[Fic] Three Sentence Ficathon 2021 fills, part six
Batch the sixth. :)
All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful
rthstewart. Come join the fun!
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31. For anonymous: Any, any, grieving for the living, written 2/12/21
Last Rites (95 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives. SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 194!
-----
"No hard feelings, I trust," Annabelle says as she aims the pistol at Mikaele's chest -- smart girl, not to bank on a head shot -- and nudges the camera behind her with one foot.
Mikaele shrugs. "I knew this day would come and I have made my peace -- perhaps, instead, I should offer my condolences to you; I will be dead and beyond caring, but you will still be caught in the nightmare the Powers have made of this world, dancing to the Spider's strings, and I know better than to think she will be kind."
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32. For
undeadrobins: Any, any, waking up to the alarm, written 2/13/21
Home Front (885 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives. This turned into a season 5-style statement fic. It's mostly a Slaughter domain, though there are some elements of the Eye, the Desolation, the Vast, and the Lonely floating around the edges.
-----
The siren wakes Jenny at midnight, two hours after she went to bed and barely twenty minutes after she finally drifted into sleep: another air raid, the fifth this week -- or is it the sixth? Time blurs under sustained attack, and Jenny is no longer sure how long the war has lasted, nor how many days of work she's missed due to travel restrictions and ruined roads.
She staggers out of her bed, warm and cloying with the false promise of security, bundles the comforter around her shoulders, and climbs down six flights of stairs to the shelter in the basement. It's crowded and rank with the sweating, shivering bodies of her neighbors. Nobody speaks. What is there to talk about? More bombs, more destruction, more senseless violence -- everyone already knows the important things.
In the corner, a radio crackles to life and begins announcing targets: a bridge, a factory, a bank (just two blocks from the office, Jenny notes dully), a church, a high rise. Nobody admits to turning it on. Nobody dares to turn it off, and the litany of death marches on.
The ground shakes.
"Close one," somebody murmurs; "I wonder what--" A susurrus of irritated sighs rises until the speaker subsides, shamed back into silence.
The radio promises that the government has only their best interests in mind, and will institute new shelter regulations soon. The army is planning a counterstrike.
Jenny tunes it out until one of the specifications pierces through her shield of numb exhaustion. Shelters cannot have more than four stories of construction above them, to reduce the weight in case a building collapses.
Her apartment is on the sixth floor. There are two more floors above her.
"Our shelter's not up to code," she says, shrinks back at the sudden flood of disapproving attention, and then rallies. "Didn't you hear? Our shelter's not up to the new code -- where are they going to put us? What if-- what if we have to run down the street with the bombs falling? What if they turn us out of our homes?"
The ground shakes again. Small flakes of concrete dust fall from the reinforced ceiling -- it wasn't properly reinforced, after all, just quickly and enough to meet the last shelter code change.
Nobody has an answer.
Jenny huddles in her comforter until the all-clear sounds and she trudges back up the six flights of stairs to her apartment. There's plaster dust on her bed and a cascade of books have fallen off a shelf. She thinks about picking them up, putting them back in order. Then she leaves it for the morning.
In the morning, of course, Jenny has no time to tidy up. The radio crackled to life an hour before her normal alarm and announced delays on the train and the bus and the roads. She'll have to leave early if she wants half a chance to reach the office only an hour late instead of not till lunch.
She drives past the ruins of a church, a school, a Starbucks. What military value does a coffee shop have? Aren't civilian targets supposed to be off limits? What kind of animals are they fighting, over there, out where the war is? Why can't the war stay over there? Who gave them -- the enemy, the government, whoever; it's not like she's paid attention to world affairs, just lumped it all together under them -- who gave them the right to bring the war home and ruin Jenny's life?
The siren blares its warning while Jenny is still half a mile from the office.
She slams on her brakes, pulls over to the side of the road and double-parks beside a minivan. There are supposed to be emergency shelters every two blocks, marked with day-glo orange paint, but she hasn't been tracking them. Is the nearest one behind her? In front of her? Which way should she run?
Her cell phone beeps an emergency alert signal. As she thumbs her lock screen open, the car radio crackles and announces, "Corner of Lafayette and State."
Jenny looks up at the cross street name hanging from the stoplight pole. Lafayette, it says. She's driving on State.
She has enough time to hope her death is quick before the explosion blots out the world.
...
The siren wakes Jenny at 6am, an hour before her alarm. She blinks away her dream -- was she driving? and got caught in an impact zone? -- and staggers out of bed for the fifth time this week -- or is it the sixth? Time blurs under sustained attack, and Jenny is no longer sure how long the war has lasted.
She has given up hope that it will ever end.
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33. For
thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21
Rainbow's End (175 words)
I realized after I posted this that
thetransintransgenic probably meant queer in the modern sense while I was thinking of queer = odd due to the time period when Oz was written. Also, this is not a crossover. *headdesk*
-----
"And this is my friend Polychrome, she's the Rainbow's Daughter and helped me come visit you even though Philadelphia isn't a fairy country," Saladin said, swinging his left hand forward, his fingers (still a bit pudgy with youth, as if he hadn't aged a day since he vanished) twined with the slender, almost ethereal digits of a strangely ageless girl in multicolored scraps of a fabric that wasn't quite gauze, wasn't quite silk, and looked as if it would cost a hundred dollars an inch for an untattered bolt.
Richard glanced at Eleanor, whose speaking look conveyed quite clearly, 'Your ancestor owned a magic umbrella, mine once killed a dragon, and our son reappeared on the roof after a storm; who's to say he hasn't befriended a fairy?' -- and that was an excellent point, so Richard turned back to Saladin and said, "A pleasure to meet you, Miss Polychrome; any friend of our Button-Bright is always welcome in our home."
"As you are welcome in mine," Polychrome said, and curtsied fit to greet a queen.
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34. For
thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21
Natural History (250 words)
So I wrote a second fill. Crossover = Oz/Chronicles of Narnia. The Field Museum really does have two separate exhibits of human-eating lions (though one is from 1990, and therefore beyond the scope of this ficlet).
-----
"Dorothy Gale," says the blonde girl with the light of other worlds in her eyes, as she shakes Susan's hand, her left arm tucked firmly around her black-haired companion's waist; "I was born in Kansas, oh, ages ago, but there's not much to see there besides farms and sky so I thought I'd bring Ozma to Chicago and show her a real modern city, and so far it's been awfully good fun, especially the trains and the skyscrapers -- how about you?"
"My father is here for work, and he and my mother thought it would be educational for me to see some of the world beyond England," Susan says; "While I can't say I'm terribly fond of railways, I do agree that skyscrapers are fascinating -- and speaking of fascinating things, I was planning to visit the Field Museum, which I'm told has many intriguing exhibits, including the stuffed remains of two man-eating lions; may I invite you to accompany me?"
Dorothy glances at Ozma who smiles and says, "We must never tell the Cowardly Lion about his cousins' taste or their fates," (Susan, who has her own history with lions, tucks this away to decipher later) which seems to signal agreement since Dorothy plants an enthusiastic kiss on the other girl's cheek before turning back to Susan and chirping their agreement.
Susan never does unearth their story, but that's all right; she's learned to respect other people's privacy, and it would be a shame to spoil such a lovely day.
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35. For anonymous: Oz books (L. Frank Baum), Ozma, poppies, written 2/14/21
If I Should Change Before I Wake (445 words)
A nine-sentence fill, because reasons.
-----
Ozma only learned about the poppy field by accident, overhearing the Scarecrow and Nick Chopper reminisce about their journey with Dorothy and wonder idly if the flowers are still there; that struck her as a question worth answering, but not important enough to assemble a Royal Progress, so she rode out to look at the poppy field accompanied only by the Sawhorse which, of course, could not be affected by their sleep-inducing scent.
Death was rare in Oz, so rare as to be nearly impossible, and the poppies' lure of repose was nigh overpowering, yet as Ozma and the Sawhorse wandered through the brilliant expanse of red blossoms, they found no slumbering bodies under the swaying stems and leaves -- either the poppies' victims had sunk into the earth entire, or someone with magical protection (or no need to breathe) had been collecting them.
"Which do you suppose is more likely, old friend?" Ozma asked the Sawhorse, one hand resting lightly on her Magic Belt.
"I have no knowledge on which to base a guess," the Sawhorse said, pawing idly at the base of a poppy stalk with one wooden leg, "but I can stay and keep watch; sooner or later someone will fall asleep and then we'll know what happens."
Ozma considered this, then nodded: "It's my royal duty to remove my enchantments and let the poppies' power affect me," she said; "I cannot let any of my subjects risk this danger unaware, and if we return to the Emerald City to ask for a volunteer, who knows what might occur while we are gone?"
"Royal duty sounds terribly unpleasant," the Sawhorse said, but it agreed to Ozma's plan so long as she used her Magic Belt to send a message to the Scarecrow before she fell asleep.
As she removed her enchantments and lay on the soft ground between and beneath the swaying poppies, Ozma wondered how long their perfume would need to take effect, not to mention how long before whatever fate befell the other sleepers would claim her in its turn.
The poppies' scent was heavy and warm, rich without cloying, and Ozma stared upward at the red petals bobbing, the green leaves fluttering, the blue sky and white clouds beyond, all melding into a strangely familiar swirl of color and scent and that echoed behind her slowly closing eyes.
As her mind unmoored from the tethers of the waking world, she realized this swooning, dizzy whirl felt almost exactly like Mombi's spell that had changed her from Tip to Ozma, and had one moment to wonder what body she would wake in before she drifted into the unmapped sea of sleep.
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36. For
rthstewart: Doctor Who, Donna Noble, That's where all the weird stuff's happening. In the paperwork., written 2/14/21
Worthy of Her Hire (195 words)
-----
Not that it's any of Donna's business, or that she's been looking in particular, but if you want to know how the marketing director spends his holiday bonus (very posh tastes, that man, in the best fucking-the-pig tradition) or where the hired lorries took the old office furniture after the big switcharound (not, shall we say, any of the usual places one takes old furniture, and she might do a spot of digging to satisfy her own curiosity on that point), she can tell you; she can tell you everything.
She files all the paperwork, after all, and scans and files the digital versions, too -- it takes a bit to learn what's normal, what's normal-weird, and what's proper weird for any company, but she has practice; she can pick that up in two weeks or less -- and it's beyond her why nobody ever expects a temp to read the papers she handles.
And if she should happen to spot something not just proper weird but dangerous... well, Donna may be a little fuzzy on the past few years of her life, but she remembers just enough to know, bone-deep, that she can make things better.
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
I have such a lot of fun with this ficathon every year. :DDD If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)
All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful
rthstewart. Come join the fun!
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
31. For anonymous: Any, any, grieving for the living, written 2/12/21
Last Rites (95 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives. SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 194!
-----
"No hard feelings, I trust," Annabelle says as she aims the pistol at Mikaele's chest -- smart girl, not to bank on a head shot -- and nudges the camera behind her with one foot.
Mikaele shrugs. "I knew this day would come and I have made my peace -- perhaps, instead, I should offer my condolences to you; I will be dead and beyond caring, but you will still be caught in the nightmare the Powers have made of this world, dancing to the Spider's strings, and I know better than to think she will be kind."
---------------
---------------
32. For
undeadrobins: Any, any, waking up to the alarm, written 2/13/21
Home Front (885 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives. This turned into a season 5-style statement fic. It's mostly a Slaughter domain, though there are some elements of the Eye, the Desolation, the Vast, and the Lonely floating around the edges.
-----
The siren wakes Jenny at midnight, two hours after she went to bed and barely twenty minutes after she finally drifted into sleep: another air raid, the fifth this week -- or is it the sixth? Time blurs under sustained attack, and Jenny is no longer sure how long the war has lasted, nor how many days of work she's missed due to travel restrictions and ruined roads.
She staggers out of her bed, warm and cloying with the false promise of security, bundles the comforter around her shoulders, and climbs down six flights of stairs to the shelter in the basement. It's crowded and rank with the sweating, shivering bodies of her neighbors. Nobody speaks. What is there to talk about? More bombs, more destruction, more senseless violence -- everyone already knows the important things.
In the corner, a radio crackles to life and begins announcing targets: a bridge, a factory, a bank (just two blocks from the office, Jenny notes dully), a church, a high rise. Nobody admits to turning it on. Nobody dares to turn it off, and the litany of death marches on.
The ground shakes.
"Close one," somebody murmurs; "I wonder what--" A susurrus of irritated sighs rises until the speaker subsides, shamed back into silence.
The radio promises that the government has only their best interests in mind, and will institute new shelter regulations soon. The army is planning a counterstrike.
Jenny tunes it out until one of the specifications pierces through her shield of numb exhaustion. Shelters cannot have more than four stories of construction above them, to reduce the weight in case a building collapses.
Her apartment is on the sixth floor. There are two more floors above her.
"Our shelter's not up to code," she says, shrinks back at the sudden flood of disapproving attention, and then rallies. "Didn't you hear? Our shelter's not up to the new code -- where are they going to put us? What if-- what if we have to run down the street with the bombs falling? What if they turn us out of our homes?"
The ground shakes again. Small flakes of concrete dust fall from the reinforced ceiling -- it wasn't properly reinforced, after all, just quickly and enough to meet the last shelter code change.
Nobody has an answer.
Jenny huddles in her comforter until the all-clear sounds and she trudges back up the six flights of stairs to her apartment. There's plaster dust on her bed and a cascade of books have fallen off a shelf. She thinks about picking them up, putting them back in order. Then she leaves it for the morning.
In the morning, of course, Jenny has no time to tidy up. The radio crackled to life an hour before her normal alarm and announced delays on the train and the bus and the roads. She'll have to leave early if she wants half a chance to reach the office only an hour late instead of not till lunch.
She drives past the ruins of a church, a school, a Starbucks. What military value does a coffee shop have? Aren't civilian targets supposed to be off limits? What kind of animals are they fighting, over there, out where the war is? Why can't the war stay over there? Who gave them -- the enemy, the government, whoever; it's not like she's paid attention to world affairs, just lumped it all together under them -- who gave them the right to bring the war home and ruin Jenny's life?
The siren blares its warning while Jenny is still half a mile from the office.
She slams on her brakes, pulls over to the side of the road and double-parks beside a minivan. There are supposed to be emergency shelters every two blocks, marked with day-glo orange paint, but she hasn't been tracking them. Is the nearest one behind her? In front of her? Which way should she run?
Her cell phone beeps an emergency alert signal. As she thumbs her lock screen open, the car radio crackles and announces, "Corner of Lafayette and State."
Jenny looks up at the cross street name hanging from the stoplight pole. Lafayette, it says. She's driving on State.
She has enough time to hope her death is quick before the explosion blots out the world.
...
The siren wakes Jenny at 6am, an hour before her alarm. She blinks away her dream -- was she driving? and got caught in an impact zone? -- and staggers out of bed for the fifth time this week -- or is it the sixth? Time blurs under sustained attack, and Jenny is no longer sure how long the war has lasted.
She has given up hope that it will ever end.
---------------
---------------
33. For
thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21
Rainbow's End (175 words)
I realized after I posted this that
thetransintransgenic probably meant queer in the modern sense while I was thinking of queer = odd due to the time period when Oz was written. Also, this is not a crossover. *headdesk*
-----
"And this is my friend Polychrome, she's the Rainbow's Daughter and helped me come visit you even though Philadelphia isn't a fairy country," Saladin said, swinging his left hand forward, his fingers (still a bit pudgy with youth, as if he hadn't aged a day since he vanished) twined with the slender, almost ethereal digits of a strangely ageless girl in multicolored scraps of a fabric that wasn't quite gauze, wasn't quite silk, and looked as if it would cost a hundred dollars an inch for an untattered bolt.
Richard glanced at Eleanor, whose speaking look conveyed quite clearly, 'Your ancestor owned a magic umbrella, mine once killed a dragon, and our son reappeared on the roof after a storm; who's to say he hasn't befriended a fairy?' -- and that was an excellent point, so Richard turned back to Saladin and said, "A pleasure to meet you, Miss Polychrome; any friend of our Button-Bright is always welcome in our home."
"As you are welcome in mine," Polychrome said, and curtsied fit to greet a queen.
---------------
---------------
34. For
thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21
Natural History (250 words)
So I wrote a second fill. Crossover = Oz/Chronicles of Narnia. The Field Museum really does have two separate exhibits of human-eating lions (though one is from 1990, and therefore beyond the scope of this ficlet).
-----
"Dorothy Gale," says the blonde girl with the light of other worlds in her eyes, as she shakes Susan's hand, her left arm tucked firmly around her black-haired companion's waist; "I was born in Kansas, oh, ages ago, but there's not much to see there besides farms and sky so I thought I'd bring Ozma to Chicago and show her a real modern city, and so far it's been awfully good fun, especially the trains and the skyscrapers -- how about you?"
"My father is here for work, and he and my mother thought it would be educational for me to see some of the world beyond England," Susan says; "While I can't say I'm terribly fond of railways, I do agree that skyscrapers are fascinating -- and speaking of fascinating things, I was planning to visit the Field Museum, which I'm told has many intriguing exhibits, including the stuffed remains of two man-eating lions; may I invite you to accompany me?"
Dorothy glances at Ozma who smiles and says, "We must never tell the Cowardly Lion about his cousins' taste or their fates," (Susan, who has her own history with lions, tucks this away to decipher later) which seems to signal agreement since Dorothy plants an enthusiastic kiss on the other girl's cheek before turning back to Susan and chirping their agreement.
Susan never does unearth their story, but that's all right; she's learned to respect other people's privacy, and it would be a shame to spoil such a lovely day.
---------------
---------------
35. For anonymous: Oz books (L. Frank Baum), Ozma, poppies, written 2/14/21
If I Should Change Before I Wake (445 words)
A nine-sentence fill, because reasons.
-----
Ozma only learned about the poppy field by accident, overhearing the Scarecrow and Nick Chopper reminisce about their journey with Dorothy and wonder idly if the flowers are still there; that struck her as a question worth answering, but not important enough to assemble a Royal Progress, so she rode out to look at the poppy field accompanied only by the Sawhorse which, of course, could not be affected by their sleep-inducing scent.
Death was rare in Oz, so rare as to be nearly impossible, and the poppies' lure of repose was nigh overpowering, yet as Ozma and the Sawhorse wandered through the brilliant expanse of red blossoms, they found no slumbering bodies under the swaying stems and leaves -- either the poppies' victims had sunk into the earth entire, or someone with magical protection (or no need to breathe) had been collecting them.
"Which do you suppose is more likely, old friend?" Ozma asked the Sawhorse, one hand resting lightly on her Magic Belt.
"I have no knowledge on which to base a guess," the Sawhorse said, pawing idly at the base of a poppy stalk with one wooden leg, "but I can stay and keep watch; sooner or later someone will fall asleep and then we'll know what happens."
Ozma considered this, then nodded: "It's my royal duty to remove my enchantments and let the poppies' power affect me," she said; "I cannot let any of my subjects risk this danger unaware, and if we return to the Emerald City to ask for a volunteer, who knows what might occur while we are gone?"
"Royal duty sounds terribly unpleasant," the Sawhorse said, but it agreed to Ozma's plan so long as she used her Magic Belt to send a message to the Scarecrow before she fell asleep.
As she removed her enchantments and lay on the soft ground between and beneath the swaying poppies, Ozma wondered how long their perfume would need to take effect, not to mention how long before whatever fate befell the other sleepers would claim her in its turn.
The poppies' scent was heavy and warm, rich without cloying, and Ozma stared upward at the red petals bobbing, the green leaves fluttering, the blue sky and white clouds beyond, all melding into a strangely familiar swirl of color and scent and that echoed behind her slowly closing eyes.
As her mind unmoored from the tethers of the waking world, she realized this swooning, dizzy whirl felt almost exactly like Mombi's spell that had changed her from Tip to Ozma, and had one moment to wonder what body she would wake in before she drifted into the unmapped sea of sleep.
---------------
---------------
36. For
rthstewart: Doctor Who, Donna Noble, That's where all the weird stuff's happening. In the paperwork., written 2/14/21
Worthy of Her Hire (195 words)
-----
Not that it's any of Donna's business, or that she's been looking in particular, but if you want to know how the marketing director spends his holiday bonus (very posh tastes, that man, in the best fucking-the-pig tradition) or where the hired lorries took the old office furniture after the big switcharound (not, shall we say, any of the usual places one takes old furniture, and she might do a spot of digging to satisfy her own curiosity on that point), she can tell you; she can tell you everything.
She files all the paperwork, after all, and scans and files the digital versions, too -- it takes a bit to learn what's normal, what's normal-weird, and what's proper weird for any company, but she has practice; she can pick that up in two weeks or less -- and it's beyond her why nobody ever expects a temp to read the papers she handles.
And if she should happen to spot something not just proper weird but dangerous... well, Donna may be a little fuzzy on the past few years of her life, but she remembers just enough to know, bone-deep, that she can make things better.
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------
I have such a lot of fun with this ficathon every year. :DDD If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)