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What Happened?

Aug30

Written to LilFluff’s prompt to my new “WTF?” Prompt Call.  

Probably a new universe.  The last two times Fluff prompted me, we ended up with Kael’s Tower/a New World and The Hidden Mall, so…

When Emma found the door in the closet of her great-grandfather’s old house, she knew what she had to do.  

It was simply the way these things were all done in the books.

She ought to check it out first.  After all, someone always did.

But since she was staying for the weekend with her cousin, she went to get Britney first.

Britney, who was very interested in the current Seventeen magazine, did not want to come see some stinky old closet on the top floor where they really weren’t supposed to be anyway.   “Aren’t we a little old for make-believe, Em?”

“No.”  Emma’s chin jutted out.  It would be so much easier to do this without her.  And yet… “We’ll be old for make believe when we’re old. Grey hair and creaky joints and all that.  Come on. A secret door!”

“Allll right.”  With a great show of reluctance, Britney came along.

The door, at first, did not want to open, and Emma had to once again coax Britney to stay and help her get the doorknob – a little thing, shaped like a fist – to turn.

When they finally opened it, neither of them were nearly as surprised as they ought to have been to find themselves in the middle of a forest.

Britney, who had read the same books that Emma had, took a coat from the closet, sniffed it, and slid it over her shoulders.  The camel-brown leather coat made her look older and more intense than she was.

Emma thumbed through the jackets before pulling the plastic off of a trenchcoat, a grey one that looked styled just right.  It was a wee bit long on her, but that was fine. They were just stepping into a forest…

They left the door propped with a rock that happened to be very brick-shaped, neither of them looking too closely at the way it seemed to hang in mid-air on this side.  And they started walking, both of them secretly wondering if they would encounter a faun or a talking rabbit, a sentient scarecrow or a family with buttons over their eyes…

What they encountered was a glass wall, a thick one, and, outside of it, a city of gleaming steel and shining lights.  There were pod-like things zooming around in mid-air, and the sky, far above, seemed to be covered with yet another layer of glass.

They looked behind them.  There was the forest, and, somewhere in it, a portal.

They looked in front of them.  “This…” Emma whispered. “This was not what I was expecting.”

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What The… Doll?

Aug27

Written to Del’s prompt to my new “WTF?” Prompt Call.  This Miiiiiight be Science! or Dragons Next Door universes – what do you think?

I suppose I had nobody to blame but myself.

I’m one of those compulsive “clickers” that likes to play with online dollies, you know ‘dress up Soldier Sapphire!  Make a Fashion Doll!”

It’s not a habit I really admit to people in real life, but the online world has always been different.

So when “make your mini-mi!” came up in the advertisements for one of the sites I like a lot – they have wings!  And some pretty funky skin colors! – I couldn’t resist clicking.

And then I spent an hour playing – maybe two hours – it could have been three.  All I know is that when I was done, I had a nice little character that looked “just like me.”

I mean, if me had blue hair.  Continue reading →

What The Spell?

Aug27

Written to Victoria’s prompt to my new “WTF?” Prompt Call.  Set in the same world as Parts and Points, which itself is the same world as a cyberpunk-ish novel I’m working on. 

The book was old – ancient –  the sort of thing that people hoard and pass on to their descendants in their wills, and Jenivere had found it in the back of a flea market booth, hiding in a bargain bin.

She’d felt a little guilty about what she’d paid for it, so she’d done a little spell around the booth, one of her favorite easy ones that just made everything a little fresher without ruining the quality of something old or antique (although it sometimes had unfortunate effects on ‘shabby chic’ sorts of things).

Now that she’d read the whole thing three times, she was ready to start one of the spells in it.  It was a shield spell – it was listed as ‘defend and protect’ – and the ingredients were almost all supermarket-easy. Continue reading →

A New World 26: Differences

Aug20

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“Tomorrow night.”  Gemma had agreed to that much.  “Tomorrow, if you come by the museum after yours closes, I will take you to Jamhaier.  I don’t know why you want to go to that place, but I will take you.”

“Thank you.”  Kael wasn’t sure she needed a guide, per se, but she knew that she enjoyed Gemma’s company and that this city had far more to navigate than just the roads and other such things a map would show.

Like these very confusing relations between the Hoija and the others, and the way that almost nobody knew about any other nations.

Had the Hoija – who had not exactly been warlike, back in her time – wiped the rest of them out?  Or taken them all over and given them all their name? Continue reading →

A New World 25: Jamhaier

Aug10

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The bar was not all that different from pubs and taverns that Kael remembered.  There was louder music, yes, the lights were different, but the drinks were much the same – just more variety.  She bowed to Gemma’s expertise for the first drink and got a wink and a decidedly flirtatious smile in return.

“Are you encouraging me to get you drunk, Madam Kaelingrade?”

“As a matter of fact, I might enjoy that,” Kael agreed.  “But I’d have to hope that you have better than an apprentice’s garret to take me back to, since that’s all that they give one for ‘room and board’.  Well at least for the room portion.  The board is quite nice.”

“Did she call you – did she call you Madam Kaelingrade?”  The bartender, a handsome man who was a little younger than Kael’s apparent age, looked surprised.  “Is there a new Kael in the tower, then? You look…” He studied her for a moment. “You look genuine.” Continue reading →

A New World 24: Mistress and Apprentice

Jul25

First: A New World
Previous: Idiots

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“Perhaps I will teach you.”

Was she looking for an apprentice?  Or for – well. Certainly she hadn’t been at a lack for invitations since she woke up.  Of course, she had spoken to more people who did not work for her in the last day than she had in many months, perhaps many years, in the time before her long nap.

“I might enjoy you teaching me.”  Gemma smiled at her with an expression that might have been interested in learning – or in other things.  “You have a fascinating way of looking at the world. What is it that you do, that isn’t pretending to be an ancient potions-mistress?”

“Well, mostly, I am a modern potions-mistress,” Kael admitted.  “It helps to have someone in the Tower, I suppose, that knows what sort of potions will actually work, which won’t do anything, and which could be fatal if handled incorrectly.”

“It certainly has to add verisimilitude.   But there have to be other things you could be doing – working for one of the big corporations…” Continue reading →

Kaijune: How Cuute

Jul19

The worst thing you can say about an enemy is “Aw, how cute.”

Not because you risk offending them – we’re talking someone who is already an enemy, for one, and in this particular case, we’re talking about things that would have to go through a whole translation process to sort that out, because they definitely don’t speak English.

No, because the moment you say cute, you’ve stopped thinking of the thing as an enemy and have started thinking of it as something to hug, to protect, to coddle.

This was a big enough problem when the things the news insisted on calling the Lilliputians invaded.  Well, visited.  They weren’t as small as the ones Swift visited in his Tales, but they came up to about an average adult knee and they were what my daughter called “chibi”: their features looked exaggerated and childlike.

But that was them.  When the rabbits appeared, well, then we had really big problems.

Really, really big problems.

Have you ever seen a grown adult soldier arguing with their officers that they can’t shoot the bunny?  Have you ever seen a tank sat on by a bunny big enough to start nibbling on the flag hanging off the twenty-seventh floor?  Have you ever seen the hairball from a hare that size?

Okay, so back up a bit.

It hadn’t even started with the Lilliputians.  It had started with some sort of humanoid-like grey people with giant eyes, and it turned out they ran an intergalactic tourist agency – I have been told, time after time and in painstaking detail, that they are not tourists, that tourists is a provincial back-water Earth concept, but people who are not scientists travelling to new places to see how they live sounds a lot like tourism to me.  Anyway, the problem with tourism (or splet!clogk, or irri♫arren↓) , as I’m sure anyone who lives in a picturesque place could already tell you, is getting the damn tourists to leave.

So may be the Lilliputians weren’t invaders, and they did go home when we convinced them that their visas had expired, but the rabbits…

Look, nobody even knows if they’re sentient.  They don’t talk to me, they don’t talk to the consul, the Grey Folks aren’t even sure how they got here. But they might be cute and they might be fluffy and now nobody wants to shoot them, sure. But the amount of shit a building-sized rabbit leaves is pretty impressive, and let me tell you, that ain’t cute.

“splet!clogk” and “irri♫arren↓” aren’t necessarily meant to be pronounced by a human mouth but I was thinking that the ! in splet!clogk is a tongue click and the gk makes sort of a choking noise; the ♫ is a whistle and the ↓ is for a drop in pitch. 

Thimbleful Thursday: Vent

Jul18

Content warning: Barbie nudity discussed, technology/human hybrid

“The trick has always been balance.” Idella Passmore had that dangerous combination of skilled enthusiasm and charisma; the tour group was listening intently, despite having no idea what she was talking about. “You want sufficient technology to retard or stop decay, of course, but people want to be people. This particular model involves a cybernetic torso with a RealSkin(tm) cover. Most of the organs have been replaced, but the brain remains and the heart continues to pump blood. In some cases, we choose to keep the uterus; in some we replace the heart with a technological marvel like our HeartPump2000.” Continue reading →