(Originally written 4/6/09)

Saturday night found Leo and Jesse contemplating a takeout food menu that Jesse had rescued from the backseat of his car. Had it been earlier in the quarter, Leo probably would have rounded up some friends for beer pong, but he’d procrastinated enough on his midterm paper all week, and it was time to get cracking. Jesse, as usual, had been working studiously in his room—she had a midterm and a project due in the coming week, although neither prevented her from making snide comments at him all day. Not that he minded, really. Besides, she willing agreed when he suggested grabbing dinner and stocking up on caffeine for the night.

She shuffled through some more junk in his backseat, handing him things as she found them. “Here’s another menu,” she offered, tossing another folded pamphlet into his lap. “Also, this is disgusting.” She surfaced with a plastic cup in hand, its contents discolored and molding. “I think this was once a milkshake. I thought you usually brought shit like this inside.”

Leo grimaced at the sight, then the smell. “Toss that outside, would you?”

“Fuck you, I’m not your slave.”

“No. You’re my bitch. Go throw it away.”

Throwing him a nasty look, she opened the passenger side door and tossed the cup in the nearest trash. Upon returning, she reached over and wiped her hands on his shirt.

“Hey!” he exclaimed, slapping her hand away halfheartedly.

“You deserve it, you little—” They deteriorated into a slapping match, but it ended quickly once Jesse managed to shove a menu down his shirt and he had to go fishing after it.

“Hey, that was the good one…” he said, head inside his shirt.

“Which one was it?”

“The Thai place on University,” he answered, pulling the menu free. “There’s no parking close by though…”

“I’m starving. Let’s just go. We can park somewhere and walk—you know, use your feet, you lazy ass.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “What do you want?”

Frowning, she scrutinized the menu for about ten seconds, then covered her eyes and pointed at the page. “That,” she said, eyes still covered.

“You just pointed to the ‘Ginger Delight.’ You sure you want that?”

“What the fuck is a ginger delight?”

“No idea. I’m ordering a pad thai for you,” he said, dialing the number.

(Originally written 10/9/08)

Etienne found himself at Mira’s room far sooner than expected. He hadn’t thought of anything to say yet—no excuses, no ploys, no plans—nothing to hide the fact that he had been sent to see her. But something inside him had fluttered at the thought of spending time in her company, and he was happy to be here. Why complicate things with deception when the truth remained that he just wanted to say hello?

Her door was open, the light from the windows filling the room and spilling out into the dim hallway. He could see the silhouette of the vase of chrysanthemums he’d brought her a few days after she woke up. They had started drooping slightly, but still looked presentable enough. He’d have to remember to bring her new flowers next time.

From the doorway, it looked exactly like Elizabeth and Olivier had described. Mira was sitting up in bed, a notebook open in her lap as she stared out the window, no writing utensil in sight. Etienne leaned against the doorframe, watching her eyes make little movements while she twisted and laced her fingers together absentmindedly. Her eyes had dark circles under them, but her expression was—as always—thoughtful and vibrant. She was thinking, maybe a little too hard and a little too much. Maybe he just needed to help her think about something else.

He knocked on the open door. She looked over at the door and smiled to see him there.

“Hi,” he said quietly.

“Hey,” she answered.

“Writing?” he asked, taking a step into the room.

She shook her head, but beckoned him in anyway. “Reading something,” she explained, gesturing to the notebook.

For a split second, he considered pulling up a chair—but he changed his mind and sat on the edge of her bed. He could see her handwriting filled the pages in front of her. Her hands played along the sides of the notebook like ballet dancers fluttering across a stage.

(Originally written 10/8/08)

Etienne was sitting at his desk, reading the first newspaper from Jean-Pierre’s team, when Elizabeth sidled in. Thinking Elizabeth would say something to get his attention, he didn’t look up at first. After he finished the main article though, he looked over and saw that she was still hovering in the doorway and biting her lip.

She looked tired. No one in the League had much experience with healing magic—only Elizabeth, with a vague recollection of anatomy lessons from her doctor brother and with the help of the handful of non-mage doctors, could do much of anything for those injured in the last battle for Paris. And with Mira’s paralysis on top of everything else, Elizabeth hadn’t gotten much sleep lately.

Etienne folded the newspaper and set it aside. “What’s the matter?” he asked gently.

Elizabeth sighed and folded herself into a sitting position on the couch, hugging one knee to her chest. Etienne thanked some celestial being that she wasn’t the hysterical type of person, because her expression implied controlled hysteria. He let her sit there for a moment before asking again.

“Elizabeth, what’s the matter?”

She bit her lip again. “I know you’re busy…” she started.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, standing and pouring her a glass of water. “What do you need?”

She took the glass delicately, and took a short sip. “It’s Mira.” She inhaled sharply. “I can’t spend much time with her, but I’ve noticed she hasn’t been sleeping.”

Etienne seated himself in the plush reading chair across from the couch. “Insomnia,” he sighed. “She’s bed-ridden; what does she do?”

“I’m not really sure,” she answered, massaging her temples in slow circles. “Sometimes she just stares out the window. I’ve seen a notebook in her lap a few times, but Olivier noticed that it’s usually open to a blank page, but she never has anything to write with. No pencil or pen, just an empty page.”

He sat back and ran a hand through his hair. “So what can I do?”

“I don’t know,” she groaned and rested her cheek on her knee. Her hair fell across her cheek, but she didn’t bother to tuck it back. “She’d talk to you,” she muttered through the veil of hair.

“And talking would make her sleep?” he asked.

“Who knows? I’m out of ideas.”

He stood up, went over to the couch, and knelt in front of her. Resting his hand gently on her shoulder, he whispered, “Get some rest. I’ll take care of Mira, alright?”

“You better,” she said mock-menacingly.

Smiling suddenly, he grabbed her and tried to throw her over his shoulder. She shrieked and tried to kick out against him, but he was stronger. With Elizabeth still flailing in his arms, Etienne managed to get through the doorway. He ran down the hallway laughing, Elizabeth screaming bloody murder all the while and pounding at whatever body part of his she could see. Several doors opened, and their residents called out words of encouragement to Etienne or Elizabeth, mixed in with miscellaneous obscenities for disturbing the quiet.

Finally they reached Elizabeth’s room, which was unfortunately locked, so the only other option was Olivier’s room across the hall. Poor Olivier, staring through the open doorway at the two of them in sheer terror, couldn’t think fast enough to slam the door closed before Etienne had dumped Elizabeth on his bed. She was still shrieking and flailing wildly, hoping to kick him by chance.

“Your girlfriend,” announced Etienne with flourish, backing away from the tangle of sheets under which Elizabeth was trapped. “Make sure she gets some rest.”

A/N Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned before that most (if not all) of these writing snippets come from a Microsoft Word document that lives on my computer. I started it in November 2006, when I first started writing the Jade League. The idea was to have somewhere to write anything and everything, without really worrying about how terrible it might be. It was also a place to test out young ideas, especially after working on the Gathering for the better part of 3 years.

In August 2008, after 21+ months of haphazard writing, that first document reached 50 pages and the scrolling got out of hand, so I moved out into a new document. Around then I sifted through all the wreckage of the first document and pulled out some good snippets to post on here. I finished off that new document, “Parting Pigeons, volume 2,” in early February of this year (18 months), and it’s time to sift through that all. There are a lot of unfinished stories, along with a healthy dosage of me wrestling with my own personal issues through fiction. Regardless of intent, they’re all going to get slapped around and shoved on here.

As I wrote to myself in volume 1: “Forgive the extra stuff that leads to the better stuff and we’re all good.” So, once again, bear with me while this blog vomits up some writing.

She found him hovering over a dead jellyfish on the beach. He didn’t look nineteen, even dressed like the surfer jocks that swarmed the beach on weekends. Instead his lanky arms trailed behind him as he squatted on the sand poking the limp pile of slimy gel, and his hair was dark with seawater and smeared with beige sand. But his eyes held such childish wonder, as if everything in his very full nineteen years were constantly forgotten and all that was left was a skinny, wide-eyed boy prodding a dead jellyfish gingerly with a splinter of driftwood.

“Andrew,” she called to him, smiling when the turn of his head flipped a section of hair straight up in the breeze. “They’re about to go get groceries,” she told him, standing a few feet back from him and his treasure.

He ignored her words and turned back to the jellyfish. “Check this out,” he said. With a deft hand, he lifted a gelatinous tentacle with the driftwood. “If you look under here, we can expose the space under the bell margin–”

Cautiously, she took a step closer. “Gross.”

“And look, if we lift this out of the way — you wouldn’t happen to have a knife or something, would you?” She shook her head. “Well you can kinda see the eyespots under here and I think the gonads are those dark spots up here.” He motioned with a finger. “We should take this up to the lab!” He looked up at her again with those curious wide eyes.

“Don’t look at me, I’m not touching it.”

“You don’t touch it, silly. We’d bring it up on driftwood or something.” He straightened, stretching his neck a little. “You know, for a biologist, you’ve got a low tolerance for slime.”

“Yeah, well for a computer scientist, you sure know a lot about slime.”

He smiled up at her innocently, and for a moment, she forgot they weren’t kids again.

A/N: random. No idea who these characters are.

(A/N: squeezing my head back into high school/Roosevelt mindset. Haven’t written Archipelago class in a while…)

Erica was excellent at ignoring the frat boys who were making catcalls as they passed her. She had purposely poised herself here, standing in a dark green bikini top and white board shorts, hair sloppily gathered in a loose bunch, and a volleyball resting on her hip with her slender wrist perched atop to keep it in place. She loved torturing boys like this, staring casually forward when all they wanted was for her to shoot them an annoyed glance. But they’d never get that satisfaction—not from her.

“…Rocklin 245, Stanford Quad East. Florin 412, Stanford Law. Davis 913, Stanford East Residences. Penryn 361, Stanford Row Residences. Penryn 768, Stanford South Residences…”

I stood at attention next to Gabe as the assignments went on. Our unit would be checking foundations and building integrity in the residences in the southern part of the former university’s expansive campus; Annilea’s would be doing the same in the residences on the fraternity row. The university had already taken everything of historical or scientific importance with them when they moved underground, so all we needed to do was check the buildings themselves. The rain had stopped, but most of the streets were flooded—we’d be slogging around knee-deep in water all day.

The southern part of campus, which borders on the row, is uphill from the rest of campus, and the water damage was minimal. Annilea’s unit stopped for lunch at the same time as mine did, strained by the monotonous work. Annilea found me at the old lakebed, a huge depression in the ground just like Gus Pengel described it. A soggy mess of grasses bordered the small lake that had gathered in the middle of it from the rain.

“Hey,” said Annilea gently as she came up behind me.

“Hi,” I replied, turning to look at her. Her tone was soft, too soft.

She bit her lip, something she only does when she’s struggling between two conflicting emotions. “It’s not there.”

I turned to face her. “What isn’t?”

Her jaw clenched. “Jigsaw. It’s not where he said it would be.”

Frowning, I reached out to touch her elbow. “Maybe we just missed something. I mean, look. The lakebed is here.”

She nodded slowly. “When we’re done, will you look with me?”

I slung my arm over her shoulders. “Of course.”

Our units finished the rest of the buildings before sunset, so Annilea and I stayed behind to embark on our own quest. The air got colder as the sun slipped closer to the horizon, and with it the rain began falling again—a light mist at first, but soon beat down in earnest. Annilea and I pulled on ponchos and shone our flashlights around at the buildings that lined the street. Soon the shadows began playing tricks on our eyes, the darkened lampposts turning into ghosts of students who once roamed this campus, of Gus Pengel and his friends. Finally the rain and cold were too much, and we decided to return to the command center.

Later that night, I sat staring out the window at the rain, absently peeling an orange and letting the citrus smell surround me. I saw Annilea’s reflection approach before I heard her footsteps.

“It’s not there, Xan,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“We looked everywhere. And I checked the maps, the SSF Digital Archives, the University’s logbook—it’s not there. It never was.”

I swallowed hard. “But Pengel…”

“Xan. It’s not there.”

Her words drifted out of comprehension. I just kept staring out the window, letting my eyes follow the weary paths of raindrops on the glass.

What if none of it was true?

In Spanish, lagunita means little lake, so really when we refer to the lake on Stanford’s campus as Lake Lagunita, we’re being redundant. But we like that irony, just as we like the fact that eight months out of the year, Lake Lag is nothing more than a grassy, dry depression in the ground.

The legend goes that Leland Stanford dug out the whole thing, about a mile in circumference, and ran a herd of cattle through the bottom to compact the dirt—only the have the lake start leaking a hundred years later. For years they filled the lake by bringing in water from elsewhere, fighting a losing battle with an increasingly porous lakebed; and supposedly some biologists realized that filling the lake with water interfered with the mating patterns of a particular species of salamander. I’m pretty sure the salamanders have their own designated crossing under the main road that runs along Stanford’s southern end, so really it’s just the lakebed leaking that keeps the university from using our tuition on trying to fill a lake faster than it empties itself.

We had a big Jigsaw reunion in the Lake Lag last summer. Deanna packed a picnic for sixty, and we all ate in the California sunshine on blankets and beach towels laid over the dry, prickly grasses in the lakebed. A couple of us started a game of Ultimate Frisbee—and while I pitied Leland Stanford and his herd of cattle for their futile pursuit of a lake, I was glad for the meadow they’d created for just such an occasion.

The ride to the surface is always a little anticlimactic. Basically it’s me and the twelve others in my unit crammed into an elevator with all our gear, twiddling our thumbs as we ascend. But emerging from the tunnel and stepping out into the blinding sunlight makes that ride worth it.

Today’s was extra pathetic—we re-routed from the station nearest the barracks to a station on the peninsula with an ancient elevator that crept upwards like the lift at the old people’s home where my grandparents live. We were deployed from standby to assist with flooding control along the San Francisco Bay—not nearly as dangerous as the last standby, but we still don’t know our complete orders.

Captain Aarons, our unit commander, went up the tunnel first to check conditions while we unloaded the lift. “Rain gear, kiddos,” he said, shaking his head as he came back down the tunnel. “We’re not rainwalkers for nothing.”

We donned ponchos and shouldered our packs, trudging up the tunnel in single file. The tunnel sloped up gently, lined on both sides by garish yellow lights that confused our shadows into shattered triangles on the pavement. I could smell the rain as we neared the exit, could feel the fresh draft of rainfall. The thirteen of us plus extra equipment had been crammed into the rail transport for longer than usual—the clear air put energy back in our footsteps.

We surfaced under pouring rain. It beat at our hoods and within seconds a rivulet of rainwater started dripping off the tip of my nose. We were next to an old railroad track that crossed a major road a few hundred meters from the tunnel entrance. Low buildings and warehouses blocked any view of more cross streets along the road, which had flooded and led water over the curbs to the glass storefronts. Across the tracks, a heavy line of trees and shrubs stood over the water, extending in both directions. A unit captain I didn’t recognize greeted Aarons and motioned for us to follow over a walkway made from sandbags and boards, and up the stairs to an old office building they’d turned into a makeshift command center.

The moment we stepped through the doors out of the rain, Gabe and I were jumped in such a flurry it took me a moment to realize it was Annilea.

“You’re here!” she exclaimed, not caring how wet our ponchos were as she smothered us both in a relieved hug.

“Anni,” managed Gabe, “I’m carrying around thirty kilos of gear here.”

“Sorry…”

She released us and helped us carry our gear inside. We piled the restock bags in the designated area, and dumped our own bags in our assigned corner. The rest of our unit settled in, but Annilea pulled me aside.

“Xan. Do you know where we are?”

I shrugged. “The peninsula?”

She shook her head. “Palo Alto. Across the tracks from Stanford.”

I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Stanford. Gus Pengel. This is where it all happened… I stood within a two-kilometer radius of everything in his book. Close enough to touch. To see with my own eyes.

When I was sixteen, my dad and I went on a road trip seeking as many forms of energy production as we could find. Driving through a good portion of Arizona, Nevada, and California, we hit most of the major forms of power plants that exist: huge smokestacks of the traditional fossil-fuel burning plant; sweeping hillsides of pointy windmills in the Tehachapi Pass; gallons and gallons of water pressing up against concrete, just waiting to rush past turbines at the Hoover Dam; fields of blank, staring solar panels sunbathing in the desert of north of Las Vegas; and even a small plant growing algae in long glass tubes for biofuel.

But our most mind-bending stop was in Los Alamos, New Mexico. At sixteen I’d learned about the Manhattan Project and the research they’d done here while racing Russia to the nuclear bomb. I’d also learned the mechanisms of nuclear fission and fusion, but until we started touring the visitor center, I never fully appreciated the elegant and dangerous power of a nuclear reactor. Somehow I doubt that anyone on a wind farm ever accidentally dropped one compound into another to inadvertently create an unshielded mass of raw power—and in the case of a few unfortunate individuals, so powerful that they died of radiation poisoning not two weeks later.

All in the name of science. I hope to God I won’t injure myself in making my groundbreaking discovery.