Ladybird Chapter 5, Scene 1

Chapter 5

Nellidae strutted out of her room, her slightly narrow hips swinging from side to side, dark hair swinging behind her. She raised her chin as though staring at the sky and thrust out her chest. Her outfit consisted of a dark tanktop beneath an open, button-down brown jacket, a leather motorcycle cap with goggles, and a pair of knee-length pants. She grinned at her audience and gave a thumbs up, bending forwarding with her hands on her knees for the excited crowd of Libel and Fleur. Both of them clapped and Libel even whistled in all jest. Nellidae felt a tingle down her spine and in her chest. She rather liked being the center of attention, much to her own surprise.

“You look great! And I can’t see your antennae at all!” Libel said.

“Thanks,” Nellidae said, face turning hot. She had been overlooked most of her life, and for some reason the cheers of a teenage girl and her maid were enough to spark a little fire in her heart. “I do look good don’t I? I look downright ravishing.”

“Oui! A real coccinelle!” Fleur cheered.

“What?” Nellidae asked suddenly, bending forward toward the maid. She stared in a critical manner at Fleur. “What’s she saying in that alien language of hers? If she insults me and I can’t tell, I’m calling immigration on her.”

“Ah non!” Fleur cried, nearly falling backwards over her cushioned stool. “Not immigration! They do horrible things to maids!”

“Don’t be such a bully,” Libel shouted, “You’re also technically illegal! C’est une idiote!”

Nellidae’s face turned completely red and she cried back, “Now you’re both ganging up on me!”

Ladybird Chapter 4: Rosewater (Complete 11,000 words)

Chapter 4: Rosewater

The news swept through the internet like wildfire.

Rosewater had played host to a new weapons test by the Ameran government, and all the citizens that happily participated in the exercise would receive 10,000 ameros and free health care for two years from the price-gouging insurance provider of their choice. Videos of the scene went viral as the lingo oft said on sites like Yourbadmovies.com, as well as more popular and respectable web sites such as Craptube.net. Most showed nothing but explosions and smoke, and a number of armored legs at best. Young military nerds from all over the world debated and made racially-loaded comments at each other over the possibilities of such new weapons technology, and how Amera was going to take over Adhania with it.

But in the end the general public cared not. It was another day in Amera, in the world. They were too busy with their frappucinos and abdicating responsibility for their children to care one iota about the Rosewater Incident. So, the incident exploded in the places where it always did, in the most obscure of places, but failed to make much an impression where it mattered.

Libel shut down her computer, and rested her head against the monitor.

Ladybird Chapter 4, Scene 4

The Rosewater government building, a squat diamond shape of concrete, was located on Westside Street in West Central Rosewater. Positively dreary, this beige monolith to the startling lack of creativity of modern-day architects unsurprisingly failed to inspire any sort of feeling in the average Rosewater citizen.

When polled, many citizens asked the poller if they really had a government building and if so where it was. They would have quite liked to have given the Mayor a piece of their minds and maybe Anthrax but for the past few years they’d been entirely stumped as to the old fart’s location. That’s how inconspicuous and boring the building was.

Forty-two percent of the citizens polled confessed to having believed that the building belonged to the Nubile Religious Male Sports group (NRMS, pronounced “Narms”). The remainder had better things to do than take a poll or became disinterested after the third question about whether President Shrub should strip citizenship from homosexuals.

Rosewater’s mayor was a man by the name of Rupert Turner, who owned practically everything in Rosewater thanks late 1880s stock market fraud committed by his ancestors and this was why he became the mayor. He was made mayor beginning in 1990, then lobbied to have the position re-drafted as “supreme chancellor” (all lower case letters, so humble was he) so he could run for it again, then changed it back to mayor. Mayor as a title evoked dignity – that was his argument.