Search Results for 'ten'

“Rise and shine bitches!” The voice of Linda Paul through the ezapper was unmistakable.
“Tonight you’ll be judged on your in character performance, so better prepare your false tits and butts, corsets and wigs, because tonight’s gonna be a kiki party’s_Have_a_Kiki ! Chop chop those pork chops”

Reggie was looking around for signs of Ced’ and Amar, only to realise Amar was the only one there sleeping, rolled in his choirboy robe like a big sausage. The thought had him starve for crispy chicken sausages, eggs and bacon. His stomach grumbled in a loud and imperative gargle.
“Where’s Ced’?” That binge on the wine was no fuckin’ good idea, they should have listened to that smart-ass Lady Prissy of Sadie. What a bitch that one, always being right and spot-on. Someone should tell her how annoying that was. And that head-splitting headache…
He woke up Amar who rolled aside moaning to leave him alone.
“Ceeeeeed’!” he yelled, “Cedriiiiiic!” again so loudly that the resounding sound in the chapel almost deafened him. Then remembering Cedric would sometimes only answer to his queen name “Consuelaaaaaaaa!”

“No need to alert the whole neighbourhood” Sadie appeared, calm and prim as a rose. “He’s sleeping outside in the gardens. Go get him, so we can get back to business, I got a tracking device with the current location of the ferrets. We’ll split in teams of two: one to retrieve the ferrets on one side, and the other to get our night’s gowns. Let’s have a draw in ten, so we can eat and get moving.”

On this bright morning of 5 January 1757, Robert-François thought it would be his birthday in less than 4 days. He would turn 42, and had just been a domestic servant for his whole life. He was not prone to depression, but the thought was almost disheartening. His life had been full of turns of fate, like many he’d known, but with so little to show for it.
Sure, he could blame his hot temper for that, his nickname “Robert the Devil” was not for naught. Still, his wife and daughter loved him well enough, he wasn’t a bad person, pious even, after years spent with the Jesuits. So what made him so angry this morning, he couldn’t tell, maybe the moon a little too bright in the morning light, maybe the melted snow turned shit in the gutter of the streets and on his shoes…
His employers at the Parlement were right, something was rotten in the country, and the King and his whores were to be blamed for it. The butcheries at war he’d witnessed, all led by silly creeping courtesans in the name of of philandering godless king.
While walking in the streets, this bright morning, with his hat covering part of his face, he was muttering words under his breath and from time to time gave a brief thought to the kitchen knife tucked in his leather bag.

Jean-Pierre Duroy couldn’t get his day going. There was a royally nagging problem of loo clogging that he couldn’t get solved. Apparently there were bugs in the microsoil under the soft underground, or was that the network of pipes he couldn’t tell. No amount of boiling water or any of the extravagant chemical concoctions by the Count of St Germain would seem to have any effect whatsoever this fine morning apart from making the matter worse.
It seemed that the removal and construction over the Grotto had not gone as well as planned when it came to plumbing.

There were more pressing matters however, notwithstanding that the royal defecation could well impact the mood for the day and maybe the whole country, so there was nothing light about it.
Such matter was to oversee the decoration of the main part of the Opera House which was already complete. Construction work had slowed during winter, and cement would take longer to settle, so there were still piles of tiles, gravel and other rubbles left lying around, but Madame de Pompadour was very eager to get a performance tonight, and had been so intent on it that she’d ordered for champagne, fine draperies, and even the newly fashionable toile de Jouy to drape inside the alcoves.
What she had not anticipated however was the inordinate amount of candles which were needed to light all the place brightly enough during the night.

The Royal beehives being unable to provide enough beeswax, they had to source the material from nearby hamlets, and already a throng of carts full of candles driven by some petite gens eager to sell theirs was lining at the entrance of the Palace pending security clearance.

Finding a time smuggler on such short notice was near impossible, Linda Paul soon found out when she hit the web. There were sure long lists of pages offering the services at seemingly attractive prices, but then never covering all the highly recommended options, such as the time collision waiver, and collateral time damage waiver.
She had a pretty good idea of what she needed to smuggle back and when, but all the time pathways simulations seemed to run into a dead-end.
After a stroke of genius, realizing that the one-timeway drop-off prohibitive surcharge may be the reason why she couldn’t get decent tariffs, she changed her simulation for a return.

“Time and item of origin/return…” she muttered as she typed “Queen Anne’s crocheted ferrets, 1625, Louvres Palace”.

Of course, going forward in time was easy, so she would simply need to give specific instructions to the time smuggler to pass on those bloody ferrets along the timeline.

A click here, accepting the long conditions with hardly a glance, “blabla, not covering extra temporal charge… blabla… ensured discretion, yes, yes, service cannot be used to leave historical artifacts protected by the amendment on the … or any incongruent item blabla… smuggling service comes with no obligation of results…”
The rest was piece of cake.

She already had the perfect time mule in mind for the delicate mission of reintroducing the crocheted ferrets where her dragqueen competition was now held.

When Nicole du Hausset, widow of a poor noble man, one of the two femmes de chambre of Madame de Pompadour, first hear Madame talk about her first encounter with the Count in 1749, she remembered immediately about her mother, and grand-mother’s secret instructions.
A few nights later, she wrote down in her diary “‘A man who was as amazing as a witch came often to see Madame de Pompadour. This was the Comte de Saint-Germain, who wished to make people believe that he had lived for several centuries.”

For some reason, she was to find a way to give him two scrawny century-old (and quite frankly smelly) crocheted ferrets, as a token for the Queen.
She still had seven years or so to make it happen, that was time ample enough to do the deed, if the Good Lord would grant her enough life, or else she would need to pass the burden to the next of kin.
She’d never known exactly why this was significant, but she’d been told that her family’s past riches were due to the success of this task, passed on to the next generation until 1757.

It didn’t take very long. An elaborate and convincing lie did come easier to her than she would have known, and the Count swallowed it hook and sinker. Next thing she knew, she’d glimpsed the plush beasts in the midst of the menagerie of the Queen, and felt relieved of a life and generation-long burden.
She could now return to a simple and uncomplicated life, although she would sometimes wake up at night in cold sweat, having had dreadful nightmares that the ferrets had disappeared before the date.

Jean-Pierre Duroy, the Grand Intendant of the Palace of Versailles woke up every morning an hour before dawn, when everything was still calm, the last fêteurs of the guest nobility were, at last, fast asleep and the stars’ lights were beginning to fade on the dark sky. The Palace was never sleeping really, but this was as close a moment of peace as he could get.
His wife Annie, the Head of the Royal Pastries Chefs, would usually sleep contentedly an hour more, waiting for the chantecler’s sonorous hail to the rising sun.

When he realized he had overslept for the first time in many years of services, he knew there was something not quite right about this particular day.
As usual, and especially during winter, there was much to be done. Preparing the routine menus for the noble tables, getting his army of little people bustling around to stock the fires with wood for the cold-fearing ladies, clean up, wash clothes, drapes and the darn mirrors. Receive the fresh foods from the local markets, clean up the latrines, which tended to get clogged with the dreaded cold… When that was done, he had to make sure the servants were doing their job properly, not abusing the generosity of His Majesty, taking good care of the Gardens, which was an horror when the snow started to melt, ensuring the guards reported to their duties, etc. etc.
And after all that, no matter what, do a meticulous accounting in the Royal Ledger.
Jean-Pierre was but a cog in that enormous machine, but a cog which could make a vital difference between a day gone right, and a day gone awfully wrong.

He had to turn that day around quickly lest it would be the latter, he thought while putting his white starched breaches. A last look at his wife who was starting to move her weight around and yawn, and he was out.

Queen Marie, Our Good Queen, as the little gents liked to call her, had not been as excited at the prospect of the salon since a long time.
She ringed the bell for the servant girl to bring more wood, as drafts of chilly air were coming from outside. Although quite modern and shiny, the palace was not as equipped for the cold season as the old castles from her mother land. Worse, with age and soft weather, she’d grown accustomed to being warm, and couldn’t bear the cold any longer.

The crackling sound of the pine wood inside the small chimney was comforting and brought her back to her thoughts. A salon, full of delightful witty people, with laughters and costumes, entertainment and champagne wine. She’d heard a special batch of barrels from la Maison Ruinart would be brought especially for the Royalties. Of course, she knew most of those were small favors for the King’s mistress, Reinette, but she didn’t care. Oddly enough, she didn’t mind the woman, who had been always very delicate and considerate towards her, almost affectionate. To be honest, she was a blessing, as the inextinguishable appetite of the King for the flesh and woman beauty was now too hard to bear.

But a party like this, ah… She reveled in the thought of seeing again monsieur de St Galle and the mysterious Comte de St Germain who always was the light of the party with his extravagant stories.

The servant had finished to dress her for the night, putting her new powdered wig on the parakeet shaped wig-holder. She’d bought the wig with its lacquered holder in the morning from a small shop in Paris, which was had quite an aura of mystery she’d heard. Naturally she’d wanted to see for herself.
The wigmaker was a gaunt and unassuming young man who notwithstanding made an impression on her. Jean-Baptiste’s wigs were simple and elegant, albeit not terribly inspired. His eyes, on the other hand, had a piercing yet soft gaze about them, and didn’t seem embarrassed to look at her, almost through her, as if she were a person, instead of the Queen surrounded by a retinue of bland people eager to please.
“Let me draw you some fingers” he’d said to her, changing abruptly the topic from his rambling about books he was inspired to write about symbols. He’d forgotten the traditional address of “Your Majesty”, yet wouldn’t be stopped —regardless of the shocked expressions on the people’s faces.
“You see, I love symbols, and when I draw people’s fingers, I can foretell events to come”.
So that was it, she’d thought, the reason why everyone was ranting about him. He’d better be more inspired at that than wigs, as her patience was wearing thin.
She’d had fortune tellers draw her cards a few times, but the fingers drawing part was curious enough to entice her into removing the glove off her eburnated fingers and letting him do his trick.
An eldritch feeling crept though her spine as he was uttering words for each of the fingers he drew on with a slight pull of his hand, just enough not to crack the joints.

In the bed warmed to a delightful temperature by the bouillotte, she began sliding into deep sleep, while a mixture of words half-forgotten or half-remembered danced around in her mind like the swirls of snowflakes dying on the warm window of her chamber: “funny moment, cold diversion, dream parade, house moustache pink, blue wonder carpets, possible king turned, green mirror travel, understand whole large parade”…

I just restored the possibility to edit one’s own comments during at least a month. If you need to edit an earlier comment, let me know, I can extend it again.

I also fixed the preview, which now must work as it should.

As a bonus, some styles you can adapt to your comments for prettier quotes (the part in yellow is what to input in your comment, the result is displayed below) :

bq(Quote). Some text in nice quote style

Some text in nice quote style

p{color:blue}. Some text in nice color (most color names should work)

Some text in nice color (most color names should work)

Momentarily left speechless as where to find the edit cogwheel of her last sentence, but not without focus, she booked on her e-zapper the Sanso Tally-Ho Coach for Versailles at no later than dawn of the morrow, while the queens banged on the caviste’s cellar door, thirsty for bowls of bubbles and fresh haircuts.

Sadie had guessed right, that there was something off, which was soon confirmed by her all-purposes e-zapper. The date and place were both wrong by a smidge. They were sent off in the Champagne area, a few hundreds of kilometers off Paris and their royalties, and the date was 1757, a hundred years or so later than expected for a musketeer adventure…
Different time, different Queen. They’d better hope to find a nice ride to get the treasure hunt going.

Good thing was that the Dragcorp had outlets posted in advance, they would probably have something ready for them.

“Listen ladies,” she said as they went out on the open to find out the night wasn’t ripe with opportunities in the little provincial town. “Let’s call it a night and get out of those garbs… “

Terry pointed to a sign in the empty cobbled street and rudely interrupted “CHAMPAGNE, champagne for everyone!”

another kitten spotted in the attic ~ a black and white one.