Today's prompt: "Same Size"! Bowman and Jacob get the pleasure of answering this prompt. Is there an explanation for why Jacob is sprite sized? Not really. Did he freak out about it at first? Probably, but that's better served in other stories. This is all about getting to hang out with his buddy at the same scale for once.
~~~
Bowman walked on the ground, something he didn’t do very often - why would he, when he had the option to fly? Today, though, he made an exception, striding confidently across the grassy space between the home trees, a shining green-gold canopy far overhead sending dappled sunlight wavering over his path. Occasional twigs, leaves, or pine needles littered the ground, but nothing that stood out too much. Wood sprites kept things as tidy as they needed to.
Nearby, all around, the forest floor in the village of Wellwood was alive with activity. Nestlings gathered pine needles with their parents. Some played games of chasing one another back and forth, occasionally fluttering their still-developing wings and leaping into the air to see if they might finally learn to fly. Older sprites whose wings had begun to wear out as all things do with age strolled here and there, chatting with each other and greeting each neighbor they encountered.
Bowman hadn’t attracted as many greetings as he usually did on such a stroll, but that was mostly due to the staring. He turned his head to call over his shoulder, “Don’t blame me if you fall behind, Jacob. You’d get swarmed, you know.”
Jacob, the reason for the stares, followed not far behind Bowman and hurried to catch up. Soon enough, though, he angled his gaze back towards the canopy, watching the sprites that chose to fly instead, wheeling and flitting to and fro amongst the branches. In his lingering awe, he didn’t even have a quip to return Bowman’s teasing.
Bowman couldn’t blame him. The human, much broader and bulkier than any wood sprite, cut a distinct figure. His orange hooded jacket, blue cloth pants, even his pale skin set him apart from the residents of Wellwood. He even stood taller than most of them at just a bit over four inches tall (a fact that Bowman had scolded him for - even now, Jacob had to go and be huge).
Compared to Jacob’s usual giant size, though, he was tiny. Normally, Jacob stood over six feet tall, too large to risk walking among the village like this. Now that he had the chance, he wanted to see it all.
Bowman wasn’t about to deny him the tour. As strange and confusing as it was to have his giant friend standing at the same size, he was having fun. Jacob had been in awe just to see the inside of Bowman’s home, something he never thought he’d see for himself. Compared to the many human things he knew, the sprites’ homes must seem so simple, and yet Jacob looked at everything like it was a sunrise.
They’d already explored Bowman’s house, and had briefly visited the much larger structure grown into the cottonwood tree at the head of the village. Bowman doubted it would be their last visit, but he’d wanted to make sure Jacob got to see plenty of the village during the best hours, with the sun high overhead and the air alive with noise and activity.
Jacob finally looked down again when they passed into the shade under a rosebush. Petals littered the ground here, with some nestlings gathering them up in their arms. The fragrant shade gave the human a chance to blink the brightness out of his eyes for a moment. “What’s on the other side of this tunnel?”
Bowman grinned. The tunnel in question led to one of the most important places in the entire forest. At the end of it, the grass grew a little taller in the unimpeded sunlight, blocking the view of what they aimed for across that clearing. “The Big Oak is over there,” he explained. “And the Well.”
Jacob whipped his gaze to the size, his eyes wide with awe now rather than sunblindness. “The Well? As in, the one the village is named after?”
Bowman snickered. “As if we’d name the village and the whole forest after just any old well,” he teased. “It’s the Well where all the groundwater was blessed. The blessing is still strongest there.”
Jacob nodded solemnly. “I never thought I’d get to see it up close. Figured it’d be too fragile for me to see it.”
Bowman shrugged and stretched his wings behind his back. “And now you have the opportunity. But don’t think you’re just going for sightseeing. Before we left I told Candara I’d make you haul back a bag or two of water, so you can put that human strength to use.”
Jacob laughed and lightly punched Bowman’s shoulder; what would normally be a gentle nudge from one fingertip became a small impact that almost swayed Bowman off balance. “All this human strength, huh? Can’t even knock anyone over like this.”
Bowman flicked his wings and shot the human a mock glare. “Be careful, giant-not! Or I’ll let you walk home on your own!”
Jacob shrugged. “Someone would tell me which way to go. But I doubt I’d get too lost anyway. I’d just have to follow the sound of you sassing someone to find my way back.”
Bowman scoffed, though it was more of a bark of laughter. “We’ll see about that, Jacob. Come on, we’re almost to the clearing.”
( send me a “🖊+an OC“ and I will talk about that OC! )
Rischa Songbird is the younger cousin of Bowman Leafwing. Since he lived with his aunt and uncle before she was born, Rischa is like a little sister to him, and he’s looked after her from the first moment he got to meet her. She came along right when he needed a distraction from his own concerns, and she kept him busy. She wasn’t the most troublesome child, but she liked to wander and she wanted Bowman to lead the way.
Even from an early age, she showed signs of the empathy that would become a side effect of her magical abilities. With the Voice of the Spirit, Rischa has one of the closest connections to the Earth Spirit in the whole village of Wellwood, enabling her to perform the most major Prayers and use magic without tiring nearly as quickly. Her empathy means that she feels the emotions and the physical sensations of those around her, especially their pain. As she grows into her power and learns to control it, she will have an easier time with it, but until then she can easily become overwhelmed.
Rischa has golden eyes, auburn hair, and medium brown skin. Her face is round and easily lit up by her smile. Based on her height and slim frame, she will grow up very petite, and her wings might maintain a smaller wingspan. She won’t reach much more than 3 and a quarter inches tall when she’s done growing.
Because of her empathy, Rischa is usually able to keep a level head in situations that might rile up others (like Bowman). If she had been the first sprite to discover giants in Wellwood, things might have gone a lot calmer!
Today at @comic_con meet @harbingerdown & #WELLWOOD star @camillebalsamo, along with @thestudioadi producers and #PracticalEffects masters @alec_gillis & @tom_woodruffjr in ROOM 24 ABC at 5:30 PM. They'll be given a #retrospect for the 30th #anniversary of #studioADI including their work on the #Aliens franchise, #IT, #TheThing prequel, #StarshipTroopers, #Tremors, #SpiderMan, and their own movies, #HarbingerDown, #FireCity, and a #sneakpeek at the new #SciFi #Horror Wellwood.
So it’s been a while since I’ve done much of anything on this blog ^^; School had consumed pretty much my entire existence so I’ve been behind on prompts and shirking the Zepheera-Visions, and I’ve also gotten myself deeply involved with the @brothersapart universe.
But that’s not all I’ve been up to.
Introducing Borrowed Magic, my first co-written AU in the BTaS universe!
@neonthewrite has lent me her Bowman to join in the shenanigans of my borrower OC Zepheera and the Tenth Doctor in my crossover series Borrowed Time and Space. Fittingly enough, we’ve named this AU Borrowed Magic.
I’ve poked at ideas for AUs of BTaS before, mostly to allow for interactions with more of the Tenth Doctor’s companions, but this one has the potential for so much fun. Not only is Bowman a spitfire of a sassball, but it’s interesting to throw yet another non-human companion into the mix! His life in Wellwood has in no way prepared him for travel in time and space, and it doesn’t help that he’s the youngest and the smallest on board (due to the slight scale difference, Zepheera ends up a whole half-inch taller than the sprite, much to his annoyance).
This is a young AU, but Neon and I do have plans in store for these dorks. I’ll start posting excerpts semi-regularly, and we’ll take any questions involving the AU!
For now, here’s a sneak peek at our first completed story!
"Zepheera, answer me!"
Who is Zepheera?
The insistent call deepened the concerned frown on Bowman's face. He watched the tall man with hardly-blinking eyes for a moment before registering that there could be another human out there. That made his wings fan open and closed as he scanned the forest for another giant nearby.
He was thinking he might have to fly a short distance to find another giant crashing around in the woods. Keeping track of all intruders was imperative for the safety of the village. Bowman turned, aiming to look behind himself first.
He did a double take at the sight of someone on the branch with him.
"Spirit's dance!" he yelped, flinching backwards. He stumbled off the end of the branch, but his wings caught him easily, flaring open and pulling him back up to hover level with one of the strangest people he'd ever seen. They had skin that looked a bit pale compared to his own, but not as pale as the tall human a distance away. Most important was the lack of any sort of wings on their back, despite otherwise being sprite-sized.
How would the sprites celebrate with Jacob if they found out about birthday traditions?
Thank! And thank for the ask~
smolcomfycat asked: How do wood sprites celebrate their birthdays? Or do they even?!
I think Bowman and the wood sprites would be pretty intrigued by the whole concept of birthday celebrations and some of the traditions that come up. Wellwood sprites don't really have a numbered calendar, so they don't have specific dates for birthdays or big events. At most they celebrate the passing of the seasons.
All that aside, with all the strange and interesting human traditions around birthdays, they might just find an excuse. A party for all the spring births? Sure! They can make a feast and have cakes and sing to each other! They'll forgo the candles, though, as fire is way too risky for such a thing.
Gift giving would probably be a little weird to them. They don't need an event to share nice things or exchange presents most of the time, after all!
Overall, I think they'd have as much fun trying out a few birthday celebration ideas as Jacob would have watching them set it all up. It's not every day a human gets to see Wellwood setting up for a party!
Prompt: What if Bowman got confused about the phrase “around the world”, and Jacob realised Bowman didn’t know that the Earth is round, not flat, and Jacob had to try and both to explain and convince his incredulous lil buddy.
This email got buried in my inbox a little bit, but thank you so much for sending it in! I had fun pondering how much the wood sprites of Wellwood would actually know about the round earth and solar system and such. My guess is there are a few that do actually know about how that works, to a degree, and could even recreate the calculations that Eratosthenes computed to find the circumference of the earth.
Bowman, however, is not a scholarly sprite. If there are sprites studying astronomy, he's not among them.
~~~
“What does that mean?”
Jacob paused in his walking to glance to the side. Bowman perched on the end of a long, spindly branch, and even his tiny weight barely disturbed it. A focused curiosity fixed on Jacob. “Which part?”
Bowman held up a hand and waved it in a circular gesture. “You said ‘around the world’. What does that mean? Is it just another human thing?”
“Oh,” Jacob turned to address the sprite fully, knowing he had let slip another phrase that he took for granted. For someone four inches tall who had never left his single forest before, Bowman didn’t necessarily have a reason to know. “Well, the earth is round, Bowman, like a … berry, or--”
“Or the moon?” Bowman cut him off with an amused smirk. “I know what round means, giant.”
Jacob grinned. “Yeah. Like how the moon is round. But the earth is way bigger than the moon and it takes a long time for anyone to get all the way around it.”
Bowman contemplated that for a long pause. He’d perched right at Jacob’s eye level, so Jacob could see the journey of realization on Bowman’s face as he tried to reconcile with what he knew. Sunrise and sunset were important parts of a wood sprite’s day, and Jacob wondered how Bowman had viewed them before.
Verdant green wings twitched in annoyance. “Well I almost never pay attention to the sky charts or anything like that,” Bowman dismissed. “Not like I want to fly that far.”
Jacob nudged at the branch so that it swayed slightly. “I know that’s a lie, you’d fly all the way around it if you could.”
“Oh, I know I could,” Bowman boasted. His wings fluttered to life and he dove off the branch to glide ahead of Jacob. “But if it’s so hard for humans to do it, I wouldn't want to leave you behind.”
“Thanks, dude,” Jacob called after him, resuming his walk.
