Tag Archive | morepls

Passing the Cat, a story of the Aunt Family for the Mini-Giraffe Call

Feb26

For rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt, after That Damn Cat (LJ) and Bless the Cat (LJ).

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Zenobia had held on to a hundred and ten, not because she really was enjoying life anymore, not even with every charm she could come up with, but simply to irritate her family.

This also meant that her niece was not young and, possibly, Zenobia considered, rather irritated as well, which hadn’t really been her point. Of the seventeen potentials, Elenora had always been her favorite niece for the position, and she’d made an effort, as much as she did with anyone, at least, to be friendly with the girl.

Girl. She chuckled into her tea. The girl in question was now in her mid-seventies, hale and hearty but prone to be a bit crotchety. And Zenobia was at the end of her ability or desire to hold on any longer, so she was having a long talk with her niece.

“This,” she said, about two hours and four cups of tea in, “is The Cat.” The Damn Cat allowed himself to be picked up in a way he never would have tolerated in her younger days. “You will find that he neither likes to tell you about himself nor to be talked about.”

“Yes, Aunt Zennie.” Elenora had taken on the family’s annoying habit of talking to her as if she was a little gone in the brain. Zenobia whacked the woman over the knuckles with her tarot deck as if she was a wayward child.

“If you’re going to be the next Aunt – and you are – you might as well know what you’re doing,” she scolded. “Pay attention and stop acting as if I’ve gone batty.”

“And what if you have?” she snapped back. “Talking to your cat? What’s next, talking to your tea? Having conversations with the lawn furniture?”

“Your Aunt Fabiana talked to her settee quite frequently in her mid-thirties. It told her all sorts of things her husband was up to behind her back. My point is, young lady, you might be a little more willing to believe things when you’re a member of this family and have been for seventy-three years.”

Elenora glared back at her. “I’m perfectly willing to believe normal things like demons and ghosts, the tarot and charms, but Aunt Zenobia, you’re talking about talking to your cat!”

“Yes I am,” she hissed, “and you would do well to listen.”

“You would,” The Damn Cat finally deigned to say. “I have helped your Aunts more than you can imagine.”

“My… Aunts. Plural.” Elenora studied The Cat thoughtfully. “You are, then, not an ordinary cat.”

“I should say not.” He groomed himself pointedly. “Not in any way. But I am still, miss, a cat. I like cream, and chicken. And the occasional slice of beef.”

“He is a very pampered cat,” Zenobia admitted, “but he has more than earned his keep and, Elenora, I think he will do the same for you.” She looked her niece in the eye. “There are many things I will leave you, because you will be the Aunt. The Cat, I am leaving to you because you are my heir.”

Next: Legacy Cat (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/284206.html. You can comment here or there.

Love and Hospitality

Feb24

For

[livejournal.com profile] rix_scaedu

‘s prompt.

Addergoole has a landing page here

This prompt pinged on a conversation I was having with [personal profile] inventrix about Nydia’s life after school and her son Corentin.

This take place near the end of Year Eight – Wren is living in the Village, as she graduated at the end of Year Seven.

Icon (in DW)is a clip of this lovely art of Wren.
Followed by Graduation Plans

"We could do this, you know."

Nydia looked over at Wren uncertainly. "This?" She looked down at the cake they were making. "You mean, the planners idea?"

"Exactly." She piped another rose onto the edge of the second tier. "Cy’DJ, cy’Maureen, we’d make a good team. We could go into business together in a small city, use the stipend Regine gives us as seed money, and raise our kids together." She tilted her head towards the penned-off playroom where her two and Nydia’s two were playing together. "They get along, and we get along…"

Nydia blushed furiously, a lovely indigo color over her unmasked complexion. "I don’t like girls, like that," she whispered.

Wren smiled reassuringly. "I don’t either, not really," she whispered back. "But that’s not what I meant. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with two friends living together, is there?"

"No, of course not," Nydia answered hurriedly. "It would be nice to have someone else to help with the babies." Dysmas had expressed some interest, when he was still in school, but since he’d graduated, all he’d done was send cash-filled cards for holidays and Cory’s birthdays. "But… boys? I mean, it might be nice, once in a while, to have a man around."

"I know," Wren nodded wistfully. "To have someone to take care of the heavy lifting, literal and figurative."

Nydia thought about that for a moment. "And figuratively," she echoed. Was that what she’d been missing? Wren had seemed rather happy, the year Elfred Kept her. And then with Kellagh the next year, but…

"I don’t want to be Kept again." She’d loved Dysmas. She still loved Dysmas. But she didn’t ever want to be under the collar again.

"Me, neither," Wren agreed thoughtfully. "But there’s nothing saying we have to. Look," she said, putting the last touches on the cake. "We can do this. We can offer love, and hospitality. Both as a business…"

Nydia was beginning to understand. "…and at home," she nodded slowly. A man didn’t have to be Keeping them to take care of, as Wren had said, the heavy lifting. "I like this plan."

 

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/282449.html. You can comment here or there.

Followed me Home

Feb21

For [personal profile] lilfluff‘s prompt

Evangaline modern-era. After Unexpected Guest

The boy jerked and scooted backwards into his pile of blankets when she said “inside.” “I didn’t do anything wrong!” he insisted, skittering backwards away from her.

Startled, Eva crouched down, making herself smaller while still blocking the exit. “I didn’t say you did. But it’s going to get really cold tonight, and the barn isn’t heated.”

He shifted a little further backwards. “You don’t look like a witch,” he answered, not sounding all that certain about it.

“What do witches look like?” she countered gently. She wasn’t surprised at the rumors – the house itself did half the work, with its hallowe’en aspect, the widow’s walk, the cupola, and the tower, the big wraparound porch and the dark red roses.

“Pointy hats?” he joked weakly. “I don’t know, long noses and warts or something?”

“Well,” she tapped her nose, “I don’t have all that big of a schnoz, and I promise you I have no warts at all. My name is Evangeline, but you can call me Eva.”

“Hi,” he muttered. “I’m, um, I’m Robert, but you can call me Robby.”

“Well, welcome to my barn, Robby.” Tone with teenagers was tricky; she could get away with fudging it a bit with her cousins and niece-and-nephews, but with strangers, botch it once and you were a clueless adult forever.

“Thanks.” He smirked back at her, like they were sharing a joke. “I can, uh, leave, if you don’t want me here.”

“I don’t want you freezing to death, in my barn or somewhere else.” She frowned at him, as he started to get jittery again. “Look, if you don’t want to come into the house, how about just the Florida room? It’s warmer than the barn, and I’ve got some soup on the stove if you’re hungry.”

He licked his lips uncertainly. “I’ve eaten?” he offered. “But… the Florida room thing isn’t part of the house?”

“It’s a porch that’s been enclosed,” she assured him. Later, maybe, she could find out what superstition was going around about the house. “There’s an old divan out there and some blankets, and I can haul the space heater out there.”

He eyed her cautiously. “You’re not asking why I’m hiding in your barn.”

“Nope. And I won’t, either.” There were advantages to being the neighborhood witch; whoever he was hiding from would think twice about coming after her. “I figure you’ll tell me if you want to.”

She stood up. “If you want to come inside, come on in now. I’m going to lock up in a few minutes, and then you’ll be stuck with the raccoons for company.”

He still seemed torn, but a convenient wind rattled the barn just then, and he nodded. “The porch,” he insisted, “right? Not in your house.”

“The porch,” she agreed. “This way.”

The Florida room had, at one point, been a back porch, but a prior Aunt or Aunts had glassed it in and had the floor insulated and redone; it was, as she’d said, chilly, but far better than the barn. She left him with the space heater, a pile of blankets, and a charmed night light.

“If you’re still here in the morning,” she warned him, “I’m going to offer you breakfast. Good night, Robby.”

He looked as if he wasn’t sure if that was a threat, but, gulping, nodded. “Thanks, Eva. Good night.”

She headed into her house, wondering if she’d get a chance to learn his story.

Next: In the Cards (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/279387.html. You can comment here or there.

Bless the Cat, a continuation of the Aunt Family for the Mini-call

Feb21

For rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt, after That Damn Cat (LJ).

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

“You should hear what they’re saying today,” the Damn Cat told Zenobia, as she set out his evening chicken.

“Indeed?” The cat, she’d discovered, loved to gossip, was completely incorrigible and occasionally very interesting. “More to do with Maude’s beau-they-don’t-approve of?” Zenobia had had a couple of those herself, back in the day. One of them still wrote her monthly; she wondered, sometimes, what his wife thought about that.

“Well, he’s quite the story, isn’t he? Every time someone talks about him, another salacious detail comes out. Tasty.” The cat licked his chops. “But no, that’s not what you ought to be worried about right now.”

That stopped her in her tracks. “Worried?” She put another piece of meat on the cat’s saucer. “That’s not a word you normally use. Tell me, what should I be worried about?”

“Gottleib and Edith plotting to kill you and put in Ida in your stead.”

“Ida?” The idea was beyond horrifying; it was stupidly offensive. “The pretty little flutterbrain wouldn’t know a charm if it bit her up her skirt, where, I might add, any number of things have already bitten her.”

“That’s the idea.” The cat pointedly groomed itself. “She’s sweet, passive, and biddable, things that they believe – rightly, of course – that you are not.”

“She’s likely to end up pregnant any moment now, too; she’s indiscreet enough.” Zenobia was still steaming over her uncle and cousin’s choice of replacement; she realized, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the rest of the cat’s news would have to sink in soon enough.

“Well, then. It shouldn’t be all that hard to eliminate her as a rival, should it?” The Damn Cat looked downright smug. “I’ve always thought your family’s insistence on spinster Aunts was foolish, but since it is unlikely to change any time soon…”

Zenobia sat down inelegantly, the kitchen stool wobbling under her. “They really mean to do away with me?”

“They seem to.” He filled his mouth with meat and kept talking. “You’re too powerful for their tastes, too intractable.”

“I’m the Aunt,” she snapped. “I’m supposed to be the power of the family and the guidestone. I’m not supposed to be passive and biddable. If the family wanted passive and biddable, they would have given the power to an Uncle!“

The cat nodded. “So what are you going to do about it? You don’t strike me as the sort to deal with such things passively.”

“Of course I’m not. But if I confront Gottleib and Edith directly, I reveal that I know what they’re up to. I might need that again.”

“Especially if you’re going to continue to make waves. You might need my surveillance again.”

“Indeed. Good kitty,” she added idly, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears. Over his loud purring, she mused, “getting her pregnant seems the thing to do. I’m going to have to pay a visit to Cousin Lewis.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/278563.html. You can comment here or there.

Briars and Vinegar: Bitter and Sharp, a story of fae-apoc post apoc for the Giraffe Call

Feb19

For Rix_scaedu‘s prompt.

Part 4 of 4.

Fae Apoc has a landing page here.

Part 1: Briars and Vinegar (LJ)
Part 2: Briars and Vinegar: Blood on the Snow (LJ)
Briars and Vinegar: For 100 Years (LJ)

The girl’s braid was nearly twice as long as she was tall, and it was loose around the top. She sighed at it, and tied it in a knot to take up some of the slack.

“Be welcome in my home,” she murmured formally. Her rose hedge parted before her, and she stepped out to greet them, offering Jeri her hand. “I’m Vin.”

“Vin?” Jeri shook the girl’s hand.

“Vinegar. My sister, my twin, she was Wine.” She makes a tired, irritated gesture. “She died a long time ago. She got all the power, you see.”

“I…” Jeri shook her head, looking at her friends. Clarence shrugged; he didn’t get it either.

“There should be food in the kitchen, and wood in the woodshed.” Vin brushed past them. “I generally wake up for a little while every summer and get the place in shape, then sleep through the winter. I can live on almost nothing that way. It’s almost a superpower.”

Hearing the tired bitterness in her voice, Clarence began to understand her name. “How long have you been here?”

“I lost count a long time ago.” As she said that, she paused by an interior wall, her hand on a series of hashmarks. “For a while, I’d wait until the longest day of the year passed, and make another mark.”

When her hand moved, Clarence counted the marks. Ten, twenty… “You’ve been here longer than eighty years?”

“How long ago was the War?” she asked vaguely. “Do you still remember the war?”

“Remember?” Jeri choked. Darrel had been reduced to staring in awe. “It’s been over eighty years since you came here!”

“No, no, not you personally. I mean, do people still talk about it?”

“Oh!” Jeri nodded, q quick, nervous, rapid movement. “Sort of, I mean. Ther was a war. Bad stuff happened. There were faeries and gods, but they all left or died.”

“Or went into hiding,” Vinegar agreed. “Back then, people would kill fae on sight, because the people who started the war had been fae.” She pulled piles of clothing from a cupboard. “If you stand there in wet clothes, you won’t warm up. Change into something dry, and I’ll start the fire.”

“So you went into hiding? Couldn’t you just… pretend not to be fae? You don’t look like a faerie,” Darrel grumbled.

“I don’t age. I don’t change. And, back then, people didn’t move towns all that much.” She set wood in the fire and started it, Clarence noticed, like a normal person, with flint and steel. “It was very obvious what I was. And nobody cared, that I couldn’t have done those things. That all I could do, the whole of my magic, was to make roses grow. So I came here, and I made the roses grow.”

“Briars and Vinegar,” Darrel muttered. “Sharp and bitter, and so much longer lasting than flowers and wine.”

If Clarence hadn’t known better, he’d have said that his friend was in love. And from the look on the girl’s face, she was, for the first time in a very long time, contemplating something sweet.

“I do store well,” she allowed, her lips finally curling into a smile.

Next: Briars & Vinegar: Eating the Roses (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/276622.html. You can comment here or there.

Tasting

Feb18

For F. Anon’s Prompt.

Note: I have never tasted a $5000 bottle of wine. I have, however, tasted a wide range of $5-$50 bottles.

She’d spent years getting to know suppliers, tasting their wares, sampling them on upcycles and down, knowing their accounting departments and the local gossip about their spouses. She’d worked in every food-industry job she could negotiate her way into over the past decade, getting to know every nuance of the world of cuisine, and, in the evenings, taken culinary classes. She’d hired the best cooks she could find, enlisted the best, most reliable suppliers, and worked with the most consistent PR firm in the state.

Now it was time for Liaza to pick the wines for her restaurant.

The sommelier poured her glass after glass. Riesling. Chardonnay. Niagara. Gewurtztraminer. Merlot. Pinot noir. Cabernet Sauvignon.Shiraz. She sniffed, sipped, swirled, spat.

The red wines were easy. She settled on four within a tasting of the first eight, and had reached a final six by the time she’d sipped sixteen. The whites…

“Boring. Sweet, but bland. Lemonade without the sugar. Not enough flavor. What, is everyone just pissing in a bucket?” Liaza was not normally crude, but she was growing frustrated, more so, because the sommelier just kept smiling.

Finally, he brought out five bottles. “These three,” he told her, “will suffice for most of your audiences. These two,” he set the others aside, “these are for the true connoisseurs.”

He poured one, then the other of the “will suffice,” and she had to agree. They were rich, flavorful wines, with strong notes that were not overwhelming. “And the others?” she asked, already much happier.

“Ah-ha. This one, first. This is a $5500 bottle of wine, from a tiny valley in France where they have been producing this single kind of wine for as long as France has history. It is a rich, storied wine, with a flavor to match.” He poured, she sniffed, smelling the fruity notes and a faint hint of spice. She sipped, tasting a light sweetness over an aged flavor that slid down the throat like ambrosia. This wine, she did not spit.

“Very… Very nice,” she agreed. “And the last?”

“Taste first.” He passed her a couple bland crackers, then a glass of water, and then he poured.

She sniffed, and her nose was overwhelmed. “Pear and… is that mint? How interesting! And something like the breeze over the water.”

“This,” the sommelier told her smugly, “is the most interesting wine in the world.”

“I…” She sipped, carefully, swishing the wine around in her mouth. Notes of pear, of course, and, yes, that faint mintieness and just the faintest sweetness. “This is…”

“…from a vineyard so small, most people don’t even know they exist. On the banks of a tiny New York State Lake. Yes. Fifteen dollars a bottle, although, once they are known…”

“We need a contract.” She sipped again. “And a dish that can stand up to this wine.”

The sommelier smirked. He’d told his brother this was the way to get their name out there. And it had only taken fifteen tries.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/273835.html. You can comment here or there.

That Damn Cat, a story of the Aunt Family for the Mini-call

Feb15

For rix_scaedu‘s commissioned prompt.

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ


Zenobia didn’t give the cat a name, but she did leave a bowl of cream out for him every morning, and a bit of her dinner meat every evening.

Her Aunt Beulah had left her the cat, along with the property and the title, when she vanished into the mist one late-November evening. He was, at that point, already an elderly cat, if family memory held, but, in this case, family memory, generally a very reliable thing, seemed to falter.

That was to say, that while family memory seemed to agree that the cat had been around for quite a while, it seemed to falter horribly, no matter which particular family member one was talking to, if pressed on the details. When had Beulah gotten the cat? Well, she’d gotten it from her Aunt Mary.

That cats did not live that long did not seem to faze anyone.

What was more, in looking at Beulah’s writings, she had, indeed, inherited a cat – several, as a matter of fact, none of them a Siamese tom. And while she had bemoaned the cats all over the place for the first several months, she had then started talking about Aristarchus, as she called her cat, as if she had had him all along.

Digging into Mary’s writings was trickier, the handwriting crabbed, the language a bit archaic and speckled with German and French for no apparent reason, but she, too, seemed to have had cats, too many cats, so many that Beulah’s notes on taking over the house and the title involved weeks of cleaning up after cats. Mary didn’t mention any specific cat by name, but there were occasionally mentions of That Damn Cat, which could, given the cat’s personality, be considered a name.

What Zenobia could determine from family journals, family gossip, and confused mutters was that Mary had been one of the batty aunts, one of the ones that was considered dangerous. Since Zenobia herself was considered dangerous, she took that with a grain of salt.

When she found That Damn Cat urinating on Mary’s journal, however, she took it as a suggestion perhaps she should stop researching his past. She gave him his cream and his dinner, and he kept the mice down and, from time to time, he gave her advice on her more complicated goings-on.

And, she soon discovered, he liked to spy, not only on her, which was irritating, but on the entire family, which was very illuminating. It seemed he had a way to get into just about anywhere, and, as a cat, he could observe on just about anything without cause for comment. Soon he was bringing Zenobia reports on the rest of her family.

Much of it was benign things, gossip and backstabbing and affairs, petty stuff that any family had. Some of it was strange but not deadly, tricks being performed on the sly, a card reading, an enchantment, stuff that was supposed to be the purview of the Aunt of the year.

And one of the tales the cat brought her saved her life.

Next: Bless the Cat (LJ)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/268903.html. You can comment here or there.

Up from the Cracks, a story of The Cracks for the Giraffe Call

Feb15

For [personal profile] the_vulture‘s commissioned prompt.

In the same world as:
Through the Cracks (LJ)
“China is Here” (LJ)
The Dark of the City (Lj)

Content warning: there’s some atypical thinking and suggestions of prior abuse going on.

I woke like a dream from the dark, slipping out of the cracks in the sidewalk, slipping out of the holes in the world. I stepped out into the daylight world when she failed to pay attention, she who had been so dismissive of myths and dreams.

(Of course I know – well, think – assume, at least – where she went. That doesn’t mean I have to tell you, now does it? The wonderful thing about what I am. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to!

(Err, except the geasa, but don’t pay any mind to that. You don’t need to know about those!)

THE POINT BEING, I stepped out, and she vanished. *Poof* And, because this is what being a Changeling is, being a crack-dweller, a troll (so maligned!) a Fair Folk (Much better)… I took over where she’d left off. Because that is what you do, when you are the things that live between the cracks in the world.

Cue ominous music.

No, really, I’m a sweetie. I’m not going to eat your face or anything. I just wanted to be out in the world, not cramped in a nether dimension. I just wanted my own chance to shine.

(If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Goat-free. Shit, was that out loud).

You keep side-tracking me. Keep that up and I’m going to eat your face, and then what will you listen with, mister?

Sweet and innocent. Sweet as sugar and pure as the driven snow, that’s me. Or, at least, that was Her.

They teach you, when you’re waiting for an Other to step through a crack, what you’re supposed to do and not do. What you’re supposed to say and not say. The lines to walk.

They teach you how to be a good little Changeling, because their goal is to get as many out as possible. If you make a fuss, you might bring the attention down of Those Who Watch, and then bam, they come patching the cracks and it’s forever before we can get anyone else out again. And we don’t want that, do we, miss wants-to-play? No we don’t, Papa. We’re not our mother. We’ll be good.

You get really good at saying the right lines, down there.

And, well, I wanted to stay out, and I knew what Those Who Watch do when they catch a changeling before they’re all the way anchored in, so I listened to what I was taught. I didn’t just slip into her skin, I became her. Every twitch, every glitch, every issue, every freaking volume (and she had a few, let me tell you).

And then, slowly, I… improved her. I smoothed out a rough edge here. I sanded down a splotchy spot there. Her complexion got better, she stopped twitching randomly. She began to speak in sentences of more than three words. She got a raise.

Her life had been constrained by rules she didn’t even understand, but what am I but the breaker of rules? Slowly, I touched up the edges of her life, fixed her hair, introduced us to a nice guy. Slowly, I sanded off the bits that made her uniquely Susan, and made her, instead, uniquely me.

And everything was going beautifully! The way we do things now isn’t the way they used to do it, shoving yourself into the body and psyche of a human, sharing living space, as it was. That has all sorts of negative side effects, the worst of which the riders going crazy, getting kicked out, or both at once. A rider without a body ends up shoving themselves into the nearest possible vessel – you end up with a lot of “charmed” items that way that were actually accidentally possessed, the poor spirit stuck until that item (stone statues are the worst) “died;” disintegrating completely.

And a rider who’s crazy brings Those Who Watch down on all of us, and, perhaps harsher, makes the world look. And there are things we don’t want the world looking at, any more than Those Who Watch do.

And there you got me sidetracked again. Stop that!

The way we do things now, that’s what I was talking about. As opposed to the old way, that nobody liked, including the hosts.

Now, I’m not really sure the hosts like it – they don’t act too nice when they’re pulled Under, but the cracks can warp you a bit – but it works a lot better for the riders. For me, in specific. The host, all of her, goes Under, and the Changeling, with a copy of her body and her memories, pops out Over.

This is important! This is important in my case, because, while I started out with a copy of Susan’s memory and body, as far as I knew, I didn’t start out with any actual Susan. Nada. Nyett. She was Below, doing whatever the stolen ones do. Crying, probably, and rocking back and forth. She seemed really good at crying and rocking back and forth.

The real problem was, I was getting good at it too. Not on purpose! I was doing my damndest to step out of those obnoxious patterns, trying to make my dull, dull host into someone entertaining to be. And I’d been working all those rough edges off.

But they kept coming back! I’d spend weeks slowly getting her – me – to used longer sentences, and then one of those borrowed memories would pop up, and there I was hiding in the closet, terrified the boojum was going to get me.

Something had to be done. And quick, because I couldn’t afford to go crazy. If I went crazy, well, we covered that. Those Who Watch, yadda, yadda, and then the people back Below would rip me to shreds, and I would never get out again.

Ever heard of a Changeling in therapy? The thought was laughable. “So, doc, I have these memories, but they’re not really mine, even though I’m living the life of the person whose memories they are.” I’d get “help,” all right, but not for the problem I actually had.

So I tried to muscle on through. It was just some memories, right? Just some memories, and some twitches, and a few superstitions that seemed to make everything worse if I ignored them. It was just some memories, a couple twitches, some superstitions, and a growing fear of going outside after dark.

Just the memories, the twitches, the superstitions, the fear of the dark, and the urge to run away from any man with a handlebar mustache.

Just memories, twitches, superstitions, fears, urges to run, and a habit of counting everything I ate.

Just memories, twitches, superstitions, fears, urges, habits, and a rising desire to set places on fire that I could barely recognize, places that spurred a fragment of a memory that, it seemed, Susan had repressed very deeply, places that made my skin crawl.

When I came to myself standing in front of a bar muttering the words to a fire spell, I decided that muscling through wasn’t going to work anymore. This body was clearly defective. I had to go back through the cracks. I had to make Susan take her body back.

Getting through the crack in that direction isn’t hard. It’s not even a challenge if you came from there, which I did, barely, remember I had.

Finding my other self was a bit trickier, but magic works so much more nicely down there. I had to hurry, was the problem. Those Who Watch notice holes in the world, like there being no Susan at all out there. We didn’t want them, clearly, to notice that.

And when I found her – cleaned up, pretty, in a field with unicorns, dangling her feet in the brook – do you know what she said? Of course you do, don’t you? She said no.

“Take it back,” I told her. “Go back to your life, I don’t want it anymore.”

“No.” She smiled like it was the nicest thing in the world she’d just said, instead of the end of mine. “No, I don’t want to.”

“You have to. You have to go back, please.” I shook her a little, I think. Neither of us liked the contact, so I stopped. “The voices, the nightmares… how did you manage not to burn the city down? You have to take it all back!”

“No,” she said again, and, still smiling, “you’d better leave. But when you go back – don’t worry so much.” She patted my shoulder. “You just have to remember to follow the rules, and everything comes out better.”

So I went back, back to her life, and the memories, and the twitches, and the interminable rules. And I found you, because I hear you’re good at this sort of thing.

I need to burn down a few buildings. And I need it untraceable.

Maybe then, the memories will let me live.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/268548.html. You can comment here or there.

These Walls Can Talk, a story of Fae Apoc/Addergoole for the Giraffe Call

Feb14

This story contains magic and references to Addergoole but no slavery, sex, or violence.

For rix_scaedu‘s prompt

Faerie Apocalypse has a landing page here here (and on LJ).

This takes place during the apoc, ~2012-2013

Out There, the bombs were falling, and the people were screaming and fleeing.

Bethesda stretched, reaching for a set of eyes near the road. She had a feeling, as she did sometimes, that someone was coming who she should let in.

Not every refugee made it past Bethesda’s threshold, of course, or she would be over-flowing with people and nowhere to put them, nothing to feed them. She had to pick and choose, which was frustrating and sometimes enraging – both to her, and to those she left behind – but necessary. This war made for a lot of hard choices.

There, in the crowd, her senses told her there were four – a mother, a child, a young man, and a terrified girl in her twenties. Bethseda whispered the Words, and opened up a door for them. Would they take her hospitality? Not everyone did. Not everyone appreciated it.

When she had first Changed, she had been miserable. She’d been in pain for weeks, of course, hands and legs, bones and skin shifting, stretching, until she was a tiny cottage, not remotely human anymore, except in mind, except in spirit. She’d finished her four years at school – near school, at least – and learned everything she could in that time.

One of the things she learned is that she was growing, and would continue to grow, possibly forever. Another thing she learned was that she had a great-grandmother who was now a castle, which gave her hope.

She learned that she could use Words. That she could still feel. And that, while she no longer had a body in the conventional sense, she still had ways of interacting with other people, even intimately. After all, her great-grandmother the castle had made children.

And she learned, slowly and with a great deal of effort, that, like Baba Yaga’s cottage (but with better legs), she was mobile. Slowly, very slowly (her legs were shorter), Bethesda could move. And, as she grew, she learned how to move her property with her, which had to be, she admitted, the strangest thing, a house walking through the city with a yard like a skirt hanging around her, covering her underpinnings.

Once she had these refugees, those who would stay, she might move again. This city didn’t seem like a good place to stay much longer. She opened her gate, and welcomed them into herself.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/268390.html. You can comment here or there.

In the Jam, a story of Fae Apoc for the Giraffe Call

Feb13

This story is safe of all faeries and/or slavery.

For [personal profile] inventrix‘s prompt. Faerie Apocalypse has a landing page here here (and on LJ).

This takes place during the apoc, ~2012-2013

They called it the Great Traffic Jam, although it was much more Jam than Traffic.

When the people had started fleeing the city en masse, inevitably, someone had realized that they could move faster walking than in their car. One person and another abandoned their cars, until those who had stuck it out driving had to walk, too, because they were, in effect, parked in.

This wasn’t the only city this had happened in. In some others, they had brought out the earth-movers and the bulldozers to clear the highways, turning their medians into junkyards. But this city had been one of the first and worst hit, and there was nobody left to clear the roads, and no reason to do so. So the cars remained.

Eventually, as it became clear that the gods and monsters were not coming this far out, people, some people, stopped walking and simply colonized the cars, those the furthest from the city, on a stretch of highway where there was, for several miles in every direction, very little except the cars and a couple farms.

Kota had been born in the back of an SUV, a giant gas-guzzler that had given up the ghost early on, run out of gas on the side of the road. A bank of four of them made up their colony’s hospital; her sisters Exie and Essie had been born there too.

She learned to read from a shipment of books overturned on the side of the road; she and her sisters grew up in the back of an RV. Their colony’s dearest possession was a grocery semi of canned goods.

And now that Kota and Exie were old enough, they were going exploring. They had heard, from travelers, that there was a tanker truck stuck in the Jam. If there was still gas, they thought, maybe they could move the Jam.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/267282.html. You can comment here or there.