5 Things Meme—of the Ficlet Variety
Aug. 4th, 2013 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scribblemynameGacked from penknife:
You post a topic, list, category, whatever, in comments. (examples: "Five SG-1 Mission Reports That Were Less Than Entirely Truthful", or "Five Times Bruce Banner Lost His Toothbrush," or "Five Ways Nikola Tesla Failed to Take Over the World"). I'll answer with a list of five things.
Ideally fandoms that I know something about, unless you want me to guess, which could be entertaining but probably not the way you want. Or (and preferably) original fiction. All storyworlds on the table, i.e. Seven Days, Kingdoms and Thorn, the Alliance, Vardin, etc.
Completed Ficlets & Scenes
Kingdoms and Thorn:
- Rachelle + Justus – Without a Reason
- Shift + Justus + Red Wolf – It's Own Absolution
- Rachelle + Justus – It Came Up
- Rachelle/Justus – Simply Because
- Rachelle + Justus – Defining Love
- Rachelle + Shift + Meld – Playing with Knives
- Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Technicalities
- Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Call Me If You Need Me
- Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Element of Uncertainty
- Marc + Cate – A Simple Question
- Marc + Cate – The Nameless Below
- Killinger + Special Unit ensemble – Tracing Trouble
Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.
Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [1/?]
Date: 2013-09-17 10:25 pm (UTC)Cate wrapped up inputting the evening’s reports into the computer and paused to pull her hair back to one side and look over her shoulder at Ilsa Killinger, head of the Special Unit, buried in research.
Marc Rede had left for the evening, taking beat through the Lower Kingdoms, not highly recommended on a bad day, but sometimes Cate thought he just needed to do it. He had never been less than cop.
Jarod Walters, their cyberpath tech, had about fried his brain sending it through a cyberpath-created and enforced security system it would take a tracer to breach—something Jarod couldn’t pretend to be. Tracers were sometimes cyberpaths, sometimes not, but they were the best at manipulating records and databases and had security authorization even the highest ranking military officer did not have. He was holding an icepack on his head, avoiding all further use of his ability, and muttering darkly that he was reduced to typing in his own reports.
Ilsa Killinger kept working. Her head shifted back and forth with her eye motion, a certain sign of her weariness. She flipped pages, dug through other stacks of files, pulled over her computer to add another query to her panel. She had stopped sipping coffee from her now-drained mug about an hour ago—getting off time.
The Special Unit had its fingers in every case related to special-type humans, but they didn’t know the first thing about stopping a rogue tracer. Cate knew tracers, several of them, but to try head-on tracer on tracer went beyond investigation and into war. Ilsa, Cate, and even Marc with storm-clouds brewing in his eyes knew war.
There wasn’t room for Cate here and now to help, so she stood and tossed her hair back over her shoulders, gathered her artifacts, and dropped her own take-out coffee cup into the wastebasket.
“Hitting the sack?” Jarod asked.
Cate glanced over the conference table at the other half of the room. Ilsa did not look up.
She shrugged, casual and indifferent facade. Something told her somewhere inside she would have to stop pretending eventually or she wouldn’t know herself from the masks, but today was not the day she heeded her own warnings. She was hitting the kingdoms.
Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [2/?]
Date: 2013-09-17 10:26 pm (UTC)Cate was not a tracer. Computers hated her so she bought the simplest of interfaces, a breed just shy of childproof. She wasn’t stupid, though for years she had thought that was the problem. Her telepathic fields interfered with electronics and under prolonged exposure could make them go haywire. That limited her options to those their own cyberpath, Jarod, wouldn’t use.
It left her the kingdoms.
Kishet was a kingdoms city—two hundred and fifty square miles of human architecture clashing with human change. Once the sprawling, haphazard metropolis of the Thorn Republic, grown over the top of three old townships, now it was the crown of the kingdoms: a wealth of districts and burros, counties and neighborhoods—nations.
She stretched out her mind, skimming the top of an ocean of thought, the dull roar of an endless crowd. Second nature to her, she sought out the tangles, knots of computer-like thinking—“Rachelle,” she politely greeted—then isolated them on her mindscape of Kishet. Fifteen. Kick Rachelle off her list, the former team operative who often consulted for the Special Unit and had tracer expertise herself. That left fourteen cyberpaths.
Hovering at the edge of power, tension blossoming at the boundaries of her mental reach, Cate knew she had choices. She could fall back into herself, plot out her suspects on a map, and deliver it to Ilsa. She could maintain this harsh edge of tension like an ever-moving guidance system and walk the map herself.
“The things I do for family,” she murmured to herself and began to walk.
Late at night in the dark office of the Special Unit and Ilsa Killinger was still hitting the books at the conference table. She shouldn't have been, of course. She should have been at home in bed with her head on her husband Hasheni's shoulder, but try telling that to the unstoppable force that was Killinger. Cate didn't bother as she stepped into the dim light of Jarod's desklamp that Killinger had relocated to beside her.
"Hey," the younger woman said. She tossed a manila file folder with a slap onto the table and pulled up a chair to plunk both elbows on the table and lean her chin on folded hands. She ignored the mild pain from a handful of bruises she had gotten while on her tour.
Neither spoke for long minutes, though Ilsa did finally reach out with a weary sigh and draw the folder toward her to flip it open. Reading brought another frown to Killinger 's face. Cate waited quietly.
It was comfortable between them, this silence. Killinger was enough of a mentor to Cate with enough of genuine affection for their relationship to become almost familial. It was why Cate was willing to come bearing gifts in the middle of the night and wait patiently to try and smooth that worried frown from Killinger’s face.
"What do you think of this?" Killinger asked quietly.
Cate shrugged. She hadn’t formed an opinion yet of the thin sheet of information she had nearly paid her life and limb to retrieve. It was enough to wrangle her way into a vigilante kingdom and locate some kind of evidence of a cyberpath tampering with city systems.
Medical wards were tied together by their own computer system. Law enforcement systems within the city mostly talked to each other due to treaty law, though not all. Transportation was locked down by the Thoroughfares but also talked to medical systems and law enforcement tracking. It would take a tracer to start pulling the hijinks that had begun to turn up, but what Cate had found were a cyberpath maintaining that work and an energist maintaining the cyberpath in a basement in the Silent Kingdom. Little surprise on location. Silent Kingdom was the one kingdom within the city where vigilantism was permitted but traditional law enforcement bodies were not.
But Killinger was patient. She waited until Cate was willing to venture, “The tracer’s probably not a cyberpath.”
Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [3/?]
Date: 2013-09-17 10:27 pm (UTC)Cate held up her wrist. “Cyberpathic technology. It’s a bracelet of sorts with a cable or wireless connection. Team operatives have implants.”
Killinger winced at that.
Cate dropped her hands to the table, still folded. “You want to bring in a tracer? Only a tracer can trace another tracer.” Rachelle’s mind had been clear of pain and eight times out of ten, she was willing to help when Cate asked.
“I was hoping not to.” Killinger closed the file folder and sighed heavily. None of them wanted war or its casualties. “The Special Unit is not supposed to deal with former operatives.”
Cate started to speak, stopped herself, and forced herself to think it over first. Too many little things wrong with all of this. The tracer was testing their power and using non-operatives to do it. She had run through her mental files: she had never seen that cyberpath and energist before.
“They’re not an operative.” She threw it out there bald and let Killinger make of it what she would. “Operatives know exactly what they are capable of.”
Killinger’s brow straightened out. There were implications in that statement, and neither woman missed them. “The Republic?” she asked quietly.
Cate tilted her head thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I’m no cyberpath, but if Jarod’s done icing his head yet, I did manage to throw everything I had through their computer.”
It took Killinger a moment to catch that, then for Cate to grin at her. Side effects sometimes had their upside.
“How did you do that?” Jarod demanded as he worked furiously through security codes not boosted by a maintaining computer. “I worked at this, and I’m a cyberpath and you just waltz in there—”
“Walters.” Cate grinned over his head at Rede. A faint smile seemed to catch him by surprise in return.
“Jarod.”
She rolled her eyes and continued, “You just fixed my computer for the tenth time last week.”
“Yeah. So.” His mind was half out of this conversation and completely buried in the machine on his desk.
“So why do you think I fry my own unit?” she asked.
Jarod groaned. “You never told me you had side effects.”
Cate just laughed softly to herself and let him do his job. Jarod was better at it than most people assumed when they met the annoying, do-you-ever-shut-up side of him. Cate had full confidence he would come up with something.
“Okay. I’m in.”
Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [4/4]
Date: 2013-09-17 10:28 pm (UTC)“Where’s the signature?” Rede asked, looking at Cate. She had mentioned tracer work was always noted at some level.
She leaned over and hit the authorization pad on Jarod’s portable computer.
“Whoa. Didn’t you just fry a computer?” Jarod protested.
Cate silenced him with a glare that was not playful. “Security override, level nineteen.”
Everyone around her sobered. Level nineteen security clearance was generally unheard of.
“Please state voice code,” Jarod’s computer chimed.
Profane thoughts floated off the top of his mind, but he bit his tongue and didn’t speak at the moment of truth.
Cate wanted to cringe at what she gave away next, but she had spent too many years doing whatever she needed to do to get the job done. “Thought, 7.05, security code…” She rattled off the last string of eighteen digits from memory.
“Code accepted.”
Jarod breathed out in relief. “You think you know a girl.”
But there it was, the signature of a tracer.
Cate looked at Ilsa Killinger and grinned. “Think you can do something with that?”
Rede shook his head as if he disliked her choice of words. Killinger simply nodded. And Jarod Walters took his cyberpathic snapshot of his nemesis’ handiwork as he muttered unmentionables about certain telepaths sticking their fingers into his computer.
Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [4/4]
Date: 2013-09-20 02:40 am (UTC)Re: Kingdoms and Thorn Ficlet: Tracing Trouble [4/4]
Date: 2013-09-20 11:27 am (UTC)I like to write Jarod, even if sometimes that means teeth-grinding, but he's a good kid and less annoying when he's not trying to show off. :grins:
no subject
Date: 2013-09-20 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-21 12:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-21 12:47 am (UTC)I guess I just wish that it was easier to get the whole case in instead of just the glimpses of it. I start to get a sense of the team and their work, and then it kind of... shuts off, and as someone who enjoys mysteries, I want the whole case.
Then again, you know me and my annoying habit of wanting everything long.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-22 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-22 02:15 am (UTC)