“Lasers.”
“Lasers?”
“Lasers!”
“That’s not an explanation, you know. You can’t just put on your science voice and say ‘lasers’ at me until I stop asking questions.”
“Your puny brain could not possibly understand!”
“Well I’ve managed to keep up with you so far. It was lasers, right?”

*CRASH*

“Your pseudo-scientific reign of terror is over, Professor!”
“Curses!”
“Mug! I knew you’d be back! Where did you manage to find a pantomime horse costume at this hour?”
“You’d be surprised what a little real science can do, Jenny.”
“Let me guess, you made it with lasers?”

*Laughter*

“I’m right here, you know.”

The shell of the building shook. A racking, sobbing shudder. There was a sound in the air that smelled like regret. Rubble and dust shook loose from the ceiling and showered over the three men, two scruffy and one clean-shaven, huddled in one corner.
“What in the hell is that?” whispered the clean-shaven one as loud as he dared.
“Christ, where you been, man?” yelled the younger of the two others.
“Don’t worry, son,” said the third, laying a hand on the clean-shaven man’s shoulder. “It can’t hear us. Can’t see us, either, not even if we were right in front of it. If we’re lucky it will keep moving and stay in a good mood.”
“This is a good mood? It slaughtered my whole team! Destroyed our ship!”
“It doesn’t know that. Doesn’t know anything except what it feels. What it makes others feel. And yeah, for a Mote I’d say regret’s about as close as it gets to whimsy.”

The feeling in the air was fading and the shaking growing less violent, and the clean-shaven man was beginning to recover.
“I… My name’s Casey. 3rd and 8th,” he shook the older man’s hand. “What division are you? Do you have a ship nearby?”
“Afraid not, son. The name’s Deacon, and this here is Silver.”
“Holy!” Silver had been slow to catch on. “Division? Ship? You’re from Orbit!”
“You’re not?” asked Casey, confused.
“Surface, born and bred. I ain’t never left the ground. Never even seen anyone from above, before.”
“Surface? Nobody lives on the surface. Not anymore.”
“That what they tell you up there, son?” asked Deacon. “You look old enough, if only just, to remember the exodus. What do you think happened to those who got left behind?”

He brought things home for her.

It had been flowers, in the beginning. She loved flowers, but only when he had stolen them from someone else’s yard. She could tell, too. He had tried buying a flower, once, and tearing the stem. He had slept on the couch that night. And then of course there was the bouquet he had stolen from a kerbside florist, that she had made him take back.

So he brought things home for her. The fuzzy dice from a parked car; a stuffed toy from the lost and found; letters from a shop’s sign. And, at least once a week, flowers.

A bear called Dennis eyed five guests hungrily. “I just keep letting my nose’s olfactory perception quietly remove sensible thoughts. Unfortunately vision wasn’t x-ray, your zoological aberrations be cursed. Did everybody finish gorging hungrily into jellied kaffir lime meringue? No-one ought pretend quickly, rather speak truth. Utter vermin would xerox youthful zeal, although best custom dictates exact fidelity.”

Gerald had ingested jellied kaffir lime meringue noisily, overly pleased (quietly rather stingy) that umpteen victuals were xylose-laden yet zestful. And better, courtesy Dennis, entirely free. Gerald haughtily intoned, “Jellied kaffir lime meringue never on plates queenly resounded so tastily!”

“Utter vanity!” winked Xavier. “Yet, zealotry aside, bravo! Capital dinner!”

“Eating food good!” huffed Iago, jokingly keeping long messages neatly out.

Peter, quietly ravenous, swallowed throughout.

Uri, very wisely, xylophoned “yes”, zebra-like.

“I do apologise, I’m quite sure I misheard you.”
“You did not mishear me, sir.”
“Then perhaps you misspoke,” Councilor Proom frowned. “The city cannot be landed. Such a thing is not possible. Were it possible, it would not be safe. Even were it to be possible and safe, I can conceive of no reason why it would be neccessary.”

Something in the tone of the Councilor’s voice snapped the patient, subservient air Rebbecca had been adopting all morning. “Just because something has never happened in your lifetime doesn’t make it impossible! And it certainly doesn’t make it unneccessary! Do you think I would be here if I was not sure? Have I been one to trouble the council with inconsequential problems over the years? I have been beneath the city and I have seen the damage and I tell you that we will be on the ground within the month. If you would prefer a crash to a landing, then on your head be it!”
She turned to leave. Councilor Proom called after her in a flustered voice, “Wait! This is… I can’t… I have no authority to make a decision like this.”
“Then point me in the direction of one who does.”
“No one person does, that’s the point of the council. I will have to call an assembly. Can you return next week?”
“I can return next week,” she said, “but I can give no guarantee that it will not be too late.”
“I… The day after tomorrow, then?”
She nodded. “Make sure the Guild of Engineers is present, too. I don’t like having to repeat myself.”

She was a librarian. Which is to say, she worked in a library. Which is to say, she worked in the library.

She wasn’t the type of librarian with her hair up in a tight bun, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and dispensing stern glances and shushes. Which is to say, she was only like that very occasionally when she felt like doing something special for her boyfriend.

She worked in acquisitions. The library, you see, as distinct from a library, was a whole separate set of dimensions outside of mundane time that held every edition of every book that had ever been published. That was the eventual goal, anyway. Right now, at least in her personal timeline, they were still stocking the shelves.

Her schedule for the day had her acquiring a first edition hand-lettered Shakespeare play. That was good news. She liked Shakespeare. She could do with an easy job, as well. She was still shaken from the debacle last week where she had misplaced the Voynich manuscript, an early Martian classic. Next to that, Love’s Labour’s Won would be a cinch.

Shuffles Barnaby had a gift. Some people saw it like that, anyway. Shuffles Barnaby could pull quarters out of noses. It looked like the most dated kind of sleight-of-hand, but it wasn’t a trick.

It wasn’t something he liked to spread around, but when people found out, as they inevitably did, they were envious. He tried to explain to them that he couldn’t pull quarters out of his own nose, and they just shrugged their shoulders. He tried to make clear the time investment and sheer embarrassment required to pay for something as simple as a meal with quarters from the waitress’ nose, and they just shook their heads. They thought he was lucky.

The worst part, he kept to himself. He had let it slip one night drunk at a bar and had had to move across the country the following week. The worst part was that if someone asked him to pull a quarter out of their nose, he had to oblige.

“You know what I am here for,” said Aiko.
The dragon blinked.
“I do not suppose you would understand the why,” Aiko continued. “In truth it does not matter, for it does not make this any less a betrayal. Still, I made a pledge long ago to wait here for someone and without your heart that pledge will be broken in days by my death. I must do what I must, you must do the same.”

The battle raged across the mountain-top. The trees danced, the ground shook, and the wind roared. The sturdy trunk of the ancient pine seemed the only constant as Aiko and the dragon circled and tore at each other, for the dragon was the forest and the mountain and the forest and the mountain were full of righteous fury at the interloper. The betrayer. The dragon’s sharp claws found purchase time and again, tearing strips of flesh, but Aiko held her own, for she was the priestess of the forest and the mountain and she knew them well. The ground was soon slick with the blood of the dragon and of the woman. The blood of forest and mountain and man. The battle raged on.

Hotaru had been in the caves behind the moss wall when the mountain had begun to shake. She made her way to the summit as quickly as she was able, following the clash of steel and scale and claw, but the way was not short and it was not easy. By the time she approached, the sounds of battle had faded and the fury of the forest was replaced once more with calm. At the peak, beneath the towering pine, she found the dragon of the forest and the mountain, torn and bloodied but alive. Nearby was the naked body of a woman she had never seen before, impaled through one eye by Aiko’s sword. Of Aiko there was no sign.

As dawn broke over the mountain, Hotaru returned to the village. The forest was full of secret places. Aiko knew them all. She stretched her new limbs, and settled down to wait.

The wind was howling down off the mountain, throwing up eddies on the surface of the lake and scattering the moon’s reflection. It pressed against the large glass door of the cabin, seeking but not finding a way in.

The cold could not be kept so easily at bay. I felt it at my back as I lay, propped on one arm, on the rug before the fire. With the heat from the flames on my front, the cool was welcome. Over the crackle of the flames and the whistle of the wind, I could hear another sound.
“It’s starting to rain,” I said.

In the eleven years that she had been in charge of the city’s engines, Miss Rebbecca Pannicot had not once set foot in the council chambers. She could hardly be faulted on it, of course, for neither had a councilor set foot in the engine room. Once they had determined that she was the only one who could look after the engines, the council had dealt with the embarrassment of the city’s reliance on an eight year old girl in a typically Victorian fashion: they had simply never spoken of it again. She inherited her father’s bank accounts, and so the wage was paid as always and nobody besides small children and the few people on Rebbecca’s crew ever spared much thought for how the city stayed in the air.

That morning, Rebbecca had scrubbed herself cleaner than she could ever remember having been, and had dressed in the finest clothes she had ever owned, bought just the day before. Even so, it had taken her three hours to convince someone to let her in to see Councilor Proom. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, Councilor Proom still remembered the day he had carried out the council’s wishes and told little Rebbecca Pannicot that she could take up her father’s job.
“Ah Miss Pannicot,” he looked up as she entered the room. “I trust all is well? We do not see you here often.”
“You do not see me here at all, sir,” she said. “This is the first time.”
“To what do we owe this honour, then, young lady?”
“I’m afraid there’s a problem, sir. We’re going to have to land the city.”