old drabblefest round-up
(All from where_no_woman drabblefests)
February 15
prompt:We're dancing free but we're stuck here underground.
character: unnamed bar patron from AOS
rating/warning: none/PG
She’s used to the best, and this isn’t it. Her classmates go to Risa between terms or Alpha Centauri, and Elenya Martinelli-Jenkins can out-glitter and be gayer than the best of them. If she’s slumming it instead in an industrial dive on Earth, it’s because she was bored, and because she can. Smoke and rhythm and alcohol haze disguise the galactic sophisticates and the brilliant ‘Fleet cadets and the tough-muscled shipyard welders. Under daylight they’d be unglamorous wannabes, pimply nerds, local hicks; but Elenya enjoys their illusions. It’s a beautiful delusion, and she’s sorry when the brawl shatters it.
March 15
prompt:: 'In this city, self-preservation is a full-time occupation.
character: Madeline
rating/warning: none/PG
self preservation
"Lieutenant Madeline."
The First Officer's voice resounds in the delicate chambers of Madeline's neck, and she stops and turns like a humanid, even though she has just put in an extra half shift and is half-way to the lift, and even though she can hear him, can communicate with him, perfectly well from behind. "Sir?"
"Your recent request for leave is...problematic, Lieutenant. I am prepared to review the details in a more private place, if you wish."
"That's not necessary," she says. She has plenty of accumulated leave and is not supervising any project that cannot be left without here; the Enterprise is due to spend 2.6 days docked at the orbital station; the usual liberty rotations were sent around just before Beta shift today. "We can talk here, but I want to know why I can't go home."
A commercial shuttle to Q'q'qv runs every hour. When it breaks through the atmosphere, you first see the hot brilliance of the planet, interrupted here and there by the dark poles and the arctic seas. You come closer, and the cities dance out at you. Q'q'qv is the brightest and whitest, but in the last minutes, just before the shuttle lands, you start to see the variation: dim spires and burning lights and a whole spectrum of sights and gradations. Madeline has seen Dheref and San Francisco, Greater New York and Tlevtlen: not one of them can come close to matching her home for beauty.
Humanids see it differently, of course, and Madeline is prepared for Commander Spock's answer. "Q'qv is presently on the Federation Bulletin of Insecure Territory, Lieutenant. In ordinary circumstances Star Fleet personnel are barred from visitation."
Madeline's family lives in a better part of town than the ones that haunt the intergalactic news reports these days. But she would walk from the shuttle landing in any case, because shaving a few skins and minor appendages off of muggers is worth the smell of the sand in the breeze and the bustle of shouts in every language of the system. Sirens and knives spinning in air and the crunch of ichor and bone and drying skin underfoot: maybe Madeline romanticizes after 6 years off-planet, but she remembers it alive and beautiful and hers.
"Respectfully, sir, it's only insecure for non-natives. And I'm not a tourist in Q'q'qv. I'm going to visit my mother; I'm going home."
She's seen the holos of what Q'q'qv was like even 50 cycles ago when it was undimmed by soot and stains, unblemished by infighting and stasis, safe for offworlders. Madeline's second-order mothers and aunty-children have left for the countryside. They gave up the 2000 cycle-old experiment of urbanism for the old ways of the caves, and they send home that they are happier. Madeline's first-mother still lives in the old compound on the hill, where the streets are still mostly clean, and the spires stand out bright. If not perfectly safe, it is at least not dangerous.
In the end, they compromise. Madeline takes the transporter directly to her first-mother's nesting room. But she wakes up early, slips past her family, and walks down the hill through the warming streets to the lower city so that she can be really at home. She takes her knife, of course.
April 18
prompt: "Bottoms up, Mac"
character: Uhura
rating/warning: none/G
"It's like you lead a double life," someone says, admiringly. "Fucking perfect in class, like, 'respectfully, Commander Spock, the obvious dysphemism in this inflectional category does not change the fact that 4th-class scatological imperatives clearly demonstrate the existence of five medio-pharyngals in proto-Klingonaase.' And then you come here and totally let loose and get wasted. Fucking amazing."
"Amazing," someone else echos.
"Come one, it's not like I try to hide it." Nyota Uhura grew up bilingual; she's a linguist; ergo, code switching is not difficult for her. She leans back in the booth, letting the club's warm din take over her ears with a different kind of phonology. "And there are five fucking medio-pharyngals. Were. Whatever." Uhura ponders the glass in front of her, which is only her third, after all. It's half full.
February 15
prompt:We're dancing free but we're stuck here underground.
character: unnamed bar patron from AOS
rating/warning: none/PG
She’s used to the best, and this isn’t it. Her classmates go to Risa between terms or Alpha Centauri, and Elenya Martinelli-Jenkins can out-glitter and be gayer than the best of them. If she’s slumming it instead in an industrial dive on Earth, it’s because she was bored, and because she can. Smoke and rhythm and alcohol haze disguise the galactic sophisticates and the brilliant ‘Fleet cadets and the tough-muscled shipyard welders. Under daylight they’d be unglamorous wannabes, pimply nerds, local hicks; but Elenya enjoys their illusions. It’s a beautiful delusion, and she’s sorry when the brawl shatters it.
March 15
prompt:: 'In this city, self-preservation is a full-time occupation.
character: Madeline
rating/warning: none/PG
self preservation
"Lieutenant Madeline."
The First Officer's voice resounds in the delicate chambers of Madeline's neck, and she stops and turns like a humanid, even though she has just put in an extra half shift and is half-way to the lift, and even though she can hear him, can communicate with him, perfectly well from behind. "Sir?"
"Your recent request for leave is...problematic, Lieutenant. I am prepared to review the details in a more private place, if you wish."
"That's not necessary," she says. She has plenty of accumulated leave and is not supervising any project that cannot be left without here; the Enterprise is due to spend 2.6 days docked at the orbital station; the usual liberty rotations were sent around just before Beta shift today. "We can talk here, but I want to know why I can't go home."
A commercial shuttle to Q'q'qv runs every hour. When it breaks through the atmosphere, you first see the hot brilliance of the planet, interrupted here and there by the dark poles and the arctic seas. You come closer, and the cities dance out at you. Q'q'qv is the brightest and whitest, but in the last minutes, just before the shuttle lands, you start to see the variation: dim spires and burning lights and a whole spectrum of sights and gradations. Madeline has seen Dheref and San Francisco, Greater New York and Tlevtlen: not one of them can come close to matching her home for beauty.
Humanids see it differently, of course, and Madeline is prepared for Commander Spock's answer. "Q'qv is presently on the Federation Bulletin of Insecure Territory, Lieutenant. In ordinary circumstances Star Fleet personnel are barred from visitation."
Madeline's family lives in a better part of town than the ones that haunt the intergalactic news reports these days. But she would walk from the shuttle landing in any case, because shaving a few skins and minor appendages off of muggers is worth the smell of the sand in the breeze and the bustle of shouts in every language of the system. Sirens and knives spinning in air and the crunch of ichor and bone and drying skin underfoot: maybe Madeline romanticizes after 6 years off-planet, but she remembers it alive and beautiful and hers.
"Respectfully, sir, it's only insecure for non-natives. And I'm not a tourist in Q'q'qv. I'm going to visit my mother; I'm going home."
She's seen the holos of what Q'q'qv was like even 50 cycles ago when it was undimmed by soot and stains, unblemished by infighting and stasis, safe for offworlders. Madeline's second-order mothers and aunty-children have left for the countryside. They gave up the 2000 cycle-old experiment of urbanism for the old ways of the caves, and they send home that they are happier. Madeline's first-mother still lives in the old compound on the hill, where the streets are still mostly clean, and the spires stand out bright. If not perfectly safe, it is at least not dangerous.
In the end, they compromise. Madeline takes the transporter directly to her first-mother's nesting room. But she wakes up early, slips past her family, and walks down the hill through the warming streets to the lower city so that she can be really at home. She takes her knife, of course.
April 18
prompt: "Bottoms up, Mac"
character: Uhura
rating/warning: none/G
"It's like you lead a double life," someone says, admiringly. "Fucking perfect in class, like, 'respectfully, Commander Spock, the obvious dysphemism in this inflectional category does not change the fact that 4th-class scatological imperatives clearly demonstrate the existence of five medio-pharyngals in proto-Klingonaase.' And then you come here and totally let loose and get wasted. Fucking amazing."
"Amazing," someone else echos.
"Come one, it's not like I try to hide it." Nyota Uhura grew up bilingual; she's a linguist; ergo, code switching is not difficult for her. She leans back in the booth, letting the club's warm din take over her ears with a different kind of phonology. "And there are five fucking medio-pharyngals. Were. Whatever." Uhura ponders the glass in front of her, which is only her third, after all. It's half full.