My gaming weekend in drabbles

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Epona

So, I’m standing in the woods, trying to make my cards give me the date of someone’s death, which is difficult with tarot, so I’ve switched to a normal set of playing cards. Except the wind keeps blowing them away, which means that someone is blocking my scrying.

This is at least an improvement on my earlier forays into magic where I nearly died turning into a mouse, but not nearly as good as the way I found the body of the magi who died. There is something very satisfying about creating the perfect digging machine, in creating ARCHAEOLOGY BADGER.

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Solace

Oh god. I had no idea that burning flesh smelled like that. It smells like burnt pork, like Sunday dinner, and that makes it worse, because nothing that awful should be able to smell like something good.

“Go! Run!” Dances with Code barks. I can barely hear him over the noise of Karolin screaming as her face melts, and she collapses to the ground.

Please Karolin, get up. Please. Behind us, I hear the roar of the fames again, as the sprit closes in on Dances With Code. He’s holding it off, for us, and I can’t let him down.

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Venice

Cats aren’t cute. I’ve no idea why anyone would think they were. What is cute about them? They aren’t loveable, they aren’t sweet natured, they are serial killers given human form. They like to chase (even men dressed as cats do that in my recent experience), then they like to claw, then they like to rip your entrails out, and play with them in front of your slowly blurring vision until you expire in their claws.

Cats aren’t cute.

And just because they happen to look human at this exact moment does not make it better. It makes it worse.

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Venice

Does Mary know how much she reminds me of Rosalba? I suspect not. She never met Rosalba, after all. Cormac should know. But then he never knew Rose particularly well, I think. Certainly not enough to miss her, although I hear she is travelling and doing well.

I wonder what would happen if they ever met, and that idea makes me giggle. Would they have some kind of nervous stutter off? Perhaps a competition to see who could throw themselves under the feet of the person next to them the quickest?

And dear God, I think I really miss her.

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Miss Morris

I am unsure if I feel safe in London. I don’t like the system, I don’t like the Senate. I don’t like the complicated rules and voting. I feel like I don’t know where I stand and I hate that feeling, which I’ve never shared with Mr Taylor. After all, he might take that personally considering how long I’ve not known where things have been standing with him and me.

Still, there’s not much I can do about it other than carry on and hope for an eventual nice safe praxis. Then, at last, I can learn to relax again.

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Solace

Michael gave me a box last night, cunningly carved.

Inside I found a bracelet, and a note.

I didn’t put the bracelet on. I read the note, and then put the box in my pocket, while I waited to find out if he had walked away from me to go and die. The night air was sharp and cold and I read his note over and over again, and the question it asked kept coming back to me, like the smell of blood on the wind.

How do you shoot the devil in the back?

What happens if you miss?