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Felis U

Dec10

Um. 

🏛️

“Okay, I have to admit that was fun.” Samaya glanced back at their History classroom and then looked over at Reggie with a hopeful smile. 

“Mmm.  Fun.” He was definitely not smiling. 

“What do you think they’ll do next?” she tried. 

Reg – who she’d met yesterday at orientation – was so far less enamored of Felis U’s idiosyncrasies than Samaya was. 

Then again – They’re willing to give you a full ride, and they’re accredited and they’re decently known.  You know we can’t afford to pay for college for you, not with your father being ill…

Samaya had just been glad it hadn’t turned out to be some sort of thin veneer over a work camp or something even worse. But she sort of wanted someone else to be enthusiastic with her. 

“Mm.  Maybe a dog?” Reggie shrugged, still unimpressed. How he could be unimpressed was beyond her, but maybe he was made of rock.  Continue reading →

71st day

Dec10

A story of holidays! 

Yesterday, I was trying to finish a quest in 4theWords (and I did!) and I asked for prompts – here on Mastodon and here on Twitter. (Still open if something strikes your fancy; I’m having fun with writing prompt stories right now). 

🎃

She’d done so well.

It was nearly dawn on the tenth of December and Xamira was sitting on her porch, watching the world and, perhaps, gloating a little bit.

Moving it earlier had been the easy part.

The pumpkin spice had been a boon, she had to admit. Xamira sipped her latte and licked the slightly-cinnamon-flavoured whipped cream off of her lip. She owed her sister in the coffee industry a favor for that one — now, even if they had never tasted a proper pumpkin pie or carved a jack-o-lantern, people started thinking Pumpkin as soon as the first chilly night came.

The crafts industry had been a big plus, too. Xamira had three blogs where she talked about autumnal crafts, autumnal cooking, and costume-making. Her Gluten, Nut, and Dairy-Free Ladyfingers (shaped like real fingers and with only natural food colorings!!) were such a hit that at least once a year her server crashed. Ditto the $10 Costumes that look like $100+ and Beyond the Sexy Everything: looking Hot on Halloween without Fishnet.

There were even posts up now on r/HotHalloween — Started to plan next year’s costumes (yes plural). What do you think about the librarian from the Mummy?

This year, Xamira hadn’t even had to start the planning-for-next-year posts; they’d just popped up organically.

That part — and Seven Spooky Wreaths You Can Make in a Weekend, and then My Husband Decorated My House for the Holiday, Can You Top It? — those were all her, no favors to a sister or cousin needed, and Xamira  was pleased. The cinnamon on her tongue tasted like victory, like that PTA meeting where she’d first suggested they hold Practice Trick or Treating the week or two weeks before in the school, so kids “knew what to expect.” (which turned out to be mostly more candy). Xamira had done a lot on her own.

Of course, she did have a cousin in inflatables who had pushed the first “spooky” lawn decorations for the season — Xamira smiled across the street at the neighbors’ yard, where a dragon taller than their first floor puffed menacingly at passers-by. And once you got people to decorate, especially outside, then inertia would help everything along and those decorations would stay up longer, and longer…

Xamira had managed to take a small holiday whose influence lasted a few days at best to a season-long extravaganza of pumpkins, candy, and being someone else for a while.

She sipped her latte again as the sun crested the horizon, and sighed as a sort of pepperminty swirl touched her tongue. 70 days. She had managed 70 days.

But on the 71st day, no matter what she did, Christmas reigned.

Across the street, the neighbors’ dragon became a giant tree. Xamira wrapped her shawl around herself and headed inside before the cold really came.

70 days was quite impressive, she told herself again. Nobody else had managed that much.

Maybe next year she’d aim for a post-Labor-Day sale. Back to School with Pumpkins?

Dress Up for your First Day … as a cat!

She had time. Even redditor CostumeFreak only had two sketches and one costume prototype done yet.

Want more?

For non-USians, Labor Day is generally considered the end of summer in the US. 

It’s the first Monday in September & is one of our Federal Holidays.

Inflatable Dragon.

Inflatable Christmas Tree.

Ladies’ Fingers.

Pumpkin Spice Latte – now earlier than ever!

Meter Maid

Dec5

This story was written because Anke posted this toot and I had an idea. 

There’d been a time when Pat’s co-workers had snickered “meter maid” when Pat left for work, but that time – that had been before the city had managed to push through a very obscure translation of a caelo usque ad centrum and managed to make it stick by the sheer tenacity of the city’s lawyers.

Now – now Pat suited up, along with a brigade of other meter maids, grey ghosts, and they strapped onto their jet scooters.

Nobody parked illegally in the city anymore.  There’d been one case, a month ago.  The people nearby had physically moved the car out of the illegal spot and into a fountain several blocks away.  Nobody had listened to the illegal-parker’s complaints.

People fed the meters and the city allowed it, because someone was paying for that spot.  People went out of their way to park tidily.

And Pat and the grey ghosts jetted up into the sky, up out of the atmosphere, and into the parking spots around the asteroid belt and the city’s first space station.   It wasn’t a safe job, not with the Ih(oh)ill bombers still swooping down at seemingly random intervals to hit the stations or the miners, not with the Higun being, well, as Higun as possible in an attempt to counter rumors that them not attacking Earth was a sign of cowardice, not with some of the unknown aliens still trying to test out Earth’s strength on occasion instead of just ignoring their laws and, say, their parking regulations.

But when you could slap a parking ticket and a drive inhibitor on a Higun spacehopper and then very politely explain the city laws, when you dodged an Ih(oh)ill bomber and managed to hit it with an illegal-driving outside of accepted lanes ticket which came with not only the drive inhibitor but also an immediate impound order (self-reinforcing, of course, like the drive inhibitor), when you caught some alien equivalent of a teenager trying to park in the park (which would be “it is free space, no? Then free it should be for any activity.”) and slapped them with just a big enough fine to make them think about pranking some other city next time –

It still wasn’t a safe job, not by a very long shot.  But it was a fun job.

And Pat’s fellow officers saluted when the grey ghosts left and cheered when they came home, and that made it even more fun.

 

Want more?

 

Meter maid (and Wiktionary) and Grey Ghost.

Guard the Garden

Nov15

Originally posted on Patreon in Nov 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

Guard the Garden

This is part of the Damkina series of stories, which you can find in her tag. 

It begins with The Gardener and is a story about a very very (very, very) old fae who, while working as a landscaper for a museum, finds herself suddenly fighting against the apocalypse.

What you need to know: she has expanded her garden to cover a sizable quadrant of the city and she has ‘not-really-followers’ as she is, well, not REALLY a goddess. Except she is.

This is in the middle of the Faerie Apocalypse: would-be gods and godlings are invading the Earth from Elleheim, where they were banished thousands of years ago. Among those who have come back, many have claimed to be ancient gods. 

See Pallas Athene here. See Hera here. See Zeus here.

🌳

“Hey! Hey, get out of our garden! Back off, you — you thing!   I have a broom and I’m not afraid to use it!”

Damkina had drifted off — not a proper sleep but a little bit of a nap in the sunlight, something she found herself doing more and more as she spent most of her waking hours rebuiilding a world for, by her count, the third time.

She hadn’t remembered it being this hard before, but, then again, the last time there hadn’t been quite so many annoying would-be gods all over the place, like aphids, getting into everything and ruining it.
Continue reading →

For Want of a Spoon

Nov14

Originally posted on Patreon in Nov 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

For Want of a Spoon

Thank you to Cal for naming & helping me name the magical schools. 

✨

If there were two things America had plenty of, people would say, it was space, space and magic.

(and money, most people would add, and then, muttering, “and luck.”)

“What are you doing this weekend?  I know we’ve got to study for runes and magical substances, and I have an essay on the Theory of Magic due, but—”

“Skycross game against Merriweather Academy.”

“Yeah, that.  Well, I guess I can study in the intermissions. How’re you doing on that splatter-shield spell?”

“That’s senior-year work and you know it is!….  all right, fine.  It’s functional about 75% of the time and it doesn’t drain my energy anymore, pulls it from temperature changes.” Continue reading →

It’s Only Forever, Not that Long at All

Nov13

Originally posted on Patreon in Nov 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

It's Only Forever - Not that Long At All - The Great NanoWrimo prompt Call

This one was a blast that sort of ran away from me and yes, it’s sort of the beginning of a story, sorry, Kelkyag. 💙

Also a  new universe, as far as I know.

☔

It was supposed to be unwise. It was supposed to be dangerous, deadly.

But Lara always stopped for strangers on the side of the road — hitchhikers, people with broken-down cars, accidents, once someone who turned out to be suffering from dementia and more than a little lost.

Her mother had always done the same. Her mother had always done the same. Her father had done so in WWI and come back home with two boyfriends and a girlfriend. That had taken some careful paperwork and some fast talking, back then.

Lara had yet to come up with anything remotely that interesting, but she’d made some good friends, stopped a serial killer, and, once, gotten a reward.
Continue reading →

A Dream Fic – The Russian’s Motives

Nov12

Today’s Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call tale was prompted by my subconcious, i.e., it’s a dream written down.  Cheers!

Content warning for: slavery, suggested violence, some actual violence and abuse, a good deal of objectification of at least one character. 

I swear I posted this the other day, but it’s still in my drafts. Soooo again, apologies if this is a duplicate.

The Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call

They were waiting, there wasn’t a better word for it.  They were quiet, idle, sitting around the lounge.  Except that he wasn’t sitting with the rest of them – neither he nor a couple of those who sympathized more with him, with what he was, had been, would be, than they did with the situation they found him in. Continue reading →

I’m Begging of You… Jolene

Nov8
Originally posted on Patreon in Nov 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.

On Fridays they were friends. Jolene had figured that much out.

Friday morning they had physics lab together. She and Dolly would sit at the same table, work on their projects together, make jokes together — about the class, about the school, even about Hank. Fridays were pretty good. Jolene held her breath to get through the beginning of the week, but she lived for Fridays.

Tuesdays and Thursdays they had Calc II, Physics Lecture, and Early British Literature together — just the lit with Hank — and Dolly was cool but not mean or nasty. She’d greet Jolene but sit somewhere else, ignore any jokes Jo tried to make, avoid conversation about anything other than class or, maybe, the school itself — and if Jo sat next to Hank, Dolly’s demeanor would get even chillier. (Jo’d tried three times, decided that was enough for a sample, and gone to sitting in the back.)
Continue reading →

Pumpkin, Spice

Nov7

I cannot find that I posted this anywhere. If it’s a duplicate, apologies!

☕

“All right, I have three partial dictionaries from back then.”

Aatu waited patiently for Vijaya to finish digging through her piles.  “And – hrm.  One cookbook from that era, or, I mean, three pages of it.  Free of charge, Aatu, as long as you give me a sample when you’re done.”

“Thanks, Vijaya.  You’re a lifesaver.”

“Nah, I’m just a word-saver.  Go on with you.  Kairu is going to want to know what you want well in advance, you know.” Continue reading →

Tinkering

Nov6
Originally posted on Patreon in Nov 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
Tinkering
New universe, as far as I know.

🌱

The terrarium seemed to have developed a strange mess in the lefthand back corner.  Isidora moved it this way and that – carefully, always carefully; even though it was on a rotating platform, she always made certain to move it very slowly – until she could get a magnifying glass aimed at the corner in question.

Yes.  She frowned at it for a moment.  It seemed to have gotten a ruined building.   Ruined, mostly abandoned, the roof collapsing.

When was the last time she’d looked at that corner?  Maybe last week.  The terrarium was mostly self-sustaining – it needed a little water and a little food every so often and she kept it plugged in to a battery back up to make sure it stayed at about the right temperature and such things, and it had been a busy week.

Still.  She took a series of photos and made a couple notes.  She’d have to keep an eye on that. Continue reading →