Alder's Grove

Okay, if Summer, Mellie, and Bishop are mellow and low-key about their bisexuality... Cole is not, and neither is Alexa.

This comes after Trouble in Doubles and Kissing One'sself (NSFW); the gist of which is that the Facets Team - Alexa, Cole, Josie, Aerich, and Peter - have opened a Door into a world which has not only exact copies of them but clones as well.

Facets of Dusk has a landing page here.

Cole had spent the day kissing - and fucking, and being fucked by - himself and several variations on Alexa. He'd thought the day couldn't get any more interesting - a high bar already when you spent your life bouncing from world to world.

They had finally gotten dressed, mostly because two Josies and one Aerich were getting very impatient, and two impatient Josies were even more persistent than one. They had finally left the room, because Peter had gotten himself punched by probably-clone Alexa for asking far too many questions, many of which really deserved worse than a punch.

Out of the room, they had gone around a corner and run smack dab into... Cole blinked. He looked at Alexa, dopple-Alexa, and clone-Alexa, although he wasn't quite sure which was which. He looked back at the man who was staring at them. Who was, for all intents and purposes, Alexa.

He waggled his eyebrows at dopple-Cole, whose face grew into a slow grin.

Peter sighed. "We are never getting anywhere here, are we?"

"Look at it this way," one of the female Alexas offered, "they generally only make three or four clones of any given person. He's - they've - got to get tired of fucking mes eventually."

To rix_scaedu's prompt.

Facets of Dusk has a landing page here

This is the beginning of their first mission, so comes before almost everything.

They had their assignment.

They had several assignments. There was the primary mission and two spoken secondary missions. There were their individual assignments, overt and covert. And there were a couple that did not come from their nominal leaders.

They had their gear.

Alexa had her Diplomat Clothes, wrinkle-resistant, fast-drying, and professional-looking in almost any environment.

Cole had his weapons. All of them. He had basic survival gear and a full uniform with no insignia anywhere. And he had weapons.

Josie had her backpacking gear and an apothacary's worth of herbal... things. Nobody knew what they were for, but they were light.

Peter had his instruments, and then some more instruments, and a large pad of paper. Nobody knew what they were all for, and some of them were heavy, but Peter carried them all.

Xenia had her weapons, her climbing gear, her survival gear, and her weapons. She weighed every single item, and discarded anything that would weigh her down.

Aerich, as far as they could tell, planned on going forth with an expensive suit, a stunning chin, and monumental arrogance. Very few of these weighed anything, at least.

They had their team.

Xenia shared a look with Cole. Both of them looked at Peter; Xenia's lip curled. Cole glanced at Aerich, his hand resting on his gun. Aerich's lip curled at Josie. Josie's nose wrinkled at Xenia. Xenia looked sidelong at Alexa. And Alexa was giving Peter the stinkeye.

They had their door.

Alexa. It all came down to Aleandra Bianchi. Cole stepped up to one side of her, Xenia to the other. This ought to be a military operation. It ought to be an exploratory mission. Instead, it all hinged on a former diplomat with a barely-tested ability to open doors into other worlds.

Peter ran his instruments over the doorway - deep in the archives of the university, well-camouflaged by opening, mundanely, to a supply room full of microfiche. Three of his instruments screamed at him every time they got near. It was definitely The Door.

They had their orders. Alexa opened the Door. Six mavericks stepped into the doorway.

A team would step out.

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:

A Jaunx, from Ekwara

Icon & Art by djinni

This icon was drawn at the same time as my Alexa icon, so it's always been rather Facets-of-Dusk for me. This story crosses the Facets multiverse with Djinni's comic Ekwara.

Facets does not yet have a landing page (whoops!) but it does have a tag, below

It was beginning to be old hat. Take a hand, wait for the chain to form, open the Door, step through. Alexa was getting very good at it. The rest of the team was getting good, too, at all the things they had to do when they reached a new location, recon and integration and information-gathering. They were, after so many false starts, acting like a team. ( Read more... )