honeydew, blueberry yoghurt, chocolate chip mint, rhubarb and some toppings
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Smog and Sky
Rating: G
Challenge: Chocolate Chip Mint #22: upside-down, Rhubarb ‘My Treat’ #9: oh, what tangled webs we weave (Taisy’s life before she joined the black ops team)
Toppings/Extras: malt (advent calendar day six), whipped cream, sprinkles
Wordcount: 355
Summary: Taisy Daniels sees the sky for the first time.
Notes: This came out so weird it’s almost cherry-worthy.
You didn’t get out of the lower levels unless you were good at something... and most people that lived down below the Smog never got out at all, no matter how brilliant they were.
There were a few success stories though. A few diamonds in the rough that flew like shooting stars to the top of the world because they could. Usually it was because they were smart enough. Sometimes it was because they were brave enough. Occasionally it was because they were brutal enough.
For Taisy it was a very literal thing: climbing.
There were lots of criminals in the lower levels and the ability to clamber around outside of the skyscrapers was not as such unusual, but Taisy was simply born with it in her blood. It was natural selection in a way-she would have said that, had she not been entirely uneducated. Fifteen years old and she was little more than a savage, a wild-child with no home and no education, nothing really aside from her ability.
At one point she’d had a home, but she’d had to get away. Staying there had been killing her. So many people in and out of her life, faces and names that didn’t match, and so much desperation. She had discovered young that the threads of life were hopelessly and gloriously confusing.
She breaks into homes to find food and drink water, and she’s fairly good at it. She drags herself up the side of Churchill Tower, day by day, level by level, dangling from walkways and swinging onto window-ledges. She’s like a little monkey or a spider, fingers cold and rigid as she heaves her scrawny body up another layer. It’s ornately decorated, which makes it all the easier to climb. At one point she falls but she catches herself on a protective rail of a balcony on the floor below, swinging upside-down for a moment before landing catlike on another balcony below it.
Nothing stops her. She climbs until she’s above the Smog and sees the sky for the first time.
It’s so beautiful, just like her mam said it would be.
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Unusual Circumstances
Rating: R (gore, implied domestic abuse)
Challenge: Blueberry Yoghurt #26: double take, Honeydew #5: strike a pose
Toppings/Extras: butterscotch, pocky
Wordcount: 100
Summary: The death of Lord and Lady Bedford.
Notes: Lord Bedford is Isobel Ashdown’s uncle; Isobel Ashdown is Edward Ashdown’s mother. This was longer but I didn’t like it and I squashed it into a pocky, haha.
The young servant that found the body of Lord Arthur Bedford sprawled at the bottom of the stairs didn’t recognise him at first. Twisted and tangled, his face dark with bruising, he was scarcely recognisable, arms snapped like twigs under his chest. Blood congealing around his cold body.
Maybe he fell. Maybe he was pushed. They would probably never know, because they found Lady Bedford hanging in her privy chamber soon afterwards. Everyone knew that he used to hit her, but that wasn’t unusual. She had been a gawky, trembling, nervous woman; always silent, always scared. Surely incapable of murder.