alicornucopia: (Default)
[personal profile] alicornucopia
Linus is dead. Stabbed in his sleep by a malcontent mortal who'd pretended friendship to invite the Archangel to stay in his home for the night after singing away a storm. The killer was himself killed by the Archangel's brother, along for the trip, but this does not the less widow the angelica. It does not the less leave the country without its Archangel.

There were eighteen years left in Linus's term, and someone has to fill them out. Alleluia shoos her acolytes and addresses her interface.

The Archangel Linus is dead. Who will be the next Archangel?

The angel Isabella, daughter of the angel Rinnah and the mortal man Charles.

Alleluia's met her... She's very young, she would have been readier if she'd succeeded Linus at the natural end of his term, but Isabella it is.

...She should wait for this news to reach the Eyrie and for Isabella to ask her, but this is an emergency interim change of leadership. Perhaps Isabella would like to have the answer ready as soon as she touches down at Sinai.

And who will be her angelico?

Darius, son of Noah and Abigail.

That's... Well, that's not her acolyte's father's name, but -

- but isn't he adopted -

Alleluia clears the interface. She goes into the acolytes' dormitory and knocks at Darius's door.
campanas: (fourthborn belljokes 2)
[personal profile] campanas
Here, in a place where she is quite an unexpected sight, is:

an eight year old girl with brown-flecked white wings, looking dismayed and lost.

with Prime (Aestrix)

with Edie and Emily (Maggie)

with Gloria (Maggie)

with Gren (Rockeye)
campanas: (fourthborn belljokes 2)
[personal profile] campanas
This would appear to be an eight-year-old girl with feathery wings.

This seems highly unlikely to be what actually is, of course, but that is sure what appears to be.

She is trudging morosely through town, attracting odd looks, peering around at everything.
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)

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.
namesthesky: (o ~ the obvious thing)
[personal profile] namesthesky
Labor rental outfit. Could be a disaster if it's for fetching and carrying, could be all right if she's hired out for writing, could be mediocre if it's for caring for people's invalid maiden aunts, could be intolerable if it's code for "whorehouse" - and there are more girls than boys in the batch she's currently shackled in a wagon with. Aya's debating whether to start a conversation with the slave next to her to see if she knows more when -

An embroidered bear that looks like it's wearing a suit of lace-bordered plate armor and has tiny useless metal wings to match and is at least four times its likely original size charges the horses, who startle madly and go completely out of control.

The wagon goes over. There's a fence, at the side of the road, there's posted warning signs, beware Magic in this ravine until post marking its end, but the wagon with all the slaves in it crashes right through the fence. Gravity's upended, everyone's screaming, some of the screams cut off abruptly as they tumble end over end down the slope. Aya flings manacled hands over the back of her head, feels a familiar snap in her arm as something strikes it - that's broken; and now her nose is too - there's a splinter of wood through her calf and her ear's ringing and wet with blood and she's got to have cracked a rib -

She's completely unharmed, unperforated, not even embroidered as far as she can tell. The steel around her wrists and ankles is gone. She doesn't see any of the other slaves - no, on second though, maybe she does, there's a bright orange snake with a tail that splits into five fish-finned ropes and a beetle the size of her head with the lyrics of Midnight Lightning written across its wing casings in block letters and a surprised-looking rabbit with wheels for forefeet and a broom-end for a tail. Everyone else is either much less recognizable or vanished entirely. But she's fine.

(She checks her heel. It's still marked. So she's unrestrained and unsupervised, but not, technically speaking, free.)

She needs to get out of the magic soonish, before it gets bored with its minimal alterations of her person, decides she'd be prettier as a glass music box decorated with butterfly wings, or a leather-upholstered down pillow that drinks blood, or a goose with windmill blades spinning around its neck. She's not, however, sure that she can climb the hill. It's likely she'd get just far out enough to count as having exited the magic and then fall, taking her chances a second time, and while this occasion she was lucky, nobody else was - she doesn't think she's been lied to all her life about the general safety of the environment. She'll have to go out the other way. She wades into the waist-high grass, routing around the clump made of swords and the clump made of swaying violin strings and the patch that might just be pitch-black flora but might be something else - but most of the grass seems only to be grass; plants tend to be safer in magics than animals. She winds up startling a dozing bird-eel-cat hybrid so thoroughly mixed up that she has no best guess as to what it was originally. It flap-flop-flees.

And then, when she hasn't seen an embroidered plant for a while since the shrub that appeared to be growing assorted national flags for leaves and onions by way of fruit, and thinks she might be close to the edge, there's a door.

It is freestanding in its frame, painted bright and glossy red with a few words in other colors on it running in various directions ("entirely", "yellow", "jump", "choristers", and "melting"), has pink fringe growing out of its hinges, and has where a handle might normally be, a slender open jar affixed with its mouth pointing up which is full of small-denomination coins, dried cloves, and what looks like it might be olive oil.

Aya has no idea how big this magic is. She doesn't know if drinking the water or eating anything vaguely appetizing that she finds around it will be taken as a second invitation to turn her blue or centipedal or dead. She could turn back and try to climb out the way she came, but - then what?

She's nowhere near the border.

Her legal owner is the employer of the fellow who was driving her and the others to the labor rental office.

The magic hasn't given her a set of papers and it has not unmarked her heel, and provoking it is more likely to make things worse than better.

And she's never heard of a door in a magic before.

She gingerly touches the jar, which is cool under her hand - and she pulls - and the door opens, tufts of pink in the hinges squeaking, to reveal what looks like a bar, which definitely isn't behind it if she peers around the frame.

Aya takes a deep breath and she walks in.
dark_light: (a ~ la la)
[personal profile] dark_light
Time passes. Canada is cooperative about portals and now there's one each in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, on a second floor of the hub with customs agents Isabella is tolerating for the time being as long as they're well-behaved. Japan and Australia and the UK all follow suit at roughly the same time, so then there are portals in their big cities, too, a couple new ones per week. Other nations are slated to trickle in as they handle their red tape to deal with sudden new national borders that don't have the built-in delay of airplanes. Some of the parking garages are being replaced with custom-built installations. Isabella pays off her loan, renegotiates for the continued use of her shiny credit card, and has reason to be grateful for her retained law firm, which is kept busy by frivolous lawsuits by airline companies. She's not appreciably cutting into their traffic yet - sure, the price point is dropping, but they're still competitive. They can just smell their own demise coming from a mile away.

Five witches besides Isabella ward the colony site. Robots guard the site of the portal, obligingly letting colonists through during scheduled trips and reporting to Isabella by mirror if anybody else shows up. Other robots help the colonists with setting up their farms and houses in the warded area. It'll hold a city, no problem, although another transfer of silks and bags to pay for warding a second site is going to be called for before they get literally everyone across, since in addition to city they need farmland, and since they can't build vertically as effectively as fully industrialized Earthlings or the deceased aliens.

One day:

"It's been exactly a year now since you crashed my picnic. Let's go to a fancy restaurant and celebrate."

months

May. 8th, 2014 10:19 pm
dark_light: (Default)
[personal profile] dark_light
Time passes.

Isabella's robot army cleans up the remaining robotic forces of their hated enemies without casualties, obligingly repurposes themselves for helping with infrastructure and explaining what she finds in the computer systems, and is generally convenient and helpful.

Adarin finishes the armor silk spell. Isabella's set are cosmetically special - mostly black, but with forest-green twining over the fabric and edged with pale blue as though she's been accumulating frost. In them, she looks almost more like a witch-garb-inspired runway model than a witch, but she loves them and promptly switches to wearing them all the time. (He asked if she wanted to wait till Christmas. She said no, and then teased him that he'd have to think of something else for Christmas.) He makes more, but doesn't pretty them up; they're for other people.

The portal network and the personnel helping with it expands. The hub building is operational on schedule and the surfaces with portals in them are moved there after being temporarily closed on their far ends. The price point starts dropping. Isabella's staff starts making progress on getting the necessary permissions to put portals in foreign countries. Isabella acquires ludicrous amounts of money; she's waiting for slightly more ludicrous amounts before she pays back her loan, though.

Zeviana and Luzia continue to get along famously without that much in the way of Serious Relationship Conversation. Zeviana does useful things for the clan and makes friends and generally fits right in. Ranata shows her interesting places on the Earth; with the help of her nepotism-based access pass to the portal network, this is mostly within the United States to start, though teleportation makes other continents more convenient to get to than they might otherwise be. Still, most of her time is spent on clan lands, which makes it at best inconvenient to scry on her from New Kystle.

Path continues to touch Adarin occasionally, briefly, especially if Isabella's off somewhere; he seems to do it mostly for a sort of check-in with the comfort it provides. Sometimes and apparently for separate reasons he will solicit extended petting, which seems to be more recreational than soothing (it's possible to tell mostly because of the way Isabella will go limp and smiley and heavy-lidded wherever she is in the room when this occurs). Vern doesn't touch Isabella again. Isabella is unbothered; she doesn't expect it.

birds

May. 5th, 2014 10:51 pm
dark_light: (n ~ yikes)
[personal profile] dark_light
The Liandrils build up their mana enough to return home. They do so; the hotel charges Isabella a steep fee for the room service and the stay itself but not enough to break the bank and not enough to represent damage to the premises or anything.

They teleport away from their daemons, experience a moment of barely-there discomfort apiece, and keep them in a well-warded closet together where they will not be readily discovered or vulnerable.

The Liandrils report on the situation to some other mages.

Some other mages are... even more concerned than they are.

This Isabella character has clearly got to go, or at least be brought under some reasonable semblance of control.

What is the obvious way to do this?

Well, to these mages, the obvious way is:

They scry on her owl. He is having a rest in this tree, correspondence about obscure magic attached to his leg; he's not near her, but as they understand it, that doesn't mean there's no connection to exploit.

They come in a group so they don't need to linger longer than is necessary to seize the bird in three pairs of coordinated hands and then disappear again.

Miles away, in her kitchen, with a vial of safflower oil in one hand and a spellbook in the other, Isabella collapses breathlessly to the floor and convulses.

properly

May. 1st, 2014 03:16 pm
dark_light: (Default)
[personal profile] dark_light
Isabella skips down the list of cities by population to put a portal setup in Seattle. Mostly for her and her mother's and potentially Zeviana's convenience. It's the biggest city within reasonable commute distance of the clan lands.

It is here that he and Isabella are hanging out, unprotected by any wards, when someone back in New Kystle thinks to check.

"Darling!" exclaims Yerena Liandril. "I've found Adarin! That liar Antelier said he was nowhere to be found but I just double-checked, and he's with that extraplanar hussy in her plane. Holding her hand. Those odd birds they have are practically on top of each other. How is your mana supply, darling?"

Profile

Alicorn Sandbox

July 2016

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10 111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 15th, 2025 12:00 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios