Derin Edala

002: DUTY

Okay. I can deal with this.

Where’s the crew?

- The crew of the Courageous are in Network And Engineering Ring 1. -

Where is NAER 1, in relation to me?

- You are currently in NAER 1. -

I glance around the ring. It isn’t a wide one, so far as javelin rings go (javelins have a truly unnecessary amount of space for the...

4.28: Available Resources

“For those of you who want to go on to be enchanters,” Instruktanto Animus explained, drawing big runes on a board in front of us in broad, sweeping motions, “the extremely difficult and complicated act of actually seating the spell in an object through runework is only the second hardest part of the job. The hardest part of enchanting an object is, of course, getting the spell out of your body in the first place.

001: JAVELIN

There’s a problem with the Javelin Program.

Well, there are probably numerous problems with the Javelin Program. I imagine that constructing several dozen interstellar spaceships, packing them with static humans and launching them in the direction of any remotely viable exoplanet within detection range comes with all kinds of physical, medical and engineering challenges. But I’m not an engineer, so the problem that’s glar...

4.27: Short Cuts

“What are your thoughts on your relationship with your masculinity?” Dr Peterson asked.

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Opened again.

“I… don’t have any thoughts on that,” I admitted. “Why?”

He glanced at his notes. “It is fairly common for boys to find ways to assert their masculinity during childhood and adolescence, but most of the traditional options were closed to you,” he pointed out. �...

4.26: The Chosen Ones

I certainly wasn’t any less angry by the time I’d made it back to my room. I shoved the door open with rather more force than I intended, and Max peered over his bed in concern. “Are you alright?”

“Fine.” There was no point discussing this with Max, he wouldn’t get – except he would, wouldn’t he? For once, Max actually was the person who’d get it. “Did you know what Magistus’ spell does?”

“Magi...

4.25: Not Quite Nightmares

With some finagling, I figured out how to set my alarm to go off at a random time somewhere between two and four hours in the future, and took a dose of Moonlily Dew, a fast-acting sleep potion that I happened to have a large supply of. (Not for myself. I don’t make a habit of taking magical sedatives; seems like a bad habit to get into. But it turns out that if you put a bunch of teenagers somewhere where everything is open 24 hou...

4.24: The Price of Safety

“Do you think we should tell Miratova, though?” Kylie asked between bites of sandwich. “I mean, she’s one person whom I think we can be certain doesn’t want the world to end in a divine apocalypse.” We were picnicking in the valley, nominally because it was a nice day out and a picnic sounded like fun, but really to be out of range of the intranet since Max was still convinced that we might be being spied on, it was impos...

4.23: Social Niceties

“Anything that you particularly want to talk about today?” Dr Peterson asked.

“Nothing important.”

“Oh, so unimportant stuff, then? Great! I love gossip.” He leaned forward and adjusted his pink spectacles.

“Well, the tour with my parents went okay. I just… well. This is going to sound weird. But… I guess it bugs me that it went okay?”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know! I just… t...

4.22: Modelling Accuracy

Okay. Calm down. I’d dealt with scars that didn’t make sense before. I could do this.

I’d start with what I knew. I grabbed some paper and a pen and pulled my bedcurtains closed; I didn’t want to be distracted right now.

Fact 1: at some point, somebody had cut this rune pattern into my chest, with perfect precision and perfect healing.

Fact 2: I didn’t remember any of it.

Fact 3: the rune pattern was...

4.21: Scars

“Peter wants to sign us up for a treasure hunt competition,” Saina said. “Are you up for that?”

We were lying on our backs in a lush, green meadow. I stared up at the wispy white clouds (light, no hint of grey) drifting above and took the time to actually consider the question. I was taking the advice of my therapist, Dr Peterson, and trying to discern what sort of things upset me. Nobody except for my close friends see...

4.20: More Tour

“Anyway,” I said, “that’s the basics. What else do you want to see? The library? My favourite outdoor areas? I could show you my potion workshop. Well, it’s not my workshop, it’s just my favourite and I book it whenever I can.” This was a trick that Fiore had taught me, giving choices. We already had a list of the places we wanted to show my parents and what we wanted to highlight there, but by giving them choices, we c...

Sample chapter -- Child of a Wandering Star

You know the old saying – if your girls can’t diagnose and brace a cross-crystal vertical support beam fracture in a level three shaft by the time they hit adolescence, re-examine your hive’s education system.

The thing was, I could diagnose and brace a fracture, no problem. And so, though I hated to admit it, could Deg. We just couldn’t do it working together.

And we couldn’t do it working together, because Deg...

Sample chapter -- Silverbane

I never would have even gotten involved in the Atlantean vampire ecological crisis if it hadn’t been for my stupid jobseeker requirements.

I mean, I get the logic. If you’re on unemployment, they want you to be trying to get off unemployment, so they make you apply for a certain number of jobs per month; sounds sensible. But it falls apart when the number of jobs you can do in your area that are offered per month are less t...

Sample chapter -- Our Side of the River Styx

We were already hours behind schedule and driving in darkness when I spotted the hitchhiker. Young woman, white dress, pale in the moonlight that shouldn’t be hitting her in the thick shadow of the trees behind her… I recognised what I was looking at immediately.

I nudged my wife, lost in her usual reverie of staring vacantly out of the window. Once upon a time she’d be napping by this point in the journey, but she didn�...

Sample chapter -- Time to Orbit: Unknown

There’s a problem with the Javelin Program.

Well, there are probably numerous problems with the Javelin Program. I’d imagine that constructing several dozen interstellar spaceships, packing them with static humans and launching them in the direction of any remotely viable exoplanet within detection range comes with all kinds of physical, medical and engineering challenges. But I’m not an engineer, so the problem that’s ...

Sample chapter -- Charlie MacNamara

As any decent stargazer will tell you, you can’t do it in the city.  You can’t do it in a town, really, not properly. Too much light  pollution. No, to properly see the stars, you have to wait for a  moonless night and head out far from any electric light source and wait  for your eyes to adjust and then, then you could see the majesty of the  heavens.

I’m a stubborn person, so I had to have casua...

What should I write next?

Now that Curse Words is fully drafted, it's time to choose the next web serial! Descriptions of all options are available in the discord. Poll closes in one month (May 04).

Demo chapters for each story will be released over the course of this month to give you an idea of what each story will be like. Enjoy!

4.19: The Tour

I was nervous. I tugged at the sleeve of my… well, they weren’t my nicest robes, but they were the ones that would look the least weird to nemaganti. My most non-trenchcoat, non-dressing-gown robes.

“What do we do if this doesn’t work?” I asked Fiore.

He shrugged, then resettled Socks, who had grumbled at the sudden movement. “I would imagine that Refujeyo will probably offer them some money.”

“My pa...

SMS text transcript between Daniel Witherford and Alice1.0

16-09-01 09:32 Daniel

Test

16-09-01 09:32 Alice1.0

Mean test scores for St Chiswick’s School of Mercy will increase by 0.53% from 2006 to 2009

16-09-01 09:32 Daniel

HOLY SHIT. HOLY SHIT IT WORKED.

16-09-01 09:32 Alice1.0

A fossilised dinosaur defecation found in early 2002 will be declared �...

4.18: A Meeting of Worlds

“So your family are coming here?” Kylie asked, looking up from her tablet but not bothering to sit up on her bed. “To Refujeyo?”

“Next weekend, yes.”

“Is that even allowed?”

“It must be,” I said. “Fiore used to come by to check on di Fiore, remember? And Max’s, uh… uncle?… came by last semester. So why can’t my parents visit?”

“Is that what you told the staff, to get them to a...

4.17: If A Girl Likes You

“Of course you can take it,” Dr Peterson, my new therapist, said. “But why should you? If you can avoid something painful and completely pointless, it doesn’t seem practical to go through it just for the sake of it.”

Dr Peterson was a short, very round man with a lot of bushy hair under his nose, considerably less on his head, and coke-bottle glasses that were, for some reason, tinted pink. He was proving himself very...

4.16: The Funeral

For Mae and Terry’s friend’s party, I had been told to dress as if I were going to a funeral. According to Max, Refujeyo’s proper funeral colour was white, but one’s own cultural funeral traditions were accepted pretty much anywhere and I preferred wearing black to white, so. I was going in black.

I straightened the collar on my fitted black robes, stared at my reflection, and willed myself to seem ‘dignified funeral ...

4.15: Thought And Feeling

I couldn’t move. My arms and legs were sunk deep into the stone. I felt the magic pulse through me, crystallise around my core, become me. Fragments of the thoughts and dreams and hopes of the creatures who were building me, all coming together to make up the core of my being, building me to their unconscious, generations-long-determined specifications.

I struggled, but the rock held fast. They were still building me, and sti...

Finding Destiny -- monthly bonus snippet

Lydia Nic Fionn gently kissed her sleeping son’s forehead and tucked a stray lock of hair behind one of his ears. He didn’t stir. Luke was seven months old, and like every Nic Fionn for the past decade and a half, his cheek was absent of the blessing of the Faith. They’d thought their spell dead, until the Refujeyo spy showed up.

But now, there was hope.

“Mummy has to go, little flower,” she murmured. “But I�...

4.14: The Child

“Oh,” I said weakly. “Is that all?”

“What do you mean, Kylie?” Max asked.

“Well. This place. Doesn’t it strike you as a bit… weird?”

“Yes,” I said, “in a great many ways. What specific weirdness are we talking about?”

“It’s just… how do you start a place like this? ‘Oh, we’ll build really complicated underground infrastructure, all secret and secure, and trap a bunch of sp...

4.13: The Hero

Max and Kylie both stared at me for several seconds.

Then Kylie threw herself forward and wrapped her arms tightly around my neck.

“This is of course great news,” Max said, “although it does mean that the last few weeks have been rather a waste of time.”

I unwrapped Kylie’s arms so that I could talk. And breathe. “What do you mean?”

“I told you!” Kylie declared smugly. “I told both of you, ...

4.12: Past Performance

“You’re distracted,” Saina noted as I sprinkled powdered liquorice root into a flask with a tiny spoon.

“Just focused,” I lied. I could feel Fionnrath’s Destiny moving throughout my body, and I imagined that I could feel it in my brain, too, eating it away. I didn’t need to be thinking about this; whether I was right or wrong, there was nothing I could do about it. I needed something else to focus on. I needed to ...

4.11: Unlinked

I was feeling normal once again by lunchtime. By nighttime, I was starting to think that the weird mental feeling had just been an overreaction on my part, that maybe I’d just been weirded out by the not-dream and unused to the effects of sedatives. I gave my roommates doses of the Broth of Dreams, and they fell asleep easily.

Which was more than I could do. I lay on my bed, staring at the stone above me, contemplating headin...

Carrying On -- bonus snippet

Gerald James sat rigid in his chair, jaw aching from clenching it too hard and too long. His wife, Alice sat beside him, equally tense. Only Kelsie, strapped to Alice’s chest in a sling, was relaxed, snoring gently away while across the table, the doctor regarded them solemnly.

“Well?” Gerald asked when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

Dr Rodriguez pushed his glasses up his nose. “I’m sorry,” he sai...

4.10: Dream a Little Dream

I skimmed the letter. It said basically what Fiore had.

“Oh, this is really bad timing,” I said. “And bad in general. Fiore, we have to shut this down right away.”

“You don’t want to leave?” he asked again.

“I can’t! Kylie is here!”

“Do they know about the familiarity bond?”

“No, and they absolutely cannot find out. They won’t understand; all they’ll see is something else pu...