Tag Archive | prompt: dailyprompt

DailyPrompt Drabble: Stepping around.

From dailyprompt and Stranded World.

It had the feel of an optical illusion, this party. People moved around in that way that they do, chatting, sliding from grouping to grouping, finger foods to drinks to bathroom to the best jokes. They moved as if everything was normal.

Autumn, in the center of the party through no volition of her own, tried to mimic their movements, tried to ignore the niggling feeling that she didn’t belong here. Of all her siblings, why did it have to be her? Summer was an actress; she could fake this better. Spring, Spring loved being in the middle of the hoity-toity, the rich, the well-bred. And Winter was implacable. But here she was, Autumn, the gypsy artist, the vagabond with the wind-blown hair, trying to pretend she belonged.

She’d been invited, of course, or she probably wouldn’t have made it through the front door. Her younger sisters had consulted on her outfit, and she looked as if her dress, at least belonged. Since the dress looked like it belonged to her, the illusion seemed to pass: this dress passes muster, thus its wearer must as well. And she’d kept the ink to a bare minimum for the occasion.

All of that, and she’d still expected to be awkward, unhappy, and uncomfortable. She hadn’t expected, quite, to be invisible, but that was how she found herself, passed over by dozens of people who, it seemed, all knew each other. It galled a bit, enough that she took a quick five minutes in the bathroom to scrub off the nothing strange to see here she’d drawn over her heart.

That didn’t seem to do it – and, as she circled the room again, Autumn realized there was something else going on, something beyond her own class-conscious insecurities. The guests weren’t just ignoring her. They were milling, walking around the room like everything was normal, but there was something in the center of the room that they were just ignoring. She, she realized, was ignoring it as well; no matter how hard she peered, she couldn’t quite see it. It was like the old saw about addiction being an elephant in the middle of the living room: Everyone moved around it, but nobody mentioned it.

But it didn’t seem like anyone could even see the elephant (or maybe they could, and she was just not a part enough of their crowd).

prompt: “can you not see the elephant?”
Not really done, but a fun intro

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/47745.html. You can comment here or there.

Invisibles

May30

This is the first half of a semi-sequel to Discovery Channel

The supply trucks had stopped coming around the first of the year; the TV broadcasts had more or less stopped around Thanksgiving time, and the radio broadcasts were getting rarer and rarer, so the fae residents-slash-captives of the “voluntary relocation center” (internment camp) didn’t get an explanation as to why they were abandoned; the food just stopped coming.

At first, they assumed that the remnants of the human government were trying to quietly get them rid of, and shrugged philosophically. They’d been expecting that for a while, after all, and they had their gardens and their little farm already. They’d be a bit short on some more exotic foods for a while, but they were magic beings; they’d make do.

Weeks went on, though, and the mood of the guards that still patrolled the halls of their former-high-school prison shifted. They stopped eying their captives with belligerent fear and began eying the livestock in the courtyards and the greenhouse with the overwintered vegetables with obvious hunger. They talked, when they didn’t think any of the internees could hear them, about their hungry families and the paychecks that didn’t come anymore. They talked about how the monsters in here were safer than their own children were.

Finally, Dita, called the Riddle of the Sphinx, who had ended up being their leader by inevitability and force of will, pulled the guards aside and suggested they just move their families into the compound. “They’ll be safe here,” she assured them, “and we have food to spare.”

The guards hemmed and hawed – they were supposed to be guarding the internees, not fraternizing with them, not locking themselves in, too – but their so-very-friendly prisoners had the magic to make food grow faster and produce more than it ought to, and the walls around their internment camp were high and sturdy. In the end, hunger and a continually deteriorating situation outside won over fear. Their guards became their companions, and they locked the gates from the inside.

That had been mid-February. When the flowers started coming up in earnest, some time in early May, radio broadcasts had trickled down to maybe one a week, there was wheat growing on the rooftops, and something was horribly wrong in the halls of their camp.

At first, they thought one of them had gone stir-crazy. They’d been in this prison for over two years now, in conditions that, while not crowded, were nowhere near ideal. That none of them had gone off the deep end yet was more surprising than that someone had finally cracked.

It was a pretty bad crack, too; people went missing, first one, then two more, and then another three. By the time the three had gone missing, the first one to vanish had been discovered, so very very dead, the dismembered, desiccated, mummified parts spread over the playground. It was the sort of death only another one of them could pull off, at least that quickly, that efficiently. They started eyeing each other with distrust, travelling only in groups, and making locks for their doors and walls to put locks in. The barracks became a warren of tiny, dark, locked rooms… and still people vanished.

They had the magic, in their group, to read minds, too, three mind-readers. Dita set her foot down, and the mind-readers read each other’s minds, then set up a double-elimination queue to find their murderer.

Cynthia, the most junior of the mind-readers, tried hard not to think about some of the things she’d found her fellow inmates to be guilty of. Not this string of murders, no – she found not the slightest shred of evidence that anyone here had even witnessed anything related to these deaths. But there was a lot of untidiness in these minds. There were tiny peccadilloes and crimes that would be felonies, if human law still cared about them, guilty consciences and sordid desires. Some of it was really, really creepy.

By the time she reached the last person, her friend Aaron, she was ready to destroy large portions of her mind just to get rid of the slimy memories. The walls around their prison had never seemed so constraining. And she had never been less happy to see Aaron.

“How’s it going, Synthie?” He plopped down in the comfy, ratty armchair she was using as an interrogation seat and grinned at her, only the off-skew cant of one ear suggesting he was at all worried.

“Urgh.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t want to know what’s in your brain, Airhead. It had better be just air and stuffing…”

“Or what? You’re too good a person to cut out the parts you don’t like.”

“I swear, if I find anything in your mind that I don’t want to see, Aaron, I’m…”

He was out of his chair with his hand over her mouth before she could finish the sentence. “You know better, Synth… Cynthia,” he whispered urgently, his cobalt-blue eyes staring at her. “You’re tired, and they forgot to feed you, here,” he pressed a cookie into her hand while she stared in worried confusion at him. “You’re not going to like everything in my brain,” he explained quietly, and comprehension finally worked its way through her exhausted mind. She nodded, and he removed his hand.

“Sorry,” she muttered, and devoured the cookie. I swear were words one didn’t say casually; that she’d forgotten enough to slip was an indication of how worn out she was. “Well… let’s hope there’s not too much in there, okay? I really want to bleach my brain out.”

“That bad?” He sounded worried. That, in itself, was worrisome; Aaron never showed concern.

“That bad,” she agreed quietly. “Let me get this over with, please?” There, let him chew on that; she never said please.

“Okay,” he agreed quietly, and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. “Do your worst.”

It couldn’t be him. She shouldn’t even look. But what if it was? If she trusted friendship and doomed them all? She closed her eyes, too, pretended this was someone else, and murmured the Working that would let her read his mind.

Don’t let Synthie see what she doesn’t want to see was at the forefront of his mind, fences neatly lined up, pointing her towards hey, about those murders? I didn’t do them. He was anxious, little bits in the back of his mind dancing around. Her threat had worried him; more than that, the drawn, tired way she looked worried him. Is she okay? Is she going to forgive me for…

She knew better, but she poked a little bit, telling herself she needed to find out for certain that he wasn’t the murderer. …forgive me, no, not there, ack, PORN! His mind flashed naked cat-girls in improbable positions, and she reeled backwards, falling off her chair.

“Synth?” She was still far enough inside his consciousness that she could hear his worry and guilt as he scrambled onto the floor next to her. “Synth… Cynthia, damn, sorry, are you okay?” C’mon, be okay. Be okay and don’t poke anymore, please? Stupid murderer. Messing up our friendship.

She shook her head carefully. “Airhead, if you ever assault me with porn again…” She made sure to make the not-a-threat cheerful, and tried to stifle the headache that wanted to leak out.

He flushed. “It’s the mind-blanking technique they taught us, you know… pink horses.”

“Purple elephants,” she nodded, but this time, let the exasperation leak. “Airhead, you’re not supposed to be blocking my mind-reading. You’re supposed to be proving your innocence.”

“Synthie, if you don’t already know I’m innocent, you’re not going to find it in my brain. Look, this was a nice idea, but if it’s not any of us… doesn’t it occur to you that that’s even worse?”

“Worse?” She blinked at him. “Worse than being trapped in her with a monster?”

“That’s how the guards feel all the time, isn’t it? What I mean is… we know each other. We know our flaws and our powers and everything else, every one of us. We’re too close not to. But if something managed to sneak in here with us and remain hidden, except to pop out and kill us…”

“We’re dealing with a completely unknown, invisible enemy.” Cynthia gulped. “Okay. That is pretty bad.” She chewed on her cuticle, nevermind what her mother would say. “Aaron, what do we do about something we can’t see?” Why was she asking him?

“Well,” he mused, “we have to find a way to make the invisible visible.”

dailyprompt ‘making the invisible visible.’

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/47613.html. You can comment here or there.

Ants, Grasshoppers, Magpies.

May30

From dailyprompt: “The future is now,” misc. post-apoc, well, apoc, the same setting and Foundation as The Cathedral (LJ Link) but some time earlier and from a different POV.

The future is now. We spent our whole lives, as our parents and grandparents and so on did, planning for the future, building the world around us as best we could, “giving back to the community,” the way people would have said a year or two ago, building up our own fortunes only to carry others along with us, in the best tradition of charity and, at the same time, in the best paths of cleaning up your own backyard first. That is: we made sure we were well off, that our neighbors were comfortable, that those in our town weren’t going hungry, and that those in our county did not starve.

And amid all that nest-feathering, we put away for a rainy day, planned for a dry season, put a little of our wealth aside in jars in the back yard and boxes under the mattress; we squirreled away supplies and never threw anything at all out that we or our descendants might use.

We were the world’s biggest pack rats, saving everything we could get our paws on in case of a long, cold winter.

And now? Now we’ve reached that winter. We’ve come to that point we were reaching for, our family, our Foundation, our mandate. And here I am, ankle deep in paperwork while outside our gates, our neighbors risk starving. And the biggest argument I’m having with the rest of the family?

Not how much should we share?. That would make sense. But can we dig into the supplies now, so that we have something to share with those who have not saved?

Ants, grasshoppers, snakes and scorpions. We talk about animals, but no-one is brave enough to say magpie while we cling to our shiny things, merely because they’re shiny.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/47326.html. You can comment here or there.

Daily Prompt: The Cathedral

May27

I’ve had the world’s slowest week of writing. I.e., this is almost all I’ve written, all week, and it’s 686 words. That’s like 1/10 of my normal weekly wordcount.

From dailyprompt: “preparing for change,” and “cathedral of data.” It’s misc. post-apoc, based on a Gehenna(*) cult idea I’ve had running in my head for 10 or 20 years.

They had built it, and they had come. The movie misquote was long past archaic by this point, but Tess still found herself thinking it when she stared out over the ramparts and towers of The Library. They had, before the disaster that had ruined their world, designed this place, built it and fortified it and stocked it.

It hadn’t been that they had known the disaster was coming, she assumed (fifteen years old when the world had collapsed, she hadn’t been consulted on the decades of preparation that had led to the library), so much as that they were, by their charter, always planning for change.

So they had built this, The Library, an academy, a town within walls, a cathedral of data. They had built a storage place for all of the knowledge of the world as they knew it, and done everything they could to keep it safe.

Sometimes Tess wondered what the Founders had been planning for. Change, of course. The entire mandate and charter of their foundation was “to prepare for the smoothest transition in times of change.” But that left open a whole realm of things, from a governmental shift of power to a world-ending cataclysm. Had they really expected this?

Expected or not, she could find no fault with their planning. Inside their fortress, they were safe, they were warm in winter and cool in summer, well-fed and well-clothed. Inside the Library, they educated generations of children and young adults, preserving knowledge that would otherwise have been lost, and, through their students, spreading that information across the continent. They had, for their small corner of the world, held off another Dark Age, through their vigilance and preparation.

The job, however, wasn’t over. There was no end point on the foundation’s charter, and the world did not stop changing just because most of the major governments had fallen. And Tess, who had been running the Library and the foundation for longer than she had been alive when the world had ended, who could barely remember what things had been like under a continent-spanning government, found herself second-guessing her predecessors’ plans.

She walked from the high wall down to the main hall of the library, nodding politely at the students as she went. In their comfortable, warm, wooly robes (the sheep and goats, too, lived within the fortress), they looked like a woodcut of medieval monks. And that, Tess believed, was the problem.

It wasn’t that the founders hadn’t planned well; their preparations were impeccable. Tess cringed to think of the billions of dollars, the thousands of man-hours, that had gone into the Library project, resources that the founders had had to burn, that she no longer had. They had built to last, and it had worked.

But what they had built, that was the problem. They had built a temple of knowledge, a chapel with the information of those-who-had-come-before as their god, and students came to worship it, to soak up the knowledge and spread the word of the founders far and wide. It staved off a Dark Age, yes, but what did it leave in its place?

Tess had a feeling, a vague one but supported by research, that there ought to be innovation. People ought to be striving to find new things, create new things, invent new things. People ought to be trying to do what had never been done before, and instead, they were simply retreading old ground. Stagnating. Not falling into barbarism, but not growing, either.

Maybe, she wondered, staring at her robed students, their pens scratching on their paper (both made here, as well as the ink) as they researched the work of long-dead scientists from long-destroyed places, maybe the purpose of a catastrophe was like winter for the trees: a chance to rest, a chance to reset. Maybe by fooling the order of things, the foundation had taken away a necessary step of human evolution.

And maybe they had just slowed it. Change was coming; Tess could feel it in her bones. It was their job to be prepared for it, that was all.

* Okay, “apocalypse.” Onceuponatime, when I played VampireLARP, E.Mc played a character in a Gehenna cult bloodline (Gehenna is the vampires’ end time in World of Darkness), so the phrase always wants to be Gehenna cult in my mind.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/46569.html. You can comment here or there.

Challenge!!

May25

dailyprompt posts a weekly summary of stories written to that week’s prompts.

This is the summary of stories written to the 4/17-4/23 prompts…

So I challenge all y’all, this week, to click into dailyprompt, write something to a prompt, and post it (It helps if you also then reply to the prompt posting and let them know, too).

Edited to add:

The week beginning 4/24 is all me, too…

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/45923.html. You can comment here or there.

Day Job, a Drabble of the Stranded World

May20

From dailyprompt: “day’s work for a day’s pay,” and comes after Tanglers

“It’s not a bad life,” Spring protested weakly into the phone. She had it pressed between her ear and her shoulder – an old-style analog phone with a big headpiece, easy enough to manage – while she danced into the high-heeled sandals. The litter of indecision sprawled across the tiny bedroom – six and a half pairs of shoes, three dresses, two pairs of pants, and a half-unraveled sweater. “A day’s work for a day’s pay, and I get to meet all sorts of interesting people.” Like her date tonight. A star mapper, but so very interesting.

“I know honey, but…” Her mother had mastered the motherly “but;” it conveyed paragraphs in a single syllable. But it’s not how we do things. But it’s so common. But how can you go about your art when you’re tied down to a day job? But, and this one was most important and never quite said aloud, but it’s not the way your brother and sisters do things. Sometimes Spring loathed being the youngest of four, the least predictable, the least well-behaved, after three so very exemplary examples.

“But it’s fun, mom.” Would she spend her whole life having this conversation, again and again? She pulled out her trump card as she buckled her second sandal on. “I get all sorts of opportunities to mess with people. Important people. Famous people, sometimes.

As she’d known it would, that stopped the argument. “Well, honey, if you’re happy where you are, then I guess that’s what matters. Are you working tonight?” She still managed to make “working” sound like “streetwalking,” of course.

“Not tonight, mom.” She hung the pendant Winter had given her over the dress Summer had helped her pick out, feeling happily wrapped in her family. “Tonight I have a date.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/44748.html. You can comment here or there.

DailyPrompt – Alone together

May19

From dailyprompt: “eight line poem” and “I want to be alone.” Originally, I had put placemarkers in for names to fill in later, but, as the story went on, I liked keeping it that way.

“I want to be alone.” [3] stared down at her notebook, the pencil limp in her hand.

“Now, honey, you know it don’t work that way.” [2] cuddled her briefly.

“It oughta,” she sighed.

“Now don’t let the bosses hear you talking that way,” her teammate scolded. “They’ll start thinking you’re defective, or, worse yet, se-ditty- itious.” She drew the word out like it was sexy, naughty, instead of terrifying.

“I know,” [3] agreed quietly. They all knew what happened to defectives. “It’s just sometimes, I can’t hear myself think.”

“And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be,” [2] nodded firmly. “That’s what we’re for, peachie, to hear your thoughts.”

“But…”

[1] and [4] had remained quiet until now, [4] because, as junior, that was his place; [1], as senior member of their Four, had left girls to girl business but now, when [3] refused to complacently back down, he spoke.

“What do you have that you can’t share with your Four?”

It was a catechism question, a trap for defectives, the root of their training. [3] answered dutifully. “There is nothing I have that I cannot share with you.” Except the burning poems inside her head that kicked and beat at her skull, wanting to get out. Except the whispers of music that went away the minute someone else spoke to her.

That’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. They were too close for her Four to not notice that she was defective, but close enough, loyal enough, that they could keep it quiet as long as she could hold together. And she could, given everyday situations. The problem was days like this, where the pressure of the poetry and the pressure of duty pounded at each other like hammer and anvil, and her in between, soft and squishy like the peach that [2] nicknamed her.

“Come here,” [4] spoke up, startling them all.

The habit of obedience was well-ingrained into all of them, and she was across the room and sitting next to him on their wide, Spartan bed before it had processed that he, of all the people in the world, she didn’t have to obey.

And then, with the gall that only a spoiled, pampered junior member of a well-off Four could manage, he kept giving her orders, in a voice so gentle it was like a recording of the ocean, calm and inexorable, pulling her under. “Lay down with me,” and she did, letting him spoon her. “She’s not alone,” he told their teammates; she barely heard [2] grunt in acknowledgement.

He pulled her against him, one hand on her hip, his chest against her back, his breath warm on her neck. She waited, wondering what he was up to; they all waited, although she could hear, faintly in the background, [2] moving around, picking stuff up.

He said nothing, did nothing. He was there, close as a second skin, close as they were always supposed to be with at least one of their four, but he was junior, with nothing he could make her do. The words stopped rattling haphazardly in her skull and began lining up peaceably, forming themselves into an orderly eight-line poem.

“Write,” [4] murmured, and, at the desk, [2] began writing.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/44148.html. You can comment here or there.

Siege, a story of Vas’ World

May18

This is a story of Vas’ World – see here for a complete description; it comes immediately in sequence with the Vas Cycle, after Contemplating the Wall

From dailyprompt:

“Stand here, by me,” Vas ordered, and was gratified although not too surprised to see that his team obeyed him. In a crisis, he was still the leader. This, he reckoned, definitely counted as a crisis.

The tentacled tree-like-thing was holding his senior xenobiologist Suki about six feet off the ground, not moving her anymore but restraining her. Other branches were stretching towards their group, while Malia and Paz waved their axes threateningly. They were surrounded on three sides by the wriggling trees, while the fourth side was bordered by a long, clearly-sentient made wall. At least one of the sentient species here, Paz’s wounded leg could attest, used ranged weapons. Somebody built walls. And the trees seemed aware of the threat of the axe.

“They look like snakes,” Malia muttered. “Some sort of boa or anaconda…”

“Fiddleheads,” Andon countered. “See the feelers inside? I wonder if they’re edible…”

“Last time I checked,” Vas interrupted, before Andon could get too distracted with xeno-cusine, “we didn’t eat sentient species.”

It was the wrong thing to say, which he realized the moment the words were out of his mouth. Malia had a pet peeve about…

“That’s not what you said about the Anjou tigers,” she complained, right on cue.

…the tiger-like ruminant creatures from Anjou Three, whose sentience was not up for debate by anyone other than a few rabid cat-lovers, and Malia.

Vas was saved from yet another discussion on comparative intelligence and the ethics of eating cows with stripes by Suki’s worried scream. Ah, yes. They still had to get her down. He didn’t want to lose yet another team member, even an obnoxious one.

“Guys…” Suki choked out. Apparently the tree-like tentacle creatures were, indeed, also constrictors. “Guys,” she tried again, coughing. And pointing behind them. “The grass…”

“I can hear the grass,” Paz muttered nervously. “It’s growing.”

Prompts included: Stand By Me, I can hear the grass grow, and anaconda

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/43601.html. You can comment here or there.

Drabble: Dancing for Joy

May17

From dailyprompt:

They are dancing again.

They dance for the full moon, for the changing seasons, for the first harvest and the last, for the first snow and the last. They dance for weddings and for childbirth, although they do not dance for death.

I cannot fault them; they have, despite that litany, so little to dance for. They came here so naked and unprepared, so bold and brave and completely not ready for what this place was; they came here and they died.

This planet is not a nice place, and they are not the first sentient race that have walked over its shifting skin and been eaten by its trap, frozen by its winters, swept up by its maelstroms. I’ve seen others come, and I’ve watched them all die. The death of these creatures did not surprise me.

What surprised me was their tenacity and their adaptability. They saw that the ground would shudder with no warning, and they built shelters like boats to move with the shifts. They saw that their plants from home were twisted by the soil into something inedible, and they learned how to eat the plants that were here, thay have grown to process the poisons of this place.

They died by the dozen, and they learned with every death. With every adaptation, the planet had to work harder to shake them off its back; and with every shake, their grip dug in tighter.

No other species had lasted through more than two seasons, but these, they were still alive when a year had passed. And now it has been two years, and, while there remains only a tenth of the original population, they die much less frequently now, and they give birth more often than they die.

And they dance. They dance for ever success, every triumph, every survival. At first I thought they were mocking the planet, taunting it for failing to kill them. Then I thought this was part of their grieving ritual, for all those that the planet had succeeded in eliminating. No other race had lived long enough to even bury all its dead, much less construct rituals to mourn them. And these creatures, all these little sentient creatures, are so different from me, from my people. Their rites, all of them, are so mobile.

It took me a while to learn that they called this particular set of gyrations dancing, longer to understand that it was a celebration, a prayer to the higher powers they believe rule them and protect them, a hymn of joy sung with their whole raggle-taggle wiggly bodies. And this thing they did, this dancing, was a thing of joy, not of revenge or of grief.

And I do not begrudge them their joy, because this planet is a hard place, as none know better than I. If they have found, like I have, to take their pleasure where they can, than the better for them.

But I do wish they would learn that the mountain they dance on is my head, and the valley my throat. They’re giving me a terrible headache.

Prompt was “dancing on my head”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/43474.html. You can comment here or there.

Well. Drabble. Moonlight Outing

May2

From dailyprompt: “not quite like that”

and

“wearing someone else’s clothes”

and

“together, they fight crime!” It all fell together from those three, but Ascha still managed to surprise me. Might be fae apoc.

“So when do we get to meet this mystery woman?” Kendall teased.

“It’s not quite like that,” Ascha protested weakly.

“I suppose it has to be different,” he conceded. For a moment, she thought she’d somehow dodged the bullet (why were metaphorical bullets so much harder than the real sort?) but he persisted, “I mean, you’ve brought every other boy, girl, and alien you’ve dated home for dinner at least once. Sometimes more than once, when Javari was living with us. But that’s ‘dinner,’ I guess.”

“There was only the one alien,” she complained weakly. “And, really, you make it sound like I have a revolving door on my bedroom. I’ve lived with you for five years, Ken.”

“I know, I know,” he said, rushing to placate her, and, for a second time, she thought she’d derailed him. “Five years, six months, and three weeks. And in all that time, there’s been six people, including the alien. So, no. Next to me, you’re a nun. Next to Corinne, you’re… well, not a nun. But that’s because she is.” He flapped a hand impatiently, clearing out that conversation. “The point is, have you ever not brought one home before?”

“I have still brought home every being I’ve dated, and even the stray cat I picked up that turned out to be sentient.” And maybe that would distract him? Please?

“Aah, Tabby. What happened to her?”

“She got her own talk show, eventually. Now she’s writing self-help books and owns her own house.”

“That’s gratitude for you.”

“Yeah. Teach me to pick up strays.” Not that Tabby hadn’t sent her a couple fat checks, but she’d long since learned to keep money away from her roommates; they had a habit of devouring it.

“Ascha, you’re never going to stop picking up strays. Like your mystery girl. Come on, A, after the alien, is there really anyone you couldn’t bring home?”

“Damnit, Ken-doll…”

“You know, you’re not making it any easier on yourself, stalling like this. Dish, A.”

She sighed , turning her back to him and packing up her bag for work. “She’s not a lover. She’s a friend, mostly. I’m not even sure she likes girls.”

“I’ve never known you to spend this much time alone with a ‘friend’ who wasn’t someone you could bring home for beers,” he complained.

“Yeah, well…” She sighed. “We’ve got a thing, but it’s kind of fragile. I tell you what, I promise I’ll bring her home as soon as I think it won’t blow up in my face, okay?”

“I’ll take what I can get, I guess. Go on, you’ll be late for your date.”

“It’s not…” but he was already out the door. “…quite like that,” she told his departing back.”

“I was beginning to worry,” Heather commented.

“Sorry, my roommates were getting on my case. They want to meet you.”

“Your roommates?” Heather shrugged into her vest and straightened her sleeves. “Is that the incubus you were telling me about?”

“Nah, Javari moved out. So mostly just garden-variety freaks.” She grabbed her uniform from the shelf. “They think we’re dating.”

“You don’t want to tell them the truth?”

Putting on the leather pants and tight-fitting armored shirt still felt like wearing someone else’s clothes. In a sense, she was, she mused, as she pinned her short hair up under the hood that masked her features, leaving only her eyes visible. Ascha stayed at home. The Bronze Sword went out – and the Midnight Maiden.

“Do you think they’d believe the truth?”

Heather – no, the Maiden – settled her weapons into their sheathes and checked her veil. “I don’t know. Some people would probably rather we were risking our lives fighting crime together than snogging in the back seat.”

“Some people, probably,” the Sword agreed. “Mine flip out about a paper cut.” She stepped into the elevator with her partner. Someday soon, maybe, they’d have a proper fortress, but this did for the time being.

“My family would flip more about the snogging,” the Maiden admitted, so quietly that she was nearly drowned out by the creaking of the ancient lift.

“Well,” the Sword offered, before Ascha could shut her mouth, “perhaps there’s more than crime to fight tonight, then.”

She resisted the urge to slap her hand over her mouth as Heather turned slowly to look at her. It would only make it worse.

“Perhaps,” the Maiden murmured, in her moonlight and whisky voice.

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Alder's Grove Fiction

The Worlds of Lyn Thorne-Alder