Murder Most Fowl

Saving Christmas – Slay Bells: Episode 3

Previously on Saving Christmas: Slay Bells

Blip ‘Wiry’ Skipperson and his elite team of special forces black ops elves were on a cocoa break when all heckerdoodles broke loose in the workshop. Unknown invaders blew up part of the workshop. Just over twenty four hours until the Big Day, and the Big Man’s Sleigh had been stolen. The team tracked the sleigh on the Global Present-tracking System to an abandoned toy lab facility that hadn’t been in use since the early seventies. When they entered the facility, the team came face to face with a group of toys who had gone bad.

– December 23, 23:23 hours

 

I know we at the North Pole have the reputation for being nothing but Nice, but every now and then there’s an outbreak of Naughty. It usually hits the toys first. We never know why, but sometimes, toys just go Naughty.

The ring of five porcelain faced dolls stared at me. And I couldn’t look away. I was rooted in one spot. Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter how tough you are. When you look into the glassy eyes of Naughty, the Naughty looks into you.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear my team yelling.

But in front of me, all I could see and hear was the ring of dollies. Staring. Saying, “Come play with us.”

A strong hand grabbed each shoulder of mine and yanked me backwards. The next thing I knew, I was looking at the ceiling. As soon as my brain unmushed itself and started cranking away again, I heard a loud ‘thunk’, and a following ‘clop’ on the other side of the door. I looked up, and saw the blade of a knife sticking out of the door.

“What the reindeer dung was that?” I asked.

“Jacknife-in-a-box,” said Shade, “I read about them. Nasty little things. They can spring across the entire room, and they’ll do it just to get a chance at stabbing you in the face.”

“That thing would have stuffed my stocking. Thanks,” I said as I sat up, “How’s about we leave that room alone.”

Cambo chomped down on her candy cane. “How’s about we open up the door again and toss in some T-4.”

“Bad idea. Don’t want to alert the enemy.”

Cambo sneered, “Yeah, well anything Naughty is the enemy.”

“Can it, Cammy. We’ve got a mission to do. The mission comes first.”

As soon as I was upright, I threw another hand signal, and Shade slipped south down the corridor. Longshot trailed after her, his candy cane crossbow ready to provide whatever cover she might need.

Before I followed them, I took a moment to use my lock picking tools to relock the door. No sense in taking any chances. You never know if a toy is smart enough to figure out a doorknob or not. But I didn’t want to take a chance.

The east hallway we were in turned right and headed across the southern third of the building. The southern section of the building was all dorm rooms. This was where the workers and toy lab scientists lived. Shade stopped when she got to the first of the three large doors along the southern wall of the corridor. She clicked her radio.

Something was in there.

I slipped ahead to unlock the door, but when I got there I saw that this door didn’t even have a lock. It was just a large, loose swinging double door. There had been a sign on the wall next to the door, but it had fallen off the wall at some point in the last forty years and it was stuck in the snow and ice that had accumulated along the edge of the wall.

Shade opened the door, and we filed in, silently.

There was no one in sight. We were in a long room, about fifteen by forty. I could see through dirty windows that the room to our right was a cafeteria, and to our left it looked like one of the rooms had a lot of old gym equipment, and the other had a load of old rotted out comfy chairs, some bookshelves, and a movie projector.

At the end of the long room were a pair of Christmas trees. Lush, dark green trees. Just standing there. There was no one in sight.

We prowled around the room, but there was nothing.

“Sorry boss,” said Shade, “I could have sworn I heard something.”

The trees rustled in the breeze.

“Well, since we’re here, we might as well check out this section,” I said. “Shade, Cambo, check out the rec room. Doc, Longshot, come with me and check out the cafeteria.”

The cafeteria was about what you’d expect. Lots of tables. The kitchen along the back was separated from the rest of the room by a half-wall and a counter that you could serve food over.

“Hey boss, you think the pasta’s still good?” Longshot held up a can with a faded label.

“Trick question,” said Doc Bubbly, “The pasta was never good to begin with.”

Longshot poked his head into the walk-in freezer, which, up here in the North Pole, is just a door to a drafty uninsulated room. “Um… boss, you may wanna check this out.”

There was a ramp down. It had been blown up and collapsed, just like the one back in the main workshop. And next to the rubble was a familiar red bag. We’d found Santa’s Sack. Now all we needed was the sleigh.

I left a radio tag on the sack. If we didn’t make it back in time, the rescue teams would be able to find it as soon as the storm cleared up enough for radio contact.

We made our way back out, and Cammy and Shade were waiting for us. “Nothing here,” said Cammy, “We were waiting for you guys to check out the rec room.”

She started to saunter towards the door in the back of the room next to the two Christmas trees.

One of the pines rustled in the breeze.

We were indoors. And we hadn’t just opened any doors. There was no breeze.

“Cambo, duck and cover!” I yelled, but it was too late. Those weren’t Christmas trees, those were Wild Pines. Before Cammy could react, the tree spun at high speed and branch-slapped her so hard that she flew back across the room.

Always on target, Longshot fired. The sharpened candy cane hit dead center, scoring a hole in the tree’s trunk and sticking fast. Sap dripped from the wound, but a little poke isn’t going to stop a Wild Pine. Two of them was going to be a tall order. And elves have never been big on height.

Doc panicked, and threw a bottle of medicinal hot buttered rum at the trees. It splashed, covering one of them with something that smelled absolutely delicious, but now wasn’t the time to indulge. The tree panicked and tried to shake it off. Anything that’s anti-Christmas gets hurt by our Christmas juju just as much as we get healed by it.

We’ve got nothing against them, but Wild Pines think that we’re their mortal enemies. They blame us for the yearly massacre of their brethren in the name of our holiday. They’re not actually Naughty. If anything, their problem is that they think we’re the Naughty ones.

But now wasn’t a time to try and negotiate. Now was a time to chop us down a tree. I pulled out my wooden workshop mallet and charged. I got a solid hit in, and broke off a few branches. But the Wild Pine just spun around again, and sent me flying back onto my cinnamon buns. While I was on my behind, I heard a yell from what was usually our quietest teammate.

“Hey, you ugly sons of birches!” shouted Shade, “I’m gonna cut you down to size!”

Shade specializes in what she calls ‘defrosting.’ Most of her weaponry is made to do maximum damage to ice and snow creatures. But the ice axe she keeps on her belt as a backup weapon can do plenty of damage to wood too. She charged in, ducking under the tree’s wild spin, and chopped squarely into its trunk. It shrieked, a sound I don’t care to describe, and tried to knock her back.

But Shade is anything if not tenacious. She grabbed the incoming branch and cracked it in two. Then she yanked the axe out of the wood and hit it again. And again. The other Wild Pine tried to get around it, but Shade was too quick for it. She chopped a fourth time, and the tree toppled over, creaking in pain.

Then our next quietest team member shouted something that I never thought I’d hear her say. “Fire in the hole!”

Shade took the cue and jumped back out of range. I saw Doc Bubbly toss a soda can at the remaining tree. It trailed brown liquid through the air, then splashed on the ground in front of the Wild Pine, adding a cola smell to the already delicious hot buttered rum and fresh pine smells that were now permeating the room.

Then I saw Doc open up a packet of FizzChunks and throw them into the puddle leading to the tree. For someone who is supposed to do no harm, the Doc sure has a mean streak in her.

The FizzChunks and the soda started a chain reaction. A string of tiny explosions ran along the trail until it got to the tree. The tree that was soaked in hot buttered rum.

I’ve never heard a pine tree scream like that before. And as long as I live, I never want to hear it again. It wasn’t pretty.

“I love the smell of burning pine and hot buttered rum,” said Cambo as Longshot helped her back to her feet, “It smells like… Christmas.”

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s episode of Saving Christmas – Slay Bells.

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Waiting for that first rejection letter

All right, so I’m not actually expecting a rejection letter as it isn’t a traditional publisher I just sent the first four chapters of Murder Most Fowl to. Amazon has started publishing serials on Kindle. And while they’re willing to publish most anything on Kindle, I think they’re trying to do at least some basic quality control for the serials, since it’s such a small subset. And I don’t blame them.

I am hoping that they accept it, of course. At the very least it’s a way to earn money from the serial that I’m going to be writing anyway. At best, it’s another channel to get readers. I’ll still be posting the audiobook chapters here, and I’m debating whether to post the full written chapters as well.

Recording woes…

Or at least an attempt to record that made me say, “Whoa…”

The last few days there’s been some construction on the road behind my apartment. This has, of course, made it impossible to record anything for the audio version of Murder Most Fowl. So, when I awoke this morning to a blissful silence, I decided to make the best of it. However, mere minutes after the *ding* of the toaster, a territorial bird decided to make his presence known.

This was not a beautiful, warbling mating call. This was a simple call to announce his territory. Territory that seemed to be right outside my window. And the call was a single note, repeated every half second, for more than an hour. I couldn’t see the bird. But I could sure as hell hear it. Clear as a bell. In every room in the apartment.

When the bird finally stopped, I thought I was going to be able to record.

It turned out that the bird stopped because the construction workers had shown up and scared it into silence.

Luckily, they seemed to be close to completed with their work, and their work abated a couple of hours before I had to leave for my job.

And that’s when the cricket started.

It was louder than the bird. Much louder. I could have sword that had it not been for the direction of the sound, I would have thought that the cricket was in my apartment.

Finally, an hour before I had to leave, there was finally a true, blessed silence. So I recorded. I took a few takes, fixed it up as best I could.

It turns out that the mediocre microphone in my laptop is actually far worse than I had originally thought. I suspect there was some kind of odd driver error, because certain sounds would trigger it to go into what I called ‘underwater mode’, where the sound would go from cheap and fuzzy to suddenly sounding like the computer had gotten water in its ears. And since I was recording straight, uncompressed sound, it must have been a problem with some kind of data compression that runs between the microphone and the computer itself. It was, in a word, unusable.

Needless to say, I started looking for alternatives. Cheap but good quality USB microphones. A working computer fan to get my desktop computer working so I could use my professional quality microphone. (A few years back I spent a decent chunk of money on a good soundcard that had various audio in/outs for actual recording. About a year ago, literally two days after I had gotten the laptop I am currently using, my desktop computer’s processor started randomly overheating and it became relatively unusable.) Then an idea occurred to me. I grabbed my iPod touch and opened up the ‘Voice Memos’ app that came with it. No bells. No whistles. Just a simple way to record what it hears. I pressed the record button, turned it over (since the microphone is on the back next to the back facing camera) and started reading.

And viola, a large violin.

… I mean, voila, clear, usable sound.

When I was done, I emailed myself the sound file. Since I had already done several (now dry, ironically due to the ‘underwater mode’) runs already, I did it practically flawlessly, and the file required very little in terms of editing. It was clunky, took several steps to do, but worked. Perfectly. And this bothers me. A lot.

Because I hate macs.

Yes, I’m an artsy type who has more wine, language, beer and music snobbery in three minutes of time in my pinky toe than most people have in their entire bodies and over the course of their entire lives. And I’m a mac hater.

When they’re used for advertising purposes, stereotypes are usually bullshit.

There’s no fundamental difference between a Mac and a ‘PC’ in this era. I put PC in quotes because technically a Mac is a PC. It is simply a PC that is put sold by the Apple corporation and uses the proprietary Apple OS. Mac is a subset of PC. PC does not mean Windows. Windows is just the dominant operating system used nowadays. Mac is just a competitor.

No, what I hate is the closed system. I may be an artsy type, but I’m the type of artsy type who likes to make things on my own, from the smallest bits possible. The only computers I’ve ever owned that I didn’t build myself were the two laptops I’ve owned in my lifetime and one hand-me-down desktop. The fact that you need to pay a hundred dollar license to Apple just to be allowed to become a ‘developer’ for either their computers or their iDevices baffles me. How in the nine hells do you expect to be able to cater to the needs of all the users if you make it so that small, independent programmers can’t make and distribute the little handy apps that can fill in the gaps that users need, but aren’t always big enough to be addressed by larger companies? The answer is: they don’t want those gaps filled. Their design culture for the last decade or so has been to make devices, then tell the user what they can do with them. The entire premise of an Apple device is just alien to the way I use technology. I am a human being. I use whatever tool I need to accomplish my goal.

Which, in this case, means that in order to accomplish the goal I have at the moment, I use the expensive Apple device that I bought a few years back with the intent of becoming a developer for it, because my love of creating stuff and hopefully making a few bucks doing it outweighs my moral outrage at their design culture. The device that I didn’t end up actually developing for, but instead used it as a portable email device when I went back to school, then as a portable music composition device when I discovered Music Studio, (highly recommended for the musician on the go, BTW. Or if you prefer synths to orchestral instruments, NanoStudio is also awesome. But I digress.) and now I use it as a portable, wireless microphone for my audiobook.

… maybe I should see if my phone has a voice notation app. It would save a few steps, instead of emailing it to myself I could just plug it in and transfer the files.

Wait, that’s another reason why I hate Apple.

Because with iDevices, you can’t do that. And there’s no reason for it. It’s just a design choice.