Birth Of An Empire

As one of my rewards for a certain number of prompters taking part in my March Prompt Call, I was going to write to a prompt from my secret stash of prompts that I got myself for my birthday. Consequently, courtesy of wyld_dandelyon we have this prompt:

"The Faerie's Oracle: The Bodacious Bodach. The bodach means well, but, well, he just can't help himself from meddling. He wants to fix things, but you know, he's a faerie, and his idea of fixing things is more than a little idiosyncratic. He will willingly carry a message for you, but might garble it a bit (or quite a lot)."

Taya Williams was tall with flaming red hair sitting like a soft halo around her head, round cheeks because she was smiling and yellow-toned copper skin. She was also enthusiastic about her presentation. “I’ve built a messaging program for my project.”

“Ms Williams,” interrupted the class’ tutor, “at this level, a simple messaging program isn’t sufficient for the time you’ve had for this assignment.”

“Oh, I know that, Mr Tungabe,” she smiled at the older but slighter man with his yellow ochre skin and black hair. “I believe that you’ll find this is quite a sophisticated message program.”

“How?” Mr Tungabe liked to knock students off their neatly scripted presentation rails.

“Guaranteed delivery,” replied Taya crisply. “It contains tools to get the message out of the originating system, through alternate routes if necessary, into the delivery address system and it incorporates multiple display options.”

“So what happens if the receiving system has protocols in place to stop unauthorised messages and your message isn’t authorised?” That came from the olive smoky beige skinned Nathan Costello in the back corner, flanked as usual by his cronies, the two Daves.

“That’s where the tool system I mentioned comes into play,” said Taya coolly. She typed a message into the interface displayed on the screen she was projecting for her tutorial group, added what seemed to be an organised address group and clicked on the send button. Less than thirty seconds later everyone else in the room was diving for devices that suddenly weren’t silent.

“Impressive,” commented Mr Tungabe. “It not only got through my spam and firewall settings, it overrode my pop-up settings. I agree with you that this is not a simple messaging program, Ms Williams.”

“I’d love to get a look at the code,” said artificial bronze hair colour Dave from his seat beside Nathan Costello.

“I’m sure you would,” Taya smiled at him, “but Bodach is my program and the code is already registered as my proprietary property.”

“Thereby proving that Ms Williams also pays attention in Mr MacIntosh’s Business Practices class,” put in the tutor. “Please continue with your presentation Ms Williams. I sit back to be further impressed.”

Getting Down To Business

This follows on from In Which There Is An Important Conversation and runs to 3,061 words.

Master Que introduced me to Master Chu as soon as possible. They were much of an age and while Master Que looked like a villain from a novel or a movie, Master Chu looked like someone cast in the older hero role. He also walked with a stick and it looked to me as if he didn’t have a full range of motion in the knee on his dominant leg. I was, as instructed, very polite and I think my mother would have been pleased with my manners. Master Chu was, for his part, very affable while Master Que was very formal, possibly because it gave him the opportunity to be, well, not submissive but definitely deferential to our host.

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This is followed by In Which I Gain An Admirer.