aldersprig: (Library)
This is a story for [personal profile] moonwolf, as payment for her compilation of The Planners Character List.

It involves the characters also found here (in order first-last):

Saying Hello
Forbidden
A Kiss Under Duck & Cover


It had begun with a kiss.

Which was, of course, a lie, the sort of lie the poets told, even now, with the world over for so long it was becoming a new world.

It had begun with a look and a smile. It had continued over the course of two years with more looks, and more smiles.
Read more... )
aldersprig: (Library)
[personal profile] clare_dragonfly requested Theresa/Thomas in the kissing meme.

This comes after Hello and Forbidden.



It came, eventually, the moment she’d been waiting for.
The sirens did it, which meant that, in a manner of speaking, she had the wild tribes to thank. As they had all been drilled, they moved into the nearest interior room, and from there under the big, sturdy desks.

Theresa had been teaching a class, the one class she still taught and one, coincidentally, that Thomas was in. She stepped into the nearby library and slid, with a dexterity she was proud of, considering her advanced years, under the widest desk. She’d been hiding under this particular desk for so long, her teenaged initials were carved into a hidden corner.

And then, just as she was getting comfortable, Thomas slipped under there, smiling wickedly at her, like he knew what she’d been thinking. There was no talking, not with the sirens blaring, but that meant they were in relative privacy.

In relative privacy, in the center of the Library, surrounded by her students. This was madness. She reached for him, ostensibly to tug him further under the desk. Safety first.

He reached for her in return, pushing her academic hood back off her shoulders, his fingers brushing against her bare neck, her cheeks. She hadn’t been touched like this in… too long.

“Too long,” she mouthed, under cover of the sirens.

“I know,” he mouthed back, and kissed her.


Next: Beginning With a Kiss
aldersprig: (Library)
Day 21 of 30 days of Fiction: 21) Write a scene with a drink(ing) of some sort.”

In The Planners setting, long before Hello but not that long after Ants, Grasshoppers, Magpies.


“Sit down.” Jasmine poured two finger-widths of the thick bluish drink into each of the tiny crystal cups; on the other side of her desk, her three most promising young relatives (a niece, a nephew, and a second cousin, twice removed, none of them old enough to drink, if the rule of law was still holding) sat like their strings had been cut.

“You know what the family has been doing.” It wasn’t a question. If they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have been called here. Still, three heads nodded silently; the niece, Theresa, frowning while she assented. Interesting.

“You know that we have locations around the continent where we have been stockpiling supplies.” They barely bothered to nod to that one; it was common knowledge. “And that there are elders of the family, senior Planners, at each site.” Of course. This time, it was the nephew, Jonah, who frowned. The family elders, Jasmine included, were often considered hide-bound and too traditional, too slow to respond, by the younger generation. So had it been through human history. “This is why I need the three of you.”

All three faces lit up; she paused to hold their attention and sipped from her cup. Politely, they all did the same; only the cousin, Bauer, didn’t flinch at the thick fruity alcohol.

She took a second sip; so did they, more carefully this time. Impatient: Jonah’s foot was tapping. She set her class down.

“I need you to keep an eye on the elders.”









My current fund-raising goals:
art for the Rin & Girey Ebook
and bedroom carpet for our new-house-to-be.

Donating gets you access to special donor-only posts! Every $4 gets you one month of access.
aldersprig: a close up of an alder leaf (Leaf)
Day 7 of 30 days of Fiction: "7) Write something dirty (take that how you will)"

This comes after Hello, and before The Cathedral, and I believe the Foundation/Library/Academy setting is The Planners.


Tess had found herself fascinated with Thomas from the moment he walked into her Academy. He was young, far younger than she was, the age she'd been when the world had fallen apart. But there was something in his eyes... if she had believed in reincarnation, she would have thought he had come back with the full knowledge of some ancient sage. He had that feel to him, that tired worldliness. She wondered if he'd ever been young.

She tried not to stalk him. She paid him no more attention than she did any other student, for his first months, his first year at her school. She said nothing untoward to him, nothing that could cause any eyebrows to raise. She shot him no steamy glances, spent no time reading his file other than as her position as Dean demanded.
Read more... )

A Kiss Under Duck & Cover
Beginning With a Kiss
aldersprig: a close up of an alder leaf (Leaf)
Okay, this setting officially needs a landing page and an icon now. via [personal profile] kc_obrien, via [personal profile] ravenswept, the first of the 30 days of fiction meme. It's in the same setting as the Library/Academy/Foundation. Which also needs a NAME

1) Write a scene saying “hello”


He came to the school in autumn, once the crops were in. They'd gone back to old habits and old practices in the Academy as in so much else of the world, knowing that the old existed and had survived for so long for a reason.
Read more... )

Forbidden
A Kiss Under Duck & Cover
Beginning With a Kiss
aldersprig: drawing of the author (LynLyn)
I've had the world's slowest week of writing. I.e., this is almost all I've written, all week, and it's 686 words. That's like 1/10 of my normal weekly wordcount.

From [community profile] dailyprompt: "preparing for change," and "cathedral of data." It's misc. post-apoc, based on a Gehenna(*) cult idea I've had running in my head for 10 or 20 years.



They had built it, and they had come. The movie misquote was long past archaic by this point, but Tess still found herself thinking it when she stared out over the ramparts and towers of The Library. They had, before the disaster that had ruined their world, designed this place, built it and fortified it and stocked it.

It hadn’t been that they had known the disaster was coming, she assumed (fifteen years old when the world had collapsed, she hadn’t been consulted on the decades of preparation that had led to the library), so much as that they were, by their charter, always planning for change.

So they had built this, The Library, an academy, a town within walls, a cathedral of data. They had built a storage place for all of the knowledge of the world as they knew it, and done everything they could to keep it safe.Read more... )

* Okay, "apocalypse." Onceuponatime, when I played VampireLARP, E.Mc played a character in a Gehenna cult bloodline (Gehenna is the vampires' end time in World of Darkness), so the phrase always wants to be Gehenna cult in my mind.
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