Work is still sponging up my time, but I have had a few slots free this week and have been doing a little writing. Just not linked to this stuff.
> Know, o Prince, that between the years when the fires consumed Orichalchus and the gleaming cities and the years of the rise of the doom of nihility there was an age undreamed of, when broken landscapes lay spread across the world like discarded toys beneath the red sun – Shongar, Truvelo, Aspinar, Golgamoria, Umarr with its ancient reptiles and ruins of far antiquity, swamp-curséd Zothar with its mud-dwellers, Xanotu, that led down into the mines of Nashtir, Ur-Vakir with its squid-headed brain eaters, Lost Tavan whose pirates rode lizards that flew; but the most terrible kingdom of the worlds was Abadonn, where the ancient dead ruled supreme.
> Hither came the Lair Legion, displaced, lost, far from home; heroes, scholars, champions, with gigantic burdens and gigantic joys, to tread the jewelled thrones of the earths under their booted feet.
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Oh. One of
those stories.
> “Oh, he’s got one of the strictest codes of all,†Sally argued. “It’s just different than most people’s. But could you see Dream beating up a woman, or cheating a friend, or turning his back on somebody who was hurting, or running away from a bad guy just because he’s going to get killed?â€Â
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Actually, I like this take on Sally.
And - since her stint as Beth's costume proves that she can do clothes - I would be interested in what happens if Sally made herself into a hat and then Jay put her on.
> “You’re only saying that because the exercise is doing you good. All the people I help with exercise threaten me sooner or later.â€Â
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You really are doing thus from life, aren't you?
> The sky raiders spotted the two nubile women down in the forest below and prepared the slave-nets.
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This is going to end well. Especially if Dancer writes it...
> “Wait!†she called. “Don’t break the door down! It’s…â€Â
>
> There was a thunk as Thungore bounced away from the great entrance doors whimpering.
>
> “…made of adamantine,†Marie concluded.
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Nice delayed drop.
> The Lair Mansion’s resident artificial intelligence turned to look curiously at the girl in white. Another part of her mind was correlating the zero success probabilities of a top-rank stunulator targeting program missing this girl three hundred times.
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Is this a good time to recall that they are decapitation devices and only called stunulators for insurance reasons.
It's scary what odd items I have lurking in my memory...
> “Ronald Arnold Gerronimo Besselyhoxtoy, I hereby depute you as an acting Agent of SPUD.â€Â
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It is impossible to see how this could not end badly...
> Samantha wasn’t listening. Instead she was remembering Kerry Shepherdson’s impromptu lecture on Three Easy Ways To Make a Commcard Explode.
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Only three? Does that include switching it on?
> “Hii yaaahh!†shouted the Manga Shoggoth, bursting from the forest to the left. He attempted to do a feet-first manoeuvre from Akira and discovered that physics was once again not co-operating. Instead he tumbled to the floor and rolled spluttering into a crumpled heap.
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Actually, Akira was mostly motorbikes, if I recall. Try "Ranma 1/2".
> “Aren’t we here?†puzzled the Shoggoth, looking round. “Where else would we be?â€Â
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The Shoggoth has a very Granny Weatherwax approach to mapreading...
> He looked admiringly at the tall thin manor built out over the jagged peak. It was of black stone, with steeply climbing slate roofs and a large tower with a copper ball atop it to catch the lightning. It was visible all the way along the valley, but the mud men and the swamp trolls and the prehistoric monsters all knew to stay well away. Flapjack hadn’t been able to resist.
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Needs a spike rather than a ball. Point charges and all that...
> “You’d better come in,†conceded the butler at last. “Walk this way.â€Â
>
> Flapjack did.
>
> “You can wait for the master in the dungeons,†the butler declared, suddenly pulling a large lever that dropped the centre of the room down into the cages beneath.
>
> “Lovely,†agreed Flapjack, falling into the darkness.
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Flapjack has style. Mostly bad style, but style non the less.
> “All the rest are dead by your time,†the Void Scholar pointed out; whereas the girl he intended to suborn as his bride to engender the line that would lead to Liu Xi’s mating with Danny Lyle was somebody Liu Xi knew. “And now we shall return to your studies.â€Â
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And this sounds like it is going to be complex.
> “We’ve found Magweed, daughter of the promised one!â€Â
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When I read that I thought: OK. That's three possibilities...
> “The place has some strange properties alright,†Al B. agreed. “A weak and rotating magnetic field, some huge geological discrepancies like the whole place is a patchwork quilt carved from other places, and an absence of any useable connection to the dimensional substrata or hyperspace.â€Â
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Actually, I started thinking along the lines of a Diskworld (The Strata variant rather than the later one).
