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If you want to improve your musical talent, they say, you go to the girl who’s always by the pond at the back of the practice room. She’s known as Iridescence to most, and Iri to fewer, but anyone gifted with the Sight (and many without) know from the sharpness of her teeth and the glittering skin that gives her her name that she probably isn’t quite human. Y’know. Just maybe. Perhaps.

They say that those who deal with her, desperate to play that cadence a little faster or to make their tone the slightest bit clearer, often never return. They say she’s a siren above land, using a different kind of spoken spells to lure those who strike a deal with her to become her own. The rumors all seem to agree that the talent bestowed upon you comes at a price. Some students vanish, as they are wont to do.

Slightly related, but Beryl says she traded for the ability to see through water once (and then refused to elaborate, absentmindedly fiddling with a pendant of copper fins, shells, and twine when she thought Hay couldn’t see) back when she was still in choir. Her stories of students confined underwater, no longer able to draw air to play their instruments, have long since passed into the hive of rumors and whispers that surround Elsewhere. Beryl quit choir shortly afterwards, and then, as those who flirt with the Gentry do, got Taken by her boyfriend. That was a wild spring break.

Anyway, trades with Iridescence probably aren’t worth it. Sounding a little less like a dying cat doesn’t sound like a fair trade for the possibility of getting kidnapped by a siren and held for eternity to play in a prisoner’s orchestra. (They probably sound good though, all things considered.) So bargains with Iridescence are best to be avoided.

This, of course, is exactly why Haywire wants to try.

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Leader Hands Hero Over to the Villain Continuation

5000 Follower Giveaway here, Entries close 25th July 2019 Prize is 2-3K words editing and me helping you with anything you’re stuck on with your whole piece or just a good talk about your story. It’s a prize draw, not a competition so don’t worry.The streak continues! Although I only had 40 minutes left or so. Sorry for being late, guys. “Work” is a pain in the neck. It’s pretty long, so I put a keep reading.

Previous Prompt: Here

Leader woke up to their hands tied behind their back. They were lying on their side and could feel a little blood dripping from their forehead onto the floor. Through the dim light above them, they could see Hero was tied up in front of them, shaking, crying, and clutching their leg in agony. Guilt ripped at Leader’s gut.

“[Hero],” they said softly. “I’m so sorry… You should know, [Villain] has me wired up to a chip with a contact lens and earpiece. They see and hear everything I do, so be careful.”

Hero didn’t look at them, didn’t answer. They tried to pull their leg closer to them and mewled. It hurt them too much.

“I will find a way out of this, for you. I’ll get you out of here, I promise-”

“Don’t. Bother,” Hero glowered, sniffling as they did so. “I’m done trusting you.”

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Me: We currently have a great deal on our books!

Customer: Why do you tell me these things? Now I MUST buy books. I MUST!

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Names have power and meaning, and what you pick says something about you. People tended to avoid commenting on Pandora’s name, as they only understood the surface of the myth and only knew that because of Pandora’s curiosity she unleashed suffering on humans. Fae however, as well as some more historically knowledgeable humans, knew a different myth.

Pandora- the myth- had been explicitly created to open the box and unleash the contents within. Given to the god of hindsight as a gift after the whole fire incident with Prometheus, she had been designed to be a beautiful and cunning opposite to man- Zeus’s revenge. Judgment for the wrongs. She was never curious, she was a weapon.

Fae initially avoided Pandora the student because of the myth, and because they sensed she knew full well what she had picked. But Pandora proved to be a magnet for the strange, and was open to the deals that came with it.

She was better at making deals than initially given credit for. Fae who thought they were clever usually got manipulated out of what they really wanted while Pandora walked away with everything she’d set out for.

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I was thinking about how sea salt that you boil in to crystals yourself is so much more potent….and I was writing about maple wine, so it all got me thinking about maple syrup/maple sugar. In some ways, maple sugar and sea salt are perfect opposites – what appears to be clear, pure water, boiled unrecognizable, emerging crystalline, the only difference salty or sweet. And making maple syrup/sugar is a PROCESS: gathering buckets of sap from around the woods, stumbling over snow banks and bushes to bring it to the sugar shack, boiling the sap and constantly feeding the fire for hours and days, going through more wood than you could imagine and watching a gradient of amber spread through the pans, darkening in to rich sweet syrup. If you want to make sugar, you take it boil it even more, evaporating the last of the water in it, the last memory of how it used to flow in a forests’ veins. It takes some 40-80 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, more to make sugar. And making syrup with someone gets real…for a time, you’re popping in and out to go collect the rest of the buckets, but after a while it’s just you and them in a small, maple steam filled shed, usually drinking something homemade and of questionable alcohol content, talking through the day and the night. Or by yourself, with your thoughts and your wishes and your ghosts, though I’ve never done this for long, just fractions of an hour, unlike friends who have spent days there boiling away heart break or trying to get their head and pans level. 

If you need something strong to protect you, you can’t do much better than homemade sea salt. But if you need to barter something, to trade for something big and important and true, I wonder if a homemade maple sugar candy might get you what you’re looking for. 

I imagine you bring it to the edge of the forest. Or more likely, that corner of the dining hall where no matter what hour of the day someone is drinking coffee and almost done a paper they never seem to finish. All the right words… “if it would please you,” what you seek, and their reply, “and in exchange?” So you make your offer: the blood of a forest’s platoon impervious to their wounds, a fire tended, a confession you would never have made otherwise, a week of your life. They are delighted, to get so much for what now seems like so little, and greedily they reach towards you, ready to take what you have promised, and before their hands, or not exactly hands anymore, can find you – you place it on the table. A small maple sugar candy. You’ve pressed it in to a maple leaf mold because hell, if you’re gonna do this you may as well do it right. The air freezes for a second, and you feel your blood still as you wonder if you have misjudged…and then you feel it begin to thaw, the sap to run again. It smiles at you. It doesn’t mind clever, and fortunately for you, it’s a fan of sweet.

[x]

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She’d heard that belief made it real, and well… she believed she wasn’t really important or interesting enough for the fae to bother with.

She enjoyed spending time on computers, but who didn’t. When she walked into a class about programming computers, they asked her name and she shrugged and said “It’s not really that important.”

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“Hey kid! Wanna make a deal?”

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! 

Here, have some evil Morty and Bipper :D

[mrdealsblog]

A Better Word

They say the Fair Folk give journalism majors a lot of grief.

Truths exposed in writing, forms cemented in photographs, stories stripped of flowery prose in favor of concise words. The Fair Folk generally looked down on journalism itself with disdain.

Which made one wonder who would choose to pursue this particular academic career at Elsewhere University.

Some reporters argue learning among the harshest critics on Earth would leave them more than prepared for life beyond the University. Some photographers believe this is the only place on earth to capture something truly extraordinary. Some designers heard even the programs here behave differently, and the words and photos laid out on a screen became something more on paper. Some simply hadn’t known any better.

Bernadette hadn’t known any better.

Elsewhere was affordable, the journalism program seemed decent enough. She liked writing, but did not enjoy chasing victims of the Fair Folk people down for interviews. She liked photography, but knew her writing skills were stronger. So she fell in an unlikely place, a copy editor for the student newspaper. Well, one of. There were many papers, and she’d nearly joined the most prominent one. But the students who worked for it all shared the same bright green eyes, and the rest of the University seemed to avoid that paper like the plague.

Still, she needed experience to graduate in this field, right? Maybe they got a group discount on colored contacts, who knows. People in college are weird like that.

An upperclassman had saved her from venturing too close to THAT paper. He realized she had no salt, no iron, no idea what she had enrolled into. But, like finding her niche, she adapted. Survived her first year without tragedy. (The same could not be said for Sherry from across the hall. One of the Fair Folk had complimented her eyes, and asked if she could have them. Sherry, who hadn’t known any better, jokingly said sure. It’s been months since anyone’s seen Sherry.)

For the most part, the Fair Folk did not venture close to the newsroom. The room itself had been smartly moved the moment time began to behave differently. It was now just a cramped, previously vacant classroom, but with lots of windows. Access to the outside world seemed to weaken the chance of a space being manipulated by time. 

Or maybe that was a comforting lie.

It was a lazy Saturday, salt lines had been neglected and Bernadette was alone when one of the Fair Folk waltzed inside. Silver nitrate burns on her hands betrayed him immediately. His hair was was a dark, voracious black that seemed to leach color from the world around it. His razor-sharp smile held too many teeth. His skin seemed almost translucent.

      “What are you working on?”

A voice that seemed to come from everywhere, and nowhere. Bernadette hadn’t given him more than a cursory glance before returning to the story on the screen. If she was afraid, she didn’t show it.

      “Editing a story.”

      “Chopping up pretty words in favor of boring ones?”

She smirked, adding punctuation to a sentence.

“I like to think of it as finding the best words. No sense in having a bunch of empty, meandering words when you can sum them up with one. For instance, I hate the word ‘very.’ It tells me there’s a better word, but the author hasn’t thought of it.”

The boy hummed at this, an unnerving sound, mulling it over.

      “So what if I told you I find this very boring?”

      “I’d say I’m sorry you find it dull.” 

His head tilted with mild interest. It then turned to sniff at her messenger bag, disgust showing at his inability to open it. She had always been particularly careful about her sigils and rowan. Bernadette hadn’t missed this display, tugging the bag out of arm’s reach before slipping a hand inside. Wordlessly, the boy was handed two sealed pads of butter. It was always good to have butter or cream on hand, in case you were taken. Some Fae found stealing humans more fun than actually keeping them and, in such a case, freedom could be easily bought. 

The boy grinned, ripping off the seals and lapping it up like a ravenous dog, teeth razor sharp and dripping. All the while, Bernadette kept editing the story. When every last molecule of butter was gone, he tossed the packs over his shoulder, turning full attention back to her.

      “What if I said I’m very tired?”

      “Exhausted.”

      “Very hungry.”

      “Starving.”

      “Very happy.”

      “Overjoyed.”

      “Very pretty.”

      “Beautiful.”

The boy threw his head back and laughed, sounding like a chorus of the damned, far too many sharpened teeth glinting in the afternoon sun.

      “Perhaps this isn’t so dull. What’s your name?”

      “Timmy,” Bernadette answered without skipping a beat. His grin widened.

      “No, it’s not. I bet Timmy is that reporter you don’t like. You’d be very mean to give me his name.”

She grinned in return, not at all fazed he knew there was someone here she loathed. The Fair Folk always knew something about something.

       “I can be devious sometimes.”

He laughed even harder, the room seeming to shake with the thunderous sound.

      “What did Timmy do?”

She scowled.

      “He’s a narcissist and a douchebag. Timmy encouraged one of our first-year photographers to capture Genevieve on camera for his story, and we haven’t seen the photographer since.”

The boy whistled, every gap of razor teeth producing a different tone. Her days of playing clarinet had long since passed, but she could have sworn every tone was sharp.

      “Genevieve does not like cameras. But she loves names. Perhaps a trade…”

Four days later, Timmy vanished, and Bernadette opened her dorm room to find the photographer on her futon, paper white and shoveling ramen noodles like he hadn't​ eaten for week. Knowing how obscure time can be in Elsewhere, it definitely could have been a week. His hair now turns green on Tuesdays and bank holidays, but he’s otherwise no worse for wear. And his hands are always burned. Always.

Every once in a while, when the salt lines are neglected, the boy with many voices returns. He has new phrases for her to deconstruct every time.

x

[mrdealsblog]

There's this one student that makes the dumbest deals. "My left shoe for Christmas sweaters to be socially acceptable all year round" "a paper crane for a hug" "teach me how to talk to snakes and I'll go into the forest and catch you one" and all of the Gentry are just so done with this person

The deals still are made, though. Someone humors them, if only to see what they’ll come up with next (or possibly because they have a Little Mermaid-esque collection of Human Junk that they genuinely cherish).

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You’re new here, and you have some doubts as to whats truth, what’s lie, and what’s tradition taken a tad too seriously. But you remember the look in the other students eyes when they told you never to take food unless it was said to be freely given. Never take anything unless you know what they want in return, or state it as free.

A kid across the hall likes to bake. They hand you a lemon muffin one day and simply say “For you.”

You nearly bite, but you remember. “Is it given freely?”

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The Offering Tree

You once heard a story of a student with terrible test anxiety. No matter how hard they studied, they would only barely pass. One day they left an offering, their deceased lover’s jacket, at the “Hand”, an old tree whose branches look like fingers extending from a palm. They got an A+ and aced the extra credit portion of their tests from then on, but they also never left town once they graduated. They can never leave.

Another story mentions a musician with stage fright, as musicians often have. They fretted and had several panic attacks before they left their first guitar pick at the Hand. They rocked their senior recital, but they never left town.

Another tells of an athlete who was in their prime, but struggled academically. When they broke their femur, they were left with the prospect of dropping out, and they were the first member of their family to attend college. They left their acceptance letter at the Hand. They got the tutoring they needed and their leg healed in time for them to finish the season, but legend has they teach locally, getting ill right before away games.

That’s the trade off. They help you, but you can never leave. The offering is only a signal that you’re desperate enough, a formality, they’d always told you.

You’ve never been confident in public speaking. You’re already on academic probation. If you fail this presentation, you fail the class. You’ll get expelled. You feel your precious item in your hand as you stare at the Hand.

Do you leave it?

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thoughts from queenrinacat