Aftermath

Grimly surveying the wreckage of his establishment, Tim Caldwell asked, to nobody in particular, “Can someone please explain to me just what the fuck happened here tonight?”

The small quiet fellow he had heard someone call ‘the Belgian’ didn’t even look up from where he was cleaning the blade of his pinfire cavalry sabre with one of Tim’s bar rags, but the tall man in the grey trench coat answered, in a British accent; “It’s…. complicated. Long, and complicated, and you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. Probably best just to forget it ever happened and carry on as before.”

The red haired woman stepped over something demonic with the broken leg of a barstool sticking out of its abdomen. “Magic’s real. Mostly it’s bad. We make it stop.” she said, casually tucking a pair of silver revolvers back into her belt.

Tim looked at her. He looked at his bar, transformed into a wasteland of kindling and gore. He looked down at the still warm shotgun in his hands, that had sat unused behind the bar for five years; insurance he’d never expected to actually need. He was quiet for a long moment.

He took a deep breath.

“Cool. Sign me up.”

Some dream from a long time ago that apparently never made it on here.

I was the Knight-Champion of the Order of St. Jean d’Arc, an exclusively female knighthood (warrior nuns! woot!). We had a good relationship with the Seelie Court, and in recognition of some service, the Queen of Faerie had gifted me with a sword made from feystone. Actually it was 2 kinds of stone, one pale and one dark and shot through with glowy blue cracks or veins, that wrapped around each other.

Something happened, I think a man I was in love with had taken up with an elf lass and she had taken him off to Faerie. In my anger, fear and hubris, I was going to storm Faerie and take him back, although in my mind I’m sure I meant to “rescue” him. I went to one of the sealed gates between the realms, which was a spiral of narrow, pale stone like that in my sword. The spiral only circled once, and then thrust straight upward from the ground about 3 or 4 feet, like a staff or rod, with a small blue stone set in a slightly wider bit at the top.

So there I stood, at the center of the spiral, the sword raised to strike open the gate, when a company of my sister knights arrived, led by the Mother Superior of the order. I heard them arrive and knew I was undone. I stood for a moment, sword still upraised, tears already starting to flow. With a cry I swung at the gate-rod, but in that instant I knew my folly and halted my blow before it struck. Or perhaps it merely resisted my stroke and I only imagined that I stopped myself. I fell to my knees in disgrace.

The Mother Superior strode across the spiral and took the sword from where I had dropped it. In a loud voice, she stripped me of the relic and demoted me to novicehood, right then and there. To my further humiliation, she proceeded to transfer both my office as Knight-Champion, and custodianship of the sword, to one of my sister knights, who happened to be my best friend.

I knelt there in shame before the still-sealed gate, too stunned to even react. Somehow I knew that for them to have arrived at that crucial moment, my friend must have betrayed me, she had tried to talk me out of my rash actions, to no avail. My heart was poisoned against her in that moment. Although in reality, it was the Faerie Queen herself who had seen what I intended and warned the Mother Superior. The Queen was furious, my actions were a breach of the ancient compact between our Order and the Seelie Court, and the Mother Superior enacted her justice right there before the gate, effectively in the presence of the Queen, to avert a rekindling of the war between the realms. The upholding of this compact had been given to our order at the end of the last such conflict, and had become its primary tenet. Few, if any, even remembered the original reason the order had been founded.

I suppose I was fortunate the Queen did not demand my head. Of course I knew nothing of her involvement, and held the bitterness in my heart toward the Mother Superior and my former friend, who must have been colluding against me, jealous of my rapid rise within the order.

I won’t let them get away with it.

One Word Mixtape : Devil

1. Run Down the Devil / Dirty Diamonds / Alice Cooper
2. Dark Fantasy / You Are the Devil / Andrew Huang
3. The Devil in My Car / Wild Planet / B-52s
4. Devil’s Haircut / Odelay / Beck
5. Devil in a Midnight Mass / Billy Talent II / Billy Talent
6. You Threw a Spark / Red Devil Dawn / Crooked Fingers
7. The Devil Never Sleeps / The Shepherd’s Dog / Iron & Wine
8. Devil and a Stiff Drink / Devils & Ghosts / The Local Strangers
9. Devil’s Lake / Indigo / Patrick O’Hearn
10. The Devil / White Chalk / PJ Harvey
11. Devil’s In Boston / Samantha Crain
12. Devil Went Down to Georgia / Charlie Daniels Band

Bonus Track: The Devil is in the Details / Geogaddi / Boards of Canada

Exchange Student

I was at the top of my class at Sector 217 Terran Preparatory Academy; straight A student, captain of the varsity mech squad, the Firelions; the biggest fish in a little pond. I was, until the day Yoshi arrived from the Lunar Protectorate.

Loonies practically live in their mechs from the time they’re old enough to walk; the lunar atmosphere is still too thin and the gravity too weak, even after thirty years of terraforming, for humans to work there unsupported. What this means, as I found out to my great chagrin, is that Loony jocks wear their mechs like a second skin.

It would probably surprise most pikers- er… sorry, I mean retainers, of course, no offense. It would probably surprise most retainers that jocking a mech is a subtle art, requiring exceedingly fine motor skills- the first mistake most neophytes make is exaggerating their movements, expecting the suit to be “heavy”. It only took a few casualties before the Academies developed the virtual training facilities. The neurokinetic actuators that translate your muscle impulses to the mech’s gravimetric engines are tuned for maximum response and minimal delay. In a combat or emergency situation, especially in space, the difference between life and death, between safety and catastrophe, can be measured in nanoseconds. The real trick of jocking is finding that infinitesimal space between thinking something and actually doing it, and riding that razor’s edge indefinitely. Going liminal, was what veteran jocks called it, and it was what we- well, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I. I was telling you about Yoshi.

We had just mobilized on a virtual defensive sortie against a mock raid from “Sector 00″, the imaginary adversary all Academies used to represent potential aggressors in times of peace. Each class of students was assembled to represent their township’s foot regiments, deployed in support of their local knighthood, each regiment armed and provisioned according to their specialty- Infantry, Recon, Medic, Artillery, Engineering, or Supply.

Technically, anyone could pilot a mech, but in practice, only the nobility could actually afford to have them built and maintained. As the eldest progeny of a Countess, naturally I had access to the most state of the art technology, as well as the most fashionable accoutrement, for both my real and virtual ‘lions. The heirs of my mothers’ vassal lords took the field in their own ‘lions under my command, each of our mechs flanked by the foot regiments of our retainer townships.

We were proud of our tight formations, our splendid array of banners whipping in the virtual wind. We had always beaten whatever the AI cluster behind the Ought-Oughts could throw at us, and we were secure in our place as masters of the battlefield.

What we were, was cocky. And about to get a spanking.

Twelve Grinning Saints

At last, after years of research and practical archaeology, we have found a fragment of that infamous sculpture known as “The Twelve Grinning Saints”. In it, the Twelve stand shoulder to shoulder, life-sized, all wrapped head to toe in white linen, as if for the grave. Each is bound at the throat with a golden cord. Their actual faces cannot be seen through the sheets, but legend has it that wide, red mouths filled with sharp teeth appear from time to time, as if painted on their funereal vestments by a mischievous artist; twelve identical, leering, blasphemous grins.

I am comparing our piece to photos of the original in a catalog of antiquities- our fragment almost certainly holds the four leftmost Saints, as far as I am able to discern- when the grins appear. Both on the Saints in the book, and, when I look up in alarm, on the four standing silently across from me in the gallery.

These four are definitely not painted.

Dearly Held

Bizarre dreams last night. Something about a slumber party with Dweign Starby, our old class president Dave Holbrook, and Wil Wheaton, at my mom’s house, in which I got Dave to run D&D for us, using a handful of random old school books and folios I found in a milk crate in the closet of my old bedroom. He did a fair job, with a bit of coaching. There was a swamp cave, a thief with a cloak that let him hide in light (rather than shadows), a druid who placed his palm to the ground and sensed all the enemies in the area (although it tipped their shaman off as well), and then he polymorphed into a squid and sunk into the swamp to hide from the robots(!!) that suddenly rose from the muck. At one point Wil turned to me and said “I’m waiting for him to ruin your dearly held character concept by forcing you to fail a saving throw.”

Later I rode a strange mutant pygmy elephant in a parade- the poor creature was microcephalic and had no ears or trunk, just a horrible little birdlike grey head with soft pointy lips. Somehow it got lost while I was doing the dishes(??) and I was very sad.

Some of my recent favorite music, in video form.

Lindsey Stirling – Crystallize

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Big Giant Circles – Thunderstruck

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In the same vein and equally awesome…
Ephixa – Song of Storms

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Moldover – Say It

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Infected Mushroom – Heavyweight

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Zealous1 ft. Dr. Awkward – Warp Zone

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PrototypeRaptor – Underworld (Nullification mix)