Lichcraft is fraught under optimal conditions, which is to say without thralls like Scarjob and Gretch.
“I told you to watch the alembic so it didn’t boil over!” wails Karaaz the Flagrant, rushing to beat out a small but spirited fire in her phylactery lab. Scarjob and Gretch cringe.
“We did!” says Scarjob, who didn’t (they were playing a game with Gretch’s eyeball).
“What’s an alembic?” says Gretch hesitantly.
“TWO RETORTS CONNECTED BY A PIPETTE JESUS HOW MANY TIMES,” shouts Karaaz the Flagrant.
Then she’s late to the Future Liches of Morcroft meeting and everybody snickers at her under their cloaks.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
This is the ruleset for Micronomic, a game for a finite set of players coincident in time. Each sentence in the ruleset is a rule. This ruleset is subject to change; rules within its first 101 words may be changed by concurrent agreement of the entire set of players. New rules may be added after the first 101 words by concurrent agreement of more than half the set of players, and rules so added may be changed in the same way. Any player may propose adding or changing a rule by submitting the new sentence to all other players for review.
Her code name was chosen to imply a bumbling sweetness that puts her employers at ease: not a complex figure, their domestic, oh no. So well-meaning. Always getting little things wrong.
She’s cost the elite of the city something in the low seven figures–just the occasional letterbox conflagration or shoe-baking incident. They can never stay mad at their underpaid simpleton, though. She means so well!
Everybody ought to have a maid, isn’t that what they say? Bedelia and her cell agree with that. They’ve got credit cards, Swiss accounts, passwords and PINs. Soon, they’ll wipe the slate clean.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
They don’t even bother hitting the light switch, which is cool, Lake decides; he can be into that. This is how he finds himself getting a clear, full-color glimpse of her tattoo.
“Whoa!” he says.
“Oh,” she laughs, up on her elbows in her underwear, “you noticed it.”
He smiles understandingly. “Woke up with that after a wild night?”
“No.”
His smile shrinks. “Lost a bet.”
She’s not smiling at all. “Chevy makes really bad cars. The kid peeing on their logo symbolizes–hey, what happened?” she asks, glancing down at his detumescing penis.
“You transmogrified it,” he sighs.
“Wouldn’t it be great if you had, like, a remote control?” says Destiny. “But for real life.”
“There are so many bad movies about–never mind,” says Kent. “What would you use it for?”
“Oh, y’know, pausing things like Zack Morris, or we could just dub over our whole first date,” she says, rolling her eyes.
Pause.
“You said you had fun,” he says, a wounded animal.
“I just meant–”
“I thought you liked the planetarium!”
“eeeeeBaSookuDeaboDooZHEEEP,” says Destiny.
“Making sound effects with your mouth doesn’t rewind–”
“Wouldn’t it be great if you had, like, a remote control?” says Destiny brightly.
Geoffrey hasn’t slept more than an hour in months. His beard is ragged; his scrubs are stained. He sits in the control room like a laboratory animal, eyes fixed, waiting for the screen to refresh.
“How often do you have to click the button?” asks the polar bear, who might be imaginary.
“Every twenty-four hours,” says Geoffrey. “Sometimes less, if he gets behind on posting them.”
“But what would happen if you stopped? Are there really consequences?”
“Yes,” Geoffrey whispers. “The world will end.”
Then there’s a whole season of time travel stuff where they’re not even on the island.
The diminudroids live in the hollow of a tree, from which they evicted a testy squirrel months ago. They’ve remodeled it: three levels, little glass windows and bottlecap furniture. Also, an anti-squirrel crossbow.
They’re four inches tall and jointed with ball bearings, wooden-limbed, marble-eyed. They have a certain genius with string and pulleys. Observing through his telephoto lens, Angelo estimates that 90% of the diminudroid lifestyle is pulley-based.
They move in stop-motion, because of course they do. How else could they be so perfectly impossible to document? Angelo puts the camera away, wondering what they eat.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010