Everything I have posted on this blog, and everything creative-writing-like on my other blog, finally findable!
52 Project: This was my project to write 52 stories in 52 weeks. It ended up taking almost 4 years but on the other hand I did 53 of them.
Inktober 2019: I don't draw, so I did the Inktober challenge as writing ficlets.
Inktober/Writeober 2020: Same thing, except I also took on a set of writing prompts from a challenge called Writeober. I can't find that Writeober prompt list now; the one I can find isn't the one I did.
Inktober 2025: I'm working my way through these on Nightmare Before Christmas rules (ie, if you were supposed to do it for October, it's fine to do it between Halloween and Christmas.)
Poetry Mondays: For a while in 2020 I was posting poetry on Mondays.
The Curiosity Analysis Team: What if cats had their own SCP Foundation, except the "anomalies" they study are absolutely normal shit?
Hole In The World: There is a hole in the world. In Iowa.
The Cold At The Heart Of The Light, and Others: My favorite OC, Meg Santoro aka Dr. Mystery, and other people with superpowers from her world.
No Drama: A post-eschatonic nigh-omnipotent being is on Earth, in human form, investigating Earth religions because he believes an old enemy of his, a politician of his people, is secretly mainlining worship.
April's Dream House: What if the reason Barbie has had so many different jobs is that she's such a bitch, she keeps getting fired? Parodies multiple toy franchises.
The Kai-Diwar Universe: Humans in Babylon 5 have a unique ability to make alliances. Humans in Star Trek have a "quality of growth." Humans in this universe like beer and kittycats.
All The Standalone Stuff On This Blog: Some of it isn't technically "standalone", but I haven't decided to TOC it yet because omg this was a lot of work.
Shit I Posted To My Other Blog: alarajrogers.tumblr.com was around a lot longer than this one and also, sometimes I post stuff straight there and forget to reblog it here.
More exciting news from the world of "Alara is trying to get published"
Y'all saw me crowing about "Lineage", right? Formerly of the 52 Project, now a skinny little book of its own?
Lineage [Rogers, Alara, Publishing, Farthest Star] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Lineage
Well, I got some more cool shit, though nothing quite that cool.
I have a story in this:
Amazon.com: FLASH!MOB: Nothing Ever Happens: A Collection of Tiny Stories Written and Published in Just a Few Weeks: 9798273538252: Duckman,
I didn't, and won't, get any money for this one, which I knew when I wrote a story for it. On the other hand, I get to keep all rights but First Serial, which is basically exactly where I am with my 52 Stories as well.
None of these are available off Amazon, sorry; indie publishers don't have a lot of good options anymore.
The next one's an online zine, and free; they post a drabble every few days. Direct link to the site:
Black Hare Press
My spouse complained that the image they used to illustrate my story was "triggering". I don't think so, it's just a very upset woman, but to avoid that, I gave you the main link to the site; they have a search bar, type "alara", I am the only Alara on the site.
Finally, my story "Changeling" from the 52 Project has been accepted by The Lorelei Signal, another webzine. The issue I'm in hasn't come out yet, but here is a link to their page:
Check out the current issue of The Lorelei Signal
I will of course yell about it here once the story is out.
This has made me a whopping total of 19 bucks so far, but on the other hand, it's consisted of two stories I already wrote and self-published here, one drabble, and one flash fiction. Still, I'm not gonna get rich off this. To the best of my understanding, almost no one gets rich off writing anymore, though you might be able to finagle yourself a middle class living if you're prolific and lucky and write a lot of books.
At least, that is all mine, and doesn't have a collaborator name on it.
Lineage [Rogers, Alara, Publishing, Farthest Star] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Lineage
I've been submitting stories from the 52 Project to markets who are willing to accept "previously published on my blog". I thought these guys were a magazine... but actually they are a tiny ass publisher making tiny ass books!
This is a little over 14,000 words, so probably I would not normally buy a physical copy for $10. But they didn't give me an author copy, and they did pay me $10, so I spent it on my own book. :-)
The cover art is very pretty:
There's also a frontispiece (who does that in this day and age? A frontispiece! Wow!) which is a lovely piece of art.
The one complaint I have is that the back text is so fucking spoilery, it might as well be a Wikipedia article about the story.
I don't get royalties, but if you'd like to support people who actually make pretty books with real human artists out of no-name authors like me, the ebook form is 2.99 and I assume it also has the art in it (I don't know because I bought the physical book).
I am strongly considering buying multiple copies and trying to get my local library system to accept them for circulation. They do have equally short books available at the library.
Rev was up in the air, carrying a packet of reports from the bishop of Rellas County to his superior, the cardinal for the Southwest Federation, when there was a horrible rumbling. On the ground, below her, she could see buildings shaking.
Earthquake, she thought, but she'd seen the underlayment maps. Rellas was firmly attached to its closest counties, and to the skin layer below. No counties directly lay on the world's inner skin, but the pillars that connected Rellas to the worldskin were strong and there were a large number of them. There was no reason whatsoever for there to be an earthquake.
She thought then of Tally, who'd gone up to the Magi's College at the North Pole to discuss something she'd found. Something she hadn't talked about much – fairly normal for their relationship; Tally didn't bore Rev with endless conversation about magical theory, not anymore at least, and Rev didn't talk to Tally a lot about air currents and thermals and where to get the best updrafts. Everything Rev knew about magic had to do with weather, and not very much at that. But Tally had said, cryptically, that there was a growing instability in the underlayer, and she needed to talk to the other Archmages about it.
Was that causing the earthquake?
Rev spiraled in for a landing, in an open field where nothing could fall on her, because earthquakes were usually over quickly and then people would need help. Her primary profession was courier, but she was one of the few Aerials who'd been deputized by the world to be a troubleshooter, a first responder on the rare occasions that trouble needed to be shot. She landed, feeling the ground's vibration beneath her, loud in a way that mere sound traveling through air could never be. The vibration was in her bones, now that she was touching it.
And that was why she wasn't instantly killed when Rellas County, like all the other counties, broke loose from the pillars on the worldskin with a roar, separated from the counties all around it, and shot up 200 meters into the air, fatally impacting every bird and Aerial who was aloft at the time, because nobody ever flew that high. Rev had, when she was younger – she'd loved pushing the edge of what her wings could do, trying to fly as high as she possibly could – but she never needed to fly that high anymore.
She stared at the sky, and then the ground, which was no longer shaking so much as it was tilting, tipping this way and that, before it reached a new equilibrium and stabilized. The sun was just a little bigger. Closer overhead. Not by much – it was hundreds of kilometers away, a difference of 200 meters didn't mean a lot. Maybe it was even her imagination. Her wings were informing her of her altitude, 200 meters above ground level, even as she was plainly standing on flat, solid land.
Quickly Rev took to the air again, climbing as fast and hard as she could. The wings amplified the power of her arms and drew energy from the rest of her body, generating the flight field that let her soar. A kilometer up, the air was starting to thin noticeably, and the sun was visibly closer.
She was no Icarine, to try to fly up to the sun – it was well known that that was impossible. The air layer that lay all over the world started to thin here, a kilometer up, and was entirely gone by the time one got to the level where the sun was suspended; also anyone who somehow managed to do it would end up with serious radiation damage. Doing it at night was patently impossible because the dome of night would get in the way. The Icarines believed there was somehow some way to fly to the other side of the world, above them to the far north. Where Tally had gone. Rev knew that was not possible.
But she could get up to a kilometer. And from here, she could see, with horror, that all the counties she could see had broken loose from each other.
Some floated at even higher levels than Rellas. Some, lower. Water poured off the side of several of them where a county line had run through a river; she couldn't make out anything much down on the world skin, but the fact that she could see it at all, gleaming in reflected sunlight that should never be shining on it in the first place, between the counties, was a kind of bone-deep horror she'd never imagined. Steam roiled up in some spots where the water was falling off the side.
This can't be happening, Rev thought.
It obviously was, though. She wasn't the kind of person who could mistake a dream for reality. And that bone-deep shaking she'd felt passing through the world right after she'd landed – just before all the counties broke apart and began to float (Floating? How was something the weight of a county floating?) – that was something she'd never felt, and was certain she could not imagine.
It could be illusion magic? Maybe?
No. She could see too much, too far. The illusion mage would have to be targeting her specifically, and who would do that?
An enemy of Tally? Rev's girlfriend was an Archmage. Maybe someone was targeting her with illusion magic, as some kind of plot against Tally… somehow.
Well, okay, it didn't make any sense. But did it make any sense that the world suddenly shattered into pieces?
Rev landed again. If this was real, people would need help. If it wasn't real, she needed to get hold of Tally.
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Connected to this other piece; these belong to a novel? (i really dunno what it will be yet) called The Broken World, in which a flying lesbian and a chaos mage who is a talking cat travel a world that's kind of like a Dyson sphere, which broke, trying to find the lesbian's archmage girlfriend. The cat has not appeared yet in this segment.
Inktober 2025 Ficlets - 11. Eternal (2020 prompt from a different Writeober)
I actually found this 2020 Writeober prompt list while looking for the lost one I actually did use, and I decided to add it to my database of prompts.
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Caesar Primus is eternal.
It was during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus that his parents sold him into slavery. He hadn't known of his power then; he'd known that he never got sick and he never lost a fight; blows from other children didn't faze him, and his father's attempts to beat him as punishment ended up being more embarrassing for his father. Primus – who wasn't called that, then, but he hasn’t used his birth name since he was 40, and he's over two thousand now – had stoically endured whippings, and the welts had faded within minutes. His father's inability to control him was probably why he'd been chosen as the child to sell as a slave.
After he became a gladiator, he became famous. He never lost a battle unless he decided to throw it, which he did occasionally when someone offered to share the money from a bet with him, or when someone who annoyed him was betting on him. He'd known that he healed impossibly quickly, that his endurance was greater than any other man. But he hadn't known what else he could do.
Roman slavery allowed the slaves to keep a little money, and there was much wealth to be had by fixing his matches and getting a cut of the take from the winners, as long as he didn't do it too often. When he had enough money to buy himself out of slavery, he did, and promptly joined a band of mercenaries. It was there that he learned to harden his skin so that steel couldn't cut it, to grow out his arms and legs just enough to let him reach an opponent who'd gauged the distance between them and assumed himself to be safe.
It was a good life. Until he was in his forties, and others started noticing that he wasn't growing old. After that, he had to travel, joining bands of mercenaries who didn't recognize him, and claiming greater youth than he had. That was how he learned not to have friends. As a gladiator, he had them, but the gladiators all recognized that tomorrow you might face your friend in the arena. In his first mercenary band, he had them, but as men became injured or died or retired and new ones rotated in, most of his friends slipped away, and the ones that remained saw how they were aging, and he was not.
He tried quitting the life of a mercenary. Settling down with a young woman who believed his story about being blessed by the gods. Having children. It wasn't her death at the age of 62 that taught him the burden of eternity. It was watching his children grow old in front of him. None of them inherited his power, though they developed odd gifts of their own. He was more than a century old, and his children died of old age in front of him, their children now grown, great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren all about him in the village he lived in… and then he understood that his great gift was also a curse.
Eternity loomed before him, and he would not have anyone to share it with.
He tried. Again and again, he fathered children, watched them grow. Some had talents like his – healing from broken bones in days instead of the weeks it took normal people, but also instead of the minutes it took him. A daughter could drive out disease… but only some diseases. Dysentery, fever, pox, yes, but the wasting away as a part of the body grew too large, or the disease of constant thirst until the body failed, those his daughter could not save others from. Some had powers over plants, a boon to a farmer. One son, he had the greatest of hopes for, as the man approached 40 looking like he had in his twenties… but by the time he was 60, the signs of aging were on him. That son was alive in the world and was Primus' companion for nearly two centuries, but time eventually devoured him too.
Eternity alone, without any companions who'd last and without any reason why he should go on like this, stretched before him. Once, in despair, he tried to slit his own throat. He healed.
And then the otherworldly beings came, and kidnapped him.
They told him he was special, that he was the first of a new race of special people, that half his children would be special like him but that none would have the amount of power he had. (Later they admitted that he wasn't really the first, just the first they'd found. He proved this to himself after he was free of them. In two thousand years of wandering the world he found evidence that the special people existed among every race of humanity, but their numbers were very, very low. He only found them because he was looking, and because their deeds tended to be famous.)
They told him that someday the special people would cover the Earth, that everyone would have gifts like him and his children. They told him that he might well be the most powerful, but that only gifted mothers could pass the strength of their powers on to their children, and that there was no way to predict exactly how the power would manifest. What it could do. Among his descendants, he had healers, shapechangers, witches who could blight crops by looking at them and farmers who could make the land bountiful… but there were also people who could fly, make things glow, who had greater strength or speed than others, and many other things that seemed entirely unrelated to what he did.
They performed what they called "tests" on him. He cooperated. They wanted to draw his blood and put it in a vial? They wanted him to perform feats to show his power? Fine enough. The more he could learn, perhaps the better his chances were of finding a woman who could bear him a child who'd live forever.
They didn't realize he was a citizen of the Roman Empire, where hundreds of languages were spoken among the slaves taken from all over the world, and that he'd learned them all. They didn't know that in his wandering, he'd learned many new languages, and realized that he had a gift for it – maybe an ordinary gift like any person could have, or maybe another "special" ability. They had little boxes they wore on collars around their necks, and when they spoke, the boxes spoke to him in Latin. But he could still hear what they were actually saying, the sounds coming out of their inhuman mouths.
And so he came to be able to understand what they were really saying. Sometimes they turned the boxes off and talked amongst themselves. Sometimes the boxes lied and masked what they were truly saying.
He'd been a farmer, and he'd told them about it, so he'd had plenty of opportunities to learn their words for crop and harvest. And they'd spoken to him many times of the special people he belonged to… so he understood, when they described the crop they would harvest, and it was the special people. His kind.
He understood their words for generations, for years. It would be thousands of years before there were enough special people on Earth that it would be worth returning to, for the harvest.
Primus never let on in any way that he understood them, and eventually they let him go, exhorting him to have more children, to spread the blood of the special people. He assured them he would… and he did. But he had a purpose, now.
Now he wanted to make a child who could live forever so that that child could carry on the work, by his side.
Now he wanted to find the other special people. To prevent jealous ordinaries from killing them, to tell them what they were, and to teach them to fight, telling them to teach their children the same.
Two to three thousand years was eternity, but it was a finite eternity. It was a goal. Cover the planet with those of his kind. And teach them how to make war, so that when the otherworlders came back for the harvest, they would reap consequences rather than the power they sought.
…And now the time is drawing near. More than two thousand years. Children with special powers being born to parents who had none, all over the world, in greater and greater numbers. Weapons of war and conflict exist that could destroy this planet, several times over… which meant they could destroy invaders from other worlds as well. He has made the powered people fight each other, so they could hone their skills and make ready. He has made the ordinaries fight each other, so they could develop greater and greater technologies of war. They're coming soon – within the next five hundred years, or less. Maybe much less.
All he needs now is to have a child with the most powerful woman in the world, and to raise that child to be strong and unyielding, like him. Someone who can carry on the work if anything did happen to him… encouraging the most powerful to fight each other has resulted in him being on a number of powerful people's enemies list. One day one of them might figure out how to kill him.
No matter. If he has an invincible, eternal child, then whatever happens to him, humanity will be ready. The Proximas, the name the ordinaries have given the special ones – the Next Ones – will be ready.
i just discovered your blog the other day and am enjoying reading the discussions about Black representation in Greek mythology!
i'm no artist but i'm writing a Trojan war retelling wherein Briseis is a Black woman with albinism. i wanted to nod to the few ancient sources we do have that bother to mention her appearance- Dares the Phrygian said she was pale and blonde, and my problematic fave Ovid said she had "snow white" skin- but I also wanted to show that ancient Anatolia was diverse, like ancient Greece it had extensive trade with Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. it's my headcanon that her father was from modern-day Libya and married a noblewoman from Lyrnessus. Briseis also gets a happy ending in my retelling, she certainly deserves it after all she went through.
any notes on writing Black characters with albinism, particularly in ancient Greece/Anatolia, would be greatly appreciated! i've already saved some posts you've made with links to articles i think will be a good start, but they're more focused on modern times. thank you!
Well considering Anatolia IS in Asia lol, yeah I think that checks out that they'd have trade with people in the "Middle East" (still Asia), the rest of Asia, and Africa!
Anyway! I am not an expert nor is it my task to explain ancient history, so I will have to leave you here with that one. But writing a Black person with albinism is gonna require almost the same things writing a Black person without albinism is gonna require. I just answered a similar ask, and I have similar sentiment to share as advice, here.
An important thing to note about albinism is that it causes poor vision. It's not just oversensitivity to light; retinas in people who lack melanin cannot capture the full resolution of 20/20 vision, and this cannot be corrected in most people, even in our world where glasses exist.
So if Briseis is an albino, this will impact her visual acuity, especially since glasses hadn't been invented yet. This may or may not end up affecting your portrayal (I'm assuming prose; it isn't really gonna affect artwork, obviously.)
That's not in any way a reason not to do it; fiction could seriously use more Black albinos. Just a thing to keep in mind when you write her (that certain famous writers who portrayed albinos did not think about (I'm talking about you Dan Brown and your albino sharpshooter assassin in Da Vinci Code)).
The think pieces and op-eds call you and others like you "isolates" or "a-socs" (it is pronounced a-soshs or a-socks depending on the news-or-podcaster), but you call yourselves "Nomads."
You are the children of the plague years, the twelve years when it was incredibly difficult for anyone who wasn't wealthy to get access to vaccines. When the economy had collapsed and the middle class didn't have the money anymore to travel to Mexico (and Canada wasn't letting any Americans in, and leaving the continent was impossibly expensive.) You were isolated from other children for safety, homeschooled and tutored by AI because both your parents needed to work so obviously actually being homeschooled by a parent was impossible. But you had no access to other children online either, because laws intended to "protect" children like you had kept you all off the Internet, banned from any social media that didn't use AI to heavily censor everything you might say to each other. Your friends and companions were stuffed animals animated by AI cores, and when you went online into the walled gardens your parents were able to afford, your AI friends came with you. Always suggesting to you games or toys or other things your parents could purchase for you.
Now, you have plenty of friends. Online. You don't interact with people in person, ever.
You hardly ever leave your car.
The high cost of housing and the eventual arrival of the self-driving car gave rise to your tribe, the Nomads. You live in your cars, with solar panels on your car roofs to add additional energy to your battery, allowing you to run appliances like refrigerators and microwave ovens. Like most of your kind, you own a van, with the back seats permanently removed because you won't ever be transporting a passenger, so why would you need them? Your bed is an air mattress; your bathroom is a portable toilet. Truck stops offer you the opportunity to shower for a few dollars, and you take them up on it about once a week, wearing a mask until you're sealed in the stall. You've been vaccinated against absolutely everything, but you cannot forget the fear of disease that dominated your childhood.
Ever since the disastrous data breaches of the 30's, "the cloud" is history and the pendulum has swung back. Everyone keeps their data on their local server farms, once again. For remote workers, this means annoying VPN connections with three levels of handshake, but all you have to do is drive to the parking lot of the office you're working for this week. The local network extends into the parking lot via wifi, and you connect to it to get your job done.
Your phone, mounted on your dashboard, lets you take video calls anytime you need to talk voice with someone in the office. Your laptop sits comfortably on a tray that's folded out between you and your steering wheel; since the car has self-driving features, if you absolutely have to, you can work while the car is driving, but it can cause motion sickness so you'd really rather not. Also, technically, you could get pulled over if a cop sees you in a position where you couldn't easily take control of the wheel if your self-driving system died suddenly or malfunctioned.
Today you're economizing. Lunch is a salad, a yogurt, and a frozen microwaveable meal, microwaved. Your freezer has capacity for about three of the things plus one ice cream, but it's okay because when you order groceries, you can pick them up curbside, so you just do it every two to three days.
After work, you drive to a park to get your walking time in. People have been known to suffer atrophy of the ability to walk if they spend all their time in their car, so you make sure to do five thousand steps a day, around the perimeter of the park, nowhere near any of the families with children playing on the playground or the teens playing frisbee. Sometimes you look at them and feel hot resentment that they get to have a childhood where they go outdoors and they interact with other children. They have friends, they have play areas they're allowed to go to. You had to live in fear of mumps and whooping cough and all the other old diseases that were considered practically extinct until twelve years where no one got vaccinated and they all came roaring back. You're glad these kids got to have vaccines in babyhood, like your parents did, so they get to have a childhood like your parents did, not more or less sequestered in a house like you… but why couldn't you have had it too? Why did you have to wait until you were 14 before you could get access to vaccines and get the freedom to be outdoors?
You're still wearing your mask, as you walk. And on the rare occasions where you encounter another walker on the trail, one of you will step off the trail to let the other pass, even though it's wide enough for two. You don't speak to each other. You certainly don't touch each other.
You haven't touched another human being besides your parents, and masked grandparents, in your life. The idea of ever doing so terrifies you.
Back in your car, you go get some food, ordering pickup from a sit-down restaurant. You get a sealed bottle of ice-cold water, because who would ever risk a fountain soda, where any number of germs from the people who work there might get in? Your food is hot, but you give it a minute in your microwave anyway, just to make sure any germs are dealt with.
As night falls, you park in a lot full of other vans, and the occasional passenger car or SUV, doing exactly what you're doing. There's a roof covered in solar panels, and plugs at every parking spot; you feed the machine your credit card and plug in to charge up overnight.
Then you pull shades down over all your windows, lie down on your airbed, and connect to the internet, to the peer-to-peer sharing network you use for porn. There are banking platforms that will let sex workers make money online again, but for your generation, paying for it is a poor substitute for connecting to other real people, other Nomads, who are doing what you're doing; masturbating in their cars, maybe wearing sexy lingerie or maybe leather or maybe nothing at all. This is what Nomads get for a sex life. You have online friends you share private time with, watching each other masturbate, talking dirty to each other. No so-called moral authorities can do a damn thing about it; it's peer-to-peer, decentralized, and involves no exchange of money. A few years ago cops used to occasionally come harass Nomads in their vans in hope of catching someone masturbating, who could then be charged with indecent exposure, but a Supreme Court decision put an end to that; a car is a private space, if you've drawn the shades. There's no public exposure involved when the car is shaded to be private, so no laws can prevent people from masturbating in locked cars with blinds on the windows, anymore.
Before bed you scroll through job boards, looking for your next gig, since this one winds up at the end of this week. You apply to a dozen, all over the country, and before the week is over you'll have applied to three dozen more. Probably about four will accept, and you'll drive to the one that pays the best. Your car battery can handle six hundred miles before you need a recharge, and that's about ten hours of interstate driving, and your GPS will direct you to a parking lot covered with solar panels where you can plug in and recharge for the night, just like where you are now. If you leave on a Friday night you can get halfway across the country by Monday morning. A gig that wants you badly enough that you can't reach by Monday will let you remote in with a VPN for a couple of days to give you time to get there, but there are Nomads with skill sets like yours all over the country; it's very, very rare that anyone too far for you to reach by Monday wants you that badly.
There are news op-eds on your feed talking about you as a Lost Generation, more literally than the last time that term was used, people who will never have children, never have a real home, never have a social life conducted in person. The op-eds act like this is somehow your generation's fault. That the severe shortage of Americans your age willing to work in food service or retail or in fact anything where they have to interact with people indoors on a regular basis is destroying the economy.
You know better. What it is actually doing is forcing employers to pay food service and retail workers well, and treat them well, and protect them from abusive customers, because some people your age can force themselves to be around other humans, if they're paid enough and allowed to wear masks. Immigration won't fill the gap, nobody trusts the US enough to emigrate to it anymore and Mexico's an economic powerhouse now, absorbing the immigrants the US used to take. Now that vaccines are back and Healthcare For All is the law of the land, there are a lot fewer Americans emigrating to Mexico themselves, but when an entire generational cohort won't take certain jobs unless they get paid and treated well, and your country spent that generation's childhood terrorizing immigrants… turns out the only option is to turn slightly smaller profits, because the more companies try to use automation to handle the jobs humans used to do in those industries, the more shrink they suffer.
Not that any of this is your fault anyway. The people writing those op-eds are generally of the generations that failed you, that let an entire generation spend their childhood trapped in their houses because Americans might have been willing to elect leaders who prevented their kids from getting vaccines, but they weren't willing to go back to early 20th century levels of child mortality.
There are also news articles about psychological treatments for Nomads, to acclimate them to living with fellow humans again. That interests you a little bit. It might be nice to be able to leave your car. Maybe to go to a hotel room with one of the friends you do cybersex with, someday. Maybe to be able to touch another person, to breathe their air…
…no. No, even the thought of it is starting to trigger a panic attack, and you can't afford that so close to sleep time. You turn to your vape pen. You're health conscious, as much as a Nomad can be, so you really don't vape very much. You are terrified of the idea of hospitals; if you ended up with lung cancer, you'd die, because you'd never be willing to risk entering a hospital. So you have to keep it cool, keep it rationed, don't overdo. Don't get addicted. But pill-based anxiety meds take way too long; the vape can relax you within a minute or two.
Time for sleep. Tomorrow you'll get fast food breakfast, drive to your current employer's parking lot, and do the whole thing all over again. You'll game and chat on company time because your PC is locked down so no employer can ever see what you're doing, but you'll get enough work done that no one will complain. This is your life. It could be better, but it definitely could be worse.
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This dystopia brought to you by "Cars", by Gary Numan, and entirely too much bullshit that's going on right now in society.
So I've begun my Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft crossover novel, and am about halfway through it at this point.
I put the first draft up on AO3 for my cheer readers to be able to access and comment as I go along, and since some of them aren't very fannish, I turned off the members' only commenting feature, and turned comment moderation on.
And ok, look. I know it's a new fandom presentation for me, as well as a WIP, so a lot of my subscribed readers are probably hesitating, and I get that. It's why I asked for cheer readers, because I am not shy about how important comments are to keeping me rolling on a long project.
But.
Probably a third of the comments I've gotten so far have been from artists sounding me out about me hiring them to illustrate my story. For pay -- it's not said outright, but at first contact it never is. They wait to mention pay until they've got you on the hook and feeling obligated.
And let me be clear; I am all for fanart. I adore it, and there is no feeling in the world quite as gratifying as learning that an artist has illustrated the work you've just spent weeks or months writing. But. Being hustled for artwork is the opposite of that feeling. Especially when the finished product turns out to be a flat color, badly done tracing mashup with no background worth perhaps 1/5th of what you were charged for it. ESPECIALLY especially when you go on to harass me every two weeks because you want me to give you more money for similarly overpriced, badly drawn work, so I eventually have to block you on discord to get you to stop.
So I'm gonna say it outright here; If you're inspired to illustrate my work, I will be thrilled. I will ask you to link me to the post when you put the results up, and I will Rec the hell out of the final product on every platform I'm on, to drive as much traffic your way as possible.
However, if you're coming around my comments section, hustling me for art-for-pay, then you should probably know that my budget for that is half of what I get paid to write it. That's right, I'll split my profits with you 50/50, right down the middle, just so everyone knows it's fair play.
Phoenixes are majestic, beautiful birds, famed throughout history as symbols of immortality. That, however, does not make up for the sheer irritation value of finding that one of them has pried open your trash can lid and is trying to lay an egg in your trash.
I ran outside with a shoe, which I threw at the phoenix. “Go! Get!” I yelled.
The phoenix screeched back at me. Phoenixes are distantly related to parrots, with hookbills, albeit long and slender ones, and a screech that sounds a lot like an angry cockatoo, except in the same pitch as a Cooper’s hawk. (Fun fact: every time you hear an eagle screech on TV or the movies, you’re actually listening to a Cooper’s hawk.) They aren’t shaped like parrots, though; they’re much heftier birds, with bodies shaped mostly like peacocks (including a beautiful long tail, though it doesn’t flare out like a peacock’s does), and a long neck. This one was flapping her oversized wings at me like an angry goose, but her attempt to intimidate me was somewhat ruined by the fact that she was sitting inside my garbage can.
Phoenixes are smart enough to know that they want to set fire to areas that will contain their fire and quickly burn out. They are also smart enough to know how to pry open metal trash can lids. They are not smart enough to know not to set fire to a plastic trash can, which is why nobody around here is allowed to own one anymore, and they are not smart enough to know not to set fire to a plastic garbage bag, which is why we all use bamboo bags. And I don’t think they particularly care about the consequences of setting dog poop on fire, but I do, and there was a substantial quantity of diligently pooper-scooped dog turds in little bamboo baggies in my trash, inside the larger bags.
“Shoo! Dammit, do not set fire to my trash!” I was out of shoes – I'd run out in bare feet, holding one sandal as a weapon to drive an annoying bird away from my trash – and I didn’t have much else to throw. I’d have to go back in the house for a stick or something. And a bucket of water, probably, because if the phoenix set my trash can on fire before I managed to chase her off, I’d need to put it out.
She didn’t look like an elderly phoenix. When they’re ready to lay their final egg and self-immolate, their feathers have usually dulled to a rust color, not the magnificent rich reds and golds of a young phoenix in its prime, and they’ve often started losing those feathers. Most of them are very, very skinny, and with enough missing feathers, you can actually tell. This one had full and solid plumage, and what looked to be a good body weight. She wasn’t looking to die; she was looking to become a mom.
All phoenixes, including males, can lay that final egg; some sort of process the males undergo in old age makes them capable of laying, though not of getting fertilized. When it comes to sexual reproduction, though, phoenixes do it just like other birds; only females lay. And I might have a few minutes. They usually find a nest and settle into it, get themselves good and comfy, before setting about the egg laying, and stressing them can slow down the process. Then once the egg is out, they generally take a few minutes to recover before setting the nest on fire.
I went back in the house for thick welder gloves, a broken metal bathroom trash can that had lost its dog-proof lid to my dog, a few years back, and newspaper, which I keep around because sometimes there’s coyotes howling in the distance, or reports of dragons, so I can’t let her out. I started for the door, thought things through a bit more, and went and got scissors and a metal pole that used to have a paint roller on it, before finally leaving the house.
Thankfully, the phoenix hadn’t yet set fire to anything, but I could tell she was warming up to it, the edges of her wingfeathers starting to glow like embers. I ran at her, yelling, “Shoo! Shoo! That is not a good nest for you! It’s full of dog shit! You want your baby to be born in flaming dog shit?” I waved the pole in her general direction.
Phoenixes, like many animals, including most humans, do not like to be hit in the face with a stick. I was bluffing – I wasn’t actually going to hit that magnificent bird in the face, though poking her in the wing or on her back had not been ruled out -- but she didn’t know that, so she flapped her wings indignantly and screeched at me as she took to the air. I waved the stick around a little more. The phoenix’s wing continued to glow. If she got mad enough at me she might try to set me on fire.
But by waving the stick at her I got close enough to the trash can that I could see the golden egg inside, about the size of an adult human’s fist. I grabbed the lid and stuck it back on the trash can.
Now she had a conundrum. Attack me for revenge? Doesn’t get the lid off and get her egg back. Pry off the lid? Has a non-zero chance of knocking over the trash can, which would break the egg. Phoenixes don’t lay often, or we’d be drowning in them; they’re lucky to drop three eggs in a 60-year lifespan, though of course the setting themselves on fire and being reborn from a final egg means they get multiple tries.
An experienced female with many lives under her belt might have figured out how to solve this problem – pry the trash can lid a little from one side, a little from the other, until it was loose enough to grab the handle in her beak – but I was guessing this one was on her first life, and probably her first egg, because all she did was hover in the air, flap, and scream at me. She wasn’t letting me get near the can again, but that was all right. With the scissors, I cut up newspaper and stuffed it into the broken, smaller trash can that had recently been in my bathroom. There was now a large quantity of used Q-tips and toilet paper that had been used instead of a Kleenex, for nose-blowing, and other less savory things, scattered on my bathroom floor, but that was a problem for Future Me. It was certainly a less urgent problem than a phoenix about to set dog poop on fire.
I brought the small can as close as I could and then started waving the stick again, which got the phoenix to back off enough that I could rip off the lid on the big can. With one hand, I used it as a shield against Angry Mama Phoenix, and with the other, I grabbed the egg and quickly transferred it to the smaller can that was full of newspaper and not dog shit. Then I slammed the lid back down and backed away.
Mama Phoenix was mad, but not so mad that she couldn’t tell that her baby was now in the small can. She flew at me, but pulled back before striking me – it was the same sort of bluff I’d pulled with the stick, just trying to make me back away – and then settled herself onto the new trash can. It probably was not as comfortable. My outdoor trash bin was large enough that the phoenix had been able to fully settle her body into her nest. This can, she had to rest on top of it, which was probably less comfortable.
I moved back a bit further, pulled out my cell phone because you don’t want to miss getting pictures of this if you can, and began filming just at the moment the phoenix’s feathers started to smoke. They flared into flames – fortunately, I keep my trash cans on my driveway, so there was no plant matter to burn – and soon there was a merry roaring blaze happening in my little can. The phoenix lifted back into the air and perched back on my trash can lid, watching the flames. They’re immune to fire until they get very old, but they don’t like to sit there on top of the heat; also, they understand fire well enough to know that it needs air.
I observed from a distance, and realized that there was a problem. There was nowhere near enough fuel from the newspaper to keep the egg in the flames long enough.
I live in a desert. There are no convenient trees around to drop sticks suitable for keeping a fire going. What I did have was a composter, full of vegetable food matter. With my hands – welding gloves could probably go in a washing machine, right? -- I scooped out some pepper hearts, zucchini ends, denuded corn cobs, and other such things, and carried them over.
The phoenix screamed at me again as I approached, but didn’t stop me as I dropped fuel into her fire, bit by bit. Too much at a time could damage the egg or smother the flames. The welding gloves allowed me to get right up to the fire and drop things in, though I did wish my hands were just a little bit further from my face.
Once the phoenix realized I was fueling the fire, she stopped shrieking at me and made something more like a burbling, chuckling noise. Phoenixes don’t talk – they're not that smart – though you hear rumors every so often of a phoenix who’s been in captivity for a few lifetimes learning to mimic some human words. The chuckling near-cluck was the best I was going to get for approval.
I went back in the house for more newspaper, and junk mail I’d been meaning to recycle. Paper burns fast and hot, though. For a long burn, I’d need wood. You don’t find a lot of that lying on the ground in Arizona. Living plants wouldn’t burn well – too wet, especially desert plants whose whole thing is conserving moisture – and I wasn’t gonna burn my furniture for the sake of a baby phoenix, so I had to just keep feeding compost and paper into the flames.
---
The opening of a story I am, of course, calling "Phoenix Arizona".
The Society of Sin has retreated, slinking off. Odysseus should feel good about the mission, but he doesn't, and he's not sure why.
Ariel notices. "You don't seem particularly excited about stopping the Society."
"It's good we kept their hands off the uranium," Odysseus says. "And kudos to you for taking Executive Dysfunction out so quickly." The leader of the Society of Sin has the power to make people confused; it sounds relatively harmless, but it's actually deadly in combat. He's made soldiers drop their weapons and go looking for keys they don't have, or panic and start seeing friends as foes, or many other, equally terrible, results that lead to his Society being able to wipe them out. The Watch has always had a hard time with him, so their standard operating procedure is to take him out early in a battle.
"I couldn't have done it without Lynx," Ariel says. "She scratched me and got me to focus my attention. Not hard, I don't think she even drew blood."
Odysseus nods. Lynx possesses cats; it's a quasi-telepathic power, but she can't read minds. All she does is cast her mind into a local cat, and control them. The Executive's power doesn't work on cats, though, and even if it did, telepathic powers in general do not work on Lynx when she's possessing a cat because her mind is processing through two different brains simultaneously. The Society's telepath Slither has never been able to read her in battle; of course they all wear protective shields for their minds, but the Society's Dr. Awe has been able to counter those, interfering to the point where the shields don't work, and then it's sometimes up to Lynx to keep secrets.
Wait.
Where is Lynx?
Odysseus looks around and doesn't see her. His team today consists of Man'o'Might, Lightning Rod, Ariel, Dr. Ray, and the Mechanist, who's usually back at base but the rumor was that Awe had a giant robot and that was usually outside Ray's purview. The Mechanist isn't here because he's stuck at the base they were defending, disassembling his own giant robot for transport. And Lynx is supposed to be there on the plane, but he doesn't see a cat anywhere.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything. Lynx's human body is back at the Watch HQ, and she often lets go of a cat if the cat was local to the battle zone. But this particular cat came with them on the mission; Lynx particularly likes her for being healthy, young but not a kitten, and apparently unusually intelligent for a cat, which lets Lynx process more detail as her cat-self. She won't call the cat a pet, but she's been feeding it and keeping it at Watch HQ. It's always come back with them before.
"She went through Ray's teleport gate," Lightning Rod said. "Right before OK Boomer took it out." OK Boomer is actually a prisoner of the Watch now; he's probably the oldest active non-immortal supervillain the Watch has ever fought. His talent for explosives is incredible; Odysseus was looking forward to talking with the man, finding out why he chose to become a villain so late in life, and maybe seeing if he can be convinced to change sides. He's not as good at it as the Envoy, whose entire thing as a hero is her ability to convince villains to back down or reform, but he has a good track record with the ones they capture who aren't that hardened yet.
So that's a perfectly good reason for Lynx to not be here; Ray had set up the teleporter to go straight back to base so the Mechanist could get his own giant robot into play, because it was too big for the plane… which, unfortunately, meant the Mechanist was still at the military base disassembling it, since OK Boomer had blown the teleport gate and they couldn't bring the giant robot straight home. That all makes sense.
The feeling of unease doesn't lessen.
"Why did Lynx go back?"
Ariel shrugged. "She's a cat. She didn't radio me to tell me, and obviously the cat didn't say."
"You know what's weird?" Man'o'Might says.
"No, what?" Odysseus turns to his super-strong teammate.
"I didn't see Ms. Anthropy. Normally she's the one to recover the Executive after we take him out, but this time I saw Fallen Angel grabbing him."
Usually, Fallen Angel fights Ariel, because they can both fly. "Ariel?"
Ariel nods. "She nearly got me once I'd knocked out the Executive. I had to dodge, and then Dr. Awe's giant robot was going after me, and Mech-A-No was going after it, and it was almost as much chaos without the Executive as when he was awake. You saw Fallen Angel grab him?"
Man'o'Might nods. "I actually didn't see Ms. Anthropy much during the fight at all. At the beginning, she shot me, I remember that."
Ms. Anthropy is a hardened killer whose signature attack involves guns, often with explosive rounds, but thus far none of the ammunition she's ever used against Man'o'Might has done worse than bruise him. "Lightning Rod?" Odysseus asks.
"Yeah, I didn't see her much either. I had those new guys, the twins, the fire and ice pair." They are also sedated and being carried in the back of the plane. The Society of Sin has never been big on personal loyalty to anyone but the Executive; they have often abandoned members who are knocked out, letting the Watch take them into custody. None of them ever know much, unfortunately.
"Ray, can you call base? Get Lynx on the line."
Dr. Ray, manning the co-pilot seat, nods. "Will do."
He contacts HQ. Nobody answers. The AI picks up. "This is the Watch. What's the nature of your emergency?"
"Janus, what's the status of the base?"
"The base? The b-b-base is, the b-b-base is f-fi-fiiii… I, I am not in contact with the base. Where am I?"
Shit. Something has happened to Janus. The feeling of unease crystallizes. "Strap in, everyone. We need to get home ASAP." As soon as he's sure it's safe, he kicks in the turbo engines and the plane roars, speeding up. Superheroes aren't typically allowed to break the sound barrier over populated areas unless it's an emergency, but Odysseus is a big fan of asking forgiveness rather than permission when he thinks it's an emergency. He didn't pick his code name because he planned to slavishly obey the rules.
They hit Mach 4 before he slows down, braking hard enough to make most of his passengers queasy as inertia throws them forward and up, shedding speed even faster than he'd taken it on. By the time he's using the VTOL to land on the Watch HQ roof, his instincts are screaming at him. "Come on, everyone! Let's go!"
***
He was expecting to find extensive damage to Janus, which he does. Maybe attempts to hack it, which he doesn't. Someone just trashed its exterior sensors, bringing down the camera system, the internal audio recording system, the health telemetry system, the intruder alert system…
"The damage all looks physical," Dr. Ray says, since they don't have the Mechanist to inspect Janus for them.
"Where's Lynx?"
"She was in her bedroom…" Ariel says. None of them have gone to the floors for the bedrooms yet.
Without internal telemetry for intruders, there could be an ambush, so Odysseus does not follow his gut desire to just run for Lynx's room at top speed. He goes with his team backing him up, fast, but carefully, checking doors and corners as they enter hallways and elevators and foyers.
But he is the first one to step into Lynx's bedroom.
She's lying on the bed. Covered in blood.
That breaks him. He runs forward, not checking the corners of the room for a possible ambush. Luckily, there isn't one. Unless the reveal of his friend and teammate's blasted head with a giant hole in her face counts as an ambush.
"No, no, no!" he screams, dropping to his knees by the side of the bed. "No, no…"
"Is there…" Ray, who sometimes plays the role of a field medic, comes forward, and then sees Lynx's head. What's left of it. "No. No, I guess there isn't."
Ariel has her hands over her mouth, eyes welling with tears. Man'o'Might clenches his fists, likely holding back the urge to break something. Lightning Rod just… sags, all the energy he normally seems to carry in his posture just gone. Ray is frozen, hands open but fingers curled, like he's imagining holding something in his hands, but there's nothing there and he's helpless.
Odysseus did not name himself after a Greek hero to restrain his emotions in a modern way. He howls, sobbing, screaming wordlessly at the walls, clutching his teammate's cold arm.
The cat must have run because Lynx was in danger and she wanted to make sure the cat got back to home territory, or something. Or Lynx had let go of the cat, because she was dead, and it had run for the teleport gate. It doesn't matter. It's a cat. Without Lynx's mind animating it, it's no more her than this empty shell on this bed.
While they were fighting, someone slipped past them, right into Watch HQ – probably using their own teleport gate – trashed the security, and killed their teammate.
It was probably Ms. Anthropy, if no one can remember seeing her later in the battle, but there's no proof, and with Janus' sensors smashed and damage to its recently recorded memories, there never will be. Not unless Anthropy decides to brag about it the next time they see her, and she's usually too professional for that. A quiet, cold killer.
They left a teleport gate up that went straight back to HQ, directly back into the ground floor hangar. They trusted the security system to keep anyone who got in there from getting into the higher levels of HQ. But security failed, someone got through the door while they were fighting the Society of Sin, someone trashed their base AI and someone murdered Lynx. While she was helpless, riding around in the body of a cat, eyes closed, largely unaware of her surroundings.
It's his fault. He should have seen this possibility. Should have demanded hardened security on the ground floor hangar, or prevented the Mechanist and Ray from putting the teleport gate inside the hangar, or demanded that Ray shut the gate down after the Mechanist was successfully through… something. Anything.
No super he knows has the ability to go back in time, or send any information back. Lynx is dead. There's no reviving someone with two-thirds of their head gone. Point blank shot. Lynx hadn’t even known her killer was there, couldn't have had time to know she was dying. There wouldn't have been any pain, she'd have died too fast to feel it. That wasn't a comfort.
His fault. Odysseus weeps like the Greek hero he's named for, crying for the men he lost to the Cyclops. His fault.
---
Lynx isn't dead! You can read her take on these events in my story Lynx, from the 52 Project. But the Watch won't find out she's not dead for a while.
You've seen me posting my NBC Rules (Nightmare Before Christmas, aka, if it was for October, it's okay to post as long as it's before Christmas) ficlets on Inktober prompts.
I have also been writing a lot of original short stories, flash fics and drabbles. 10 completed short stories this year (that were also started this year, though tbh I haven't finished off anything I started previously, yet) and 10 fics under 1K words, 4 of which are drabbles. I can't post these because I'm trying for professional publication, though I think I may post some to my Patreon.
And, I started up work on Cold Light again.
My most recent, which I finished yesterday, was for a horror anthology about cats experiencing eldritch horror. Yeah, some anthologies are really fucking specific. (Some magazines too. I've tried twice to break into the magazine about queer people and plants.)
I have actually managed to place two stories this year!
Lineage, from the 52 Project, has been accepted for Farthest Star's "Longfic" anthology (I will have more details when they provide them)
"They Only See Me When I Cry", a drabble about a banshee, was accepted for Black Hare Press's "Dark Moments" anthology, and they've already paid! (A whole whopping $4. Awesome! ... hey, it's more than I'm making off the royalties for my Star Trek pro story anymore.)
I've done 55 submissions this year (the number is that high because I started out trying to place the 52 Project stories with markets that take reprints... haven't been able to find markets suitable for all 52, but between shipping some of those off, and some of my older fics, and then the newer stuff, I'm up to 55), with 2 acceptances, 27 rejections, and 26 that haven't come back yet. (Some of those are old enough they're almost certainly rejections but I haven't written to find out yet.)
So, I'm doing stuff. Very little fanfic this year, but I haven't given up on it.
Trigger warnings: Mention of sexual abuse of children (nothing graphic); violent fantasies; brief flashback to a murder.
(It gropes outward...)
Forty pairs of blank eyes stared into space. Forty children, ranging in age from 15 to 19, sat motionlessly lined up on two benches, staring out at nothing with shattered eyes. They made no sound individually; even together, the sound of their breathing, regular and completely synchronized, could only be heard in dead stillness. But then, the room was dead still. The guard, Park, glanced over at them and shivered.
Even Drones had more life to them. But Drones were activated. These were larval Drones-- their training not yet complete enough for the Bright to possess them. Drones could manifest the Bright, or the Bright's subroutines-- they talked and moved, at least. These silent ego-destroyed teenagers gave Park the creeps. She turned away.
There were other guards-- like that asshole Norman on third shift-- who used these for sex. The larval Drones did whatever you ordered them to, and unlike full-fledged Drones, there was no chance the Bright would possess them in the middle. You could slip a larva-boy some prippies to get him up-- the equipment still worked, it was the software that'd been erased-- and the girls were even easier. Park couldn't understand the attraction. When she wanted a man, she wanted a man, not a blank-eyed boy all pripped up with nothing looking out through his sockets. Maybe she could understand how a girl who did nothing but lie there could get a guy off-- guys were pricks. Give 'em a hole and they'd fuck it. Like Norman. Damn, but he was an asshole. Park thought of his slimy voice, his snickering laugh. She'd do him, all right. She'd do him through his armor with a tefblade up his ass. Bastard.
<anger, humiliation, anger {shivering willies}>
*Can you hear me, Terisa?*
Park was thinking of her last boyfriend. What he'd said, and why she'd had to come to Hands of the Bright. It was his fault, the asshole. He shouldn't've said what he did.
*Terisa. Come away.*
How he'd looked on the floor, after she'd taken the gun and blown his head away--
*You are not Park. Terisa, come away. Come.*
Gravitating toward a voice, toward thought, like a plant toward the sun, it grew. The voice faded, leaving it in cold darkness, abandoned. Lost, it reached out and found another sun. It grew toward that instead, away from Park's human mind.
The light filled the universe, beginning at last to coalesce into understandable forms. Data streamed in from everywhere. The rise and fall of the Neue Deutschmark. The location of a Chinese tong that still opposed the Bright, and informants' reports on the tong's members. The processing of young assassins, young spies, young Drones.
It fell deeper, falling toward the light. No longer a plant growing, it was a satellite in decaying orbit, spiraling toward the sun. Pulled by the need for completion, for thought and emotion. Untrained, it didn't know where to go to link in, to feel the Bright fill its mind. So it plunged deeper toward the Bright, without broadcasting the recognition signals that would tell the AS of an intruder.
And it reached the core, and became the Bright, as earlier it had become Park.
And she yanked away, as if from a fire, and fell back into herself, blinking in sudden awareness and shock.
Terisa Grayson looked around herself in growing panic. She recognized nothing. She was in a room with teenagers, lots of them, but they were strangely small and had blank expressions, shaved heads and loose gowns. And her own clothing-- her hair-- good God, she had breasts! Terisa stared hard at the soft lumps bulging her gown in front. She was only 12-- but those were a woman's breasts. And her feet reached the floor. The bench was fairly high-- she could see that by looking at the teens around her, whose feet also touched the floor. Terisa was short. She should not be able to touch the floor.
12 years old, but she was in a room full of teenagers, and she was one of them.
What's happening to me!
Instinctively she reached out, unconscious of what she was doing, and touched the voice. *Be calm, Terisa.*
What's happening--
*You're waking up. You were a Drone of the Bright.*
What's a-- She stopped, belatedly realizing that she knew what a Drone of the Bright was, though she couldn't remember learning. A psi, with either telepathy or the rarer cyberpathy, whose ego had been destroyed, who lived only to serve the Bright. And she knew what it was, too. More than she'd learned in social studies-- more than anyone. She knew the Bright's primary.
*You must run, Terisa.*
Run how? Who are you? How did I get here?
*I am Beatrice. You already know how to run. Do it.*
And the voice went silent.
Terisa glanced over at the guard. The woman's name came to her-- Naomi Park-- and a host of details. Wanted by the police for murdering her lover-- not the first man she'd killed, nor the last. Her revulsion at the rows of zombie children, not yet Drones, no longer human. Park's mind sucked at Terisa's, almost overwhelming her-- the only mind besides her own in the room. But she had the strength, now, to pull away.
What am I sensing? The strangeness struck her suddenly-- her telepathy was full-blown. She had never been sucked toward people's minds before-- only sensed bits and fragments. She had never before been able to walk into someone's head, just like that.
Later. I'll deal with it later. Right now, she had to get out of here.
She drew from Park’s mind the behavior of Drones and the layout of the building. With her face kept deliberately blank, she rose to her feet and came up behind Park.
“Let me out.”
Park jumped with a shriek. She whipped around. “You- you- you’re awake?”
“I have been activated. The password is ‘fleurtylukijilo.’ Let me out.”
“Um. Yeah. Sorry about that.” Park unlocked the door. “I thought none of you guys were old enough to be activated.”
“What you thought doesn’t concern us overmuch, Naomi Park.” Park had talked to a Drone in full possession by the Bright three or four times, and that was how she remembered them talking.
“Right. Sorry.” Park stepped aside and let Terisa pass through.
Her uniform was entirely wrong; she was dressed as a larval Drone, someone not yet free to wander about under the direction of the Bright. She tried to project an “I’m not here and even if I am I’m not worth commenting on” field (and how did she know how to do that, anyway?), and it mostly seemed to work. No one questioned her as she threaded her way through the base.
At the exit she paused. There were two guards there, both telepaths, both capable of seeing through her “I’m not here” field. Dressed as she was, they would question her, and she didn’t know how to construct a good shield or false memories or anything. To get through the checkpoint, she genuinely would have to link to the Bright, or at least one of its subroutines, and turn off her own ego. In the first place, she didn’t know how to turn off her own ego, now that it was awake, and in the second place it would be too much of a risk if she did – she might never be able to turn back on. There had to be another way out.
She walked away from the exit, trying to look as if she knew where she was going, and continued to project her “I’m not here” field. Terisa linked into the low-level subroutine that kept the Drones operating. It told her where to go for a fresh Drone uniform. The subroutine didn’t compel her, as it would have a Drone; she had an ego, and a will of her own.
Uniforms hung in racks, each specific for an individual Drone, each with that Drone’s number. Terisa’s cohort had not yet progressed to the point where full Drone uniforms had been prepared for them; she had to steal someone else’s and hope that that Drone was currently inactive. Twice she misjudged her own size, and had to put back the stolen uniform and take a larger one. Finally she found one that fit. She left the supply room and headed away.
This time she didn’t need to project an “I’m not here” field; her uniform made her blend in perfectly. There were other exits for Drones, without the high security of the main exit. She pulled a password out of a different Drone subroutine and gave it at the checkpoint.
Past the exit was a long sloping tunnel up. The subroutine told her to grab a set of civilian clothes out of a locker and put them on, hanging her Drone uniform in the locker. The clothes were unisex, ill-fitting and scratchy, but she didn’t want to call attention to herself. She obeyed.
The tunnel mouth opened onto a barren, rocky field, with huge rocks stuck in the ground here and there. As she left the tunnel, a door closed behind her with a swish. She turned, and saw a big rock, with no sign that there had ever been a door in it.
Penned in a wire fence about fifty meters away was a parking lot full of vehicles. Ostensibly the parking lot belonged to a low gray building nearby. Actually, that building covered the main exit. Terisa didn’t know how she knew any of this, but information had been flowing into her mind since she woke up, and she hadn’t really had time to question any of it yet. She slipped through a small gate in the fence, designed for Drones, and took one of the authorized fully automated buggies. Another subroutine explained how to drive it. She linked between the buggy and the subroutine, activating the buggy, and headed for the nearest large population center.
While she drove, or rather while the buggy drove itself, Terisa examined it with her mind. There was a tracking device she couldn’t disable, one that let the Bright’s databases know exactly where the buggy was. Right now that was not a problem, but sooner or later someone would realize she was unauthorized. The Bright itself would notice, given enough time. As an AS, it was too complex to keep its attention focused on every part of its own mind, but there would be an alert subroutine notifying it of the discrepancy, and eventually it would pay attention. Right now it was in the middle of a battle of some kind. She could no longer link directly into it, as she had when she had no ego, but she remembered that much from her last, brief contact. For a moment she had been the Bright, long before she was prepared, and the experience had jolted her back to awareness. At least, she thought that was how it had happened.
Something in her shied away from considering her situation in anything but the most practical terms. If she lost herself trying to figure out how she was almost made a Drone, or why she was free, she would get tangled in things she couldn’t handle now. So. Fact: She was free, but the Bright would notice she had left soon. Fact: She didn’t know what city she was in, or for that matter what country, or even what year it was. Fact: She was somehow a full-blown telepath and a trained cyberpath, something she’d been taught in school was incredibly rare. Certainly she’d never felt any affinity with machines before… No, that was dangerous, skip it.
She had to find a safehouse, somewhere that she’d be protected from the Bright. Every schoolchild knew that the Corps was the enemy of the Bright, and worked to protect psis and innocent citizens from it and other psionic criminals. She could go to the Corps, and they would protect her. She—
No. As the buggy neared the city, her blood ran cold, as she remembered her contact with the Bright. The Corps would have telepaths – they could read her mind. And if they saw what she knew, they would destroy her ego themselves, or kill her. She couldn’t go to them.
So where could she go?
She didn’t know enough. She knew just enough to know who she couldn’t trust, and not enough to know who she could. Desperately she cast out for the one entity she thought would help her. *Beatrice! Beatrice, who are you? Where are you? Help me!*
Then she sensed the distant thread of minds focused on her, and realized that her time was up. The Bright knew she’d fled. Hastily, Terisa pulled the buggy into a side street and abandoned it, running off into the urban maze. All her attention was focused on escape. If Beatrice answered, she could no longer hear it.
Mark Donovan, thirteen years old as of a week ago, hit the pavement hard with his knee and elbow. His foster parents had gotten him a bike for his birthday – well, handed it down from an older child who'd aged out of the system, but it was a bike, and it worked – and a new helmet, but hadn't sprung for knee or elbow pads. The fall ripped skin away, left him bleeding in multiple places on both joints, with a sprinkling of tiny gravel and rock dust clinging to his skin as if the ground had offered him an equal exchange. "Your skin for my rocks," or something like that.
"Not a fair trade," he mumbled, sitting on the curb and rocking slightly. He felt cold, dizzy and sick, gray flickering at the edges of his vision, but he knew the feelings would go away if he just sat still for a bit. He was in shock, that was all. Impact and pain. He'd be fine in a minute, and then he'd limp home and wash his wounds. He wasn't ten minutes from his house… by bike, it'd take longer to walk the bike back, but he wasn't in any shape to actually ride it.
The roads were not exactly safe places to ride a bike, so Mark had half-ridden, half-walked the bike to a former big box store, now quite dead, with an empty parking lot, and he'd just been riding around aimlessly, doing donuts and figure eights. He hadn't noticed the rock on the ground; he'd gotten too comfortable with the bike and had started to think too much about the birthday party he hadn't been invited to. Last month, Eddie had declared Mark his best friend. Their birthdays were two days apart, they both liked the same video games and TV shows, and at age 12 that was enough to declare forever friendship. This month, Eddie had invited several of his friends to his birthday party, but not Mark. And hadn't explained why.
Mark was so damn sick of this. Tears stung his eyes. From falling off his bike, he decided. Yet another rejection from a friend shouldn't upset him anymore. He ought to be used to it. The older he got, the more often it happened. When he'd been younger he'd been able to keep friends for at least a schoolyear before they decided they never wanted to talk to him again, and his first foster family had kept him from infancy to the age of 6. The second one had lasted until he was ten. This was the third. They'd turned cold, flinching when he spoke to them, not meeting his eyes anymore, barely talking to him. The birthday present had been perfunctory, something they'd done because of course foster parents gave their charges birthday presents, not because they cared. He'd seen this pattern before. But at least the bike worked.
Well, actually, he hadn't checked it over since he'd hit the rock and it had thrown him, falling to the ground itself, so maybe it wasn't working anymore. He'd better check it.
Mark looked up… and there was a small, golden… animal… sitting on the asphalt in front of him, looking at him plaintively.
It was cute. It looked kind of like a gargoyle, so, objectively, ugly as hell, but Mark had always thought gargoyles and similar monstrous-looking creatures were adorable. He had a collection of human skulls – not real skulls, art pieces and foam sculptures and the like – and had had a plush Cthulhu before he'd come here to his current foster parents, who were religious and had probably taken it away from him, though they'd never admitted to it and claimed he must have lost it. That was his aesthetic. Edgy, but cute maybe.
The little gargoyle was about a foot tall. It looked kind of like the Pokemon Charmander, like a tiny baby dragon, but its snout and mouth were longer and a lot more aggressively sharp, and its eyes were smaller and closer-set. It had ridges above its eyes that made it look like it had eyebrows, though it was scaled and as hairless as any other scaled thing. A short tail twitched.
Is that a baby dragon? Mark thought, and then, Am I hallucinating? Did I hit my head?
He took off the helmet and looked at it. He couldn't see any damage.
The creature was still looking at him with puppy dog eyes like it was begging for a treat, patiently. Dogs had never liked him, and thus he'd never liked dogs back, but this was obviously not a dog.
"C'mere, little fella. I won't hurt you," he said to the creature, which inched forward just a little bit. "I haven't got any treats on me, but if you want a pet or a scritch, I'm up for it."
The thought occurred to him that it was a carnivore. His blood, currently oozing out of multiple spots on his knee, might serve as a treat.
The next thing he thought was that that was unbelievably stupid and a great way to get bitten.
The very next thing he thought after that was to wonder when he'd decided to do it anyway.
He'd wiped his fingers against his bloody injuries, then held out his hand to the creature. It came forward, walking bipedally, right up to his hand, then looked up at him. Mark felt like it was asking permission. Obviously animals didn't do that, but whatever.
"Go ahead," he encouraged the critter, offering it just one bloody finger. Ready to snatch it back if the thing tried to bite him.
Instead, it delicately licked his finger.
"You wanna come home with me?" Mark asked. "You wanna be my pet? I can keep you in my room. You like blood, I can get you meat juice?"
It inched forward, to his bloody knee, and started licking the blood off. It felt good, actually. The tongue was a little raspy, like a cat, and probably he shouldn't be allowing this and he was probably going to get some kind of infection and die, but it was so cute. The sun glittered off its golden scales. Its tongue was so delicate for a creature that looked like it could bite his face off if it really wanted to.
"How about I take you home?" Mark said. "I can call you Goldie. No, wait, that's lame. How about Golden? You look like a Golden."
*that what you wanna call me, boss? then that's my name.*
Mark jerked. The voice hadn't really been there, he was sure of it. No sound. He couldn't have said what it sounded like. The words were just in his head, like a song you suddenly think of because someone mentioned a word that reminded you of a lyric, except he didn't know any songs like that.
"Did… did you just talk to me?"
*sure did, boss*
Okay. This had gone rapidly from slightly strange to totally bizarre. But it was cool. Mark was good at rolling with what life threw him. "I'm your boss now? Why, because I fed you my blood?"
*yeah. can I lick your elbow, too?*
"Why the hell not," Mark said, and offered it his elbow. "You like, a baby dragon or something?"
*nah, i'm a grownup. not getting bigger than this.* It was able to talk and lick at the same time, since it wasn't using its mouth to speak to him.
"You look kinda like a gargoyle. Or a Pokemon. Or some kind of demon. That'd really mess with Mr. and Mrs. Donovan, wouldn't it? They already half think I'm worshipping Satan because I like heavy metal and I draw skeletons on my textbook covers." He laughed.
*sure, i can be a demon if you want*
"Doesn't really sound too confident, but sure, whatever. You're my pet demon? Can you do any tricks?"
The golden demon vanished and then reappeared next to Mark. *i can do that.*
"Teleportation. Sweet. Uh, did I pass out here in the parking lot and I'm dreaming all this? Because this is kind of abnormal."
*normal's not any fun, though*
Mark grinned. "You got that right. Look, I don't think my foster parents ought to see you. I know they're gonna throw me out but I'd rather they do it after getting the agency to get me a new placement, not freak out and toss me out of the house, okay? You can come to my bedroom but I can't carry you into the house."
*no prob, boss. i'll meet you there*
And then it was gone.
Well. Now Mark needed to get back home, as soon as he could. He didn't feel shocky anymore, and the scrapes on his knee and elbow were no longer bleeding… in fact, they were still scraped, with loose skin flaking off, but they were no longer bleeding, or dirty, and didn't look like they'd ever bled. The pink color of tearing off some epidermis, not the red of broken skin.
"That's a cool trick," Mark said.
He really hoped he wasn't hallucinating this stuff. He couldn't wait to find out what other tricks his demon could do.
---
A ficlet about Mark des Demanges (though he hasn't adopted that last name yet), the main character of "Tainted Blood", the first story I ever got accepted for publication in a real magazine. And then the magazine went out of business and never actually printed my story. Can't post it here because I'm trying to sell it to markets who are like "it can't be on the internet but it's okay if it was in a magazine" or "it's okay if the magazine went out of business and never printed your story" (how often does that even happen, that there's at least one webzine where that is a valid criterion for submission?)
There's a story about him as an adult that is online though, in my Inktober/Writeober 2020 collection. It's Inktober 2020 2., Wisp.
We're on Nightmare Before Christmas rules: anything that should have been done in October, that's done in November or December before Christmas, counts.
---
Ria found the phone buried at the bottom of a drawer under her bed where she used to keep everything she used for "exploring".
A pair of boots that would never fit her or anyone she knew again – rugged, but pink, sparkly, and with a handful of light-up LEDs still working when she banged the shoes against her floor. A rain poncho that used to be big on her, which was extremely tight. She'd need a new one, eventually. An umbrella covered with cute panda bears that wouldn't open anymore. Wolfy, her trusted wolf companion, his fur a little gunky with the residue of too much mud she'd never quite washed off. The journal – purple, fuzzy, heart made of glitter on the cover, but now the fuzz was balding and the glitter was wearing away – where she used to record her observations. And the phone, her Guide.
It was five years old. It used a power cord standard she wasn't sure she had a cord for anymore. But once she removed the cracked, heavy-duty pink case with the narwhals on it, the underlying boring white phone charged fine on a QI charger.
Wolfy said, "Ria? You're charging the Guide. Does that mean you're back?"
Ria looked at him. "You're in a drawer, covered with crud, What do you think?"
"I think I'd appreciate a wash," Wolfy said. "And maybe to sit out on a desk or something, not in a drawer."
"I'll see what I can do."
The Guide booted, and found the Internet. House wifi, admittedly. Guide was three phones ago and not still on the wireless plan. Ria tapped the Map.
A bright, cartoony, game-light green background screen, covered with big messages and logos in childish fonts, appeared. So embarrassing, when she'd been 11, just going to middle school. "Hi, Ria!" the Map said. There was an avatar of a scroll on the bright grass-green background, with speech balloons. "Where do you want to go today?"
Ria grinned. "The wireless store, to get you on a pre-pay plan and buy some minutes."
"Sure thing!" The green background gave way, with a sliding effect, to a map. Like Google Maps, but with bigger print, and no advertising. A tiny icon of a little girl walking started up at her house, a dotted line traced a path to a wireless store – the closest one, Map's choice parameters had been designed to contain an eight year old – and circles denoting physical landmarks popped up. When she tapped them, cartoonified photos of places on the way to the wireless tore popped up.
The server was still up and being updated. The software backend must be running. Because that used to be the pizzeria, and now it was a Mexican place. And the drugstore that had closed was now a weirdly upscale convenience store no one her age ever shopped at. The cartoon images showed the buildings as they were now, not five years ago when she last used the Map.
"Is there a way to upgrade you?" Ria asked. "I'm sixteen, I might get a car."
She would not get a car. Mom and Dad had let her explore all over the woods behind their house before puberty, but now she had a curfew, and Mom and Dad insisted on meeting any friend she wanted to hang with before she was allowed to, and they couldn't be boys. But with Guide, who'd be invisible to her parents if it was on her own pre-paid cell plan, and no Family Sphere GPS tracker to tell her parents where she was like on the phone she had now…
"There might be upgrades available!" Map said. "I was very popular with parents for their children once, but a lot of those kids are older now and there's some nostalgia for me, so there might be a version that supports driving! Would you like me to check?"
"Not right now." Map could still hear her when she spoke, but responded to her in message balloons on the screen, like she'd set up years ago when she had wanted to be "stealthy" in her explorations. She could type to Map or speak to it, and it would answer in text, always.
Once she could drive. Once she could get a better job than weekend waitress at the local café.
Guide would need a more modern OS, assuming the more modern ones would still support Map. Maybe she'd have to root it. Put on a leaner OS that didn't require as many resources. Get the stuff intended to keep a child corralled off the phone, without any of the corporate junk the new phones pushed on teens and adults.
It was in really great shape for its age. The narwhal case had been intended to protect the phone against the worst a child her age could have done, five years ago, and while she'd been far from the most careful child, she'd also been far from the least. The case had taken all the damage so the phone didn't have to. She'd need a new case.
Wolfy said plaintively, "Are you going to on adventures with Guide, and not me?"
An old phone in a modern case that wasn't sold to elementary school girls could look stylish. Grownup, or at least, fashionable. A stuffed wolf plushie could never be anything other than a stuffed wolf plushie.
But did she honestly care what people thought, anymore? It was all part of the Box – the walls around her, intended to keep her controlled. Safe, for parentally approved values of Safe. Parental opinions, school rules, peer pressure. When she was in middle school, she hadn't noticed how her desperation to fit in with her peers, to wear makeup and giggle about boys and celebrities and watch the right TV and play the newest games, had hemmed her in. She'd thought it had been her own choice to give up exploring, but that was how they tricked everybody – made them give up what made them unique to become something as predictable as every other person their age, and made them think they'd done it because they wanted to.
It was time to slip out of the Box.
"Nah," she said. "I'll wash you up after dinner tonight. A little Woolite on a small cleaning brush, some water to rinse, a fluff dry under a hair dryer, and you'll be good as new. And then we can go adventuring together again."
---
Is this a science fiction story involving weird intrusive uses of AI? Is this a fantasy story where plushies really talk? Is this the story of a disturbed, paranoid child who hallucinates? Who knows! Who cares!
The store on the Boardwalk appeared to be titled “DAVE’S DEEP DIVE”. Underneath the sign that said so, there were signs advertising scuba gear rental, scuba gear for sale, and ocean-harvested merchandise such as shells, sponges, and whatnot. There was a prominent sign on the front that said “SCUBA LESSONS!” Underneath that, a smaller sign said “Exosolars welcome!”
Rihaanyaki studied the signs carefully. After a few seconds of staring at them, the heads-up display on her left contact lens offered her written translation of the signs into Arrnehukai, which confirmed her understanding of the English on the signs. She approached the stand, resisting the urge to nervously adjust her voder. A Kai did not demonstrate nervousness in front of a lesser race. Even Humans, the only race to befriend the Kai, should not see a Kai’s emotional vulnerabilities.
“Hello,” she said. “Your sign says that you teach scuba lessons to exosolars?”
This is not what she actually said. What she said was “Iu, rehole’un ssa scuba ffi mriaha naheurr’le ke ahurr’leoh hea?” But she said it very quietly, almost purring it. The voder on her neck was what said “Your sign says that you teach scuba lessons to exosolars?”, and it was loud. Rihaanyaki could have spoken English, if she’d tried very, very hard; there were sounds Kai couldn’t make, but not that many of them. However, there were lots of sounds that Kai didn’t want to make on the grounds that they were really hard to do. She’d studied English and didn’t really need the small earjewel that would translate anything the Human said into Arrnehukai, but she was terrible at pronouncing it.
“Uh.” The Human stared at her. “Uh, yeah, we do… do you have a friend who was interested in scuba lessons?”
“I am interested in scuba lessons.” Why had he assumed she wasn’t the one who wanted the lessons herself? Wait, no, she was pretty sure she knew the answer to that.
“You’re a Kai.”
“I am a Kai, yes. And I would like scuba diving lessons.”
“Can you even swim?”
"I can!" Rihaanyaki said proudly. "I swim often at home."
"Oh." The Human's eyes widened. "Yeah, sorry, I guess I'm being a little racist or something. I'd just thought… well, most cats on Earth hate the water, so I'd figured the Kai wouldn't like it either."
"As a species, we don't," Rihaanyaki assured him. "I am… considered weird. I grew up on a bay, and my mother taught me to fish with claws… do you know what that means?"
"Um… grabbing the fish?"
"Yes! To reach into the water and grab the fish. It's a popular sport, but when we play it on the pier of a bay, we get to eat the fish!" She laughed. Well, to be precise, she huffed through her nose rapidly, while purring. Kai-formed beings, in general, could either roar or purr. Some Kai considered it an unfair violation of their warrior aesthetic that they themselves purred, but Rihaanyaki always thought it meant they were always destined to be a civilized species, following the Way and behaving like sapients and cooperating with each other. Her voder made the Human sound that was a direct equivalent, what they called "laughter."
"That sounds like fun for you guys," the Human said.
"It was very fun. But one day I fell in! It was quite shallow there, so I was easily able to stand up and walk back to shore, but I found the sensation of water in my fur pleasant. Everyone told me I was insane, but I could catch so many fish while walking around in the water instead of being trapped on the pier, the other kits told me I was cheating and they wouldn't play with me anymore… but my mother still cooked the fish I caught and there were far more than the other kits caught, so I was still winning whether they admitted it or not." She laughed again. "And that's how I learned to swim. So. Do you offer scuba diving lessons to Kai?"
"The sign says 'extrasolars', it doesn't say 'extrasolars except for big cats', so yeah, obviously, if you want scuba lessons we'll offer them. I don't have any suits in your size but we generally start with basic snorkeling anyway before moving up to wearing full suits, so if you pay in advance, we can get a suit made for you and it'll be ready by the time you need it."
"I have a great deal of Earth money," Rihaanyaki said.
"That's great, but don't go around telling people that. You're a Kai, no one's gonna try to pickpocket you even if you keep it in local currency on your person, but there are a lot of people who might try to scam you."
"Yes, I know what that means." Rihaanyaki nodded, which was not a Kai gesture, but she'd learned it when she'd learned English. "Using deception to steal money from the unwary. We don't have that problem on Mreh'gai. Kai who follow the Way do not lie, and anyone who doesn't follow the Way usually ends up being discovered because they got into a stupid fight and then we exile them to the desert."
"You exile people who don't follow your religion?" the Human said. Rihaanyaki thought, from her studies, that the tone the Human was using might express unease.
"The Way isn't a religion, if I understand that word correctly," she said. "Religion is generally a belief that there is a supernatural being, outside the realm of sapient understanding, who has opinions on what is right and wrong, and those opinions should be obeyed and the being should be honored, right?"
"Mostly, yeah. There are religions that don't work that way. My grandma's from Japan; they believe there are spirits in everything, and it's important to honor and respect those spirits but their concepts of right and wrong have very little to do with human understanding."
"I see. Well, the Way has nothing to do with supernatural beings of any kind. It's scientific."
"Scientific?"
"Yes. You see, in the beginning, the Kai did not build cities. Our women made colonies, clusters of related Kai and adopted ones and chosen mates, and our men were nomadic, traveling between colonies. Men would fight each other when they met on the road unless they were part of the same colony; women would fight each other for dominance within the colony. It was impossible to build anything lasting in such a way; nothing got done. So we developed a system of rules, which we call the Way, that allow Kai to live in harmony with one another."
"And one of those rules is, if someone tries to make friends with you, you have to make friends back, right?"
"Yes, of course, I imagine all Humans know that one, since it's how we became your allies." She twitched her tail in a mild expression of humor, equivalent to when a Human moved its face muscles as if it was going to bare teeth, or maybe bared them just a little bit. Which was weird. A nearly universal mammalian signal for aggression throughout the Local Arm and the humans used it to indicate friendliness and a response to humor. "Though 'friends' may be overly strong. If someone expresses friendliness to you and gives gifts to show their intent isn't hostile, you must be friendly to them and give gifts back, but you don't need to invite them to your wedding. Is that right, wedding? A ceremony celebrating that your clan has accepted your choice of mate and that your kits with that mate will be accepted as belonging to both clans?"
"Kind of, yeah, that's sort of a description of a wedding. Ours are more about acknowledging that two or more people accept each other as partners, with rules that they've laid out amongst themselves as to whether or not they're allowed to be with anyone else while their marriage is in effect. Not so much about your family accepting them. Otherwise my grandma and my granddad would never have gotten married." The Human laughed.
"Interesting! Humans mate for life, don't you? Or for very long times?"
"Yeah, that's the ideal. You usually promise to be together until one of you dies, but sometimes you have to break that promise because it just didn't work out the way you wanted it to."
"I'm glad we don't make that kind of promise," Rihaanyaki said. "The Way takes promises very seriously. If you break a promise, unless it's through no fault of your own, you are considered an oath-breaker and you won't be exiled, but people won't trust you. But we don't consider it important to remain mated to the same person beyond a heat cycle; it's more important to acknowledge that your kits from this cycle were fathered by this man and therefore they're connected to his clan too. And both clans have to agree, otherwise the kits only belong to their mother's clan."
"But you exile people for breaking your rules?"
"Well, if you won't follow the Way, then you can't be trusted to be civilized. You might start fights with someone who wasn't hostile or who was willing to keep hostilities to non-violent means like staredowns, or mocking poetry battles. You might be someone who tells lies, and then who could make deals with you, or trust you in their neighborhood? You might even steal things from other Kai. So we send them to the deserts to live with each other, as well as they can, and we don't let them have weapons. They can use claws and teeth and rocks if they want to hurt each other; we don't need to let them have swords and guns."
"I guess it makes life simpler, but I think I prefer living in a society where I'm allowed to lie without getting kicked out of my home, people will just look down on me if I do."
Rihaanyaki raised an eyebrow – a gesture that worked identically between Humans and Kai. "But in your system you have to worry about being scammed. I don't."
"Until you come to Earth to learn to scuba dive."
"You have me!" Rihaanyaki laughed.
"Are you trying to say 'touché?'"
Her earbud first informed her that what the Human had said was "You touched me", and then clarified that actually it was a term from a game of swordmanship that meant "You won a point", by touching the opponent with a very slender sword that was basically all point. "According to what my translator is telling me, yes." She put her paws on the counter. "How much do I owe you and when will we start?"
The Human named a sum that was meaningless to Rihaanyaki, but her translator informed her that her Earth currency would easily cover it, and then said, "And right now, if you want. You put down a down payment for one lesson. We fit you with a lifevest, and a snorkel, and teach you how to breathe through it, which takes most folks, like, three minutes tops; it's not Diwar technology." The translator informed her that this was an equivalent to the Kai expression "it's not FTL physics". This made sense to her. The Humans had never developed their own FTL technology; they had first taken it from the Katalk, the crab-people conquerors who'd tried and failed to conquer Earth, and then received upgrades from the Diwar once they met and befriended the infamous feathered engineers. For them, FTL physics was Diwar technology.
The Human continued. "Then we go get in a golf cart and ride half a mile along the pier until we reach quiet waters, where the depth's about two meters and the waves are too far from shore to be particularly strong, and you try it out. The lifevest will make it so even if you swim down to the sea bed, you'll bob right back up the minute you stop trying to stay down, so you can't drown even if you're mistaken about how well you can swim. You play around underwater for half an hour, and if you like it, then when we're done, you sign a contract for regular lessons and pay the rest of the fee. Then you just make sure you show up on time for whenever we schedule your lessons for, and you're golden." For a moment Rihaanyaki, whose fur was primarily dark brown with occasional patches of orange and white, wondered why the Human was describing her as "golden", before the translator helpfully added that the term was an idiom for "in a very good situation".
"This sounds excellent to me. May I have your name? Or… is it Dave?" It was called "DAVE'S DEEP DIVE SCUBA LESSONS", after all.
"Naah, Dave's actually the guy I bought this place from three years ago. I just never changed the name. I'm Jabari Kale." The Human stuck out a hand, which Rihaanyaki recognized as a gesture of friendship, based on the concept that it demonstrated there were no weapons carried in the hand. She returned the gesture and shook the Human's hand.
"I am a female. I know it doesn't matter as much to Humans as it does to Kai, but may I know what your gender is?"
"Eh, six of one and half a dozen of the other. I'll answer to he, she or they, just not it. Here's the agreement – you sign here for the first day's lesson, here for safety agreements, waivers, you promise to do what I tell you and if you don't you can't sue, etc, then you pay for the first lesson. And then we can get started."
Rihaanyaki handed over the requisite amount of Earth currency. Earth had the concept of currency cards, both hard cards containing specific defined amounts and soft cards that could draw on a bank account, but they also had paper currency, which Rihaanyaki found fascinating. The Kai had never had this type of paper currency; they'd gone straight from coins to bank drafts and then to currency cards. The bills felt a little stiff and crisp in Rihaanyaki's paw, as if they'd come newly minted straight from the currency change kiosk at the spaceport. As Jabari Kale of-any-gender counted the currency, she said, "I am very eager to explore underwater!"
---
This is from the same story as "Coral", from Inktober/Writeober 2020.
It doesn't want to kill you. It would be perfectly happy if you turned into a tree of the same species and joined it forever, neatly planted in a column and row.
they've invented a minor character named ernesto who's only role is to follow goncharov around and say "nice one boss!" whenever he does anything. im so proud of them
I feel like boiling Ernesto Cagliari's role in the story down to "guy who follows Goncharov around and says nice one, boss!" Is really doing his character a disservice. Yes, he's a very on-the-nose parody of the sorts of nameless henchmen and "right hand men" that you see in other mafia media, but he's also a subversion of the trope who embodies the way that powerful men who surround themselves with yes-men eventually find themselves trapped in an echo chamber where they can't separate their own delusions of grandeur from the real world. The entire carnival chase sequence in Venice ends with Goncharov leading himself into a literal funhouse where he's trapped with an (actually nameless!) assassin and surrounded by distorted mirror Ernestos all equally unable to help him find the exit because all they can do at that point is encourage the boss's fruitless andmisguided efforts. It's only once Ernesto is killed by reality violently reasserting itself in the form of the assassin, and the funhouse mirrors are broken in the ensuing fight that Goncharov even begins to confront the immediate reality his actions have created and the broader reality of those people who live outside his self-important bubble.
Is that really a subversion of the trope, though, or is that more a reification of it? Ernesto really does lead Goncharov to be trapped in an echo chamber (given that a mirror is just a visual echo); it's Ernesto's death that frees him. Rather than a subversion of the trope, this seems to me more like "LOOK HERE, LOOK AT THIS TROPE, THIS IS WHY THIS KIND OF FOLLOWER IS BAD" and then letting Goncharov live through it further emphasizes that. See, this boss was about to die because of this phenomenon, of the yes man who yeses his boss to death, but because the yes man died, the boss was saved!
I don't know, am I reading too much into it? Maybe sometimes the curtains are blue and the yes man is comic relief until he isn't.
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