Tag Archive | prompter: mb
Protected: Drawing a Line
Protected: Margen’s Wort
Ladies Who Garden
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways, Community Service and Time Passes on Patreon.
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It was Whitney’s second spring working on the Crossroads park, so she had gotten used to some of the more surprising help – not just the fae and ghosts, the strange-people and the occasional mysterious work done between when she left one night and when she returned the next, but vagrants and rebellious kids, cops and neighbors of the area and, once, the entire local chapter of the Pagans motorcycle club.
She was, still, a little bit confused when seven women – all wearing pastel straw hats over their well-coiffed grey hair, sporting gloves with flowers on them that nevertheless looked as if they had seen use at some point, and carrying brightly-coloured caddies full of gardening tools – walked up to her while she was taking a water break.
“Gwendolyn Marcus.” The lead woman – yellow hat, yellow gloves, pink caddy – held out a gloved hand. Continue reading
The Trouble With…
Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
This story is a continuation of The Trouble With Chickens and all other stories in The Feltenner Chickens section of the Science! universe. If you haven’t read those, the pertinent points are: the chickens are huge. The size of carriages. Large parts of the university have been given over to them. And the Professor Lokeg-Fridelabout doesn’t mind getting students killed.
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“You want to – to convert one of the abandoned buildings into a poorhouse?” Resklin Tarajirra had never seen Professor Lokeg-Fridelabout look quite so surprised. Up until now, he hadn’t know the professor had emotions beyond snide, annoyed, and cruelly pleased – although the annoyed had gotten awfully dark last week when Trenner Oujiduie showed up with a Feltenner chicken chick following her around. “Tarajirra, that seems rather dark for one of your sort – it seems dark even for me,” the professor admitted in a rare moment of self-awareness. “If you wanted to eliminate the poor, there are kinder ways than feeding them to Feltenner chickens and the Wind Alone knows what else lives in there. What did Oujiduie’s paper say? Ferrets?”
Ah, a snide sneer. That was more like it.
“Ferrets, yes, Professor. You see, I don’t want to feed the poor to the chickens. Or the ferrets. My thought is more in the other direction – with the analysis that we’ve been working on, if we could feed the chicken eggs to the poor, we could start a very reasonable work house there, move some of the more tedious research in that direction –”
“That, Tarajirra, is what graduate students are for.”
Continue reading
Discovery
Originally posted on Patreon in March 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
This is a story of Audrey and Sage of Dragons Next Door, after Rule One but before they leave their schools.
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The door to Sage’s lab burst open. Victor Puddington strode in, waving a piece of paper in his off hand and a book in his good hand. “They found a new herb!”
Sage ran both hands over the cantrip he was working on, casting a stasis spell that hopefully would hold it until he could get Victor out of his office. “Found? They? Herb? Puddles, you’re being dreadfully inspecific.”
“Don’t call me that.” It was habit by now; Sage wasn’t certain that Victor even knew he was saying it. “All right, all right. If you want to be specific, here we go. While exploring some of the narrow passes in dragon territory – the ones that are untouched for the most part because the dragons can’t really get in there – they – they in this case being the Tower’s Deep Exploration Team, you know, Smitty and his boys -” Continue reading
Time Passes
Originally posted on Patreon in February 2019 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
After The Fairy Road and Planting Some Good on my blog and The Cats’ Ways and Community Service here on Patreon.
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There was not, Whitney had thought, an easy part to the restoration of the Crossroads Park. The whole thing was a challenge, and the whole thing was back-breaking work, work that ate time, hours and weeks and seemingly years passing by while she dug. The whole thing was the hard part.
That was before she got to the really hard part.
There was a corner of the park now that looked fresh and beautiful — so fresh that not only had the local newspaper taken pictures, one of the national magazines had come in to tell her story. The plantings, mostly perennials, had been picked to thrive with minimal care, the grass was trimmed weekly by a local kid who wanted something to do for a school project, and the local fae and spirits had taken to sharply … reprimanding… anyone who littered in the cleaned area or near it.
But that meant that first, the rest of the park looked far worse than it was, and secondly, Whitney was now faced with a wall of brambles where a raspberry bush and a rose bush had gone feral and started fighting over a statute of a Revolutionary War hero. Continue reading
Protected: plus ça change
Community Service
Originally posted on Patreon in November 2018 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
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The storm had come through the city in a rush and left much the same way, like the sort of relative you never really wanted to have staying in your house, leaving everything a disaster zone behind it.
There were branches down on every street; there were power lines down all over the place. Work was closed. The city was closed.
And Whitney was in the park. It seemed, if she’d been asked – which she hadn’t – like the thing to do; you cleaned up. Her apartment building had power – slightly erratic, but better than nothing – so she’d cooked everything that might go bad and brought it all, stacked in her biggest coolers with warming pads, to the park with her.
She shared with the couple homeless folk who refused to go anywhere else. She shared with the policeman who was doing his best to walk a beat; she shared, of course, with the cats and with the Cat. She shared with the line workers, even though she knew that they didn’t mind the overtime.
In between sharing food, she moved branches and detritus. She picked up someone’s schoolwork – Tyler Halpert – and put it in a neat stack under one of the little roofed areas, along with the newspaper, the paperwork from the insurance office, and some sort of mail that came in a red envelope with hearts drawn on it.
When she looked back, there was a ghost sitting on it. She smiled at the ghost; he smiled at her. They both went on with their days.
Whitney thought nothing of it when she saw the policeman talking on his radio. That was his job, after all. She was much more surprised when three vans pulled up. Continue reading