Alara Alara The Place

Here we are with “No Drama” again. The actual book is in first person, but I went with third and a different POV than John’s because I wanted to explore what he looks like from a human’s perspective.

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Lailah arrived at the bar as quickly as she could, panting slightly. “John! What’s the emergency?”

“There’s no emergency,” her partner, John Deer, assured her, slurring slightly. He had a glass of bourbon in front of him, no ice, mostly empty. The fact that he was slurring, and the fact that he had called her insisting that it was an emergency and she needed to meet him at Gaetano’s right away and now he was claiming there was no emergency, suggested that it was not his first one, or likely, even his third.

“You said there was an emergency,” she snapped. She hated bar stools. She hated absurdly tall men who sat on bar stools and then looked down at her because she was very short and not on a bar stool. “Tell me now why I don’t just walk the hell out of here.”

“Because Heph was busy and Mike’s in his studio and he won’t let me call,” John said, “and it’s a funeral, so I need someone to drink with.” He grinned as if what he had just said was the most reasonable thing possible.

Lailah sighed and put her camera bag on the bar. “Buy me something, then,” she said. “Something light if you expect me to drive your ass home when you’re done.”

“Bartender!” ( Read 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.) 

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“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.” ( Read more... )

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.

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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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 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.”

( Read more... )

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

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“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?

( Read more... )

So the first thing I need to explain before I tell you about meeting Heph is his name.

Humans call me John Deer (it’s a joke. Their name for a man who has no name is John Doe, but a doe is a female deer. I don’t technically have one of their genders, strictly speaking, and if you go by the body I’m in, it’s not female, so I thought I’d go by John Deer. Turns out the joke’s on me; add a silent e to the name and it’s a company that makes tractors. Go figure.)  However, as I hope would be obvious, that’s not my real name. The Aleph don’t have physical bodies and aren’t made of matter and the pure information we are made of doesn’t translate to syllables you or anything that makes sound can pronounce. If I were to translate my name, it would be impossibly long to convey in words; an Aleph’s name is, essentially, a hash function of our personality, the defining nature of our being. I’m not going to stand here and recite my entire personality to you, or anyone else’s entire personality, either, and don’t expect any other Aleph to do so.

So when we walk among pre-eschatonic species, we generally go by the names of gods in their language, or animals of symbolic value (which on most planets, for many groups on that planet, are indistinguishable from gods), or Virtue Names like “Patience” (that one is definitely not mine). And then, when we speak to one another with our meat mouths because we’re in meat bodies, we use those names, the use-names specific for that planet, that culture, that language. On Earth, in English-speaking languages (as well as a significant number of the other ones), I’m known to other Aleph as Fox, Ferret or Weasel, depending on their current opinion of me. My opponent goes by the Lion, or the Ape. But Heph doesn’t use animal names; for the past several hundred years, when he walked on this planet, he called himself Hephaestus. The Greek God of engineering, smithing and invention – technology, in other words – who also happened to be crippled. I think it would be hard to find a myth better suited to be Heph’s use-name.

You see, Heph was born damaged. (We aren’t “born” like you’re born, messy screaming infants coming out of a parent’s orifices. A seed is woven by an entire team of Aleph who’ve chosen to procreate and gotten permission to do so, and then that seed grows fractally. So we are a little less random than spinning the Wheel of Sperm and Ova like you guys do… but not much less random.) By the time he was grown enough that anyone was able to notice the damage, it was too late to correct him without making major changes to his essence, and most Aleph would have to be dying before they’d consent to that (if then. Personally I’d rather die.) It’s hard to explain what the problem is to a non-Aleph, so I need to draw an analogy. In essence… his bandwidth is too low. He cannot quickly upload anything to the Host, and he doesn’t have the storage capacity for the energy we draw down to do our reality-altering things. Where the rest of us are gods, Heph is barely a guardian spirit.

Back when we were both living in the Host most of the time, I am… ashamed to admit that I overlooked Heph, the way almost all the Aleph do. He can’t join with one of us – well, he can, but it’s shallow because of his low bandwidth. Not to be crude about it but it’s as if one of your males was trying to make love to a woman with the vaginal depth of a tea saucer. It… doesn’t do a lot for most Aleph. He can’t participate in most of the things we do because he can’t store enough energy to do it. So he isolates himself from us, and we let him do it because we’re all kind of at a loss as to how you include a guy who can’t do 90% of what you take for granted.

Heph, however, is very smart. All Aleph are by human standards, but Heph is by our standards. So he found a way around the problem.

( Read more... )

The Diwar are famed throughout the galaxy (well, to be pedantic, the general area of the Local Arm) as engineers and inventors. They are well known for the quality of their work, their scientific advancements, and the skill with which they implement theory into practical reality. (Also, their great love of beer, which has led to an unlikely friendship between the Diwar and the newest species to develop spaceflight in the Local Arm, Humans.) Their interest in engineering and creation is so great that, where Humans, Kai, Luffen and other species celebrate competitions of physical skill, the Diwar's great planetary competition is The Great Build, an engineering competition.

Remember that the person at the bottom of the medical school graduating class is called "doctor", and you will have some idea what the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples are like. Every competition has a large number of teams involved, and someone's got to be on the bottom.

The Hyperpurples are the team of Fillit Province, a northern, rather chilly and rocky demesne on the homeworld which is primarily known for fishing. Yes, this is not a bad Human speculative fiction where all the people of a planet have the same professions and behave the same way. Not all Humans work in the fiction industry, not all Kai are warriors, and not all Diwar are great engineers. The people of Fillit Province are proud of their Build team, though; despite the fact that the Hyperpurples have literally come in last in the last four competitions, Fillito are loyal. After all, for a tiny fishing province without even a great university to be able to field a team at all, let alone one that even made it into The Great Build, is an amazing accomplishment. The accomplishment is not that the fisher-Diwar are great engineers in comparison to the rest of their people, but that they are engineers at all.

The problem is that the competition keeps itself from getting stale by kicking out any team that is in the bottom 10^th percentile for five competitions in a row. If the Hyperpurples don't perform better than at least ten percent of the other teams this year, they're dead in the water. Loyal followers in their hometowns will be deeply disappointed. (Diwar are known for their passion as much as for their love of engineering. Disappointing a Diwar usually results in unpleasant consequences, such as finding that your personal conveyance has been disassembled and its parts strewn about your property.) Family members will declaim at length about the tragedy... and how members of the team who scraped and saved to leave Fillito Province to get a good education at a decent engineering school should have stayed home and caught fish for a living. Funds that were flowing into the Hyperpurples' bank accounts from the sales of merchandise to their loyal fans will dry up.

"We could try to do something safe. Something respectable," Irta said, nervously pulling at the feathers along the shoulder of his large-arm. There weren't many left. Irta, like all of them, had been under a lot of stress lately. "Maybe a conveyance for a non-standard environment? Something that would work in, I don't know, 20 g?"

"Boring!" Bakoon declared, with a wide wave of his own large-arm and a fluff of his crest. "We need to capture the imaginations of the public! To come in 11^th percentile or higher, we can't do something mean and pedestrian; beyond a contest of engineering skill, this is a contest of ideas!"

"Besides, it's not as if we can win on our engineering skill," Rikwaal said sardonically, her small-arms busily occupied with inputting because Rikwaal liked to look as if she was so important to the team, her work never stopped. She was actually a project manager, so the truth was, without a project to engage in, she didn't have anything to do either.

"Speak for yourself," the team's other female, Enshru, snapped. "You can't win on engineering skill because you are not an engineer."

"Judging from our performance the last four years, neither are the rest of you," Rikwaal said.

"Guys, could we stop arguing? This isn't getting us any closer to the prize," Le'ir said. He was young, and very earnest, but well-respected for his comportment, his friendliness, his alcohol tolerance, and his ability to go for three days without sleep at crunch time and still have his work come out as competition-quality. "We need a really new idea. Something to shake things up."

"I agree!" Bakoon said. "Regardless of our skill at engineering, one of our metrics is viewership. Get enough Diwar to follow us and it won't matter if we fail spectacularly and blow something up. We'd at least come in higher than 11^th percentile, if everyone following the competition followed us as a focus-team."

Enshru snorted. "It sounds like you think this competition is one of those Human things where the Humans with big muscles pretend to wrestle each other! This isn't about show business, it's about making something that makes people take notice of us!"

"Which we have never accomplished before," Rikwaal said, "and therefore, it really seems implausible that we'd manage it this time."

( Read more... )

Set in the Young Wizards universe by Diane Duane, inspired by the cat wizard books. At one point she mentions that dog wizards exist, but never, to my knowledge, do we get to meet any. If I'm wrong and canon completely contradicts these guys, then boy I'll be embarassed.

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Faro padded gingerly out onto the ice. It held her weight at first, but six body-lengths and it was starting to creak dangerously. “This is bad, Ilya,” she said. “It’s taking my weight for the moment, but I feel like it could crack any minute.” The ice was supposed to be solid and firm out a mile or more from shore.

“Be careful, Faro!” her partner, Ilya, shouted to her.

He was speaking his own language, which Faro referred to as Ruhhyi, and Faro was speaking her own – which Ilya’s kind called Kyonsky, or Kyonish when he was speaking with the Americans they worked with sometimes, but Faro just referred to it as what it was – Pack-speech. She often felt that she was one of the luckiest rawuu’uhff, Pack-people, on the planet; most Pack-people couldn’t make themselves understood to their huun packmates, and had to study and work incredibly hard just to make sense of a handful of commands in huun-speech. But Faro and Ilya were both wizards, both capable of the Speech – the language of magic, of the universe’s creation – and as such, could understand any other language spoken to them.

“I’m always careful!” Faro barked back. In her mind she assembled, and then whispered, a phrase to the ice, reminding it of when it had been solid and thick, easily able to hold a Pack-person’s weight. The ice, so reminded, obliged her by bearing her out as far as it existed. She jumped from floe to floe, digging thick claws into the ice when she landed to avoid skidding, until the ice layer that floated atop the seawater was so thin, it might as well be water and she’d have needed an entirely different spell to be able to walk on it.
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The patient was sitting on the table, dressed in a hospital gown, looking deeply irritated. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I wanted to go to Five Guys,” he said. “Why didn’t you take me to Five Guys?”

The woman with him – close to the same age, late 20’s or early 30’s – sighed. She sounded exasperated. “Greg, we have talked about this. You’re here because—”

“You know, there’s a great sale on fishing gear at Walmart. I could be at Walmart right now buying fishing gear.”

“You don’t even fish!”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Dr. Park. What brings you here today?”

“Nothing!” Greg Landers, my patient, said. He was a white guy with brown hair and stubble on his face, medium build, and looked overall reasonably healthy. “I’m fine! I just want to go to Five Guys. Or you know, Charles Schwab is a great place to open up your 401K. They’ve got a satisfaction guarantee. You won’t see that at every investment firm!”

“He’s been like this for days,” the woman with him said. “He won’t go to work, he won’t do chores around the house… he eats, but he spends the whole time complaining that it’s not some restaurant he wants to go to. Mostly Five Guys. Greg doesn’t even like burgers that much.”

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It's funny, I started my Livejournal in 2001 more or less in response to the death of my grandmother, and now here I am coming back because I want to talk about my mom dying. That's kind of morbid.

( Rambling about my mom )