Tag Archive | prompter: rix
Turning Leaves
Written to rix_scaedu‘s prompt.
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The leaves were turning wrong.
When you lived in a wooded area for a while, you got so you could feel the rhythm of autumn. The leaves closest to the road, closest to the prevailing wind, closest to anything that chilled them down, turned first. The biggest trees turned slower. The middle of the woods turned slow and last.
But in the forest behind Erato’s house, there was an almost circular place where the leaves had starting turning quickly, almost before the little maple that faced the wind all alone to the west of her house. Continue reading
Dating Things – a story of Tootplanets for Patreon
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The spellbook had been one of the best finds on the planet they had poetically called 17-5-12.
The original population had been something very close to humanoid, as far as the drawings, the records, and the shapes of the buildings showed. They had left behind stacks and stacks of ephemera, all of it on linen-esque paper-fabric, much of it rolled into scrolls, slide into cases, and sealed into vaults.
At least: much of what survived had been treated such. They’d found a lot of scraps here and there, pieces stuffed into nests of the local rodents and the local avians, pieces stapled to walls by what they assumed were the last survivors. Continue reading
Summer Vacation, a vignette of Jamian et al for Patreon
Part of my continual crosspost/mirroring project
Set some years after the apocalypse. Jamian is a character from my first webserial, Addergoole. Miryam came from Addergoole: Year 9. This is just a little bit of them on a beach, to Rix’s prompt and Wyste and B’s choice of characters. Oh, and Cay and Vi are also from Addergoole. Arna has most of her mentions in Addergoole: a Ghost Story but also comes up in Year Nine.
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Jamian still loved the idea of summer vacation. The world had more or less fallen down around their ears; the resort towns were all boarded up, fallen down, or walled off into compounds; there was no office job to take a vacation from, no school to get the kids out of, and his kids were all out of the nest anyway. But he still would take a week and just walk down to a beach somewhere to dip his feet in the water, while Cay and Vi laughed at him from a solid vantage point.
Continue reading
Two snippets to Prompts
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.
Inconvenient Magic – a story for Patreon
I have discovered that Asta might be my favorite Aunt. The more I write about her and her “placeholder” status, the more I like her.
This takes place maybe 5 years before Evangaline becomes Aunt, so in the 2000’s. We have not met Will before.
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“Oh, dear.” Asta patted her nephew’s shoulder gingerly. “Not again?”
Will sighed and looked out the window. “Again. I managed to cover it up, the way you showed me…”
“But if this keeps happening, eventually the grandmothers and the mothers and the fussbudgets down at church are going to figure it out, no matter how small-minded they are,” Asta finished with a sigh. “And then they’re going to give you Willard’s choice.” Continue reading
Stranded Cat
The cat was trailing strands behind itself, so thickly that at first Spring could not see the color of the cat or the shape of it, just a cat-size ball of Strands.
“Did you-”
Her partner snorted. “That’s Ginger Tom. Well, that’s what I call him.”
Spring squinted, and noticed a line from her partner to the cat, no, several, thin but intense.
“Ginger Tom?” she prompted. This was… interesting.
“Well, Anna down the street, she calls him Pumpkin.” He strolled up the hill of his neighborhood as if it were flat. “And then Geordi down there, he calls him Nightmare. And Candid-and-Cariadad, they call him Only Man, and the redhead who won’t tell me her name, she calls him brother.”
Now Spring could make out the cat, a big orange – no surprise – ginger tom. “They all know him?”
“Know him, love him, feed him. you can see it, can’t you?”
“The way he’s connected to the whole neighborhood?” Spring paused. “No, that’s not right. Not quite connected.” She found herself smiling. “Smart cat. I didn’t know they could do that. He’s made himself the neighborhood.”
“Not a mouse or vole in a mile radius.” Her partner was definitely proud. “And he brings the other cats around like a posse, too.” He gestured towards several other cats. “Shares the food. He’s a good cat.”
Watching the strands twisting around the hill, Spring had to agree.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1307202.html. You can comment here or there.
The Wall- a story for Patreon
History and memory did not go past the wall.
It was as tall as anyone could imagine, an unknown width, and it surrounded the Community, giving them room enough to live and grow but no more.
It could not be climbed, being smooth to the touch and unpleasant to be in contact with for any length of time. It could not be drilled through, nor broken. It could not be dug underneath.
The people of the Community asked themselves what the wall was for, and they came up with many stories in answer: it was to protect them from something big and deadly outside. It was to protect something small and fragile from them. It was the edge of the world. It was a portal into another space.
Continue reading
The Trouble With Chickens…
“The trouble with chickens,” Professor Feltenner had written in her journal, “is that they don’t scale very well. And when they scale up, their instincts do not. They have been domesticated for far too long. What I need is a wild chicken, a chicken who has never been bred for tameness and domesticity. That, then, should be clever enough for what I need.”
Professor Feltenner’s travels into the jungles were the stuff of academic legend. It had become the very morbid joke around the university that if you did not like a student, it was a clever idea to get them to take Feltenner’s classes, because there was a very good chance she would then take them with her on one of her summertime or winter-break expeditions – and then there was a very, very good chance that they would not return.
Professor Feltenner, on the other hand, always returned – even that last time, that fateful trip when she came back with one bedraggled grad student, two smallish cages, and a man named Gorvald she claimed to have found in the middle of the jungle. Since Gorvald’s accent spoke of the Rus and the far-Eastern mountain ranges, everyone at the university raised eyes at that – but Gorvald was good with the things in the cages, and someone needed to be. Gods above knew the poor grad student whimpered every time she saw so much as a feather.
“The trouble with chickens ought to be solved by working with a more pure specimen,” Professor Feltenner wrote in her journal. “Today, Gorvald and I begin the experiment on the junglefowl we have acquired. With luck, working from an enlarged junglefowl pair, we can begin breeding better and juicier meat with a much more sensible bird.”
The junglefowls’ thoughts on that were never properly recorded; once they had dealt with Professor Feltenner, they (with brains that scaled up, it seemed, much better than their domestic counterparts’) opened the doors to the lab and fled, taking several carriage-sized domestic fowl with them. You could hear their cries late at night in the forests near the University, and the professors had a new way to rid themselves of difficult students.
Next: http://www.lynthornealder.com/2017/04/30/the-trouble-with-theories/
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1280875.html. You can comment here or there.
The Tale-Teller – a story for Patreon
The thing was, she was both the tale-teller and the story. She was both the portrait and the model. She was the song and its subject.
There were theories about that, of course: theories and theses and stories and myths. Stories have a lot of power, after all.
And storytellers have a power, a mystery, all of their own.
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She came into town, whispers and mystery. Wild like the harvest wind, lean and hungry. Continue reading