#ardeas original stuff

[ardeawritten]

A story in which the human is the Dragon. Not humans-as-space-orcs, but human in a world where everything is tinier and more delicate than it. Say, a human gets stuck on a planet/realm/whatnot where the other life is smaller and more fragile. Normal human movements can harm that life, a raised human voice can cause it pain. There's no shared language, no common ground, maybe the indigenous residents aren't even bilaterally symmetric. Make them radial floating jellyfish fairies.

Human causes great devastation by virtue of being alive and not understanding what other intelligent life "looks like" in that place.

Locals have a natural defense mechanism and Bite Back (piezoelectric stinging crystal hair or somesuch, not a defense to them, but it does a number on human nerve endings)

Human realizes in a vague way they are making Problems and retreats to remote cave, hoarding familiar and useful supplies.

The locals establish a Perimeter, as they too do not understand the Thing That Destroys.

A Curious Young Local seeks to bridge the gap/gets dared to go in the cave/is offered as a sacrifice etc. and, now that Human has a vague idea that it isn't the only sentient thing around, First Contact Round 2 goes more smoothly.

Communication is a pantomime game of trying to not be threatening while controlling frustration. It never really gets past vague ideas, but with familiarity grows an emotional common ground.

Locals are divided: kill the Human, leave it alone, or continue outreach? Can it be trusted?

Human is conflicted; there is pain outside the Perimeter, but there is also Opportunity. Can it avoid causing harm and trust to not be harmed in return?

Its Companion Local acts as guide, making overtures of friendship to demonstrate trust.

Something Goes Badly. A faction wants to kill the human/there's an external disaster with bad timing/the human twists an ankle and falls over, and there's Chaos. Human is hurt, human is regretful, human is back to Square One and is very confused.

Companion Local follows, and demonstrates they can heal too, not just hurt, as Locals realize human can feel pain too, not just cause destruction.

Locals are Threatened by natural disaster/enemies/strife something, and realize the Big Solid Person inside their perimeter may be worth its keep. Companion asks for help; human agrees. One more time, it will try.

Human Helps! Shared struggle fosters greater understanding. Human will never truly coexist with Locals, but with creative social barriers and safe areas, not all interactions need to end in Disaster.

Companion Local learns human shoulder and head is good for riding on.

[ardeawritten]

...goofed and told my mom about the time I smacked a dude for nearly getting a friend of mine bit by a rattler. She, who has led a charmed life of complete fearlessness and yet somehow has never felt the need to even imagine a physically violent encounter, projects onto me same winsome victorian-feminine 'gentle-womanhood' she values in herself.

There's a small rant about our differing values under the cut, because it's a rant kind of night.

And while yes, my track record for physical retaliation is very very short and confined mostly to pre-20s, how do I explain to this woman that she was the one who raised me to value my own safety and judgement above someone else's ego? (or heck gave me male socialization for everything except cooking-dinner-for-the-men?)

I am not a gentle-woman, I'm a single small-town woman living in lion country. Small-town womanhood means never running from a threat (they can all outrun you) and never turning your back on a predator (unless you're the one who just killed it) and never waiting for someone else to solve the problem (they're on a tractor three fields away and won't be home until dark.) So yes, teenage me smacked a guy much bigger and older than me (across the chest and not hard, a 'back up' signal used with horses, not a face-slap,) because he was aiming to put my friend in the hospital and that was a problem that needed more than words to solve. (Words had been tried and had proven ineffective.)

And I killed the rattlesnake, because he'd injured it and made it angry, and that made it a threat we couldn't afford to ignore.

....treatment for our species of snake runs 40k-100k, with a one to four month recovery time, if you get lucky and don't get a secondary bacterial infection, have an allergic reaction to the venom, or have an allergic reaction to the antivenin. It was about sixteen inches long and had six rattles. There was absolutely no question as to the threat it presented.

(And a part of me is still sitting here going but what if he decides he's angry about that now, what if he drags it up with my boss, could he get me fired for touching him even though it was twelve years ago?)

If it happened again, I'd still smack him.

And then I'd do what I should have done then, and haul his butt to the local authority and have him be the one with the official mark on his official record, not me be the one with the unofficial mark on my social record.

Not me be the one looked down upon by my own mother for being the wrong kind of feminine.

[ardeawritten]

Hiked eight miles, + a couple more for side-tracking, cross-country and I am dead right now.

It was very, very cross-country and there was lots of elevation involved.

Some Notes:

-Long dry bunchgrass is slick like ice and can cut your hands on steep slopes

-Wild rose stems are about two feet tall and function like little natural booby traps that smack your shins full of thorns

-Sometimes rocks just naturally make marble-gravel. I found some today, and while it was neat it was also a little interesting to skid around on while traversing a steep slope

-A dry swamp, when it's spring and supposed to be wet, is a very ominous sign

-A wet swamp, on the other hand, is cause for joy

-A bluebird is the bluest thing you'll ever see. A meadowlark makes the most amazing song. A whirling flock of turkey vultures is a majestic sight. Turkeys, on the other hand, are just ridiculous.

-It's OK to swear at the elk that are carrying their antlers weeks past the usual drop-date

-A clay-soil road will hold the tire tracks of the one vehicle to cross it when when it was wet for months, sometimes even under snow and through till spring if the road froze before the snow fell and the snow evaporated instead of melting

-Sometimes deer and elk make weird antlers that lack the usual branching pattern. Sometimes this looks extra cool and majestic, and sometimes it rightly looks like the product of a cancer or other health problem (which it usually is)

-Trees don't like following rules and staying in their home ranges. Sometimes they sprawl everywhere (juniper,) sometimes they self-limit to tiny little cool wet alcoves and refuse to compete (pine,) and sometimes they get pooped out by a bird or something and say HI THIS IS MY SPOT NOW (fir)

[ardeawritten]

I'm back up to 70 lbs in a pack. A little less than half my body weight, and I'd like to get up to 80 or 90. I did 80 last year, split between pack and handbags.

Since graduating to my mom's big external-frame, it's gotten way easier to pack that much weight! Proper weight distribution and keeping that gap between skin, spine and objects is huge.

Getting the pack on and off requires sitting on the ground in front of it, getting arms through the loops, getting onto my knees and then carefully balancing as I stand up. It's a pretty significant dead-weight and it sits well right on my lower back and hips. Well-balanced means I can hike with it and be fine, not sore or in pain afterwards, and though the straps can cause some light contusions I'm not doing damage. No back, hip, knee or ankle pain.

For Wildland, 60 lbs (40 lbs of water, 20 lbs of pack) is the expected normal so I figure if I can train up to 80+ I should be in good shape if we have an incident and I have to scramble with a water pack + my pack and fire shelter.

(It helps that the weight is my rock side-hustle; I don't think I'd be this fit if I wasn't essentially paying myself to exercise. This rock in particular is apparently going to Kazakhstan!)

Fun note about packing weight: center of gravity is super important! You have to know your own, and communicate it accurately if someone else is helping you prepare. I got handed a "male"-balanced pack one time and though I could carry the 50 lbs fine, the weight was too high up on my back and I just about knocked my teeth in for three days until someone noticed and corrected the balance. A "female" pack doesn't weigh less, it just distributes the weight on the lower back and hips instead of up behind the shoulders.

[ardeawritten]

A family friend just passed away recently (old age, peacefully at home, etc. etc.) he was a WWII veteran, who definitely grabbed a buddy and hitched a ride via cargo plane from their base in England to Paris just following the Liberation (in what was a very creative and unsanctioned use of leave.) He told me the whole story once about five years ago while sitting on a back porch eating fresh peaches.

I wish I could remember all of it, because he sure could. He didn’t think it was anything special because he’d been very young at the time and the city was packed with English, French and American soldiers so to him the experience wasn’t unique at all. For him, the greatest and most memorable moment of the war was seeing the joy among civilians when there was finally an end in sight. He also talked about being invited to stay with a Parisian family who spoke no English, and how their generosity might have extended too far (he had to send a nice young lady back to her own room with a polite but firm no; the tragedy is she’d probably not thought there was a choice in the matter, or been given one by previous military occupants).

There’s a stigma surrounding people who seem to like that war a little too much; I think his story will always be my litmus test. And also, I sure hope someone wrote it down. I don’t know if anyone did. I sincerely regret that I didn’t.

Write things down. Write down getting vaccinated, eating takeout in the park, watching the inauguration, choosing which mask goes with your outfit. Put a couple Bernie memes in your insta-book. Print stuff out, put it in hard copy in a box somewhere. There will be a time when the whole world has not lived through 2020, doesn’t understand it and isn’t sure it really happened, and it’s to our stories written now that they’ll turn, if we write them. Otherwise, they’ll fill in their own gaps and create their own narrative of but what if it all didn’t happen like that or but what if the violence is all we should remember or but what if the death toll was really a good thing.

(Another friend just lost a parent, not to old age, and not peacefully; another friend just delivered a baby 5 weeks premature, a second child, and her first isn’t permitted to visit them in the hospital; another friend is balancing a history of vaccine allergies with a high-risk medical status. It’s not all cute masks and mittens, but that doesn’t mean the day’s good shouldn’t be honored in its place alongside the day’s pain.)

Write today what you want known about today in 75 years, or it’ll be written for you by someone who wasn’t here.

[ardeawritten]

A post-apocalyptic apple tree.

Hear me out-

(a better example would be post-apocalyptic onion fields, to be honest.)

This picture is from a homestead. At some point, about a hundred years ago, someone built a house here. I found the well, a bedstead, a rusted-out and mangled iron stove, and an apple tree.

I don't know exactly who/what/where/when/why, but the general trend was a lot of folks moved into the area back in 1880-1910, found the countryside a verdant, lush grassland, claimed land recently made available (via forceful displacement & the Snake Indian War, hence the post-apocalyptic onion fields; this whole area was within civilization for 14,000 years before the apple tree and was ground zero for a genocidal campaign waged against the tribes by white militants) and built themselves a house. They probably didn't have any idea who'd lived there before them, and the sales pitch was that the land was naturally vacated (a myth still told today) due to climate change.

ha

Anyway, the homesteaders, mostly European immigrants lured by promise of land and opportunity who wanted to be something other than what their parents had been (the family next-door were Swiss; his motive for changing continents was not wanting to be a village chimney-sweep like his father before him) had no idea what a high desert climate was or how to work with it. A decade of slightly wetter patterns resulted in an illusion of naturally-irrigated temperate grasses and meadows. The early 1900's swing back to a more normal arid climate meant most of those homesteads failed.

The springs dried up. The plants died as they sprouted, or never germinated at all. The cattle grew thin and the watering-holes vanished. Imported animals overgrazed the slopes, and when the rains did come they flooded down narrow canyons. The winters were dry, clear and cold, or mounded with heavy snow, and the summer wildfires destroyed everything not built of stone.

And everyone left. They moved to established cities on the west coast or returned east, defeated, after years of personal, remote failures.

Or they died, killed in gun violence over water and land, killed by disease, killed by childbirth or the elements or naivety. The towns that are left are small and scattered and very, very poor, with even the largest landowners and 'cattle barons' living year to year and waiting to see if this year it rains. Because it might not. (At this time, there is no rain.)

The apple tree stands above someone's personal apocalypse. Someone, at some point, left this house for the last time. Either they buried their dream, or they were buried by it. It burned and burned again until nothing organic was left except the apple tree. Now, when it burns the apple tree will go too, because the juniper in its center will spread and hold the fire.

I'm going to come back in February next year if I can, if the snow will let me, if it doesn't burn this summer, and take cuttings. A neighbor wants to propagate from a tree that can survive a hundred years untended in the desert.

We don't always fail as badly as we think we have within our own lifetimes.

[ardeawritten]

The mission was, on paper, simple.

Find the HEV. Bring back samples of the carbon underlayer (rumored to be an energized, programmable carbon fiber nanotube arrangement) and the protective plating (rumored to be a cutting-edge 3D-printed polymer lattice kiln-fired to a tough, durable, radiation-shielding semi-crystalline state) and, if possible, a copy of the integrated programming (rumored to be an advanced biometric/medical suite capable of autonomous diagnostics and treatment.)

Simple.

Black Mesa was allegedly raking in billions in military and private sector contracts for their advanced metamaterials, everything from new forms of tank plating to new forms of rocket fuel, but the stuff the HEV was made of wasn’t hitting their usual contract markets. If it existed, really physically existed outside a PowerPoint presentation in an R&D pipe-dream, they were keeping it awfully close to the chest.

And that begged the question, the question Horizon Labs was willing to pay him six figures to answer: why?

Why pour millions or more, and years of research and development, into a product you aren’t selling?

Because the product doesn’t exist, went the popular train of thought.

Because the product is just an asset to the production of something more valuable, went an entirely different train of thought.

Either way, Horizon had an itch that would be nicely scratched by a little “inspiration” from Black Mesa’s polymer laboratories.

Johnson wasn’t new to the game.

He’d wandered the halls of two universities as an adjunct professor and collected up the combined research of a slew of brilliant young doctoral candidates (not like the universities would ever let students patent or publish.) He’d stolen blueprints for a quantum supercomputer from a quasi-military installation in Florida (they’d stolen them from a Japanese tech lab first, and Johnson was just leveling the playing field by selling them to a Nigerian royal. A real one who paid in gold.) He’d walked out of a medical research facility in Russia with samples of artificial bone grown on a hand-carved calcite lattice and embedded with the recipient’s own DNA (four hospitals in India had pooled their resources to buy that job.) And he still had, under the skin above his left elbow, a microchip containing the formula for the world’s most efficient organic rocket fuel, developed in UAE fishponds. He had a buyer waiting for him in Jerusalem.

But he’d gotten a tip that someone on the far side had an idea who he was, and then Horizon had contacted him about this job. The combination of being literally underground and also making a paycheck was rather appealing at the moment.

Black Mesa was a little deeper underground than he’d anticipated, he thought, as he looked up at the raw red stone ceiling arching three stories above his head.

He wasn’t new to the game, but Black Mesa was another kind of player altogether.

Old, twisting, dangerous. Its guards were a hand-wave to convention; the real danger was the facility itself and, as his belt Geiger counter pinged a warning, the decades of research they’d already abandoned here.

He’d never heard of anyone successfully stealing intellectual property from Black Mesa before, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been tried. He’d heard of lots of tries.

The tram line turned a corner; below, the pooled nuclear coolant shimmered radium green.

[ardeawritten]

My job is a regular 8-5 desk job nine months of the year, and in the summer months is a crazy nutty “do what you have to” schedule, wherein I do not take a full day off for about three months. (Honestly I love my job, and I really miss the Summer Scramble, it’s not self-martyrdom it’s actually a lot of fun and not hard work, just a lot of being On Site and present.)

But because of that, each summer I end up with a story I write almost entirely in my head to serve as a distraction in the slow moments. A few years ago that was a story about a high-end prosthetics craftsman who at his friends’ insistence buys a decommissioned military robot as protection. When he gets mugged on his way through town, the robot does its job but takes damage. He hauls it home to repair, thinking alright I manufacture electronic, cybernetic prosthetics, how hard can a robot be, and after digging three layers deep into vintage military hardware finds himself holding a few very not mechanical human organs. Cue panic.

Turns out the robot was originally human, a civilian caught in the crossfire of a warzone decades prior, and in the ensuing chaos what was supposed to be medical cybernetics got mistaken for military hardware and the civilian identity lost under the ensuing layers of military patchwork. The rest of the story was him and the robot figuring out what personhood looks like when all that’s left of the original human is a couple internal organs, piecing together the whole story and figuring out what they are to each other moving forward. Had a whole supporting cast, world-rebuilding-from-war themes, exploring identity and self-expression by building one’s body piece by piece, etc.

And then I never wrote it. 

It’s on the write someday list somewhere after Dragon Sword and Worldship and Griffin Girl and Pantheon and Minotaur Moon...!