My Trick or Treat Stories

I wrote three treats for Trick or Treat.

Annihilation (Movie)

The Journey, for Rhizophora. 1366 words.

Lena explores the beach by the lighthouse.

The prompt was "I just want to see Lena exploring more of the Shimmer." Irresistible.


A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin

Five Times Balerion Saved Rhaenys and One Time She Saved Him, for coaldustcanary. Balerion | Rhaenys Targaryen's Cat & Rhaenys Targaryen (daughter of Elia). 5153 words.

A butterfly flaps its wings, a kitten chases the butterfly, and a girl and her cat get a different destiny.

Rhaenys Targaryen was Elia and Rhaegar's daughter, who named her black kitten Balerion after the dragon. She was murdered as a child in the sack of King's Landing. It's implied that the huge ferocious black tomcat who prowls the keep is her Balerion, grown up; Arya catches him as part of her training. The prompt was for more of Balerion, and perhaps an alternate fate for Rhaenys.


The Stand and some other Stephen King works

Flagg by Night, for skazka. 748 words.

Randall Flagg takes a trip down memory lane.

Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie

Poirot goes on a cruise along the Nile, where he sees a tragedy in the making but is unable to prevent it. After one of the passengers turns up murdered, he has a very short time in which to solve the mystery before the ship reaches the nearest port.

One of Christie's best books, with vivid, memorable characters, an excellent puzzle, and some real emotional heft.

The central characters, apart from Poirot, are introduced before the Nile cruise and some time earlier. Linnet Ridgeway is a beautiful, young, fabulously wealthy socialite who's generous and means well but is also high-handed and blinkered by privilege. Her best friend, Jacqueline, is poor, passionate, and quick-witted. Jacqueline's fiance, Simon, is also poor, not terribly bright or sophisticated, but very handsome. Jacqueline loves him with a consuming, somewhat scary passion.

When we meet them on the Nile Cruise, Linnet is married to Simon and Jacqueline is stalking them. Poirot tries to warn her off this path, to no avail. So when Linnet turns up dead with a bullet in her head, suspicion should point straight to Jacqueline (her enemy) or Simon (who will inherit her money). But at the time that Linnet was murdered, both Simon and Jacqueline were in the presence of multiple others for most of it... and then Jacqueline shot Simon in the leg! After that, he had a broken leg and she was sedated and watched by a nurse. So they (and some of the people who witnessed all this) have unimpeachable alibis. Is there anyone else onboard who might have wanted to kill Linnet?

This trio isn't just a set of Christie's best characters, but great characters in general. They feel very alive. They're joined by a very fun set of other characters, of whom my favorite was Cornelia, who's poor and plain and helping out her rich aunt and is in a Cinderella situation, but loves traveling and is actually having a wonderful time. Others include a young angry Communist, a has-been author of erotic novels, and a soup-slurping German doctor. Everyone has secrets.

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Christie scale: MEDIUM-HIGH levels of RACISM.