snippet – Moe Lane

12/22/2024 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE BAD PLACE.

Ah, my old friend/enemy in media res.

This wasn’t the first time Timmy had to run away on a wet winter’s night. It wasn’t even his — fourth, fifth time? He wasn’t really sure. Timmy got chased a lot, in this kind of weather. That’s why he wore boots that wouldn’t slip in the snow. You never knew.

He didn’t like being chased, but at least he knew how to do it now. You kept your eyes open, and your ears even wider. And you didn’t run faster than you had to, either. You did that, you lost your breath fast, and then you were caught.

Timmy figured he was gonna get caught at some point anyway. But that was why you kept your eyes open. You only cut and run when you want to find a good place to turn, and fight. Or at least a better place.

You didn’t waste your breath whining, either. That’s why he didn’t even mutter, “Where’s the garbage cans?” as he ran. He just thought it real hard.

Just like he thought about how Frostvile Pines absolutely sucked.

12/12/2024 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE BAD PLACE.

Damned if watching the movie didn’t help.

Maggie Henderson wasn’t the mayor of Frostvale Pines. That was an old guy named Bob. She wasn’t the fire or police chief, either. No, Mrs. Henderson owned the local coffee shop, which made her the person running the town. Timmy could get his head around that. He’d seen lots of people run things from behind the scenes.

What got Timmy was the way Mrs. Henderson talked. Nobody was that nice all the time and meant it. And her smile! It reached her eyes! That was way crazy, too.

“We first noticed something was wrong a week ago, Tim.” (He was apparently too old for ‘Timmy,’ and too young for ‘Timothy.’ It’d been weird for a second when she’d asked what his name was, too.) “Little things, like a garbage can knocked down, or a light left on. We weren’t sure what was going on until food started going missing. Then we knew.” Mrs. Henderson’s smile went worried. Really worried. “Somebody from Out Of Town had shown up.”

Timmy could hear the capitals in the words. “You mean, somebody like me. Not somebody from, um…”

“The Big City?” Timmy noted those capitals, too. “Oh, no, definitely not like one of those folks. They’re always welcome to visit our little town! In fact, they come here all the time, especially around the turn of the year. But they’re not the sort who’d just hide and steal food. That’s a… well, that’s a problem.”

12/11/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

A double helping of wordcount, today.

Abbie was a better codesmacker than Tobias was, so he let her navigate the barely stable mess that was their current electronic mail system. He also pulled in Ward, for reasons he tried not to think about. The good doctor had a certain viewpoint that was proving increasingly helpful for… anomalous cases. It made sense to have him along for the ride from the start.

It wasn’t that easy. Grabinski hadn’t logged into the system in the last twenty-four hours. But he had been checking his mail before that. He had even sent a message. The message file had been thoroughly corrupted, to the point of making the recipient unintelligible, but at least it was a sign of some activity.

“Why didn’t we think of this before?” grumbled Abbie. “Are we just assuming that a crazy person’s too crazy to even use email?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ward snickered. “We weren’t even wrong. Nobody on base these days sends an email when a face-to-face meeting will do. I’ve been encouraging it, actually. Too many neverwokes happening to people who stayed in their rooms and never saw anybody. I’m hoping bunking up two to a room will help with that in the future.”

12/10/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

Accomodations!

“Only none of them have seen hide or hair of the man.” Tobias scowled at the tablet. “He’s not drawing rations anywhere, either. That concerns me more.”

“Because it means he has a food source we don’t know about?”

“Exactly. I don’t care if he’s living on thrown-out shipping nuggets; we need to know where every calorie is.” He scowled. “Hell, we need more shipping nuggets. They’d be perfect for the Lifeboat.”

“Hmm. What does Asenath think?” Lillian smiled at Tobias’s startled look. “She may just be a manifestation of your current mental state, but you do have the advantage of being a very smart man. I assume that would extend to your hallucinations. We have to use everything we can.”

Tobias decided — not for the first time — that Lillian was very smart herself. Well, Asenath, what do you think? Oh, and sorry about Lillian…

There is nothing to forgive, Commander. She does not dislike or even disapprove of either me, or our working together. She simply believes that I do not exist. This hardly makes her unique. Dr. Peters is also better at making you practice self-care than I am, sometimes. It is in my best interest to maintain a good working relationship with her, even by proxy.

12/09/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

The Bad Week!

He didn’t need to ask her what she meant by the term. “As well as we could. We managed to get all but one of the surviving domes under lockdown, but the mutineers in Bloch Dome had somehow managed to disable the HVAC control, so we had to go in and stun them by hand. That was Hell.”

By now the memory didn’t suddenly flash into his brain. It ambled in, almost comfortably: They were still in the life-support tubes when the mutineers stumbled upon them. Tobias’s team had been offered no quarter by their foes, and it was all that Tobias could do to keep his troops from responding in kind. He’d had to stun one of his own team to keep her from strangling a stringy-haired maniac after they’d finally dragged him off the soldier he’d been disemboweling with a rusty saw.

“Stunners? You were lucky, Commander. We had no stunners, no pacification gas after the first week — the fool that Bruno replaced saw to that! — and not enough hibernation drugs. But when our rebels had been taken? Oh, we had knives. Such a helpful crowd control measure, knives. Cheap, simple, no power, no moving parts. Just an edge and a throat.”

Reithner’s eyes may have been open, but they were looking at nothing in the room. “They cycled us all through crowd control at first, you know. And we all did it. Even Bruno took a turn, slicing the throats of those too violent and insane to trust. But you could tell right away who among us hated it, and who did not. The ones who did not somehow found themselves on the rotation more often. They even volunteered! And we did not forbid them.”

12/09/2024 Snippet, BANSHEE BEACH.

Time-delay joke!

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “We don’t always do that, either. You can’t go around thinking…” I abruptly shut up.

“That the big, bad Dominion ambassador of the North can’t be looking everywhere, surely?” I would have said her smile was melancholy, except Dominion Archmages are supposedly allergic to the stuff. “You’d be right, too. Except sometimes she can.” She took a drag. “I’m sure she enjoys those little moments when it’s unnecessary. A meal and a walk along the boardwalk is probably as much time as she can hope for. Ah, this is my hotel.”

I gave it a peer. The Cochimi Ritz wasn’t as flashy as the Xanadu, but it looked… cozier. Probably quieter. Absolutely I wouldn’t be able to get past the front door if I had a signed note from the King. Or if they had a sudden bout of ‘dead body in the library.’ That skeleton key lets me in everywhere.

“It suits you, ‘Betty.’” I gave her a nice little bow, because Lucas can kiss a hand, and not look ridiculous. “Enjoy the rest of your evening. Will you be here long?”

“For a while, Mr. Vargas, for a while. Thank you for dessert and the walk, by the way. I found it restful. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

I waited until she was half up the stairs. “You, too! Oh, and there was just one other thing…”

She turned to me, quizzical. “Yes, Mr. Vargas?”

I gave her my best smirk. “Don’t call me Shirley.”

That might have been the first time I’ve ever heard the Banshee laugh.

12/08/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

Lunar lairs have to be smmmmaaaaal…

It’s actually not very hard to secure a man in a spacesuit; control his air, and you control him. Supposedly the local environment was habitable, but Tobias didn’t trust those readings for a moment. Judging by the generally horrible features of his captors, there were probably all sorts of contaminants down here.

Subconsciously, Tobias had been expecting a long, torturous journey through endless passages and caverns, but that was ridiculous. All of this atmosphere had to brought in, heated, and kept from escaping, after all. There could be no luxuries like a vast complex. Not on the moon. Instead… just down the way was a door, which led to a three-story atrium. That had a collection of rooms scooped ouf of the rock, and that was the end of the matter.

Whether or not it was the end of them would be a different story.

12/07/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON BEASTS.

Starting to finally figure this one out.

“I’m sorry to say that Marcin was rather good at puzzles,” Lillian told him. Tobias had decided that reading her into the situation was safe enough; he trusted her, Asenath trusted her, and there wasn’t anything else for a lunar geologist to do right now. Besides, she knew Marcin from Dee Station.

“He enjoyed working out old collisions from the asteroid tracking data,” Lillian went on. “He always said it helped him quiet the part of the brain that kept him from painting. He was good at those, too. Not a master, mind you, but he could have made a go at it if being a lunar researcher hadn’t worked out.”

“Was he one of the, ah, interesting ones at Dee Station?” Tobias asked her as he studied what images existed of Grabinski’s work. He had been a neo-graffitist, so most of his work obviously was back at the abandoned British facility.

“Interesting-interesting, or interesting-barking mad?” Lillian shrugged. “The former, I’d say. He had his little ways, like the rest of us, but he would sit with people at meals and come to parties. I think he had a fellow, back on” — she waved up, all the while keeping her eyes resolutely anywhere but in the direction of Earth — “You Know Where. I know he took it hard when everything happened. Even when we still talked about it, he chose not to talk about it. I suppose he never saw the point.”

12/07/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

No translation!

Tobias was not a small man, nor had he neglected his exercise training on the Moon. He still staggered when one of the attackers casually shoved him against the wall, then pulled out the cleaver that had been strapped to the side. The few lights set in the passageways that still worked made the cleaver-man’s face into a nightmare of shadow and scar, with a sneer that could have been carved into the very bone below. “Ein dicker Amerikaner,” he spit. “Gut. Das beste Fleisch muss eine Weile abgehangen werden.”

Beside him, Reitner gasped. “Warte! Bist du auch Schweizer?”

That stopped the cleaver-man cold. He looked Reitner up, down, then gestured at the two attackers who had grabbed Reitner. “Zeig mir dein Gesicht,” the cleaver-man barked. Tobias decided that this was definitely German, but not quite the version still spoken in some parts of the EU. It sounded more guttural, and with fewer Euro loan-words.

The man must have said something like Reveal yourself!, because Reithner promptly made her helmet fully transparent. She looked… well, like Hell, Tobias admitted. We all do. Too-pale skin with frozen sapphire eyes, and her hair was buzzed too short to tell the color. But the set and shape of her face oddly matched the attackers’. You could believe that they and she were related, and that thought filled Tobias with both horror, and pity.

12/05/2024 Snippet, BANSHEE BEACH.

Information!

“Depends, compa… Shamus. I mean, maybe there’s some simoleons in it for me if I figure it out?”

“Maybe there would be,” I promptly agreed. “Lucas?”

The look Lucas gave me at that was anything but blank. Dirty as hell, in fact. He still didn’t bobble as he pulled out a bankroll and peeled off some monroes. But when Bananas reached for them, Lucas smoothly raised his money-laden hand out of reach. “So, hey, friend. Do you know what happens when an Adventurer pays for information and then somebody tries to welch out of it?”

“Ah… no?” offered Bananas.

Lucas smiled. Technically. “Are you eager to find out?”