Tag Archive | morepls

Goatback or Not

Sep12

After With the Goats

Liegya hadn’t meant to be a census-taker.

She’d meant to be a show-rider, a fancy-goat-dancer, a parade-trick-acrobat.

And she was good at it, good with the goats, good with the acrobats, good with the showmanship.

She still was. But parental push had been harder than she’d expected, she’d gotten very good marks in counting and accounting in school, and the position in the census bureau had come with a very nice salary and a house she only saw once a year.

And it came with her pick of goats, and being with the goats 9/10 of the time, even if she’d rather be counting other people’s goats than the people themselves.

When the villagers told her about “oh, Lazhman, probably out with the goats…” She had to go look. At the goats, of course.

And maybe at another soul who’d rather be with the four-legged than two.

Reiassan has a landing page here (and on LJ).

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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/809674.html. You can comment here or there.

Trek-Style Geek, a story for #3WW

Sep10

To Three-Word-Wednesday (Today’s words are Carcass, Geek, Slash).

“When you said you were really into Star Trek, this is not what I expected.” Anna stared at the refridgerator carcass which currently took up the large part of the shared living room. “Hector, what are you doing?”

“I didn’t say I was into Star Trek. I said I was a ‘Star-Trek-style Geek.'” Hector pulled another piece from the guts of the fridge. “This isn’t our fridge, don’t worry. I got it off craig’s list.”

“That aside – and good – what is it doing in the living room?” Anna picked her way closer through the debris.

“The dining room wasn’t big enough.” Hector didn’t even bother looking up at her; he was performing some sort of hack-and-slash excavation of what was left of the fridge’s internal organs. “There, that’s what I was looking for! And, besides, this is closer to the basement door.”

“Closer to the… Hector if you’ve done anything to the woodwork…”

“Relax, re…” Hector shook his head. “No, sorry. Anna, I promise I read the entire lease and haven’t done anything to hurt any part of this house. It’s just that the doorway there was exactly what I needed. And now that I have this piece…” He pulled himself to his feet with an arcane piece of circuitry. “There. That’s the last thing I needed. I’ll clean up the rest before dinner, but you have to see this, Anna, please?”

He was being so sweet. Were Star Trek nerds – Star-Trek-style geeks – supposed to be sweet? “O…kay?” Anna trailed Hector to the basement door – the precious door with its 19th-century woodwork.

Very carefully set in and around the door was some sort of – metal frame? – although to call it that did it a disservice. Anna thought she could recognize parts of the ‘fridge door and parts of a destroyed table a previous roommate had left. But what Hector had made – well, it was somehow beautiful. And, she noticed, very carefully set in the ancient wood frame, not attached to it.

“With this, I’ve got it.” Hector knelt down and screwed something to the right foot of his – um, archway? – still not quite looking at Anna. “It’s pretty, isn’t it? And I knew that this house had capital-H-History. So I figured out the last bits, and…” He flipped a switch Anna hadn’t seen before. Something whirred, something else zzapped, and in the space that should be leading down to the basement, a field of blue sparkles appeared. “See?” Now Hector looked at Anna, a wide smile crossing his face. “I told you I was a Trek-style geek.”

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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/807238.html. You can comment here or there.

A Heritage Earned

Sep8

This is to [personal profile] librarygeek‘s prompt and comes after The Heritage that Wasn’t

“Kitsune are believed to possess superior intelligence, long life, and magical powers.”

The dictionaries were not helpful. The online databases were not much more useful. The only place – other than the letters, which were clearly not enough help – where Jen could find any information at all was an old, old, pre-space database which someone had reconstructed as a school project.

Kitsune were benevolent, or mischievous, or even malicious. They were spirits, or they weren’t, they shifted form, or they simply appeared to sometimes be human. The information was all over there.

But that one line: “…believed to possess superior intelligence, long life, and magical powers.” That, Jen grabbed on to. She could not lengthen her life, not on her own. But she could learn magic.

Of course, “magic” did not exist. Of course, “superior intelligence” was a matter of genetics and pre-birth implants and careful training. Of course, kitsune were a myth.

But Jen had been living off-planet just long enough to have learned that Central Bureaucracy had its lies that it needed to tell, and that colonists, settlers, the Modified, and the true aliens all had their own truths, truths which had more to do with what Jen needed than the Central Bureaucracy Registered Facts ever would.

Superior intelligence came from a series of illicit implants, a longer series of sleep-learning in an Earth-banned procedure used everywhere, usually to bone up on a specific subject, and an ever longer series of sessions with a Modified shaman.

The same shaman taught Jen the preliminaries of magic, and set her on the path to a second teacher, and then to an alien, native of the planet on which she & her father were now residing, who taught Jen things Central Bureaucracy had never even thought to forbid.

Kitsune were myth, but on her twenty-third birthday, Jen found herself staring in the mirror at a fox-fairy.


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(the tip jar is a kitty for reasons)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/805169.html. You can comment here or there.

If You Want to Be A Samurai, a continuation of Doomsday for the Giraffe Call

Sep2

2 continuations were anonymously paid for; this is [personal profile] alexseanchai‘s requested continuation of the “Samurai” thread
Gonna be a Samurai
Gonna Learn how to be a Samurai and
Being a Samurai Takes Work.

First Year

“Dancing is a good idea, Austin, Sianna. It teaches balance, rhythm, and a sense of where your body is n relation to your partner.”

It turned out that almost everything was useful to learning how to be a samurai, at least to hear Miss Ascha tell it. But the weird thing was, everything was also useful to learning how to be a dancer, like Sianna – even swords-training – or a teacher, like Ethelwin wanted to be – even the meditation exercises – or even a bounty hunter, which is what Sweetbriar wanted to be this week.

Austin wasn’t sure if Miss Ascha was right; he wasn’t even sure if she was being honest or if she was just encouraging them to learn their math and dancing and meditation. But Professor Inazuma and Principal Doomsday agreed with Miss Ascha, yes. Dancing was useful for being a samurai. Addition and subtraction were useful for being a samurai. And science and history were very very useful.

They were his teachers, and Austin was going to have to listen to them if he wanted to be a samurai.

Second Year

“I don’t see why Sianna and Sweetbriar can’t run with you, Austin. You all need an escort, after all.”

“They’re going to run slow.“

“Well, isn’t that the point?” Miss Ascha could sound so reasonable when she was being so stubborn and difficult. “To see the city and understand it?”

“And to run.“

“Well, I’ll tell you what. You try it for two weeks, and if it leaves you miserable, then I will come up with another solution. But Ammon is willing to take the time to run with the three of you, and not many on the staff have that time or inclination.”

Austin had run all over his home town alone, before he came here. But he understood that he’d have to follow rules if he wanted to be a samurai. “Yes, Miss Ascha.”

Third Year

“And then the pre-collapse Americans… Yes, Austin?”

“Were they really shipping food all over the world?”

Professor Lily pulled another map down. This one had lines drawn all over it. “Many times they were shipping food to another country, like this, another continent,” she pointed at the map, “and then shipping a very similar food back from that continent. But most Americans in those days didn’t farm. Most people in affluent nations had never seen a farm, much less worked on one, as you have.”

“You’ve worked on a farm?” Sweetbriar had to know that already, didn’t she? But she turned around and stared at him.

“Yeah? Where’d you grow up?”

“Fishing boats.”

It explained a lot about his classmate, but Austin was more interested, right now, in what Professor Lily was talking about. “Didn’t anyone tell them how to do it more reasonably?”

“What sort of authority do you think would have done that, Austin? What sort does it now?”

“Well, whoever runs the town, right?”

From the look on Miss Lily’s face, Austin could tell that he was going to have to be a samurai farmer to make anything work out sensibly.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/799478.html. You can comment here or there.

Friday Flash: Intelligent Life

Aug29

Written to @ShingetsuMoon’s prompt (here but spoilers-ish) for Friday Flash

The machines started small on Earth, as they had on every planet so far.

They found the brightest, the cleverest, the most innovative – people and dolphins, elephants and corvids, apes and chimps. They picked them off, one by one or in groups.

A smart guy dies in Oxford and a grifter dies in New York City, who’s going to make the connection? A murder of ravens goes missing – who notices? An elephant at least makes a stink when she falls dead.

They noticed the dolphins first – but it was a group of researchers who noted it, and they weren’t far behind. Then the chimps, signing “help us, help us,” until the virus destroyed their brain.

The virus was the machines’ primary weapon – it ate brain cells, was tolerably target-able, and was not known to any surviving human researchers (since they’d stolen it from their first victim & obliterated his notes). But they used bullets, where that would not cause a stir; they used knives, where nobody would notice; they used electric shocks that stopped the hearts and knew they’d already killed off the smart morticians.

It took them twenty-five years, but these machines were patient. It had taken them a week on the planet called Belji(click)ton, sure, but on Martinach, it had taken over a century. They had time.

By late 2015, there was not a human left on the planet who could make change for a twenty without a calculator. The dolphins that were left thought they were fish. The monkeys – best not to talk about the monkeys, and the apes had been, as a precautionary measure, completely wiped out.

The machines surveyed their work and, contented, left. They were, after all, only ordered to destroy all intelligent life in the world.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/796034.html. You can comment here or there.

Please help me narrow down this tag to 5 or ten choices…

Aug29

http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/tag/morepls

I have “write a more-please” on my writing list, but when it comes up, I often find myself paralyzed by choice. (This is not helpful for writing & directly in counter to the purpose of the list!)

Thus, I’m asking you guys to help me narrow it down. Pick one to three things you’d most like to see continued and comment here.

(For completests: I created a morepls: fulfilled tag for things I’ve, well, written more to, but I didn’t backlog. If you see something that needs the tag to be changed to “fulfilled,” either change the tag yourself or leave a comment on the post that I should change it.)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/795732.html. You can comment here or there.

A Review of “On the Nature of the Sira & Its Flow” (Reiassan Demifiction)

Aug16

A study of the paper,
On the Nature of the Sira and Its flow
by Opaknaipbo-Oset, Scholar of Edally Academy

Paper written c. 850 R – study 1002 R.

Scholar Opaknaipbo-Oset was one of the first to study aether as a science, although he did so in the era when it was believed to be sira, an ancient Tabersi word meaning simply force.

In this paper, one of his most comprehensive, he details the flow of several different kinds of sira. In a move that is not uncommon to ancient scholars but unusual in his era, he color-codes three sorts, lithic as green, aqueous as blue, and igneous as red – much as Temples of the Three still color-code the services of the gods – the blue, Tienebrah, the red, Veignevar,the green, Reiassannon.

More than that, which is, after all, a simple trick used throughout history, Scholar Opaknaipbo-Oset tracks specific flows and patterns of the sira over the continent, and within specific “spells” and formulae.

Although there is a great deal of superstition in Scholar Opaknaipbo-Oset’s work, there is a great deal of value there as well. While he still thinks of the aether as a magical force of the gods, he manages to make some surprising discoveries about the flow of aether that still color research today.

Within the book is a series of maps. Scholar Opaknaipbo-Oset spent years, with a series of interns and apprentices, walking across the continent from end to end, mapping every line of wild aether he could detect, and finding patterns in the way that it moved and spread. Those maps are the basis for research still being done today.

More interesting, to those who study such things, are the diagrams of “spells.” If Scholar Opaknaipbo-Oset could diagram things that he thought were magic, what can those of us, who truly understand the nature of aether, do with those diagrams and Scholar Opaknaipbo-Oset’s work?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/779493.html. You can comment here or there.

Three-Word-Wednesday – The Easy Way & Hard

Aug13

To Three-Word-Wednesday (Today’s words are eradicate, mercenary, squeamish).

In the same world as last week’s story, The Job

There were always politicians.

Even now, even after the near-end of the world, even after the years of struggling to find a new way to survive, even now, when survival was not guaranteed for more than ten percent of the remaining population, there were politicians.

And they would stand in their safe, protected halls in their safe, cozy auditoriums, and they would pound their fist and shout. “Eradicate the Blank Plains!” they would demand. “Wipe out the Creatures! Make this world safe!”

Over and over again, the politicians would shout, because shouting was safe when you were within the walls.

There were always the mercenary ones.

If it seemed like there were more of them now, when every commodity was a rarity, when there were so many ways to gouge and so few could afford to be gouged, then it was probably a matter of perspective: there had always been those out for number one.

They would stand by the gates and offer “services,” in the marketplace and offer supplies, by the graves and console widows, and all at a low, low price.

If it could be bought, they’d sell it, because selling was easy when your audience was captive.

There were always the squeamish.

If they seemed far more delicate now, when there was no room for delicacy, when food was scarce and resources tight, if they seemed too soft to live, it was probably the comparison: most people had grown far more hard. But there were always those that could not toughen.

They would wail over their choices for meat, when even their herd animals were starving. They would wring their hands over an outlaw’s death, when outlaws threatened everyone.

They would flap their hands, because it was easy to be squeamish when someone else was getting dirty.

There were always those who wouldn’t do what was needful: the politicians, the mercenary, the squeamish.

And then there were the Rangers.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/774111.html. You can comment here or there.

Robot, a story-test of Clockwork Apoc

Aug9

“You’re a robot,” they’d told him, “an automaton. We made you, we created you. You are a steam-powered device. You have no feelings, you have no emotions. You do what you are told.”

They clothed him in metal until he forgot he had ever had flesh. They told him what he was, and told him nothing else. They fed him a sludge they informed him would lubricate his joints, and they taught him that to fail to obey meant sharp pain – that, in essence, his programming would not allow him to disobey.

“You are our robot,” they told him, and parade him before tin-hat dictators and penny-ante princes. “You are our robot.”

They taught him to be their robot, until one day, he taught them that humans, unlike the robot they’d made him, could die.

This came from a 7th Sanctum prompt: The theme of this story: metaphorical conflict. The main character: neurotic robot. The start of the story: service. The end of the story: education.
It sort of wrote itself from that.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/768634.html. You can comment here or there.