autokinetic: (Default)
[personal profile] autokinetic
This doesn't look like Relativistic Tactics at all.

...This looks like Sue's dream place. Where he got Ivy.

Aegis goes right in. Maybe there's more stuff besides golden sparkle dream critters that one can bring home from a place like this.
middlingalong: (i ~ word as vorpatril)
[personal profile] middlingalong
Ivan is asleep when it happens, but the captain knocking on his door gets him up quick enough. "What? Where's the fire?" Ivan asks. This was supposed to be a quiet posting. Well, the posting on Earth was supposed to be quiet too, cultural, etcetera, but Xerxes is supposed to be downright boring. Ivan is not supposed to be awakened from his eight hours unexpectedly.

"Murder, not a fire. You're cousin to Lord Mark Vorkosigan, aren't you?" says the captain.

Ivan has to think for a second. "...Yes?"

"Security vid picked him up within radius of a murder. This is the first we knew of him being on the planet, but the locals want us to bring him in so they don't have to it themselves and risk mishandling a Vor lord. Seemed worth consulting you on him - the file on him's really something."

Ivan blinks. "You need to arrest Mark."

"Yes."

"...Sir. Uh, give me a while to try doing it myself. He's... I'm not positive I can succeed but I am pretty sure I can survive trying, and unless he's in a cooperative mood I'm very uncertain anybody else can say the same thing."

"He may have just killed a man."

"I'm aware. He likes me. He doesn't know you from a hole in the ground, or anybody else within fetching distance, sir. Give me his last location and a few hours? Please?"

"By yourself?"

"He wouldn't know anybody you could send with me from a hole in the ground."

The captain chews his lip. "None of your shenanigans, all right?"

"Sir, I'm not the shenanigans one, it's just contagious when m'co- my other cousin's around. I'll see if I can find him, if I find him I'll try to bring him back."

The captain eventually acquiesces. And that is why Ivan is tromping around downtown, debating whether or not to call "Mark? Mark?" like he's looking for a lost dog.
cross_and_bow: (f ~ level)
[personal profile] cross_and_bow
Bella was expecting to be slightly late to math class. This is not math class, but it seems like the sort of thing she ought to be later to math class in order to investigate. In she stalks, ready for something to jump out at her, wondering if she ought to pull a stake out of her bag.
middlingalong: (j ~ rattlesnake)
[personal profile] middlingalong
Ivan must be drunker than he thought he was. He could have sworn he knew his way around Vivienne's parents' house, since she wanted to introduce him last week and showed him the place, but maybe they have a... secret... upstairs... bar? where Vivienne's room is supposed to be? And most certainly was last time he checked? He's never going to find the sweater she sent him up looking for here, anyway. Why is there a secret upstairs bar in Vivienne's parents' house?

patrol

Oct. 1st, 2014 02:35 pm
thinkering: (i ~ tinker)
[personal profile] thinkering
When Lorica's been a Ward for a few months they start pushing her to go out on patrols. She still hasn't finished the suit for her dad, although hers is good until it gets field-tested and she knows what to add - and there are other projects she'd like to spend PRT money on - but she's playing the game, so she goes patrolling. She's an exemplary member of her little team, mostly because by luck she gets along with the fellow who's appointed leader; they start letting her go alone with a little flock of scout robots.

She's doing a sort of aerial parkour, flying but touching down on roofs and jogging along occasionally to get a closer look at anybody wandering by, in a zigzag over a nest of side streets. Her suit's a little louder than she'd like, some kind of joint deterioration. She can fix that when she gets back in.

activism

Sep. 15th, 2014 05:06 pm
chanuphis: (g ~ hat)
[personal profile] chanuphis
With all the hubbub, a seventh-year Gryffindor - Hermione Granger, which is rather exciting - takes Miranda aside for a brief chat about how she has some experience with famous eleven-year-olds and also with prodigies, and says that she is willing to be a tutor/supervisor for Miranda's wand experiments. This is much appreciated, and Miranda accepts, but doesn't have time to take her up on that before Easter's on the horizon.

Miranda meets her mum at the train station at the end of Easter hols and is promptly Apparated directly to Charlie's house in Fordwich. She is successfully not-found by reporters there.

But partway through the vacation her Daily Prophet mentions that there is a sort of town hall meeting, open to any British-residing wix, about - the agenda's about forty items long, but it boils down to "there are not enough of us" (and also, "oh no, wild Dementor").

Miranda owls her mum.

Her mum dithers but agrees to take her on the condition that they will Apparate away if anyone shows too much interest in Miranda. (The paper seems, in its small flurry of articles about her after the one she was tricked into giving "quotes" for, to have decided to call her "Silverlight", almost like it's her last name: "Belgian Theoretical Magic Expert Weighs In On Possible Mechanisms for Miranda Swan's "Silverlight" Feat". "Miranda Silverlight: Evidence of New Family Trait Magic?" "The Prophet Investigates The Source of E. Miranda "Silverlight" Swan's Unusual Wand.")

Miranda brings a copy of her agenda, crosses both wands in her hair even though she isn't allowed to do magic over hols, and walks in at her mum's elbow into the Ministry hall being used for the meeting.
the_very_best: (f ~ side-eye)
[personal profile] the_very_best
Bella's not sure where she has wandered. She thought she was about to walk into a shop, but this appears to be an unattended bar. With none of the windows associated with the shop she thought she was entering. It could be an elaborate psychic assault of some kind, but it doesn't feel very... assault-y... and she was in the middle of a town and doesn't think any humans want to sic their 'mon on her. It's strange. She approaches the bar, looking around warily, hand hovering near her belt.

with Max (Benedict)

with Earth and Lightning (kappa)

with Ann and Sabrina (kuuskytkolme)
her_imperial_radiance: (Default)
[personal profile] her_imperial_radiance
At the bar, there sits a girl with a long copper-colored braid, slight and beautifully-complected and wearing khakis and an oversized pullover. Next to her is an enormous man, darker and looking at her (worshipfully) and the rest of their surroundings (suspiciously), wearing a brown uniform that is held on entirely via the cunning application of magnets. She has a glass of something fizzy and gold and he's got a Coke in its can.
segreant: (m ~ mindscape)
[personal profile] segreant
Kaja's swordstaff decapitates a zombie as Ragnar swoops down. She hears teeth scrape against the metal of her armored boot, but they don't get enough purchase to crunch through, and Ragnar's up again, wheeling for a better strafing angle. There's only three left. She barks commands to her griffin and he banks, flaps, dives.
imeanforever: (f ~ exploits)
[personal profile] imeanforever
Promise is on her way home when she hears something just about crashing through the woods. What could that be?

She lands in a nearby tree, relaxes her wings, and peers at the source of the sound.
subtly_artistic: (Default)
[personal profile] subtly_artistic
This door was supposed to lead to the hall closet with the cleaning supplies, but Bella doesn't see any good way to mop up spilled soup from the kitchen floor. "Extraplanar studies students," she mutters, stomping into the bar in her nice useful boots. If she takes notes on this place she can probably get extra credit somewhere for it. She goes up to the bar, and notes the lack of bartender. Maybe they stepped out for a minute.

knife

Jul. 7th, 2014 05:40 pm
dark_light: (Default)
[personal profile] dark_light
Isabella and her husband go home.

And Chamomile's opinions about the proper location of souls assert themselves.

prime

Jun. 25th, 2014 07:42 pm
dark_light: (c ~ collected)
[personal profile] dark_light
Aya names her adopted world Pantheon, and nicknames herself Spring (in the sense of springs of water, like those her goddess is of). Isabella and Adarin stay long enough to make her a mirror set (the other half accompanies them, in space in Isabella's portal bag made by the used-up resurrection herbs), make a portal in a nook of the chosen mountaintop between Pantheon and Chamomile, and leave a marker for another so there will be an easy chain from Chamomile to Pantheon to the home of the elderly and apparently lonesome Adarin.

And when they have done all of this, they stay long enough for not-lonesome Adarin to recover enough mana, and -

they go visit his alt.

navigation

Jun. 9th, 2014 08:23 pm
dark_light: (b ~ skyward)
[personal profile] dark_light
The Earthlings native and adopted stay in Marlatia, hiding uneventfully in the guest room, for several days. Isabella immortalizes king and queen both when they sneak her to a sufficiently large, empty, and unoccupied room to do it in. When Adarin has enough mana he makes mirror pairs for each of their majesties to contact their counterpart - Isabella's portal bag is kind of accumulating mirrors at this point. And when he has more mana still, Iobel finds a slightly-bigger-than-door-sized plank and a set of hinges and some screws and combines all these objects on the ceiling of a lockable room on the first floor but out of the way, currently serving as storage for a lot of broken musical instruments that someone once probably identified as probably repairable. This plank gets a portal on it, and the Earthlings go home.

After catching up on business - and allowing time to recover mana, again - and getting their Marlatian alts a laptop each, and putting a router and chargers within easy reach of the portal on their side, which is also on a sheet of wood but is kept in their basement propped up against a wall -

Isabella snuggles up to her husband and suggests searching the planes for more of themselves.
alicornucopia: (Default)
[personal profile] alicornucopia
Incandescence is an RP (role play) hosted on Dreamwidth between me (Alicorn) and Aestrix. We each play many characters; all of my RP accounts (including many not used in Incandescence) belong to the Belltower community and Aestrix's may be found at Aestrices.

The short version of what Incandescence is about is that we put alternate universe versions of Bella from my fanfiction Luminosity in a wide variety of settings, some fanfictional in nature and others original, with some of Aestrix's characters, and see what happens. (Luminosity is a reasonable introduction to the "Bell" character template, but it is not strictly required reading for Incandescence and the two are not presently mutually canonical in any significant way.)

Incandescence is similar in many ways to Effulgence, which is an RP with loosely the same premise that I run with kappa instead of Aestrix. The circle is completed in the kappa-and-Aestrix comm Pixiethreads and the all-three-of-us Resplendence. There is an index of RPs in this vein by assorted author combinations here. If you like any one of these you should probably read the others too. Effulgence is by far the longest.

Content warnings: Incandescence contains rape, torture, abusive relationships, references to same, and other forms of cruelty to characters. Proceed with caution. We are mean.

Each world in Incandescence may be read alone up until the point where it collides with others. Below is an index in recommended reading order if you plan to read them all. The ∞ symbol next to a section heading means that this heading was still in progress in the last listed thread within that section, but you may read past ∞-marked sections without problems. You may discuss Incandescence (and other Alicorn projects) on the forum. Most posts have comment threads under them; some prefer to read them in threaded mode, where they keep drifting off to the right, but many people otherwise prefer to read in "flat" (just click "flat", and the comments' left margins will all line up and they will be arranged in pages).

Aestrix ran out of impetus with which to write Incandescence. It came to an end formally in January 2015. If you want to know what we originally planned to have happen, it is summarized in this thread. You may download an EPUB of Incandescence.


  1. Chamomile

    1. Picknicking
    2. Thingamajig
    3. Familial
    4. Clannish
    5. Finances
    6. Planetary
    7. Birthday
    8. Properly
    9. Birds
    10. Months
    11. Anniversary
    12. Stash
    13. Population


  2. Bindings

    1. Obvious Choice
    2. Shindig
    3. Announcement
    4. Hostility
    5. Motherly


  3. First Plague

    1. Contact
    2. Breakfast


  4. Door

    1. Into A Magic


  5. Second Plague

    1. Navigation
    2. Revolutionary
    3. Gateway
    4. Prime
    5. History Lesson
    6. Painting
    7. Knife


  6. Phixable

    1. Ghost
    2. Sphinx
    3. Faun
    4. Bugbear
    5. Peryton


  7. Third Plague

    1. You've Got Mail
    2. Equation
    3. Sister
    4. Witch
    5. Dragon


  8. Daevinity

    1. Filtration
    2. Certification
    3. Renovation
    4. Desolate


  9. Fourth Plague

    1. Jealousy
    2. Couples
    3. Homestead
    4. Archaeology
    5. Dissemination
    6. Domain
    7. Dropouts
    8. Keys
    9. Portals



  10. Gemini

    1. Apollo
    2. Cassandra
    3. Nasatya
    4. Artemis


  11. Fifth Plague

    1. Twin
    2. Surprise


  12. Necklace

    1. Golden Knife
    2. Slow Progress
    3. Impatience
    4. Celebrity


  13. Sixth Plague

    1. Falling Ill
    2. Overnight
    3. Repossession
    4. Virtuous Gossip


  14. Ravel

    1. Happenstance
    2. Artificer's Standard
    3. Platinum and Diamond


  15. Midnight

    1. Like Glass
    2. Volatile Under Pressure


  16. Basket

    1. Wildflower
    2. Cultivar


  17. Pond

    1. She Never


  18. Geode

    1. Dreams
    2. He Likes Tea in the Mornings
    3. He's Such A Prude Though
    4. So Far There's Always An Age Gap


  19. Sorcery

    1. Supreme




Due to limitations of Dreamwidth, we cannot edit any comment that has replies under it. Please don't submit notifications of typos in Incandescence unless they're on the top-level posts or the last comments in a thread. Or if you can't understand what was meant and you need clarification.

Please never make comments on story threads. You are encouraged to discuss Incandescence in my forum.

There will not be any more Incandescence, with the possible and rare exception of individual unpealed scenes. If you want closure for these plots and a peek at what we would have done if we'd continued writing, see the eulogy.

contact

Jun. 4th, 2014 12:28 pm
dark_light: (c ~ collected)
[personal profile] dark_light
Veron is installed in a nice house in Seattle with the help of Isabella's staff.

The colony gets big enough that Isabella sculpts herself an ice crown and applies permanency to it so it won't melt. She makes Adarin one too out of cypress branches, wired into shape, magicked to stay alive and shaped like that, and then freed of the wire. She wears hers on Earth sometimes, as well as on the colony. Her queen elects not to comment.

Various people are resurrected. Isabella hires more people to sort more requests; she's not going to be able to handle this via descending on charities. (She extracts longer-term promises of help - and nonviolence - from the clans she shares this spell with, though.) She opens an office near San Francisco, puts a lot of poultry in the back yard and makes a deal with an egg producer to save the otherwise unwanted males till adulthood for the purpose in future months, arranges regular deliveries of all the necessary herbs and ashes, and has someone carve out an enormous stencil of all the runes to speed up the process: the diagram may now be drawn with a broom, as long as it's still a witch doing it. (She also has stencils of the immortalization spell made.) There is always some witch in residence, working off their favor to her a few hours at a time, and a security team to prevent unruly demands, interference by religious protestors, and a receptionist or two to make sure the people coming in actually have appointments (or standby arrangements, in case of no-shows) to collect loved ones.

She gets into a bit of an argument with the United States military about resurrecting fallen soldiers. While she originally had no intention of discriminating against soldiers, she insists that resurrected ones be considered honorably discharged and that their re-upping be optional, and absolutely refuses to approve any systematic preferential resurrection of people who are just going to pick up guns and walk into war zones again.

Normally, there would be some clan with access to the spell who'd cut a deal.

On this occasion, with this particular Olympic witch having come up with three (really two, but the portals are still officially credited to her, with everyone understanding now that she's proprietary about the process and capitalistic about the disposition to fund her anti-death projects) revolutionary spells in fewer years than that, they're a little concerned that they won't get a look in the next time she publishes, if they do things she doesn't approve of.

Isabella threatens to move her resurrection office to New Zealand. The military backpedals. Resurrections proceed.

(Isabella does open a second resurrection office in New Zealand. And one in Finland and one in India. There are witch clans all around the world and they are all beholden to her.)

Insurance companies freak out, then remake their actuarial tables and throw lawyers at their contractual language and calm down again. Isabella's insurance company of choice has a small head start. Isabella's insurance company of choice loves her.

Luzia gets her son back. She dithers for a bit about the husband. She gets the husband back. The husband is kind of taken aback by Luzia's activities since then but decides that Zeviana "doesn't count" as cheating. It's up to Zeviana whether she wants to call that close enough and continue carrying on.

Isabella and Adarin have no such problems. They continue to be deliriously happy.

Then, there's a relatively slow day. Isabella flops across her husband's lap on the couch and says, "Want to start looking for places to plague with utopias?"

population

Jun. 2nd, 2014 09:45 pm
dark_light: (d ~ fascinated)
[personal profile] dark_light
Adarin is shaken awake one morning by a fiancée who is about five thousand times perkier than she usually is at odd, dark-outside hours.

"Wake up wake up wake up!"
from_scratch: (Default)
[personal profile] from_scratch
Cam is out flying. There's a decent cloud of atmosphere around the gold plane, now, millenia of demons making air around themselves for comfort and not sealing it up because why would you bother. There's a small forest, here - the effect is kind of ruined by the lamps it has to grow under, but it's still pretty.

He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -

with the Joker (kappa)

with Ripper (kappa)

with Darren (Aestrix)

with Minus (kappa)

with Emma (Marri)

with Facility 3141592 (armokGoB)

with the admin (kappa)

with Jarvis (kappa, Aestrix)

with Miles (kappa)

with Hank (Nemo)
from_scratch: (Default)
[personal profile] from_scratch
Cam is lounging in a hanging furniture object that's sort of a cross between a hammock and a chair and leaves plenty of room for the wings and tail, feet up, sipping hot cider, and watching a documentary about the history of the colonization of Luna because he does like to keep current. Ho hum.

stash

May. 17th, 2014 11:13 am
dark_light: (Default)
[personal profile] dark_light
Isabella has one of the central not-a-portal bits of the hub - the ones that are occupied by a shifting collection of the airport-standard restaurants and gift shops and newsstands - turned into a small apartment-cum-office for Seraphina. The office is unlabeled for the time being - just "Authorized Personnel Only" in ominous letters - but Isabella tells her what the fire and security alarms sound like and suggests that she be a responder to these if they go off. "Mutter your mnemonics under your breath while you do anything magic in public, and people will figure you're a witch," she says. "I'm still thinking about any less irregular jobs I could have you doing, but unless you come out with a more generic set of healing spells than it sounds like you currently have I don't think I can explain installing you as magical first aid." Seraphina gets a modest stipend on top of her room and voucher for the hub restaurants, and a brief tour of Chicago shopping (because there's dozens of cities to choose from but Chicago's the one she's seen before) so she knows how to avoid major cultural pitfalls trying to get a new pair of shoes.

Xiara, when her mana recovers, is directed to teleport to a tucked-away part of a temperate national preserve, told to lie low, given a list of endangered species she is not to eat or disturb, and left to her own devices with a mirror in case she wants to talk about something or needs help with a park ranger or something. Isabella could use an architect, but mostly on the colony, which is not to be known to any mages yet.

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