#talla writes

[author-talla]

The city-state of Halidi is relatively young, a mere fourteen years. And yet, it is one of the foremost powers in the land of Karamaroob. It all began when the Great Sorceress Cypress the Magnificent became bored.

One day, perhaps in late Fall, though the seasons were mostly meaningless in Karamaroob due to its oceanic disposition, Heiaspera decided that her gifts of magicianry were wasted in her tower all alone. She decided that she had quite "had enough of all of this isolated hermit wizard bullshit" and grasped her flight stone. With a word of power, the Sorceress lept into the air, and rode the winds to an unoccupied plot of land in the east of Karamaroob, a place which had no name, yet. There she began work, creating a school. You see, dear reader, there is no nobler a pursuit than that of teaching, and Cypress desired to share the arts of magicianry with as many as would choose to take it up. The school was built within the week, thanks to the hordes of summoned creatures she called to aid in its construction. It was a grand thing, a regal arcade led to the main entrance, which was set into the structure, such that two balconies could flank and overlook incoming students. The central courtyard contained a great tower and the campus itself contained multitudes of strangely organized spaces, compact enough to fit a grand hall into a gardening shed.

Naturally however, a school in such a remote a space required infrastructure to support it. As students came into the place, Cypress decided that they would need food, and so putting forth a call for farmers and cooks and bakers from the neighboring lands. Thus followed one need after another, and in the end, a small nation had emerged, all to support and uphold the school at its heart. In the end, the city-state was known as Halidi, the city of the candle, with its rulership defaulting to the headmistress Cypress, in lieu of anyone else.

Four years after its inception, the city formed the exploratory commission and navy, whose job was to find new knowledge and baubles of strange kinds to bring back to the city, where her studiousness, Cypress the Magician would study it with her comrades the other faculty who have come to join her.

Dear reader, this is how Formall De Hyde came to become stranded on that strange sea, by seeking what was not to be found. His charge from the lady of Whitecandle herself, was to seek something, a weapon to be used in the horrible future that his lady has seen.

Soon, the Dark Master shall turn his gaze to the world of Karamaroob. New lands lay undefended, ripe for the taking. New people for his furnaces, new forests and shrines to desecrate. The Hopestalker will not rest.

And now the good captain is on earth. What will he find there to aid them in the war that approaches?

[author-talla]

The Shell

For the last three days, Aan could swear she heard a sound in her living room. It was hard to place where it was, or what it was, but any time the room was otherwise silent, she would hear something soft. Like TV static, or maybe pipes. It wasn't a loud noise, but it was there... Probably.

She supposed it could've been a hallucination. Certainly it wasn't the least likely explanation. But she definitely heard it. Today, she sits in her rocking chair, listening. She's almost got the direction nailed down, though of course every time she's sure she knows where it is, she loses it.

The next day, Aan stood by her mantle, her gaze transfixed on a conch shell. It's such a small thing, she'd never have noticed it. But Aan doesn't recognize the shell. She never put it there. Her roommate, Kiran, had never been the the beach, and hadn't been in the apartment for the last several weeks following his incident. The Shell is new, and yet old.

She grasped the Shell, and raised it. The noise was coming from the deep, twisted folds of the Shell. She lifted it to her ear, and heard the Ocean, no louder than one would expect from an ordinary shell, and yet that noise, that accused noise, it was the same she'd heard for the last four days.

She was about to put the Shell down, or maybe she was about to smash it against the ground, we will never know, because as she did, she heard a noise, a voice.

"Help, Help, is anybody out there?"

And Aan froze. The Shell had spoken. Or maybe something inside it. She lifted the Shell back to her face, and looked inside.

An infinite plane of water, a stormy sea, with waves that would've been dozens of feet tall if they'd been on any ordinary expanse of water, but in this case we're probably twos of inches. On that sea, she saw a ship. Probably a full inch from bow to stern, flying a little blue flag with an emblem of a white candle emblazoned on it.

Upon the deck of that diminutive boat was a man, tiny, waving his arms above his head.

"You there! With the big eye! Please, the seas are quite rough, and I'm all out of food!"

Aan felt something immensely strange. Who was this little man? Why was he on a ship? How was that sea inside a Shell, and how did that Shell end up in her living room?

She spoke then.

"who are you?"

Not the most important question in the moment, but perhaps it would get her some answer.

"I am Formall De Hyde! Captain of The Clownfish, a loyal servant in her studiousness's exploratory navy! Who are you?" He shouted over the roar of the waves all around his ship, which now seemed to be near capsizing his tiny vessel. Despite his immaculate manners, the little man was clearly urgent in his request for aid.

Aan reached a finger into the Conch Chell, and tried to get it to the ship, she supposed of she could get it in there, Formall could maybe climb atop. As she did, she responded, "uh, I'm Aan Then, tenet of this apartment, so kind of like a loyal servant of my landlord."

As the ship neared the massive finger, Formall ducked below deck, and returned with a (comparatively) small bag, he then kept, proportionally quite far for someone his size, and landed on her finger. He nearly slipped off as she brought him out of the Shell. Somehow, as he emerged from his calcite prison, the man grew. It wasn't a gradual process, as the verb would imply. Instead, somewhere between the inside of the Shell, and the inside of her apartment, Aan found that the man had become taller than her. Formall De Hyde now stood, nearly six feet tall, Aan was sticking a finger out at him foolishly, and holding a Shell behind him.

How very strange this situation had become.

Formall was damp with spray from head to toe, he wore a uniform of blue and yellow, along with a badge of that same white candle on his lapel.

I really don't know where to take this now. Admittedly this was mostly based on a prompt from my brother about a person being trapped in a conch shell.

[author-talla]

In the little gap between the law of man, and the laws of the world, there is something. It may be regarded as pointless folly to attempt and understand Metamathematics, but it could be argued that mathematics as a field began as speculation. When the first cave person sat down to count rocks, their fellows likely took them for a fool. Now the stock market makes and breaks millionaires.

To describe Metamathematics as magic would not be correct any more than describing the glasses you put on to focus your gaze as magic would be. It is not due to mysticism that the lenses focus light in that way, it is due to precise engineering and understanding. Knowledge.

To be a true master of Metamathematics, one must understand some part of the Metafabric, sometimes known as the Great Mesh, or as the Antimatrix. This is the substrate within which all things take place. All the variables are laid plain when one fully understands the Metafabric. At the same time, total comprehension of the Metafabric has always resulted in the immediate and total annihilation of the comprehender.

[author-talla]

There is a fire at the center of CITY.

The moles seek this fire. They dig through the layers and layers of empty office spaces, the scavenger burrowers that seek.

CITY cannot see. CITY is not alive. And yet...

Every once in a while, when Bec turns their back, they feel eyes on them. Occasionally , when they turn a corner into a new dilapidated room, when they take that first breath of dusty air, almost solid from eons of containment, they would swear they feel a mind on them, a will, a watcher.

There is a fire at the center of CITY.

Bec will find it.

Today, Bec treks over mountains of debris, looking as if the old things were discarded, chairs, computers, batteries, weapons. Everything piled in a heap, and yet appearing brand new.

The moles know where the fire is, yet they have not found it. They can feel the heat of it bleed through the walls of CITY.

As Bec opens a new door, they swear the temperature creeps slightly higher. They know they have taken the right path. The room they have revealed is dark, save for an old Crt monitor flickering on a table, illuminating the green walls, upon which hang a variety of paintings. All the paintings are of the same subject, but at different angles. A naked woman, with a pitying expression. No matter where Bec steps, the woman looks at them.

There is a fire at the center of CITY.

It is impossible to measure distance here, it is not a place of straight lines, or of open spaces. It is all rooms and halls. Bec doesn't know how far they are from the homeroom, they know they have travelled through seventy rooms between there and here, but the rooms are of significantly varying size. They cannot know how far, save my measuring their own fatigue. It has not been long, they must keep going. They will find the fire.

Every time Bec enters a room, they scratch the door they move through with their mark. Long ago, when Bec was near others, they saw other Mole Marks, but now they see none. No others have been this way.

There is a fire at the center of CITY.

Doors have a way of closing when not observed. Silently, they return to their base state, obscuring, choking, hating.

Bec will one day die in CITY. They will fall ill, or encounter some brigand with a knife, or perhaps they will be lucky, and fall into the fire at the center of CITY.

[author-talla]

The Bureau

teleporters 4

Today a man came by the office. He came early in the morning.

Our only warning was the door sliding open at five in the morning. He flashed a badge in my bleary eyes as he carried Adma out of the room.

I don't know where he went. I don't know where Adma is. I didn't read his badge, I couldn't.

I received a message telling me that the Bureau of Civilian Activities had detained her for an indefinite time, that she might be released after her questioning.

It's been four months since the teleporters went out.

I miss you.

I miss Adma. I miss my husband, I miss our children. I miss Mars, and my own bed. I don't think they've been delivering my messages home.

[author-talla]

Of course it had to be the statues.

Lieutenant Tallery ran.

Of course the wizards had traps, that was to be expected. Most traps were easily detected, even the magical kind. There was a kind of high-pitched sound that accompanied enchantment. Tallery, like most of her ilk, could easily pick it out. Unfortunately these statues had no sounds about them whatsoever. She wasn't quite sure on how they'd achieved that, but it was a very clever trap for her and her entourage.

All this and more ran through the head of the glorified grave robber as she ran. The statues, grim, stone things carved in the shape of ancient kings. They were in an ancient bastion, set into the great wall of stone that most people called Mount Vessel. The wizards that once crafted this place were now long dead, but their automotons closed in on the small detachment of soldiers, somehow exceeding them despite their comparative mass.

Tallery rounded a corner into an ancient hall, and the torches lining the walls lit at her presence, no doubt a minor convenience to the wizards when they were around, Tallery thought she might snag one to add to hang in her place once this was over. Behind her, the statues caught a straggler, she barely heard a scream, but he went down quick enough, hopefully he hadn't suffered too bad.

One of the statues spoke for the first time, a word of power, and the doors ahead slammed shut. Dead end.

She whirled, and pulled her rapier from a scabbard at her hip. Any other rapier and she might've left it, a fragile blade against a warrior forged of rock. Unfortunately for the statues, Tallery was a very good grave robber, and the thing about robbing old warlocks and sorcerers was that every once-in-a-while you picked up a trick or two to keep with you. She's been hoping to avoid using the charge, but seeing as her men were being picked off this seemed as good a time as any.

"Everybody down!"

The one thing these soldiers feared more than statues stood high, and leveled her rapier at the pursuers. There were three of them, a good number, a powerful one. The blade flashed, and she flicked the energy toward the trio. Fire and hate washed over them. A whirlwind of destruction, and in the end only dust remained.

The rapier, spent now, was sheathed. Perhaps she would find a way to recharge it later.

Idk. Maybe this one went ok. I wanted to write more I just don't know where to take it. I don't know if anyone could tell but I've been reading the Tyrant Philosophies series by Adrian Tchaikovsky recently, which heavily influenced the tone of this one. Tallery sounds like a Palleseen name, and she's definitely some sort of mix of Angilly and Drathel. This wasn't consciously deliberate, but I am a massive fan of his writing style.

[author-talla]

Water Balloons that feel pain.

The teleporters are out 3

"Hey."

"Hey!"

"You awake? Zoh?"

I awaken slowly, blearily. It is the third, no, the fourth week of the teleporter outage. The office has been converted into a living space in addition to a workplace. I was sleeping at my desk. My coworker Adma woke me. Adma is technically my superior at the company, but she wouldn't ever tell me what to do in an authoritative sense. She's more my friend than my boss.

"Zoh, I made water balloons that feel pain."

"what?"

"Water balloons that feel pain. I got really bored last night and messed around with the gene editor. They're basically a skin sack full of nerves with a central cavity to allow us to inflate them."

"why did you make water balloons that feel pain?"

"I'm not sure, I was very tired and I think it sounded funny to me."

Adma lead me to a table, where the bioprinter was spitting out what looked very convincingly like uninflated balloons. They were small, and wrinkled, a pinkish color (presumably from the blood vessels to support nerves).

We inflated the balloons, they vibrated when we did, Adma described it as "purring". When we threw them, they popped just like regular water balloons, but with a shrill sound like a whistle when they did. I thought it sounded like a scream.

Adma wants to make them self aware next. Teach them their lot in life. She said it feels reminiscent of the human condition, whatever that means.

I guess when you're bored enough, you invent things.

[author-talla]

The teleporters are out 2:

Ever since the war began, the teleporters have been out. Every once in a while the government allows us to send messages home, so I send my husband messages from the moon. the messages take weeks to travel on either direction due to the heavy screening process, but at least I know he's alive and he knows I am.

I still don't know what started the war, but the workplace monitor agent told me that the people of Saturn started to rebel, and that's why the fighting started. He says that they bombed a statue of Christton II, and began refusing to pay tax to the Galactic Authority. He also told me that the reason the teleporters are out is that the rebels could use the teleporter network to get anywhere in the central worlds if it went back online.

I've been staying in a government-supplied apartment while stranded on Luna. I suppose I could quit and board a ship to Mars, but the monitor agent also says the rebels keep attacking civilian ships.

The thing is, I hadn't heard anything about rebels on Saturn until this happened. I don't know if I believe this. What would I do if the monitor agent were lying? I just want to go home.