Alder's Grove

Written to DaHob's prompt to my new "WTF?" Prompt Call.  Fae Apoc, early apocalypse.



Things had been going weird for weeks, but Tlalli had been doing a pretty good job of pretending they weren’t.

She went to classes every day, went to work after that, and screened stupid application after stupid application for a roommate, looking for someone who wouldn’t be torture to live with and would actually pay the rent something like on time.

There was some weird shit on the tv, weirder shit on youtube, and twitter was blowing up with the stuff people had seen - and the people that had died or vanished.   One person she followed posted a list every morning. Just an image, black names on white text. It was getting pretty long.

read on…

My Giraffe (Zebra) Call is open!

Written to @dahob's prompt.

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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.

 

and on wordpress...

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-"
( Read more... )

The invasion happened overnight (as far as the Americas were concerned, at least). The portals opened, circles of blue light no bigger than a porthole, in bedrooms and offices and stores and streets around the world, and then they closed again, just as the sensors were starting to detect them, closed again.

There were witnesses, of course; even in places where it was midnight, not everyone was sleeping, and in places where it was daylight, the portals opened in very public places. All of them told the same story:

read on...

“He’s your cousin.” Karen’s mother made the word sound positively scandalous.

“It’s not as if he’s my first cousin or something,” Karen countered tiredly. She’d already had this conversation with a sister, two cousins, and her mother’s aunt Betty. “To find a common ancestor — and only one of them, I might add - you have to go back up two family splits to a great-grandmother who married three times. Gerry down the street is more related to me than that.”

“But…” Her mother made a distressed noise. “You’re not supposed to… supposed to…”

read on...

The collar clicking around Trey's neck was supposed to be the culmination of months - years - of planning, the final realization of all his hopes and dreams.

It made the feeling all that much more sour. This collar wasn't pretty, like the ones in the contraband romance novels. It wasn't light and airy, it wasn't comfortable, like the ones Trey had played with, in underground clubs and quiet swing parties. It didn't come with nice words and a quiet understanding of his place in the world, a sense of comfortable inevitability, a sense of honored submission.


read on...

After Cali, Femdom, Catgirlsand Part II.

"So." The cat-girl, the woman who owned him, Lady Sharanna (all of that in a petite and terrifying package), slipped behind the wheel of the car and started the engine with a button-push. "Why did you fight them?"

Daniel swallowed his first response, and then decided maybe it was the best answer. "They kidnapped me. They took my clothes. They stuck a collar on me."

After a moment that had gone on long enough that Daniel had begun to worry, "Those are," she said thoughtfully, "rather good reasons to fight. But it got you..."

"Bruised. Chained." Daniel shrugged defensively. "It made a point."

"Ah." She let the silence drag on again. "So... what point are you making now?"

"Now?" It was his turn to hesitate, giving it more thought than he'd thought he'd have to. "Now... I guess I'm proving that if you treat me like a person, I can act like a reasonable hu- a reasonable being, too."

She pulled the car out of the parking garage, a smile growing on her face. "Good." It was still a very sharp smile, but this time Daniel actually felt a little reassured. "I like that point."

Now I'm not saying this is how it happened, and I'm not saying it didn't happen that way. If you look at the journals for that day, you don't see anything that interesting. But a few tipsy whispers say otherwise.

~

Asta’s journal from this particular October, 1968:

Attended Corina’s wedding to a lovely young man – Anthony.

Met a wonderful woman, Anthony’s great-grandmother Margaret. Shall have to get together with her sometime to exchange recipes – and perhaps knitting patterns.

There was a bit of a scuffle at the wedding –

(read on...)

For just $1, you can read all the Patreon stories!

The first part of the story: Fox Hunt
The second part: The Hunt Continues
The First Continuation, part of @dahob's commission: Chase the Fox Part One

And yet more Fox! Chase the Fox Part II

Hitchhiking had gotten old pretty quickly. George hadn’t thumbed a ride in years, not since his college days, and he found that all the things that had made it so unpleasant back in Maine were almost identical in California — the road splashing and the traffic noise, the hours you’d go by with nobody picking you up, the odd juts out of your way when you did get a ride, the talking. The endless uncomfortable chatter....

(read on!)

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Written to dahob's prompt to my Giraffe Call!

Set in the world of Fae Apoc, sometime in late 2011/early 2012.

Day five. They were beginning to run low on supplies, no matter how carefully Yonit parceled everything out. Carl had a massive cut running down his calf, and it gotten infected, despite all of their care. They had spent the last four days complaining about the fae, wishing them all dead, and pacing the tiny, cramped life boat.

A massive fight between someone calling themselves Llŷr and someone who claimed to be Poseidon had swamped the Atalus in the middle of a trans-oceanic trip. Yonit had been one of twenty-two people who had made it into this lifeboat; they'd lost radio contact with the other boats two days ago.

And now - now they were running low on supplies, and the bitching about the fae was getting worse, and Carl had a fever. She'd done what she could in whispers and muttering, but there was no privacy in the little tube of a boat, and she needed to be able to concentrate.

"I guess," Carl muttered, sounding half-delirious, "you guys will have to eat me first. I hear the heart's good eating. Save that for the women."

Yonit swallowed hard. "Would you guys..." She was going to die. She was going to die one way or the other. Maybe she could manage to save them. "Would you rather be... be reduced to cannibalism? Or would you rather be on the boat with a fae? 'Cause, um... some fae have the ability to make food. And water."

She closed her eyes and waited for the shouting to start.

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Having trouble picturing the lifeboat? It's this sort.

If you want more, I'm sure I can manage more of this one! Drop a tip in the tip pack below.

Giraffe Call rates apply: $1/100 words.

The Meme

Today's prompt is from @dahob - Why do you like apocalypses so much?

Heheheheheee.

So, I chewed on this a bit, and it came down to two major things: why I like dystopian settings, and why I like space colony stories.

I swear this is all related!

So, dystopian settings. I looove dystopian settings, although I have to admit that that's 50% lazy writing. That is: if the setting is the bad guy, then it's man vs. the environment, and the innate bad guys are mostly working within a bad setting.

Tír na Cali's a perfect example of that: "Yes, I own you, but I can't exactly free you. The Californian government will never let you go home, and, even if they did, the Americans would lock you up and pick your brain for every scrap of information about our country. So you're stuck with me and my only options are keep you or sell you."

Of course, in Addergoole, the reason for the uber-dystopia is right there, in the school, a living breathing person. Um. Poor thinking on my part there. O_o

"Man against his environment." That's my favorite style of story, of the classic three taught in English classes (Man v. self, other man, environment), and that really covers the "space colony" story part of this, too: I love the idea of carving out a new world, a new home, against massive odds. I love making something from scraps, from whatever's left over. And with space colonies and post-apoc both, you walk into it with some "modern" tech, and some idea of how modern tech should work.

Except cargo cults, of course. But I still need to write one of those.

So why do I like apocalypses so much? Because I get to write people struggling against their environment, and persevering.

By the time Daniel was dragged to the sales floor, he was bruised in at least seven places, two of which didn't show; he was chained, collared, naked, sweating, had been forcibly showered three times and had his hair combed five time. He was furious, but he'd gone past furious into panic and then past panic into shaking.

And then the cat-girl walked into the room.

There was no other word for her. She had perky cat ears, whiskers, and a tail; she had a human face and body with fur or patterns on her hands - paws? She was wearing a small dress and tall heels, and very little else.

She strode in like she owned the place, and here, in California, where supposedly anything went, everyone stared. Daniel couldn't fault them; he was staring too. Had to be prosthetics, or some sort of cosplay thing. But the ears were moving. The tail was moving.

The girl was moving. Woman, he supposed, nobody ever called them cat-women. Except DC comics. Anyway. She was moving towards him. She was carrying something in her hand. Something - what -

"Oh, no, no, no, no." He couldn't back up. He was so very locked to this place he was standing. He could fall backwards, and he did that. "No."

She leaned down until her lips were nearly at his ear. "Yes."

He felt the leash clip onto his collar, but he was out of options.

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/873343.html

Written to @dahob's commission.

( Read more... )

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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: Learning the Arrangement

Courier jobs were, sometimes, risky. They were sometimes people who didn't want messages to go through, sometimes people who hadn't heard don't shoot the messenger.

It paid immensely well, however, and Cory was willing to take quite a few risks for the money. Risks like taking packages over closed borders into war zones. Risks like delivering people to and from situations where they didn't, legally, belong.

Risks like carrying a very lovely hand-written note to a very lovely, rich woman.

Cory swallowed and reminded himself of his Californian-style manners. Look down, smile, stay polite and speak when you were spoken to. He'd prefer the Middle East. He'd prefer North Korea.

"You're certain this is for me?"

"Yes, your ladyship." Cory had practiced in front of a mirror. He practiced every time he had a mission.

"And did you read it?"

"No, your ladyship." Of course not, your ladyship.

"You weren't even a little curious?" She still sounded bored. Bored was good.

"I'm not paid to be curious, your ladyship." Which meant he never gave any indication that he cared in any way what was in his messages.

"And you are paid to be polite." Oh, dear she was sounding amused.

"Very well, your ladyship." Very, very well, your ladyship.

"Come here."

"Your ladyship?"

"Come. Here."

Ten feet separated Cory and the Lady. He liked those ten feet, his standing position and her lounging on the couch.

On the other hand, he knew better than to say no to a Lady in Tír na Cali. "Your ladyship." Cory bowed, deeply, the way he'd practice.

"You're cute, and you know your manners. Very cute." Her hand darted out and grabbed his chin. "I think I'll keep you."