Aftermaj storms were a matter of serious concern in Skymoore, but they were rarely so disastrous as they could be. Sure, things blew in the wind, caught fire, and collapsed, but the random acts of magic – disappearing floor, randomly-summoned spirits, people suddenly existing in several places simultaneously – only affected those who weren’t careful. Because, you see, magic had a way of respecting boundaries both natural and constructed. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Nine”
Category: Bad Faith
Bad Faith, Part Eight
Kelsie was waiting beneath an overhang across from Karessa’s home.
“You look like a drowned kitten,” Karessa said.
“I lent you my umbrella.”
“About that…”
“I assumed. So where do we go?”
“I thought you were the mastermind here.” Kelsie crossed her arms. “Teasing. The spell is amplified by music, so where do you go around here if you want to make some noise?”
“Well shit,” Kelsie said. “We’d better get going.” Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Eight”
Bad Faith, Part Seven
Dingleob Boelgind spent two nights a week with his grandmother, Ponifka. When kamenclo grow old, the magic that keeps their stone bodies in a humanoid form weakens and becomes erratic. One might grow additional limbs, crumble to the floor, or become a tasteful vase. Ponifka Boelgind mostly became a stone wall separating her living room into two halves. This would sometimes last for hours. It was challenging, and Dingleob’s time and support meant the world to her. Sometimes he read to her, sometimes they just talked. Sometimes the said nothing at all. Every time, it was pleasant. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Seven”
Bad Faith, Part Six
The plan was simple, or it would be once Karessa got inside the Dufton’s mansion. Their estate was protected by an invisible magic field which produced an alarm if anyone not on the family’s guest list stepped through it. The only other way in was to be granted entrance by the pair of stone-faced guards (literally, they were golems) which stood watch over the gate leading into the estate’s extensive courtyard.
Unfortunately, Karessa was no longer on that list. The news stung. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Six”
Bad Faith, Part Five
Few things burn quite so hot as young love. Few things claw at you quite as painfully as young heartbreak.
Karessa spent her days and nights in her room. Crying, mostly. Sobbing. Howling. Thrashing. Bleeding out as tendrils of despair tore at her heart. Screaming his name into a pillow like a cry for help into a void in which she dwelled alone. She hated him. She missed him. She wanted him back. She wanted him dead. She wanted to die.
Time passed. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Five”
Bad Faith, Part Four
Like most people, Agnes Pullinsworth was one-of-a-kind in a number of utterly mundane ways. For instance, she is the only human in Skymoore to ever speak the elvish sentence “tohli duv ildamayn ardvnas.” She is the only living person in history to ever set foot in both Rollin’ Roland’s, the bakery in Castiron and Rollin’ Roland’s, the bowling alley in Skymoore. And, perhaps least interestingly but most relevant to the story at hand, she was the first customer to ever visit Odd & Ends.
She hated it, and she left Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Four”
Bad Faith, Part Three
“Out,” Karessa said. “I’m allowed to be out.”
“You’re sixteen,” said the woman who gave birth to Karessa, who was seventeen. Her mom was sitting on their couch, reading a book with a half-dressed giant on the cover, and glowering. “And you live in my home.”
“I pay for the place,” Karessa did not say. “I was just with a friend,” Karessa said. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Three”
Bad Faith, Part Two
Insultingly close to the Mish Mash lie the evergreen plains in which the wealthiest families of Skymoore had built their estates. There you could find the Windblown Manor, home of the Windomere family, Progress Point, home of the Stonesoul family, and the creatively-named Dufton Estate, home of the Dufton family, to which Lawrence Dufton belonged. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Two”
Bad Faith, Part One
A long time ago, sometime after Seamoore became Skymoore and sometime before the present, a number of disabled, sick, pretentious, and otherwise undesirable people were deemed unfit for proper society, and they were quarantined in a crowded district to live in misery together. (Today it is generally agreed that this was an awful thing to do, though that doesn’t do much for the people who languished there.) The resulting region was forced to expand upward, rather than outward, and to become its own self-sustaining ecosystem, containing a little bit of everything if you knew where to look. This jungle of wood and rust, known today as the Mish Mash, was almost a city unto itself, with its own politics, its own culture, and its own leaders. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part One”
Bad Faith, Prologue
“No! No. You can’t do this!” Teyla Eastwind sobbed, pathetically, on all fours in the abandoned art museum she called home. “You have to stay!” Continue reading “Bad Faith, Prologue”
Odd & Ends 