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Recent Statuses

17 days ago
Current Ethical issues aside, AI prose is just really bad.
3 likes
25 days ago
She wanted to read, she wanted to write, but the main thing she wanted was something to fight
4 likes
1 yr ago
Make it clear that you don't need him to be reading Dante tomorrow. Also suggest it would be fun if you had a private language that you could use to mock English speakers in secret.
5 likes
2 yrs ago
Luckily history suggests an infinite ability for people to be shit heads ;)
1 like
3 yrs ago
Achmed the Snake
1 like

Bio

Early 30's. I know just enough about everything to be dangerous.

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Eleanor leaned back in her chair and held up her empty glass. The doors were being dogged and the engines were beginning to wind up. By the look on the stewardess' pretty face she thought it was a bit late to be filling drinks, though she stepped towards Eleanor none the less.

"Oh just leave the bottle will you?" Eleanor said tartly, her impatience momentarily overcoming her normal veneer of calm. The woman in the next seat made a disapproving sound and Eleanor fixed her with a second pointed glance reminding her to mind her own buissness. The stewardess retrieved a bucket of ice from the refreshment area and set it on the small table beside the executive. The intercom overhead went off and the pilot began his rote boring declaration about flight time and then instructed them to watch the game of charades that convinced people they had the proverbial snowballs chance in hell if the came down from thirty thousand feet.

"Nearly everyone who works for the Group asks that at some point, myself included," Eleanor admitted. Certainly all the operatives she had known had tried at one point or another to figure it out. The Sunday Group was listed as a private company with its websites and financial records sanitized to the point of uselessness with corparateze. The Sunday Group works to provide quality data driven service to the community. The Sunday group is committed to providing a standard of excellence in a changing business community. The Sunday group is so bland it is amazing it doesn't put you to sleep just reading about it.

"You don't have to believe me but I honestly don't know and I've tried... alternative approaches at various times over the years. Certainly that suggests whoever is calling the shots is taking precautions against more esoteric attempts to figure it out.

"Emmaline, my wife, you met her I think? Yes? She worked for the group before I was recruited. She claims to have been approached by a man calling himself Samuel Priest, though I've never been able to verify that any such person, at least as Emm described him, actually exists." Emmaline had tried her own scrying as well, but even the most elaborate spells turned up blanks or nonsense results that looked like randomness but had to actually be considerable occult countermeasures.

"Certainly whoever or whoevers are in charge have connections in Law Enforcement and various other communities, occult and otherwise, though exactly how I can't say. I like to believe we are on the side of the angels, metaphorically at least," Eleanor concluded. Biblical Angels were a fairly sanitized account of other beings, beings with four sets of wings and far too many eyes and if they served any God, Eleanor doubted it was one that humans would find comforting. The security theater was winding up and Eleanor refilled her glass before they pulled out onto the taxi-way.

"Perhaps," she said, raising her glass in salute to the younger woman, "you shall be the first to figure it out." The engines roared to life and the jet raced down the runway, pressing them back into their seats as they lifted off into the afternoon sky.
Was a little nervous, we had a patient who tested negative and was admitted then test positive before she went to surgery after I had been in and out of her room a half dozen times with a regular mask and no eye protection
Will be updating tomorrow and moving us forward to seattle. Sorry I've been delayed, I was exposed to Covid last week and I just got out of isolation today.
Emmaline lifted her face from Amal's lap as the rug settled onto the grassy hillside. Sir Brenly hopped from the carpet with evident relief, nearly tripping in the ankle length grass of the stony hillside. Emmaline stepped off somewhat more gracefully as the rug settled to the ground in what they had come to recognize as exhaustion. The elegant decant was somewhat spoiled by the assemblage of small twigs and leaves that had tangled in her hair and the sudden gust of wind that momentarily lifted the tails of her stolen silk shirt up around her waist. Fortunately Sir Brenly was still scanning the nearby treeline for any sign of imminent giant attack, a reasonable concern as far Emmaline was concerned.

"Do you have any idea where we are Sir Brenly?" Emmaline asked as Amal rolled up the carpet. The knight turned and started to see that Emmaline was holding her staff in her hand.

"Where in the name of the Lady were you hiding that?" the knight demanded incredulously, having spent the past several hours watching her unconscious body. Emmaline shrugged uncomfortably, explaining about her strange connection with a foreign Goddess and the staff she had found in forgotten shrine in the Arabyian desert, especially when she didn't understand it herself. Sir Brenly regarded her for a moment then seemed to put it down to yet another oddity with the two foreigners. Like most inhabitants of the Old World the Knight had exaggerated ideas about the capabilities of wizards. Emmaline had learned early on in her career of scamming the gullible that almost no claim was so outlandish as to be completely dismissed.

"I'm afraid I do know My Lady," the knight said with an axious glance back at the trees.

"I'm old enough to remember the last Errantry War, and unless I am very much mistaken..." the knight paused and sighed mournfully.

"Unless I am very much mistaken, we are in Albion."
-336
Emmaline awoke from a dream in which Amal was pinching her bottom while she tried to read. Amal pinching her bottom was good deal more engaging than reading so she didn't much mind. Wet splatters on her cheek bought her round as chilly raindrops began to fall. Sitting up she found herself sitting on a patch of dark grass beside Amal. Glancing around she thought she picked up the shattered remnants of her spell, though now it was broken the sorcerers glass was fading into vapor.

"Where are we," she asked, her voice gaining strength with each syllable and the realization that they weren't either dead or drowned, which, now that she had a minute to think about it, would just be a subcategory of dead. Amal looked incredibly relived when she spoke and she glanced down at herself to make sure she hadn't been wounded.

"I was hoping you could tell me," Amal said helping her to her feet and then enfolding her in a hug that crushed her too him, their lips meeting in a passionate kiss for a moment before the irritated snapping of the carpet bought them back to the immediate situation. The rug apparently didn't much care for being rained on, a reasonable enough outlook she supposed, though after a year and a half in Araby she was happy to see even this chilly rain.

"Well it dosen't look like anywhere I have ever seen," Emmaline admitted. The cold windswept coast might be anywhere on the Northern Coast of the Empire though the trees didn't have the overgrown and wild look of the Riekwald or the mighty Drakwald forest. Nor did they have the overly manicured appearance that the smaller growth of forest in Bretonnia typically displayed. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious but it didn't seem like they would have had time go drift all the way east to the Empire.

"Well wherever we are, we aren't slaves," Amal said with a confident grin, somewhat betrayed by the fact he was beginning to shiver.

"Well we are going to be dead from exposure if we don't find some shelter," she observed. In the distance she spotted Brenly and what looked to be the remains of the mast. She glanced over the cliff at the storm tossed sea below. They must have cleared the escarpment by no more than a few feet and she was glad to have been unconscious rather than uselessly terrified.

"Let's collect Sir Brenly and then maybe we can find some shelter in the trees, at least we can get out of the rain."
-334
"You work with them?" Javier said, his face twisting with disgust. Junebug, who had been looked at by disgust by many during her mercenary career, merely shrugged. Mercenaries were rarely well regarded in the areas of operations. The local civilians tended to view foreign murders with horror and fear and their local allies tended to view them with hatred born of their own weakness.

"We work for people who can hire us," Junebug replied in a neutral tone. Magdalena laid a hand on her husbands arm, though what he intended to do other than glower Junebug couldn't imagine.

"We all do what we can to survive," Magdalena said. Junebug set down her bowl and took one of the bottles of local booze and swished it around her mouth before swallowing, choosing neither to amplify or deny the statement.

"Ungol makes his lair in the cannery on the far side of town, it dosent operate anymore, seeing all anyone is interested in on this planet is drugs," Magdalena said with surprising anger in her voice. Junebug remembered the skeletal structure from the flight in, assuming it had been some kind of abandoned construction project.

"It is a shame we cannot afford to hire men to clean the scum off this planet," Magdalena sighed.

"Honestly, other than by controlling the drugs, I don't see how anyone could, there just isn't enough industry here to afford real professionals," Junebug observed. That wasn't strictly true, like any tradesmen, there was a variety of competencies among professional mercenaries, but clearing the gangs of Tsiosinte wouldn't be a job for amateurs. Street fighting to clear out several hundred or thousand armed thugs was likely to be a messy and expensive business. The armored could have secured the planet in a month or so, though the destruction here in the city where most of the fighting would take place would have been extensive. A low end outfit might just seize control and install themselves as the new gang in charge, and even that assumed that the Cartel on Kimberly would do nothing, and a very likely response was to hire a bigger and better force of mercenaries to take the place back.

"We must hold out for better days then," Magdelena said sadly. Javier sighed in frustrated anger.

"Well let us not weary you with politics, you are tired, we have beds," Magdalena said with artificial brightness. She made a guesture to where a trio of foam pads in the corner with rolled up sleeping pads. Junebug glanced at the bedding and nodded, a little dissapointed that there was no privacy.

"Yeah, I suppose we should rack out," Junebug agreed, pushing the empty bowl back towards her host thankfully.

-329
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