Tag Archive | boom

Walls, a response storylet

Aug24

Started in [personal profile] inventrix‘s DW here (and the comments)

Then here.

Now, below.

Cya left Leo’s house slowly. She walked out of the yard as if she was still, somehow, thinking he’d say “no, wait, come back.” She walked down the road, ignoring people, ignoring animals, ignoring the little voice in the back of her head that was always suggesting improvements to the city.

He sticks around because he’s crazy. THAT voice had always been there, even when it was pretty obvious Leo wasn’t so much sticking around as being tethered by ill-thought-out promises and Cya’s habit of Finding him whenever he got too far off. He sticks around because he’s tethered.

If his insanity was changing, evolving, would there still be room for the Protagonist’s Friends?

She walked to the wall around her city and climbed the ladder. It was her city; nobody was going to tell her not to be there.

“You built a real city,” he’d said. She chewed it over. Yes, yes she had. It wasn’t New York City or even Chicago or Milwaukee, but it was a city. She’d set out to make one, and she had.

“We aren’t teenagers anymore.” It was hard to argue with that, either. After all, they had grand-children who were past the teenaged years.

That was where something had gone wrong. Then he’d asked if something was wrong with him. Then he’d asked if he was insane.

She stared out at the mountains beyond her city, and the road snaking its way past Cloverleaf. She looked inwards, at the growing city she’d wrought. It would hold, she thought, even if she didn’t. It could grow now, with or without her.

Leo… Leo wasn’t exactly predictable, but he, Howard, Zita, even Gaheris, Mags, they’d always had a set of behaviours they could be trusted to act within. Cya too, of course; Cya was The Calm One.

Which explained entirely why she was crying. She bit her lip and raised her chin. Nobody would ask why the mayor of the city was sobbing on the walls, but it wasn’t particularly great for morale, either. The Mayor made things go, just like Cya always had. She didn’t bawl her eyes out.

She certainly didn’t bawl her eyes out over her friend the insane samurai. And absolutely not because he might not be insane anymore.

The drop from the walls was a long one, too long to make safely, but making the earth soft and bouncy was an old trick by now. Cya slid down to the ground and let the soft space between inner and outer walls cradle her. Nobody would see her breaking script here. Nobody would be worried by her crying.

Leo… Leo was changing.

“How bad…” It had been bad, sometimes. It had been awful sometimes. But selfishly, Cya had not minded as much as she should, because it let her be useful. It let her be needed.

“It’s nice.” And she’d done what she always did and given him what he might possibly at some point need. She’d built him a house with her own hands and Workings. She’d stocked it with food in case he visited. She’d done a bigger version of packing him a go-bag. And, sane, or becoming sane, or differently insane, whatever was going on with him — whatever she’d triggered in him — Leo had cared about as much as her angrier Kept had cared about their go-bags.

She stared blankly at the walls of her city. What in hell was she supposed to do next?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/975867.html. You can comment here or there.

Angelic Visitation

Aug14

This comes after The Storm Prince of Death and @inspectrCaracal’s response here. It is set in the Fae Apoc, at least 60 years after the 2011 apocalypse.  Yoshi is the son of Cynara, often mentioned.  

⚡

Yoshi loved his parents, he really did, but sometimes he just needed to get out into the world and get away from them. The same was true of Dáirine, with whom he had a strange sort of on-again, on-again relationship that neither of them quite understood.

To get away, he’d taken to wandering the world — a family trait, it seemed. There was a lot of world out there to see; Yoshi had a feeling that he could travel for a century and not see half of it. But he made a point of checking in every year or so. There was nothing more embarrassing than having your mother appear out of nowhere because you hadn’t remembered to visit.

It was on the way back “home” — to Cloverleaf, which had never been home but was the place his family lived — that Yoshi encountered the little village. It was friendly to a passing stranger, something not all towns would do in this rough age, but their friendliness had a cautious edge to it. Continue reading →

Cya talks to her Father (again)

Aug1

After the series of letters [here] and a visit to Cya’s son Vidrou, Enion (Cya’s father) attempts to make amends with his daughter via letter. Eventually he succeeds well enough that she decides to try talking to him one more time.

She packed a bag.

She didn’t need to; she was teleporting to the area, and returning, she assumed, within a few hours.

But there was a certain feeling of parallel that she couldn’t ignore, and so Cya packed a go-bag. Clothes, easy to hand-wash and line-dry. Medical supplies. Two days’ food. A source of fire, an emergency blanket… pencils and a notepad.

On a day over a hundred years ago, she had packed a very similar bag. She’d done so countless times since, for herself, for children and grandchildren and great-great-great-great grandchildren, Kept and students and friends.

But in September of 2000, she’d packed a bag, and her father had sent her away to Addergoole.

She’d given him a year to stew — a year after she decided he might actually be capable of change, three years since he’d visited her son and his wife, more than that since she’d sought him out and realized that the father she’d remembered was every bit as self-centered and not nearly as impressive as she’d remembered. It had been a good year, full of growth for her burgeoning empire and bright improvements in her Academy and her University.

She almost hated to ruin it by visiting him.

But, on the other hand, if she didn’t track him down soon, he might bother another of her children — possibly one of the less-sweet-tempered ones. Certainly one of the less sweet-tempered ones, since of all her children, Viddie had always been the most mild. (What that said, then, about the fact that Viddie had been angry after dealing with her father…)

“Let’s go.” She held out her hand. Wischard — her teleporter this decade — set his hand in hers and they both closed their eyes.

There was a bit of a twist – Wischard was rather new, and not used to homing in on her Finding yet — and then they opened their eyes to a shabby-looking inn.

Cya recognized the area. It was maybe a five-day trip from Cloverleaf, a district she had visited but not had much luck bringing into the fold: a hive of scum and villainy, creeps and thieves. It, she thought, likely suited her father quite well.

“One hour,” she told Wischard. “Thank you.”

“You sure? I don’t mind sticking around, in case…”

Wischard was only three years out of Addergoole. She could guess many of the in cases that he could be thinking of.

She had great-great-great grandchildren his age, although she was almost entirely certain that he wasn’t one of them. She was fairly certain she could handle most in cases.

“I’ll be all right, Wischard. He’s my father. That eliminates at least one sub-set of danger.”

“You’re the boss.” He didn’t look too reassured. She didn’t fault him, knowing what she knew — about both Wischard’s father and her own. “One hour.”

She had a feeling that, while he might be popping away now, he’d be within screaming range for the next hour. That was fine; she hadn’t brought Leo because she wanted a chance of her father talking to her, but she didn’t mind the back-up. She was not on her home territory right now; she was on very shaky ground indeed.

She walked into the bar as if she owned the place anyway, her chin up, her shoulders back, her stride a swagger as if she was armed with grenade launchers.

The conversation stopped, paused at least. She was — to all appearances — a beautiful woman in her twenties, clean and well-dressed. That sort of person wasn’t very common here, not if they weren’t selling themselves.

She walked past all of them as if they didn’t exist. She wasn’t here for the grifters, the drifters, the bandits, the thieves. She wasn’t here for the scroungers, the bullies, the hunters, the veterans.

“Doomsday,” someone whispered. Cya smiled. “Doomsday,” someone said, louder this time. She smiled more widely. Soon they were all saying it. Soon they were all getting out of her way.

Everyone but him. He looked at her. She looked back at him. She found she was grinning. She found he was looking a little bit worried. She raised her eyebrows at him. “Dad.”

The bar was silent again, a heartbeat, another heartbeat. Then he said, carefully, as if was balancing on a knifeblade, “sa’Red Doomsday.”

She pulled up a stool and perched, her smile relaxing into something that felt more comfortable. Someone cleared his throat. Someone else ordered a drink. Slowly, the sound of the bar returned.

“Are you here to kill me?” His shoulders were tense, and she could tell he was double-checking all his exits. He’d taught her that. Always have an exit strategy. “Your son, he seemed to think you’d want the honor yourself.”

“Viddie wasn’t wrong.” She let him sweat a moment. “But I’m not here to kill you. Your letters — they got me thinking.”

“Yeah?” He leaned forward a little, then seemed to realize he was doing it and straightened up. “I’ve been thinking, too.”

“Don’t strain anything.” She smirked faintly, then wiped her hand across the space in between them. “That wasn’t kind, I apologize. It’s clear you’ve been thinking. Viddie said he… well, what Vid said was that he thought there were things you hadn’t considered before.”

“That is — yes. I imagine they make me a bad father. No.” He took a long swig of the rotgut he’d been drinking. “I was a bad father. But-“

Cynara held up her hand. “I’m not here because you were a bad father, or to let you fix that, make up for it. No.” She paused, gathering her thoughts and letting him stew. “I’m here because that doesn’t matter at all anymore.”

He rocked back a little. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again to take a drink. “What do you mean?”

“You were a bad father in, what, 2000? 2002?” She twitched her shoulders. “It’s too late to even be a decent grandfather for most of my kids. There’s no chance for you to be a father for me anymore.”

“I’m still your father.”

She smirked faintly. “It is still a truth that your seed helped create the child I was. It is still truth that you named that child and raised her to the age of sixteen.” She needed her own drink. She flagged down the bartender & paid him with a bill bearing her own face. “That’s it.”

His chin went up. She recognized the expression. Sometimes, she still saw it in the mirror. “I’m your father.”

“Enion, Loophole, I don’t need a father right now. I haven’t needed a father in quite a while.” It felt both wrong and good to say. “And it shouldn’t bother you that much.” She was a bit bitter, still, she had to admit. “You didn’t need a daughter for a hundred years.”

He finished his drink and flagged the bartender down for another one. “Then why are you here?”

“The same reason as last time.” She twitched her shoulders. “I give people — certain people — too many chances, at least according to Leo. So. I want to see if you can see me. Because…” She finished her drink. “Because you matter, dead gods curse you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/965269.html. You can comment here or there.

Cloverleaf: A Basic Write-up of the City

Jul31

Cloverleaf is built approx 50 years after the apocalypse, or about (plus or minus 7 years) 2061.

Notably, it was built almost entirely by magic, and as such the walls show no block marks, no seams.

Built about 14 miles (23 km) northeast of Helena, Montana – to take advantage of the prewar hydroelectric dam there – Cloverleaf takes the shape of three large (approx. 1 mile diameter) walled circles, touching at one edge.

Two of these circles hold farmland; the third holds the city of Cloverleaf, itself taking the shape of three overlapping walled circles with a very tall tower in the center (where the three circles overlap). Three gates pierce the outer wall, one for each inner circle, and from those gates to the Tower in each circle runs a wide “Main Street.”

Each Main street is lined with inns and restaurants close to the gates, stores and shops and light industry (home crafts) in the middle of the circles, and apartment buildings then factories (still rather light industrial – think fabric, grain mills, stuff I haven’t quite figured out yet) closest to the Tower.

On the wide sidewalks on Main Street, street vendors abound, often taking over much of the street as well.

Most traffic is foot or horse-and-carriage; cars are rare although jury-rigged car-to-carriage/wagon set-ups are not uncommon, esp. in traders coming from the outside.

Fae are common, welcome, and visible here. Guards are visible at the front gate — they check in all guests with a level of interest that ranges from “casual hello” to “three-hour interrogation.” They also patrol the city, and so, while there is crime, it is not rampant.

Off Main Street, streets branch to either side in a very regular pattern. There are quite a few parks and green spaces, punctuating neighborhoods of houses, many of which have a certain sameness to them and a very pointedly stone construction: stone buildings with slate roofs, many painted or tinted in brilliant colors. Yards are big by pre-War city standards, big enough that you could, if you want, subdivide each yard and put a second house on it. Houses are small by pre-war Suburban standards but large enough to comfortably house large families.

Every house has running water and electricity; phone is not a thing and neither is TV but there are radios and radio programs. The library is huge and full of a very random, completely un-curated selection of “anything we can find.” There is also an art gallery – similar collection style – and a history museum.

Much of what is available is industrial-era technology, and there are a lot of scrounged and repurposed items, especially metal things.

Fashion is driven by a few very visible people, and has a sort of Turkish-meets-bazaar-meets-medieval feel much of the time. Cotton, linen, and wool are produced in/near Cloverleaf; the dyes are still mostly natural, except those things Meentiked up magically.

The Clover is the unit of currency; a 100-C bill is approx one day’s salary for a basic job.

The political system is a representative democracy under an unelected benign dictator; each circle has (at the beginning) 2 representatives into a council. There is also an appointed Administrator who works much like a VP/Speaker of the House. Economy is lightly taxed capitalism with basic needs for all citizens, the guard system, and maintenance of the city paid for by tax revenue.

Citizens are provided free basic hotel-style housing; there are no homeless in Cloverleaf (unless they want to be. Still working on that). Very basic food/clothing needs are also provided.

Cloverleaf does not, as far as I know, have an army.

It does have a Leo.

edits: Within ~20 years of its founding, Cloverleaf has a weather-moderation system intact. It does not entirely eliminate weather in the city, but what it does is raises the wintertime temperature sufficiently that longer-season crops can be grown, and that the punitive northern winters aren’t nearly as punitive.

Also, a mile away from the city or so on the non-river side, there is a hundred-acre forest butting up against and climbing the side of the foothills. Its trees are arranged in a disturbingly regular grid pattern, but it otherwise gives off the feeling of a very natural forest – plenty of plant diversity, wildlife diversity, undergrowth and such.

As the years go on, the forest is expanded by about a acre a year, with trees that are speed-grown up to the ~40-year-age mark and then allowed to go wild. There are probably also more naturally planted trees, as Cloverleaf citizens are allowed to hunt and farm this woods, but encouraged to maintain it as a long-term resource.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/964849.html. You can comment here or there.

A Letter – Enion Dayton to Leofric

Jul30

Some 50 years after this and after a meeting between Enion, Cynara, and Leofric roleplayed between Inventrix & I.

Enion Dayton, the Loophole, is Cynara’s father, elsewhere known as Moosedad. He’s also Orlaith’s father, but that is currently unrelated.

(And yes, Orlaith’s daughter Ce’Rilla ends up married to Cynara’s son Viddie. At least she didn’t marry Yoshi, who, like Ce’Rilla, is the child of an Ambrus-get on his father’s side. ;-))

Dear Leofric Lightning-Blade,

Meeting you again – and this time with my daughter Cynara – was certainly an education. The rumors are that you two are close. From the looks of things, you are more capable of swaying her opinion than anyone.

I don’t see why you would try to keep me away from Cynara, unless you have some ulterior motive. If you don’t, I would like you to release me from the promise you forced me into. There is no reason why I shouldn’t be allowed into Cloverleaf. After all, my daughter created it.

You can send your reply to the Halfway Inn, outside of Salvation, in what was once Idaho. I’m sure your messenger can find the place.

Sincerely,
Enion Dayton
Loophole

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/964215.html. You can comment here or there.

Venison, a rather short story of Cloverleaf (@inspectrcaracal)

Jul24

(This one born out of a dream in a rather different way than the last dream-story)

They didn’t hunt venison in or around Cloverleaf.

Oh, sure, sometimes someone snagged a buck for their table, but they did so on the sly, and they didn’t hang trophies.

There wasn’t a law against it — there were very few laws in Cloverleaf against what you could hunt, sell, or eat in terms of food, and they mostly said “don’t hunt or eat sentient beings” and “don’t sell poison or other non-foods as food.” But early on in the city’s life, someone had shown their founder-and-leader a prize trophy buck.

The proud hunter — and everyone around him — had noted the way Cya Red Doomsday went pale and a little green. And then someone took a long look at Leofric, one day in Autumn when his Mask was down.

Word got around, slowly but surely. And nobody hunted venison around Cloverleaf anymore.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/961058.html. You can comment here or there.

A Change in Routine, a story (beginning) for @InspectrCaracal

Jul2

Luke was waiting for Cya at the fence around Lady Maureen’s.

She was, she’d admit, predictable, but never in the sixty years that she’d been doing this had Luke stopped her. Talked to her, yes. Chatted, asked questions, sometimes even second-guessed her choices.

Something was different in his posture this time. There was something about the set of his feet and the spread of his wings that told her he wasn’t going to wait patiently, and he wasn’t here to chat.

Cya shifted her own posture, making sure she could feel the weight of every weapon she carried. She couldn’t win a fight with Luca Hunting-Hawk, certainly not on his territory. But she could make sure she got away and survived long enough to call in Boom.

He stepped forward. “Cya.”

“Sir.” She noticed, then, that he had his body and wings angled oddly. Hiding something? “Nice weather this year.”

“I have something for you.”

That’s what I’m worried about. “Sir?” He never had been great at small talk.

“I’m not something!” The complaint came from behind Luke; he shifted, folded his wings, and hauled a young man in front of him.

He was blonde, with a look Cynara recognized well – the chin, the nose, although the eyes were different. He looked more like Howard than like Leo, but they often did. And he looked not very close to either of them — but that made sense, because it’d been generations, and not every child of Aelfgar could’ve managed to have children with a sibling.

Unlike any of her favorite Aelf-get, he had a crown of horns radiating out of his blonde curls like a sunburst. Like many of them, he was wearing a seemingly perpetual scowl.

“Cya Red Doomsday, this is Apollo the Sun-fire. Apollo, this is the woman I was telling you about.”

Cya raised her eyebrows. “I don’t really do unwilling, Luke.” She couldn’t miss the way the Hawk’s fingers were pressing into the boy’s forearm.

“You used to.”

“I used to be a child. We were all children, once.” This conversation was not going where she’d thought it would. “I grew up.”

“That’s the problem.” He pushed Apollo forward; the boy tried to resist, but Luke was a force of nature. “This one didn’t. He managed to sit through four years of Addergoole and I don’t think he learned a damn thing, not the important stuff. He’s going to get himself killed out there.”

“He’s right here.” Apollo shifted as far away from Luke as the grip on his arm would allow. “And I’ll be fine. Look, I know how to fight. I’ll be able to take on anything I run into out there.”

Cya sighed quietly. “I see what you’re saying. But the thrill of the fight got old a long time ago, Luke, and I have my hands full.”

Apollo leered at her. “I’ll give you a fight, Lady.”

“Red Doomsday.” Luke’s voice grew soft and formal. “I am fond of this idiot, and he was my student. I am asking you a favor, that perhaps you might succeed where I have failed. It is not a small favor, and I pay my debts.”

Cya let that hang in the air. She looked the boy, pout, spikes, blonde hair, up and then down again.

“You.” She nodded at the kid. “You Belong to me for the next year.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/957294.html. You can comment here or there.

Damage Control, a very-likely-non-canon story of Cynara (And Leo), c. 2009

Jul2

The call came while they were watching TV after dinner: Supernatural, which amused Cynara on one level and reminded her of school in a whole different way.

“Got it,” she answered. The kids were listening, so she tried to make her voice sound reassuring. “I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

On TV, the Brothers Winchester were fretting about how one couldn’t be a monster hunter and have a family. Cynara pulled her Kept aside. He was new, but he was already proving himself to be reliable and reasonably level-headed.

“Look, I’ve got to take care of a thing.” She saw Yoshi was watching her, but what could she do? The life sort of came up on you, regardless of if you had kids or not. “Everything should be okay here, but if anyone comes to the door, if anything strange happens — look, this is not an order, I am trusting you to use your judgement. But if it gets scary, lock yourself and the kids in the bedroom – their bedroom, the windows are protected – and stay out of sight, okay?”

He was fresh out of Addergoole; things being weird really didn’t faze him. He nodded. “Do what you have to do, boss.”

Maybe she was getting better at picking them. “Thanks, hon.” She gave him a kiss, hugged the kids and told them to behave, picked up Go Bag #3, and headed out.

Her first stop was a quick Find, looking for SWAT-worthy crime that hadn’t been noticed by the cops yet. She slipped on her gloves, and, standing across the road and behind a tree, made a hurried 9-1-1 call.

“I think they’re selling guns,” she whispered worriedly. “And they have some woman tied up…”

It was a bad scene, but nothing the cops couldn’t handle. And it would keep them busy.

She dropped the phone in a garbage can a few blocks away and made another call of a similar nature a few miles away. Once she’d gotten the third one down — it was amazing how much crime went on unnoticed in this city — she started making the other calls.

Her friend at 9-1-1 wasn’t supposed to give away any information, but he could confirm three phone calls of a man with “some sort of sword.” He could also deny that there had been any calls of anyone being attacked. Yet.

A quick web search told her the three most likely targets; the two that were most likely innocent got a call in from her second and third burner phones, a bomb threat and a weather warning. She dropped those phones in the river and a garbage can, respectively, and hopped back in the car.

The trick wasn’t finding him. Cynara could find him anywhere on the planet. The trick was minimizing the possible damage.

She made one more call, this one from her own call. “I’ve got it in hand.” The police were thoroughly distracted. The potential victims — the ones that were probably not actually Nedetakaei — were warned. Now all she had to do was either help Leo kill monsters or talk him down from killing innocent people.

She made another phone call, just in case, and kept driving.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/956987.html. You can comment here or there.

Raise ‘Em Up, a ficlet of Cynara/the apocalypse

Jun27

I was listening to Keith Urban’s Raise ‘Em Up on the way to work today, and… this is what I got. A moment of Cynara as the world burns.

Lift your tear-filled eyes
Up to the sky
Comin’ home you’ve been gone too long
Tonight we’re gonna
Raise em’ up

Boom Ranch, 2012

She hung up the phone and leaned back with a thump, glad there was no-one around to see her.

Tulsa was gone. Three more friends and 300 hundred thousand other people she’d failed to save.

She indulged herself in a moment of grief. Then she picked up the phone again.

“Catriona? This is Cynara — ah, Máire the Red. I’m glad I caught you. I’m glad you’re okay.” She knew she sounded cheerful, upbeat, casual. She had a lot of experience sounding stable when she was shaking inside. “Look, I don’t know what arrangements you’ve made, but some friends and I bought a ranch up in Wyoming, and there’s a nice piece of land next door where I’m putting together a tent city of sorts. Running water, electricity…” Her voice caught for a moment. “It’s as safe as we can make it, Cat, and that’s pretty safe.”

The rest was just details — location, call sign, what to pack. Cya resisted the urge to tell her “pack everything. Pack it all; this isn’t going to blow over.” Instead she made herself sound calm, practical. Bring what you’d take for a three-week camping event. Bring stuff you like to work on, bring your crafting supplies. Bring friends, anyone you really trust. Bring yourself, fast. As fast as you can pack.

She hung up the phone and indulged herself in a moment of hope. Then she picked up the phone and dialed again.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/954339.html. You can comment here or there.