Open here – a mini-fic-a-thon

This is a challenge where you answer a prompt with a fic consisting of only three sentences, set in any Alder-Thorne verse.

You can post and answer as many prompts as you like. Only one prompt per comment please.

Comment on DW, please.

For elliemurasaki‘s prompts to my real-world call:
Farmer’s market.
New job.
Bookstore trawling.
“I’m not sure if this counts as a job.”

Jessica’s mother was frowning. She was often frowning, but now she had her forehead pinched, her lips pinched, her hands pinched… she was holding on to Jessica with every part of her body without actually bothering to touch her daughter.

“You said that about the Farmer’s Market job, too.” She was almost done packing. She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser again. She didn’t want to find she’d left anything behind.

“Standing behind a table selling vegetables all day? It’s not exactly career-forwarding, is it?” Jessica’s mother had a lot of opinions on career, as long as it wasn’t her own.

“Well, one, it was an entry-level position towards a sales job there.” Until her mother had a conversation with Jessica’s manager. “And two, all the trust says is that I have to be working.”

“And I don’t think this counts as a job.”

“The trustees do. And that’s what counts here.”

“You shouldn’t talk to your mother like that, Jessica.”

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t bother putting any emphasis on the words, because it wouldn’t matter anyway. Talking to her mother was like shouting down a black hole.

“Trolling around old book stores… living on the road… no supervisor, no defined hours…”

“But I’ll be getting paid a salary.” Jessica checked the back of the closet one more time, and tucked the old teddy bear she found there into a pocket of her suitcase. “They want my skills.”

“Your skills.” Her mother sneered it, but the sneer seemed to dissolve into something more open. “You don’t have to leave, you know. You could stay here, get another job like the one at the Farmer’s Market. You don’t have to pay rent.”

Jessica checked under the bed again. “I’ve got to go, Mom. I’ll keep in touch.” she kissed both her mother’s cheeks and made sure she had all her bags before she left.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/587495.html. You can comment here or there.

To lilfluff‘s prompt: Prepping being useful in a non-apocalyptic crisis

The radio had been hollering about snow for days, and it had gone from hollering to hysteria in the last 24 hours.

Albert and Madeline checked their water supplies, brought in a few more loads of firewood, trimmed a few branches off the trees nearest the house. They made a thick casserole for dinner and watched a couple sitcoms.

Madeline’s mother called; she talked for a couple minutes and made sure everything was okay at home. Albert’s sister called; they gossiped for a couple minutes. The wind was starting to pick up when he got off the phone; they checked the front and back doors and closed the blinds.

They woke to a power outage and eighteen inches of snow. Albert built up the fire in the wood stove while Madeline shoveled the way to the road. They melted buckets of snow over the wood-burning stove – and boiled water for coffee.

Casserole reheated nicely over the stove, too, and then they sat back on the couch, warm in the glow of the fire. “Finally.” Madeline smiled over her coffee. “I thought the damn blizzard would never come.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/583249.html. You can comment here or there.

To clare_dragonfly‘s prompt: Collecting more and more cats

It started with the one cat.

Jenny was working four ten-hour days a week, which meant she wasn’t really home enough for a dog. But she was in a new city, in a strange neighborhood, and when she was home, she was home for days at a time, and it was lonely.

So she got a cat, a black kitten from the shelter with a kink to one ear. She named him Sable, and he and she became close friends.

But the work hours turned into 12-hour workdays, and Sable was lonely at home. So Jenny bought Azure, another rescue from the pound, grey tabby with a missing tail-tip.

Two’s enough, she told herself. Two’s fine. But then there was this kitty mewing on the front step of her apartment, so into a cage when the skinny orange thing, and to the vet. The pound would have destroyed the kitten, so Flame came home with Jenny.

Three was more than enough for her small apartment, so she started looking for a bigger place. More responsibility at work had come with a raise and then another one, but it also meant she was working sixty-hour weeks. She didn’t have time for socialization; she came home and petted the cats while she watched TV until she fell asleep.

The bigger place came with a cat the owner couldn’t take with him. Well, this place had a whole second bedroom and bathroom, so of course Pearl could stay. And then a co-worker was moving, begging someone to take care of their favorite cat, and it already had a color name, so Charcoal came home to meet the clan.

When she found herself picking up Ice, Jenny realized she needed a bigger place. She bought a little farm out on the edge of town, and paid a college boy to feed the cats on days she couldn’t make it home, and mow the lawn and rake and shovel. He wasn’t an unattractive boy, either…

…and she was living on a farm, so people dumped cats there when they couldn’t handle them anymore. Ember. Chestnut. Splatter. Carrot.

…and the boy, whose name was Cordovan, which went perfectly with his hair.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/580953.html. You can comment here or there.

To Wystie’s prompt: ~A cult~

Nancy hadn’t, really, meant to start a cult.

It had started innocently enough, after all: she’d been lonely in her new city, so she’d made a list of things she could do and liked doing. Then she’d put together four of the least weird, and put out an ad on craigslist.

They’d met in her apartment, at first. It wasn’t the best idea, but the thin walls in her complex and her nosy neighbors, usually flaws, meant that any screams would be quickly noticed.

Three people showed up to the first meeting, seven to the second. By the third meeting, she’d rented them a room in a local church for their meetings; by the seventh meeting, she had to move them to an old storefront a couple blocks away.

Word got out, not just from the cragislist ad but from word-of-mouth; her original core of people told more people, who told more people, and soon she was charging $20 at the door just to cover the price of punch and pizza, rent and supplies.

She hadn’t realized she had a cult until she had to appoint people to guide groups of new recruits. Those first three attendees were her choices, of course, Maxine, Erica, and Terrance.

That’s when stuff sort of took a left turn. Maxine was fine, dealing with people who were mainly interested in the crafts and the cooking. Erica took the people who liked the old-fashioned stuff and got them building a library of resources. But Terrance, Terrance found all the people who really, really wanted to belong to something.

When Helen showed up and they had uniforms, she knew something had gone horribly wrong.

When they put the Grand Poobah hat on her head, however, she questioned the wrong part of the equation. After all, it had been her idea, right?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/578545.html. You can comment here or there.

Okay, I’m going to give this a try.

Someone (*cough* T) suggested I try writing stuff set in the real world.

I’m pretty unsure about this – I like being a genre author! – but I’m willing to give it a try.

Give me a couple real-world prompts and I’ll see what I can do.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/572810.html. You can comment here or there.