I’m mostly posting this because I haven’t posted anything here in a while.
If you keep an eye on Weiila’s things at ff.net you will have read “Ready or not”.
And if you haven’t, here’s a link:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1761950/1/
If you don’t feel like reading it, here’s a quick summary:
It’s about what happens after Sciel (a carmilla from my fic “Mirror mirror”) decides that Rakadra (a half demon from her fic Those NOT Chosen by the Fairy) needs some female attention. And that fic came to be because of a thing Weiila and I joked about when I was writing the ending of Mirror mirror (an ending that was never used though, since I got fed up with writing the fic and abandoned it for a few months, and then just threw in a short end to at least wrap it up).
Through a large part of the fic Jason (Lise and Kevin’s son from Those NOT Chosen) had been a real thorn in his side, and Weiila suggested that he would say something along the lines of “Just wait until I get kids and sic them on <I>you</I>!”
My reply was basically: “Great idea. Write something about it.”
And I guess Weiila gave a short “doh” before creating that fic.
You can guess the end result. The horrible hellspawn that we usually refer to as Rakky’s daughter. He usually refers to her as “brat”, and sometimes even worse things, though…
But now I’m getting sidetracked from the real point of this thread. (New record! I’ve brought my own thread slightly off topic even before I’ve gotten to the point :P)
The point is that I’ve written a short fic about some of the more interesting parts of the time between that and my next fic (which will feature Rakadra’s daughter).
And I thought “What the heck, why not post it here?” So here it is:
There are some universal things about parenthood that all parents must experience.
There are no parents that haven’t got a photo album of some sort or other collections of memories that shows important things in their children’s lives.
They tend to show their childrens first steps, their first words and just how darn cute they were when they were sleeping.
Right after that last one most parents think “What went wrong after that?”.
But the family we will look at right now don’t have photo albums showing first steps and such, for two reasons.
One, they don’t have any kind of photo albums.
Two, their daughter doesn’t walk, but they did still experience their racial equivalence of those moments.
Even the shapeless <I>things</I> that lurk just beyond the the edges of sanity, that even the demons only speak of in hushed voices, look with pride upon what can only be described as their spawn’s first guloph.
And even though Rakadra will try to kill me for this, I jsut couldn’t resist showing some of the more special moments of his (unwanted) family life.
He was lucky though that demons can fast forward through much of their physical age since a troddler among a group of bloodthirsty killers isn’t expected to live long enough to turn into one.
It was mostly a matter of appearance anyway. Some had the look of “ancient evil” right after birth, while other, like Sciel for example, could look young and sexy even though they’re actually… Well, I’m not going to piss off more demons than necessary right now, so let’s just say that she’s a <I>bit</I> older than she looks, m’kay?
(It is said that “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. Now imagine that woman coming from Hell.
Exactly…)
So, anyway, let’s check their collection of memories.
We’ll start at the beginning…
Or maybe not. Let’s fast forward to the interesting parts instead. Besides, I don’t want to know how demons take care of their babies.
We’re going to look at their first family picnic.
Are you scared of the image of Rakadra, the violent, vicious, sadistic half demon along with his nagian wife and their daughter sitting on a red and white checkered blanket. All of them eating unmentionable things, some of them still alive, and generally having a good time?
You should be. And you’ll have to get over it, since that’s the first memory we’re going to look at.
As I just said, they’re on a blanket, red and white, there’s a basket on the side. Standard picnic. Except that they’re in the underworld so the landscape is a bit strange. It seems to be some sort of hill that they are sitting on though, and there is even what might be called a tree next to them, it’s leafless twisted branches giving some shade from the non-existant sun.
Rakadra and Slither are sitting on the blanket, eating and making small talk about things that demons talk about while on picnic. But to save us all some pain and horror we’re not going to listen in on their conversation.
Let’s look at what their daughter is doing instead, shall we?
She appears to be at the physical age of four or five but, as previously mention, that is unimportant. At the moment she is at the bottom of the dark lump (that could have been called a hill if you were, for example, blindfolded in a dark room while under the influence of heavy drugs) playing with some large mantis-like creatures about two feet high with razor sharp claws.
Apparently they’re playing a game called “break the legs of the bug and watch it squirm”, because that’s basically what she’s doing. And she seems to be enjoying it more than the mantises.
She’s down to her last playmate right now since the rest of them didn’t like the game and decided to leave. The last one is a bit bigger than the rest though, and a lot more vicious.
It had already lost one of it’s seven legs, but it still hadmore than enough left, right?
At the moment they’re in a deadlock, slowly circling eachother.
None of them is ready to show weakness and give the other the upper hand.
The insect won’t because weakness would mean that it would lose more legs.
And the small naga won’t because weakness is unacceptable, and she also likes the game a lot more than the insects did.
That’s why she was the first to make a move to break their deadlock.
With a short warcr… Eh, <I>play</I>cry she lunges forward but has to throw herself to the side the next moment as a large scyte-like claw nearly severes her arm at the shoulder. But that won’t stop her from trying again, and again, and again, forcing the mantis to retreat before her furious and giggling assault.
It finally gives up on it’s pride as a warrior of it’s race (and probably a male too) and listenes to it’s self preservation instinct that had been nagging at the back of it’s head all this time.
It extends a pair of thin, transparent wings on it’s back and swipes at it’s opponent to make her back off for a moment. It’s wings flaps so fast the are all but transparent and the noice of this one insect was like an entire beehive moving to a new location.
But the young naga wasn’t ready to part with it’s plaything this soon, it still had legs left! But the question was then, how would she stop it?
Her mother’s genes had gotten the final word in the battle of her appearance, so she didn’t get her fathers wings.
This is where an ancient racial memory leaps into her mind. it’s one of the things that she would <I>know</I>. It wasn’t something you just remembered, it was something programmed into the entire body.
There was a horrible earpiercing screech, like a full set of claws (and since we’re talking about demons here, that a LOT) against a blackboard and the two parents looked up.
At this moment one might think that it was their daughter that was screaming. Nothing solves a young kid’s problems like screaming until the parents get fed up with the noice and fixes it.
But it turns out that she wasn’t. When her parents comes down to investigate, and most probably seriously hurt, the source of the noice they see that she is, in fact, giggling.
The little girl looks up at her parents. “It tried to fly 'way.” She says between fits of giggling. “But I burnt it’s those.” She points at her fathers wings.
“Aww… How cute!” He mother squeals and picks her up. “Her first magic spell.”
Rakadra nods approvingly. “And her first real kill.”
To demons first words and steps aren’t that important since some of them don’t speak and most don’t even walk.
Most of them tend to lurch but the rest crawls, slithers, creeps, float, heck, some even bounce or roll forward but very few actually <I>walk</I>.
And at that moment it starts to rain.
Even though they are in the Nether that shapes itself to fit the wishes and mood of the inhabitants, no picnic is complete unless it is quickly aborted because of the weather so they quckly gathered up their “food”, rolled up the blanket and left.
And for the next memory we will go forward a few “days” in the Nether, but their daughter will be about 10-12 years older, because she didn’t like being a little kid anymore.
A door is slammed open.
In the Underworld doors are only symbolic to show that whoever opens them must either have a good reason for disturbing the privacy of the one behind them, or be prepared to defend themselves.
At the moment Rakadra had a very good reason to open this particular door. His daughter was behind it, and there was a lot of noice coming from behind it.
“WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE UNHOLY ABYSS IS GOING ON IN HERE!?!” He screams, barely making himself heard over the sound that nearly blasted him out of the room as he opened the door.
Apparently his daughter was having a party.
He did recognice Sciel among the faces in the crowd. She was a honorary teenager because her physical age was, at the moment, around 19. The rest are a mix of different female demons. There are succubi, nagas, different hellspawns, and just about anything that can be called female and can party.
“Dad, get out!” His daughter says after lowereing the volume of the music enough to be heard without screaming.
“Not until you lower the volume of that!” He points at the large black object currently sending out a male voice singing: “The moon is full, never seems to change, just labeled mentally deranged.”
“Why should I?” She answers.
“Because I say so!” Rakadra yells.
“And why should I listen to you?” His daughter crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Why don’t you go out fighting with Kevin, or whatever he’s called?”
The music blares on as Rakadra tries not to explode: “Build my fear of what’s out there, cannot breathe the open air.
Whisper things into my brain, assuring me that I’m insane.
Keep him tied, it makes him well. He’s getting better, can’t you tell?”
He obviously failed that attempt. “Now you listen to me Miserie!” He yelled. “If you don’t get these people out of here <I>now</I>, I will.”
Once again there is a short silence in which the music is heard clearly again.
“They see it right, they see it well, but they think this saves us from our heeeeeellllllllllll…
Sanitarium! Leave me be!
Sanitarium!”
At that moment Miserie and the singer had the exactly same thing to say:
“Just leave me alone!”
She’s about to slam the door in Rakadra’s face, but he just extends an arm and smashes the piece of wood to bits.
There is a shocked silence among the guests, but the speakers don’t notice, or, if they did, in the Nether you can never be sure, at least they don’t care. They just keep playing as Rakadra and his daughter have a staredown.
After a long instrumental part the lyrics comes back.
“Fear of living on.
Natives getting restless now.
Mutiny in the air.
Got some death to do.
Mirror stares back hard.
Kill! It’s such a friendly word.”
“You know.” Rakadra says in a dangerously soft voice. “For once I actually like your kind of music. I totally agree with it on that last part.”
And this is when Sciel comes to his daughters rescue. “Aww, come on Rakky. Why don’t you,lighten up a bit?” She smiles. “I remember that you used to be a real party animal when you were that age.”
“Really?” Miserie sounds baffled. “Him? Who’s more boring that his old feud with the beastmen?”
“Sure,” Sciel smiles even wider. “But he was always so shy with the ladies. Did you know that <I>I</I> had to set him up with your mother?”
“Sciel.” Rakadra’s glare freezes the air between them, but she doesn’t care. She just puts a hand on his chest and pushes him backwards.
After that she simply creates a new door, this one made out of black iron.
For a moment Rakadra wonderes how she could have pushed him outside, but then he realizes that the floor had moved a few inches down, while he had stayed in the same place.
He tries reaching out for the thick door, but that only results in a black bolt of lightning leaping at him.
“Damn you Sciel.” He mutters as he leaves the place. “Well, at least my private life seems interesting enough to lower the music. I guess that will do, for now…”
So… Thoughts? Comments? Death threats?