No. 27 Scientific Beauty (or, If You Don’t Like This, Blame My Computer)

Hello again! Long time no see. And by no see, I mean long time no writing, because apparently NanoWriMo dragged my motivation away with it when it when it left. But hey, I’m back, and I have a journal with a couple of salvageable stories that I want to type up, so perhaps we’re heading back on track.

Now, if you don’t like this story, blame my computer. It was better, full of thoughtfully considered words and wit. But alas, in my haste to write I had not saved the story, and my computer chose this time, when I was two hundred masterful words in, to give me the blue screen of death (Or the modern day equivalent) for the first time ever. The work was non-salvageable, and I had to retype it. I hate retyping things. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be able to share the somewhat less good version with all (fifteen) of you. Enjoy!

No. 27

I was woken up by a gentle kiss. I then reached for the dagger that I wear on my hip, and was shocked to discover that I was wearing a dress. Someone had put me in a dress. Dresses and I go together a lot like sodium and water. The same two outcomes are inevitable; there will be explosions, and someone is going to get hurt.

Since I had no dagger with which to respond to my erstwhile kisser, I decided that punching would probably work just as well, with less chance of ‘Oh, I’m sorry, are those your internal organs on the floor?’ becoming a problem. I was pretty sure that I would have the element of surprise on my side.

I whirled around and swung a punch at him. The intent was to hit his nose with a satisfying crunch, but my trajectory was off so I ended up getting in a good blow against his sternum that made him an unexpected acquaintance of the floor.

“You do not introduce yourself to a sleeping woman by kissing her!” I attempted to channel my old schoolteacher, who made one want to flee and hide under the nearest object when she turned the full measure of her fury upon you.

He looked dazedly at me from the floor. He was wearing highly opulent clothing, unnecessarily so, and his face had a few scratches from either cats or thorns that were in the process of oozing blood.  “What?”

I squinted at him and scrutinized him farther, taking in aspects of his appearance; highly jelled and slicked back hair, purely decorative sword in a sheath at his side, boots that were polished enough to be used at mirrors and little else, and the fact that he appeared to be wearing more jewelry than I owned. I spat the next word, in lieu of actually spitting. “Prince.”

The prince looked at me with a mixture of fear and confusion, “I’m sorry ma’am, the fairy said that you could only be woken by a kiss from your true love. I thought I might see if I was that person.”

I raised my eyebrow and took on a tone of panicked reassurance, “Really officer, I only kissed her because the crazy lady who was claiming she was a fairy told me that if I did I might get to marry her and who knows, I might be her true love. Yeah. That would hold up in court.”

He blinked at me and looked like his whole view of the justice system was crashing down, “So you’re not a princess?”

“Oh no, I’m a princess. I’m just a princess who thinks you should leave before I find my dagger and make you. Have a good day, spread the word that there was a dragon protecting nothing but ruins, warn people that this place is haunted, whatever would deter them. And how did you get through the thorn wall?”

“I put some strange concoction on them. It was from the stores of an alchemist who was burnt as a witch for knowledge of unnatural arts.”

“Oh lovely, was it sulfuric acid? I hadn’t thought of that. And you burn people at stakes now? I think that the world has managed to devolve. Right then. Off with you. Feel free to take a ‘dragon scale’ from the basket by the door on your way out. Be sure to warn all your friends.”

The prince just kind of stared at me again, “But aren’t you happy to be released from the curse?”

“This isn’t a curse. We traded knowledge with the faeries so that they would let all of us in the household sleep until the world was a bit more knowledgeable, and clearly that hasn’t happened yet. There’s just one faerie who’s decided that this is a foolish decision and keeps sending in moronic princes like you to get us to wake up. If I could send a crossbow bolt through her wings it would make my day. Now, leave for goodness sake.”

At this point he looked rather confused and a little worried, and simply wandered away in the general directions of the outside.

Once was gone I looked at the ceiling, “Can I tell you how to make objects hover with the proper frequencies of sound waves in exchange for a guard dragon? And we’ll have to make the hedge wall resistant to acids.”

I heard the musical noises of agreement, “Got it? Good. I’m going back to bed.”

NanoWriMo

Ah NanoWriMo, how I loath you. Sure I appreciate the fact that you make me sit down and write, but I don’t appreciate that I get even less sleep than usual.

This means that I will probably not be posting much this month (not that I post much usually), and if I do it will probably be rant-ey, sleep deprived, and attached to an utterly weird poem or short story. Just a warning. Happy NanoWriMo to you all.

Land of Dreams.

And yet another. Dear nonexistent readers, Enjoy!

This is the world that, almost always, you forget, the world of wishes, and horrors, the world of missing thoughts, and scattered memories. This is the world of dreams.

Although, yes, dreaming is attributed to your subconscious, that’s really not it at all. It is a place, with people and lives. It is simply a lost and forgotten one. It was truly a place, once, but time wore at it, and nothing can stand forever. We refused to give in, refused to let our city crumble, the last of the mages used their power to move the planet to a land out of time, out of anything.

Of course, unplanned dimensional travel is rather hard to get right on a good day, and it was most certainly not a good day.

We got trapped in limbo, never aging, never changing, and getting the oh-so-fun added bonus of being where people dreamed.

And although, sure, you have the occasional good lovely dream sometimes, most days they are confusing or scary. So we get all the monsters under the beds that you can stand. And they’re not like the demon geese that you can just spray for, either. All those monsters and nightmares have little changes, unintentional personal touches, you might say. So you can’t just generalize them. At best you can toss them into one of the few categories to be noted down, has a solid form, has no solid form, sometimes had a solid form, and oh crap get it off of my facduvdcyiavciuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

It’s rather annoying.

I digress, this is the place that you travel when you sleep, and whatever you dream about appears here. This is pretty much the world that your brain uses for a dump.

It is difficult, but we have learned to adapt. Living up high usually helps, although those winged-bear-chupacabra-armadillos are a menace, and really make you wonder what whoever dreamed it was on. I mean seriously, where do you even get that?

People come here too sometimes, more often than not as a discard from a dream that wasn’t bad (or one that was), but occasionally from the real world, falling through the dreams.

But all the monsters and oddities aside, the most annoying things are the lucid dreamers. I don’t mean the people who manage to control what they see and do a little bit, I mean the people who can control it all. They are like really bloody annoying, inconsiderate, all-powerful gods.

It is infuriating. They don’t know that this is a world, they just think it’s their subconscious so they don’t care if the completely re-sculpt the environment and wipe out twenty-seven percent of the population because they want to fly over an ocean, not the forests. That jerk killed nine hundred, sixty nine thousand, four hundred, eighty three people.

But, we learn to live with it.

And we do wonder about where we dream.