I haven’t used Blender in a while, but decided to make a render of my old “The Inquisition Is Ever Vigilant” poster. I also think I may have made a grammar mistake in the original, so the text has changed to “We are Ever Vigilant” instead.
I will not tell where I was born – let the fact that it was a surface village of the League be enough. As a citizen of the League, I sat through the endless classes on being a good citizen. We were taught that everyone must pull their weight in the League for the common good. To Leave No Feartollán Behind. I went to Mass like everyone else. I attended the Civil Defence training sessions, even as my parents struggled to pay the levies and tithes to support the militias. I planned to become a nurse.
None of it made the slightest difference. One of Connacht Trading’s security guardsmen accused me of being a thief and a Fomorian sympathiser, and everybody I knew turned a blind eye as he removed me from my home without a trial. Just like that.
Continue reading “Fomorians In Their Own Words: Ms S.”
Now available from BuyMeACoffee!
My second short story collection is now live, both on this site and on Buy Me A Coffee.
“Hey, Red!”
Diarmuid morosely looked up from the lukewarm sink that held two stained metal plates, and narrowed his eyes as he beheld the stocky younger boy with the fangs and green patches of skin next to the draining board. “What is it, Grady?”
“Me name’s Tomás. Nurse said you could use a hand.”
“I could. And mine’s Diarmuid. Not Red, or Red-Eyes, or freak…” he trailed off with an irritable sigh. Grady briefly exposed more of his fangs as his mouth silently worked, before he picked up a tea-towel and began to wipe the plate that lay on the draining board. For a few minutes, neither spoke as Diarmuid focussed on scrubbing the plates and tried to ignore the sidelong glances the other boy gave him. Eventually, he couldn’t take it any more.
“Go on…you want to say something, just get it out.”
Continue reading “Washing-up Wrangling”Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! But what about that of the Dwarven League?
The knock on the door was something that Colonel Munro had been expecting for the last five or ten minutes, after the telephone on his desk had warned him that the visitors had arrived at the inner security checkpoints. Closing the pair of dossiers and the report that lay on his desk, he looked up and barked a command to enter. His adjutant swung the door open, announcing that the visitors from the Containment Office had arrived.
“Send them in, Cole. And have somebody fetch Dr Magnusson,” Munro ordered, standing up. The lieutenant withdrew and stepped aside, revealing a pair of nuns who were both clad in dark khaki habits. The one on Munro’s right was just about four feet high, with larger eyes and a pair of sun goggles dangling around her neck – clearly a woman of the tunnels. The other one was apparently human and, with far fewer lines on her face, appeared to be younger. Neither bore any obvious sign of a particular order, but they didn’t need to.
Continue reading “The Dwarven Inqusition Comes…”
Here’s a couple of artwork pieces I’ve been working on for Connacht Disaster Zone. One is a logo for a dwarven organisation that is responsible for investigating “Fomorian infiltration” in the areas immediately surrounding the disaster zone, and the second below the fold is one of their propaganda posters.
I’m not 100% sure on the grammar of this, but this translates roughly as “Office of Containment”. They’re effectively a secret police organisation under the auspices of the dwarven church, with a fair amount of authority (and some friction with other units). I’m planning to add a few stories that involve them.
I had the original image completed a week ago, following this GIMP tutorial, and most of the intervening time has spent been trying to figure out a name for the unit. All of them were longer and more haphazardly spelled; I’ve occasionally joked that the first person to write Irish down must been severely dyslexic.
Gráinne was bored. Outwardly, her expression didn’t change as she stared out the window, absently watching the waves in the bay, but she was still feeling peevish about being chased out of the library earlier that morning. Sure, her mother and father-in-law needed to discuss something in quiet with Aidan, but did it really have to be when she had just curled up in the armchair? And it wasn’t her shift on the wireless scanning rota, so she couldn’t even make herself useful by listening to the enciphered messages that Aidan suspected were coming from somewhere named Cruagh Island.
Her train of thought didn’t so much leap as make a sharp right-hand turn into wondering who they were meant for, and if it was possible to reach across the sea with these radio waves. Not the immediate one between Cleggan and Inishbofin, but the wider sea out towards North America. And if so, could they reach the other side of the world…and if so, could they be used to send something other than dotted bleeps and dashed creeps?
Continue reading “Fomorian Fantasies of the Future”This is a follow-up to In Which The Kingdom of Scandinavia Plans To Troll The British Navy. I had originally planned to have a crate of guns be discovered on a beach somewhere, and have the police/soldiers who found it speculate on who put them there. However, when reading about Joseph McCarthy for some reason (I blame TV Tropes!), I noticed that both Truman and Eisenhower made snarky comments about how he might as well be an asset of the Soviets, given how irrational he made attempts to root out Soviet spies in the American government look.
Apparently, the KGB shared a very similar opinion to Truman and Eisenhower. Between that and the mess that is the last few years, it occurred to me that a similar politician might be a useful asset to the Scandinavians (or anyone else trying to stir up trouble for the British Empire, for that matter).
As usual, there’s a PDF version here. The formatting there is probably a bit better than here; WordPress’ block editor takes some getting used to.
Just one letter. That was all she had to do – post a letter. The gentleman with the genial smile, vaguely Continental accent and the icy blue eyes had paid her two pounds for a penny-rate letter, already stamped and addressed. He’d hinted that she might find it useful to write one herself.
Mrs Lynch smiled to herself as she approached the postbox just outside Heuston Station, revealing a haphazard array of tobacco-stained teeth. Hardly the best pay for her little favours, but quite good for such a trivial task and the extra two pounds would be very useful if Jimmy, Anna or Michael caught the flu again.
The name on the envelope was one she knew well. Jonathan Butler, County Councillor for Galway-Roscommon. Anyone in Connacht – the parts that hadn’t been overrun by the Fomorians – knew of him. A hollow-cheeked man with a very intense stare, frequently in the papers over London’s lack of support for Connacht. Sure, there was a heavy military presence, but not a lot else. Perhaps the man with the blue eyes wanted him to draw some more attention to this again.
ψ
“Jonathan? A letter arrived from Dublin. You might find it worrying.”
“Oh?” Jonathan Butler looked up from the dry, verbose report on education standards in the province. Sarah handed him the letter, her normally sunny face set into a grim frown. He frowned in turn and scanned it. His eyebrows ran north along his face as he read, stopping about halfway towards his hairline.
Continue reading “A Useful Politician”
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