The cheque said “AMOUNT: two dollars and forty cents BEING FOR: classified ad”, rounded block letters in green ink amid the printed prompts. My mother never wrote cursive. “Thanks Mum“ I said, “I’ll pay you back from my paper round money on Saturday”
“No need” she said, “I’m going out; if you have the ad ready I’ll post it for you.”
I folded the cheque and the form I’d clipped from the newspaper. It had been tricky writing on the newsprint with a pen “HOME COMPUTER Amstrad CPC6128 with monitor, printer and external 5.25 inch drive. Original software plus over 30 games. $425. Ph 551806”.
After Mum left I went to my room and booted up my new PC, with its Extra Beige system unit and Different Beige monitor. I patted my 6128’s screen sitting on the floor under my desk. “Sorry old girl, no room to keep you but I’ll find you a nice home”.
Before I even got Kings Quest loaded the doorbell rang.
The visitor was a woman with amazing purple hair, and cat ears. “Hi, she said, I’m Kit, here about the Amstrad”
“But…it’s not even posted yet. And I only listed a phone number!”
“Never mind that”, she smiled, bouncing on her toes “do you still have it?”
I nodded, too flabbergasted to speak
“Four twenty five, right?” she said, thrusting an envelope at me, “here’s five hundred, keep the change. Now, what I want-“
“Wait, what are these things”. I’d opened the envelope to find five slippery rectangles of plastic bearing “100” in large letters, coloured variously green and yellow with a transparent region in the middle. “These aren’t-“
“Oh shazbot!” my visitor said, snatching the envelope back. “Bee Arr Bee”. Then she vanished, with an electric ZZZZAAPP sound.
ZZZAAAPP. She was back, holding out a sheaf of five grey paper rectangles, the recently introduced but rarely seen $100 notes, thick linen paper with subtle colours - easy to photocopy and colour in with textas, I’d seen on TV. I held the note up to the sky to see the metal thread and watermark. “Are these real?”
“Trust me,” she said, “they were hard to find but totally legit.”
“Okay, uh do you want to see the computer running?”. I felt like I was running to catch up with this interaction.
“No need” she grinned. “I’m giving it to you. Box it up and stash it in Mum’s roof. You’ll be glad to have it when you’re older.”
“Wh…what?”
“Do they speak english in what?” she muttered half to herself?
“what?”
“Exactly! Right on script”. She poked me in the chest. “You’ll be alright kid. Forget about the ‘strad for a couple of decades, OK?”
She ran hand through her brilliant purple hair, vibrating like she was having the best time ever. “Oh yeah, you’ll need these”. She tugged at her cat ears and i realized they were a headband. She handed me the band with its two ears. “One last thing“—a suddenly serious look—“listentoyourdreams. You’ll know when it’s time. See ya!”
The mushroom ring was drawn in chalk, so I'd thought nothing of it...
As the fae realm drew me in, I tried to remember - was it just local fairy food that I needed to avoid? Was the lunch in my bag safe since I'd brought it with me?
"It worked! It's a human!" exclaimed an excited pixie.
"They-them, please," I blurted instinctively.
"They're a human! Humans exist!"
"Ugh, you won the bet, now let's send them back..." grumped an elf.
“Excuse me”, the waitress noted in passing, “you’re on fire”.
She wasn’t being complimentary to my appearance; my encounter suit was leaking oxygen again. I hate fluorine planets.
I swatted at the flame and stepped up to the bar. “Cylinder of pure H₂O please” I asked the barkeep. “and, uh, have you seen Captain Zhang tonight? I arranged to meet her here and…” I waved away another flame and applied a quick-seal patch to the crack in my armor “…I’d rather not wait too long; no offense but your bar’s atmosphere is not really my thing”
The witches secretly watched from the shadow of the moon.
In the marsh below, the king wheezed as he jogged past the Old Stump for the third time, wearing boots, breeches and muddy leaves. He waved a scepter in his left hand, and clutched a barely sedated badger in his right.
"Last month the Leaves foretold that his next child would be a son. Why did you tell him this was the only way--?"
"Because he was rude; I'm making him work for it!"
The knight struggled out of his armor then strode toward the dragon, "I need to be crushed immediately."
The dragon shifted his massive body, waiting for the knight to lay flat in his nest of furs and fabrics. Then he gently rolled some of his mass onto the knight's, worriedly asking, "Rough day?"
"Rough week," sighed the knight.
"It's Monday!"
There was no response, the knight had already dozed off under his favorite weighted-blanket.
#WordWeavers 2405.20 — How did you settle on your antagonist's appearance?
Antagonists almost always are regular people with different agendas than the MC's. Rarely, they have a skewed sense of right and wrong or how reality works, which could describe a few MCs. In any case, I very much wish to prevent latching on to a stereotype as it will paint a divergent picture of what I want to represent and, far worse, comes with a subtext that I have no control over. Like the MC POV, I keep appearances vague so the reader can use their imagination, only less so because antagonists are seen and features important to the story must be eluded to. The MC will also make uncensored comments in her internal dialogue, aka 1st person narration.
In one case, the antagonist got her own side story as the POV. Note in the following #excerpt from Fledge, she has woken up with bodily changes (and amnesia). She self-labels herself as a chimera, a monster that's a combination of creatures but in her case parts of other people. She never states facial features, needs never say anything about hair color, or what we relate to as race. She does mention an in-story kind of human. However, the following feature is important to her "appearance" as it relates to the question, as well as the plot. She's squatting on a tree limb two dozen stories high...
He [her rescuer] pointed at the useless things on my back. "You remembered enough to shield your fall [...] using them. You're learning."
Below my normal right shoulder blade, a red-feathered monstrosity twitched. Adjusting my hips carefully, I glared left to see iridescent blue and purple feathers and down lit by the setting sun, better suited for a pigeon's breast. The day angel wing poked out, balancing, splaying breeze-rustled feathers to instinctively steady me. My blue "add-on" was larger than the red. Both went thwack to my back, acting as if they'd noticed I'd noticed my alien, unasked for, new limbs playing—behind my back—and hid. I had to steady myself with a hand.
“Emerald 457 Scaley this is Tower. You are clear to approach paddock 22 east”
Air traffic control used to be a fairly unexciting, though important job. After I retired and joined ATC Sans Frontières, I learned just how precarious air travel has made the life of dragons. Dragonkind was driven almost to extinction before ASF provided radio collars and traffic guidance.
“457 please also be advised of helicopter muster operations to your north. Our records show this flock is BSE negative. Good hunting”
Here in the Precrime Division we solve crimes before they happen. There’s a rumour that we use psychics, and it serves us well to let it spread uncorrected. Just between you and me, we mostly monitor search engines for queries like “statute of limitations” and “countries without extradition treaty”.
It’s a /little/ bit harder than reverse-parallel parking, but once you learn to complex-park by rotating your car at 90 degrees to reality, you can park pretty much anywhere you like. Just be really careful to remember where. And stay out of the Mandelbrot set!
The human child decided not to tease their fish-tailed pal, and instead talked about marbles and their mutual love of turtles and pizza.
Decades later, the human had to admit that the siren looked so happy atop the firetruck she was assigned to, screaming her lungs out as they raced towards a blaze.
I don’t know when I stopped breathing. I first noticed yesterday when I climbed the stone stairs leading up to the pedestrian overpass near post office square. I wasn’t panting in the slightest. I can breathe if I want to, and obviously I need to for talking, but otherwise the nanopores pull oxygen right through my skin.
I’m gonna get in so much trouble if the lab finds out I’ve been contaminated.
#PennedPossibilities 311 — What is a memory that makes your SC swell with pride?
That armor. The black dragon armor, light as an autumn breeze. The last who owned it, legends say, a million died to take it away from her, but failed in the end.
She gave it to me: The ruler of the world, the most powerful thaumaturge alive. I was the one who nearly killed her, when we fought for our lives incidentally breaking the Curse of Harmony upon her.
I didn't break the curse but was the one who nearly killed her. Yet...
My friend—whose life I saved by pushing her out of the way of a plasma bolt and getting my flank burnt as a result—reminded me of the legend. Made me test the magic, which let me fly like an arrow and loop and dodge more agilely than a sparrow. She added, "She told me it's the first time anyone's got that close in a century. It's a bribe, you know, A loan. She wants you to work for her. You impressed her. "
I’ve been shopping at one of those fully automated Woolworths for years. It’s so convenient, you swipe your loyalty card and the robots load your groceries into your car. Their AI works out what you need from your purchase history. Except it doesn’t know my kids have moved out; I don’t know what to do with all this Nutella. Send recipes.
#PennedPossibilities 310 — MC or SC POV: What was your favorite day or holiday when you were a child? Favorite Day Remembrance CW: Sad.
Why are you making me remember this now? My favorite day? When I was a child? It was /that/ day, each time Mom returned home. She would sing to me, but she belonged to the world, the theatre, to the concert hall. Plenty of her albums proclaimed that. "Midnight, the Voice and the Heart of the Nation." Those albums, they're all I really have of her. She wasn't one for family pictures. Or family. It's why I can't listen to them any more, and walk out of restaurants when any of her show tunes play.
I do sing her songs in the shower, unthinkingly. My roommate doesn't know who I really am, but she's told me my voice is just like hers. Stupid memory. Stupid reflexes.
I remember being /so happy/ when she'd return home. She'd sing to me, but wasn't at all "hands on." She'd sing and she'd listen to me telling all the things that happened that day with friends and nannies—always with a smile, but I was always on the floor or in my bed or in someone else's lap. Her manager—with whom I share my hair color and skin color so he likely fathered me—would hold me while she sang sometimes. He'd read to me. He'd call me his little tomato, since that was the hair color we shared.
I remember the pair once laughing after I'd been put to bed, not sleeping. I'd peeked through a barely opened door to see. /Him/ she held.
I loved them both.
You've made me remember. Are you happy now? How many times could it have been that I remember her returning? A few dozen? They died before I was five, and now I remember /that,/ too.
[That's the Aurora Midnight, the devil girl from the Reluctance stories. Author retains copyright (c)2024 R.S.]
#WordWeavers 2405.10 — Antagonist POV: What do you like the most about yourself?
[A short tootfic. Likely canon. Her Highness speaking. From /Inklings:/]
My jaw almost dropped at the shear gall of the question, but the Midlands plenipotentiary was, if anything, expert at being jovial. His smile was disarming. He was a diplomat. I didn't gape, but put the tea cup down carefully.
"You're referring to the dragon incident, aren't you?"
He nodded. He plunked a couple lumps of brown sugar in his tea, stirring. It accounted for his corpulence, something rare amongst his gaunt brethren who spent much of their day running on forest paths. He'd made it from the Midlands in just weeks, on horseback I guessed. Poor horse. "It's on everyone's tongue. You'd mobilized the militia. Detailed reports hit the Forest Ridge High Tower as if carried by a thunderstorm."
He was making sure I knew "people" kept him well informed, and that my military wasn't what interested him. Much, anyway. I sighed, crossing my legs as I sat back.
I'd mobilized the best and most radiant of my magic users. None could best me, but we expected to face a wyvern the size of my in-town mansion. It had burnt up part of the Fell Woods. A good thing, thinking about that unassailable haven for monsters and wild beasts. Then it attacked a farm.
"The attack on the farm was an accident," I said off-handedly, steepling my fingers.
He paused. Blue eyes speared me. I'd never announced the details of what happened because if I made them official rather than rumor, the public might panic. Nobody died.
The Midlands ought know, I decided then and there. It'd be to my advantage. I'd let him decide the implications. "The grain silo had a moisture problem. It had started to ferment. Who would have thought a dragon might like beer?"
He chuckled, then, "You're serious? You know this? /How?"/ He put down his tea cup with a loud clink, spilling some of the reddish liquor.
I'd rode in with an elite company of my army, through a wood arch that proclaimed "Cornfeld," into a farm yard. I'd been ready to use my radiance to repel fire; dragons of all shapes breathed fire. My troops had the best spears, but it had been centuries since anyone had needed weapons against dragon scale. Would newiron even work? Drowning the beast by swirling airborne the farm's pond was almost our best offense, if the magical beast decided to fight. I knew they disliked fighting. I hoped that I had that much correct. If I had to resort to radiant kinesis to heave rock from a stone fence, it might decide to retaliate against my Townships—if I failed.
What I found was a half-naked girl, barely a woman though very tall, mollifying a distraught farmer and mediating with a red dragon who looked to be hanging on her every word. I could tell this, even though the dragon had the form of a giant bat.
Apparently, with her mediation, both parties were apologizing to each other!
Worse, though covered with mud and ash, visibly scarred, the young woman was devastatingly beautiful. The type of beautiful that made a seasoned and well worn woman like me think of a different kind of bedmate. I wasn't a man...
Wintereyes was her name. She had befriended a dragon.
Innocent and kind.
And immeasurably dangerous.
The ingénue now attended my magic university, despite being uncomfortable around people and wearing clothing. Learning to be human. One of mine.
I said, "What I like about myself is that I know when to fight and when to make friends."
“Kevin! Kevin! Can you hear me? Fuck how do you even do CPR on a synthetic? Somebody call 911. Or tech support”
“Ngnnnggnhhh…”
“Hold it, I think he’s coming round!”
“Urgh. What happened?”
“It kinda looked like you fainted, we were really worried for you mate”
“Oh good, finally!”
“Wait, what?!”
“I’ve been running in debug mode for a week, trying to log one of these brownouts. Debug mode feels like you’re wading through treacle. I can finally send the logfiles off to my GR and get a diagnosis. “