, down probably wouldn’t lead her to more dorms.

Imagine dorms in the basement of a sinking building. She shivered melodramatically, thinking of watching the dirt climb up your windows until you were in the dark.

The stairs downward seemed even creepier. The lights had been on upstairs, but down here, there were only flickering red lights, the emergency system. It bathed the halls in even more creepiness.

Even worse, there were no doors down here, and the tile, rather than being flecked off-white like everywhere else in Edowanda, was some sort of stone-like grey. And so were the walls.

“Great,” she muttered, and then stopped, because her voice echoed off the walls. I’ve wandered into a cave under Edowanda. Well, I wanted an adventure.

She kept walking, because she hadn’t come this way to turn around because of the floor.

She reached a door after what seemed like far too much walking – she had to have come back down the dorm hall and started on the opposite one by now – a tall steel door with a broad, ornate handle, looking out of place down here.

Then again, Edowanda had the strangest bits of architecture placed in the oddest places, like at one point the state-sponsored architects had been beset by a flare of rebellious artistic flare and insisted “No! This square brick building needs an ornate archway! But just one!” So a fancy doorknob on a basement door seemed about keeping with the overall weirdness of her alma mater.

She hesitated with her hand on the doorknob. Somehow, this seemed more like trespassing than anything she’d done before now. If she went through this door – if she went through her, she was deliberately breaking and entering.

That was stupid, she scolded herself. She’d broke the chain, she’d opened dorm doors. She was already breaking and entering. This door wasn’t even locked.

Still…

She chased the thought away. If she was going to do this, she might as well do it all the way.
She opened the door.

A new story. SUNY is State University of NY; this one is made-up.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1342622.html

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Funeral – best-Laid Plans

Jun5

First: Funeral
Previous: Funeral: Introductions

Senga smiled crookedly at Erramun. “We fix problems. Sometimes we end things, sometimes we start them, but mostly people just pay us to solve situations they need solved.”

“That sounds really, really vague.”

“It’s meant to be really, really vague.”

“So which side of the law are you on?”

“We’re a legal organization. Most of the time, we stay on the proper side of the police and of the law. Sometimes we fudge things a bit,” she admitted. “Those moments where the Ellehemaei in us has to be more important than the law-abiding citizen.”

“And in those times?”

“We clean up after ourselves. So, back to advice.”

“It’s advice you want when you run a cleaning service and you’ve just been handed someone named Death Comes Silently.” He sounded bitter rather than dubious. “You want advice.“

“Well, I don’t want you for wetwork, although if you fade away without something to kill, I’m sure I can come up with someone who needs ending.” She looked him in the eye and watched his responses.

There was a little twitch of surprise and then a tiny smirk that barely touched his lips. “I can live without killing. I’m not one of those. But if I was-?”

“If you were, we’d have to shift our business model a bit, but I’d keep you fed.”

“…Generous. So you don’t have a problem with killing, but you don’t want me for wetwork. So…”

“So I don’t mind killing generally, but I don’t like it in the specific. It’s messy, it gets to be too easy, and it’s really hard to be sure someone’s evil enough to deserve killing. So. Death Comes Silently. What do you do that isn’t death?”

“Come Silently?” He smirked a little bit.

“I think that was actually a joke. Or at least a pun. So, ah. You’re the world’s quietest at orgasms or you sneak?”

“I do a lot of things very quietly. I’m pretty good at B&E, actually.” His smile had vanished and he was really looking at her again. “You really want me to advise you?”

“I’ve just been handed an Ellehemaei several times older than me, at a guess. You know things I don’t. You’ve have had to have been living in a box to not know more than I do.”

She didn’t miss his twitch, but she didn’t think he wanted her to see it, so she ignored it.

“You’re not gonna lose face, having your Bond Servant tell you want to do?” He was holding himself very still in his chair. Not like he was afraid, she thought, but maybe like he didn’t know if he moved, if he could stop moving.

“There’s a difference between telling me what to do and advising me. And mostly, we’re family, my crew. The good sort, not like my cousins. If I have you giving me advice, they’re going to think it’s cool.” She set her hand on his knee and watched how he went even more still.“Okay,” she said, more quietly. She stood up and locked her door, then throw up a complex Working that meant that nothing short of a bomb was getting into her room – or out of it. “I think we need to have a more important conversation first.”

“More important than what you want to do with me? I’d like to know what I’m going to be doing for the next six years.” He stood up, then, as she closed the distance between them, sat back down again.

“What’ve you been doing for the last six years?” Damnit, no, she was letting him distract her. Well, maybe he needed to say it.

His face shut down.

Maybe not.

“You going to order me to tell you?”

“Not yet. So. I don’t get to know what you did for the last six years and you want to know what you’re going to be doing for the next six. So. Advice and back-up, until I know more.”

“So… rather than ordering me into telling you, you’re going to blackmail me into telling you?”

She found herself smiling. “Seems fitting for me. You think being advice and back-up is a punishment?”

“I’m not so old I need to be the grumpy old sensei in the back of the room just yet.”

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind. Now that we’ve decided we don’t agree on that in the least,” she sat back down on her bed, “more important things.”

“-than what you’re going to do with me?”

“Well,” she smirked at him, unable to resist the straight line, “I thought we’d talk about what I’m going to do with you.”

He glowered. “Make sense, woman.”

“Telling me what to do already?” she teased, and then almost regretted it as his face underwent contortions trying to deal with a guilt-surge. “Easy, easy. I’m not mad at you.”

“I don’t care if-” He trailed off, grumbling. “Fine. You’ve got me by the short and curlies. What are you going to do with me?”

“Now that’s an image. And maybe I’ll think about that later,” she admitted. He was a handsome man. “You’ve been under a collar before.”

“I’ve been Owned before.” He touched his bare neck and shifted his shoulders. “The last one didn’t survive.”

“I don’t think you’re going to kill me. If you were, I think you would’ve done it in the funeral home. Would have been easy; you wouldn’t have even had to get your hands dirty if you didn’t feel like it, you could just say ‘no.’” Senga shrugged. “So. So’ve I. I know how it gets weird in your head. I can’t stop that, it’s the way the natural law works for fae.”

“I know that,” he snarled.

“You know it, but you’re twitchy and fighting it and making yourself feel like shit, if I’m any good at people – and I’m pretty good at people, and it’s just gonna get worse, and you know that too. The bond’s pushing at you, it does that. It’s magic.”

“I know that!”

This time it was a shout.

“Then why are you acting like a nervous virgin in his first collar?” She didn’t shout back, but she snapped it out.

“Who are you to tell me anything about how I’m acting or what I’m doing or how I’m feeling?” he bellowed back at her.

“The person who’s responsible for it,” she retorted. “Remember? I just agreed to take you as my Bond Servant, which means that I agreed to be responsible for you, body, mind, and heart, for the next six years. This, I have a vested interest in what you’re doing.”

“You don’t know anything!”

“Then maybe you should tell me.”

“I-” He cut himself off and glared at her. “All right.” He looked far too angry for the concession she heard in his voice – or maybe, she supposed, he was angry because he was conceding. “I will tell you one thing. But then I’m going to ask you a question.”

“I welcome it.” She folded her hands in her lap and waited.

“I don’t like the collar.”

When it became clear that he wasn’t going to elaborate, Senga tried her best raised-eyebrow look at him. He looked back at her implacably for several minutes before finally sighing.

Senga was fairly certain she’d only won that staring contest with him because he was currently her Bond servant. She made a mental note not to be in a position where she had to try that otherwise.

“I don’t like the physical collar. The sign of it. The way it feels. The restriction.”

“Aah.” She studied his neck for a minute. “That makes me wonder what sort of collars your previous owners put on you. That being said…” She considered her words for a minute. The collar, within fae society, was the sign that he was hers, sworn to her. If he wasn’t wearing one, it suggested that he wasn’t under her control.

Considering she was pretty sure everyone was going to think that anyway – she was definitely going to think it! – she had to play this one carefully.

Her thoughts were either a lot more transparent than she’d meant them to be, or he was having the same thoughts. “You can’t afford to look weak, or everyone will assume I’m in charge.” He shifted a little. “I’m not an in-charge sort. I don’t want that.”

“I don’t want it either. It’s the feel you hate?” She looked at him again and thought about a strip of leather like a dog collar around his neck. She thought about pulling on the d-ring in front and watching him resist it. She thought about him wearing nothing but the collar…

…this was not helping her have calm conversations. On the other hand, if those thoughts were transparent, he hadn’t picked up on them. He looked nervous.

“I’m not a dog,” he muttered. “I don’t like being treated like an animal on a leash.”

“…Aaah. Well then.” She reached out and touched the side of his neck. “That, I can work with.”

He leaned his weight ever so slightly into her hand, as if pretending he didn’t want to feel the touch. “You can? What are you going to do?”

“I can’t afford to look weak,” she reminded him slowly. “You’re going to have to wait until I do it. Until then-”

Her phone buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. She forced down a curse while she glanced at the screen.

“Well. Job calls. You can make yourself at home, or you can go check out Monmartin Manor and see how much we’ll have to do.” She tossed him her car keys. “I assume you know where it is.”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1337275.html

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Worldbuilding June Day 1, B

Jun2

1. Introduction
B. Portal Bound
Many centuries ago — nearly a millennium — portals opened between an untouched planet and several other worlds, and a few people came through, a farmer and his family.

Over time, those portals shifted — when they were open, where they opened from — until a clever wood-carver discovered that with the right bits of magic and the right bits of wood, you could stabilize a portal. It still opened when it pleased, of course, but with the proper doors, it would open to the same place and in the same place.

The main nation of this story is run by a bureaucracy that balances on the mandate of the long-missing Prince. It runs well enough, this nation, and the bureaucrats like it that way.

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Worldbuilding June Day 1

Jun1

1. Introduction
Desmond’s World
The world Desmond lives in is on the cusp of industrialization, a word in which most people don’t believe magic exists. Poverty, class struggle, hunger, and crowding are, however, all too real.

The nation Desmond lives in is isolated on all four sides: on three sides by nearly-impassible mountains, and on the fourth by an ocean which is inhospitable and almost entirely non-traversable. It’s a small nation, seven days’ travel by horse long from pass to pass and three days’ travel by horse wide at the widest.

While magic is not believed to exist, it underlies everything, just as the tight isolation, the high price of any trade goods, and the stratified class society do.

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