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Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
In

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Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

crabrock posted:


wtf?! this orb seems to change shape at whim! what a strange orb!

Things I Learned During My Apprenticeship

747 words

#1: Do not touch the orb unless you understand it. Touching the orb is a good way to find your fingers in Moscow, your toes in a horrifically moist part of Venice, and your left buttock on top of the eighty-five mile marker on a highway in Arizona.

#1a. At least understand how to put your body together across folded space without the help of Master Fineas, who apparently can't count to ten and may leave a toe unaccounted for.

#1b. When you understand the orb well enough, you must destroy it and forge it anew with your own hands and mind. If you survive, your apprenticeship is over.

#1c. The orb Master Fineas forged for me contains within it an exploding sun. 

#2. Space isn't real. Which is to say that there isn't any kind of empty three-dimensional manifold in which objects are placed. Rather, position is a property of matter, or rather a series of properties of matter that can, with the proper spell, be manipulated.

#2a. This is how you can have a toe in a dank puddle of something foul in another city and still pump blood in and nerve sensations out.

#2b. This is also how you can, to pick an example completely at random, walk directly from Master Fineas' study into the vault beneath the Sorceress Xaou Li's tower.

#3. Xaou Li was Master Fineas's ex. The breakup was rather heated. It was not the first time they had ended their affair.

#3a. Xaou Li is a Sorceress of temperature and energy.

#3b. 'Teleport into my existing vault and take a box of my old things back with you without her noticing' is Master Fineas' idea of a midterm exam.

#3c. Two items out of three is, just barely, a passing grade.

#4. Wizards and Sorceresses are, without exception, greedy lovers and are also, with a few exceptions, bad lays.

#4a. Xaou Li was no exception to the first but was to the second. By her report Master Fineas is an exception to neither.

#4b. I'm fairly certain none of what happened was about me.

#4c. I'm not the first of Master Fineas' apprentices she has seduced.

#4d. Apprentices are not all that young: to qualify one needs multiple graduate degrees with very little overlap. They are fairly young compared to wizards of the age to take one on.

#4e. You know what helps you last longer even better than baseball statistics? Try focusing a little attention on your specially displaced slightly cold and damp right middle toe.

#4f. Master Fineas has, at times, attempted to compensate for lack of skill by enlarging his entire body and trusting to proportionality. Xaou Li found this amusing. 

#5. Size, as it turns out, doesn't matter.

#5a. Master Fineas never taught me that aspect of the orb, of how to use it to rescale objects. 

#5b. The square-cube law is for chumps. Because mass is also fake. It's all just distortions in space-time. If you can do that, you can make your giant insects the right mass to breathe and fly, make your giant dogs able to stand on their own feet, make your molecule-scale or galaxy-scale lab mice able to do whatever you need them to do, within reason.

#5c. If you try to go to quantum scale or bigger-than-the-observable universe scale you'll just end up tripping balls and then have a horrible hangover for a week.

#5d. Time is real. You can't mess with it, other than in boring special relativity ways, at least not with this orb.

#6. There's a trick to breaking the orb and surviving.

#6a. If the orb is shrinking at the same rate that the sun is exploding when it shatters then the nova will be perfectly balanced for a few seconds, long enough for a glassforging cantrip. 

#6b. For that to work you also need to be shrinking at the same rate.

#6c. Novas explode at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Special relativity comes into play here and those few seconds are stretched out to several months in the rest of the universe.

#7. A lot can change while you're cracking and repairing your orb. Your master might get back together with his ex. 

#7a. But he's not your master any more. 

#7b. And it's not his orb any more. 

#7c. Which means there isn't any blocking spell to stop you from bringing that damned toe back onto your foot where it belongs.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
In

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
Prompt

(Copying the Devil I guess.)


All Time Travel Stories Are About Regret

950 words

The first time I met my future self I didn't recognize him. I was twelve, wandering lost in the woods between my grandparents' house and the cemetery, and he, the other me, was much older, looked sort of like my dad, or one of my uncles, but not like me at all. But he knew things.

He gave me the big cryptic advice, the things that all made perfect sense later. Not to join the military. Not to move to New York, or New Orleans. "I didn't," he said, "Any of that. But you won't quite be me." And he was already starting to fade. "But most of all, be bolder. Act without overthinking. The way to do it is to do it." And then he was gone.

I barely listened to what he said at all. I might not have remembered it, not for another two decades, when the reasons to avoid those places became clear. Except that that wasn't the only time.

The second time I met my future self, met a future self, I was older, between high school and college. And it was a different woods, a national park, me separated from a group of friends, out rappelling. I couldn't do it, couldn't  let go and start falling down the cliff. I wandered off and the sky opened up, raining grey sheets in front of the brown trees and green leaves. I tried to find the group but couldn't. Then the storm passed and there I was. He looked a lot more like me.

He had more actionable advice, like what major I would have just ended up dropping, when my wisdom teeth are due to come in and wreck their neighbors,that I should make sure to visit a dentist before it comes to that. Solid stuff. No lottery numbers though. "Wouldn't work. My being here changes things. Little things like which ball comes out of the tumbler. And big things, like which big dumb war gets started. But the shape stays the same. The butterfly wings may move one hurricane, but next week or next year there'll be another."

He was fading, but slower than before. I could hear distant noises up the trail, I was about to be found again. "Oh, one more thing. Darren. He loves you, you know."

I didn't. I didn't even know he was gay, although it wasn't a shock. "Wait, what?"

"Not like some huge romantic thing, just a tragic crush."

"But I'm not, I mean, you're not, are you?" I said.

"No."

I didn't really know what to do with that, as my future self faded, as my friends found me, wet and still embarrassed that I didn't go down the wire. At least I wasn't the only one who didn't make it, didn't have to walk down  the long trail alone. After that cloudburst nobody else was going that day. I did the things, got those rocks out of my mouth and didn't was a year on engineering courses I wouldn't be following up with. I didn't know what to do with the Darren stuff except be a better friend.

The last time I met my future self wasn't in a forest. It was in a library, in the lower stacks that seemed endless, especially as distracted as I was, forgetting just which bound academic journal year I needed every time I looked away from the scrap of paper with their Library of Congress letter. I had just met Amber a few weeks ago and was about to tell her how I felt. I knew she felt the same, knew it.

The lights flickered, and there he was. Much older. Sour. "You have to leave her."

"Like hell", I said. I hadn't noticed the cane until it was coming at my head. He didn't hit very hard, just enough to smart a little.

"Idiot," he said. "Do you think I would be here if I didn't mean it?"

"What happens?"

"She leaves you for another man. One of your best friends, although you haven't met him yet."

"You think you can lie to me?" I said.

"No," he said, sighing, leaning against the stack. "I guess not." He took a deep breath. "She died. Ten years from now, and I could barely take it. Cancer."

"Why not come to me later, whenever we can go to the doctor and catch it early?"

"You think we didn't? I had ten different encounters with my future selves, trying one thing after another to fix it. Nothing worked. And then another twenty later, when-"

I didn't want to know, but I had to. "When what?"

"Our son," he said. "Twenty times, and nothing we can do gets him past sixteen. He-"

"No," I said.

"So I went here rather than trying twenty-one," he said. "You have to end it, before-"

"How do we do it?"

"Don't call her tomorrow," he said. I can be an idiot even however many years on.

"Not that," I said. "How do we travel back in time."

"It just happens," he said. "When we want it enough. Knowing that we're going to fade away. Speaking of which," he said, looking at an increasingly transparent hand. "It hurts. None of the others ever told me how much fading hurts."

I'm going to call Amber tomorrow. And I'm going to ride it all out, ten years or anything more the butterflies give me. And do what I can afterward. And I don't think I'll ever see myself again. That was what the first me I met wanted, I think. For us to stop living in an endless timeloop of regret.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
In.

Rival vinylmancers compete without rules or mercy over the rarest albums across the thirft stores of Chicago and the dreadful powers intact first pressings can unleash.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.

Azza Bamboo posted:

Prompt idea: It's the 1950s and fairies/pixies (tiny people with gossamer wings) are stealing the tubes from electric radios for some reason.

Mine now.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
Prompt idea: It's the 1950s and fairies/pixies (tiny people with gossamer wings) are stealing the tubes from electric radios for some reason.


What the Poor Man Has, What the Rich Man Needs

927 words

Atom Ace was fighting the Flaming Skull over the South Pacific Saturday, and he needed all the help he could get. But it was looking like me and grandpa wouldn't be able to be there. The radio was on the blink again, and even if we could afford to take it in for repairs they'd take at least a week. Too late for Saturday.

"No problem," said Alex. He was sweet and almost cute in his way. Smart, short, glasses with dark rims that matched his hair. Used to have a crush on me but these days we're friends and he's mooning over Cindy Simkins. He lived across the street and he knew about electronics. "I can take a look this morning, get any parts I need after school, and have it back together this evening." So that was what we did. Alex unscrewed the cover and took one look at it. "Now that's strange."

"What's strange," I said.

"Take a look." I was already leaning over his shoulder. "The tubes are all gone."

"Gone?" I said.

He pointed in the radio. "See here, Nora. See these little sockets? There's supposed to be vacuum tubes in there."

"But there's not," I said.

"Did someone else try to fix it?" asked Alex. Me and Grandpa asked around the house but nobody said they'd done anything. 

"Should be easy enough to fix," said Grandpa. He handed Alex some money for the parts and we both went on to school.

And it was easy. He put the new tubes in and the radio started working again, just in time for Mom's detective show.

Except it was back on the blink in the morning. We opened it up again, Grandpa and I, and the tubes were gone again.

Grandpa sent Alex out for another set of tubes, and we decided the only thing for it was to keep a watch, and guard the radio all night. I hadn't stayed up all night before. Not even for Santa. But we did it. And deep in the night, we both fell asleep for just a second, but woke up to the scraping sound of turning screws.

I bet you've never seen fairies unscrewing screws. It was funny, really. Two of them, like skinny hummingbirds, holding the screwdriver from opposite ends and flying around in tight circles until it comes loose, which is also when they get too dizzy to fly straight and drop the screwdriver. It's a wonder we slept through it the first time.

They had the last one off and a third one lifted the case. "Hey!" said Grandpa. "That's not yours!"

"Isn't it, though," said one of them, the one wearing a little hat. The leader, I guess. "The laws of our land have never been other than catch as catch can."

They grabbed the tubes and flew, and we followed, even when they reached a swirling flower-rimmed portal not much larger than them. I reached my hand in and felt it pulling. Grandpa grabbed my other hand, and we both somehow squeezed through and found ourselves on the other side of the sky.

We made our case in their courts, where we found that the thief had accurately described the law. We lost, and found that we also had no right to passage home, that we were stuck there, forever, lest we find some way home.

Grandpa knew the rules. He told me to eat nothing given to me, to not accept any gift without something to give in return. But day followed day and I got so hungry I had no choice, and the Tart that the Fairwater Lad offered smelled so delicious. I snuck away from Grandpa and ate it, ate a dozen, and I did not find him again for some time.

The Fairwater Lad had me tell him stories, stories I stole from the radio, stories of the Atom Ace and his copilot Horatio. He laughed at each one, even at the sad or scary bits, but I got tired and bargained for my freedom. 

I had to offer my firstborn child. "Ha," I said, after he agreed to see me home. "I'll never have any child, and you'll come empty on the bargain."

He smirked. "Should you die childless your firstborn will be naught, and naughts will e'er outcross what things with money can be bought."

Of course, it didn't work out that way, but that another story, a story that ends with me negotiating with a Queen of Fairy, my glass dagger with its shadow-sharp blade pressed tight to her ivory throat.

Grandpa had found his own passage, gambling day after day, building up winnings. From that day onward he aged in reverse. I helped him with the makeup when he started to need it, then helped him make up the story of my long lost Uncle Jake when that stopped working. One of these days he's going to start being a kid again, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Saturday came around and Alex had a fresh set of tubes bless him. So we listened to Atom Ace defeat the Flaming Skull and his dead-manned bombers, downing enough to earn another ace, although Horatio quibbled that kills might not count when the enemy pilot's were already dead. And in the height of battle we decode the messages, that helped him fight as they sold soap and sweets. Now maybe that didn't really make a difference to Atom Ace, but maybe it did. We'd seen stranger things just this week.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
In.

Marvels.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
F57.2. Person's tongue as path to sky.

Ad Astra Per Linguam

800 words

Space travel is easy. All you have to do is say the name of your destination planet and you're on your way. That's the real name, mind. Not a vulgar name borrowed from some dead god. The real name, which is generally about twenty syllables most of which aren't sounds used in any living languages. Still, loads easier than messing with propellants and tin cans and orbital mechanics.

The other thing about space travel is that it can hurt. A lot. You're flashing through a series of points between the worlds most of which are full of hard vacuum and cosmic rays. Ideally you want a spaceship, or at least full scuba gear. But when you need to get off world while being chased by a dozen of Emperor Mortoi's elite guards across the Sebrian Bridge, feeling electraspike needles whizzing past your head, you can count yourself lucky if you manage to pull your goggles down from your forehead. That's where I was, trilling out the last few letters of the real name of Astarte wearing a formal dinner suit and jacket, torn at the knees and ripped across the chest. That and a leather engineer's hat. Way too much exposed skin. 

The good news is that the long term risk of melanoma is way lower than you might think. The bad news is that that's because the layers of skin that are getting a killer sunburn are also being frozen and bursting apart from vacuum exposure. Did I mention that it hurt? It does. A lot. The killer sunburn, lungs that feel like you've been in a plague ward, ears deaf and ringing for hours. At least I had the goggles. The last thing you want to throw on there is blind eyes bleeding down your face. Especially here.

Astarte is one of the old worlds. Just like the first traveller's thought Baal, the place I just came from must be Mars, what with the red deserts and canals and the ancient decadent empire, Asante got mistaken for Venus at first. Jungle so thick there's no space to stand carpeting the surface. Predators everywhere. And up three miles above the canopies where the air is just the right amount of thick and muggy, you have the real planet. Airships, floating cities and fortresses. Even guys in wingsuits everywhere.

When you reach your destination you end up on a solid surface. There are markings that can be put onto a floor that will attract space travellers so long as it's open to the sky.. On Baal they put them on customs houses. On Horus they're in ancient temples, some of them days of cold travel from the nearest settlement. On Astarte nearly ever capital ship has them on their deck.

I came down on the deck of the Arclight Avenger, still at a full run and not more than a dozen yards from the edge. This is a sublevital class of airship: the balloons go on the bottom. A big flat deck on top for launching wingsuit marines and flittlerships. So most of the edge has little or no safety railing. You've got to be aware of this kind of thing, be ready to stop running or turn the second you land. I turned, right into a couple of the ship's crew.

Getting captured is an occupational hazard of space travel. The good news is that you're a valuable asset and they're unlikely to harm you, excepting a few hard cases who refuse to believe that you don't know a particular world's name. The bad news is that if they don't trust you they'll watch you, twenty-four seven or local equivalent. No names are short enough that you could ever say one in less time than your handler can make you shut up, so that works. But it means you have strange goons watching you sleep and dress. Which was where I was. The Baalian court dress was space-damaged and didn't even make useful rags. I had to swap it for a Arc Corporation rankless uniform while a pair of burly airmen watched ever minute. Professional, at least. Kept their eyes on my mouth.

After that it was dinner with the captain. I'm looking forward to it. I have a bonding agreement with a few Astartean corporations. Not Arc, and certainly not Heavenspear, but a few. One of them has got to be on working terms with Arc, and they can make arrangements over the wireless once they get near an open tower. Get my privacy back, get some paying work. Get closer to affording a Horan mnemologist.

See, after my first trip I forgot the name of Earth. I knew it, but it won't come out anymore. It's always right there, on the tip.of my tongue.

Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
In with "I used to be a detective, with my hat and my desk, until the war."

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Thranguy
Apr 21, 2010


Deceitful and black-hearted, perhaps we are. But we would never go against the Code. Well, perhaps for good reasons. But mostly never.
Life Goes On

902 words

I used to be a detective, with my hat and my desk, until the war. Loved every cold and lonely minute of it. Missing persons, divorce cases, background checks, mostly. Same deal: they gave me a name and not much more. Someone who seems simple, normal, even boring. I looked closer. Dig enough and nobody is simple, nobody is normal, nobody is boring. I used to think there was a bias going on here, that the normal ones just don't inspire other people to hire detectives. The war taught me better.

These days, no hat, no desk, no detective. I can't do the soul of the work any more, can't wear out shoe leather. I help, a little, but Romey's the detective. I'm just the voice in his ear. Work's changed, too. The old jobs still happen, sure. But most of the time we're looking into the recent past instead. Where there was war there were war criminals. Trust me, I know.

"Call it," shouted Perry, looking back at me, away from his sights. The gun went on doing its work away from his gaze, spewing bullets in a slow arc. Suppressing fire. I had the phone. The old mall was practically a fortress. The enemy wouldn't be dislodged, not without artillery. It was a solid target. Signals marked it as a drone control center. I made the call.

I made the call. I was a soldier, with my helmet and hardened phone. Perry kept up the suppressive fire as the missiles flew. When the soldiers streamed out they weren't coming out hands up. Guns up, trying to shoot. Perry and the other gunners kept shooting.

I made the call. The airstrike turned the old dead mall to rubble. We didn't learn until the next day that it was kids, teenagers running the drones on laptops set up in the old Hot Topic.

There's people who want to say they thought they were playing a game. That would be nice. Put it all on some villain officer old enough to know better. But I've seen the interviews. They were kids, not idiots. They knew exactly what they were burning down or blowing up, who they were shooting. We all taught them to hate early. So yeah, plenty of war crimes to go around.

Romey was working one of those cases. Old one. From before the open part of the war. Extreme blackmail job. Someone found a good family man and put on the pressure. Make a credible threat. Laugh when he offers money. Give him the mission: go to this place and start killing. Don't get taken alive. Let the world wonder what your motive was forever. Next to impossible to prove. Wasn't even until after the war, after Citizen D's confession that people ever realized it was a thing that happened.

Romey did the walking and the talking. He had his hat. He had his desk and car and license and taser and notebook. He was a detective. I was the voice in his ear. No hat. No desk. No head. No rear end.

The war was almost over when it happened. House to house action in Jacksonville. Rounding up ringleaders and pockets of resistance. Our snipers had just taken our three drones incoming to our position, but they were just a distraction. Their own guys with the long guns fired at the same time, and one of those high caliber bullets had my name on it.

The paperwork says 'exploded heart.' Almost a miracle the field medic kept my brain warm and wet long enough for the upload to take. I'd raise a glass to that guy any day, except, well.

I'm the voice in Romey's ear. I'm good at that. During the war the web got worse. Disinfobots trenched in everywhere. Ask any question and you'll find convincing lies. The living don't have the time to filter anything and other bots are helpless: the disinfobots evolved on fooling them. You want to find anything more sensitive than restaurant hours you need an upload. You need a voice in your ear.

My therapist tells me I shouldn't have used that word. 'The living.' That it implies that I'm not. I tell her I'll stop once they let us vote again.

So I dug. Some people say nothing ever gets really deleted anymore. They're not right, but they're not entirely wrong. Some things go away forever, especially when someone really wants them to, and when your puppeteering some poor soul into mass murder you really want to cover those tracks. But it's easy to make mistakes. And this guy, who wasn't even political, wasn't even fighting the coming war, he made a mistake or two.

Romey took it all in. The guy was dead, part of the statistics. It was a revenge thing, hiding one victim in a pile of bodies. The client was somewhere in the middle of that pile. There wasn't anyone to put away. Still, the client was satisfied. Sometimes when they think they're paying to win a lawsuit or get even or find a long lost someone, what they're really getting for their money is closure.

At the end of the day, I went into idle mode, dollar-a-night discount digital dreams to keep my fake neurons from seizing up. At the end of the day Romey took off his hat, got up from his desk, and went home.

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