(reading time: 49 minutes)
The passage of the next several days revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of their mode of travel. Snaps almost immediately noticed the hidden gyroscopes that kept their rooms upright even when the bag was turned upside down. The adjustment could be felt as a slight loss of weight in one’s bottom and heard as a rattle. Continue reading
(blurb)
A new kind of warfare dawns in the early years of the twentieth century, planned and perpetrated by a mysterious individual known only as the Challenger. Rumor has it this challenger could fit in the palm of your hand.
This won’t do for the residents of Minimil, a city in a barn that has a reputation to keep up. Filled with shoulder angels and devils, fairies, enchanted toys, Lilliputians, and every other kind of small magical creature, they can’t simply stand by and watch as the name of the tiny is smeared.
So they send out an elite team including a gingerbread soldier haunted by battlefield visions of the nutcracker and mouse king, a tiny automaton built by Leonardo da Vinci, and a ghost of a not-really-notable Christmas past to investigate in this novella inspired by Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
(reading time: 52 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 6 minutes)
The midnight oil had burned, so light poured into his windows and prevented sleep. His peanut brittle curtains were not up to the task of keeping it out, only managing to dye it amber. Still he guessed it was morning, as he heard the bonsai dryads begin to go about their work, pruning and watering the thousand miniature trees that turned Minimil into a land. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 1 minute)
Crash into a Tree
“Yeah can I get two of the…” The woman’s voice stalled as she scanned the menu even though she’d already been in line for ten minutes. Chef Ricky was grinding his teeth and sweating a puddle into his sneakers. He couldn’t, on his life, recall why he thought applying to run the Groadster for a week was a good idea. Every item sold was at a loss, and all the cameras that were supposed to follow him were gone after the first two days. “…churros.”
“Would you like them with vanilla sauce, chocolate, or my special dark cherry syrup?”
“Plain.” He whipped around to take them out of the warmer before she could spot his seething rage. For five years he’d been a god of syrup, formulating ones with less sugar and more flavor. He could turn Amerenas into ambrosia, mangosteens into manna from heaven, and papaya into a god-damned panacea, but she wanted it plain. The same way she kept her graying hair plain. Her expression vacant. Her shriveling toes in sandals. A street eater. Not the kind of customer he ever wanted, but the only ones the world wanted to give him… and he only got them at a loss. Continue reading
Join the modern fairies Chaxium and Ladyspiller as they use their transforming magical mecha-snake to intervene in the human world, this time roped into the latest manifestation of the Wild Hunt, where ghosts have possessed autonomous cars.
This is part of a novella series, so I recommend starting with the first.
(reading time: 1 hour, 29 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 2 hours, 30 minutes)
Snakewaist:
Wild Rideshare
by
Blaine Arcade
There’s an Opening
So that was how we defeated the deadly demon of Gougecoin! And with that I guess it’s time to wrap up this post. For the fairies who skipped right to the end to see what we wanted, here’s the notes for the test: Chaxium and Ladyspiller Beezgalore are the feisty frontier pilots of the ferrier Snakewaist! We’re on the roam, helping fairies far and wide with any threats out of the ordinary.
Snakewaist is an ambidextrous arm, and we’re happy to join up with any fairanquin that’s righteously motivated! As far as assisting us, which you should totally do if you enjoy these posts, we are always in need of food, beverages, toiletries, clothes, and ferrier supplies. We can be reached by any North American continental hypnotized bug capable of withstanding Canadian cold.
I happen to be partial to ranch baked potato eyes, cave water taffy, and wildest rice. My partner Chaxium likes sherbet spread, peach pit marzipan, and drowned cranberries. Just send any care packages to magical frequency pisces-malachite-7-9-4. Thank you all in advance, and I’ll post again when there’s something new going on! (Hint: we’re totally in the middle of something right now, so be ready.)
Regards and thanks, Ladyspiller Beezgalore
“There, how does that look?” Ladyspiller asked, handing her girlfriend Chaxium the showing glass so she could read over the draft of the post. They were both seated on the exterior snout of Snakewaist: their lizard-legged but serpent-shaped fairy war machine. The machine itself was coiled cozily on the soft passenger side seat of an abandoned human vehicle. Abandoned, yet it drove along an empty road just fine, its air conditioning blasting on the four-bladed wings of the fairies. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 27 minutes)
Alast’s Attachment
Always a ravenous learner, Alast didn’t care much for the university town surrounding the Far-Eyed Academy. His knowledge came mostly from experience, and from books scavenged and purchased cheaply alongside other supplies. It was something he had to earn, which in itself taught him to share it with others.
Naturally he assumed a university would function along the same lines. The struggle was over; the knowledge safely stored within. Dissemination of it should have been their greatest joy, yet he’d never seen a series of buildings so tightly locked up. Iron gates stood everywhere, and students couldn’t enter or exit without a faculty escort. They all wore glasses with smoke-colored lenses, and they refused to even speak to him. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 25 minutes)
A Drop from Kilrorke’s Eye
Though the great oceanic basins of the sinks looked perfect from a distance, there were occasionally cracks in their foundation that ran all the way through, producing waterfalls down to the World Floor; it was a fall so long that, in cold weather, the water could freeze into an avalanche before melting once more and splashing against the warmer ground.
The cracks in the tilestone would eventually be sealed by tiny animal colonies with mineralized shells, so the falls were understood to be a temporary bounty to the cities and villages in the shadow of each sink. One such fall had first made land directly through the roof of the mayor’s home in the sizable settlement of Corkinit. It destroyed the wood and glass of his skylight and killed him instantly. The stone foundation of the large house withstood, its basement windows and lower doorways working to channel the water into ten new streams. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour)
You can be Courageous and Sweaty
All those bags of tiles should’ve made an awful racket: a sound like an avalanche of polished metal. Sleep would’ve been impossible if they were anywhere other than the sound-absorbing air of the rundown house. Dianarhea had all her remaining staff, as well as every pirate, set to the task of shaking those bags over tins. Captain Rob really was out of touch with the desperation associated with rampant criminality, for he had no idea what they were all doing when he finally awoke from his long rest.
He was in his assigned bedroom, tightly tucked in so he wouldn’t scratch at his wound. His first attempt to move made it throb, the pain bringing back the fullness of his failure. He couldn’t recall if the wild imagination bead had been claimed, but he knew that he failed to claim it. Nearly a rest with nothing at stake, and the spike chose that moment to puncture him. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 36 minutes)
A drop from Kilrogue’s Mouth
There was a time, when the ages didn’t yet have their names, where the akers were feared far less. The gods hadn’t finished dying yet. There was still enough divine blood in the offspring of the Custodians that they sometimes demonstrated extraordinary powers and earned their own legends. Some of them settled for extraordinary infame, happy to be relegated to the role of trickster in the tales to come.
A few figures across the floor of Porce could tame akers well enough to ride them and to build their homestead upon the back of their steed. One of these akers, without rider and in declining health, lived just on the sink side of Fawsingsing. Before its rider perished the beast was instructed to guard over the treasures gathered during their adventures. It was a hundred rests of adventure, so digging in the soil beneath the aker would produce a treasure with every fourth handful. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 30 minutes)
That Feeling on Deck
The next couple of days were a flurry of activity the likes of which the rundown house had almost never seen. Folk don’t realize how important all the small sounds of a crowd can be to their sanity. If they are surrounded on all sides they naturally expect to hear tiny coughs, whispered jokes, obnoxious laughs, and shuffling. That was why crowds, even important ones, had never assembled inside the rundown house. It sucked all those small sounds away and made every gathering feel like a mass grave.
The thieves currently occupying it had little time to dwell on this unsettling phenomenon, as they were in and out in large numbers at all times of the day. There were many on Teal’s crew left over from the Greedy Old Mop, and they were delighted to, once the gateway mirror had been moved from the spread to the filling, get their hands dirty once again. It was especially because they could do their filthy part in the plan and be back on the Snyre to wash their hands of it within drips. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 34 minutes)
Low-Fat Cream Filling
The party that hoped to crack the sugar on top with a most daring robbery did not have an easy time in the first step of their plan. It was best for them to move between levels as quietly as possible, but that became difficult when the massive chamber that acted as the main port of travel between the military wafer and the cream filling was in such chaos.
The phenomenon Dianarhea described was worsening; lifelong diplomats, celebrities, and magnates lost wealth from their pockets with every passing drop and were forced to give up their homes and travel down to the artisanal spread. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 