Facets of Dusk Landing Page

Mar9

The Doors were a rumor, a whisper, something the magi murmured about beyond closed doors. They had never found one – until it turned out that it wasn’t the Doors they hadn’t been able to find, but the openers.

Now Alexa, the only Opener known in her home reality, works with a team of scientists, explorers, magi, and soldiers to discover where these Doors can take them. And it will be quite a ride!

Best places to start
In the Storm (Cole, intro)
Intro (Alexa, Intro)
Into the Doorway, an introduction Continue reading →

Thimbleful Thursday: Cherry on Top

Jan16

Written to Thursday, Jan 9th’s Thimbleful Thursday Prompt, Cherry on Top.

Facets of Dusk universe, no particular time.

Content warnings here are only suggestions of violence and a little authorial snark.

🍒

The drink had a dark grey cherry on top of white whipped cream in a grey glass with a blackish grey drink inside. The straw was white and light-grey striped, and the lips wrapped around it were pale and glistening grey.

Cole turned to Xenia to find her, too, in shades of grey, her hand clearly on her weapon and her face set in anger.

“This place,” she murmured softly. “Have you heard them talk?”

“I just came in for a soda,” he murmured. “And it’s-” Continue reading →

Protected: The Wild West Town of Camelot

Nov19

Protected: Be Careful What You Ask For

Nov5

Patreon Posts – Crossovers

Oct17

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.

🚪

“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.

Read On

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.

Read On!

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.

Read On!

Technically, [this meets the] Qualifications, a Facets of Dusk story for Patreon

Oct13

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 →

Wishing a Merry Christmas – Patreon repost

Dec25

This story was originally posted Dec. 27th, 2011. It takes place in the Facets of Dusk universe, or, rather, between many of the universes of that setting. The Facets team is moving through Doors between universes, mapping them… or, possibly, stuck trying to find the right one home.

🎁

“Working on Christmas,” Xenia grumbled. She checked her weapons again, as if that would help

“Well, what would you prefer?” Aerich snapped. “We could stay here in this wasteland, or we could go through the Door and hope there’s a building with four standing walls there.”

read on…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1218186.html. You can comment here or there.

Visible Bisexuality: Go (bi) Yourself (redux), a Facets Ficlet.

Sep22

Okay, if Summer, Mellie, and Bishop are mellow and low-key about their bisexuality… Cole is not, and neither is Alexa.

This comes after Trouble in Doubles and Kissing One’sself (NSFW); the gist of which is that the Facets Team – Alexa, Cole, Josie, Aerich, and Peter – have opened a Door into a world which has not only exact copies of them but clones as well.

Facets of Dusk has a landing page here.

Cole had spent the day kissing – and fucking, and being fucked by – himself and several variations on Alexa. He’d thought the day couldn’t get any more interesting – a high bar already when you spent your life bouncing from world to world.

They had finally gotten dressed, mostly because two Josies and one Aerich were getting very impatient, and two impatient Josies were even more persistent than one. They had finally left the room, because Peter had gotten himself punched by probably-clone Alexa for asking far too many questions, many of which really deserved worse than a punch.

Out of the room, they had gone around a corner and run smack dab into… Cole blinked. He looked at Alexa, dopple-Alexa, and clone-Alexa, although he wasn’t quite sure which was which. He looked back at the man who was staring at them. Who was, for all intents and purposes, Alexa.

He waggled his eyebrows at dopple-Cole, whose face grew into a slow grin.

Peter sighed. “We are never getting anywhere here, are we?”

“Look at it this way,” one of the female Alexas offered, “they generally only make three or four clones of any given person. He’s – they’ve – got to get tired of fucking mes eventually.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1175714.html. You can comment here or there.

Through Another Door

Nov4

There were people waiting for them when Alexa opened the door.

It was certainly not the first time that had happened. They’d run into hostiles a time or two, scientists on one memorable occasion, and there had been the time the door had opened into someone’s bathroom.

(If Door-hopping ever became a proper mode of exploration, there would have to be some sort of note sent around about remodeling.)

But this time they opened the door into an attic and two children, one snatching her hand back as if she’d been about to open the same door. They were dressed in school uniforms; the boy had a black eye and the girl two scraped knees. They were, not surprisingly, staring at the team.

“You are most definitely not Aslan.” The girl had a working-class London accent and a very withering glare.

Alexa opened her mouth, momentarily at a loss for a reply.

“No.” Josie stepped forward, her voice carrying gravitas like Alexa had never heard. “One of the truths about such portals as this is that they rarely, if ever, open to the same world twice. But there are other portals out there, and they will take you to many places.”

“Be careful-” Cole began, and then trailed off, at a loss for once in his life.

Aerich stepped up, his voice stentorian and serious. “-for there are monsters and dangerous people through many doorways, and you will not always be given a guide.”

Peter said nothing. His meters were beeping and whirring away.

“Good travels.” Alexa bowed to them. “And may the Door always lead you home when you need it to.”

Peter’s meters clicked; they had all the data they needed. Alexa shut the door firmly, holding the girl’s eyes until the door and the world was closed.

“HQ would have loved them.” Cole’s voice was surprisingly bland.

Alexa was equally surprised to find her own voice vehement. “HQ can go fuck themselves until those kids are adults. Let them explore while they still have wonder.”

“They might die, you know.” Josie was back to sounding stoned and dreamy. It made the sentence she’d uttered even more creepy.

For once, it was Aerich who defended her. “They might. And they will then have died exploring. Let them live, as Alexa said. Time enough for HQ and such things later.”

“Makes you wish, doesn’t it?” Peter finally looked up from his machines. “Sort of makes you wish we were young enough to see the world like they do.”

Facets of Dusk has a landing page here

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1003850.html. You can comment here or there.

Fitting In, a story of Facets of Dusk for the Impossible Situations mini-call

Oct25

In retrospect, things would have gone smoother if the team had made any other choice at all, even staying frozen in indecision.

But the volcano was seconds from showering them all in hot ash and then burying them in lava, and that wasn’t a way any of them wanted to die. So Alexa grabbed Cole’s hand, who grabbed Josie’s, who grabbed Xenia’s, who grabbed Aerich’s, who grabbed Peter’s…

Who grabbed the Jameerery mayor’s hand. And the twenty-five Jameerery, no fools and not wanting to die, had been forming up a chain of hands already, so when Alexa opened the Door with her free hand, all twenty-five Jameerery came through with the team.

And in most cases, in most worlds they went between, this wouldn’t have been a huge problem. They were alternate Earths, after all. Cole had lost count of the number of Coles and Alexas they’d run into, and there had been that place with the clone Josies…

The problem was that the Jameerery were, ah. Trolls. Or elves. They had horns, at least, and their skin had a slightly purplish tint to it. They worked magic – although not enough to withstand an eruption of that scope, clearly – and they had ears that were pointed and almost catlike. To put it shortly: They weren’t human. And it showed. And the Door back to their land had either burned or was encased in lava.

And so Cole found himself putting an adorable straw hat on the head of the most adorable of the Jameerery refugees, who sadly happened to be their mayor’s daughter. It covered the horns, and Xenia had already dyed the girl’s violet curls black. But covering the violet skin was going to be a trick…

“The girls could be very religious sorts,” Josie mused. “But I don’t know of a sect in our world where the men cover their faces.”

To lilfluff‘s prompt.