Alder's Grove

After Poise, to thnidu's commissioned continuation.

The question of was I poisoned was not as easy to answer as one might assume.

I did not, say, keel over (that is, turn my bottom over top) and die. But as I said, sometimes someone can poison your mind as well as just your body.

I knew I had what it took. My displays were perfect. My speech sounded unrehearsed and off-the-cuff and covered exactly everything I needed it to with no stuttering or humming or hawing. And the core product was sound. More than sound, it was brilliant and necessary.

But as I walked into that building - chin up, laptop bag in hand, looking like a million bucks and walking like I owned that place - I was secretly terrified. Five people had turned it down. Six of my friends had told me it was a long shot. Seven relatives had laughed in my face. To sum it up: I had been poisoned in my mind. I was ready, or I wanted to be ready, to make this presentation.

But was I ready? The doubts crowded onto the bus with me, shoved for a place in the elevator with me. I looked prepared. I looked proper. I looked prosperous. (Three more words that had no root in common, much to my surprise).

I was terrified.

I made my posture perfect. I smiled sweetly. I swallowed as if to bring more of that potion of poise into my body, into my mind.

I ran over all of my lines. I debated pertinent points sub-vocally. I told myself, once again, that my product was predestined to win this contact.

And in the back of my head, the poison continued to war with the potion. I was poised — but I was tainted by doubt. Two different sorts of weight were pulling at me.

The situation was grave, and it deserved gravity. Yet I found myself giggling. Here I was, pulling in two directions by the same thing — by a potion. By a great weight.

And that, my friends, was the lift I needed. The giggle, the laugh — the joke. By the time I left the elevator I had cut the strings weighing me to the criticism and doubt — if only temporarily, for those strings are very persistent — and I was buoyed up, walking on air, poised but yet no longer poisoned.

But had it even been poison? For if it had not been for that pun, I may not have been smiling, they might not have smiled, and the day might not have been won.

Funny things, potions and words, both.

🍹

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January by the numbers continues (We're in February now but hey)

From kunama_wolf's prompt poffertjes: a ficlet.

It was said of the humans that there were certain things they would always bring with them.

(To be fair, it was said of the Yonra that they always brought everything with them, and of the Pish’teck that they never took anything, never needed anything, and never kept anything. There were sterotypes about all of the space-faring races, and about the three non-space-faring but space-capable races who populated the same region of the galaxy as the others.)

It was said that as soon as there were five humans anywhere, one of them would start selling food to the other four. As soon as there were ten, one of them would start selling art to the other nine. And as soon as there were twenty, one of them would start making laws for the other nineteen.

And one of the things every single space-faring human group brought was food carts.

The Ella Fritzi was a human-run ship out of Luna, carrying a full-time complement of crew and staff, as well as passengers and crew. It wasn’t a luxury liner, not by a long shot, but it was safe, and comfortable, and it got where it was going in decent time.

Decent time was a leisurely ride compared to some of the new ships — it might take a week between stops, or it might be a month, depending on the distance and the spacing of the wormholes. SInce that meant its crew and staff were on the ship most of their lives, and since the Pish’teck crew members, especially, got kind of loopy if their chronobiological rhythms got messed with, the ship had artificial seasons as well as artificial day and night. “Summer” got a little warmer, the light a little brighter. “Winter” got downright chilly, but the Ordalian down blankets packed up tiny and puffed up warm for each cabin.

In the “summer”, Fervin the assistant chef brought a food cart full of hotdogs and hamburgers and gyros around the socialization decks. It always surprised the alien passengers when humans — who had three meals a day included in their passage — would pay extra credits for this strange sausage-inna-bun sort of food.

In the “winter,” Fervin’s cart carried poffertjes and hot cocoa, and the aliens and humans alike ate them up. Once, the elected ship’s-mayor (a civilian position, not related to the running of the chip, the navigating it, or anything except how people spent their off time) tried to regulate what Fervin could put in his poffertjes.

The riot lasted three days and threatened to destroy the Ella Fritzi. After that, the new mayor declared that, as long as Fervin’s foods consisted of things edible to at least humans, no regulations could be made about it.

After all, humans might have a need to govern each other — but their need to be sold food to seemed to trump that.

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January by the numbers continues (We're in February now but hey)

From thebonesofferalletters's prompt "Void;" a story? At least a ficlet.
🆗
Every Bureaucrat had their stamps. Validated. Approved. Rejected. Further Review needed. The stamps held the power of their words, and every honest citizen feared having their chit marked Rejected.

Most wore their chits on a necklace, or hung off an earring. They weren’t large things, and one didn’t want to lose them. To lose your chit meant to not be a citizen anymore, and to not be a citizen anymore meant crimes against you were, at worst, littering. Public noise nuisance. That sort of thing.

Some people — people like Chalene, cautious people — had their chit tattooed on them by a registered, Approved tattooist. That way, nobody could take it from there, and they could not lose it.

(Identity theft, chit-theft, was known to happen. There were children born against regulations who never had a chit. There were people who had gone chit-less but needed to pretend for some reason. There were the Void, who had more cause than most to need to pretend).
( Read more... )

January by the numbers continues (now FIVE days off but still going strong).

From clare_dragonfly's prompt "ambiguity;" worldbuilding for a world I've just barely started. It's a little unclear... but that suits the prompt.
✴️️
The world known as Calepurn has many nations, sprawling across the mainland, the islands, and the connected piece of land known, for no good reason, as the Appendix.

Many of these nations have their own languages, and all of them have their own dialects, but almost everyone who travels between nations can speak Lengraffa, the language of Firrset.

Lengraffa is a language evolved from many different tongues over thousands of years, and while it has a root here or there in English, it bears even less resemblance to Modern English than Modern English does to Old English.

(Spaston, a language spoken almost solely in a tiny mountain nation on the Eastern coast, is much closer to Modern English, with many loan-words from Spanish. But that is a story for another day.)

Lengraffa is a language drenched in ambiguity. Like Modern English, it drips with homophones. Words sometimes wander the continent, only to come back wearing a similar-looking coat but having an entirely different purpose. Casual usage changes words, until the same word can mean both a thing and its opposite.

Now into this language of uncertainty, where a simple sentence can be as clear as mud, throw a magic system which required precise geometry and very clear intention.

Magic was found in Firrset, they say, but nobody outside of Firrset truly believe that — and neither do many within Firrset. In a system of magic where the faintest ambiguity in phrasing can ruin an incantation, how could magic have ever risen in a place that speaks Lengraffa?

As further proof, many non-Firrsets point out that when an incantation goes wrong, the magic leaks into the environment, causing occasional eruptions of strangeness. And in Firrset, there is more strangeness than there is anywhere else on Calepurn.
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January by the numbers continues (still three days off...)!
From clare_dragonfly's prompt "tendril;" a ficlet.

🌱

She was sitting on the floor, leaning against his legs while they watched TV. She liked sitting there, and he liked the feeling it gave him - security, being taller than her, bigger than her.

He was a very insecure man, although nobody would say that to his face and those who knew him only casually wouldn't guess it. He liked being in charge - but he was good at it, and so nobody questioned it. He liked being intimidating - but he was 6'6" tall and broad-shouldered, muscular, and so he didn't have to work at it.

She sat against his leg because she knew that it made him comfortable, the same reason she wore his collar.

She knew who was really in charge and, somewhere in the back of his mind, so did he, but they danced the dance anyway, and she did what he said, and sat at his feet.

He kept her safe. Not just because he was big, and strong, and intimidating, but because he offered protective coloration, camouflage. She could look different, be different, but some people could always find her. Belonging to someone else, that made her someone else entirely. And since it was something nobody who knew her would ever expect, it hid her all the better.

She leaned against him, her hair twisting around his legs on its own. It did that, her hair, the tendrils sliding around whatever they could reach. She pulled herself up that way, like a squash plant, rising higher on what her tendrils grabbed.

And they slid into him. Not in a way he could feel - not that he could feel much, so defensive, so closed off, that he never noticed things that close to him - but they slid into his psyche. He liked being in charge... but she liked running him.

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January by the numbers continues (still three days off, meeps~)!
From kelkyag's prompt "Stylish scalloped skirts swish shockingly;" a ficlet.
🕺
There’s the faux-history that the sight of an ankle was once considered shocking. There’s the myth about limbs and their ability to raise heart rates, and maybe those myths and faux-histories are true. Certainly, in many places in the Empire, the ladies go bundled up tightly, covered discreetly from head to toe, and then men are thrilled at the sight of a wrist. In other places, it is the men who wear long-vests over scalloped tunics over loose pants, and women peer surreptitiously to see the curve of a man’s buttock or the line of his hip.

In Urhallo, where the summers are warm and the winters are chill but not freezing, the women wear trousers made of muslin and calico and dress-like vests made of starched linen; the women smoke the fellna-weed that gives them visions, and play cards all night under the moon.

The men dance for them, young and single men, their vests and jackets coverings their shoulder blades and sternums, their arms to the wrist, and hardly more than that. The man sway their hips and thrust them, hum their songs and shout them, whisper endearments and sing them.

The men in Urhallo — all of them, not just the dancers — wear skirts, swishy ones that flow with their movement or straighter, businesslike ones that don’t get in the way and still conceal their lines from prying eyes. The dancers wear skirts, short ones, with scalloped hems cut just so. And the viewers — male and female — all lean forward, hoping the skirt will give them a little view of what the swishy skirts hide.
💃

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January by the numbers continues (now three days off, meeps~)!
From kelkyag's prompt "Careful consideration;" a ficlet.
🚀
There are some situations which require the sort of consideration that takes actual minutes, actual thought, actual knowledge of the options.

There are some situations where you have to weigh your choices, study the consequences, research the possibilities.

Sometimes, you really have to go into something with your eyes open and your homework done.

Like moving to another planet, for instance.

You need to know where you're going, at a bare minimum, what you're going to do when you get there, how you're going to survive, how you're going to make money.

I mean, that's the absolute minimum. Like, can you breathe the air? Can you survive the gravity? Is there anything there to eat? Most of those planetary colony flights are one-way-only: you get there, you’re stuck. It’s not the sort of thing you do on a whim.

Unless, of course, you’re Jeropey Onefferie. RIght about now, Onefferie is sneaking on to a colony flight, picked — if you can believe this; I hardly can and I’m telling the story — by the roll of a die. He’s stowing away on a bet, the winnings of which he may never be able to collect.

It’s a colony flight, you say, of course he can survive where other humans can. Ah, but we are not on Earth; we’re on Besh Rithtaen, armpit of the universe, highway off-ramp of the galaxy, collection spot for at least three hundred sentient races, many of whom (including humans) live in sealed environments or environment suits.

And the colony ship he’s slipped on to is a Meshtarina ship. That doesn’t spell immediate demise — the Meshtarina live in the same range of environments as humans.

We know this, however, because the Meshtarina run human farms on planets outside the Federation regulations.

There are some situations which really do require careful consideration.
👽

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January by the numbers continues (now two days off~)!
From kelkyag's prompt "Poise;" a ficlet.

This one turned out a little weird~~

🍹

It means weight.

Well, it doesn't mean weight, but it's all about weight.

Poise. When I was little, I thought "being poised to" was the same as "being poisoned" and I thought if someone was poised to, say, leap, it was because someone had poisoned their mind.

(Speaking of leaps, I made quite a few strange ones when I was young)

Turns out a poison is a potion, and not necessarily a weighty one.
( Read more... )

January by the numbers continues (now two days off~)!
From kelkyag's prompt " Dubious dirty diapers;" a ficlet.
🚼
"The thing is... I don't have a kid."

Gere stared at the laundry. Pene stared, too, but mostly at Gere.

"I know you don't have a kid. I would have had to help you fill out the paperwork."

"All things considered, you would have had to help me with a lot more than just the paperwork. So. I don't have a kid."

"True. And, just in case this is somehow in question, neither do I."

"I know that. But the thing is, Pene, those aren't your 900-credit pants, are they?"

"Why in the legions and the stardust would you ever pay 900 credits for a pair of pants?"

"Well, they've got stardust in them, for one; they make my ass look amazing, and when I'm meeting with 900 million-credit clients, they make me look like I belong there and not in the kitchen."

"Right. So, those are your pants?"

"Those are my pants. That's my vest beneath it and, if you pick those up, that's my socks and underwear and whatnot - it's my clothes. Just in case someone else nearby has exactly the same tastes as me, I checked for the tiny rip I had repaired in my favorite vest and the way the pants are hemmed with a very narrow hem to allow for --"

"Yes, yes, you're a giant, we all know that. Gere. It's your laundry, come back to you from our laundromat. What's the problem?"

Gere lifted up all of the afore-discussed laundry to reveal a small pile of mostly-clean diapers, with an apologetic note. "These. And," under the carefully-lifted diapers were a pile of onesies and an adorable baby set of pants-and-vest, very like the aforementioned set of Gere's. "And..."

"...and we don't have a kid. Gere, who sends diapers to the laundromat? Whose diapers have stains the laundromat can't get out?"

"...and who dresses their baby just like me? We have some problems here."
🚼

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January by the numbers continues (still a day off~)!
From anke's prompt "baking" - a blog post.

I love baking in Winter!

I like baking in summer, too, and it helps that the way our house is laid out, you can run the oven in the kitchen without really heating up the living room or our offices too much, so I can bake bread and cakes all year round if I want to.

Mostly, though, in the summer I bake cookies.

I have been making bread every Sunday for a few weeks now, and I find I like it. Start the bread with a sponge the night before or early Sunday morning, and then by 2 or 3 in the afternoon everything’s ready to go, and we have fresh homemade bread for the week (anything left over and gone stale, or the bread experiments that didn’t quite work, get dried in the oven and frozen for stuffing or bread pudding).

But I like baking cakes, too, pies, crisps, biscuits, cookies… Small Batch Baking, although it has its flaws as a recipe book, was a really good start for me. If I make a cake, a lot of the time it’s somewhere between a mug cake and a small batch recipe in one of my tiny pans or ramekins (I have a tiny bundt pan. It is the world’s most adorable bundt pan). That way, we have cake for a day, just enough frosting, and then it’s gone, poof.

Last night, I made a Small Batch Banana—Pecan bread pudding (forgot the pecans), with, as above, the ends from a few weeks of homemade bread (Since homemade bread stales a lot faster than store-bought). If you’re going to make banana anything, my suggestion is: wait ‘til the bananas are black or nearly black, and then halve the sugar the recipe calls for. You get full banana taste that way! (Also, much easier to mush up).

Honestly, I could talk all day about baking. My husband does the cooking... but I do (almost) all the baking in the house, and I love it.

And it makes the house smell so nice.

January by the numbers continues (just a day off~)!
From thnidu's prompt "Seven silly sausage sellers swilling snazzy sodas;" a story of... maybe Things Unspoken?.

It had been a good day for Dayuved Yura's sausage-vending franchise. The central square and the park that ran two blocks south of it had been packed with people; the road in between had been busy with people hurrying back and forth between the two places; the bicycle-taxi peddlers were hungry, too, and snatching sausages in their brief breaks between customers - sometimes, they even stopped with a cab full of people, often meaning the passengers all bought sausages, too.

(Bicycle-taxi peddlers always got a discount at Dayuved Yura's places, and in these situations, his sellers were instructed to quietly refund the peddler the full price of their sausage under the cover of "giving change," as long as the passengers bought at least two meals. It kept the peddlers coming to Dayuved's cards, and not to someone else's inferior meat-in-a-bun wagons.

Now that the sun had set and the nighttime shift had taken over, Dayuved and his six daytime workers gathered ad Amincob Kote's soda stand to marvel over the day.

"That dancer-" Dayuved started. "Did you see those feathers?"

"Those marchers, with the twirling sticks," put in his second-in-command. They had the best places in the central square, but today, everyone had been in a good place.

"The heralds," murmured the most junior seller. "They blew those horns, and it was like everyone was on strings."

"The woman," an old man on his fourth job whispered. "She was..."

"Yeah," everyone murmured. There was little else that needed to be said. But someone, the quiet one, managed anyway.

"Her companions... so shiny. So tall."

"Who was she?" breathed one of the young ones. But all the old ones shook their heads.

"She sold sausages for us. She made smiles on their faces. She went to the place on the hill. That's all we know, that's all we ask."

"But that's... that's silly," complained the young one again. And the old ones just smiled and sipped their sodas.

"Silly, son, keeps the gold in the cash-box and keeps our heads on our necks. Silly sells sausages."

"Silly sells sausages," they all agreed, leaving the young ones feeling that "silly" was some sort of cynical cipher for sensible.

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January by the numbers continues~
From anke's prompt "glitter;" another apocalypse story..

There were big things and small things that Gemma missed.

She tried to focus on the big things most of the time: reliable food, heat, running water, electricity. Medical care, drugs. Those were the things that were going to keep her alive, keep them alive. Those were the things that required all of her energy, that first six months.

Shelter, even. Shelter wasn't as hard as the other ones, because there were still intact buildings, but then you had to protect your mostly-intact building from everything, and everything was a much longer list of threats now than it had been six months ago, a year ago.

Food, same thing - you could find canned goods, preserved goods, but eventually, all of that was gone or gone bad. Same thing for drugs, and when they found a doctor they guarded her with their lives. Running water, electricity, those were the hardest, and those were the least important, at least in the short run.

But when she went to sleep at night, Gemma missed clean, bright colors, frivolous painting, swishy skirts. She missed glitter, and giving someone a card just because you could. She missed decorative clothing — light sundresses and bright-colored t-shirts and mismatched socks on purpose, not because your feet were freezing.

She had not been one of the magi before the world cracked. She had heard of them, the way you hear about CEO’s, Fortune-500 sorts of people, but magic was for the 1 percent, the super-important. She’d been a barista.

Now, though. 90 percent of the surviving population had something — a piece of a broken city they carried, a cracked charm, a wound that held some small fragment of magic. And in her own fragment, Gemma held light and heat, sunshine in a hand that no longer worked well otherwise, pierced by a piece of rebar.

Late at night, when she had done all she could towards their survival for the day, Gemma would sit up in her bed and aim her magic hand at the wall. She’d focus, thinking about candy hearts and ribbons, Hallmark cards and picnics, and she would project the tiniest little lights onto the wall: Glitter. It sparkled and shone and danced on the walls, and, for a few minutes, Gemma barely even missed running water and espresso machines.

January by the numbers starts here!
From anke's prompt "butterflies;" a story of Addergoole (Year 9 character).

“So, I'm going to teach you a few very important things, and when you have figured them out, I want you to be sure you think about them as examples, not just as truths in themselves. Allegories, all right?"

Alhandra remembered her father's stories for years. The one about the monk who climbed the mountain. The one about the monkey who made bad promises. The one about the princess with the sword. This, this always stuck in her mind, in part because he didn't start out like he always did:

I'm going to tell you a tale, and when I'm done, perhaps you can tell me what you learned.

All of his tales were lessons, but these, somehow, these were supposed to be more important.

So Alhandra remembered.

"Butterflies first. Pretty things, butterflies, small and fragile, right? They're not the most dangerous-looking things around. Lots of people are like butterflies, angel. They look pretty, they look weak, like they won't last too long. You know the sort."

Allhandra nodded. She knew the type, all right, even then.

"Butterflies can be poison. And people who are beautiful, they can be poison, too. They can be deadly." He touched her hair, gently. "They don't have to be. The little butterflies that wander around the meadow behind the house, they're safe. And not all pretty people are poison - that's important, too. But you know about the viceroy butterfly, how it imitates the monarchs? Remember that. Some people are poison in a pretty coat, and some people are harmless and look like poison."

"So... look beyond the wings?"

"It's more important than you'd think it is, princess. Not just the pretty faces, but the pretty words. Not just the pretty words, but the soft touches. You have to really, really know someone before you know if they're poison or just pretending."

"What's the next part?"

"Noam!" Alhandra's mother had called from the back yard at that point. "Noam, it's time."

She'd had to wait for another day to learn about sharks.

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January by the number starts here!
From novel_machinist's prompt "endings;" a piece of fiction.

Everyone looks at "new beginnings" with wide-eyed hope, optimism, and to be honest, they should. New beginnings, clean slates, all that, they're made for optimism and hope and in most cases, they're made out of those things, too. You're not (usually) a new person, you don't have a new brain or new abilities. So you're hoping on a new place or a new date or a new notebook.

The thing is, out of those hopes are new people made, so I'm not going to tell you that they don't work, or that they're bad, or wrong, or anything else. No, the thing about "new beginnings" is that they're also endings. That old person, that old place, that old notebook, that old brain? They all end.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, you might say. After all, you wanted to get rid of that thing for a reason, didn't you? You wanted a change.

Good for you. And I mean that sincerely. Good for the ones that actually become someone new. Good for the ones that change their habits, their hobbies, their bodies, their brains. Good for you. You wanted a change, and you went about getting it. That's to be applauded.

But remember - even if just once in a while, even if just in the back of your mind, remember it was an ending. And remember The End, where all those things that didn't continue wandered off to.

That's me. I'm the gatekeeper, here. I'm the one that archives and stores, shelves and rearranges all those things that End. Which explains something, by the by. Because the longer something's been here, the further back in the shelves it is, and the less likely it is to get out.

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