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 127: Penelope looked away from the woman and to the dry lakebed.
Penelope looked away from the woman and to the dry lakebed. “Abilities,” she repeated.
“Yes,” the woman replied. She walked closer but maintained a respectful distance from Penelope as though not wanting to crowd her. Penelope had never been good with strangers in her personal space and appreciated the gesture. “When your abilities blossom you care called to the lake. It whispers the possibilities and the abilities choose you.”
“The words I saw on my skin the other night?” Penelope asked. The woman lifted an eyebrow in question.
“Most do not see actual words,” she said studying Penelope. “They feel the water circling them, and feel the weight of being studied but do not see words. What words did you see?”
“I couldn’t read them,” Penelope said. “They were moving too fast and not in a language I know.”
“Perhaps in time you will learn it.”
“Maybe,” Penelope said. “What language is it?”
“I can not tell you that.”
“Right,” Penelope replied. “What can you tell me?”
“I can tell you that most walk to the lake submerge themselves to be tested and then on the following night return, wade into the lake once more an accept the gifts they are offered.”
“They don’t drink the lake water?”
“They do, even if they don’t realize it. And rarely do they drink enough to affect the lake’s level. Or if they do, they do not notice. They pull from the lake and then they leave.”
“Oh,” Penelope said. She looked at the dry bowl of the lake and wondered if she did something wrong. She wasn’t sure but looking at her actions she was certain that if presented with the same scenario she would do the same thing. She didn’t like the idea of the lake forcing her into it.
“And the superheated sidewalk and sand?” she asked.
“You were not going in on your own.”
“What …effect does taking the lake have? What does it mean?” Penelope asked.
“It means that instead of picking and choosing between your bloodlines, you were willing to accept all of your blood,” the woman said.
“And most people …don’t?”
“No.”
“Right. And you don’t explain it to them?”
“I rarely speak to them,” she said. “I am the guardian of the lake, so to speak.”
Penelope looked from the lake to the woman and then back to the dried up lake. She wondered if she should apologize.
“Apologies are not necessary,” the woman said before Penelope could decide. “I guard it for those of the blood, but it is not mine.”
“But you don’t talk to the others?”
“They don’t stay,” she said. “They take their abilities and go. They do not take their abilities and then walk to the lake to study it after their abilities have been taken out.”
Penelope thought about the shopping cart at the grocery store. “So the feeling I shouldn’t go to the front of the store, or that I should look under the car…”
“Not a traditional ability,” the woman said. “But as lines converge and many lines become one, they mix and mingle. New abilities are created. Your ancestor mixed two lines and that one was born.”
“Two lines,” Penelope repeated. She wondered how many lines were actually in the lake.
Ten til Midnight 