First: A New World
Previous: Out
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“How did these idiots ever manage to conquer the Hoeraija?”
“Well, there are several ideas about that, actually.”
Kael did not jump. She had not lived as long as she had without learning how to remaining calm no matter what snuck up on her. But she did turn around slowly with a raised eyebrow. Continue reading
The completion of the Problem with Chickens/Assignments story.
🐔
Trenner slept surprisingly well, tucked in on a couch that still had its no feet on the furniture sign, in very fussy handwriting, prominently displayed.
After all, if there were strange noises outside, they were no stranger than the ones she might hear in the dormitories. And if there were strange breezes coming across her, well, her second-year roommate had left the window open all winter. It was, she realized, more relaxing than her trips home, where everything felt not nearly lumpy enough, too quiet, and too soft.
Once she had woken, performed her morning ablutions – she did not ask where the water had come from, and her guide did not tell her, but it smelled sweet and washed her with no ill effects – and geared up, they were on their way into the wilds that had, once, been the Dormitory and Agriculture Quad. Continue reading
There were times when she regretted that the Mara could not shift their sex the way the Daeva could, and this was one of them.
The colonies were still wild, of course; that was why she had come. She was craving a challenge. She was craving a frontier.
She kept running into men who wanted to put her in a house. Put her in a house and put her in her place. And that – that was not what she wanted, not a house-man with house-soft hands, not a house-life with curtains and furniture. She wanted a frontier. Continue reading
Inspired by Life Extension, by Isaac Arthur.
…People will obviously still leave jobs, but they’re no longer retiring.
You are not going to get the management slot when Sally retires in two years, you are not inheriting Dad’s business, at least not for several centuries.You’re not inheriting his house either.When he does die odds are good he will have several thousand descendants kicking around.
You also now have a de facto gerontocracy….
His sci-fi videos are chewy but really interesting.
A story of Cya Red Doomsday, who does not get old, and one of her descendants, who hasn’t had time to grow up yet. Continue reading
First: Purchased: Negotiation
Previous: Family
💰
If you want to sleep with me…
Leander didn’t exactly freeze, but he did go quiet for a moment. He looked at Sylviane. She was looking – well, he thought she was looking shy. He was going to put his foot in it in the worst way.
He cleared his throat and decided to go for honestly. “I… well. You’re gorgeous. You’re sweet. You’re absolutely nothing like what I expected. You’re nothing like what I’m used to. And uh. I… you don’t want to do that. You don’t want me to do that.
He braced himself for anger, for hurt, for something. She looked confused. “I don’t want to… sleep with you? Have sex with you?” She whispered the last and he once again had to think about her age, or maturity, in some confusion. “Do you, uh. Do you have spines or something?” Continue reading
Originally posted on Patreon in July 2018 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
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This is, more or less, slice of life as the world burns. The gas station guy came to me and I needed to give the story something of an end if not a beginning.
So here it is, Fae Apoc, early in the war so mid-2011.
“What do you mean,’no satellites found?’”. Hayley pounded the dashboard with her fist and glared at the GPS, her phone, and the road. “They’re up there, you idiots! They didn’t go away!”
“Well.” Tyler cleared her throat. “They might have, you know. The god-things took out Manhattan. A satellite is probably no big deal forgot them, you know?”
“I see a gas station. We should fill up while we can.” Lindsay pointed from the back seat. “There. Eddie’s Gas and Service.” Continue reading
I was re-reading Thief of Time, and there is a line in there about “just dump the extra time in the ocean.” It was always wet and watery:
Oh, maybe fishermen would start to dredge up strange whiskery fish that they’d only ever seen before as fossils, but who cared what happened to a bunch of codfish.
So here is a bit about someone who might care.
There was an island in the middle of the ocean that the Monks of Time did not know of.
They didn’t know about it because it wasn’t supposed to exist for another five hundred thousand years, but it existed in a place that a particular set of Procrastinator-drivers in the halls of time particularly enjoyed, and as such, it had gotten more than its share of time manipulation.
Geography and geology are always a bit of a question when you live on a disc on the back of four elephants riding on the back of a turtle, but as far as anyone could tel, this was also a place where certain sea creatures had been going for millennia to die, and thus, between that and some activity it was best to call volcanic, although Vulcan went by a different name here, had pointy ears, and had only once even looked at this place1, well, anyway, there was an island here.
And because shipwrecks happen everywhere and possibly more than everywhere when your ship is suddenly beset by a pre-historical2 creature or, worse yet, suddenly becomes a grove of trees and two confused elephants or a pile of mold and driftwood, this island had people, and had had people for quite some time (Probably. Maybe. Likely.)
Even evolution works strangely on the Disc, and so, after a while (or several whiles, depending), someone needed to do something about this aging a thousand years before one could manage to breed, or coming back before one’s grandparents had gotten around to it, and so on.
There were not a lot of people on this island, but it wasn’t on any charts, which only increased the shipwrecks (it’s a bit off putting when first your First Mate loses fifteen years of life and then there’s an island right in front of you while you’re still talking her out of a fight with the cook and the ship’s boy over Music With Rocks In It), and things continued strange around there. Which meant that, in due (let’s be honest and say un-due) time, the people who survived there ended up being, ah, immune to time.
They could step through it, and sometimes did. They could create elaborate looping paradoxes – and, indeed, it became an art form there: what is the most beautiful paradox that you can create? None of this I’m-my-own-Grandpa sort of thing; on this island that was considered to go without saying, after all. And if you wished to go and replay last Tuesday, well, go ahead. Maybe alone, maybe with your previous self or several of them.
And while the Monks of Time did not know about this island, neither did those on the island know about the monks of time.
If they did, it is thought by those who pay attention (Mostly Sark’ck) that there were at least three consecrated mounds of dust and ash that might have some very strong words for those Monks.
1 Nobody was saying that Vulcan, or, as he was known here, Sark’ck, had anything to do with a particular green-blooded bastard in a another part of the multiverse, but he did have a habit of adopting stray myths and making them his own…
2 And in the Discworld, where someone or other had been writing down history since the time the fifth elephant landed in the Uberwald, that is saying something.
“Rashi, what did you do?”
The interns at the laboratory known only as The Lab did their level best to be close enough to hear the argument while far enough away to avoid any fallout. Just three weeks ago, a new intern had taken umbrage at being shouted at and, while the Boss was fine – the boss was always fine – three nearby interns had lost parts or all of their limbs to a parasitic vine. With the memory still clear – with Yando still sitting in his mechanized chair, working the controls with what were only sort of fingers (and sort of vines) everyone was very cautious this time. Continue reading