Moe Lane's Blog, page 862

Yeah, I got nothing.

Watched The Mask tonight instead of writing stuff. It was a heck of a lot better than I thought it’d be, but that didn’t help me with deadlines, did it? Talk among yourselves, I guess.

08/14/2020 Snippet, TIPPED ON A STIFF.

Cabs!

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“That tears it, Sofie,” I said. “Somebody’s got a tracker on you.” I turned to look at the cab behind us, and winced. Speaking of tearing: damn stitches were acting up again. They might even be getting worse.

“Improbable: I checked twice,” replied Sofie.

“Improbable?” asked Smith.

“I’m not perfect. But I’m checking again… no.”

“What about that gizmo?”

“That’s the first thing I checked, Shamus. I cleaned it out before redoing it. They’re not tracing us through it.”

“Tell you what,” said Smith. “I’ll just go ask. Excuse me, friend?” he said to the cabbie. I knew him, a bit: Memo was reliable, didn’t gouge you on the fare, and kept his damned mouth shut about what he heard.

Only problem was, Memo spooked easily. He already looked a little nervous as he looked back at us. “Yes, señor?” he said, apprehensively. He might not talk about what went on in the back of his carriage but Memo could hear it just fine, and cabbies hate it when a Shamus shows up while on a Case. Things can get exciting.

The ‘Looks Interesting Enough’ MONSTERS OF MAN trailer.

I do have to wonder: how does Hollywood* think the military-industrial complex would keep stuff like this quiet? That still below from MONSTERS OF MAN represents a state of the art which is still… a considerable distance off from ours. I’m also deeply skeptical that an android is going to shoot better than a human for quite some time.

But this is a Frankenstein flick and I need to keep that in mind, so don’t mind me.

*Or at least the portion of it concentrating on VOD these days.

08/14/2020 Snippet, MORGAN BAROD AND THE ELDRITCH TOME.

Action!

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This building had been hollowed out, more or less; some of the stacks looked more or less intact, but the rest had been shoved out of the way to make room for the carpet-shoggoth. It took up one entire corner of the now-open space, with tendrils of demonic acrylics veining their way up the sides of the walls and digging deep into the floor. But there were still plenty tendrils free to lunge and strike. Oh, yes, there were. At the moment, the flare seemed to have confused the monster, but that was clearly only temporary.

“Morgan,” said Ben almost conversationally from behind a half-fallen bookshelf, “tell me again why I can’t throw a fireball at it?”

One of the tendrils lashed out, still reflexively. It landed nowhere near the three of them, but managed to knock over a shelf. Which knocked down another, and another, causing a demented domino effect that ended with a bookshelf slamming and blocking the doors they had just come through.

“Never mind!”

“Already forgotten!” said Morgan as he broke cover, sword out and blurring. “Ice ball on the center of mass!”

“Don’t strike with your wrist out of line!” Ben yelled as he threw the ice ball.

“I didn’t need to be told that!” Morgan noted with some pleasure that the dark yarn sliced up real nice when cut with a sword. It gave him some hope that they could whittle this thing down to size.

“Neither did I!” Ben yelled, with a grin that matched Morgan’s own.

08/14/2020 Snippet, OMBUDSMAN.

Good talk? Good talk!

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“But it ain’t just Canton, and it ain’t even those Toledo bastards,” Jimmy went on. “It’s those goddamned Erie bastards. You hear what they did?” Jimmy slapped the table. “They joined up! They’re in the Consortium now!”

“Yeah,” Bad Jack said after a moment. He poured himself a drink, because he was gonna need it for this talk. “I heard. You want a drink?”

“That’s all you gotta say? Do I want a fucking drink?”

“No, Jimmy, I got a bunch of things to say. Starting with ‘Who the hell said you could talk to me like that?’” Bad Jack held Just Jimmy’s eyes until the other man flushed and looked away, waving his hand in unspoken apology. “That’s better.

“Now, let’s talk about Erie. There’s not a god-damned thing we can do about Erie, Jimmy. And why should we? That Outfit that ran us out, they got knocked out by a new crew. And that new crew? Lasted six months. Now we’re hearing how the latest bunch of punks went and invited Hershey in. Did you want to go back and have the crew grab Erie, instead? Close the circle, or something like that?”

‘Demeter’s Daughter.’

No Amazon link for this one. More Renn Faire than Pennsic; but I miss those, too.

Demeter’s Daughter, Anne Lister

the G.I. JOE: OPERATION BLACKOUT videogame reveal trailer.

GI JOE: OPERATION BLACKOUT isn’t quite what I want.

What I want is a GI JOE MMORPG. Straight up. Played straight. ’80s aesthetic. And absolutely unapologetic. I’m never gonna get that, of course.

…Sorry.

08/13/2020 Snippet, OMBUDSMAN.

Rejection of false efficiency!

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Later on, Bad Jack kicked himself for not seeing how bad that lunch went. At the time it seemed to go, well, not great but not bad, either. He had made sure that there was nobody around to snoop; just him and Jimmy and a bunch of eats on a table, just like in the old days where you made your own sandwich. Nothing formal, hey?

But Just Jimmy was still a little stiff about it. “No waiters?” he said. “You finally toss ‘em out on their ears?”

Bad Jack gave him a look. “Don’t bust my balls on this, Jimmy. I gotta have, you know, an entourage. Give people stuff to do.”

“Yeah, sure, but these guys are all cripples and geezers. The old days, they’d be from the crew. Reliable.” Jimmy looked disgusted. “Not workers.”

That had bothered Bad Jack too, at the start, but… “I need every guy I can trust out there earning for me, Jimmy. Let these guys clean the plates and pour the wine. I wanna save my crew for the tricky stuff.” And even if I didn’t, the Consortium gets real pissy about kicking ‘cripples and geezers’ out. ‘False efficiency,’ they call it.

08/13/2020 Snippet, MORGAN BAROD AND THE ELDRITCH TOME.

Self-reflection!

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Things weren’t smelling so good down here. The air was musty, and the stench of carpet shoggoth was pretty strong. Sort of like rotting acrylics, Morgan thought. He was pretty sure that kind of thing was impossible, but it was happening anyway, and was probably not going to be great for his lungs in the long term. So let’s just kill the monsters, find the books, and go.

What little light came into this section of the library annex was from fairly small windows, and apparently the carpet shoggoths didn’t like them; stuff had been tossed against them, and sometimes smeared, until they were almost dark. Which meant that a light spell might be helpful… or a flashlight, dammit! Part of Morgan resented how quickly the trappings of technological society had disappeared; another part of him was bemused at how well he had personally accepted the new way of things. It’s not that I wanted to wander through a magical post-apocalyptic landscape, he told himself. I’m just not letting it bother me.

Yeah. That’s it.

Morgan internally debated on how to best open the door for about two seconds before he kicked it open. There was no need to keep quiet, there might have been a monster behind the door anyway, and there was no way he was going to go through this place without his sword and shield handy. “Hey, Ben! Kiddo!” he shouted, before somebody shot a spell or stone at him. “At the vestibule!”

“Coming down!” yelled Ben from the stairwell. He and Kiddo moved down, Ben holding onto the banister. “Weight’s not back to normal,” he said to Morgan. “Spell’s lasting longer than normal. Offices above are clear.”

08/13/2020 Snippet, TIPPED ON A STIFF.

Backstory!

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“So, tell me about Irene,” I said when we finally found a cab. “What’s her deal, Sofie? Or you could tell me, Mr. Smith.”

I didn’t expect a straight answer from him, and I didn’t get one. He just shook his head and said, “Don’t know enough about this place or what she’s doing here, sorry. I’ll tell you this, though; Miss Irene won’t take kindly to being captured. She sees a chance to ruin somebody’s day over it, she’ll take it and worry about it later.”

“Yes, that sounds like her,” said Sofie. She turned to me. “I met her about six months ago. She’s been a very good friend ever since.”

“Of you, your husband, both, or neither?” I asked. Smith’s eyes bugged out slightly, and he started to cough. Sofie and I looked at him, confused.

“What?” I said. “It’s a reasonable question.”

“Yes. And the answer’s neither,” said Sofie. “Irene didn’t pursue any affairs. She only even flirted when she was worried about not fitting in.”

“Not interested?” I said.

“No. I asked her about it once, and she said that as a foreigner any liaison could be dangerous.” I chuckled at the joke; Smith looked a little confused.