Tag Archive | prompt: dailyprompt

Pre-story: Tairikie a year earlier

Oct29

From [community profile] dailyprompt, 2013-10-25: “getting dressed for a special occasion”

This is in the setting of my upcoming nano project, in timeline, the cold-season before school begins.

“Tair-tair, hurry up.”

It wasn’t so much that Tairiekie’s father was rushing her as that he’d called three times in the last half an hour, and that he kept using her baby-name. She was at least a little past being called that.

“Almost ready, father.” She tugged the sleeves of her under-shift straight.

It was new; the whole outfit was new. The festival of Tienaabaa1 was about new creations. It was also many layers thick, because the festival of Teinaabaa took place on the shortest days of the year.

“Do you think that my project will win an award?” It was her last year competing in the children’s level. She had won an award every year before, but she’d only taken first place twice.

“I am sure you will do us proud. Are you dressed yet, Tair-tair?”

“Almost.” She had done the embroidery herself; she tugged her overvest to fit better over what was supposed to be a chest and wasn’t, quite, yet. The loose vest looked more like a child’s clothing than a grown woman’s, but all the decoration made it look loved and proper, at least.

Four layers of blue swished back at her in the silvered mirror in her parents’ room. Blue, for Tienaabaa. Blue for winter. Blue for the engineers, her mother, her father… and likely her as well.

She clattered down the stairs in her dyed-blue boots. “I’m ready.” Everyone at the festival would know she was loved and cherished. Everyone was going to know how brilliant her festival demonstration was, too.

Her father kissed the top of her head. “You will make your parents proud, Tairiekie.”

  1. . Tienaabaa (TEEN-ah-bah) is the deity of the wind and the water, the mind and creation. Formerly Tienebrah, (Tee-EN-eh-brah), the word was Calenyenized in the mid 1200’s.

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Leaving Town

Aug31

For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn”
From dailyprompt: “highway” and “that awkward moment when…”

Set in Faerie Apocalypse.  You can find Nila also in Hey you Kids get off my lawn!

*~*

The city lay in ruins. Nila didn’t know when, if ever, Michael was coming home. Power had gone out a week ago, and the looters had come through the neighborhood like locusts. She’d held them off when she could, hid with the children when she knew she couldn’t, but it was time to leave.

She settled Susan in her Kevlar sling and from there into her car seat, and made sure Allan’s backpack was balanced and light enough, taking the far heavier pack for herself. She checked all of her weapons and both of Allan’s, stared for a while at the note to Michael, and led her children out of their home.

The highways were buckled and bent, twisted like a ribbon in ways that would be unbelievable, if you didn’t know that god-monsters walked the earth now. Nila took the back roads near there, keeping an eye on the gas gauge. If she’d planned this right – yes. The car ran out of gas just as they reached the edge of the worst devastation, past the mobs and the crazy people, past the banks of less fuel-efficient cars and the toll-takers.

She settled Susan on her back and held Allan’s hand with her left, and sited a path south. South, she’d heard, the devastation was less complete. South, the winter would be warmer and more survivable.

She focused on the path in front of her, on her children, and tried to ignore the ruins around them that had been home.

~

They had been walking now for three days. They had to take it slow; Allan was sturdy for his age, but he still tired easily, and Nila couldn’t carry him, not and Susan, too. The kids were taking it like champs, but she could tell, as the sun began to inch downwards, that it was time to stop.

She was focused on the children, ignoring her training in a way that would have horrified her former Mentor, ignoring the surroundings, when they rounded a bend in the long country road and found it blocked.

There was a long awkward moment when she stared at the man-creature and he stared back at them. “Creature” because he was clearly not entirely human, “man,” because the part of him that was looked like a boy in his mid-twenties. “Awkward…” because the thing was clearly trying to decide if they were a threat. Them, a twenty-two year old girl and her two young children. She took a long look over him, cataloguing his injuries, noting that he wasn’t Masking the things that marked him as inhuman – or perhaps no longer had the energy to?

His doglike ears canted in her direction, and she dropped her own Mask, letting him see the flower-like patterns that swirled across her skin, and the blue “petals” of her ears. “We just want to pass,” she told him carefully.

He stepped out of the way awkwardly. “I won’t stop you.” From the way he was swaying, he couldn’t if he wanted to.

Nila sighed, and set her pack down. “Swear you mean me and mine no harm.”

The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ)
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ)
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ)
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ)
15) prompt: ascension (LJ)
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ)
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ)
18) prompt: a step too far (LJ
19) write a story in which something goes BOOM. )LJ)
20) Write the end of the story ‘The Purple Bag. (LJ)
21) Roll a d20 twice. Combine the themes of the two previous stories for those numbers. (LJ)
22) Prompt: White Knight (LJ)
23) write a scene that takes place in a place that is war-torn

DailyPrompt: Promising Shangri-La

Jul28

From [community profile] dailyprompt: ‘I will return to Shangri-La,’ with a side order of “elation and heartbreak.”

Of the same world as these two strange tales:
Moving In
Dancing for Joy

“I will return to Shangri-La.”

It is said that the last settler to leave the ruined alien city declared that as he left, staring back in defiance at the desolation that had destroyed so many of them. It became a war cry of sorts, Talbot’s Promise. Tal’s Cry. “I will return.” We will survive; we will rebuild.

They found places on the blasted planet that were, at the very least, less inhospitable, places where the ground itself did not try to destroy them, cities that had been abandoned for longer, or with less gruesome reminders, at least, than those in the city they had named Shangri-La. Nowhere did they find a place free of the hand of the former residents, but there were places more bearable.

A generation built, planted, harvested, married and bore and buried, saying to each other, with every elation and every heartbreak, that they would return to Shangri-La. They would get theirs back on the city that had so very nearly destroyed them. This place would do, for now. But they would return. They spoke of Talbot’s Promise – and plotted.

Their children made the alien settlement their own, reshaping the buildings to fit their bodies, working the earth until it gave up fruit that was both edible and palatable. They married and celebrated, mourned and moved on, and their numbers grew.

They explored, just a little out at first, and then further, learning as they did that, not only were they not the first sentient species on this planet, it was unlikely they were even the tenth or twentieth. Those who had studied the science their parents could remember postulated that the planet was the interstellar version of an island on a trade route (concepts learned from their parents as well, as this place had neither). Those who were merely poets suggested that it was a bear trap (the planet did, however, have something that could pass muster as a bear). Astronomy flourished, and the engineering that would be needed to build a return ship, should they ever manage the infrastructure.

They spoke of Talbot’s Promise, the children born here. They would return to Shangri-La. They would defeat the city that had killed nine-tenths of their number. They would win, and then they would leave this place. They spoke of Talbot’s Cry – and they built their own city taller.

Their children, in turn, grew up thinking of the spaceways as a fairy tale, and Shangri-La a long-forgotten place. They expanded, and grew, married and danced and gave birth, and stretched the land out further, learning more and more about those who had been here before. Xeno-archeology flourished, and botany, and crisis architecture, for the planet still had its share of ways to fight them.

They looked to the north, sometimes, where they had been told their grandparents came from, and thought of Talbot’s Cry as a sort of metaphor. “I will return to Shangri-La,” their poets said, told the story of mankind’s fall from grace, and their determination to succeed. They spoke of Talbot’s Myth, and they lived.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/90831.html. You can comment here or there.

In the Storm

Jul6

From dailyprompt: “waking to a storm.”

Facets of Dusk (LJ Link), Part one of a small series or long short story.

Cole woke to a storm, thunder booming close by, lightening flashing through the blinds. He checked his cues before he moved: the sheathed antler-handle knife hanging off the bed, the tall blue vase sitting on the nightstand, the sheets, also blue, and the painting on the ceiling. His bed, his home, his world. No other permutation or variation he’d encountered had this specific set of things.

Home. Right. And alone in the bed, because tomorrow they were out again, and he needed to not wake up with his arm draped over a teammate somewhere unless he’d meant to do it. But it was just barely ten in the evening, according to his clock, (like the knife and the vase, a souvenir from another world, its workings more reliable than a battery when he spent more time gone than home). He had twelve hours until he had to report.

He contemplated the slim phone with its thick list of numbers, the rotary phone next to it, the drawer in his nightstand where he kept a stash of condoms and other necessities. Not tonight. Not and risk leaving someone sleeping in his apartment, or risk sneaking out like a thief in the morning. Anyone he could call deserved breakfast, and probably lunch and dinner, too.

Bar it was, then. He knew a few around here, and they knew him, but with the storm attacking the night sky, there was only one that seemed appropriate. He showered off the grit and dust of downtime, dressed, and headed through the rain to Any Port in a Storm.

The bar was quiet tonight – a Wednesday – with only a few regulars around, the rain keeping out all but the diehards. No college pickups here, no travelers relaxing after their business, although the stranger in the corner booth might be looking for a friend. Cole plopped down at the bar, and waited for Susie to bring him the usual.

“Been a while,” she murmured. “There were some folks in looking for you last week.”

“Knee-breakers or tax-takers?” And how the hell had they found his favorite hideout? There was more than Susie’s accounting to account for his cash-only business here.

“Neither. Law-makers, maybe?” she hazarded. “Or, you know, profs. They really looked like profs, and gave a couple of the juniors a panic.”

“Heh. Whatcha tell them?” He paid for the drink and the information with a folded bill.

“Cole who? No, we heat with oil.” She affected her pretty-ditz expression and, dutifully, he chuckled.

“Thanks, Suze.”

“Yeah, well, you pay the rent. Someone here tonight, though, didn’t ask for you, but she’s looking for something.”

“Oddly, I don’t owe anyone money right now.” In this world.

“Honey, she doesn’t look like the sort you pay, and I’ve never known you to pay for it anyway. She’s wearing at least three concealed weapons, five if you count the cleavage.”

“Oh lucky day.” He downed the drink and overpaid for another one. “Let’s see who she is, shall we?”

“You have fun with that. I’m going to hold the bar down so it doesn’t walk off.” She leaned her massive tits on the polished wood by way of demonstration; Cole patted the top of the left affectionately (in bed, she called one Suzie and the other Kwoozie) and took his drink and himself further into the dark ships’ boards of the Storm.

Ed, the insurance saleman. Mindy, his on-again-off-again mistress. The stranger with the expensive suit and the cheap phone – yep, not touching that one. A biker with three empty glasses and a half-full basket of nachos. None of them even looked at him. He wasn’t who they were here for.

The burgundy-red on white of spilled wine over marble caught his eye, gleaming even redder in the dim stained-glass-filtered light. Cole’s fingers tightened on his glass, and he nearly turned and left. He had to work tomorrow; he didn’t want to be working tonight.

She noticed him, of course, before he could leave. That was one of her skills. Xenia looked up from her tall, foamy glass of beer and waved at him, the languid way a cat’s tail waves warning. He waved back, a half-hearted three-fingered sort of thing, and joined her at her table.

“Tracked me down.”

“I do that.” Entirely unrepentant. “I wanted to see you.”

“There’s work tomorrow.”

“There’s always work. I wanted to see you in your element.”

“So you’re saying work isn’t my element. What, I’m out of place in the team I lead?”

She grinned at him and leaned over the table, like she was sharing some sort of big secret with him, her small tits peeking out of the top of her tank top, and whispered, “at work, you are the team, Cole. I just wanted to watch you at play.”

 

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/70421.html. You can comment here or there.

30 Days, Daily Prompt, Kink Bingo… Make you Mine

Jul5

Day 25 of 30 days of Fiction: “27) Prompt: trapped.”

From [community profile] dailyprompt: “life and liberty”.

A double up on [community profile] kink_bingo – O-1 – possession/marking – from my card.

An excuse to use a new icon from djinni

And in the Harem sub-setting of Tir na Cali. (all that for 500 words!!)

“‘… among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”

Stephen was talking to himself when Ursula came into her suite. She’d left the manor for a couple days, her ostensible purpose a meeting at the Agency but her side goal giving him a little time to get used to the room and the idea of being hers.

She returned to find him staring out over the vineyards from her balcony, murmuring what she believed was probably part of the American’s Declaration of Independence, over and over again.

“ ‘That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” she provided from memory, and was rewarded by a twitch in his shoulder blades.

“I didn’t know you were back.” He hadn’t turned around yet, but he did remember to add, rather belatedly, “my Lady.”

“I just got home. We have most of the American documents in our library, you know.”

“I was just thinking,” he said, his bare back still to her and his back tense, “that I took it for granted, back home. I never really thought about the Declaration, or any of that. Liberty. You people barely even have the concept.”

“That’s like saying your people don’t have the idea of ‘pursuit of happiness,’ just because ours do it better,” she objected mildly. “It’s just not a priority for us, the way it is for Americans.” She hadn’t intended to argue with him today. She never intended to.

“I guessed that.” Now, now he turned around, frowning, and raked his eyes over her in a way that would have gotten him whipped by most of her cousins and peers. His eyes stopped at the narrow gold collar she was holding in her left hand. “Being trapped here, and all.” His gesture was a bit choppy as it took in the scenic vista behind him.

“Trapped,” she agreed softly. He was, after all, with her or in the harems. He was never going to go home again. “How are you enjoying your new cage?”

He winced, and she almost felt guilty. Almost. “The newspaper on the bottom is nicer, and it’s a bit roomier than the old one,” he quipped back. “Quieter, too. I’m still not sure about that part.”

“I’ll try to be sure you don’t get too lonely,” she assured him. His eyes were still on the collar in her hand; she wondered how long he could keep making jokes while staring at it.

Not long, it seemed. “I already have a collar,” he snapped abruptly. “Where are you going to lock that one?”

“You have my grandmother’s collar.” She set this new one down on the table, her eyes still on him. “Kneel for me, Stephan.”

“Make me,” he snapped back, his hands going to the steel band around his neck. “What’s the difference? A collar is a collar. They all make me a slave, right?”

He was, she noted, really freaking out. “This one will make you mine.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/69723.html. You can comment here or there.

The Anthropologist’s Journal

Jun30

From [community profile] dailyprompt

Planners’-verse, further in the future.

Beginning of Spring, probably year 317 Post-Conflict

I have been living among the Kaveh for a little over five seasons now. Such was not my original plan, of course; we do not embed anthropologists in the wild tribes any more. Early attempts had a 0% survival rate, and even we – the Tower, that is – are not that mad.

I was not, at the time, even studying the Kaveh, or any of the wild tribes. I was visiting a village along the canal, discussing education plans and a method of marrying-out to nearby settlements that would prevent the excessive inbreeding such places are prone to. Considering what the tribes did to that place, I doubt that is a problem anymore.

Not the Kaveh, however; that was the Kybelii. They raided in numbers and with ferocity that exceeded any report or tale I have ever heard, tearing through the village. They killed the men, and took the women and children prisoner, including, of course, me.

I will not write of my days with the Kybelii. They were a violent and smelly people, and I don’t mourn their demise, except in the loss of their genetic diversity.

Their demise, and my unwilling and accidental embedding among the Kavah, came two and one-half moons after the slaughter of Johnsport, when the Kavah and two other of the wild tribes attacked and killed all of the Kybelii warriors and about half of their domestic population. They split the remainders and the slaves – myself, again – among the three tribes. I, of course, went to the Kavah.

At first, I believed that this would simply be the same unpleasant, odorous captivity with a new set of captors. Our information on the wild tribes didn’t indicate any major variation in behavior: they pillaged, stole, and raped, and as far as we could tell, they did so indiscriminately. Their slaves were treated as chattel, as cattle, bought and sold, bred until they died, often in childbirth.

And perhaps that would have continued to be my fate. The tribe sold many of the slaves they acquired from the Kybelii, and two more died on the long trip from summer pastures to winter camp. I could have been among either group, easily enough.

But a young female warrior-in-training who I believed to be the chief’s daughter, and her brother, slightly older, took a liking to me, and I was moved into the yurt they shared with their mother for the duration of the winter.

By the time that the long, miserable, snow was over and it was time to move back to summer pastures, I was swollen with an unwanted pregnancy from the Kybelli, and had learned to speak the dialect the Kavah used and taught my owners quite a bit of the Scholar’s English I had grown up speaking. I had also befriended my owners’ mother, as well as the two teenagers themselves, and, through them, the chieftain, as well as the man, their lore-speaker, who I had originally thought was the chief.

(Their lore-speaker is the father to my young mistress, the chieftain the husband-to-be of both mistress and master. More on that later).

And it seems that their lore-speaker is intrigued by the way that The City People (that would be yours truly, neveryoumind that I am, in fact a Tower Person) handle their disputes. His children were very miffed to find him taking more and more of my time, but he is, after all, an important person. And he is open to new ideas, even if, between you and I, journal, they are in actuality very old ideas.

We have been working on the idea of justice, recently, he and I. The Kavah, as with, I gather, many of the other wild tribes, have a concept of “revenge” and one of “survival,” but justice has until now been missing from their vocabulary.

During the summer, there is little time for talking, so I talk quite a bit during the long idle periods of winter, and now, as the snow begins to melt, I find myself talking quickly. They will raid again, soon. Perhaps I can bend them, slowly, towards fairness and justice. Perhaps this year there will be less slaughter.

I hope that I can. Their summer pasture, this year, is awfully close to the Tower.

Prompt: “bending towards justice”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/67085.html. You can comment here or there.

DailyPrompt: Missing

Jun7

From [community profile] dailyprompt

Her lips lingered on his, her hands on his hips, memorizing his taste (salty), his scent (just a bit sour, as it was after a long day of work), the way his eye crinkled at the corners, the way his hands felt on her back. “I’ll be back,” she murmured.

“I’ll be here,” he replied. For the moment they said it, it was the truth. For the moment of their farewell, it was complete, and real, and more than a little touching.

Science and trial and error had shown that humans needed the emotional stepping stones of farewells, of leave-takings. Experience on the long liner trips, though, had shown that things left behind, memories, roots to the earth, did nothing but hamper the pilots and explorers. They needed to be free to fly, and they needed their nest when they returned.

And so there were those like him, and like me, who minded the home fires. Who were there to be lovers and spouses and anchors when the explorers were on earth. Who were there to be forgotten when they left the planet. Loved but never missed. And never knowing what we missed, either, because we, as much as they, forget when our backs our turned.

We cannot waste our time in pining any more than they can. There are few of us, and many of them.

Prompt: what we miss because we forget

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