i

Janie sighed and took her hair down from the ponytail she typically wore. She closed the lid of her laptop, taking a moment of joy in the collection of stickers she had spangled across it, before considering again the videoconference she just finished and searching the room with her eyes for a hairbrush.

Ugh. She didn’t want to admit it, but she felt nervous. She was, in fact, definitely afraid of Mx. K, which was not auspicious. As it turned out, Mx. K was not anything like the work-study scholarship sponsor that Janie had expected based on the application she responded to. Outside her dormitory window, Janie could see the breeze shifting the branches of the oaks that bordered the edges of the central common area. Storms were expected for the afternoon. She wished she could open the window and let fresh air into the room, but of course, the dorms weren’t designed like that. Students opening windows would throw off the efficiency of the central air and heat. It was almost autumn of 2029, and despite Janie’s recent transition from high school to college, everything was still just a bit dystopian.

And this work-study program she’d signed onto, it might be a whole lot dystopian. But then again it might also be the start of something that felt like a solution to some problems. It was a little bit mind boggling. But it was certainly well funded. Janie’s parents had encouraged her to look for undergraduate research opportunities, and she’d been very excited to find herself rising through the interview process for this opportunity, which looked for all the world like a conservative company throwing some research dollars around on campus, maybe aiming at creating goodwill with the young people that would soon be entering the field. A work study program that paid twenty-five dollars an hour created a lot of goodwill.

It had been couched as an opportunity to help gather and analyze data in ongoing psychological and sociological research. The vetting process for candidates had been rigorous, and before the last round of interviews, the candidates had been asked to sign very robust nondisclosure agreements, which had been a bit of a red flag for Janie. On the other hand, Koch Smith Kuchi Kline checked out as a big name biotech firm that did all kinds of research and one that was particularly active on her campus, even endowing a chair in the biochemistry department. The chair they endowed even deigned to teach an undergrad course each semester. And it was a popular course. Maybe the company really was all sunshine and rainbows. Maybe they were going to solve some significant part of the clinical depression epidemic that was plaguing the nation. Maybe they were just extra careful. Maybe they needed to be.

***

Ben Donegal was frustrated and exhausted and had too much to do. He reached for the styrofoam package on the far corner of his second desk and then stopped himself. Why, oh why had he gone to lunch with his team? Yes, he liked his current team a lot. Yes, things seemed to be running pretty smoothly these days, if at a fairly breakneck pace. It was the late 2020s, though. What else could you expect at a state environmental agency.

Unfortunately, Ben felt that he couldn’t trust himself around food. He knew that he loved it too much. And then he felt miserable worrying that his colleagues were noticing him loving it too much and just generally obsessing about it. The very faint good smell of the leftovers was enough to pull his mind away from the complex problem in front of him.

Why had they gone to Main Street Meats? Why had Cari ordered the pork rind appetizer, acted like she loved it and then insisted on packaging over half of it up? She claimed to have enjoyed the fresh fried airy crunch, but then she only ate one of the oversized rinds- claiming that she was saving room for her big salad with the pile of brisket on top. She’d insisted on sharing the rinds around the table, but it turned out that only Cari and Ben liked them. Pork rinds were one of those texturally polarizing foods. Also a food that people probably didn’t enjoy listening to other people eat. Cari had remained oblivious to these concerns through lunch, though. She lacked guilt just like a skinny person would. Ben shifted in his big old office chair and grimaced as he felt the mechanism on the left side of the chair grinding again. There were so many things to feel guilty about that skinny people and normal sized people just didn’t understand.

He forced himself to stop thinking about how good it would feel to crunch into the remaining pork rinds in the package, one after another. There were two hours left in the workday. His belly should have felt full after the lunch he’d enjoyed just a couple of hours ago. He did not need to snack. And even if he did need to snack, he could wait until almost everyone else had gone home for the day, so not to burden them with his crunching. He could do this.

He needed to figure out how to allocate about thirty emails worth of work that were sitting open on the screen in front of him. It was frustrating because his team was already all feeling overworked. And each one of them had their own good reasons to be stressed. Ben prided himself on being the glue that held a strong team together. His job title did not list him as a writer for the press office, but rather as the administrative assistant for the small department. He’d never finished his degree, so his chances for rising higher were squashed. But Ben had stuck with the agency for almost 20 years now, and knew better than the younger writers how the agency worked and what was expected by the various higher-ups. He could put the right people on the right projects. At least he could when his team had enough people to cover everything that needed to be covered. He might have to talk to his team-lead about how to allocate some of what was sitting in his inbox today. And he needed to think carefully about how to do that. Mr. Brunner sometimes had different ideas about how to distribute things that didn’t work as efficiently as Ben thought they should.

He wished he could stop thinking about the pork rinds.

***

Janie pulled the brush through her long hair, wishing she could chat with her mom or her roommate about the “research” assignment Mx. K had put in front of her. The nondisclosure agreement she had signed prevented that, though. Mx. K had suggested that in time, Janie might work with other researchers who had related subjects, and that when that happened they would be able to discuss their cases, but that everything would, of course, remain confidential within the company.

Janie had been given her first test subject, one who was a real person with a history of mental health issues. Her task was to delve deeply into this person’s data file and try to figure out some ways that her subject’s life could be changed that would help them to feel more fulfilled and in turn perhaps more motivated. The data file on the subject was the creepy part. Some very sophisticated surveillance algorithms had been used on her test subject. She had thorough data. Very thorough data. Photos. Videos. Average time spent browsing different parts of the internet. Types of media consumed and when. Detailed work habits and eating habits and sleeping habits. And she could request even more data if something interested her in particular.

“Sort of like some kind of stealth-mode life coach?” Janie had thought. “But people aren’t going to respond to life coaching that they haven’t asked for are they?” It all seemed very invasive. She found it hard to believe that the subjects really had given permission to participate in this kind of research. But then that made her think about the nondisclosure agreement she had signed in her quest to get this job. She realized that she couldn’t remember now. Just how much of her ability to talk had she signed away? Maybe her subject had signed something equally sweeping, because maybe he wanted a fix and was willing to trust that one could be found and that his permission would be used wisely.

She thought of Mx. K in the videoconference. They hadn’t left time for many questions about the assignment. Mx. K’s energy was all “This was an exciting opportunity! This was a chance to help the company make a real difference.” K had a very high wattage smile, with perfect bright white teeth. Maybe their incisors were a little too prominent for perfect teeth. Those teeth were set in a medium tanned face with pleasant looking youthful skin, shiny brown eyes and a stylishly androgenous short haircut. K’s shirt was white and their jacket was tan, both with standing band collars. Janie wondered how tall they were.

She had asked, “Will the subject be asked to implement our recommended changes?” and K had responded that those weren’t the kinds of changes the study was looking for. “We need our young researchers on this project to think outside the boxes these people have worked themselves into,” they replied. “So while we’re open to fixes that our subjects could initiate, we have a certain latitude within the environments of these subjects and an ability to implement a range of solutions from the outside. So what we are looking for are suggestions of changes that would make the subject feel more integrated into the parts of their lives that they value the most. Things that would make them feel fulfilled. Maybe at work, or within their community, or family. Whatever they appear to value. Part of what we are studying here is people’s inability to see what could be changed that would improve their lives and the system. We think that getting fresh eyes of young researchers on some key subjects might result in important improvements without expending as many resources as traditional methods might use. You will find a list of some sample changes that other researchers have suggested that have been of some value in your materials, but we hope that you don’t find it limiting.”

It seemed crazy. It seemed less like research than spying. Spying and busybodying. Maybe so that a big corporation could do even more busybodying to make a difference for some subjects. But it also sounded like it was genuinely intended to benefit the subjects. Janie took a deep breath. Her roommate wouldn’t be back for several more hours. She opened the file on her first subject, a man named Ben Donegal.

“What you failed to see Adara, is that ‘as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.’”

Zedekar was lecturing her. Zedekar was angry. She had misjudged everything.

Adara fervently wished she were anywhere other than the wizard’s stone tower. His eyes shone as he warmed to his topic. Outside the intermittent rain continued between gusts of wind and occasional, still-far-off peals of thunder. Wild weather was headed their way, but the gusting wind was the least of Adara’s worries.

“You were so busy thinking short term, little apprentice, that you forgot who is really in charge. You thought of this year’s crop yields, and this year’s fat larders, but you didn’t think about where that would leave us.”

“But sir,” she couldn’t believe that she was daring to argue. On the other hand, her advice to the grain-master had been good! “If they plant all eight of the East fields in the new wheat, instead of just two, they are almost sure to double the yield in all eight of the fields, just as they did in the one that they tried last year. Not only that, the seed for the new wheat is still cheaper than the old seed. . .”

The old wizard glared as he advanced on Adara and her words died in her throat. This was the man who had beaten her predecessor within an inch of her life. Adara still had a knot on her left forearm from one of his lessons over the winter. She clenched her jaw to keep from cradling that forearm away from him.

Short term. Long term. . . What was Zedekar thinking? Now it was early spring. All winter, they’d measured the snows and rains, and the icy mornings, only to conclude that winter was much the same as winter had been the preceding year. It followed that the weather this spring and summer was likely to be very similar to last summer, so that new wheat really should have been the best choice. . .

He stopped his advance and lowered his voice. “Come here and listen to me, you little fool. Really listen, because this is the kind of lesson you won’t have many chances to learn.”

Reluctantly she stepped forward. Three long slow steps until she was close enough that she had to tip her head up to meet his eyes. He glared at her, but didn’t reach for her with anything but his terrible low voice.

“If we harvest a bumper crop of wheat this year,” he asked, “what happens?”

Adara’s mind raced. Extra wheat was wheat that would ensure that everyone had plenty. Extra could be sold to neighboring estates, resulting in coin for the Baron’s coffers. Coin in the Baron’s coffers might mean many things. Repairs of equipment, additional livestock, metal for the foundry. . .

She couldn’t see the dire thing he was about to tell her. She didn’t want to see it. Her eyes shifted away from Zedekar’s face, briefly touching on Jace’s downcast gaze before skating back to the old wizard. Her fellow apprentice wasn’t going to be helping her out of this situation. He wouldn’t even look at her, and his mouth was twisted into an expression that she thought of as his grin-grimace. He might have an idea of what Zedekar was thinking, and he might have been dismayed about it, but he was struggling not to show that he felt any sadness. His eyes looked dead. Jace had been apprenticed to Zedekar two years before Adara. He didn’t pick up magic or reasoning as quickly as she did, but he was better at predicting Zedekar and his moods. Adara’s stomach dropped at the grin-grimace. This was going to be very bad.

“You don’t want to answer me, Adara?” Zedekar almost purred. “I’ll give you the answer.”

“If we double last year’s harvest, everyone in the Barony has plenty of bread all winter, and the Baron makes some extra coin. The men of this hold are fat and happy and they have extra time to think about what they want, and how they want the Baron to spend that extra coin. Maybe they start to question what I’ve told them about when to clear the next West field and when to let the East fields lie fallow. Maybe they suggest to the Baron that he should talk to other witches or wizards that might help him increase his holdings even more.”

Adara wanted badly to step away. Zedekar was really working himself up and his voice was rising. The hand that carried his staff was raising up, too, which scared her even more. He had struck her arm with that staff in his last frothy fury, just when she dared to step away.

“You think of ‘us’ as the whole Barony,” he sneered at her, “But the ‘us’ that matters is the three of us in this tower. ‘Us’ is not you and the harvest-master, Adara.”

Her cheeks colored at the mention of the soft-spoken harvest-master, and she hoped beyond hope that Zedekar hadn’t really noticed how much she enjoyed dealing with harvest-master Belen. But her heart sank even more as he continued.

“I’m afraid that the harvest master will be the most hurt by the bad advice you’ve given him without first running it by me. He will not be permitted to sew all of that new wheat. Some of it will have to be ground at once, at a loss, for we’ll only sew two fields with it. We can supplement the coin we need to buy the rest of the seed with coin from his personal coffers, which means he will be relegated to many more years of saving before he ever has a dowry. Young women probably won’t even look at him by the time he saves a bride-price all over again. But that’s what happens to people who don’t listen to. . .”

Adara knew that her face had gone completely red. Bad enough that he was punishing Adara, but Belen didn’t deserve any of this, and had come to the same independent conclusion that Adara had about the new wheat. He only wanted what was best for the Barony. Adara’s eyes stung with anger and fear, not just for herself, but for. . .

Wait a minute, why wasn’t Zedekar continuing?

Adara looked up and this time she couldn’t keep from stepping back as Zedekar stumbled forward, toward her, his lips moving. He dropped his staff, and his hands grasped toward his neck. Something black protruded under his chin, with red blossoming around it.

Adara stepped to the side as he fell to his knees then slowly collapsed onto his face.

Adara and Jace stared at each other wide eyed.

Then their attention was drawn to the big window beside Zedekar’s desk. A slender but strong looking hand and forearm covered in a battered leather bracer grasped at the lintel and then with a loud thump and grunt another matching hand and arm gripped on beside it. With a mighty heave and groan, Marantha, the huntsman’s spinster daughter, pulled herself up into the open window and then leaped down into the room. She swept the room with her eyes, taking in Jace and Adara and Zedekar. In three easy strides, she crossed the room to Zedekar, knelt beside him and then tore the crossbow bolt that protruded from the back of his neck back through his neck with a jerk. Roughly, she flipped him over onto his back and before anyone could say anything, she used the still-sharp head of the bolt to slice his throat open, cleanly and deeply, from one side to the other. His eyelids fluttered and his blood flowed in regular gushes as Marantha stood.

“You can never be too sure with wizards,” she said in a low voice, swiveling her gaze between Jace and Adara.

Jace broke the silence with a voice that Adara would later liken to the squawk of a chicken.

“You told me you needed a charm-breaker because you were afraid for someone you cared about,” he squawked at Marantha. “I thought. . . I thought. . .” The thought was clearly caught in his throat.

“You thought I wanted to break a love charm that someone cast on someone I fancied, I know,” Marantha answered him with a sympathetic laugh, “not a protection charm that someone cast on themselves. But if you think about it, I did need that charm-breaker to protect people I care about, so you did sell me exactly what I needed.”

“And,” she kicked at the now still body of Zedekar, “My thanks to you. It worked.”

Jace staggered to Zedekar’s chair and collapsed into it.

“Now you lot have got to decide how you’re going to play this,’ Marantha continued.

“You climbed the outside of the tower?” Adara asked, “Even though it’s been raining?”

Marantha grinned, “Well, this is actually the fourth time that I’ve climbed it. This evening was the first time I climbed it while it was damp, though. And this is the first time I made a one-handed crossbow shot while hanging from the side of the window, too. That was really the tricky bit. Well, it was the tricky bit, once I had the charm-breaker. Without that, the bolt probably would have bounced right back at me.”

“But honestly I think I got up here just in time. That old git going on about bending twigs and growing trees. As if he’s some kind of woodsman or woodwife. Ha! And after what he told the woodwife to do with the South forest eight years ago, too.” She shook her head in disgust and beads of rainwater scattered around her.

“The idea of Zedekar as a forest steward is just rich. High time we had a new wizard or witch is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking it’s a good thing he had a couple of apprentices about ready to take over. . .”

Adara Ellis lifted her head from her hands, looked around the laboratory, sighed mightily and lowered her face back toward her hands. She could not win for losing today, and she was pretty sure that she was about to start crying. She had to figure out how to shake herself out of her funk. She was so close to a final solution and she didn’t want to be the person that screwed this one up. Nobody other than her closest partner seemed to realize it, but this one- this proposed innovation that she was testing was potentially for all the marbles. This was a solution that might just turn the tide in the battle against climate change. She just had to get her proof of concept finalized and this discovery could revolutionize inexpensive carbon capture.

She really thought that the science behind their new methodology was sound, but things just kept going wrong this week. It was almost enough to make her think that someone was out to get them, the way things kept stacking up. But that couldn’t be. Things were weird at work sometimes, but she didn’t want to believe that she lived in a world were someone would actually interfere with the kind of research she was doing.

Adara took a deep breath. She reminded herself that 43 year old research fellows at federal agencies did not cry into their hands when they needed to be checking gas lines and triple checking the equations that told them the amounts they would need for this final confirmatory experiment. She looked up at the clock. Her friend Milo was going to stop by in twenty minutes and he always made her feel better. It was a strange friendship that the two of them had developed back when her lab was audited over a year ago. Researchers didn’t usually make fast friends with their auditors. Especially when it was unclear what had triggered the need for an in-depth audit of her work in the first place, something that Adara was still uncomfortable with her management about. But Adara hadn’t been worried about any audit findings, knowing that her work was solid and neccessary, and she had found Milo Stepanovitch to be someone who asked good questions. He was a quick study, too, when it came to figuring out the necessary parameters for what she was doing.

After his investigation was finished, Adara kept trying to recruit him back into research figuring he was too good a chemical engineer to continue on picking apart other people’s work. He needed to be innovating! He countered that the cheaters of the world were innovating, too, and somebody good who understood the details needed to be there to make sure they didn’t get away with too much of the dwindling supply of good will towards researchers, not to mention hard earned research dollars.

She busied herself making sure that everything was in order in the lab and ready for her to start taking measurements on the new system. The gas chromatograph had been testy last week, necessitating multiple recalibrations until the rf values were as consistent as she could get them. It was almost as if either her eluent or her samples had been contaminated at some point, because with fresh batches of everything, she fairly quickly got the machinery back into a pattern of consistent results and measurements.

The chromatograph last week had been the first of a number of odd setbacks this week, culminating in the need for Adara to be in this particular lab on Friday evening, as all of the other available time there had somehow been blacked out this week. She was tired of wondering where the setbacks came from and whether they were happenstance or part of a pattern. She wanted to do the work.

As she checked a connection on one of the gas lines, her partner from the geotechnical side of the house, Gillian bustled in. “A Friday night lab appointment makes me feel like we’re back in college, so I brought some of what got me through my last degree,” she pointed with her chin toward the coffee shop drink carrier she had balanced on her satchel, “Caffeinated goodness for everyone. Did I remember correctly that you like mocha and Milo is more about the Chai life?”

Adara’s stomach rumbled as she went to take the proffered cup. Lunch had been rushed and long ago, and she was very grateful for the coffee. “Gillian, you’re a godsend,” she said as she took the beverage, and the two of them set to work making sure that the test chamber they had put together was all in order.

***

Milo laughed at himself a little as he headed into his friend Adara’s lab on a Friday evening. His wife had been disappointed he wasn’t going to be home for all of pizza and movie night with the family, and his squash partner was annoyed that he wasn’t going to be at the gym. But Milo still really enjoyed watching science happen, and maybe foolishly he kept getting the impression that something more than good work might be happening with all of the mishaps that kept stacking up in his friend’s lab.

It had been years since he left the contracting job where he regularly needed to carry a pistol and gone back to school to pursue an engineering specialty and then auditing. But after he pulled into the parking lot of the lab where he was meeting Adara and Gillian, he opened his glove box and removed the pistol he kept there, checking the weapon before putting it into the underarm holster he’d had to let out a little bit before donning it that afternoon. Everything felt secure with it there and there was nothing wrong with being cautious.

He braced for the bite of the cold outside his car through his light jacket and started to walk toward the closest entrance. It wasn’t a bad parking lot sunset, he noticed as he pulled out his badge for entry into the building. He swiped the badge and then was surprised as the pad flashed a red light at him, denying him entry. He looked at the face of his badge- as part of the IG’s staff, he’d never had a building come up as off limits. He wondered if he’d missed an email about a necessary update and started to pat down his pockets in search of his phone. Before he got very far he was startled by a quiet voice right behind him.

“I can let you in, auditor,” Milo was surprised to see that it was Ezekiel Biggs, with his face cast down at the ground as usual and his shoulders slumping in that direction as well. Zeke was the man in charge of requisition of supplies for all of the labs in this building and because he was so quiet and kept to himself so much, a whole mythology had sprung up around him. If Zeke liked you, it was said that all of your supplies would be plentiful and on-time. But if you annoyed him, it was a different story.

Milo had always found Zeke to be helpful in whatever he investigated and figured that his reputation as the sometime lab ogre was mostly a result of what Milo read as painful shyness. Zeke didn’t typically look at people when he spoke with them, and it was rare to see him outside of his basement offices. But he typically knew what was going on in each lab with a great deal of familiarity.

“Thanks Zeke, I didn’t see you there. You scared me for a minute.”

Zeke snort-laughed a bit as they went in.

“Isn’t it a bit late for you to need to be tracking supplies?” Milo asked the other man. But Zeke didn’t respond and Milo realized that he was already moving off toward the stairs that led down to the basement. Zeke _was_ kind of a weird dude.

***

An hour later, the three friends had finished their drinks and run through all of the prep for the experiment one last time. Gillian had caught a potential stumbling block or error in the setup that Adara missed and they worked through a tweak that would take care of it. Milo wondered if he might be about to see something of a historical moment as Adara walked over to one of the gas cylinders with its bright stickers identifying its contents, ready to turn the valve and start the flow.

She put her hand on the valve, but before she turned it she turned back to her friends and said, “I really hope we get the readings that we expect for this system today, and if we do, I just want you guys to know that your work and your support here have really mattered to me. It’s been a rough week or so, and. . .”

Her voice trailed off as the door swung open and in walked Zeke, pushing a trolley loaded with gas cylinders.

“I hate to interrupt you, Dr. Ellis,” he said to his shoes, “but I was looking at our gas supplies and I noticed a discrepancy between what you had checked out and what I still had in stock.”

He had everyone’s attention as he wheeled the trolly closer to the cylinder that Adara was standing by.

“I know you need a specific gas mixture for the kind of chromatography you’re running here, and I’m pretty sure that I brought you the gasses you need in these cylinders earlier in the week, so I was surprised to see them back in supply this morning. I think what really matters for what you’re trying to show, is.. . .”

Milo had to smile as Zeke tried without success to suppress another snort-laugh mid sentence.

“Well what matters here is the matter that you’re measuring, and it looks to me like someone has set you up for something other than success by switching your cylinders.”

Milo began to pick at the corner of the bright sticker declaring the mix of the gas in the cylinder that Adara was about to turn on and he didn’t seem too surprised when he was able to pull the label off to reveal a slightly different label underneath it.

Adara and Gillian stared at him wide-eyed. This had to be more than another annoying coincidence!

________________________________________

tonithegreat hopes that you can forgive the use of a “matter” pun as inspiration for this story! Who doesn’t like a touch of intrigue laden science, though?! Hopefully not the Idol voters this week!

Lunchtime is lonely by choice. Kas could probably find a colleague to eat with most days, but her work is a lot of talking to people, and talking them through very tangled problems. So it’s nice to escape to the solitude of her car with it’s heated seat and maybe some kind of healthy drive through window and some NPR or a podcast for a little bit each day. It’s especially nice on days like today when it seems like very little of the world makes sense.

The mountain of work that’s waiting for her when she finishes this lunch seems never-ending. Kas knows that even when it doesn’t feel like it, her work fits her into the world in a way that has meaning. It’s just that people are doing so very many things that don’t seem to make sense or that just seem to be hurting other people- hurting the world. There are days when Kas’s job feels more like a part of broken society than a part of society.

She takes a sip of her iced tea and enjoys the cold liquid in her mouth and the clean bite of the bitterness. She knows that she’s probably mostly just down because she has a lot on her plate- more to do this week than is realistic. And she is tired. It’s been more than three weeks since she tested positive for Covid, and since that terrible first week of headache and fever she’s been steadily mending. But she still isn’t quite back yet despite all the negative tests. It is taking forever for her sinuses to clear.

She pulls into a city park near her work and finds a parking spot in the dirt and winter leaves under the trees. It’s just cold enough that she doesn’t want to open the windows all the way, but she cracks them and hears birds and barking dogs and kids running across the boardwalk that crosses the pond. She feels like she should recognize the voice on the radio- a movie director who has completed a film about an evil grifter, a man who joins an old fashioned carnival and learns the art of the con.

The director- ah! It is Guillermo del Toro- is making the movie seem palatable even though it is dark stuff- not Kas’s cup of tea. He’s talking about a theme of the fortune telling carnies selling false dreams through trickery, how they learn to sell what he calls the dark rainbow by making the right kinds of promises that appeal to everyone. Kas is convinced that Guillermo del Toro is a genius, even though she hasn’t seen that many of his films. He always seems to find a way to make a story about something that’s off-putting into something intriguing.

***

Saturday! Kas made it to the weekend. True, she still has more to do- dishes, laundry, workouts, dog walks, cleaning- than the weekend could possibly contain. But it feels good to have choices about when to do what. It feels good to get up early and sneak out alone.

What even is the dream she’s chasing, now, Kas wonders, in this moment of relative morning calm, ensconced at the bar at the breakfast joint just outside her neighborhood. Definitely having a minute to sit and let someone else cook for her is part of it. But not all of it. She’s also looking forward to making something good for her family tonight.

The wait staff here and even the line cooks that she can see all have their own distinct fashions. Pretty tats and facial jewelry and makeup expertly applied. There’s one waitress whose red lipstick is a beautiful bright orange-red, perfect for her skin tone. Kas tried to explain to her daughters how lipstick is one of those things where you have to pick the right shade for you, and so picking a color for their whole dance troupe to match costumes was always going to be difficult. But Kas doesn’t wear lipstick enough to even know what color families work best for her. When she sees herself reflected wearing lipstick her eye is always caught and jarred. Whose great big highlighted lips are those, anyway?

So Kas almost never wears lipstick. And though it’s true that she prefers a natural looking lip, it’s also because she just never really learned the habit of lipstick, or any makeup for that matter. She dabbled a little, sure. When she was younger, she loved to cosplay at science fiction conventions and she started to try to learn makeup for that. She did a character once that wore lipstick with a bright purple-pink hue. She would never have guessed that the purple would look nice on her, but it had.

Her daughters were mortified when she told them about the conversation she had with another mom from their dance troupe regarding makeup. This year the team was all supposed to buy liquid eyeliner, which Kas thought was needlessly difficult to apply. “I’ll buy whatever they tell us to buy,” she’d said, “But nobody at my house knows how to apply that. I don’t even think that liquid eyeliner is s skill that humans need to cultivate. I mean, we could be using those brain cells for something else.”

She hadn’t meant anything against people who chose to use liquid eyeliner. It just seemed like a needlessly difficult choice. She figured that you’ve got to pick your battles in this life. But not everyone chose the same battles.

Kas’s waitress came by with a full glass of tea for her and Kas smiled. Her waitress was one of the few who didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but her eyebrow piercing and nose stud and outfit all still looked just right. There were a multitude of ways to look put together.

***

Monday morning and it is cold, wet, and grey, but Kas is feeling put together again. It’s funny how some weeks Monday morning turns into a good place to start after a weekend of introspection. Maybe things will soon seem out of control again and maybe they won’t, but there’s a nice rhythm in the start of a normal work week.

—————————————————————-—————————

tonithegreat is hoping for some normal workweek rhythm herself. Hopefully this little vignette vibes with your rhythm this week. This was a tough prompt from my perspective!

Hey, livejournal is still a thing? Idol is still a thing? Sure, count me in!

Humans were still idiots. As a race, they always had been. Crystalyne Regina hated that she’d had the bad luck to be born one of them. The fae had much more healthy and realistic perspectives, and on the whole were a lot more interesting. There was so very much in the universe that her fellow humans were always overlooking in favor of their own needlessly narrow versions of reality.

Crystalyne studied her face in the rear view mirror of the custom built sprinter van that she had hoped to share with Kai for the last few nights, right up until yesterday. Her peach and ivory hued skin was still dewey and completely flawless, except for the tracks of her recent tears.

Her thick platinum hair with it’s pale blue streaks was still artfully messy, arranged in a bun and half hidden under a blue hand-knitted wool beanie that warded her against the mountains’ morning chill. The jeans and worn merino turtleneck that hugged her lithe body provided dark contrast to the light airy interior of her home on wheels with it’s window-shutters open to the crisp morning light. She still looked great, at least. And she couldn’t help but start to smile a little at the jagged white-topped peaks she could see out the window. Goddess but she loved these mountains.

The pictures she’d set up this morning would form the backbone of a gorgeous instagram story about summertime #vanlife options on the Argentine side of Patagonia on her Sn0wQween account.

Ad revenue and sponsorships related to her Instagrams were funny things. They would never come close to bankrolling her lifestyle, but social media was a fascinating sandbox to play in. It opened up opportunities for her that she otherwise wouldn’t have known about. Social media wasn’t unlike magic in that respect.

Social media was also a lot more fun than her career had been. What young people like Kai didn’t understand was that a person had to provide for themselves first. Sure, Crys had been granted a bit of a head start on securing her own future with the Regina family fortune in hand. But her parents hadn’t really been interested in increasing their riches the way she was.

Crys hadn’t allowed herself the freedom to seek followers and friends until after she secured an empire of her own. Sure, people had called her cold in her hard-charging youth. She hadn’t even discovered her passions for mountains and road travel and snowboarding until after she sold her third tech startup, despite her early proximity to the Sierra. And in the old startup days she had scoffed at people who wasted time and became entangled on social media, especially as crude as it had been back then. Now that she was in her mid-forties and one of the richest women in the Americas, though, she had time to look down and see what other people were doing. And other people were all over social media in all of their spare moments, it seemed. So many of them were so disconsolate spending their energy there.

Kai was certainly a fool to go back to his little artist life with his artist friends. They were begging to be noticed by any media, trying to get their starts without any empires behind them. It was backward. That life even seemed more transient than usual to Crys, with the world in an uproar the way it was now. Everyone was looking forward to the turning of 2020 into 2021 with hope in their hearts. But the city Kai had gone back to was bound to remain a pandemic playground even after the way it had suffered in the first wave of the disease that it weathered in spring.

Crys gave herself a little shake. She had shown that foolish man magic; real magic. The kind that had required years of very well-funded research for her to harness. But apparently authenticity with a dear friend who wasn’t even physically attracted to him was more his speed than Crys’s precision passion had been. She shivered a little even now, thinking of their passions, when she’d first discovered him. Kai had been seeking a soul that understood beauty almost as much as she was. But experiencing the beauty of the world was not going to be enough for him. He wanted to capture it in art, too, where Crys was happy just to experience it.

It was her own fault, she supposed, for getting caught up in scrying, seeking first a soul who could appreciate the beauty that she saw all around her and then somehow shifting into a search for a lost and longing soul to compliment her own. Lost and longing? Longing maybe, but why had she thought of herself as lost? Crys met her own gaze in the mirror and shook her head, feeling herself slip back into melancholy as she replayed the last few days again. That guy had really gotten to her.

From her perspective, it started when Crys came upon a perfect alpine lake last week, with one edge still frozen, even as close to midsummer as it was here, and when she realized that the moon was full that night, she thought of the lake as she had first seen it with the sunset reflected on it’s glassy, icy surface and knew that the lake would be perfect site for an esbat scrying. The ley lines were strong beneath these wild mountains, and her midsummer longing, even though she’d already experienced midsummer this year in the northern hemisphere, was particularly intense.

She conjured red roses to use in her spell, since the mountain meadow flowers were such a riot of color around the lake and she always loved red roses the best. They would help link her back to Patagonia if she traveled the ley lines. As she swirled the petals along with those of the mountain flowers into the icy water around her legs, she had a strong premonition that she was going to find exactly what she most needed, but also that it was going to come with a price.

What Crystalyne had shown Kai after she found him had been authentic. But sometimes the real face of the world, even without arcane underpinnings was just too much for people. She had tried to show him the cold beauty of her beloved Patagonian mountains and the precise beauty of the magic of the ley lines that she had used to bring him almost halfway across the world. But as much as he wanted to believe in magic, he wasn’t ready to believe that it could be used to actually travel between continents. Because of his disbelief, she couldn’t fully bring him into her scrupulously clean van. She had to keep him frozen in a bubble of winter from his northern hemisphere- a simple enough task this high in the mountains.

He was so young. When she first felt the depth of his longing and followed it to the dingy apartment from which he stared up at the muted stars from his small open window, she’d expected a man or woman of twice his age. But she had to admit that his undertones of hunger for physical love were part of what made it so easy for her to follow the energy of the cold lake water into his space. The temperature there was even colder than the night air had been in Patagonia. The steam she brought with her as she met his hunger coalesced into banks of snow, covered in ephemeral flower petals. As he’d passed his hand through insubstantial columbine and into the very real snow that had formed beneath it, he asked her, “Are you the muse I’m dreaming of, or a substantial seductress?”

Crys had conjured one of her roses for him, and answered only “yes” as she kissed him while simultaneously bringing the force of her will to bear on his young open mind. She also did something else, something that she’d recently found made her connections with those that she scryed upon deeper. She let down the barriers to her own mind to him, so that he could tell and feel what she was thinking.

With only two kisses, he was ready to follow her back to the moonlit lakeside in the mountains she had come from. They half merged in the ether as she snapped them back to her body floating in the cold lake. She could tell already that their life experiences had some jagged differences, but their lakeside lovemaking was still frantic and sweet until he let himself start to slow down enough that logic and doubt crept into his thoughts.

That was when she’d had to construct an ice palace around him, pulling magic up out of the lake and cold air down from the mountains to spin a sort of stasis around him until she could explain to him how everything worked, and why it made sense for him to start a new life with her. But that task had proven beyond her. Even though Kai had been sad in his old life, he wanted to find his own happiness. As if there were such a thing.

Crys realized that she was crying again, and she was glad she’d finished the photo shoot. Even her magic enhanced skin would start to redden soon if she kept this up. The crying felt cathartic in a strangely good way, though. Almost as if it had loosened something behind her eyes that had been bothering her. Maybe she’d needed to lose something to remind her what was important.

Maybe she should think again about what she wanted to do in her comfortable “retirement.” Maybe connection with others wasn’t something to be avoided anymore. Kai’s youth had reminded her how it really felt to commit to something like a friend. Maybe there were causes she should be considering outside her her current existence. Or maybe she should go into the climbers’ camp just a bit farther up the valley from where she had her van, and see if anyone wanted to boulder nearby. She wasn’t confident with alpine climbing, but she did have a crash pad and pretty good acclimatization to the altitude. And maybe what she needed more than anything was to spend some time with people with other ideas about how to find happiness, that were different from her own.

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This week’s entry is an intersection with awesomely patient and talented me_sonrei. Click on her username and scroll down to her related Week 24 entry to check it out. She and her partner last week did a beautiful fairy tale retelling with the topics we were given, so we decided to try for paired Snow Queen inspired pieces this week.

I hope you enjoy them both!

Carrie sat in the sand and listened to the surf. The sun had set behind her ten minutes ago. Her surf board was close by her feet. Her son was bodysurfing in the last of the reflected sunset light. It had been a very long week. She picked up the beer beside her and took a sip.

Was she fiddling while Rome burned? Was it wrong to be out enjoying her life for several hours while others struggled with Covid and protested police violence. She hoped not. It felt like she needed this evening. She took a deeper pull of the beer and sighed. She definitely needed something. Her son whooped as he caught a wave and it brought a smile back to her face. Watching him loving life in the last reflected bits of pink and purple sunset was definitely part of what she needed.

Believing that she lived in a society where other people had the same chances to enjoy the world this way would be nice too. But she didn’t believe it. Not tonight. Yesterday the United States had launched people into space again after a long hiatus. Today, cities across the country were seeing violence between police and peaceful protestors. In her own city, just as she’d been considering joining a march downtown, she’d heard reports and seen video of someone driving a truck into the crowd of protestors. “Good thing you didn’t head down there, right mom?” her son had asked. But she didn’t know the answer. Maybe it was even more important in that case for her to stand in solidarity. But how did you explain that to an eleven year old?

Carrie wanted so much to feel like she was making the world a better place. Instead, she’d just received a text from a friend at home asking her to be careful when she drove back into town, because a curfew had been instituted. A curfew, not for Covid, but because of fear that the peaceful protesting would still somehow turn violent.

Carrie looked out at magenta reflections on breaking waves. She’d been slightly afraid that there would be enough people at this beach that it would be difficult to stay socially distanced, but she and her son had arrived late enough that there was no issue at all. There were only about fifteen other people that she could see scattered up and down and shore. The red flags were flying for rip currents, so other than waders, she and her son seemed to be the only ones in the water. But she had tired after 45 minutes of surfing that had pulled them about half a mile down the beach, and was just watching Sam, her son, now.

She thought about the experience of catching a wave just twenty feet from Sam who’d caught the same break- and of turning to see his smile as they sped in parallel toward the shore. Sure, she hadn’t actually fully stood up on her board a single time tonight, but she and her son had caught some great waves. She would always remember his smiling face looking over at her in the sunset light.

On nights like tonight, it felt like parenting was the only thing Carrie was getting right in a world gone mad. She wanted to call her best friend Xena again, but they’d just talked for an hour on Carrie’s drive out here, and she really didn’t have anything more to say.

Xena wasn’t just a great friend. She also managed to live so authentically. Xena’d moved in with her wife and was comfortable with her identity as a witch inside and out. She managed to make ends meet by running her bakery and she managed to bring her customers joy and nutrition, and, yes, carbs and sugar, but she fed their souls, too. She dispensed heartfelt advice to her customers and was a fearless part of her community. Carrie wanted that for herself, she just hadn’t ever taken the time to nurture it somehow.

And now it seemed like the world was on fire.

Carrie loved her job, but it wasn’t like Xena’s bakery. It wasn’t a place where she felt authentic every day. Carrie worked for change every day, sure. But the world also needed authenticity so much right now.

But Carrie needed to keep her paycheck coming in. And she actually liked her work. When she’d first started her job with the state, it had seemed like a place of relative tolerance. But Carrie just hadn’t ever talked to her coworkers much about her pagan leanings. Religion didn’t come up at work and she didn’t bring it up. She’d never found herself a place in the pagan community and life got busy over the years. So more and more through he years, she just smiled and nodded when her coworkers mentioned prayers and church services.

Was it better to work on the problems of the world from inside the agencies that could make a difference or was it better to make a comfortable life from which it was more possible to work on change? Carrie didn’t know the answer.

Off to the south a bit of lightning flashed cloud to cloud in the dark mass of clouds that had been gathering.

“C’mon Sam! It’s time to get out!” She called down to the quickly darkening surf, and he came jogging up with his board under his arm and a huge grin on his face. The clouds lit up with some lightning again and he exclaimed, “Light show! I guess it is time to get going. Mom, I am never going to get tired of this. When can we come back?”

Carrie felt a lightness in her heart. Sharing this place and one of her favorite ways to enjoy it was something. And she and Sam could talk and work on thoughts about other things that maybe both of them could do on the long drive home tonight. And maybe she would call Xena again.

“Mom, I thought of the beginning of a song while we were out there,” Sam continued, “Do you mind if I work on it with my uke’ a little on the way back?”

Her smile grew large as she hoisted her board up from the sand. The world was still a complicated place, but maybe she and Sam would come up with some things to do about it. And maybe some of them would also help her feel better about her place in everything.

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This week’s entry is an intersection with the talented d0gs. Check out her paired piece by clicking her username and scrolling down to her entry.

I am both deeply disappointed and filled with resolve by current events. Those of us in relative privilege are allowed our grief at where we are. But we’ve also got to mobilize and work toward where we need to be. Which, my girls and I think, can include surf breaks.