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rainbowfic2012-04-06 05:17 pm
settecorvi) wrote in rainbowfic2012-04-06 05:17 pm
Tyrian Purple #2, Alice Blue #2
Name: Chel
Story: Demiurge, The Bonetrain to Pandemonium, Part 2/? (Part 1)
Colors: Tyrian Purple #2 (hold up the sky), Alice Blue #2 (if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there)
Supplies and Styles: Beading wire (here), pastels (discipline)
Wordcount: 740
Summary: In which Naveed uses the word “mindreaver” to good effect, steps into the serpent’s jaws, and takes a plunge.
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Notes: Continued from Part One, and probably won’t make much sense without it. Criticism is deeply appreciated! What didn’t work for you, or could be improved?
“I’m a mindreaver,” Naveed tells the uniformed boy chewing his nails outside the conductor’s cabin, and his corona of leaves curls into a caul suffocatingly close around his head. He unlocks the door for her without further prompting.
Aide thinks “Knew it” in a minty-metallic gust. Disaster focuses him; his corona has condensed from chaos into streamlined rings. Half of them concern the scroll of twinned paper he’s scribbling on, and wondering who’s reading his report on the other end is rather distracting. The other half involve whether or not she can actually stop the bonetrain before it kills everyone or drives them insane, which is rather more distracting.
Nobody here can afford her attention wandering.
So focus. Breathe in, and she feels the skittering weight of all the intruding thoughts, hers and his and the boy’s and the train’s, like insects on her skin. Breathe out, and she shunts them all away into quarantine in a corner of her architecture as she steps into the bonetrain’s jaws. It’s not a healthy coping mechanism, but it is terribly useful in emergencies.
The conductor’s cabin is a curved and shadowed space, separated into two levels by a balcony carved from the braincase. The light of the worldstrands filtering through the eyesockets limns the ridges and hollows of bone silver. The teeth are a nightmare of translucent needles neatly interlocked and wired closed, dominated by the two fangs curving under the shelf of the palate. In here, they can barely feel the train’s snapping and jerking as it fights towards wakefulness.
The word ‘mindreaver’ makes the guard who bars her path at the top of the spiral staircase leading to the cranium avert his eyes and step aside. She’s wearing too much color to look the part, but it’s all in the delivery.
On a pedestal in the cranium’s vault sits the conductor with her hands uplifted, tracing curving patterns in the air as she follows the pathways laid down by a long-dead brain. Her corona spins in sedate orbit around her; she is another person who cannot afford panic. Two auxiliary pilots sit against the skull’s arch and watch her as though their lives depend on it, which is in fact an accurate description of the situation. Their thoughts arc towards her in utter focus.
Naveed cannot see the bonetrain’s mind.
Here of all places she should be able to find it, and she can’t spy so much as a stray glimmer in the air. She tamps down hard on despair and tosses it into quarantine, too. “So what now?” hovers on the edge of utterance in Aide’s corona, and she preemptively silences him with an upraised hand.
She crosses the cranium to the conductor’s pedestal and sinks to her knees like a supplicant within the space described by the woman’s thoughts. A distant corner of her attention notes Aide intercepting the other pilots before they can interfere, and she’ll thank him for it if they survive. Now, she centers on the conductor’s corona. It’s practically the train’s, after all. The woman’s hands move sheathed in its translucent veils of light; she is working at the speed of her thoughts, her actions so deeply engrained they are as natural as writing. Her eyes are closed, her breath comes slow and deep.
The strongest secondary modality in Aide’s corona was taste. The conductor’s corona sings to her. Naveed matches her breathing to the conductor’s and listens as the light spills across her skin. Indigo ribbons carry the melody, a lullaby crooning hush now, sleep now, sink back into dreaming death. The steel threads guiding them pound with the steady drumbeat of discipline. Saw-edged and faint screams the knowledge that she just isn’t good enough, and in a few minutes the train is going to shred the last of her tenuous control and bolt.
The song rushes through her until it fills her awareness from edge to edge, until her bones buzz with it, until she catches an echo there, octaves below at the very limit of her hearing. The bonetrain’s mind thrums in sound so deep it becomes pressure. Its thoughts surround her like deep water and bear down on her chest in iron bands. She could drown in them, they swarm so thickly.
“I’ve found its mind,” she murmurs, softly so as not to break the conductor’s concentration. “When I enter it, I may go limp, twitch, hurt myself. That’s perfectly normal.” The lie comes easily. “Don’t try to move me. Don’t even touch me. Do you understand?”
Aide’s assent tastes like tears, like the ocean.
Naveed closes her useless eyes and dives.
Story: Demiurge, The Bonetrain to Pandemonium, Part 2/? (Part 1)
Colors: Tyrian Purple #2 (hold up the sky), Alice Blue #2 (if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there)
Supplies and Styles: Beading wire (here), pastels (discipline)
Wordcount: 740
Summary: In which Naveed uses the word “mindreaver” to good effect, steps into the serpent’s jaws, and takes a plunge.
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Notes: Continued from Part One, and probably won’t make much sense without it. Criticism is deeply appreciated! What didn’t work for you, or could be improved?
“I’m a mindreaver,” Naveed tells the uniformed boy chewing his nails outside the conductor’s cabin, and his corona of leaves curls into a caul suffocatingly close around his head. He unlocks the door for her without further prompting.
Aide thinks “Knew it” in a minty-metallic gust. Disaster focuses him; his corona has condensed from chaos into streamlined rings. Half of them concern the scroll of twinned paper he’s scribbling on, and wondering who’s reading his report on the other end is rather distracting. The other half involve whether or not she can actually stop the bonetrain before it kills everyone or drives them insane, which is rather more distracting.
Nobody here can afford her attention wandering.
So focus. Breathe in, and she feels the skittering weight of all the intruding thoughts, hers and his and the boy’s and the train’s, like insects on her skin. Breathe out, and she shunts them all away into quarantine in a corner of her architecture as she steps into the bonetrain’s jaws. It’s not a healthy coping mechanism, but it is terribly useful in emergencies.
The conductor’s cabin is a curved and shadowed space, separated into two levels by a balcony carved from the braincase. The light of the worldstrands filtering through the eyesockets limns the ridges and hollows of bone silver. The teeth are a nightmare of translucent needles neatly interlocked and wired closed, dominated by the two fangs curving under the shelf of the palate. In here, they can barely feel the train’s snapping and jerking as it fights towards wakefulness.
The word ‘mindreaver’ makes the guard who bars her path at the top of the spiral staircase leading to the cranium avert his eyes and step aside. She’s wearing too much color to look the part, but it’s all in the delivery.
On a pedestal in the cranium’s vault sits the conductor with her hands uplifted, tracing curving patterns in the air as she follows the pathways laid down by a long-dead brain. Her corona spins in sedate orbit around her; she is another person who cannot afford panic. Two auxiliary pilots sit against the skull’s arch and watch her as though their lives depend on it, which is in fact an accurate description of the situation. Their thoughts arc towards her in utter focus.
Naveed cannot see the bonetrain’s mind.
Here of all places she should be able to find it, and she can’t spy so much as a stray glimmer in the air. She tamps down hard on despair and tosses it into quarantine, too. “So what now?” hovers on the edge of utterance in Aide’s corona, and she preemptively silences him with an upraised hand.
She crosses the cranium to the conductor’s pedestal and sinks to her knees like a supplicant within the space described by the woman’s thoughts. A distant corner of her attention notes Aide intercepting the other pilots before they can interfere, and she’ll thank him for it if they survive. Now, she centers on the conductor’s corona. It’s practically the train’s, after all. The woman’s hands move sheathed in its translucent veils of light; she is working at the speed of her thoughts, her actions so deeply engrained they are as natural as writing. Her eyes are closed, her breath comes slow and deep.
The strongest secondary modality in Aide’s corona was taste. The conductor’s corona sings to her. Naveed matches her breathing to the conductor’s and listens as the light spills across her skin. Indigo ribbons carry the melody, a lullaby crooning hush now, sleep now, sink back into dreaming death. The steel threads guiding them pound with the steady drumbeat of discipline. Saw-edged and faint screams the knowledge that she just isn’t good enough, and in a few minutes the train is going to shred the last of her tenuous control and bolt.
The song rushes through her until it fills her awareness from edge to edge, until her bones buzz with it, until she catches an echo there, octaves below at the very limit of her hearing. The bonetrain’s mind thrums in sound so deep it becomes pressure. Its thoughts surround her like deep water and bear down on her chest in iron bands. She could drown in them, they swarm so thickly.
“I’ve found its mind,” she murmurs, softly so as not to break the conductor’s concentration. “When I enter it, I may go limp, twitch, hurt myself. That’s perfectly normal.” The lie comes easily. “Don’t try to move me. Don’t even touch me. Do you understand?”
Aide’s assent tastes like tears, like the ocean.
Naveed closes her useless eyes and dives.
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I'm glad the sense of serenity in the midst of chaos comes through! Naveed is supposed to be calm, partly due to personality and partly because of her job and training. I, on the other hand, can be not so much a bundle as an entire bushel of nerves, so figuring out how to write her is a bit of a challenge.
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Thank you!
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And I. I can hear the bonetrain. I hear it in my SHINS.
...that's totally awesome, just so you know.
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I have to say, if you're hearing the bonetrain in your shins, you might have trouble giving it the righteous kicking it needs.
Thank you so much!
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This is true. But, I believe in your cast! They shall administer the kickings! And I, I shall drink my coffee and be delighted.