The exercise:
Write something that has to do with: a full moon.
It's remarkable how different work is when the moon is full, as it was today. Particularly when combined with property tax season (deadline is July 2nd, so only a week to go... until people start getting their overdue notices...).
4 comments:
Your comment makes it sound like you work at night, which I'm pretty sure you don't... do you? What changes does the full moon bring then, other than half the town turning into weremoose?
A full moon
Connecting the cables was intricate work as new cable had to be hauled down to the conduits, the old cable stripped out and the new one braided in. Father tried to be helpful but it seemed that he could see less down in the cabling ducts so his voice echoed from distant corridors offering advice where he could, but mostly Danya had to figure it out herself, using diagrams that Father located on the upper floors of the Tower. She tried not to complain about having to climb 30 floors twice when it turned out that the first trip only picked up half what she needed, but it was hard.
As was the cabling, which took nearly two days to get right. But when it was done, when the little red lamps along the duct turned first yellow and then green, and Father congratulated her, she felt a flush of pride and stumbled, exhausted, back upstairs.
"It will take a while for the power to be fully restored," said Father, his voice cool and faintly impersonal just like always. "The reactor was powered down for obvious reasons and it would not be safe to attempt to just move it back to full power in one step. This time tomorrow we shall check on the reactor, and then we shall start distributing the power to the machines below us, and you shall see what else I can do."
That evening though, as Danya stretched and exercised in the light of the full moon in a room at the edge of the fourteenth floor of the Tower, she saw an odd procession approaching. She paused, staring out of the windows, and then squinted. It looked, though she couldn't be certain, as though there were about twenty people being led, hands tied together and then tied to the waist of the person in front of them, by the goblin that had thrown her into this Tower all those years earlier.
"Do you see that, Father?" she asked, pointing. There was a pause, which though she couldn't know it was Father looking at her, working out what direction she must be looking in, and then accessing the external sensors on the Tower that still functioned. Repairing them was on his list of things for Danya to do, but so far it hadn't been a priority.
"I do," said Father after a longer pause than she was expecting. "Only one of them is carrying a weapon, but it is hard to determine intent. They may all be hostile. You should stay on this floor."
Danya watched the procession from the window, and after a little while remembered that the Tower had portable cameras that allowed the viewer to zoom in, and went and fetched one. When she could see the faces in the procession more clearly, she gasped. Her brother, older now but still recognisable, was there, as was her father. Her mother though, and she checked through the queue several times, was missing.
"Not hostile," she said. "Well, maybe the goblin is. But I know some of these people."
"We will not take chances," said Father.
When the procession reached the door of the Tower the goblin, now grayed and hunched but still of the same disposition, shuffled around in a parody of his former dance and started to sing the song that offered the people to the Tower. Before he reached the end of the first line there was a sharp zapping sound and a thin, pink-ish beam of light shot out from the Tower and struck the goblin between the eyes. He tottered and then collapsed, a little black blood and smoke rising from the hole the beam left behind. Then the Tower door opened and Danya stepped out, just a little hesitantly, wearing the Kevlar body armour that Father had insisted on and so looking for all the world like some kind of armoured lord or knight.
"Come in," she said, wondering if her voice sounded as strange to them as it did to her. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Come in, and make yourselves at home."
What is that bright light shining in the sky?
I must alert -- it's too bright, something's wrong.
Why does human think all is well?
I shall bark at it.
Why is human mad at barking?
Something's wrong.
I must say how scary the bright light in the sky is.
Greg - the weremeese are significantly more ridiculous than the usual moosefolk we deal with. Like, without fail, the crazies come out with their bizarre logic and complaints and refusal to understand logical explanations.
Like, even more than usual.
I have a friend who worked as a lab tech in a hospital in Vancouver. He always said every full moon was an adventure, as the crazies arrived at the hospital every time.
Uh, that ending to your first post is rather ominous. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Okay, that wasn't how I was expecting that to go. Good riddance to the goblin, obviously, and I am hopeful for a happy (partial) family reunion. It's been long enough that I can't remember much of her family, but I hope her mother is absent for a... not unhappy reason.
Morganna - hah, this makes a lot of sense, actually. Can always count on good dogs trying their best to be good dogs.
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