Category Archives: Fiction

Any posts containing actual stories or parts/chapters of stories.

October 2

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Fictober, Prompt 2 – “You have no proof.”

Original fiction.

Warnings: magical battle of sorts, non-graphic description of someone being dead.

The man clutched the scroll to his chest and looked at me as if I had just insulted all of his ancestors.

“Of course I won’t hand it over to you! It is mine, and acquired only at great trouble and cost!”

“And you didn’t stop to think about why that might be the case?” I asked him, keeping my voice even and my face calm. He had no idea what he was holding, and it was going to cause trouble for more than just him if I couldn’t stop him from using it.

“Obviously, because it confers a great boon to the user,” he huffed, as if this was obvious.

“It was stolen,” I said, losing a little bit of my temper, “out of one of the most secure magical facilities in all the known lands. I know that you know this, because that is why the thieves you hired to steal it charged you so much, and why you had so much trouble finding anyone to even attempt the theft in the first place. Has it not occurred to you that it was under such heavy guard because it doesn’t do what it claims to do, rather than because it does?”

A brief – very brief – flicker of doubt crossed his face, but then it settled into a scowl again.

“You have no proof,” he spat at me, “no proof at all of those rumors! Have you ever even seen it yourself?”

I had not, of course, looked at the scroll myself. Its rolled-up exterior was all anyone I knew had ever seen.

“No one,” I said slowly and meaningfully, “who has ever looked at that scroll is around to tell us what exactly happened to them.”

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October 1

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(Fictober seems like a good time to return from the metaphorical dead? We’ll see how this goes!)

Fictober, Prompt 1 – “I need you.”

Original fiction.

Warnings: implied blood sacrifice, implied murder, implied non-consensual surgical procedures (but nothing actually graphic).

“I need you,” she had said.

Arrogantly, or naïvely, or stupidly, or maybe all of those things, I had believed her.

Well, heard what I wanted to hear, at least. I had believed the implication, just as she had known I would, and it was only the implication that was untrue.

She was not, in the strictest sense, a liar.

We were planetside, deep underground to escape the inhospitable surface, which had made sense enough at the time. But now I couldn’t trust anything that I had seen on the way down, since the viewports could easily have been manipulated to show whatever she wanted me to see.

This lab was definitely real, though. As was the operating table I was strapped to with metal cabling, and the humming generator, and the tubing, and the instruments she was laying out next to me, their edges gleaming sharp under the too-bright overhead lights.

“Hush now,” she soothed, eyes distant as she scanned what looked like a mix of technical specs and spellwork on a datapad, not really looking at me. “You wanted to help me, didn’t you? And you will.”

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Fixer

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(The other Xmas present story, probably time I should get around to posting it. |D Another humans and aliens story, but much happier than the last one.)

Warnings: mild swearing?

The smooth, steady rumble of the drill gave way to an unpleasant squeal of machinery.

Nngli flinched away from it, her arms contracting closer to her soft core protectively. Nothing further happened, fortunately, but the drill had stopped. Nngli contracted further in upset and disappointment. How could they possibly get the samples she needed now?

“Shit,” came the voice of her one companion on this tumbling asteroid: a human from Terra named Kendall. She emerged from the enclosed drill control station, bounding quickly across the surface in the minimal gravity.

“Hold on!” she called over the comms to Nngli, who followed anxiously after once Kendall had examined the drill and nothing else alarming happened.

“It is broken?” she asked, three arms reaching out and then contracting again. She had no help to offer in this situation. At least she could be grateful that someone (hadn’t it been one of the humans?) had finally worked out a proper translating device that would accurately convert Glion brainwaves into an audible signal for humans. She almost sighed in slight envy for the humans’ ability to produce physical sound, though they did lack the Glion ability to shift color and pattern.

Communication had certainly been difficult at first.

“Yeah, a little bit,” Kendall answered her, laying flat and peering down into the drill hole with a bright light. She stayed there for long clicks, but then pushed herself upright with the sound the humans called a ‘sigh,’ indicating frustration. “There’s something jamming it, which might have broken something. Won’t know ‘til we get it pulled back up.”

“Oh no! Then we shall have to wait for a Fixer to arrive,” Nngli said, all her initial disappointment rushing back. That could take a long time, and this work might not be considered important enough to send anyone. She’d had to find a human Operator to bring her here and work the drill, after all.

“A fixer? You mean someone to make repairs?” asked Kendall. “You’re looking at her!”

Nngli rippled her arms in confusion. “But, Kendall is an Operator!”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do a little repair work here and there,” Kendall moved her face in the shape that humans called a ‘smile.’ “Wouldn’t have kept my ship going so long otherwise!”

“Wait,” Nngli said, arms rippling more in greater confusion. “You mean that your brain allows you to have more than one specialty?”

Kendall stopped and stared at her. “Umm…yes? Do Glion brains…not do that?”

“All learn to think and communicate, of course,” Nngli explained, “but the pathways in our brains are permanently set by that which we learn. Many pathways must be set for expertise, so many must be focused on the desired skills. I am an Analyzer, what you call a scientist. I have studied only Analyzing. I could not learn to be a Fixer now.”

“Oh,” Kendall said, her eyes a bit wide. “That’s…that’s a bit— Well, it’s very different from humans. Our brains create neural networks and pathways, I think, but they aren’t…permanent? They sort of are, but we can make new ones too. So, I know how to operate machinery, like the ship and the drill, but I also know enough about how they’re put together that I can do some repairs too. I don’t know as much as an expert, but in this case, I think I can manage.”

“Really?” Nngli asked, knowing that underneath her vacuum-suit her skin had shifted into the light red color of hope.

“Really,” Kendall promised with another smile.

True to her word, Kendall had the drill unjammed, fixed, and running smoothly again in less than one wake-sleep cycle. Nngli had extended all twelve of her arms, waving them joyfully when the steady rumble had started up again.

“Thank you, Kendall,” she communicated, pleased to receive a smile in return.

“You’re welcome,” Kendall responded. “I think you’re right about this hunk of rock having the elements we need, so I’m glad to help out with this.”

“Achieved quantities will be shared fairly,” Nngli assured her.

“I know, and thanks for that. It’ll help both of us out this way.”

The drill bore down, and Nngli settled in to wait, finding patience and calm where she had been unable to before.

Humans were very different, as she had been warned. But this one, at least, was an excellent partner, and together, they would prove that these asteroids were worth the time and trouble to mine.

Nngli hadn’t ever thought anyone would care about this particular Analyzing work, but she was glad to be wrong. Alone, she could never have reached this asteroid or run the drill. Alone, Kendall would not have known where to look.

But together…together they could succeed.

So That Our Banner

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(This was part of an Xmas present, so now I can post it here! A humans and aliens story.)

Warnings: war, blood, angst, Les Mis reference (does that need its own warning? |D )

MK-GL-2654 surveyed the broken ground with distant satisfaction. Troops lined up behind them, row after row of shining armor and laser weapons gleaming under the weak sunlight of this dying world.

There were not many of these pesky Terrans left. It had already taken far more resources than the United Leaders had planned to get this far, to have forced the Terrans into these last few, meager hiding places. More time. More troops.

Far more troops.

The whole planet had turned out to be less hospitable than the Terrans’ civilization had led the Unified Mklak to expect, but they had encountered such physical conditions on other worlds and still prevailed without trouble.

No, it was the Terrans themselves who had been the real trouble.

MK-GL-2654 felt safer admitting that now that the strange little creatures were about to be exterminated at last.

Orders from the ship in orbit above passed through MK-GL-2654’s implants, and MK-GL-2654 triggered the thought which would send them collectively to the troops stationed at the ready.

As one, as it should be, they stepped forward, marching toward the broken fortress in which the Terrans had chosen to meet their end. They had fought long and hard to protect this piece of harsh land, though MK-GL-2654 only now saw the pattern of Terran offense and defense over the many sun-orbits they had been here.

No matter. All the Terran efforts had failed, and today this stronghold too would fall just as all the others had before. The only thing standing between the Unified Mklak troops and the Terran stronghold in the broken stone cliffs and red hills was an even rougher barricade, made of earth and rock and broken Terran vessels.

MK-GL-2654 halted the troops just out of firing range of the Terran weapons. Although this terrain was not comfortable for the Unified Mklak, it was not comfortable for the Terrans either. Movement on the barricade told him that the Terrans had noted their presence.

They would have a short time to contemplate their end.

A Terran, one with black skin, rose to stand tall at the center of the barricade. MK-GL-2654 knew that to be one of the remaining Terran leaders, and again felt distant satisfaction to know that it too would meet its end today.

Others appeared, skins of different shades mingling as they stood together, ragged and unpleasantly discordant in both the nature of their skins and the coverings they used to protect those soft skins. MK-GL-2654 turned to survey the perfect uniformity of the troops, a much more pleasing sight.

“Your time is over, Terrans,” MK-GL-2654 said then, broadcasting the words through the mouthpiece of their armor. “If you surrender now, your deaths will be swift and merciful.”

Terrans rarely surrendered. MK-GL-2654 was not surprised when this group showed no signs of doing so.

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Fictober End

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It feels really weird not to be writing a story tonight, after a successful month of doing Fictober. It’s a relief, in a few ways, but also weird.

It’s a relief because I’m pretty wiped out tonight, and it’s good to not need to thing about writing just now. I’m taking tonight off, but hoping to keep up the general momentum of writing something every day.

It’s a relief because I felt like I was on the verge of running out of good ideas.

(But it’s also a relief because I kept not running out of ideas and now I have…too many new stories to write. So. There’s that.)

I’m really glad that I did it, and I feel good about having managed to do at least a little something every day! Some were definitely better than others, but that’s okay. I’m leaning towards doing it again next year, especially if I’m able to flesh some of these new things out in the meantime.

Congratulations to everyone else who participated! There were some great stories, and I’m going to go back and get caught up on some things because some nights I ran out of energy to read much once I had my bit done.

Thank you to fictober-event on Tumblr​ for running it! It was a lot of fun.

October 31

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Fictober, Prompt 31 – “Scared, me?”

Warnings: monsters, implied hunting. Some Halloween spookiness to finish things off.

Acknowledgment: This whole piece was inspired by a creepy Halloween night description that LiveJournal user eryne-chan wrote many years ago in an LJ RPG. I really liked the description and saved it, and wanted to do something in tribute (though this story is entirely unrelated to the original RPG post). The last half of the last line is borrowed directly from her description, because I could not get it to sound quite right with any other wording. The rest is merely “inspired by.” Happy Halloween!

I always patrol the streets on Halloween. I start early, before the sun is fully down, as the little children and their parents make their trick-or-treating rounds. I’m well known by now, and many of the children wave excitedly when they see me, exclaiming over whichever guise I have picked to wear this year. Their parents nod to me in thanks for the extra pair of watchful eyes.

There are some monsters that would snatch children away.

I nod back, but do not speak to them.

Dark comes early here, at this point in the dying year. Soon enough the streetlights are flickering on, pools of warmer golden light, a safer companion to the cold light of the moon, rising above.

Some of the streetlights continue to flicker, never quite coming on.

The parents with children avoid those streets. The older children, the ones allowed to walk together without adult supervision, make an appearance in greater numbers now.

They do go down the streets with flickering lights, encouraging each other toward the lighted doorways and spookily welcoming decorations.

“Scared, me?” they ask each other brashly, and do not listen to the instincts that tell them to stay away from darker paths.

I do not stop them. That is not my purpose, and in any case, it is mostly safe.

The moon is thin this year, its light weak.

Darkness steals into the spaces between houses, thickening between the pools of lamplight, creeping up to fill the treetops. With true darkness, the children are not the only ones on the streets anymore. More figures, costumed and masked as is appropriate, join the children, following in their footsteps, accepting candy at doorsteps but never taking their eyes from those they follow.

I follow them, and they are forced to nod in acknowledgement. They follow the children, as is their nature, but they do nothing else.

Adults begin to return to the streets, costumed themselves now, heading for restaurants and parties and bars. Other figures join them and are complimented for their costumes. They smile realistic sharp smiles, and nod in thanks, and wait.

They too are forced to nod in acknowledgment as I pass by. They follow the adults, as is their nature, but they do nothing else.

For now.

If the adults notice anything amiss, they brush it off as a product of the atmosphere.

“Scared, me?” they ask each other jokingly, and do not ask why the atmosphere feels the way it does.

Hours pass, and still I patrol the streets. Parties wind down, and people make their way home. Those that know, or sense, that they are not alone hurry. Many hurry. Some move more slowly, unaware, or too inebriated, to realize they should be watching the time.

The seconds tick by. I can hear them in head, though the large clock on the main street counts only minutes and hours, silently.

Almost.

I hold my breath, and many others hold theirs (or not) with me.

The clock strikes midnight.

There is no chime, as there might have been in older times, but all know that it has come. Even the drunkest people feel a sudden chill, and the darkness deepens as the moon slips behind the trees, acknowledging that the time of its pale light is done.

There is a moment of stillness.

I smile.

Masks begin to slip, and other smiles grow sharper.

Those humans who have not made it safely home must now make their way through streets that are less friendly. Some will not make it unscathed. Some will not make it at all.

The darkest hours of All Hallows Eve are our time…and dawn is a long way away.

October 30

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Fictober, Prompt 30 – “I’m with you, you know.”

Warnings: general weirdness, brief mentions of stabbing and beheading, but nothing graphic. Fantasy of some sort.

I passed down an old road.

Once, I would have done so alone.

I wished that it were still so.

“I’m with you, you know,” he reminded me from behind. “I will always be here.”

“Not always,” I said. “I know of always, and you do not.”

“I have the means to follow you no matter where you go, or how you may try to escape.”

“For now,” I agreed. Already, long years had passed, and thus far his words had been true. I had given up attempting to escape or evade him. No matter what power or path I tried, by the next night, he always dogged my trail once more.

Acceptance had given me patience, and strength. I had not stopped looking for a way to sever the connection, just as he had not ceased to try and destroy me.

I was not indestructible, none of my kind were, but the means to end my existence would never be within his grasp. He had corrupted his own soul to gain the power for this…this leash. The power that he would need to destroy me had to be gained by other means, ways now closed to him.

Perhaps if I told him this (if he believed me), he would go away.

But I was cruel, and since he tormented me, I had chosen to silently torment him. At the end, he would know that all of this had been in vain, and despair. But only when I could be free of him.

He would not have believed me, in any case, though lies had never once passed my lips.

That was why all the others I had met, those who did have the power and will to destroy me, had never done so. We spoke, and they let me pass on, walking the old roads as I had always done.

I was older than humankind, and no friend to any. But that was not always the same as being an enemy, and my sustenance I could take in various ways. That this human did not understand that there were differences in my kind, just as in his own, was another mark against him.

This road, this was one of the oldest. I did not allow myself to hope that what awaited us at the end of it might allow me to be rid of him for good. I had had such hopes before and been disappointed.

But I would continue to walk this road, and the others, and he would follow me unwittingly, unlearning, uncaring, and long forsaken of the chance to have been something more than he was.

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October 29

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Fictober, Prompt 29 – “I’m doing this for you.”

Warnings: monster, creepiness, not much else. Horror, of sorts.

I reeled in another clump of lake weed, and pulled in a deep breath, cultivating patience. Fishing was not my favorite pastime, a feeling exaggerated by the fact that it wasn’t going well today.

“How much longer must we sit here?” the monster asked from the other side of the boat.

Frustration surged up despite my best efforts, and I spun around to face it, scowling.

“I’m doing this for you,” I pointed out, “because you desperately wanted panfish for some unexplainable reason, and even more inexplicably you wanted me to do the fishing. You are well aware that I’m bad at this.”

“The contract—” it began, scowling back.

“The contract,” I interrupted sharply, “states that we will provide you sustenance in the form of livestock, once every two weeks. Anything additional to or apart from that is on a voluntary basis only, and I’m fast running out of a desire to continue volunteering. If you still want panfish caught by me, then shut up. If you don’t, then tell me so we can both go do other things.”

Not that I knew what the monster did with its time when it wasn’t bothering someone in town, but at least it might stop bothering me.

It bared sharp teeth (the one thing about its form that it couldn’t hide or change) at me.

I bared my blunt, human teeth right back at it, snarling. “Well?”

The teeth vanished behind something that was dangerously close to a pout, and it turned away, apparently unwilling to call it quits.

If part of me was less disappointed about that than it should have been, I saw no need to acknowledge it.

Rebaiting my hook, I cast my line back out into the lake, and waited.

And waited.

The monster continued to…sulk? Its semi-furred back was to me. It had chosen a weird shape today, vaguely humanoid but with fur and other, almost cat-like features, though no cat had ever looked like that. It almost reminded me of that one musical with the weird cat costumes, now that I thought about it. Did the monster know about that? Had someone given it access to the internet? That was a truly terrifying notion.

“Why did you want me to catch your fish?” I asked to break the silence and my own increasingly weird train of thought.

Its head turned slightly until one gleaming eye was peering at me over its shoulder. “Because you smell the best.”

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October 28

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Fictober, Prompt 28 – “Enough! I heard enough.”

Warnings: bad language, implied past harassing behavior, implied violent death, monster, slightly ambiguous ending? Horror.

“You stupid bitch! You can’t tell me where to walk on a public—”

“I can when you’ve repeatedly been asked to stop harassing my friend and persist in doing it anyway.”

“This is harassment, you can’t just—”

I raised one extremely unimpressed eyebrow at him. “You’re the one spending your Friday nights walking around in a serial killer mask, getting your kicks by scaring random strangers. If one of us is in danger of harassing somebody, it’s not me.”

This launched him into another diatribe, with more insults liberally peppered throughout. I was tempted to cast my own aspersions on his character (well, more than I already had), parentage, and intellectual abilities, but restrained myself with effort.

A quick glance showed me that Sasha had snuck by while I was physically blocking him from following her, and she was now out of sight.

“Enough!” I cut him off. “I’ve heard enough. I can’t stop you from walking up and down a public street.  I get that it’s almost Halloween, and you’re not the only one in costume. Plenty of the bar goers even seem to appreciate the scare. But I can and will prevent you from scaring my friend, who has to walk by here for her job every night. She has repeatedly asked that you leave her, specifically, alone, and you have refused, which definitely moves you out of ‘sort of acceptable Halloween creepy’ and solidly into ‘actually creepy asshole.’ So, I will be here every night to walk with her and prevent you from being that creepy asshole as far as she is concerned. Capiche?”

He swore at me again, voice low enough to be muffled by the mask, and turned away.

I wished desperately that I could give him the ass-kicking he richly deserved. Halloween was big in our town, had been for almost a century, and he’d become an (unfortunate) fixture in the past couple years. If he kept his scares to the drunk bar patrons who were looking for that sort of thing, or for ‘fun’ selfies with a famous fictional serial killer, that would be fine.

But that wasn’t enough for our masked friend. I didn’t think he was a real danger to anyone, fake knife notwithstanding, but he was definitely the kind of asshole who enjoyed actually scaring people unwillingly, and that wasn’t cool.

He headed back into the dark alley that he enjoyed lurking in, with one more obvious glance and a raised middle finger at me.

Man, he really deserved that ass-kicking, but I kept my feet firmly planted on the sidewalk outside the alley. He’d not raised a hand or made any attempt to grab or harm me, even now when he’d been really angry, and I wasn’t going to be the one to escalate things.

Something else moved farther back in the alley.

Something big.

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October 27

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Fictober, Prompt 27 – “Can you wait for me?”

Warnings: monster, implied violent death, brief mention of blood. North woods horror.

I sighed as Matt threw his plate into the trash bag and started for the lake shore.

“Can you wait for me? We can go together if you just give me a minute to pack everything away,” I called after him.

“It’ll be dark soon, though!” he protested, turning to face me but still walking backwards towards the kayaks. “I want to watch the fish some more.”

“All right,” I told him, sighing again. “Just don’t go too far until I get there, okay?”

“Okay!” he agreed, off again immediately.

As I turned back to dinner clean-up, I realized that his life jacket was still sitting next to mine on the spare picnic table.

“Matt!” I called, “come get your li—”

He wasn’t there. The kayaks sat where they had been since we’d come back earlier in the afternoon, untouched.

“Matt?” I called again, uneasy. “Come back and grab your life jacket before you go.”

No answer.

Unease growing, I put down the pot and started after him. He’d probably just gone into the woods to chase after some interesting plant he’d caught sight of, but usually he yelled for me when he found something exciting.

As I crossed the campsite, peering into the woods on either side, there was no sign of him. There had been no sound either, of someone moving through the leaves and underbrush. I increased my pace, hurrying all the way down to the lake shore, but he wasn’t there either. The kayaks were untouched, the paddles next to them.

Really worried now, I turned back. “MA—!”

He was standing behind me, watching me.

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