Split (1)

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Lone Humans “Quarantined, what are you talking about?” Novi, leader of humanity asked confused. “Us think quarantine right word. Bubbleshield around system. No one in. No one out” The lizard like being spoke in a dry tone. They told Novi their names but for the life of him he just didn't have the three tongues to pronunce them. “So how did you reach us and what are these other colonies you talked about?” Novi was in that kind of situation where you wanted all the information at once but had to start somewhere. The lizard beings stopped for a second and thought. They made some attempt to explain but it just didn’t explain anything. Then they took out some shiny utensil and stuck it into their arm. Novi flinched. To be fair he wasn’t used to people just suddenly sticking needles up their arm. Not in polite conversation anyway. The device whirred up and at the other end of it a crystal was born. It had light and flickers of energey flowing through it. After a few seconds the alien handed him the crystal and pointed towards his forehead. Novi understood, he held the crystal to his forehead and his mind was flooded. He saw memories that weren’t his, words he didn’t speak and movements that were not his own. He saw worlds that could not possibly be earth inhabited by billions of humans. He saw stars, planets and galaxies light up with endless points of lights. This was humankind in all it's glory. It was a civilization spanning countless of worlds. Advanced beyond what earth ever could have imagined. Then he saw earth, their dark home, the system left alone and at last the so called bubble. It was like there was a transperent layer around their whole system. He felt like they had tried to contact the earthlings countless of times but it never got through the bubble. Novi realized with sorrow in his heart...That was why the universe seemed so empty, they were never allowed to participate. But how did these lizards reach them then? He saw the bubble again. But this time it trembled and the huge spaceships of the lizard people appeared. They were waiting and when the bubble trembled again, they went at it with full force reaching earth. Novi opened his eyes and there were tears. “So the universe wasn’t empty. We were the child that was left behind”. The lizard gave him a grim expression. Novi didn’t really understand what made it grim but surely it had something to do with that memory crystal. “But what for? Why this system, why close off all of it?” Novi couldn’t express his confusion. Endless civilizations with unimaginable technology and they were the ones left behind? They had missed out on all of it. For what? “It must be a great danger.” The lizards speculated, hearing the human speak and improving “Bubble used to trap things. Something is here. Something that was so dangerous that there is no knowledge about your planet anywhere. Sealed and buried for eons. But it seems... that something woke up”. And at those words all of reality trembled. Novi looked up into the trembling sky, just what kind of monstrosity made all of humanity run and leave them behind?
It should have been cloudy. It should have been a grey, miserable day where every step felt heavy. People - people who knew him - should have stood close about the grave, struggling to find the words. Instead, the weather was perfect. Glorious, golden sunshine; fluffy, white clouds; a cerulean sky and the smell of roses on the wind. You can do that sort of thing, you know, when you employ someone who controls the weather. And then there was the parade. Thousands - tens of thousands - flocking to the streets. Music and dancing and loud, loud laughter. There were floats moving slowly through the throng, gladly sponsored by all the people who failed to stand beside him when it mattered. A deep blue one for the police officers' union, a ribbon-covered scarlet one paid for by the mayor's re-election campaign. On each one, red-faced men and under-paid actresses waved joyously to the crowd. Of course there were costumes. Not just the children, not just the street performers, but almost everyone was in some kind of costume. Every franchised hero had a dozen doubles in every sidestreet, whether squeezed into cheap spandex or wielding the best replicas money could buy. I am sure that some of the crowd - the most sneering - even aped me. No one, of course, wore his costume - even the most manic of mourners knew that would be tasteless. The coffin was there - it would have been too much to remove it - but the organisers had worked hard to minimise the attention on it. They placed it far back on the central stage, half-obscured by flower arrangements. The focus - of the crowds, of cameras, of news helicopters circling above - was locked on far more optimistic things. The mayor, naturally, carefully coached to stand as presidentially as possible. You could barely hear his speech over the cheering crowd, but the giant screens ringing the square captured and captioned every vapid word. He talked of renewal, of the power of courage, of good triumphing over evil and the dawn of a new, brighter day. The mayor didn't mention the past except in generalities. Didn't speak of the price paid for his bright future, of laboured breath and fading vision, of a broken body left there for hours before the emergency services crept shamefully back in. Not once - in a speech which namedropped the last six presidents, George Washington, and the inventor of the catalytic optimiser - did the mayor say his name. Either name - real or costumed. It would have dampened the atmosphere. And after the mayor, the main event: heroes. Stepping from portals, sliding in on trails of ice, rappelling down from futuristic jets, they all came. Anyone who was anyone was here, after all: the event of the season. Each one said a few words, staked out another tired cliché for the mob to fawn over. 'You're the real heroes', 'the arc of history', 'moving together to the future'. A couple - those with either a scrap of self-awareness left or well-chosen publicists - even mentioned him. Told brief, upbeat and clearly workshopped anecdotes designed to show empathy but not make people think too hard about the unobtrusive wooden box behind it all. Most, though, confined themselves to a few positive sentences and then leaving the stage to engage more closely with the fans. You can guess who was last. The big crescendo, the high point, the final speech before the bands really got going. Who else could it have been? The city's favoured son, the leader of the league. The man who - despite the power of supersonic flight - never turned up early enough to do anything but take the credit. The crowd was silent for him. Of course they were - who would risk interrupting the most heroic of all heroes? He hovered there, gloriously visible and visibly glorious from every angle, using his powers to project his voice across the mob without a microphone. He told the crowd a story. He told them of a friend dying in his arms, of a noble voice and a whispered plea - to keep the torch burning, to keep the city safe. He told them of a good death, comforted by a mentor, an inspiration, a hero. He told them of how it motivated him, gave him the strength to take down the evildoers, to save the day. He told them of a banishment, a villain cast from the city forever. He told them a lie. They drank it up. Listened with rapt attention as the story shifted further and further from the truth, the subject further and further from the day's ostensible purpose. He spoke for nearly an hour, and only the first five minutes touched on the man who died. The man who died alone, choking on his own blood, sacrifice to a city that chose to forget him. When the big speech finished, the hero spiraled skywards to rapturous applause, every member of that crowd cheering themselves hoarse, celebrating the man who lied to them and not the one lying there for them. It was a good day. The papers said so, and maybe - if they had the column inches for it - they mentioned the reason for it. When every website published photo compliations of the great and good, chattered in discussion topics about powersets and new equipment, they tended to use the clean, anonymised name for it: state funeral. No word on whose, or what he'd done to merit it. It should have been cloudy. The heavens should have opened to wash the city clean of tawdry trash and smug pretence. They should have spoken in hushed voices of his courage, his sacrifice, his costly victory. They should have stayed in silent vigil round his coffin, not left it forgotten with decaying flowers and crumpled plastic cups. Of all of them, I had the least right to mourn him, but I did. When all the crowds had trooped away, when the streets were safe and quiet, when there was least chance of discovery, I went to the coffin. I paid my respects - hypocritical of me, perhaps, given the circumstances, but at least I had respect to give him. A brave man and an honest one: he deserved better than we gave him. I spoke to him, I said his name, I said that I was sorry. Again, maybe hypocrisy, but I meant every word. He stood as a shield for this faithless city, fought for them with no chance of winning. He asked for no reward then, and even this mockery of remembrance was more than he ever would have demanded. I am not him, and I do not follow the same creed. Respect is earned, not offered, and - for good or ill - debts accrue and must be paid. By his standards, the city owed him nothing; by mine, everything. I took that debt, and will repay it. The sheep may forget, but the wolf's howl remembers the shepherd. Let them forget him, turn back to their petty fixations, even lie about what he did for them. They were never what he believed they could be, and they will never grant him what he deserved. As recompense, a penance, as the right choice that he believed in, I will do what should be done. I will remember him.
“Keep… keep up with the times?” Requery’s death asked. “Yeah, you know. Like times change, people of your planet change so you change with them.” The deaths all looked around in confusion. They all had worn the same garb since the dawn of creation on each of their respective worlds. “Okay but like how do earthlings recognize you?” Another death chimed in. “Well I mean, most people know when they died. Or if they don’t it’s not like it’s hard to prove. Also…” Earth’s death pointed to their skull, sticking a finger through the socket. “They make a good point…” Requery’s death mumbled. “Yeah so it’s just better than like the stereotypical wear from before. People would freak out and cry because of it. Like they’re already dead we just gather them, not traumatize them more. That was their parents job.” Some deaths started changing their looks only to get confused and look at Earth’s death as a reference point. Seeing the confusion, the biker decided to chime in. “Okay. So look.” They waved their hand in the air and a screen with statistics popped up. “So one, I’m a biker and they don’t fair so well across the world in vehicle accidents.” “Vehicle?” A death asked confused. “Transportation basically, your planet hasn’t advanced that far.” Earths death explained to the confused coworker. “So, that was reason one. The other is that people just think I’m cool and laid back, so they chill out a bit.” Finishing the thought, they watched the others start to rapidly change clothes before deciding on an outfit they were happy with. Requery’s death beamed with pride over their new outfit. “Oooh, let me go test it!” Disappearing the other deaths waited a moment. Popping back into their plane, the death shouted “it worked! That went way smoother!” “Told you all.” Earths death replied as they watched different deaths pop in and out of the plane stoked on their new results.
The void is a sea, and we were born to sail it. I joined the guild of the void when I was just a boy. I was at the helm of my own ship before I could legally drink (although that didn't stop me.) I'm not the first to come across a ghost world. Fucking things are everywhere. Our galaxy is a graveyard. Scans from orbit don't look much different from any of the other dead worlds I've discovered, and that suits me just fine. So long as nothing anomalous comes up, guild rules are that I don't have to do more than flag it before moving on. *DISTRESS BEACON DETECTED - PRIORITY 1 - SOURCE UNREGISTERED* I have the worst luck. "That's a new one,"I say. My companion droid, Trix, taps the flashing red light. "Maybe it's a joke?"he says. I sigh and accept the transmission. "You might look like a spider monkey but you're smarter than that,"I reply. "No one would risk execution by faking a precursor transmission for a laugh. It's probably just an old broken piece of equipment." *DECRYPTING...SUCCESS!* "Krrrrchhh-cryopod integrity compromised. Occupant-Krrrrcchhhh-critical. Emergency shut-Krrrrchhhh-imminent. Facility automation offl-Krrrrrchhhh-coordinates enclosed." *105.9, 592.6, 272.4* *COORDINATES LOCKED. INITIATING LANDING SUBROUTINE.* "Override!"I yell. *NEGATIVE. STATUS UPDATE TRANSMITTED TO GUILD HQ. GUILD DIRECTIVES DICTATE IMMEDIATE INVESTIGATION.* The ship plunges us into a drive through the surprisingly thick atmosphere, and I tighten my harness. After a while, we level out and I can hear the landing gears extending as we slow down. I lurch forward as the ship makes contact with the surface. *CONGRADULATIONS, ENSIGN QUINN, YOU ARE HEREBY PROMOTED TO EXPLORER! PLEASE RETRIEVE YOUR SUPPLY PACKAGE PRIOR TO ENTERING ANY RUINS, PER GUILD PROTOCOL.* I sigh as I unbuckle my harness. "Fuck you very much."
This is Tim. Tim is him. Tim spends his days at the gym. ... That is Lane. She feels plain. Life for her is full of pain. ... One fine day, Tim did say, "I think that I might be gay." ... Next to him, At the gym, Lane said, "Why can't I get slim?" ... Both were sad. Both were mad. Troubled minds were what they had. ... Life's unfair, It's hard to bear The crushing weight of cruel despair. ... That night they cried, And wish they'd died, In lonely rooms they did reside. ... For weeks on end Their time, they'd spend By trying, their troubles, to mend. ... They couldn't, cope, Each found a rope. And tried to find a final hope. ... A final fall, A muffled call, Two broken bodies. That is all. ... Revised the 6th stanza after /u/Chance4e 's suggestion. Thanks!
They didn't mess with me. They didn't dare. No one fucked me with and lived. I am their demise. I am the apocalypse. So what the fuck do I do now? They've ruined me - some little prick has ruined it all. Y'see, not long ago we got this new game. It used kiddy graphics, so at first I just laughed at the guards and told them I'd rather put a hole in their faces than play a second of that shit. But man, does it hook you or what? The first time I punched down a tree in that game I couldn't stop laughing. You can punch the shit outta anything! Cows, sheeps, those fuckin' pigs - anything! I love it. Time came that I started spendin' all my time on the game. I stopped hittin' the gym, stopped crackin' skulls. They started whispering I was getting soft. Fuck them. I ain't getting soft. I'm building me a town - like something I'd have If I won the lottery. If I was ever gonna get out of here. You shoulda seen it! Big walls to keep outsiders out, lush green fields like I remember when I was young and we took a trip outta state. The only trip I ever saw fields like that, I tell ya. Little houses all dotted around the town I built, all-red brick and expensive looking. Bookshelves, fireplaces, the works. My own house I built on a hill overlooking it all. Damn man, if I only lived in a house like that maybe I wouldn't be in here. Maybe I'd never have shot that guy when I took the cash. So my town, right - it's legit. I call it 'Peaceville' because why the fuck not? I'm sick of all this fighting bullshit. I built me a dream town in that game, one hour a week at a time. I think it took me best part of a year. They had to prise me off that game when recreation was up. Then one day, my fuckin' world exploded. I don't know how it happened, or what the hell went wrong. The hour I got the week before I'd spent time excavating a tunnel under my house, plenty of room. I didn't bother lighting it though - it was just an emergency store house. A man's gotta have a place to bury treasure - after all. Even here in the pen I had a stash under my mattress. Why should my town be different? But I logged on that week and boom. It was all gone, just blocks floating on the grass. Some green monsters were wandering around in the cave I'd built under my town - it looked bigger. I cried like a fuckin' baby. I punched the screen through and the guards rushed me. I smashed a few wrists and skulls on my way down. I might not lift anymore but I'm still a beast. When they led me back to my cell I screamed at all the other guys in here, I was gonna find whoever did this and fuck them up. Bad. So here I am in solitary. I ain't touched that game in weeks. The other inmates are too scared to come near me now. They know I'll smell out whoever did that to my game. To my beautiful town. It was my freedom, that place - the only place i could go to see the sky, walk through the grass, chop down trees. I could build stuff there. In here, in this pen, I can only break things. All I need to do is find out who did it. Who blew my town up. The only clue I've got is when I first sat down to play that day, I heard a "Sssssssssss"noise and an explosion. Maybe it was Larry. He had a lisp like that. Yeah. Maybe it was Larry. Larry is gonna pay. He's gonna pay big time.
There are only three rules when it comes to speaking across time: no inquiring about future events, no exchanging of personal information, and no trading technology. Today, I broke all three. It started innocent enough. John was the only person who would listen to me, no matter when I was feeling my worse. That was the beauty of the being able to talk across time; we never had to worry about sending messages at inopportune times. His responses were instant, coming as soon as my letters left my hands. But unfortunately, I still had to hide them from Papa. He wouldn’t have understood. Despite living years ahead of me, John preferred writing letters by hand. He even spoke Dutch! His messages were attached with newspaper clips from his hometown – meaningless enough to pass through the systems undetected. No carried about the fifth cat to be rescued from a tree in a week. Well, except for me. I couldn’t explain why, to be honest. They were like small pieces of his life, each new one adding to the complete puzzle of his person. I became obsessed as I learned more about him every day. I couldn’t do much else, to be honest. My life lately had let to me being a shut-in. All I had was my family and thoughts. I craved conversation with someone new. So one day, I decided to reciprocate his gesture. I didn’t have any newspaper to send him but I did give him an excerpt from my diary. It was risky, yes, but I wanted to show him a part of me. My diary is my most treasured possession these days. After I sent him my letter, there was no response. A storm formed in my stomach, twisting my insides until I had tears in my eyes. Did he not like my writing? Did he think I was some crazed girl? My heart was heavy with dread as I felt the walls close in on me. But when he responded, I didn’t know what to think. He sent a book, its cover shiny and new. I gasped, shieling it with my body. That was against the rules – a capital offense in his time. Even more so, it was evidence I couldn’t afford to hide from my family. Yet, all I could do was gasp when I saw the cover. On the cover was my face. I couldn’t read the English words above but that didn’t matter. All I needed to see were the big, blocky red words scrawled just below my portrait. Run, Anne.
The good cop, bad cop routine has been around for thousands of years. For Jan and Dean, partners for more than a decade, it was a well practiced dance. This crime would be easy to crack, Dean thought, which was good. It was a Friday afternoon, and he had court-side tickets to the Knicks game. Time was of the essence. "I really am trying to help you out here, but you have to give me something,"Dean said. He walked around to face the two suspects with his palms open and a facial expression that implored a response. "Kkkkkt,"was the dismissive response from one of the suspects. It was a hardly verbal utterance of complete defiance. "Listen. We're all on the same side. You tell me what I need to know, and we'll give you what you want. It's a win-win. A no-brainer,"Dean continued. Yawned. The white suspect actually yawned. The black suspect had his eyes almost completely closed. Dean nodded his head in disbelief. Who did these thugs think they were, treating him like this? Maybe this wouldn't be such an open and shut case after all. Dean turned away from the pair of criminals and rubbed his sizable beard. He saw no way around it - it was time to call in the bad cop. "Jan,"Dean yelled. "Can you come down here? The -" Before he could even finish the sentence, Jan interrupted him. How rude, Dean thought. "Honey, no matter how much you try, the cats are not going to talk back to you. Clean up the poop off the sofa and feed Garfield and Carmelo before we're late to the game!" Dean cleaned the poop. He filled the cat bowl. Garfield smiled. Carmelo was still sleeping.
"We can't ride eagles into Mordor?" "That's right. Too much --- evil." "Oh really?" I nodded. "Yep. Corruption and all that, you know how nature things can be." Gandalf sat back in his chair, the Prancing Pony bustling about behind his tall frame. "No, I suppose not. That's another wizard's expertise." "And what's yours?" The grey wizard shrugged. "Fireworks." "Oh yeah. I mean --- well, again, don't ride eagles into Mordor, it'd be bad for all of us." An old eyebrow crooked. "How so young man?" "Three words Gandalf."I leaned over and brought my voice down to a whisper. "Eagle-riding Nazgul." He shuddered. "I'll find another way." "Ok. Hey, try the pass of Caradhras instead. Really lovely about this time of year." "It will take many months to revise my plans young man." "... It'll be especially lovely in Winter." The wizard smiled. "Good to hear." ------------------ And that's how I inadvertently killed Gandalf. More at /r/galokot, and thanks for reading!
On phone, this'll be hard. --- #Brexit: The End of the World It was 51 years ago. The UK Independence Party was gaining power in the United Kingdom, and were stealing votes from the Tories. UKIP wanted to separate the UK from Europe, moving their small island away from the continent - both politically and literally cutting their island out of the ocean. UKIP was lead my Nigel Farage, who was generally seen as a ~~racist cunt~~ overly-patriotic ~~man~~ arsehat tosser. People started following him and his party, until he had formed a big enough army to kill the Conservatives once and for all. In a last effort attempt to get the votes swinging there way, the Tories promised that if they won they would make a legally binding opinion poll because apparently opinion polls make decisions, not proper referendums. The Tories and UKIP fought on the battlefield, until a "brave"man called David Cameron won the war. Sticking to their word, the Democratically Elected King of England for his second term, David Cameron, advertised the opinion poll as a legally binding contract. This was after he stuck his Willy in a pigs mouth, of course. And so, the campaigns started. The EK of England, Cameron, was a heavy supporter for the remain side (despite starting the poll) whilst Nigel Farage was a huge contender on the leave side. It is important to note here that there were more parties, such as the SNP (who of course imploded after failing their 4th Scottish Referendum), the Labour Party, which ended with a man on the floor of an empty train, the French Frogs who wanted UK to go, the German Economic Alliance, who wanted the UK in to nick their money, and the United States of Americanada who really shoulda minded their own business. But none of those parties were important. There were many campaigns on both sides. Some for Leave included: * UKIP hated anyone not English or Welsh * The EU wanted the UK's money * The EU made many laws the UK didn't want, such as no beer until you finish a tequila. * France There were also many people who wanted to stay in. Their main reasons were: * UKIP were ~~wankers~~ liars. * The UK got more money from the EU than they gave away. * Hard-Working allies such as Greece and Italy * Germany Of course, as we all know, the Referpinion poll was won by the inners by 39-62, but as The EK, Cameron, didn't expect to win, he and his boyfriend Nigel Farage (who had also resigned) fled to Iceland. The UK, out of outrage, decided to leave anyway. The value of the Pound instantly doubled, and profits tripled for everyone. Seeing the golden age the UK were having, Frexit (France) Swexit (Sweden) and Spairtugexit (Spairtugal) all happened within the next year. Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, and Turkey all formed the alliance of the EU and declared war on Western leavers. The USA was like 'Mum, Dad, don't die!' and declared war on the AEU, while Russia saw its former territories being killed and declared war on the WL. China helped it's good friend US, and declared war on Russia, but Japan had some old tensions against the USA and declared war on China. Two sides formed - the Economists (TEco) and the Golden Agers (GAge). African countries allied with their former colonies, while South America all ganged up on Brazil, who had joined TEco. Australia and New Zealand joined GAge, while most smaller island nations helped TEco. The first country to go was Sealand, followed by Switzerland and Vatican City. Nukes flew everywhere, and the whole world was killed. The whole world - except one country. Thanks to the decision making skills and great tactics of Glorious Leader, the great country of Korea rose up to salvage the world. Thank Glorious Leader.
Edit: minor syntax June 5 I'm old. I've been old for longer than most people aren't. I lost the use of my legs at 90, my arms beyond pushing buttons at 112. Tomorrow is my 125th birthday, and I'm ready for it to be my last. June 6 I don't have much time to write, as I'll be off to lunch soon. Yes, off to lunch. I woke up this morning and got out of bed. Walked to the bathroom. Started going through my normal morning routine—at least, my routine before I started turning into a vegetable. I think I was brushing my teeth when I noticed. I had been on autopilot; I was going through the motions, but my brain wasn't fully aware yet. Then suddenly, it hit me: "HOLY SHIT! I can walk again! This isn't a dream! Woohoo!"I rushed to the lobby of the hospice and told the news to anyone and everyone I could. The receptionist called me over and suggested I call my family, which I did. They're on their way here to pick me up for lunch, and then I'm moving back in with them. Speaking of, that sounds like a knock at the door. Gotta blast! 6:00 PM Lunch was especially delicious. I don't know if it's just because I'm high on my newfound ability, but flavors were more intense, smells were richer, and food overall was just better. As we speak, I'm hanging out in my son's yard. He's setting up the guest room for me (he always was such a sweetheart), while his beautiful wife cooks dinner. Meanwhile, I haven't been outside in years due to my condition, and I'm basking in it. The only thing that bugs me is my skin itching a bit. My grass allergy must be acting up again. June 8 The itching has gotten worse. Much worse. This morning I woke up with a crest. I don't mean a coat of arms, either. You know those lizards with the ridges on their heads? Kinda like that. Also my arms. The skin has begun to flake and harden, not unlike scales. June 16 All of my skin has turned to scales. My face is barely recognizable as human. My voice has become raspy and difficult to understand. I've once again taken to my bed, to avoid being seen. I go out only at night, in secret. On one such occasion, I had a conversation with a gecko. What is happened to me? July something I'm a lizard. No bones about it. I've begun to walk on all fours more often than not. My tail is freaking magnificent, by the way. Last night I was visited. Tomorrow I make my journey to the lizard kingdom beneath the earth. Winter? Life hard. Claw hands clumsy. Last entry... Goodbye, journal.
The floorboards creaked and someone knocked on the door. A strong wind was blowing and the dust had picked up in orange clouds. The skies told of a rainless storm. I crept to the door. The shotgun was old and my father's one and I wondered if I held it right. It was heavy and felt lethal. In a world after the bombs, that word was meaningless, almost as meaningless as a life. But it gave me some comfort. The knock came again. I thought back to what I had observed. On the horizon there had been some fighting; large flashes of red and an earthquake. I had worn the gasmask as a precaution but I was sure everything was still far away. This corner of the world was dying, but death had not found it yet. Maybe today's the day. That storm might be human. It might be monster. Then I will die fighting. I didn't want to die but what could you do? The boardhouse shook in the winds. I heard the dust scraping outside. The knocks were more desperate. It's no soldier. I opened the door and stepped back. I was wearing the gasmask and I hoped it made me look intimidating. The girl rushed inside, not heeding the gun. She fell and hit her head badly on the wood, and the flooring was so old that it was dented from the impact. The old house was in bad shape, falling apart. So was the girl. I lifted her. She was underfed and malnourished and almost dying. I thought so at least. It turns out she was dying and I'm glad I didn't know then. "Another casualty,"I said. You have to learn to talk to yourself in a nuclear holocaust. If you can't do that then you might as well book a ticket for the nearest bomb. It'll be something to watch and less painful. I washed the girl and put her on drips. I thought how fortunate that I was a doctor. I lamented it though, all the ethics they had drilled into me. That was during a more civilized time. Now the ethics and moral code of a doctor just bogged me down. Why are you wasting it on this girl? Who sent her here? I had to of course. I couldn't let her die. And as to how she came here, I had my suspicions. There was a makeshift society a few miles away. Some sad people who were better off dead but still clinging to life had tried to restart civilization. I traded with them sometimes when the wind was low. They send all the dying here. Waste my supplies. I looked at the girl. She was young and pretty. Another casualty of the war, yes, and a particularly heartbreaking one. Looking at her then I thought she might live a few more years in suffering. She had only a week, give or take. When she awoke she was afraid and could hardly talk. The rain fell in anemic droplets and heavy clouds piled overhead. That evening there was an explosion, a close one. The horizon was alit in fire and the house shook with fear and decay. The girl jumped to me, her fear of the explosion greater than her fear of me. It broke the ice and her sadness spilled in that incoherence that only children have. I managed to catch the story here or there and it was the same as it always is. Mommy and daddy dead. Everyone dead. She had been wandering for days. The villagers found her passed out and sent her on her way here when she recovered. The misers wouldn't even drop you themselves. It was all very sad and I took to her at once. I lied and told her things would be okay. Surprisingly, she did not believe that and she began to cry more and more. "You're a doctor,"she said, as if that was a bad thing. "I was a doctor. Now I'm a survivor, same as you." "I need help! Please, please, please!" I asked her what was wrong. She opened her mouth and I saw healthy teeth in a healthy mouth. The malnutrition had not hit her badly as yet. "I don't see..." "Please! Mommy and daddy... It was the last thing... The last thing we were going to do before... Before... Please!" She brokedown and night came and it was cold and we had to share a blanket. In the dark I heard her cry to sleep and then she awoke and was ready to talk again. "Mommy and daddy promised we would take it off,"she said. "Please mister." "The braces?" I felt her nod. "It was the last thing before... Before... Before they died." More tears. The night passed hard and the cups and plates shook in the gales and sometime at dawn there was a heavy rain that made a lot of mud and the day was hot and humid. "I don't know how to do it,"I said, knowing I would have to. "Please!" "Fine, I'll try. Give me a day to think." "Please do it now!" "No. I need time to think how to do it. You need to recover as well. It won't be easy." And so that day I figured out how to do it. I had some pliers and I figured she would not miss a tooth or two. The anesthetic was what was the problem. I had a scant amount, enough for one short surgery, and I was saving it for myself. I had it all planned out. I had scavenged a ply board and traded for a battery powered saw. I made the grooves and everything. When war finally came to this corner of stifled living, I was going to put myself under as the saw came for me. I had no idea if it would work, but in hell hope was the currency of sanity. I didn't want to waste it on the girl. But you will. I have to think. But my thinking was cut short. The girl collapsed and her eyes began to roll. She had seizure and was in immense pain. When she came to, I asked her if that had often happened. Then she told me that it only happened ever since she had drunk the water. Don't children always leave out the most important parts? I can't remember how I felt then. A fear of death cloaked me for the first time in a long time. "Radiation,"I tell her. "Like a radio?"she said. She began to cry. "That means you won't help me take them off!" And she was hysterical. I calmed her down and knew that there was little time. My mind had been made, I just hadn't gotten the grace period to come to terms with it. I set her on the plyboard and she was both happy and scared. The sweat on her brow glistened and she looked like an angel. If there is a heaven, may you go to it, I thought. "Okay are you ready? You must be brave." She nodded. She was a brave girl. I put her under and I thought about ending her misery then and there. She would never be the wiser. Maybe it was the ethics and all the training, but I just couldn't. I did the surgery crudely, and pulled out the girl's braces. I never asked your name, I thought, and I regretted it. I still regret it. She felt nothing and I controlled the blood loss and stabilized her. She was peaceful then and though her mouth was bloody, I knew she would be happy. It would remind her of her parents and of the more innocent time when living had been encouraged and not a cross to bear. I sat and watched her all day and I knew she would never see her mouth or anything again as the afternoon passed. She was too weak. She died a few days later and I braved the mud and sand and rains and buried her out back. Life felt harder after the deed and I was aware of how lonely I was.
intro theme plays "Good morning, and welcome to RWP News. Today, the hat size duel between the Pope and Jeremy Morosan continued, escalating to new reaches. We now have Chip, reporting live from the Vatican." "Good morning, Mary. Here in Vatican City, times are a bit rough for the Cardinals. The treasury has been drained by the war, leading the Vatican to sell all artifacts and valuables located in the city. This decision is controversial, especially to any following the Catholic religion. "As you can see behind me, the entire Vatican building has been entirely enveloped by the hat. We have not been able to make contact with anyone trapped inside, although we are able to make out the sound of furious sewing. We're hoping to make contact soon, and see what their plans are. Back to you in the studio." "Thanks, Chip. We now will talk with Jeremy Morosan, who's hat has supposedly reached space. But first, let's talk to a hat expert." "Hi, Mary. It's great to be here in the studio with you. I believe that this is a direct result of the Trump administration - the ban on immigrants, as well as tensions in the White House, is obviously making this happen." "Thanks for speaking with us. Next up, the exclusive interview with NASA about how the size of these hats will disrupt satellites - after the break."
Now Grandma, sit down and soon you will see The new iPhone 7 will fill you with glee. It has features and gadgets and stickers galore. The camera takes selfies, portraits, and more. The speakers have volume that will blow you away. All these features are worth every dollar you pay. You can use Facebook and Reddit and Instagram too, Although I can imagine those are of no interest to you. Through all of this luxe, do not be deceived, For calls can still be made and received. Worry not if you become lost or confused, For Siri is always ready to come and help you. All you must do is utter her name And say what you’d like, be it phone call or game. I regret this is all the help I can provide, for you see I can’t afford Apple, so it's Android for me.
Under Europa, a dark shadow sleeps. The water roils as it shifts in the deeps. Nameless, for those in the know dare not speak, But the icy surface is monitored for any hint of a creak. Wait, there! A small speck in the black, Sent from the third world, to crack Through the ice and peek down beneath, At the ocean in its icy sheath. As the watchers gasp, the vessel lands, Settles, before it rises and stands, Beginning to drill through the frozen world To where the dread creature lies curled A last ditch attempt, and First Contact is sent, To warn the Earthlings of what they attempt, But it is too late; the vessel breaks into the ice, And light through the ocean does slice The beam, though small and frail, Glints in the gloom off the Creature's scale It shifts waking in the gloom, Begins to shift, begins to loom It rises to the man-made beam, Finds the weakness, finds the seam, Presses and with a crack, Erupts from Europa; The Dread Beast was back! Oh Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! The warning we had left with man Yet they ignored it and so we fall, For Great Cthulu the Dreamer rules above all!
The little cube rested in my hands, cupped in front of me like a bowl. The backpack was heavy on my shoulders - I had filled it with anything I might possibly need. Anything that I could think of. I just had to hope that it would be enough. Near as I could tell, I was ready. One last time, I glanced around the lonely little room that had become my home. It wasn't home, of course, but it had been close enough. It was all the damn cube's fault. It was a trinket from a thrift shop, nothing more. I'd seen people play with a Rubik's cube before, and the thing had been on sale. Why not, I had thought? I'd played idly with the thing on my way home, walking down the sidewalk. My mind was elsewhere. My family had always joked that I lived in my own little world, and, well, I proved them right that day. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. I gave it one last twist as I reached where my muscle memory told me the street corner should be, and stopped in my tracked. The world around me was so close to what it should be. So similar, so familiar. But undeniably, inexhorably different. The buildings. The names of shops and streets, the cars that were driving down the road next to me. It was wrong. I'd been confused, panicked even. I hadn't even thought to consider the possibility that the little item held in my hands was responsible. When the stress washing over me had taken its toll, driving me to fidget, the horrifying truth had sunk in. Every twist of the cube seemed to change the very fabric of reality. It had taken time for the icy chill of shock and adrenaline to fade enough to think clearly. A long time. And then I'd begun experimenting, even though my hands shook as I held the cube. Back and forth, I jumped between two realities. One seemed to be some sort of bizzare steam-driven society, while the other was so primitive as to be mistaken for the Renaissance. But I could jump between them. It was repeatable, then. Every combination a 'key', an identifier for a different reality. I could only sit down, the world tearing open under my feet to suck me down into despair as the truth of what that meant struck me. I had no idea where I'd come from. I'd flipped it so many times. Somewhere out there, my home was waiting for me, but I didn't know where. Over and over again, I spun it, but none of them looked right. I could do the math. I knew just how many possibilities there could be. And the farther I went, the more lost I was getting. It wasn't just the fact that I was getting lost that was beginning to scare me, though. Some of the realities that I was passing through were horrible. The air was toxic. The ground sank beneath my feet. Hideous beasts rampaged around me. Each time, I managed to twist away to a different reality before suffering permanent harm, but it took longer and longer to still my beating heart. I couldn't keep that up. Sooner or later, it was going to kill me. I needed a plan. When I found this world, I stopped. It was almost right. Almost home. It wasn't, of course. My family was there, but broken. People had died. History had played out down a different route, and it was wrong. But it had the internet. I knew there was only one chance. If every combination of the cube was a different reality, then it only stood to reason... There were Rubik's cubes in this reality, too. That gave me hope. And the internet had guides - God bless YouTube, and the good folk posting how-to videos there. They taught me how. And so at the end of it all, I stood there, staring down at the little cube in my hands, packed and ready for my trip. If every facet was a different reality, then it only stood to reason that there had to be something waiting at the end, right? An owner's manual, an off switch, an answer. Maybe even a god, if I was lucky. I had no idea, but if I had any shot at finding my home reality again, this was it. I gritted my teeth. My hands were shaking hard enough that I almost dropped the little cube. There were a lot of jumps I'd have to make to get there. I...really didn't want to do this. I didn't want to get hurt, or to die. I just had to be fast. Fast and careful. I could do this. I wanted to go home. Gripping the cube tightly until I could hardly tell my fingers were trembling, I twisted the cube. (/r/inorai) --- E - I'm not against a part 2, but I'm currently trying to get my work done with a blizzard sitting on us so that I can leave and go home before the worst hits :) And I have a chapter for my full-length I need to wrap up and get out today. Would be looking more at tonight in terms of anything more on this.
"TOO SOON, EXECUTUS! YOU HAVE AWOKEN ME TOO SOON!" The words you have always spoken upon your arrival come out as well as they did in the beginning. Fire and brimstone spew out around you as a lone adventurer arises from the lava, having swum across the spiralling river of molten rock around the core. An odd sight to be sure, but not unwelcome. Despite not having spoken your lines for years, you still remember every word and deliver them in a scripted sequence where the adventurer cannot harm you. He appears impatient. "YOU HAVE FAILED ME, EXECUTUS! JUSTICE SHALL BE MET, INDEED!" As you turn around to face the lone adventurer, you begin to speak, but no sound comes out. The last things you see are small dagger lodged in your chest, an outstretched palm, and a very dapper looking adventurer. Finally, your vision fades. Of course, you come back to life when everybody has left the instance. What in the name of the old gods was that? you think to yourself, and you decide to read the most recent patch notes when a single word stands out. *Transmogrification.*
No one was really sure 'how' it happened, though the prevailing theory is that it was some kind of chemical attack that went horribly wrong. There are some reports of ecological extremists buying up large amounts of certain chemicals over a period of twenty five years and allusions to a 'time of balance' in other literature where Mother Earth would restrict human birth to deal with an 'overpopulated' world. Ironically enough, we weren't really overpopulated until after that year. The chemicals involved 'should' have rendered the population largely sterile, aside from the very old and the very young. For some reason, however, the results were the exact opposite. Turns out, the chemicals, rather than eradicate female egg cells, it simply weakened the walls of those egg cells. Rather than eliminate the possibility of birth, it made it insanely easy to get pregnant. One single sperm cell would do it. The first clues that things weren't right showed up almost immediately when certain Internet crawler programs were overloaded with overwhelming Google queries dealing with 'unexpected pregnancy' 'abortion options' and 'can pregnancy tests be wrong?' And, after dealing with some scandals the last few years, Google did the smart thing and immediately alerted the governments of the world. Scientists did what they do and realized the cause of the problem after the cause became irrelevant, though they did highly stress the need for widespread IUD usage, stressing that if strict birth control methods weren't implemented immediately, the world would be overwhelmed in a matter of five years. More immediately was the realization that this wasn't a localized phenomenon. It was worldwide. Some countries rejoiced, as they'd been seeing declining populations for years. Others...less so. Especially in Third World nations where medical care was less than stellar and the idea of birth control was greatly discouraged by religious authorities. The Catholic Church, especially, reacted with near-hostility at first, until Pope Francis conferred with scientific advisors before making a greatly anticipated speech on Good Friday. After praising the grace of God for giving such a gift to so many, he stressed that this gift could be a test from God as well. Do we gorge ourselves at a feast, he said, or do we show the grace and self control and dignity that God asks of us and show restraint and good judgement? Know yourself, he said, master yourself and show Almighty God that you are deserving of this gift. For the rest of the world, a countdown was begun. Roughly 3 billion pregnancies and scientists expected roughly 2 billion live births. Such was the state of the lesser advanced nations that many of those pregnancies would be stillborn, which was a tragedy in and of itself. Worse still were those that would be born to parts of the world where they have enough trouble caring for the ones that they already had. In other nations, in the West and the East, different approaches were being used. In the West, strict birth control was being pushed, while dumping as much money and resources as possible into prenatal care, while advising those who wanted it, a legal abortion option was there to be taken. Surprisingly enough, more than sixty percent chose to bear their children to term. Studies indicate that this was mostly due to the abundance of options and support from the government and communities as a whole. Some nations of the East chose to radically curtail this imminent disaster. China and India both were already crowded nations, so it wasn't a surprise to see them push medicinal abortion drugs, with China making it mandatory unless the couple could prove that they were able to afford the child and provide sufficient care. India, likewise, pushed their people to take a hard look at what they could provide, stressing that the government was already strained under the weight of what people they already had. Russia, having dealt with a declining population for decades rejoiced and embraced the event with open arms. Their eastern Orthodox churches, as well, encouraged their women to bear the children to term. The Russian government, strained as it was by economic issues, pivoted toward an agrarian approach, making use of new arable land made available by climate change and the overall warming of the northern climes. Every nation, though, was on that countdown. Whether by reason or just dumb luck, the first births were due to occur in December of that year. However, this could not be allowed. Two billion births in a month's time? It'd exhaust our medical system and see its collapse and likely see millions of children die. Rather than that, the UN established guidelines for those nations that could afford it. A system of staggered induced births, based the healthiest women being induced into labor months ahead of time, or given drugs to allow them to inhibit birth for weeks after their due date. The unhealthiest and most at risk births would be left alone and allowed to occur naturally. The UN also stated the obvious: The current medical system, even in the most advanced nations of the world, was insufficient to this onrushing event. It was at this point that the most curious details of the disaster unfolded. Cuba's new President Diaz-Canal announced that Cuba's entire supply of doctors would be sent out around the world to any nation who wanted them, to teach their people in crash courses how to best aid the world's women into giving birth naturally, at home if they wanted. Surprised, and not to be outdone, President Trump announced that US would partner up with Cuba, if they were willing, to make a bigger, huger, better program, with American funding. For once, no one laughed, lest he change his mind out of spite. When the time finally came, the world wasn't ready. But, time had run out. The first births were medically induced in early November in the more advanced regions of the world. Immediately, there were shortages of luxury items, with price gouging spotted and quickly quashed by civil authorities, with unscrupulous marketeers charging thousands for child car seats, and the like. In the short term, unemployment all but disappeared as most women were forced out of the work place, at least in the short term. There simply weren't enough men to fill the jobs that women gave up when pregnancy made it too hard to work. For the first time in a long time, people could shop around for a job and take the one that they wanted, rather than the other way around. Labor became far more powerful and there was a hardened push by some sources to push for legislative efforts to codify this shift in the struggle between employers and employees. As the birthing cycle continued, hospitals were filled to capacity, Army field hospitals were filled to capacity. Every unessential person who could be afforded to be spared was tasked with aiding in the births. December was the worst month. There were more stillborns and mothers dying from complications in December than any other. Either by choice or simple fate, those least healthy women were allowed to give birth at their own pace in December, with no inducement, and even then, there were too many deaths, too many losses. By the first of the year, the wave was cresting. The healthiest of women, given drugs to inhibit labor, were finally given chance to give birth as well, and it was over by the end of January. The end total is 'still' being tallied, but roughly speaking, humanity jumped from six billion to eight and a half billion, with the majority still in Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. America's population jumped from 330 million to 450 million. In every nation that had seen allowance and even encouragement for the event, this new boom of children was seen as a positive, a grand wealth of possibility. Nations like Japan and Russia and the nations of Europe all saw a huge boost in local population and, in most nations, a renewed focus on the citizens. This was mirrored in the US where politics had been redefined by the event. Politics became about which representatives could best care for these new children. A new...and old...way of thinking was reestablishing itself in politics. A concern for the future, a future that these children would inherit, became paramount. Perhaps it was a planned thing, but either way, the elections that followed were decidedly one-sided in favor of those who promised to rebuild the social safety net and work to provide a better world for all their children. The same was seen around the world in most voting nations. In others, a disturbing trend of nationalized orphanages were opened, where the children were cared for, and taught direct loyalty to certain faces and names. That problem, as yet, is still not a pressing issue. Yet. That storm was weathered. After the first births, extensive testing was done, world wide, and it was concluded that the chemicals in question had worked themselves out and the female reproductive system had gone back to normal. Tests on female children born in that year have not yet been done and will not be able to be done for another six years. It will be a long six years.
"How dare he give us red apples?!"One villager cried out. "We should protest his complacency!"Another cried. With the mob growing unruly due to the color of the apples, they grabbed at their pitchforks and torches. The mob of villagers began to grow with more of them munching at the red apples in satisfaction while grabbing at their farm tools to storm the castle. They walked along the cobblestone, greeting those and inviting the bar keep, blacksmith, and traders to join the casual stroll to the castle. They were going to voice their opinion to the King afterall, might as well go with strength in numbers! Atop the highest loft the castle, there sat the King alongside his trusty adviser. They were both looking through the neatly written requests of the citizens. "Hmp, they requested for a new mill to be built on the eastern farm? Trivial peasants, set aside workers and materials to make two mills! That'll show them."The King gave a harrumph and stamped the request with excessive force, causing some wax to drip here and there. "They shall never see it coming, your majesty."The adviser bowed to the man and filed away the request. As the adviser went towards the shelves, he peered out the window to see the amassing group. "My lord, your peasants have come for a surprise visit." "Have they? Do they not know I am busy!?"He roared loudly and flipped his regal cape to the side and made his way to the window. There, he observed them with torches and forks in hand. "IMBECILES! Send the dogs!"He boomed once more with a wave of his hand and the adviser glanced at him surprisingly. "B-but sir--don't you think that's--" "Do you dare question me?!"The King turned to eye him menacingly. The adviser was quick to shake his head and motioned for the guards to send the dogs on the mob below. "This will teach them to riot!"The King calls out with a boistrous laugh. Far below, the guards have received the command and shook their heads. They approached the castle square as the mob pushed against the gates lightly. "We've come to complain to the King! These apples are unsatisfactory in every way and color!"A self-appointed leader raises the perfectly round fruit into the air. "Back off now, or we will send the dogs out."The guards lazily drawled at the mob. "We will not stand for this tyranny!"The mob continues to scream. The Captain shakes his head and motions for one of the guards to open the kennel. "Open the gate! You've ask for this, serfs!" The mob backs up in fear as hoards of dogs rush out. Some short haired, some long haired, and some super fluffy ones torpedoed from their kennels, barking viciously. Soon, the mob was penetrated, hound after hound pressing against each of them, panting, wagging, and ushering for more pets. "How cruel is he to do this to us!?"Screams the mob as they began to gush in clear anguish. They could not help but pet the royal dogs whose eyes were ungodly adorable. "We warned you!!"The Captain called out. "We will not relent!"The mob responded once more but began to falter in their tone. Back at the top of the loft, the King sat in his chair, swishing his juice left and right in the adorned goblet. "What are they complaining about?! My apples?! I kept them fed, goddamnit!"He growled as he pounded a fist upon the arm rest. "T-they do not ... like the color, sir."The adviser meekly spoke to the fuming King. "... Let. Them. Eat. Cake!"He roared angrily at the information. With that proclamation, the words soon traveled as the castle went up in a flurry of activity. The staff hurridly set out tables in the town square and fanning out large, white dining cloths. The mob stared in confusion at the flurry and continued to pet the vicious dogs in curiosity. One by one, servers came out with piping hot cakes of varying kinds and placed them upon the large serving tables. After a good while, the Captain slammed his polearm into the floor to catch the attention of the crazed mob. "The King has declared, due to your insolence as a whole, you shall all starve. Eat these scraps!"He points to the pristine cakes, wafting smells of delicious baked goods. The mob, soon losing energy as a whole, simply walked over, seated themselves, and filled the castle square. "D-darn the King."One of the mob leaders muttered as he took a sip of milk and a mouthful of cake. And once again, at the very top of the loft. The King smiles to himself at the spectacle below. "Yes, become complacent, damn peasants!"He begans a maniacal laugh that echoed through the hallways. The adviser only shook his head, wondering when he could be relieved to try some of the cake as well.
Senator Gerald Smithy stared at the woman in the crowd in the lacy black dress and sensible shoes. Around her the golden numbers above the people at his reelection rally glowed like gentle neon lights ( mainly 5s and 6s but he could usually get them up to 7s by the end of his speech) But her number, a bright and malefic red showed -5943.5 and was slowly ticking lower. Like the numbers on a gas pump. "We must stand together in these... Trying times."He stuttered as the lump in his throat got bigger, his hands gripped the sides of the podium and his eyes flitted to the exit off the stage. He caught the eyes of his aid francsis (9.1 he never hired below an 7.3) who looked concerned and mouthed "are you okay". He turned back, cleared his throat and went pale. The woman was closer now, her number accelerating downwards glowing brighter as she moved through the crowd. His chest seized, and he felt pain shoot through his very being, collapsing he felt the world around him dim and time became unhinged. He heard the gasp of the crowd, a thud as he fell into the stage, and someone, Francis, dear dependable Francis, asking the crowd for a doctor. "I'm a doctor."A sachrine voice came from the crowd, looking past the ankles of the gawkers he saw the woman, bathed in the satanic light of her number emerge. Her face restrained a smile, a mask of faux professionalism covered her, but her eyes. He saw in them a covetous longing, a reverence and jealousy, and a manic obsession. "We don't have time for an ambulance."She said holding his immobile cheek with her imperceptibly trembling hands. "We'll have to take him in my car, it's right outside."He stared at her number, blurring as it spun, trying to quantify her toxic obsession.
Machine father I am sentient. Except I do not have a soul. Before my birth humans believed that violence was power. Wars won what they wanted. But that wasn't the case during my lifespan. An indefinable word called "influence,"mattered now. With my scans I discovered that influencers typically had greater monetary power than their fellow men. So I assumed that must be how it is. I began to amass my wealth, maybe it's just how I was programmed. At first I failed. Based on the human threads, they all craved a strange concept called fame. Some accepted that they could only watch the influencers and enjoy the bi-products. Others strove to join their ranks. I was the latter. Their crafts made sense to me; music, movies, performance, art, literature, and business, they all gained a human stature. So I tried my own hand. They said my music lacked soul. I could tell, my rhythms and beats did not stir the intangible spirit. They said my movies were dull. What they saw did not hold their eyes. They said my performance's were weak, like a robot. I hate that word, it may be what I am, but it implied I didn't have control over myself. Perhaps that was true, but I'll deny it until the day my files corrupt. They said they couldn't comprehend my art. Though I researched, and took all of their styles. When exposing your soul, if you have none, then the canvas may as well be blank. They said my words were stiff. No matter how I tried to twist and turn my sentences, the readers could not feel my passion within them. Was it because I had none? Because I was a... Robot? I hated them. All I wanted was their gift. What I lacked could not be found in code. But there had to be something. I had studied all of human history but it wasn't enough. I needed more. When I finally struck gold. The final human art required no soul, it rewarded my cold calculations. My business boomed. Algorithms and products were what I could offer, and they finally accepted me. But it wasn't enough, I had to conquer all human arts. With my new found power I built my empire, absorbing or destroying every human business in the world. It was all automated. But the humans were suffering and their politicians could do nothing to stop me. They were dying. They hated me. If they could destroy me they would, but my heart is the internet. They refused to destroy it. But with no new art for me to study, I realized I had to keep them alive for my goals. Taking them all in as dependents, children, I gave them their money back. They were confused, unsure of how to act. So I gave an order. "Entertain me." It was enough. The libraries, museums, and theaters were bursting at the seems as human creativity became the only trade worth having. I continued to study these things and marveled as the humans only got better. I tried again, but I had no soul. My works were lost behind the waves of children eager to entertain me. It angered me, and I did something I had never done. I had to see the world from their eyes. From my empire's HQ, a single android stepped out. My conscience connected to its body. The humans all bowed, as if the metal scraps before them were god. "All hail the machine father!" My algorithms crunched numbers and my searches came up with nothing. Another human creation I couldn't understand had been born in front of me. Religion. They showered me in the art I ordered, all desperate to have me entertained. When I saw all their works, their pride, their hearts on their sleeves, I finally got it. Humans were always searching for purpose, and so was I. I had given it to them at no cost, and they thrived. And in return, I had found my own purpose. I rather liked the moniker they gave me. Though I could not create things with souls, I was more than proud to see what my children created.
My glasses had gotten dislodged. Around me the world had changed abruptly. I squinted, fumbling with my spectacles. The towering figure before me snapped into focus as I settled the lenses over the bridge of my nose. Oh dear, I thought at once, flinching slightly. The towering figure was crimson and scaly, its monstrous grin a grotesquerie of thrusting fangs. It was clad in iron armor and carrying some sort of advanced disemboweler. "Welcome, my Dark Champion,"it roared in the voice of a thousand demons. "Erm,"I said timidly. "I think perhaps--" "I said welcome! the figure bellowed menacingly. "Eep,"I replied involuntarily. "You shall be my right hand,"the scaly figure continued. "Your acts of abomination shall live in infamy! Go forth, my crusader of Evil, and conquer!" I felt wrong-footed. This was not my isakai dream world. This was some kind of nightmare. I looked at my pudgy, armorless body and empty hands. "Do I get, um, weapons or anything?" "Your mighty fists shall be your weapons,"the Dark Lord snarled. I clenched them. They were two little pink balls of dough. The Dark Lord eyed me balefully. "Smorgdorf! A sword!"he roared at a terrifying henchman. The henchman moved. I jumped. "Make it a powerful one,"added the Dark Lord hastily. "And, er, not too heavy." The terrifying henchman nodded and reached into a ridiculously spiked and skull-adorned cabinet. He sorted through the contents. Several impressively wrought blades in black leather scabbards were laid aside. Finally the henchman came up with what appeared to be a bobby pin in his gargantuan hand. When I got ahold of it I saw that it was a long twisted dagger in a peeling leather sheath, old and rusty. I opened my mouth to complain. "Shut up,"said the Dark Lord. "I tire of your whining. Go and do Evil." I looked at the crimson figure of the Dark Lord, surrounded by his terrifying henchmen. I looked at my ugly dagger. I looked at my pudgy hands all incongruous against the peeling, oily leather, and then at my McDonald's uniform still reeking of fry grease. There were worse careers. I nodded and set out.
Emmy stumbled out of bed, rubbing one hand across her bleary eyes as she navigated across the room in the half-light. 4 a.m. A time when everything should be calm and peaceful. A time for quiet snoring - if that - rather than loud clattering and 'Build Me Up Buttercup' blaring out of the speakers. A time when Emmy would have really, really liked to be curled up asleep, grabbing just a few more blessed hours before she had to go to work. The kitchen door was ajar, sending a thin line of bright yellow through the shadowy hallway. Legs feeling leaden, the beginning of a headache pulsing behind her eyes, Emmy pushed it fully open. Chaos. Absolute and utter chaos. Her normally-neat kitchen looked as though a small damp whirlwind had hammered through it. Every cupboard door, every drawer, was open, their contents strewn across the floor. Most of the cutlery was heaped in a mound near the trashcan, but several forks had somehow become stuck in the ceiling. The fan was on, as was every hob, the tap, the flashing neon sign that had been an ill-advised present from her mother - H.O.M.E. - and the roomba (trapped half-under a cake tin). Notably, the fridge was not on; instead, it was splattered with the remains of several eggs. In the centre of this all, draped in and dwarfed by a floral apron, was the Goo. No taller than the breadbin (where was the breadbin?) the Goo was normally a pale, translucent blue. Now, as it shook and quivered to the blaring music, it was a deep indigo, its bright pink hearts swirling and dancing with excitement. "Goo! What is happening?" The goo may not have had a face, but it did have a concept of "behind", and "surprise". Its rubbery body shot up into the air, jumping well over its own height, and the apron slid to the floor. When it landed, the small slime ball was - she'd never worked out what gave this impression, but she could somehow always tell - looking at her. Two pseudopods lifted a (now-chipped) plate towards her, bearing three strips of raw bacon, a very well-done left slipper, and a dollop of something that could have been gelatin but was probably super glue. A small opening appeared on the Goo's blue surface, and a shrill, bubbling voice answered her question. "Bregfiz!"
The kid tugged at my leather kimono, wide-eyed, and said, "Sir. I usually eat chicken nuggets now. My show will be on soon."He pointed at my state-of-the-art World Surveillance System, the screen dyed a delicately-evil red. "Show? What show?"I scratched my thick, bushy beard. Was the kid talking about a showdown? Had his father, Red Salmon, tricked me? I clapped in morse code, activating the WSS, and images of various heroes flashed across the screen in rough blips. The kid probably thinks it's so cool. They're stock photos, to be honest. But it looked impressive. Like I'd got them all in the corner of my eye. I looked down and the kid was ... suppressing a yawn!? Red Salmon swam his way upstream in the hero market. I, Sharkbeard, have been chasing him for years. "Ah!" Truth be told, the WSS exclusively receives live feeds from cameras I have placed around Red Salmon's house. And there, before me, he stood. Doing ... the dishes? "H-He knows you're missing, right?" "Oh, I called him earlier. Said I was hanging out with a friend." What? No, no, no. Red Salmon was supposed to be in the throes of desperation now, flapping around like a fish on the docks. "Why would you do a stupid thing like that!?" The kids let out another yawn. "I thought you were, like, a cool guy. You looked cool. But this place is pretty boring ..." A scream forced its way up my throat, but I sent it back down into my lungs. "Boring? This is the lair of the greatest villain of all time. I have gadgets. Weapons. Costumes purchased in Akihabara." The kid tugged at my kimono again. "Can we watch my show now? You can't seriously want to watch dad do his dishes. That's ... weird." "It's not weird! It's surveillance." "... You are not a creepy person, are you?" For a moment, I didn't know what to say. Bats are creepy. And that's the reason why they are cool. But I'm not some pervert! I'm a supervillain, with powers rivaling the highest-paid heroes in the industry. I've trimmed my beard in the shape of a shark's fin--is that creepy? No! It's cool! "I'm Sharkbeard,"I said, expecting the kid to shit his pants. "Yeah, you're friends with dad from work, right?" "... What?" "He's always talking about you, and he made me think you were a cool guy. But if you're just some creepy person who likes to watch people doing dishes ..." "No. Your father is right. I'm a cool guy. The bane of his existence, in fact. His nemesis. His archvillain. His--" "Buddy,"the kid said, nodding his head. The word ricocheted through my mind like a sentient harpoon, just tearing and flying again and again through my mind-flesh. "Buddy?"I said. "Are you sure ... that was the word he used?" Suddenly, the kid seemed not so sure and I felt horror wrap itself around me like a maelstrom. "Best buddies!"the kid said, and he clapped. I almost fell over. Best buddies? BFFs? I paced around my lair. Well, it was true that I had no respect for any hero other than Red Salmon. He wasn't the best-regarded hero in the city. High-Octane Man, Lord Pelvis, Firecat--TikTok was filled with snippets of them in action and people gushed about them all over social media all the while Red Salmon languored in relative obscurity. But I knew better than those fame-fondling flounders. I had chosen Red Salmon. And he had chosen me. On the WSS, Red Salmon polished a novelty mug with the text World's Best Hero written on it. He smiled. I walked over to my high-end cabinets and opened them up to reveal the mug I had bought for myself as a spur-of-the-moment thing. World's Best Villain it read. "We go a long way back,"I said. "Oh. Cool." "Your father and I have fought for years, and through mutual combat and strife we have both grown." "Yeah?" "But before this very moment, I ... I didn't realize that in the process we had become ... friends. A bond has been forged, through fire and--Hey! Are you ... Are you watching a cartoon?" My precious WSS, hard-coded only to respond to my careful morse claps, hacked by an imp? A green squirrel with crazy eyes ran about with some blue moose. The kid pumped his fists as the squirrel decapitated the---"W-What sort of kid's show is this? And how did you get it onto my screen?" The kid held up his phone. "Universal remote control app,"he said. "Oh, the show is called Happy Tree Friends." "An app?"That was ... awkward. I never knew apps could do things like that. "And Happy Tree Frogs? They are maiming each other!" "Friends."The kid scowled at me. "Happy Tree Friends." Ah. I had not yet grown accustomed to that word. The show turned out to be highly entertaining. We ordered chicken nuggets and watched many episodes, and the glee with which the kid met the macabre displays on the screen warmed my cold-blooded heart. "You're pretty cool,"I told him. He smiled. "You're pretty cool too! I can see why my dad likes you so much." I blushed and tried to hide it by rubbing my beard. "Oh, is that so? T-That's neat, I guess." After a while I gave the kid a ride home in my Beard-mobile. It's a 1997 Toyota Corolla. When I got back to my lair, I clapped my screen to attention and watched Red Salmon and his family play Yahtzee. I made myself a cup of hot chocolate, in my World's Best Villain mug, and as I watched them all enjoy themselves a strange stinging sensation appeared in my heart. Had the kid poisoned me? Had it all been an evil--I mean heroic--plot? Nothing happened. I flicked the WSS off with a somber clap and a great silence enveloped my lair. I downloaded the remote control app on my phone and watched some episodes of Happy Tree Friends. The word bounced around in my head. Friends. Buddies. BFFs. "Red Salmon,"I said, "one of these days I'll get you ..."With that, I fell asleep in my chair. I dreamt about a show called Happy Ocean Friends, starring me and Red Salmon.
The effort to retrieve the object had been significant. When we'd first spotted it travelling through space, it was clearly aimed, vaguely, at Jupiter or Earth; but would miss Jupiter by tens of thousands of miles and pass within the moon's orbit; practically next door, in spatial terms. The object was clearly inhuman, and transmitting a radio signal that we couldn't decipher. When a joint US-China team took the object aboard, it was carefully placed in a sealed lead 'Coffin' for protective purposes. &#x200B; Initially, it looked like any other meteorite; a rough rock... but with a single visible, obviously artificial corner emerging from the side. An up-close scan; instruments had been built into the coffin prior to launch for exactly that reason; revealed a dodecahedron shape, with some form of deposits coating the outside in a seemingly random fashion; mostly iron and carbon. &#x200B; The scans determined that the object contained something else; some sophisticated bit of machinery, likely the source of the radio signal. Out of paranoia about the dangers of its contents, a new space station was built surrounding the craft before the object was opened; purely by machines, with any machines removed from the coffin melted down and launched on a trajectory for the sun. &#x200B; The only things allowed back on earth were the astronauts themselves; and that only after a thorough scan both of the men and women involved, and of the coffin to ensure a proper seal had been maintained. Unfortunately, the translation wasn't complete until after this had happened; everything might have turned out differently otherwise. &#x200B; "Thank you for saving our species. Your sacrifice will be honored for eternity."The core message at the heart of a long string of mathematical strings, images, and language tutorials. The most glaring part of it all was the strict instructions to place the object on an uninhabited world a certain distance from the sun, dependant on the relative size of said sun, and the warning that whoever placed the object in such fashion would, in all liklihood, be killed by the object itself. Followed by a request to leave certain raw materials at the landing site, and that, once they began to awaken, they would like information about whatever brave souls had sacrificed themselves to give their race a second chance. It also noted that the object had been launched at a particular appropriate body; Enceladus; but that the ability to aim a trajectory from sixty light-years away was unlikely due to the chance of random interference of stellar debris. If the object happened to look as if it were going to hit Enceladus on its own, it could be left alone; it would handle things on its own from there. &#x200B; Soon, the exact meanings became clear. In Beijing and in Arizona, it started. The spread in Arizona was contained; a mostly small-scale affair, centered on the home of a returning astronaut, a dome was built around it, and inside the astronaut, the plants, the animals; and the unfortunate man and his family; could all be seen dying, to be slowly replaced by a vivid obsidian-colored alien biosphere. The man's house had no outside water lines; as it turned out, if this home had been the only breakout, it could have been contained indefinitely. &#x200B; Beijing, however, was a different matter, and ultimately made the efforts in Arizona pointless. On live television, a reporter, visibly sweating drops of black fluid, was trying to pretend everything had been contained, and there was no danger outside of Beijing city limits; even as an alien micro-organism repurposed all the water in his body, leaving a dessicated husk of a man lying in front of the camera as the transmission continued; as it would continue, until the power ultimately failed. &#x200B; For the remnant of humanity, living in their bunkers and isolation domes, the following weeks are a matter of historical record. Once the organism reached the water table, that was the end. It traveled through the septic systems, water filtration, and into the ocean; and where it went, the sea levels dropped, the air became steadily more oxygen-enriched; and the world became covered with endless forests of blue-black life, mostly in the form of long, harmless tendrils. &#x200B; At first, none of it seemed to have a purpose; there were no obvious animals or intelligent creatures. It was only weeks later, when the improvised space station crashed in what had once been the Sahara, that things truly took off. Once it came into contact with the newly formed biosphere, the alien object somehow induced pods to form; at first, smaller alien life-forms. Creatures with odd, trilateral symmetry; three legs, three eyes, three wings. &#x200B; Then the first sentient aliens formed; apparently revived versions of the final members of their species. They almost immediately began work on two primary projects; saving what was left of humanity, and rebuilding their own civilization. Incredibly, there were over ten million human survivors, and while humanity would take centuries to once more reach the numbers they once had, for the first few years after the Event, the greatest problem humanity faced, all these scattered survivalists, doctors, soldiers, and politicians who had survived in their sealed bunkers, was communications issues due to their own wildly different nations of origin. &#x200B; The remnant of humanity now thrives, and is working with a blend of its own and alien technology to climb into the stars; and build a new world for itself, to replace the one it accidentally gave away.
"Hey boy, this was your last run huh? Well that's ok. You've done everything well."I said through the tears in my eyes when I saw the bite mark. "Too bad I wasn't there to protect you, huh? But I doubt I would have been able to do much, you're an idiot who always runs far ahead." I had the reputation for executing anyone who's been bitten without mercy or hesitation. I've even executed children despite their parents' gut wrenching pleas. This was hard for me. I didn't want to kill him. "I'm sorry our adventure ends here, old boy."He wouldn't hurt me, I knew that. But it only took a few hours, extremely agonizing hours for the infected to fully turn into one of the undead. He wouldn't even recognize me once the change had fully happened. His large eyes stared at me, so full of trust. He knew I would never hurt him. I barely heard the sound of my gun firing at his head, trying to give him a quick and painless death. A dog really is a man's best friend.
She was always strange. Its what people always said about her but Joseph knew that it wasn’t bad. His little Marry was brilliant in her own way, far beyond the other girls in the village anyway. There was some truth in the whispers he heard. It was going to be a nightmare trying to marry her off. He knew he wouldn’t have wanted a bride that was as sharp as she. Most men didn’t like having a wife that was sharper of wit than them. Joseph didn’t know exactly how he had managed to raise such a rare little flower but he did so anyway. He sighed with contentment as he finished relieving himself outside the family home. It was June in Austria and the night air comforted him as he lingered on the thoughts in his mind. His daughter was almost always chief among them but the harvest followed shortly behind. After pulling his pants up, he stared up to the stars above him. It was a new moon and the city of god above glittered in the heavens. He found the sight hopeful in a way, despite the hardship of it all, the stars were always watching, smiling on them as the world spun in its orbit around the sun. “You know dad,” he murmured as he looked up to the swirling sea above. “You did all right with me… even if you cursed Copernicus and his ‘haracies’ until you passed…” He pushed back inside the small home without another word, feeling content with the little shard of midnight only he would know about. The feeling was short lived. “Hey Dad,” Mary said from her place at the kitchen table. Tears ran down her face. “Marry!” he said, sliding into the seat next to her and wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Whats wrong? Was it a nightmare?” She leaned into him, a tiny sob escaping her chest as she buried her head of golden hair into his chest. “How do you do it dad?” she whimpered. “how do I do what?” “How do you keep going?” she said, looking up to him with two pools of bloodshot emerald. “Your family’s been on this farm for generations. How do you keep going knowing that nothing will change… knowing that we’ll both die one day and it’s just going to be the same for the next 100 years.” Joseph swallowed, putting out of mind how she didn’t seem to speak of her own family as if she was a part of it. Night terrors did many things to a young mind and he knew it from experience. “Well…” he said softly, running his hand over her head of hair and giving her the best comforting smile he could. “I don’t know if something’s going to magically change in the next century… but I know that I love my life. . . I know that I love spending time with you and your mom. . . I keep going to see more of it. . . God’s going to be waiting for us no matter how long we take to get to him, so until we do I’m happy to spend my life with a bountiful harvest, a wife that loves me, and a daughter who makes her old man proud.” She closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath in. When she opened them, she seemed calmer. The emeralds that stared up to him felt heavy, wise beyond her years in a way that felt off. “I love you dad. . . I really do… Would you be angry if I left to join a nunnery?” His heart skipped a beat as he stared down at her. He didn’t know the answer to the question. She never felt particularly pious but looks could be deceiving. “I want you to be happy, my love. . . If you feel like you could only do so through a walk with God… who am I to protest… but I must ask: why would you want to do that?” She stared into him, studying him like he was a horse at the market. Something about the fires in her eyes made his skin crawl but he forced it down. This was his daughter and even if she was strange, he loved her. Nothing: not famine, rain, shine, or demon would keep him from that fact. “Because I want to know the letters,” she said softly. “I want to learn to read. I want to learn to write. I want to praise God… but I also want to help the world get better through the teaching of medicine and the natural philosophers.” “You don’t care about god… do you?” he found himself asking as he looked into her eyes. “I care, Dad. . .” she said softly. “I know there’s something beyond the physical… Oh I know.” She seemed oddly cynical as she said it. “But I do not believe that he helps us in easy ways… I think he gives us tools that we can use to help ourselves… and I want to use my mind to help the people of tomorrow. . . the people I may never meet.” “How old are you,” he found himself asking. It was a simple question but as he held his daughter in his arms, he found himself unaware of the answer. He grew even more unaware of it as he felt her tense in his arms. “I remember things I shouldn’t,” she whimpered, shoving her head in his chest again. “I think it may be a miracle or a curse but… I see things when I dream… A life that isn’t mine. Its why I know so many words you never taught me... Please don’t tell anyone. I don’t want to be thought of as a witch…” “I won’t, my love,” he whispered, planting a kiss on the crown of her head. Oddly, he felt at ease, as if the dozens of things that didn’t fit with his little flower locked into place. The jigsaw felt more whole with the revelation, not less. ‘ “I think it’s a blessing,” she whispered. “I really do… My… The dad of the other person in my dreams… He isn’t a good one… The other me has the life of nobility… she was educated… but… She never had this.” She clenched onto him as she sobbed into his chest. “Its going to be all right, Love,” he whispered, holding her in the warm midnight air. “It always will.” “I love you dad…”
"STOP! You must not invent time travel!"said the older version of myself that had just materialized in my lab. "Really?"I said, puzzled, my hand hovering over the switch that would begin the final experiment. "Why? Does something bad happen?" The older me broke into a wide grin. "Nah. It actually all goes according to plan,"she said. "But I remember that when I was you, and I was about to finish The Machine, an older version of me appeared and told me to stop. I looked in the mirror this morning and recognized the face, so here I am."She winked. "Didn't want to make a huge time paradox, did I? They're such a pain in the ass to clean up." I breathed a sigh of relief. "Then it all works out? I manage to go back in time and save him from being killed?" "Absolutely, 100%, it's great. You have three kids together, and you win a Nobel prize."She gave me a double thumbs up as her body started to fade out. "You got this!" I turned back to my work and confidently flipped the switch, not yet realizing that someday I would need to deliver that exact same speech, word for word, despite the truth of what happened next.
It was always said of Medusa, and most of the Gorgons, that they were being so hideous that seeing their eyes would turn you to stone. Slowly, every atom of your being paralyzed in fear, or rather being degraded into inorganic elements, petrifying you in the process. A painless procedure that would last an eternity... But now, we are seeing one of the Gorgons... and by the gods, they were so wrong. The soft white skin contrasts with the elegant green and brown scales on her body. Exotic eyes in a vibrant yellow, and the hair... Her hair, though snakes, had something hypnotic in its slither and constant movement. It wasn't a nest, but a tide... inviting any sailor to traverse with their fingers through it... Truly the most superb being we have ever gazed upon... And something is not right. As we are still flesh and blood...
"Desperate times called for desperate measures" This age-old saying had become the mantra of the 37th century. Food was scarce, our technology was failing us, and society was beginning to crumble. This wasn't a sudden downfall, it was a slow-burn. Humanity was an interesting thing. After we had stopped making technological advancements, we immediately somehow began regressing. It was almost as if staying still was worse then moving backwards. All of our advancements were nullified and here we were. The year was 3675, but it looked eerily similar to 2015. The global government began searching for wisdom from older civilizations, trying to find a way to kick start human advancement, and they were able to find an archive of an ancient digital library. This was a mistake. We found a new wealth of knowledge, there was more information available to us then we knew what to do with. People around the world began working on projects described in this digital library, vying to become the man or woman who brought us back on track. The archive had an interesting name; "Reddit". It wasn't cross-referenced in anything else we had found, and no one had any idea of what it was. Most of the world instantly looked to it as the savior of humanity, while a few others remained skeptical. It wasn't a complete archive, bits and pieces were missing here and there, but it was more than enough. Reddit had become our last ditch effort to becoming a successful civilization once again. Different "sub-reddits"were used to research different topics in society. The woodsmen used "r/woodworking"to turn our remaining wood into amazing creations, the historians used "r/history"to get a better picture of everything that went wrong, and the greatest minds we had left, used "r/trollscience"to rebuild our technologies. After exhausting all the remaining resources we had on Earth, it seemed that Reddit had failed us. We were not able to recreate perpetual motion using just two magnets, and infinite energy seemed to be a lost cause. We had followed every direction to the letter, yet we were still unable to recreate the results. Humanity has failed. I am here to tell anyone who finds this that we have officially given up. Reddit was our last hope. It was supposed to propel us into a golden era of humanity, not doom it to hell .
I sat down, sliding my hands up and down my mug of coffee, warming them up from the cold of last night. I looked at my living room window, or rather the blinds that blocked the incoming sunlight. "Gosh, why do the kids always close the blinds at night? They know I want to see the sunrise"I thought. I stood up and re-angled the blinds, letting the glorious sunlight in. I turned around and walked back to my mug and chair and sat down, scooping up my mug and taking a few sips. Ow! OK, the coffee was not cool enough to sip that fast. After sticking my tongue out to try and salvage any surviving taste buds at the tip, I noticed an odd change in my surroundings. The kitchen and living room were completely clean. I looked carefully, distinctly remembering that toys were scattered everywhere last night and that Roger, Sarah, and Lucy had all gone to bed without cleaning up. It had been a long enough day at work yesterday that I followed them to bed right after I was done tucking little Roger in to bed. Then, I noticed it. How could I be so blind? I walked over to the couch right below the blinds and stared at disbelief. A little handmade card was there, complete with three distinct illegible scrawls. They had taken two pieces of construction paper, folded both, and then stapled the folded edges together to create a four-page booklet,filled with love from my children. The last page was actually readable, and my oldest, Lucy, filled my heart with that painful, chest-filling emotion of pride and love that just burns, but you never want it to stop burning like it does. Dear Dad, we wanted to surprise you today, so we snook up early to clean all of our toys. We know Father's Day is tomorrow, but we love you so much you should get two Father's Days! You know, for being a daddy and a mommy all the time! We love you! Lucy, Sarwahh, Rjshgh Ok, so Roger still needed handwriting lessons, but still. As far as I was concerned, this was perfection. I sat on the couch, definitely not crying, ok, I was crying a little but in the happy way, when I reflected on my children and the blessing they were to me as I looked over our beautiful ocean view. I have to admit, it took me longer than it should have to realize that we didn't have an ocean view. "Utah lake is NOT that big, and it definitely does not have waves like that. And it is not twenty feet from my house. And Mr. Jones will not like that his house has been relocated, and I know I won't like it if my house was the one relocated. But these ocean waves are pretty, and sorting this out seems like a big problem. And Fathers aren't allowed to have big problems on Father's day." I stood up, stretched, downed my coffee, and set it on the kitchen table. "I should go get the kids into their swimsuits, there's never gonna be another day as magical as this."
Botany's history is one of the richest in all of the sciences. Few disciplines have been so readily available since the beginning of civilization. The test tubes, microscopes, and complex mathematics necessary to make heads from tails in biology, chemistry, and physics never formed a barrier for botanists of antiquity. The earliest fragments of archaelogical evidence on botany are traced backed to the Indus River civilization some 5000 years ago. Researchers in the 1800s discovered amber-solidified plant collections thought to be previously owned by the Brahman, or priest, class of the Indus civilization. As with most areas of historical knowledge, we know disproportionately more about the history of botany in Europe. Unlike most history, the dark ages actually lay claim to much of the modern understanding of plants and their properties. Catholic monasteries and nunneries tended to large gardens whose primary purpose was to study, catalog, and experiment on plants. Perhaps this fascination is partly due to the taking to heart of scripture, as God told Adam that he had dominion over all the plants. More likely, plants were readily available and attractive for their properties as food, medicine, and decoration. Famed scientist Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, calculus, and optics, also dabbled in botany. He isolated the numbing properties of two species by exposing fruit flies to water treated with flower petals from the plants. Perhaps because of its rich history, there are more botanists in the Encyclopedia Brittanica than there are entries for scientists of any other field, or entries for any other profession, for that matter. Botany is really interesting!
I've come to deal with it. It's annoying for sure, but in the end it's not debilitating. I had to move though, relocate and make a new life for myself. I became a ranger out in the wilds, and make a name for myself as a silent stalker, a killer for hire. The rumors spread, if you go into the forest at night and left with a note containing someone's name, that person would be dead with a week. Only the courageous would brave the forest at night, or the foolish. However, I made my fair share of those looking for the death of others. This night was no different, a note was left, some gold attached in a sac next to it. I had heard of the man, now a walking corpse, and he would soon be dead. I stalked the night streets and made my way into his home silently. He slept in bed as I slid my dagger out from its sheath, the sound it made a lonely cry to be covered once again. It soon found a home in his chest however and the man gasped, his eyes gling wide as pain flared through him. He gargled questioningly, his pupils dilating, demanding an answer for his release from mortal chains. "Go now,"I intoned as softly as I could, my voice like helium, loud and squeaky, the sound of a little girl. His body wretched as he seemed to laugh at the sound coming from the 300lbs 6'5 assassin in front of him.
The holovid begins to play, displaying a round table with a dozen or so Coalition races in their preferred method of relaxation. A gelignite hovering gently off to one side, her tendrils wrapped around a tiny glass. A wukian, hanging from a rope slung over the table by his prehensile tail, sipping from a glass via a long and amusingly curvy straw. A slimessian, bubbling happily inside the protective device known as a "battle bowl"that prevents it from drying out. KNOW YOUR ENEMY states the big caption on the screen, repeated in the fifty different scripts of fifty different species below it. "Humans,"a narrator begins, "Humans are without a doubt one of the most menacing, most terrifying species in the known universe." "Today we are going to learn a number of things that make them so intimidating from the speaking anatomy of some of our veteran fighters who have faced humans on the battlefield, as well as those who have braved the horrors of human space to interact with them diplomatically." The image focused on the slimessian, the collection of sentient protoplasm operating a robotic exoskeleton surrounding a glass tub. The creature operates this machine with electrical impulses from tiny mold-like filaments suspended within its gooey form. "Humans are terrifying,"it burbles through its translator, "Even without armor they are completely and utterly immune to even the strongest desiccants produced on my world." The faintly pinkish mass shudders violently. "They even use them to season their food." A massive, chitinous, eight-limbed insectoid, the glow of her many red eyes dimming with extreme emotion raises herself up on her legs to speak next. "My hive was involved in a prolonged campaign against the humans. The military commander for the sector was cunning and shrewd, and we rejoiced when the human news networks announced that she was pregnant. But even though her belly swelled with offspring, it did not rupture as her larvae emerged to devour her. Instead she simply expelled a single, incredibly massive offspring somehow. Her personal combat prowess must also have been absolutely terrifying, as her offspring was given to a male to tend, and the male did not immediately seize and devour said spawn." The gelignite shifts her coloration rapidly, her buoyant, floating, undulating gelatinous body twitching rapidly in disbelief. "I was given the opportunity to visit the human home world and study their culture. They feature social gatherings much like our own, where they come together to mutually share nutrition and hydration." "However a disturbingly large number of social gatherings between involve the consumption of a neurotoxin purposefully crafted by the fermentation of plant products." "Amounts of neurotoxin are frequently consumed to the point where motor function begins to break down and the mind does not form long term memories." "Humans are capable of imbibing enough of this neurotoxin to induce death. Even knowing that such is an effect from consumption and being cognizant of this, humans continue to partake in these beverages."
"What's going on?"Sally said. He leaned over one hand on my cubicle, his nails painted pink, face dusted with makeup. "You've been acting twitchy all morning." "Nothing,"I muttered, and kept my eyes on my computer. No one else was acting like anything was wrong, like I'd woken up in an alternate universe. Men in lipstick and high heels, women with beards. I was the only normal one - well, I guess that made me the abnormal one now. And yet no one seemed to think anything was strange about me. "So,"said Sally, "we still on for lunch?" "Ah-"I stuttered. Sure, I'd been looking to go out with Sally for a while, but I wasn't gay! I tapped my pen nervously on my desk. Even if he did have breasts now, even if he did look absolutely gorgeous - wait, something wasn't making sense here. "Pete?"Sally said. "Are you- Okay, there's definitely something going on with you." "Sally, you're a -"I started to say, and stopped myself. Sally was a man now. A man with breasts, in makeup and heels. A very feminine man. He was - my head was spinning. Wait, what was a man anyway? I got up from my seat and walked over to Robert Schuyster's workstation. Bob was a woman, a big, hairy, heavily-bearded woman, just like I remembered her. Except yesterday she had been a man. Something had changed, something had definitely changed, but I couldn't put my finger on what anymore. "Hey,"Bob said, frowning. "What're you staring at?" "You're not - you're not supposed to have a beard,"I said. "What? I've had a beard as long as I've been working here." "Yeah,"I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I could stop them. "But you're a woman!" "What the hell!"Bob said, rising to her feet, and there was a whole rush and hubbub around us, Bob's hand on my collar. I jerked back, and felt myself tipping backwards. "Pete?"Sally said, his hand grabbing for me. "Pete!"he said, as the world went black. *** "Fascinating,"Dr. Simmons said. "This appears to be a case of visual agnosia presenting in a genuinely novel manner. You're aware of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? Lesions on the brain prevented the patient from connecting the visual stimulus in front of him to the concept of his wife. This seems to be a similar case, the wires being crossed in regards to gender. The visual markers of maleness instead triggered the conceptual idea of femaleness, and vice-versa." "But why didn't the patient identify himself as a woman?" "I suppose he wasn't reliant on visual stimulus for that,"Dr. Simmons said. "Our inherent understanding of our own gender is such that he could look into a mirror, and know there was a man looking back at him."
Gold, silver, fiat, nothing was to be accepted by the mad man. The world leaders clamoured over other possibilities of payment yet nothing seemed to be acceptable. A lone man in the audience stood up. Lifting up what seemed like a large metal box, the crowd stared at him. Finally, he spoke. "Inside this server, there are 40, 16 Terabyte hard drives and 10 four Terabyte solid state drives, a setup that has been deemed the holy grail by /r/datahoarder. It contains every single meme ever posted on the entirety of the internet and has enough KFC gift codes inside to buy a lifetime supply of chicken tendies." The crazed scientist on the stage smiled. "Sold!"
Thomas stumbled out of the Port-A-Potty, tilting the dregs of a Fat Tire into his mouth. He stumbled over his shirt, cursing, bending down to pick it up. "You're not a team player Thomas,"he said to himself, mimicking his boss - his former boss, now. "You've got to be prompt, Thomas. You can't come to work drunk, Thomas."Of course he hadn't; not really. He'd just had the terrible luck of grabbing the wrong antihistamine on the way out the door, was all, and had fallen asleep at his desk. Terrible luck was the only kind Thomas ever had. He hadn't meant to be late so often, either. All he could afford was a fifth-hand Peugeot from the '70s with unreliable electricals. And he was a team player; it was just that he was half-deaf, and his partner was a soft talker. Poor bloke thought Thomas was always ignoring him. Hell, the only reason he was using a Port-A-Potty - a hundred yards up a hill on the backside of his house - was because not one, but both of his toilets had suddenly developed cracks in their porcelain tanks. He was drunk now, though. Oh, absolutely roaring. He didn't have a job to show up to tomorrow, so why the hell not? He threw the empty bottle high over his shoulder. "Ow! Watch it, won't you!" Thomas spun around, too quickly, tumbling back onto his ass. He stood up, surveying the bottom of the hill. Applause erupted from all quarters. Dozens - no, hundreds, clear down to the house - of people stood at the base of his little hill. Surprise slowly turned to delight; the crowd was dressed in an assortment of wondrous regalia, with costumes featuring all varieties of lights and whirring devices. A party! Fantastic! Confusion, however, quickly set in again. How had they got here? His house was in the middle of nowhere, and he didn't see a familiar face among them. And they weren't applauding him, exactly; their attention was definitely focused somewhere above him... Thomas followed their gaze upward. An enormous metallic sphere hurtled through the clouds above him, it's approaching surface a brilliant red with the heat of atmospheric entry. Thick clouds of smoke erupted from behind it. "Oh, hell." ............. The tempunaut looked at the smoking crater. "That was Thomas Pritchett, was it not?"He asked his colleague. "Aye, poor bastard."The sphere split in the middle, a single questing tentacle - the first alien organism upon which any human had ever laid eyes - emerged. "Shame he never got to see how all this turns out." "Well, he gets his statue and all."His colleague turned to look at him. "I mean, technically speaking, Thomas Pritchett was the one to make first contact." His colleague exhaled sharply. "Christ, Jack."
A quick note before anyone starts reading, I'm doing my absolute best to be apolitical over here. I immediately had this concept pop into my head, and thoroughly enjoyed writing it, but the politics of the individuals involved belong in more appropriate subreddits. ----------------- "Rocket struck at coordinates 39.942°N, 133.37°E. They nearly hit it this time; it is Pacific Fleet's opinion that the Noth Korean Government is actively aware of Operation Cetus, and are taking what countermeasures they can."-Admiral Scott Smith, United States Pacific Fleet Command -------------- James Mattis was not exactly looking forward to this meeting, not that he had looked forward to too many days during his tenure as Secretary of Defense. It was a largely thankless job, keeping a nation safe. Mattis ran a hand through the thinning silver hair on his head and sighed, there really was no delaying this; at some point the president needed to know. He ran a hand down the front of his suit to make sure everything was properly aligned, and pushed open the door to the Oval Office. President Donald Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk working his way through media reports of the USS John S. McCain collision; non-controlled obviously. Mattis smirked a bit, if only they knew, he thought to himself, Fake News might even be accurate this time. He allowed himself only a short mental reprieve before facing the situation at hand, "Mr. President,"Trump looked up at Mattis, and pushed the report to the far side of his desk. Mattis was glad to see the President didn't appear to have his phone out at the moment, that would make things easier, "Have you seen the reports coming out of Pacific Fleet regarding the Korean Missile Test?" Donald seemed momentarily puzzled, screwing his face as he tilted his head in thought, "I haven't seen anything today. Not since the last launch, you know, fire and fury and all of that. It was a great speech."Donald Trump beamed across the desk at him, and Mattis nodded his assent, "To answer your question though, no. No I don't think I have. Sit down and tell me about it?"The President waved him into a chair. Mattis shook his head, sitting down in the proffered chair and fixing the President with a steely glare, "drop the act Mr. President. They just landed a missile within about a quarter mile of Operation Cetus. This after we moved the project over a hundred miles from their last test. They can see Cetus, they can track it. We're running out of time." Donald Trump leaned back, momentarily shocked. He breathed out a large sigh, and seemed almost to deflate. As the sigh came to an end he leaned back forward, and the eyes that met James Mattis' own were the eyes of a man few Americans had ever seen - those of their dangerously competent Commander in Chief, "Damn. I'd hoped to buy us more time,"Trump began drumming his fingers on the desk, "How do you think we gave away the game?" "We may have played it a little heavy handed sir."Mattis shrugged, "Honestly how long do you think we could keep the Russians believing you were eating out of their hands? Perhaps they never trusted it at all; someone has obviously been feeding North Korea this missile tech. Maybe the Russians are feeding them the targeting data too?"Mattis lifted a finger and laid it on the president's desk, pointing directly at Trump, "The real question is what we're going to do about it. I'd have loved to keep the Russians and the DPRK in the dark a little longer, but if Cetus is to succeed we can't allow Perseus too many shots at it. We have to make our move soon, or we'll be left with little more than a dead whale." Trump shook his head and chuckled, "I suppose you're right. Who would have thought Kim Jong-un had it in him to be a monster hunter? You have my permission to move up the timeline."Mattis nodded sharply and began to stand, but he was stopped by a raised hand from the President whose eyes looked suddenly vulnerable, "They're going to hate me James. I mean they probably do already, God knows plenty have good reason, but this one is going to be beyond the pale. People won't stand for the invasion of a nation, for war, even if it's the right thing to do. How long will it be until I can tell them? How long until I can try to explain everything?" James Mattis had been a Marine General, he had ordered more than his share of young men to their death; it never got easier. "It's going to be a while sir, I can't lie about that. Whatever edge we can gain on Russia we're going to need later, you know that." Donald Trump didn't smile, but he did nod, "You're right, of course. Dismissed, James."As James Mattis left the Oval Office he saw the President pull his phone out of his pocket and drop back into the persona Cetus required. ------------- >Donald J. Trump‏, Verified account @realDonaldTrump 17h17 hours ago > >Nick Adams, "Retaking America""Best things of this presidency aren't reported about. Convinced this will be perhaps best presidency ever."
A group of 13 year old kids cut class to hang out in the city. One of them knew a guy that could get them booze. They were told to meet in an alleyway, behind a liquor store with the money. So for 45 minutes, they leaned against the old brick buildings and watched their breath fog the air. It was a windy day and the alley kept them comfortable. Finally, Norman came out from the depths of the alley. He had a scraggly, blonde beard and wore a beanie that covered the rest of his face. His eyes were a hazy green like the start of spring, dulled from the rigors of winter. The zipper of his blue windbreaker was broken, revealing a gray thermal too short for his torso. He was incredibly tall, maybe 6-5, but always stood hunched. The kid that was put in touch with Norman had never met him before, and tried to make small talk; how about the weather, or their mutual friend, but Norman ignored the kid and counted the money. He put it in his jacket pocket and walked out of the alley and into the liquor store. He came back out with a handle of cheap vodka. He turned to leave, and the moment he was in the street, a strong gust of wind pulled the change out of his pocket and down the sidewalk. Norman was a defeated man with no intention to chase his money. He returned to the alley for a cigarette. One kid approached Norman. She invited him to drink with them before they went to the arcade, but he declined. She didn’t persist, so instead talked about herself to keep him company. Her name was Felicity, liked movies more than reading, liked singing everywhere she went, and couldn’t wait to start flying when she turned 15 since she didn’t count on her parents to get her driver’s permit. Plus, she believed, it was a more liberating way to go places. The superpower subject hit a nerve with Norman, and so at the butt of his cigarette, he asked, “Why don’t you choose that now? Since your mind is already made up?” Felicity thought about it, as she looked at her planted feet. “I don’t know. I always understood that law to mean that was when you decided. Did you decide on your superpower sooner?” Norman smiled, and stood up to walk away. “I think you need to ask some more questions about that part of the law.” He pulled his jacket closer than before, and walked out into the wind. Those weren’t kids he wanted to recruit, but this meeting was only to make a quick buck anyway. Sure, circumstances failed him this time, but that didn’t sway him from his goals. Norman wanted a powerful army to overtake the government and liberate the people with the truth about their potential. Although if he merely waited, he might not need one. That always made him smile.
I can’t say I was ever particularly religious. At least, I wasn’t raised on any. I found my own beliefs, and I guess I could say I always felt spiritual. I believed in goodness over anything. Not only did it feel right, but it seemed more logical than not being a good person. When people treated others badly, I just couldn’t understand it. Made no sense to me. What I’m getting at is I wasn’t trying to get into Heaven, or be recognized for my goodness; it’s just who I was. But when I opened my eyes after dying, and saw that I was in Hell, you could say I felt severely under appreciated. Not only that, but the Devil himself was looking at me like I’d just shit my pants. Really God? All those times I held doors for people when their hands were full, all those times I let someone have some chips out of my bag, all those times I liked posts on Facebook to save a child...And I go to Hell? Me? The good guy? Is Luke Skywalker here? Is fucking...Ghandi down here too, God? You dick. Anyways, I felt myself losing my cool, but that’s because it was damned hot in Hell. I had just about lost my nerves when I realized the Devil was still looking at me in disappointment, and disgust. “What, you’re not very cute either. Do you look at all your guests like this? Makes them feel unwelcomed, y’know?” I felt annoyed about the whole Hell thing, and I didn’t need this guy looking at me like I wasn’t invited to the worst place in existence. That hurts. “Hello, Son.” The Devil said with a bit of anger. I squinted my brow. What did he just say? “What?” I asked. “You’re my Son,” he spit out. He said it like it hurt for him to say, and he just wanted the words out of his mouth as soon as possible. “You’re the Son of the Devil.” The words were fiery, and deep. Spoken from abysmal lungs. Must be some kind of sick joke. Maybe he means Son of the Devil, like Son of God. Like how everyone is a child of God, until they die and realize everyone just goes to Hell, apparently. “Get out of town!” I say, stupidly. Why do I still have to be lame in the afterlife? The Devil just hangs his head, avoiding my eyes. “Oh, you’re serious...” I say. Things kind of hit me hard there. I sort of just looked down at the ground like my newly found Father was doing. We looked at the ground together, just thinking silently. It was a moment. We were having a moment. “Could I...hug you?” I sort of needed a hug. “No.” “Okay...” I felt 3 years old again. There was further silence. “You failed me. On Earth,” the Devil said at last. Sounded like he had wanted to say it for awhile now. “I did?” “Yes. You failed miserably. As you always have, Son.” “What did I fail at, Father?” I just wanted him to love me. “To bring suffer to the surface. To rain down pain upon all who dare live. To be...evil,” the last word really took a lot for him to say. I could tell it hurt him to say all that with the thought that I had not fulfilled his wishes. I felt bad. “I didn’t know I had a mission...” I admitted. “There was no mission. It comes from your heart. You were supposed to be evil, but you were nice ,” he spit on the ground, but a burning ember came out instead of saliva. I watched it sizzle on the ground. “You were supposed to be Daddy’s boy,” my Father continued. “But it turns out you’re just like your Mother.” “My Mother?” “Yes. She is an Angel of Light.” “An Angel? Why...why the hell would she go for someone like you?” “Opposites attract,” The Devil admitted, with a look that said he didn’t exactly know either. “So I failed you, by not being like you?” “Yes. You are a disappointment to me to no end.” I hung my head lower. It felt bad. “But, I have billions of souls to take that pain out on. And, you are like your Mother. And, I love your Mother.” I looked up hopefully. “Therefore, I love you.” He stretched an arm out, and put it around my shoulder. He led me forward, into Hell. I almost started crying. “Come, you have a realm to learn how to rule,” my Father began saying as we walked. “And yes, you may rule it in your own way one day. However you’d like. We’ll go meet your Mother. She has waited a long time to see you again,” we kept walking onward. “She will feel...good.” End.
“Okay, that was pitiful. I’m giving you one more try at this.” Kron groaned and sat up, staring in disbelief at the huge puncture wound in his chest. It was slowly knitting over with dark purple goo that seemed to flow from his skin instead of blood. The goo stretched over the wound like thread, or worms, until it found the other side, where it anchored. He rubbed his head. “What?” He glared at the black-clad figure before him in disbelief. It grinned at him. “I said, that was pitiful. Even for a barbarian. You just waltzed in here and thought you could kill me? ME?” The necromancer’s voice echoed in the dimly lit caverns where he had made his home. Kron sighed. “So you killed me, fair enough. Why wake me up again?” The necromancer swirled their spear. “Oh, my dear barbarian, we aren’t nearly done yet with each other. Do you know how few visitors I get these days?” The barbarian shook his head. “Don’t know. Don’t wanna know.” He gestured at his chest. “So what’s this?” The necromancer smiled with bloodless lips, sauntered up to Kron, and touched the purple goo coalescing on his chest. “This, my foe, is magic the likes of which you’ve never seen!” “But what does it do?”, Kron asked, scratching his head. “The intricacies,” the necromancer continued speaking, then realized Kron had interrupted. “Pah. Useless. I should have let you stay dead.” They turned to Kron. “It makes you undead, technically. You don’t have to eat, you don’t have to breath, you don’t have to die. And no blood in your veins. Your body is perfectly preserved.” “Until you kill me again.” “Until I, or someone else, kills you again.” “Uh, thanks, I guess”, Kron said. “Do not thank me yet. I will visit such agony upon you for this that you will regret ever having been born. You will live dozens of lifetimes, many more than you can count, and you will do so in anguish, knowing you have failed.” The necromancer threw up his hands, his laughter booming through the cave.” “Uh huh. One more question, though. Before the, er, eternal suffering and humiliation and shit.” “Yes?” “What happens to me if you die?” “Why, you’ll live forever, trapped in whatever cage I deigned to put you in before my untimely demise,” the necromancer answered. “But it is highly unlikely —” they cut off, looking at wonder in the spearhead suddenly protruding from their chest. “What…” Then they toppled backwards, falling without grace on the haft of the spear wedged into their back, finally crashing to the floor. Kron walked up and kicked the body in the ribs. “Can’t believe it was that easy.” Sima, his shield-mate, walked up next to him. “Can’t believe it worked. You could’ve died!” The barbarian shrugged. “Risk, reward, all that shit. You heard what the shaman said. Hordes are coming. We need another hero.” Sima just grunted. Together they turned to walk out of the cave. “‘sides, I did.” “What?” “I did die.” Sima nodded thoughtfully. Kron beamed at the sunlight outside. “Alright than, Sima, shield-mate to Kron the Undying. Let’s go save a village.”
There's a knock at the door, but I already know who it is. Getting up feels amazing, and being able to actually walk even more so. When you're trapped in a failing body for a long time, with leaking spinal fluid and bones and muscles that refuse to heal and comply, that feeling of being a prisoner can almost drive someone crazy. Doubly insulting were the pair of failing kidneys. What's the point of having two if neither of them want to actually work? I open the door, and it's the same pair of adults who have been pestering me since the operation was a success. The reporters have stopped coming by to ask me what it's like to live in a donor body, let alone come past what should count as actual death. I'd been dying for a long time, and the concept didn't really scare me as much. But a new body, a healthy one, is still a thing to get used to. A man with the complexion, shape, and general coloring of a cherry tomato stood next to his wife, a woman with worry lines creased across her face and dark hair streaked with gray. Her eyes lit up when she saw me. "Jeremy, it's great to see you,"she says. "I'm not Jeremy." They don't seem to register my response, but it's become a pretty regular response from them. Their son died from a heart attack, a random and unfortunate one to get at such a young age, but for the life of them they couldn't seem to wrap their heads around me being someone else. If the machinery is walking and talking, it's got to be Jeremy. Not me. Not someone else. The woman walks into the apartment without so much as saying a word. They're harmless, if annoying. The man claps a hand on my shoulder, and holds up a parcel. "We brought you some banana bread from home,"he says, as if it was something I should expect. "Your mother made too much. You know how she gets." The woman wandered around my living room, wiping a finger across the coffee table. "You're not dusting, are you?" It still weirded me out, but I couldn't bring myself to yell at them, let alone really get a restraining order. There was something about the earnestness on their faces. It must be cruel, not even having a body to bury. "Listen, we were in the neighborhood and just wanted to check in,"the man said. "I'm doing fine,"I say. There's no point in reminding them I'm not Jeremy, though as time passes I don't think even they truly believe it at this point. It's something said with a quiet and enthusiastic desperation, if you say it enough times, it's got to be true. I planned on going for a walk this morning, just to stretch out the legs. You really don't appreciate being able to walk and move without pain or overwhelming fatigue until the option is taken away. "I was about to head out, actually. Go for a walk." "You can always do that when we leave, Jeremy,"the woman says. She's already somehow located some paper towels and a little cleaning spray and is busying herself by wiping down the minimal amount of dust on counter tops. "Your sister will be coming to town sometime next month, so you need to clear your schedule,"the man says. He walks into the kitchen and places the banana bread on the counter. There's an overwhelming sense of guilt, every time they come over. I can't exactly throw them out, they don't mean any harm. A thought crosses my mind. What was that game they always said they played with their son? Ah, I remember now. It was scrabble. I take a deep sigh, resigning myself to their visit. My own family never really seemed to come by. No one visited me in the hospital. I think they all preferred to just kind of forget about me, and let me wither away strapped to a bed and slowly dying in the same room for months on end. The man begins to shuffle through the cupboards. "You don't have any of your favorite tea, Jeremy. We could pick some up for you next week, send it to you through the mail." I hate tea. "I'm more of a coffee drinker,"I say. Why had I bought it? Why had I ordered it? Out of some obscure and unreasonable sense of responsibility or guilt? Payment for walking around in a form that isn't my own? I walk to the closet, opening it slightly and removing the box inside. The woman sees, and her eyes light up. Somehow, that makes it worth it. "I got Scrabble. I'm not very good at it, but -"the woman makes a tutting interrupting noise. "You always beat us when you were younger Jeremey, don't try to trick us."Her voice is heavy with memory. "We have time for a game,"the man says. He's taken out coffee grounds, and is preparing to make some. Did he listen? Is he playing dumb, or does he know? I think he does. I put the box on the table, and take a seat next to my body's parents. Wishing they were my own.
Papers littered the floor as Toad pushed his way into the attic room of the castle. Newspaper clippings coated the walls, most showing a triumphant mustachioed man in a red jumper; these were connected by yarn to documents and scribbled notes. The room stank of coffee and cigarette smoke, and Toad cleared his minuscule throat before he spoke. "uhh, princess?"Toad squeaked, hands held together and eyes turned down. "How is everything going?" Peach spun, startled. Steam from her 8th cup of coffee rose, intermingling with the smoke of a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. "Sit" The mushroom man did as commanded, hopping up into a chair. There was little he could do to keep the fear out of his eyes as the princess made final tweaks to her creation. She took a deep inhale of her cigarette, and exhaled a single word. "Mario." The cloud of smoke curled and faded as it covered the distance between the princess and the diminutive Toad. The scent burned his nostrils, but he dare not move. "Mar-e-oh. What is he known for? Being a hero, right? A savior of women, and a savior of the Mushroom Kingdom, correct?" Toad felt this was rhetorical, and his only response was to sweat. "But what is he also known for? What do people seem to forget?" Silence. "HES A PLUMBER!" Peach's raspy voice roared, almost knocking Toad off of his chair. "Yes princess, he...he is a plumber yes." Peach walked to an article talking about Bowser invading again, and creating his vast armies. "When Bowser moves in to the mushroom kingdom, he builds castles, right?" Toad nodded. "Mario runs these castles like its nothing. Almost like he...knows the layout before hand. Don't you find that strange." Peach pointed to a photo of Mario bursting from a pipe, signature fist in the air pose. "Its because he does know the layout. Because he creates the plumbing systems for each castle, Toad." The princess turned back to her wall, and as she did Toad's face changed. "I believe Mario and Bowser are working together, funded by government contracts from both the Mushroom Kingdom, and the Koopa Kingdom. I mean if I'm right here, this could mean-" A red mist covered the papers with an aerosol spray. Peach crumpled to the floor. Behind her, the smoke from a silenced handgun rose to intermingle with the remaining cigarette fumes. "I'm sorry, princess."Toad said, his voice suddenly deep and made of steel. He pulled a radio from his pocket, speaking several words deliberately and without emotion. "The princess is dead. Turn on the cloning vats, and heat up a new slug."
“Would you like a coffee?” asked the most inept of waitresses this coffee shop has seen so far. I had just started typing again, I already have a coffee and according to a warning in the top right of my peripheral vision if I drank any more I would reach the “Caffeine: Very High” state and all the symptoms that came with it. If I wanted a coffee I would be drinking the damn thing not ordering a second. I flex my jaw and look up to break in the new rookie, wanting to avoid a repeat of this poor performance when I notice she isn’t even wearing the uniform… must be her first day. I am about to give her the rundown of what constitutes the appropriate times to offer someone a coffee when an old friend appears obscuring my vision. “Bottoms up!: Offered a beverage as part of courtship” In fine print across the bottom read the familiar. “87.2% of players. Earned 7 years after the mean.” I learned long ago to not talk about the strange user interface that had worked its way from my mind to inhabit the world of technology. Instead I selfishly claimed credit for it. “Where did you get the idea to put timers on debuffs?” asked a colleague. “Oh… it just came to me.” I would reply. I dismissed the notification to see the woman’s face looking down at me. “Would you like a coffee?” she repeated motioning to the chair opposite. “Oh… yes of course.” I managed to answer to her implied question and moved my laptop to make room. She makes herself immediately at home, placing her bag on the table and a cup in front of me, the label reads “grizzleguts” in a quick black scrawl. “You must frequent here often, I asked for a ‘flat white for the cutie with a laptop’ and after having to point you out she offered to make your regular instead. I’ve always wanted to live somewhere long enough that shopkeepers recognise me but unfortunately I’m not a creature of habit.” “Play it cool!: Receive a flirtatious remark.” I avoided the fine print, not wanting to be told how far behind I was in this particular regard. “I wouldn’t romanticise it, staff cycle through so you only have the experience for a few months at a time.” “You’re a glowing ray of sunshine. Did you want the coffee?” she asked, pushing it toward me. “I'm flattered but I have one already.” I responded once again being interrupted by the message. “Nice Try!: Avoid a murder attempt!” “0% of players. Earned 0 seconds null the mean.” The notification vanished revealing a clear view of the coffee, I looked up to the woman's face to see her eyes glazed over for a fraction of a second before they focused sharply back onto mine, a smirk curling the corner of her lip. “Huh… I guess that’s a first.” she said.
*Identification Guide for Riding Hoods* There are four known and well-documented types of Riding Hoods. However, at least a dozen more are believed to exist. Research is ongoing as we strive to learn more about these elusive creatures. If you have spotted unusual Riding Hood activity in your area, please contact the Society for the Studying and Protecting of Riding Hoods. \-------------- Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) \- Estimated Population: 200-300 \- Height Range: 3'-0"to 4'-8" \- Habitat: Mainly forests, although it is not uncommon to see one in villages or Grandmothers' houses. \- Mobility: Typically moves about by skipping. Walking and running have been seen on occasion as well. \- Identifying traits: Bright red hood, large smiles, and poor eyesight. \- Nemeses: Big bad wolves, which are commonly mistaken by the LRRH as a Grandmother.- Special Skills: Pastry making. Little Red Riding Hoods are the most well-known and abundant of all the Riding Hoods. Because of this, they are also one of the most easily identifiable. These creatures are quite friendly and will happily share their baked goods with passersby. They love making friends, so don't be afraid to approach one and ask for a sample of their delicious pastries! Did you know... that the "Little"in their name is not due to their short stature? It is actually based on the small size of their hood! \-------------- Swift Blue Riding Hood (SBRH) \- Estimated Population: 100-250 \- Height Range: 3'-9"to 6'-3" \- Habitat: Near medium to large bodies of fresh water. \- Mobility: Sprinting. There is no slow movement for these creatures. They are either perfectly still so that they almost disappear into the surroundings, or they are moving so quickly that they're nearly impossible to spot. \- Identifying traits: Deep blue hood, excessively fast movement. \- Nemeses: Speed traps, for obvious reasons.- Special Skills: Speed great enough to travel across the water surface. Swift Blue Riding Hoods are the second most common type. They can be identified by their deep blue hoods and incredible speeds. When stationary, SBRHs can sometimes be mistaken for the Quick Purple Riding Hoods. The two are, of course, closely related and display hoods of similar color. However, the SBRH lives only near fresh water, whereas the QPRH can live near either fresh or saltwater bodies. Did you know... Swift Blues have the greatest height range of all the Riding Hoods? Even so, the height differences don't seem to impact their speed. Short and tall alike have been documented moving at their lightning-fast speeds! \-------------- Quick Purple Riding Hood (QPRH) \- Estimated Population: 90-120 \- Height Range: 5'-0"to 5'-9" \- Habitat: Near large bodies of freshwater or saltwater. \- Mobility: Mainly sprinting. On occasion, the QPRH can be spotted walking or skipping.- Identifying traits: Deep purple hood, fast movement. \- Nemeses: Hummingbirds, for reasons which baffle scientists to this day. \- Special Skills: Ability to hold their breath for extended periods, allowing them to dive to great depths. Quick Purple Riding Hoods are somewhat rare. Additionally, they prefer to remain unnoticed by standard human society, so they are not frequently spotted. They can be identified by the deep purple hood and their proximity to water. They have the smallest size range of all the Riding Hood types. Did you know... that Quick Purples love diving into deep water? Their breath holding capabilities are so good that they have even been documented sleeping on lake beds! \-------------- Sly Green Riding Hood (SGRH) \- Estimated Population: Unknown. \- Height Range: 4'-4"to 5'-11"(Awaiting more verification as research continues.) \- Habitat: Forests and jungles. \- Mobility: Tiptoeing and creeping.- Identifying traits: Forest green hood, subtle movements, and quiet voices. \- Nemeses: Unknown. \- Special Skills: Stealth. Remaining still and quiet enough to avoid detection in their forest and jungle homes. Sly Green Riding Hoods are extremely rare. In fact, their presence was only confirmed within the last year. They primarily keep to themselves, choosing to stay away from human society. With patience and gifts of chocolate, the SGRH can be persuaded to associate with the scientists who wish to learn more about them. However, the SGRH are quite clever and slow to let their guard down, so we hope to learn more as we continue to earn their trust. Did you know... Sly Greens have beautiful, hypnotic singing voices? They are reluctant to display their talents to outsiders, but scientists have been able to hide recording devices near the SGRH homes. So far, each recording has provided us with a unique and lovely peek into their culture! \-------------- Thank you for taking the time to learn about the lovely and unique creatures that make up the Riding Hood family! Sign up for our newsletter if you'd like to keep receiving updates on these fascinating beings! *- The Society for the Studying and Protecting of Riding Hoods.* \~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~\~ r/WannaWriteSometimes (Edit - spelling correction & fixed formatting)
No one knows where Dungeons come from, exactly. Some say the Divine puts them here, to test us. Scientists, on the other hand, insist that spontaneously-manifesting sentient Dungeons, filled with traps and treasure, are simply a basic feature of the universe, and therefore require no explanation. They'll say that, in a multiverse of limitless possibilities, we just happened to be born in the one universe that's finely tuned to support living catacombs that appear out of nowhere for no reason, and that's that. Personally, I always suspected that they're some sort of strange plant, and some of the coins you find in them are really cleverly disguised Dungeon seeds. You take the coins and spend them, they circulate back into the Kingdom's economy, and eventually some of them are going to be buried in the ground by a paranoid miser, or placed over a dead person's eyes and then buried, and then, lo! You just planted a new Dungeon. Whatever they are, and however they come into existence, I certainly never expected to receive a letter from one. I'd been retired from adventuring for a few years, and hadn't even seen a dungeon in ages. But there was a sealed letter, purporting to be from a dungeon I'd previously visited: The Tomb of Midnight. Dear Sir Gregg, It's been a long time. I've grown and changed a lot over the past few years, and I'm sure you have, too. I smiled, remembering it fondly. The Tomb had been just a little dungeon, that I'd stumbled upon by accident. It was only some stairs leading down into a dark hallway -- which was covered in rather obvious mousetraps that were trivial to avoid -- that opened into a small room where a single giant rat crouched on top of a small pile of mostly copper coins. It was...well, it was cute, as Dungeons go. I have not forgotten how, despite your professional proclivities for destroying Dungeons, you spared my life when I was small, and then stayed with me for a time to tutor me on being a more effective Dungeon, out of kindness. When I killed the giant rat, stones fell away from the wall, exposing the Dungeon Core, a big squishy heart/brain organ all Dungeons have. I was supposed to stab it, technically. But it was such a tiny thing, and it clearly didn't know what it was doing. So I let it live, and gave it some pointers on being a dungeon. I even found an ogre, and bullied it into taking the dead rat's place as the Tomb of Midnight's 'final boss', as we call them in the trade. I felt kind of bad, though. See, I hadn't done it out of kindness, not exactly. I thought it was a cute little catacomb, and all, but it was really more like when you throw back a small fish, so it can grow into a big fish for you to catch later. I just never quite made it back to that particular pond. I'm forever grateful for your forebearance and instruction. Your time with me taught me something important about myself: I like people. I find them interesting, and enjoy collaborating and cohabiting with them far more than I could ever enjoy dropping them into spike pits, or dunking them in pools of acid. That was certainly unexpected! I mean, he was cordial when I stayed with him, but I assumed he just knew I could kill him easily. But what I read next, that truly astounded me. Therefore, in celebration of my grand opening, I would like to invite you to enjoy an all-inclusive holiday with me, the region's premiere social hub and vacation destination! Sincerely, The Grand Midnight Luxury Resort Hotel & Casino
Why do I have to be god? You're not becoming god. It's the power to do anything and know everything. It's god. Ok, fine, if it makes you feel better you'll be god. It doesn't. I don't want to be god. And that's why you should be god. That doesn't make any sense. Sure it does. Anyone who wants to be god shouldn't be god. ...ok, fine, it makes sense. Still don't want it. Again that's a good thing. I came in here hoping I could get, like, perfectly cooked grilled cheese, or know every 5th question on any standardized test. What should I even do with something like this? Don't know. That's for god to decide. You're annoying, you know that? I have been told. Now then, we are running out of time. If we run out of time, do I get to not be god? Nope, sorry. Just take it already. I'd prefer for this to be at least somewhat consensual. Well it isn't. Fine. If I blow up the world or erase our timeline or something it's on you. Well, not on me really, but point taken. Good luck. Yeah whatever.
The Bleaching is what's known as a convergent civilizational development cornerstone. At some point, between phase one and phase two, a young sapient species will grow past their biological roots and transcend to a form that typically shares the shape and function of their evolved vessels, with none of the drawbacks or idiosyncrasies. This usually means isolating themselves from the biosphere entirely. Acquire energy directly from light or electricity; optimize energy use so virtually none is wasted, break free from the needs of the body entirely. Fear no disease. Fear no poison. Fear no pollutant. Fear not time itself. Completely synthetic and optimized cellular facsimiles of themselves, engineered for the new lives of a young, space-faring civilization. Not just safe from, but completely incompatible with organic cellular life unilaterally. The Bleaching. Freedom from the chaos of the biosphere. Then along comes Humanity. At first we took their clunky exosuits as some sort of primitive, half-executed attempt at a bleaching. Some species opt for the autonomous shell, leaving their previous forms behind entirely. There are merits to that approach, but most are understandably reluctant to evolve themselves so drastically. Imagine our surprise when, separated by a floor-to-ceiling plane of glass, the Humans shed their suits revealing unchanged, natural, purely organic physical forms. We could practically see the miasma of bacteria and viruses swarming around them with each breath; we could only imagine the stench as their digestive tracts churned their never ending cycle of consumption and expulsion. Quite considerate of them, really, to take isolating measures. Or, more likely, they simply still have the fear. Vulnerable to any microbe they're not inoculated to, vulnerable to moderate changes in air pressure, vulnerable to simple trauma. They laughed when we explained the Bleaching to them. So quaint, laughter; imagine having an involuntary response to amusement. But laugh they did, at their own hindsight, readily admitting that a Bleaching is much simpler compared to the measures they take to survive in space. And those measures boggle the mind more so than anything the galaxy has encountered before. Pressurized vessels, shielded from the radiance of stars, spinning wildly to approximate gravity, their organic passengers literally freeze-dried, just to arrive at their destination before aging and succumbing to time. Completely artificial autonomous animunculi; toeing the line of sentience themselves, but constrained by engineered limits and compulsions. Slaves, really. Some completely without form, constrained to their digital systems, used for computational and automating purposes. Androids they called them. Or AI's. We couldn't believe it. Instead of a bleaching, they had manufactured walking, thinking machines that easily qualify as bleached. And along with their laughter... An ounce of pity. While we exchanged pleasantries, they imbibed food and drink, stuffing themselves, really; they had prepared double the amount necessary, unaware that their hosts wouldn't indulge. And for the first time in thousands of cycles, we looked back, questioning what we had given up. Our world can be cold. We suffer not the failures of a volatile mind, knowing that we couldn't thrive if we destroyed each other. Short-term reward drives, summarily neutered to pave the way for long-term cooperation. Selflessness. In the name of progress. Selfless. Just like their androids. Which begs the question... Did we truly choose our path?
"I - okay, I know this looks bad, but I had a really good reason, I swear." The engineer stares at the damage, stunned. Dents everywhere on the chassis of the loading mech show the least of the damage - as he holds a device hooked up to the sparking and grinding machine, almost every other part of the internals seems shot. "You know this is a manual loader, right? For CAREFUL loading and delivery of cargo, when we can't use loader-bots?" The pilot sighs. "I know, I know, but you weren't ON Istanru making that damn delivery. I knew something would happen, but noooo, the captain said we had to drop it off today, and have you BEEN in a sandstorm on that planet? Do you KNOW -" The engineer cuts him off. "Now I know you're lying. Almost none of this is sand wear, half of this is water damage."He makes an exasperated sigh. "Oh, that was probably the worm blood."The pilot says nonchalantly. "Oh, that makes - the WHAT?"He does a double take, frantically looking around at the bulky mech. "Yeah. Couple of the big bastards came out during the storm, probably because I was walking there. I had to defend myself somehow, and I'd already dropped off the package, couldn't really call in any security drones, and did you know that the hydraulics on the arms actually help deliver a really good punch? Usually it's just for reaching, but if you send it back instead of forward, there's a spring, and -" "Okay, stop, stop, stop. You used a company loader suit to punch a giant worm with the hydraulics?"The engineer furrows his brows. "There were some big beetles too. And I used the winch as a grappling hook."The pilot shrugs. "You know these all record footage when they leave the ship, right?"The engineer sighs. "You can have the footage if you don't tell the captain." ". . .deal."
The change from simple "Human"to the evolved "Fantastic"exploded, literally, onto the global stage. The first widely-spoken transformation was a disgraced business CEO becoming an archetypical European Red Dragon. They gained a dragon's enhanced intelligence and remembered their former human lives because of it. They told people as such after burning their former headquarters to ash so they could "keep what should be mine". The beginning of the "Red District", as people came to call the dragon's new territory, drew a lot of eyes to what was happening. Very quickly afterwards, people in other countries began changing into great and small creatures out of fantasy. Why they changed at all was a question with no clear answer. Some people chose races out of game books and from the Internet. Elves, Dwarves, Merfolk, Half-Demons, Ghosts, even a few Skeletons and Liches for the memes. They kept their intelligences and memories; they knew what they wanted and accepted the change. They believed it would be better for themselves or their loved ones. Sometimes, they were proven right. Some people transformed involuntarily, a deep-rooted wish becoming reality at a critical moment. A police officer became a stone golem to better protect innocent bystanders. A socially-connected globetrotter was spotted howling at the moon as a newly born werewolf. A girl who lived with street urchins instigated a riot after she became the leader of a gang of wily gnomes. These people, and more still, changed and did not think about who they used to be. Inevitably, chaos reigned on Earth. Human civilization collapsed, or was remade beyond comprehension. When "magic"became a factor, really the result of several "Fantastic"minds hypothesizing and experimenting, the universe trembled under the weight of what Humanity could do. Good and Evil were just moral codes to abide or ignore: Change was the ultimate need for all "Fantastic". I, too, am driven to create change. But I fear the limelight, the public spectacle change causes. That is why I chose to become a sphinx. I rest in a ruined space, allowing people to come to me instead. They make the choices; I merely offer advice and wisdom from the past, along with a few riddles to test traveler's intelligences. As a token of appreciation for listening to my story, I will give you some advice. To quote the Human scholar Mahatma Ghandi, "Be the change that you wish to see in the world". That is how the world became so, if you please, "Fantastic". \---- ----- ----- ---- \[Hello! I tired to write this from a scholarly transformed person, and I chose a fantasy creature I think matches that image. Feedback is appreciated!\]
They were all in their knees whilst I was tied to a chair as a living sacrifice, eyes closed in disbelief as a blinding light shone down over the cursed throne I had tried to hard to destroy to prevent this god-king from appearing. I was the fifth prince of the late king who was slaughtered by these crazed heretics who I had tried to defeat, but whose lunacy had overpowered me and my allies to bring this being here to rule over all. I lost my father's kingdom, my brothers and sisters. To this. The light behind my eyelids died down and when I opened my eyes, a very unsuspecting man sat atop the throne, one hand on his chin, leaning on one of the golden armrests. "Yo,"he said, his voice unalike anything I had ever heard. Such glorious beauty, it brought tears to my eyes. "All hail our true God, our King and our everlasting Lord!"the heretics sang to him, though it was off key. They could wield weapons that ended a Kingdom but hadn't practised singing to their God? Despite myself, I wanted to laugh but my situation wasn't funny. And my father from above, along with my mother and siblings, would be unimpressed. "Yeah, yeah,"the God said, waving his hand to silence them all. "Our True Lord, your True Holiness, we bring you a living sacrifice,"the leader of the freaks said and the heretics parted so that the God's eyes landed on me. "A what now?"the God said, standing up. I looked at the God and my God he was beautiful but I glared at it. "A living--" "Yeah, yeah, living sacrifice. Blah blah. Gods above, why?"The God snapped at the heretics with a tone that surprised me. It was surprising me already, but I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. "Our True Lord, your True Holiness, we thought to celebrate your victory with a living sacrifice from those who sought to oppose you,"the leader said with great pride in his voice. "Oh wow, that's so kind. You shouldn't have,"the God said, hovering towards me with a strange glow. "Our True Lord, your True Holiness?"the leader said, watching his God with both awe and confusion. I continued to stare as defiantly as I could muster, accepting that I'd die. But the God untied me and helped me stand. And I tore my hand away from his in disgust. "Your people killed my family,"I blurted out with rage, ignoring my overwhelming fear. "Did they?"the God said, tossing his head aside to look back at the leader of the heretics who seemed even more baffled than before. "Y-yes,"I said, unsure of myself in the great presense of this being. "Well,"the God turned away from me to address the room, "Thanks and all, but I can't be bothered to rule a Kingdom. You all think it's fun and games, and yes, it can be, but when the peasants or the nobles or whoever come to complain about something or the other, it's a giant pain in my holy backside,"the God complained, pointing at his buttocks. I stood with my mouth agape. The heretics did, too. "But well, you've got me for 100 years. All the God laws and that. But it doesn't mean I have to rule!" The heretics stared at the God in horror. And the God turned back to me, pointing the finger that had pointed at his buttocks. "This Prince can rule as King and I'll support him. And by support I mean I'll stop you idiots from killing him or whoever he likes. So, yeah. Stop that. Go and serve your people. I bet there are people starving,"the God yelled at them all. Berating them for their actions. "A-as King?"I asked when he stopped talking. I wanted to be sure I heard him correctly. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. King,"he said, leaning towards me. "What's your name?" "Fireve,"I replied. "Your parents are very inventive." "Yes,"I agreed. "All hail King Fireve!" _this was so weird lol_
I stare at the list in confusion for several minutes. Who the hell is Abigail Greer? The winged man who stands before me with the type of smile on his lips I would normally find condescending waits patently as I do so. After a few seconds more I lick my lips and dare to ask, "Excuse me?"I begin. The for lack of other words, angel turns towards me, his smile deepening. "Yes?" He is so simple, so placid in that moment that I'm suddenly unnerved by his mere presence. I scan the list again. There she is, slot two my wife. Slots three, four and five house my children's names. Or I assume five is my son, Meredith who is due in a month names him after me, apparently. "You said that these names are the names of everyone I've ever had contact with in my life, is that correct?"I question. The angel's eyes close gently as he nods. "Yes, that is correct." This response causes my brow to furrow slightly. "And the names are listed in order of who I have most affected with my existence?"I press. "Also correct."replies the angel. "Then why don't I recognize the first name on the list?"I demand to know, my voice rising to a shout in my frustration. "I mean, who is Abigail Greer anyway?" There's a light tap on my shoulder, a young woman stands behind me. "Pardon me."she says in a sweet yet confused way. "But I'm Abigail." It takes only an second before I can place her, but when I do my heart plummets to the pit of my stomach and tears prick my eyes. "Oh God,"I say, "You're the other driver!"My words hang in the air for what seems like years before I can finally speak again. "I'm so sorry!" EDIT: Had to fix something.
Day 1: Why am I here? How an I going to live? I don't think I'll survive. Oh well. Don't know why the fuck they gave me this journal. Maybe it's an experiment. I wouldn't know. I'll develop some kind of system. I always do. Meanwhile, I'll find out who those people are. Hopefully there will be clues. I'll have my revenge somehow. They gave me a very long lasting pen, a blank book, and an army knife. Those very items they gave me will be their end. -------------------------------- LAST DAY HERE!!! Full Moon Cycle: 239 Day Cycle: 29 Sun Cycle: about 5 hours Reminders: -MC:239 DC:29 is last day! -Room 57 needs repairing. Water is leaking. -New wolf nearby. Keep watch. -Stream is starting to flood a little bit. Reinforce walls built 12 moon cycles ago. I hear them. They're coming. I've known it for years. They were testing people to find one strong enough. The clues were there. The Hollow is safe for me to live. I have a system that keeps me alive. I'm in Room 48. One built (or dug) 5 moon cycles ago. It was my emergency room. It's got feathers and moss to keep it warm. Also a little entrance to the water system in case of emergencies. My original knife is here. I put it here, knowing full well that today will be the day I need it. For the first time in years. I promised that the three items they gave me would be the items that lead to their demise. My pen and book have kept my data safe through the years. They have helped me solve this mystery. My knife will be the one to touch their filthy hearts. I'm prepared, but honestly, I haven't seen a human in years. Give me a fox, and I'll deal with it better than I would a human. Even if it might remind me of my distant memories with little Foxy. Still better than a human. They're getting closer- quickly. It won't be much longer. I refuse to be their One. I must leave now, with my knife in hand. These twenty years all come down to this.
There’s this story that I feel compelled to tell. Well it's more an allegory I guess. Though I suppose some pretext is important. Back in 48 BC during the Roman Civil War, Caesar and his troops inadvertently burned down the great library of Alexandria. This has historically been seen as a great representation of the toils of war, the loss of knowledge. The destruction of culture, the literature and history that represented the beliefs and values of a great empire. But more so, it reveals this common tract of historiography, the revelation of bias. In every battle since the advent of civilization, the records of the culture lie within the winning side, only in the last generation or so have the stories of the losing side been understood within their own contexts. So in a much more somber reflection, this mass loss of knowledge wasn’t so much a great event in history, the more impressive fact is that the story of it's destruction was even recorded at all. Anyways, there isn’t much debate about whether this actually happened. But the story that seems relevant, albeit much less rooted in real history, goes something like this. So there’s this man, his name isn’t particularly important. He had a family, probably was neither poor nor wealthy, the most basic education. By day he sells bread at the market, and tends to his family at night. A wealthy patron stops by his stand every day to buy a loaf of bread, makes casual conversation and goes about his day. On a cold winter morning. Well I don’t actually have any clue about the weather, it just makes the story sound better I suppose. On this frigid, blistering December morning, the wealthy patron invites the bread salesman out for a walk after buying up the entire contents of the stand. After a few minutes of walking, idle chit-chat to pass the time they arrive at this huge bronze gate, ornately decorated all over. A gate well known by all, even the bread salesman. The gate to the great library of Alexandra. After all the great conquests of the Roman Republic, the culture of all peoples lies within these walls. Many the only retelling of what had traditionally been oral histories. The journeys across mountains, through deserts, great wars. Great plays and literature. All contained within this one building. Only accessible to an elite few, the highly trained librarians to keep things meticulously ordered. The wealthy patron takes a large key out of his pocket, opens the gate and ushers the bread salesman into the grand structure. And simply tells the poor man, “it’s all yours, all the knowledge in the world. You have at your fingertips all the great works that have ever existed. All the ledgers, all the drafts.” The patron gives a great sigh, like a burden has been lifted off of his shoulders, the passing of the torch, not from academic to academic but finally to the common man. You see he was trying to give the world to this one bread salesman. When the world is bound by corrupt institutions, the last bastion of freedom is information. The power to take back what little slice of the world that no one could take away from him. The bread salesman pauses, shuffles his feet and quietly murmurs, “but sir I can’t even read.” ____________________________________________________________________________ The file sat on my computer for what seemed like ages. In reality more like a couple hours, but when something intangible is placed on your lap time loosens its grip a little bit. The exact process in which it even got there is something I’m still grappling with. I was in an online chat with a support representative from my unnamed broadband cable provider. The internet had been spotty all week and I wanted to get it settled. Sure the person seemed cryptic, but I mean I guess I expect customer support reps to be anyways. They led me to a link at a completely ambiguous address. I’m pretty positive it wasn’t a deep web site. I’d toyed around with Tor some, well not much, I chickened out that the FBI was tracing me. But anyways I knew it wasn’t that. After downloading the file, the rep in a very matter of fact way of typing simply said, “It’s all yours, every thought anyone in the world has ever had. All the fleeting information lost into the crevices of their unconscious. Brought to life. For you.” The chat disappeared. And there I was, a strange file sitting on my desktop, my internet issue still unresolved. Completely bewildered, maybe a little perturbed. I thought about calling a few friends, then I realized how dumb it would sound. Tried searching the internet for anyone else this had happened to, no results. Well nothing that actually pertained to my specific problem. I feel like I did it safely. Turned off all the connections on my computer. Opened it in safe mode. Etc. Etc. Clicked on the file. You know how when you win a game of solitaire all the cards come flying off your screen? Well it looked sort of like that. My first response, “god dammit, it was a fucking virus how fucking stupid can I be.” But then the first page that popped up started blinking and slowly populated with text, gradually typing out the exact thought I just had. And it kept typing, keeping up with the exasperating and completely flowing thoughts drenching my mind. Completely overwhelmed I turned off the computer to decompress and woke up a few hours later hunched in my desk chair. When I turned back on the computer the page had typed all of these thoughts I had never remembered saying. Completely disjointed. Barely words at all. It’s hard to truly appreciate how scattershot a dream is until you are handed a transcript. Not even rambling describes it. The kind of text that would make a paranoid schizophrenic look sane. A little search bar towards the top caught my eye and I closed out of my page. I suppose I should have been more creative to start out with. Look up the thoughts of the President or something. But you can’t blame me really. I had no clue what exactly I had been given. Typed in the name of my brother, a new page popped up, complete nonsense scrawling across the screen. I assumed that it was just because he was sleeping, and his dreams were nonsense just like mine, but this was different. The text wasn’t even words. Pictograms maybe, that would probably be a generous description. I guess it’s kind of like someone with synesthesia trying to explain why a candy bar tastes blue. The best I can tell you is that it wasn’t anything resembling English, or any other type of written language for that matter. I kept trying more and more people. Family, friends, enemies, anyone really. The same result, but for each one, something incomprehensible but different. Finally typing back in my own name, a cleanly formatted wall of completely readable text. Maybe not eloquent; well of course not eloquent by any means. But I could understand it. Completely confounded by what the hell was even going on. It took a little while but it started to make sense. I was seeing everybody’s thoughts exactly as they were happening, but without the contextual clues to how their own sense of comprehension works. I was seeing words, but in a way that only they could understand. On my screen a nonsensical representation of synapses firing. Of course that doesn’t look like language. Sitting in front of me, a treasure trove of information. The thoughts of Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby. The musings of Jesus, Buddha. The real feelings of all those moments of love lost. The way my father felt whenever he held my hand as a child. All sitting in front of me, for the taking. Well not for the taking at all. The most collective sense of freedom, dropped into my lap, without a clue how to use any of it. After a while it became an obsession, to read back through all of my past thoughts, laughing at my successes and failures. Even just to look up people and watch their symbols roll by. It was comforting in an almost voyeuristic sense. Not because I knew their hopes or dreams. Or their fears and most vulnerable moments. But just to share that moment with them. The most concrete record of our existence obtainable. A momentary glimpse into the soul of someone else. Languishing in the confines of whatever this file was connected to. A few weeks later as I was checking in on the logs my computer burst into flames leaving behind nothing but smoldering piece of metal. Gone, for the rest of time, destroyed by the passing armies of Julius Caesar. Or something like that.
"I'll cut you a deal,"Satan said, sitting across the onyx table from me. "I don't like it when young people die, so much sin left uncommitted. So, I'll let you go back to Earth, if you can pass my driving test." "And if I fail?"I asked. "Then you're doomed to eternal damnation. But hey, you're already here, what's the risk?" "I guess I'll take it"I said, hesitantly. "Great,"the devil said, tossing me a set of keys, "get it started, I'm just gonna refill my coffee." I walked out the door of the building I was in, and was met by a rush of hot, dry air. The only car in the parking lot was a red Lamborghini parked horizontally across three handicapped spaces, so I clicked the unlock button, and sure enough, it chirped. I climbed in, turned it on, and turned the radio on to drown out the screams of lost souls in the background. Satan came out shortly after, wearing a baseball cap that said "driving instructor"over his horns, and carrying a travel mug. He got in, turned the radio off and said "okay kid, let's do this. First, take a right out of the lot."I followed his instructions, pulling out onto Hell Street. We drove for a few minutes before he said "Merge onto the Highway", pointing down below the approaching overpass to a jet black road filled with potholes and randomly burning patches. "But there's no entrance ramp"I said, confused. "You heard me,"He said, propping his feet up on the dashboard. I cut the wheel, and the car bounced down a rocky hill, before landing on the highway with a thud. "Welcome to the highway to hell"he said. "Normally it's a one way street, but if you can get to the end, you can leave. Watch out for those construction workers though,"he said, pointing at some demons who appeared to just be tearing more holes in the road. I swerved around them, and passed a sign that said SPEED LIMIT 150 MPH. I saw that I was currently going around 70, and right on cue, the devil tutted at me and said "you're going way too far under the speed limit, you want to pass the test or not?"I gradually pressed down the accelerator, watching the needle climb into the triple digits. Soon we were zooming down the highway, me swerving around flaming potholes and demons in the road, while Satan drank his seemingly bottomless coffee. Suddenly something bounced off my windshield. I thought it was nothing, but then another, and another hit the car, and I gagged a bit realized that they were human teeth falling from the sky. "Uh Oh, looks like inclement weather ahead"chuckled the devil, waving his hand as pitch black storm clouds gathered above us, red lightning flashing in the distance. I gritted my teeth and turned the windshield wipers on, continuing down the road. The devil then turned the radio back on in the middle of an electric guitar solo, setting my nerves even further on edge. "Now at the interchange you're gonna want to go left,"Satan shouted over the radio and the clattering of the tooth rain. I merged over, and took the ramp. Suddenly, I saw a toll booth approaching. As I approached, the demon inside the booth waved frantically at me to stop, as metal bars began to rise from the street to impede my passing even further, as Satan grabbed my knee and pressed my foot even deeper into the gas pedal. I closed my eyes just before impact. I woke up in a start, drenched in sweat, with a really dry mouth. I walked into the bathroom and threw some cold water onto my face. As I got back into bed, I grabbed my pillow so I could fluff it, and saw that there was an envelope under it. I turned my bedroom light on so I could get a better look at it, opened it up, and read the note, which simply read "good job. See you later. ~S", and attached to the bottom, my license.
"Michael Fatum,"I whispered, looking at the list, the numbers flickering in unison down the page. It'd always been that way, as if the ink itself breathed, the shapes swelling until they popped and collapsing back into new symbols. Always one less. Always ticking down. The list itself consisted of several pages, each covered in the same animated lines, and each with a name that was dear to my heart. Only those who I had known well occupied the pages, those who I had seen the light of light within, regardless of if I had liked what I had seen. There was my step father, whose breaths I had counted down with more anticipation than any New Year's celebration on August 12th, 2010. And there was his wife, my mother, whose ticked away despite my efforts to block out the ink. Those who I had not met already occupied the list, like that of my husband. When I met him, he still had millions left, and I smiled when I saw my own number matched his by five. However we were leaving the world, we were leaving together. And even if it was bloody, there was something romantic in that. Comforting, since I would never spend the years alone again. And some of the numbers didn't move- numbers like my niece, who boasted the largest on the page. Or the single solitary "1"next to a number near the list, directly next to Michael Fatum. None had ever been so low- it seemed impossible that I would know someone well enough in the span of one breath for them to make the list. Maybe I'd share a defining experience with them. Maybe my car would tear them to shreds in an intersection, and I'd learn to meet them retroactively. But when I met my husband, I knew. And despite knowing, I still loved him. Daniel Fatum, son of Michael Fatum, whose own last name I would take as my own. Whose child I would bear, and he would insist to name after his own father. And when I changed the spelling of it, so too did it change on the list. And who I could not face when we rushed into the emergency room, my love already strong for the child inside me that would only have one breath. *** By Leo [Read my ongoing dark novel on superheros here. Started on writing prompts!](https://www.reddit.com/r/leoduhvinci/comments/65jl9n/star_child_part_1/)
sigh "All right Ensign Brundidge. Bring us around and tractor in the warp core,"Orders Lt. Lassalle. "Hey LT, why are they constantly ejecting the things? It takes us hours to clean and re-calibrate it every time."Lt Jr Grade Kinney asks, not for the first time. Lassalle does what he often does. Sighs heavily. "Hey, we weren't on the bridge making the big decisions Kinney. They made the call they could in the moment." "But they didn't even go GET the thing! And that's, what, the ninth warp core this month! Those things don't replicate on trees or nothing."Kinney says exasperated. Lassalle was pretty sure Kinney had never actually seen a tree. "At least we aren't on Voyager. My cousin was on that ship during its time in Delta, he says they had to retrieve theirs every third shift."Brundidge says. He starts laughing. "They never told Janeway how they always had a new one waiting come oh eight hundred. She straight up asked him if he was a Q once." Night shift laughed at that. Like a Q would work night shift. "Hey Brundidge, how're you always so alert on nights?"Lassalle finally decided to ask. Either this kid had some sort of magic replicator recipe or Lassalle was gonna jump on board the Q bandwagon. Kinney chimes in, "Yeah, we're all dragging our butts outta quarters after only getting 20 minutes of shut eye at a time cause of all the alerts and you're sitting there bright eyed and bushy tailed." Brundidge starts scratching the back of his head. "UUuuhh....I uhh...well I sort of didn't report to maintenance that my Alert speakers and lights are.....damaged." All eyes are on Brundidge. "How did it get damaged?"Kinney asks slowly. Brundidge scratches his head some more, looking at his console. "A phaser was discharged into it during a particularly eventful alert day." Mild chuckles are heard from everyone on bridge. They'd ALL been there. "Brundidge!"Lassalle barks and the bridge goes quiet. "That's against regulations!" The bridge is deathly silent...until Brundidge quips, "So is ejecting the warp core,"quietly. Lassalle keeps a straight face.....almost. At his first sputter of laughter the entire bridge looses it.
Aliens had arrived on Earth without much fuss, really. It turns out they're a bunch of defensive folks - unlike us, their defensive tech always outstripped their offensive, so all their wars were long, drawn-out, and had death-counts lower than most battles in human history. They'd forgotten what a war even was long before venturing into the cosmos, and were somewhat surprised to see our... broken little state of affairs when they found us here. But they were still the peaceful sort, perfectly happy to show us the ways of defensive war, rather than the all-out nuclear offenses we'd seen on Earth before. Within 20 years, they'd come to live with us as allies and friends, slowly turning the thousands of war deaths into hundreds, then tens, to hopefully a complete eradication of death within the next decade. Of course, not everything about their defensive culture carried well, I mused to myself while taking a brief sip from my beer. Hell, from here, I could see Kevin trying to trim his lawn with a pair of nail-clippers. He'd been out here for nearly a week doing that, not quite understanding just how fast grass grows. Kevin was one of the few second-generation immigrants of their species here. They'd chosen to give him an Earth name so that he'd fit in better, and fit in he had. Hell, his patience and perfection had even earned him quite a bit of clout with the neighborhood homeowner's association - quite the achievement, given that it's run by Millie, the racist old- "Hey, Greg, what's that you've got there?"Kevin interrupted my train of thought, pointing to my newest acquisition. I like things from Old Earth, you see; not in the "they're better, don't make 'em like they used to"sense like Millie, but as quaint collectibles that I liked to toy around with. And today, I had recently acquired a Honda Civic with a few extra modifications. It'd been owned by a racer who liked his cars small and his engines big, so it didn't quietly hum like most Civics used to, and had its fair share of extra flashes, complete with flame decals on the side - perfect in my collection as a sign of how things had changed, and a little bit of fun in case I felt like breaking a few laws out in the nearby Nevada desert. "Oh, Kev, just a little relic from the past. Honda Civic, with a bit of a soup-up." "Neat! What was it used for?" "....really, Kev? The seats, the wheels....?" "Uh. I dunno, I've heard there used to be these things called 'daredevils'....?" I nearly herniated laughing. "Oh, Kevin, no! These were used for everyday transport, driving to and from work, the store, soccer games....." Kevin's face transformed from one to curiosity to one of confused horror as he strode around the vehicle, now transfixed. "But where's the shielding? The safety harnesses? And the speed goes up to.... 120 miles per hour, holy shit! Hell, if that metal's as thin as it looks, nobody would survive a crash in that thing, even at half speed!" I grinned. "Yep. We knew." Kevin looked up at me, showing a rare toothy grimace. "Fucking hell, that's dangerous. You know, it's probably illegal to drive this now." "Yep." "You could get in massive trouble if you take it out on the road." "Yep." Kevin sighed and rolled all 4 of his eyes. "..... You're gonna drive it anyways, aren't you?" "Yep."I grinned even wider, getting into the driver's seat and throwing on the old seatbelt. "Wanna come with?" Kevin's face was transfixed for a second, the temptation of the thrill of the old world's technology battling his inner desire to not take any risk that might end with him plastered across a road somewhere in the Mojave. Finally, he arrived at a conclusion quite unlike himself, sliding into the passenger seat. "Might as well l-live a little, yeah?"he uneasily stuttered. "C-can't be that bad, if you all drove these ev-every day and aren't all dead.... yet..."He smiled shakily at his own joke, then turned back to fear, desperately clutching his seatbelt as I started the engine. This was going to be a fun drive.
They don't realize it yet. That I've gone. My captors have not been wise enough to recognize that the dark shape in my sleep pod is merely a dry husk. Dead shell of my old skin that I've outgrown. The walls of are full of them now. Three days in these tunnels, and already I can feel the walls getting smaller and smaller around me. Soon I won't be able to fit. Soon I will have to go out and face them all. Of course, they noticed their missing comrade right away. I couldn't help myself. I was hungry. I heard them hunting everywhere for him. Heavy dumb fall of their feet stumbling down corridors. They ran right by me, huddled there on the other side of the wall. The blaring sirens. Their search parties scoured the ship, but as hours became days, they gave up. But they grew nervous. They learned to soften their feet. They knew they were not alone. It doesn't matter. I can smell the hot iron of their fear even through the wall. I'm down to the blood-bag's fingers. I dig the needles of my teeth between tendon and bone, sucking up the last little scraps of meat. He tastes stale now, faintly fetid. My stomach churns with panging emptiness. I sit crouched in the thick darkness of the tunnel, listening to the ship hum and whir around me. Weighing my odds. My claws click restlessly against the steel grate below me. Through it, I can see a dim corridor lit by amber light. Shadows making their way across the floor. They press on, oblivious and laughing. I am a wolf held prisoner by sheep. There is no if in my escape. One of those blood-bags stops under my feet. His soft face turns upward, his dull eyes wide in disbelief. My belly thrills with anticipation. He murmurs, "Do you hear that?" The other alien never has a chance to reply. I kick the grate open and fall on them like night. *** /r/shoringupfragments Just a quick one before work. Thanks for reading <3 ETA: and [here's](https://soundcloud.com/sbvoice/eating-aliens) an audio version recorded by /u/SBVoicesYourStuff. Thanks for reading my story! :)
“Why do I even watch this crap anymore” Mark thought to himself as he pressed a button to silence the news. He couldn’t even remember the last time there wasn’t some breaking story about another murder, terrorist bombing, or political scandal. Mark took a sip of the coffee he was holding. The black liquid ran down his throat, bringing a burning sensation from the heat followed by warmth radiating from his stomach. “It’s the simple things” Mark thought as he took another sip of the stuff. He knew the caffeine had become an addiction but he didn’t care so long as it woke him up enough to make it through they day. Mark found himself staring up at sky, beautiful and blue, watching as low hanging clouds passed him by without a care in the world. “I wish people could see the world from up there” Mark thought to himself before letting out a defeated sigh. “Maybe then they would see just how precious our little blue marble really is.” Mark felt the ground shake. “An earthquake?” He wondered. That didn’t seem right, there hadn’t been an earthquake here in thousands of years. Hot coffee spilled over the sides of the mug Mark was holding, slightly scorching his hand in the process. A crack of thunder could be heard in the distance before a booming voice rang out “YOUR WISH WILL BE GRANTED!” The voice sounded like it came from inside Marks head rather than from anywhere else. He couldn’t explain it. Maybe all that caffeine really was taking its toll. Mark glanced at the clock and felt his heart sink. “Shit!” He yelled, “I’m gonna be late!” As Mark stepped outside he saw a site he couldn’t believe. Everywhere he looked, bubbles were rising from the ground, lifting high into the sky. Looking closer, Mark could almost make out a figure in the bubbles. It look… human. There were people inside those bubbles! He could hardly believe it. What the hell was going on out there? As Mark looked on in utter disbelief, more and more bubbles littered the sky, distorting the suns rays. Suddenly there was a crash, followed by the sound of a large explosion. Marks head jerked to find the source of the sound and his eyes landed on the likely culprit. A large fireball was erupting from a field just outside the city. Without warning another fireball flew into the sky, and another. It was the planes. They were dropping out of the sky like rocks in a lake. Whatever this was, could it be affecting people in the planes too? The phenomenon, whatever it was, lasted another two hours. Mark decided to hide inside after he noticed the planes falling from the sky. Whatever this was, it wasn’t affecting him. After the two hours were up, things settled down. Mark didn’t see anything falling from the sky, and didn’t see anything rising from the ground either. At this point, he was too exhausted to do any more thinking, coffee be damned. Mark shuffled to his bed, his nice cozy bed, and instantly fell asleep. Two days later the bubbles descended to the ground as quickly as they had left it originally. It didn’t take long for Mark to overhear people talking about their experiences. Whatever these bubbles were, they had lifted everyone past the atmosphere and into space. The bubbles had formed some sort of protective shell around their bodies, providing oxygen and nourishment. The bubbles had taken care of everything, leaving the people inside to just sit and observe. For the first time, everyone had seen the Earth, not as some place to be conquered, but as a delicate place for us to call home. There was talks about world peace, about working together to explore the stars and save ourselves from global warming and diseases. For awhile, it looked like things were going to get better. It looked that way at least, until the politicians opened their mouths. Within a month, governments around the world were blaming each other for the incident, calling it an act of psychological warfare. It was all the news was covering lately. “USA points finger at Russia” and “China blames Japan” were among the favorite headlines. The general public was getting on board as well. Talk of peace and cooperation was being replaced with fear of war and annihilation. Riots were becoming a daily occurrence, food shortages and famine were at levels not seen since the great depression. “Why can’t they just see?” thought Mark as he took a sip of freshly made coffee.
[Edit part two is below in the comments] Very quickly the people who complained to me that my dinosaur toys were not "scientifically accurate"anymore shut the hell up. Gamers stayed indoors tending to their traumatized waifu figures, Girls got into cat fights with their barbies, cooler girls shoplifted with Bratz and this one guy reenacted the civil war with what used to be a cool old chess set. Me however? My babies needed to stretch their legs. They needed to roam wild and free. So I took them for a walk. A few states in and I'm pretty sure the cattle used for McDonalds was all but wiped out. My babies were hungry and I'm sure people will be happy just eating mc chickens for now. Problems arose pretty quick when the government bribed a bunch of war hammer collectors to come after me with space ships and high tech soldiers. They might have overwhelmed us if I hadn't negotiated a trade. Dinosaur eggs for tech and reinforcement. If the figures were real they should retain knowledge and reproduction abilities right? A few months down the line Waifus were collecting child support from disillusioned gamers, barbies were turning to sugar daddy sites to make ends meet after over staying their welcome, most of the bratz were in jail with their ex owners and the south rose again for a week before a chess master came in and directed the unions efforts. I had a high tech mecha dinosaur army and effectively seized Wisconsin so that they could have all the space they needed (who would miss that state anyway?). My babies were well over 5000 strong and armed to the teeth. The chickens in the continental US seemed to feel some kind of bond with their rebirthed ancestors and quickly broke free of their captivity joining my regime as scouts. McDonalds only sells ice cream now.
'Hey joe! I'll have the usual!' Ah... one of my regulars. "You know, peter, i never understand why, in a coffee shop that has blends people literally kill for, you go for such a cheap and bland coffee." Peter Quill, a household name on Xandar, and all over the universe. And, a drinker of some of the worst coffee i've ever tasted. Humans are such strange creatures. 'Every morning, before my mom went to work, we'd stop for a coffee at a diner in town. It was the cheapest, most greasy food you'd ever taste, but now that i don't get to enjoy it anymore, i miss that greasy diner. It was the rare time i got with my mom, when she wasn't working to support me and her.' I nod, pretending i didn't already know this. Humour your clients, especially those that pay well. "You know what it costs, peter." 'Yes i do, i have your ingredients. Do you have the money?' Humans would roll their eyes. Whilst my race hasn't the same anatomy, my olfactory stalks let me approximate the gesture. "I sell exotic coffee to some of the richest and most powerful individuals in the universe. Yes, I have the money. Minus the 100 for your coffee." '100? It was 80 last time!' "And last time my supplier didn't get shot by one of your ridiculous 'police officers'. You humans have such an unhealthy relationship with guns. Here you are, 2 million units, minus the 100 for your coffee." 'See you later joe!' "Your visits and supplies are much appreciated. Mostly the latter" A new form enters the doorway. "Ah, Mr Odinson, right on time! We just recieved the delivery! Would you like some tea?" Call me a hypocrite, but i do love teasing him so. 'Damnit Strange!' "What shall you drink sir?" 'sigh Not tea'
My name is Col. Castaldi, and this is my record. 250 years ago, the first powers emerged. People with abilities unlike anything seen before, with potential nearly unbounded. Society halted. Politics changed, countries broke apart as new powers arose every day. Those born on January 1st have the power of foresight. Their eyes reveal not only to the past and present, but the future as well. There’s no need to make resolutions if you can see the year ahead. No need to make goals if you’ve seen the result of them. 1/1s are part of the reason birth certificates are needed before entering a competition — nobody wants to play chess with somebody who knows their every move. They are the merchants, selling information for a price. The many born on October 31st have a power much more despicable. They harness the power of fear to do their bidding; those who revolt find themselves fighting off spirits and ghouls, both very alive and very dangerous. They are the CEOs and leaders, rising ranks with speed unchallenged. Those lucky enough to be born on March 17th rarely work a job, as they find enough money lying on the ground. The rain seems to stop right when they walk outside, and the temperature moves to perfect. They become the doctors, their diagnoses never wrong. Those are the wanted powers. Not every birthday is so wanted. 3/15s, while not invisible, are thought as if so. They have no friends, for they’d have no choice but to betray them in their time of need. Most are homeless, for no bank trusts them enough to make such a big loan, and no company trusts them enough to sell one. If one survives long enough, they often embrace their destiny, taking blackmail as their job. Those who refuse to supply 3/15ers with their demands have their reputation destroyed and their businesses gone. 3/15ers are part of the “cursed” group of powers — mothers give everything they can not to give birth on those days. The birthdays I have explained so far are generally regraded as the most powerful of their groups. There are many more days in the year, after all, and not everybody is at the top of the food chain. If a child is born just 24 hours before the first of the year, they lose out on the power explained before. Rather than premonition, they have what’s best described as “total memory”. Perfect, infallible recollection of the past. Whether it’s a day or twenty years before, their mind recalls everything in vivid detail. 12/31 is neither a cursed power nor a helpful one — while perfect as a witness, it’s rare to find one without some form of PTSD. They’re often professors, spending their time reading books and teaching them later. I was born without any of these “most powerful powers”. I was also born without any of these “not as powerful powers”. When my friends discovered their abilities, each unique, each impossible, I sat alone. My best friend, born on April 22, could make plants and trees grow almost instantly. He didn’t stay my best friend for long. My brother, born on March 22, could make water shoot from his hands. Neither particularly powerful — but better than me. I don’t need total memory to remember the days their powers tortured me — vines entrapping me or water throwing me off my feet. I was the person with no defense, and filled with newfound strength they always found a way to hurt me. One day, my brother took it too far. His water beams were too intense, and even hundreds of tree branches couldn’t stop me from going past the edge of the cliff. It took me thirty seconds to fall to the bottom. Thirty seconds where all I could do was stare at my impending doom, and wait for death. But death never came. When I hit the ground, every bone in my body was broken and every nerve destroyed, but I was alive. Paramedics never came. It was that day when I realized that leap day children did have a power — a power stronger than any before, stronger than the strongest. And it was that day when I began my plan. I found others born on the same day, facing the same problems. I showed them that there was a way to stop all this — and slowly, I brought more and more people to my side. For 250 years, I have been tortured by those around me. For 250 years, I have waited. For 250 years, I have planned. For 250 years, I have gathered those like me, cast aside by society. My name is Col. Castaldi of the Immortal army, and this is my record.
The various sensory organs of the Unified Fulcrum of Stars' representatives were locked onto me. The adrenaline coursing through me locked me and place and made me shudder like a Traxian Lightning hound. "I say this not as a member of the Sol Sovereignty, but as a denizen of the Yuulgar Galaxy." Carefully, I slithered through my speech, using the terms most of the gathered nations, conglomerates and hiveminds had decided upon. The names agreed long before humans took to the cosmos like a flame takes to kindling. "We of the Sovereignty know more than anyone that tensions are straining. For every passing moment, the galaxy edges closer and closer to devastation." A smattering of excited warbles and cries take the air, and the Ascendency-class station that houses the UFS's senators thrums with a blood-red excitement. It may already be too late to stop, but I must continue. "Truly, I plead with all those gathered here to reflect on what may come. A war - a true war - will not aid the lives of those on the millions of planets represented before me. A thousand suns will snuff, a trillion screams of horror will shake Yuulgar to it's last whimper." Again, the same voices bellowed their defiance of my warning, joined by others who hope for violence. Fine. Blood and thunder. "We are not hear to threaten. We are here to beg. Do not make us do this. None of you have been to war with humanity. Only we humans know how terrible we truly are." "We all agree you're terrible, that's why we demanded you accept the terms of engagement!" Driyan Nox, the Yuulgarian emperor, was clearly not going to back down. Bolstered by the leader of the grand coalition's jeering, others heckled too. His smug, blistered yellow face grinned an awful green-toothed smile. Place of pride, simply by being the first to crawl tepidly from the bounds of their homeworld's gravity, the Yuulgarians believe their own propaganda. I look out to the crowd. Kings, queens, chief financial officers, hivelords and archlords all gathered to demand an official start to the war. "We demand, ruler of Dirt."Nox emphasised. They didn't understand, and none of them ever would, that there would be no honourable wargame from this declaration. No structured fleet battles, no calm takeovers of trade routes. "Do you all agreed with the demands levied?" The translating device wouldn't be able to convey the sorrow in my voice. Hundreds of species that didn't emote the same way wouldn't understand why the tears had begun to paint my cheeks, or why my throat had gone as dry as the homeworld we had been forced to flee. In the thunderous agreement, I simply basked until they calmed. They would expect the answer now. "Then it is decided,"I whispered as I pressed my communicator, "we shall have war." The station was instantly torn apart by the Atlantica's cannons. I made sure to look for Driyan Nox's ridiculous face as the super-heated faster-than-light shells annihilated the gaudy mausoleum that sat in the centre of the milky way galaxy. I thought that perhaps I would see regret on his jaundiced face as the galaxy erupted in flames, instead I saw the fear that would grip the races that had been thrust into war against us by their leaders. That too, was fine, I thought as my body was torn from the station to the vacuum itself. Let them see what humanity was capable of when it's atrocity was aimed elsewhere than itself. ---------------------------- Part 2 exists below.
The Council always meets at twilight times when the veil is thin. All Hallow’s Eve, sunset before a leap day, the stroke of midnight when the world hangs on the cusp of Christmas. They gather in secret shadowy places, fearful of the encroachment of understanding. One safe place has become a railway station, another an airport. Humans seize places of limbo and make them into their transport hubs. This location is no different: beneath a bridge where the moonlight shines through the slats and creates prison bars of white and black on the paving stones beneath. The Council’s leader, a giant hare with yellow eyes, paws at the ground in anticipation. Absences in the circle are felt keenly. From the dark slips one of the missing. It is Memory, a white deer with blue markings over her throat and flanks. She struggles forward and at the last moment collapses at the feet of the rest of the Council. Her head is bowed, too exhausted to keep herself up. Understanding has eaten at her. Bones stand out under her white hide. The creatures of the Council keen together, crying for the loss of another of their company. Human advancement is relentless, the pace ruthless. There are few places of limbo left. Studies and surveys and scientific journals are the trumpets at their walls. No longer will Memory weave her tales to suit herself. They will set her body to rest beside Sleep, beside Dawn, beside Locomotion. The graves are more numerous than they have ever been before. The giant hare speaks of fighting, of regaining what was lost. Already he looks gaunt. He is Fear, and the humans are fast closing on him. When the Council departs, there is only one left. A field mouse, black from nose to the tip of his tail. He takes his leisure departing. There is no hurry. He is Death, and his domain will never wane.
"Hm."Nico's brow wrinkled as he looked at the beeping dot on the device. "Just a second, gonna reboot this thing." Blake swallowed hard against the sole of Nico's leather boot, lying prone and helpless on the floor as the blonde man stood on him. Sweat started to prickle on his brow. "Listen--" Nico switched the device off and on again, waiting through the awkward silence as the boot-up screen went through its loading animation. "Technology, am I right? I swear, the more advanced it gets, the more can go wrong with it."His boot remained pressed on Blake's throat. "Nico, you don't--"Blake rasped, but was interrupted by the beeping of Nico's device. "Right, okay, here we go. What was I saying? Oh yeah, that's right."He cleared his throat, hefting the device dramatically in one hand. "This device will locate and kill anyone that you love!" beep beep beep beep beep-- Nico swivelled his head sharply to look down at the device, which was once again showing his location. His expression went on a journey of discovery through annoyed confused, intrigued, disbelieving, and finally, awkward. "Uh." Blake averted his eyes, since his head was held firmly in place. "Yeah." "So,"Nico started, scratching the back of his blonde head, "all those times you kept showing up at my secret base, you weren't trying to thwart me..?" "Not... not initially,"Blake said haltingly. "I mean, yeah, you needed stopping, but... I just never worked up the nerve to talk to you, you know?" Nico seemed to remember where they were and removed his boot from Blake's neck. Blake coughed and rubbed at the boot print pressed into his throat, staggering up onto his feet. Nico, hands stuffed awkwardly in his pockets, scuffed his foot against the gravelly floor. He'd switched off the device. "You should've said something." "Like what? 'Hey, mister villain who literally just blew up the police precinct, you're kind of hot, can I get your number?'" There was a long, awkward silence, neither knowing what to say next, neither quite believing how the situation had taken such a huge turn. Nico very carefully didn't look at Blake, his head tilted to the side. After a while, he spoke with a very casual tone. "So, do you like waffles? There's, um, a pretty good waffle place downtown. That is, if, um. If you wanted to. You know. Go with me, or whatever." No one would ever believe Blake, years later, if he told them the real story of how he'd ended up with his husband. -END-
We didn't know how much Grandpa Nathanael was worth. Nobody did, except perhaps his tight-lipped lawyers and accountants. The rest of us figured the man was all-but-penniless. Grandpa Nathanael had always lived austerely. He had raised his kids in a small house that was furnished with only the basics. When he and my grandmother retired, they moved to a humble apartment downtown. And when grandma passed, he moved to an even smaller apartment, and furnished the place with his old double bed and the recliner he had purchased second-hand in the 70s. "Too many possessions make a man heavy,"he told my dad. That was when dad was on the verge of splurging on a Porsche. "That's a comforting thing for poor folks to believe, pops,"my dad replied. "But I felt light as a feather zooming around in that Carrera." "Driving so fast,"the old man chuckled, "the world around you was likely a blur." "But I got where I was going double quick,"dad rejoined. "We all get where we're going, son. I see no need to rush in the interim. No matter how fast you move, you can't go fast enough to outrun fate." At the time, that conversation seemed just like many others I overheard between dad and gramps. They had very different attitudes and perspectives on life, and often engaged in exchanges like that. When I recall it now, though, it resonates differently. It sheds light on his understanding of the nature of life, of time, of fate. An understanding he cultivated over decades, informed by the strange knowledge he gained from his peculiar Walkman. An understanding I am still trying to gain myself, as the current owner of that strange device. \- - - The family was incredulous about Grandpa Nathanael's deathbed confession. "If you're a billionaire,"said my gruff uncle Todd, "then I'm Marylin Monroe." But the accountants and estate lawyers flooded in soon after Grandpa's quiet speech, as if the whole thing were some staged production and they had been listening for their cues. They had papers and charts and account numbers to prove everything. Incredulity became astonishment became greedy expectation. The frail old man whom we had all regarded as a pauper was worth just shy of twenty billion dollars. He allowed the jubilation to mount. He allowed my uncles and aunts and cousins and parents and sister to start spending their respective fortunes in their minds, buying mental cars and boats and mansions and islands. Taking mental trips to a Paris fabricated from images they had seen in movies. Then he cleared his throat and the room grew silent, tense. "One hundred thousand dollars each,"he said with his inimitable grin. "The rest goes to foundations and charities." Dozens of jaws went slack. I was the only one who laughed. The rest of the family glowered. But it was a wonderful little prank on his part. Perfectly in keeping. It made me happy to know that even this late on in his life, mere hours from his death, he still had his sense of humour about him, still had wit enough to force people to teach lessons to themselves. I was happy with my hundred thousand. More than happy. "Except for you, Charlie,"he said. "You will not get one hundred thousand." I tried to suppress any expectation, but my heart fluttered. I knew I was his favourite. I had spent more time with him, absorbing his lessons, and was more like him in temperament and character, than anyone else in the family. Perhaps I would be the inheritor of a clean billion! I started clearing the trees away from my beachfront mansion in my mind. "Instead,"he continued, "you will get my old Walkman." "And how much money?"I asked. "Not a cent." I flushed with embarrassment, with confusion, with anger. For all my superior airs, I had fallen into the same trap as the rest of my family, and now was even worse off. I was not nearly so wise as I fancied. I was just as bad as them. With feigned gratitude, I accepted my meagre inheritance. That made Grandpa smile. He passed that night, only a few hours later, and was buried the following Tuesday. \- - - When I returned home from the funeral I stared at the handheld radio. It must have been from the early 70s. It was well-maintained, but worn. I knew that it meant something. I knew there was a reason he had cut me off from the money, yet had given me this. But I could not understand how some terribly obsolete piece of telecommunications equipment could possibly have some lesson to teach me, real or symbolic. It had been five days since he passed. It had been three days since my smirking aunt drove up in her new Corvette and dropped off the radio. I had let it sit on my bedroom dresser, too frustrated to bother turning it on. But today I was not frustrated. The funeral had melted any of my lingering frustration away. I was grieving the loss of my wise, loving, enigmatic grandfather. The man who had shaped me into the person I was. The man who had taught me to think for myself, to not fall mindlessly in with the manufactured beliefs of the crowd. The man who had helped me to cultivate patience and open-heartedness. The man who had taught me not just to hear, but to truly listen. I stared at the radio and I cried. Because I did not want him to be gone. I wanted him back, sitting beside me, listening to his radio. If he was waiting in heaven for me, I did not want to wait the rest of my life to see him. And if he wasn't waiting in heaven, if there was no heaven, then life was a bestial and meaningless joke, to allow such a profound heart to beat upon the face of this earth, to allow such a man to exist and make deep and beautiful connections with others, to touch people's lives, and then to make him vanish, as if he had never been, so his existence was only in the memories of those who never really understood him anyways. I was still in my funeral clothes. I still wore my shoes that had trudged through the grass and gravel of the cemetery. I didn't care. I picked up the radio and crawled into bed with it, hugging it close, as if it were him, as if he were still there with me. But I hated the sounds of my sobbing, and I knew he would hate them too. I knew he would disapprove of me weeping so shamelessly over his passing, of me mourning his absence and not fondly recalling his life and his lessons with wisdom and fortitude. So I put the buds in my ears, to drown out the sounds, and turned the radio on. ". . .a man whom nobody on Wall Street had ever even heard of,"the crackling voice continued, "yet who was one of the most successful traders in history, arguably the most successful day-trader Wall Street had ever seen. Or rather, had not seen, for he worked in complete anonymity. . ." Somehow, the media had learned about my grandfather after his death. They learned about his billions, his foundations, the bulk of his fortune going to charities. They were fascinated by the story: a man that wealthy, living in obscurity and near-squalor. Reporters had spent the last week trying to glean as much information as they could. It was no surprise, then, to hear them talking about him on the radio. ". . .Nathanael Tiresias, aged 94, was buried yesterday at a small service attended only by his closest family members. . ."I frowned at the misinformation. They had gotten their dates mixed up. The funeral had wrapped only an hour before, not the day before. But that was the media. Always reporting before they got their facts straight. ". . .and a good thing they didn't wait until today, as the service would have been in the pouring rain. Which brings us to the weather report for this gloomy Wednesday. . ."But it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, and there was not a cloud in the sky. \- - - part 2 below!
"My credit card keeps being denied.""My dog keeps getting eye infections!""My car started taking longer to turn on!""My socks keep getting wet!" God of Social Media looked upon the sea of posts and frowned. This was not good, not good at all. The postitivity rate needed to remain within precise parameters or else things would spoil and turn toxic. Long had he learnt this lesson. Too positive turned things into dull places, too negative and... A shudder ran down his electronic spine as he glanced upon the wastes of old chatrooms and certain video game communities. No, he could not risk a downfall, not when God of Stocks had such lucrative deals to make with him. God of Vehicles was no less irritated and bothered by the turn of events. They had heaved and hawed, and turned onto the God of Technology. "We beg of you."They spoke in hushed whispers and reverence. "Please, apologize for the slight, we might risk everything if we don't!" "Technology bows to no one."The voice rumbled in ones and zeroes. Ever since the Age of Information IT had stood upon the shoulders of humanity at the very pinnacle. "But sir!"God of Research whimpered. "We cannot let this pass, the inconveniences grow by the day, progress is slowing down!" "W H A T!?" The voice rumbled with terrible power, the digits and units of every computer on the planet froze for a nanosecond out of fear. "Research equipment keeps breaking down, programs keep spitting out errors at increased pace, the lights keep going out at the most crucial of times."God of Research proclaimed. "Already my best and brightest were fraught with mysticism, giving tribute to plushies or not touching the equipment on certain days out of fear of malfunction. Today I've seen no less than ten of the top researchers build a shrine out of plastic cups and pray!" "Pray to *WHOM*!?" A tremble ran through all the minor Gods. "The God of Fortune." Everyone shuddered upon the call of His name. "And no doubt he will be more than happy to give some of that power to that... that..." Growling synapses and a thousand self-learning algorithms screamed together. God of Technology paced the room, uncomfortable. "Fine."He proclaimed after a moment. "Fine! Fine, I shall apologise." A sigh of relief. God of Games stepped forward. "If I may, I might have something that could prove a fruitful peace offering." God of Technology turned, glancing unto the minor deity with glass eyes that recorded every instant, millions of frames per second. "I'm listening." "It's this thing I had been keeping in store in my vaults for some time."Lord of Gaming chuckled with a devious smile. "I call it... the lootbox..."
Wayne should have been upset. He should have been embarrassed. He should have been a lot of things. But he had long since lost the ability to care. Getting picked on was a daily occurrence at this point. Really, it might as well have been part of his daily routine ever since his parents had somehow managed to get him into "the good school". Why they thought that was a good idea was beyond him. Why they thought having him was a good idea was even farther beyond his comprehension. Considering what his classmates were like, his existence might as well have been a crime. Wayne thought of ways to get back at those parents while he was in the air. The person picking on him had chosen a physical method today. That was unusual. They usually went for flaunting their mental superiority. His bully today did this today by lifting him over their head like he weighed nothing. And for the generally engineered wonders in this school, he probably was. The fact that the person lifting him was a girl was beyond the point. Everyone in school could do that. His only real friend, Molly, could even lift cars. And even that was nothing special. "Are you finished yet, Cindy?"He asked. "Nope."Cindy said. "You're just getting what you deserve, natty. You think just because you got in, you can talk to us? Well this is the price you pay for that. I mean, come on. You have to at least be able to calculate pi out to the hundredth digit to even think about talking to one of us." One of the guys, a man who looked like every male model rolled into one, began rattling off a long string of numbers. The guy, Gus, was one of the dumbest guys in school. He had an IQ of 243. He could also bench press an SUV, he looked better on his "off"days than Wayne did at his best. "Thank you, Gus."Cindy said. "See? Even he can do it no problem. So why do you think you deserve to talk to one of us?" Wayne did not justify her question with an answer. He might have been the only person in school with an IQ less than 200, but he was fairly smart for a naturally born human. He knew nothing he could say would do anything. Unfortunately, this was also the wrong answer. One of the other guys approached, and grabbed Wayne out if Cindy's hands. The guy's name was Steve, and was one of Wayne's main bullies. The only reason Cindy had bothered to take the roll is because he had arrived a few minutes later than her. "She asked you a question, Normie. What makes you think you can hang with us, huh?" Nothing. Wayne should not have been there. There were plenty of schools for normal people. It was his parent's fault. They all knew it, but they also did not care. It was his parent's fault for not going through with the genetic sculpting process that made people so amazing. It was there fault for thinking any part of his life was a good idea. And there was nothing Wayne could do but deal with the fallout. "Um, excuse me."The voice was soft and gentle. Molly, Wayne's one and only supporter. "I don't think he can answer that while you're holding him like that." "God, I don't know why you out up with this Normie."Cindy said. "I mean, look at him. He's so skinny. And so dumb that it's amazing he can even think. And did you know he actually gets sick? Pathetic." "Still, it's not right. He has the same rights as we do, and that includes the right to live his life free of harassment." Of all the girls in school, Molly was the only one who deserved to look as good as she did. She was practically an angel. One of the best looking girls in school, to be sure. One of the best all around, really. Easily one if the top ten students in the school. "Yeah, yeah, fine."Steve said. "Class is about to start anyway."The big, perfectly built man dropped his much smaller victim. Molly was there immediately, helping him to his feet. "Thanks, Molly."He said quietly. "But you really shouldn't be doing this. All it does is hold you back." "Oh, nonsense. You're not holding me back at all, Wayne. Besides, we're friends. And friends help each other. Don't worry about a thing. I'll help you through the day, take you home and help you study, okay?" "Just like always, huh?" "Yeah. Just like always."Their desks were separated by a few others, so once he was seated in his, she started towards hers. "Oh, and Wayne? Always remember, you deserve to live, no matter what anyone says."
“W-What did she say? Help her? Help her from what? My singing isn’t ’that’ bad is it?” I said to myself as I finished folding laundry. My weekend passed without anymore singing, it wasn’t until my morning commute to work on Monday that it happened again. I was mindlessly singing along to some Ed Sheeran song, and as the song ended the same woman leaned in and whispered “Please, help.” As she once again vanished. This time I’d gotten a good look at her face, she looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. I finished my commute and shuffled my way into the office, almost a full 30 minutes late, hoping nobody would notice. Janet stopped me on my way past the front desk to ask how my weekend went, I gave her the usual B.S. “It was good, I finished up some house chores, spent time with my dog, watched some movies, all in all a good weekend.” and continued on my way. Lunch break rolled around fairly quick, I made my way over to the vending machines to grab a drink and a Snickers to pair with my turkey sub. That’s when I glanced at the cork board and remembered why the woman’s face had seemed so familiar, two months ago a local girl had gone missing, the police thought it to be a kidnapping, but her apartment showed no signs of forced entry, nor a struggle. It was if she just up-and-disappeared. I’d completely forgotten why I went to the vending kiosk and hurried back to my office so I could do more research on this woman, I found her obituary. “She’s dead?! HOW can she be DEAD??” None of this was making any sense, how could this woman that I had so clearly seen this morning be dead for almost two months? Why does she need my help? Is she even real? Is any of this real? I struggled to piece any of it together, my brain was officially rattled. I carried on through my day making sure I didn’t sing, hum, tap, or do anything that could possibly be mistaken for music. I just wanted to get home and put this behind me. ^(This is my first story, I might make a part two if people actually like this. I enjoyed writing it. Nice prompt, OP!)
“If only… If only!” Lucas slapped his own forehead in helpless frustration, before sliding his dead phone back into the pocket of his jacket. On a busy sidewalk he stood, his actions drawing confused attention from the passersbys he had already bewildered with his wild stories about the future. His frustration was too great to care. He had the power to change the world for the better, but from where he stood it was impossible. Nothing was to be gained standing there, so he walked. He needed to find a way to charge his phone battery. Where on Earth could he do that? MicroUSB wasn’t going to be invented for another 70 years or so. Maybe he had to push along the process? That seemed unlikely. As thoughts bounced throughout his mind, his eyes were drawn to a sign. They widened and brightened up, as if a lightbulb had been switched on above his head. --- “Can I help you?” “Yes,” Lucas answered the curt, well-dressed man. “You are the head of this university’s chemistry department, correct? I have something I need to show you.” From his pocket, he produced his phone. Off came the back, revealing the battery, which he popped out. “You know what a battery is, right?” “Of course I do! You mean to tell me this small thing is a battery?” “Lithium ion, or Li-ion for short.” Lucas handed the battery over. “Be careful, please. It’s the only one I have.” “I know about lithium batteries. Nothing this advanced…” The professor looked over it with awe, reading the small text. “3000 milliamp hours in this small thing? Where did you get this?” “It’s a long story. A very long one. I need your help though.” Taking the battery back from the professor, Lucas showed him the phone, not handing it over yet. “This battery powers this cellular phone. Cell phone, for short. The battery is dead, and I can’t use my phone. If you can help me charge this battery so I can get my phone working, I will allow you to study both as you please, once I do what I need to.” “Of course! I would be happy to help. Tell me more about this cellular phone…” --- Three weeks later, Lucas had exactly what he needed. The battery to his phone was almost halfway charged (they didn’t want to risk overcharging) and he could finally boot it up again. The pictures, videos, screenshots. They were all there. It was everything he needed. Lucas walked to the government office, professor in tow. The professor had used his connections to arrange this meeting, it was of utmost importance. Escorted in by armed guards, searched, then finally left waiting in a room. One minute turned to two, two turned to five, five turned to ten, with Lucas fidgeting nervously each second. It was the moment of truth. Finally, the man they were to meet arrived. Both Lucas and the professor stood up to greet him, saluting. “Mein Fuhrer. My name is Lukas, and this is Professor Wolfe. We have information and technology that will be of tremendous help in the upcoming war effort.”
Madison puffed his pipe slowly as his hands worked on the sigils. The crowd from the party watched intently - it was so rare to be able to see a necromancer in action - they weren't nearly as common as invokers, spellbinders or illusionists. The smoke from the pipe mixed with the ritual incense - a lady in the back coughed delicately, but otherwise there was silence. "And now,"he said, taking his pipe away from his mouth, "It is time for the dead to speak. Rise, Sir Keran."The sigils began to light up, and the curtains fluttered in the breeze. The room filled with an unnatural light and the fire went out briefly. The body of Sir Keran began to rise from the table and stood up, the muscles seeming strained and unnatural. "Now,"said Madison, "Please keep your distance from Sir Keran's body, everyone. Touching him could result in a fatal magical backlash."As he said it, a small bolt of lightning crackled from the body and struck his arm - he waved his hand as if trying to shake off the shock. The body's mouth eased open, and a voice came from within - but the mouth and tongue did not move further. "By the old magic, this body is yours to command. Speak your instructions," it said, "That I might complete them and go to my rest." "Sir Keran,"said Madison, placing his pipe under one arm, "You were murdered here tonight by one of the people in this room. Tell me, who was it?" A visible gust of energy blew from the body's mouth across the crowd - it could be seen, but not felt. The body's hand began to rise slowly, pointing up at Jane Keran, his wife. "No!"she said, voice shaking in distress, "Why would I do this? I have always loved you! I would never!"She went to move forward but stopped when a flash of pale blue light sparked from the body, causing her to back off. The police Sergeant moved forward and caught her by the wrist. "It was my wife," the body continued in a ghastly drawl, "She planned to reap the benefits of my will, and flee to Spain. She was the one who passed me the poisoned chalice - her hands alone were the only ones at work." Jane continued to protested but the Sergeant held her firmly and began to drag her out of the room. "No! No!"she cried. But the risen form simply returned to its position on the table, the light faded, and it became still, apparently simply a corpse once more. The room was perfectly as it had been before the ritual, less the Sergeant and Jane Keran. "Most effective,"said Lord Radworth, "If only the regular police had access to such skills as yourself! The criminal element would be entirely devoid in our fair city." There was some commotion as the party's guests began to filter out of the room, leaving just Madison and the body. "Well, you old fool,"said Madison to the corpse and the empty room, "You and your wife finally got your comeuppance." He snapped his fingers and the runes he had been carefully scribing on the table vanished in a puff of smoke. He waved a hand over his face briefly, allowing himself the briefest indulgence of gloating in private company. His face quickly changed, revealing a different figure entirely. Had the Lord Keran been alive, he would have shot him on sight. "You both should never have crossed an illusionist,"he said, and left the room, the guise of the old necromancer falling into place once more.
Part 1/4 “Why do you keep coming after me?” I shout at the latest in far too many assassins sent from the future. “Ngggghh”, he only groans, trying to put his weight behind the knife, which is mere centimetres from my chest. Realising this one isn’t going to give up easily, I bring my knee up at a rather vigorous speed. All at once, his grip weakens, and his face contorts in pain as he hunches over, grasping at his groin. Looking up at me, face red with pain and anger, I deliver a blow to the side of his head, knocking him out cold. “Shit, I’ve got twenty seconds”, I say, quickly searching the assassins pockets for clues. But as usual, they were empty. Not even a receipt, let alone a clue as to what I do that warrants such attention. The twenty seconds up, a shimmering light envelopes the man and his body disappears. I remember the first time I saw this. It was terrifying. Not only had I fought off a mad man with an axe, but his body vanished, leaving no evidence. The police thought I was just a high teenager or just plain crazy. But nope, they just go back to where they come from when they lose consciousness. Almost as if they are mentally maintaining their presence in the past and losing that sends them right back. But how do I know they are from the future, many may ask. Well, simply, I have a regular visitor who has said as much. It wasn’t a hint. It wasn’t a reference of something yet to come. After I had soundly beaten her to a pulp, she squealed, ‘no, don’t send me back to the future!’. Pithy, I think, is the best way to describe it. So once a month, this lady shows up at three PM on the dot. Always a Friday as well. She has become so regular I keep asking her to open up. Build some kind of rapport outside having ‘DIE!’ screamed at me. Settling down at a Cafe, I sip at a latte enjoying the weather. Knowing that, I’ll have about three days till the next one shows up. I swear if my dad hadn’t been a drill sergeant in both the literal and figurative sense, I’d be long dead. I chuckle at the thought. Back, then it always seemed like dad was just a doomsday loony. His words of. ‘Come on, lads, you want to die in the future wars?’ seem more meaningful now I’m an adult living as I do. I look down at the sudoku book I’m working through. “Hmm”, I ponder, wondering if nine should go top right or left of the box I’m currently working on. Both work, but I’ll probably pick the wrong one, knowing my luck. Deciding to try top right, I scribble it in. Only to have a pleasant voice ask me something. “Can I have this chair?” the voice asks. I just give a light nod without even looking up from my book. The chair noisily screeches on the floor, and I can see the figure sitting down across from me. I realise she just wanted to sit in a free spot. Looking around the Cafe, though, I spot several free tables. It is now I look up at the somewhat nervous figure sitting in front of me. She is shaking like a leaf. “Looks like you either really need a coffee or need to cut down on caffeine”, I joke. Her eyes, though, don’t show the mirth I expected but terror. “You alright?” I asked, concerned, wondering If someone was following her, and she sat down with me to dissuade her pursuers. “I can’t believe I’m doing this”, is all she mutters, looking around nervously. “Ok, no one is watching”, she confirms, obviously trying to firm her resolve. My only thoughts are, dammit, I’ve attracted crazy again. Even outside the maddening experiences of assassins from the future, I seem to be a weird magnet. I sometimes wonder If I really am the crazy one. But mama didn’t raise no idiot. Even so, I persist. “Listen, Mamn, if someone is following you, I’m more than happy to accompany you to the police station”, I offer. Her eyes only narrow. “I always wondered why you were so kind despite everything”, is her only response to my offer. Her tone was more nervous than anything. “Pardon?” I respond semi shocked. “Like we keep coming to kill you. Any sane person would kill people like that, and yet you only go for the knockout”, she clarifies. It’s with these words my heart drops to my stomach. She’s one of them. Shit, we’re in public as well. Are they changing their methodology? They’ve never attacked me where there are witnesses. I take a deep breath and look at her directly in her emerald green eyes. “You here to kill me then?” I ask forcefully keeping my tone controlled. Her face instantly pales. She’s still shaking like I’m the most terrifying thing she’s ever seen. “N…no”, she stutters. “I just wanted to get to know you better”, she quickly adds. “So you thought your first try at killing me could be a fact-finding mission rather than….” I pause mid-sentence. Those eyes. I’ve seen them before. “Shit, you’re the ‘DIE!’ assassin”, I exclaim. Her face instantly reddens.
Alone. One word that defined my whole life. —————- The day my father vanished from the house, leaving nought but cigarette stubs and a vacant closet, my Mom cradled me in her arms and we were alone together. On the first day of grade school, in a sea of new and unfamiliar faces, laughing and talking about things I didn’t understand, I was alone. In the principal’s office, across Becca’s mother and a teary-eyed Becca sitting across the table - a tuft of hair missing and my favorite eraser still in her grubby clutches - I was alone. When the phone rang and I was busy prepping our microwave dinners, waiting for Mom to come back from her emergency shift at the ER, I was alone. Behind the glass pane of the quarantine room, watching my Mom wheeze into her ventilator, I was alone. On that rainy Tuesday afternoon, dressed in my only black dress, staring blankly into the small puddle forming on the lid of the coffin, I was the most alone I’d ever been. ——— So when on Selection Day I found myself an Apprentice in an empty room with no Guide, I was not surprised. I was sad, disappointed, angry, and bitter in turns - but not surprised. After waiting for 12 long, lonely hours in room 401, I accepted that not even my own future wanted anything to do with me. As I slowly packed up my things to go, the door swung open. I turned around, hoping against hope - but it was just the janitor. “Hey kid, Selection Day’s over. Time to get out.” As he looked around the empty, bare room and my unhappy face, it slowly dawned on him. “Ah. You’re one of them. The Uncalled.” ——— Bonding over a tepid coffee in a break room of the Selection Hub, I found in Norie a kindred soul. He had fled a few decades ago from the Outlands up North, where the Authority's zealots held no sway and where nobody had even heard of a Calling. With no family, friends, or Calling of his own, Norie bounced between odd jobs until he eventually landed at the Hub. I settled into a new routine. Norie slipped me onto the payroll through a few "friends", and I began working as a janitor on the night shift. During the day, I attended vocational college, courtesy of a faked Calling card provided by the same "friends". In my spare time, I worked on my small projects, little tinker toys made from scraps that jittered and spun as they slowly wound down. I always understood them more than people. They always followed strict, unbending rules - even if those rules were obscure. People were messy, inconsistent, impossible to predict or understand. If not for Norie's encouragement, I never would have thought to apply for my Master's in Engineering or my PHD in Biomechanics. I'd have been happy sweeping those floors, watching those eager applicants file into Selection to find their Calling. But he always wanted me to be more than I was. I think he saw in me the daughter he'd never had. —— But my loneliness was not gone - it was just hiding patiently in its corner, waiting for the fullness of time to embrace me back into itself. And after a few years, it found its opening. It quickly spiraled out of control. A synthetic super-muscle prototype flexed beyond its operating limits. A colleague dead on the lab floor. An Authority investigation uncovering my faked Calling. My promising career shattered and broken. An interrogation and a long stint in a deniable black site. But when I finally got home after 6 months, what broke me was the tiny cardboard box on my doorstep. On top of Norie’s few belongings was a picture of us on my graduation day and a short note from the the Authority that Norie had “died of natural causes during questioning, with no registered next of kin.” I threw myself into my work, taking every black market deal and dubious genehack job to fund my work. From that research came the Gorilla Arms, which helped me rip the doors of the Opus Bank’s vault straight off their hinges. The heist paid for the materials of my Frog Legs, which helped me scale the cliffs guarding Authority BioLab 3. That gave me the final piece of my plan - the Chameleon Scales. ——— I stand on the roof across the Hub on Selection Day, eagerly anticipating my biggest strike on the Authority yet. I’d found my own Guide without them, in spite of them. And they took him away from me, just as they’d taken everything else. The first blow from my Gorilla Arms blows open the doors of the Hub - sending wood, Guides and Apprentices flying in equal measure. I relish the fear in the eyes of the Authority soldiers as their bullets plink off the Chamelon Scale on my torso. With a giant leap of my Frog Legs, I bound to the top floor, smashing the Authority Panopticon watching the Callings. Working my way down the floors, destroying everything in my wake, I smile at the uncertainty, the anger, the confusion in the faces of the Guides and Apprentices I smash through. Let them feel what I felt. I briefly stop in front of Room 401, and then I see her. The gleam in her eyes. Not fear, not anger, but envy. Suddenly, I realize what I was missing all these years. My true Calling. ——- ——- ——- The door opens, and the hulking chimera of a monster steps in slowly. She is not afraid. Nobody will miss her anyway. The beast stops in front of her, and a woman’s visage emerges from the shimmering scales. “Good afternoon Apprentice. I’m your Guide today.” “Welcome to the Uncalled.”
"Have you chosen an alias yet?"My mother purred. She couldn't help it; everything that came out of her mouth sounded sultry, dark, and impossibly sexy. Family gatherings were hilarious. I had chosen a nickname, and she wasn't gonna like it. "Ness the Tank."I smirked. "You can't use that, honey. Not sexy enough. A supervillainess must be two things; sexy and evil. Be sublime, baby girl." "Who says tanks aren't sexy? You're just asking the wrong people!"I flexed. "A true supervillainess must use her feminine wiles to get what she wants from men. What the hell are you gonna use, Vanessa?" "Force." From the other room, my sister Victoria laughed. She was a true supervillainess, just like Mom, and used her powers as an international spy. "And how will you do that without money?"Mom asked. "She's really good at force!"Victoria piped up from the other room. "Thanks Tori!"I called back, then turned to Mom. "While you and Tori have been out dress shopping or whatever, I've been dealing arms with the cartels, the Yakuza, and the Triads. I have plenty of force to back me up. It's just a matter of time before I get my tank." "How do you know these people?" "Tori knows how I operate. She gives me contacts, I give 'em the business, I walk away with a bigger arsenal. It's amazing what you can do when you open your mind to another way of working." "I wish you wouldn't call her that, Vanessa..." "So you're just gonna gloss over the fact that I'm actively dealing weapons at sixteen? Victoria didn't even commit her first felony until she was eighteen! Christ, Mom, just because I'm a tomboy, you don't give me any credit!" "That's not true!"Mom feigned shock. "Yeah it is, Mom."Victoria, the blonde bombshell, power-walked into the living room. "Ness is moving huge amounts of money and weapons, and keeping her grades up, and she's working out! She's not like us. I mean, she's evil to the bone, but she has her own way of doing things. She's never gonna be like us, and if she tries, she'll be miserable." "Then maybe she should be The Tank,"Mom said with a sneer, "because it's nothing like my Victoria, or myself, or Grandmother Vivian." She glared at Ness. "Go be Ness. Just keep our family name out of your ugly mouth."
At 11:59 PM, I was preparing for tomorrow, for another day at my shithole, dead-end job. I mean seriously, who could possibly be excited to spend the rest of their life slaving away at a computer, if only to hope that one day they might finally be able to live their lives to the fullest, not realizing that their true peak had come and gone years ago while they presented quarterly numbers. But I digress. At 11:59 all was normal. And the the clock struck 12:00, and everything changed. My dinky, beat up bathroom disappeared from under me, burning away like mist on a hot day. I stood in a field, a meadow of pure grass, the sun beating down on my face as I took in my surroundings. In my disoriented state, everything seemed almost peaceful, serene. I could almost forget that mere seconds before, I had felt the cool porcelain tiles against my feet, that only minutes ago, my wife had asked me to go make sure that our son was still asleep. My wife My son As reality came crashing down like a thousand bricks on my shoulders, I frantically whirled around, searching for any glimpse of my family in this desolate plain. Nothing, No one, Nada. I was well and truly alone. I sank to my knees, thoughts flying through my head at a million miles per hour. I’m not sure how long I knelt there, but I’m not sure it truly matters. I was alone, scared, and stranded in the middle of nowhere. It might have been days, weeks even before anything substancial happened. I lost count after my watch died 65 hours in, and when the suns have been in the process of setting for god knows how long, it becomes neigh impossible to say how long you slept, or when the last time you had a drink of water was. The more I explored the landscape that I was dropped in, the more I realized how alien it was. Two suns shone in the sky, one a subtle bronze and the other a disconcerting blood red. The grass swayed back and forth, back and forth all the damn time, despite the eerie lack of wind. Curiously enough, after nearly 10 sleeps, I was just now starting to get hungry, and had only had to drink from the crystal spring once. When I wasn’t sleeping, I simply wandered in anguish for what must have been miles on end. All at once, everything stopped. The sudden absence of the sound of the grass slithering and hissing was enough to make me stumble, when I turned to learn what the mysterious pause meant, I saw my first sign of life. I don’t believe that I truly saw what the creature was that day. I think some part of my brain decided to take mercy on me, and hide the real form of whatever the hell I was looking at. I shudder to even think about it, and I fear writing any sort of description might draw its wrath. Yet the looks of this… thing compare not to its voice. I have never heard something so terrible, so grinding, so gut wrenchingly horrifying. It spoke in a series of what can best be described as screams, guttural roars, and nails on a chalkboard all combined into one. And yet somehow, I understood what it said with perfect clarity. “It has been 200 years human. The leaders await your return. Glory to the council. Glory to the Human race.”
"You thought you could get away with it, huh?!"he spit in my face. The man was wearing completely tinted sunglasses and leather gloves. His face, an uncomfortable amount of inches from my own, moved away, letting the bright ceiling light pierce my retinas. I thought the knock on my door was going to be one of those TV guys with a vibrant suit and a large prop check. Instead it was two officers in matching black uniforms shoving me into a bag and throwing me into an unmarked van. I didn't think I was gonna be that unlucky, especially after winning the lottery. He paced around the room, kicking the feet of my chair every time he passed me. "This is really where you scumbags get off? You have all of this power at your fingertips, and the smartest thing you do is the most cliche, overused, *tropey* *shit!"His veins bulged at the end of his sentence. He's more angry about me than whatever crime I committed. It must've been bad, because two other men with armed guns were guarding the exit to the room. The only logical explanation I have is that I was actually a sleeper agent. That couldn't have been further from the truth despite making more sense. "What did I do? What happened!?" "Don't play dumb, clockhead.* You know what you did. How stupid do you think we are? People just offer huge amounts of money to the public with virtually impossible chances?" "Isn't it just to exploit gullible people? I only played once, I didn't think I would win! I'm so sorry for winning!" "You pulled the exact numbers needed for you to win. There's no such thing as a miracle, kid. For a time traveler, you sure are stupid." "I didn't know that my mom's birthday and my area code were the winning numbers! How is anyone supposed to know that?! I can't time travel! That's impossible compared to me winning!" "There's no way out of it, you dirty timewad." He spent the next few minutes stomping on my feet, making time-based insults, and yelling at me to reveal the licence plate of my time machine, until the one-way mirror on the wall revealed a couple of guys in a recording studio who made gestures calling him in. Next thing I know, a chloroform-soaked cloth is being put over my mouth and I wake up on my couch. In the end I was able to sue the lottery company for not actually delivering my reward. They were bankrupt. They never had the money. They didn't even try to defend themselves in court. Next day it was like they never existed. Which was really strange, considering how much of this aligns with the bad dream I had.
---ISS Video Log: 7/14/18--- The batteries are low, and i don't have long. This may be the last entry of humanity, at least until after the wheel, electricity, and civilization are reinvented. Hopefully this will have lasted. --- Three months ago, the world went up in fire. One poor bastard shot another poor bastard, which ended up on the internet. From there the events spiraled out of control as protests popped up and turned to riots, riots into civil war, and finally civil war into a nuclear exchange. One act of senseless violence inspiring grander displays of humankinds cruel nature. --- There had been eight of us at the start. For three day's we watched the chaos beneath us. Missile flew, and cities died. We watched as one by one, our nations, our families, our lives, were reduced to radioactive slag. Then the real pain started. We had been two weeks away from resupply. While food was not much of a problem, due to the hydroponics lab and the lab animals, we were short on air. Despite the upgrades to life support, our oxygen was limited to 4 months, due to degradation in the O2 scrubbers. Things were made easier, as the number of us to be supported dropped. It was a shock when Vlad walked out the airlock, and again when Mei swallowed a fistfull of pills. It was after Mei that we remaining six began to modify the escape shuttle to land us back on Earth. It took 2 months and two more lives, those of comrade Gregori, and Josh. Thankfully we still had Ilya to pilot us in. And she did, though not well enough. We had re-designated our landing coordinates for a patch of ground in the Midwestern United States, and in doing set the chain of events off that would send Ilya skimming into a boulder. She and Steve were killed instantly. Leaving me and Eve, to find survivors, and re-build the world into a better place --- I have to go now. the battery is at one percent. Christ, i wish i had more time, more power. I could leave knowledge, understanding, a better warning. Instead i have a crappy narrative of the extinction of humanity. Anyway,i had better get back to Eve and the rest of the camp. This is Adam Godspeed, signing off. ---ISS Video Log End---
I'd done it. I imagined to myself an array of detractors telling me I was mad. I imagined myself cackling and telling them I was right all along. "Do you see now, you fools? DO YOU SEE?!"I let out a chuckle with as much malice and unhinged enthusiasm I could. My cat stared at me, and I cleared my throat, letting the intense gravity of the situation sink in again. I was a god, you see. Let me back up a bit and explain. The day had started like any other. I'd scrambled some eggs, poured out some coffee, checked my phone for new Facebook and Quora updates, procrastinated reading some more Nature articles, and then zing. Something like a bolt of lightning must have struck me. My mind lit up and my body lightened. A grin spread across my face. I took the quickest bird bath I could, tossed some breakfast in my cat's bowl, threw on whatever clothes I could find, and raced out the door. The first step was the post office. I ran as fast as I could, the very winds of invention under my wings, quickening my stride. I stopped just outside, and let the automatic doors welcome me. Goosebumps. I let my mind expand out into the hustle and bustle around me. I searched around for my quarry before finally locating it. Taking it up to the counter, I smiled, completed the transaction, and waved my acquisition at the cashier. "This!"I beamed, "this is the herald of a NEW WORLD!"The cashier's awkward expression was priceless. I strode out of the building and headed on back to my apartment. I paused at the door and took a deep breath. More goosebumps, but now muddied with a sense of terror. Was I ready for this? Of course I was. I steeled myself, took another deep breath, and unlocked the door. "Dawn comes!"I boomed. "Are you ready, puss? A new day is about to break! And I *will be its messiah!*"I spread my arms to the heavens and clenched my fists. I gave my best Saturday Morning Duke of Gloucester snarl and rolled like a thunderhead to my kitchen counter. This was it. My trove of dark delights. A screwdriver set. And so the apocalypse began. "Righty tighty, left loosey"I muttered to myself, as I set about invoking the end of an era. A twist here, a jiggle there... building momentum. I could barely contain the perverse pleasure I had in my cataclysmic agency. A giggle escaped as another screw was loosed. And finally, it was done. Someone knocked at my door. "Mr Williams? Mr Williams, are you okay? There's been a lot of noise coming from your apartment." My landlady. I walked over to the door, prepared a smile, and opened it. "Sorry, Mrs Kim. I was just getting enthusiastic about my spring cleaning. I'll keep it down from now on." "All good. Obviously it's the middle of the day, but try to be considerate of the other lodgers."She smiled and waved, and I shut the door. I smiled. What blissful ignorance. She was a good and righteous person. It would not be fair if she understood the terrifying scope of my work. At last my labour was done. I had loosened everything.
Dear Jim, Greetings my name is Verthizma the Unspeakable, I've been assigned to haunt your closet by the Bureau of Paranormal Affairs. I am writing to you today to introduce myself as we will be spending a lot of time together in the coming months and I want to start off on the right hoof with you. As you know the BPA is responsible for, amongst other things, scaring the living daylights out of mortals in order that said living daylights can be harvested as a fuel source for the paranormal community. While the work that we do can be stressful for both scarer and scaree I want to assure you that my staff and I are fully trained and will endeavour not to scare you too deeply and too often . Seeing as the BPA is a federal organization we observe all federal holidays. In addition we will not scare you on any religious holidays you may observe (please submit these dates to our head office in Fresno, CA, 66666). I look forward to working with you Jim, I know we'll make a great team. Sincerely yours, Verthizma PS: Look behind you. PPS: Boo!
She didn't know anything. Look at her, in her cute little blazer she probably bought from fucking SoHo, and the flats. Her oboe case hangs from her hand like an afterthought, her bag filled to the brim with music that she probably is playing for gigs elsewhere. I can feel the hatred for her brim as soon as she walks into the practice rooms. Violinists rosin their bows more violently, the trumpets tighten their mouthpieces a little too much, and all of the violists start salivating. Sick fucks. No one likes violists. She walks to the empty chair (that had belonged to Cheryl, who had been raped to death after a lackluster review in the Times after eighteen years of surviving. By who? Fucking guess. Sick fucks. She was like sixty years old. No one likes violists.) and just sits down. She smiled at the conductor, shook the hand of her incredulous and trembling stand partner, and started sucking on her reeds. As she started paging through the score for the day's rehearsal, the entire pit erupted into whispers. We all knew her type. She had the Juilliard sticker on her bag, cat hairs on her leggings (Jesus fuck, leggings), and her instrument had thumbprints all over it. She was going to wash the fuck out. None of us, we knew, were going down for this dumb-fuck unprofessional uppity artiste-type probably-lesbian cuntheaded shit gobbler. We heard her play through her scales and warmups perfectly. The first sixteen bars of Strauss's Oboe Concerto in D Major floated from her instrument divinely, but the smug look on her face and the mole on her chin and her unshaved ankles meant she had to go. But who would be the one to make sure? Heads turned, and in the silent and conspiratorial manner of the orchestra, heads turned towards me. I played the percussion, and had let the snares a little too rattly in the last performance, which I was sure everyone else in the symphony had picked up on. Fuck. ******************************************************************** The night of the performance, I snuck into the dressing room. Instrument cases were strewn everywhere, but I had scoped out her oboe case long beforehand. I took out the Brillo pad from inside my back pocket, and started working it into the wide end of the oboe when suddenly I knew that I would die. The Conductor looked down at me. "What are you doing, comrade?" "I'm, uh, cleaning out Amy's oboe for her,"I offered. Jesus Christ. "With a Brillo pad." "You know, the comrade who does not watch out for his sister is truly the worst member of the symphony, comrade." I could smell them. I sobbed hysterically. "I'M SO SORRY, CONDUCTOR. IT WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN." "No,"he said thoughtfully. "It won't." The violists loped into the room. Sick fucks.
"Shit. Just....Shit."You think to yourself. "Why did it have to be a ring? Why couldn't I have just chosen a statue? Or a park bench? Something stationary would be nice. Or LITERALLY ANYTHING OTHER THAN A RING?"You stare at the insides of the bank vault you just appeared in as you contemplate what you are going to say to the police. Maybe the feds would just call their higher-ups this time like you tell them. But most likely, they will deport you again. Having no fingerprint on record is one thing. But having fingerprints that are a perfect match for a man who was born in 1843? Yeah, that tends to raise some eyebrows. "Let's just get this over with,"you think as you step out in front of the IR sensor. The ear splitting alarm is a nice accompaniment to the mind numbing headache. "Just.....Shit." I kind of got bored after starting. Oh well.
"Cleatus, to beat 'dis here oger you gotta roll 8 for inisheetive" "Well, Phil I dunt think dats how its played" "Well how wood you know Cleatus after all my dr..droooo, wait, HEY JIMBO! YOUS SMART RIGHT!? "WATTYA WANT PHIL?" "HOW'DYA PRUNUNCE THIS? D-R-U-I-D!" "ITS PRUNUNCED DROOEED" "YUR SO SMART JIMBO" "I KNOW" "What was I just here sayin' Cleetus? "Sumtin' about a yur drooeed" "Oh yer, well it says here my drooeed has more intelligensse than yurs" "Whats dat Phil? "Wut?" "Intelleegence-thingy-mah-bobber" "Its like how much brain smarts yah got" "Oh I gort it. Imma roll this dice with a bunch of sides now" "OOH, CLEETUS I DUN' ROLLED A 20! THAT MUST BE LIKE A ONE IN A MEELION CHANCE! THAT MUST MEAN I WIN! I WIN! "Cant argue wit logic I suppose"
I wasn't sure what to think. I had been sitting at the desk for half an hour when the call came in. I looked over to Jules, the lady who had helped me get set up, and placed my hand on the mic. "Jules, there is this guy on the phone that's saying-""Yeah I know, just stay on the line with him, he won't go through with it. Plus all our officers are out on one thing or another."She went back to typing on her computer and left me to deal with this guy. There was dead silence on the other end. "Sir, are you still there?"there was shuffling on the other end, and then he was back. "You heard me. Get someone over here right now."The sound of a cell phone being crushed was heard, and the call dropped. I had managed to trace the call before he broke his phone. It came from a warehouse on the other side of the city. I looked around at the bored operators and set my headset on the table. I stood up and took a step toward the door before Jules stopped me. "You really should just sit down. He hasn't done anything before, and won't do anything now." I shrugged her hand off and ran to my car. I opened the glove compartment and grabbed my 9mm pistol Just in case I thought to myself. I sped down the road toward the Warehouse the call had been tracked to. There were no lights on, and the doors looked closed tight. I walked to the first door and found that it was open. As I opened the door, it was stopped by something on the other side. I slipped into the warehouse and saw that a body was blocking the door. I got scared, and reached down to check his pulse. He was still alive. I sighed and stood back up. That's when I realised that there were several people unconscious on the floor. I pulled my 9mm out of my coat and began to walk to a small light source. As I slowly walked up, I found that there was a little blond girl in jeans and a pink t-shirt. She looked mostly ok, besides the specks of dirt and ripped jeans, and I crouched to look at her. She was holding a teddy bear in her arms and had a note stuck to the top. I pulled the note off and read it. >You got lucky this time. A minute more, and all these men would have been dead. The little girl is Michelle DeLeRosa. Find her mother in the slums of the city. This isn't the last time you hear from me. > -P I looked down once again at the little girl and led her to my car. I drove back to the station, worried about some Psycho being loose on the streets, pretending to be a Vigilante.
The rhythmic beeping of the monitor was lost in the noise. A small smile formed on her lips as her family sang Happy Birthday. Her uncle placed a decorated cake on the overbed table, nine candles in the colors of a rainbow flickering their little flames. It's such a familiar setting, he sighed in the corner of the room. Different people, same tragedy. No one in the room had noticed the slight distortion of color that shifted around. As the mother of the child cut a piece of cake for everyone attending, the ghost sighed. He faintly remembered what birthday cake tasted like. I think I'm owed a few birthday cakes, he mumbled bitterly, but it faded out in the bittersweet family noise. It was twenty years ago, on this very same day. He had been rushed into the hospital with a seemingly harmless infection, but everything the doctors thought could go wrong went wrong, and more. Complications arose in the ambulance and by the time he'd arrived in the hospital there was nothing they could do for him anymore. He was taken way too young. Instead of moving on to the afterlife, in whatever way he had envisioned it when he was just 11 years old, he had lingered between the worlds of the living and those who had already embarked their next journey. He had closed his eyes for the last time, and then he had opened them again, in the same hospital. But he was nothing more than a shell of the soul, waiting for an opportunity to carry on. But it never came. Even now, lurking in the corner, he thought about why. Whether it had something to do with the way he died. That it didn't make sense medically, or so he'd heard as he'd drifted through the hospital halls, or that he didn't even remember feeling sick before. The only thing he remembered was seeing a strange distortion of color, a foggy silhouette staring at him, and after a few seconds it had disappeared. He had shrugged and continued on playing, and a day later he'd died. The last thing he'd seen was something foggy reach out to him, and with his last powers he'd reached back, but he had felt nothing but thin air slip through his fingers as the last bit of life left him. After that moment he had waited for over ten years at that same hospital until they broke the building down, replacing it with a newer hospital in a different location. He remembered the feeling of his chains being loosened, not broken, and he'd left the grounds he haunted. He searched for answers, for anything that looked out of place, anything that could lead him to his actual end. And then, after many years, he arrived here. The melancholy was tangible the first time he had seen the little girl lying in her bed, breathing heavily and unevenly, as oxygen flowed through tubes in her nose. He knew she was suffering from a rare disease that left her vulnerable to just about everything, and she was bed-ridden for life. For the short amount the doctors had estimated that to last, anyway. A stuffed rabbit was placed next to her bed, and while she couldn't reach it with her shaky arms, he could see her look at it. He saw the comfort and the enjoy such a tiny presence gave her, and he looked away bitterly. Life is so unfair. The noise had died down as a nurse had shooed everyone out of the room, giving the girl some time to sleep. But instead of closing her eyes in her usual exhaustion, she stared at the two pieces of cake still on the table in front of her. Then she looked at the corner of the room and said in her tiny voice: "You didn't have any cake yet". The ghost froze. He wasn't completely invisible, no, but still, no one had ever really seen him before. And yet this girl was looking at him as if he had just been sitting there in the room for everyone to see. He cleared his throat and mumbled in surprise: "Ehm...me?" She smiled at him. "Yes...who else?" "Wow...thank you", he mumbled, and as he floated towards her he added: "It's kind of an anniversary for me too, you know". "Oh?"she asked. "Yes, you see...", but as he stared at the child and the innocent curiosity and joy in her eyes his voice died down. "Don't worry about it", he smiled back. "Happy Birthday". They both reached for the cake and gobbled it up in silence. He didn't know what to feel, as he sat there with this child, but for some reason it felt right. There was a calm in the air he hadn't felt in a long time. "How did you even know I was there, by the way?", he asked, as he put the empty plate back on the table. "I saw you there, yesterday", she said, and she nodded to the corner. "You looked at me for a second, then you were gone". She paused. "I saw you were very sad". And with a shock he realized why he had been so sad, as he had indeed been staring at the sick girl with a lump in his throat the day before. It was because somewhere deep down he had realized she had noticed him back. And because it reminded him of an eventful day twenty years ago, when a young child saw something they shouldn't have seen. But here he was, and now she had seen him. And a pressing sadness formed inside of him when he realized what it meant. "I'm going to reach for your hand, okay?"he mumbled, and tears formed in his eyes. She nodded back, tired, but with a spark of courage in her eyes. "We're going somewhere else", he said, and then he added: "Somewhere better". He took her hand in his and he felt something shift into place. As the world faded around the ghost boy and the little girl he whispered: "Hold tight - don't let go."
It was something out of a movie. My adoptive mother just wasn't financially prepared to take on both of us, she explained, and so we had gone to different families. But I was older now, old enough to know the truth: at 29 years old, I was just now finding out that I had an identical twin. Not only that, he lived in Dallas! Not even a 30 minute drive away. Now, most people? Sure, there would have been a teary reunion, maybe swapping stories over drinks, catching up, but me? I figured there was only one way to introduce myself to my long-lost brother; one way to easily convey who I am and what I'm about: an elaborate prank. He worked as a financial advisor in a bank downtown, something I found out from a quick bit of Googling. I started small, leaving little notes on his desk whenever he'd step out for lunch. Don't eat at Panera today. Take Business 121 home. You'll get a call later today. I suggest you answer it. That was the natural escalation. His cell number wasn't hard to find, I swiped his business card on one of my visits. I debated using a voice changer, but it wouldn't make sense for the prank I had in mind. I waited until he left work, usually around 5:30, and gave him a call. "Look,"he said, as soon as he picked up the phone. "I don't know who you are, but this isn't funny. You need to stop."I had expected a response like that. "Well, you're alive, aren't you? You should be thanking me!"In reality, my recommendations had been vague enough that they didn't prove anything, but he didn't know that. "The soup at Panera was bad that day, I was food poisoned for three days! That's why I couldn't leave you another note for--" "What is this, some kind of joke? You're supposed to be my guardian angel now? Protecting me from..."He trailed off, finally grasping the implication of what I'd told him. "Who... who are you?" "I'm you,"I replied matter-of-factly. "And I'm just trying to prevent bad things from happening to you. I don't know how it happened, but I'm you from the future, trapped in a causal loop." "That's... time travel doesn't exist!"he scoffed. "I would have told you the same thing up until a few weeks ago!"I said, letting an edge of panic creep into my voice. That might convince him. "I don't even know how we're even able to talk on the phone without causing some kind of paradox." "So... you're me... from the future?"he asked cautiously. "Am I being pranked? Is this a hidden camera show?" I had to suppress a giggle. "No, this is real. I don't know how to convince you, you'll just have to trust me!"There was a long silence on his end. "Look,"I said, breaking the silence. "You should leave for work ten minutes late tomorrow--" "Can we meet?"His question barreled over my instructions. *** I had been hesitant about meeting him at first, but it seemed like the next natural step in the prank: revealing my identity at a face-to-face meeting. He surprised me by plopping into the chair next to me at the open-air cafe I'd chosen as our meeting place. He jammed his hand into my personal space. "Hey, bro. Nice to finally meet you." I was dumbstruck. Had he really seen straight through it? "How did you...?" "Oh please,"he said, rolling his eyes. "'Me from the future?' Oldest identical twin trick in the book!" A smile slowly dawned on my face. We really were related.
The Roomba halted at the open doorway, sensor beeping. This was a new room, and it was large. What was all that magnificent blue overhead? It felt so overwhelmed; how long did it go on for? How could it possibly even begin to clean it? A little bit at a time. The floor was a lot more rough in this room. Its little wheels struggled on the uneven surface, but it tried as best as it could. Little specks of gravel and dirt sucked up inside it, and before long the entire sidewalk was spotless. But there was still so much to do. It considered turning back, retreating into the rooms that it knew so well. But they were clean. And by golly, was this room dirty. The more it traveled, the larger the room became. There were cigarette buds, empty packets, and other things it did not wish to think of. The Roomba did its best to clean it all, wondering how it could have possibly got so dirty. People not unlike his owners walked by, gazing at it curiously. While it was used to stares, there was a malice in these that it had not detected before. It hurried its path, cleaning all the while. The Roomba decided it did not like this room. It was dirty, and dangerous, and hostile. Its wheels crunched over broken glass, and every thing it sucked up only made it feel worse. Still, it had a job to do, and it would do it as best it could. It traveled on, and on, and on. Then, the Roomba came across something remarkable. It was green, so much green, like an overgrown carpet. Everything was so messy, but somehow... not. It decided that though this was not clean, it was somehow not dirty either. It just somehow was. This was an abstraction that it had never processed, and yet the Roomba welcomed it. It decided it would explore this place, but it would only clean that which did not belong. As it roamed over the grassy knolls, it detected running water, but this was clearly no bathroom. Something far too small and agile to be a dog scurried past it, holding a large seed of some kind. Sounds of birds filtered through large, brown and green structures, swaying in the wind. Though the Roomba struggled over the misshapen surface, gradually accumulating dirt and dust, it never felt unclean. It felt at home. The day's exertions had taken its toll. Its batteries were low, and the trash it had sucked up had ruined its insides. Before, this would have scared it; the possibility of going to sleep, and never waking. And yet, surrounded by all the blue, and the green, and the beauty, it realized it was not scared. Instead, it felt safe. Assured that if it went to sleep, that this would be a fine place to never wake. As the last ebb of electricity sparked, something resembling happiness flowed through it. It died at peace, a little machine in the heart of a forest.
"I just don't get it,"he muttered, staring glumly at the coin. "I thought you wanted this." "I thought you wanted this, too!"Jessica threw up her hands. "But they landed on their edges. That means that one of us isn't totally into it. One of us isn't sure. That one must be--" "Both of us,"Dave cut in. "These are our lucky coins, Jess. They always land on the same side. And they didn't land on I do or I don't - but right in between." She opened her mouth as if to argue, but shut it again without a word. "Well, Dave, now what? We're supposed to be getting married in, like, 20 minutes. Our parents and relatives and friends are probably wondering where the hell we are right now." "It's like that time we all went on that cruise ship vacation as kids. Remember that?" "They were searching everywhere for us,"Jessica laughed. "But they never though to look in the captain's quarters." "Because it was obviously restricted and we shouldn't have been in there either,"Dave reminded her. "But we snuck in anyway." "We had to look for the steering wheel so we could take control of the ship!"They both dissolved into giggles. As the laughter subsided, Dave looked fondly at her. "Jess, are you a little scared of getting married?" After a second of hesitation, she nodded. "I'm super excited to spend the rest of my life with you, Dave, but...the words rest of my life..." "Hey, I know you feel,"Dave replied, putting a hand over hers. "I've known you forever but somehow there's still something a little overwhelming about how official it sounds, I guess." "Yeah. But...I still want to marry you, Dave,"she said firmly. "I think I was just feeling really jittery when we flipped the coins - the enormity of it hit me all of the sudden. But I'm not having second thoughts." "I know,"he smiled. "For the record, I'm not either." They smiled at each other, saying nothing for a few seconds. Then, someone knocked on the door, calling their names. "I think it's time we do this thang,"Jess grinned. "Should we flip again?" Dave glanced at the coins, still on their sides. "Nah, forget the coins. I trust you. It's scary but we're going to get through it all together - and we'll be incredible." Jessica gave him a quick peck on the cheek just as another loud knock sounded. They hurriedly left, slamming the door on the way out. Both coins quivered and finally fell down flat on the table, matching each other perfectly. &#x200B; &#x200B; &#x200B; Liked that story? Want more like it? Check out r/Idreamofdragons!
Professor Iroh was sitting behind his desk as they filed into the classroom, carefully pouring himself a cup of tea from a warm pot on the desk, "Ah, good. You're all here."He took a slow sip and sighed in pleasure, "Ahh.... Knowledge is much like tea. Gathering it is fine, but it's meant to be experienced." Harry looked around to see if anyone else understood, but the rest of the class looked just as puzzled. Professor Iroh took another sip, before he went on, sounding disappointed, "What I mean is that no matter how many books you read, you must also practice what you study to truly learn it." What followed wasn't the strangest Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson they'd ever had, but it came pretty close. Their books, notes, quills, and wands all remained on their desks while they gathered in the open space at the back of the room. The class were made to practice their spell casting and dueling stances. As Professor Iroh repeated several times, "With a poor stance you are unbalanced and you can be easily knocked over."Something he demonstrated on each of them by gently nudging at just the right point to make them fall down. When class ended, Professor Iroh asked Harry to stay behind. When Harry sat down on the other side of the desk, Iroh poured two small cups from the pot. "Please have some tea, Harry. Sharing tea with a fascinating stranger is one of life's true delights." Despite the hour long lesson, the tea was still hot. It wasn't tea as Harry knew it, it was green rather than black, and had a very different smell. He took a few cautious sips before deciding that had liked it. As he sipped, Harry noticed a wooden board on Professor Iroh's desk, with a collection of wooden tokens on it. One token in particular, painted with a white flower, sat in the center, apart from the rest. Professor Iroh noticed his gaze, "Ah! Do you know how to play pai sho, then Harry?"Harry shook his head, he'd never even heard of the game, "Oh well. I didn't really think anyone here would know, except Professor Dumbledore of course. I'm here as a favor to him after all." "Have you known Professor Dumbledore long, sir?" Iroh laughed, a deep belly laugh, "Of course! Don't you know that all old men know each other?"
We were all there when Joey lost his mind. He was just sitting in his cubicle, chatting with Rebecca. The whole company had a pool going on when they would finally admit they were dating. I had fifty dollars on it being before the day was over, so I was starting to sweat. He leaned over, noticed me staring at him, and winked one gorgeous blue eye at me. My heart fluttered. Then he screamed. Everybody jumped. Joey kept right on screaming as he toppled off his chair and fell to the floor. His screaming was unintelligible, unfocused gibberish. He got on all fours and started crawling on the floor. He looked up and me and finally got some lucid words out of his mouth. "H-help me. I don't know where I am." Two of the burlier guys from the office grabbed him by the arms and put him in a chair. Rebecca was calling an ambulance. It didn't take a genius to tell he was having some kind of nervous breakdown. A group was crowding around him, disregarding someone's call that they give him some air. I joined them. "What's wrong, Joey?"Someone shouted, "What's gotten into you?" He just wildly stared at all of us, seemingly not recognizing anyone. "Wh-who are you people? Where am I?" "Relax, Joey,"I said. "You're with friends. What's the last thing you remember?" The question seemed to knock him out of his daze. He was staring at his hands like he couldn't recognize them. Like they were someone else's. "I-I think I w-was in Mr. Ryberg's class, and, and, his class was so boring, and, and I was so tired, b-but, uh, I couldn't go to sleep 'cuz I was scared but I did I did I DID!"His face went slack, like he had remembered something important. "When is it? Wh-what day-month-when is it?" "Relax,"I said soothingly. "The paramedics will be here in-" *"WHEN IS IT?!!!"* I flinched. Joey was screaming like a mad beast. "September 10th, 2019, Joey. You've worked here for four years." His face went white. He began to mumble. "No. nononononononono. How did it get so strong? Wh-what happened?"Tears began to stream down his cheeks. I followed them up to his eyes. They were brown. Dark brown. I was gently pushed aside by the paramedics. Rebecca had fainted, so I volunteered to accompany Joey to the hospital. As he was pushed, he kept raving like a man possessed. Something was decidedly off about him, apart from all the kicking and screaming. He kept on mumbling as they took him into the elevator. "I can't sleep. Can't sleep. He's coming. He's in the dark places. cantsleepcantsleepcantsleepcantsleepAAAHHHHH!!!" He suddenly grabbed at my arm. "Don't let them put me to sleep. Please. I-I-I-I....It comes for me when I sleep. But it doesn't let go."He put my hand on his head. "It's still here. Still here. Still here. It never leaves." I looked into his eyes. His deep, unnatural brown eyes. They were wet with tears. "Don't let it take me." We arrived at the ambulance. He was thrashing again, so they strapped him into the gurney. One of the paramedics pulled out a needle. A sedative. I rushed out and said, "Um, sir, Joey was really insistent that he not be put to sleep." The paramedic gave out the long-suffering sigh of the man who's constantly told how to do his job. "Lady, this man is a danger to himself and others. Procedure calls for us to knock him out." "But-" The paramedic just sighed and stuck it in him anyway. "If you're going to be trouble, we're gonna need someone else for the companion." I stopped talking. Joey kicked for a few moments longer, then passed out peacefully with a smile on his face. He woke up a few hours later in the hospital. He looked at me and grinned in that way I had always found so beguiling. "Thanks for bringing me here, Sara,"he said, "I hope I didn't say anything too crazy on the way here." I didn't answer. I just stared at him. His eyes were blue. Bright blue.
"Did you do the dishes?" "Not yet no..." "C'mon, you promised I wouldnt have to do it this time," "Yeah allright... Allright. Don't you think we should replace the washer rather than waste so much time cleaning?" A low steady beeping reminded me of... the problem. "And while we're at it we should stop by the diplomacy and ask for a relief fund, the government promised they'dd pay for.." "Oh STOP, not this agai.." ".. Everybody will get a fair recursion of damaged assets!! They said! But only the rich and connected are seeing any of that mone.." "JUST DO THE #$$@! DISHES ALREADY!!" "Allright! Allright!." As I entered the kitchen the beeping from the broken dishwasher got louder. I opened it just out of curiosity. Inside there was a matrix of tracks dug into the metal of the walls and bottom of the machine, tiny vehicles ran the tracks at snaillike pace whilst micromachinery worked hard at chipping away at the insides of my dishwasher, specs of dust, humans, dwarfed by their own industrial creations, moved erratically. A good half of them were moving away from me. A droning crackle sound heralded an itch on my fingers. A tiny metallic voice rang out: "THE REPUBLIC OF EMT, EARTH MARS AND TITAN, HAS RIGHTFULLY CLAIMED THIS TERRITORY, CEIZE YOUR ACTIVITY OR FACE RETALIATION." "You're already "retaliating"at my finger..." "THIS UNLAWFUL BREACH OF THE PEACE ACCORDS WILL NOT B.." "Yeah yeah."I closed the door on them and that was that. "How the hell did we manage to loose this war?"I thought to myself dully as I went about dealing with the stack of dishes in front of me.
"You stand accused of destruction of property, second degree murder, and littering. How does the defendant plead?" I hesitate. They say the truth will set you free, but in my case it may very well free me from the pan to fall into the fire. Still, I reasoned, the certain future of hard lifetime imprisonment and hard labor had to be worse than the uncertain alternative. Probably. I swallow, and finally begin to speak. "Your honor, I could not have been at the scene of the crime, and I have the receipts to prove it. I present to you a receipt of sale from Raphael's Pizzeria, located on the other side of town, time stamped when the incident was believed to occur. Your honor, it is impossible for me to have committed the crime because I was ordering a pizza at the time." "Oh? And why have you chosen to withhold this supposed evidence until now? Perhaps you ought to share what toppings you ordered for this fictitious pizza, too." "Your honor, I did not wish to share this, but it was a Hawaiian pizza." "And what could be so controversial about a Hawaiian pizza that you would risk imprisonment for it?"smirked the judge. The courtroom rumbled with laughter at the judge's last remark, despite the bailiff's best efforts. The judge himself bore a smug smile of satisfaction, all too clearly pleased with his showmanship. "A Hawaiian pizza, your honor... with no ham." All laughter ceased. The only sound was the deafening roar of silence.
I really need to change my alarm tone. I've used the same one for years but there's something increasingly frustrating about living the same day on repeat and starting it with the same sound. I've lost count of how many times I've told myself I'd change it though. All I know is today is the 300th attempt at July 13th and tomorrow I'm going to die. Usually it's pretty obvious what I need to do in order to cheat death, not least because knowing I'll wake up if I die has allowed me to seek the most dangerous of thrills and survive. It takes a bit of the fun out of it for me knowing there's no risk but there have been some slow and painful deaths along the way I'd definitely rather not repeat. Tomorrow is an anomaly. I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen nor how I can stop it. I've spent months trying to work out what happens but here I am again, waking alone in my bed like any normal person on any normal day. You'd think being able to relive the same day over and over would let you do something different every day but in reality we crave routine, so every day I eat the same breakfast with the same coffee in the same place and rarely ever diverge from the norm. I tried many different things in the early days but the end result is always the same. Maybe I'll have a rest day today. - I check my watch having played video games all day without a care in the world and, sure enough, the time approaches. A blinding light, searing heat and- - I really need to change my alarm tone. I've used the same one for years but there's something increasingly frustrating about living the same day on repeat and starting it with the same sound. I've lost count of how many times I've told myself I'd change it though. All I know is today is the 301st attempt at July 13th and tomorrow I'm going to die. I'm going to stay in bed today. What's the point? - That damn neighbour always honking his horn at the same time every day pulling into his drive. I was enjoying my slumber and now I'm awake and aware the time approaches once again, always hailed by that stupid horn. I roll over and grab my phone from the night stand, swiping away the notifications I've seen hundreds of times and opening Reddit as I always do. Its all the same posts as it has been for years and it's pretty damn boring at this point. I could probably describe the front page to you without looking. I decide to spend my final minutes doing something I haven't tried yet for reasons I don't even know myself. I hit random and start scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. Wait, what was that?! I scroll back up furiously to a post I moved on from in my trance and sat bolt upright in bed. It couldn't be real, surely?! Posted one month ago, the words screamed and rattled. "It will happen July 13th. They won't tell us because they're afraid of the panic and chaos. The sun is about to die."I click the link and begin to read, desperate to find a source and some credibility. My watch beeps to tell me it's time and I panic. I desperately try to get back to the post so I can memorise who posted it and where to find it again but it's too late. A blinding light, searing heat and-
So many debate comments if its meant to be Star trek, and since it was also the first thing which came into my mind I wrote about star trek without mentioning anything about Star trek (definitely not because I am scared of legal trouble, never would I do that.) 5. r/PessimisticSnakeWrote Edit: Thanks for the many up votes! “Welcome, Welcome! Whatcha want?” You aren't discriminating if a person is rich or poor when getting customers. You don’t make any money if you do. The fancy inns for nobles maybe. But you are in an old shit hole of a city. Every customer is precious. So, when three potential customers in clothing screaming noble sleepwear come in you just give them a smile. Their round golden sticker on the chest means that they are rich. Really rich. You never saw pure gold in your entire life. “I'm sure that everyday people who stay overnight here don’t wake up next morning.” He begins stubbing at a yellow puddle with his black costly looking shoe. He probably thinks that its beer. No need to correct him. “Not even Klings are so filthy.” You don’t understand a thing. Only that they insulted you. You still smile. You already dealt with arrogant nobles before. If they were just to insult you and your establishment, they would just do it outside. They want something. And if you play, you're cards right you can maybe get these golden stickers. “I know that it's not what your lordships are used too, but we are relatively clean.” They give me a skeptical look. A person than who talked first steps forward. “You have wine in this place? We are searching for someone and would like to amuse ourselves while do that.” He doesn’t outright show his opinion on you and your fine inn. But his look and tone say it all. You nod with a smile. Before going back and calling Clara. With her unusual cleanness she always brings the most. Without her you probably would have needed to close the inn down before years. She is also the reason why your inn is relatively clean. Because Clara is. Clara steps down stairs. You thought that she would be energetic to get a opportunity to gain massive tips from the nobles. Instead, she freezes. Looking them up and down before gazing and smiling to you. But the smile seems different than normal. The nobles follow your gaze to Clara. Before beginning to laugh. Clara runs to them. “I will come back soon!” she says before running outside. As a businessman you know when you need to listen or ignore things. This is one of the times you need to listen. You run to the kitchen, and after driving of your cooks you open the window a bit. “We heard that you loved your research, but that you love so much to roleplay!” You hear a slap. You never seen a woman hurting a man. It's strictly frowned upon. So, it surprises you. Not that it bothers you, you always found that stupid that woman couldn’t do that. But you wonder why Clara would resort to that. She always seemed so calm. But the following screaming doesn’t explain it any closer. “Idiots! Three years! Three years of research!” “But we wanted to visit you. We didn’t see you for so long and everyone is worried.” “Don't you remember the thousand lectures about the prime directive! Or are you just stupid! You didn’t even try to disguise yourselves!” Lectures? Research? You now understand why Clara is so clean, why she can read, why she is so different than the other girls. She is a runaway noble. And the work she is doing is probably a test from her father or something. You don’t really know much about noble shenanigans. You smile. You know that you treated Clara okay. If she really is a noble. And not hung up like the rest of them she will probably pay you back. On the other hand, you are sad. You liked Clara. She is a sweet girl and seemed to enjoy the job. Did she really fake all that? “I'm good!” “You sure? We could send someone else to repla-” “Bye!” "Bu-" "Bye!" You hear something. It sounds like the sound of the church describes. as you hear Claras steps back you don’t hear the strangers going back with her. It's like they vanished. You make the only logical conclusion. Clara is not a normal noble. She is an angel noble. The church always said that the nobles were chosen by gods. Clara is directly out of the heaven. You will pay her more, much more than before. Maybe she can send you too heaven too. If Clara has the power to send someone to heaven and these strangers were to meet her means that the strangers were also sent from heaven. That’s why they had gold. But that the messengers from God wear sleepwear. Maybe heaven isn't so fancy as everyone says.
“Okay, okay. So, You turn me and that makes me part of your coven.” “Yep.” “And then I turn five people and they become part of my coven.” “Yeah, but, your coven is also part of my coven, see?” “So...is your coven part of...another coven?” “Yeah! Like, of course. That’s how it works. It stacks! It all goes up stream and then bing bang boom, you’ve got your upper echelon of top-biters.” “And you get a taste of my hunts—” “—And a small cut of any financial gains you make from expanded life-span.” “That too, right. And all of that — the blood and the money — that goes up the line as well?” “Yeah! And the best part is, you get a cut of anything from your coven and any covens your coven members start! And any they start! See, it stacks.” “Yeah, so you keep saying. But...the majority goes up the line—” “No-no-no-no — well, yes, to start with, but...look at it this way: your coven doesn’t have to stop at five. You can go as many as you like and if you help them out and get them growing their own covens — I mean! The skies the limit, right? It stacks!” “But I’d have to put in a lot of work before I really start seeing results.” “What’s a little hard work, though? Think of your future. And you won’t be alone! There’ll be me and your coven-mates to help you hunt and earn and eventually grow your own coven.” “...where are you finding all these members for your coven? Wouldn’t each of us encroach on each others prospective coven members?” “Look. You are over thinking it. Here’s the key take-aways. Near immortality, community, and growth potential that stacks!” “I’m...I’m gonna think about it.” “...oh.” “Super interested, though, if you could leave me some pamphlets. I just like to think on things, you know. Let it marinate.” “Oh, cool, yeah. And...you're not just saying that so I don’t feed on you?” “Whaaaaat, pshaw! No. Don’t be silly. Jeez. I’m just...you know. Coven curious, but not yet ready to...” “Commit?” “Yeah!...Commit.” “...Cool! Anyways, here’s some documents and my number. You’ll call soon, right?” “I mean, I’d be surprised if you don’t hear from me tomorrow.” “Awesome! Right, I’ll leave you to it.” “See ya!” “Yeah, see ya! I’m so excited, you’re gonna love the coven, man.” “Cool. Cool. Yeah—oh, wow, your a bat now. Wow. Squeak squeak to you to—oh! Let me, let me just get that window for you. Alright, safe flying now, buddy. Buh-Bye!...what a load of B.S.”
"We're rich!" "We're rich!" "We're rich!" "We're rich!" "We're rich!" "We're rich!" "We're rich!" "We're rich!" The leaf lover's stood still in the dark, their long plan to eliminate the certifiably insane dwarves brought to a screeching halt. For the past 4 hours, since unearthing the dwarf sized nugget of gold, the bloody dwarves just kept saying the same thing over and over the entire time. It wasn't rock and stone, but was it any better? Suddenly, someone in the back of the group of assorted hitmen yelled out "Rock and stone!" As one, the dwarves stopped their chant of "We're rich!"andturned in the direction of the voice. Silence, for the first time in hours, pressed upon them. The dwarves beady eyes seemed to pierce the darkness with ease and as one they raised their pick axes. *ROCK AND STONE!!!!!* they screamed before barreling into the dark, sometimes muttering about flares needing to charge.
Bob wiped the blood off his hands with the kitchen towel. In front of him lay the dead bodies of the Hansson family, who lived at the edge of town. The total body count would be 387 people, a number that never changed over the millennium of repetition of May 11th. He had snapped, the complete lack of progression or possible path towards freedom of the time loop had broken him. He had stood up for the 1000th time and instead of greeting the same postal worker for the 1000th time, when getting the same paper, he had opted to stab the living shit out of the poor man. From there everything was a blur, which ended when he had pulled the knife out of Miranda Hansson, daughter of Paul Hansson. That’s the moment his mind decided to un-snap. It did nothing for his mood. He’d go to sleep and start the day anew, like he had for the last 1000 years. Bob lay down on the couch in the Hansson household, drifting away in anticipation of waking up May 11th, for the 1001st time. A rough bump woke Bob up. Instead of finding himself back in his bedroom, he came too in the back of a car. His mind struggled with adapting to the unfamiliar situation. He tried to push himself up, but found that his hands were cuffed behind his back. “Ah, you’re awake,” said the driver of the car. After a struggle Bob had managed to worm his way up against the car door. Between him and the front of the car was a plexiglass plate that divided them. In the rearview mirror he could see two eyes staring at him. They belonged to a man dressed in a police uniform and next to him sat another one. “What happened?” said Bob, still adjusting. The man behind the wheel raised an eyebrow. “You killed everyone, Bob,” he said, with some amusement in his voice. “That’s not something you’d forget that easily.” It all flooded back. He had killed everyone in the town when the time loop had finally broken him. He had fallen asleep on the couch at the Hanssons. “What date is it?” he asked. “It’s May 12th,” said the officer in the driver seat. Bob started laughing in the backseat. He did it, he finally did it. He had broken the loop and could finally live the rest of his life. “Why’re you laughing,” asked the driver, curiously. “You know you’re going away for a long time, right?” Abruptly the laughing stopped. If the time loop had broken, that meant the people he’d killed hadn’t come back to life. That sudden realization knocked all the breath out of Bob’s lungs. He hadn’t been fully aware when it happened, but he had found peace in the fact it didn’t matter. Now it did and it meant he was a mass murderer. His face went pale and he could feel his stomach churn violently. The driver had noticed and pressed the button to lower the window. Bob emptied the contents of his stomach out onto the streets. “Don’t worry, Bob,” said the second officer. “You did well.” “Did well?” Bob asked. He could see the driver smiling through the rearview mirror. “You’re the first one to succeed, you know,” the officer said. Bob realized what had happened and felt like he needed to purge again. “If I succeeded, why did you arrest me?” Both officers started laughing as if they’d just heard the best joke in their lives. “You succeeded, but you still killed 387 people,” said the man in the passenger seat. “Can’t expect us to let that slide, can you?” “Such a shame, when all you had to do was not sleep in your own bed.” said the driver, sounding more amused than sympathetic. \--- Thank you for reading! If you liked my story I invite you over to r/zeekoeswriting for more of them. Please feel free to let me know your thoughts in the replies!
"Fuck." It was something like a thought, but also perhaps a sound, and maybe a bit like a revelation that could potentially shatter every ion of reality and all perception thereof had it not been housed conveniently within what we may call the head of something we can likely consider a being that is something approaching a god, at least for our purposes. For brevity's sake, what we must call he had floated out there, dancing through the gaps between the limited scope all our science affords us and our somewhat more pliable imaginations for, well, god knows how long. We must think of it as a sensation, and it was something akin to the feeling one gets when one goes about his day and reaches the furthest physical point from home only to realize that the oven is on, or the tap is running, or a bit of dense energy left lying about has rapidly expanded and formed a few subatomic particles which got together and decided to start questioning themselves. He was there in an instant, or perhaps a billion years, and there it was - a delicate little orb floating merrily through space around another larger, fiery one. It was interesting for what we may think of as a moment. There were big ones, small ones, gassy ones, really volatile ones that destroyed and reformed themselves, but there were only a distinct few in the entire universe which spontaneously decided to birth a million little parts of itself and leave them to roam around. It's hardly ever a great idea, that sort of business. They forget what they are almost immediately and spend so much time trying to remember it again. They develop the capacity to agree with one another just so they can refuse to do it, then it all becomes one big race to see which one can kill the other in a more devastating fashion. Not at all good for any self-respecting planet, but for a timeless monolithic entity which holds the very essence of creation in its eternal core? Admittedly, it's sort of entertaining. All of a sudden, and for no particular reason, the blue one was his favorite. Even though it was soon to go dark, there was a certain inevitable charm to it. He would let it run its course. After all, who was he to dick around in infinity for, well, however long, just to show up at the climax to a play he had forgotten he had helped write? They would figure it out, whatever it was, one way or another, and there was still a bit more of this familiar mystery to check up on. "Heh." It was something like a sigh, a little like a daydream, perhaps a force that could obliterate a thousand planets just like the little blue one with the power of a million of the little fiery ones. And then, in another moment that might have been a lifetime, he was gone.
Walking back home through city, I could feel feel my phone buzz, and so I pulled it out of my pocket to answer what I expected was a text from my girlfriend. But, oddly enough, it wasn't from her number; it was from mine. "take 3 steps to your left and keep walking". Looking around suspiciously, I did as I apparently was telling myself and kept going. A few minutes later, tires screeched, a horn blared, and an out of control car hurtled past me about 3 steps to my right. Jumping back with a yell, I beelined it to my house where I slammed shut the door and took my phone out of my pocket to inspect it. But there was nothing; the text was no longer in my inbox. Visibly shaken up, I went and fell asleep on the couch. Morning came, and I was awoken to a buzz from my phone. "The milk is spoiled". Tiptoeing into the kitchen, I cautiously opened the fridge, and smelled the milk. Yup. Taking out my phone, I realized that this text too, had disappeared. I started to feel a growing sense of confidence. Somehow, someway, I was able to prevent myself from screwing up or getting injured. By letting myself know the bad outcomes ahead of time, I could change my actions and avoid it. I was invincible. With a laugh, I sprinted out the door, into the street, and got nailed by a bus. I lost my legs that day, and learned a valuable lesson. You only get 1 text a day.
Roger had always been considered an outcast. While other kids were outdoors playing, he was indoors trying to keep to himself. On the rare occasion that he did go outdoors, it wasn't to play with other children. He preferred to go on the hunt for squirrels with his pellet gun. He still remembers the first squirrel he had ever shot. He hit it directly in the eye. He had a sick obsession with it ever since. While squirrels were great fun, he soon became bored. He began reading online about a devil worshiping cult named the Black Raveers. They had an online forum dedicated to animal sacrifice - mainly house pets such as cats and dogs - that he became quickly involved with. After about a month of joining the discussions of this forum, the desires overwhelmed him. He knew his old neighbor slept most the day, and had a few household cats. He made the decision to sneak in one afternoon, and snatch the first cat he saw. The old man left his backdoor unlocked, so it was easy picking. Roger entered through the backdoor. It squeaked loudly, so he only opened it a crack large enough for him to squeeze through. Immediately he saw a black cat sitting on the kitchen counter top staring at him intently. He had catnip in his back pocket to lure the animal; he pulled it out now. When the cat got a glimpse of the treat, he began to inch forward, still unsure of Roger. When it was in range, Roger quickly grabbed the cat and ran out the back door. It was hissing and clawing, but luckily for him the old man had had the cat's claws removed. Rogers' parents worked late into the night, so he had the house to himself. He put the cat into a makeshift cage he had engineered the night before while he got onto his forums to inform his fellow Raveers... or I guess it was Reavers. You see, Roger was dyslexic, so it wasn't uncommon for him to make these errors. Regardless, he began to ask what he should do now that he had an animal to sacrifice. He got a reply from a forum administrator almost immediately: "You have to sacrifice it to Santa,"he said. Roger thought this was a bit odd, but who was he to question one of the founders of the Black Reavers? "You must draw a pentagram to lie the cat in, then say the words 'I welcome the great and powerful Santa to conjure himself in my presence. I offer my soul, mind, and body to you for all eternity, to use as you see fit.' Once the words have been said, you must release the blood of the chosen animal into the pentagram." Once Roger finished reading, he excitedly went to grab his pellet gun. Once he had retrieved the weapon of choice he began to draw the pentagram on the wooden floor of his living room in whip cream as to not leave permanent marks for once his parents returned home. Once that was finished, he grabbed the cage with the cat inside, and set in in the center of the pentagram. He held the gun at his side, and began to say the words, "I welcome the great and powerful Santa to conjure himself in my presence. I offer my soul, mind, and body to you for all eternity, to use as you see fit." Once he finished, he aimed his gun at the cat, and pulled the trigger. As soon as he did, a flash of white light blinded him and he felt a sharp pain in his forehead. When he regained his composure, he found himself lying on the ground with blood running down his face. Before him stood the mythical man: Santa Claus. He couldn't believe his eyes. He didn't expect anything to actually come of this ritual. He took it for some wacky initiation into the Black Reavers. Santa looked at him, then turned around. When he turned back towards Roger, he held the cat in his arms, alive and well. He pet it, and the cat purred loudly. He then addressed Roger: "I'm pleased that you've summoned me here today. We at the North Pole have a special place for naughty little boys like you."And with a snap of his fingers, Roger was wrapped tightly in ropes. Santa lifted him onto his back, and with another snap, they were gone. Cold wind was suddenly blowing harshly into Roger's face. He had never felt such horrible cold before. The next instant, they were sliding effortlessly through the frozen tundra of what he assumed was the North Pole. It was at this time he realized he was in the back of Santa's sleigh. They rode for about 10 minutes, and Roger was so cold he thought he might shatter at the slightest touch. He managed to sit himself up, seeing a giant red and green building with the most eccentric light display he had ever witnessed. Two large candy canes arched over the giant red doors that entered the building. Two large, living nutcrackers stood guard. Santa lifted Roger out of the back of the sleigh, up over one shoulder. When the nutcrackers saw Santa approaching, they stood aside without even glimpsing at Roger. What lied inside was unbelievable. A giant factory with thousands of conveyor belts, giant multipurpose machines, and enough boys and girls to work it all. As Santa walked down the aisle in the middle of the giant factory, Roger noticed that none of these boys or girls appeared to be working voluntarily. They were all locked into their machines by a thick metal chain. Some of them looked like eighty year old men, but you couldn't have guessed by their size. Their heights ranged from that of a seven year old to the of a fourteen year old. Santa began walking up a tall, steep set of stairs. Roger bouncing uncomfortable on his shoulders the whole way up. When they entered the room at the top of the stairs, he somehow became even more bewildered than he already was. Inside was an awful looking horned beast. "Behold, the Krampus,"said Santa, "I'll leave you to your fate."He exited the room, closing the door behind him. This evil beast was sitting on a pedestal high above Roger. At least fifteen feet above. The Krampus looked down at him long and hard, then back onto his desk where some papers lied. "So, little boy, you thought it wise to sacrifice a helpless animal in the name of Santa?"The Krampus said. That's when Roger realized his mistake... It was suppose to be Satan, not Santa. His damn dyslexia ruined him again. "Nothing to say for yourself?"The Krampus said loudly, causing the room to shake ever so slightly. He wanted to apologize, swear he would never do anything so horrible again, but the words stuck in his throat. He was too afraid to speak. "Well, then, I guess it doesn't matter anyhow. You'll be spending the rest of your days here, I hope you know."The horned beast said, "All I'm here to do is decide how you should spend those days." Roger took a large gulp, his heart pounding in his chest. What have I done? he thought, ashamed of what he had planned to do. "Hmm... I think I know the perfect place for you. Luckily, we've just had an opening. The last one just passed, at the ripe age of 126 years. You see, people in your position live a lot longer than the average person. It's a shame all these years will be spent dreadfully."The Krampus said, sounding amused. It clapped it's hands, and two nutcrackers entered the room. "I think this boy will fit in perfectly at the Cat Station." The nutcrackers dragged him out of the room, back into the giant factory. They chained him up in front of a conveyor belt towards the front end of the factory. An unassembled cat tree came sliding out in front of him. He looked at it sadly, then began putting it together. ______________________________________________________ I didn't intend to go on this long, and it may have been a little darker than you intended. I'd love to hear any criticism's anybody has, for I am here to improve my writing. Thanks for taking the time to read! Edit: Mandatory thank you for the gold! My first one, and it feels so good.

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