Archive | November 2017

Ba(n)kers

Nov27

This story brought to you by the fact that I kept misreading Lilfluff’s prompt “a baker” as “a banker.”

🍞

The old bank smelled delicious.

Of the village that had stood here before everything had collapsed, seven buildings remained and seven new ones had been constructed from the wreckage of the old.

In the center of everything, the bank was an anchor, not a window broken, not a tile out of place.  It had withstood storms before.  It would withstand more than that in the future.

And in the middle of the bank, Geraldine Atwater and Clementine Smith had built their ovens.

They kneaded bread on the old marble counter-tops and stacked it for display on the check-signing stations.  They took deposits of money or trade goods or ingredients and gave receipts in bread and rolls and pastries, anything they could figure out how to make with what they had.

They’d gone back to the old traditions: The brewery hadn’t stood, but they’d rebuilt it, and they used the yeast from the brewery for their bread.  The area was littered with millstones and old museum replicas of mills.  They’d used them as a blueprint for a new mill, right next to the bank-cum-bakery.

The area had never stopped farming.  They had to borrow from the Amish and the Mennonites to get things back to an old-school way, but they traded with everyone they could still reach, and in the end, Gerry and Clem had enough for their bakery, and the town had enough to eat.

Today was a special day, and today they were baking up a storm.  The ovens had been fired since three hours before dawn and now, the bread for the village and the rolls for their sandwiches baked, they were twisting up the braids and the swirls of a grand confection.

Today marked three years since their first loaf had been baked in their new oven.  And it marked three and a half years since the day they’d all stepped out of the Great Storm.

The bread sculpture wouldn’t show the storm, though.  Four feet tall and seven feet long, the sculpture would show hands.  All of their hands, the whole village, the Amish, the Mennonites, the crazy hermits up the hill.  Hands, and a mill wheel, and the framework of a building being pushed into shape.

“Should we call it Thanksgiving, do you think?”  Gerry twisted the gnarled knuckles of Eli Schneiderman’s old hands into the dough in front of her.

“Nah, that already means something.  Call it…. Call it Friendship.  No.  Community Day.”  Clem added a line of cinnamon to the millwheel.  “The sweetness of a true community.”

The Testers

Nov26

Written in part to prompts from Wyste and Lilfluff, clearly not finished.

🐇

“And when you turn twenty,” Thomas whispered, “the Testers come and they take you away.  And if you’re very very lucky, they take you to a good place, and if you’re not, they take you to a bad place.”

The younger children shivered.  Kelly was supposed to be watching them tonight, but she was letting Thomas tell his stories, even if they weren’t at all helpful.

She’d be twenty tomorrow.  She remembered when they’d taken Aaron.  And before Aaron, Jennifer, and before Jennifer, Keisha and Min and Lad and Petyr Continue reading →

War Prize

Nov26

Written sort of adjacent to Inspector Caracal’s prompt. 

This is set in a earlier era of Reiassan than Rin/Girey and definitely earlier than Edally, although really we see almost no markings of era in the story.  

🐐

They had been walking for four days.

At first, Gianci had preferred the walking.  It had to be better than sitting in a prison tent waiting to die.  It had to be better than being dirty and sweaty, fighting on the front lines because he’d pissed off the wrong person in High Command.  It had to be better than dying with a Callenni spear through his gut, the way he’d watched Tierri die, the way he’d thought he was going down when that tiny dark soldier had hit him with something in the gut. Continue reading →

First thanksgiving – a Tale of Addergoolians for Patreon

Nov23

In which we prove that I am lousy at naming things, oops.
Luke and Mike are from Addergoole. Luke is Seneca Indian; Mike is a gender-swapping Dutch minx.

This story is set in 1864, one year after Abe Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday. Parties take time to plan, dontcha know?

🍁

Luke knew Mike had set him up the minute he walked into the party.

The way the fancy people in their expensive dresses turned to stare, the whispers that he couldn’t imagine he wasn’t supposed to hear:

Isn’t he supposed to be on a reservation?

Do they eat real food?

They let them serve in the Armed Forces? Oh, as scouts, of course — but that rank can’t be real. Continue reading →

Married?

Nov21

This story was spurred on by the 2/3-Nano semi-burnout and by buying a 2-month-old, 20-meter long dragon as the mate for a 2-day-old, 2-meter-long hatchling. 

Despite that, I tried very hard to avoid anything remotely squicky.  Also, this is not about dragons. Continue reading →

Followed, Anticipated- a story of Fae Apoc for Patreon

Nov21

If you are new to my Fae Apoc setting, Kai(lani) and Rozen are from my Addergoole series.

This story takes place 50 years past the original story, nearly 40 years after the apocalypse, after the Retirement stories.

Short summary: Rozen, a “big bad wolf” in school at Addergoole, managed to finally piss off Regine, the school’s Director, enough that she mind-controlled him into a Belonging (magical slavery; “Keeping”) and shipped him, literally, to Kailani, her protege, ignorant of or uncaring about the romantic/sexual/violent tension that had existed between those two in school. 

Since Kai was growing too old to pretend to be human in her current locale, she chose to go on the road with her new, somewhat violent, companion. 

👻

Kailani and Rozen were being followed.

Not exactly followed — more like followed-in-front-of — and not by a person or people.  Rozen would have been able to deal with people.

(If he was allowed to, of course.  He had no physical collar, because in the places they were travelling, sometimes having a collared person with her would get Kai killed and sometimes it would get him killed and, either way, it was a dangerous luxury.  He wondered sometimes if having a physical collar would have helped him get used to the uncomfortable feeling of being on a leash. )

They were being anticipated by rumor and legend, and Rozen didn’t like what they were saying.

He was Masked, of course, and Kai’s disguise was to go back to the way she’d looked at sixteen and seventeen, fresh-faced and not that much like the aging Dean Storm.  So when people told them about the midnight-skinned man with white hair and red eyes, he was pretty sure they weren’t seeing his middling-brown skin, hair, and eyes and thinking they were talking about him.

“I swear, Kai, I’ve never been through that town before.”  She was frowning, had been frowning since they left the town — in more of a hurry than they normally did, almost enough to bring attention to themselves. “Any of these towns we’ve been through.  I—”  He shifted.  “I stuck to the northwest and, uh, the Lakes, you know that.” Continue reading →

Slave, Auction, House, Surprise

Nov20

(With no auction and no house, oops)

Wyste prompted me:

a slave auction house, a surprise.

and I’m going to blame the part where I’m sick* for the part where I missed like the auction and really the house. 

* I’m not really sick.  I’m having a predictable adverse reaction to a medication that will be over by tomorrow morning.  But I feel sick.  Peh. 

🏘️

Arie had been trudging for days.  His feet were bleeding, he was fairly sure, and his shoulders and neck were sunburnt.  

The raiders had caught five of them in a trap that he felt stupid just thinking about, the sort of ridiculous thing that Wile E. Coyote would have turned his nose up at, but they’d been tired, they’d just finished fighting off something Arie was pretty sure was a wyvern, and- Continue reading →

Desert, Bus, Neverending

Nov20

I’m not feeling great but I wanted to beat some monsters in 4thwords so I asked for some prompts on Mastodon. 

@DialMforMara prompted

Write about a desert. Or a bus. Or both.

which led me to finally look up desert bus.  I’m not sure about this ficlet, but it’s something, all right.

🚌

Kim had no idea how long they’d been going.

There was nothing on any side of them but sand and the miserable wrecks of former towns, nothing in front of them but the same.

Behind them – behind them there was something.  They had managed to stop for ten minutes once, twenty the time they found a gas station still selling anything, and otherwise they stopped only long enough to dump another can of gas in the bus.

Even that was too much.  When they stopped, they could look behind them and the road was clear.  When they filled the gas tank, or the time they stopped and siphoned gas from a wrecked tractor-trailer, stealing loaves of bread and jam from its broken crates, they always had this minute, two minutes of thinking maybe we’re safe.

Maybe they’d imagined it.  Maybe they were running from nothing.  Maybe they could stop, could rest, could relax.

Then it would be there on the horizon, the thing with too many arms and too many legs and far, far too many eyes, the thing that sounded like a swarm of bugs and a death metal concert and, when it got too close, broke glass and shattered eardrums and, if you let it get far, far too close, made one blind.

Then they piled back in the bus and started driving again, pedal to the metal, faster than any poor old school bus ought to go.

Kim drove, Heidi drove. Omar drove.  Everett and Grace drove. Marcia couldn’t drive any more and they weren’t going to let Gerald drive, but Gerald would watch out the back window for hours, and Marcia…

They were pretty sure Marcia knew they were there, so they kept her comfortable.  She started to get restless before any of them saw or heard the thing coming, too, her and Gerald, so they were like canaries, even if Kim thought it was awful to think of them that way.

It was her turn to rest, so she curled up on a seat the best she could, wrapped a crappy gas-station football blanket around herself, and tried to rest.  They’d still be driving when she woke.  She was pretty sure they were never going to leave the desert.  They’d still be driving, or they’d be like Marcia and Gerald, or like John and Brittany, who they’d lost.

Even then, she was pretty sure, death or hell or nothingness would still feel like driving through the desert, forever, in an old school bus.