lagilman | It's Monday

It's Monday. It's snowing, the kind of snow you get in the Spring - large wet flakes that just make you tired to look at. The cats are kvetchy and needy but not in any apparent distress (so long as I don't move).

I have no obligations of the social kind until Wednesday, and then nothing again until Friday.

I have about ~~10,000~~ ~~8,000~~ ~~6,000~~ ~~4,500~~2,800 words to write this week, and ~~an outline to revise.~~

*periscope down*

But, first, a snippet from the WiP :

I was prepared to bribe, if needed; we had a slush fund for that, not all of it in cash – but the par-gnome beat me to it, placing one large hand square on the top of Og’s head, and pushing down with obvious threat. “Talk, or I eat your brains for breakfast,” he said.

I was pretty sure that wasn’t an idle threat. From the way Og’s eyes rolled up in his head, he was, too.

“Whispers. Not even whispers. Loud thinking, maybe.” He squirmed a little under the weight of the hand, then shrugged, all pretense of resistance going out of him. “I hear talk in the Greening. The piskes talk. Humans, too many humans. All hours, sleeping and eating and shitting there.”

“A full campsite?” Times were tough, yeah, but I didn’t think the local politicos would allow an actual shantytown to go up in Central Park.

It’s tough to shrug when you’re being squished from above, but Og did his best. “Whispers. They hide, but they are not good enough to hide from piskies.”

Piskies were the Cosa Nostradamus’ official gossips – tiny, inquisitive, borderline rude pranksters who didn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘privacy’ and wouldn’t have cared if they did. The looked a bit like one of those old-style kewpie dolls crossed with a squirrel, or maybe a mouse lemur – big eyes, grasping claws, fluffy tail and a topknot of hair that came in colors that should not be seen in nature. Most of the Cosa Nostradamus despised them, but people I respected – namely Wren Valere and Ian Stosser – listened very carefully if a piskie spoke to them.

The only problem was getting one of them to talk to you, rather than prank.

“A campsite of humans in Central Park,” I repeated, to make sure that I wasn’t misunderstanding.

“Children-humans,” Og corrected me. “That was why the piskies whispered. “Young humans. They thought they might play with them but they threw pine cones and rocks and drove them away, instead.”

The pronoun abuse in that sentence nearly gave me a headache, but I was able to follow it. “The children drove the piskies away. They didn’t want to be found.”

That meant that there had to be at least one Talent in the group, or someone familiar enough with the Fatae to know that either the piskies weren’t a hallucination – a common enough belief – or that if you were trying to keep a low profile, you did not invite piskies to hang around.

“No adults?”

Og rolled his yellowing eyes up at me again. “How should I know? I only know what piskies whisper and they’re piskies.”

Valid point. The fact that they liked to gossip did not mean that they got the facts straight, or wouldn’t embellish or pare down to make the story more interesting.

“Enough?” the par-gnome asked, and I nodded. He let up his hand, and Og popped up like a cork, glaring at me like it was all my fault his rounded scalp had gotten polished.