41 Results in the "Original" fandom
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Chapter
05 – Cheshire Cat
Days later, Nadia stepped out of the Pass out From Exhaustion Suite cursing the late-afternoon sunlight. The suite had really been earning its name lately. She shuffled along, wiping her eyes, legs stiff and screaming with every motion. “Look who’s up!” Tess said, far too cheerily. She was at one of her workbenches, wearing huge safety goggles as she did…something. Nadia’s eyes were too weak just yet. She fumbled around at one of her desks, having already given up on coffee—it was never…-
21.8 K • Completed
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Chapter
2.8 – providence or atoms
My stamina gave out long before we caught the Demon. I’d never been very fit. Scrawny legs, no real strength. Hadn’t gotten any serious exercise since childhood. Raine had insisted we not run. Hurrying along Sharrowford’s canted, hilly streets for over an hour was more than enough to drain what little reserves I had. I gave in on the corner of Harries Road, slowed and stumbled to a stop and doubled over with my hands on my thighs, sucking air through a raw throat. The ache in my diaphragm…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
1.8 – corpus
Elpida took command. “Into the gravekeeper’s room, now!” Click-click-click went metal on metal, racing down the lift shaft. “Amina, hold onto that shield and get behind the wall. Vicky, grab three more ballistic shields, toss them back there, then start flipping tables, pile them in the archway. Atyle, you take a shield as well then get behind the wall. And help Kagami, hunker down. Howl—” Elpida froze. The others froze with her, hanging on her words; they didn’t know…-
39.9 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
1.3 – mind; correlating
Slipping was never the same twice. Once, when I was twelve years old, it gripped me as I stepped into the shower. A jerk and a twist and another world bloomed around me; I crept naked for hours through a rotting jungle beneath a throbbing black sun. My parents found me curled up under my bed, drooling and insensible. When I was a little older I went missing in the middle of school. Everyone recalled I’d been in biology class, but I never arrived at maths. I’d rounded a corner behind my classmates…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
04 – La Garrud
“Pay dirt!” Tess said. “This stuff is moving.” Nadia ran her index finger around the rim of her coffee cup. Late-afternoon light bathed the office. Soft and gentle, it stung in her eyes. “And here’s another deposit,” Tess said, pacing behind her. “I haven’t even put it all up yet.” “You’re selling it already?” “Sure, why not?” Nadia rubbed her temple with two fingers as she squinted at the coffee. She took a tentative sip and jerked back. Still too…-
21.8 K • Completed
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Chapter
2.9 – providence or atoms
Anticlimax is often far more challenging to accept than the release of action. All the best stories build up and up, then explode from sheer pressure. We expect our lives to work that way. For years I believed in my own special susceptibility to that lure, the temptation to see one’s life as a story, with myself cast in the role of the hounded, persecuted protagonist; paranoid schizophrenics slide down that slippery slope with such ease. But we all do it, contort ourselves into narratives, each of us…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
1.7 – corpus
The gravekeeper’s chamber: two dozen feet of grey metal pyramid with the top scooped off; a black sphere cradled in that apex, blank and still; the upright coffin with half a girl inside, more wire and tube than flesh and bone. Elpida did not see the avatar speak. None of them did, except perhaps Ilyusha. The others were clustered on the laboratory side of the first room, with the corpse and the coffin hidden by the dividing wall. By the time they recovered from the shock of the mechanical…-
39.9 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
1.4 – mind; correlating
I halted at the front gate to Evelyn’s house as Raine stepped onto the garden path. When she realised I wasn’t following, she turned and raised her eyebrows at me. “You have got to be joking,” I said. “Evelyn lives here? Alone?” “Her family owns the house. It’s complicated. Come on, it’ll be fine, she won’t bite, not this time.” We’d left campus about twenty minutes ago, skirted the northern side of the student quarter, and crossed over into Sharrowford’s frayed eastern…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
2.11 – providence or atoms
For the first couple of years after Wonderland, after my trip down the rabbit-hole, after losing my twin, after the doctors and the hospitals and the drugs and the dislocation, I did speak to spirits. Mostly I screamed at them to go away. Twelve-foot figures of dripping neon had stalked the nighttime hallways of Cygnet Children’s Hospital. Often they’d wander into my room, ghosting through the door and crawling up the walls and watching me in bed, too terrified to sleep. I’d scream and rave and…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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