Alder's Grove

For @Dahob's prompt; this happens concurrent with The Planet Called "Oh, Fuck, We're Screwed," (LJ)

"Holy Fuck. It's snowing."

Of all of them, Tarval had been the most resistant to the "it's getting cold" idea. Although meteorology was not his primary or even his secondary skill, he had been an amateur weather-watcher on his home planet of Teyska, and had been certain the signs pointed towards a chilly but dry, mild "so-called winter."

Besides, the trees didn't like him, and he didn't like them.

He had continued to do his own thing - preparing for the mild, brief cold snap he was expecting - and continued to tell everyone they were crazy for listening to trees, trees that tried to eat people, and not to the signs of the weather.
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Vas’ World
They had trained for this scouting mission for over a year; they’d trained in the space service for years before that. But they were still unprepared for everything they found on the new planet.

Vas’ World is a soft sci-fi story of planetary exploration; like the exploration, this setting is still in the nascent stages.

Icon by meeks.

Stories include:
(The Vas Cycle)
Naming Names
Observe and Report
By the Wall (LJ [Donor Perk]
Contemplating the Wall
Siege
Horseback
Fighting for Dominance
Elevator
Coming Up (LJ)
Wound (LJ) (Donor Perk)
Greetings (LJ), to eseme's prompt
Harvest (LJ)
Further Exploration Reveals... (LJ)
"I said, Further Exploration reVEALS," (LJ)
Reveal SOMETHING? (LJ)

(The Becky Cycle)
Care Package
Rescue?
Kisses
Introductions
all four available in Tales for the Sugar Cat e-book!

The Sea and Sky (no xpost), of the origins of this planet.
Vinting Love (LJ), after Sea & Sky
Harvest (LJ)

Read my short story "Xenonegotiation," set in the pre-history of Vas' World, in the April Issue of EMG-Zine!

Read my short story "Xenonegotiation," set in the pre-history of Vas' World, in the April Issue of EMG-Zine!

After "I said, Further Exploration reVEALS," (no xpost), clare_dragonfly's reward for feedback here.

Vas World has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

"Answers would be nice," Paz muttered petulantly. "This place gives me the creeps."

"How did you ever end up in the Corps?" Malia slipped through the door and swept the beam of her flashlight over the room - not a library, as she'd hoped, but some sort of office, in more disarray than anything they'd found yet.

"Really good test scores. And I can hit a bullseye at 500 yards, which squeaked me by the psych."

"...Our psych eval needs evaluating." She picked the smallest desk and sat down, carefully, in the chair.

"Well, what about you, Miss Loves-Everything?"

To an anonymous prompt.

Vas' World has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

This comes some short time after Greetings ()


it had been with effort that Paz and Malia had slipped away from their "welcoming committee" who were, after five days, beginning to feel more like benign jailers. Vas was still doing the staring-slack-jawed thing he'd been doing since they encountered the purple girl, and the rest of the team were baby-sitting him, trying to get him to snap out of it. That left the uncomfortable pairing of Paz and Malia, who had in common that they thought Vas was a bit of a jerk, to handle the finding-an-escape route and generally doing the job they'd been sent here to do.
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Continuing flash series! I'm going to write one flash for every Icon I have, over 4 LJ accounts, 1 DW, and a whole bunch of not-currently-in-use, until I get bored or run out of icons.

Today's icon:


I don't remember, I'm sorry, where I yoinked this from, 3 years ago, to serve as Kailani's fisrt icon ("sea and sky.") Today, I'm using it as a picture, not a Kai icon.

The sky and sea seemed to go on forever.

Their exploration ship had crash-landed on this planet, splash-landed, more like it, when a computer failure (meters and yards were not the same thing, and why had it taken this long for someone to notice the problem?) had sent it off course. Many of the crew and passengers had made it out alive, in the amphibious landing vessels that were designed for any human-habitable landing site, and now they floated along, staring out at the endless sea.
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Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/278156.html

From my call for prompts and (LJ post); to @SharonTheRose's prompt "a misogynist funds himself in a woman's body, in a patriarchal system."

Vas' world, from the point of view of the McAliens.


a misogynist funds himself in a woman's body, in a patriarchal system.

Seffie knew something was wrong the moment he woke up. He was in the wrong house, for one; the ceiling above him was painted in strange blue lines, not the red curlicues of the home he had built for the wife and children he had yet to find and make.

The blankets over him were wrong, woven in patterns he didn’t recognize, and they flowed strangely over his body, lumpy, incorrect.

“Woman!” Even the voice shouting in the next room sounded wrong, the accent twisted and barely intelligible. “Where is my food?”
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Day 16 of 30 days of Fiction: "16) Write a scene on horseback."

Vas' World, and in sequence with the rest of the Vas cycle. See them all here (Lj Link)


“Can I call it a horse, at least?” Malia twitted Vas, not for the first time.

“It has blue hair,” Paz complained, “and a purple mane and tail. Mine at least is sort of natural-colored.”

“She, not it,” Suki interjected, “presuming mammalian biology. All three of them appear female. And considering the intelligence they showed, might not appreciate being spoken about as if they weren’t there.”

Vas, who was having a bit of trouble reconciling any number of things about the proto-horses, including the cotton-candy pink mane of the one he and Suki were riding, said nothing.
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Thanks to meeks (meeksp), I now have an Icon for Vas' World! It's the trees, from this story (dreamwidth link).

eseme's discussion on fiddlehead ferns had more than a little to do with how I visualized these trees :-D

Originally posted here in response to a photoprompt

"What. Is that?" Andon stared at the long stretch of stacked stone, his jaw dropping.

"We told you," Paz answered patiently. "Walls."

"Are you sure they're not natural occurrences?" Suki tried. "Some sort of land coral-like thing or...?"

"Not unless coral grows with integral mortar." Malia and Suki were getting along, Vas noticed, worse and worse since Becky's disappearance. Since they'd barely been able to be in a cabin together beforehand, he did his best to keep them separated. The walls, though, changed everything.

"So there's really a sentient species here?" Andon looked so disappointed. He'd been hoping, Vas thought, for a colonial mayorship or something. Not that he couldn't still have it, but...

"Sentience could be arguable," Paz grumbled. He was still unhappy about the attack, and so inclined to be less than charitable about their hosts. "But the have tool-using capability and weapons. And something built the walls."

"Walls, plural," Suki snapped. "This isn't the first one?"

"We were a little busy getting shot at," Malia snapped. "You may have noticed?"

"Well, you'll have to show me the other one, too."

"Only if you want to get shot at," Vas pointed out. He didn't like Suki's tone any more than Malia did.

"It's still science, and it still needs to be observed and recorded," she answered primly.

"I'll observe and record..." Malia mumbled. Ezra, finally, chose that minute to get involved, in, of course, exactly the wrong way.

"Now girls..."

For a moment, both women were united in the venom they turned on him. "We are you fucking colleagues, Ezra," Malia snarled...

"Not children in a classroom," Suki added. And then, before Ezra could retort, she screamed.

Every man there turned, hand on his weapon, in time to see the branches of the tree-like vegetation, the twisted branches that had looked a bit like tentacles, a bit like arms, twist around the senior xenobotanist's waist, pulling her off the ground and up into the air. Another tentacle wrapped around Malia's waist.

"I have a hatchet," she snapped. "Don't even think about it."

---

Pronunciation note: "Vas" is pronounced like a fine-art vase, vos.

Posted originally here, in response to Ty's 15-minute fiction prompt. It's clearly not complete, but I like its beginning

They followed the newly-named Yarthout River all day, their little craft handling its rapids with a smoothness and ease that surprised Vas. Wisely, he kept his surprise to himself; Malia and Ezra would be unbearable enough about their success without him acknowledging it.

The cliff sides grew lower and lower as the sun, too, sank down, until by late afternoon, they were floating through a meadow of strange blue-flowered grain.

It was dinner-time when they reached the confluence of what he was now thinking of as “their” river and a wider, wilder waterway; Ezra and Paz guided their boat to the V between the two rivers, where the ground raised into a hillock covered in another flowered grain, sprinkled with trees that seemed to be some sort of fruit.

“It seems almost pastoral.” Malia had been saying things like that since they made landfall; Vas did his best to ignore all of it. It was unscientific, for one, and had no place in their research. For another, it set a mood in the party’s mind, coloring the places they studied in insidious ways that would end up skewing their later feasibility reports.

He would have ignored it again, but Paz was getting in on it now. “Not almost, Mal. Look at the way the trees are planted up there. That’s not a random placement.”

He opened his mouth to stop their silliness, but the view over Paz’s shoulder stopped him dead.

“That,” he croaked, “is a wall.”