"My, this is a fascinating place," Lavine said, looking around the client's selected base. "Late eighteenth century?"

"Yup! My grandmother left it to me in her will," the client beamed with pride.

She nodded in understanding, looking at the mosaic laid across the ceiling, right at the entrance. "And you want to lead your supervillain regime from here."

"To honor her memory, yes."

Lavine continued her self-guided tour through the estate, making hemming and hawing noises as she looked at everything.

Wren and the client followed behind her, nearly bumping into her as she froze, looking at a patch of wall where a tapestry was hung.

She considered it. "You want style. Something that just screams aristocracy. What do you think about putting a stained glass window here featuring you?"

"Oh, wow, that'd be so cool!" the client had stars in her eyes. Over her shoulder, Wren gave Lavine a scolding look.

"Could you bring me your moodboard again?" Lavine asked, successfully distracting the girl for long enough to sidle up next to Wren and roll her eyes, "What do you want, Supply Boy?"

"I verify your statements with a third-party architect, and he seems to think that hollowing out that particular column will do structural damage likely to take down half the house in the next five years," he said, pushing his sunglasses up his nose. His gold butterfly earcuff caught the light.

Lavine scoffed. "You don't trust your coworkers?"

"No," Wren told her bluntly.

"Well, if you must know, that's the plan. We have a policy that if we find that our clients are wilfully damaging important structures, we can relieve them of it, right? Consider this a double bonus for us."

Wren had to give her that. But also...

"We don't have a policy like that."

"Get on that, will you, Supply Boy?" Lavine ruffled his hair. "Final terms and agreements haven't been signed yet, so there's time to slip it in. Then we can get an extra slice of the pie each before the scraps are left for the others."

Excerpt from my in-progress novella, Frayed Seams.

Follow the young aro transfem protagonist on an egg-cracking journey, and help support my work on Patreon, where the entire novella is currently available for all tiers.

The sun was burning the back of my neck.

There was a tree a few feet to the left, with a cool shade below it, yet I could not force my feet to move out of the relentless heat. All of me felt like a butterfly, pinned down and waiting for my organs to be extracted.

It was my first experience with my curse.

A careless order by a similarly unaware cousin, as we were playing some game out on the courtyard. It wasn't his fault. I was just too good at tag, and he didn't realize the implications of telling me to Stop.

My parents found me near evening.

I was six when someone told me that my powers came with downsides. That no one could be allowed to move faster than light. Not without precautions.

I don't know why I'm thinking about this now. The sun beating down on my neck must be bringing back memories.

A sword came at my face, my hand jerked up to block it with my own. The blades clashed, nearly turning into another standoff.

I gave up on that, dropping the weapon on the ground. While my opponent scrambled, I put on a burst of speed, darting behind him and reaching my index finger right over his pulse point, all before he could blink.

When the burst ended, and everything shifted back to a normal speed, I proclaimed: "Dead."

Mitch's face twisted into a grimace and he dropped his own sword on the ground, stone grinding against stone, "Dammit. You cheated."

"It's pronounced resourceful."

His constructed weapons were already melting into the ground. Not fast enough; I nearly tripped over the malformed hunk they'd become.

"You should get better at covering your tracks," I said, hopping slightly to shake off my stubbed foot, "Can't have much of a quest if we get arrested for destruction of public property."

Mitch startled, "Wait, fuck, we're still doing that this year?"

It was the first year we were eligible for a quest. I'd really thought we were on the same page about this.

"Yeah. Obviously. Why wait?"

-----

Haaa I write original fiction too, you know?

I'm not still set on the names, and this excerpt is a little tightly packed to speed things along for the reader. But yeah, this is Puppet Knight, featuring my fear of my lack of control over my own life.