For those just tuning in, this challenge is about taking a story idea from bare bones idea into a fully fledged story by writing consistently every week day for fifteen minutes. The sentence I end with on one day, is the sentence I start with on the following. Part one was Bob’s story and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story below. Part Two follows a character named Penelope. I have a few basic sentences to act as road marks on her journey. I am loosely calling that an outline. We will see where she ends up by the time the story is done. For now, we start Part two of the 2025 Fifteen Minute Writing Challenge.
Day 22: She liked working in the school green house and wondered if she would ever get a chance to put those lessons to use in real life.
She liked working in the school greenhouse and wondered if she would ever get a chance to put those lessons to use in real life. Seeing the greenhouse here sent a little thrill through her. It was hers now. She smiled. Then she remembered the lawyer’s caution about the plants. She looked to the pots. The ones outside weren’t ferns or tomatoes. Most of them she couldn’t name.
A quick peek into the greenhouse let her see that while many of the plants were thriving, they too were not ones she remembered from her classes. ‘I did concentrate on the culinary plants.’
In addition to her love of working in the green house, Penelope had always loved fresh herps and vegetables. There was something magical about planting a seed, helping it to grow and then taking what was grown to the kitchen and using it for food. As a result she concentrated more on the plants she could eat than anything else, her mind thinking more of having a kitchen garden than persuing further studies in horticulture.
‘I’ll have to dive into some books just to figure out what is here,’ she thought. There were no markers, no plant tags.
“But there is a large library below,” she reminded herself.
Penelope shut the greenhouse door, content to leave things as they were at the moment. She then went back into the house proper. ‘Even if I don’t know the plants it would be a nice place to sit and relax at the end of the day,’ she thought. She made certain the door leading to the roof was locked into place and then descended the stairs.
Her steps took her to the library. The walls were fitted up with shelves. The rows of books were occasionally broken up by a small piece of hart or a well-placed knickknack. It was a pleasant room of dark wood, good lights and what looked like comfortable reading chairs. Thee was also a long table with a book stand on one end. As many of the books on the shelves were fairly large, Penelope figured the stand was to hold the larger volumes while the reader paged through. As there was a taller stool tucked under the table, she thought she was right.
In the corner was a stand that held not books but rolls of paper. They slotted into the honeycombed holes and filled the corner from floor to ceiling so that Penelope was faced with the round ends of the rolls. There was something oddly pleasing and quite decorative about the honeycombed shapes filled with circles. It looked like an art piece in the corner.
Curious, she walked over and looked in. There was a small brass plate screwed into the front of each honeycomb. It was flat on the inside and she had to lift up the rolled paper to read the words etched into the brass.
“Maps,” she said, reading the details on the plate. She let go of the paper and lifted a few more of the rolled pieces. All of the tags proclaimed them maps. “I suppose it makes sense,” she said. Penelope stepped away. Slowly she let her steps take her around the room. There was not a lot of order to the books. She found they were all mixed up.
Ten til Midnight 