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Feast of Sterha

Mar5

New setting or one-shot, just an idea that came to mind, slightly inspired by The Exiles Trilogy and slightly by my inability to stop singing Good King Wenceslas.  

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“So let today hereby be named the Day of the Martyr Baloran, with all due pomp and ceremony, and let us remember this day by, hrm, bu picking up rocks from our neighbors’ fields and using them to help build the walls between fields, on my authority and honor as the leader of this colony-”

“Ah, honored one?”  Gerilip did not like interrupting the Leader, but her job lead her to need to quite often.  “Today is the day of the Blessed Epolitie.”

“Ah.  What about Baloran’s birthday?”

“The day of the Blood-Consecrated Delfikin.”

“Ah, hrm. The day Baloran joined the Service?”

“That’s the feast of the Holy One Relian.  Honored One,” Gerilip cut in, before this could get quite silly, “there is only one day left open on the calendar.” Continue reading →

Bad Fight

Feb21

Written to a prompt I found here. 

Superhero on Google Android 9.0

Red wasn’t supposed to be out on his own yet.  He was supposed to be a sidekick.  He was supposed to be following Blue around still, maybe cracking wise and maybe just mopping up the henchmen that got away.

But that wasn’t what he’d signed up for.  That wasn’t what he’d been training until all hours of the night for, sneaking out of study hall for, spending every minute he could in the lab for.  No.  No, he was a meta, a shining new example of the Modern Superhero – that h Continue reading →

Rise

Feb19

This is written to a prompt I encountered on Pinterest from here.

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We had never come up with a cure.

Instead, we had come up with ways to deal with it.  I say we, but it was my grandparents and their parents who did most of that work.

The rest of us just learned what we had to do and got on with the work of rebuilding the world.  By the time I was an adult, you could barely tell that there had been a world-scarring, population-destroying mega war in my grandparents’ time.

And then, of course, the fucking aliens showed up.

They had spacefaring tech that we were only beginning to develop.  They had weapons that were, frankly, amazing, and, from a biologist’s point of view, also horrifying.  They had ships parked in our atmosphere.

We had zombies.  Continue reading →

The Visit

Feb14

He could have had any man or woman in the whole nation — probably in several of the adjacent nations as well. He was a brilliant man,a dashing pirate, and his airship was one of the finest known to navy nor fleet. He was a folk hero the likes of which had not come since Dywin Talizen in the age of stories and myths.

And his airship had ducked in, dodging the royal navy ships and the cannons, to visit a political prisoner in a quiet exile in a mountainous corner. He had brought her a rose, the sort of gift that fit the stories, risking everything for a romantic gesture.

He couldn’t stay long; he couldn’t even risk a kiss, even if she would have accepted it. But he brought her a rose.

And he brought her a key.

Continue reading →

Outta the Woods Yet?

Feb12

The big cat had been chasing Pren for heart-rending minutes when she managed to skid into a cave she’d never seen before.  She shimmied through a hole that was barely big enough for her and scooted up into a little ledge area. The cat might wait for hours for her, so she made herself comfortably before she pulled out the flint and steel and lit her torch.

The walls of the cave glittered and shone the way that sometimes a small piece of rock would.  The whole area was smooth, rounded, like she had scooted up from the cave into something even less natural than her tree-house.

On the far side of the room was a lever.  Pren looked at the lever. At least, it was a stick poking out of the wall at an angle.  Her mother had shown her how to use things like that to set traps for animals, when she had been small.  When her mother had been around. It might dump her into a net or drop something on her, although both the floor and ceiling looked sturdy enough in the torchlight.  It might drop something on the cat.

The cat was trying to get up the hole she had slipped through.  One clawed paw batted upwards, bigger than Pren’s foot.

She scooted backwards and pulled the lever.  Even a trap was better than being eaten by a cat.

She fell backwards as the wall opened up, into a brightly and smooth room full of strangers and shining lights.

Continue reading →

Big Sheep Island

Jan28
Originally posted on Patreon in January 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
I was hanging out with friends this weekend and my husband was talking about the Falklands. He said something about “it’s a big sheep island.”
So I, ah.  I drew a Big Sheep Island. 🙂
Note: the Tile Hill tail used to be longer, but an earthquake sank the lower end. 

Obsolete

Jan20

When you listened to the old-timers talk, the problems were mostly space.

When you actually listened to them, the problem was space in specific areas, or space that someone wanted, or something like that.

But there was a “crowding issue”.  There were issues with too many people in NYC.  There were issues with lots and lots of people in places on the other side of the globe.  There were problems with obsolete technology.  As far as Rhini could tell, there had been a whole bunch of problems like that, or things people had thought were problems, and some really rich people had thought those problems were going to take over the world. Continue reading →

Treaty

Jan13
A prequel of sorts to Lost Day and A Toque for Hill Primus.

“It’s only for a-”

“Ambassador, between us, let’s not mince words.  There’s never an only for a while when it comes to government.  Something exists, and then it continues on. So let’s talk about what we get out of it and what we have to put in.”

“We had to agree to a single arcology to get every other nation putting in to agree to one.   Which is important, because some of those other nations really need the population space. It quadruples the amount of room that a lot of their population will have to live in.  So we’re going to put one – well, we had four buildings in construction already in Virginia, so we’re working with an architectural team to turn those into one big building that can house at least five thousand people.  And every other nation on the committee is doing the same. They’ll be monitored and maintained by the Starlight Hospitality corporation; they’re the ones we have doing a lot of the work on the national parks like the Grand Canyon right now.”

“How are you going to get people to move into a giant skyscraper?”

“For one, it’s not, it’s more like an enclosed town that just happens to be several dozen stories tall.   There’s – there will be, and soon – plenty of accessibility, solutions for power outages, and then, on the other end, nice spaces, good views, plenty of natural plant and animal life, and good shopping and entertainment.  It’ll be like a really nice city, just with no cars and no attached traffic and such. For another thing, we’re going to bribe the first three thousand people. Free rent-”

“You’ll end up with homeless people.”

“Then they won’t be homeless anymore, will they?”  The Ambassador smiled benignly.

“And who is paying for all of this?”

“The Starlight Hospitality corporation is paying for seventy-five percent out the door.  We’re selling rental space for restaurants, stores, and the like to cover the rest, and the rent for anyone over 3000 will cover any unexpected expenses.  Digital commuting allows people to talk to anyone they want without leaving the warmth and safety of their arcology.”

“And what does the Starlight Hospitality Corp get out of this?  Other than the exclusive contract to run these things which, I imagine, will turn them a pretty penny.”

“Well, that.”  The Ambassador cleared his throat. “And there is all of that test market research on an effectively captive audience.  And data on people’s traffic patterns and such. I hear they plan to build another fifty of these things in the upcoming twenty years.  Ours are just their, mmm, their test market.”

“So… they build these things, a treaty forces us to fill them up, and then they get all the money?”  

For the first time, the Ambassador looked nervous.  

“…Yes.  Yes, that is the situation.”

“And we’re stuck with it.”

“Yes.  Yes we are.”

“Then I’m sure—”

Something about the voice made the Ambassador nervous.

“-you’ll be glad to take one of the first apartments there.  

“I will?”

“You will.”

“I… will.”

“For free, of course, since you’ll be one of the first 3000.”

“That’s too generous, really, I can’t—”

“Not at all.  I’m sure your wife and kids will love it.  And you’ll be very comfortable there, right?  You won’t notice being data mined at all! Now come on, I won’t hear no as an answer. It’s a very nice place, I’m told, yes?  And we do want to set a good example, after all.”

Want more?

 

My Arcologies prompt call is still open here. 

Continue reading →

The Stapler Rebellion

Jan10

“Class, can you tell me what this is representing?”

The VR diorama  showed two women in early Space era outfits, the one in a tidy romper with a skirt-wrap of a style that was classic enough that it kept cycling around every generation or so, the other in a sloppy scientist’s jumpsuit.  The classily-dressed woman had her back turned on a distraught scientist who was shaking a stapler.

“Oh!  That’s the Stapler Revolution!”  One of the know-it-all students bounced a little. “That’s when — when they changed all the laws about staplers? No, that’s not right.  It’s…” Continue reading →