What is a writer?
A miserable little pile of words!


Call me MP or Miz


Fiction attempted, with various levels of success.


Yes, I do need help, thank you for noticing.



caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

"Hello, Kuarn," says the paladin, in the brisk way that covers for any kind of self-doubt or hesitancy. "Can we speak?"

"I dunno there's a lot to speak about," Kuarn says warily; trapped in a corner of alleyway on his way to the inn's entrance, as the paladin heads elsewhere on whatever godly errand. "We had a good long talk a while back, as I recall."

"Yes, we — yes." The paladin clenches her hands, and then, obviously deliberately, loosens them. "That's — what I wanted to speak about. If you'll grant me the time."

"I've a minute," Kuarn says, and looks at her.

"Ah," the paladin says after a little pause. "Here — no, of course, if that's — I don't want to presume." And her hands clench again, as she takes a deep breath. "Because I think — and I've been thinking, ever since — I think I've already presumed quite a bit, Kuarn."

Which is not the same as apologising to him, but might be as near as one of the type gets. "Oh, aye?"

"You and I," the paladin says, "have had different lives. Have different lives. I can't judge— well. I shouldn't. And yet I did."

There's a worn spot in one pocket of Kuarn's breeches, the perfect place to worry with a thumb. It's a tell; Kuarn stills his hands, counts out some seconds. "Some of what you said," he allows, "was — not pleasant to hear, but not wrong. I'm not starving in a gutter, in your company. I don't need to be stealing food."

"You don't need to be stealing," the paladin says, and gets ahold of herself. "No, no, that's — I said all that, and I'm trying to, trying to make amends for saying it—"

"I'm part of this now," Kuarn says, and waves indistinctly at the paladin, and their other, absent companions. "Part of something bigger than just me. And you need me for stealing, but — stealing for cause. Stealing with purpose. Not for myself, for a couple of coppers and a bread roll in my pocket. I don't need to do that any more; if I need a couple of coppers and a roll, and I don't have it myself, you'll — you'll all see to it I get it." He kicks at a pebble. "We did say all this. I was listening."

"I'm still—" the paladin says, "I'm still sorry."

"Aye," Kuarm says. "Not all that pleasant myself, was I," and he points his chin in the direction the paladin came from. "Been talking to the nun," he adds. "Trying to get — a new sight on things. A look at what life looks like without stealing for myself."

The paladin produces a wincingly mixed expression at the mention of the cleric, because the Dun Bitch is not exactly a kind of a god appealing to the paladinly type. But at the same time, she's pleased that he's trying, she really is.

"I find that noble of you," she says, and then gets flustered, because paladins aren't supposed to say that kind of thing to thieves, and she clasps his shoulder and makes makes hurried excuses and scarpers.

"Did the god-warrior find you?" Lemnestra grunts over the dregs of an ale, in the taproom.

"Aye," Kuarn says.

"Bothered you, did she? Had it on her to bother you."

"We spoke." Kuarn is aware that, on some level, the cleric's interest in the state of his tarnished soul is only as some kind of playing-piece in an inscrutable game against the paladin. Whether it's religious, or because they're both women, or because Lemnestra's just a cutthroat rat bitch who needs no reason, he couldn't say. "She's happy I'd take an interest in stealing for reasons bigger than myself."

"Aye, that she would," the cleric says. "Hand over your day's take to the Dun Bitch, then, sonny, and let the Dun Bitch take care of our merry band's coffers."

Kuarn thinks, fleetingly, of what the paladin's face might look like in pained and disappointed realisation; and dutifully hands over the sum that the Dun Bitch deemed an appropriate contribution from richer pockets for the day.



caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter
A fic in the Apparat setting. See also:

Goatfish Eats the Sun shallows from its deepnavigation at the nearest planet with orbital repair facilities, battered and furious; hull scorched, a score of crew deepsickened or injured, a wing of pilots missing.

Hren Zo-Seven wakes slowly in the soft cradle of a ship's hospital bed, arms crowded with gel leaves, each monitoring her condition or slowly, electromolecularly, infiltrating medications through the barrier of her skin to diffuse within her. Tall Kettle's staff stop by to check on the leaves, their ultimate dissolution and absorption to her skin, and slap fat new medicine-swollen ones on in their place; painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and trace exotic molecules. She is in interface shock, her neurological tissues angry and swollen around her insystemics, the slightest diagnostic chirp a migraine-auraed shock.

Shipself sends a newly autofactured servo, something midway between the shapes of a chameleon and parrot, to sit by her on the pillow and narrate to her in a synthesised whisper all the chirps it cannot currently send to her directly; and at her bedside, at all hours, is her wife.

"I know what you'll say," Two Marks murmurs, when she first wakes lucid, for long enough to talk. "You'll say oh no, I left her, I left our girl; and I'll tell you that she said to you to do it. That you did what you must, what any deepnavigator must; for your ship, for its crew, for yourself, and for me."

"But what if she's hurt," Hren says, cracking; "what if—" and she can't say any more.

"I can't think that," Two Marks says steadily. "You're hurt, and that's as much as I can think, just now; so Nene is fine, and she'll only be a little while. And she'll be proud of you, for keeping us safe."

Hren sobs for a while into her wife's shoulder, feeling neither proud nor brave nor good at all.


The pirates, when they come to check on the remains of their ambush, are perhaps expecting wreckage. One of the wing of mechs, piloted by Shaking Leaf, was too near the detonation, and nothing remains of him; the other five are waiting, hearts and weapons hot.

The pirate vessel is of Peninsular make, a long spindle; the wing have spent long hours, drifting to conserve fuel and calculating the most likely deepnavigational approaches, waiting for traffic in and out to become viable to an experienced crew who know the area, and the ship shallows perfectly within their noose. Swarm-deployment missiles burst before the wing are even detected, spraying clouds of short-lived propulsionless servos: chirp-jammers, drivefield deformation generators, sensor countermeasure beacons. Dazzled and muted, unable to hastily deepnavigate away with its drive effects pulled out of shape, the ship wallows, pointlessly warming its weapons as the unseen mechs are already latching to its hull.

Precision fire with breacher splinters cuts apart the ship's systems infrastructure, cable-connected mechanisms severed. Very Roll starts cutting into the drive pod for physical access, to annex its systemics; holding the interior of the ship is moot, if its attackers control its deepnavigation.

Nene crouches her mech on the exterior of the bridge pod, and chirps to its pirate inhabitants through the already-clearing communications haze: I have breachers aimed at your air systems. Stand down.

Her mech filters some internal shouting from the hull vibrations picked up through its feet. The pirates seem angry, panicky, planless; their ship's remaining capabilities shrivelling and turning against them under their hands, as the mechs' countersystemics rip apart and suborn its software.

Nene swallows against the constant sick feeling and burning-metal taste of the antiradiation medicines her mech is continuously pumping her with, and finishes locking the pirates out of sensors and manoeuvring; casts the system interfaces across the mech-wing's tactical links to Very Roll, as his mech's claws burrow system-breaching taps into cable bundles and optical lines. Even as the last of the deformation generators exhausts its power and allows the billowing drivefield to snap back into useful shape, the deepnavigation drive itself yields to them.

Without a mechself or a deepnavigator, any trip is going to be slow and harrowing, but the ship has waypoints set for nearby ports, and will be able to sense the nearby gradients of deep enough to autonomously fumble some halting, cautious route.

Take us out of here, in case any more come, Nene chirps Very Roll; and shudders as the mechs, in preparation, sluice sedatives into their veins and sensory-baffle their pilots as best they can. The punctured, parasitised, and hijacked vessel shivers as its drive surges under new direction, then begins a slow, juddering, robotic descent into deepnavigation.

A fic in the Apparat setting. See also:


spork
@spork

Seattle-based magical girl Sarah Sappho is a regular at local e-waste recycler RePC, where she's always buying strange pieces of forgotten technology
her most recent purchase was an old digital camera that stores photos on floppy disks
with a sensor that turns anything into a green-tinged pixelated mess, a battery that lasts less than 10 minutes, and a drive mechanism that only works after being given a solid thwack, it's definitely not anyone else's choice of camera, even for artistic ironic hipster shots

however, in her hands, it's a weapon to protect Cap Hill from monsters
she takes a blurry picture of a monster and it gets pulled through the lens and trapped in the floppy disk, which can hold four photos at maximum resolution
with a flick of the eject switch, the disk emerges and she immediately throws it to the ground and stomps on it, permanently destroying the monster trapped within

the camera will inevitably break or finally stop writing disks or get destroyed by a monster, but that doesn't matter
she'll be back at RePC next week to cobble together another new way of defeating monsters