[Fic] "The Courting Dance," ch. 8 - Chronicles of Narnia

I got distracted and ended up finishing chapter 8 of "The Courting Dance" instead of getting any further on the Jade/Dave/Terezi porn (which still needs a title, btw...). Noooooooot the same mental track AT ALL. But oh well, writing is writing!

Politics intrudes on romance, but Hwin knows that as long as her friends work together, they can overcome any obstacle. (1,425 words)

( Simple Problems )

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Back to The Beating of Our Hearts

Forward to chapter 9

Read the final version on ff.net. (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The journal version is a beta draft, with all the mistakes that implies.)

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As always, I welcome any ideas on how to improve the chapter (and how to make Hwin's POV more properly equine). :-)

[Fic] "Gifts Unlooked For" -- Homestuck

I got ambushed by a kinkmeme prompt again. *hands* It was a shippy request, but I only really managed pre-relationship stuff. Alas.

Prompt: Jane/Roxy. Anything based on the Act 6 Act 4 flash. Because seriously the ladies deserve love too.

In response to which, here are 2,750 words of Roxy POV, random world-building, a lot of talking about Jake English, Roxy and Dirk being moirails, Roxy crushing on Jane, and some thoughts about how Jane got that really interesting fork she was wielding during the flash.

Gifts Unlooked For (kinkmeme version) / Gifts Unlooked For (AO3 version)

And now I am going to bed, because it is nearly five in the freaking morning and I have to be at work at 11am. *headdesk*

the trouble with working in an old building is that it comes with old plumbing

Today started out all right -- basically a frantic whirl of Oh god we have to get all the holiday decorations up NOW NOW NOW!!! courtesy of PM, but that's manageable and the Elmira delivery was small so it wasn't a problem. We were basically on top of everything by 3:30pm, at which point I went downstairs to bring up supplies for tomorrow.

While I was in the humidor refilling the humidifier and putting pipe tobacco into Ziploc bags to take up and refill our display jars, PM came down to put away some of the autumn window display stuff she and MS had replaced with Christmas stuff. I remarked that there was a funny smell, which I attributed to the humidifier having been running without water. (Nobody filled it yesterday. Grrrr...) She remarked that there was a funny hissing noise coming from near the ceiling. Maybe it was the radiator, I said.

We locked the humidor and went to the main basement rooms. (Our building has three businesses upstairs, each of which has a separate part of the basement. The smoke shop's section is biggest -- it consists of three joined rooms behind locked fire doors, and a wooden-walled walk-in humidor built as kind of a lean-to in the open general area of the basement across from the old elevator shaft. (The elevator has not worked for decades.)

And there we discovered the source of both the weird smell and the hissing noise. One of the hot water pipes that runs along the basement ceiling had sprung a pressure leak and was spraying warm water straight into the wall, from which point it ran down and had created a giant, dirty, smelly puddle all over the floor. *headdesk*

PM called maintenance and I set out buckets to catch what runoff I could, and began mopping up the overflow. The maintenance guys arrived after about ten minutes, traced the pipe, shut off two valves, and then had to leave to get some pipe cutting tools and a replacement segment about a foot long.

I continued mopping until I had dumped three buckets of filthy water down the elevator shaft (and spilled half a bucket on my shoes in the process, argh).

Which is why I was half an hour late getting out of work this evening.

OLD PLUMBING: I AM NOT A FAN.