Further Assimilations

– another in the Sidequest series: fiction fragments which may be expanded someday –

Alex Waverly stood over the crumpled shell of Featherton’s protector. The other four were dazed and wounded, but this one was dead. He couldn’t believe he’d watched her fall less than a meter away from him. The Doves couldn’t fall. It was impossible.

He grabbed the neck brooch from Wing Majesty’s immobile form. Her magically generated costume had faded to the sweatshirt and jeans she must have been wearing before transformation. The gem upon the brooch was as lifeless as its owner.

Alex clenched his fist around it. He knew he might be killed for what he was doing, but he wouldn’t let the Hate Beast do as it would with its fallen foe. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could trigger the Purification Beam in a final vengeance.

Everyone in Featherton knew the power phrase; they’d all heard it in a hundred television specials, limited movie events, and radio commercials. He held the brooch above his head and shouted it, knowing it was a futile, ridiculous act. “I Defend the Living Light!”

It served only to attract attention. Seven glowing eyes swung toward him, and the Hate Beast began to advance. Once more Alex shouted the phrase, and he might as well have been holding a plastic toy for all the good it did. The creature scuttled closer.

“I Defend the Living Light!” he screamed a third time, meaning it as he never imagined he could. A thrill shot through his body; he understood his life was over, but he had not gone down without a fight.

A strange sensation made him look up to see the Light Gem glowing brightly in his hand, sending a kind of painless burning through the nerve endings in his skin and shooting down his arm. He felt decidedly odd.

“Welcome, hatchling…” echoed a voice nearby. An image of Wing Majesty stood tall and proud beside him, no longer battered and wounded, and wearing the ornate blouse and cropped skirt of her Dove uniform. Her eyes were closed as in trance. “Only one fully committed to the Living Light may take the place of a fallen Dove. You, young lady, have shown your faith, and shall take my place as I replaced my predecessor. Kneel before me to receive your – “ She opened her eyes to look at him. “ – oh.”

Alex stared back at her. He couldn’t find words.

“Oh… oh!” She started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh. “Never in a thousand years has any Dove seen anything like this!”

“This – this isn’t funny!” he choked out.

Majesty’s laughter died down. “It is… and it isn’t. You are right that becoming a Dove is no matter for humor. Still… every Dove as far as our memories go has been a woman. Yet, you are utterly committed to the Living Light. Without it, you wouldn’t see me now.”

“What’s going on? Did I defeat the Hate Beast? Are the other Doves okay?”

“Do you wish to defeat it? Do you wish to save my sisters from a horrible demise?”

“Well… I mean… of course I do. The Light has kept us all safe, for uncounted generations. We all owe you so much.

“I believe in what you do. I have for as long as I can remember… I have always wished I could help, somehow.” From somewhere deep inside him, the words came almost without thought. “I swear with my life to defend the Living Light.”

She pierced him with her gaze. “You mean every word of that. You truly do.

“Very well. You shall be known as Wing Chrysalis. Arise, and take your place among the Doves!” Her stern expression slipped ever so briefly into a grin. “This should be interesting.”

The next thing he knew, Alex was back in the street. The Brooch of the Light felt warm in his hands, and the Hate Beast lay dead with a 15-centimeter hole burned clean through it. The other Doves were on their feet and rushing towards him.

“How did you… I saw you grab her brooch. You couldn’t have triggered a Purification!” Wing Scimitar shouted.

“Um… look at, er, him. I think maybe he could have,” said Wing Chalice.

“Oh, no,” sobbed Wing Scepter, looking down. “Majesty has passed beyond, hasn’t she…”

“And she passed it to some guy? Some random guy? Are you kidding me?” cried Wing Talisman.

Alex tried his best to follow their exclamations. “Would someone please tell me what has happened? And why do I feel so cold?”

The Doves looked at each other. Chalice nervously twisted a fold of her skirt and said, “Majesty’s brooch is yours now. You put a Purification Beam right through the face of the Hate Beast. You saved all four of us. You’re a Dove.”

Talisman had trouble meeting his eyes. “It seems so. You’ll need training, but you have the powers… the responsibilities… and the uniform.”

Alex looked down at the pair of hairless, shapely legs visible beneath the hem of his glowing, sparkling skirt… and at the fully developed chest filling his short-sleeved blouse… and fainted.

Once upon a time, I did a guest appearance in a panel of the Fragile Gravity webcomic. Today, the circle is complete, as I've been privileged to write and draw an episode.

Monday morning, my Twitter client lit with a notice from kittykatya: she and impink needed two guest strips due to a family emergency. Now, I can draw a little, and I have always dreamed of having the fame and respect of a webcomic artist, so I volunteered. To my great surprise, Barb accepted. Oops: looks like I had to draw something. When would it be due? More oops: Wednesday. But it got done.

Take a look, and be sure to let me know what you think, especially if you liked it. And there's quite a lot more to tell ( behind the scenes... )

Now that I'm digging the Daft Punk, everyone's been saying over and over that I needed to get the Alive 2007 album. Picked it up this weekend, finally listened to it with the speakers turned up on my morning commute. That's some fine commuting music, that is.

It looks like Starr won't be making it to Technicon Last; she can't get out of working that weekend. Her shifts are crazy - it's a regular thing for her to have five days off in a row, but somehow her scheduled weekend shifts always fall on convention dates. It annoys us both. She has more than enough PTO to cover it if she took off, but that requires a great deal of shift-trading, and for some reason few of her co-workers want to work extra weekend shifts. Can't imagine why.

I may have a very memorable con costume this year.

I like Twitter because it provides useful writing exercise in expressing onself succinctly. I shouldn't fret, though, if I miss a few dozen because I'm away from a 'Net connection. Most of the stuff I'll want to know shows up in LiveJournal, and LJ's much easier to keep up with. (Blogging of any kind forces me to keep in mind two good practices: try to avoid that cursed passive voice, and don't write a novel where a couple of paragraphs will get my point across better.)

Had a chance to sit down and think about my answers to gryphynkit, and so here they are:

(Rules thing first: to be interviewed, reply to my post asking me to interview you. I then reply to your post with five questions. You should post your answers and this meme on your LJ, because thinking up these questions is hard, daggonit.)

1. What is your favorite episode of anything?
I choose to parse that as "Pick something you really like, and talk about your favorite episode of it." My favorite episode of Classic Trek would have to be "The Doomsday Machine"; I loved episodes where we got to see other Starfleet vessels, making it seem less like Earth had only the one ship. There's some (very one-sided) space battle stuff, excellent lines from Kirk and Scotty in places, and that cool pounding 'space-predator' soundtrack. Absolutely grade-A stuff. The digital revision isn't bad at all, either.

2. Given the chance to meet *anyone*, real, unreal, living or not, who would your top 5 be?
1. If there's a Creator(s) of the Universe, with a form that I can perceive and understand, then I have quite a list of questions.
2. If there are friendly, advanced alien civilizations somewhere out there, than I'd like to meet a member: I have a list of questions.
3. I would like to meet a book publisher who thinks my science-fiction novel is awesome, and wants to give me a six-figure advance on the sales. (The fact that the novel doesn't yet exist in any coherent form is immaterial.)
4. I would very much like to have met Douglas Adams. We could talk about music and Mac stuff all day.
5. I want to meet the people on my Friends List that I never have in person. I generally friend people because I find them interesting, and most of the time, people turn out to be more so face-to-face.

3. What is the Question?
Who are you, and how do you plan to evolve into who you want to be?

4. What person/char/entity would you most like to be like?
Fictionally, I think I'd like to be somewhere between Buckaroo Banzai and the Doctor I mention below. Realistically, I'm pretty happy with who I am at base level, though there are a few qualities - mainly, ambition and drive - that I'd like to have more of.

5. Who is your favorite Doctor?
Oh, I've had my brief flings with Nine and Seven, but there's really no contest: the Fourth Doctor will always be tops in my book. Never afraid to take a stand, never at a loss, fiercely loyal to his companions, unafraid to take the most disastrous situations lightly. Some might say that he's less complex and ambiguous than his later incarnations, but that in itself is pretty interesting when one takes in his background and position.

I've been sick for the last two days - sinus congestion, stabbing stomach pain, sore throat, fever... same old same old midwinter bug. Reluctantly, I took Tuesday off, which I think cut a couple days' duration off this bug; it's fading away as I sit here, leaving me with a scratchy throat and headache. I should be fine for the weekend; good thing too, as I had to do a bit of finagling to make MarsCon.

On the other hand, it means I'm woefully behind on my prep. I managed to get some studying in for the panels in which I'm involved, but my costuming took the hit, and I don't know if I'll have anything ready for the weekend. Since I'll be leaving directly from work tomorrow, I have to get packed and otherwise ready tonight. Good thing I managed some laundry.

Sometime Friday afternoon, I will have to find time to take a nap if I want to do late night stuff. This is unaviodalbe, as my internal clock these days is currently set to a 5:30am - 10:30pm waking shift, and cons don't run on that time. Considering that my Saturday panels hover around 10pm and midnight, I'll probably need to do the same that day as well.

I need to do some restructuring of my life schedule anyway. One reason for my dryness of prose output in 2008 was that I had not made much time to sit, off by myself, and actually write something - the most I've gotten done in that regard is hiding in people's offices scribbling on the Newton while monitoring their OS X Leopard installs. (Up to three hours of glorious undisturbed concentration!) It's easy to journal in 5-minute increments at work, but I have not yet mastered the art of focusing on plot and character in those tiny chunks.

On the other hand, I'm slightly pleased with my attitude towards the problem. I'm doing better these days with creating plans of attack for my roadblocks instead of just whining about them and using them for excuses. I'm decades overdue on developing this skill.

My exciting New Year's: no party, no fancy dinner. I didn't feel well, so we stayed home to watch the ball drop on one of the excruciating network New Year's shows. We waited for the countdown to start... and waited... and waited... and looked at the clock to notice that it had somehow become 12:22. Yes, we fell asleep waiting for New Year's. Such a hardcore life we lead, eh?

I repeat what I said last year: if I'm planning to party or otherwise celebrate late into the evening, I'm at a point in life where an afternoon nap would be a wise preparation - especially if I'd gotten up at 5:30am that day to go to work.

Slept until almost noon on the 1st, because I'm still exhausted from last weekend. (Possibly from all of December.) Starr had to work, so after lunch I headed to Bert and Meche's, where they got a game of Munchkin Quest going. I'm glad they have it, because I want to play it again, but this time I don't have to buy a copy. It looks like an average game might well be 4-5 hours, though we had some non-gamer types at the board, which slowed things down a touch.

I'm tempted to say that my New Year's Resolution is "1280 x 1024, 32-bit color at 60hz". But in fact, the personal-improvement things I hope to accomplish this year are to keep trying to lose some spare tire, improve my education and my earning power, and do more non-journally writing. I'm especially unhappy with my writing output in 2008; I've stared at a lot of empty text files this year. That will be changing.

Happy New Year to all!

I just found the Megazone 23 3-disc DVD set on Barnes and Noble. These movies influenced my imagination strongly, and I set one of the strongest pieces of fanfic I've written aboard a similar Megazone.

I got to tell you, though, this Christmas my reptilian "want" reflex is a little muted by the recent move. I can't forget that everything I might buy, or receive as a gift, is something I may have to pack up and move in a box someday. Right now, I'm not thrilled at the prospect; who knows, perhaps my distaste will fade over coming months.

On the other hand, I still do have a B&N card from my birthday... and a couple hardcovers or a DVD set don't take up all that much space... right? Right?

Yeah. I think I'll wait until after the holidays and see if I still want it then :)

In a perfect world, I would have an e-book or three loaded on the Newton right now, or have an iPhone with web access. Instead, I am sitting on Rt. 664, as I have for the last hour, waiting for them to clear a major accident from the Monitor-Merrimac tunnel. The good news is that I've got a nice calming trance podcast on the iPod.

I tried first to write some notes for fiction projects, but while a thought or two leaked through, I'm generally blocked; so I am journaling on this Apple notepad instead. I need to scrawl less sloppily; the handwriting recognition on the final OS rev was pretty good, but there's only so much of my bad penmanship it can take. Lowercase 'f's keep coming out capital, for some reason. I'm adding more curve to the tops.

Car behind me just stalled out, guy asked for a jump start. No problem. Asked three times which terminals he had the jumper clamps on... after impressive display of sparks from my battery terminal, went and checked myself. Reversed them. Thank goodness that didn't kill the Hyundai.

Just remembered I could send email from my work Blackberry; updated everyone there on my status. It seems I'm not the only NASA employee trapped here. I wonder if the accident was mechanical failure, or one or more people being idiots? I've been cut off twice in the last 24 hours by rude drivers trying for a single-car position advantage; Hampton Roads drivers can be brutal. On the other hand, I certainly hope no one was seriously hurt... as the cliche goes, "been there, done that".

Whoops. We're moving. Will post this from work.

How insane have the last two days been? Well, I feel naked without my wristwatch, and I almost never go out in public without it. Sunday, I took it off and set it down for some reason - probably related to cleaning the apartment - and I don't know where. But, since Sunday, I just plain haven't had time to look for it. I keep looking at the pale band of skin on my wrist, and wishing I could scratch the mental itch of my watch's absence, but it'll have to wait!

On the other hand, my efforts from yesterday have not escaped notice. In the morning meeting, I heard phrases like, "Michael's documentation sets a gold standard that we'd like to see our other documentation reflect."

Now, focusing on one thing for that length of time is a real strain for me. I left work yesterday rather loopy, the last couple of pages do have some interesting typos, and my brain felt like I'd just tried out for preliminary Psionic Combat training. But the results seem to have been worth it!

Meme from lemonlye:

When you read this, quote Doctor Who in your LiveJournal.

The Doctor: I don't suppose you've completely ignored my instructions and secretly prepared any Nitro-9, have you?
Ace: What if I had?
The Doctor: And naturally, you wouldn't do anything so insanely dangerous as to carry it around with you, would you?
Ace: Of course not. I'm a good girl and do what I'm told.
The Doctor: Excellent. Blow up that vehicle.

- "Silver Nemesis"

(I resisted the urge to quote my own fanfic. Aren't I well-behaved?)