Posts Tagged Nother

[WIP] Kaido no Yume.

Oct 20

Tags: , , , , , ,

I woke up again, covered in tigers.

Maro’s arm was over my back, and he was sleeping with his cheek pressed against mine.  Or rather—the absence of feline snores from his direction suggested maybe he was still awake.

I pulled in closer to him, and softly murmured his name into his ear.

“K’haiso, you should be sleeping.”  His voice was full of sleep itself; I wondered if maybe I had woken him up after all.

“Maro, who was Kaido?”

His arm gripped me tighter to him, pulling me into his stripy warmth.  “Our brother,” he said.

I nuzzled into his powerful arm and didn’t say anything.

He leaned in closer and I could feel his breath on the fur of my ear.

“Our brother who was lost to the sea.”

It was sad enough to hear the words.  It was worse to feel the tiger shaking against me, eyes shut, entirely unafraid of showing his tears.

“Our brother who never came home…”

And he only held me tighter, and kissed my forehead, still trembling with the emotion.

“Sleep, wuafo,” he said, and I knew it ought to be impossible, because my tears were wetting his fur and I couldn’t make them stop.  But sleep came anyway and soon enough it was morning.

Add a comment

[scrap] Matanky.

Oct 17

Tags: , , , ,

The little human from Traff’s Γ7 was trying to sell me a new spaceship, and doing a lousy job of it.

“I need a decent observation deck,” I said, looking over the ugly beige ship he was trying to sell me at the moment.  “Does this even have one?”

“Oh sure, sure,” he said, and I suspected maybe his translator was missing something. He took me through long empty hallways, and into a tiny space about the size of a wiring closet and pointed to a small screen.

It only took half a second of awareness to see that the screen was not, in fact, a viewport, and given the way he failed to pretend to sustain the illusion, proudly turning the screen on to show a moderate-resolution view of wherever the spaceship’s mounted camera was, I knew I had not been understood.

I brought up a picture and tried to show him what I meant.  He responded by tapping a few buttons on the pad below the monitor, which immediately changed to display the exact same picture I showed him.

“See?” the little human said, beaming.  “Observes anything!”

Add a comment

[scrap] Matanky.

Oct 17

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The transit drive was humming.

The transit drive, of course, shouldn’t ought to hum.

The correct sound is a rush, like roaring wind just about to lull.

The hum, a bit louder now, was far from the idea of lulling.

I turned my eyes away from the starfield, which was appearing to jitter as the Lyra started to shake.

And it started to jolt.

I ran through the narrow cramped halls of the ship, metal clanking with each step, hoping to reach the engine room in time.

Animal instinct said, away is probably a better direction to run.

Animal instinct knotted my stomach.

I don’t have to worry about animal instinct if I don’t want to, I thought, panting.

The clang-clang of the metal pathway redoubled with the clank-clan of metallic feet.

I can be strong enough to survive an exploding starship engine.

My fists clenched with the sound of metal scraping metal as my body continued to change.

I can get there faster so I don’t have to.

My roboticizing body moved faster, and when I reached the overlook, I just hefted myself over the railing and jumped down.

I sensed heat, and more dangerous radiation.

Energy shields too then—not a problem.

And then I thought, looking at the ailing engine… “Troubleshooting, really? Not a chance.”

I’m a computer now, I’m not going to stop and think.

There was too much radiation interference for me to connect to the diagnostic over the wireless, so I ran to the nearest console and punched the port, changing my paw to interface.

I didn’t think.  Thinking was way too slow.  The Lyra’s diagnostic routine hit my processor and I processed.

—And it was hopeless.  The Lyra hadn’t isolated the problem’s root cause and neither could I.  That generally meant a full-blown failure—irrecoverable.

Diagnostics only gave me a few seconds before the whole thing went bang.

Stop thinking, stop thinking, stop thinking…

Safety protocols for an exploding spaceship—check, check, check.

Internal alarm.

Safety protocol for an exploding spaceship traveling at FTL speeds: I believe the full text of the procedure would be something like “Don’t be silly.”

C’mon, shapeshifter, think—

stop thinking stop thinking stop thinking

Index of what remains after a spaceship blows up while in transit: assorted subatomic particles and intense radiation of a rather exotic sort.

So be it then.

The Lyra turned into an explosion of blinding hyperplasma the instant after I did.

Add a comment

[scrap] Toby.

Oct 17

Tags: , , , , ,

I saw a big guy who kind of reminded me of Toby…

I could be any size I liked, really; I chose to be a head taller than everyone else so they’d have just the smallest amount of understanding.

I’m a giant; I’m proud of it; the only hiding I do is for practical reasons.

So I choose to live in a world too small for me to remind people I live in a world too small for me.

I guess it’s a bit of stubbornness.  Complaining about finding shoes that fit doesn’t really suggest to anyone that I actually have a 40-foot body stored in a basement under the theater.

People are not to know this.

So it’s me venting, really.

“This doesn’t fit me” means “this doesn’t fit me.”

I wish it did—and I’m glad it doesn’t.

Add a comment

[scrap] Matanky.

Oct 14

Tags: , , , , ,

Started writing about my tanuki character Matanky at Rainfurrest, which I went to with his name on my badge. It seemed like everything I had to write about him was broken spaceships.

Drifting again.

Seems like it always comes back around to drifting.

I sat squeezed into the tiny S-Cape pod. The tiny, non-functional S-Cape pod.

I was glad, again, to be a shapeshifter, and thus someone to whom things like needing to breathe air are technically optional.

The tininess wasn’t really an issue either; I could get smaller if I needed to.

Of course that wasn’t on my mind; I was watching the debris of the Lyra spread in various directions, swimming in a cloud of dust.

It always comes back around to dust, too.

You wouldn’t expect, after so many centuries of space travel, that a modern spaceship could fall to something as simple as dust—but the floating remnants of my ship proved it.  Just a small cloud of dust with just the right reflectivity to make it through the shields and just the right particularity to damage the system beyond repair, and just the bad luck to hit me.

After a long enough time, all the probabilities tend to become certainties, and the improbabilities quite likely indeed.

So me, in the S-Cape pod, watching the blasted remains of the seventeenth or possibly the nineteenth Lyra.

Over a wide enough space, the time tends to flatten.

Whether or not it was Lyra XVII or Lyra LXX, it still hurt like the first time.

And I was once again alone in the cold and the dark and the diamond-studded universe.

Drifting.

It always does come back to drifting.

Add a comment

[WIP] Kohath.

Oct 11

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Previous | First

The semi-secret breakfast was chiefly fried potatoes in all the usual configurations… tater tots, country potatoes, potato pancakes, hash browns, and so forth—with smaller amounts of eggs and miscellaneous breakfast fixin’s.

In my condition, though, which was better but still not optimal, I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat much, so I just took a small plate and sat next to a lunar and human talking—about the Vegan wars.

I recognized political argument, and resolved not to jump in.

Add a comment

[scrap] Rouss.

Oct 11

Tags: , , , ,

Once you get to feeling different, it’s hard to stop.

There’s always going to be something, whether it’s the color of your hair or skin or eyes, the way they drive their car, or the way they think of other people…

Everyone is different from you, and if you keep looking you’ll only keep seeing bigger and bigger things…

And after a while you won’t just be different, you’ll be separated.

And that’s the point where I was at.

I knew I’d never find what I was looking for sitting at home, so I spent my free nights out.

Trouble is, when you’re focusing on being different, it’s painful to be around people.  Proximity feels like distance…

So I went out to the social functions, but only the big ones where there was little chance of meeting anyone in particular.

At the time, of course, I didn’t see that with that sort of mindset, I might as well have stayed at home—my unspoken fantasy of being found would have been just as likely there.

I know better now, of course.  If you want someone to look at you, your best option is to start looking at them.

It’s just like not seeing the forest for the trees, but in reverse—you get overwhelmed by the forest and forget there are trees in it.

But I hadn’t found my tree yet, so still I wandered.

Add a comment

[scrap] Mitch.

Oct 11

Tags: , , , , ,

The first dream was the scariest.  I don’t mean it was a nightmare or anything; it’s just that it was so obviously not my dream, that I worried someone might have gotten into my head somehow.

That was, of course, vanishingly unlikely, but I was, what, twelve?  They told me I wouldn’t have any magic, so I figured it was projected in from outside.

But when I’d woken up, the dream was gone, and nobody seemed to be trying to put anything further in my head.  I lay in bed and listened.

And I started hearing things I’ve never heard before.  From Toby’s bed I heard a rumbling, a rustling, a far-off running train.

It came in his mental voice—I knew it was him.  I knew his telepathy was strong, but… that wasn’t quite right at all.

I listened more.

I heard more.

I got up from bed and headed out into the hall, the wooden floor cold under my tail and paws.

Mařa’s room was across the way; I heard—I heard her mind’s voice crying quietly.

She wouldn’t have been projecting that.

I noticed what my mind was doing unconsciously.

I stopped listening.

It was quiet again.  No broadcasts, then.

I started… listening again.

I started hearing again.

Could it really be happening?  Could I really be getting a knack after all?

I went back to bed.  In the morning, at least, I’d have to test it.

I went back to sleep.

The dreams kept happening.

1 comment

[scrap] Toby.

Oct 10

Tags: , , , , ,

My day starts in the basement of the theater.  It’s a little disconcerting, every time, to experience the room from two perspectives—on the one hand, my projection, which I’d come to think of as my usual body, saw the space as large, if a bit crowded; on the other hand, my real body saw it as a small, enclosed space—like sitting in a closet.

The fans ran nonstop, as body heat tended to make the place stifling, otherwise.

I set the bucket I came in with down and tried to imagine what life would be like if I couldn’t project.  The pallor, the weakness, all inescapably mine, because the world outside was the wrong size for me, and I couldn’t live in it.

Instead I was able to escape the body, somewhat—but I still had to take care of it.

It could indeed have been worse.  It could always be worse.

I tried to keep that in mind as I started washing my poor body down.

No, I don’t hate my body.  I am… well, we all have to hide who we are.  But having another body that can’t really take care of itself gets to be a chore.

And I guess, also, that having high standards doesn’t help.  I wouldn’t leave myself to live in slobbery.

So I was down here every morning.  I’d wash my poor body down, because while I did have to take up space, I didn’t have to make it unpleasant for others.

It wasn’t hard work, but I did have a lot of area to cover—it was like washing four or five cars a day.

When I was done I’d always…well, today I lay on my poor body’s chest, stroking softly as much of it as I could reach, because every body needs touch for the sake of touch, or it starts to break down.

My poor body’s hand would cover me sometimes, because sometimes I felt the need to return the favor.

I might have fallen asleep there, my poor body holding me against its chest; I’d certainly lost track of time enough that it seemed too soon before Mitch was poking at my mind.

Toby! Come on, I’m going to be late!

Add a comment

[scrap] Mařa

Oct 10

Tags: , , , ,

I keep apologizing because I don’t know where to start.  You get used to feeling awkward when you see every person’s death with them.

You’d think I’d get used to it after a bit, but I never could.

So, forgive me if I have trouble knowing where to begin sometimes.  I’m too busy thinking about how things end.

Add a comment