Mini-ficlet prompt meme: help Liz reach tax day without snapping

[edenfalling]

Okay, I am trying to sit down and restart work on my FTH fic, but I seem to have temporarily misplaced my knack for stringing words together in a coherent narrative.

So here I am, breaking my resolution about not doing mini-ficlet prompt memes. *headdesk*

This one really is for mini-ficlets, though! I may run long, of course, but I want these to be finger exercises rather than major projects.

You know the basic drill by now, yes? Pick a square from my Genprompt Bingo card, add one to three characters plus a scenario, and I will write you a ficlet of at least 3 sentences and/or 100 words.

Here is my Genprompt Bingo card. For those who prefer lists to graphics, the open squares are: Light-Hearted, Holiday Cottages, WILD CARD, Suicide, Another Year Older: Birthdays, The Age of Reason, Steadfast, and Takeout.

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Obligatory small print:

1. I reserve the right to veto any fandoms I don't know well enough to write, and ask you to please try again.

2. Crossover prompts are fine! On the vanishingly unlikely chance anyone wants to read a snippet from any of my original worlds and stories, that kind of prompt is also fine.

3. In the Genprompt Bingo challenge, WILD CARD means to grab any prompt from the complete Round 12 prompt list. I reserve the right to veto any such wild card substitutions and ask you to please try again.

4. Genprompt Bingo fills do not have to be gen! (The 'gen' refers to the squares, which do not automatically presuppose shipping.) Just be aware that I'm not great at romance, so if you request shipfic, it will come out fairly low-key and may end up as ambiguous gen anyway.

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Fill List:

1. Kitchen Science: lighthearted, jane and dirk making the most mathematically perfect cake. Written 4/13/18 for longroadstonowhere (175 words) [Tumblr crosspost; AO3 crosspost]

2. Than It Is To Receive: BIRFDAY, Naruto …actually that’s probably a scenario in itself XD. Written 4/13/18 for alexseanchai (425 words) [Tumblr crosspost; AO3 crosspost]

3. All Work and No Play: Holiday Cottages, Naruto (i was thinking of the summer camp au but another setting would be fine also). Written 4/13/18 for silverblade219 (425 words) [Tumblr crosspost; AO3 version]

4. Grandmother Dragon: I would like the prompt "The Age of Reason" with Telemain having to explain something complicated to Kazul. (I reversed this, because reasons. *evil grin*) Written 4/22/18 for wistfulmemory (575 words) [Tumblr crosspost; AO3 crosspost]

5. Equivalent Exchange: Can I have a snippet of "Utiliarian Virtue," please? Pick a prompt and wing it! Written 5/1/18 for cherokee1 (650 words) [Contains discussion of atrocities and war crimes]

Comments

[alexseanchai]

BIRFDAY

Naruto

...actually that's probably a scenario in itself XD

[edenfalling]

Do you care whose birthday? (Like, is this canon or can I go "Way of the Apartment Manager" AU here?)

[alexseanchai]

I was thinking canon Naruto but I love your AU so go for it XD

Kitchen Science

[edenfalling]

longroadstonowhere said: lighthearted, jane and dirk making the most mathematically perfect cake

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"Mathematically perfect in what sense?" Jane asked. "A cake all of whose ingredients are measured in perfect numbers? One where all ingredient measurements are factors of one another? One whose proportions exemplify the Golden Ratio? One whose number of ingredients is a perfect number? One shaped like a Platonic solid? Baking is no place for wishy-washy lack of specificity!"

Dirk stalled for a noticeable second, apparently not having expected her to take his joke seriously. (He really should know better by now. The Crocker-Egbert family was all about wrong-footing other people's jokes in service of their own prankster's gambit.) Then he made a valiant counterattack: "Why not all of the above? No point half-assing a challenge when we could make it the next best thing to impossible. Just picture the sweet triumph when we pull our magnificently improbable creation from the oven and present its possibly non-Euclidean glory to our adoring public."

Jane grinned. "You're on," she said, and slapped her spare mixing spoon down into Dirk's reflexive grip. "Now pay attention, grasshopper, and watch the master work."

[silverblade219]

Holiday Cottages, Naruto (i was think of the summer camp au but another setting would be fine also)

Than It Is To Receive

[edenfalling]

"Hey, hey, Yukiko-neechan, when's your birthday?"

Yukiko looked up from her tempura and raised her eyebrows. "January 17. Why?"

Naruto made a disgruntled face. "That's forever away. And Sakura-chan's birthday isn't till March, and Shinnin's isn't till May. It was really cool getting presents for the first time last week, and I wanna make everybody else feel special like that! I wanna throw a party and buy presents and make a cake. But everybody I know has birthdays at stupid inconvenient times."

Yukiko's eyebrows climbed higher. "Parties are a lot of work and presents cost money to buy or time to make, but if that's what you want, we can figure something out. Like, oh... why not a friendship appreciation party for Shinnin and Sakura? Or a teacher appreciation party for Iruka? You could even throw a belated party for Kakashi -- I think his birthday was in September, but he's so secretive we could just pretend we thought his birthday was this week and he won't correct us because that would mean revealing personal information."

Naruto scrunched his nose in thought. "Um. It'd be funny to mess with Kakashi, but maybe kind of mean, too. And that's not what parties are for. Let's do the teacher party for Iruka. That way I don't have to keep it a secret from Shinnin and Sakura-chan. Maybe they can help out!"

"Maybe," Yukiko agreed, already planning strategies for roping the girls' respective parents into the planning loop. (Teacher appreciation should be an easy sell, even with Naruto in the mix. And sacrificing her kitchen to the kids' baking attempts should win another few points.) "You can ask them tomorrow."

"And if I practice now on Iruka, I can make sure your birthday party is the best ever!" Naruto added, waving his chopsticks for emphasis; one slipped through his fingers and flew across the table. "'Cause I remember you didn't have one last winter, and that's no good. Everybody deserves parties, and when I'm Hokage, I'm gonna make sure everybody gets them. So there."

"I've heard worse plans for spending our municipal tax levies," Yukiko said dryly, fishing the stray chopstick out of her windbreaker's hood. (Yuck. Oh well, she'd been planning to do laundry tonight anyway.)

"Well, yeah. Because my plans are awesome," Naruto said firmly. "Hey, hey, do you know what kind of cake Iruka likes? I wanna make sure we get everything perfect."

Yukiko leaned across the table and pressed the chopstick back into Naruto's hand. "You're a ninja, kid. Find out for yourself."

Re: Than It Is To Receive

[alexseanchai]

*bouncebounce*

Re: Than It Is To Receive

[edenfalling]

:D

All Work and No Play

[edenfalling]

"You know what we need?" Sakura said two nights before election day, lack of sleep scattering her thoughts like a bad day of target practice. "We need a vacation. A whole week in a cute little holiday cottage with a flower garden, on the shore of a lake, by the edge of a forest, with no reporters whatsoever. Maybe one intern, though. I really like having interns. It's so useful having people who jump to obey my every whim."

"You are the empress of all you survey," Naruto agreed, sounding disgustingly awake. Sakura flapped a hand at Sasuke, who obligingly thwacked his own hand into Naruto's shoulder where the two of them lounged on their collective bed. Sakura rubbed her eyes and resumed staring at Ino and Sai's latest poll analysis, hoping the words and numbers would miraculously resolve into coherent information.

"I hate statistics," she muttered. "Passionately. Well, not really. I don't have the energy for passion anymore. So I guess it's more like a brick wall of implacable dislike instead of a bonfire of rage. Or something." She ran her words back through her brain, and lowered her face until her forehead mashed into her keyboard. "Fuck. That analogy made more sense in my head."

"Yeah, you need a vacation," Naruto said. "Hey, come to bed. The numbers will still be there in the morning, and in the meantime I can give you a neck massage so your head doesn't declare rebellion overnight."

"What he said," Sasuke agreed, his voice thick and muddled with sleep. "Even the stupid cottage. We can rent the most tasteless, fluffy, flowered monstrosity in the country, just to make sure nobody will ever connect it to us."

"It won't work. The interns will know," Sakura said into her keyboard.

"Your interns are faithful to their great and terrible empress, and will keep their mouths shut," Sasuke said. He rolled onto his back and aimed a tiny, sleep-mellow smile in her direction. "It's late. You need to be sharp tomorrow. Kill the light and come to bed."

Sakura gave her screen one last glance, grimaced at the string of gibberish now gracing the end of Ino's report, and shut the laptop with a decisive push. "Fine. But you owe me so much nude sunbathing and skinny-dipping. Also hiking. And a fresh bouquet of flowers every morning for the whole week." She stripped off her tank top and sweatpants as she spoke, dropping the clothes haphazardly on the floor.

"As you wish," Naruto said, and pulled her down for a kiss.

Re: All Work and No Play

[silverblade219]

Thanks! This is really cute

Re: All Work and No Play

[edenfalling]

:D

Re: Than It Is To Receive

[wistfulmemory]

This was fantastic! Thanks for this wonderful glimpse into this AU. It always makes me happy to see these stories.

[wistfulmemory]

I would like the prompt "The Age of Reason" with Telemain having to explain something complicated to Kazul. Thank you! :)

Re: Than It Is To Receive

[edenfalling]

Thanks! I like writing snippets in this AU -- they're like little promise notes to myself that I WILL get back to "Guardian" someday.

[edenfalling]

...can I reverse that, actually? (I just had an annoyingly insistent plotbunny about intricate dragon kinship structures and Telemain being about as far from a social scientist as humanly possible.)

[wistfulmemory]

Definitely! I'm glad my prompt was able to inspire a plotbunny. I look forward to seeing where you go with it. :)

This is cherokee1

[(Anonymous)]

Are you still playing this? Can I have a snippet of "Utiliarian Virtue? Please?

Grandmother Dragon

[edenfalling]

"It's not complicated," Kazul said irritably as she rocked Daystar's cradle in the grassy clearing outside Cimorene's new house. "Humans are the ones who can't use words sensibly, always gluing extra assumptions onto perfectly simple ideas. I never said my son was my new grandchild's sire. I said he was its father."

Telemain blinked. "I... take it that those concepts are not synonymous among dragons?"

Kazul reminded herself that Morwen was fond of the magician, that he was a staunch ally against the wizards, and that it was rude to eat people one knew in social contexts, particularly in front of small children. (Even if the small child in question was fast asleep and would never know. Cimorene would know, when she and Morwen returned from their well-earned day of relaxation at a famous spa in Kaltenmark, and Kazul didn't need that kind of trouble.)

"Yes," she said, letting a trickle of smoke waft between her teeth on the sibilant. "One is biological. The other is social. Obviously one dragon can fill both roles, but it's not required. In fact, most hatchlings have several fathers, given prevailing gender ratios and the difficulty of keeping an eye on small individuals with much more physical initiative than good sense. I had six myself."

"That sounds potentially overwhelming," Telemain said, "not to mention crowded. How on earth do you go about organizing-- wait, prevailing gender ratios? I'm no expert in the social sciences, but why would that be an issue when dragons can choose your own biological sexes? Wouldn't a roughly one-to-one ratio be the most efficient for--"

Kazul snapped her teeth together with a deliberately exaggerated click. Telemain, in a rare display of common sense, stopped talking.

"Do you remember what I said about humans gluing extra assumptions onto simple ideas?" Kazul asked. "You're doing it again. Stop."

Telemain took a deep breath, visibly rearranged his thoughts, opened his mouth, and then paused to rearrange his thoughts again. Finally he said, "My apologies. Would you be willing to explain the reasons behind dragon gender ratios, and what effects those ratios have on your... do you still call them family structures? Or is that another place where our definitions diverge?"

Kazul smiled and reached into the cradle with a single, careful talon to tug Daystar's blanket up over his torso. He sighed in his sleep, drooled a bit, and wrapped four tiny, pudgy fingers around her claw. She allowed him to hold her captive. (It was a pity she couldn't introduce Daystar to any of her grandchildren yet -- human infants were far too fragile, even discounting the business with the sword and the wizards -- but with a pinch of luck, they might still become friends when the war was over.)

"You're learning," she said to Telemain. "And that depends. How do you define a family?"

Telemain frowned. "That's a surprisingly difficult question, now that I think about it. I believe I once read a description in one of de Groot's manuals on inheritance-linked spells that began by separating families of blood and families of choice, continued through a discussion of marriage structures and their varying effects on family curses, and detoured through property rights before--"

Humans did love to complicate things. But they made the world more interesting as a result, and there were worse ways to fill a quiet summer afternoon than an impromptu discussion of interspecies anthropology. (And babysitting, of course, but that went without saying.)

Re: This is cherokee1

[edenfalling]

Sure! Do you have a specific prompt from the list in mind, or should I just pick one and wing it?

Re: This is cherokee1

[(Anonymous)]

Pick one and wing it, yes! My birthday was the 18th, and this would be a great thing to read for a present. Ahem. Thank you....

Equivalent Exchange

[edenfalling]

I went with "power corrupts" as the prompt!

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"The first thing you need to know is that the Keeper's not completely wrong," Yurikaw said as she tapped at the glass screen of her interdimensional iPad equivalent, gun and helmet set aside on Laura's kitchen counter. "Travel between worlds, dimensions, timelines, whatever you want to call them, is dangerous. Does your language have a word for colonization?"

"Yes. You just used it," Laura said.

"Actually, I didn't. I used the equivalent in my language. I just have very good translation technology -- external, not internal, but it does the job." Yurikaw tapped her earpiece and grinned. "But anyway, you have that concept. Apply it to entire worlds. Or imagine the worst... pandemics? Did that also translate?"

Laura nodded. Beside her, Aujae nearly managed to conceal a flinch. Laura squeezed her hand and wrote a mental reminder to ask about that later.

Yurikaw turned her tablet to face Laura, displaying an image of emaciated corpses covered in weeping, pus-filled sores. "Imagine over ninety percent of a whole world's population wiped out by another world's equivalent of a childhood irritant." She tapped the screen, changed the image to leprous-looking trees swathed in choking, rust-colored smog. "Imagine worlds strip-mined for resources until they were so polluted they couldn't support life anymore." Another tap, another image. "Imagine slavery" -- tap -- "genocide" -- tap -- "wars that span a dozen dimensions, half of whose inhabitants might not even understand why they're suddenly the site of another world's battles."

Yurikaw set the tablet down and stared across the kitchen table, like she was trying to make eye contact for emphasis. Laura met her gaze for a second, then let her attention drift to the other woman's chin and hands.

"Except you don't have to imagine any of that," Yurikaw said, gesturing toward her tablet, "because everything I've just mentioned has happened. The Keeper was built as a safeguard by some survivors of those wars. Its central directive is to keep humans, or our dimensional equivalents, from committing similar atrocities again."

"That sounds reasonable," Laura said. Aujae stifled another flinch, skin chilled and sweaty against Laura's palm and fingers, but she made no move to pull away. Laura pulled their joined hands over to rest on her thigh and asked, "Where did it go wrong?"

"When the Keeper concluded, perfectly logically, that the only foolproof way to prevent people from abusing interdimensional travel technology was to make sure nobody had that technology in the first place. And after a few failed attempts to convince people to ignore new discoveries, it concluded -- again, perfectly logically -- that the only foolproof way to make sure nobody had interdimensional travel technology was to kill anyone who came close to inventing it and destroy all their work. If that fails, it escalates until it deems the problem solved. Of course, the Keeper can't do any of this directly -- its programmers did build some failsafes into their creation -- but it can send agents as its hands. Hence your friend the assassin."

"Aujae has a name," Laura said sharply. "You should use it."

"You're right. She does. My apologies, Agent Guilaeo," Yurikaw said in a level, stripped-bare tone.

"Accepted, Agent Madranashkiyug," Aujae said, equally flat.

"Thank you," Laura said. She waited, but Yurikaw seemed occupied with staring at Aujae instead of continuing her explanation. "Um. So. That's the first thing -- that the Keeper isn't entirely wrong? What's the second?"

Yurikaw broke off her staring contest and picked up her tablet. "The second thing is that the Keeper has become as bad as what it's working to prevent. I said it escalates, if a surgical strike doesn't work. It doesn't have limits on that escalation. Ask Agent Guilaeo about some of her assignments. Ask her about the metropolis of Sivan -- or what used to be Sivan, before she glassed it and touched off a worldwide war."

Under the table, Aujae let go of Laura's hand.

Re: Equivalent Exchange

[(Anonymous)]

This is Cherokee1. I really, really want to read this book.
The idea came from a series of drawings I did, and concluded I was not at the time technically adept enough to spin it into a comic.
I kept the drawings though, and pull them out occasionally.
Tons of research on the sigils alone. Mostly I used alchemical symbols.
I love reading your take on it.
C

Re: Equivalent Exchange

[edenfalling]

Thank you! The original prompt was such an intriguing idea, and I've enjoyed playing with it over the years.

I did finally make a high-level outline of the story -- nothing hugely detailed, but sort of a "this is the background worldbuilding, these are the major characters, here is the emotional plot and the action/adventure plot, here's how they resolve" rough sketch. So it's looking more like something I could write someday, instead of just disconnected snippets. I guess we'll see!

Re: Than It Is To Receive

[sheliak]

Naruto is awfully cute in this! And it's always nice to see more of this world.

Re: Than It Is To Receive

[edenfalling]

Thank you! :)

Re: Grandmother Dragon

[sheliak]

I like the reminder that etiquette is one of the main reasons for dragons not to eat specific people.

(I feel like making things complicated is as much a Telemain thing as a general human one! He likes complexity.)

Re: Grandmother Dragon

[edenfalling]

There are reasons Cimorene is so insistent on Daystar's dragon etiquette lessons! ;)

And yeah, Telemain complicates things at least three times as much as the average human. He's just like that.

Re: Equivalent Exchange

[(Anonymous)]

Hi! This is cherokee1, rereading "Utilitarian Virtues" again. I am pleasantly surprised that you are still active on LJ. This is my 21st year of having a LiveJournal, defunct as mine is.
I hope you are well and happy.

Re: Equivalent Exchange

[edenfalling]

Hi! I'm really only on LJ by way of automatic crossposting from Dreamwidth, but it's important to me to keep that line open. :)

I am doing fairly well these days, and am as happy as can reasonably be expected given the ongoing pandemic and everything. I hope you are also doing well!