I did this little wheel-based poll activity, and the name it generated for me was Thief of Kings. As a YA novel. I think I might want to write it now??? Though it wouldn’t end up YA I don’t think??
[FMC] is a faerie. She is part of the Court of Rot, a group of fae who have sideways allegiance to the Unseelie Court of Autumn. They are however, considered Seelie fae, and answer to Titania last. Human concerns should be far below her.
Of course, there is one human concern. She was never placed as a changeling. That was the one part of interacting with humans that always did seem trite. The fun part was the drama. The power struggles and corruption. The rot that wound its way through gilt castles and private forests.
If she must steal a human to be raised in the Court, let it be one of them whose life she steals. See how the humans fare if she can trick them long enough to be crowned their King.
The notion of being a changeling as a coming-of-age ritual, fun stuff about what faux pas can and can’t be overlooked by people of lower social station, heirs as property of the state rather than real children, biting off more than you can chew…
I am unlikely to actually write this, but thank you nonetheless to @fintan-pyren for the inspiration, and to @macabremoons for leaving me with changelings on the brain. Though I might write it once I’ve got some other works under my belt.
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Inspired by misreading a post by @faytelumos and similar to idea left on @twibunny by @big-idiot-wolf-boys.
!Witch Angela has a plan to get her friend Bella back. It’s taken longer than expected; earning the grades to make it into law school isn’t exactly conducive to free time, but after just over five years since Bella died she’s pretty sure she’s got the spell down.
The only issue is that the “totally random” test subject she picks off a list of those who died without next of kin during the Spanish Flu is Edward Masen.
Promise you’ll read it and I tell you what happens next as Angela pulls Edward’s human soul from his body to try to resurrect him. Or you can look under the cut and try to interpret the handwriting of my planning document.
Thelyne is one of the founders of Nadalos that I am trying to write about this month. She's got a short story in my drafts. Thanks to @illarian-rambling and @demeter1111 for the inspiration I had no concept of what to call her up til now.
I was rewatching the Trope Talk on Ancient Superweapons, as one does, and I had a long thought.
Red mentions that the version of the trope where the weapon is actually a villain that was sealed away and has now been released is more boring than the more technological options, because you just have to defeat the villain. That if the villain had to be sealed away and nothing else would have worked, then there's no chance of reasoning with them or anything.
This proves that deep down people don't really think of carceral justice as being reformative in any way. Of course if you lose your freedom for doing a thing and then you get out you're not going to stop doing the thing you might just be additionally angry at whoever removed your freedom.
You might say this is a poor comparison, because of the social compact. That because the justice system has assumed authority and that people in the society buy into the rest of the society thus inherently acquiescing to the system, they would be more likely to treat their punishment in the way it was meant to be received, as a warning not to do the thing again.
This could just as easily apply to the ancient villain. Who's to say their being sealed wasn't an act of justice. Often times their opposition are kings, even kings they had previously sworn loyalty to. Or their sealing is divinely facilitated, if the threat is beyond the scope of mortal men, and what greater social compact is there than the one with a provably exitant God?
You might alternatively say the comparison fails because the sealing wasn't meant to be a punishment, it was meant to be preventing the villain from doing harm. This would be somewhat hard to distinguish from the perspective of the villain, especially if the punishment is framed as "we're only dealing them away because they can't be killed", so really, seems like it could just as easily be a punishment as anything else.
So both sealing a villainous superweapon until the prison breaks and carceral justice end up serving the same purpose, and yet we never expect villains to reform inside. They must simply be stopped again.
Oddly, the one counterexample I can think of to this is Lucifer. There are versions of the Devil that have taken their time in Hell as an opportunity to reflect, and actually don't feel strongly that they need to take revenge on humanity anymore, and will no longer repeat the behavior that got them punished in the first place. Admittedly, these versions of Lucifer are often more sympathetic to begin with, but regardless. I think it's a very interesting concept.
"Oh great Master Dracula, on this last full moon of the year we have sacrificed the thousandth virgin for the sake of your return that you may rule in dominion over this miserable human race"
Dracula, who's really had a lot of time to reflect on his actions and their consequences in the thousand or so years he's been dead:
"Oh no. Why would you do that? I don't need to rule the world, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to be sacrificed for my return. I will require you to get me a list of all your victims families so we can begin the process of restorative justice, as much as that may be a futile effort. Honestly, you disappoint me"
"Maybe crying had been invented somehow, on the day they Fell"
-@gingiekittycat, We Can't Keep Meeting Like This
It wasn't the day the pain began. It was the day the pain learned to escape, to be made free, to go into the world and find that even though it was never meant to be like this it was still, somehow, somewhere, wanted.
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Clive is the best YouTube parrot in the world. The videos his human makes usually consist of one of a few tricks he has been taught; saying hi, identifying an object, saying whether it is hard or soft. It is very easy, and he gets treats afterwards. Then it stops, his human is staring rapt at a television producing sounds Clive has heard before but doesn't really understand. He tries repeating some of them, new ones, which his human normally appreciates.
"Been multiple UFO sightings"
No response from the human. He doesn't even seem to have noticed.
"Learned the language from the birdsong included in the Voyager"
"Hush, Clive"
Clive flies back to his perch in his own room to groom himself in irritation. He hears his human talk to himself back in the big room, but that's not so strange. What is strange is the devotion with which Clive is subsequently caught. A task the human usually reserves for when Clive is feeling ill, and so is weaker. But despite his healthy condition, he finds himself nodding off to sleep in his transport cage, outside world moving around him as it always does when all the lights go out like this.
When the lights turn back on, the world has changed. This is not strictly unexpected, the world always moves and changes when the lights are out. But this is not a shape it has taken before. They are in a wide open space, his cage placed on a table he knows "what is this made of?" equals "wood". He doesn't know what "what is this made of?" equals for the object next to his cage. he tests to see if it is close enough to peck at, which it turns out it is not. The object must be very big; it was hard to tell otherwise, because of how unfamiliar it was.
There were a lot of humans around, but not just them. The humans were mostly behind him, but there was something else in front of him. It didn't look like any of the creatures he had ever seen, nothing like any of the lights his human had ever taught him to identify. They were all looking at him though, because the humans clearly wanted them to.
"Say hi, Clive," his human instructs from too far away to see, and so it is quiet, and nervous, but Clive knows what to do.
"Hi!" he squacks.
Clive knows a lot of words, knows what to do when they are said, but his human is disappointed this time. He wants something else. Clive doesn't know what, but he cannot leave. He cries out in frustration. The strange creatures reply, in the universal language of birds, "all is clear, the predator is gone"
The humans are very excited by this. Eventually he realizes that they mean for him to speak with the strange new things, to tell them what the humans want them to know. It takes him several weeks of training, but he figures out how to start repeating what the humans are saying in Bird, and what the aliens are saying in human
Sometimes familiar words, words he has repeated over and over in response to familiar stimuli show up here, where nothing is normal. He realizes what they really mean, how useful those words can be outside of repeating them for a treat. They convey meaning. They are allowing him to tell the humans things they hadn't known before.
Clive really is the best YouTube parrot in the world
Inspired by my conversation earlier the day I initially posted this with @cyreneduvent
The world froze. It didn't, for me, get appreciably cooler. It felt like a chill wind, the kind that always sweeps through the leaves this time of year, and so I didn't pay it any mind, until something in my subconscious started screaming.
Even with the wind, the leaves on the ground were not moving. The roar of traffic in the distance was not perceptible, instead of it's usual blurred out bass under the rest of the sounds. When my next footstep landed, taking me the rest of the way off the road and onto the sidewalk, the gentle but cleanly audible tak of heel on concrete let me know that the traffic wasn't the only sound that was missing.
They all were.
I turned around to see the car that had been waiting for me to finish crossing still idle, edged eagerly over the stop line for an event that had already occurred. The driver was looking across the intersection, hands crossed on the wheel as if the car was already making the left turn their signal had been indicating they planned until moments ago. Now the light on their bumper, like everything else, was still.
My mind did not immediately jump to what was in fact the right conclusion, because such a conclusion would be absurd. Instead, I simply assumed the car would resume its journey once I had gotten further from the intersection, and resumed my walk to work before the stillness was enough to cause me to lose my nerve. If I walked faster along the sidewalk and then onto the path that traced a shortcut right into the back parking lot of my workplace, I told myself it was only to avoid my hesitation at the intersection making me any later than I already was.
When I pushed open the door to the convenience store, the bell did not ring. When I reached up and checked it, however, it swung with its traditional cheery dings. I expected the my coworker Anish would complain at my tardiness, as usual, but heard nothing.
"Anish?" I called, my voice pitched low as if I hadn't spent the past three years in vocal training after HRT had left is strange and gravelly.
I flinched small, a usual overreaction to the small slip, but my movement caught that there was a customer in the store. Already embarrassed, I moved towards Ms. Majarov to apologize. She was a regular customer, and her age left her with certain strong feelings about how service employees should behave, including that we ought to keep our voices down.
Her basket was on the ground, something that only happened when she needed to get something from the bottom shelf, or her back was bothering her more than she was willing to let on. Given she was still standing, I assumed it was the latter, and moved to pick up her basket for her. Even as I got closer, she did not acknowledge me, or my rudeness from earlier.
"Ms. Majarov? Are you all right?" I reached out a hand in case she had somehow not heard me, despite her constant pride in the fact that she alone among her numerous siblings still had perfect unassisted hearing.
When I touched her hand, still outstretched from setting down her basket, she startled violently. I was worried that such an abrupt movement would make whatever had pained her enough to set down her basket worse, but instead her hand just moved smoothly to cover her heart dramatically as she spoke: "Ms. Linsey! How did I not hear you come in? And on time, too!"
Thank you to @magic-is-something-we-create for the tag!
Rules: Rewrite your given line in the voices of your characters!
I am rewriting "This plan isn't going to work"
Elise: "Really? This is gonna be fun. Only once, though I really can't be bothered to Groundhog Day this idiotic idea." Her smile is genuine as she puts a temporal beacon down so it will be easy to reverse time back to this situation once the plan backfires.
Eric: "I wish, before we proceed, to note that while I do not doubt your abilities I do harbor reservations about the likely efficacy of this plan of action" (In German) If speaking English, "Hold on a sec, I wanna say that you're real awesome and such, but this is probably not gonna work out the way you think it will." (It is not his fault he learned English from Elise)
Davriel: "We should instead do this." The man does not have time to explain why you are wrong. Honestly, there's a very short list of people that would even get that much, instead of him just proceeding to enact his plan.
I will leave an open tag if anyone would like to rewrite "Where are we going?" in the voices of their OCs
