Oct. 21st, 2019

 The child struggled against the hands of the cultists holding him down, yelling curses that some might falsely believe a child his age wouldn’t know. He kicked his arms and legs wildly and tried to bite the arms of his captors. It didn’t help.

The cultist standing behind the child’s head, the one holding the knife, spoke. “O Great One, accept the sacrifice of this innocent!  Feed on its soul—”

“I’m not an it, you motherfuckers—”

“—restore your strength, and rise from your—”

A sound that had been gradually getting louder became recognizable finally as the sound of… a swing band, playing In the Mood. It was distracting enough that the cultist holding the knife lowered his hand slightly. “What the hell is that?”

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Based on the characters from my novel "The Cold At The Heart Of The Light."


“The pattern’s going to be roughly the same in every cell you look at within a specific organism,” David said. “There might be some that stand out as different, mutations or chimerism or whatnot, and then of course there’s things like the symbiotic bacteria in our bodies, but the basic cells are all going to have the same pattern in them. Do you see it?”

How could she tell? There were so many things that were the same in each of the rat’s cells, how could she pick out a specific pattern as being the DNA?

“It just – it’s a symphony, a tapestry,” Meg said. “How do I pull out individual threads? How do I hear specific instruments?”

“I don’t know,” David said, frustrated. “It’s not my power! I can see how chemicals interlock with each other, but what you’re doing is so much more complicated, and you know so much less science and math than I do—”

“Well, excuse me for being in junior high,” Meg snapped.

“You’re not in junior high. You haven’t been in school at all for a year, and with a power like yours, and a mind like yours, that’s not okay.” David glared at her.

Meg huffed. “Oh, yeah, I’m just gonna go sit in class all day, in high school, with kids whose biggest issue is the bitch in the other homeroom who’s stealing her boyfriend, and then after I get home and do my homework, I’m gonna go kill some people for Mike. Right? That totally fucking makes sense.”

David took a deep breath. “You don’t belong in school. No one belongs in school, it’s essentially a warehouse for children, with some stamping dice to crush them into similar patterns to maintain the status quo. But you need to be reading. I got you books on biology and chemistry—”

“They’re boring. They don’t feel like they have anything to do with what I see and feel and hear.” Meg couldn’t even describe what sense she was using to detect things inside the rat. How could she compare what she was sensing with the dry, flat words on the pages of the books David had given her?

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In addition to the “Snow” prompt, this also came from a prompt from the tumblr blog Sparking Story Inspiration: “Princess Snow White and the evil Snow Queen? One and the same.”


My mother was a witch, but she died when I was too young to learn her craft from her. My stepmother was a witch, but she hated me and taught me nothing. Everything I know, I have learned for myself.

When the prince awakened me with a kiss, he expected me to be his wife, and I had no idea there was any other possibility. No, even to say that implies more questioning than I did. I had been raised a princess, taught that my value would be in marrying the prince of another land and securing an alliance for my father’s kingdom. When the prince said he would marry me, I did not particularly want to – I wanted to return to my simple life in the cottage, with my dwarven friends – but if I had been asked, I would have said I chose the marriage freely. Because I had been taught, this was my value, this was the most important task of my life. This was why the huntsman had spared me, why the dwarves had found me and cared for me. This was my purpose.

He was handsome, and I thought he was kind. Certainly he treated me as something lovely and precious to be protected, at first. On our marriage night, he demanded a husband’s rights, and I had been left ignorant of such things by my stepmother and how young I’d been when I went to live with seven wifeless men who would have died rather than corrupt my innocence with a hint of such knowledge. It was painful, and somewhat frightening, but he was the man whose kiss had awakened me from the sleep of death. I trusted him.

I should not have.

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 Ichtyrios bent his head very, very low to look inside the nursery. “They look so unfinished. Like fat little larvae. Do they undergo a metamorphosis?”

His companion, Ysabriem, laughed. “It’s a lot like that, but they never enter a cocoon… over the course of 12 years, they change into smaller versions of the full-grown ones. Before that age they need enormous amounts of care, and they’re not very useful. We start training them when they’re 5, teaching them mathematics and ciphering, and then the physical tasks around the age of 7.”

“But they’re not useful until they’re 12? That seems very odd. Aren’t they supposedly intelligent?”

“Oh, they’re very intelligent. Excellent problem-solvers, and those tiny little digits of theirs are incredibly dexterous.”

“So why does it take them so long to become useful?” He lifted his head. “Our young are born knowing enough to be fully functional even if their parents are dead.”

“Our young take 30 years to hatch. They grow their young in their bodies for not even a full year.”

Ichtyrios nodded, his talons reaching up to stroke his chin. “That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that. They’re halfway through their lives by the time one of us is ready to hatch.”

“Closer to a third, but yes.” Ysabriem began walking toward the Choosing creche. “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“It’s why I came, yes,” Ichtyrios said impatiently, huffing a quick puff of smoke. “I just – I’m not sure. A commitment of seventy, eighty years? Hardly forever, but it’s not trivial either.”

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Set in the same universe as "The Cold At The Heart Of The Light" but features a different character.



Max looked over the yard. “Yikes.”

The executor nodded. “It looks like they didn’t do anything to take care of the yard for the past 10 years. When Walter died, the paramedics had to borrow a weed clipper from the wife to get the walkway wide enough that they could get the stretcher through.”

“My God,” Max said. “Is – was there any chance they could have saved his life otherwise?”

“Oh, no, I’m sure there wasn’t,” the executor said. “He was pronounced DOA. But Helen wants to sell the place and move to an assisted living community. Apparently Walter’d been telling her for ten years that he was having things taken care of – either he was doing the chores, or he was having a landscaper come by, or something – and with her being mostly bed-ridden, she took his word for it.”

“That poor woman. She really hasn’t left her house in ten years?”

“Aside from going outside to bring in grocery and package delivery, neither did Walter. We’ve found a few paths he made through the underbrush to get to the gate where they’d leave the packages, but they weren’t big enough to bring the stretcher through.” The executor shook his head. “The best we can figure, either he was a hoarder of garden vegetation, or he had the worst cast of procrastination anyone’s ever seen.” He gave the suburban jungle one last eyeing-over before turning to Max. “What can you do with this?”

“A lot,” Max said, “but too much of that growth is woody for me to just make it all disappear. When green-stem plants die, like flowers and tomatoes, they just collapse to the ground, but woody plants like trees and shrubs and some kinds of vine will still be there when they die… they won’t continue to grow, their roots will shrink and they’ll dry out and be easier to dig out or cut down, but it’s still going to take some work to remove them.” He pulled at a woody vine that had completely swallowed the white picket fence… at least he thought it was probably a white picket fence from the tiny bits of picket that showed through the vines.

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Yeah, I'm not even pretending to do these in order anymore. This one is in the same universe as A Hole In The World, another ficlet I wrote.

There is a hole in the world.

You went to Iowa, you bought your ticket, you stood on a very long line, and you went through the hole. That was five years ago.

They say humans can’t colonize this world. Something about it overtaxes their systems, fills them with adrenaline – fear, anger, excitement. It’s an incredible thrill to be here, breathing the air of an alien world. It looks so much like Earth, all in greens and blues, with plants that aren’t Earth plants but look like they could be… but then there’s that sky with the giant green planet that plainly is not the moon. People who aren’t avid star watchers can’t tell that the stars are all wrong and people who aren’t botanists can’t tell that the plants never grew on Earth, but everyone can tell that that thing isn’t the moon. The one constant of existence that for untold millennia has bound all humanity, that all humans see the same moon… and now, it’s no longer constant.

The atmosphere has more oxygen, substantially more – a mixture of 30% rather than 22%. No one is quite sure what the long-range effects of that are going to be. Some thought the overly oxygenated atmosphere was responsible for people’s restless energy, high arousal and inability to sleep, but then it was pointed out that on Earth, people who sleep with extra oxygen sleep better and deeper. It’s impossible to sleep well or for very long, here in the alien, untouched forests.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.

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I probably should have refused the job as soon as she told me I was going to have to change my name, but it was Cat Schrödinger, man.  What hench in her right mind wouldn’t give her left tit to work for her? 

“I can’t have you calling yourself Diamond Bitch,” she said. “Can you go by Diamond, instead?”

“It’s a play on words,” I argued. “You know. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. So I’m a Diamond Bitch. What’s wrong with that? I mean, we’re villains. I don’t have to have some kind of hero-code-compliant name.”

“Bitch is a misogynistic slur and it offends me.” She looked up at me through thick glasses like I was a specimen she was analyzing. It made me uncomfortable. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“I… guess I can call myself Diamond,” I said. “Doesn’t sound really original, though. I mean, there are girls in trailer parks who are named Diamond on their birth certificate.”

“If you’d like to call yourself Diamond Dog, I can accept that.”

Yeah, no. Maybe Cat Schrödinger was offended by the word bitch, but I thought it had a lot more chops than dog. A dog is loyal and kinda dumb and will follow you everywhere wagging her tail. A bitch will bite you if you fuck with her. “Nah, I’ll stick with Diamond, I guess.” I leaned back on the wall, adopting my “cool” pose. I like my cool pose. I’ve practiced it in the mirror a lot. “So, what’s the job? You got something spectacular planned for your coming back to the game? Or is it just general henching?”

“Neither,” Dr. Schrödinger said. “I need a bodyguard—”

“Okay, that’s cool, I can bodyguard—”

“—for my kids. Someone who can keep them safe while I go back into the ‘game’, as you put it.”

That was the point where I should have definitely refused the job. ExpandRead more... )

This ficlet is based on "April's Dream House", an idea of mine that was originally envisioned as a foul-mouthed adult animated comedy that is kind of like a cross between Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Tuca and Bertie. The premise is that a bunch of little girls’ toys are living together in a name-changed-for-copyright-reasons Barbie Dream Mansion because the Barbie character can’t pay her mortgage anymore, due to being such a mega-bitch that she’s been fired from over 100 different jobs in wildly disparate professions like medicine, rocket science, and cake decorating. So she is renting out rooms to other toys. Behind the scenes there may be some little girls who are much more profane and aware of sex as a concept than we are comfortable imagining our little girls to be (although those of us who were little girls, or have raised them, or both, may know otherwise), playing out these stories (which is why you can have stuff like Doktor Zapp having lost his previous laboratory to a giant dog.) The detailed character bible is at https://alarawriting.tumblr.com/post/174289659708/aprils-dream-house.

Franchises parodied include Bratz, Monster High, Hello Kitty, My Little Pony, Playmobil, and how weird it is to have your plushies and baby dolls interact with fashion dolls when the scales don’t match, so you get a baby doll the size of the fashion doll. (I think I got that idea from Toy Story 3, which idiotically claimed that Big Baby was male despite the fact that baby dolls are almost always marketed as female and that the child who’d owned Big Baby was a girl and girls generally cast their gender-neutral toys as female.) 


“Where is my fucking box of Christmas ornaments?”

April was busily tossing everything Catrina owned down the stairs from the attic garret where she lived. “April! What the fuck! That’s my stuff!” Catrina yelled.

“Yeah, your stuff that you couldn’t bother to keep neatly like I told you to, and this is seriously a health code hazard,” April said. “But more importantly, you’re living in the room I put my Christmas ornaments in, last January, and I need to find them.”

“You keep tossing my stuff around like that and I’ll kill you, mraow!”

“It’s my house, bitch, and you don’t pay anywhere near a fair rate for the rent.” April moved on to the back of the attic, where no one lived. “Ugh, this place is a nightmare.” ExpandRead more... )

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