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

[wistfulmemory]

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

[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. :)

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: 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.