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 119: She didn’t know if the scene just had him in shadow or if because she asked about the neighbor, the magic didn’t focus on showing him that much.
She didn’t know if the scene just had him in shadow or if because she asked about the neighbor, the magic didn’t focus on showing him that much. Penelope made a mental note to write up a question to search for the shadowy man later. She saw the older neighbor fade away and was about to pull her hands away from the glass when other figures appeared. This time it was the couple who lived on the other side of her.
‘I suppose I didn’t specify which neighbor,’ she thought as she focused on the couple.
“She could be useful,” the man was saying.
“We don’t know what her skills are,” the woman said.
“They said they’d pay for any information, and we could use the money.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “You missed the details,” she told him. “He said they’d pay for information about the girl developing the abilities on the list. They don’t really care if she turns out to be ordinary like us. They won’t pay for that information.”
The woman sounded bitter when she said ordinary like us.
“We are of no use to them, remember,” she added. This time there was no mistaking the look on her face, it was annoyance mixed with a great deal of envy. “We aren’t even of one of the families who own the houses on this block. You are just a secondary bloodline so we are allowed to stay here until the child is born and then if he proves ordinary we have to move back across town.”
There was no mistaking her bitterness this time. She rubbed her belly.
“Maybe the child will be strong enough that we’ll need the house protections longer,” the man said. She laughed.
“With our levels?” she asked. “We’ll be lucky if he has any skills and even then it would still be borrowed until your great uncle needs the house for something or one of the bloodline needs it. You’re only a step remember?”
“Its more than your family has,” the man grumbled.
The scene began to fade and Penelope thought it showed her as much as she needed to know. Before she pulled the magic from the glass though, she had one question she thought imperative. “What abilities are on the list?” She focused on the question and the glass cleared and a page of paper seemed to appear under it. There were several abilities on the list and Penelope read them over, committing them to memory. She let the spell fade, pulled her hands from the glass and slipped off the bed. Before she could forget, she opened her notebook and jotted down the abilities that someone was willing to pay her neighbors to find out if she had.
She knew from her experiment with the chart and broken string of rings that all of them had received a ring to mark them. ‘But so did a lot of things,’ Penelope thought.
She set her pen down. ‘Maybe I’ll look into those first and make sure not to mention anything that possibly associates with them when I talk to the neighbors.’
It seemed as good a plan as any. Penelope rubbed her temple with her hand. She felt a wave of tiredness and her stomach once again seemed empty and hollow. One of the few things she knew about magic was that it used the energy of the person wielding it.
‘I suppose that means I used energy.’
She decided she would make another peanut butter sandwich and then figure out how to ask if Mrs. Merriweather was trustworthy or not.
Ten til Midnight 