Category: Daily

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A Tall and Narrow Notebook

Kera wiped the long day out of her eyes with the heels of her hands and leaned back in the burgundy leather chair. Her two lab-mates were finally gone and she could attend her spell notes in private. Relying on the clarity of their spells to convey the import, few mages kept additional notes these days, but Kera’s grandmother had given her a shingle-sized notebook for her thirteenth birthday and she had kept notes ever since. None of her notes were extensive—maybe a short paragraph or two. And it wasn’t likely they could help another mage in any significant way. But Kera liked the ritual of mixing the India ink and composing her thoughts.

Kera looked up from placing the period at the end of a sentence when a double-knock on her open door drew her out of [the zone].

“I’m sorry. We hoped you were finished.” A woman Kera had seen before but couldn’t place stood in her doorway. The woman’s blond hair was French braided into two short plaits which barely went past her ears to her neck. She wore a sea-green back-buttoned cassock and clutched a clipboard to her chest. She twined a pen, a hank of keys, and a pair of sunglasses in the same hand holding the clipboard. Kera couldn’t tell if the woman was important or just thought so.

“I was. Just.” Kera set the pen down and left the narrow notebook propped open. Looking around for the rest of the ‘we’, Kera used her phone voice to ask, “How can I help you?”

260 words on day 883

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Norraleena and Sam

https://1000days.douglasblaine.com/20110617/so-much-closer/

Johnka placed himself between the hole and her and continued the same quick pace he held in the sand. Tritti tried loosing her hand from his grip, but he didn’t relent. Looking behind his back as he pulled her down a stone stair, she could see the hole was deeper than it was wide. She looked down on green, recently leafed, spring trees.

“I hope you’ll like my home. We’ve come at the best time, I think. Yes?” Johnka asked. She realized they had stopped on a landing and that he was looking at her; she’d been trying to make out the words of a strange conversation she’d been hearing from below as they came down.

“Oh, sorry. Here. Here.” Johnka guided her with two hands on her waist to the edge of the landing and placed her at the wooden rail. “You can hear them speaking? You’ve got an ear for things, Tritti, my girl. I call them Norraleena and Sam.”

Johnka leaned out over the rail and cocked his head to aim his ear to the speakers below. His eager expression encouraged Tritti to do the same, so she did.

The voice she immediately attributted to Sam spoke near constantly in a throaty bulbous sort of way. At first she thought he must be full of himself—talking without pause—but even unable to make out his words as they sifted up the cliffside and became unintelligible Tritti realized he was trying to impress Norraleena. That his sometimes-near-laughter voice was a mixture of desperation and humor. Tritti wished he would stop talking for a moment and just listen to Norraleena.

Tritti found Norraleena’s voice droopy and thin. She alternated moments of light aggreement with interjections of her own comments. Sam ignored those. Listening longer though, Tritti realized Norraleena never stopped speaking either. What she initially thought were polite interuptions she realized were simply the louder phrases of her own unending flow of words.

Tritti shook her head. “Who…what are they?”

Johnka winked and headed down the stone stairs.

Tritti tried to listen some more, but her attention was now on the round man skipping down the stairs to the next landing. She leaned back over the rail to see how many more to the bottom: no more. Returning her attention to her host she saw a rope bridge a quarter way around the hole. Johnka was already halway down to it.

401 words on day 882

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A Cool Blue Mage’s Cassock

This follows the Crainstock, LTD. stuff you’ll find somewhere else on 1000 Days…

The extended warmth of the traverse and the uncanny sensation of being piped like frosting onto a cake told Kera she’d stepped through a portal and not just a door. There was a déjà vu hiccup mid-trip she wondered about, but soon forgot as she was deposited onto the black sand of a broad flat beach. The sunglasses in Donna’s pocket made sense now.

Twenty-five mages circled a great metal band and hummed a low continuous monotone. Kera had expected a torus instead of a band. The band was…

Donna roughly twisted Kera around, placed her free hand in the center of Kera’s back and guided her without apology to a white tent. Kera got her hands up in time to part the flap as Donna pushed her through. Magic cooled the air inside and flattened and packed the sand to a black gloss. At the back—in a ring of padded folding chairs—Mr. Balasubramanyan sprawled across a pair of them with his head in his knees; he didn’t look up. Donna pushed Kera behind a tri-fold. “Get undressed. All the way. Earrings, contacts, patches. I’ll get you a cassock.”

Kera heeled off her sandles, shuffled out of her Levi’s, and quickly unbuttoned her blouse. She hesitated a moment before unclasping her favorite flower bra, but then continued and stacked that neatly on her growing pile of clothes. Donna returned and tossed a blue mage’s cassock over the top of the tri-fold.

“Tattoos too?”

“Don’t be flip, Miss Woods. All. All your ink was natural or you wouldn’t be in our employ in the first place.”

Donna’s repeated word struck just as Kera slid her panties past her knees; shame…

xxx words on day 879