Why haven’t mad scientists taken over the world? Either they already have, and we just don’t notice, or they’re too dysfunctional to take over much of anything.
This setting posits a little bit of both.
Best place to start
Engineered (LJ)
The stories run in more or less chronological order.
This is a follow up to A Break? from my Fishy Prompt Call here – anyone can prompt (if you haven’t already) and please do!
Science! is a longstanding setting of mad science; Jess, below, is from Quick Thinking, (and, of course, A Break?). Cara is from almost all the Science stories except that one… But her first appearance was here. The two interns were unnamed in A Break? but this is the same vacation and same interns.
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“You know these woods really well.” The shorter intern – Callum O’Neill – had been following Jess around since she had wandered down from the cabin loft bedroom sometime past sunrise but before noon. The other one – Lilian Win – had stayed back on the porch overlooking the gorge, taking photo after photo on her phone. She seemed to have calmed down, however, so Jess wasn’t going to complain. Continue reading
From now through mid day Thursday, August 6th, I have a Prompt Call running here – anyone can prompt and please do!
Jess, below, is from Quick Thinking, in the Science! setting. Cara is from almost all the Science stories except that one… But her first appearance was here.
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“Just four of them, Jess? Dr. Adpirn was supposed to take them on the annual research vacation, but I’m sure you’ve heard what happened-”
“Was that the one that the thing down in the basement levels got?”
“No, that was Doctor Waspue. Dr. Adpirn was the one that got a little too involved in the testing of a new miracle drug. The problem was, of course, the side effects…”
Jess winced. She tried to stay away from the biological sciences as much as she could, although, as Chief of Security for her division, she ended up spending a lot of time in every department,including the icky ones. Continue reading
I am taking prompts on the theme of “Begins with Pi-” (preferably a phrase rather than a word).
Content warning, this one is definitely inspired by current events.
Also, I have the typing version of a sore throat – my right ring finger is sad – so pls. forgive any typos.
“There’s a problem with the milk.”
Cara raised an eyebrow at intern in her well-practiced “do tell?” expression. She’d brought double PhDs to their knees with that eyebrow.
The intern was uncowed. Cara didn’t know whether to write the skinny grad student off as an idiot or be impressed by the stainless steel guts that demonstrated. “The whole milk, to be exact. Not ours, that is, we didn’t develop it; it’s in the dining hall.”
The intern hesitated. “That is, as far as I know, it’s a dining hall product and not one of our developments; if the Facility is using its dining hall for non -consensual, uninformed testing, I quit.”
“Not the staff dining hall.” It was not the most robust denial, but Cara wanted to see what this one would do.
The intern relaxed minutely. “Then there is a serious problem with the whole milk.” Continue reading
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This is all @lilFluff‘s fault. Brought on by a toot thread in a now-deleted server, quoted below. Science! ‘verse.
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“I think we’ve got it!”
Liam stopped at the door and peered at his scientists. They had to be his; they were in his building.
But he couldn’t remember what this room – tucked behind the break room and next to the fire escape – was even for.
The scientist looking at him looked like she’d forgotten what a brush was for, but she also looked thrilled.
“Tell me more.”
“The square meter challenge. It was a problem for interns, twenty years ago.”
Liam made a mental note to make sure someone in HR knew about this department.
“And…?” Continue reading
Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
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“You want to – to convert one of the abandoned buildings into a poorhouse?” Resklin Tarajirra had never seen Professor Lokeg-Fridelabout look quite so surprised. Up until now, he hadn’t know the professor had emotions beyond snide, annoyed, and cruelly pleased – although the annoyed had gotten awfully dark last week when Trenner Oujiduie showed up with a Feltenner chicken chick following her around. “Tarajirra, that seems rather dark for one of your sort – it seems dark even for me,” the professor admitted in a rare moment of self-awareness. “If you wanted to eliminate the poor, there are kinder ways than feeding them to Feltenner chickens and the Wind Alone knows what else lives in there. What did Oujiduie’s paper say? Ferrets?”
Ah, a snide sneer. That was more like it.
“Ferrets, yes, Professor. You see, I don’t want to feed the poor to the chickens. Or the ferrets. My thought is more in the other direction – with the analysis that we’ve been working on, if we could feed the chicken eggs to the poor, we could start a very reasonable work house there, move some of the more tedious research in that direction –”
“That, Tarajirra, is what graduate students are for.”
Continue reading
Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
Most of my settings come from one or a few stories that are written around the same time, which start coalescing themselves into a world. Fae Apoc and Tír na Cali are exceptions to this, as is Foedus Planatarum, sort of, but today I’m starting with Science!
It turns out the first story of Science!, which included Cara, Alex, and Liam, the three who show up in the lion’s share of these tales, came from a “Wine and/or Roses” prompt call- prompts of Lilfluff’s and wyld_dandelyon’s coming together to create a story about roses with retractable thorns.
Then Shutsumon added “What’s in it?” “Blood of grape and juice of girl,” and we had another story in the same timeline.
And then the next Giraffe Call was “Origins and Creation” and we ended up going on further in the same setting.
By that point, the setting was “set” – there were scientists who did bad things or very good ones (sometimes which was which depended on your point of view); there was the Boss and the tower where all this happened, there was an island, and there were Cara and Alex, whose roles are never, or possibly just rarely, defined but who seem to see everything and be along for everything.
That pretty much sums up my world creation method: Start from scratch and see what happens.
This donation slider from the wine and/or roses call was just too good not to share.
I made it myself!
Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
My Science! setting is often set within The Facility, an unknown site which today we get a peek into.
In lieu of a map, a directory. This turned out to be only 3 floors out of the whole complex. Below, a diagram of what the blocks mean.
Originally posted on Patreon in November 2018 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
Cara wasn’t scared of much of anything. Except the Repair Team.
They came striding through the Facility, their outfits smooth and black and altogether too tidy. The Repair Team never had anything out of place. Cara would hate them. She would hate them *later*; right now she and Alex were hurrying towards Liam while trying to look like nothing was out of place at all.
“Boss-” Alex asked. It was his turn to ask this week.
Liam didn’t take his eyes off the Repair Team. “Not us this time.” Continue reading
Written to Sauergeek’s prompt to my new “WTF?” Prompt Call.
I am picturing this as the same era/world as The Trouble With… (Chickens, assignments, ferrets, and so on)
It wasn’t, exactly, a dance.
That is, it was never a dance that would performed in high society, in the dance halls of the Dames and Lords.
It was a dance that was born out of too much whisky, the sort of stuff that ambitious university students brewed in the abandoned dormitories. It was born out of the awkward one-woman-to-ever-seven-men ratio that was common on the University campus – especially those sections where students were brewing bathtub hooch and coming up with interesting ways to “Age” it without getting caught. And it was born out of one woman’s very determined urge that, if she was going to be in experimental sciences, she was going to get dances, no matter what her uncle said on the matter.
It was neither a tango nor a foxtrot, but it was face-paced, steamy, and done best when more than a little intoxicated. It was something like a square dance, except that it was done with one woman at the heart of eight men. And it was quickly declared against the rules by the university, illegal by the government, and immoral by two different churches.
It was so wildly popular that before she graduated, the young woman responsible for the craze wrote an anonymous tell-all book, the sales of which funded her experimentations for the next fifty years.
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