“Hey, Otto, I’ve been wondering…” you trail off, suddenly awkward about what’s been on your mind for the past week.
Otto turns his head to look at you, one eyebrow raised in question.
“It’s kind of about your actuators, but also kind of not? God, I’m saying this all wrong.” You pinched the bridge of your nose, trying to gather your thoughts into one, easy question.
Otto’s eyebrows furrow and you can practically see the gears turning in his head, trying to figure out where this was going.
“You know you can ask me anything, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions,” Otto says slowly. He finishes turning his body so one arm is propped on the back of the couch, head in hand as he waits for you to ask what’s on your mind. He folds his left leg on the couch as he leans closer to you.
You decide that just getting it out there quickly will make it less embarrassing. “If you have sex do you just tell the actuators to chill in the background for a while or do you incorporate them in?” you ask all in one go.
Otto gets a curious expression on his face—half surprise, half something else. His lips part into a small o as he blows out a breath, turning into a devious smirk at the end. You bite the inside of your lip as you wait for him to respond. He has to know what that look does to you by now, right?
“Hypothetically speaking,” Otto prolongs the moment a beat longer, licking his lips without breaking eye contact with you, “I would probably use them to prop me up in the best position so I don’t lose feeling in my arms or legs when I go down on you.”
You feel your cheeks burn but you don’t back away from the conversation. You like it when Otto gets bold. You mirror his body language, facing him fully, leg propped up on the couch and brushing his own.
“Just hypothetically?” you’re not much shorter than Otto when you’re both sitting down. You roll forward, leaning your weight on your leg so your faces are level.
“Well I haven’t been exactly swimming in sexual partners these last few years,” he says.
You smirk and put one hand on his thigh. “Well I’m right here when you’re ready to dive in.”
Otto gives a breathy laugh low in his throat. He leans in as you do and kisses you. You raise your free hand to wrap loosely around the back of his neck as you deepen the kiss. Otto moans as he wraps an arm around your waist to push your bodies closer.
Heat pools low in your stomach as he crushes you to him.
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In the margins
I scream
        help me
        help me
          help me
But a perforated edge conceals
the knowledge of my pleas
and I turn my paper in
smiling
sighing
by design, a liar
With an A on my paper
and a broken mind
between blue lines
That reveal no flaw
       in its writer.
Corsica gives her sister a ride to school every morning. Her much younger sister. The baby, Ant. The surprise. When they first learned that their mother was pregnant again, Ajax (visiting home) had kicked Prospero (about to graduate) under the table and asked if their mother was losing her edge in tactics, not seeing that coming. Prospero had choked on his protein shake and Ulysses had tried to smother his own laughter behind his hand, and Corsica had really just been staring open-mouthed at her parents as they made the announcement.
It’s a routine, something the Jones’ are good at. Wake up at 4:30 AM, begin the workout routine, shower, eat breakfast, do some light sparring—verbal or physical, depends on the day—go to work. Corsica still lives at the compound because it’s easiest while she works at the Academy. She did her time under the Council of Chosen, and now she teaches some next generations of adventurers. Fighters.
Breaking the routine is immediately noticeable followed by thorough investigation. Antiope usually found an alternate way home from her classes, knowing Corsica often had meetings or staff duties to attend to after school. Her baby sister was often more reserved in the evenings than the rest of her siblings had been. Well, she was a brat for sure, but she could get away with it in the evenings more. Sometimes Corsica got home from work and didn’t see Ant til the next morning.
Ant doesn’t come down one morning.
Ant doesn’t come down at 4:30. Or 4:45. Or 4:50. Corsica is biting her lip as she stretches, splitting her attention between the stairs and their father, who’s complaining about missing his workout buddy loudly, pointedly.
She volunteers to go drag Antiope out of bed. Might as well get this over with. Ant knows the routine by now, and knows she actually enjoys it some mornings, and doesn’t want her baby sister to get read the lecture from their mom about the importance of physical fitness again. Corsica knows it by heart. She could say it backwards, probably.
She punches up the stairs, making noise and overall being a horrible example of her style of fighting as she comes up to Ant’s room.
And finds it empty. Bed unmade but cold, unused. Her pajamas still thrown in the corner by the little rug in front of her desk. The mirror at the opposite end of the room reflects the same thing she’s seeing: empty, unoccupied space.
Corsica checks the other rooms, just to be sure. Ajax’s and Prospero’s and Ulysses’ old rooms, which are now mostly additional recreation/work space, or set up for their mother’s tactical puzzles.
Nothing. She heads back down, asks if Ant was spending the night elsewhere, if their parents had just forgotten.
Hector stops running on the treadmill and hops off, pulling a sweat towel from around his neck and dabbing at his face, reading the look in Corsica’s eyes. Athena purses her lips, thinking. She orders another quick, thorough search of the compound. They all return with nothing, no sign or notice of Antiope.
Corsica calls the police. The detective who meets her—a goblin woman—asks all sorts of questions. Corsica was the last of their family who was with her. Dropped her off at school, didn’t give her a ride home. Didn’t see her come home. At school—which school? Aguefort Adventuring Academy.
Corsica suddenly remembers the girl from her junior class. The half-orc, the girl who hasn’t returned to classes since she noticed her absence. It may mean nothing. But two fighter students, in the same year at Aguefort go missing? The detective voices the same thought that crosses Corsica’s mind. She promises to do everything she can to find Antiope. She leaves.
Corsica calls her brothers on the way to work that day, driving solo for the first time in three years. From whatever corner of Solace they’re in, they listen, they look. They try to gather any scrap of information that may be related to where Ant went and who is responsible.
For seventeen months they are unsuccessful.
In the sixteenth month Corsica is pulled into one of the “cameras” on the property of the school. It’s a palimpsest in disguise. She is captured and held and unable to leave. She is captured along with every other teacher in the school, it seems. All of the competent staff, anyway. The former adventurers, the ones who could do something if a threat arose.
When she’s released from the palimpsest she sprints to the noise, the flashing lights and thunderous roars coming from the gymnasium. She sees her baby sister Antiope, at least six inches taller than she remembered last, her clothes all stretched and too short for her limbs. She’s firing arrows and her aim is wonky and the bow seems too short for her reach, but her sister is alive and she pulls her crystal from her pocket and group calls her family to get to Aguefort right now and the Jones’ all find a way to Aguefort in the next hour. But Corsica hugs Antiope first, and apologizes, for her and for the rest of the family.
Antiope hugs her back but doesn’t talk much. The next morning she comes down earlier than routine and finds Corsica in her room, still getting ready, and asks to be dropped off at the mall later to get new clothes.
In the light of day she can really see all seventeen months stolen from her baby sister. How angled and unsure of her new height Antiope looks. How her spatial awareness is the most off it’s been since Ant was a kid. Since around the first time she got a growth spurt.
That morning she lends Antiope some of her own gear. It’s not a perfect fit, but it will work until they get something better.
Their parents offer to give her the option of summer school to make up on the training Antiope lost to being out of time, and she refuses. She sticks to the routine. Corsica starts offering rides home after school as well. Ant refuses, but her eyes are hiding something as she says no.
In the seventeen months Antiope was gone, their parent’s didn’t touch her room except to tidy it in anticipation of her return. To come back to something orderly would be a relief, surely. To come back to routine.
But Corsica did notice her parents act a little…different, in the time that Antiope was gone. A more noticeable version of empty-nest behavior than she’d seen from them before. Not that they didn’t care or weren’t looking, but they had no kids to currently raise. Their habits shifted accordingly.
And when Ant came back, they didn’t revert back to the old routine. They kept going as is and Ant had to adapt to the new way. Corsica saw something growing in her little sister, the baby, the brat, Ant, that she had only occasional glimpses of before.
When Ant’s temper flares and she gets into staring matches with their mother over breakfast, when she says things that are wild and disrespectful and unimaginable, she’s sweating just imagining saying that to their mother, she sees that her baby sister isn’t the same girl they lost a couple years ago. She is, age wise, nineteen and going into her senior year. She will be twenty by the end of it. She is a teenager who lost seventeen months of life in suspended animation, body growing without her mind present. She is someone completely new and relentlessly familiar wrapped into one.
Corsica gives her a ride to school. She gives her advice. But she doesn’t break routine.
Penny Luckstone was the oldest of eighteen siblings when she was put into a palimpsest.
Penny Luckstone is the oldest of twenty siblings when she is released.
Penny Luckstone disturbs the rhythm of the morning flow these days, when she tries to help her parents with everything in the morning. The next oldest siblings, two freshman at Mumple, have taken her place in the morning routine and it's a large adjustment to bring her back in. To make things work right again.
Penny Luckstone knows how to care for her siblings but her siblings have learned how to do it themselves in the time she's been away. The next four oldest stepping up more, keeping all of them grouped up and together and helping their parents. Staying home and being good Mumple folk. Not adventuring or learning dangerous talents or disappearing and making their mom go even grayer than eighteen-nineteen-twenty--kids has done for her already.
(It was nineteen kids again, with the baby born and Penny missing. It averaged out. After she returns and stumbles trying to help her dad make sandwiches and is shooed out of the kitchen she wonders if she'd stayed captured and missing if it would have been one burden lighter for her parents--she's eighteen years old but she didn't live a year of that for herself. She's costing her parents more for still being home, for not going off into the world yet, for not being like the rest of their Mumple family and getting a steady job at the tavern with her mother or at the mall to talk like an NPC like her father. She wonders sometimes when she sneaks out the window to sit behind the Luckstone at midnight, if she would have saved them some grief by being a good rogue and disappearing forever.)
Penny Luckstone is nineteen and about to start her senior year at Aguefort Adventuring Academy. She has gelled back into the routine at her parent's house, mostly. She tries to talk more, and there's no time and no room for that. Her mom carves out a minute and a half to walk her to the corner, congratulates her, gives her an itemized list of things she knows about Penny, and Penny does feel her mother's overwhelming love for her. She does.
But she also sees the strain and the gray hairs and the arms pumping as they walk and she thinks of her nineteen siblings (the first time she hasn't been around to hear them talk names, was for the baby, Lorie. The first time she wasn't around to help. To be what they need.)
And she holds the letter for a secret society that promises to keep telling her she's top grade. And she thinks of her friends and their faces when she says she might leave them. And she thinks of her family and how well they flowed and how hard it was to get back into their rhythm. The Seven don't need a rogue. They won't even notice she's gone. They'll find an even better rhythm without her.
The choice isn't easier, but it does clear up as she goes to school.
All the way until the choice is taken away and someone else tries to break them up first.
Carl Cleaver is a professional adventurer. He is one of the best, from a family of the bests. When Katja wakes up she doesn’t call for her father, though. She calls for Cinnamon. The bond between horse and girl is the strongest in her life.
Katja went missing first. She wasn’t reported missing, however, until her fighter teacher, Corsica Jones, noticed her absent from class after four days and a weekend. Carl was off on an epic quest with his adventuring party, and Lockwood was attending to business outside of the residence for a few days. He didn’t like to leave the young miss alone in the residence, but it couldn’t be avoided. He kicked himself plenty for leaving to Bastion City and not knowing truly, which day Katja disappeared.
Lockwood was unable to get in touch with Carl Cleaver for thirteen months.
Katja was missing an additional eight months once Carl was reached. In that time Lockwood heard reports of one or two other girls from Aguefort go missing as well. No relation to each other. Nothing he could see, anyway. Lockwood dug together information and kept it in a folder to give to Carl when he returned. Surely he could sway his party to look for Katja with more luck than the police were having.
When all was said and done, Katja took her weapon to Kalvaxus alongside the other maidens, in the school gym at the prom she hadn’t gone to any of her years at Aguefort. She had been starting her junior year when she was taken, shy and not feeling the school dance scene in any previous year. Twirling her ax around and slashing and carving into the dragon that stole their time from them felt good, though. The most fun she’s ever had at a party.
Going home that night, the mansion was still empty. Carl was in another city in Solace, something-something his adventuring party. Katja called him as soon as she was home, and he cried and said he’s glad she’s safe, he’ll be home soon as he can.
Katja spent the night in the stables with Cinnamon. The farrier and Lockwood stayed with her, both pretending to be on business. She didn’t say anything to them about it, and they didn’t say anything much either, but their presence brought a little more warmth to the stables as she brushed out Cinnamon and nuzzled into her horse’s neck and cried.
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Sam Nightingale went missing near the end of the school year, amidst all the other insane things happening. The school itself barely blinked an eye, the students too busy surviving classes and dodging corn monsters. Her best friend Penelope was upset, but tight-lipped about it. Rebecca and Gideon were concerned, but Gideon had work to occupy him and Rebecca had money to hire a private investigator when it was clear the police had no leads on finding her girl. She comforted Penelope and cried her own tears where none could see her, hoping Sam would be found and brought home soon.
When Sam returned she was there when Principal Aguefort called the Everpetals down to the gym to collect their dead child, a key figure in the plot to kidnap the maidens to fulfill a prophecy to destroy everything. She watched a coldness come across Gideon's face that never truly left, after. Watched Mrs. Everpetal break into hysterics at the sight of her little 'lucky Penny' dead on the floor of the gym. Scorch marks on her dress and slashes and tears ruining both the gown and the girl.
Sam watched from the sidelines, the adrenaline from sharing the moment with the other maidens of re-killing Kalvaxus, getting their own revenge on the one responsible for their capture faded. Disappeared. She was angry, definitely. But she couldn't tear her eyes away from Penelope's body. Penelope Everpetal, her best friend, her first crush, the one person she trusted with all of her shit to the point of living at her house.
After-prom wasn't a party like she'd been to the last couple years at Aguefort. It was a horrible car ride to the Everpetal's where Mrs. Everpetal hugged her in the entrance hall, sobbing into her gross few-months-old outfit, now featuring dragon blood as well, and saying things unintelligible to Sam.
Later that week she got a call from her mother, from the resident Mrs. Nightingale, about how to angle her rescue and experience for a comeback no one will ever forget. Sam cracked her crystal mid-monologue and now all of her saved pictures of her and Penelope had a spiderwebbing cracks running through them. She couldn't bring herself to delete them.
