ClockworkWraith

@laughlyn: I really liked your intro. I don't know, something about the candy bit was just too bizarre not to appreciate.

Rhetta Peake sat quietly in a chair in the living room of the little Grimm City property, reading an article about the Korean War in a 1953 issue of Time Magazine. She had spent most of the 1950s doing what almost every other woman in the 1950s had been doing - raising a family, being a model housewife. She'd kept up with the news as best as she could, but mostly hadn't concerned herself with it. Now, with more time on her hands and no family to care for, she'd pulled down the boxes of old magazines from the attic and started going through them again, remembering what she could.

The little house in Grimm City was only one of the properties that she was now sole owner of. None of them were exorbitant, but she and Johnathan had kept modest homes in many areas. It had been necessary, when they'd begun moving around so much. Grimm had been... one of Rhetta's favorites. It had been easy to return to. People in Grimm City tended not to ask so many questions. It wasn't like London or Atlanta, where everyone was a busybody. A lot of the residents of Grimm had secrets to keep, and didn't get too fussed about other little things, like a woman who never seemed to change.

The clock on the wall ticked to six-thirty, and the first two quarters of the Westminster Chimes played with comforting familiarity. After so many years, Rhetta hardly even heard it, and would have paid it no attention whatsoever... except that was when the lights went out. She glanced up in surprise, then lay the magazine aside and rose to peer through the curtains across the street. The lights had gone out everywhere.

How strange. In the dimness, she opened the drawer of the end table and fished out a packet of matches, turning up the wick on the oil lamp and setting it alight. Electric lights were simpler, but there was a comfortable familiarity to the steady glow from behind the hurricane glass. Some nights, she preferred lamplight for her work. She thought little of it, and sat back down to read again, finishing a few more magazines. By night when the lights still hadn't come back on, she decided in favor of investigation, slipping into shoes and a peacoat and tucking a satchel over her shoulder. Like most women's purses, it contained a variety of oddments that she would deem critically necessary, but others would malign as useless. In Rhetta's particular case, it was mostly little bits of clockwork - gears, wires, tools to work them, all carefully packed into individually sewn compartments. There as well were some of her more portable works - a few small birds that lay still at the bottom of the bag, their springs unwound. She pulled one out, a little bluebird, and wound it with a clock key so that it fluttered to a semblance of life, and perched on her shoulder. Should she need an extra pair of eyes, she could send it out.

Towards the city centre she traveled, and it wasn't too long before she was able to discern gunfire. She slipped out another clockwork bird - a tiny brown hummingbird, quick and unobtrusive, and wound it up, sending it ahead as a scout. The riots had started. The proper thing to do, of course, would have been to go back home and wait patiently while it was handled.

After ninety-eight years, Rhetta Peake had grown a bit tired of the proper thing to do. This time, she was going to see what it was like to get involved.

@shanana: Awesome, I'll join in then when it goes up. Sorry to hear about the posting issues, that's always frustrating.

Is there still time to get involved? I don't know why I didn't see this until just now, but I'd be interested in joining.

@musa_bashir:

Well, that was all certainly very strange. Rhetta Peake had not been raised to be the sort of person who went chasing after random strangers running about doing... what was it the children called it these days? Parkour? She sighed, shaking her head a little, and recalled the sparrow to her hand, letting it sit there a moment before tucking it away again. Young people, always rushing through life. She remembered how that had felt, once upon a time.

That life of hers, though... well, it seemed to have ended. She still wasn't sure what sort of life she was building, but it didn't involved young men with guns and too many other things on their minds to stop and appreciate the little things in life. Rhetta had been a spectator in other people's lives enough times and for long enough in the past that she wasn't going to do that again.

She'd find her own way... wherever it was. Abandoning the scene at the window, she returned her attention to the market, undisturbed.

@musa_bashir:

No worries, I saw your post on WC or wherever. Glad you're settled in.

Things went from being quite mundane to being very interesting indeed, and rather quickly. All of a sudden there were many cars disgorging people with guns, and all of them seemed intent on the others. Law enforcement or security or something like that. Quickly, they were cut down with gunfire, and Rhetta edged back away from the window. She didn't think she wanted to be caught in the crossfire. Her sparrow held position without attracting any apparent attention, and Rhetta let its filters feed back into her machina.

The men from within the building pulled out a data stick, which Rhetta felt probably answered the question of whether they were uploading or downloading. She sent her sparrow after them as they left the building, perched on a wall where it could view the action, even as gunfire slaughtered two of them. She didn't mind the blood - she was used to such things. Usually it was a little more controlled, though. Scalpels were not less messy, but the mess was certainly more contained. Rhetta did not envy whoever was going to be responsible for cleanup. The data stick was passed along, and Rhetta was tempted to have her sparrow follow with it, to see where it ended up... but the last man had gained her curiosity. 'I hold line.'

He didn't seem to speak English all that well. Rhetta had to wonder why he spoke it at all. Perhaps it was the only language he had in common with the others. She wondered who they were, or where they came from. The world seemed bigger, somehow, since her William was gone. It wasn't, really... it was just that she was paying attention to more of it. Different things seemed like they might be important these days. Rhetta wasn't sure if that said something about the world, or if it said something about herself.

She left the sparrow beside the lone man crouched beside the building, waiting to see if he could, indeed, hold the line.

If it's going to be CVnU, can I join? This character isn't very magical, but I'm looking to get involved in things.

@ada_guillaume:

Going back and reading old stuff is often like that, I think. There's stuff I wrote a long time ago that I remember thinking "This is awesome, I'm so great!" and then I go back and read it after some years and it's just... ugh. I figure in a few more years I'll look back on the stuff I'm writing now and be like "...but why, though?"

Of course, the only way to get better is to keep practicing.

@musa_bashir:

At first glance, it really did not look like all that much. A van, driving down the street. The commotion came, though, when the men got out of the van, all well-armed. Some foreign thing? Rhetta had to wonder. Sometimes her knowledge of the manners of other countries was not what it ought have been. Sometimes, too, her knowledge of her own country was not what it ought have been. Things changed, so quickly it seemed. All of a sudden, it had been the year two-thousand, already. When she had been born, it had been a far off dream. And now... well, now there were children who'd been born in that same year, who looked barely younger than Rhetta herself. It was discomfiting, sometimes, to speak to them, with their short-term goals and their brief sparks of life. No patience, in the young. Restless, they seemed.

Rhetta was hardly about to interfere in whatever might be going on - she was not one for diplomacy, either in its aid or opposition. Still, she was curious what these costumed marauders might be up to. At least... she hoped they were costumed marauders. It could have been that their attire was cultural. Sometimes she did not understand all of this 'political correctness' methodology. It came with the globalization, she thought - the linking of everything together. The young saw too much of each other not to see themselves reflected in people from different walks of life. She'd lived in a more insular time, to be sure. She was still trying to figure out how to live in this one.

Curiosity piqued, though, she left the stall where she'd been lingering over cinnamon and stood beside the window, a hand slipping into her purse and pulling out a little brown sparrow. The bird shivered in her palm a moment, ruffling its feathers with the barely audible whine of hydraulics and the subtle clicking of gears against one another. She opened her hand and released it to fly out the window, half-closing her eyes as she followed its flight in her consciousness, moving after the men in the strange outfits, wondering what it was they intended to do.

Within the building, her sparrow settled to watch - the men seemed quite focused on the computer system. She wondered whether they were pulling something out or putting something in. Rhetta liked computers. They might have changed more swiftly than people, sometimes, but they never changed into something she couldn't understand. She'd learned computer systems early, when they were a novel thing, writing programs on stacks of carefully ordered punch cards.

I do wonder who they are, and what they're doing in that building, though.