Challenge #00054: Underground
Evoverse: Sara encounters the Morlocks. Up to you what happens next, but I am genuinely curious *chinhands*
Cold. Wet. Hurt.
Okay. Alive. Alive is always good. Remember the three O’s. Objective, Orientation, Orders.
Objective. Um. Getting out of here would be nice.
Orientation. It’s dark. Way too dark. Wind-up lantern in right hip-pouch. Get it. Wind it up. Find out where one is. Find out the damage.
Ow. That was going to hurt when she warmed up.
Orders… orders were… um. Oh yes. Go home.
This was not home.
First things first, patch self up. She had hand sanitiser amongst her medkits. That would do for cleaning. Honey for antiseptic. Various patches for her hurts. No broken bones, that was always good.
Space blanket for temperature control. Vital.
Someone was watching her. A little kid.
“Hello, sweetie?” Sara tried. “What’s a nice little kid like you doing in an oubliette like this?”
The child just stared.
“Am I blending into the brickwork?”
She shook her head ‘no’.
“I see you don’t talk to strangers. Smart kid. I don’t have candy. Just hardtack and gum. And judging by the way you don’t turn a hair at my blue-ish appearance, I’d guess you know some mutants.”
Nod. Wave with an almost comically-oversized hand.
“Ah, you *are* a mutant. I see. It can’t be just you in these tunnels. Your clothes are too clean, for a start. And you’re very well fed, if you don’t mind me noticing. Someone’s helping you out, yes?”
Nod.
“Do they know you’re here?”
Someone morphed outwards from a wall. “We know she’s here,” said an asian-looking man with missing upper and lower cartilage on his nose. “Torpid doesn’t talk.”
Sara bowed at the child from her seat. “Greetings, Lady Torpid. I go by the code-name Chameleon, myself. And you, Sir Wallflower? Are introductions in order, or am I waiting a deeper, darker and danker dungeon?”
“We were waiting for you to wake up. You’re heavier than you look.” He gestured for her to follow. “And turn that light off.”
“I’m night-blind. Sorry. I can turn the candlepower right down if that would suit. I -um- like to see where to put my feet. Is that all right?”
He glared at her, rolled his eyes, and growled, “Whatever.”
Sara turned the candlepower of her lantern right down and wrapped her free arm up in foil. “Would you mind holding my hand, Lady Torpid?” she whispered. “I’m feeling a little scared…”
Torpid grinned and held her hand. Her code-name indicated that she had powers that would incapacitate a body and, given her general respect for personal space in combination with her age, it had to be touch-related.
No child should ever be missing a hand to hold.
She counted her paces and the lefts and rights in order, as well as the ups and downs because, when you get down to it, underground is a three-dimensional space.
And then they hit the Cavern.
It was a topsy-turvy world of stalactites and crystals and, in its way, another world. Sara turned off the lantern. She didn’t need it in here.
“This is our best-kept secret,” said her guide. “We call it the Sanctuary.”
“Sanctum sanctorum,” Sara whispered. “How can you stand to go to the surface knowing you’re leaving this?”
“We need food.”
“And you’re not using hydroponics?”
“Some of us can’t get by on vegetables.”
“Well, I’ve been experimenting with microfarming. I’m guessing you guys aren’t as fussy as some of my compatriots? They’re always telling me, Sara you just can’t eat worms. Sara, why did you feed me crickets? Sara, that risotto you’re cooking had *better* have meat from an accepted farm animal… Honestly. One batch of Hunan Surprise and people act like I’m constantly trying to poison them.”
Sir wallflower stopped so he could boggle at her. “Maybe you should talk to Callisto.”
Callisto did not live up to her mythical namesake. She had an eyepatch, a tendency to slouch, and a posture that bespoke of a vicious streak so wide that it eclipsed half the solar system. She wore faux fatigues, but had the musculature to back them up. Her entirety of being said, Don’t fuck with me.
“So riddle me this,” said Callisto. “Why do you get the fancy gear and we have to scrape?”
“Given the crystalline structures in this chamber, I’d hazard that you managed to escape detection. I know Xavier would be willing to help–”
“We don’t need his help!”
Sara frowned. “Um. You were the one complaining about having to scrape. If fancy gear is the bone of contention, I’m certain we could come up with an equit–”
“You think you can just enlist us? Just like that? A few fancy words and we’re all your helpless minions.”
“Dear, if I could make minions with fancy words, I’d have Duncan Matthews on a leash.”
That made her laugh. “Fine. We bought you down here because you’re the most likely to leave us be when we tell you to fuck off.”
When, Sara noted, not if. “Am I a consultant?”
“Unpaid, yes.”
“How do you feel about eating insect protein?”
[Muse food remaining: 1. Submit a prompt! Ask a question!]
via laugh-addict
yes except more food.
Reblogging for GPOY
(Source: for-the-love-of-the-words, via the-gay-is-over9000)
Whew!
Said defunct laptop has been restored to functionality once more. Yay.
…yknow. In case anyone cared…
My WIP’s back up and running and heading towards 35K at a rate of knots.
Shall let you know when I hit 40K and how much more trouble I have to put my characters through.
Big thanks and kisses to my grand fixer-upperer :)
AIGH!
So I took my laptop and my novel-in-progress with me on a grand adventure, this afternoon.
Said adventure involved writing two more pages and some damn good stuff.
But when I got it home… the laptop won’t work.
It has power. It was working just fine when I shut it the last time. It just won’t. Turn. On.
And I need those two pages, dammit!
Are there any Mac experts out there who can help me? I would not otherwise be worried, but my lappy needs internets to update my work on the cloud. If it’s on the cloud, it’s *FINE*.
But it’s not fine.
Because it broke sometime when I was off the interwebs and disconnected from the cloud.
help
its gankin me
Requests
So far, I’ve had requests for Love is Blue, Misfits, and that weird one with Kurt and Todd as a couple after an avalanche. I don’t recall a title.
The bad news is, I don’t think I even have that last one. I’ll look, but I have a LOT of fics, some of them are doubles, and not all of them are mine.
The good news is, I already posted Misfits. Starting here.
I may have to concoct a chapter-and-verse reference file and permalink it on my page. Except I have no idea how to do that. Or reblog my own posts.
Love is Blue is a weird one. Blue Moon(which I’m sure I don’t have), the fic that grew from that, is even weirder. How the blip can I convince all the porn blogs following me that I’m not running a smut blog if you guys keep requesting my smut?
But I’ll look for it and put it up anyway. Ya pervs ;)
Trilogy progress: book 1, part 3
I just hit 30K words.
Halfway to having a decent novel.
And I still have to write two more. Yaaaaayyy…
Now I’m on the home stretch, I’m thinking about how to handle the second book. And how I’m going to handle polishing the first novel whilst writing the second.
Any volunteers for beta-reading?
Challenge #00041: The Noodle Incident(s)
There was that one time with the limes, the rhododendron hedge and the grand piano that all parties agreed never to speak of again…
Oh, the potential for each of these. I don’t know which universe to play with. So I’ll play with all of them :)
There is a certain genius for mischief. People who possess it are generally pranksters and the geniuses at it can make their chosen victims laugh at their own predicament.
Two such geniuses, Rael found, should never go together.
He already had enough on his personal agenda with Shayde, a creature who possessed magics in advance of current technology. But it got infinitely worse when the Enterprising Endeavour was in port and Hwell Barrow escaped the watchful eye of his saurian business partner, Ax'and'l.
Hwell had initially tried, according to all reports, to ‘blarney’ Shayde. Shayde, on the other hand, spotted him coming from a mile off and turned him down flat in ways he did not understand until ten minutes after she left the room. Things escalated quickly from there. He sent her chocolate-coated insects. She sent him caramel encrusted lizards. He somehow managed to dope her shower head and dyed her hair teal. She somehow got into the Enterprising Endeavour’s systems and dyed the air fuchsia. He set a flock of guinea pigs loose in her garden. She shipped live cargo to a very distant port… live cargo that liked to eat the containers she put them in, and breed like insects.
There was that one time with the limes, the rhododendron hedge and the grand piano that all parties agreed never to speak of again… Nobody could prove who did it.
The Enterprising Endeavour was in dock again. Which meant that Lyr, being both a precognitive psychic and a keen observer, had once again drafted Rael as bodyguard and reliable eye-witness. Which, in turn, meant he had to move his warming tank in for something Shayde called a 'sleep-over’.
“Ye serious. Ye never heard o’ smores?”
“Never,” said Rael. For all he knew, this was another Drop Bear story.
“Ah, yer in fer a treat,” Shayde opened her door.
Hwell had escaped his guard and managed to completely fill Shayde’s quarters with peculiar, helium-filled balloons.
“Condoms,” said Shayde as they escaped their former confines and began drifing into the corridor. “He cannae resist the classics…”
X-Men Evolution Universe
“What are you doin’, Tallwater?” Logan growled.
“Nuh-thiiiinng…” Sara almost sang. She was up to her elbows in bits and bobs, building a Device.
“You’re up against Fixit again, ain’t'cha?”
Sara put her screwdriver down so she could face him. She’d gone from aqua to very much more than a little bit blue-ish. And she was almost glowing. “I owe him one.”
Logan shook his head. “You been on his case ever since he accidentally sent you jauntin’ dimensions.”
“And he has the nerve to retaliate!” Sara was snippy, and when she got snippy, her Bostonian accent got thicker. “And he’s better at it… Well… There was that one time with the limes, the rhododendron hedge and the grand piano that all parties agreed never to speak of again…”
“Y'never thought of callin’ a truce and working on the problem?”
Sara glared at him. “That,” she sniffed, “requires him to apologise first.”
And, because I love it so much…. Dresden Codak’s X-Men Reboot Universe
In the opinion of Pepper Potts, there are some kind of geniuses there should never be two of, let alone two of in the same general area. Like, an entire continent.
Her life was interesting enough just trying to keep a leash on Tony Stark. Playboy multimillionaire genius inventor and any other nouns you had to spare. But now there was Sara Adrien. Mutant chameleon creative genius and a lot of other spare nouns, and a few of them actually polite.
Tony hated her for two reasons. One: she re-designed his holographic emitter vambrace so that it could both disguise a person for longer and fit into a rather clunky-looking sports watch. Two: she had found out his full name and used it against him whenever she was ticked off with him.
Well, not exactly hate hate… but not quite as mature as friendly rivalry, either. It was hard to maintain friendly rivalry with someone who had subconsciously absorbed the theories of ninjitsu as a method of getting the pranks past both Tony’s and Pepper’s paranoid security measures.
The nanobot packaging had been the last straw. Not that it disassembled its wrapping paper form and then spread anywhere it detected Tony’s DNA, but that it graffitto’d, Tony Stark is a louse! anywhere it had enough clear space.
And he couldn’t sue her for libel, because she’d paid to have a new species of louse named after him.
Pepper couldn’t see anything that would make them stop. There was that one time with the limes, the rhododendron hedge and the grand piano that all parties agreed never to speak of again… but it just kept… going.
“Eureka!”
Never before had three syllables struck terror into Pepper’s heart. She had to look, just so she could appreciate the train wreck that happened afterwards.
It was a hovering hula-hoop. Or rather, it looked like a hovering hula-hoop.
“What monster have you created now?” Pepper asked, only half-joking.
“Personal weather system.” Tony in a manic mood was never much for excess verbiage. “It’ll follow her around, stealth at first, of course; and rain on her - and only her.”
“This could not possibly go wrong,” Pepper deadpanned flat sarcasm.
As per protocol for these things, Tony set it loose, waited half an hour, and then sent the taunting text, How’s the weather?
And for two weeks, nothing happened. Two glorious weeks without so much as a black fax.
Tony actually relaxed. Well, relaxed for Tony.
Then came the garden party. A fine mist filled the air, but it did nothing to dampen the spirits of anyone in attendance. Until Sara showed up. Glittering and spectacular and - Pepper noticed - not being rained on.
“Why the hell is she dry?” muttered Tony.
“How the hell should I know?” murmured Pepper.
“Mister Stark,” said Sara.
“Ms Adrien,” said Tony.
They shook.
“Wonderful work with the programmable watering system,” said Sara. “I have it doing the rounds at Xavier’s. And congratulations on your fashion choice.”
“…zuh?” said Tony.
“I hear orange is the colour for celebrities of your calibre.”
Pepper and Tony looked together. He had turned a brilliant, vibrant, fake-tan orange.
Tony licked his hand. “Orange kool-aid?”
“I was out of Tang.”
“I’ll get you for this.”
“Really, Mister Stark. You have to stop handing me the weaponry. Those are the nanobots you originally sent after me, remember?”
Tony fumed. “Yes,” he growled.
“And nice try suborning the Sentinels. It won’t work a second time.”
“Wait. I didn’t reprogram the Sentinels.” Tony turned to Pepper. “Did I?”
Pepper didn’t have to check. “No. That wasn’t us.”
“Hmph,” said Sara. “Someone is using our personal vendetta against us.”
“Us?” Tony quoted.
“I did not put you on SHIELD’s watch list.” Sara snagged and sipped some juice. “My motto is Mostly Harmless, as you will recall.”
Tony caught on. “Someone’s trying to up the stakes.”
“Shall we happen to them together?”
Tony had a very nasty grin. “Yes. Let’s.”
Oh dear. Now he had Pepper in conniptions at two syllables.
[Muse food remaining: 3. Submit a prompt! Ask a question!]
Trilogy progress continued, book 1
Have hit 20K words.
A minimum of 40K to go.
Introduced the chief villain, added a plot twist, and made my heroine temporarily deaf.
Oh, and someone pre-chewed a bug for someone else.
Fun times.
Trilogy progress, book 1
10K words down.
50K words to go.
Then I only have to worry about the next 120K words…
(gibber gibber gibber)
That was my last challenge prompt
I think I’ve been doing moderately well with my challenges, so far. Anyone is welcome to submit a prompt, and it doesn’t have to be fanficcy.
Anything you’d like to see written, I’ll make an honest effort to write.
Anything.
Take me at my word. Submit a prompt, ask a question, or even give a prompt in the answer-space below.
Want to see what I can do?