{"id":7045,"date":"2020-02-05T08:30:32","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T13:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/?p=7045"},"modified":"2020-02-04T20:48:19","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T01:48:19","slug":"lets-pretend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/lets-pretend\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Let&#8217;s Pretend&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-24\" src=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/k-avatar-e1443983846496.png\" alt=\"by Kent\" width=\"81\" height=\"81\" \/>Olga\u2019s younger and more receptive sister<\/li>\n<li>\u201cbrain fingerprinting\u201d<\/li>\n<li>treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods<\/li>\n<li>blue-gray vest with silvery buttons<\/li>\n<li>even slightly out of the ordinary<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Tune in next time part 464 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/tune-in-next-time\/\">Click Here for Earlier Installments<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s pretend you do need to tell me how dangerous it is,&#8221; I grumbled. &#8220;I&#8217;m tired of riddles, and I&#8217;m tired of Jim&#8217;s bullshit. I don&#8217;t think I actually want him to be devoured by yetis, but maybe if I just don&#8217;t have to know one way or the other&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;So now they&#8217;re real yeti?&#8221; Doctor Nanna pursed her lips into a duckbilled sneer.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Cannibal furries, then. I don&#8217;t even care anymore. Are they the source of the danger? They only seemed interested in Jim.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They are the foot soldiers of Oksana, who is <em>Olga&#8217;s younger and more receptive sister<\/em>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I shook my head. &#8220;Olga&#8217;s the youngest.&#8221; And, from personal experience I was sure she set the bar impossibly high for receptivity.<\/p>\n<p>Doctor Nanna shook her head too, mockingly. &#8220;Not that Olga. The one who pushed the cart in the room with all the books back at the Academy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A chill ran down my spine. There was a reason no one from the Academy ever utters the word &#8220;librarian&#8221; aloud, and that reason is Olga. She could tell which parts of a book a student had skipped over or misunderstood because, she claimed, our minds left smudgy traces among the words, and this <em>&#8220;brain fingerprinting&#8221;<\/em> told her what everyone was reading about, and by extension what everyone was plotting.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What does Oksana want?&#8221; I asked.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We think she&#8217;s throwing a party, and Jim has been forcibly invited. But you must remember that Oksana <em>treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods<\/em>, and that sooner or later the gavel falls for all of them. Jim knows things. We can&#8217;t let him be transferred to the highest bidder.&#8221; She gave me a warmer look, but only for a moment. &#8220;We&#8217;ve already lost too much time. Now, go put on your mountaineering uniform, the one with the <em>blue-gray vest with silvery buttons<\/em>, and recruit your team without alerting them that this is anything <em>even slightly out of the ordinary<\/em>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>bonus points for using them in order<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Stichomancy Writing Prompts\" href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/stichomancy-writing-prompts\/\">about stichomancy writing prompts<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/stichomancy-writing-prompt-generator\/\">try our stichomancy writing prompt generator!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Olga\u2019s younger and more receptive sister \u201cbrain fingerprinting\u201d treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods blue-gray vest with silvery buttons even slightly out of the ordinary Tune in next time part 464 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Click Here for Earlier Installments &#8220;Let&#8217;s pretend you do need to tell me how dangerous it is,&#8221; I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319,4],"tags":[91,403,534],"class_list":["post-7045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stichomancy-prompts","category-writing-prompts","tag-bonus-points","tag-tune-in-next-time","tag-yeti"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7045"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7052,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7045\/revisions\/7052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runeskelley.com\/skelleyverse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}