vignettes

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
look 🏞️

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

[marycatelli]

"Oh, no," said Violetta. "They don't enchant them. It's a problem, with the forest enchanted. Besides, people will look at them and wonder what's wrong with the wood, that we do not trust it to build bridges."
Jasper laughed. "That would do it for reasons." He hopped on the bridge.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Danny looked out over the landscape, wondering how Nyawral saw it. Chongu eyesight was attuned much more to motion than shapes or colors -- hence their infosystems making important information jiggle a few pixels instead of turning red as human systems would. Their eyes were also more sensitive to low light levels, and could see when he would've needed IR goggles.

And that was just eyesight. Those tall triangular ears could capture fainter sounds at higher frequencies than human ears, while the nose that seemed small compared to a human's could pick up faint spoor of a passing animal -- or person. The facial whiskers were only the most obvious, and a Chongu had many other sensory hairs in the fur, sensitive to even faint movements in their environment.

The jury was still out on psi. Some human scientists were sure that it was just their ordinary senses being more sensitive to faint stimuli that gave them the appearance of mind-readers. But there were some who talked of something mediated by quantum fields or some other, unknown mechanism, that really did enable a few particularly sensitive Chongu to do what seemed impossible.

[marycatelli]

Always complications

[marycatelli]

In the dimming evening, the scar where the creature had torn its way out, and the tiny, stiffening corpse were still clear. A shrew, thought Honor. Nothing but a shrew.
Ignore it, she told herself, and pointed to Stephan and Asteria the square where the wrongness lay. They listened attentively, and every now and again, the air seemed to twist.
No stranger than what she did, Honor told herself, and began to unweave the net holding those creatures in.
She barely saw them as they burst out, their paths were so twisted, and Lucius so swift to strike them down.