Tag Archive | prompter: sky

Know the Ropes

May26

Once again I asked for prompts on the FediVerse and Ciel offered me a lovely one. 

Content warning: bondage.

*~*

The noise of the city vanished in Mackenzie’s lair; everything vanished in her lair.  The floor was soft, the walls were painted a very pale blue, and the hooks overhead were painted to match the slightly darker blue of the very durable ceiling.  The cabinets along one wall were placed so that they more or less vanished into a shadow; the door itself was hidden in the shadows of those cabinets. 

When you walked in, when Mackenzie set the lights just so, you could pretend there was nothing else in the world but you, her, and the room. 

Right now, Bran was feeling as if Mackenzie’s smile was its own fourth participant.  “I saw you with Antony the other night, your video.”  She licked her lips. 

Bran raised his eyebrows.  “That’s the thing Antony and I do,” he answered carefully.  He and Mackenzie had a very well-defined relationship, both inside and outside of this room.  Jealousy had never entered into it, jealousy for either of them. She had a boy who kept her bed warm most nights and cooked her dinner.  He had Antony he tied up on camera, and Kef most weekends, in and out of the club.  Continue reading →

Quite Pleasant

Nov20

Story written to @SkySailor’s prompt on Mastodon, because it is that sort of day. 

Content warning: Non-consensual sex (not in detail but definitely there), incarceration, impregnation, transportation, and almost anything else you can think of that ends in – ation

Continue reading →

Experts

Aug16

A Fae Apoc story prompted by @SkySailor.  Set in the post-apoc of Fae Apoc. 

💠🔹💠

“Excuse me?  Excuse me, I’m looking for an expert?”

He looked like nothing you’d stop to look twice at, and most people didn’t even bother with looking once.  He was weedy, small, underfed. Fifteen years after the collapse of most of the world, he looked like – well, like it was a miracle he was still alive.

Nobody worried about him.

“What sort of expert, son?  We’ve got all sorts here.” The aging professor had not been quite so aging when the school had stopped being quite the same institution he’d been hired by.  Tenure was, however, tenure, and there weren’t that many universities hiring Labor Economics professors in this day and age.

Not when they were more worried with the simple economics of laboring enough to survive. Continue reading →

Last Night’s Writing

Jan20

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 →

A short fic of an ocean planet

Mar26

As far as they’d been able to tell, the land masses on Esto IV consisted of three archipelagos, none of which had a single island larger than a square mile, and one single island of about two miles square with erratic volcanic activity.

It wasn’t an ideal situation – their colony ship had been packed for farming a temperate, land-locked area fed by several rivers – but it was far better than eating vacuum, which is what they’d been looking at when the ship developed a critical flaw halfway through their trip.

If they ever regained contact with the home company, Martina might have something to say to them about their ship construction. Right now, she was far more focused on an entirely different sort of ship and its build.

There was room for them to live across the bigger islands, all thousand and seventeen surviving colonists and ship’s crew, and there was room enough to grow some sort of crops, but most of their livelihood was going to have to come from the sea, and only a few of the islands were close enough to connect by bridges. Boats were going to be a large portion of their lives.

Martina studied the pieces of ship she had managed to pull off with a blowtorch, and contemplated shapes. The seas’ tides were like nothing at all on Earth, unbroken by continents, shifted by two small moons. Their boats would have to be steady and resist tipping; their sailors would have to have stomachs of iron.

Nearby, Sim and Imp were working on a series of stilted houses just a little off the beach. Martina swallowed a wry grin. She’d been thinking about a tropical vacation for years. Now she was going to live it.

more: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080400.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1079721.html. You can comment here or there.

Flipped, a story of Tír na Cali

May9

Edit: Forgot to cut for content- slavery, unwilling, and revenge-slavery.

“No! You can’t! It can’t be you!”

He had not been the best master, but he had also not been the worst.

“No! What are you going to – oh, Goddess and – ow!”

He had not been dumb – was still not dumb – which had made organizing things so that he lost everything and she managed to get both freed and enriched by the situation quite difficult.

“Right, right. I’ll behave. I’ll behave. You don’t have to – ow!”

She’d been motivated, slightly smarter than him, and she’d had outside help. So now, it was her passing over her credit card to the nice lady at the slave shop, and it was him kneeling there in the cell, the thick plastic slave-shop collar around his neck and the plastic manacles around his wrists. He kept looking up at her; the guard kept pushing his head down. And he kept complaining. That was new, the whining.

“Get him up and into my car.” She nodded at the guard. “I’ll take it from there.”

“How do you have the mon- Ow!”

She smiled cheerfully at him. She found this part immensely fun, more fun than only ruining him had been. “It turns out that the Agency is immensely interested in what I can do. And they pay very, very well for hazardous duty.”

“No,” he whined. “You belong to me…”

She held up her hand, stopping the guard from striking him again. “Try again. Or you’ll spend your first month as a slave muzzled.”

“No,” he said again, much more quietly. “No… mistress.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/936354.html. You can comment here or there.

Rescue and Shelter, a ficlet of Tír na Cali

Feb26

The below story is Tír na Cali and includes slavery, previous abuse, and people who believe in the system as it stands.

It came from a comment by Sky:”What if the Californians have things similar to animal shelters for lost and abandoned slaves?,” and was prompted also in part by a ficlet cluudle wrote about the same idea.

Shauna had been running.

She hadn’t been running away, no. She’d been moving past her owner’s fields and into the suburbs, staying out of sight, staying quiet and low and unimportant. She’d managed to disable the tracker on her collar and the identity chip but not the latch itself, and that was all right. Because if the collar had come off, she’d be a runaway. And runaway slaves did not get sold to nice places and they did not have nice prospects.

No, she was just running, just moving away from her master’s property at a quick pace. Too quick: she slipped on a culvert and fell, skidding down the concrete edge and hitting her head on the curb.

She woke in a bed, in a place with no traffic sounds and the smells of the forest wafting in. She opened her eyes slowly, feeling for pain and finding none. Her master owned no place that smelled like this. Had his son found her? Had…

A woman smiled at her. She was dressed in soft colors and soft fabrics; her eyes were blue and her hair was brown, and she was not wearing a collar. She was holding a tablet, and sitting comfortably near Shauna’s bedside. “Welcome.” Even her voice was soft. “You are in the Rescue Shelter.”

“Thank-” she swallowed to wet her throat, and tried again. “Thank you, ma’am.” The room she was in was not large – big enough for the bed and the chair, a small dresser and a big window. But they were the only ones in it. “What-“

“The Rescue Shelter is a recovery facility for abused slaves.” Even though the woman’s voice was still gentle, there was an edge to the words. “When you were brought in, you had quite a bit of damage, and most of it could not be explained away by the culvert in which you were found.”

Shauna winced. There had been “damage,” yes. She had done her best to hide it, for as long as she could. Her owner loved his son.

“We’ve documented all of it. A tenth of it would be enough to have you removed from the home, you know.”

Shauna had not known. She looked away from the earnest, soft woman. “Slaves that get removed, they don’t get sold to nice places, do they? They don’t get to be Chatelaines or Head Cooks or, or Companions.”

The woman smiled again, gently but proudly. “When you are recuperated, I can introduce you to several people who have gone through either this Rescue Shelter or another like it and gone on to hold very esteemed positions indeed. The people who tell you otherwise are those who don’t want you to complain, even when your treatment is illegal and immoral.”

“You’re… you’re not an abolitionist, are you?”

“Oh, no. I’m not one of those sad people who wants to do away with the whole system, no. I just want the system to work the way it’s supposed to. Now…” She looked at her tablet and smiled, before meeting Shauna’s eyes again. “Your collar data chips were damaged, I imagine in the fall. Would you like to tell us your former owner’s name?”

Former. Shauna swallowed. “No, ma’am, please. It wasn’t his fault.”

“Very well. Would you like to tell us your name?”

Shauna shook her head and pressed her lips together. Her name was on record. There were only so many slave-Shaunas in the country.

“All right.” The woman moved things around on her tablet for a moment. “We could call you… ah, that’s a good one. How does Hope sound?”

Unbelievable. But… nice. “I like it,” Shauna – Hope – offered.

“Then that’s what we’ll call you. Nice to meet you, Hope.” The woman half-bowed from her chair. “I’m Cariadad ni Rougan, but you can call me Carrie.”

Tír na Cali has a landing page here.

Setting notes: grey eyes & red hair indicate being a part of the ruling class, thus Cariadad’s blue eyes are comforting because she is probably not high-class.

ni Rougan is interesting because only bastards take “daughter of their father” such (and the ap Gwydion, but they’re another story); a bastard is someone whose mother has no name (i.e., a slave) or would not claim her.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/902969.html. You can comment here or there.

Agreed, a continuation of Arrangements

Jan4

Written to SkySailor’s commissioned continuation of
Live-In
and
Arrangements.

It too Adrian two weeks to decide. Sara tried, during those two weeks, to let him have all the breathing room he needed to decide. She made the most of crock-pot and one-dish recipes, shortcuts and take-out, to make sure he didn’t have to feel like meals were waiting on him; she did cursory cleaning every day, and she tried to get enough work done that it didn’t feel like she was waiting on his decision.

That last Friday, he didn’t make it home until past ten in the evening. His eyes were bloodshot, his hands were shaking, and his skin was ashen. He let Sara chivy him into a bathrobe and slippers without even a pretense of an argument, and sipped the doctored hot cocoa, thick with rum, until his cheeks began to get some color.

“Would… would you tell me what to do? If I agreed to be your housewife?”

Sara hesitated. He was so twitchy right now, it seemed like everything might send him over the edge. “I don’t want to boss you around…”

“But I liked it! When you told me to do things, before, I liked that. My job.. they never tell me, they just yell at me when it’s not done!”

Ah. “Ah. I can do that. I can give you direction.” She found herself smiling. “I can even reward you when you get it all done. right.”

“When? Not if?”

“Hey, I’ve seen what you can do. I might have to up the ante, start giving you bonus round tasks.”

“And you’re really okay with – with supporting me?”

“If you’re really okay with being my housewife. Yeah.”

“I…” He was quiet for a few minutes. Then Adrian nodded. “I’ll quit tomorrow.”

Sara gave Adrian a nice manly apron the day he left his job, and a ruffled one with pink polka-dots the next day. They sat down the next night to the best-tasting meal either of them had had in weeks, months, really; it took them less than a week to fall back into a comfortable routine.

And it was great. He’d ask her what he should do, and she’d tell him. He’d go above and beyond, and she’d do something special for him. Sara went back to getting work done, and Adrian was happy again.

Except…

“So, are you happy, being her bitch?” It was game night, and Ellery had been drinking, but that didn’t excuse it.

“When is he going to stop mooching off of you? I can’t believe he quit his job and you’re okay with him staying here!” Rachael wasn’t the best of Sara’s friends, not by far, but she was a shopping-and-coffee-on-Tuesdays sort of friend. Not that it made her opinion okay, but it definitely made it heard.

“Dude, are you just going to let her tell you what to do? What are you, her housewife?” Sara hadn’t even been telling Adrian what to do – they were watching movies with friends, and he’d asked her what wine she thought was good – when Craig came out with that one.

But it gave Adrian something to answer that he could actually answer. When he came back in from the kitchen, he was wearing his apron. The one with the pink polka dots, even. And somewhere he’d gotten a string of costume pearls.

Sara watched him pull himself up straight and hand Craig a glass of wine. “Yes.”

Their so-called friend had already forgotten. “Yes, what?”

Adrian was smiling. Grinning, really. Sara found that she was, too.

“Yes,” she filled in. “He is my housewife. And a damned good one at that.”

“Well, then.” Ellery was clearly trying to make up for his Game Night slip. “Where are you two registered?”

“Cook’s World,” Adrian answered promptly. And thus the idea for their nonwedding was born.

If you’d like to see more of this story, I bet there’s more to be written. Just drop a tip in the the tip handcuffs:


This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/878812.html. You can comment here or there.

All Yours

Nov10

Priming the pump again. Writing a little non-Nano to get myself going.

Caroline swallowed. “You’re sure… sir?”

“I’m sure.” Jaden handed her the leash. “I promise you, I am certain about this, and no negative repercussions will come down on you for this.”

She took the leash as if it were a snake. “You said…”

“I said a lot of things, and most of them were wrong. I’m sorry for that, but this, I’m fairly certain you want this.”

“Well, a little bit, yeah…. but you’re in charge. You’re the Keeper.”

“And I’m still your Keeper. But for the next day, you’re in charge. As long as you keep to the rules-“

She found herself smiling. “I’m not very in charge if I have to keep to rules, am I?”

“Well…” It was interesting, to watch him smile. “All right. You have a point. It would be better if you kept any overt stuff inside the room, okay? It’s easier to protect you if people don’t think you’re topping from the bottom.”

She pondered that. Things were safer, being with him. “All right. So-“

“So, for the next twenty-four hours, I promise to do whatever you say, as if I were Kept. And for the next twenty-four hours, none of my orders hold sway over you.” He dropped to his knees. “In effect, I’m all yours.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/846286.html. You can comment here or there.

Learning the Arrangement

Oct21

Valeta’s nails were sharp on Ivor’s shoulders, and her breath was warm in his ear. “You want to be a good boy for me, don’t you?”

Ivor swallowed a protest. Good boy sounded so kidlike, so condescending.

He didn’t have to say anything. She chuckled anyway, her laugh stinging in his ear. “The options-” She pricked the side of his neck with those sharp, sharp nails – “are to be a good boy or a bad boy. You may answer me.”

Ivor’s mouth was dry. He licked his lips. “I don’t want – don’t want you to think I’m a bad boy.”

“It’s a start.” Her nails raked down his back, leaving sharp stinging behind. Ivor gasped, which only served to make Valeta laugh. “You’ll learn,” she assured him. “You’ll learn why you want to be my good boy.”

He’d signed the contract. Ivor straightened his back and nodded, short and sweet. He’d wanted to learn.

Written to Sky’s commissioned continuation of An Unusual Arrangement.

If you’d like to see more of this story, there is definitely more to be written! Just drop a tip in the the tip handcuffs:

Next: Getting Into the Arrangement

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/832377.html. You can comment here or there.