hans-writes-things

[hans-writes-things]

Fairy Dust & Fascism...

It’s been giving me trouble, this little thing I’ve been working on.  It’s hard to write a story wherein the main characters are police of a sort in today’s climate. It feels off, as if it makes my fingers a bit grimy, and yet I know that there’s still a need for the detectives and the public servant, etc.  Black Lives Matter. The current situation, the current climate, is a reaction to an ongoing impossible situation of prolonged injustice, oppression, and violence.  You can’t push a human being, or indeed any creature, into a corner forever. We, as all things, will eventually fight back.  This is the backlash.  A proper solution to the problem is to end the violence that caused it.  To rehaul the systems that perpetuate it and to bring to justice the perpetrators of it.  I will be going back over what I’ve written already and working on trying to make the thing I’m building in my little fantasy world better, update the language and the structure of the thing, but I’m probably not posting updates or new chapters for a little while.  Instead, I’m thinking of trying to force my adhd brain to spit out them short stories again.  Bring back sunday morning shorts.  I don’t want today’s real world fascism in my story. I don’t want it in reality either, but my story is fully mine to control. I want to make sure I do better before I put more of it out there, and if possible, I want to put it out into a world where it’s not a mere fantasy to have a “police” that actually serves the public best interest, especially those that really do need it the most. 

[hans-writes-things]

Fairy Dust Chapter 8

The Pinnacle of Arcane Research, PAR for short, was a massive glass tower with a museum of magical artifacts in it's lower three floors, followed by five floors dedicated to the largest school of arcane magic on the entire continent. The rest of the 150 floor building was dedicated to research. This was the tallest building in L'waren, by a wide margin. It was a city landmark, and a symbol of power and perseverance to any of the city's races that had a history of magic.

After the fade of magic throughout the world, wizards of every race scrambled to keep hold of the power they had accrued through their art. Most wizards, being too arrogant to band together, obviously failed in their endeavors, but a few of the more clever ones formed alliances that grew into companies. One of my ancestors had been a wizard of some renown, and the company he and his had founded was still alive, still run by my sister. The Pinnacle was a joint effort, created and funded by a handful of companies of wizardly origin, built with the end goal in mind of making arcane magic a force to truly be reckoned with again.

I knew why Sam had hesitated to tell me where we were going. It was not my favorite place to visit. My name alone would get us through the door and even allowed us, on one occasion, to make appointment with the high wizard in charge of the school in connection with a previous case, but the look on her face suggested something more this time.

As we entered the building through the main doors, walking through the group of daily visitors coming to view ancient magical artifacts, I couldn't help but to be awestruck by the view. Ancient wizards had commissioned the craftsmen in building their towers and PAR had spared no expense trying to emulate history's greatest wielders of arcane magic. The entry hall was especially opulent, sporting a pair of massive, gnarled and twisting trees, made from stone, and decorated with thousands upon thousands of precious and semiprecious crystals and stones to serve as foliage. Threads of the purest gold wove through the whole construction and the boughs of the trees met over the entryway to the museum to form an arch. It wasn't the first time I looked at these, and yet they seemed even more marvellous, more magical, than the last, and they were. I knew that they would be even more amazing still the next time I would look at them. It was part of the school of the Pinnacle. The students of arcane magic would prove their dedication to their studies by spending one whole week of every school year, exhausting every ounce of strength in their bodies, by pouring their magic into the trees, helping to shape them, maintain them, even grow them. On a good year, the nearly twenty thousand students combined, would grow them a whole inch between them. On a bad year, the trees would wither a little, even lose some their foliage. Of course the result of that ritual was mainly used as a measuring stick for the top floors of the tower, the high wizards, and their decisions as to how to market their work. Still, the trees were undeniably beautiful, and undeniably magical, and they tugged at my sense of awe and wonder, no matter what else I knew of them.

The air in the entryway held a soft and constant birdsong, and within the boughs of the great trees I could see the subtle flit of movement. This year had been a good year then, a bumper crop of ready and eager young people, hungry to be part of the magic that the tower offered. Sam scoffed softly at the display and offered me an awkward smirk. "Thinking of running away and joining the mages?" She elbowed me in the thigh as she spoke. She was trying to lighten the mood, and I felt my mind starting to put a couple of things together, though I hadn't quite figured out what was off just yet. "Yeah Sam," I replied, breaking eye contact, "I've always wanted to become a gardener, don't you know?"

She walked over to the right towards the desk, guards, and elevators that lead to the upper floors of the building. I followed a few steps behind, feeling as though I was decidedly not going to enjoy this visit one bit, though I still hadn't quite figured out why, beside the usual. Behind the desk sat an elven woman with dark hair and dark skin. She seemed older than any other elf I'd ever met before. Her skin seemed thin and wrinkles creased the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her eyes were bright and sharp though, a stark contrast with the rest of her features. Her hair was tied up in a tight bun. To either side of the desk, and behind her down the hall to the elevators, stood several half orc guards.  The ceiling was not as high here as it was over the entrance to the museum section, and the muted colours of the desk, the woman's suit, and the guard uniforms, helped to make the severity of this other entrance less conspicuous when compared to the bright and welcoming gateway to magic offered between the two magical trees.

"Good morning." Sam started but was cut off before she could continue. "Detectives Xyrocelzam Daxldizk and John Winters, what can I do for you?" "We request an audience with the archmage." Sam said without hesitation. I bit my tongue and froze in place a step behind Sam. The archmage? She hadn't explained exactly what we were here for, but, the archmage? "Your errand?" The elven woman asked, and though she reacted quickly she had hesitated, just a hair. "Interplanary travel." Sam said, again, as though the phrase was normal and expected. This time the elven woman hesitated notably enough to draw a concerned glance even from one of the guards. "I beg your pardon?" "We need to speak with whoever is in charge about how something extra planar could even get here" Sam said, this time her voice a little firmer. "It can't" the elven woman started, but this time Sam cut her off, "and we would very much like to know who around here has been playing with necromancy." This time I could see one of the guards move his hand reflexively down to his weapon. "Or we could just discuss how the arcane is falling short" Sam offered and gestured in my direction "the divine are already preforming miracles again." And there it was. That's why she had been so apologetic and awkward. I sighed and slowly, with my hands held open in a gesture of surrender, reached up and removed my new sunglasses. The elven woman gasped, bringing one of her hands up to her mouth, and shot up from her seat. "My gods" she whispered. "I'll make some calls, please wait here."

I turned and sat at one of the benches to the side, keeping my eyes low to the ground. The room was too bright, not just in the amount of light, but the sheer intensity of colour. Even the shapes and angles of things seemed sharper than they should be and the room felt as though it might start spinning at any moment. "I'm sorry" Sam whispered, standing next to me, "but we need answers." I nodded, which immediately reminded me how close I was to nausea. "Count the tiles." Sam offered, and I looked down at the floor. What I had previously assumed was a smooth surface had actually been made from countless little tiles of odd shapes and sizes, all of them nearly the same colour. Nearly. I started counting and trying to get a feel for them, for what they were, for the pattern in what looked more like chaos. Slowly I found myself realizing the pattern they formed was reminiscent of a forest floor. Pebbles, single straws of grass, a carpet of old mulch and leaves, dirt. The room settled and the pain became manageable and I couldn't help but to lift my eyes and glance in the direction of the magical trees. They glowed with magic, each tree echoed a thousand times in faint reflections through the air itself. Each stone and crystal leaf throwing the image through the room. I was in an entire forest of gentle light and unearthly beauty and all I could say was "what?" "Yeah, I thought you'd like that." Sam whispered.

"The archmage will see you now." The elven woman called over. I closed my eyes, and pocketed by sunglasses before standing up. "Please follow me." The old elven woman led us past the elevators to the far wall of the hall, then placed her hand on the wall, chanted a gentle spell, and revealed a small keyhole. She entered a key she held on a bracelet and to the side of her the wall slid open to reveal a separate elevator with only two buttons. One for up, and one for down. To my surprise, we went down.

"My name" the elven woman spoke "is Far'emin Chuft. I am one of the three members of the current council of archmage in the Pinnacle of Arcane Research." "I know." said Sam. "I didn't." I muttered, feeling a little more myself, and thus a little more frustrated at the turn of things. "We aren't fond of a lot of people knowing, Detective Winters." The elven woman continued. "Wizardry is all about knowledge, about information, and protecting personal information is how we keep ourselves safe. Magic is not what it was in my mother's age, after all."

The elevator slid to a halt and opened. I squinted instinctively but quickly relaxed again. The hallway was softly lit and coloured. The hallway had simple wooden floors and walls, well worn by age, but clearly well cared for. The ceiling had softly glowing lights though I couldn't see an electrical source for them. On the other end of the hall were wooden double doors, open a slight crack, and from beyond them came a pair of voices in hushed conversation. Far'emin kept in the lead and threw the doors wide as she entered. The room was large and circular with portraits along the outer wall, faces of what I presumed were noteworthy wizards, perhaps previous archmages. The center of the room had a circular table with a large crystal set in it's center, emanating a soft glow that somehow managed to bathe the entire room in a gentle and comfortable light, even to my sensitive new eyes. Around the central table were thirteen plush chairs, only two of which were occupied.

As Far'emin entered the room she ran her hands over her face and back over her hair, letting out a soft sigh of releif, and when I glanced her way her hair had changed colour, from a deep and rich brown to a stark white, and the skin of her face and hands had darkened still, as though it had absorbed the colour from her hair, darkening to nearly coal black. I whispered "Drow" before I could catch the though in my mind, and Far'emin chuckled slightly. "How very astute." "Let me introduce my colleagues," she then said "the very honorable mister Joseph Darian Swit," she gestured towards a stout human man with almost dwarfish features. Thick black beard and a pair of round glasses completed the look. He looked up and nodded at her mention of his name. "and the lady Amana Silverlight." The high elven woman stood up from the circular table and gave a slight bow. My mind ran a few pointless circles within my head, reminding me of what little was known of the drow even before the fade, and the reputation they still had to this day, and watched as Far'emin walked over to the high elven woman and gave her a hug and a gentle kiss and just gave up on thinking I knew anything.

Sam, which until this moment had seemed unfazed by the entire encounter, stood frozen by the door with wide eyes, watching Far'emin's every move as though she expected her to simply explode, taking the room and everything in it with her. "Sam?" I asked softly. "She's a fucking dark elf!" Came a half whispered response. "Yes, yes I am." Far'emin responded with a sigh. "I know what reputation my people have, but there's much you do not know. The fade did not just affect the surface." "Come now!" Joseph suddenly spoke, his voice a deep booming one that jostled us to move, "Take a seat and let us see those eyes. Please?" Sam seemed to remember why we were here and took a steadying breath. "Alright then. Come on tall boy."

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What you get here, on Tumblr, is my first draft of each chapter, as it happens to exist.  I’m considering making a patreon for working on this thing.  In the meanwhile, keep me in writing fuel via;  https://ko-fi.com/miniar

[hans-writes-things]

Fairy Dust - Chapter 7

I waited until I was down to the parking lot before fishing the sunglasses out of my pocket. I hadn't wanted to put them on in Barbara's office, stubbornly holding onto the foolish idea that I wouldn't need his help. I didn't want to need his help. I didn't like needing anyone's help, not really. I stood and mulled over his words. The schedule, sent down from on high, ordering me see him daily for a minimum of 30 minutes at a time, until such a time as Barbara decided he could do no more for me. "If you had nothing to say, nothing at all, you wouldn't have said anything." He had reasoned, and I had been unable to refute the logic, so I had been forced to agree to the schedule, both because it was captain's orders, and because, despite my feelings to the contrary, I apparently still needed to talk.

I unfolded the arms of the sunglasses and slipped them on, thinking to myself of the irony of how they were shaped, that they would probably make me look like a blind man. Every last muscle in my face and along my scalp immediately relaxed and the wave of relief that washed over me almost knocked me off my feet. I hadn't realized how much tension I was holding, how much squinting I must have been doing, but the moment that my new eyes were sheilded from the brightness of the world, all that washed away. The sunglasses dimmed the light of the world, and muddled the bright colours, rendering everything a little darker and a little grayer. I closed my eyes behind the shade and basked the comfort. When I opened them again, Sam was there, the car running in front of me, waiting for me to get in.

"I looked into your sister's tips" she started, but suddenly stopped, I could see her clenching and unclenching her jaw. It took a few moments before she continued "as far as I can tell, Bakder's is a small time shipping company, servicing but a handful of coastal towns. It looks all above board and clean and simple and I hate it. It's too simple." "How so?" I prompted. She clenched and unclenched her jaw a couple times more before she answered. "It's a clean surface." It was a gnomish phrase that I had heard her use several times. Gnomes were not so fond of clean surfaces. Anything alive and substantial, anything that truly existed and did anything, generated some mess or another. A clean surface could suggest something so new it's value and purpose was not even known yet, but more often than not, a clean surface was simply a falsehood. When a gnome called something a clean surface they were in fact calling it a lie. "And Ork Door?" I eventually asked. "Worse!" She exclaimed. "They own a little bit of bloody everything as far as I can tell. Apartment buildings, shares in several different companies, a couple of shops, none of which sell any of the same things, even a gym!" She gestured at the air around her as she spoke, taking her left hand off the wheel. "In my neighbourhood no less!" I blinked at that. "Really?" "Yeah tall boy. I don't like it. I don't like it at all."

I leaned back a little further in my seat as she went on about the two companies, taking in the information. Bakder's Shipping had offices down in the harbor district, to no surprise to anyone, but Ork Door apparently had it's offices over in dust town, three buildings away from the scene of murder we had been called to investigate the other night. The place where we had fought a creature no one thought anyone would ever see again. The place where the duster died at the hands of one of the few remaining trolls in existence. The place where tortured wild fairies had clawed my eyes out, something which should have rendered me permanently blind, with nothing but a pair of gaping holes where my eyes used to be. My stomach turned at the mention and I felt the bile rising in my throat. I clenched my fists so hard my fingers ached and I tried to bite back on the terror that the mere mention of the place had sent runing through me. It hadn't been my first brush with death, we had had our close calls before, but this time it was different and it had changed me, in more ways than one.

We sat in silence then, Sam in her gnomish booster, driving a car big enough to hold a pair of half orcs with ease, and me pressing my fingertips into the palms of my hands, a cold sweat running down my spine, every hair raised on the back of my neck, teetering on panic. I don't know how long that moment lasted, but after I while I started to realize we weren't headed in the direction of dust town. We weren't heading for the docks either. We had driven in a meandering manner, taking what could be considered the longest route possible to somewhere that was only three blocks away from the castle. I licked my lips and cleared my throat, coming more fully to my senses, and with more than a little effort I unclenced my hands and jaw. "So, where are we heading?" I finally asked, my voice coming out raw. Sam sighed and gave me an apologetic glance. "PAR"

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Another short chapter. 

Mind you, you’re all just getting the RAW first draft here... some day I’ll go over, adjust, rewrite, fix, adjust more, clean up, add stuff, remove stuff, go over it again, and then... put it out there, all finished and pretty.... 

....yeah.... some day.... 

IF I make it that far! Wanna buy me some writer fuel?

[hans-writes-things]

Fairy Dust: Chapter 6

I knew Marcus Barbara only by sight and reputation. Like most of the cops in the department I had my prejudices and like most people I wasn't exactly going to go out of my way to challenge them, not when I had more important work to do, like mindnumbing paperwork. I had seen him around though, especially on those rare occasions I hit the department gym at the end of my day, taking out my frustrations on the treadmill. That was my therapy. Letting my long legs stretch out to their fullest, pushing the limits of my endurance, focusing on nothing but the motion of my body as my brain pulled at the knot in my mind, unraveling whatever problem I was facing until it became simpler. Often enough, there was Barbara, too big for the treadmills, jumping rope and then lifting more than my full bodyweight with what seemed to me to be far too much ease. The rumors around the office were that he was of barbarian heritage, possibly with a little orc, or even hill giant, mixed into his blood. The huge man was the last in line in a cop family that spanned several generations, and the first one to choose another profession. I had heard the stories of his father as well, after all, cops like to gossip. I could understand why someone like Barbara chose to become a shrink, and those that had been sent to him had said it wasn't that bad, still, didn't mean I wanted it.

I ran all of this through my mind as I walked down the hall to the door with his name on the glass. Sure, things had gotten better in the last hundred odd years, but there was still a lingering image of what cops should be like, of the mental and physical strength to overcome any adversity, the integrity to do so without breaking the laws we were meant to uphold, and the honor to do so fairly and in the service of justice. Of course, this image was what we held of ourselves more than anyone else, and most of the world knew that choosing the job didn't make you a good man, and no one in their right mind would truly expect anyone to witness the worst of the world and walk away unscathed, and yet, the stigma towards any cop needing help with their feelings seemed to linger. I didn't want to seem weak in the eyes of my peers.

"Come in!" Came the call through the door before I so much as raised my fist to knock. I grumbled under my breath and took the doorhandle. The room was not what I expected. Instead of my imagined soft chairs and friendly colours, the walls bore the same colours as my captain's office, the exact same hue, I knew, to my altered eyes. The light had been dimmed somewhat and Barbara had clipped a sheild to the screen of his computer, lessening the glare. His shelves were the same practical metal shelves found anywhere around the building and his desk could have been taken out of any department. The room even smelled like cop. Behind the desk, in a well weathered leather desk chair, sat the towering man, Marcus Barbara, wearing a white shirt with sleeves rolled up. He sported a neatly trimmed short beard and hair and a calm but serious expression as I came in. He gestured to the simple chair across from him, wordlessly offering me the seat. I sighed, closed the door, and sat.

And then we sat, for a long moment. The only sound in the office being the occasional creak in his chair, or mine, and the ticking of the clock on the wall. Eventually I broke the silence.

"I'm only here on captain's orders." I blurted out. No answer. "I don't really know what I'm supposed to do here." And still, no answer. "I didn't ask for them." "For what?" He asked, finally responding. "The eyes." And then we sat in silence for a while longer.

A few hundred years ago, so short a time that the very eldest of the elven kind still remembered it from their childhoods, magic was far more powerful than it was today. A cleric could have given me my eyes back, my eyes, not new ones that weren't mine, if his magic was cast early enough after the event. A group of clerics could, over time, even restore lost limbs. In those days, a single strong wizard was a force to be reckoned with. Capable of levelling an entire village with their manipulation of the raw forces of magic, of nature. And then, something changed. Day by day, the efficacy of spells and enchantments seemed to lessen. The power and personal investment of the caster required to preform feats of magic became greater. And so the world lost a lot of it's magical power, and a lot of spells, both common and uncommon, stopped working. What had once been a rare and expensive spell simply became impossible. No matter how many clerics you could gather, no longer could they restore a lost limb, and even if brought to a healer quickly, the loss of one's eyes as I had lost mine was considered irreversible. Yet here I was. Seeing. And seeing more than any human being around me.

"I don't have the time." I started "For what?" Barbara asked. "To think about it right now." I sighed. "Not yet." Barbara simply nodded, to my surprise. "Then don't. Just know that you'll have to, sooner or later, and the sooner you work through it, the better, not just for you, for your partner too." I grumbled again. He was right of course, but that didn't mean I had to like it. "In the meanwhile" he reached into a drawer on his desk and handed me a pair of sunglasses, the sort with a blocking edge, "these might help."

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Ok... so... maybe Barbara and his wife are my fav couple of ppl in the world that is building around my little story... 

Also... ok... so... I might not be writing as often as I should... but something is happening now... the thing is going... so... maybe there’ll be more soon!

Buy me a ko-fi to support this project and my continued existence!

[hans-writes-things]

Thirteen years.  It had been thirteen years since I first met him.  He’d been little more than a boy at the time, barely into his mid twenties, and I had been a little older.  Ok, a lot older.  Alright, to be honest, I don’t actually remember exactly how old I am, but that is beside the point.  Thirteen years.  Time simply whips by when you are immortal and I had completely missed it, and then he sat there, across from me, as we sipped coffee and caught up as we hadn’t seen one another in a couple of months, and he asked me how I did it.  “Seriously bro. What’s your routine?” I swallowed and eyed him curiously.  “We’ve been friends for ages and, seriously, it’s like you haven’t aged a day!” I mentally berated myself for forgetting about aging.  I mean, it’s not like my kind simply run around making friends all the time, but there he was. I’m not entirely sure how it even happened. I had just been in town to undermine the local election and set a feel wheels in motion, you know, demon stuff, and I’d decided to go out for a drink.  Thirteen years and my appearance hadn’t changed and he was noticing.  I tried to avoid eyecontact and change the subject again.  “So she said yes?” “Yeah! She did! I almost didn’t believe it!” “I knew you two would get along.” Of course I had known. I’m a demon. I know what people want and usually it’s my job to use that against them, but this was my friend, so I had found him someone who shared his desires. Being a busy demon I’d selfishly decided to make sure he’d be well looked after and in good company if I wasn’t around.  It was a perfectly selfish decision. 

“I can’t thank you enough for introducing us bro. Seriously. You’re like, my best friend.” I swallowed and avoided eyecontact again.  Was I blushing? Me? I who had posed nude before great artists in many a guise.  I who had been a terrible muse and an inspiration in utter debauchery of every intimacy conceivable? I who had spent centuries reveling in the carnal arts in the company of every gender that mankind could produce, threesomes and foursomes and orgies of every combination? “That’s why I asked you to meet me for coffee you know. I wanted to ask if you’d be my best man?” I choked on my coffee.  I mean, I had know he would invite me, surely? I had thought this through, surely? There he sat, staring at me with those brown eyes full of hope.  My friend. My only actual friend.  I sighed.  I couldn’t really put it off any more.  “I can’t.” “What?” The words felt raw in my throat. A throat that could pour lies like the sweetest honey and painful truths like bitter wine with utter ease, and there I sat, struggling to tell my friend the truth.  I am a demon. Do not confuse my hesitation here for some guilt or morality.  I assure you, the hesitation was purely selfish.  I just didn’t want to lose the pleasure of his company yet. 

I snapped my fingers and paused reality around us.  I could only halt the flow of time for a moment, but the action was enough to make it impossible to back out.  He noticed the stillness of all things around us and blinked.  The other patrons of the café, the cars in the street, the people on the sidewalk.  “How?” “Joe, I’ve been meaning to tell you.” I let my mask fall and revealed the black and red scales of my skin, the slitted pupils, the small horns, the clawed fingers.  “I’m not exactly human. I can’t stand by your side when you get married. I can’t even enter the church. I’m a demon and I’m not welcome on holy ground.” Joe leaned back and stared at me in wonder.  “So that’s your secret huh?” “What?” “Why you don’t age. You think I’m blind bro?” I shook my head, time started flowing again and my mask returned.  He looked into his cup for a while and considered the situation.  “What if we do it secular?” “Bro.” I blinked. Must have got something in my eye then. “Bro.” He assured me. 

You, a demon, have befriended someone.

They are the best friend you have ever had in your long long life and you love them more than you thought you could ever love a human.

The only issue is that you haven’t told them what you are. The later it gets, the harder it becomes to tell them, and the easier it gets for them to figure it out on their own, but you are worried that they will be terrified of you and never want to see you again once they know.

[hans-writes-things]

Got my computer issues dealt with more or less.  Got my ass in gear.  Gonna be doing more of the work from now on. 

[hans-writes-things]

Minor Annoyances of Writing Fantasy

the number of weird words you end up adding to your word processor’s dictionary, just so your screen isn’t filled with red squiggles

the number of supplemental files containing world building information you need to KEEP OPEN at all times

the truly bizarre things you need to research (”Hmmm… does it make more sense for my merpeople to be based on dolphin biology or fish biology?” or “wait, this character is half dragon? HOW? I feel like I need to understand how that would happen… let’s see if there are any existing mythos for it…” or “Just how damaging is mistletoe to an oak tree? What other trees have a susceptibility to mistletoe? What about other parasitic plants?”)

creating new slang, axioms, and proverbs that make sense in a world unlike our own

trying to maintain a consistent level of technological advancement across multiple aspects of culture

names for things that are not characters

Feel free to add your own!

[hans-writes-things]

This Week’s Sunday “Morning” Short is brought to you by this Prompt! _____________________________

Junkyard Maze: A Fairy Dust Short Story

Xyrocelzam Draxledizk had been on the force for about 150 years when she got saddled with her new partner, a tall human male which had just recently been made detective, and she was absolutely positively the opposite of thrilled with getting saddled with the newbie. I wasn't exactly thrilled either. The tiny gnome made it abundantly clear from the moment we met that she was against having me as a partner and was even more clear in letting me know that despite my training and my acing the detectives exam, I was about as knowledgeable and useful to her as a broken pen. And then we caught the Stringer case.

The city of L'waren has always had it's share of crime. It's apparently inevitable in a big city where you can find nearly even civilized race of the realms all living together in a varying degree of wealth and squalor, or, at least no one has come up with a solution for it yet. I had requested to work homicide and once I had completed the prerequisite training and testing the city police commission agreed. I was posted at the castle, an older building in the midtown financial district, and told I'd be partnered with their most experienced detective at least while I found my feet. Detective Draxledizk had gone through almost a dozen partners in the past two years. Each one requesting a new partner or even a transfer, refusing to work with the little gnome, and she was taking some heat for her behaviour despite working with a captain that had joined the force with her back in the day. Their friendship had protected her so far but there was a limit to what the captain could do for her and as much as she hated it, she knew it.

The Stringer case was unique in that we broke the case in record time, though we didn't actually know that until after we made the initial arrest.

Darian Stringer had been a successful alchemist and for the last fifteen years before his death he had owned and operated his own little shop just a few short blocks from the castle. The proximity to the wealthier people of the city would  put some of our neighbours on edge and so the case came with some pressure to close the case quickly and quietly and as politely as possible. Damn lucky we caught the case then.

We arrived at the scene of the murder in the early morning, shortly after it had been called in. Both of us had barely managed to walk into the department before being handed the assignment and sent back out. A early morning customer had knocked on the door of Stringer's Apothecary, looking to see if the alchemist was in yet, and found to his surprise that the door was unlocked. When he entered he said he had smelled something horrible and been forced to exit the shop again to throw up on the street, but not before seeing what looked like legs on the floor behind the counter. He had then immediately called for help.

The ambulance cleric had discovered that the body behind the counter was that of a middle aged human matching the description of one Darian Stringer. He had been nearly decapitated with an acid enhanced edged weapon, something enchanted and probably very old. He suspected the weapon had been an axe and told us that the time of death had probably been shortly after Stringer had closed up shop for the night.

My new gnomish partner, having been freshly warned to play nice, put me in charge of interviewing the witness that found the body and getting all the information I could from the cleric, and I, hoping to prove my worth, was as thorough as I could be but neither had any more information to offer. I gave them my card and collected their contact information and thanked them for their time and went to regroup with my partner.

As I entered the apothecary again, the little gnome stood at the soles of the victims boots and looked about the walls and ceiling, occasionally taking a few careful steps to rotate her view before glancing at the victim and then the ceiling in turn. I watched her and attempted to quietly follow her gaze, trying to see what she saw, but found nothing. "Nothing." I muttered under my breath. Her eyes snapped over to me and she cocked her head slightly, as if impatiently waiting for me to finish my thought. I cleared my throat and tried not to blush or buckle, but instead decided to just let my mouth run as I worked through my thoughts, talking out loud does help us humans piece things together sometimes, but most other races prefer to do their thinking inside their heads. "I mean, there's no splatter on the ceiling, or the walls, not that I can see in any case." She rolled her hand, offering me to keep going. "There still could be, something I can't see, but if we have an axe murderer on our hands, it should be a lot messier shouldn't it?" She smiled and nodded, the first smile she'd ever shown me. "Yes. It fucking should be."

I walked over to her, watching my step to avoid disturbing anything, and looked about the walls and ceiling, and then at the body. The gash across the throat showed white bone in places and the flesh looked off colour and blistered, as though it had melted and oozed. The smell of acid and death and raw burnt meat hit my nostrils and my breakfast protested, threatening to contaminate the scene. I steadied my breath and tried to keep my wits about me. "Could the acid have prevented blood flow?" "Highly unlikely," she said, "never heard of an acid strong enough to do that." She thought for a minute and stared at the body, the pallor of the flesh beneath us before settling on a better answer. "I think he was dead before he got the axe, and I think he bled to death."

We walked out of the apothecary together in silence. I took long slow strides and she bounced beside me with her quick little legs. Her hair was a deep red and she kept it in a braid at the back of her head. She was barely half my height and I admit that sometimes I felt as though I was walking with a child, not a woman more than five times my age, and for the life of me I couldn't quite pronounce her name right. Every time I attempted to say something to her, starting with detective Draxledizk, she would flinch, sometimes correcting me on my pronunciation, and I would apologize. She took it personally, even though humans had always been unable to pronounce her name perfectly right. We got in the car, leaving the scene to the techs so they could work their various magics and sciences and find information for us to work with. My partner was driving, it was her car, and I sat awkwardly next to her, going over the witness statements. She in turn questioned me as to whether I had asked about a number of things and seemed pleasantly surprised that I had even covered some things she hadn't thought of.

I had become better at watching my surroundings since working with her, even though it had barely been two months, but I had also learned that she wasn't really the biggest fan of answering my questions, but after a good thirty minutes driving away from the city center I couldn't hold my tongue any longer. "So..." I let the word drag out, I could feel her rolling her eyes at me somehow without taking them off the road, "where are we headed?" She sighed. She sighed at me far more often than I liked. "To see an informant, an old friend." I waited, she would tell me everything she felt like telling me if she wanted to, there was no point in asking. She gripped the wheel tighter, her knuckles whitening, and then forced herself to relax. "He's a weapon nut. Collector. If anyone knows anything about some axe with an active acid enchantment even existing in the city, he would be it." I asked before I could think to stop myself. "But?" She shot me a glance for a split second, knuckles whitening again. "He's off the books. We have history." She paused and it occurred to me that she was speaking with me because she preferred to talk to me than her so called old friend. "It's complicated." She stopped talking and focused on her driving. Complicated usually meant personal, at least in my experience, so I didn't press for details.

She seemed on edge for the rest of the drive, occasionally gripping the wheel so hard I could hear her knuckles pop and the leather creak in her grip. I worried that her head wasn't in the right place and at no time did she call in where we were headed. I wished that she'd trust me, talk to me, and for the first time I wondered why she had driven her previous partners away. I wouldn't learn the reason that day, but I was about to get a little insight into why she didn't trust easily.

Eventually we pulled up outside a warehouse to the western side of the city, close to the city limits, an area with heavy traffic of trucks coming in and out, hauling whatever goods needed hauling from one place to the next. A place where nothing seemed as though it was built to last or meant to stay any longer than it absolutely had to. Half the streetlights looked damaged and between bustling loading and unloading docks were vacant lots where small wildflowers had begun making their way up through the cracks in old parking lots. The warehouse had a sign that looked like possibly the oldest thing in this whole section of the city. Rust and old neon lights that had been painted over instead of replaced with new ones. The place was named The Barrow and proclaimed to be the best place in town for rare and unusual antiques.

I let her take the lead, following a little behind and to her right, and scanned my surroundings the whole way up to the door of the warehouse. She walked up the door and pounded on the metal with a clenched fist and then looked up at a security camera above the door and flashed her badge. The door clicked and she pushed her way in, and I followed.

Inside the warehouse were shelves upon shelves upon shelves of a variety of old items of every legal kind. They were not all facing the same direction however and it appeared that they had been just placed wherever they could be squeezed in, but something told me that this effect was more intentional than accidental. The place looked nothing like an antique store, not by any stretch of the imagination. It looked more like the sort of rusty clutter that you'd expect to find at a mechanic hoarder's house. The air was metallic to the taste and thick with the smell of every engine oil ever manufactured. Old industrial lights flickered somewhere overhead, making the whole place even more disorienting. "Antiques huh?" I muttered to my partner. "I'm sure all this junk was precious to someone, once." Came her reply. We both let out a small snort of a laugh.

"Be right with you." Came a raspy voice from somewhere within the maze of shelves. Detective Draxledizk turned to face me and with a quiet voice, sharp and cold as ice, said, "if this goes south, get out the door and call for backup. Do not go into the maze without backup. Ok?" I nodded once and she nodded back to me, her round face turning into a jovial smile as she did. It was a little bit unsettling. A round older dwarf with a scraggly gray beard stained with what looked like smears of motor oil and ash came around one of the corners and thumped towards a metal desk just across from the door and took up his place standing across from it before even looking at us. "Good afternoon officers, what can I help you with?" "Detectives," snapped my partner, "and I'm here to see him." The dwarf dipped oil stained fingers into his breast pocket and pulled out a pair of delicately framed round glasses and gingerly pulled them up onto his bulbous nose. "Is that you Xyrocelzam?" She nodded, still smiling like it was her birthday and she'd just won the lottery all at once. "Yes Borrl, it's me, now, tell him I'm here please." The dwarf looked decidedly unsettled and I was fair sure it was her smile that was making him uncomfortable. "Sure Xyrry, I'll tell him."   "That's Detective Draxledizk to you Borrl."

The dwarf pulled a grimy walkie-talkie off his belt and thumped away towards the maze of shelves, speaking dwarven into the thing in sharp short gravely syllables. I could barely hear the difference between the reply and static when it came in. The dwarf turned around and gestured for Detective Draxledizk to follow him, she looked me square in the eye and said, just loud enough to make sure he heard her, "stay here Detective Winters, if I'm not back out in ten minutes, call in the tactical unit and tear this place apart." I gave her a serious nod then adjusted my stance to mimic that of the military trained guardsmen that I had worked with in the past. Her eyes glittered and she smiled at me again, two times in a day, I was actually starting to make progress. Then she turned and followed the dwarf.

I looked around and checked my watch. I felt foolish for not noticing it when we entered but as I looked about the room I realized that there were no security cameras inside the warehouse, more confirmation that this wasn't an antiques dealer in the traditional sense at least. It hadn't been more than a minute since she slipped into the maze after the dwarf and I had been determined to follow her orders, but couldn't shake the nagging sensation that this wasn't right, somewhere in the very back of my head my old instructor's voice rang out, "and most importantly, never leave your partner without backup." I groaned and hoped I was doing the right thing, then I unholstered my weapon and walked into the maze, trying to track their footprints in the dust and grime.

I moved as stealthily as I could, taking long and careful steps, trying to move as quickly as I dared as well. They had a two minute head start on me and the maze of shelves around me was even more confusing once I entered it. The flickering lights above didn't help either. Still, there were clear paths in the dust and grime on the floor, fairly easy to track, even for someone without low light vision or any real training in tracking. It seemed that the genius criminals that had built the maze had forgotten about dust and tracks. After nearly five minutes of tracking I heard voices. Three gruff masculine voices speaking in the dwarven language and the muted groan of a smaller, feminine voice, more familiar than the rest. One of the voices got slightly louder, seemed like a bark of orders, and I heard a pair of fast moving footfalls heading in my general direction. I stepped as far off the path as I dared, trying my best not to disturb the dust too much as I slipped around a corner and held my breath. The two dwarves ran past me faster than I had ever seen a dwarf move and didn't seem to notice me at all. I wouldn't have long until they'd make their way back and kicked myself for not having simply gone and called backup already as I hurried as quietly as I could down the rest of the path.

My gnomish partner lay in a heap on the floor in front of a dwarf that probably outweighed me. This seemed to be the central chamber of the maze, the actual shop, and the items on the shelves lining the inside of the area were a lot finer than those that were displayed throughout the rest of the maze. Most of them were also quite a lot less legal. Ancient weaponry interspersed with flasks and vials of various liquids. Fine robes and body armor were displayed alongside a case of fine jewels and several crates of sedated fairies were stacked up on one side of the space. There were paintings, and other genuine antique items as well, but in this setting I found myself doubting that they had been legally obtained. The dwarf towering over my partner was smiling a wide smile showing golden teeth. He wore a patch over one eye and his red beard was braided in a single thick braid. He was wearing a chainmail shirt over a black one and a pair of simple black jeans and boots. He looked like someone people would be afraid of no matter what year they met in, and he had my partner at his feet. A single hard kick with the heel of his boot and he could probably kill her, and we had just started to get along. I had to wait for him to move but I also didn't really have the time.

The dwarf spat out some words towards my partner as she lay groaning on the floor. I didn't understand dwarven, but it sounded a lot like insults. "Do ya know what ya did ta me?" The dwarf spoke with a heavy accent before switching back to his own language. He started to pace a little bit and I watched to try and time my entry when he would be at least three steps from her but he didn't step that far away. Another string of insults with a few ones I understood. Words like bitch and whore and cunt, and fucking cop made their way to my ears. He seemed unstable and I was beginning to fear for my partner. By this time I should have been outside calling for backup for sure, but even if I would have made it out it would still be at least 20 minutes until they'd get here. The dwarf's walkie-talkie was on the table behind him and it exploded into static and then a row of dwarven words. The huge dwarf turned away from my partner and she started backing up away from him, one small movement at a time, trying to find cover behind a crate just to her left. The dwarf walked over to the table and picked up the walkie-talkie and I noticed my partner's service weapon tucked into the back of his belt. He barked out some orders to his minions over by the entrance, and I figured I was almost out of time, that sooner or later they would come charging up behind me and then we were probably both dead. It was either now or never. I stood up and stepped into the central room. "L'waren police department. Put down the walkie-talkie and place your hands on your head."

The dwarf slowly complied and started to turn around as I made my way sidestepping towards my partner to make sure she was okay. "Idiot," she groaned, "gave you an order." "Yeah well," I answered, "never leave your idiot partner without backup." She chuckled slightly and started to get up. I didn't dare take my eyes off of the dwarf in front of me as I kept moving sideways until she could reach me with ease. "Ankle holster, secondary weapon." "Clever boy!" Her voice seemed cheerful as she helped herself to my backup gun and brought it to bear on the chainmailed dwarf. "You can cuff him now, I have him covered." "Thank you Detective.. " I began, but she cut me off with "call me Xyrocelzam." I laughed and glanced over to her "not sure I can pronounce that either." "Fuck off tall boy," she said with a smile. "Okay Sam." I replied.

"This is my ex", she said after we handcuffed him, and his two minions as they came back to check on their boss. "He used to be a cop too. We raided this place together once. I had no idea it was his at the time and when I found out he had made some changes to how he runs things so that it couldn't be traced back to him. So, I leaked the information that the owner of one of the most successful black market warehouses in the history of L'waren was married to a cop." The dwarf spat in her direction. "I divorced him and forced him out of the service with a few well placed truths, even if they couldn't be substantiated. He was under investigation for almost five whole years before they decided the shithead wasn't worth it." "And he's the weapon nut?" I asked. "Yeah," she sighed. "And I was just looking for information. But, now I guess I got to call this in. Assaulting an officer is a pretty serious crime."

And with that, old Borrl cracked. The alchemist had been working for her ex, cooking potions and sometimes fairy dust, but he'd been starting to become unreliable and so needed to be dealt with. After he'd been killed, her ex had decided to take an incredibly rare weapon from his personal collection to the body in the hopes to lure her to him. He had expected her to come alone. He had intended to kill her. Borrl apparently felt a little bit guilty for his part in the plan and wanted her to know that, just not enough to do anything to warn her.

Since that case I can't tell you how many time Sam's saved my life, but she always insist on reminding me that I saved her life first. 

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These two OC’s are my favorite idiots atm. 

I hope you like ’em too. 

Anyways. I’m broke as shit as I am disabled and can’t make ends meet on disability alone.  My bed is dead. My laptop is shit. My phone is broken. So.... y’know... a little support goes a long way. 

If you’re as skint as I am but like my words and wanna support my continued existence, please hit that reblog button, pass it on. 

If you got a dollar to spare, you can click here and pass it on via kofi.

<3 <3 <3 to everyone who's helped so far. 

Prompt #5328

“I’m sure all this junk was precious to someone, once.”

[hans-writes-things]

do you have any advice/links for someone trying to write through major depression or other mental illness? writing is the only ive ever been good at & all ive ever wanted to do but i havent been able to write a single word in well over a year and im starting to lose hope that i ever will again. its like my motivation and creativity have just up and evaporated and im not sure how much longer i can keep praying for rain

Writing through mental illness.

I have a tag here with all the motivational writing posts I’ve made. Some center around writing when you can’t seem to get yourself to do it, and a few are born directly from my own struggles as a writer with chronic anxiety and depression.

But I think the problem here might be that you are praying for the rain. Waiting and wishing the motivation and creativity will come is a viable strategy when you’re young, mentally healthy, and have boundless time and energy, but after that point, it will never truly work. It’s really hard to move forward from this, because your brain will tell you that if you have no inspiration, that you’re failing, that your words aren’t good enough, that you should stop. 

Except your brain lies, trying to make up for the fact that it doesn’t (yet) know how to write if it can’t write the way it used to.

Professional writers don’t write good, creative words. They write terrible, awful words, often words they hate. Sometimes they write them slowly and sometimes they write them knowing they’ll throw them all out in the end. But they write them anyways.

So my advice is this: Don’t pray for rain. Write a desert.

Write the most terrible, horrible, awful sentence you can think of.

“She ran super fast up that big fat hill and it hurt.”

Now you have a sentence. It’s a terrible, horrible, awful sentence, but it’s there, and it’s yours, and you can fix it later.

Then you write another sentence just as awful.

You don’t write them for long. Maybe the first day you challenge yourself to write ten sentences. Ten sentences every day, five days a week. Then you write twenty. And then thirty.

The more you write, the more your brain forgets that it doesn’t know how to write without inspiration, and figures out that all the skill and knowledge and ability is still there, inside you. 

You write much better, stronger words (sometimes), though you don’t always know it until you reread them. 

You set small, reasonable goals, and work your way to bigger ones. 

You take breaks (and plan breaks into your goal setting.) 

You reward yourself when you hit those small, reasonable goals. 

You don’t care that your words are terrible, horrible, awful words because that means you’re in league with the most genius writers of all time.

You’ll look back and find that as you wrote that desert, the storm blew up behind you.

Rain doesn’t bring writing. Writing brings the rain.

[hans-writes-things]

Sunday Morning Short: Fairy Dust Backstory - The Therapist

Hey folks. Decided to do something a little different today. I want to assure you I’m still working on fairy dust, don’t worry.  Some of it (ok… a lot of it) is gonna get rewritten and reposted, if not here than elsewhere, and you’ll absolutely positively get to know where, so no worries.

In the meanwhile, I wanna tell you about some of my side characters.  For the main characters, you’ll just have to read Fairy Dust, it’ll all get revealed there eventually, probably, or however much I want to. But for some of the side characters, I “know” a lot about them that may never need be referenced in the story at all, so instead… I’ll give you their backstory to some greater or lesser extent with their first moments coming into contact with the main event that kicks off Fairy Dust. 

Here’s chapter 1 of Fairy Dust btw, if you want to know what this is all about. 

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Introducing Barbara (Fairy Dust side story)

It was an ordinary morning, at least to begin with. The alarm went off at 5:30 and Marcus slapped awkwardly at it from the comfort of the warmth and softness of his bed. His wife Helen murmured her usual complaints and they spent their first few minutes of the new day bathed in the golden light of dawn as it poured through the white curtains. It was a part of their ritual, to wake up a little earlier than they needed just so they could take it slow and say hello to one another before it was time to rush off and tend to their lives outside their home.

There was something off about this morning however. He couldn’t quite place it but he felt uneasy, like there was a cold chill sitting firmly over his shoulders, like death’s hand being placed there to warn, or maybe to comfort. Marcus was no stranger to death. He’d joined the local police service as a young man, eager to follow in the footsteps of his father who had recently joined the homicide department, then everything had fallen apart. He shuddered as the memory came crawling back to him once again but it was a familiar ghost by now, one that he’d long learned to face and acknowledge and then let go. Today it was particularly vivid however and the echo of the gunshot took longer than usual to fade and the ghostly scent of blood and gunpowder lingered even as he stepped into the shower.

His wife started the coffee maker he had set up the previous night and put away the dishes from the dishwasher as he showered. Their rituals had the practiced rhythms of the years behind them. The moment he was finished with his shower he turned the heat down a little bit for her and stepped out into the bathroom as she entered. He flicked a couple of drops of water at her and she laughed, her bubbly voice and bright smile melted away the last of the chill still lingering across his shoulders and he pulled her towards him and kissed her. She smiled and poked at his chest, giggling still, and jokingly scolded him for getting her nightshirt wet. He watched her undress out the corner of his eye as he toweled off and took the moment to just feel happy. Then she stepped into the shower, stuck her tongue out at him, and closed the door.

Marcus had met her after the tragedy, when he was just starting on the path to find out who he was all over again, and she had been a friend when he really needed one, someone who didn’t know, someone who he could just exist with, without the weight of all the history. He had been a few years older than the other students at the school. He wasn’t the oldest there, and it was only a few years, but it still made him feel a little out of place. She was a year older than him and so they had first bonded over how strange it was to feel so young out in the world around them but then attend classes and feel surrounded by children. She was studying law, while he was studying psychology. She hadn’t asked him why, or why it took so long to figure out what he wanted, and he hadn’t asked her. They were happy to just have someone to talk to.

Marcus got dressed for work and then tied an apron around his hips to protect them as he milled about their little kitchen, getting the rest of breakfast together and listened to his wife’s voice singing in the shower. He hadn’t turned on the radio this morning, as he usually did, and while he noticed this he decided not to wonder why. He didn’t want to acknowledge his morning’s premonition. He had always been a little bit psychic, which is a little uncommon among the humans of the realm, but far from unheard of. He probably inherited it from his father, which is probably why Charles Barbara had risen through the ranks as quickly as he did. He had been an excellent cop with fantastic instincts, or that is what everyone had said, but there’s always a price to pay for knowing more than most. Charles had been barely eighteen when he became a father and had done his best by Marcus and they had been close. Marcus looked up to his father, respected him, emulated him, even modeled himself after him to a degree, so when his father died he felt he had lost himself as well and it quickly began to show. They had sent Marcus to speak with the department shrink and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Helen snuck up behind him while he was stirring the scrambled eggs, lost in thoughts that seemed to be going nowhere, and wrapped her arms around her husband. They weren’t the most usual of couples. Marcus was well over six feet tall and looked as though he could pick up a car if he wanted to, though these last few years his visits to the gym had grown fewer. Helen was only a hair shorter than he was and her strength looked to match his. He had taken some judgement from friends and family, first for leaving the police service to become a shrink, and then for marrying a half orc, but he knew that she had it worse. There was no hiding her heritage, not with the slightly greenish gray tint to her skin, the point of her ears and the slight tusks in her bottom jaw, and people held it against her, expected her to be savage, slow, and simple minded. She had taken these prejudices and made them into advantages in her early career and earned the respect of her peers, but this didn’t mean that the sidelong glances and words of strangers couldn’t affect her any more. She held him tightly for a moment, then softened her grip and the ritual resumed.

He had never met someone with as much passion or compassion as Helen and while she had all the skill and intelligence to become yet another high price lawyer with wealthy clients she had opted to become a public defender instead, taking the occasional pro-bono job in between. She in turn told him that she had never met anyone like him. When he had first told her that his dad had been a cop and that it was what he’d always thought he wanted to be too, he had seen her stiffen at the mention. Then he had told her what had happened to his father.

He’d lost his mother when he was very young and had very little memory of her. He had been raised by his father and his father’s mother. His father’s father had been a cop too, back in the day, and died in the line of duty, so he had always known that that was a possibility and that used to terrify him, the thought that one day his father might go to work and never come home again, but what had happened was worse. Marcus had been one of the youngest men to be accepted into the police service and had barely been given his first uniform. He was at the bottom rung of the ladder with a small walked beat with three others, in a fairly safe area of the city center, working in the early morning, getting a feel for the chain of command, writing tickets and babysitting shoplifters until a patrol car would come pick them up. He hadn’t seen his father in a few weeks, he’d been busy working, taking point on a case, a bad one. Marcus didn’t know all of the details, but it had been a particularly brutal murder with a ritual element. Necromancy. His father had seen something, been exposed to something otherworldly and wrong, and something within him had broken. When his father and his partner had attempted to apprehend the suspect something went terribly wrong and his father was the lone survivor. They had sent him to the department shrink but it had only made things worse. A few nights later Marcus had woken up in a cold sweat and rushed to his father’s apartment just a block away only to hear the gunshot as he approached his father’s door. He could feel it before he entered. His father was gone, a note laying in a growing pool of blood below him.

They sent him to the same shrink as had handled his father. She had meant well, surely, but she wasn’t well equipped. She was barely older than Marcus and spoke from a place of innocence. She wasn’t familiar with death, not like he now was, and nothing she had to offer felt right, or helpful. She had painted her little office in the colours that were meant to invoke comfort, but they clashed with his reality. There were plants in the window and a crayon drawing on the wall behind her desk. He had felt alien, out of place in her office, as if the interviews had nothing to do with the reality he inhabited. She began to grow frustrated with their interviews as time passed on, and their personalities clashed. It was no one’s fault, he knew that, if not then, then later, but it built up over time until they both lost their temper. Him feeling as though she was playing pretend and lacked any true understanding, and her feeling as though he didn’t take her seriously or want to even try to improve. He had shouted, she had shouted, it was unprofessional, sure, but she was new and young and he might have been trying to get on her nerve. The breakthrough came when he shouted that he could do her job better than she was doing it, and she had looked him straight in the eye and dared him to prove it.

Now, he had her office. She held no grudges. She knew she was in over her head and had quit the same day as he did and a couple years later he had apologized to her, properly. They were on friendly enough terms now.

Helen had in turn told Marcus her story, a common enough for half orcs. Her mother was orc, a single parent, and they were poor. There are only so many jobs for orcs in the city and back then it was even worse. They did what they had to to survive. He hadn’t asked about her father, but she had told him anyway. She wasn’t sure, but she expected it was the landlord. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, an accident, but an easily preventable one. She had decided to sue the people responsible, though it hadn’t been easy. Most lawyers who would even meet with her had spoken to her slowly, using simple words and gesturing a lot and refused to take her seriously, more than one had made sure they had some of their law firms security personnel in the room with her. Eventually she had found someone to take her case, a woman with slightly pointed ears and a taller than average height, a half elven woman, and in her relief she almost got ripped off. When she pointed out the error in the contract before signing it, where the percentiles had been switched in case of any damages she’d receive, the half elven woman had corrected it, but ever since that moment Helen knew that she needed to watch her own lawyer. She hadn’t expected her to be able to read the contract, let alone catch the error. She hadn’t sued for the money, but to see justice served and to make sure the problem was solved, but she had received enough to be able to go to school, study law, become the person she had needed the most.

In a way they were both working to help the people that they used to be and along the way they had found each other and they made each other happy.

Marcus plated the eggs while Helen pulled the mugs from the top cabinet and made their coffees ready. They sat together in the silence of their little kitchen and ate breakfast with their knees touching under the table. They breathed in each other’s presence and the blooming gold of dawn bloomed into warm morning sun. They touched each others hands and clinked coffee cups together. They told jokes and laughed, smiled, and basked in the sanctuary of their morning ritual. After a while she washed the pan and put away their bread and juice and he loaded their plates and cups into the dishwasher. Practiced moves from their years together. Then they put on their coats, collected their briefcases, kissed deeply and whispered their i love yous and see you laters.

It wasn’t until Marcus sat on the bus that he heard the news of a massive shootout over in the dust district that left at least three police officers dead and several more severely wounded. The news reader went on to say that there was very little information as to what happened exactly and no comment on who was responsible, but there had been a report of a troll and at least one other assailant of unknown race or origin. The cold weight pressed down on Marcus’ shoulder again. Something really bad was coming and he would have to try and help the survivors pick up the pieces afterwards. He could feel it, deep in his bones, that whatever this was, it was only the beginning. 

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If you like my sunday morning shorts, or my Fairy Dust, please consider clicking here and tossing me a few coins so I can afford to continue to exist in this harsh bleak hellscape that is 2019. 

Or if you’re as broke as I am, a reblog goes a long way. 

My love and support to all you beautiful people who’ve supported me so far. 

[hans-writes-things]

Sunday Morning Short: Fairy Dust Backstory - The Therapist

Hey folks. Decided to do something a little different today. I want to assure you I’m still working on fairy dust, don’t worry.  Some of it (ok… a lot of it) is gonna get rewritten and reposted, if not here than elsewhere, and you’ll absolutely positively get to know where, so no worries.

In the meanwhile, I wanna tell you about some of my side characters.  For the main characters, you’ll just have to read Fairy Dust, it’ll all get revealed there eventually, probably, or however much I want to. But for some of the side characters, I “know” a lot about them that may never need be referenced in the story at all, so instead… I’ll give you their backstory to some greater or lesser extent with their first moments coming into contact with the main event that kicks off Fairy Dust. 

Here’s chapter 1 of Fairy Dust btw, if you want to know what this is all about. 

_____________________

Introducing Barbara (Fairy Dust side story)

It was an ordinary morning, at least to begin with. The alarm went off at 5:30 and Marcus slapped awkwardly at it from the comfort of the warmth and softness of his bed. His wife Helen murmured her usual complaints and they spent their first few minutes of the new day bathed in the golden light of dawn as it poured through the white curtains. It was a part of their ritual, to wake up a little earlier than they needed just so they could take it slow and say hello to one another before it was time to rush off and tend to their lives outside their home.

There was something off about this morning however. He couldn’t quite place it but he felt uneasy, like there was a cold chill sitting firmly over his shoulders, like death’s hand being placed there to warn, or maybe to comfort. Marcus was no stranger to death. He’d joined the local police service as a young man, eager to follow in the footsteps of his father who had recently joined the homicide department, then everything had fallen apart. He shuddered as the memory came crawling back to him once again but it was a familiar ghost by now, one that he’d long learned to face and acknowledge and then let go. Today it was particularly vivid however and the echo of the gunshot took longer than usual to fade and the ghostly scent of blood and gunpowder lingered even as he stepped into the shower.

His wife started the coffee maker he had set up the previous night and put away the dishes from the dishwasher as he showered. Their rituals had the practiced rhythms of the years behind them. The moment he was finished with his shower he turned the heat down a little bit for her and stepped out into the bathroom as she entered. He flicked a couple of drops of water at her and she laughed, her bubbly voice and bright smile melted away the last of the chill still lingering across his shoulders and he pulled her towards him and kissed her. She smiled and poked at his chest, giggling still, and jokingly scolded him for getting her nightshirt wet. He watched her undress out the corner of his eye as he toweled off and took the moment to just feel happy. Then she stepped into the shower, stuck her tongue out at him, and closed the door.

Marcus had met her after the tragedy, when he was just starting on the path to find out who he was all over again, and she had been a friend when he really needed one, someone who didn’t know, someone who he could just exist with, without the weight of all the history. He had been a few years older than the other students at the school. He wasn’t the oldest there, and it was only a few years, but it still made him feel a little out of place. She was a year older than him and so they had first bonded over how strange it was to feel so young out in the world around them but then attend classes and feel surrounded by children. She was studying law, while he was studying psychology. She hadn’t asked him why, or why it took so long to figure out what he wanted, and he hadn’t asked her. They were happy to just have someone to talk to.

Marcus got dressed for work and then tied an apron around his hips to protect them as he milled about their little kitchen, getting the rest of breakfast together and listened to his wife’s voice singing in the shower. He hadn’t turned on the radio this morning, as he usually did, and while he noticed this he decided not to wonder why. He didn’t want to acknowledge his morning’s premonition. He had always been a little bit psychic, which is a little uncommon among the humans of the realm, but far from unheard of. He probably inherited it from his father, which is probably why Charles Barbara had risen through the ranks as quickly as he did. He had been an excellent cop with fantastic instincts, or that is what everyone had said, but there’s always a price to pay for knowing more than most. Charles had been barely eighteen when he became a father and had done his best by Marcus and they had been close. Marcus looked up to his father, respected him, emulated him, even modeled himself after him to a degree, so when his father died he felt he had lost himself as well and it quickly began to show. They had sent Marcus to speak with the department shrink and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Helen snuck up behind him while he was stirring the scrambled eggs, lost in thoughts that seemed to be going nowhere, and wrapped her arms around her husband. They weren’t the most usual of couples. Marcus was well over six feet tall and looked as though he could pick up a car if he wanted to, though these last few years his visits to the gym had grown fewer. Helen was only a hair shorter than he was and her strength looked to match his. He had taken some judgement from friends and family, first for leaving the police service to become a shrink, and then for marrying a half orc, but he knew that she had it worse. There was no hiding her heritage, not with the slightly greenish gray tint to her skin, the point of her ears and the slight tusks in her bottom jaw, and people held it against her, expected her to be savage, slow, and simple minded. She had taken these prejudices and made them into advantages in her early career and earned the respect of her peers, but this didn’t mean that the sidelong glances and words of strangers couldn’t affect her any more. She held him tightly for a moment, then softened her grip and the ritual resumed.

He had never met someone with as much passion or compassion as Helen and while she had all the skill and intelligence to become yet another high price lawyer with wealthy clients she had opted to become a public defender instead, taking the occasional pro-bono job in between. She in turn told him that she had never met anyone like him. When he had first told her that his dad had been a cop and that it was what he’d always thought he wanted to be too, he had seen her stiffen at the mention. Then he had told her what had happened to his father.

He’d lost his mother when he was very young and had very little memory of her. He had been raised by his father and his father’s mother. His father’s father had been a cop too, back in the day, and died in the line of duty, so he had always known that that was a possibility and that used to terrify him, the thought that one day his father might go to work and never come home again, but what had happened was worse. Marcus had been one of the youngest men to be accepted into the police service and had barely been given his first uniform. He was at the bottom rung of the ladder with a small walked beat with three others, in a fairly safe area of the city center, working in the early morning, getting a feel for the chain of command, writing tickets and babysitting shoplifters until a patrol car would come pick them up. He hadn’t seen his father in a few weeks, he’d been busy working, taking point on a case, a bad one. Marcus didn’t know all of the details, but it had been a particularly brutal murder with a ritual element. Necromancy. His father had seen something, been exposed to something otherworldly and wrong, and something within him had broken. When his father and his partner had attempted to apprehend the suspect something went terribly wrong and his father was the lone survivor. They had sent him to the department shrink but it had only made things worse. A few nights later Marcus had woken up in a cold sweat and rushed to his father’s apartment just a block away only to hear the gunshot as he approached his father’s door. He could feel it before he entered. His father was gone, a note laying in a growing pool of blood below him.

They sent him to the same shrink as had handled his father. She had meant well, surely, but she wasn’t well equipped. She was barely older than Marcus and spoke from a place of innocence. She wasn’t familiar with death, not like he now was, and nothing she had to offer felt right, or helpful. She had painted her little office in the colours that were meant to invoke comfort, but they clashed with his reality. There were plants in the window and a crayon drawing on the wall behind her desk. He had felt alien, out of place in her office, as if the interviews had nothing to do with the reality he inhabited. She began to grow frustrated with their interviews as time passed on, and their personalities clashed. It was no one’s fault, he knew that, if not then, then later, but it built up over time until they both lost their temper. Him feeling as though she was playing pretend and lacked any true understanding, and her feeling as though he didn’t take her seriously or want to even try to improve. He had shouted, she had shouted, it was unprofessional, sure, but she was new and young and he might have been trying to get on her nerve. The breakthrough came when he shouted that he could do her job better than she was doing it, and she had looked him straight in the eye and dared him to prove it.

Now, he had her office. She held no grudges. She knew she was in over her head and had quit the same day as he did and a couple years later he had apologized to her, properly. They were on friendly enough terms now.

Helen had in turn told Marcus her story, a common enough for half orcs. Her mother was orc, a single parent, and they were poor. There are only so many jobs for orcs in the city and back then it was even worse. They did what they had to to survive. He hadn’t asked about her father, but she had told him anyway. She wasn’t sure, but she expected it was the landlord. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, an accident, but an easily preventable one. She had decided to sue the people responsible, though it hadn’t been easy. Most lawyers who would even meet with her had spoken to her slowly, using simple words and gesturing a lot and refused to take her seriously, more than one had made sure they had some of their law firms security personnel in the room with her. Eventually she had found someone to take her case, a woman with slightly pointed ears and a taller than average height, a half elven woman, and in her relief she almost got ripped off. When she pointed out the error in the contract before signing it, where the percentiles had been switched in case of any damages she’d receive, the half elven woman had corrected it, but ever since that moment Helen knew that she needed to watch her own lawyer. She hadn’t expected her to be able to read the contract, let alone catch the error. She hadn’t sued for the money, but to see justice served and to make sure the problem was solved, but she had received enough to be able to go to school, study law, become the person she had needed the most.

In a way they were both working to help the people that they used to be and along the way they had found each other and they made each other happy.

Marcus plated the eggs while Helen pulled the mugs from the top cabinet and made their coffees ready. They sat together in the silence of their little kitchen and ate breakfast with their knees touching under the table. They breathed in each other’s presence and the blooming gold of dawn bloomed into warm morning sun. They touched each others hands and clinked coffee cups together. They told jokes and laughed, smiled, and basked in the sanctuary of their morning ritual. After a while she washed the pan and put away their bread and juice and he loaded their plates and cups into the dishwasher. Practiced moves from their years together. Then they put on their coats, collected their briefcases, kissed deeply and whispered their i love yous and see you laters.

It wasn’t until Marcus sat on the bus that he heard the news of a massive shootout over in the dust district that left at least three police officers dead and several more severely wounded. The news reader went on to say that there was very little information as to what happened exactly and no comment on who was responsible, but there had been a report of a troll and at least one other assailant of unknown race or origin. The cold weight pressed down on Marcus’ shoulder again. Something really bad was coming and he would have to try and help the survivors pick up the pieces afterwards. He could feel it, deep in his bones, that whatever this was, it was only the beginning. 

__________________

If you like my sunday morning shorts, or my Fairy Dust, please consider clicking here and tossing me a few coins so I can afford to continue to exist in this harsh bleak hellscape that is 2019. 

Or if you’re as broke as I am, a reblog goes a long way. 

My love and support to all you beautiful people who’ve supported me so far. 

[hans-writes-things]

Sunday Morning Short: Fairy Dust Backstory - The Therapist

Hey folks. Decided to do something a little different today. I want to assure you I’m still working on fairy dust, don’t worry.  Some of it (ok… a lot of it) is gonna get rewritten and reposted, if not here than elsewhere, and you’ll absolutely positively get to know where, so no worries.

In the meanwhile, I wanna tell you about some of my side characters.  For the main characters, you’ll just have to read Fairy Dust, it’ll all get revealed there eventually, probably, or however much I want to. But for some of the side characters, I “know” a lot about them that may never need be referenced in the story at all, so instead… I’ll give you their backstory to some greater or lesser extent with their first moments coming into contact with the main event that kicks off Fairy Dust. 

Here’s chapter 1 of Fairy Dust btw, if you want to know what this is all about. 

_____________________

Introducing Barbara (Fairy Dust side story)

It was an ordinary morning, at least to begin with. The alarm went off at 5:30 and Marcus slapped awkwardly at it from the comfort of the warmth and softness of his bed. His wife Helen murmured her usual complaints and they spent their first few minutes of the new day bathed in the golden light of dawn as it poured through the white curtains. It was a part of their ritual, to wake up a little earlier than they needed just so they could take it slow and say hello to one another before it was time to rush off and tend to their lives outside their home.

There was something off about this morning however. He couldn’t quite place it but he felt uneasy, like there was a cold chill sitting firmly over his shoulders, like death’s hand being placed there to warn, or maybe to comfort. Marcus was no stranger to death. He’d joined the local police service as a young man, eager to follow in the footsteps of his father who had recently joined the homicide department, then everything had fallen apart. He shuddered as the memory came crawling back to him once again but it was a familiar ghost by now, one that he’d long learned to face and acknowledge and then let go. Today it was particularly vivid however and the echo of the gunshot took longer than usual to fade and the ghostly scent of blood and gunpowder lingered even as he stepped into the shower.

His wife started the coffee maker he had set up the previous night and put away the dishes from the dishwasher as he showered. Their rituals had the practiced rhythms of the years behind them. The moment he was finished with his shower he turned the heat down a little bit for her and stepped out into the bathroom as she entered. He flicked a couple of drops of water at her and she laughed, her bubbly voice and bright smile melted away the last of the chill still lingering across his shoulders and he pulled her towards him and kissed her. She smiled and poked at his chest, giggling still, and jokingly scolded him for getting her nightshirt wet. He watched her undress out the corner of his eye as he toweled off and took the moment to just feel happy. Then she stepped into the shower, stuck her tongue out at him, and closed the door.

Marcus had met her after the tragedy, when he was just starting on the path to find out who he was all over again, and she had been a friend when he really needed one, someone who didn’t know, someone who he could just exist with, without the weight of all the history. He had been a few years older than the other students at the school. He wasn’t the oldest there, and it was only a few years, but it still made him feel a little out of place. She was a year older than him and so they had first bonded over how strange it was to feel so young out in the world around them but then attend classes and feel surrounded by children. She was studying law, while he was studying psychology. She hadn’t asked him why, or why it took so long to figure out what he wanted, and he hadn’t asked her. They were happy to just have someone to talk to.

Marcus got dressed for work and then tied an apron around his hips to protect them as he milled about their little kitchen, getting the rest of breakfast together and listened to his wife’s voice singing in the shower. He hadn’t turned on the radio this morning, as he usually did, and while he noticed this he decided not to wonder why. He didn’t want to acknowledge his morning’s premonition. He had always been a little bit psychic, which is a little uncommon among the humans of the realm, but far from unheard of. He probably inherited it from his father, which is probably why Charles Barbara had risen through the ranks as quickly as he did. He had been an excellent cop with fantastic instincts, or that is what everyone had said, but there’s always a price to pay for knowing more than most. Charles had been barely eighteen when he became a father and had done his best by Marcus and they had been close. Marcus looked up to his father, respected him, emulated him, even modeled himself after him to a degree, so when his father died he felt he had lost himself as well and it quickly began to show. They had sent Marcus to speak with the department shrink and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Helen snuck up behind him while he was stirring the scrambled eggs, lost in thoughts that seemed to be going nowhere, and wrapped her arms around her husband. They weren’t the most usual of couples. Marcus was well over six feet tall and looked as though he could pick up a car if he wanted to, though these last few years his visits to the gym had grown fewer. Helen was only a hair shorter than he was and her strength looked to match his. He had taken some judgement from friends and family, first for leaving the police service to become a shrink, and then for marrying a half orc, but he knew that she had it worse. There was no hiding her heritage, not with the slightly greenish gray tint to her skin, the point of her ears and the slight tusks in her bottom jaw, and people held it against her, expected her to be savage, slow, and simple minded. She had taken these prejudices and made them into advantages in her early career and earned the respect of her peers, but this didn’t mean that the sidelong glances and words of strangers couldn’t affect her any more. She held him tightly for a moment, then softened her grip and the ritual resumed.

He had never met someone with as much passion or compassion as Helen and while she had all the skill and intelligence to become yet another high price lawyer with wealthy clients she had opted to become a public defender instead, taking the occasional pro-bono job in between. She in turn told him that she had never met anyone like him. When he had first told her that his dad had been a cop and that it was what he’d always thought he wanted to be too, he had seen her stiffen at the mention. Then he had told her what had happened to his father.

He’d lost his mother when he was very young and had very little memory of her. He had been raised by his father and his father’s mother. His father’s father had been a cop too, back in the day, and died in the line of duty, so he had always known that that was a possibility and that used to terrify him, the thought that one day his father might go to work and never come home again, but what had happened was worse. Marcus had been one of the youngest men to be accepted into the police service and had barely been given his first uniform. He was at the bottom rung of the ladder with a small walked beat with three others, in a fairly safe area of the city center, working in the early morning, getting a feel for the chain of command, writing tickets and babysitting shoplifters until a patrol car would come pick them up. He hadn’t seen his father in a few weeks, he’d been busy working, taking point on a case, a bad one. Marcus didn’t know all of the details, but it had been a particularly brutal murder with a ritual element. Necromancy. His father had seen something, been exposed to something otherworldly and wrong, and something within him had broken. When his father and his partner had attempted to apprehend the suspect something went terribly wrong and his father was the lone survivor. They had sent him to the department shrink but it had only made things worse. A few nights later Marcus had woken up in a cold sweat and rushed to his father’s apartment just a block away only to hear the gunshot as he approached his father’s door. He could feel it before he entered. His father was gone, a note laying in a growing pool of blood below him.

They sent him to the same shrink as had handled his father. She had meant well, surely, but she wasn’t well equipped. She was barely older than Marcus and spoke from a place of innocence. She wasn’t familiar with death, not like he now was, and nothing she had to offer felt right, or helpful. She had painted her little office in the colours that were meant to invoke comfort, but they clashed with his reality. There were plants in the window and a crayon drawing on the wall behind her desk. He had felt alien, out of place in her office, as if the interviews had nothing to do with the reality he inhabited. She began to grow frustrated with their interviews as time passed on, and their personalities clashed. It was no one’s fault, he knew that, if not then, then later, but it built up over time until they both lost their temper. Him feeling as though she was playing pretend and lacked any true understanding, and her feeling as though he didn’t take her seriously or want to even try to improve. He had shouted, she had shouted, it was unprofessional, sure, but she was new and young and he might have been trying to get on her nerve. The breakthrough came when he shouted that he could do her job better than she was doing it, and she had looked him straight in the eye and dared him to prove it.

Now, he had her office. She held no grudges. She knew she was in over her head and had quit the same day as he did and a couple years later he had apologized to her, properly. They were on friendly enough terms now.

Helen had in turn told Marcus her story, a common enough for half orcs. Her mother was orc, a single parent, and they were poor. There are only so many jobs for orcs in the city and back then it was even worse. They did what they had to to survive. He hadn’t asked about her father, but she had told him anyway. She wasn’t sure, but she expected it was the landlord. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, an accident, but an easily preventable one. She had decided to sue the people responsible, though it hadn’t been easy. Most lawyers who would even meet with her had spoken to her slowly, using simple words and gesturing a lot and refused to take her seriously, more than one had made sure they had some of their law firms security personnel in the room with her. Eventually she had found someone to take her case, a woman with slightly pointed ears and a taller than average height, a half elven woman, and in her relief she almost got ripped off. When she pointed out the error in the contract before signing it, where the percentiles had been switched in case of any damages she’d receive, the half elven woman had corrected it, but ever since that moment Helen knew that she needed to watch her own lawyer. She hadn’t expected her to be able to read the contract, let alone catch the error. She hadn’t sued for the money, but to see justice served and to make sure the problem was solved, but she had received enough to be able to go to school, study law, become the person she had needed the most.

In a way they were both working to help the people that they used to be and along the way they had found each other and they made each other happy.

Marcus plated the eggs while Helen pulled the mugs from the top cabinet and made their coffees ready. They sat together in the silence of their little kitchen and ate breakfast with their knees touching under the table. They breathed in each other’s presence and the blooming gold of dawn bloomed into warm morning sun. They touched each others hands and clinked coffee cups together. They told jokes and laughed, smiled, and basked in the sanctuary of their morning ritual. After a while she washed the pan and put away their bread and juice and he loaded their plates and cups into the dishwasher. Practiced moves from their years together. Then they put on their coats, collected their briefcases, kissed deeply and whispered their i love yous and see you laters.

It wasn’t until Marcus sat on the bus that he heard the news of a massive shootout over in the dust district that left at least three police officers dead and several more severely wounded. The news reader went on to say that there was very little information as to what happened exactly and no comment on who was responsible, but there had been a report of a troll and at least one other assailant of unknown race or origin. The cold weight pressed down on Marcus’ shoulder again. Something really bad was coming and he would have to try and help the survivors pick up the pieces afterwards. He could feel it, deep in his bones, that whatever this was, it was only the beginning. 

__________________

If you like my sunday morning shorts, or my Fairy Dust, please consider clicking here and tossing me a few coins so I can afford to continue to exist in this harsh bleak hellscape that is 2019. 

Or if you’re as broke as I am, a reblog goes a long way. 

My love and support to all you beautiful people who’ve supported me so far. 

[hans-writes-things]

Sunday Morning Short: Fairy Dust Backstory - The Therapist

Hey folks. Decided to do something a little different today. I want to assure you I’m still working on fairy dust, don’t worry.  Some of it (ok… a lot of it) is gonna get rewritten and reposted, if not here than elsewhere, and you’ll absolutely positively get to know where, so no worries.

In the meanwhile, I wanna tell you about some of my side characters.  For the main characters, you’ll just have to read Fairy Dust, it’ll all get revealed there eventually, probably, or however much I want to. But for some of the side characters, I “know” a lot about them that may never need be referenced in the story at all, so instead… I’ll give you their backstory to some greater or lesser extent with their first moments coming into contact with the main event that kicks off Fairy Dust. 

Here’s chapter 1 of Fairy Dust btw, if you want to know what this is all about. 

_____________________

Introducing Barbara (Fairy Dust side story)

It was an ordinary morning, at least to begin with. The alarm went off at 5:30 and Marcus slapped awkwardly at it from the comfort of the warmth and softness of his bed. His wife Helen murmured her usual complaints and they spent their first few minutes of the new day bathed in the golden light of dawn as it poured through the white curtains. It was a part of their ritual, to wake up a little earlier than they needed just so they could take it slow and say hello to one another before it was time to rush off and tend to their lives outside their home.

There was something off about this morning however. He couldn’t quite place it but he felt uneasy, like there was a cold chill sitting firmly over his shoulders, like death’s hand being placed there to warn, or maybe to comfort. Marcus was no stranger to death. He’d joined the local police service as a young man, eager to follow in the footsteps of his father who had recently joined the homicide department, then everything had fallen apart. He shuddered as the memory came crawling back to him once again but it was a familiar ghost by now, one that he’d long learned to face and acknowledge and then let go. Today it was particularly vivid however and the echo of the gunshot took longer than usual to fade and the ghostly scent of blood and gunpowder lingered even as he stepped into the shower.

His wife started the coffee maker he had set up the previous night and put away the dishes from the dishwasher as he showered. Their rituals had the practiced rhythms of the years behind them. The moment he was finished with his shower he turned the heat down a little bit for her and stepped out into the bathroom as she entered. He flicked a couple of drops of water at her and she laughed, her bubbly voice and bright smile melted away the last of the chill still lingering across his shoulders and he pulled her towards him and kissed her. She smiled and poked at his chest, giggling still, and jokingly scolded him for getting her nightshirt wet. He watched her undress out the corner of his eye as he toweled off and took the moment to just feel happy. Then she stepped into the shower, stuck her tongue out at him, and closed the door.

Marcus had met her after the tragedy, when he was just starting on the path to find out who he was all over again, and she had been a friend when he really needed one, someone who didn’t know, someone who he could just exist with, without the weight of all the history. He had been a few years older than the other students at the school. He wasn’t the oldest there, and it was only a few years, but it still made him feel a little out of place. She was a year older than him and so they had first bonded over how strange it was to feel so young out in the world around them but then attend classes and feel surrounded by children. She was studying law, while he was studying psychology. She hadn’t asked him why, or why it took so long to figure out what he wanted, and he hadn’t asked her. They were happy to just have someone to talk to.

Marcus got dressed for work and then tied an apron around his hips to protect them as he milled about their little kitchen, getting the rest of breakfast together and listened to his wife’s voice singing in the shower. He hadn’t turned on the radio this morning, as he usually did, and while he noticed this he decided not to wonder why. He didn’t want to acknowledge his morning’s premonition. He had always been a little bit psychic, which is a little uncommon among the humans of the realm, but far from unheard of. He probably inherited it from his father, which is probably why Charles Barbara had risen through the ranks as quickly as he did. He had been an excellent cop with fantastic instincts, or that is what everyone had said, but there’s always a price to pay for knowing more than most. Charles had been barely eighteen when he became a father and had done his best by Marcus and they had been close. Marcus looked up to his father, respected him, emulated him, even modeled himself after him to a degree, so when his father died he felt he had lost himself as well and it quickly began to show. They had sent Marcus to speak with the department shrink and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Helen snuck up behind him while he was stirring the scrambled eggs, lost in thoughts that seemed to be going nowhere, and wrapped her arms around her husband. They weren’t the most usual of couples. Marcus was well over six feet tall and looked as though he could pick up a car if he wanted to, though these last few years his visits to the gym had grown fewer. Helen was only a hair shorter than he was and her strength looked to match his. He had taken some judgement from friends and family, first for leaving the police service to become a shrink, and then for marrying a half orc, but he knew that she had it worse. There was no hiding her heritage, not with the slightly greenish gray tint to her skin, the point of her ears and the slight tusks in her bottom jaw, and people held it against her, expected her to be savage, slow, and simple minded. She had taken these prejudices and made them into advantages in her early career and earned the respect of her peers, but this didn’t mean that the sidelong glances and words of strangers couldn’t affect her any more. She held him tightly for a moment, then softened her grip and the ritual resumed.

He had never met someone with as much passion or compassion as Helen and while she had all the skill and intelligence to become yet another high price lawyer with wealthy clients she had opted to become a public defender instead, taking the occasional pro-bono job in between. She in turn told him that she had never met anyone like him. When he had first told her that his dad had been a cop and that it was what he’d always thought he wanted to be too, he had seen her stiffen at the mention. Then he had told her what had happened to his father.

He’d lost his mother when he was very young and had very little memory of her. He had been raised by his father and his father’s mother. His father’s father had been a cop too, back in the day, and died in the line of duty, so he had always known that that was a possibility and that used to terrify him, the thought that one day his father might go to work and never come home again, but what had happened was worse. Marcus had been one of the youngest men to be accepted into the police service and had barely been given his first uniform. He was at the bottom rung of the ladder with a small walked beat with three others, in a fairly safe area of the city center, working in the early morning, getting a feel for the chain of command, writing tickets and babysitting shoplifters until a patrol car would come pick them up. He hadn’t seen his father in a few weeks, he’d been busy working, taking point on a case, a bad one. Marcus didn’t know all of the details, but it had been a particularly brutal murder with a ritual element. Necromancy. His father had seen something, been exposed to something otherworldly and wrong, and something within him had broken. When his father and his partner had attempted to apprehend the suspect something went terribly wrong and his father was the lone survivor. They had sent him to the department shrink but it had only made things worse. A few nights later Marcus had woken up in a cold sweat and rushed to his father’s apartment just a block away only to hear the gunshot as he approached his father’s door. He could feel it before he entered. His father was gone, a note laying in a growing pool of blood below him.

They sent him to the same shrink as had handled his father. She had meant well, surely, but she wasn’t well equipped. She was barely older than Marcus and spoke from a place of innocence. She wasn’t familiar with death, not like he now was, and nothing she had to offer felt right, or helpful. She had painted her little office in the colours that were meant to invoke comfort, but they clashed with his reality. There were plants in the window and a crayon drawing on the wall behind her desk. He had felt alien, out of place in her office, as if the interviews had nothing to do with the reality he inhabited. She began to grow frustrated with their interviews as time passed on, and their personalities clashed. It was no one’s fault, he knew that, if not then, then later, but it built up over time until they both lost their temper. Him feeling as though she was playing pretend and lacked any true understanding, and her feeling as though he didn’t take her seriously or want to even try to improve. He had shouted, she had shouted, it was unprofessional, sure, but she was new and young and he might have been trying to get on her nerve. The breakthrough came when he shouted that he could do her job better than she was doing it, and she had looked him straight in the eye and dared him to prove it.

Now, he had her office. She held no grudges. She knew she was in over her head and had quit the same day as he did and a couple years later he had apologized to her, properly. They were on friendly enough terms now.

Helen had in turn told Marcus her story, a common enough for half orcs. Her mother was orc, a single parent, and they were poor. There are only so many jobs for orcs in the city and back then it was even worse. They did what they had to to survive. He hadn’t asked about her father, but she had told him anyway. She wasn’t sure, but she expected it was the landlord. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, an accident, but an easily preventable one. She had decided to sue the people responsible, though it hadn’t been easy. Most lawyers who would even meet with her had spoken to her slowly, using simple words and gesturing a lot and refused to take her seriously, more than one had made sure they had some of their law firms security personnel in the room with her. Eventually she had found someone to take her case, a woman with slightly pointed ears and a taller than average height, a half elven woman, and in her relief she almost got ripped off. When she pointed out the error in the contract before signing it, where the percentiles had been switched in case of any damages she’d receive, the half elven woman had corrected it, but ever since that moment Helen knew that she needed to watch her own lawyer. She hadn’t expected her to be able to read the contract, let alone catch the error. She hadn’t sued for the money, but to see justice served and to make sure the problem was solved, but she had received enough to be able to go to school, study law, become the person she had needed the most.

In a way they were both working to help the people that they used to be and along the way they had found each other and they made each other happy.

Marcus plated the eggs while Helen pulled the mugs from the top cabinet and made their coffees ready. They sat together in the silence of their little kitchen and ate breakfast with their knees touching under the table. They breathed in each other’s presence and the blooming gold of dawn bloomed into warm morning sun. They touched each others hands and clinked coffee cups together. They told jokes and laughed, smiled, and basked in the sanctuary of their morning ritual. After a while she washed the pan and put away their bread and juice and he loaded their plates and cups into the dishwasher. Practiced moves from their years together. Then they put on their coats, collected their briefcases, kissed deeply and whispered their i love yous and see you laters.

It wasn’t until Marcus sat on the bus that he heard the news of a massive shootout over in the dust district that left at least three police officers dead and several more severely wounded. The news reader went on to say that there was very little information as to what happened exactly and no comment on who was responsible, but there had been a report of a troll and at least one other assailant of unknown race or origin. The cold weight pressed down on Marcus’ shoulder again. Something really bad was coming and he would have to try and help the survivors pick up the pieces afterwards. He could feel it, deep in his bones, that whatever this was, it was only the beginning. 

__________________

If you like my sunday morning shorts, or my Fairy Dust, please consider clicking here and tossing me a few coins so I can afford to continue to exist in this harsh bleak hellscape that is 2019. 

Or if you’re as broke as I am, a reblog goes a long way. 

My love and support to all you beautiful people who’ve supported me so far. 

[hans-writes-things]

Sunday Morning Short: Fairy Dust Backstory - The Therapist

Hey folks. Decided to do something a little different today. I want to assure you I’m still working on fairy dust, don’t worry.  Some of it (ok… a lot of it) is gonna get rewritten and reposted, if not here than elsewhere, and you’ll absolutely positively get to know where, so no worries.

In the meanwhile, I wanna tell you about some of my side characters.  For the main characters, you’ll just have to read Fairy Dust, it’ll all get revealed there eventually, probably, or however much I want to. But for some of the side characters, I “know” a lot about them that may never need be referenced in the story at all, so instead… I’ll give you their backstory to some greater or lesser extent with their first moments coming into contact with the main event that kicks off Fairy Dust. 

Here’s chapter 1 of Fairy Dust btw, if you want to know what this is all about. 

_____________________

Introducing Barbara (Fairy Dust side story)

It was an ordinary morning, at least to begin with. The alarm went off at 5:30 and Marcus slapped awkwardly at it from the comfort of the warmth and softness of his bed. His wife Helen murmured her usual complaints and they spent their first few minutes of the new day bathed in the golden light of dawn as it poured through the white curtains. It was a part of their ritual, to wake up a little earlier than they needed just so they could take it slow and say hello to one another before it was time to rush off and tend to their lives outside their home.

There was something off about this morning however. He couldn’t quite place it but he felt uneasy, like there was a cold chill sitting firmly over his shoulders, like death’s hand being placed there to warn, or maybe to comfort. Marcus was no stranger to death. He’d joined the local police service as a young man, eager to follow in the footsteps of his father who had recently joined the homicide department, then everything had fallen apart. He shuddered as the memory came crawling back to him once again but it was a familiar ghost by now, one that he’d long learned to face and acknowledge and then let go. Today it was particularly vivid however and the echo of the gunshot took longer than usual to fade and the ghostly scent of blood and gunpowder lingered even as he stepped into the shower.

His wife started the coffee maker he had set up the previous night and put away the dishes from the dishwasher as he showered. Their rituals had the practiced rhythms of the years behind them. The moment he was finished with his shower he turned the heat down a little bit for her and stepped out into the bathroom as she entered. He flicked a couple of drops of water at her and she laughed, her bubbly voice and bright smile melted away the last of the chill still lingering across his shoulders and he pulled her towards him and kissed her. She smiled and poked at his chest, giggling still, and jokingly scolded him for getting her nightshirt wet. He watched her undress out the corner of his eye as he toweled off and took the moment to just feel happy. Then she stepped into the shower, stuck her tongue out at him, and closed the door.

Marcus had met her after the tragedy, when he was just starting on the path to find out who he was all over again, and she had been a friend when he really needed one, someone who didn’t know, someone who he could just exist with, without the weight of all the history. He had been a few years older than the other students at the school. He wasn’t the oldest there, and it was only a few years, but it still made him feel a little out of place. She was a year older than him and so they had first bonded over how strange it was to feel so young out in the world around them but then attend classes and feel surrounded by children. She was studying law, while he was studying psychology. She hadn’t asked him why, or why it took so long to figure out what he wanted, and he hadn’t asked her. They were happy to just have someone to talk to.

Marcus got dressed for work and then tied an apron around his hips to protect them as he milled about their little kitchen, getting the rest of breakfast together and listened to his wife’s voice singing in the shower. He hadn’t turned on the radio this morning, as he usually did, and while he noticed this he decided not to wonder why. He didn’t want to acknowledge his morning’s premonition. He had always been a little bit psychic, which is a little uncommon among the humans of the realm, but far from unheard of. He probably inherited it from his father, which is probably why Charles Barbara had risen through the ranks as quickly as he did. He had been an excellent cop with fantastic instincts, or that is what everyone had said, but there’s always a price to pay for knowing more than most. Charles had been barely eighteen when he became a father and had done his best by Marcus and they had been close. Marcus looked up to his father, respected him, emulated him, even modeled himself after him to a degree, so when his father died he felt he had lost himself as well and it quickly began to show. They had sent Marcus to speak with the department shrink and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Helen snuck up behind him while he was stirring the scrambled eggs, lost in thoughts that seemed to be going nowhere, and wrapped her arms around her husband. They weren’t the most usual of couples. Marcus was well over six feet tall and looked as though he could pick up a car if he wanted to, though these last few years his visits to the gym had grown fewer. Helen was only a hair shorter than he was and her strength looked to match his. He had taken some judgement from friends and family, first for leaving the police service to become a shrink, and then for marrying a half orc, but he knew that she had it worse. There was no hiding her heritage, not with the slightly greenish gray tint to her skin, the point of her ears and the slight tusks in her bottom jaw, and people held it against her, expected her to be savage, slow, and simple minded. She had taken these prejudices and made them into advantages in her early career and earned the respect of her peers, but this didn’t mean that the sidelong glances and words of strangers couldn’t affect her any more. She held him tightly for a moment, then softened her grip and the ritual resumed.

He had never met someone with as much passion or compassion as Helen and while she had all the skill and intelligence to become yet another high price lawyer with wealthy clients she had opted to become a public defender instead, taking the occasional pro-bono job in between. She in turn told him that she had never met anyone like him. When he had first told her that his dad had been a cop and that it was what he’d always thought he wanted to be too, he had seen her stiffen at the mention. Then he had told her what had happened to his father.

He’d lost his mother when he was very young and had very little memory of her. He had been raised by his father and his father’s mother. His father’s father had been a cop too, back in the day, and died in the line of duty, so he had always known that that was a possibility and that used to terrify him, the thought that one day his father might go to work and never come home again, but what had happened was worse. Marcus had been one of the youngest men to be accepted into the police service and had barely been given his first uniform. He was at the bottom rung of the ladder with a small walked beat with three others, in a fairly safe area of the city center, working in the early morning, getting a feel for the chain of command, writing tickets and babysitting shoplifters until a patrol car would come pick them up. He hadn’t seen his father in a few weeks, he’d been busy working, taking point on a case, a bad one. Marcus didn’t know all of the details, but it had been a particularly brutal murder with a ritual element. Necromancy. His father had seen something, been exposed to something otherworldly and wrong, and something within him had broken. When his father and his partner had attempted to apprehend the suspect something went terribly wrong and his father was the lone survivor. They had sent him to the department shrink but it had only made things worse. A few nights later Marcus had woken up in a cold sweat and rushed to his father’s apartment just a block away only to hear the gunshot as he approached his father’s door. He could feel it before he entered. His father was gone, a note laying in a growing pool of blood below him.

They sent him to the same shrink as had handled his father. She had meant well, surely, but she wasn’t well equipped. She was barely older than Marcus and spoke from a place of innocence. She wasn’t familiar with death, not like he now was, and nothing she had to offer felt right, or helpful. She had painted her little office in the colours that were meant to invoke comfort, but they clashed with his reality. There were plants in the window and a crayon drawing on the wall behind her desk. He had felt alien, out of place in her office, as if the interviews had nothing to do with the reality he inhabited. She began to grow frustrated with their interviews as time passed on, and their personalities clashed. It was no one’s fault, he knew that, if not then, then later, but it built up over time until they both lost their temper. Him feeling as though she was playing pretend and lacked any true understanding, and her feeling as though he didn’t take her seriously or want to even try to improve. He had shouted, she had shouted, it was unprofessional, sure, but she was new and young and he might have been trying to get on her nerve. The breakthrough came when he shouted that he could do her job better than she was doing it, and she had looked him straight in the eye and dared him to prove it.

Now, he had her office. She held no grudges. She knew she was in over her head and had quit the same day as he did and a couple years later he had apologized to her, properly. They were on friendly enough terms now.

Helen had in turn told Marcus her story, a common enough for half orcs. Her mother was orc, a single parent, and they were poor. There are only so many jobs for orcs in the city and back then it was even worse. They did what they had to to survive. He hadn’t asked about her father, but she had told him anyway. She wasn’t sure, but she expected it was the landlord. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, an accident, but an easily preventable one. She had decided to sue the people responsible, though it hadn’t been easy. Most lawyers who would even meet with her had spoken to her slowly, using simple words and gesturing a lot and refused to take her seriously, more than one had made sure they had some of their law firms security personnel in the room with her. Eventually she had found someone to take her case, a woman with slightly pointed ears and a taller than average height, a half elven woman, and in her relief she almost got ripped off. When she pointed out the error in the contract before signing it, where the percentiles had been switched in case of any damages she’d receive, the half elven woman had corrected it, but ever since that moment Helen knew that she needed to watch her own lawyer. She hadn’t expected her to be able to read the contract, let alone catch the error. She hadn’t sued for the money, but to see justice served and to make sure the problem was solved, but she had received enough to be able to go to school, study law, become the person she had needed the most.

In a way they were both working to help the people that they used to be and along the way they had found each other and they made each other happy.

Marcus plated the eggs while Helen pulled the mugs from the top cabinet and made their coffees ready. They sat together in the silence of their little kitchen and ate breakfast with their knees touching under the table. They breathed in each other’s presence and the blooming gold of dawn bloomed into warm morning sun. They touched each others hands and clinked coffee cups together. They told jokes and laughed, smiled, and basked in the sanctuary of their morning ritual. After a while she washed the pan and put away their bread and juice and he loaded their plates and cups into the dishwasher. Practiced moves from their years together. Then they put on their coats, collected their briefcases, kissed deeply and whispered their i love yous and see you laters.

It wasn’t until Marcus sat on the bus that he heard the news of a massive shootout over in the dust district that left at least three police officers dead and several more severely wounded. The news reader went on to say that there was very little information as to what happened exactly and no comment on who was responsible, but there had been a report of a troll and at least one other assailant of unknown race or origin. The cold weight pressed down on Marcus’ shoulder again. Something really bad was coming and he would have to try and help the survivors pick up the pieces afterwards. He could feel it, deep in his bones, that whatever this was, it was only the beginning. 

__________________

If you like my sunday morning shorts, or my Fairy Dust, please consider clicking here and tossing me a few coins so I can afford to continue to exist in this harsh bleak hellscape that is 2019. 

Or if you’re as broke as I am, a reblog goes a long way. 

My love and support to all you beautiful people who’ve supported me so far. 

[hans-writes-things]

Sunday Morning Short: Fairy Dust Backstory - The Therapist

Hey folks. Decided to do something a little different today. I want to assure you I’m still working on fairy dust, don’t worry.  Some of it (ok... a lot of it) is gonna get rewritten and reposted, if not here than elsewhere, and you’ll absolutely positively get to know where, so no worries.

In the meanwhile, I wanna tell you about some of my side characters.  For the main characters, you’ll just have to read Fairy Dust, it’ll all get revealed there eventually, probably, or however much I want to. But for some of the side characters, I “know” a lot about them that may never need be referenced in the story at all, so instead... I’ll give you their backstory to some greater or lesser extent with their first moments coming into contact with the main event that kicks off Fairy Dust. 

Here’s chapter 1 of Fairy Dust btw, if you want to know what this is all about. 

_____________________

Introducing Barbara (Fairy Dust side story)

It was an ordinary morning, at least to begin with. The alarm went off at 5:30 and Marcus slapped awkwardly at it from the comfort of the warmth and softness of his bed. His wife Helen murmured her usual complaints and they spent their first few minutes of the new day bathed in the golden light of dawn as it poured through the white curtains. It was a part of their ritual, to wake up a little earlier than they needed just so they could take it slow and say hello to one another before it was time to rush off and tend to their lives outside their home.

There was something off about this morning however. He couldn't quite place it but he felt uneasy, like there was a cold chill sitting firmly over his shoulders, like death's hand being placed there to warn, or maybe to comfort. Marcus was no stranger to death. He'd joined the local police service as a young man, eager to follow in the footsteps of his father who had recently joined the homicide department, then everything had fallen apart. He shuddered as the memory came crawling back to him once again but it was a familiar ghost by now, one that he'd long learned to face and acknowledge and then let go. Today it was particularly vivid however and the echo of the gunshot took longer than usual to fade and the ghostly scent of blood and gunpowder lingered even as he stepped into the shower.

His wife started the coffee maker he had set up the previous night and put away the dishes from the dishwasher as he showered. Their rituals had the practiced rhythms of the years behind them. The moment he was finished with his shower he turned the heat down a little bit for her and stepped out into the bathroom as she entered. He flicked a couple of drops of water at her and she laughed, her bubbly voice and bright smile melted away the last of the chill still lingering across his shoulders and he pulled her towards him and kissed her. She smiled and poked at his chest, giggling still, and jokingly scolded him for getting her nightshirt wet. He watched her undress out the corner of his eye as he toweled off and took the moment to just feel happy. Then she stepped into the shower, stuck her tongue out at him, and closed the door.

Marcus had met her after the tragedy, when he was just starting on the path to find out who he was all over again, and she had been a friend when he really needed one, someone who didn't know, someone who he could just exist with, without the weight of all the history. He had been a few years older than the other students at the school. He wasn't the oldest there, and it was only a few years, but it still made him feel a little out of place. She was a year older than him and so they had first bonded over how strange it was to feel so young out in the world around them but then attend classes and feel surrounded by children. She was studying law, while he was studying psychology. She hadn't asked him why, or why it took so long to figure out what he wanted, and he hadn't asked her. They were happy to just have someone to talk to.

Marcus got dressed for work and then tied an apron around his hips to protect them as he milled about their little kitchen, getting the rest of breakfast together and listened to his wife's voice singing in the shower. He hadn't turned on the radio this morning, as he usually did, and while he noticed this he decided not to wonder why. He didn't want to acknowledge his morning's premonition. He had always been a little bit psychic, which is a little uncommon among the humans of the realm, but far from unheard of. He probably inherited it from his father, which is probably why Charles Barbara had risen through the ranks as quickly as he did. He had been an excellent cop with fantastic instincts, or that is what everyone had said, but there's always a price to pay for knowing more than most. Charles had been barely eighteen when he became a father and had done his best by Marcus and they had been close. Marcus looked up to his father, respected him, emulated him, even modeled himself after him to a degree, so when his father died he felt he had lost himself as well and it quickly began to show. They had sent Marcus to speak with the department shrink and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Helen snuck up behind him while he was stirring the scrambled eggs, lost in thoughts that seemed to be going nowhere, and wrapped her arms around her husband. They weren't the most usual of couples. Marcus was well over six feet tall and looked as though he could pick up a car if he wanted to, though these last few years his visits to the gym had grown fewer. Helen was only a hair shorter than he was and her strength looked to match his. He had taken some judgement from friends and family, first for leaving the police service to become a shrink, and then for marrying a half orc, but he knew that she had it worse. There was no hiding her heritage, not with the slightly greenish gray tint to her skin, the point of her ears and the slight tusks in her bottom jaw, and people held it against her, expected her to be savage, slow, and simple minded. She had taken these prejudices and made them into advantages in her early career and earned the respect of her peers, but this didn't mean that the sidelong glances and words of strangers couldn't affect her any more. She held him tightly for a moment, then softened her grip and the ritual resumed.

He had never met someone with as much passion or compassion as Helen and while she had all the skill and intelligence to become yet another high price lawyer with wealthy clients she had opted to become a public defender instead, taking the occasional pro-bono job in between. She in turn told him that she had never met anyone like him. When he had first told her that his dad had been a cop and that it was what he'd always thought he wanted to be too, he had seen her stiffen at the mention. Then he had told her what had happened to his father.

He'd lost his mother when he was very young and had very little memory of her. He had been raised by his father and his father's mother. His father's father had been a cop too, back in the day, and died in the line of duty, so he had always known that that was a possibility and that used to terrify him, the thought that one day his father might go to work and never come home again, but what had happened was worse. Marcus had been one of the youngest men to be accepted into the police service and had barely been given his first uniform. He was at the bottom rung of the ladder with a small walked beat with three others, in a fairly safe area of the city center, working in the early morning, getting a feel for the chain of command, writing tickets and babysitting shoplifters until a patrol car would come pick them up. He hadn't seen his father in a few weeks, he'd been busy working, taking point on a case, a bad one. Marcus didn't know all of the details, but it had been a particularly brutal murder with a ritual element. Necromancy. His father had seen something, been exposed to something otherworldly and wrong, and something within him had broken. When his father and his partner had attempted to apprehend the suspect something went terribly wrong and his father was the lone survivor. They had sent him to the department shrink but it had only made things worse. A few nights later Marcus had woken up in a cold sweat and rushed to his father's apartment just a block away only to hear the gunshot as he approached his father's door. He could feel it before he entered. His father was gone, a note laying in a growing pool of blood below him.

They sent him to the same shrink as had handled his father. She had meant well, surely, but she wasn't well equipped. She was barely older than Marcus and spoke from a place of innocence. She wasn't familiar with death, not like he now was, and nothing she had to offer felt right, or helpful. She had painted her little office in the colours that were meant to invoke comfort, but they clashed with his reality. There were plants in the window and a crayon drawing on the wall behind her desk. He had felt alien, out of place in her office, as if the interviews had nothing to do with the reality he inhabited. She began to grow frustrated with their interviews as time passed on, and their personalities clashed. It was no one's fault, he knew that, if not then, then later, but it built up over time until they both lost their temper. Him feeling as though she was playing pretend and lacked any true understanding, and her feeling as though he didn't take her seriously or want to even try to improve. He had shouted, she had shouted, it was unprofessional, sure, but she was new and young and he might have been trying to get on her nerve. The breakthrough came when he shouted that he could do her job better than she was doing it, and she had looked him straight in the eye and dared him to prove it.

Now, he had her office. She held no grudges. She knew she was in over her head and had quit the same day as he did and a couple years later he had apologized to her, properly. They were on friendly enough terms now.

Helen had in turn told Marcus her story, a common enough for half orcs. Her mother was orc, a single parent, and they were poor. There are only so many jobs for orcs in the city and back then it was even worse. They did what they had to to survive. He hadn't asked about her father, but she had told him anyway. She wasn't sure, but she expected it was the landlord. Her mother had died a couple of years ago, an accident, but an easily preventable one. She had decided to sue the people responsible, though it hadn't been easy. Most lawyers who would even meet with her had spoken to her slowly, using simple words and gesturing a lot and refused to take her seriously, more than one had made sure they had some of their law firms security personnel in the room with her. Eventually she had found someone to take her case, a woman with slightly pointed ears and a taller than average height, a half elven woman, and in her relief she almost got ripped off. When she pointed out the error in the contract before signing it, where the percentiles had been switched in case of any damages she'd receive, the half elven woman had corrected it, but ever since that moment Helen knew that she needed to watch her own lawyer. She hadn't expected her to be able to read the contract, let alone catch the error. She hadn't sued for the money, but to see justice served and to make sure the problem was solved, but she had received enough to be able to go to school, study law, become the person she had needed the most.

In a way they were both working to help the people that they used to be and along the way they had found each other and they made each other happy.

Marcus plated the eggs while Helen pulled the mugs from the top cabinet and made their coffees ready. They sat together in the silence of their little kitchen and ate breakfast with their knees touching under the table. They breathed in each other's presence and the blooming gold of dawn bloomed into warm morning sun. They touched each others hands and clinked coffee cups together. They told jokes and laughed, smiled, and basked in the sanctuary of their morning ritual. After a while she washed the pan and put away their bread and juice and he loaded their plates and cups into the dishwasher. Practiced moves from their years together. Then they put on their coats, collected their briefcases, kissed deeply and whispered their i love yous and see you laters.

It wasn't until Marcus sat on the bus that he heard the news of a massive shootout over in the dust district that left at least three police officers dead and several more severely wounded. The news reader went on to say that there was very little information as to what happened exactly and no comment on who was responsible, but there had been a report of a troll and at least one other assailant of unknown race or origin. The cold weight pressed down on Marcus' shoulder again. Something really bad was coming and he would have to try and help the survivors pick up the pieces afterwards. He could feel it, deep in his bones, that whatever this was, it was only the beginning. 

__________________

If you like my sunday morning shorts, or my Fairy Dust, please consider clicking here and tossing me a few coins so I can afford to continue to exist in this harsh bleak hellscape that is 2019. 

Or if you’re as broke as I am, a reblog goes a long way. 

My love and support to all you beautiful people who’ve supported me so far. 

[hans-writes-things]

Must have written some 5k words tonight and None of them are... Going... 

It’s like watching a person set up some fireworks for a display, fumble with the matches for 2 hours, then manage to light something that promptly falls over and doesn’t go off at all. 

And I haven’t time to write tomorrow.  I will be driving. 

So, my apologies, but you’re probably not getting a story this week... 

[hans-writes-things]

A frustrated man comes back from the dead.