Category: Transposition

“The night of the big blackout, a lot of fae who normally don’t spend any time around humans went wandering. One came home talking about the nice young people she’d met, some of them faelings, and how she’d given them her blessing, which basically involves using that aether energy. Her great-grand-daughter has some idea just what kind of havoc she could have started, so she asked my family to help. For those of us who are human, the results of a fae blessing can be strange, upsetting, awkward, but generally they can be dealt with and sometimes it can be…

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Kayla blinked, and stared at the stranger, re-evaluating rapidly; the other smiled wryly, and spread both hands. “Like I said, I might be able to help.” “Okay, let’s try this again,” Kayla said. “Come have a seat. I’m Kayla.” The dark woman’s strides were long and effortless; Kayla, who had little patience for women who equated being feminine with being helpless and weak, regarded with approval both the way she moved and the muscle visible in her arms as she drew nearer. “Riley. Do you want to get your friend?”

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Kayla laid her phone on the picnic table next to a printout of Theo’s long, obsessively-up-to-date, and helpfully annotated contacts list, and buried her head in her hands. The cheerful warmth of the early-afternoon sun did nothing to help the chill inside that was as much fear as lack of sleep. Somewhere between Theo leaving early from his weekly DJ job at the club, which was highly atypical in itself, and coming home, he might just as well have dropped off the face of the earth. At least four of his friends had vanished at roughly the same time. And…

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The room beyond the door was simply a windowless trapezoid with the same grey walls that reminded him of finished cement, the same somewhat padded floor. To one side was a toilet with a sink next to it, a roll of toilet paper suspended under the latter, and a narrow full-length mirror next to that apparently set into the wall; there was, literally, nothing else in the room. He took a deep breath, faced the mirror directly, and made himself actually look.

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“Wake.” The command echoed through JC’s entire body and jerked him back to consciousness with uncomfortable abruptness. Firm, though not hard, surface underneath… but that was barely the beginning of what felt wrong. He sat up, or tried to: his wrists refused to separate from one another, and his ankles likewise; he felt completely off balance, weight and proportions distributed all wrong. He could hear motion around him, and struggled to his knees so he could look. The light level was higher than before, still not quite daylight levels but enough to allow him to see clearly.

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Rumbling thunder drowned out the rattle of dice on the tabletop. “Fourteen,” Kurt said, waited, then prompted, “Yo, Earth to JC? Did I hit the thing or not?” JC blinked, forced his attention back to the game, and hastily checked his notes. After all, it was only a storm, the thunder was only electrical discharge. Not the snarl of some cosmic animal, no matter how much it sounded like it. “Um, sorry, yeah. You swing at it, it blocks with its buckler but your sword skids off the metal rim and hits it across the chest. Roll for damage.” Lightning…

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Erica leaned back in her canvas chair, bracing her feet up on the rim of one of the heavy ceramic planters that filled her balcony. There was barely enough room for two chairs among the greenery, but that was the way she liked it. For just her, it was perfect, actually: she didn’t need much space for stretching her legs when her height had never quite made it to five feet. Around people, she’d learned to ignore looks and behind-her-back comments about her lack of height and substantial weight. The other secretaries and the techs in the office where she…

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Zach looked down at the blonde head resting against his shoulder, and gently brushed a straying lock of hair back, a few white strands glinting in the TV’s light. He’d felt Heather gradually relaxing through the movie. Not much surprise that she’d fallen asleep. He didn’t take it personally. Her job as a business consultant was sometimes demanding and draining and could involve difficult people. Some days she came home from work exhausted but still so wound up that she flitted around the house doing twenty jobs at once, vibrating with manic energy. His job, as he saw it, was…

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Kayla took her earphones out, and turned off her mp3 player’s radio. “Fairly local, boys, but nobody’s sure what took the power down yet. All they’ve got is that it’s a right mess, a lot of stuff failed all at once. No one’s expecting to have it back up tonight, but they’re working on it as fast as they can. They’re warning everyone to stay calm, keep cool, and just wait it out.” She coiled her earphones and laid the whole thing on the picnic table, and removed the plastic clip from her shoulder-length ash-brown hair so she could recoil…

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