Archive | October 2017
Finish It: Let Him Go
The last Finish It! before NanoWrimo: Tilden, from This Story
Ce’Rilla sh’Orlaith by Accalon and Vidrou sh’Cynara by Leofric, Tilden’s parents
Cya Red Doomsday and Leofric Lightning Blade, two of Tilden’s Grandparents. All icons by Djinni.
It had been two weeks.
Tilden had repeated, calmly but insistently, “you should let me go.” Every night. Every time Laufeia ordered him to do something unpleasant – and Laufeia had a taste for rather unpleasant things. Every time she ordered him naked. “You should let me go.”
Eleri, whose own Kept had walked into the collar willingly and who had not nearly the taste for cruelty as her friend, found herself in a bit of a tight spot. She could advise Laufeia to release Tilden – but every time she did, Laufeia got a little nastier, a little angrier. She didn’t just take it out on Tilden, either, but on Eleri and on Caetano and on their third crew-mate, Manlius, who took it all in without seeming to notice or care. Then again, Manlius took in everything. Only at dawn did you get a sense for how stressed he’d been, as the “sun rose” in his room with intense heat or nothing at all. Continue reading
ATMN-1985, a Stranded story for Patreon
Okay, I guess the theme is really talking to me this month.
Here’s another bonus, spurred on but not really related to a line from a Popular Mechanics article I read last night: (paraphrase) “AI is going to make the Industrial Revolution look small.”
🤖
Autumn knew better than to grab the strands of the world too much around HAllowe’en.
Everything was thinner at that time, more responsive, more willing to bend and twist and open.
But the Strand looked so tempting. It was this line of connection, this connection that went — nowhere? It trailed off into a space in mid-air, looking as if it turned into wires at the end.
So she followed it, drawing the look of the wires on to her arm in watercolor, little circuit-board designs that appeared to her mind’s’ eye.
She stepped through a thin space in the air and found herself on a silvery road, the buildings rising up around her on left and right, stretching above her, making it a tunnel of mirrors and glass.
Oops. She tied off a marker so she could find her way home and followed the wires of the Strand, trailing along through wires upon wires upon wires.
She turned a corner into another tunnel and found herself face to face with someone doing the same thing as she was.
Someone? Not quite. But not quite something, either, a metallic-and-plastic figure wearing a knit hat of red-orange-and-green and a swirling dress that matched.
The Strand from Autumn went straight to this figure. She stopped. She stared. The figure stopped and stared.
There were a few other people on the road — mostly human-seeming, some only humanoid-seeming. From the corner of her eye, Autumn could see all of them connected by tenuous strands.
“You are—” The figure frowned. The expression was cartoony, plastic eyebrows moving and lips turning downward.
“You’re…” Autumn shook her head and bowed. “I’m Autumn Roundtree.”
“I am ATMN-1985. I am called Autumn.” The figure raised an eyebrow at AUtumn. “You do not belong here. Your only connection here is me.”
Autumn took a moment to study ATMN. “You’re —”
She was connected all over the place, as much as Autumn was, back home, as much as her mother was.
“An autonomous Intelligence designed to understand connections between beings.” The smile was broad and surprisingly genuine-seeming. “Your counterpart.”
“Amazing.”
Autumn felt a tug on her, and ATMN made a noise of concern.
“Your connection is thinning. You cannot stay, you need to go where you came from. Or—”
“Or,” Autumn agrees solemnly. “It was nice to meet you, ATMN. Perhaps I will see you again.”
ATMN curtseyed. “I would like that. I would like this new connection to last.”
Autumn hurried back as her connection to her own world tugged and throbbed by turns. She followed the thinning line back to where she’d started and pushed through the thin space in the world. Her ears popped, her head rushed, and, for a moment, she lost consciousness.
She came to leaning against the old maple tree in her mother’s back yard, leaves crunching as they fell down upon her.
“Nothing but a pack of cards,” she muttered. She knew better than to reach for Strands around Hallowe’en. It always left you with too many questions.
Want more?
A New World: Myths
First: A New World
Previous: Carrenonna
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“That is… a very good question. But I suppose the answer lies in the fact that Kaelingrade is said to have disappeared, isn’t she? Whereas Carrenonna-” She trailed off, hoping someone knew.
“Kaelingrade vanished without a trace, tower and all, in a cold spring one day during the Aterpian Wars,” read the father. “What are – oh, those were some of the wars before we landed, weren’t they? Skirmishes?”
Kael raised her eyebrows at the man. “Skirmishes? You are talking about battles when thousands on thousands of people died.”
“But they didn’t have real technology here, did they? Before we, I mean, before colonists came. That was a long time ago, but I know there wasn’t anything like modern warfare.”
“Oh, come on, Dad.” The older daughter rolled her eyes. “Just because we can drop bombs and blow up entire cities now doesn’t mean that we’re superior or something. And besides, they had magic back then, real magic, didn’t they?”
“Aria, what did we say about-” Continue reading
Patreon Posts – Crossovers
This is a weird one. Today’s Patreon Sum-up involves three stories I wrote, not to prompts, but because they appeared to me. All crossovers of one sort or another.
Okay, so I’m working on my outlines for Finish It nanowrimo coming up in, well, November. And I got to the one for Facets of Dusk and I started thinking about – well, the doors they might open.
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“Get us someplace with medical care!” Simon shouted.
“Someplace with advanced technomagical medical care.” Aerich’s aristocratic snarl sounded panicked.
“Someplace they’re not going to shoot at us.” Cole’s voice was calm. But Cole, who had Josie in his arms, also sounded serious.
I blame this on my current marathon re-read of the Sandman comics.
📚
On Halloween, 2011, when the walls between worlds were thinner than they had ever been, the woman called The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (because her Mentor had been fond of Robert Heinlein, in his day and in her day) left her kids with her sister, as per their arrangement, and slipped out between those world-barriers.
Okay, I guess the theme is really talking to me this month.
Here’s another bonus, spurred on but not really related to a line from a Popular Mechanics article I read last night: (paraphrase) “AI is going to make the Industrial Revolution look small.”
🤖
Autumn knew better than to grab the strands of the world too much around Hallowe’en.
Everything was thinner at that time, more responsive, more willing to bend and twist and open.
Internet, Connection, Changes: A blog post
Our router gave up the ghost last week, leaving us with considerably less interwebs than we are used to, and, due to an Amazon misunderstanding (did you know Prime ever meant not-quick-shipping? We didn’t!), this situation persisted through the weekend.
I (re-)read all of the Sandman graphic novels and Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice.
I also started thinking about the time before we had two computers, and the time when we didn’t spend so much time on the internet that having one connection was a hardship. Continue reading
Technically, [this meets the] Qualifications, a Facets of Dusk story for Patreon
Okay, so I’m working on my outlines for Finish It nanowrimo coming up in, well, November. And I got to the one for Facets of Dusk and I started thinking about – well, the doors they might open.
🚪
“Get us someplace with medical care!” Simon shouted.
“Someplace with advanced technomagical medical care.” Aerich’s aristocratic snarl sounded panicked.
“Someplace they’re not going to shoot at us.” Cole’s voice was calm. But Cole, who had Josie in his arms, also sounded serious.
Alexa was trying not to panic. She waited until there were hands on her shoulders and she grabbed the door handle. Medical care. Medical care. Not going to shoot us. Medical care.
She yanked the door open.
Claxons sounded. Continue reading
Between the Worlds: A Fae Apoc/Sandman Crossover for Patreon
I blame this on my current marathon re-read of the Sandman comics. Sheba and Magnolia are characters in Addergoole: The Original Seriesand Addergoole: A Ghost Story. Destruction is from the Sandman comics etc.
No idea about this image but I liked it.
Oh, and this is set during the Faerie Apocalypse that gives this setting its name.
📚
On Halloween, 2011, when the walls between worlds were thinner than they had ever been, the woman called The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (because her Mentor had been fond of Robert Heinlein, in his day and in her day) left her kids with her sister, as per their arrangement, and slipped out between those world-barriers.
SHe was gone for hours; to her senses, it was days — and maybe years. It was hard to tell, in some of the blank places she found herself.
When she returned to her sister’s home, she had with her a very tall, broad man with red hair, wearing a collar made of plaques of enameled wood.
Her sister, who had spent a few bored days — in that time when the world was falling apart but there was nothing to do but plant, and build walls, and wait, and pray — reading all of The Cat’s Sandman collection — stared in horror. “Is that—”
“He is.” She had a look best described, unfortunately, as cat-who-ate-the-canary. Continue reading
Tír na Cali-Flight Rising
oops
🐉
They had been meant to be field workers, fodder, perhaps sacrifices to the Goddess if the year was lean.
Their parents didn’t even know each other. They had been “suggested” to breed by the simple expedient of feeding them the strongest aphrodisiac drugs and then locking them in a small padded room together with nothing else to do. The farm needed workers, and, in a year like this, sometimes the Goddess needed a couple brought to her side to help them. Nobody spoke of that, of course, like a pile of other things that nobody spoke of, but it still happened.
The field overseer looked at the two slender pre-teens. They had grey eyes and red hair and sunburnt the moment the sun touched them. They had an aristocratic pose and the boy looked almost exactly like the late Baron Tannen.
“These two aren’t for the fields or the Goddess,” he muttered. “Consort save me, what am I going to do with them?” Continue reading
Patreon Posts!
Okay, so I was playing around with a roleplay with Cal and Cynara decided to build herself a castle. Well, a play castle, this is ~8×8 with a tower; it’s a shed-sized castle.
The poll has spoken!
The walls between the worlds are thin in October, especially as Hallowe’en approaches. It’s easier to step between universes – or to slip and fall down a rabbit-hole you were never expecting.
This month’s theme is Crossovers – those slips, those falls, those determined steps into another world.
Open to $5+ “To-do List” Patrons!
I mentioned a story about renovations…
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The renovations started in June.
They closed on the house in October — Judy had a feeling about the place; Steve thought it had good bones — and lived with the ugly panelling, the wonky ceilings, the strange toilet all winter long.
As soon as the weather was consistently warm, down came the hideous paneling.