Day 18, TINSEL RAIN NaNoWriMo: 37138/60000.

Today was almost a complete bye day – my youngest had to go to the dentist to get some baby teeth taken out, and that more or less torpedoed my schedule – but I did manage to get enough of my brain together to write some fight scene. Fortunately, I have a buffer, so I’m still ahead of my target number! Unfortunately, I now need to rebuild the buffer before Thanksgiving! Ach, well.

‘That’ was a rattling doohickey — I’m sure it had one of those weird alchemical names like The Refining Pickle of Antimony or whatever, but ‘doohickey’ works — and from the way people were reacting it wasn’t supposed to be doing that. Or graduating from rattling to hopping on the table like a jumping bean. But people didn’t start clearing the space until the doohickey started puffing out purple smoke. Even I knew that was a bad sign.

One interesting thing about alchemists: they’re real good at diving for cover. Teresa and I didn’t have anybody in our way as we ran towards the doohickey, which made for a nice change. Normally there’s this one guy who wants to get right up and babble something or other until he gets shoved out of the line of alchemy, but this time we had a free path. Happy day!

Yeah, yeah, if I didn’t want to give messed up doohickeys the chance to blow up in my face, I could always run the other way. I can’t, though. That’s not how it’s done. Something bad might happen, and none of these people it might happen to had it coming, probably. Or if they did, I hadn’t heard about it yet, which is pretty much the same thing. I can carp about it all I want, and I do, but I’d better be going into trouble while I’m flapping my gums.

That’s why I was heading towards the doohickey, at least. And Teresa? Eh. Adventurers. Just what it says on the can, right?