Tag: snippet

01/09/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

Just making up stuff, at this point. Like I know how to fly. And like it really makes any difference to the story if I do, or not (I think people overdo this, sometimes).

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I think I still may be sounding a little blase on the subject of wind-dancing. Like I’m romanticizing something that’s really just a matter of reading overlapping displays and careful adjustments. People talk up their boring jobs all the time, right? Fair enough. Lemme give you an idea of what it’s like, from my perspective:

The original inhabitants of One-Eighteen didn’t use a driver’s wheel, or a single flight stick. They liked to use all four limbs to fly: each hand controlling a separate squeezable trackball, while pushing various buttons with their feet. Including a few things that we’d put on a dashboard, like engine boosters or the emergency air evacuation switch. We’ve been able to put in a regular, Terran-style flight stick for regular use, and it works fine — for, again, regular use. If you want to get creative, you need to use the original configuration. Most people try it once, and then stop trying to be too creative.

I’m not most people.

01/16/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

Right now I’m just adding bits in my head that I know I’ll need later. Actually making it all coherent will take more time. At least, that’s the plan.

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I wasn’t looking forward to trying to get a straight answer from Oft about the Scout site at Erebus. I didn’t get one, either. And it was for a really annoying reason: he legitimately didn’t have one.

“I’m sorry, Pam,” he told me as we drank our beers. Including the Anticipant, who was surprisingly easier to handle once everybody had a couple of drinks in them. “If I knew what brought the Scouts there at the start, I would have told you. I was hoping the Anticipant would glean something from the site, but she could not.”

“How would you know?” I muttered.

Oft raised an eyebrow. “She may find it difficult to give details in a manner that you or even I can understand — no offense — but she knows what the phrase ‘This is important’ means, and she’s capable of saying it. If she doesn’t know, she can say that, too. And she has perfectly good ears.”

01/04/22 Snippet, GARY AND THE WENDIGO.

Bigfoots!

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One of the nice things about Bigfoots is, they don’t need much in the way of supplies. They do their own hunting and don’t need clothes, so they’re pretty good is living off the land. What they do need is mostly stuff like salt or corn meal or toothpaste.

Oh, and books. Gary liked books. He didn’t care what they were, either, just as long as they were in English. “It gets quiet up here sometimes,” he told me as we unloaded three crates full of romance novels and self-help books. “Reading helps with that.”

“I hear ya, Gary. You got a favorite genre, though?”

“Anything human’s fine.” He gave a loose-limbed Bigfoot wide shrug. “It’s all the same amount of weird to me, so I don’t care. You want coffee?

1/4/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.

I’m trying to get GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND into draft form over the next two months, which will give me an achievable time schedule. So I started back up on the merry-go-round today. Huzzah!

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How do you sneak into a corporate lab? …Well, you don’t have to do a lot of sneaking, honestly. Most of the security protocols get disabled when they detect two people walking in with calm demeanors and regular heart rates. When it comes to the Tomb Worlds, the corps don’t worry about corporate espionage nearly as much as they do about solitary maniacs looking for essential ingredients. For that matter, the corps worry more about the research itself than anybody trying to steal it. More than one solitary maniac with a bloody vision started out as a researcher who dug too deep.

Oh, are you wondering why anybody researches anything out here? It’s a fair question. Honestly. Folks do ask it. The answer is, the things we’re learning are worth the risk. It’s cold when you say it aloud — or write it down, I guess — so we don’t. But we all know it anyway.

01/04/21 Snippet, GARY AND THE WENDIGO.

Getting back to this one.

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“Yeah,” Gary replied after thinking about it. “It’s very, huh, far, though? Not as many trees,” he explained when I looked at him. “You can see for longer.”

“Hmm, a fair amount,” I allowed. The cabin wasn’t at the top of a hill, just a flat spot on the side of the road; but from the porch you could see the ground start lowering itself to meet up with the river, down in the valley. I don’t know how far it was, really. We didn’t go down into that valley. But it’d be a hike, to be sure. “Somebody tell you about the clear space?”

“A little, Shirley Lee. I don’t touch the wooden poles, don’t go past them after dark unless I have iron, and if something tries to break them, I should go get help.” I wasn’t good at reading Bigfoot faces at the time, so I couldn’t see how unhappy he was about that. “They kept telling me that last one.”

“Who? The people who first moved you in?”

But he shook his head. “My paw and my uncles. Like there’s any help around here!” He stopped there, suddenly remembering that I drove up here to offer a hand, and everything. “You know what I mean.”

Snippet the Last, THE STARS ARE WRONG.

This was supposed to be a fairly short story, too. Thirteen thousand freaking words. I’m gonna see if this one I can sell to a magazine.

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Why did I still follow? Was it from some compulsion, put on me? Or the pitiless stars above? Or was it simply because I still hoped to find my partner, and the other Guardians? I do not wish to say. Suffice it that I followed the Vicar, until we came to a door. A most ancient door, made of strange metals, and from methods now lost to time. It was priceless.  It was also obscene in its pitiless, rigid angularity. It imposed itself on my senses, as if to say: I exist, whether you like it, or not. And you cannot remove the idea of me from your world, for I am more real than you.

The Vicar casually pushed open the obscenity as if it was a commonplace item in the everyday world. He also snickered as I gingerly followed him through the doorway. “If a door alarms you so, Guardian, what will you think of what follows?” I did not answer him, for beyond the door was a room full of icons and images which threatened to send me shrieking into the boon of madness-fueled unconsciousness. Would that I had!

Described baldly, the icons were perhaps not so horrible. They were images or statues of people, both men and women, with a few beasts and some designs of no-doubt occult significance. But they were wrong. A woman, hand held high, cruelly intent in smashing her burning scepter upon the unworthy; a misshapen bird of prey, clutching foul weeds and weapons in its claws. Statues of leering fat men, brazen candelabra with unlucky numbers of unwinking candles, tiles inscribed with six-pointed shapes and sinuous scripts unknown to me; and above all, two horrid banners. One reminded me of a bleeding field, with what I realized were the horrible stars burning above it. The other was a simple emerald triangle on a silver field. I did not need to be told that this must be a sanctuary for the Emerald Pyramid; the horror that permeated the room was horror enough.