Last night, I was feeling like I was running on one cylinder and running out of gas, but I play this writing game, 4theWords, and I really wanted to move up one step on the leaderboards for battles.
Which meant 4 130-word (or so) battles.
So I asked for suggestions on Mastodon, and this is what came of it.
Well, technically, two of these weren’t even from suggestions…
But anyway! Words!
📝
Filling the Boots
He woke and shook out the cards. Continue reading
My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!
🦓
It was the day past the Autumnal Equinox, and the Emperor wasn’t dead.
The Rothenkill Empire, a wide-spanning mass of bureaucrats, generals, courtiers, financiers, farmers, and clerks, waited with their collective breaths held.
The servants of the Emperor moved slowly and carefully, as if their heads might fall off if they went about their tasks too quickly, or if they said the wrong thing.
Everyone was waiting. Everyone was confused. And almost everyone was worried.
In the Rothenkill Empire, it was said that the Emperors fell with the leaves. And, like leaves, it was known that sometimes, the Emperors needed a little push, a helpful shove.
So where was the shove?
“This is nor normal,” complained the Chief Financier in charge of budgets. “What are we going to do? Someone should do something.”
“Someone has to do something,” complained the Head Bureaucrat in charge of law distribution, re-writing, and deletion.
“Won’t someone do something?” pleaded the General of the Imperial Armies. “He’s starting to give orders that make sense and can’t be ignored! What are we going to do if we can’t ignore him?”
The Emperor, snug on his throne, pretended he could hear none of this. He hadn’t ascended to the Poison Throne by looking or acting particularly bright, after all. None of his predecessors had, either, not in decades, possibly not in centuries.
“The problem is,” muttered a person serving as a handmaiden, “nobody remembers how.” Her grandmother had once helped off three emperors in a row, but that had been when you got a class of emperor that sometimes needed a shove. “And with this one, I’m not going to risk it.”
And the Emperor smiled as the empire – the mass of functionaries that had killed his father, his grandfather, and countless of his various uncles and cousins – began to crumble under its own confusion.
🚪
🚪
It wasn’t as if Cary didn’t know that there were strange things in the world.
You saw it on the news sometimes, of course, dragons in the sky or someone really small turning bank thief.
But for the most part, that was an East Coast sort of thing. It didn’t happen out here. It definitely didn’t happen in Cary’s city. Continue reading
This is just a little story of summertime and beaches, because I wanted to. 😎
At first, we all thought it was some asshole in a particularly good Godzilla costume.
There was a convention going on, after all, just a couple blocks away, and there were at least three people within sight wearing a Deadpool mask, a matching speedo, and nothing else, to say nothing of the Warhammer angel stoic in her black armor over on the boardwalk. I myself was one of at least five women in Wonder Woman swimsuits getting a little surf-and-sun on in between panels. Continue reading
Otherwise known as: I had to make 444 words on #4thewords to keep up my streak, and I didn’t want to write anything else…
First to @dahob’s prompt here and second to Rix’s prompt here
On some level, it was a fascinating study in closed genetic populations. This little island had been cut off from everything else since the End Wars. The bridges had been blown, the waters had become impassible, and a series of bad explosions of magic meant that most people didn’t even remember that it existed.
If a Finder hadn’t targeted it as holding useful resources, it might have gone another seventy-five years before anyone noticed it was there.
As it was, the island had a small population that seemed entirely to consist of rabbit-Change fae. They were very rabbity, more so than any other rabbit-Changes the team had ever seen. And they were very definitely at war.
As far as the team could tell, the striped-looking rabbit people were fighting with the pointed-like-a-Siamese-cat rabbit people over territory rights on the ruins of the single large town in the center of the island. It had gotten quite violent, from the blood and the bodies and the missing limbs, and they hardly noticed the team’s arrival.
Since the team’s goal was at the side of the island, not the center, they were tempted to just let the rabbit gang war continue, but, seriously, there was too much interesting information to be garnered, so they grabbed one of each and hauled them off to get some information.
By the time they left, they’d identified five of each breed – turned out there were sub-breeds – to kidnap, and had even done a little bit of peace-making in the gang war. There was much more to be had from this tiny island, but they had their own war to fight first.
“Seriously, what are you doing?”
The Mara had purple-red wings and looked to be almost as short as Luke. Male, golden-skinned and golden-haired, they stooped into a dive and landed directly in front of Conrad. “You call this a battle plan?”
Conrad looked the Mara up and down. “I’m sorry, you are…?”
He was in no mood to put up with pureblood bullshit. His wife and kids were half a country away, where he couldn’t protect them, and he was fighting would-be gods with the weapons at hands, which might as well be sticks and stones.
“Piotr, called Catapult. You need better weapons.” The Mara bowed deeply. “Just so happens, I’m a weapon.”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1320826.html. You can comment here or there.
January by the numbers continues (still three days off, meeps~)!
From DaHob’s prompt “miracle;” a ficlet.
🙌
“There was a time,” Golbeck told his daughter, “when the gods came down every weekend. They would amaze us with their miracles, they would charm us with their dances, they would sing songs for the honor of our nubile youths. And then they would take those youths away, not to be seen for weeks or months or even years.”
“Time flows differently there,” Golbeck’s line-wife Tenrin put in. Her voice was dreamy and quiet, and her eyes were looking off somewhere that was not their home. “A day there might be a year or two here, or it might be twenty years — or only two or three nights.”
“Some people say, because of that, that the gods have not left us, but are merely napping. The gods do sleep,” Golbeck commented, and now it was his turn to sound dreamy, lost in some past memory. “They nap, they rest, they snore like any common human does. But it has been so long-“
“A lifetime,” Tenrin whispered.
“Forever, it seem,” murmured Juspor, their line-husband and the oldest of this generation. “Forever, since they came down. Forever since they blessed up.”
“Forever since they took any of us.” Pakeyya was the second-oldest of the wives, but she looked as young as their youngest. “Some say the gods have packed up and gone to wherever it is they go, never to return.”
“Then what does that mean for us?” Golbeck’s daughter asked, wide-eyed: Golbeck’s daughter, with the star-sparkles in her eyes and the song in her voice. “Everyone left here? Everyone who never knew the gods?”
Her father kissed her forehead, and if there were stars in his eyes, too, they were only the memory of divinity. “We live our lives. We bring what miracles we can to ordinary existence. We love our families.”
“We move past the memories,” Tenrin murmured. “We grow past the parties.”
“We remember we are not divine,” Juspor muttered dryly, “and do our best with humanity.”
🌅
Up in the home of the gods, Yerrinarishan, the god of the harvest, lay with a damp cloth over his eyes. Feperallin, goddess of all things of song, closed the door quietly behind her.
“I’ve got the last of them home. Pretty thing; we’ll have to invite her out with us again. Patie something? Parkour? Pateyya.”
“If she’s still alive next weekend.” Yerrinarishan lifted the cloth off two of his eyes to look at his companion-goddess. “You know how it goes. We come back a couple days later and they’re all gone.”
“Should I go get her now, then? Ilspar and Wendar-Fen have gotten the place cleaned up, or, at least, it’s less horrid now.”
“Oof, didn’t we keep a couple of them around for the cleanup? We always did before.”
“Oh, Mepper got pissy about it. Something about exploiting them. I tell you, they never minded being exploited when I did it.”
“Still… Maybe we should go get her. Or, hey.” Feperallin sat up abruptly and just as quickly laid back down, covering all nine eyes with the cloth. “…they have offspring, don’t they? Humans do that. We could bring her offspring up here.”
He held his head and whimpered. “…tomorrow night. Tomorrow, when I’m not so hung over.”
⛰️
Back in the world, Golbeck grew older and his daughter grew to adulthood, waiting for another miracle.
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1238892.html. You can comment here or there.
