#inexorableblob

[raevenlywrites]

STS: How would your characters deal with an outbreak of an incurable disease? Would they panic? Would they fight to avoid infection? Would they celebrate with their friends? Would they desperately seek a cure?

They would bubble their court and break from the planar system, much like the griffic nation did after releasing a terrible biological weapon upon the mara back during the chimera wars

[pens-swords-stuff]

In Wanderlust, what is happening in the rest of the world?

The United States of America has a "magic problem" unlike anything ever seen before in the West. This fact is indisputable. It is one of the few instances in which I agree with the uneducated opinions of the masses, though just because it is true does not justify the many injustices of yesterday, nor those that are yet to come.

What is missed by the lawmakers is that America has always had this "magic problem": it is only now a point of contention not because it is getting worse as the result of some terrible moral decline, but because of the rising population of users over the last four centuries. Magic is more visible now than ever before. There are more practitioners, benign or dangerous, than ever before.

But why is it only rising here and not elsewhere? Germany reported stability in its magical population. The United Kingdom is declining in terms of innate aptitude, following the path of our magical forefathers in Egypt, Norway, Ireland and settling down into that steady 0.2% figure we are all intimately familiar with –– the tolerable level of invisibility.

In America, 6% of the population are carriers for the ability – marked as anything above zero on the Kelley Scale, whether they are able to produce so much as a spark themselves or not. Similar rates are recorded for Canada and some countries in South America. Their children may or may not be witches; they could simply be sensitive to the forces at play in this world that most are ignorant to. There is a greater range of outputs, from charlatan mediums working with the barest hint of truth to powerful sorcerers of limitless potential.

To further compound the issue, the well-known phenomena of witches born to entirely non-magical, Kelley 0 parents is recorded only in the United States. And it is consistent. This is a country where outliers are known to occur, and you can no longer trace magical aptitude along genetic lines. It appears random –– and governments, let alone individual families in this nation, do not deal well with random.

CARRINGTON, L. (1973). WITCH-BURNING TO WATERGATE: A HISTORY OF MAGIC IN AMERICA. NEW YORK: HEAVEN PUBLISHING. 

Written by @decantae, not me!

[lettersandinkstains]

petrichor - the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a long period of dry weather for prompt!

bailee & scarlet - a study

The ground is wet and she tries her best not to catch herself in some of the mud. It has been five years since then, and the ground has yet to grow back – but maybe it won’t. Maybe the land is now cursed with angry ghosts that refuse to leave, and refuse to let life grow.

And maybe that’s for the better.

The only comfort is the after rain smell, it at least makes the land around her feel more real instead of a nightmare she’s walking through.

As she grows closer and closer to her destination, the otherwise hot air of the California heat disappears – and maybe that’s her paranoia. Either way, Bailee finds herself slowing down quite a bit. She sees a flash of red ahead and squints, not many people know of this house, most have long since forgotten about it until something else reaches the news.

With much reluctance, Bailee hurries forward until the burned house comes into sight. Once, when she was a child, it had looked so much bigger but just as dark and cold. Around it is dirty and torn police DO NOT ENTER tape, no doubt any curious ghost hunter and other types have entered the house. Not that it matters, they won’t find anything there.

Standing in the doorway, with color striking against the otherwise drab gray, stands someone she had never thought she’d ever see, nor wished to.

“Scarlet?” She calls out, and the girl turns around, her eyes wide. They stare at each other, both stunned. There is no reason for either of them to be out here, no reason to visit a past that needs to be buried away. “Uh. Why are you out here?”

Scarlet steps down from the near broken deck, but not quite getting close to Bailee.

“You did quite the wreckage on this old place,”

Bailee scrunches up her nose. “The fire wasn’t my fault. Again, why are you out here?”

“Was Lucija behind the recent rain storm?”

“I doubt she can control the weather. Why are you avoiding my question?”

“Fine. I could ask you the same.”

Because I need to make sure the fire wasn’t a complete nightmare, that the house is gone for good. She thinks, bitterly. “Does it matter?”

“No,” Scarlet answers. “I suppose it doesn’t.” She crosses her arms over chest and glances back at the house. “If there is a hell, I think the portal is in there.”

“You can feel it too, huh.” Scarlet doesn’t say anything to that, instead, she briskly strides past Bailee, trying her best to keep her head held high. Trying her best to pretend she was not seeking out a home she barely got a glimpse at when they were children. Yet, she stops, further away from Bailee and turns around. Her cousin had yet to actually move.

“Hey, let’s go get something to eat and talk. It’s been a few years,”

Bailee slouches a little and pulls the hood of her sweater up and turns around. “So long as you pay.”

And the walk back is quiet, and the dinner is quiet despite the loud chatter around them. The smell of the air is sharper now, as rain threatens to pour down. And still, for every minute spent with Scarlet, Bailee finds the words stuck in her throat, stuck at her tongue, just as frozen as they had been when they were children. It’s as though the ghosts of the house has their hands wrapped around her throat, and if she talks, it’ll hurt.

And she’s scared that the moment she starts talking, she won’t be able to stop. And it’s not Scarlet’s business. And it’s not her own.

“I’m sorry,” Scarlet whispers before they part ways.

And it feels as though she had been stabbed by those words.

[brynwrites]

So an ask for you: If there were a commercial or trailer about your book(s), what scenes would you want included?

Oh man, so I’ve been thinking about this for over a week and I still can’t properly imagine a trailer for any of my books xP Here are the things I did decide though:

It would be cool to end an Our Bloody Pearl trailer with an image of Perle reaching for the dock and then sinking.

An Our Petty Poisons trailer would definitely need to show one of the times Cacau subconscious wraps himself around Thais when they’re both in danger.

A VtS trailer would have so many stars omg. I’d love to see Fable appearing out of the darkness with his fantastic smirk, a shot of blood creeping through the cracks in the galaxy marble floors of the castle, and the void spilling out of someone’s eyes.

[druzydabbles]

🖊+an OC whose name starts or ends with a vowel.

[Send me a “🖊+OC“ and I’ll talk about that OC!]

With a vowel, hmm? Let’s go with Isabel, who’s nickname fulfills both of those points!

Isa is the extremely rebellious girl whose parents were both pirates that settled down to a more domestic life. She... wasn’t really the biggest fan of this, always listening to the stories of their adventures with star-filled eyes, and always trying to sneak off to join a pirate crew herself, despite all of her parents’ scolding.

She succeeded at age 14, but found it common to be kicked out of a crew due to her strong opinions and strong voice for those opinions, so ended up transferring through quite a few different ships before joining up with the Diluculo. The only reason she wasn’t forced off of this ship was because she ended up being the only reason for her new crew’s survival after a flunked raid.

Plus the ship’s doctor had developed quite a strong parental instinct for the girl, and the Diluculo didn’t want to lose their only healer.

[sidhewrites]

The Earliest OC I made was an airship captain, who I based off a MUSCLE toy character (Kinnikuman in Japan) I had, though honestly I don't know that he did anything really, I just named his vessel and pretended to fly it around my yard which was a blasted wasteland. I'm still not good at plots. :(

But you come up with an entire world for your character in your backyard! That’s so cool! Kids have this great creativity to them that’s just amazing

[bookenders]

“She swallowed tulips” or “Wine-pink waves”

[Sensory prompts!]

Hi @inexorableblob! I picked tulips (#12) for this one. This one is inspired in part by @sulfurousdreamscapes’ story here. 

—

We remember the flowers. Their color, their shape, the way they made us feel. Their petals bloomed from her lips and fell when she laughed. Seeds slipped through her fingers when her hands couldn’t hold them in, her heart beating too strongly to keep them hidden without sounding them rattling in her ribs.

Hers were tulips, always. Teeth-cut stems found homes in pots and vases across town, in shop windows and beside cash registers, on windowsills and night tables, in gardens and lapels.

Purples went to her parents, her kings and queens, advisers and guards. Their heraldry sat potted on the porch.

Those whose petals were striped with sunsets and dawn-light were gifted to friends, as they saw her as she was, a bloom growing tall and grasping at sunbeams. In crystal vases they sat on coffee tables to welcome friends with colorful smiles.

The white tulips no one saw outside of her home or her person. She weaved the stems round and round, tied them in her hair and bore them as a crown. On days we saw her haloed, she seemed to have grown taller, lighter, more sure in the set of her shoulders.

We saw her hand them out when they sprouted from her smiles. Her hands cupped them like a chalice filled with moonlight, rare and loved.

One morning when the sun was sheltered by clouds, I met her in her garden. It was all of ours, really, but we called it hers when the tulips took over. I smiled, said hello, hoping I was warm enough.

And she caught my eye and flushed with summer, her smile a holiday for my heart.

She lifted a hand to her mouth, swallowed, shy, and offered me her hand.

Want more original fiction?  Take a gander at my original writing tag and my short stories tag!

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Originals Tag List: @piratequeenofpixies, @quilloftheclouds, @snickertoodles, @carmenwrites, @purpleshadows1989, @ofvisitorsthefairest, @theevolutionofledarose, @kriss-the-writing-nerd, @waterfallwritings, @abalonetea

[thewrittenpost]

Gwendolyn, what would you do if you woke up normal, but a different person?

Ask someone a question about their oc and the writer has to answer from the POV of the oc

"I suppose... well, I guess I'd have to figure out who I was? Did I take someone else's life when this happened? Are they stuck in my life, with the magic? Because if so, I couldn't really leave things like that... but I guess a few days of no magic would be a welcome change, instead of always worrying it would get out. Oh, and I'd have to let Lettie know. She would definitely notice and throw a fit if I was a completely different person one day!"