author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

One of my writing prompts was “gray goo,” and that’s what I imagine reality flux is like: gray and viscous, just solid enough to hold a shape the way whipped cream holds its peaks. Like a slightly soupier version of clay, but much more responsive to the forces that can mold and change reality.

It is possible to learn all the wrong lessons from reading your way through a library. It all depends on who the librarian is.

Condor is making another imaginary friend. She’s doing it a little differently this time. Instead of modeling clay, she’s using reality flux. She doesn’t normally get to play with reality flux, but when the Duchess asks Condor to make her an imaginary friend, that’s what she gives her to use, and last time Condor pinched a bit off and hid it away. Honestly, Condor feels a little bad about it. It feels like stealing. But just that little bit can’t hurt, right? And the imaginary friend always comes out perfectly no matter how little she uses, when it’s flux.

The flux is so much more responsive than modeling clay could ever be. Instead of rolling and pummeling it, Condor barely has to suggest it into shape. She just holds a picture in her mind, and the flux does the rest. And where her clay creations come out of the Imagination Kit looking like a cartoon imitation of life, flux creations seem startlingly real.

Condor wants a real friend very, very badly.

She knows it’s stupid. Friends do not come highly recommended. The Duchess’s library has hundreds of stories about children and their playmates, and in every one of them, so-called friends betray or bully each other until it all ends in tears. But it always starts out so promising, with games and secrets and gifts, shoulders to cry on and laughter to rejoice in, hands to hold through the good times and the bad. No wonder the children in the stories keep trying to make friends.

Condor thinks that if she makes friends, she can make them the sort that laugh and play games and don’t do any of the bad things....

This has been an excerpt from the Friday Fictionette for August 19, 2016. Subscribers can download the full-length fictionette (1097 words) from Patreon as an ebook or audiobook depending on their pledge tier.

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