vignettes

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
successful 🏆
Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.

Comments

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Those first years were a struggle. When NASA established Shepardsport, everyone was thinking in terms of the various scientific activities over here on Farside, from the big optical telescope and radio telescope array to training for people going to Mars, to make sure they would turn up with Earth Separation Anxiety Disorder on the way.

And then everything blew up, after Tsar Joseph thought he could help us end the Sharp Wars by offering to take in all our Sharps -- and the Flannigan Administration turned it into the Expulsions. Except NASA didn't want to see its investment in astronaut clones handed off to the Russian Empire. With the precedent of exiling Reggie Waite up here, NASA started shipping all their astronaut clones up here, and it was our problem to figure out how to expand our life-support systems fast enough to keep everybody breathing and eating.

There were a lot of makeshifts in those days, including sending people to the outlying settlements that had surplus capacity until we could expand fast enough. Some of the technical jerry-rigging ultimately got refined into regular methods -- and in the process of using the surplus food generated by the mining settlements' Zubrin hobby farms, we created a market economy alongside the commissary system that had prevailed as long as everything was run like a ship at sea or an Antarctic research station.

Looking back from the perspective of history, we can safely say that those years were the ones that marked the change from exploration to long-term settlement.

[marycatelli]

But -- success!

[marycatelli]

Delicately, he reached out and touched them both. Then, with exquisite care, he worked the spell.
One branch withered into a dry twig. The other slowly straightened up, rejoined, and knit together its wood. A bud faced him, and its leaves lived.
The spell did work. The price was paid.

[marycatelli]

Lelio's eyes popped open. From Torrin? Then he bit his lip, glancing sideways. He had tried to hide from Torrin when he was practicing. And when he found that rock and tried to hide it. Torrin had jeered.
"I will help you," said Mother. "So he does not find out."

[marycatelli]

"There are wizards who do not care, of course. But the work is a waste of your craft, and a sign of your judgment. There has never been a wizard who was truly perilous who kept up a castle by magic."
"There's always a first time," said Scholastica. And realized that she had said it aloud.
The Archmage snorted. "There's always a first time for anything that happens. It is like saying there will be a first time that a hedge wizard will prove a match for a master scholar. It assumes that success is possible, and only time matters."