Tag Archive | prompter: kelkyag

Some Paperwork… a story of Space Accountant for the Summer Giraffe Call

Jul27


Written to kelkyag‘s prompt here for my Summer Giraffe Call. Um… before the accidental marriage timeline, after the initial first-day timeline in Space Accountant

“You have have records on paper.” Genique stared at the Moneykeeper with a look that was fifty percent horror and fifty percent dry amusement. She was still getting over the fact that this so-called pirate ship had a Moneykeeper, in addition to a Quartermaster and a full rank system.

As she looked around Moneykeeper Jeffer ReemMickey’s office, Genique came to the slow realization that the ship didn’t really have a Moneykeeper. They had… an old man who had probably been a brilliant pirate – maybe a hitter, maybe something like a tech expert – when he was younger. He hadn’t died the way pirates were supposed to, early and violently, and they’d given him a sinecure position, something to keep him out of the way.

“Well, and what else would I do?” ReemMickey stared right back at Genique.

“The fire hazard alone…!” Genique shook her head. “The weight on this poor ship. How did you even get all this paper?”

“And how do pirates get anything?” The man was wearing enough jewelry to consist of a weight overage on its own, much of it likely stolen from kidnapped space-cruise travellers. “I took it. And I made the notes like the captain wanted, and tracked the money.”

“So how much money does the ship have right now?”

“And how should I know that?”

“…You know what? Never mind. What I am going to do is track every piece of this paper, and then we are going to have a bonfire. I think the attack bay can handle it.” Genique sat herself down in the center of the mess. “Thank you, Moneykeeper. I’ll be getting to work now.”

She thought he might be swearing at her, but Genique didn’t care. She was already logging in notes.

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Searching for Answers, Chapter 3 of The Portal Closed

Jul19

After: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1007793.html and http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1007910.html – for the Finish It! Bingo. Not technically a finish, per se, but another chapter.

“If there are other portals, it stands to reason that someone has heard of them.” Clarence came into their hide-out with his arms loaded down with books and his backpack heavy with more.

Barbara set up the camp light and cleared the main table to give them a workplace. “Like that old woman, oh, dear…. Dorothy. Dot Garrington. The one who told us when she had been to Ombrion, and we thought she was putting us on for the longest time?”

“Or,” Diane said more softly, “Donald Jackson, the one that Verdana told us about. Went missing here — I still have the clipping. Because he died in Ombrion.”

“Do you think there’s another portal here? In [town?] If we have to go further out, it’s going to take some doing, especially with the school administration getting so concerned about us.” Barbara wrinkled her nose. Mr. Richardson was doing his best to intervene on their behalves, but the school administration had started paying far too much attention to the four of them.

“Well, that’s the first thing to look into. We know about Mrs. Garrington, and we know about Donald Jackson. Verdana confirmed those. So we have to find anyone else. I’ve got twenty years of old newspapers from old Mr. Dellard’s garage, and gloves, because old Mr. Dellard is not the tidiest.”

“How is that not going to bring suspicion?” Ralph demanded.

“Because Mr. Dellard paid me to clean out his garage,” Clarence shot back. “Because we need spending money, and we’re not old enough for jobs — and besides, I’m too short for the counter of anything retail here, and I don’t think they’d hire me as a fencing instructor.”

Barbara did not giggle, although she did smile a little bit. They were all shorter than they had been, but Clarence, they had discovered, did not have his growth spurt until eighteen or nineteen. He, of course, found the entire thing completely unfair, but there was not much one could do about biology in Ombrion, and less here on Earth.
“Jobs are a good point. I could pick up some babysitting work. The Hardessy triplets are nothing after dealing with…” Barbara trailed off softly. There were things they never talked about. That was one of them. “Well, anyway. I could babysit.”

“I think the branch library needs someone to work afternoons,” Diane offered, “and there’s more research time. After we read through Clarence’s papers here.” She slid on a pair of gloves and picked up a notepad.

Barbara did the same. “So, we’re looking for Dots and Donalds. Strange stories and missing people?”

“And maybe missing time. You remember when we made the paper and all got grounded for a month and a half?”

“Urgh. Yes.” Barbara glared at the paper. That one had been Clarence’s fault, but it was ancient history in so many ways now.

Ancient or not, it probably didn’t stink as bad as these papers. Barbara opened a window after the first thirty-year-old paper, but that didn’t help much until Ralph opened another one on the other side of the building. It meant they had to be quieter — their little hideout might be out of the way, but people did still walk by here — but since all they were doing was reading, that wasn’t all that difficult.

“Got it!” Ralph crowed out. “Look, here…” he dropped his voice to a whisper as all three of them glared at him. “Here. I mean, probably not the only one, but Millie Dioli, here. She was missing for a week, and they assumed she’d fallen in the river.”

“People fall in the river all the time,” Clarence argued.

“Yes, but they don’t come back talking about strange things she saw in the library. The Dolan library,” Ralph added, with heavy emphasis. They looked around the building they were in — the “old, abandoned library” that had “Dolan” carved very clearly above the front door. “She said she’d been in the library the whole time, and that she’d only been gone for an hour.”

“Nnng.” Barbara curled her knees to her chest. “They didn’t institutionalize her, did they?”

“No, although she was, um, ‘soundly punished for her lies’ and eventually told them she’d been off playing pirates and lost track of the time.”

“If she’d been ‘playing pirates’ in the Bay of Sorrows…” Clarence pursed his lips. “That would explain the time shift.”

They all shuddered. The Bay of Sorrows seemed to work differently from the rest of Ombrion in all ways, and it was infested with pirates that they had never been able to get rid of. “So what happened to her?” Barbara leaned forward. “If she didn’t get institutionalized…”

“I brought some phone books.” Clarence pulled them out of his bag. “Although if she married…”

Diane shook her head. “After ‘playing pirates’ with those pirates?”

They all shared another shudder, and Barbara pulled Diane close to her in a sisterly hug. “Probably not,” Clarence allowed. “Dioli… Dioli… All right, she’s in the phone book. But we should keep looking, too. If she’s only been to Ombrion, she won’t be able to help us find someplace else.”

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Planting some Good

Jul7


Written to kelkyag‘ prompt here to my Summer Giraffe Call Round 2. This plays off of and comes after The Fairy Road

The park in the middle of the city had always been creepy. In this city, that was hardly surprising, especially for the thousands of people who had no power of their own but enough of the blood to sense what was going on. The park had power, power by the boatload, and it had danger and ghosts twice on top of twice the power it had. For a small thing, a city block crossed by stone, it was fraught with history and with meaning, and it was so overgrown as to be more of a tangle than a park.

It would take careful handling, but Whitney had found that many things did. She started in the library, reading every article the Local History librarians could find her, down to the smallest clippings, single lines in the crime blotter, short paragraphs in obituaries, mentions in the Floral Column when she went back far enough.

She got permission by submitting a form that was ignored — that being the way of city bureaucracy — and she started slow, taking the earlier bus so she could have an hour in the mornings to work, carrying tools and plants in her gym bag.

“On this spot,” she told the dandelions and the thistles, “Emory MacDonald proposed to Dahlia Stonemason. He knelt here, in the alyssum, and her tears fell on the sidewalk.” She pulled weeds and smoothed down dirt, finding, under all the overgrowth, the marble border some long-ago gardener had placed with care. Into the fresh dirt, she planted some alyssum and watered them with bottled water.

“On this spot,” she told a particularly nasty weed a few days later, “Sally Hennings vanished. They say she’d collapsed, been hit so badly she had had lost consciousness, but when the police arrived, she was gone, never to resurface.” There she planted lilies, setting the bulbs in little circles so she could dig them up for the winter if she needed.

That was a Friday; in one week she had cleared an area 2 feet deep by five feet wide. But when she returned on Monday, she found she was not working alone.

“Here,” the translucent man told her, “a woman kissed her lover for the last time before the war.” He knelt down and dug, translucent or not, and daffodils — bright and flowering and out of season — replaced the matted weeds.

“Here,” a slim creature who had never been human sang, “They buried a diary. The book is gone, but the story remains.” Ivy twined from its feet, filling the shaded area with brilliant greenery.

Whitney did not turn, but she knew the voice that had come behind her. “This place has many a story, woman of the city, and you have no debt to it nor to its denizens. You will be a long time at unearthing them all, even with the help.”

“It needs to be done,” Whitney replied, although she could not have said why. “So I shall do it.”

“Very well, then. You will have the time and the space to do it in.” His voice had the finality of fairy gifts, but still, he sounded kind.

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Unicorn Truths – a story of Unicorn/Factory for Finish It! Bingo

Jul6

After Stroke the Unicorn and Unicorn Strokes, for the Finish It! Bingo

Blanket content warning for Unicorn/Factory: This setting involves unicorns using their horns for both violence and sexual violence, although none of that is directly described in this story.

Jakob took the woman to his home for the night. She deserved better than an anonymous inn bed, after the story she had given them, and, what was more, Jakob found he wanted the rest of the story.

His wife and second-oldest daughters put her to bed. They were not rich, but every home had some small corner that could be made up for guests. In the town, they whispered that the Administrators might come to visit. In the Villages, it was said that you never knew when a guest would turn out to be a unicorn in disguise.

She wore his wife’s second-best nightgown and was wrapped in a quilt Jakob’s mother had sewn for them. She seemed to fall asleep quickly, but Jakob himself lay staring at the ceiling for a very long time before dreams took him.

She ate breakfast with them the next morning, polite as a gentrywoman, appetite as small as her capacity for whisky had been large the night before. She helped Jakob’s wife Elin wash up after, and then, and only then, she asked Elin politely “May I?”

What Elin thought of this woman, Jakob might never know. She looked at this stranger, dressed in widow’s weeds and carrying such pain, and she knew what she’d wanted before Jakob did.

“Of course,” she said. There was a tone in her voice that Jakob had never heard, and it occurred to him that he was intruding on matters most often private to woman.

The woman tilted her head at Jakob. “Let us walk,” she offered, “down by the green.”

“As you wish.” She had gone to the river. She was a Village girl. What had changed in her that she carried herself so nobly? Or was it Jakob, that he wanted her to be noble, because of what she had done?

She said nothing until they were meandering the town green, sidestepping the sheep that grazed there. “You want to know what the unicorn’s answer was.”

“Lady, only if…” She cut him off with a hand.

“You were kind to me when I was being unkind. You brought me into your home when all you know of me is that a unicorn rejected me. For your kindness, I am going to repay you with harsh truths that are too much for me to bear alone. And yet, I can tell that you want me to do so.”

Jakob swallowed. “I want to know what the unicorn’s answer was,” he admitted.

“Unicorns are a mystery to men. That it was it is. They are a mystery to everyone, but the women walk to the river, and so the men think we know something they do not.”

Jakob nodded his politely, but forced the words out. “Women see the unicorns,” he offered, “and they… touch them.”

She raised an arch eyebrow at him. He thought she looked nearly amused. “Does touching someone tell you about them?”

Jakob coughed, thinking of a misspent youth. “Ah. No.”

“Indeed.” She leaned against a tree and looked pensive. “But… Sometimes, the unicorn will answer a question. Sometimes he will answer two. I asked two.”

She was leading him into the story, he knew, but he couldn’t bring himself to resent it. She had been wounded, he thought. She may be lucky to be alive. Few of those who were so wounded ever married, ever bore children.

He cleared his throat yet again. “You said you asked what you’d done wrong.”

“..I did.” She sighed. “And the unicorn told me a secret. But, you see, it’s a secret nobody wants to believe.”

Nobody, Jakob thought, meant no-one where she came from. He thought she might be challenging him, and then he thought of the days in the tavern and amended his opinion. She was challenging him.

“And the unicorn said?” he offered. He did not want to know. He did not want to hear. It was the only thing he could do, to hear.

She eyed him. “You will not want to believe.”

“Lady,” he answered, naked in sincerity and in terror, “I cannot do anything but believe, not after what you have survived.”

She bowed her head for a moment. Jakob thought, perhaps, she’d wanted him to refute.

“He said,” she whispered, so softly he had to step forward to hear him. “He said ‘sometimes the river needs the blood.’ He said,” she continued, while Jakob struggled not to rear back, “that they insisted on purity because then, then there was someone to bleed when the river needed blood. He said,” she was no longer whispering, but Jakob did not move away. “He said that he was sorry, but the unpure ones no longer came down to the river. He said,” and now she was shouting, sobbing, “he said I had done nothing wrong! And he would try to not kill me, but the river…”

Her voice broke. Jakob held her, not knowing if she wanting it, knowing only that he needed to do something. “…the river,” she whispered. “It demanded the blood. I’ve stroked a unicorn.” Her eyes went to Jakob’s. Even now he had to fight not to flinch away. He held her shoulders, feeling like he was holding so much more. “They made a bargain.” Her voice was cracking, growing weaker. “We only thought it was the one we made.”

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The Deck, the Fire, the Art – a story of the Aunt Family for my summer Giraffe Call

Jun27

Written to kelkyag‘s prompt(s) here to my Summer Giraffe Call.

Okay, this story references or is after several stories, so here goes:

This is where the divination deck originally showed up – 1st story in the whole series.
This story and then this one introduce Adam.

Wild Card comes immediately before the one below.

This is the Finish-It Bingo referencing Wild Card.

Kathleen remembered.

She did not, often, these days. In her more cognizant moments, she thought she might prefer it that way. There was so much to remember, after all, and, like holding a lighter and forgetting what you meant to set the flame to, a half of a memory could be dangerous.

Tonight she remembered. Her niece — her sister’s granddaughter, and that sort of thing was what you never forgot, because the family lines tied everything together — had turned over an ancient card in a game that was supposed to be innocent, and everything had come flashing back.

Adam, her cousin Adam, and the other one… what was his name? She remembered the wounded look in his eyes, the way he held himself as if expecting a fight. She couldn’t remember the name he had worn. But he and Adam had sat under the tutelage of aunts and grandmothers, just like — and yet completely different from — the way Kathleen and Ruan, and, much later, Rosaria, had all done.

She remembered Adam and the other one telling a story. Their eyes, she seemed to recall now, were on Ruan. There was fire in their voices, and their fingers moved across the page, brush and pencil telling as much of a story as the words.

“And he looked so fun,” Adam admitted, while the other one sketched. “He looked like a clown, or some sort of joker. Not the make-up, just the smile. I saw… I saw her looking at him.” He faltered, and picked up the paint brush.

The other one cleared his throat and let Adam take over the drawing. No, not a drawing, a card. They had been making a divination deck under Elenora’s guidance, and they’d grabbed one of the blanks to make their story. “It wasn’t that she looked at him. There’s lots of looking, at a carnival like that. She went to him.” He swallowed. Kathleen remembered the look of calculated risk in his expression. He needed to tell something. He just wasn’t sure it was a good idea. “And I saw it, all the times it had come before.”

Lightning flashed, and Kathleen was back in the present, staring at her niece. Her niece, the Aunt. She cleared her throat. “We’re going to be seeing him again,” she whispered. “I hope we’re ready this time.”

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Even a Locked Chest Must be Unlocked – a story continuation for “Finish It” Bingo.

Jun10

After A Locked Chest is Locked for a Reason, a story of the Aunt Family. To the Finish It! Bingo.

If it weren’t for the angry cat sitting on top of the chest — currently in the form of a juvenile marmalade tom — the chest would not have stood out in the Aunt’s attic. This corner of the attic, furthest from windows, chimneys, and the two entrances, was stacked to the roof with such chests, leather-clad and metal-bound, each of them locked and the keys all hung on a ring downstairs. Aunt Eva had been cataloguing and numbering them, one giant chest of diaries at a time.

Beryl studied Radar. She’d started thinking of him as her cat, foolish as she knew that was. He was an Aunt cat, and she was not the aunt.

“Can I move the chest?” she offered. “By the handles, I mean. Or on a cart?”

Radar bristled again, and then settled down, grooming every bit of his fur straight, all without answering at all.

Beryl knew from experience that fur-smoothing could take hours if not the entire day, depending on exactly how ruffled Rader felt, so she headed to the far corner of the attic for a cart.

The Aunt-house attic was something to behold, even after Eva had been sorting through it for the last few months. There were boxes in here labelled in years that began with 18—, their contents not so much detailed as broadly described. “Vases, from church picnic,” one read. “Caution: May be cursed,” read another box. Beryl avoided that one; anything an Aunt thought deserved a caution was not something she wanted to mess with casually.

“This chest isn’t labelled ‘danger’,” she pointed out to the still-grooming Radar, as she dragged the cart over to the chest. She’d grabbed a pair of silk gloves from the open box by the near stairway, and pulled those up to her elbows while she waited for an answer.

None appeared forthcoming. Radar was working on a tricky bit by his tail and didn’t even glance at her.

Beryl touched the handle of the chest; nothing changed in neither chest nor cat. “How do you know, then? g’Aunt Sarah’s been gone for, um, a while.”

Once again, Radar ignored her. Beryl picked up the chest carefully, both because you never knew how the trap-charms might be lain and because Radar was not moving from his perch, and moved it onto the hand-cart. “This is going to be a bumpy ride,” she warned him. “Um.. Hold on?”

Getting the chest to the stairs was the easy part, and Radar rode along, giving off the air that he meant to never speak again, just an ordinary cat, look, another bit of fur loose. The bumpy part came when Beryl carefully let the hand-cart down the stairs; Radar slid towards the back, shifted position without looking at Beryl, and kept grooming himself. He did the same thing as they went down the back stairs into the kitchen, where he leapt off onto the table.

Aunt Eva looked up. “Beryl, honey, I told you to bring those down a handful at a time, not a handcart at a time.”

“I know, Aunt Eva, but Radar, here, is bound and determined that nobody except you should handle these diaries. He nearly took some flesh off.”

“I barely tapped you,” Radar answered primly. “Evangeline, these books are not for childish consumption.”

“Who are you calling a child?” Beryl glared at him, no longer feeling like indulging his little tantrum. “Besides, you said only Aunt Eva should touch them!”

Radar groomed his face for a moment. “Nobody should read them. But, since the diaries of each Aunt should be read by the new Aunt, Eva must.” He looked out the window. “Bad things happen when the diaries are not read. They exist for a purpose.”

“I know that, Radar.” Eva gestured at the piles of diaries that they’d been cataloguing for months. “That’s why I asked Beryl to go get Aunt Sarah’s books.”

Radar’s tail swished angrily. “Beryl should not read these.”

“All right, all right. I tell you what. I’ll start on these while Beryl finishes up on Aunt Asta’s stuff. But if I decide she can read it, Radar, then she’ll read it.” She picked up the cat, who seemed to be getting larger the more uncomfortable he got, and held him up until she was looking him in the face. “Do you understand?”

Radar tried to stare her down, the more fool he. Finally he glanced away, as if looking out the window. “You won’t. But you’re the Aunt.” Suddenly, he was twisting and squirming. “Put me down, woman. I’m not some kitten you can manhandle like a toy!”

Eva was laughing as she set him down but when her eyes met Beryl’s, she’d gone solemn again. “You heard the cat. You get working on Asta’s early journals, and I’ll see what’s so exciting about Aunt Sarah’s stuff. All right?”

Beryl wasn’t going to win this argument. “All right, Aunt Evangeline.” She drew her aunt’s full name out like some sort of formal title, as if Aunt Eva wouldn’t have known she was sulking without some obvious cue like that.

As was probably completely fair, Eva ignored her to turn her focus on the chest. Beryl, a little embarrassed by her sulking, tried to focus on Aunt Asta’s journals, but she kept peeking up at Eva’s progress.

Aunt Asta as a young woman — pre-Aunthood by quite a while, and should Beryl be keeping a journal, too? Eva was deep in concentration over the chest, a crystal floating over the lock and one more held over each front corner. If the chest was booby-trapped, now was not the time to ask her about — well, anything.

She had gone to fight in the war! Well, to “support the war effort,” but the women of their family were fighters rather than supporters. The family had been against it. Of course. Beryl made a face at the pages and the grannies-who-had-come-before. Even Chalce was having trouble with that. Family stayed close, until it was time to split. Never mind that Berkeley had the program she wanted and wanted her in return.

Aunt Eva had the chest open, the crystals put away. You never knew when a nosy neighbor might stop by. But she hadn’t moved from her seat on the floor; she was holding the old book carefully, squinting at the handwriting.

“Aunt Boo’s journal has a cantrip for reading better,” Beryl offered. “Journal three, the blue one… what?” Eva had glanced up at her, not quite meeting her eyes. “You’re blushing.” Aunts didn’t blush! …did they?

Eva cleared her throat. She looked away, took a sip of tea, and cleared her throat again. Even old Aunt Sarah’s books couldn’t have been that dusty. There were cantrips and embedded charms for that, easy ones.

“Ah. Well… it appears…” She looked around the room, so Beryl looked as well. Radar was nowhere to be seen, and no grannies or cousins had snuck in. They were alone in the kitchen.

Eva took another sip of her tea. “It appears that Aunt Sarah has a very active life. And she was, um, quite detailed in her descriptions.” She glanced down at the page, her blush darkening. “I wonder how Radar knew.”

“I was there when Asta opened them.” Radar strolled in, tail high and looked as if he’d never had his little freak-out. “And Elenora. So you see?”

Beryl held her breath. She didn’t even know if she wanted to read Aunt Sarah’s dirty diaries, but complaining that she was old enough to would just prove that she wasn’t.

Eva glanced down at the diary and sipped her tea again. “I do see,” she agreed slowly. She looked up at Beryl and winked. “Annd… once she’s done properly cataloguing Asta’s journals… Beryl should read them as well. There are preconceptions about Aunts that I think it’s best she lose early on.

Radar’s tail fluffed up and his back started to arch. He shook himself, although his tail stayed puffed out like a chimney brush. “As… you… say,” he grated out.

It probably wasn’t kind to laugh at him, but Beryl’s hand was still stinging from where he’d smacked her.

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The Rescue of Junie, for “Finish It” Bingo and several requests.

May25

Never Try to Steal a Dweomer
Backpack Gremlins (LJ)
Hunting Junie I (LJ)
Hunting Junie II (LJ)
Hunting Junie III (LJ)
Red Covers (LJ)
Bounty (LJ)
Team D (LJ)
Victimization (LJ)

This runs to 3800 words.

There was a man – a human man, a bog-standard boring kidnapping human, normal and plain as they came – picking up an unconscious dweomer child, and Kelkathian and Azdekious were doing nothing at all to stop him.

Indeed, they were riding along, Az tucked inside Junie’s backpack and Kel riding in her front shorts pocket.

There was another human – even more boring and standard than the first, including the fact that this one didn’t even have a shred of common sense – swearing at the first human, but the first one was doing his best to ignore him.

There had been a number of scenarios in Kel and Az’s planbook that ended like this, but none of them had been this positive.

The only problem was, as Kel saw it, that this human might not be a match for the first three teams of creeps that were after Junie, and he was, at the moment, their biggest, best defense for her.

Well, that and he’d been fine with the whole kidnapping idea, up until he found out that the kidnap victim just happened to be from Smokey Knoll. Kel couldn’t argue with the guy’s self-preservation instincts, but one had to question his moral choices.

“Hey! Tall person!” He might not be able to see gremlins. There were definitely humans who seemed to have an issue with their vision, especially when it came to the Small and Smaller Races. But if he could…

The man swallowed and stopped dead. “I am trying to take this child back to her family. I am going to take her back to the bus stop where she was grabbed—”

“Yeah, yeah, you said that already. Down here, human.” Kel waved. “I’m not big but your eyesight can’t be that bad.”

He squinted, sucked in breath, and stumbled. Kel noted that, though he nearly fell down, he never lost his grip on Junie. “Shit. Shit, look, I swear I didn’t know. Donnie, that idiot —”

“How was I supposed to know?” Donnie shouted from somewhere under the roof-lining of the van. “And who are you talking to?”

The human coughed. “Uh. One of the girl’s protectors. Good luck, Donnie.”

“Smart man.” Kel peered up at him. “So. You have a problem.”

“I, uh, I noticed that, yeah. I’m trying to fix that.” He was turning red. Kel always found it fascinating how humans did that.

“Not us. Not even her parents. Or the dragons that are her friends. Or her harpy babysitters. Those are problems. You have a more immediate issue.”

“…are you wearing mirrorshades?”

“Yep. Bodyguard duty.”

The man barely suppressed a snicker. “Right. Sorry. What’s the bigger problem than the dragons?”

“You’re team D. Which means teams A through C — which know what she is — are gunning for you now.”

“…oh.” Kel wasn’t entirely sure about human coloration, but suddenly-pale didn’t seem like a good sign. “Oh. Are, uh. Are these ‘teams’, are they, that is, um. Human?”

“Well.” Kel ticked them off on fingers. “The mirrorshades, we’re pretty sure they’re human. Team A. Team C, that’s a hunter. Could be human, could be a dweomer. Betting on human, though, or he’d have twigged what we were doin’ to him quicker. That leaves team B.” Kel shuddered melodramatically. “We’re not sure about him. But I’d stay away from any sweet old men if I were you.”

The human had regained some of his color. He looked down at Kel and twisted his lips up. “Look. I might be human, but one of the things I know about places like Smokey Knoll is that you avoid anything that looks sweet, or innocent, or innocuous. Like her.” He nodded at the unconscious girl in his arms. “So. I’ve got to get her to the bus stop and I’ve got to keep her away from several other creeps. I’ve got to avoid being eaten by any bodyguards who might not understand why I’m there. And I’ve got to do this all while knowing her parents might still kill me.”

Kel nodded sharply. “That’s about it.”

“Remind me to go into a better line of work if I survive this.”

This guy was starting to grow on Kel. “Good idea.”

———

Chelsea had been swearing for ten straight minutes. Ryan had been checking their equipment — still dead, of course — their visuals — still blank of anything except two very annoyed harpies — and, lacking anything else, his own pulse — still running high, but that was to be expected with Chelsea swearing up a storm and their target simply gone.

He wasn’t going to ask if she had magic that let her do that. Not yet. It might go on the list eventually — like Chelsea had said, they were into the “red covers” now, which apparently meant off the map and into the “here be dragons” part.

Ryan’s gran had warned him about those parts of the map — in Gran’s place, she’d been being literal. “Don’t go to Seventh Street, that’s where the witches live.” “There’s dragons down in the subways, so always take some rue and some comfrey with you when you take the Metro.” It had turned out that the witches on Seventh weren’t remotely human — elkin, they called themselves, but they were anomalous individuals to the home office and, living down in the numbered streets, hadn’t managed legal representation to challenge the label. The dragons in the sewer were a non-sentient — according to home office, who hadn’t had to cage them — being that was not, technically speaking, a dragon, but you couldn’t fault Gran for the assessment.

After the dragon-things, Ryan had started writing down everything he could remember of his Gran’s cautionary tales.

In code. In a locked notebook. That was locked in a hidden case. The home office —

Well, if Chelsea was talking about the Red Covers, maybe the home office was more understanding about folk tales than he’d thought.

They would not, however, be understanding about missing the target another time. Ryan sighed and checked the visuals one more time.

“Chelsea? Chels. Ma’am. You’ve got to see this.”

———
Orin was in something a few steps beyond a foul mood. He had been dive-bombed by harpy chicks, stabbed by pixies, and farted on by a centaur foal, and all that in the half an hour he had taken trying to leave the neighborhood nearest Smokey Knoll.

The nonhumans didn’t usually let their children out of the village without an adult escort, but Orin had a feeling what was going on. He’d already been suspecting gremlins when his equipment started failing… and gremlins probably counted as adult supervision when your kid had wings or hooves.

Orin looked at the thing in front of him now. He didn’t like using words like thing; get to thinking about your prey as non-people and you forget they thought like people — more or less. But this… well, it was outside his vocabulary of monsters. And if this was the juvenile, he really had to get out of the area before the adult showed up.

He held up both hands and spoke carefully and clearly. “I’m leaving. I’m just trying to get to West Ave. Leaving Smokey Knoll.”

The thing growled deep in its throat. It was asymmetrical! Living beings just weren’t. Was it wrong? Like, sick or damaged somehow?

It didn’t matter. It was moving towards Orin threateningly. He didn’t dare attack it if it was a juvenile. He didn’t dare let it attack him. Orin repeated himself. “I’m just trying to leave.”

The thing cut off in mid-growl. It turned, facing more or less where Orin had been trying to go, and snorted.

“Well, shit,” Orin muttered, as the thing lumbered off down his escape route.

~~~

“Well.” Kel shifted position on Junie’s backpack strap. “I see the mirrorshades and the creepshow, but not the … oooh.” The echoing bellow of an upset juvenile troll cut through the air. “I wonder what got Little Junior upset. Well, he’s harmless to … uh. Me and Az, and Junie. He loves Junie.”

The human coughed. “Junie?” He looked down at the girl and the gremlin he was carrying. “Is this…”

“Yeah. The darling of large parts of Smokey Knoll. Relax, relax,” Kel scolded. “You didn’t know, and Az and I are gonna do our best to keep you alive.”

“Toads are alive,” he muttered. Kel snorted.

“Nobody in Smokey Knoll would turn you into a toad. Well… nobody you’re going to run into in this situation. Hrrm. You see the people in the expensive sedan looking upset?” Kel gestured, because even with binoculars, nobody would see a gremlin gesture at 200 feet.

The human had to be more surreptitious, but he was. “Yep. Those your team A?”

“Yeah. I think they’re working for one of the big paramilitary groups. And Junie might not be powerful now… but she’s still a little-thing and they like to get them little and…”

The human swallowed. “Yeah. I get it. Creepy bastards with back up.”

“On the plus side, they have no functioning tech more impressive than a stick and, if I really wanted to, I could make their sticks stop working.” Kel grinned. “Az and me are good.”

“Remind me not to piss you two off… again.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll need any reminding if you get out of this. Of course, we fried the kid’s cell phone, too. That was a mistake.”

“Oh, good to know I’m not the only one who screwed up.” He made a face. “What’s this creepshow?”

“You see that old man there? The bird-watcher with the binoculars and the breadcrumbs?”

“Him? I’ve seen him all over town.”

“Yeah, well, normal kids work too, it’s just the fancy ones like Junie are a delicacy.”

“Are a…” He swallowed. “Right. Anyone notice if I put a bullet through his brain?”

“Probably your authorities. Unless we vanished the body… but we try not to do that too much. Has consequences.”

“I do not want to know how gremlins vanish bodies,” he muttered. “Okay, so I have to get past the sedan and the… shit, I think the sedan saw me.” The two in mirrorshades were getting out of their useless car and heading their way. “This is going to get messy.”

Privately, Kel was inclined to agree with him. “Az!” Gremlins had very good hearing, when they wanted to. “Trouble!”

“What are they going to do, hit him with sticks?” Az’s return hiss was almost a cackle. “They’ve got nothing.”

“They’ve got two big folk to our one big folk, one unconscious child, and us. That’s not good odds, Az. And the creep is still over there.”

As if he’d heard Kel, the creep looked up, binoculars pointed straight at Junie. Kel swore. “We could really use the cavalry.”

~

A repeating bellow was echoing over Smokey Knoll. Ryan’s field book said it was probably a juvenile troll.

He didn’t know whether to be more worried about that or the man in Very Ordinary Clothes carrying their target — their unconscious — target directly into the probable path of the juvenile troll.

Then again, there was the dark cloud growing over Smokey Knoll. That looked really worrisome, too.

At the moment, however, Ryan’s attention was utterly and completely held by the petite flying person aiming a small spear at his nose. Her — he was assuming her, and let Chelsea ream him out later — voice was a chipper, happy squeak that he could barely hear.

“I’m looking for my friend! She’s… she’s a tallfolk, but short for tallfolk, and she’s got brownlike hair and she went missing about when you showed up.” The thing had pink hair and, more importantly for Ryan right now, the tip of the spear was pink. Glistening, sickly-sweet pink.

Ryan swallowed very carefully. If he breathed heavily, he might be able to blow her away. Then again, if he breathed too heavily, she might jab that pink spear at his nose, and Ryan didn’t know what that would do.

He made a mental note to look up pixie weapons later. If he was a very small creature with a very large temper — which this thing apparently had, even if their species as a whole did not — he would be carrying the deadliest poisons he could get his tiny hands on, or maybe neurotoxins, paralytics, acids… the list went on, none of which he wanted poking into his face.

“If you will look to my left,” he said, very carefully and very slowly, “you might see a tallfolk, ah, a human—” probably “—carrying the young lady that is probably the one you are looking for.”

The pixie flew even closer to him. She was holding the spear with a great deal of professional skill, for all that she could fit in his cupped hands. Ryan held very, very still.

With a whoop that threatened to break glass, she darted away. “Junie! Junie, Junie what are you doing to her?”

The cloud was getting closer. Ryan glanced at Chelsea. “Walk to a safe bus stop, send a tow for the car tomorrow?”

“We can’t just…” She frowned and looked at the cloud. “Yes. Walk fast, Junior. If you want to live to go on another mission.”

Ryan glanced up the hill into Smokey Knoll. He swallowed once, and turned around and started walking — quickly — before he snapped out a “yes, ma’am.”

Chelsea was shorter than him. He made sure she didn’t fall behind.

~

Kel whooped happily as the mirrorshades ran off. “That’s two down! Now all we have left is… oh.”

“Yeah, oh. That doesn’t look good.” The cloud on the horizon had settled itself into the shape of millions of insects — or very angry pixies — swarming towards the bus stop. “I don’t suppose they’re here to eat the last of your baddies, are they?”

“They’re no more my baddies than they are — uh. Kid’s waking up. Be very careful, mister, and whatever you do, no sudden moves.”

“She’s…” he stopped whatever he was going to say. “Right. Uh. Pink things.”

“Pink… oh.” Flying towards them was a small team of angry pixies. “Same goes for them only twice.” Kel stood up as tall as possible on the backpack strap and waved both arms wildly. “Same team, same team!” For once, the gremlin wished to be larger. “Same team.”

“Same team,” the human echoed. “Easy, easy, I’m on your side. I am..” he swallowed as one of the little pink pixies — taller than a gremlin, sure, but delicate and flighty and ethereal, everything gremlins really weren’t — the little thing hoovered in the air near his nose. “I am taking Junie to her family. Can you contact her family? She is unconscious and she is in danger.”

“He’s on our side,” Kel confirmed. The pixy barely glanced down, but that wasn’t surprising. Its spear pulled back a little bit; it had heard. “Junie’s been drugged, and I don’t know what will happen when she wakes up — which is going to be soon. What happened to the harpy team? Haven’t seen them around.”

“They were on Teams A and B for a bit, but they started getting sick. Medula fell out of the air.” The pixie tittered. Pixies were not known for their empathy. “So they had to head off. Something’s drugged them or something.” It was still looking directly at the human. “The others have been doing what they can, but there’s a lot of funny-headedness going around. Anything bigger than us isn’t happy.”

Kel’s gaze was pulled towards the dark cloud of bugs. “Yeah. That’s some really nasty mojo going on. And Junie…”

“I think she’s waking up.” The human shifted uncomfortably. “Should I set her down?”

At some point, this guy was going to figure out that Kel and Az were using him as legs. “No, no. Not until her eyes are open and she’s making words. Any word on the cavalry?” Where was everyone?”

“Green team couldn’t get any answer. And brown team couldn’t make their selves understood.” The pixie clucked in frustration. “This wouldn’t happen if…”

“Shht, shhht,” Kel hissed. “And if the sky were pink what would the flowers look like? We’ve got what we’ve got and that’s that.”

“Well, what we’ve got is this… guy. This guy-thing doing this.” The pixy gestured backwards angrily at the cloud of bugs coming closer and closer.

“Wait.” The human crouched down carefully. “I’ve got an idea.” He looked up at the pixy. “You should go find an adult person big enough to carry Junie and legally or morally responsible for her. Parent, parent-of-blessings, whatever. Someone that can get her home. And you should go now.”

Kel frowned at the human. Blessings-parent? Most of the experience the gremlins had with humans was in annoying their technology, but didn’t they normally say godparent? Blessings-parents, that was… well, it was a centaur word, as far as Kel knew.

Also, what was he up to?

The pixy was frowning, too — glaring, really. “What are you to tell me what to do?”

“Look, if I do this right, it’s doing to disrupt all magic in a small radius. If there’s any magic in your flight….”

“Right, looking for Junie’s family or the Smiths.” The pixy took off in a flutter of wings.

“”Right. So, I’m going to need you and your partner to distract any humans with tech, and keep Junie calm if you can. This is gonna take — well, hopefully not too long.” From his pockets, the human pulled a few things. Kel recognized a packet of salt, a candle stub, a small bamboo fan. “Don’t suppose there’s water in her bag?”

“Az,” Kel hissed. A moment later, the shorter gremlin emerged, hauling a short bottle of water — short for a human’s hand, at least. Az was wrapped around it like a cozy.

“Thank you.” He scattered the salt in a circle and, much to Kel’s surprise, added pepper. Then he put the water bottle to one side of him and the candle to the other. A flick of a bic lighter and the candle was burning. Three pebbles went directly behind him.

“What are you doing, human?” Kel wanted to jump up and down. “We should be running.”

“I can’t outrun that, not carrying her and maybe not on my own. You and your partner are welcome to try if you want, but leave now.”

Kel frowned. “No. She’s our responsibility.”

“And because of my partner’s idiocy, she’s my responsibility, too. So let me work.”

Kel looked at the cloud. It would be on them soon. “Right.”

The human began muttering things under his breath. Some of it was Latin, Kel thought. Parts sounded like Low Ogre or Simplified Dragon. One part sounded like High Troll.

Kel watched him. The power was crackling off of him, crackling, sparking, rising, and… connecting. Slowly, far too slowly for Kel’s comfort, the lines of power began to touch the salt and fuse to it.

The bug-cloud was close enough that they could hear it, a steady, malevolent buzz. The power weaving into the salt formed a ring and began lifting up, surrounding them. The buzzing grew closer, setting Kel’s jaw on edge.

“Hey!” The policeman seemed to notice them before he noticed the bugs. Or maybe he thought the human was making the bug cloud. “You can’t…”

Belts were hard, but they counted as technology. Kel fried his with a sharp glance and a moment of hard concentration that caught his radio and his cell phone in the blast.

The cloud was resolving into millions of individual bugs. Not bugs, bees, and wasps and hornets. Kel dove into the bag, head out in case the policeman wasn’t deterred.

The human shouted a final word — it had to be Latin, Kel was pretty sure — and the sparkling ring of light closed in a dome over their heads. He sagged a little, just as Junie opened her eyes.

“What… hey!”

Kel was still holding a tight breath. Those bees… they could easily kill a gremlin. That many bees, they could easily kill a small human, maybe a large one. The cloud of bugs was heading straight for them.

“Hey, hey, let me go.” Junie was wriggling violently in the human’s arms now. Kel tensed. She had a habit of getting… explosive… when she got too stressed, and then passing out and forgetting the whole thing. It was a third of why the gremlins had been assigned to watch her; nothing fazed a gremlin.

But right now exploding could hurt Junie badly. Kel couldn’t look away from the bees. There was this thin line of salt between the threat and them. there was… Kel took a breath. “Junie, honey. This human is a friend. He’s taking you back to your parents.”

“Let me go… Kelkathian? Azdekious?” Junie’s voice went quiet. “That’s a lot of bugs.”

The bugs hit the edge of the salt line and broke over the shield, hitting it like a windshield, scattering around it, flying over it. For a moment, their little group was surrounded on all sides by stinging insects… but none came inside the shield.

The human let out a breath. “Hi,” he said ruefully to Junie. “I’m the cavalry.”

Around them, half of the bugs vanished. A third of them fell to the ground, confused or stunned. The rest of them flew off aimlessly. Whatever magic had been guiding or summoning them had been broken.

Kel sniffed the air. The distinctive sulfur smell that always heralded a Junie-attack was slowly dissipating. But… Kel studied Junie. There had been no attack.

A flap of dragon wings and a dragon-trumpet announced that one of the Smiths would soon be here — Cxaidin, from the sound of it. Kel looked up at the… at the would-be kidnapper. “You…” Kel took a breath. “You’re not a human.”

The… the would-be kidnapper… smirked. He looked, Kel thought, justifiably tired. “You’re the only one who said I was.”

“But…” Kel flapped hands at the place they sat, between Smokey Knoll and the human world. Junie peered at her, looking mostly perplexed and a little lost.

The not-a-human shrugged, still smiling. “Some of us find places like Smokey Knoll, I guess. Some of us aren’t so lucky.” Deliberately, he leaned to one side and broke the salt circle. “The dragon’s your friend, right?”

Kel felt as stunned as the bees on the ground still looked. “Uh… yeah. Cxaidin Smith. Junie’s god-father.”

“Safe travels, gremlins. Junie.” He helped the girl to her feet with a gentle thump. “Thanks for giving me a chance.”

Cxaidin landed with a dragon-snort, eating all of Kel’s attention for a moment. By the time the gremlin turned around, the not-human was gone.

Buy the
Thorne-Author
some tea

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A Reason, a continuation of Space Accountant

Apr20

This follows after: Taking Chances, Betting on it, Betting Time, Bunking Arrangements, and Accidental.

It is a partial answer to Kelkyag‘s question here and is only a year and a half in coming…

“Spill.” First Mate Cleonorayen Clyd flopped into the spare chair in Quatermaster Marist Irio’s bunk without asking or even knocking. She made up for it by thunking down a thick bottle filled with a bluish liquid.

Marist grabbed two heavy-bottomed glasses and poured generous shots. “You’re talking about the little accountant, right?”

“Bunk change. Bunk change, Marist, what on earth possessed you?”

“What? She wanted a bunk change, I gave her one. Pretty Marsey there is going to be a happy-if-confused young man for the next year.”

“But he could have been that without a marriage contract. What are you up to?”

“Pitmaster.” Marist threw back her drink in one swallow. “If the girl is in a marriage contract, she doesn’t go to the Pit. And none of us want her going to the Pit… do we?”

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The Thing about Tangling… (an experimental fic of Spring/Stranded World)

Apr8

This follows Tangled, Day Job, and Tangling isn’t just a walk in the park.

“Ready to go?”

The thing about being a tangler…

“Hold on, just give me a minute…”

Is that you were touching strands all the time.

“Spring, my love, can you be organized for more than fifty seconds?”

And running your hands through other people’s lines all the time.

“If you wanted someone organized, Lance, you should have bothered someone else’s stars.”

But you couldn’t touch other people’s strands…

“I didn’t want anyone else’s stars. Here’s your left shoe.”

…without getting tangled up yourself.

“Awesome. Now, where’s my purse?”

And the thing about knots was…

“You didn’t leave it on the bus again, did you?”

…they tended to manifest in strange ways when you weren’t paying attention.

“No, no, you brought it home for me. Remember?”

…and when you were distracted, tangled up in someone else, it was easy to not pay attention.

“That’s right… here it is. What would you do without me?”

“Oh, I’d get by. But it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.”

And the thing about being a tangler was…

“Well, I do aim to please.”

…When you got tangled up, you got really tangled up.

“And that’s what I love about you. Well, part of it.”

Close with a kiss, and find yourself even further tangled.

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Happy Inter-Universal Women’s (Week): Eva and the Tarot

Mar9

to [personal profile] kelkyag‘s prompt here:Eva and the opinionated tarot deck.

It was a quiet night.

“Too quiet,” Eva muttered to herself, making her voice ominous and over-dramatic. It was silly… and it was begging trouble. She did it anyway.

Her nieces and nephews were all off doing whatever it was they did. Her aunts and great-aunts and assorted other older relatives were all off doing whatever it was they did. Her sisters and cousins were all probably taking a breath, just as she was.

Except she exhaled carefully over her most difficult deck and drew a single card.

The queen of pentacles looked at her upside-down. Eva glared at the card, and it glared back at her.

“This is my job,” she informed the deck, but a guilty pang in her chest told her otherwise.

The Aunt was not usually employed, but Eva was not trying to be a normal, usual Aunt.

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