RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist<blockquote><p><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/PennedPossibilities" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PennedPossibilities</span></a> 733 — Tell us what your MC’s home is like. CW: Long.</p></blockquote><p>I will take this question as not where she is <em>living,</em> but rather what the MC would <em>think of</em> as being the <em>home</em> she ran away from.</p><p>When her mother died—killed actually, and surprisingly got named a hero and got elevated and thus so did her daughter—her guardian had an <em>appropriate</em> abode built for her, matching her future station as a head of government and an army.</p><p>The town wall got broken out and extended around pasture lands subsequently turned into manicured gardens. A mansion of intersecting grand limpet-like domes and looming convection towers got built in less than a year by an legion of artisans and laborers. Palaces and princes don't exist in her world, but this edifice might as well be described as such, and as having been built for one. </p><p>She remembers the grand staircase of white marble swirled with black, with brass clad carved dark wood railings. The expanse could have covered the footprint of the three room house she'd spent her first five years in: a bedroom for her opera star mother (and her manager who is probably her father), her own room, and the music room / dining room / kitchen. </p><p>In the mansion, she got her own room, of course. In an odd touch of kindness, it had been constructed to exactly match the same as her old one—if you subtracted the baths and dressing room—into which her plain furnishings, goth girl curios, and even her draperies were moved that jarring day of transition when she was six. </p><p>However, being a mansion it also had a dojo, an armory, a dance studio, an exercise room, three different instruction rooms for schooling in music and art and science, a solarium, an observatory, a working laboratory with vent hoods and chemical storage, a pool room containing an indoor olympic-sized pool capable of making waves to swim and struggle against, a cinema, multiple dining rooms to host from 12 to 144 guests (and host them she did, often, as practice, from the age of seven), and a ballroom for grand parties that often included very grand dances (think quadrilles and waltzes) she had to lead. It included residencies for guests of high as well as low station that could rival eastern city hotels, including aeries for day angels—and a special suite for Rainy Days, the Director of Home and the Nine Outer worlds (she's the main series antagonist), though the MC was never informed of its existence as it might have made her rebel prematurely.</p><p>The adjunct dome, closest the town, got built out as governmental offices, conference facilities, and an audience room, mostly to train her to run the prefecture she'd was to be granted stewardship over. Of course, her mansion had plenty of servants quarters, kitchens, and workrooms, which she knew as well as her own room, as she often snuck into them (okay, <em>fled to</em>) when her life of constant training became unbearable. She learned to enjoy simplicity and simple duty there, as well as sticky not very sweet vegetable breads, butter pumpkin becoming very comforting and her favorite.</p><p>She thought it was an escape, but it was further training. Of course it was.</p><p>The grounds, the gardens, the parade field, the woods, and the tenant farms beyond them were a whole different matter, and sadly more familiar in her early teens as she had to intern managing them.</p><p>What her home <em>didn't have</em> were proper facilities for learning and teaching how to work miracles and practice the relevant revelation. That was belied by the contents of her enormous private library, but if there is one defining characteristic of the devil-girl, it's how she can be obtuse and blind about certain details until they hit her upside the head. Her home missing what she needed to learn The One Thing she was most interested in was <em>insufferable.</em></p><p>"It isn't lady-like," her guardian would explain when asked.</p><p>She ran away from this grand estate, and lands that stretched from the piedmont to beyond the shore fisheries at sea, and responsibility, to learn how to wield reluctant energies and forces (let's call it magic, to simplify the concept), as well as to find the one friend she had once had, whose words had made it possible for her to work her miracles, and who had betrayed and abandoned her.</p><p>Still. </p><p>Go ahead. </p><p>Ask her about <em>home.</em> </p><p>She barely lived there a decade, but it's her room in that mansion that comes to mind, and her meeting her cold butler-like guardian (who she detested) waiting for her on that staircase of marble and bronze every morning to begin her grueling instruction.</p><p>She's glad she ran away.</p><p>[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]</p><p><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/BoostingIsSharing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>BoostingIsSharing</span></a></p><p><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/gender" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>gender</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/fiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>fiction</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/writer" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>writer</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/author" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>author</span></a><br><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/mystery" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>mystery</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/thriller" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>thriller</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/romance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>romance</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/sf" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>sf</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/sff" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>sff</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/sciencefiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>sciencefiction</span></a><br><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/writing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>writing</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/writingcommunity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>writingcommunity</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/writersOfMastodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>writersOfMastodon</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/writers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>writers</span></a><br><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/RSdiscussion" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RSdiscussion</span></a> <br><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/RSstory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RSstory</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/RSReluctanceStory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RSReluctanceStory</span></a><br><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/microfiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>microfiction</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/flashfiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>flashfiction</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/tootfic" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>tootfic</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/smallstory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>smallstory</span></a></p>