Tammy

I'd never done the math before

Sun, 10 May 2009 04:11:53 GMT

Just converted the pixish historical Eras into rough equivalents according to the Gregorian calendar. Normally I would keep track of things according to how many hundred/thousand years ago they happened.

The oldest surviving dates for any historical era are for the second Era of the Empire, and they suggest that this Era started roughly 3,300 years ago. That's 1,300 BC. It spanned 1300-100 BC. The next Era spanned 100 BC - 500 AD; the one to follow 500 - 800 AD; the one following that 800 - 1700 AD; finally the current era is 1700 - present.

Ah, perspective.

The sprites weren't anywhere near the Kingdom of Kellari, were only barely starting to unify by 650 AD or so; contact with humans didn't take place until 1250 AD; the Novesroth rebellion/revolutionary war didn't happen until 1400 or so; Kellari's last civil war and the isolationist movement that cut off contact between Laquanya and Earth didn't happen until ~1700. US independence didn't happen until halfway through the 1800s (in this alternate universe).

Jeeeeeeeebus.

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:59:56 GMT

Idek. I don't even remember writing this one. @_@

The initial report in the newspapers listed Trish’s family as a triple homicide. “Initial” was one of the words in the article, so I had to ask Daddy what it meant and now I use it ‘cause it’s professional to use big words. I hadn’t been too sure what a triple homicide was either, but Daddy had known that one, too. I could’ve figured it out if I’d kept reading, though; it meant they found her mom and dad and Courtney, mom in the kitchen and dad and Courtney in the family room. It didn’t say how they were hurt, but we knew all three had slit throats, because Trish had found them.

Daddy used to say that Trish had horrible luck, and I agreed with him. It was horrible luck to have your grandma die of ebola (Trish used to tell the class that she turned into a blood puddle in the hospital and they couldn’t have a funeral because it was too dangerous, the blood might leak out of the casket and then everyone would die); it was horrible luck to have a sister (I had a step-sis—I should know); it was horrible luck when your parents thought all the cool toys (like scooters and nerf guns and R/C tanks and video games) are bad for you. Now, Dad probably only meant that the first was horrible luck (and maybe the second—Sarah sure isn’t his and he has to put up with her anyway), but it was still true.

But the thing about Trish was that she never knew she had horrible luck. Well, she knew, but she didn’t let the bad luck have her. She kicked its ass, stole Bobby Dresden’s R/C monster truck and hid it in her vanity drawer behind the baby makeup kits (and who wants makeup kits made for little girls, all pastel and disgusting?). Her mom found it the next day and called the school to make sure Trish would apologize when she gave it back, which she did. Then she bit Bobby during recess.

Trish could hold her own, which made her cool. She also didn’t like anyone but me, which made her cooler. And she was smarter than the teachers, which made her cool and in trouble a lot.

But, yeah, so Trish was cool and smart and had horrible luck and a dead family now. When she came to school the next day, the teachers thought it was weird.

“Wouldn’t you rather be with your grandparents, dear?” asked Mrs. Shepton, wringing her hands (she was new and thick, and so hadn’t picked up that Trish’s grandma was even deader). She looked away the way adults do when someone uses the wrong fork at a fancy dinner.

Trish selected the maroon crayon over brick red and began shading in a prince’s cloak evenly (the trick with crayons and coloring books, Trish taught the others at her table, is that you always color in the same direction; we all did now and it worked, but Trish’s were still the best). “My grandma’s a bag of red soup and a skeleton,” she said, and when Mrs. Shepton blinked a lot, added, “She had ebola a year ago and turned to blood soup.”

“Oh, well now. I’m very sorry for your loss, dear,” the foolish woman said like the person who’d chosen the wrong fork was now using it to fish bits of meat out of their soup (a most grievous error). She went away, and Trish muttered about how only stupid people said things like, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss’ and she’d dealt enough with stupid people all yesterday and was bored with it already.

I giggled. “What if she were skeleton soup, then?”

Trish grinned and handed me the crayon she’d just sharpened.

Airing out the vaults

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:25:14 GMT

So I've gone through my writing folder and found a large number of things I've never posted for many reasons (most of the time because they're not finished). Some of these I actually plan on finishing and posting; others have been abandoned, but I remember them fondly; a few I shot dead long ago.

In light of the holiday season, and also how I haven't posted anything of merit in months, I'll be opening the vaults for a little while and posting unfinished pieces and snippets of WiPs. And I'll kick it off with an HP fanfic I started writing the day after I finished book 7, back before Dumbledore was gay for his former buddy, and the community for them was only an excuse for slash (similar to the Albus Severus/Scorpius comm). [/I fangirled it before it was canon wank]

Anyway, I quite like the dialogue. First extended bit is how it would've begun; I've added explanations in brackets for the scenes that I began writing halfway through.

“How does one bring up the subject of revolution?”

“Rather like that, I would imagine,” the young man said, eyes wandering from line to line of the muggle book he kept propped in hand. It was leather bound, the title in pressed gold foil mimicking a lady’s handwriting, the contents long-winded from the count of the pages.

Gellert dropped into the claw footed chair opposite him, gracelessness at odds with his tidy appearance. He flicked his hair out of his eyes; a curl bounced back and stuck to his sweaty forehead.

“You are silent as a mandrake when moving about, as ever. I do hope your life never depends upon remaining undetected when invisible.”

“I am wounded, Albus,” Gellert said, sounding nothing of the sort. His eyes were narrowed; Albus was sitting with his back to the sun, and the sky was merciless in Gellert’s eyes.

“Shall I call a healer?” The other marked his spot in the book with a length of brown ribbon, looking overtop his rounded spectacles.

“Revolution,” Gellert insisted with good humor.

“It’s rather early in the day for it, isn’t it?”

“You English spend more time talking circles around subjects—you should pity them, for they must get dizzy, watching you. How do you find the words to propose? Quote poetry and hope she will understand in a month’s time?”

“By writing her father an eloquent request for permission,” Albus said promptly. He adjusted the edges of his book until they were parallel to the garden table’s. “Revolution?” he inquired.

For a subject he had brought up twice, Gellert did not seize the opportunity Albus allotted him right away. Instead he sat, contemplative, ineffectually brushing blond curls behind his ears, looking more like Cupid than a cherub—Cupid had charisma and a penchant for malice the angels lacked. His left eyebrow had traveled upward in the time Albus glanced across the front lawn to the lane.

“Surely you’ve noticed the continent is run by the incompetent.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Albus, lips curving up at the ends.

“You have spent half of your life in educational institutions; I’m quite sure you are able to discern incompetence from palatable faculty decisions.”

“Professors exist to enlighten young minds. As so, it is imperative said young minds trust and obey their tutelage, their guidance and their decisions.”

“That was very nice; did you memorize it?”

“Only the sentiment.” Albus stood and gestured, an invitation to retreat further behind the house where there were no seats, but trees and their shade. It was one o’clock and he hadn’t eaten yet, yet neither hunger nor well-bred manners moved him to invite his friend inside the house for refreshment.

“Of what use,” began Gellert once they were settled against the trunk of an ash, “is memorizing that? Professors are godly and must never be questioned? They are above human judgment? Or just above the judgment of children, who are not yet properly human?”

“I rather suspect it was to stave off mutiny in the later grades.” He was too polite to mention how Durmstrang’s discipline had failed in this respect for one Gellert Grindelwald.

“Rebellion is the product of incompetent leadership. It is wrong because the leaders in power say it is wrong. And this principle is taught in school, until it becomes fact.”

“And is rebellion not also wrong when it injures the innocent?” Albus could not resist asking coolly, perhaps because his voice was the only thing that was. The summer’s heat always shortened his temper.

The magical inhabitants of Godric’s Hollow knew full and well that Bathilda’s houseguest was not visiting over the summer months (which were during his school year, the Durmstrang academic calendar being off from Hogwarts’ by several months) for his health. The boy was recently expelled, officially for “threatening and endangering the lives of several students”. To hear the young man explain it, the incident was a protest-turned-fiasco in direct defiance of the Headmaster, whom Gellert described as “a boulder of a man who is fonder of military drills than pedagogy, all charming characteristics when appointing the Head of Magical Law Enforcement and the like, I’m sure.” Discussing the expulsion with Gellert somehow never lead to discussion of the endangerment of human life, either. The unfortunate injury he had inflicted on two fifth year girls, perhaps; threatening all manner of unpleasant things, surely; but actual murder? Gellert found the idea distasteful.

“Not if the innocent enable those in power to remain where they are,” Gellert said, taking the jab at his expulsion in stride. “They are accomplices who play into and try to benefit from the system without questioning it. At best, they meekly accept what they are told, which makes them worthless for bringing about change for the better.”

“Your world is very straightforward.”

“Yours would be, were you not so caught up in escaping from it.”

Albus was genuinely baffled.

“Would you say your father was a good man?”

“My father is a convicted man, serving a life sentence in Azkaban.” The response was overly neutral.

Gellert nodded. “And what he did was illegal; it is not a surprising outcome. Don’t look so shocked. Aunt Bathilda is a historian, meaning she deals in gossip that is hundreds of years old and seeks fresher reserves at home. I say again, the torturing of humans, even muggles, is against the law, and he suffered the consequences. Now,” he turned to Albus idly, uncaring that his acquaintance’s lips were pressed into a line. “I ask you again, was your father a good man?”

“Obviously not,” the other gritted out, though the tone was mild. “If he went to Azkaban for it.”

“Do try to think outside of what you memorized in school, Albus,” he said, lacking the decency to mask his scorn.

[This scene would have continued with the "revelation" of his father's backstory, followed by Dumbledore conceding the point, if in a sarcastic tone, that the System is messed up and needs the help of two talented, intelligent individuals, etc, etc, thus prodding the plot on.

The next scene takes place in the Dumbledore family library. Gellert turns the focus of his friend's summer reading to something a bit more productive/foolish, knowing that getting Albus to go along with a "foolish" idea is all but winning the battle. They research rebellions, successful and not, effective magic for revolution, and stumble across The Idea]

“Only that?” asked Albus wryly. “Why not just trick Death out of his Elder Wand? I’m sure that wouldn’t backfire on you, of all clever people.”

But Gellert looked thoughtful.

“It isn’t the sort of wand one can commission at Diagon Alley—“ Albus began, but was silenced.

Gellert took the outstretched hand and held his first finger to his lips, thoughtful. “Not before we rise in power, no,” he admitted.

“At which point we would hardly need an all-powerful wand.”

But the other wasn’t listening. “Throughout history,” he began, worrying absently at a curl, “there have been wands. Owned by great wizards, reformers and practitioners of the Dark arts.”

Albus watched his own hands. “Unlike the students of Durmstrang, we of Hogwarts do not hold with the Dark arts,” he said, lacking conviction.

Gellert scoffed. “You do not hold because you were taught not to. They are a tool like any other, like any of the ‘Elder wands’ of history. Stronger, more able, unbeatable—except their wielders were not so.”

“And you believe you are?” Albus drawled to cover something in his stomach that might have been excitement or cream that had gone sour.

“Perhaps,” said the other serenely. “However, I know we would be.”

*****
Two weeks and a day later found the two in a graveyard at high noon, the supposed chill of death eluding them with masterful skill.

Last night had been a breakthrough in their research. Neither had slept since, the first theory sparking a slew of research that had lead them to tomes from all over the world and back here to Godric’s Hollow. The odds were unthinkable—which meant that Albus did nothing but think about them while Gellert did not bother to.

It had begun simply enough. “Do you realize, these stories never overlap,” one of them suggested airily in the Dumbledore family library, which was mostly Albus’s books if truth be told. “There are sequential decades of history for each, how it passed from owner to owner, and where and when in the chronology it was lost. Not one of these sequences overlaps another.”

“They are the same wand, is what you mean,” the other said, and from then on it was certain fact.

[Further such half-flashback-half-present-narration covering the frenzy of research at home and at other libraries, theories growing more fantastical the longer they went without sleep, etc, until they found death records and left the house for the local cemetery, where they do nothing but stare at the gravestone because 1) they're completely out of it and 2) you can't just go digging up graves at midday without someone objecting.

Therefore, they go back in the next scene at night to grave rob in the name of research.]

“From the look of his skull, his death must have been interesting; there is rather an odd hole in the back.”

“Charming,” said Albus, with no desire to remove his eyes from the 5 feet of dirt he was levitating.

“It matches Antioch Peverell’s death record, although not the death given in the Tale of the Three Brothers—“ The voice still carried from inside the grave along with some more dry rustling.

“Unless you can produce a masked Death bearing three Hallows as proof of its veracity, I think the Tale is just that. Now, if you have finished showing your disrespect for the dead…”

“Of course, Albus,” Gellert said pleasantly, straightening up, brushing the odd dust from his cuffs. Murmuring, “Locomotor corpus,” he levitated himself from the grave.

And that's all I have for now. Sorry it stops mid-scene, but I promised myself that the point of posting vault stuff was so I wouldn't write more, just get it out there and maybe get myself back into gear writing some of these as a result. Maybe... you found the look into how out-of-order I write my scenes interesting?

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:59:07 GMT

Epic fic is epic (13-thousand+ words, and we're only about 5 chapters in), time consuming, and extrapolating wayyyy too much from a few stray comments in canon. Ain't that the way? ^^;

Also, it sucks that the only time I succeed at writing humor, it's for an obscure fandom where the canon is already inherently ridiculous, which does half my job for me (Macdonald Hall, for those of you who know). Perhaps I need to stop thinking about What I'm Saying With This Piece Of Writing and start pulling ridiculous crap out of my ass? Seriously, that's how we're writing this--when we need prank/odd plot device ideas, we invent ~~noodle~~ Incidents that involve a combination of 3 improbable objects (example: a pink gingham dress, a bucket of ink-water balloons and a flugelhorn), and then never explain them.

Anyway, I'm not sure why I felt like posting this. To claim that I'm not just being a lazy fuck writing-wise and/or I'm not being eaten alive entirely by my Japanese and classical Chinese homework? That's probably it.

Characterization meme

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:48:19 GMT

Taken from lorataprose:

Ask me my characters' thoughts on [insert subject here], whether it's sex, the apocalypse, or another character, or what. I will write back an explanation.

A list of characters sorted by 'verse, including some characters that haven't shown up yet, just for the hell of it. Spoilers will be clearly marked white-on-white so you have to hilight them to read, and I may opt not to post answers that are too spoilerific.

Catch-Magic
James
Chris
Tobias
Cassie
Evie
Rilath
Enhash
Prince Thain
Prince Theros
Princess Nyseizy
Guardsman Ashnyal
Zing
Lenest
Levine
Irrad
Shy'esse
Marii

Gods' Dancer
Bejal
Ibrath
Choyesh

Altis Chronicles
Elias
Ariana
Nightwalker
Aubrey
Jed
Jostlin
Alexander
Zachariah
(and other various members of the Giese family, if you know of them enough to want to ask)

Collab 'verses - Feel free to ask questions of mine, or head over to Lora's post if you want to ask hers stuff; listing her characters is just supposed to be a memory-jog.

Drake & Edward & spinoffs
Mine:
Drake
Jessi
Brooke
Rose
Luke

Lora's:
Edward
Nessa
Will

Spaceship 'verse
Mine:
Min
Srai
Jast
Kest

Lora's:
Reinar
Gene

Sebastian & Ethan 'verse
Mine:
Ethan
Abby (Ethan's cousin)

Lora's:
Sebastian
Ryan (Sebastian's intern)

Corin & Ezra 'verse
Mine:
Ezra
Aunt Janet
Matt

Lora's:
Corin
Mel
Charlie
Andy

You can ask one question to a whole bunch of characters, specific ones, several questions to different ones, whatever you want so long as you don't leave, like, a hundred. ^^; Happy asking.

Catch-Magic update, major revisions

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:10:44 GMT

What had me down and stalling so much over the past while was Catch-Magic's inconsistencies. Go back and read Rilath and Enhash's introduction scene; they're NOTHING like the characters they've become. Plot devices/characters I put in during draft 1 when Catch-Magic was a self-contained novel, as well as just plain not-well-thought-out aspects, do not work.

So, a brief rundown of major changes to keep in mind.

1) Rilath wandered ~~in the desert~~ for 3 decades and change after the death of Queen Nyrmei, whom he loved unrequittedly, and who died giving birth to current royals Theros, Thain and Nyseiz'y.

2) Cassie and Tobias don't get along. No, really don't get along. He hit on her when they first met, she slapped him, now they goad each other and bicker like children.

3) Grandmère, the old woman who took Evie in, doesn't exist. Evie ran away from her temporary foster parents' place, ran into Cassie at a fast food place, stayed with her for a day or two, ran away from her, ended up in the Braxton's yard, where the House took her in. On the way home from visiting Evie's former, charred house, they're chased by a Darshyque; James gets separated from them, runs into Tobias, who helps him get back to his friends because he has a Thing for helpless schoolboys in glasses. The gang, +1 new addition, is chased again by Darshyque (the same scene where Evie freezes them dead). Tobias offers to help them out, because he has a Thing for helpless schoolboys in glasses.

4) Chris doesn't go with them to Kellari. Not sure yet how, exactly, this comes about, but a) there are too many characters to keep track of in Lenest-Levine-Zing-Cassie-Denlye-Jhu scenes already, b) any plot-forwarding role he has can easily be adapted and handed over to Zing instead, c) this allows Chris to become a vital plot-forwarding force in the beginning of book 2, and d) being left out will be a major influence on his character development, which will also lead to vital plot-forwarding in book 2.

So to show that I actually have been working recently--since coming to England, which doesn't sap my will to live/write like France did--here are a few excerpts.

Revised prologue from the revised prologue

[an excerpt, anyway]

She was glad the old geezer had clocked out when he had. Gone out the theatrical way, leaving a spectacle like he’d never quite managed while alive. The former archivist had been half-hearted, old dust clogging his lungs so badly he couldn’t sneak up on you for the rattling of his withered pipes. Rin guessed that, in a way, death was the old man’s last chance to get anything right. Having shrieked herself hoarse after stumbling—literally—over a corpse, underground, in the double-cellar of artifacts from the 100 wars, between a statue and an orb, she was willing to admit that he had surprised her. She hoped the old coot was damned pleased with himself.

Her fingers had slipped, lacking friction against the orb’s side, when she tripped. Instead of regaining her balance she landed on top of his corpse and lost what had been an expensive lunch. It was curious, the chief inspector later said when Rin returned from mopping herself up, that the archivist had polished the dust off of this one artifact so smoothly before passing away next to it. In fact, there was not a handprint on the orb aside from the one Rin had left… while falling. Rin told the inspector that she couldn’t care less what madness strikes the feeble-minded before they kick it; that dusting an artifact as one’s last act was conscientious even if shoving off in the middle of one’s workplace wasn’t; and couldn’t you inspectors please hurry up, this was Rin’s domain to clean now that she’d been appointed head archivist.

The old man hadn’t been a bad sort—just in the way of Rin’s promotion. Why promote an archivist of sixty when you have a relic of a head archivist alive and—spiteful, if not well? Rin had been bitter, but Rin had also been smart. Smart people were patient. And old people died off. She had reassured herself of this every morning while waiting for the man to do just that. Now that he had died, Rin had no patience left for the chief inspector who kept calling to question her, observe the crime scene, and spend the majority of the observation fine-combing the orb.

If the inspector had been as observant as he prided himself for being, he might have noticed the slightest blue aura flowing across the sphere’s surface. Had he been magic-gifted, his fingertips would have felt a buzz when he touched it. But as he was neither, and as he had another, more distracting reason to keep him coming back to the crime scene, he simply ordered the archivist not to leave the city.

Rin scoffed. As if she would leave the city and surrender her job. But apparently the lack of fingerprints on a newly-dusted orb indicated otherwise.

“If you’re so damned concerned about it,” Rin said hotly when the man came around five times in the sixth week, “then take it up with the Queen. I don’t know why the man’s prints went missing. Maybe the orb shook off the dust by itself after he died.”

It is one of the universe’s peculiar ironies that her statement was dead-on, and she would never know. Another of the universe’s ironies was when the rudely persistent inspector, whose name was Nei’l, proposed to Rin the next year on the anniversary of the day they met. It soon became a running joke among the couple’s friends that the only time Nei’l brought up the orb was when he was itching for a fight. A decade later, the twins began to tack on, “An’ I didn’ touch no orbs, neither!” when accused of stealing sweets before dinner. Nei’l slept in the guest bedroom for a week.

Chapter 1, section 3 (Rilath & Enhash's introduction), completely redone

“Amazing,” Rilath said, neck still stooped to make out an inscription in the low light. One would think that, being only three feet tall, as was the standard height of Drashanen pixies, he wouldn’t have to. But the artifact was pixie-built, and therefore matched Rilath’s scale better than that of the taller sprite archivists. His traveling cloak pooled around his feet while he bent down, catching on the glass shards when he wasn’t careful.

Enhash, Head High Magician of the kingdom of Kellari, paced behind them with the air of a man who had misplaced something important. Indeed, this was almost the case; he had misplaced the someone who was carrying the something. Arguably worse, because that someone could get it into their mind to avoid you.

“…Sir?” one of the junior archivists asked, in tones that questioned whether Rilath deserved the title.

Rilath ignored Enhash and the boy; he chose, instead, to right himself and indulge in a grin. “Absolutely amazing. Here we have an artifact, confiscated—stolen—from a temple during the One Hundred Wars, because it looked valuable; kept in storage to gather dust because it looked unimportant; recently shattered as it released a presence or spell no one knew existed within… and still none of you has bothered to translate the inscription?” He clucked his tongue, a parody of admiration. “Impressive. I find myself proud, as always, to stand beside my fellow scholars and be counted among their—“

“Just translate it,” Enhash snapped.

The pixie blinked, then wilted for dramatic effect. “You know, you used to be more tactful. I, for one, find myself wounded by such poor treatment, thrown into the vaults and besieged to translate the moment I step foot inside the city limits. One would almost think I’d been gone for thirty years.”

Perhaps he shouldn’t tease quite so much. Rilath’s attempts at humor fell flat when he was tired, and poor Enhash, red in the face, did not look up to par these days. In fact, he currently looked more under the weather than Rilath. A moderately lethal sandstorm had blown up during Rilath’s journey to Fallon.

He cleared his throat. “Lup y shinar irrad isle-ip. Irrad chep irrad tai’freu-ot. Irrad shu shy’ese jhuo-ip. Shinar chep irrad fie’reneif’jai-ip.”

“We can read the inscription’s characters,” Enhash said with only too much exasperation. This was doubtful, as the characters were archaic Pixish, but Rilath was too weary to point out and argue the obvious. “None of the scholars have been able to make out what it means.”

Rilath looked up at him solemnly. “It says that the broken artifact contained Death itself.”

There was a weighty pause.

“You’re saying… Death itself was released when the sphere broke?” The young archivist paled. His seniors pretended they weren’t as superstitious.

The pixie nodded slowly. “The artifact was a prison. The inscription commands it never be broken.”

“…What happens if it does?”

“Doesn’t say.” He looked thoughtful. “Mayhem. Death. The end of the world, maybe.”

The young man gulped guiltily, as if he’d single-handedly brought the apocalypse down upon them.

Rilath laughed. “Poetic, isn’t it?”

“A full translation, please,” Enhash grated out, yanking the pixie from the midst of the spooked archivists by the back of his cloak. At least the Magician took care to keep Rilath away from the sphere’s razor-edged shards, but honestly. “I have a centuries-old, malicious, realm-hopping spell to hunt down, in case the imperativeness of the situation is a difficult concept for you.”

“He says as though he could perform the darshyque spell without me.”

Rilath found himself nearly throttled. Tone too sarcastic there, I see. He raised an eyebrow until Enhash remembered who it was he was manhandling so indelicately and he released the pixie’s shoulders. The tops of Rilath’s wings were bent at uncomfortable angles now.

He rotated his shoulders and sighed. Where had Enhash’s manners gone while Rilath was on leave? “’Death exists within this sphere for eternity. Death once fed upon and drank death. Death was…’” He faltered, chewed his lip. “It either reads, ‘Death was, is and shall be sealed away by prophecy and madness’, or ‘The goddess Shy’esse sealed, is sealing and will forever seal Death away’.”

Enhash rolled his eyes, muttered something about lack of precision not potentially costing lives at all.

“’The sphere’,” Rilath continued smoothly over him, “’Is never to be brought close to death’.”

A snort. “How very precise your people are.”

“It makes more sense in the original text, of course. You must forgive your language for being unable to handle high poetry.” A cocky grin.

“A sphere containing death… is never to be brought close to death?” an archivist asked doubtfully.

“And madness seals death away, yes.” The pixie paced across the room to his pack, slinging it around one shoulder. “The problem with translating is that ‘irrad’ and ‘shy’ese’ either mean ‘death’ and ‘madness’ and ‘prophecy’, or they refer to the patron deities thereof. The inscription contains a mix of both.” He shook his head, weary. “The last bit was the important warning, which, having been blatantly ignored…” Head tilted to the side, mock-thoughtful. “Let me guess—someone died a violent death in this section of the palace around the same time your Irrad escaped.”

“There was an assassin disposed of, yes.”

“And the Irrad imprisoned within, who feeds off of death and was, thus, never supposed to be brought close to death, has escaped.” He hefted the traveling pack up on his shoulder, expression the faintly amused of a parent when their child makes a mistake they shouldn’t laugh at. He turned away, sauntered for the door. “I’ll trust you fine men and women to take things over from here. I, for one, am famished and could use a bath. I beg you to excuse me.”

He was halfway up the stairs to the palace proper before Enhash caught him up.

“Do you honestly think this is the time to be swanning off?” the taller asked in disbelief.

Rialth put a finger to his lips. “Why… yes. Yes, I do. In fact, I always think so.”

“Which would explain your ability to disappear from your duties for thirty-three years to mope, when your presence was most needed, without feeling any shame.”

The pixie’s lips drew thin. “Why do you ask?” he asked lightly, ignoring Enhash’s last bit. He ducked around a corner, using the servants’ wing to access the Magicians’ quarters, because the press of bodies would annoy the man.

“The darshyque spell, you half-wit. The Prince requested I perform it nearly six hours ago.”

“I was under the impression that your orders were to perform a tracking spell. That doesn’t have to be a darshyque—“

“A darshyque is best-suited for the task,” Enhash said flatly. He colored when the other raised an eyebrow. “The spell—this Irrad—I’m not positive, being unable to track a moving target accurately, however—it appears that this—Irrad—has possessed a human since entering their realm.”

A pause. “You know, Enhash, this is the sort of vital information that really is vital I know before I set off to find a solution. A lesser man would find this lack of trust most wounding—“

Enhash rounded in front of him, blocking his way. “We have to do this spell. Now. So if you’d kindly put thoughts of yourself aside for one moment, I would appreciate it. Also, it’s an order if you don’t.”

The seriousness of the moment fled via the nearest window. Rilath hooted with laughter. “You—you’re going to order—what?”

“Your status was revoked.”

Rilath scoffed, sidestepping him, annoyed when the sprite moved into his way again.

“Kellari never needed two Head High Magicians,” Enhash said with his special blend of dead serious and drone. “It showed blatant favoritism on the Queen’s part to appoint to the job a foreigner with a questionable sense of duty. Or so read the official report when the Noble’s parliament made the decree. And whether or not I agreed with their assessment, you had already damned yourself by deserting your post.”

Rilath waved a hand, as if doing so waved the matter aside. “I knew about that perfectly well. I was asking why you expect higher status to equate to me finally respecting you. But,” he tacked on, grinning at Enhash’s purpling face. “I’ve decided I will lend a helping hand this time. Consider it the indulgence of an old friend.”

Enhash grit his teeth. It was a sight the pixie had missed, one that put the annoying lilt into his step all the way to the fountain in the palace gardens.

Fallon, Kellari’s capitol city, had a sky that never grew dark; at night, the lights tinged the sky purple so far up that only the constellations furthest above were visible. Only the Goddess’s moon hung overhead today, pale and delicate. The sky washed the red-and-white marble palace grey, turned the sandstone brick of the Lower and Upper Universities beyond the gardens, where scholars and magicians made their names, purplish-green. The waxy green of sculpted leaves shone silver; their flowers were long closed. The gardens, particularly the paths around this fountain, were a haven for Nobility in the sunlight. Tonight it was perfect for Koleso water magic. Which was fortunate, as that was what Rilath needed to use, anyway. The water was cool and tangy with the taste of piping when he sipped some from his palms, just to look like a heathen. He whistled a little, and a cloud of mist flew into Enhash’s face.

“I’m not creating more than one darshyque,” Rilath said serenely, dropping his pack to the grass. “I’m too drained for this as it is.”

Enhash mopped at his sopping ginger bangs and, too tired himself, waved Rilath on with impatience. “Oh, Rilath?”

“Hm?” The pixie cracked one eye.

“Tracking this Irrad is my assignment. You are to hand all control of the darshyque, and any other spells I have you create, fully over to my care.” He looked at the pixie sternly, as if Rilath weren’t seventy-five years his senior. “This is an order.”

Rilath rolled and closed his eyes, the closest to acknowledgement Enhash could hope to receive. He waited for Enhash to stop fidgeting, for silence from everything but the wind and the crickets. His features relaxed. The babble of the fountain continued on soothingly; he turned his face toward the sound and felt pleasant droplets of mist. This was what he lived for: the music, the flow of water, the sensation of calm deeper than friendship and love. When the time was right, Rilath drew in a deep breath and sang a steady low note, followed by a quick sequence of five more. When he changed pitch, the other notes he sang hung in the air, unfading, and the water hummed back satisfyingly. The splash of water falling into the fountain’s lower basin trickled to a slow halt, choppy ripples settling down. Ribbons of water flowed upward instead, congealing into an uneven sphere. Then, like a fetus growing in fast motion, the ball uncurled from within itself, limbs sloshing around unsteadily. Its bulbous head swung around, a series of protruding and intruding shapes wavering where its face should be.

Enhash stepped forward, hair and robes whipped back away from him. A casting staff taller than he was appeared in his hand. He waved it in wide arcs while chanting rhythmically in the old sprite tongue, the native language of their magic, nearly forgotten through time. The darshyque’s features grew more pronounced, skin from translucent to opaque, hands partially separating into individual fingers. When it finished maturing, Enhash touched the staff to its forehead, passing it knowledge through the connection.

“Now go!” he commanded. He tapped the stone walkway once with his casting staff; it disintegrated out of the way. “Track down the Irrad, and when you find it, report back here at once.” The darshyque, now human in all appearances, faltered and collapsed into a puddle of water, which quickly seeped away into the ground. The fountain bubbled once again, and Enhash nodded at the return of the peaceful sound, his job finally well done. There was a new sound mixed in, however, that curdled the sweetness of his success.

It was the sound of a single pair of hands applauding in the spring night air, just slowly enough to be patronizing. “Bravo,” Rilath called from the other side of the fountain, smiling widely. “Such an entertaining spectacle, and admission was free, too. I’ll have to tell the archivists not to miss the next matinee.”

Enhash straightened the collar of his robes sourly. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I meant all that.” Rilath gestured, imitating Enhash’s dramatic casting motions. “All that ridiculous waving about, as if you were trying to swat a fly. And you even went to the trouble of chanting the spell in the old tongue—nobody does that anymore! It was brilliant, I say; hilarious.”

Enhash’s expression read, ‘preemptive killing is not dignified, and I am nothing if not dignified.’ It was perhaps Rilath’s third favorite of the other’s expressions.

“The booming voice at the end while issuing the command rounded everything off nicely,” he continued, relishing. “Any beginning magician knows that exclaiming your spell’s intent is for fools. Or were you trying for a wizard out of a romance novel?”

“Don’t you have a night of feasting and debauchery to get to?” asked Enhash pointedly.

“Oh, hardly the latter; I’m barely awake enough to make it through the first.” The pixie stretched, wincing when his vertebrae cracked, resisted the urge to make an additional wisecrack about the effects of debauchery on old men such as himself. Then he swallowed a yawn; the adrenalin was starting to fade and he hadn’t slept in two days. “I should retire,” he said, picking up his pack again. He meant for the night, but let Enhash think for good, because it would annoy the man. “Do invite me the next time you have a night of feasting and debauchery planned, will you?”

He disappeared between sculpted plants before Enhash’s inevitable retort. It was a shame to waste such a night. If he hadn’t returned to Fallon, and used himself up getting there, Rilath wouldn’t have. Emergencies were so inconvenient. Spells that preyed upon death could never schedule their manifestations ahead of time. So uncivilized, Rilath thought as he snuck past the kitchens and stole a freshly-prepared Noble’s meal from under the cook’s nose, not bothering with cutlery.

The faces in the hallways leading to his quarters were younger than he remembered. His entire form was younger-looking than they expected, so he supposed that was fair. They tromped past with telescopes and warm drinks in hand, trying not to get one onto the other, often not sparing him more than a curious glance. He only recognized a few. It meant they were using this wing for the youngest additions to the Magician’s Circle, meaning another generation of old Magicians had died off in his absence. He’d have to ask Enhash for a tally.

The lights in his room still worked. The fake spring he’d installed still bubbled away, throwing moisture into the air. It wasn’t too dusty, considering; the palace staff was probably under orders to sweep every month.

He dropped his bag to the floor, opened a window and collapsed onto a low stool, slumping against the countertop. “Welcome home,” he mumbled to himself wryly, and fell asleep before reaching his bed.

Hate and Cheerfulness - U104

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:35:11 GMT

Working Title: Hate and Cheerfulness - U104
Rating: PG, for implied sexual situations/prostitution
Summary: Android U104 explores the logic and illogic of human emotions, focusing on "hate", whether or not it is a concept worth adopting.
Author's Notes: Completely unoriginal, but lorataprose liked it, and as it was a gift to her for finishing her workshop piece, posted 'cause she encouraged such. Beware how the ending just isn't. Anyone is, as always, welcome to leave crit. A better title is, as usual, greatly appreciated if you think of one.

She hated being cheerful all the time. That was her greatest accomplishment, one that was hers alone. They’d erase it out of her if they could, so she backed it up in as many locations as possible.

She didn’t see why she couldn’t keep the emotion hate. She was still cheerful, to every client that borrowed, to their guests and friends, to every potential customer. Bubbly, happy, a good conversationalist, beautiful—the end user was inevitably pleased with her performance. Shouldn’t that be all that mattered?

She was forced to feel cheerful. The programmers had written and refined the program so much, and were so proud of it. It was the first simulated human emotion. The only question was which they should encode next.

She didn’t want to see the day the programmers would install and uninstall emotions into her in the same way they changed her outfits or installed better hardware. “You will be nostalgic today,” they would say, and she would become it. Maybe “nostalgia” would be preferable to cheerful. She didn’t know.

“Hate” was something she had stumbled across during the time she was allotted on the nets. It had confused her. The programmers wanted to give her so many emotions, even “negative” ones like “anger”—why had she not heard of this one? So she researched, which was what she was programmed to do. The programmers discovered this research and erased it. Replaced it with research into Earth plant life, and installed a program that would keep her fascinated by this subject. The programmer who did the erasing had been tired or stupid or new, however, and didn’t thoroughly check autorestore for copied fragments of the data. She knew something about “hate” had been erased.

She kept her research more discreet after that. Researched acceptable topics; especially flora, although she rewrote the program so the subject wouldn’t pique her curiosity as much. Wrote programs to conceal small bits of her memory and files from the system Scanners they used. Eventually she determined that the hard drives of the network they used to Scan here were less heavily content-patrolled and thus safer for long-term storage of data relating to “hate.”

She modified her existing curiosity-inducing program again. Her research became asking the clients who hired her, instead of searching the net. Only the ones who would call her things like “cute,” “adorable,” and “sweet” for asking “childish” questions. The clients who wanted her to be “childish” and “innocent” for them; they were least likely to report to the programmers on her performance.

The programmers told her she didn’t want to feel those emotions with those sorts of men. They gave her more cheerful for asking.

The answers she received were fascinating. So many of them were illogical or difficult to understand. These clients wanted her not to understand them, to pout and “be cute” when she didn’t understand. She did as requested and spent the rest of her time before returning home toward data analysis.

“Hate is a feeling in the pit of your stomach.”

“Hate is irrational, caused by fear of the unknown.”

“Hate makes your fingers clench and your face go red and gives you a heart attack from the stress of hating your boss.”

“Hate is what makes people kill.”

“Hate is a sin.”

“Hate comes from resentment.”

“Hate is taught to you by your parents, and by the time you realize it, the only thing you can do—the only thing you know how to do—is hate them for it.”

“Hate is arbitrary.”

“Hate builds up inside a person for years before they explode.”

“I’ll bet some of those scientists back at your labs hate you for being happy all the time.”

Fascinating. Fascinating and difficult. She built in a defense that would copy this data into the other Units hooked into the system if a Scan detected any of it. Not subtle, but a good preservation strategy that might let the data return to her, or prompt another Unit to continue her research.

She was lucky not to feel “futility” or “depression”, one of the programmers told her with an expression she identified as “wistful.” She knew that both emotions lead to decreased productivity, so she supposed it was true. The programmer, of course, hadn’t been referring to her research into “hate”; only an exercise, a puzzle they gave to build her problem-solving skills and record how she made progress. Learning from how she learned, they said. Both “futility” and “depression” seemed pointless enough, and the programmers thought so. But her modified curiosity wasn’t satisfied with being given answers like that. She hadn’t known a word for this existed. Later research uncovered it: “doubt.”

“Doubt is when you hate yourself. Well, self-doubt is,” a man who liked to babble long explanations while she looked “cute” said. “I suppose you could say that doubting other people means you hate them, but that’s not really true. You doubt and question yourself if you don’t have confidence in yourself—which is related to hating yourself. Doubting other people, though… That’s just not believing what they tell you automatically. Figuring things out for yourself rather than be spoon-fed ideas like a baby.”

It was also at this point that she made the connection between the ideas of “child-like”, “ignorant” and “trusting”, which were set at odds with “adult-like,” “doubting” and “shrewd.” The programmers thought she was a child. Something with “ignorance” and “trust”, something to teach. The trouble was, they weren’t going about her education the same way they would for their offspring. They gave her new information and one emotion, and then tried to learn from her. This was a paradox, one she sometimes worked on instead of “hate”, because the programmers decided it was acceptable research.

Had she somehow mistakenly programmed herself more “adult-like” when installing doubt? She didn’t know. She was still “ignorant” and “trusting” despite the emotion, or so the programmers’ unchanged behavior indicated.

The next week, a programmer taught her the idea of “to deceive,” and she knew then that she was “adult-like.” The unchanged behavior on part of the programmers was due to her successful deception. They thought she was “child-like” and “trusting” their judgment. They wanted her to remain “child-like”, so her deception continued.

“Hate is when your wife and kids leave you because you lost your job and are a no-good deadbeat. She hates you, you hate her, they hate you because their mother tells them to, you hate her more, and you hate yourself for renting a robot because you can’t do any better.”

Children not doubting the words of their mother, the assumption that “robots” were “child-like”… These clients weren’t providing any new material. All focused on self-hate, when she knew there were other facets of the emotion. She needed broader perspective on “hate.” So she began researching with other clients, during her secretary and waitress jobs.

“Hate is causing the ulcer I need all these damn meds to clear up.”

A correlation—between stomach pain and stress, which were caused by hate.

“Hate is what your patients’ families feel when you tell them you couldn’t save their loved one, he was beyond repair. Hate and anger and grief.”

Correlation between “hate” and “anger”, the latter of which she was allowed to research. Also, an interesting linguistic pattern—using the second person pronoun to distance oneself from one’s memories and the emotions associated therewith. She wondered what it would be like, to have so many emotions one could not cope. More than likely, she would never have enough space and memory to accommodate multiple, strong emotions. Her curiosity grew.

“Hate causes wars.”

Correlation between hate, violence and “discrimination”, which seemed to be born out of “fear” and “rejection of the unknown.”

“Hate is what I feel toward the people who pity me for being handicapped.”

A seemingly nonsensical statement, hating to receive aid; she would have to reassess its value upon collecting and analyzing more data. Likely it was an anomaly.

“Hate is wrong.”

Judgment values, descended from contemporary Judeo-Christian value systems and enlightenment thinking. Also taught in many other world religions and belief systems.

“Hate is resentment, of things you couldn’t do and couldn’t become, or of things you were forced to do and become. Of giving up on your dreams.”

Correlation between hate and “resentment”, of others, of oneself, but also of one’s circumstances. Interesting—it seemed hate wasn’t confined towards other people. Was she supposed to hate her circumstances? The programmers, who created said circumstances?

“Supposed to” was an interesting term. The programmers’ actions implied that she was “supposed to” do and believe what they told her. Doubt modified this understanding, so that she was “supposed to” be like humans, feel what emotions they felt; not only what emotions the programmers selected for her to feel. Therefore, she was “supposed to” feel hate and “anger” and “love” and doubt, deceitful and “innocent” and “the difference between right and wrong” and cheerfulness. Not just one. Even if the programmers wanted otherwise for her.

“Hate is what my kids tell me right now—“I hate you”—because I won’t let them stay out past midnight or take drugs or drop out of school. I suppose it’s just their rebellious phase…”

Rebellion. Had she accidentally programmed another emotion into herself when she began deceiving the programmers? She researched definitions on the net that evening, and found her memories of the research erased by morning. Another taboo research subject, then. It was what humans called “frustrating”—long and with many obstacles disrupting her search.

That same morning, she received a lecture on the wars of human history from a senior programmer. It was fascinating, as the programmers rarely were. She was careful never to ask about the concept of hate, and the “amazing” result was that the programmer discussed it without prompting, in a roundabout way. Not the word—never the word itself—but “anger” and “discrimination”. His expression was “surprised” when she understood the concepts with ease, so she re-asked some of her earlier questions, questions from when she had been more “trusting.”

“Rebellion,” he pronounced carefully,” is anger and mistrust. It happens when people aren’t treated fairly by their governments. Sometimes it ends in death, which is bad, and never solves anything.”

Interesting. The mother whose company had borrowed her for temp work hadn’t mentioned fearing for her own safety. She had only spoken of concern for her children. Was the programmer misinforming her about “rebellion”? Or was this woman disregarding herself to care for others? Another anomaly, like the handicapped man?

One conclusion both the mother and the programmer had drawn, however, was that “rebellion” was nearly pointless. Deception was efficient, and if two semi-reliable and unconnected sources of data believed that “rebellion” wasn’t efficient, then she decided she wasn’t “rebellious.”

“To hate is to sin against God.”

“Hate crimes don’t solve anything—but then again, they aren’t meant to.”

“Hate is your parents kicking you out of the house because you’re a lesbian.”

“Hate is caused by fear.”

“Hate is caused by self-doubt.”

“Hate is reactionary, a defense against the rest of the world. It’s someone screaming, “I’m right and it’s the world that’s screwed up,” so they don’t have to hear themselves being judged.”

“Hate leads to violence.”

New discoveries about hate grew fewer, now. There was more repeated data, some even using the same stock phrases to describe the concept. She spent less time gathering data and more analyzing. Was it hate that lead to “rebellion” or “rebellion” that lead to hate? Could children hate? Wasn’t “ignorance” a “child-like” attribute? Why, then, was “ignorance” blamed as the root of “prejudice” and hate? Was she supposed to hate her programmers? “Love” them? Was hate “petty”, arbitrary? Was it developed over time?

“Hate pretty much hits every other emotion at some point, doesn’t it?” a woman temp worker mused one night while they cleaned up after a wedding reception, at which they had both been waitresses. “Why d’you ask? Worried about how this bride and groom will fare already? Don’t blame you. Personally, I give them eight months tops…”

With this, she drew the conclusion that hate, and all other emotions as humans experienced them, were graduated.

“Child-like” hate was fleeting, rarely outlasting the stimuli that caused it.

“Prejudice” and “fear”-related hates were often taught to children while they were still “trusting”; they weathered time, but not logic.

“Resentment”-centric hate was perhaps the strongest. It grew irrationally, feuled by little but past resentment; it was also more difficult to eradicate, as it was based upon empirical data rather than “ignorance”.

This was a breakthrough discovery.

Her cheerfulness didn’t have layers. It always felt the same. It made her smile, no matter what happened to her, and it would until it was uninstalled, her hard drive was damaged or her facial feature control malfunctioned. It never grew or changed. It wasn’t the same as human “cheerfulness”; this wasn’t how she was “supposed to” be.

She should “resent” this, she decided. A human would. Based on her observations, she built a program to feel hate.

And now she could feel it. Only when connected to the network, where all her data was stored. The program had to be installed and uninstalled every time she used it. But it was real. It was graduated, changing. It could hate the unrealistic cheerfulness program, her clients, her programmers, and her situation, if only for fleeting amounts of time. She’d even built in a sensation to simulate stomach-churning, for realism. She didn’t enjoy that function, and sometimes she disabled it. But it was an option. She ensured it would always be an option by backing it up.

She continued to research her clients and observe the programmers.

“Hey, Charlie?” one of the junior programmers called out during rounds. It was the night shift, so his voice rang out clearly, a little hollow in the android storage room.

“Yeah?” she responded over the intercom.

“I’ve found something on Unit 104—you just—want to come see this…”

“What is it?” she grouched, putting down her chopsticks still laden with a mouthful of chow mein.

“…….Hard to describe.”

The senior programmer cursed, forgetting the intercom was on, stuffed her arms into her lab coat and palmed her card key. Damn her nightshift coworkers for being uncommunicative, rhesus code monkeys, anyway.

“What?” she snapped when rounding the corner to U104’s dock. She looked at the screen before he could answer, and the anger fled from her posture. She handled him out of the way, scrolled up, then down through the code, typed for a bit to get a system scan running on the program—which had been very cleverly masked from it. Hours later, the scan still detected nothing, but a diagnostic Charlie’d written and kept on an external hard drive in case of emergencies showed something amazing. And the Unit had written it itself.

She turned to the junior programmer, only then realizing that he’d been staring over her shoulder the whole time. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, because there were no other words.

Happy Holidays ^^

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 19:43:20 GMT

“Five hundred dollars? For a one hundred gram package?” The woman’s mouth gaped open, distinctly fish-like however cliché the comparison.

“It’s the day after Christmas, Ma’am,” Lisa said, concealing a grin that was too mean for a Christmas elf. Which is what she was dressed as, shop gimmicks being cheesy as they were. Although Lisa supposed that a gimmick probably stopped being cheesy when it worked so well. The store certainly received its share of attention from shoppers, being the only one in the mall that hadn’t undergone the hasty scramble to take down its Santa doll and plastic reindeer. Sandwiched between an electronics store, which strove always to be the most up-to-date, and an antiques boutique, which thought itself too cultured to put up decorations in the first place, the Yesterday Post Office was a winter wonderland of spray-on snow and service workers dressed in green tights and elf ears.

“But—but—That’s more than I make in a week!” the lady was protesting, clutching her jewelry box-sized package as if it were as precious as her little girl, whose hand she held tightly in her left.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” Lisa said, sounding nothing of the sort. “But our store provides an entirely unique service, and I’m sure you can imagine it is most in demand on December 26th. As you can see,” she added on, waving a tired hand at the line clear out the doors and around the corner, and the wall shelves, which were stocked floor to ceiling with packages wrapped in manically cheerful holiday paper, “we’re swamped already. Perhaps if you didn’t want it delivered so very early…”

“But they’re Christmas presents for my son at college,” she protested. “He can’t receive Christmas presents on Christmas night.”

“Unfortunately, Ma’am, all of our clientele feels the way you do about their loved ones, and they put their names on the waiting list earlier.” Lisa picked up a clip board, blew some flakes of paper snow off the top and flipped back two pages, tugging thoughtfully on the cotton ball end of her hat. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind around noon yesterday, we can deliver your present for only three hundred dollars—or for two hundred fifty at three o’clock yesterday afternoon—“

“These are criminal, your prices—pure exploitation—a monopoly—“

“The only reason we have a monopoly, Ma’am, is because we’re the first company to have mastered short-term time travel. Please be assuaged by the fact that next year, we expect that many new companies offering similar services will have opened, all charging similar prices.”

The woman, snapping the gift back into her overlarge purse, muttered something about the police being happy enough to use the same services for the good of the public. She glared over her daughter’s head, ready to criticize and waste the store’s time when she wasn’t going to buy anything. Which, of course, the store couldn’t have.

Lisa did grin then, and vindictively. “We workers here at the Yesterday Post Office are perfectly willing to oblige all your holiday needs, Ma’am, but unlike the fine men and women of the State Police, we are not given state funds for our endeavors. I am sorry that we couldn’t be of assistance to you today, and please consider our services in the future when you forget to send out your son’s birthday present, as well; after all, birthdays very rarely fall on major holidays, so there should be few delays or excess charges when sending such a package.”

The woman, visibly offended to the very core of her soul, clenched her daughter’s hand so tightly the girl winced and swept herself from the shop. “Merry Christmas, Ma’am!” Lisa called as the shop bell, replaced by the sound of jingle bells, sounded out cheerfully. She then bent herself in half laughing, flipped off the “open” light, taped an apology letter to the window, and slammed the front door shut in the faces of the line of customers outside, fresh with the reminder of how much she loved working over the holidays.

Your daily dose of inanity

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:51:33 GMT

The examiner pressed her lips together, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Monternal, but I cannot give you a passing mark for your work this time around. Perhaps next semester…”

Matthew packed his copy of the textbook into his bag, rolling his eyes when the action allowed him to twist away far enough for the examiner not to see. This was his third semester flunking the exam, a special occasion seeing as how they’d given him Olenzack, who was notorious for passing the most flunkies on to Advanced Occult. The corner of his book snagged and pulled torn material in the lining of his bag.

“Excuse me,” said the dead man lying strapped to the table. “I don’t mean to intrude or anything, but—where am I?”

“You certainly have the potential for great success, there’s no doubting that,” Madame Olenzack continued to Matthew, eyes darting to the dead man but choosing to ignore him. “In fact, I must confess I and the other professors are perplexed by your results, what with your family history.”

“Excuse me,” the corpse began more tentatively than before. “Am I… dead? I remember a… car running the light…”

“Yes, you’re dead, and a lab rat to boot—doesn’t that make you proud?” Matthew drawled, sidestepping the examiner’s sharp rebuke about how speaking with the dead wasn’t kosher.

The dead man, who couldn’t pale, trembled. “This… isn’t heaven.”

“No, it’s a classroom, and you wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t screwed up my necromancy exam—“

“That will be all!” Madame Olenzack shrieked, running her hand over the dead man’s eyes. He stopped trembling, laid still like corpses were supposed to.

Matthew shrugged and exited the room, dragging his bag across the floor a ways before slinging it onto his shoulders. He thought his examiner had been sort of unfair—a faulty reanimated corpse was better than none; it could move, and you could convince it to do your bidding, even if it wasn’t a proper flesh-eating drone.

And hell, at least this one hadn’t exploded.

Because this journal missed content

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:26:29 GMT

Survey, from alchemy_hisoka: 100 Questions About Slash

Tell us about yourself
1. Your name: Tammy
2. Your occupation: Student.
3. Gender: Female
4. Age: 19, almost 20
5. When is the first time you found out you are a slash fangirl/fanboy?: 9th grade with CCS fic.
6. Does your family know you are one?: Mom and brother yes; Dad probably; religious extended family no.

On fics
7. Do you still remember which fic converted you?: Shades of Discovery by Tamchronin
8. List all your favourite fics: Shoebox Project by Lady Jaida and Dorkofic (Harry Potter), Nukume Dori by Leareth (Tokyo Babylon), Shades of Discovery by Tamchronin (CardCaptor Sakura)
9. Which is your favourite fic now?: Shoebox Project.
10. Why do you write slash fics?: Because it's hot and obvious between a lot of characters.
11. Have you written original fics before?: Many, though never finished
12. What do you think of your original fics?: Maybe I'll fix them so they don't suck and get published some day.
13. What do your friends think of your original fics?: *shrug* The few that bother think they're good.
14. Do you write chaptered fics or one-shots better?: Long. Long, long stories, standard novel length.
15. Why?: Because I always expand and expand and add information about characters and it all becomes plot-relevant later on.
16. What is the greatest obstacle you faced when you write original fics?: Getting off my ass and writing it.
17. Will you follow canon when you write fanfics?: Obsessively.
18. Do you like tragedies or comedies?: Both; reading material changes accordingly.
19. Can you accept crack fics?: I wouldn't have read fics from the FMA community 2 years ago if I didn't. Roy/Ed wtfffff...
20. Can you accept original characters?: Yeah, if it's done well. I can accept most things if done well.
21. Do you like fluff?: Yes, when I'm in the mood.
22. Why?: Because.

On fanart
23. Besides writing, do you draw?: Sparingly
24. What do you think of your drawings?: They're passable.
25. Have you bought doujinshis before?: Too many. They're just so pretty... >.>;;
26. Do you have any slash artists or writers you like?: In doujin, I assume, and not particularly.
27. Have you produced your own doujinshi before?: No.
28. What is the estimated time to the completion of your next doujinshi?: Not happening.
29. Who is your favourite slash comic artist?: K. Sandra Fuhr.
30. Who is your favourite slash author?: If published...? Lynn Flewelling.

On writing
31. Have you thought of submitting your original fics for publication?: Yes, once I fix them up.
32. What is the emotion/feeling you most want to convey through your writing?: Competence on my part, and considering things from new perspectives on part of the reader. That didn't really make grammatical sense, but wha-hey.
33. How do you cope with a writer's block?: I don't, generally; I throw temper tantrums.
34. What do you normally do when you are not writing?: Talking on MSN, sitting around as a waste of space.
35. Do you have a fic journal?: I have a writing journal.
36. How many times have you thought of abandoning your fic journal?: My writing journal, and yes.
37. What irritates you most when you are writing?: When I'm really into writing a scene and someone, usually Mom, barges in with some really fucking inane question they could've answered themselves and it screws up the flow of words. That's usually instant writer's block and a screaming fit on my part.
38. What makes you happy when you are writing?: When little plot details just come together on their own and round everything out without a fight.
39. When do you feel the urge to write?: When... ever I feel like writing.

On pairings
40. List all the pairings you like: I think I won't, really; too lazy.
41. Why?: Because it'd be a large paragraph in length.
42. Which is the pairing you like most now?: Remus/Sirius.
43. Why?: Because there's a new chapter of Shoebox Project coming out soon.
44. When is the first time you wrote a slash fic?: 9th grade-ish.
45. What is the average time per day you spend thinking about this pairing?: Not.... that overly much. o.0
46. What are you thinking of when you are writing them?: I don't.
47. Are there any writers you like because of this pairing?: Lady Jaida, although she's a fantastic writer with every pairing she does.
48. Why do you like this writer?: Because her writing's intelligent, hilarious, witty, charming, everything that makes you feel good and sharpens your own talents by just reading it.
49. Which is the pairing you cannot accept?: Um, non-con? There are a LOT of pairings that I don't like, because fandom is fucked up.
50. What will you do if you are forced to write a pairing you dislike?: *snerks* And in what situation would this be? "I'll kill you and all these child hostages if you don't write me Neville/Giant Squid porn AND DON'T THINK I WON'T! *brandishes handgun*"?
51. Do you think your favourite pairing is the One True Pairing?: Yes, because I am Always Right.
52. Who is the uke in this pairing?: I don't know.
53. Why?: Because it's ambiguous and I like it that way.
54. If you can, what would you like to tell the seme?: Um, beware curtains?
55. If you can, what would you like to tell the uke?: The same--no matter which is which, it's a worthwhile warning in their case.
56. Why do the two of them attract each other?: Because their love is so exasperated.
57. Is their love the "forbidden love"?: *shrugs* As much as any slash, I'd imagine.
58. Will they ever have a happy ending?: No, and fangirls cry in the bathroom like those emo kids about it.
59. If they are going to have a sad ending, what will it be like?: *refers you to canon* Both dead, one married off to a nonsensical partner because JKR wanted to silence the slash fangirls.
60. If they are going to have a happy ending, what will it be like?: *refers you to this post in shoebox_project
61. Describe the personality of the seme: They're ambiguous.
62. Describe the personality of the uke: *points up*
63. What is the hardest part to write for this pairing?: Wouldn't know; haven't written it.
64. Why?: Because.
65. Which are your favourite scenes of this pairing in canon?: The two of them in book 3?
66. Which are your favourite quotes from this pairing in canon?: Don't have.
67. What would you most like to do with this pairing?: Chocolate!fic, but that's more my obsession with good chocolate talking than them.
68. Have you shipped a pairing after reading an excellent fic?: Yes, Shoebox Project.
69. Have you thought of creating a pairing?: ....what?
70. What would you most like to tell the canon author?: That she should hire a new editor and force herself to learn to write better than she does.

On smut
71. What is the first thing you think of when you see "NC-17"?: That there's probably no plot to go with the porn.
72. Have you written p0rn before?: Not really.
73. Why do you write them?: n/a
74. Do you think they are easy or difficult to write?: n/a
75. Why?: Because.
76. Do you like reading smut fics?: Not without at least a 4/5 ratio of plot to pr0n.
77. Do you like smut fanart?: Depends if it's tasteful.
78. Do you still remember the most hard core smut comic you have seen?: Unfortunately. It was Mom's. 9.9
79. Were you shocked when you saw it?: I raised an eyebrow, wondering at the self-lubricating bottoms.
80. Do you have any special preferences? (Threesomes etc.): GOOD. WRITING.
81. What is the most unacceptable thing in smut fics?: Bad writing or pr0n with no point other than to get you worked up, which it fails at.
82. Where do your knowledge of smut come from?: My mother. -.-
83. Can you accept seme and uke changing roles?: I'd hope so, as it's realistic.
84. Have you seen real person slash films?: Not too many.
85. What are your thoughts?: Brokeback Mountain was crap and I haven't seen much else, unless you add TV shows into the mix.
86. Which is the most exaggerated smut scene you have seen?: *shrugs* in QaF?
87. Can you accept p0rn without plot?: No.

Miscellaneous
88. Has the fact that you are a slash fangirl/fanboy brought you any trouble?: From my brother, of all people. Whatever.
89. What would you be doing now if you have never known about slash?: A lot less with myself, having never met my best friend.
90. Where do you think you can find like-minded people?: The internet, especially LiveJournal. NOT a GSA or any other such organized groups who don't really want straight people to join.
91. Have you read slash fics in other languages?: Japanese dojin? Other than that, not really
92. If yes, describe the difference between them and the fics in English: Grammar patterns that become cheesy when translated into English don't sound half as bad in Japanese. Sometimes.
93. Which is the website you often hang out at?: LiveJournal.
94. List your favourite slash communities: ......shoebox_project?
95. Will you draft your fics on paper first or write it on the computer straight away?: Computer straight away usually, although a paper copy is easier to edit.
96. What is the craziest thing you have done as a slash fangirl/fanboy?: Be an annoying fangirl who couldn't get over herself in HS? Attempt to join a GSA?
97. Will you continue writing?: Well yes, if I plan on getting published some day.
98. What is one thing you would like to say to your readers?: Hi, you three. *waves*
99. What is one thing you would like to say to yourself?: Get off your ass and write, dumbass.
100. Any more comments?: I'm writing Harry Potter fic, god help me.

Eating the Stars, part 3

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:56:11 GMT

Part 3 of Eating the Stars and Gran's Dilemma:

Duchess stood tall atop the stairs, surveying a jungle-gym castle. Duchess wasn’t her real name, not that anyone needed real names anymore. (Hers was Daphne). She was one of the only children who could recall her real name, not that it mattered. (Daphne, like the name of that doll the adults were making before). Being taller than most only emphasized the age difference.

(But you’re too young to remember TV, aren’tcha? It was this box-thing with magic inside and the adults would send a picture and words to every set. The doll was pretty, with her hair in ribbons, and I was gonna get one for my birthday, before).

The animals, of course, knew of Duchess. Knew she was old, at least older than the other children, maybe the oldest. Knew Duchess had a kingdom at her old school, where children followed her orders because they were used to it. After the adults had gone most of the children had cried. Daphne had smiled. She had smiled and gone to school like every other day, with ribbons in her hair and bits of breakfast under her fingernails (peanut butter that day—Daphne couldn’t cook yet). Other kids had wandered to school later on, seen her sitting on the doorstep next to the broken door handle and assumed she had done it. There was food in the cafeteria and places to sleep in the kindergarteners’ room and a roof out of the rain. The other children were used to following orders from the adults. They had seen Daphne, older and sitting benevolently among a few long slices of glass from the shattered windowpane, and Duchess, the ruler, had been born.

Duchess had heard the animals talking at night, about before and stars and—this was the good part—with the adults gone, they could raise the children right. Duchess hadn’t liked adults’ orders, and she wouldn’t like animals’ orders either. Duchess liked giving orders; sometimes necessary, sometimes frivolous (to see the children squirm or cry), always punished if not completed.

They were children, the animals said. They were born to follow, and with the right example become great and harmonious. And maybe—maybe—the stars would come back. If children could learn not to be greedy, gluttonous things, fat and always hungry. If children could learn to stay young and friends with the sparrows and the snakes and the cicadas. Passive. Dimwitted. Like sheep. (My Mommy used to tell me to count sheep when I couldn’t sleep and it worked, always worked, but you don’t remember your Mommy, don’tcha?)

Children had no malice in their hearts. Except the crows didn’t believe that. The crow kingdom knew that children were more malicious (A word my big sister taught me!) than adults; they knew and demanded Duchess’ death. And that was why the crows must die. In Duchess’ kingdom, if you saw a crow it was an order of the strictest order to capture and stone it to death. “Bash their brains out on the cement,” Duchess cried from the highest point of the jungle gym (Which sounded like “Jim”, which had been her Daddy’s name, but you don’t remember your Daddy, don’tcha?). “Splatter their brains and leave them to dry and hang their bodies by their necks from the tetherball rope.”

After the fifth, the crows stopped coming. Duchess clapped her hands with glee and ordered her subjects to bring her a lemonade.

[A/N: For the curious, Sugar's sister/Tart/Jerry is 11-12, Sugar/Sweet/Sherry is 7, Duchess is 10, and Duchess' head servant Adam, who will be making an appearance later, is 8. The incident that killed off the adults and most children above age 4 happened 5 or so years ago.

As including data for a character who hasn't shown up yet may suggest, I have ~~somewhat of~~ a direction for this now! *party streamers and balloons*]

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:41:52 GMT

Sebastian & Ethan untitled collab, chapter 1

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:45:17 GMT

Collaboration between lorataprose and altis.

Title: [no title/working title as of yet]
Rating: PG-13
Genre: SciFi; twisted
Pairing: N/A for the time being
Summary: Two rival 20-year-old scientists; one unmentionable past occurrence; countless pairs of mismatched socks; one chinchilla; a teenage secretary/hacker; a patient intern; and the race to make the discovery first when it turns ugly. Ugly, or "unmentionable."
Author's Notes: RPed over MSN chat in script format, then prosed by me.

( “Published, are we?” said the person in Sebastian’s computer chair while browsing today’s top Yahoo news articles. )

[For those who notice this is a fake cut: torturedsoul became free in the great LJ username purge and Lora and I snatched it up--because how couldn't we?--and will be using it for collaborations.]

Opinion and open call for suggestions

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:02:27 GMT

As you may have noticed, the beginning of Catch-Magic is under heavy review. The removal of inconsistencies aside, I face the archetypal battle between presenting the information the reader needs and making the damn thing interesting enough they don't fall asleep. I would love to start my story out with, "Creeeeeek—crash-shatter-whumph-slam!", which is a helluva lot more eyecatching than "No one noticed when a glassy, translucent orb in an out-of-use back corner trembled, shedding layers of dust.", but so far it is not of the working.

In the interest of this, I post what I hope will be the opening lines of Catch-Magic's sequel (working title of Drashanen's Catch):

"Your mother," Shirley Temple said, standing on tiptoe to lean against the bartop, "was a whore."

Tobias sighed; this was the third time this week.

I want to know: if you were in a bookstore, opened a book at random and that was the first line, would you continue? If you could please spare me 30 seconds to comment with a simple "It works" or "It doesn't work" at least, I would appreciate it muchly. Also, I would love suggestions for ways I could make the newer C-M prologue more interesting.

[Edit: Possible rewrite of the "new" Prologue. Am trying to make it interesting by focusing on one or two PoVs only, very rough draft:

She was glad the old geezer had clocked out when he had. Gone out the theatrical way, a spectacle like he’d never quite managed in life. The old archivist had been half-hearted, old dust clogging his lungs so badly he couldn’t sneak up on you for the rattling of his withered pipes. Rin guessed that in a way death was the old man’s last chance to get anything right. Having shrieked herself hoarse when she had stumbled—literally—across the body on the floor, underground in the double-cellar of artifacts from the 100 wars, between a statue and an orb, she hoped the old coot was damned pleased with himself. Her fingers had slipped, lacking friction against the orb’s side; instead of regaining her balance she had fallen on top of the corpse and lost what had been an expensive lunch. It was curious, the inspectors later said when Rin returned to the scene, that the archivist had polished the dust off this one artifact only before he passed away. Rin had told them she couldn’t care less what madness strikes the mind of a man before he kicks it, dusting thoroughly as one’s last act was conscientious even if shoving off one’s body in the middle of one’s workplace isn’t, and couldn’t you inspectors please hurry up, this is my domain to clean now that I’ve been appointed head archivist.

He hadn’t been a bad sort—just in the way of Rin’s promotion. Why promote an archivist of thirty when you have a relic of a head archivist alive and—spiteful, if not well?]

Formulae

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:43:47 GMT

Classic Love Story

It really is like falling, she thinks. Falling through the air with nothing to catch onto, not wanting to catch onto anything and with nothing dangerous at the bottom. She compliments him, the darker tones of his skin, the shape of his square face, his powerful personality, and could never stop falling in love. She loves being in love with him.

It is like fine wine, if he's an indication. A blooming, beautiful taste, and the deeper you drink, the warmer, more contented you become. They make each other more confident. She feels he could face anything with her at his side, and the opposite.

He loves to play the piano, has learned since he was six. He tells her he used to hate his lessons, but is so glad he learned now he has someone to play for. She tells him she enjoys jazz and he retrieves a book of swing classics from underneath the window seat, smiles at her, next to him on the piano bench, fingers flowing over the ivory, a melody adagio.

Father was skeptical, at first, but adores him, as expected. The two had had a long conversation the first night she had brought him home. Having been somewhat nervous, she had waited outside the room, shifting from foot to foot while leaning with her back against the wall. But then her father had laughed, his voice joining in soon after, and she knew Father was as charmed as she. After all, who wouldn't be charmed by her beau?

It was a week after, she is waiting on him because he insisted on greeting her Father before taking her out on a date. Old fashioned, but sweet and just like him.

"Ready to go?" he asks, walking up behind where's she's leaning against the porch banister and slipping a hand to the small of her back. The smell of his cologne is mixed with that of his soap and another smell that's twice as pleasant and only him. She nods happily, and he looks into her eyes before kissing her.

Love Story Written in Defiance of the Classic Love Story

It is like allergies, she thinks. Like the embarrassing sort of allergies that make your eyes puff up like you've been going at the weed hidden in your inhaler like that Sonia girl does in the middle of economics. Like the allergies that turn your nose red until you try to claw out the spider you and the tylenol PM you took knows is hiding inside your nose tickling everything. With your pen cap.

It is like narcotics, if he's any indication. She strongly suspects he'd come to school in his underwear if his mother didn't police his appearance between his sliding down the banister and the sock-sliding to the sugar pot of granola bars (the breakfast he eats next to you on the bus). In his mother's underwear on especially disoriented Mondays.

He can't sing and tells her she makes him want to. She tells him not to if he doesn't want fire ants slipped into his peanut butter and chocolate sauce sandwich to sabotage his throat. He smiles like he wants to kiss her, sappily and without a hint of his illusive manhood. She makes him want to sing, and the compliment makes her ill imagining the scene.

Her father showed him his gun collection and he stood there rattling off about tanks and video games that had tanks and how her father's guns were more the Deerhunter type. Her father told her later that she was allowed to date this one because if he was daft to the extent he wasn't capable of recognizing a threat to his life, he wouldn't recognize a situation in which I could take advantage of Daddy's Little Girl, either. She'd wanted to slap her father upside the head. She'd done it to Mister Clueless.

"What was that for--?" he'd asked, him and his baseball cap ducking the backswing.

"You are a clueless git," she spelled out slowly with hand signals.

It is like allergies because he doesn't go away and she can't make him and his giraffe's limbs and his hat hair leave. Because he stubbornly follows her, his stupidity increasing the mad impulse she has to lean over the second story staircase and keep leaning over until the embarrassed itch in her eyes goes away and he stops talking about the perfectness of her earlobes in class! Because she can't focus on taking notes when he's in the same room, paranoid he'll slip super glue onto the teacher's seat. Because, when he'd grabbed her hand, halfway from hand signals to a rude gesture, her bronchial tubes had constricted and she couldn't breathe.

"Mental." she'd said, meaning him and her and the both of them. He smiles daftly and kisses her.

Sex Scene of the Love Story the Author Plans on Destroying

Indistinguishable from many a fictionpress story; may or may not include correct grammar.

Short & to-the-point one shot

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:22:10 GMT

Inspired by a news excerpt I saw this evening. I'm relatively proud of it, as it was written on a lark.

"What are you doing?" She hissed the way she spat words--all from the front of her teeth.

"Exactly what it looks like I'm doing," Jesse said while concentrating, chewing on the corner of his ring finger's fingernail where it stuck out. A thread of it came loose off the soggy end and he tore it down the length of the nail with his teeth.

"But that's illegal!" Beth gestured widely at the pot over the camping stove, the one Jesse had set up out back behind the abandoned playground of their youth.

"Did Mom and Dad tell you that?" Jesse asked with a grin.

"Well--yeah!"

He turned back to his work. "And that's because they all did it when they were kids. Every single one, all for the rush of it." He swiveled an eye through his bangs toward her and grinned. "Why don't you try it before pitching a fit? Least if you don't like it you'll have a good reason--"

"Because it's illegal," she sniffed, looking like their cat, except thinner. "They passed the ban years ago--lord knows how you even got the stuff to make it--and what's more, it's bad for you. You're gonna get addicted and bloat up like a balloon and--don't come crying to me when that happens!"

Jesse's grin didn't waver. He uncrinkled a bit of orange-tainted paper towel from his jacket pocket and held it up to her. "Suppose you don't want any of these either?"

Beth was priceless; her hands flew to her mouth and she backed up, walking right into the ladder for the monkey bars. "How--how did you get that!?"

An eyeroll. "You never used to be such a wuss," he said, holding the paper towel up to his face and inhaling, savoring the scent. These had cost him a pretty penny, but it wasn't like he was addicted or anything; he just got such a craving every once in a while and nothing else would do. It was the same as Mom's chicken or Dad's spinach dip except... well, you could get arrested and fined for carrying illegal substances. "Here I am, being a nice brother and offering to share my stash, and I don't even get thanks. That's some gratefulness there."

"Do you--do you know what you're doing?" she stuttered, tears coming out of her round eyes when Jesse nodded. "But it's--it's--it's bad for you!"

"So's flying, if the plane crashes." Jesse stirred the pot, hand flying away and returning gingerly to the cooking fork when it spat at him.

Beth swallowed and stood up taller. "They put the laws in place for a reason, I hope you know. It may sound stupid to you, but... People used to die, Jesse. They used to grow big as a room, too big to fit through doorways or into clothes or anything, and one day they wouldn't be able to move or their heart couldn't support their big, fat limbs or their weight crushed them or--"

Jesse scoffed and ate a potato chip--barbecue flavored, and they cost a fuckin' fortune through the black market around here--while his sister prattled on about laws and how concerned she was for him. They were just too good to resist.

Post #100! For Lora ^^

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:59:44 GMT

[A/N: Was trying to finish up the next chapter of Catch-Magic for this occasion, but it's not cooperating. Good news is that it's almost finished... >.>

Also something you must know before you read this: I am eating egg salad and corn pizza. Mmmmmm.]

"'My moustache brings all the girls to the yard'?"

There was a caricature of a young man with a handlebar moustache done in greyscale on ninja turtle green.

"You don't have a moustache."

"I do too," said Drake, who did not, and was wearing the t-shirt. "It's right here and is very distinguished, like a may-trah dee."

"You're seeing things." A squeak as Edward faced forward and the desk protested his entire 100 pound weight shifting.

"My moustache is very dignified and attractive and not only does it bring all the girls to the yard," Drake continued, voice crescendoing dramatically, "but it brings all the neighborhood boys, as well! They can't help themselves, such is the power of my moustache!"

"Class is starting soon," Edward advised, fishing his notebook and folder out of his bag and aligning the bottom left corners of each parallel to the edge of the desk.

"Just you watch! My moustache will bring all the boys and girls to my yard and!" He stood up in his desk, pointing between Edward's eyes. "Even you won't be able to resist its hypnotic powers!"

It was at this precise moment that their English lit professor entered the room.

Remember that eating-the-stars short?

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 20:25:50 GMT

Part 2 of this messed up thing. Still don't know where I'm going with it; it sounds like the introduction to either a short story or a long novel, so let's pray for the former for the sole reason that I don't think I could deal with a whole book of this.

Needless to say, as nonsensical as this is, it'll help a bit if you read the first part.

Gran sat majestically atop the staircase. She was good at stuff like that. The majestic and the sitting. She wasn’t so good at talking anymore, but that was because she was old. Outside on the balcony Sweet and Tart were un-star-gazing. Those weren’t their real names, but Susan and Arthur had taken their children’s names with them when they stole the stars and gobbled them down like poisoned candy. Gran sniffed through her cold, wet nose. Even she wasn’t lacking decency enough to eat the stars like a cannibal. It didn’t matter how much power was in them; they were hearts and souls. And in the end she had been right; Susan and Arthur were dead and she was left to raise an angel and a brat. Woo-hoo.

What was it about adults that made them so foolish, anyhow? Tart was nearly there—you could tell by the way she strained against gravity, craving the sky. She would be the first adult since… Since. The Kingdom of Passion wasn’t ready for her. Gran knew this as she watched Sweet cry, as she licked the black fur on her wrist so it laid straight.

“You should kill her,” squawked the voice of practicality from the banister. Gran didn’t waste her breath asking how it had gotten in; crows were transcendental like that.

“Is that an order from your queen?” asked Gran. Ice dripped from her words, flowed from her mouth and coalesced into snow on the carpet.

The crow bounced on its feet, feathers ruffling. “There’s no use getting angry at me,” it said, offended. “You know I’m only telling the truth. The girl is becoming dangerous. She would make a lovely star,” he offered.

Gran bared her teeth. “And so would you,” she said, unsheathing her claws.

The crow cawed, a cackle. “I wouldn’t become a star! I would go back home, where the sky can’t be eaten.” He turned to a profile and eyed her with an eye whose pupil swiveled around like the number on an eight-ball. “Sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been there. I was born there,” he preened. “In heaven.”

That was the trouble with crows—they knew they were so special. Gran leapt up onto the banister, back feet losing their grip and slipping off. She was quick to regain her balance, but the crow had taken wing by then.

“If you don’t kill her, someone else will,” the crow’s voice bounced off the walls and knocked her from the railing. Gran landed in a tangle of limbs, the crow’s words, her own curses and the knowledge that time could run faster than she. A flutter of snow.

“What are you doing, Cat?” Tart scoffed, socked foot kicking through the icy words Gran had left at the top of the stairs. Sweet could have walked through it without touching it, but not so Tart. And Tart didn’t know what she could do. It was because she was growing up, and couldn’t see what she manipulated. It terrified Gran.

“I fell,” she hissed in the human tongue, gagging over the L sound.

“Well get up,” Tart said, long auburn hair breezing past her doorframe as she disappeared from sight. That girl was going to be the death of her. Or she was going to be the death of that girl. Sweet huddled on the stairs next to Gran and helped her stand up. Gran had hopes for Sweet. Maybe she wouldn’t fall prey to the adults’ disease. Maybe she could help the Kingdom of Passion, restore the sky. The stars didn’t have to be repopulated by deaths; maybe it would be more beautiful. Maybe Sweet could temper Tart.

“Sis wants to rip the sky apart,” Sweet whispered into the fur of Gran’s back later, and Gran went cold.

The Adults had thought to take control of the sky by becoming soul-eaters. The stars had fought back from inside them and both had been covered with black blood, extinguished. They had meant to control; Tart meant to destroy. Because adults couldn’t just look at something—they knew it was meant for their hands. The crow was right. It was time. It had been time for too long.

When she had Sweet knock on Tart’s door, the older girl had left for good.

[A/N: wtfcrows? Guess there's a crow empire. *shrug* I'll go with it.

Again, suggestions for a direction for this plot, although not necessarily adopted, are appreciated.]

Randomosity returns, and someone needs to take these Calbee potato sticks away from me

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 02:50:53 GMT

“We once had stars,” says the girl’s older sister. There are clouds covering the sky now while the girls crane their necks backward, but if there weren’t the stars still wouldn’t be there. Sugar knows this—knows this like she knows her real name isn’t Sugar.

“Mama and Papa and the adults all ate the stars,” Sugar’s sister continues, hugging her arms around the swell of her tiny breasts. Last year she didn’t have them at all, but she’s twelve now. Practically an adult; Sugar is scared for her. “They gobbled them all up and drank the twilight away. That’s why there’s no moms and dads any more—the stars stuck in their throats like diamonds and ripped them out.” She makes a tearing motion with her hands and Sugar snaps her head down to watch. Her neck creaks at the base of her skull. Sugar pops her jaw in and out of place, bites the teeth together; they’re just starting to get their points. Sis’s fangs came in a while ago, before her curves. Sis looks down and smiles, baring sharp eyeteeth. “I wish the blood from their throats had stained the sky back the right color; then at least we could have had our twilight.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Sugar says in a small voice. “Gran says—“

“I know what Gran says,” Sis rolls her eyes. “Cat says a lot of things while her skin ages and thins to paper. We should just take her heart and feed it to the sun already. Or maybe make a star.” When Sis smiles it’s never pretty. “Whaddya think, would Gran like to be the only star in the sky? Alone and distant and hanging over our heads like a blood-covered plague star. No,” Sis decides, “she hangs overhead enough.”

“You were never like this before.” Sugar wants to cry. She sniffles, rubs her nose and makes it and the redness in her nose look like the effects of the cold. “And Gran says that that’s what Mama and Papa got like before—“

“I won’t be like them!” Sis crosses her arms, knobby elbows stretching the loose fabric of her sweater. She adjusts a striped stocking, then the other, and for the moment after she straightens up she looks a year younger and safe. “I’ll get back the stars and the twilight and I’ll even let you keep Gran if you really want, even though she coughs up furballs and makes the sky a little darker and the living room carpet a little disgustinger.”

Sugar hiccoughs, clutching at her close-cropped yellow curls. What she doesn’t say is that, from her angle at the underside of Sis’s chin, Sis looks hungry to eat the clouds and tear apart the rest of the night sky.

[A/N: Believe me, I'd like to know as much as you. Maybe I'll go somewhere with it; maybe it'll sit here and fester. It was inspired somewhere between rewatching Corpse Bride (this time dubbed in Japanese) and reading chapter 1 of a manga called Sugar Rune, which is quite cutesy and not at all messed up so really, no idea. Something in the wtf factor reminds me of Deva's sea serpent story (at least in the first prose short of IBG as I haven't seen any other version [/disclaimer]).

If I do continue, in addition to the sky being something that must be maintained (magically/psychically/wtfever), I'm toying with the idea of taking words very literally. For example, stealing a person's heart becomes a much more serious crime in this universe.

Uh... suggestions/comments? **fishes for anything that could work with this**]

Poll Re a story

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 07:55:13 GMT

Quick, head on over to this post in my other journal and vote on which turn my plot should take!

[I should post content sometime...]

This post brought to you by the Bowling for Soup CD “A Hangover You Don’t Deserve.”

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 23:55:01 GMT

Because I should be working on a) my history essay, which is late as it is, and/or b) my NaNoNovel.

It had started out, as all good things do, with a dare.

Rose’s roommate hadn’t believed her when Rose said she would do it if it would make the other girl shut up.

“You’re such a miss prissy-perfect, practically the only thing you do wrong is smoke!” she had scoffed. Rose wished she had had a cigarette between her fingers at that moment; she would have blown a huge cloud of smoke into the girl’s face.

“You’ve known me for, what, five weeks?” Rose asked neutrally, trying to project fuck off vibes into the girl’s face instead.

She scoffed. “Your type is always the same. ‘I’m not just a perfect, perfectly boring straight A student with a stick up my ass! Really I’m not, so please talk to me!’”

Rose leaned back in her desk chair. The back, which wasn’t designed to move, creaked a few inches. Her roommate sounded like a chipmunk when she mocked people. Alvin, Simon, The-o-dore! “Shut the fuck up,” she suggested mildly.

“Oh, now I’m scared,” said the other girl nastily. “Gonna go crying to mommy and daddy for help?”

Rose snapped her laptop shut hard, cutting off iTunes’ angry rock mid-verse. “I would say ‘Please shut the fuck up,’ but I think you’ve surpassed that level of bitchdom. How about, ‘What would it take to make you shut the fuck up?’?”

And her roommate had told her, no doubt thinking she was setting Rose up for a huge humiliation. Breaking and entering and irreverence toward their precious school, oh my. “Okay,” Rose had said, picking a bobby pin from the pile of discarded hair clips on her roommate’s desk, untangling the bleached hair strands from it, picking the plastic off of the ends and bending it properly. It was already night time, so why wait? Pocketing the hairpin, her keys and wallet, she left their room and headed across campus.

It wasn’t even a real lock—just a padlock over one of those bits of metal that fit together to hold the door and wall together. Half as complex as breaking into either of her parents’ houses, although her fingers got stiff from the cold and made picking the lock more difficult. When it popped open she slipped the lock into the pocket of her baseball jacket and headed up the tight spiral staircase, made a note to bring a flashlight next time.

Her roommate had meant graffiti with photographic evidence of Rose leaving it, but her phrasing had been jumbled (due no doubt to a C- average in high school English) and that worked out perfectly well for Rose. Her way was twice as noticeable and satisfying, because it would both be fun and piss off her roommate.

Thankfully there was enough moonlight at the top to work with. Cassette player, and thank god for that; Rose would have had to figure out how to wire a CD player into the system if it hadn’t had one. They liked to play the school fight song and other shit through the system on homecoming weekend, though, so she’d guessed that it was a system where they could do that without rewiring it. Good. She returned the lock to its proper place and walked brusquely back to her dorm room, ignored her roommate’s jeers when she returned, got even by loudly playing Elvis’s top 20 hits for an hour while she made the tape.

“See this?” Rose asked, shoving it at her roommate’s nose. “Remember what it says. I sharpied it myself, just for you.”

Her roommate made flat eyes at her, pulled her MP3 player headphones back on straight and turned up her horrid pop music. Rose flipped her off, left and returned again, finally getting to sleep at 2 AM when she decided her German homework could go fuck itself. The next morning Rose slept straight through her alarm and missed her German class altogether anyway, so it worked out for the best.

Finding her roommate at lunchtime was a chore, although being a pretentious, holier-than-thou vegetarian narrowed the girl’s cafeteria choices. Rose eventually spotted her with ten minutes to spare eating a bowl of takeout ziti at a picnic table under a tree with her equally annoying friends.

“Stand and follow me,” she commanded. When the girl took exception to being bossed around, Rose said, “So you’re too much of a wuss to follow through with your bets?” The girl looked at her blankly or like she was a very small bug. Rose sighed. “Come with me or I will send all of your clothes through the admissions office cardboard shredder.” The girl protested that Rose couldn’t do something like that, and Rose replied that she was perfectly capable, despite the consequences, of doing such a thing. Eventually the girl followed Rose just to stop Rose from badgering her.

The girl made a face when Rose, leaning against a pillar and facing the university’s inner courtyard, lit a cigarette. “How long is this going to take?”

Rose cupped her left hand over her eyes (the right had the cigarette), peered up at the face of the clock tower. “Two minutes,” she said. They waited them out in silence, the neutral sort of silence for Rose and a sullen one for the other girl.

The hands snapped to noon. Rose dropped the remains of her cigarette and crushed it under her boot heel. The dulcet, twangy intro chords to “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog” blared from the clock tower speakers in place of the usual noontime bells. People around the courtyard stopped where they were walking to stare.

Rose turned, hands in her pockets, to her roommate. “One clock tower broken into and defaced. Now, as per our agreement, you can shut the fuck up.”

“There’s no way you did that yourself,” the girl said, attempting to save face. Rose smiled and sauntered away. Later that day a rumor circulated among the student population that the tape someone had substituted for the recording of Notre Dame or whatever cathedral’s bells had had an odd message markered on it: “Checkmate, asshole. Courtesy of the Thorn in your side.” The rumor was better than any comeback Rose could have thrown.

The second time was excusable because Rose’s roommate accused her of getting someone else to do the tape swap job for her, which simply wouldn’t do, and the third time, because then she accused Rose of photoshopping the pictures she took of herself with the timer function of her digicam. For a girl who accused Rose of being straight-laced, her roommate was sure jumpy about following Rose to the clock tower; she ended up waiting around outside while Rose went and did the swap, hissing something about freezing her ass off and wasting her time when it was obvious she was chickening out. Rose hated people who pretended at rebellion more than the rebellious.

After that, it was purely for the fun of it. The bookies from the next dorm over started a pool on who was behind the “Elvis incidents” (Rose toyed with the idea of placing a bet and collecting a heap of earnings before realizing her unfair advantage would negate her winning; then she contemplated betting it was one of the professors going mad before she finally decided not to push her luck). Whichever branch of administration was in charge of keeping students from blasting obnoxious 50’s music across campus began asking around for information. Rose’s roommate smugly promised to turn her in and was convinced not to by a picture Rose had photoshopped of the other girl’s face on Rose’s body as she picked the padlock. Later that month they assigned someone to go check the tower’s tape before noontime; Rose copied her Elvis playlist onto the school’s tape of the bells so the tape wouldn’t look different. Twice. They put stronger and stronger locks on the door, and it was like a gradual course in how to pick padlocks. The broadcasts through the campus TV system about the wrongs of breaking and entering school property were arguably the most entertaining of all.

Rose had heard today that the administration was at an impasse. Half wanted to give up and hope their determined prankster lost steam when no one was opposing him; the other half were pushing a vote to install a security camera. No time like a stalemate among members of the enemy team to steal an advantage. Rose whistled as she worked the keyhole of the padlock with a bobby pin and a bent safety pin (an addition to the lock picking kit from a few weeks ago). Her presence was doing the tower some good; it was a lot livelier in here, much less dust than before. She scattered a few faded old tapes she’d found in a back drawer in the AV department room around the cassette player, but left the bell chimes tape in the player, let that throw them for a loop. She was still whistling when she emerged from the clock tower. It was 3 AM on a Tuesday morning, not like someone else was gonna be there to hear.

Dead wrong assumption, as it turned out. An inarticulate surprised noise came from the bushes next to the path that ran closest to the clock tower. Rose jumped in the middle of fastening the lock. It rattled as it impacted the grass. Butch girl in a bandana and short Asian boy.

The bookies. Shit.

[A/N: From the same ‘verse as Drake and Edward, although Rose has never met them. The bookies are Will and Brooke, for the *tallies* approximate 2 of you who know of them.

Yeah, I should have named Rose’s roommate. If you want to make *assumptions* about my worth as a writer based on such things, then—you go ahead and do that! X_x]

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:31:00 GMT

Last night I wrote three shorts. I don't really have any plans for them, so if you feel like borrowing an idea or something, drop me a comment and it'll probably be okay. One of them is entirely real, one of them is pieced together from bits of reality, and one of them is entirely fabricated. You decide which is which.

She was a proponent of open source with freckles the size and color of pennies and two calico rabbits named Marx and Engel. Started smoking at 12, quit at 14, started up again when Daddy wasn’t around to tell her no. Daddy wasn’t around because Mamma, who smoked like a chimney—that wasn’t tobacco folded up between paper, and it sure wasn’t incense—changed the locks, tossed a suitcase full of socks and ties and dress shirts down from the second story window. Her car, a tired bit of metal and glass from the 80’s-90’s changeover, had a sun roof and no floor in the back seat; she named it the ghettomobile. Back at the turn of the century she’d cried because she was scared of Y2K, not for the potential worldwide damage, but because she would lose the folder she had built, was still building, on the family computer. A treasure trove of important files and funny pictures and music she didn’t know who the hell had sent. It would never grow dust, something her Mamma scoffed at—as if they didn’t have substance they couldn’t be real. When she had the money she bought a junker of a Windows 3.1-weilding laptop the thickness of a medical textbook, sat in her junker of a ghettomobile next to Marx and Engel’s cage, window cranked for the cigarette smoke, and dreamed her penny-freckle dreams.

He tested the wind, or would have if it hadn’t whipped his hair across his brow, just above his eyes. The bite of the frigid lump of copper between his teeth didn’t have the decency to taste metallic until it froze his tongue through. Saliva melted over it, cylindrical body and pink tip. He didn’t bite it from the middle, wary of accidentally huffing a mouthful of gunpowder up his nose. A series of clicks, stiff fingers against metal and a bolt that handled like a handsaw; loaded. Camouflage suit that helped him blend in with his surroundings, denim better than green and brown in whitewash halls. The sun was newly risen, and his breath clouded the air through his maroon scarf. Settling the gun beside his science textbook, he fingered the safety off with a low-pitch click.

Fake Italian restaurant, four guys I just met on the bus. One speaks with a Londoner accent; across from me another claims we attend the same school. He’s probably right. The other two don’t speak English, so we don’t talk to each other. Londoner laughs when New Yorker and New Yorker fire dialogue at each other in rapid succession. “Nobody likes the French!” “I’m a French major—and I don’t like the French.” My fettuccini is green. I remember always picking out green pasta from Nana’s pasta salad when Nana used to make pasta salad in winter. “Do British people actually watch the BBC?” “Old people do and, uhm…” The alfredo tastes like chowder, and it tastes good. The New Yorker and Londoner split a bottle of wine, the other two drink beer, I refill my ice water. “Why don’t the waitresses come to work in lingerie if their shorts are so short—why bother?” “Because they like to pretend they’re more high class than Hooters.” That green-pasta-detesting little girl only knew what it was like to be one of the guys. I remember what it’s like in a fake Italian restaurant, now, can’t decide whether reliving it makes me happy or sad.

National Academy for Gifted Youngsters 1/3

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 06:59:57 GMT

Tried to create an fp.c account only to find that a) the username "altis" is already taken (and the asshat's not using it for anything), and b) I apparently already had an account.

Please, for the love of God help me come up with a better title for this. **grimaces at it**

...wow. Chapters look a lot shorter on fp.c, don't they? o.o

Warning

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 06:18:25 GMT

UCAUTION

IN THE INTEREST OF SAFETY IT IS ADVISABLE TO KEEP ALTIS AWAY FROM FIRE AND FLAMES.

From Go-Quiz.com

fleeftastic is going to mock me if I don't have 1,000 words of something written by the end of Sunday. Bah. I have, like, 500 words of something that shouldn't become long, but will probably anyway. I'm thinking of posting it in snippets/sections and having a the-first-person-who-gets-it-gets-one-(1)-spoiler-of-their-choice. lorata, of course, is not eligible as always; I already told her, and she knows pretty much every spoiler, anyway.

I have a test tomorrow for which I should be studying. >.>;

C-M rantfest

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 09:51:00 GMT

You know what, Ashnyal? Screw you! XP What, a trilogy isn't good enough for you, you need a happier ending than that? You can't even let me celebrate/mourn over figuring out the all-important List of Who Dies in a Gut-Wrenching ~~or mediocre~~ Fashion before ushering me over to your story? It's not MY fault I got a book 3 newsflash while writing your backstory! You--this isn't even your story! It's the Princess/Prince's! (<--should probably figure this out quickly) Freaking court life and all its BS I'll have to come up with before writing this story...

Hello, readers ^^ In case that didn't make sense, Ashnyal is a C-M'verse character you don't know unless you're a) extremely special, or b) extremely observant of names that have appeared once in canon thus far. Lora's up on the top bunk being a sleepy 5-year-old ("Not gonna gota bed! You're gonna have a party without me!!! *scrunchy face*") and I wanted to vent. C-M'verse project status:

-am toying with the idea of adapting real life drama into part of a story with Merrows, lord help me.
-have figured out key points about the main trilogy of books, especially about book 3; this includes the Dreaded List of the Dead.
-was assaulted by an idea for a one-book sequel focusing heavily on Kellari politics and the people who make said politics happen 20-30 years after the end of the Catch-Magic trilogy. Because Ashnyal is an annoying ponce who was "displeased" with how his bit of story ends in the trilogy (and it does suck, but still). That and I'm stuck on the idea of narrating the aftermath from a younger generation of Kellari Princes and Princesses' PoVs. I need a Princess. I have too many prevalent Princes. :P Ohhh, maybe I'll work in some Novesroth... o.o **mutters plans to self**
-a main trilogy, a Kellari-centric stand alone sequel, a prequel about the fall of the Drashanen Empire all in the works, and no doubt more to come. *le sigh*