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Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#151: May 12th 2010 at 8:09:24 AM

Was I supposed to laugh at the end? 'Cause I did. Poor Aubrey just doesn't have what it takes to be a hard-boiled detective, does he? More like Jackie Chan than Sam Spade.

Anyway, <applause> is in order.

harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#152: May 12th 2010 at 8:56:31 PM

Oh, sure—I can't keep things to laugh about out of anything. And maybe not, but at least he's well out of the situation he was in when he was younger. I felt sad after writing that.

edited 12th May '10 8:57:10 PM by harmattane

Ce ne pas un post.
EnglishIvy Since: Aug, 2011
#153: May 13th 2010 at 2:01:19 AM

Is there a printer friendly version of this floating around, perchance?

harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#154: May 13th 2010 at 2:08:52 AM

Of which one?

Ce ne pas un post.
EnglishIvy Since: Aug, 2011
harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#156: May 13th 2010 at 2:41:04 AM

Not right now, and I'm also not sure about how to put it into one. I'll look for something.

Ce ne pas un post.
harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#157: May 15th 2010 at 7:13:52 AM

I thought I would have another update by now, but instead, just another illustration: October "Bonesaw" London. She was prettier in my head; I haven't done this kind of drawing in a while.

Why do the Londons have such weird names? Because it doesn't matter; it's their hair they'll be teased about in school.

Ce ne pas un post.
harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#158: May 18th 2010 at 11:21:21 PM

Go ahead and mercilessly remind me to update tomorrow. Because I plan to, but have a bad tendency of going back on my own plans.

I keep wanting to update the finished one, though, and remembering that it's well, done. I'm all sad about having killed Aubrey off now that I know him so much better after writing that. sad

Ce ne pas un post.
Haven Planescape Hijack Since: Jan, 2001
Planescape Hijack
#159: May 18th 2010 at 11:23:08 PM

Come up with some convenient phlebotinum to resurrect him!

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku
harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#160: May 18th 2010 at 11:47:07 PM

No, that would be against the rules of the setting. Anyone can die. Well, any mortal can die. wink And no surprise immortals. tongue

Ce ne pas un post.
Haven Planescape Hijack Since: Jan, 2001
Planescape Hijack
#161: May 19th 2010 at 12:56:43 AM

VIOLATE "Magic A" Is "Magic A"
LET GLORIOUS CHAOS ENGULF YOUR SETTING

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku
Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#162: May 19th 2010 at 1:14:01 AM

Seems to me that there's a lot of room for more Aubrey before he dies. But, he may work better in short stories.

harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#163: May 19th 2010 at 8:10:32 AM

True, and there are ways to do that that fall within the boundaries. Killed does not equal forgotten, especially by Ginger, and, well, about her...she is still alive. wink

Also, @Haven:

DO NOT BREAK THREAD PROTOCOL
WHAT IF THE ENTIRE GALAXY FOUND OUT?

Back later.

edited 19th May '10 8:11:16 AM by harmattane

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harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#164: May 21st 2010 at 3:28:31 AM

"Thanks?" Kenichi withdrew a bit, putting his free hand behind his head to have nothing to do with it there but twist his hair between his fingers. Tama recognized this. He did feel awkward. "I have to...you know." As much as he smiled talking about it, Kenichi's failure of nursing school still shamed him. She was close enough to him to know the difference between his amused laugh, his frightened laugh, his ashamed laugh, and all the others. She held his hand tighter and shifted the subject.

"Are you really the only one? Sandrine must have stayed—is she here? Can she help you?"

"No! No. Gods, no. A good thing."

Tama cringed. "Because you told her about us?"

"Never got the chance. But she never liked me to begin with. The moment I remembered to tell her, her boot was...mid-collision with my face, and I would've gotten boot residue in my mouth. Ew. No, I didn't."

Tama would not have laughed hearing the story from anyone else. "What a bitch—she didn't deserve the attention."

"But she knew what she was doing."

"Who cares?"

"She had a point," he insisted. "I didn't know everything, either."

Tama hesitated, then asked accusingly, "What?"

"Not what you think." Kenichi looked at the floor, moving his feet until they were lined up with the tiles. "Maybe it's not the best time..."

Tama squeezed his hand so hard that it felt like a bundle of bones tied together like twigs. "I want to know what to kill her for."

"Not her. She's the least of it...nothing you can do. I can help this kid better if I don't think about it. But for now—" He looked back up at her, with his glow suddenly back. "—it's getting late. Wanna pick a room? There are millions of them!"

The tension left Tama, too. She looked up—the floors wound around the perimeter of the building in a tapering atrium. "Maybe a couple hundred."

"Hundreds!"

"We're going to spend more time looking at them all than using one."

"They're all so ugly—it's awesome! Most of them are even worse than the one I had."

"I'll have to see it to believe you." It had been bad. Green leopard print bad.

"As long as I'm going to stay here, I'm thinking I want to sleep in a different one every night, and you get to choose the first one. Doesn't even have to be a bedroom." He shrugged. They had come close together again without realizing it, almost dancing on their toes. "Parlor, office, bathroom; anything. Except not the reactor, maybe. Not my lucky room. But we've just got to write Lux the number."

"Show me." And she took his face between her fingers from below, drawing it close to hers. He felt her breath in his eyes and blinked. "Just hurry."

He leaned with her and tried to kiss her, thinking she had wanted to try something new, but when his lips were in range, she licked his face instead, from chin to nose. They were too much like friends to kiss properly. Close friends—close enough to abolish personal space and then some—but friends. She seized his arm in the middle of his yelp of pleasure and ran from the hall.

"Where are the elevators?"

"I have got to show you the elevators! You can see through the ceilings..."

edited 21st May '10 3:49:55 AM by harmattane

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Morgulion An accurate depiction from Cornholes Since: May, 2009
An accurate depiction
#165: May 21st 2010 at 6:01:36 AM

I think I like the part with Tama and Kenichi the best- you communicate the free-spirited friendship/love between them superbly. You also have some quite funny moments in there. Once again, great job.

This is this.
Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#166: May 21st 2010 at 8:20:55 AM

Tama And Kenichi are great together.

harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#167: May 23rd 2010 at 5:32:24 AM

Next update will be of this story. However, today, there is this, which I mentioned elsewhere: what happens when you piss off Death too many times. Yeah, I'm an evil person destroying your time, etc, etc, etc.

No matter what it looks like at first, though, a part of it is still tracing how Aubrey London got to where he is here. Just from a really weird angle and while being a bit of a parody of fighting tropes.

edited 23rd May '10 5:45:20 AM by harmattane

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harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#168: May 25th 2010 at 5:35:39 AM

Here's something—I know I painted it way, way too small (I was thinking of avatars to begin with, but then got too elaborate), but I think this is the closest I can get to what Kenichi looks like. D'awwww.

Ce ne pas un post.
Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#169: May 25th 2010 at 8:09:31 AM

D'aawwwwwwww, indeed. And very close to what I pictured him as looking like, too, so your characterization of him is working in the story.

harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#170: May 26th 2010 at 8:18:56 PM

Since I am in the mood for painting things in Photoshop, and I do my best art when I am, still going:

The earth-shattering discovery of how to intimidate Aubrey London is credited to Kenichi Zimmer, age 8, who, while on holiday in Iosethep, asked to take his picture. How hard it is to get him to show his entire face in a photo ranks a 9.88 on the Moh's scale, between winning a land war in Norf and licking one's elbow with no arms. More photogenic than he thinks he is?

(Yes, boat lights, but due to injury and a very nightmare fetishist-like way of covering it up.)

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Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#171: May 26th 2010 at 8:48:17 PM

Not at all the way I pictured him. Still, as soon as I saw that picture, it completely displaced the other image of him. To the point that I couldn't really tell you what he used to look like in my mind, except that he was vaguely Ernest Borgnine-ish in build — kind of short and square.

harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#172: May 26th 2010 at 9:37:42 PM

Hm. Perhaps I need to do a bit of corrective editing. I always saw him as a visual battle between elegant and frightening. Looks older than he is due to his build and his hair, and has a visible infatuation with the early 20th century.

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Haven Planescape Hijack Since: Jan, 2001
Planescape Hijack
#173: May 26th 2010 at 9:43:52 PM

Yeah, my mental image was inaccurate as well—I didn't picture him as dandy-ish at all, though admittedly compared to Lux II (pre-curse, of course) I suppose he's not. Maybe that means I need to reread the first chapter.

Anyway...tempted to make an avatar outta that.

edited 26th May '10 9:44:00 PM by Haven

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku
harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#174: May 26th 2010 at 10:05:56 PM

I'm thinking it's an error of my own. But yeah; they are both scary, but the difference is that Lux II enjoys his scariness and Aubrey has a love-hate relationship with his. At the moment, the zombie short is the best place to get an impression of the latter.

Just one more thing: the fan was something he quickly picked up off his desk to hide his face; he wouldn't carry it around all the time.

And I already made an avatar. It's inactive, though.

edited 26th May '10 10:07:43 PM by harmattane

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harmattane X_X from Location, location Since: Jan, 2010
X_X
#175: May 27th 2010 at 7:44:44 AM

At three in the morning, Kenichi and Tama were still awake. So was Lux. They were in their chosen room, but Lux was not.

He left his room after looking up and down the hallway several times to ascertain that no one was there to see him wearing nothing but a long coat that Kenichi had left draped over his chair. Lux's body took its time to grow, and at fourteen, he was still very short. The coat fit him like a bathrobe. It was too dark to see what color it was; the technicolor light in the bedroom had been no better.

He clutched Kenichi's note tightly against his chest, twisting it in its hands as if to prevent it from disappearing. He was going to see Kenichi.

Room three-forty-six. And what room was he in? Two-something; the patterns of the ground floor's tiles curled out from under the railing that lined this hallway, dampened to greys. He looked at the door—two hundred seventy-three. A random, inconsequential room for a now inconsequential person.

He pulled the coat's belt tighter and circled the floor to get to the elevator, which rose across the gap in the middle of the floor from him.

This turned out only to be good for exercise. After pressing the triangular "up" button, the display overhead pinged alive with a descending number in the fifties. One of two stupid things had happened: either Kenichi and Tama had punched a load of buttons in the elevator that they were not going to use, suggesting potential drunkenness, or they had left the elevator up high and taken the stairs down to the third floor, suggesting certain drunkenness. He wondered briefly whether there was a mathematical correlation between stupidity and kindness before turning around to take the stairs. It wasn't worth the wait.

But he stopped. Maybe it wasn't worth the stairs, either. No one was here to stop him from getting to Kenichi's floor however he wanted, and there was something he had wanted to try since he was little—well, littler. And no one was here to stop him from doing it the most dangerous way possible, before the moving elevator came down and knocked him to the bottom of the shaft. That was where he was going.

He leapt to the side of the elevator doors and took the doorknob of the floor's maintenance closet, waiting a second for the contours of his hand to be scanned by the lock. It wasn't the extensive supply closet of the first floor, but maybe it would have one of what he was looking for. His heart beat faster already. Why did the damn lock have to take so long?

By then, the elevator had only descended to floor forty. Good; Kenichi and Tama had pressed some buttons. Not only did it buy him time, but they were only potentially drunk.

Click—he opened the door as soon as the lock snapped out of place. Inside...very large tools, a coil of old cable, circuit boards, electrical things he did not recognize...and there was one. He took it out.

He did not know what it was called, but he had seen and knew how to use one. It looked like a foam life vest, which would be very out of place in a cabinet of elevator supplies, but though it had the components to work as one, it had a few more that repurposed it. He buckled it and pulled it as tight as he could across his chest. Breathing was a lesser consideration; when these were too loose, they could fuck up, badly.

Two main straps diverged around a canister of compressed Carulean B, which made this device what it was. It looked and acted a lot like a gas, but that was another thing Lux was not perfectly sure of. He did know that it barely took any of it to lift a person enough to let them climb the elevator cables effortlessly, as he had seen done hundreds of times.

How to use the canister was not something he had seen up close, however, and he twisted several suspect but useless parts before producing a hissing sound with the tiny wheel at its end. Instantly, he smelled the Carulean B, which leaked from earlier uses. It smelled like nail polish, but stronger, the scent of the elevator shaft itself. It didn't matter, however. He wouldn't be breathing. The rule was to close the canister just as the vest started trying to become even tighter, meaning no capacity left in the cells. He did, feeling his heart beating in his head.

He had no more time to make it upstairs than it took to hold his breath. The elevator had dropped to floor twenty-nine and had been in continuous descent since floor thirty-five. Maybe Kenichi had stopped pressing buttons after that.

Lux took one running step toward the elevator doors and hit them face first, having overreached with his feet. Effectively, he was lighter than he was used to being. The doors recognized his skin by his nose and opened into the empty shaft, and he fell straight down. He didn't even get to check the position of the elevator one last time. Falling, and that was all he could think about.

edited 27th May '10 7:45:54 AM by harmattane

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