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[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | I stared at the shelf, pointing at the trash can. It shined, obviously some type of metal. I couldn't identify it, however.
"That is our MJÖSA trashcan."
"Oh." I nodded slowly, as she lead me further down the aisles, pointing out different things in my price range. I couldn't pay attention however, as I kept mumbling MJÖSA under my breath.
"Are you okay?" She glanced up at me, I nodded, giggling as I kept saying it. It was simple, but the word itself seemed to reside in me.
"Would you like someone else?" She asked.
"Yes, come forth to me!" I laughed, before my voice started gurgling. The ground shook, and I fell onto the ground, as a red, well thing, that really could be described as reminiscent of Kil'jaeden rose from it, and stood up, roaring. The lady and I backed away in fear, before he spoke.
"I AM HERE TO DELIVER YOUR DEEPEST WISH. I WILL CHANGE THE NAMES AT ALL IKEA STORES TO NORMAL."
"Oh thank goodness!" | I have brought dishonor upon myself, my house, my ancestors, and my cow.
I roll my ceremonial towel across the floor of the store, in front of all who have witnessed my shame.
I kneel before the dragon and beg that it see my final act of repentance as I draw my tanto and prepare myself for the steely end.
With one swift plunge, I put an end to my shame and suffering.
I found a way to get out of building the furniture for the wife. Thank you dragon. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Greetings master... it has been many years since I last was required..."
A Goliath of a beast stirred amid the smoke and smog that clogged the air in my now shattered study, desk pieces and my newly built chair's legs strewn everywhere.
"What the fuck dude," I replied upset that my chair was broken, "that took like two hours."
| I have brought dishonor upon myself, my house, my ancestors, and my cow.
I roll my ceremonial towel across the floor of the store, in front of all who have witnessed my shame.
I kneel before the dragon and beg that it see my final act of repentance as I draw my tanto and prepare myself for the steely end.
With one swift plunge, I put an end to my shame and suffering.
I found a way to get out of building the furniture for the wife. Thank you dragon. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | I have brought dishonor upon myself, my house, my ancestors, and my cow.
I roll my ceremonial towel across the floor of the store, in front of all who have witnessed my shame.
I kneel before the dragon and beg that it see my final act of repentance as I draw my tanto and prepare myself for the steely end.
With one swift plunge, I put an end to my shame and suffering.
I found a way to get out of building the furniture for the wife. Thank you dragon. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "God dammit!" he cried. He had a strong Boston accent.
He looked like a cross between Danny De Vito and the devil emoji. He stood two foot high and only had on a pair of khaki shorts on.
There had been a crack of lightening and a little poof. The demon was not impressed at his summoning...
"I told those guys five times. FIVE! Another goddamn furniture summons."
He looked over at me and held up his hand as I began to speak - "I'm gonna sort this now once and for ALL. This is the last goddamn time I swear to Gawd"
He pulled out a new Iphone 7. He stabbed at it with his small red hands and black claw like nails. The phone went to his ear and his face turned into a snarl.
"Yea IKEA customer service, it's me again, KUNTSTORP . You guys have gone and done it now! I demand the name be changed Today, not tomorrow, not next week - TODAY."
He looked over at me with the phone still at his ear. I hadn't put the screw driver down yet. "Sorry about the mix-up... Do me a favor chief and put the coffee on - this is gonna take a while."
I turned obediently and slowly walked to the kitchen, I still could not believe what was happening. He started shouting down the phone
"No goddammit, this is not a crank call, I don't care - send the cops over.... No don't hang up! Put me through to your line manager - I spoke with Tom on Thursday and Patricia on Monday and they know who I am! I'll teach YOU to put ME on hold!"
He was now sitting on my couch with his legs crossed and tapping his claws impatiently on the arm...
"Hey chief, OK if I smoke in here?" He called.
He had already lit the cigarette....
"Yea... I...I guess. Do you want milk or sugar in your coffee?" I responded. He took a long drag and said "No sugar I'm sweet enough already but I'm a devil for a drop of cream".
The irony wasn't lost on him as he sniggered while the ash fell onto my living room floor. "Hey chief, you got an ashtray laying around here ?" | I have brought dishonor upon myself, my house, my ancestors, and my cow.
I roll my ceremonial towel across the floor of the store, in front of all who have witnessed my shame.
I kneel before the dragon and beg that it see my final act of repentance as I draw my tanto and prepare myself for the steely end.
With one swift plunge, I put an end to my shame and suffering.
I found a way to get out of building the furniture for the wife. Thank you dragon. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | “So you’re telling me you blew this month’s rent on a new entertainment system for the living room, and now you expect *me* to put it together?” My fist crinkles around the encyclopedia of an instruction manual that my darling husband tossed to me only moments prior.
“You know I’m no good at these slow, meticulous projects- not like you, sweetie,” His voice is muffled as he cowers behind the two rectangular boxes containing the puzzle pieces of another impossible piece of Ikea furniture. “Please put it together while I’m at work?” His eyes pop up from the side of the box, pleading and doe-eyed.
I roll my eyes. “Okay fine. But I’m never letting you within a 20-mile radius of an Ikea again.”
He finally appears from around the boxes to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you honey, I’ll see you after work,” he says, and just like that, I’m home alone with a 5 hour task ahead of me and a pathetic excuse for a ‘day off’.
“Bastard,” I say to no one. An intricate 3D model of the unit taunts me from the front of the instruction manual, its title embedded boldly beneath it. “Fä..jall, bo? What the hell does that even mean?”
I toss the book to the side and begin opening up the boxes, heaving out large pieces of wood and at least 10,000 tiny screws. By the time I have emptied the boxes I’ve broken a sweat and my noodle arms are screaming in defeat.
My cat appears from who knows where, purring as he weaves in and out of the piles of wood before rubbing his white face against the cardboard boxes.
“Okay Joey, let’s get started,” I tell him, looking at the first set of instructions.
**Clunk.**
*Thud.*
***Scrape.***
“Joey, get out of the box!” I yell over my shoulder, but I glance up to him sitting in front of me. With a gasp I whip my head around to see a face staring at me from inside the box.
“Holy shit,” I choke, shoving myself backwards without taking my eyes off this -- *thing.* An uglier version of Rumpelstiltskin stares back at me, with tiny nubs of horns protruding from its forehead and crooked wings twitching behind its swollen face.
“What the fuck are you?” I breathe.
“Oh, sorry deary, didn’t mean to be rude,” It speaks with the voice of a garage disposal. The small creature struggles to lift itself over the side of the box, dangling for a few helpless seconds before falling to the carpet, rolling like an armadillo into a standing position. His naked, wrinkly body jiggles a hello.
“My name is Fjällbo,” It greets, "great demon of the Underworld, destroyer of all those that stand before me. A mercifulness warrior, a skilled soldier. And I have been summoned here -- well, about an hour ago. I do apologize for my lateness, navigating your world isn’t always the easiest,” It flashes me a toothy grin.
“You’re…a demon?” I gulp.
Fjallbo takes a step closer to me, its face contorting into madness, its unruly eyebrows arching into a sinister smile. “Oh yes deary, I am." It croaks.
“What…what are you going to do to me?” My voice is barely a whisper, my body frozen in a fear I've never thought possible.
“Oh, I’m going to make you…*suffer*,” Its eyes darken as it takes a step further.
“You’re going to feel a pain you’ve...never felt before...” Another step. From here I can count every one of its dagger-sharp teeth.
“A pain…that you will surely...never forget.” It is mere inches from my face now, its sticky breath hot on my skin. It slowly reaches out its gleaming claws, and as quick as lightning it snatches a single screw before poofing out of existence.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I wail, my body crumbling over into the fetal position.“DAMN YOU IKEA DEMON, DAMN YOU!” | I have brought dishonor upon myself, my house, my ancestors, and my cow.
I roll my ceremonial towel across the floor of the store, in front of all who have witnessed my shame.
I kneel before the dragon and beg that it see my final act of repentance as I draw my tanto and prepare myself for the steely end.
With one swift plunge, I put an end to my shame and suffering.
I found a way to get out of building the furniture for the wife. Thank you dragon. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Wergle-Shergle," attempted Harry.
"No, there are umlauts," said Sally. "It should be more like Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"Worgle-Shorgle."
The credenza glowed. Its cabinet door swung open and closed. An inexpensive yet tacky rug span with colors and patterns. A figure appeared in the demonstration bedroom, black-horned and cloven-footed. "I am Worgle-Shorgle, master of the seventh pit. Slaver of dark ones, eater of souls."
"Worgle-Shorgle," said Sally, "how would you pronounce this name with the umlauts?"
Worgle-Shorgle leaned close, brimstone on his breath. "Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"I told you," said Sally.
"Let's get some meatballs," said Harry.
As the young couple left, Worgle-Shorgle tapped his pitchfork against the ground. He paced menacingly between a desk lamp and a lighting fixture. Such incredible demon-summoners these must be, he thought, to have trapped him in such a diabolical labyrinth. | I have brought dishonor upon myself, my house, my ancestors, and my cow.
I roll my ceremonial towel across the floor of the store, in front of all who have witnessed my shame.
I kneel before the dragon and beg that it see my final act of repentance as I draw my tanto and prepare myself for the steely end.
With one swift plunge, I put an end to my shame and suffering.
I found a way to get out of building the furniture for the wife. Thank you dragon. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | You sigh, scratching your stomach absently. There aren't nearly enough meatballs in one plate to satisfy. Two plates might make a decent snack, but it would take at least ten to even begin to dull the aching edge of hunger. She always insists it's not healthy for you to have so many, smiling sweetly as she orders you one plate. You sigh, wistful as you follow her away from the line and the warming pan full of meatballs. Half the food on your plate is hardly edible. Why is it so very important that you consume green beans, again?
There are just some things more filling than others, though it's never really enough. She teases that you wouldn't stop until you ate Ikea out of business if she let you. Smile at her, faintly, as you force yourself to savor the meal.
The wandering begins soon after. You're not sure how long the two of you have been coming to this place, inspecting furnishings and fixtures neither of you seems to need. It's practically a ritual; consume a plate of meatballs, wander the labyrinthine showrooms, remark on this piece or that, then return home.
You can never quite recall when you took her as a companion. It has been some time, though. She is stoop-shouldered with wild, woolly gray hair sprouting every which way from her head. Today it's a bit tamer, straining the bounds of the waist-length braid. She taps her cane, sweeping it in an arc ahead of her, eyes fixed ahead.
She is not the easiest companion. That she insists on monitoring your meals is enough to frustrate, but she herself unsettles you in ways you cannot pin down. It is the small gestures, like how she grips your arm when children are nearby. The fact that every single meal comes only through her. The tremor you can never quite shake whenever she turns those empty blue eyes on you.
You pass through bedrooms for the third time this week. You like to linger here, but she always walks a little faster, the ball at the tip of her cane scraping over the floor double-time. A bit of obstinacy flares. There's quite a crowd today and a gentleman about your size is walking alongside. You match your steps to his, masking the sound of your feet, and slowly drop back. He takes your place immediately, weaving and merging through the crowd to get ahead.
You have not bought yourself long, but it is something of a satisfaction to see her pick up her pace to follow the fellow. She will figure it out soon enough. For now you retrace your steps to the bedrooms, standing in the middle of some diva child's pink paradise.
A little girl drags on the hand of an adult, pleading something or other. A little boy scoffs, tugging in the direction of a tunnel tented loft-bed fortress. Absently, you consider returning to the food court. Perhaps you can sneak another couple plates of meatballs before she finds you.
The tag on a child-sized vanity catches your eye. You've seen it a few times before and each time there is a strange twinge in your gut, but you never get to linger much. You check over your shoulder but there's no sign of her yet. You squat by the table and turn the tag over, underlining the words with your finger.
The letters tug at you. You run the syllables over your tongue, but they don't feel quite right. You flatten the vowels a bit, but no better. You try rounding them out and shoving them together. That feels closer.
You take a deep breath, blurting the five-syllable name as three syllables.
For a moment, you feel utterly ridiculous. You are a grown man squatting in front of a little girl's vanity, muttering a Swedish name you don't even--
No. You know it now that you have heard it correctly. There is a faint echo in your mind and so you repeat the word. The mirror on the vanity cracks. But there is no sound. The mirror has not cracked, your own face has cracked. A black line runs from the corner of your eye down to your chin. As you repeat the name, the crack shoots off in all directions, like a spiderweb snaking across your skin. After a fourth repetition of the name you know to be yours, bits begin to flake off.
Someone is screaming, but you are fascinated as first your lips, then your nose and cheeks crack apart and fall off. There is nothing underneath. You can see to the back of this hollow shell where light begins to show through.
In an instant, you are aware of exactly how many children are in the building.
You begin to recall things. Pleasant feelings. The cries of small humans silenced in the night, little bodies left stone cold and wide eyed for the morning light to find. The small, glowing embers of their souls warmed your hollowness, giving you substance for days at a time.
As pieces emerge from the fog, you wonder why you bothered to suppress yourself. You could have gone ages more like this, stranded and always hungry, always empty, never knowing why. On mere chance you found yourself drawn to this place where the language of your region is so accessible, recalling from a simple piece of furniture fragments of your own name. Is that why you always return?
"I wondered when it might be."
You have only a few bits and pieces of shell clinging to your outline and as you turn to face her, these last bits fall off. There has already been a stampede out of the area, but you still know where each child is, and now no one can see you. All that stands between you and your first real meal in decades is her.
Her hands rest on top of the stick, one folded over the other, her head tilted to the side. "It was not enough to observe you, you know. You buried yourself deep so I couldn't learn from you that way."
Uneasiness pricks through the immediate hunger. This face is familiar but the fog around it is slow to part.
"There's not very much information about your kind. It took so much research. We had to come to the states. I had to bring you and watch you every day."
It takes a moment to register that she is not speaking English the way she has the past several... decades. She has been with you for decades. Ever since you left... and she followed. And she speaks the tongue of your region, down to the local dialect.
"It took even longer to prepare. Time is the only way, in this case." She lets her cane fall to the ground, her hands still folded in front of her. "But I have no regrets. Tell me, are you hungry?"
A tear-stained face flashes through your mind, distorted with rage. Four little bodies, still and stiffening. The wrong house. You came to the wrong house. She had more knowledge than the other villagers. Even so, she could not destroy you, but she came so very close...
You move back, readying to flee. A lapse, and you know it as the air about you displaces. Faster than thought she has lunged forward and grasped you, empty eyes staring straight through to the wall.
"Are you hungry?" she asks again. "How much can you hold?" Then seals her mouth across your face as the full, blazing fire of her aged soul pours into the aching emptiness, straining you, stretching, swelling to burst... | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "I'm sorry," I said, for what had to be the tenth time since the interview started. "What am I here to do, again? Exactly?"
The manager of the IKEA, a pugnacious and pot-bellied little man settling unpleasantly into middle age, turned his head to glare back at me. "Get rid of the pests!" he repeated, clarifying absolutely nothing. The fluorescent lights glinted off his bald egg of a head, piercing through the meager hairs that attempted to cover the expanse of sweaty scalp. "You have pest experience, yes?"
I winced. Back in college, as I worked far too optimistically towards my liberal arts degree, I'd had to deal with several rodential beasties that infiltrated the half-dilapidated house where I'd landed such a compelling deal on rent. My skills at catching rats with overturned laundry baskets and swatting bats out of the air with tennis rackets soon became well known among the female community, and landed me several invitations to sorority houses (although they never turned out quite like my imagination suggested).
It had been my buddy, Nate, who suggested that I stick this fact onto my resume. "Come on, at least it's something!" he pointed out, crumpling up another beer can and tossing it onto its fellows in the recycling bin. "And really, no one reads resumes any longer. They just look to see if they're 'busy' enough."
I sat at the table nearby, wincing as I tapped my pencil against my lips, looking down at the sadly empty page. "Yeah, okay," I finally decided, jotting it down. "Maybe I'll just have to go to Home Depot and pick up some traps."
Now, following after the manager as his yellow shirt led me deeper into the bowels of IKEA, I had the sneaking suspicion that I'd made a terrible mistake. Each time I looked down at the implements he'd pressed into my hands, this suspicion grew stronger.
"I'm hunting pests," I repeated. "But shouldn't I be using traps? What's with... these?"
The manager just snorted. Apparently, I no longer deserved the use of words. Equally apparent was that I was the only candidate desperate enough to take on this job.
And he was right, there. Months of failing to land any cushy office work eventually led me, at my wits' end, to start casting a wider net. And hell, at this point I was more than happy to sell a family with screaming toddlers on a crappily made, overpriced set of living room furniture if it meant putting food in my sadly bare fridge.
"Yes, we have one," the manager suddenly announced. He spun on one foot, so quickly that I nearly collided with him. His finger stabbed out, pointing to one of the objects he'd shoved into my hands. "See the glow?"
I stared down in shock at the metal crucifix, which I'd assumed that I was putting away where it would be for sale as the Bjorn-Tuun. About eight inches in length, it now emitted a pale glow, and felt slightly warm in my hand. I nearly dropped it.
"What's going on?" I stammered. Was this some sort of a joke?
The manager, meanwhile, was looking around. "Ah! There!" He pointed down a hallway between two shelves stacked tall with boxes. Following his finger, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement in the shadows. "Pest!"
"What? Is it a rat or something?"
"No! You go, get rid of it!" And he gave me a shove in that direction with a sweaty hand.
I had no idea what was happening. I guessed that the smart move here was probably to drop the crucifix, as well as the other object the manager had shoved into my hands, and get the hell out of here. Maybe working for McDonald's wouldn't be quite so horrible, after all.
But I'm kind of known for making stupid decisions. Why stop now?
I shifted around the objects in my hands. I held the crucifix in my off-hand, and tugged at the handle of the other object. With a soft hiss, the blade slipped free of its scabbard, which I dropped, not having a third hand to hold onto it.
The sword was a little under three feet long, with a cross-shaped hilt. It felt strangely light in my hand. I had no idea why IKEA believed that a sword was a good idea for killing rats, but if I impressed my boss, I could get the job - and then switch over to normal rat traps.
I came around the corner of the warehouse. The glowing crucifix freaked me out, but it at least provided some illumination. I held it up, seeing movement ahead. I hefted the sword, getting ready to strike at-
-at a tiny little red humanoid, squirming around as it flapped tiny batlike leather wings, waving what looked like an oversized fork??
"What the hell?" I gasped out, jumping back, staring down at the thing with wide eyes.
"Yes, Hell!" shouted the manager, from behind me. "Strike! Pest!"
The little demon - and what else could it be? What was going on, was I losing my mind? - cackled, a high little tone that grated at my ears like nails on a chalkboard. Hefting that fork - no, a trident! Three tines! - it leapt at me.
Instinctively, I swung the sword at it, even as I struggled to not close my eyes.
Somehow, I hit.
The sword flashed through the demon with a sound like steam escaping from a kettle. There was a brief flash of white, and then the little red creature was falling back. Even as it lurched away, its body disintegrated into a tiny little pile of ash.
"What the he- heck is going on?" I cried out, spinning around to look at the IKEA manager. "What was that? Was that a demon? Am I being drugged?"
"Drugs?" he repeated, frowning. "No drugs. We test for that. But yes, you did a good job with the pests! You are hired! You kill these when they come. Cross shows you where they are."
"But where do they come from?" I asked, sensing the man was about to turn away.
He frowned at me, like I'd asked an especially stupid question. "Hell, of course. Demons. Summoned by name."
"But who's saying their names?"
His finger stabbed out. "You! Stupid shoppers, cannot even pronounce the names of the furniture! Summon demons instead!"
"What, when we say Torboonsin, it's summoning up-"
I didn't even finish the sentence. A loud poof went off near me, and something cackled near my ear. Instinctively, my hand came up - the one holding the sword.
"See?" said the manager, as dust rained down on me. "Your job is to get rid of them. And don't let customers see!" A glint came into his eye. "Fifteen dollars an hour, if you keep your mouth shut!"
I didn't hesitate any longer. That was worth any amount of weirdness. "Deal."
"Great." He turned away. "Talk to HR at the end of the day. And don't let them lick you."
"Wait, what happens if they lick-"
But the manager was already gone.
I looked down at the crucifix in my hands. I'd never been especially religious, but maybe the cross didn't know that? In any case, it was still glowing.
I tightened my grip on the sword. Oh well. Time to go to work.
*More stories at /r/Romanticon* | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | And there it was, my new bookshelf, a few days too early. You see, my husband was away on business, and as much as I don't want to subscribe to gender stereotypes, he was the one who usually handles these sort of things.
The doorbell rang. It was my nosy neighbour Francine.
"Was that a delivery truck I spotted earlier? What did you get? Is Garrett back?" She tries to peer around me.
"Yup, it was. A bookshelf. And no, he isn't."
"That's a shame. Otherwise he could help you with it. He's so good with his hands."
Don't punch an old lady, don't do it.
"Yes well, thanks for that. Got to go, lots to do." I close the door in her face.
Good with his hands huh? Who the hell talks that way about someone else's husband? God I needed a drink.
I pour myself a glass of Chianti and settled in for another episode of the bachelorette. Yes, I watch keeping up with the kardashians too. Bite me. The Chianti floods my body, sweeping through my insides, leaving traces of warmth everywhere. I giggle my way through the show, wistfully remembering the days where Garrett would plan spontaneous dates and shower me with love and affection. Now he showers me with his sleep apnea induced snoring.
After the show was done, I realised I was a fair bit tipsy. Being tipsy sometimes means making bad decisions, like deciding to build ikea furniture. I grabbed the instruction sheet and giggled at the product name. What the hell was this? Brusali? Sounds like some kind of pasta. I say it again a few times, laughing. God I should have gone for the Billy. Then i could have said, 'i need to get home to Billy' and people would think I was having a torrid affair.
"Why are you laughing like that?"
I look up to see this most gorgeous shirtless man, with salt and pepper hair, and abs for days. I stare shamelessly before realising that this was a strange man, in my house.
"Did you break in?"
"You conjured me. I am here to tempt you to sin."
"Come again?"
He looked at me, a bored lazy look on his face. "I am a demon. Does that paint a clearer picture?"
"Right. I think I had too much wine."
"Are you ready to fall?"
"More like barf."
"I mean fall into sin."
"What was in that wine?" I stumble away from him, running into the kitchen for some water.
He follows me, leaning lazily against the counter, watching as I gulped down some water and splashed my face with the rest of it.
"You don't look like a demon."
"How would you know? Have u seen one before?"
Good point.
"Can you please leave?"
"Does the word demon mean anything to you?"
As I stared at him, and he stared back, I knew one thing for certain: I was never shopping at Ikea again. | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | Let's sing a song about a kid
Lost and found is where his ends meet
Wanted to show the whole world how cool he is
By buying the best shit money can get, why not just stick with meat?
So he went to a mall open for all
Trying to find the coolest thing to buy, coolest sounding of all
Bumping his head phones up, he enters Ikea
Doesn't have any fuckin idea where he's heading, still bossin and crossin
The names don't make much sense, kids got the vocab of evanescence
Doesn't mind what the store clerks yell to him
He goes to the far end of the corridor that's lighted less
Dark things allure me, thinks the kid thinking of azkaban
Stupid Harry Potter stuff doesn't help him cope with what's up next
He goes to the only item on the last shelf and reads it's name,
Appears Michael Jackson's demon, the item is 'Shamona! Kid's white dream play set."
If it's too rude and long pardon me,
I'm not a rapper nor am I a poet I'm just a Bee
Making bitchy ass tunes out of thin air for fuck's sake
Hope it's funny and you like it; have a nice day!
Lok. | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | My man. Let me tell you a story. A true story, about a brotha being jumped by a demon at the local IKEA. It's absolutely true and y'all better sit down and listen.
I was strolling through the IKEA, looking for gardening tools to maintain my wife's garden. She was the type of woman to go off on someone hard if they didn't maintain her garden. I'm not one to judge, so I just decided to pick up and leave to the local IKEA. Besides, it's only a five minute drive. I eventually found a power drill and decided to get my ass outta there before the lines became too long and caused my wife to come home with a trashed garden. We wouldn't want that happening.
I was just walking through one of the many luxurious furniture aisles to return to the checkout area when I noticed the labels. Goddamn, those were some broke ass labels. I mean they were literally broke and financially couldn't support themselves. The labels were so hard to pronounce, I was goddamn sure that if I pronounced one of them wrong it would summon a demon, or something!
I walked up to a bureau and read the label in my mind. "Suckamah Wood". What the hell? That seriously sounds like "suck on my wood". Bro, that's nasty! But it was funny; so I decided to read it out loud for a quick giggle. "Zhuckamynut", I mumbled. Shit! I said it wrong. Eh, not like it goddamn matters.
Suddenly, a giant cloud of smoke appeared in front of me. Only a few moments later, the smoke dispersed, revealing a big half-horse half-devil creature. He had big horns and a bushy dick. I tried to feel his dick but he kicked my hand away with his giant hooves.
"Bitch! I'm the Centaur of IKEA. Why the hell you summon me here?"
"Goddamn, sir", I remarked respectfully, "I didn't mean to summon you. I was just trying to read this bureau label."
"Well shit. You summoned me accidentally?"
"You got that part right."
"Then I need to go."
And poof, just like that, the big nig was gone. I'm gonna miss that big guy, but it's nice knowing that I can summon the bitch whenever I try to save my failing marriage at IKEA.
| ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | I stared at the shelf, pointing at the trash can. It shined, obviously some type of metal. I couldn't identify it, however.
"That is our MJÖSA trashcan."
"Oh." I nodded slowly, as she lead me further down the aisles, pointing out different things in my price range. I couldn't pay attention however, as I kept mumbling MJÖSA under my breath.
"Are you okay?" She glanced up at me, I nodded, giggling as I kept saying it. It was simple, but the word itself seemed to reside in me.
"Would you like someone else?" She asked.
"Yes, come forth to me!" I laughed, before my voice started gurgling. The ground shook, and I fell onto the ground, as a red, well thing, that really could be described as reminiscent of Kil'jaeden rose from it, and stood up, roaring. The lady and I backed away in fear, before he spoke.
"I AM HERE TO DELIVER YOUR DEEPEST WISH. I WILL CHANGE THE NAMES AT ALL IKEA STORES TO NORMAL."
"Oh thank goodness!" | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Greetings master... it has been many years since I last was required..."
A Goliath of a beast stirred amid the smoke and smog that clogged the air in my now shattered study, desk pieces and my newly built chair's legs strewn everywhere.
"What the fuck dude," I replied upset that my chair was broken, "that took like two hours."
| ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "God dammit!" he cried. He had a strong Boston accent.
He looked like a cross between Danny De Vito and the devil emoji. He stood two foot high and only had on a pair of khaki shorts on.
There had been a crack of lightening and a little poof. The demon was not impressed at his summoning...
"I told those guys five times. FIVE! Another goddamn furniture summons."
He looked over at me and held up his hand as I began to speak - "I'm gonna sort this now once and for ALL. This is the last goddamn time I swear to Gawd"
He pulled out a new Iphone 7. He stabbed at it with his small red hands and black claw like nails. The phone went to his ear and his face turned into a snarl.
"Yea IKEA customer service, it's me again, KUNTSTORP . You guys have gone and done it now! I demand the name be changed Today, not tomorrow, not next week - TODAY."
He looked over at me with the phone still at his ear. I hadn't put the screw driver down yet. "Sorry about the mix-up... Do me a favor chief and put the coffee on - this is gonna take a while."
I turned obediently and slowly walked to the kitchen, I still could not believe what was happening. He started shouting down the phone
"No goddammit, this is not a crank call, I don't care - send the cops over.... No don't hang up! Put me through to your line manager - I spoke with Tom on Thursday and Patricia on Monday and they know who I am! I'll teach YOU to put ME on hold!"
He was now sitting on my couch with his legs crossed and tapping his claws impatiently on the arm...
"Hey chief, OK if I smoke in here?" He called.
He had already lit the cigarette....
"Yea... I...I guess. Do you want milk or sugar in your coffee?" I responded. He took a long drag and said "No sugar I'm sweet enough already but I'm a devil for a drop of cream".
The irony wasn't lost on him as he sniggered while the ash fell onto my living room floor. "Hey chief, you got an ashtray laying around here ?" | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | “So you’re telling me you blew this month’s rent on a new entertainment system for the living room, and now you expect *me* to put it together?” My fist crinkles around the encyclopedia of an instruction manual that my darling husband tossed to me only moments prior.
“You know I’m no good at these slow, meticulous projects- not like you, sweetie,” His voice is muffled as he cowers behind the two rectangular boxes containing the puzzle pieces of another impossible piece of Ikea furniture. “Please put it together while I’m at work?” His eyes pop up from the side of the box, pleading and doe-eyed.
I roll my eyes. “Okay fine. But I’m never letting you within a 20-mile radius of an Ikea again.”
He finally appears from around the boxes to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you honey, I’ll see you after work,” he says, and just like that, I’m home alone with a 5 hour task ahead of me and a pathetic excuse for a ‘day off’.
“Bastard,” I say to no one. An intricate 3D model of the unit taunts me from the front of the instruction manual, its title embedded boldly beneath it. “Fä..jall, bo? What the hell does that even mean?”
I toss the book to the side and begin opening up the boxes, heaving out large pieces of wood and at least 10,000 tiny screws. By the time I have emptied the boxes I’ve broken a sweat and my noodle arms are screaming in defeat.
My cat appears from who knows where, purring as he weaves in and out of the piles of wood before rubbing his white face against the cardboard boxes.
“Okay Joey, let’s get started,” I tell him, looking at the first set of instructions.
**Clunk.**
*Thud.*
***Scrape.***
“Joey, get out of the box!” I yell over my shoulder, but I glance up to him sitting in front of me. With a gasp I whip my head around to see a face staring at me from inside the box.
“Holy shit,” I choke, shoving myself backwards without taking my eyes off this -- *thing.* An uglier version of Rumpelstiltskin stares back at me, with tiny nubs of horns protruding from its forehead and crooked wings twitching behind its swollen face.
“What the fuck are you?” I breathe.
“Oh, sorry deary, didn’t mean to be rude,” It speaks with the voice of a garage disposal. The small creature struggles to lift itself over the side of the box, dangling for a few helpless seconds before falling to the carpet, rolling like an armadillo into a standing position. His naked, wrinkly body jiggles a hello.
“My name is Fjällbo,” It greets, "great demon of the Underworld, destroyer of all those that stand before me. A mercifulness warrior, a skilled soldier. And I have been summoned here -- well, about an hour ago. I do apologize for my lateness, navigating your world isn’t always the easiest,” It flashes me a toothy grin.
“You’re…a demon?” I gulp.
Fjallbo takes a step closer to me, its face contorting into madness, its unruly eyebrows arching into a sinister smile. “Oh yes deary, I am." It croaks.
“What…what are you going to do to me?” My voice is barely a whisper, my body frozen in a fear I've never thought possible.
“Oh, I’m going to make you…*suffer*,” Its eyes darken as it takes a step further.
“You’re going to feel a pain you’ve...never felt before...” Another step. From here I can count every one of its dagger-sharp teeth.
“A pain…that you will surely...never forget.” It is mere inches from my face now, its sticky breath hot on my skin. It slowly reaches out its gleaming claws, and as quick as lightning it snatches a single screw before poofing out of existence.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I wail, my body crumbling over into the fetal position.“DAMN YOU IKEA DEMON, DAMN YOU!” | ...look, that's great and all but could you and your nine arms PLEASE help me get this fucking huge ass box up to the register!?! Sorry to yell l, but my kids a driving me crazy today. Btw nice hairdo. Wait, Kyle? Where's fucking Kyle...that kid! Kyyyyyle!!! There he is, you get over here mister and stay by me. Sorry about that. Ok bigguy.. push!!! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | You sigh, scratching your stomach absently. There aren't nearly enough meatballs in one plate to satisfy. Two plates might make a decent snack, but it would take at least ten to even begin to dull the aching edge of hunger. She always insists it's not healthy for you to have so many, smiling sweetly as she orders you one plate. You sigh, wistful as you follow her away from the line and the warming pan full of meatballs. Half the food on your plate is hardly edible. Why is it so very important that you consume green beans, again?
There are just some things more filling than others, though it's never really enough. She teases that you wouldn't stop until you ate Ikea out of business if she let you. Smile at her, faintly, as you force yourself to savor the meal.
The wandering begins soon after. You're not sure how long the two of you have been coming to this place, inspecting furnishings and fixtures neither of you seems to need. It's practically a ritual; consume a plate of meatballs, wander the labyrinthine showrooms, remark on this piece or that, then return home.
You can never quite recall when you took her as a companion. It has been some time, though. She is stoop-shouldered with wild, woolly gray hair sprouting every which way from her head. Today it's a bit tamer, straining the bounds of the waist-length braid. She taps her cane, sweeping it in an arc ahead of her, eyes fixed ahead.
She is not the easiest companion. That she insists on monitoring your meals is enough to frustrate, but she herself unsettles you in ways you cannot pin down. It is the small gestures, like how she grips your arm when children are nearby. The fact that every single meal comes only through her. The tremor you can never quite shake whenever she turns those empty blue eyes on you.
You pass through bedrooms for the third time this week. You like to linger here, but she always walks a little faster, the ball at the tip of her cane scraping over the floor double-time. A bit of obstinacy flares. There's quite a crowd today and a gentleman about your size is walking alongside. You match your steps to his, masking the sound of your feet, and slowly drop back. He takes your place immediately, weaving and merging through the crowd to get ahead.
You have not bought yourself long, but it is something of a satisfaction to see her pick up her pace to follow the fellow. She will figure it out soon enough. For now you retrace your steps to the bedrooms, standing in the middle of some diva child's pink paradise.
A little girl drags on the hand of an adult, pleading something or other. A little boy scoffs, tugging in the direction of a tunnel tented loft-bed fortress. Absently, you consider returning to the food court. Perhaps you can sneak another couple plates of meatballs before she finds you.
The tag on a child-sized vanity catches your eye. You've seen it a few times before and each time there is a strange twinge in your gut, but you never get to linger much. You check over your shoulder but there's no sign of her yet. You squat by the table and turn the tag over, underlining the words with your finger.
The letters tug at you. You run the syllables over your tongue, but they don't feel quite right. You flatten the vowels a bit, but no better. You try rounding them out and shoving them together. That feels closer.
You take a deep breath, blurting the five-syllable name as three syllables.
For a moment, you feel utterly ridiculous. You are a grown man squatting in front of a little girl's vanity, muttering a Swedish name you don't even--
No. You know it now that you have heard it correctly. There is a faint echo in your mind and so you repeat the word. The mirror on the vanity cracks. But there is no sound. The mirror has not cracked, your own face has cracked. A black line runs from the corner of your eye down to your chin. As you repeat the name, the crack shoots off in all directions, like a spiderweb snaking across your skin. After a fourth repetition of the name you know to be yours, bits begin to flake off.
Someone is screaming, but you are fascinated as first your lips, then your nose and cheeks crack apart and fall off. There is nothing underneath. You can see to the back of this hollow shell where light begins to show through.
In an instant, you are aware of exactly how many children are in the building.
You begin to recall things. Pleasant feelings. The cries of small humans silenced in the night, little bodies left stone cold and wide eyed for the morning light to find. The small, glowing embers of their souls warmed your hollowness, giving you substance for days at a time.
As pieces emerge from the fog, you wonder why you bothered to suppress yourself. You could have gone ages more like this, stranded and always hungry, always empty, never knowing why. On mere chance you found yourself drawn to this place where the language of your region is so accessible, recalling from a simple piece of furniture fragments of your own name. Is that why you always return?
"I wondered when it might be."
You have only a few bits and pieces of shell clinging to your outline and as you turn to face her, these last bits fall off. There has already been a stampede out of the area, but you still know where each child is, and now no one can see you. All that stands between you and your first real meal in decades is her.
Her hands rest on top of the stick, one folded over the other, her head tilted to the side. "It was not enough to observe you, you know. You buried yourself deep so I couldn't learn from you that way."
Uneasiness pricks through the immediate hunger. This face is familiar but the fog around it is slow to part.
"There's not very much information about your kind. It took so much research. We had to come to the states. I had to bring you and watch you every day."
It takes a moment to register that she is not speaking English the way she has the past several... decades. She has been with you for decades. Ever since you left... and she followed. And she speaks the tongue of your region, down to the local dialect.
"It took even longer to prepare. Time is the only way, in this case." She lets her cane fall to the ground, her hands still folded in front of her. "But I have no regrets. Tell me, are you hungry?"
A tear-stained face flashes through your mind, distorted with rage. Four little bodies, still and stiffening. The wrong house. You came to the wrong house. She had more knowledge than the other villagers. Even so, she could not destroy you, but she came so very close...
You move back, readying to flee. A lapse, and you know it as the air about you displaces. Faster than thought she has lunged forward and grasped you, empty eyes staring straight through to the wall.
"Are you hungry?" she asks again. "How much can you hold?" Then seals her mouth across your face as the full, blazing fire of her aged soul pours into the aching emptiness, straining you, stretching, swelling to burst... | My family was having fun following a few drunk college kids through IKEA. They were loudly mispronouncing every item they could find. Our laughter added to their enjoyment. After several rooms of these antics I noticed a door that I swear didn't exist moments before.
This isn't really an uncommon occurrence in IKEA and was about to dismiss it when a colorful furry emerged. Whoever was in the outfit tried to scare my daughter. However, just at that moment the whole room erupted in laughter at the most recent mispronunciation.
As the laughter boomed, I swear I heard a distant whistle followed several dings of a bell. The continuing dings seemed to confuse the furry who quickly returned through the door. As it shut I heard "2319! We have a 23..." *slam* | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "I'm sorry," I said, for what had to be the tenth time since the interview started. "What am I here to do, again? Exactly?"
The manager of the IKEA, a pugnacious and pot-bellied little man settling unpleasantly into middle age, turned his head to glare back at me. "Get rid of the pests!" he repeated, clarifying absolutely nothing. The fluorescent lights glinted off his bald egg of a head, piercing through the meager hairs that attempted to cover the expanse of sweaty scalp. "You have pest experience, yes?"
I winced. Back in college, as I worked far too optimistically towards my liberal arts degree, I'd had to deal with several rodential beasties that infiltrated the half-dilapidated house where I'd landed such a compelling deal on rent. My skills at catching rats with overturned laundry baskets and swatting bats out of the air with tennis rackets soon became well known among the female community, and landed me several invitations to sorority houses (although they never turned out quite like my imagination suggested).
It had been my buddy, Nate, who suggested that I stick this fact onto my resume. "Come on, at least it's something!" he pointed out, crumpling up another beer can and tossing it onto its fellows in the recycling bin. "And really, no one reads resumes any longer. They just look to see if they're 'busy' enough."
I sat at the table nearby, wincing as I tapped my pencil against my lips, looking down at the sadly empty page. "Yeah, okay," I finally decided, jotting it down. "Maybe I'll just have to go to Home Depot and pick up some traps."
Now, following after the manager as his yellow shirt led me deeper into the bowels of IKEA, I had the sneaking suspicion that I'd made a terrible mistake. Each time I looked down at the implements he'd pressed into my hands, this suspicion grew stronger.
"I'm hunting pests," I repeated. "But shouldn't I be using traps? What's with... these?"
The manager just snorted. Apparently, I no longer deserved the use of words. Equally apparent was that I was the only candidate desperate enough to take on this job.
And he was right, there. Months of failing to land any cushy office work eventually led me, at my wits' end, to start casting a wider net. And hell, at this point I was more than happy to sell a family with screaming toddlers on a crappily made, overpriced set of living room furniture if it meant putting food in my sadly bare fridge.
"Yes, we have one," the manager suddenly announced. He spun on one foot, so quickly that I nearly collided with him. His finger stabbed out, pointing to one of the objects he'd shoved into my hands. "See the glow?"
I stared down in shock at the metal crucifix, which I'd assumed that I was putting away where it would be for sale as the Bjorn-Tuun. About eight inches in length, it now emitted a pale glow, and felt slightly warm in my hand. I nearly dropped it.
"What's going on?" I stammered. Was this some sort of a joke?
The manager, meanwhile, was looking around. "Ah! There!" He pointed down a hallway between two shelves stacked tall with boxes. Following his finger, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement in the shadows. "Pest!"
"What? Is it a rat or something?"
"No! You go, get rid of it!" And he gave me a shove in that direction with a sweaty hand.
I had no idea what was happening. I guessed that the smart move here was probably to drop the crucifix, as well as the other object the manager had shoved into my hands, and get the hell out of here. Maybe working for McDonald's wouldn't be quite so horrible, after all.
But I'm kind of known for making stupid decisions. Why stop now?
I shifted around the objects in my hands. I held the crucifix in my off-hand, and tugged at the handle of the other object. With a soft hiss, the blade slipped free of its scabbard, which I dropped, not having a third hand to hold onto it.
The sword was a little under three feet long, with a cross-shaped hilt. It felt strangely light in my hand. I had no idea why IKEA believed that a sword was a good idea for killing rats, but if I impressed my boss, I could get the job - and then switch over to normal rat traps.
I came around the corner of the warehouse. The glowing crucifix freaked me out, but it at least provided some illumination. I held it up, seeing movement ahead. I hefted the sword, getting ready to strike at-
-at a tiny little red humanoid, squirming around as it flapped tiny batlike leather wings, waving what looked like an oversized fork??
"What the hell?" I gasped out, jumping back, staring down at the thing with wide eyes.
"Yes, Hell!" shouted the manager, from behind me. "Strike! Pest!"
The little demon - and what else could it be? What was going on, was I losing my mind? - cackled, a high little tone that grated at my ears like nails on a chalkboard. Hefting that fork - no, a trident! Three tines! - it leapt at me.
Instinctively, I swung the sword at it, even as I struggled to not close my eyes.
Somehow, I hit.
The sword flashed through the demon with a sound like steam escaping from a kettle. There was a brief flash of white, and then the little red creature was falling back. Even as it lurched away, its body disintegrated into a tiny little pile of ash.
"What the he- heck is going on?" I cried out, spinning around to look at the IKEA manager. "What was that? Was that a demon? Am I being drugged?"
"Drugs?" he repeated, frowning. "No drugs. We test for that. But yes, you did a good job with the pests! You are hired! You kill these when they come. Cross shows you where they are."
"But where do they come from?" I asked, sensing the man was about to turn away.
He frowned at me, like I'd asked an especially stupid question. "Hell, of course. Demons. Summoned by name."
"But who's saying their names?"
His finger stabbed out. "You! Stupid shoppers, cannot even pronounce the names of the furniture! Summon demons instead!"
"What, when we say Torboonsin, it's summoning up-"
I didn't even finish the sentence. A loud poof went off near me, and something cackled near my ear. Instinctively, my hand came up - the one holding the sword.
"See?" said the manager, as dust rained down on me. "Your job is to get rid of them. And don't let customers see!" A glint came into his eye. "Fifteen dollars an hour, if you keep your mouth shut!"
I didn't hesitate any longer. That was worth any amount of weirdness. "Deal."
"Great." He turned away. "Talk to HR at the end of the day. And don't let them lick you."
"Wait, what happens if they lick-"
But the manager was already gone.
I looked down at the crucifix in my hands. I'd never been especially religious, but maybe the cross didn't know that? In any case, it was still glowing.
I tightened my grip on the sword. Oh well. Time to go to work.
*More stories at /r/Romanticon* | My family was having fun following a few drunk college kids through IKEA. They were loudly mispronouncing every item they could find. Our laughter added to their enjoyment. After several rooms of these antics I noticed a door that I swear didn't exist moments before.
This isn't really an uncommon occurrence in IKEA and was about to dismiss it when a colorful furry emerged. Whoever was in the outfit tried to scare my daughter. However, just at that moment the whole room erupted in laughter at the most recent mispronunciation.
As the laughter boomed, I swear I heard a distant whistle followed several dings of a bell. The continuing dings seemed to confuse the furry who quickly returned through the door. As it shut I heard "2319! We have a 23..." *slam* | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | And there it was, my new bookshelf, a few days too early. You see, my husband was away on business, and as much as I don't want to subscribe to gender stereotypes, he was the one who usually handles these sort of things.
The doorbell rang. It was my nosy neighbour Francine.
"Was that a delivery truck I spotted earlier? What did you get? Is Garrett back?" She tries to peer around me.
"Yup, it was. A bookshelf. And no, he isn't."
"That's a shame. Otherwise he could help you with it. He's so good with his hands."
Don't punch an old lady, don't do it.
"Yes well, thanks for that. Got to go, lots to do." I close the door in her face.
Good with his hands huh? Who the hell talks that way about someone else's husband? God I needed a drink.
I pour myself a glass of Chianti and settled in for another episode of the bachelorette. Yes, I watch keeping up with the kardashians too. Bite me. The Chianti floods my body, sweeping through my insides, leaving traces of warmth everywhere. I giggle my way through the show, wistfully remembering the days where Garrett would plan spontaneous dates and shower me with love and affection. Now he showers me with his sleep apnea induced snoring.
After the show was done, I realised I was a fair bit tipsy. Being tipsy sometimes means making bad decisions, like deciding to build ikea furniture. I grabbed the instruction sheet and giggled at the product name. What the hell was this? Brusali? Sounds like some kind of pasta. I say it again a few times, laughing. God I should have gone for the Billy. Then i could have said, 'i need to get home to Billy' and people would think I was having a torrid affair.
"Why are you laughing like that?"
I look up to see this most gorgeous shirtless man, with salt and pepper hair, and abs for days. I stare shamelessly before realising that this was a strange man, in my house.
"Did you break in?"
"You conjured me. I am here to tempt you to sin."
"Come again?"
He looked at me, a bored lazy look on his face. "I am a demon. Does that paint a clearer picture?"
"Right. I think I had too much wine."
"Are you ready to fall?"
"More like barf."
"I mean fall into sin."
"What was in that wine?" I stumble away from him, running into the kitchen for some water.
He follows me, leaning lazily against the counter, watching as I gulped down some water and splashed my face with the rest of it.
"You don't look like a demon."
"How would you know? Have u seen one before?"
Good point.
"Can you please leave?"
"Does the word demon mean anything to you?"
As I stared at him, and he stared back, I knew one thing for certain: I was never shopping at Ikea again. | My family was having fun following a few drunk college kids through IKEA. They were loudly mispronouncing every item they could find. Our laughter added to their enjoyment. After several rooms of these antics I noticed a door that I swear didn't exist moments before.
This isn't really an uncommon occurrence in IKEA and was about to dismiss it when a colorful furry emerged. Whoever was in the outfit tried to scare my daughter. However, just at that moment the whole room erupted in laughter at the most recent mispronunciation.
As the laughter boomed, I swear I heard a distant whistle followed several dings of a bell. The continuing dings seemed to confuse the furry who quickly returned through the door. As it shut I heard "2319! We have a 23..." *slam* | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | My family was having fun following a few drunk college kids through IKEA. They were loudly mispronouncing every item they could find. Our laughter added to their enjoyment. After several rooms of these antics I noticed a door that I swear didn't exist moments before.
This isn't really an uncommon occurrence in IKEA and was about to dismiss it when a colorful furry emerged. Whoever was in the outfit tried to scare my daughter. However, just at that moment the whole room erupted in laughter at the most recent mispronunciation.
As the laughter boomed, I swear I heard a distant whistle followed several dings of a bell. The continuing dings seemed to confuse the furry who quickly returned through the door. As it shut I heard "2319! We have a 23..." *slam* | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | You sigh, scratching your stomach absently. There aren't nearly enough meatballs in one plate to satisfy. Two plates might make a decent snack, but it would take at least ten to even begin to dull the aching edge of hunger. She always insists it's not healthy for you to have so many, smiling sweetly as she orders you one plate. You sigh, wistful as you follow her away from the line and the warming pan full of meatballs. Half the food on your plate is hardly edible. Why is it so very important that you consume green beans, again?
There are just some things more filling than others, though it's never really enough. She teases that you wouldn't stop until you ate Ikea out of business if she let you. Smile at her, faintly, as you force yourself to savor the meal.
The wandering begins soon after. You're not sure how long the two of you have been coming to this place, inspecting furnishings and fixtures neither of you seems to need. It's practically a ritual; consume a plate of meatballs, wander the labyrinthine showrooms, remark on this piece or that, then return home.
You can never quite recall when you took her as a companion. It has been some time, though. She is stoop-shouldered with wild, woolly gray hair sprouting every which way from her head. Today it's a bit tamer, straining the bounds of the waist-length braid. She taps her cane, sweeping it in an arc ahead of her, eyes fixed ahead.
She is not the easiest companion. That she insists on monitoring your meals is enough to frustrate, but she herself unsettles you in ways you cannot pin down. It is the small gestures, like how she grips your arm when children are nearby. The fact that every single meal comes only through her. The tremor you can never quite shake whenever she turns those empty blue eyes on you.
You pass through bedrooms for the third time this week. You like to linger here, but she always walks a little faster, the ball at the tip of her cane scraping over the floor double-time. A bit of obstinacy flares. There's quite a crowd today and a gentleman about your size is walking alongside. You match your steps to his, masking the sound of your feet, and slowly drop back. He takes your place immediately, weaving and merging through the crowd to get ahead.
You have not bought yourself long, but it is something of a satisfaction to see her pick up her pace to follow the fellow. She will figure it out soon enough. For now you retrace your steps to the bedrooms, standing in the middle of some diva child's pink paradise.
A little girl drags on the hand of an adult, pleading something or other. A little boy scoffs, tugging in the direction of a tunnel tented loft-bed fortress. Absently, you consider returning to the food court. Perhaps you can sneak another couple plates of meatballs before she finds you.
The tag on a child-sized vanity catches your eye. You've seen it a few times before and each time there is a strange twinge in your gut, but you never get to linger much. You check over your shoulder but there's no sign of her yet. You squat by the table and turn the tag over, underlining the words with your finger.
The letters tug at you. You run the syllables over your tongue, but they don't feel quite right. You flatten the vowels a bit, but no better. You try rounding them out and shoving them together. That feels closer.
You take a deep breath, blurting the five-syllable name as three syllables.
For a moment, you feel utterly ridiculous. You are a grown man squatting in front of a little girl's vanity, muttering a Swedish name you don't even--
No. You know it now that you have heard it correctly. There is a faint echo in your mind and so you repeat the word. The mirror on the vanity cracks. But there is no sound. The mirror has not cracked, your own face has cracked. A black line runs from the corner of your eye down to your chin. As you repeat the name, the crack shoots off in all directions, like a spiderweb snaking across your skin. After a fourth repetition of the name you know to be yours, bits begin to flake off.
Someone is screaming, but you are fascinated as first your lips, then your nose and cheeks crack apart and fall off. There is nothing underneath. You can see to the back of this hollow shell where light begins to show through.
In an instant, you are aware of exactly how many children are in the building.
You begin to recall things. Pleasant feelings. The cries of small humans silenced in the night, little bodies left stone cold and wide eyed for the morning light to find. The small, glowing embers of their souls warmed your hollowness, giving you substance for days at a time.
As pieces emerge from the fog, you wonder why you bothered to suppress yourself. You could have gone ages more like this, stranded and always hungry, always empty, never knowing why. On mere chance you found yourself drawn to this place where the language of your region is so accessible, recalling from a simple piece of furniture fragments of your own name. Is that why you always return?
"I wondered when it might be."
You have only a few bits and pieces of shell clinging to your outline and as you turn to face her, these last bits fall off. There has already been a stampede out of the area, but you still know where each child is, and now no one can see you. All that stands between you and your first real meal in decades is her.
Her hands rest on top of the stick, one folded over the other, her head tilted to the side. "It was not enough to observe you, you know. You buried yourself deep so I couldn't learn from you that way."
Uneasiness pricks through the immediate hunger. This face is familiar but the fog around it is slow to part.
"There's not very much information about your kind. It took so much research. We had to come to the states. I had to bring you and watch you every day."
It takes a moment to register that she is not speaking English the way she has the past several... decades. She has been with you for decades. Ever since you left... and she followed. And she speaks the tongue of your region, down to the local dialect.
"It took even longer to prepare. Time is the only way, in this case." She lets her cane fall to the ground, her hands still folded in front of her. "But I have no regrets. Tell me, are you hungry?"
A tear-stained face flashes through your mind, distorted with rage. Four little bodies, still and stiffening. The wrong house. You came to the wrong house. She had more knowledge than the other villagers. Even so, she could not destroy you, but she came so very close...
You move back, readying to flee. A lapse, and you know it as the air about you displaces. Faster than thought she has lunged forward and grasped you, empty eyes staring straight through to the wall.
"Are you hungry?" she asks again. "How much can you hold?" Then seals her mouth across your face as the full, blazing fire of her aged soul pours into the aching emptiness, straining you, stretching, swelling to burst... | It was my first time buying from Ikea. It was also the last time buying from Ikea.
My friend TJ and I had gone to Ikea to pick up a desk, a kitchen table, and a few other things we needed for our apartment. We decided to tackle the kitchen first.
"Hey Rod, how do you say this name here? I guess their all funky, but this one sounds especially weird." TJ was pointing at a table in the catalog he had before him.
I looked at the image and its attendant title. Kullaberg. It looked like the name of a castle.
"I believe it's pronounced," and here I put on a ridiculous Swedish accent, "Kullaberg!"
It felt like flash grenade going off in my face. I saw crimson. We both began choking and coughing from the sulfurous smoke billowing from the box with the kitchen table in it.
"What is thy wish, my lord?" The nine-foot-high demon before us had curled horns, hooves, and a pitchfork. He was one of the traditional demons.
"You're a pretty traditional demon," TJ remarked.
"I have served my masters for millennia; now I shall serve thee. Bid me to carry out thine wicked will. Do you have murderous or lustful thoughts? Do you want the powers of the earth? Would you like to be immortal?" The demon was really getting into his role; he'd been doing this for a while.
"I guess it wouldn't be so bad to be King of Fiji... or Seattle. I guess we could do both and then just trade kingdoms depending on weather and time of year. What do you think, TJ? Do you want any of the stuff he mentioned?" The situation was new to me; also, I'd only gotten like three hours of sleep. I thought I'd get some input from my better-rested friend.
"Yeah... maybe. We just need some furniture right now. Actually, now that you're here, can you tell us how to pronounce this word?" TJ pointed to the Swedish-sounding word in the catalog.
The demon looked shocked for a few seconds. Then he did a slight shake-of-the-head-raise-of-the-eyebrows thing and looked at the word.
"Of course, that is mine own appellation. It is pronounced," and here the demon went into his genuine Swedish accent, "KUUULLABERRRG!"
More smoke, more wretched sulfur smell, and another, identical, NBA-sized demon appeared.
"What is thy wish, my lord?" The new demon was now speaking.
The old demon looked shocked (and I thought a little hurt; he may be out of a job, soon). He looked down at his hands and torso, and then looked back up and fixed his gaze on the newly-minted demon.
"You know what this means, right man?" TJ asked.
"No. I'm still a bit too tired to think. I think I'm actually falling asleep. Did we get the furniture yet?" I didn't really have it in me to stay awake much longer.
"No, Rod. Forget the furniture. There are way more important things we now have access to." He sounded creepily excited.
---------------------------
Two weeks later we were drinking lemonade, sitting in the bleachers at our college gym on campus. We were quite riveted with the spectacle before us.
"Do a layup! Use your ultra-speed! No, not like THAT! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, KULLABERG!" At TJ's mention of this name, all ten players turned to look at TJ at once. "I just meant Kullaberg 7!"
More billowing smoke, ashes, crimson glare, and another identical demon.
TJ cut the demon off before he started could introduce himself, "Yeah, I know the spiel, demon. Get on the bleachers with the other seventy substitutes; you were an accident."
TJ was a demanding and heartless coach; the new Kullaberg hung his mass-produced head in shame and went to go sit on the bleachers with the others. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "I'm sorry," I said, for what had to be the tenth time since the interview started. "What am I here to do, again? Exactly?"
The manager of the IKEA, a pugnacious and pot-bellied little man settling unpleasantly into middle age, turned his head to glare back at me. "Get rid of the pests!" he repeated, clarifying absolutely nothing. The fluorescent lights glinted off his bald egg of a head, piercing through the meager hairs that attempted to cover the expanse of sweaty scalp. "You have pest experience, yes?"
I winced. Back in college, as I worked far too optimistically towards my liberal arts degree, I'd had to deal with several rodential beasties that infiltrated the half-dilapidated house where I'd landed such a compelling deal on rent. My skills at catching rats with overturned laundry baskets and swatting bats out of the air with tennis rackets soon became well known among the female community, and landed me several invitations to sorority houses (although they never turned out quite like my imagination suggested).
It had been my buddy, Nate, who suggested that I stick this fact onto my resume. "Come on, at least it's something!" he pointed out, crumpling up another beer can and tossing it onto its fellows in the recycling bin. "And really, no one reads resumes any longer. They just look to see if they're 'busy' enough."
I sat at the table nearby, wincing as I tapped my pencil against my lips, looking down at the sadly empty page. "Yeah, okay," I finally decided, jotting it down. "Maybe I'll just have to go to Home Depot and pick up some traps."
Now, following after the manager as his yellow shirt led me deeper into the bowels of IKEA, I had the sneaking suspicion that I'd made a terrible mistake. Each time I looked down at the implements he'd pressed into my hands, this suspicion grew stronger.
"I'm hunting pests," I repeated. "But shouldn't I be using traps? What's with... these?"
The manager just snorted. Apparently, I no longer deserved the use of words. Equally apparent was that I was the only candidate desperate enough to take on this job.
And he was right, there. Months of failing to land any cushy office work eventually led me, at my wits' end, to start casting a wider net. And hell, at this point I was more than happy to sell a family with screaming toddlers on a crappily made, overpriced set of living room furniture if it meant putting food in my sadly bare fridge.
"Yes, we have one," the manager suddenly announced. He spun on one foot, so quickly that I nearly collided with him. His finger stabbed out, pointing to one of the objects he'd shoved into my hands. "See the glow?"
I stared down in shock at the metal crucifix, which I'd assumed that I was putting away where it would be for sale as the Bjorn-Tuun. About eight inches in length, it now emitted a pale glow, and felt slightly warm in my hand. I nearly dropped it.
"What's going on?" I stammered. Was this some sort of a joke?
The manager, meanwhile, was looking around. "Ah! There!" He pointed down a hallway between two shelves stacked tall with boxes. Following his finger, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement in the shadows. "Pest!"
"What? Is it a rat or something?"
"No! You go, get rid of it!" And he gave me a shove in that direction with a sweaty hand.
I had no idea what was happening. I guessed that the smart move here was probably to drop the crucifix, as well as the other object the manager had shoved into my hands, and get the hell out of here. Maybe working for McDonald's wouldn't be quite so horrible, after all.
But I'm kind of known for making stupid decisions. Why stop now?
I shifted around the objects in my hands. I held the crucifix in my off-hand, and tugged at the handle of the other object. With a soft hiss, the blade slipped free of its scabbard, which I dropped, not having a third hand to hold onto it.
The sword was a little under three feet long, with a cross-shaped hilt. It felt strangely light in my hand. I had no idea why IKEA believed that a sword was a good idea for killing rats, but if I impressed my boss, I could get the job - and then switch over to normal rat traps.
I came around the corner of the warehouse. The glowing crucifix freaked me out, but it at least provided some illumination. I held it up, seeing movement ahead. I hefted the sword, getting ready to strike at-
-at a tiny little red humanoid, squirming around as it flapped tiny batlike leather wings, waving what looked like an oversized fork??
"What the hell?" I gasped out, jumping back, staring down at the thing with wide eyes.
"Yes, Hell!" shouted the manager, from behind me. "Strike! Pest!"
The little demon - and what else could it be? What was going on, was I losing my mind? - cackled, a high little tone that grated at my ears like nails on a chalkboard. Hefting that fork - no, a trident! Three tines! - it leapt at me.
Instinctively, I swung the sword at it, even as I struggled to not close my eyes.
Somehow, I hit.
The sword flashed through the demon with a sound like steam escaping from a kettle. There was a brief flash of white, and then the little red creature was falling back. Even as it lurched away, its body disintegrated into a tiny little pile of ash.
"What the he- heck is going on?" I cried out, spinning around to look at the IKEA manager. "What was that? Was that a demon? Am I being drugged?"
"Drugs?" he repeated, frowning. "No drugs. We test for that. But yes, you did a good job with the pests! You are hired! You kill these when they come. Cross shows you where they are."
"But where do they come from?" I asked, sensing the man was about to turn away.
He frowned at me, like I'd asked an especially stupid question. "Hell, of course. Demons. Summoned by name."
"But who's saying their names?"
His finger stabbed out. "You! Stupid shoppers, cannot even pronounce the names of the furniture! Summon demons instead!"
"What, when we say Torboonsin, it's summoning up-"
I didn't even finish the sentence. A loud poof went off near me, and something cackled near my ear. Instinctively, my hand came up - the one holding the sword.
"See?" said the manager, as dust rained down on me. "Your job is to get rid of them. And don't let customers see!" A glint came into his eye. "Fifteen dollars an hour, if you keep your mouth shut!"
I didn't hesitate any longer. That was worth any amount of weirdness. "Deal."
"Great." He turned away. "Talk to HR at the end of the day. And don't let them lick you."
"Wait, what happens if they lick-"
But the manager was already gone.
I looked down at the crucifix in my hands. I'd never been especially religious, but maybe the cross didn't know that? In any case, it was still glowing.
I tightened my grip on the sword. Oh well. Time to go to work.
*More stories at /r/Romanticon* | It was my first time buying from Ikea. It was also the last time buying from Ikea.
My friend TJ and I had gone to Ikea to pick up a desk, a kitchen table, and a few other things we needed for our apartment. We decided to tackle the kitchen first.
"Hey Rod, how do you say this name here? I guess their all funky, but this one sounds especially weird." TJ was pointing at a table in the catalog he had before him.
I looked at the image and its attendant title. Kullaberg. It looked like the name of a castle.
"I believe it's pronounced," and here I put on a ridiculous Swedish accent, "Kullaberg!"
It felt like flash grenade going off in my face. I saw crimson. We both began choking and coughing from the sulfurous smoke billowing from the box with the kitchen table in it.
"What is thy wish, my lord?" The nine-foot-high demon before us had curled horns, hooves, and a pitchfork. He was one of the traditional demons.
"You're a pretty traditional demon," TJ remarked.
"I have served my masters for millennia; now I shall serve thee. Bid me to carry out thine wicked will. Do you have murderous or lustful thoughts? Do you want the powers of the earth? Would you like to be immortal?" The demon was really getting into his role; he'd been doing this for a while.
"I guess it wouldn't be so bad to be King of Fiji... or Seattle. I guess we could do both and then just trade kingdoms depending on weather and time of year. What do you think, TJ? Do you want any of the stuff he mentioned?" The situation was new to me; also, I'd only gotten like three hours of sleep. I thought I'd get some input from my better-rested friend.
"Yeah... maybe. We just need some furniture right now. Actually, now that you're here, can you tell us how to pronounce this word?" TJ pointed to the Swedish-sounding word in the catalog.
The demon looked shocked for a few seconds. Then he did a slight shake-of-the-head-raise-of-the-eyebrows thing and looked at the word.
"Of course, that is mine own appellation. It is pronounced," and here the demon went into his genuine Swedish accent, "KUUULLABERRRG!"
More smoke, more wretched sulfur smell, and another, identical, NBA-sized demon appeared.
"What is thy wish, my lord?" The new demon was now speaking.
The old demon looked shocked (and I thought a little hurt; he may be out of a job, soon). He looked down at his hands and torso, and then looked back up and fixed his gaze on the newly-minted demon.
"You know what this means, right man?" TJ asked.
"No. I'm still a bit too tired to think. I think I'm actually falling asleep. Did we get the furniture yet?" I didn't really have it in me to stay awake much longer.
"No, Rod. Forget the furniture. There are way more important things we now have access to." He sounded creepily excited.
---------------------------
Two weeks later we were drinking lemonade, sitting in the bleachers at our college gym on campus. We were quite riveted with the spectacle before us.
"Do a layup! Use your ultra-speed! No, not like THAT! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, KULLABERG!" At TJ's mention of this name, all ten players turned to look at TJ at once. "I just meant Kullaberg 7!"
More billowing smoke, ashes, crimson glare, and another identical demon.
TJ cut the demon off before he started could introduce himself, "Yeah, I know the spiel, demon. Get on the bleachers with the other seventy substitutes; you were an accident."
TJ was a demanding and heartless coach; the new Kullaberg hung his mass-produced head in shame and went to go sit on the bleachers with the others. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | And there it was, my new bookshelf, a few days too early. You see, my husband was away on business, and as much as I don't want to subscribe to gender stereotypes, he was the one who usually handles these sort of things.
The doorbell rang. It was my nosy neighbour Francine.
"Was that a delivery truck I spotted earlier? What did you get? Is Garrett back?" She tries to peer around me.
"Yup, it was. A bookshelf. And no, he isn't."
"That's a shame. Otherwise he could help you with it. He's so good with his hands."
Don't punch an old lady, don't do it.
"Yes well, thanks for that. Got to go, lots to do." I close the door in her face.
Good with his hands huh? Who the hell talks that way about someone else's husband? God I needed a drink.
I pour myself a glass of Chianti and settled in for another episode of the bachelorette. Yes, I watch keeping up with the kardashians too. Bite me. The Chianti floods my body, sweeping through my insides, leaving traces of warmth everywhere. I giggle my way through the show, wistfully remembering the days where Garrett would plan spontaneous dates and shower me with love and affection. Now he showers me with his sleep apnea induced snoring.
After the show was done, I realised I was a fair bit tipsy. Being tipsy sometimes means making bad decisions, like deciding to build ikea furniture. I grabbed the instruction sheet and giggled at the product name. What the hell was this? Brusali? Sounds like some kind of pasta. I say it again a few times, laughing. God I should have gone for the Billy. Then i could have said, 'i need to get home to Billy' and people would think I was having a torrid affair.
"Why are you laughing like that?"
I look up to see this most gorgeous shirtless man, with salt and pepper hair, and abs for days. I stare shamelessly before realising that this was a strange man, in my house.
"Did you break in?"
"You conjured me. I am here to tempt you to sin."
"Come again?"
He looked at me, a bored lazy look on his face. "I am a demon. Does that paint a clearer picture?"
"Right. I think I had too much wine."
"Are you ready to fall?"
"More like barf."
"I mean fall into sin."
"What was in that wine?" I stumble away from him, running into the kitchen for some water.
He follows me, leaning lazily against the counter, watching as I gulped down some water and splashed my face with the rest of it.
"You don't look like a demon."
"How would you know? Have u seen one before?"
Good point.
"Can you please leave?"
"Does the word demon mean anything to you?"
As I stared at him, and he stared back, I knew one thing for certain: I was never shopping at Ikea again. | It was my first time buying from Ikea. It was also the last time buying from Ikea.
My friend TJ and I had gone to Ikea to pick up a desk, a kitchen table, and a few other things we needed for our apartment. We decided to tackle the kitchen first.
"Hey Rod, how do you say this name here? I guess their all funky, but this one sounds especially weird." TJ was pointing at a table in the catalog he had before him.
I looked at the image and its attendant title. Kullaberg. It looked like the name of a castle.
"I believe it's pronounced," and here I put on a ridiculous Swedish accent, "Kullaberg!"
It felt like flash grenade going off in my face. I saw crimson. We both began choking and coughing from the sulfurous smoke billowing from the box with the kitchen table in it.
"What is thy wish, my lord?" The nine-foot-high demon before us had curled horns, hooves, and a pitchfork. He was one of the traditional demons.
"You're a pretty traditional demon," TJ remarked.
"I have served my masters for millennia; now I shall serve thee. Bid me to carry out thine wicked will. Do you have murderous or lustful thoughts? Do you want the powers of the earth? Would you like to be immortal?" The demon was really getting into his role; he'd been doing this for a while.
"I guess it wouldn't be so bad to be King of Fiji... or Seattle. I guess we could do both and then just trade kingdoms depending on weather and time of year. What do you think, TJ? Do you want any of the stuff he mentioned?" The situation was new to me; also, I'd only gotten like three hours of sleep. I thought I'd get some input from my better-rested friend.
"Yeah... maybe. We just need some furniture right now. Actually, now that you're here, can you tell us how to pronounce this word?" TJ pointed to the Swedish-sounding word in the catalog.
The demon looked shocked for a few seconds. Then he did a slight shake-of-the-head-raise-of-the-eyebrows thing and looked at the word.
"Of course, that is mine own appellation. It is pronounced," and here the demon went into his genuine Swedish accent, "KUUULLABERRRG!"
More smoke, more wretched sulfur smell, and another, identical, NBA-sized demon appeared.
"What is thy wish, my lord?" The new demon was now speaking.
The old demon looked shocked (and I thought a little hurt; he may be out of a job, soon). He looked down at his hands and torso, and then looked back up and fixed his gaze on the newly-minted demon.
"You know what this means, right man?" TJ asked.
"No. I'm still a bit too tired to think. I think I'm actually falling asleep. Did we get the furniture yet?" I didn't really have it in me to stay awake much longer.
"No, Rod. Forget the furniture. There are way more important things we now have access to." He sounded creepily excited.
---------------------------
Two weeks later we were drinking lemonade, sitting in the bleachers at our college gym on campus. We were quite riveted with the spectacle before us.
"Do a layup! Use your ultra-speed! No, not like THAT! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, KULLABERG!" At TJ's mention of this name, all ten players turned to look at TJ at once. "I just meant Kullaberg 7!"
More billowing smoke, ashes, crimson glare, and another identical demon.
TJ cut the demon off before he started could introduce himself, "Yeah, I know the spiel, demon. Get on the bleachers with the other seventy substitutes; you were an accident."
TJ was a demanding and heartless coach; the new Kullaberg hung his mass-produced head in shame and went to go sit on the bleachers with the others. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "I'm sorry," I said, for what had to be the tenth time since the interview started. "What am I here to do, again? Exactly?"
The manager of the IKEA, a pugnacious and pot-bellied little man settling unpleasantly into middle age, turned his head to glare back at me. "Get rid of the pests!" he repeated, clarifying absolutely nothing. The fluorescent lights glinted off his bald egg of a head, piercing through the meager hairs that attempted to cover the expanse of sweaty scalp. "You have pest experience, yes?"
I winced. Back in college, as I worked far too optimistically towards my liberal arts degree, I'd had to deal with several rodential beasties that infiltrated the half-dilapidated house where I'd landed such a compelling deal on rent. My skills at catching rats with overturned laundry baskets and swatting bats out of the air with tennis rackets soon became well known among the female community, and landed me several invitations to sorority houses (although they never turned out quite like my imagination suggested).
It had been my buddy, Nate, who suggested that I stick this fact onto my resume. "Come on, at least it's something!" he pointed out, crumpling up another beer can and tossing it onto its fellows in the recycling bin. "And really, no one reads resumes any longer. They just look to see if they're 'busy' enough."
I sat at the table nearby, wincing as I tapped my pencil against my lips, looking down at the sadly empty page. "Yeah, okay," I finally decided, jotting it down. "Maybe I'll just have to go to Home Depot and pick up some traps."
Now, following after the manager as his yellow shirt led me deeper into the bowels of IKEA, I had the sneaking suspicion that I'd made a terrible mistake. Each time I looked down at the implements he'd pressed into my hands, this suspicion grew stronger.
"I'm hunting pests," I repeated. "But shouldn't I be using traps? What's with... these?"
The manager just snorted. Apparently, I no longer deserved the use of words. Equally apparent was that I was the only candidate desperate enough to take on this job.
And he was right, there. Months of failing to land any cushy office work eventually led me, at my wits' end, to start casting a wider net. And hell, at this point I was more than happy to sell a family with screaming toddlers on a crappily made, overpriced set of living room furniture if it meant putting food in my sadly bare fridge.
"Yes, we have one," the manager suddenly announced. He spun on one foot, so quickly that I nearly collided with him. His finger stabbed out, pointing to one of the objects he'd shoved into my hands. "See the glow?"
I stared down in shock at the metal crucifix, which I'd assumed that I was putting away where it would be for sale as the Bjorn-Tuun. About eight inches in length, it now emitted a pale glow, and felt slightly warm in my hand. I nearly dropped it.
"What's going on?" I stammered. Was this some sort of a joke?
The manager, meanwhile, was looking around. "Ah! There!" He pointed down a hallway between two shelves stacked tall with boxes. Following his finger, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement in the shadows. "Pest!"
"What? Is it a rat or something?"
"No! You go, get rid of it!" And he gave me a shove in that direction with a sweaty hand.
I had no idea what was happening. I guessed that the smart move here was probably to drop the crucifix, as well as the other object the manager had shoved into my hands, and get the hell out of here. Maybe working for McDonald's wouldn't be quite so horrible, after all.
But I'm kind of known for making stupid decisions. Why stop now?
I shifted around the objects in my hands. I held the crucifix in my off-hand, and tugged at the handle of the other object. With a soft hiss, the blade slipped free of its scabbard, which I dropped, not having a third hand to hold onto it.
The sword was a little under three feet long, with a cross-shaped hilt. It felt strangely light in my hand. I had no idea why IKEA believed that a sword was a good idea for killing rats, but if I impressed my boss, I could get the job - and then switch over to normal rat traps.
I came around the corner of the warehouse. The glowing crucifix freaked me out, but it at least provided some illumination. I held it up, seeing movement ahead. I hefted the sword, getting ready to strike at-
-at a tiny little red humanoid, squirming around as it flapped tiny batlike leather wings, waving what looked like an oversized fork??
"What the hell?" I gasped out, jumping back, staring down at the thing with wide eyes.
"Yes, Hell!" shouted the manager, from behind me. "Strike! Pest!"
The little demon - and what else could it be? What was going on, was I losing my mind? - cackled, a high little tone that grated at my ears like nails on a chalkboard. Hefting that fork - no, a trident! Three tines! - it leapt at me.
Instinctively, I swung the sword at it, even as I struggled to not close my eyes.
Somehow, I hit.
The sword flashed through the demon with a sound like steam escaping from a kettle. There was a brief flash of white, and then the little red creature was falling back. Even as it lurched away, its body disintegrated into a tiny little pile of ash.
"What the he- heck is going on?" I cried out, spinning around to look at the IKEA manager. "What was that? Was that a demon? Am I being drugged?"
"Drugs?" he repeated, frowning. "No drugs. We test for that. But yes, you did a good job with the pests! You are hired! You kill these when they come. Cross shows you where they are."
"But where do they come from?" I asked, sensing the man was about to turn away.
He frowned at me, like I'd asked an especially stupid question. "Hell, of course. Demons. Summoned by name."
"But who's saying their names?"
His finger stabbed out. "You! Stupid shoppers, cannot even pronounce the names of the furniture! Summon demons instead!"
"What, when we say Torboonsin, it's summoning up-"
I didn't even finish the sentence. A loud poof went off near me, and something cackled near my ear. Instinctively, my hand came up - the one holding the sword.
"See?" said the manager, as dust rained down on me. "Your job is to get rid of them. And don't let customers see!" A glint came into his eye. "Fifteen dollars an hour, if you keep your mouth shut!"
I didn't hesitate any longer. That was worth any amount of weirdness. "Deal."
"Great." He turned away. "Talk to HR at the end of the day. And don't let them lick you."
"Wait, what happens if they lick-"
But the manager was already gone.
I looked down at the crucifix in my hands. I'd never been especially religious, but maybe the cross didn't know that? In any case, it was still glowing.
I tightened my grip on the sword. Oh well. Time to go to work.
*More stories at /r/Romanticon* | "Nömona..." I quietly said
"What now honey?" My wife replied
As a giant flash of light blasted from the box.
All I heard was the scream of my wife, then I was gone.
-End of story-
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | And there it was, my new bookshelf, a few days too early. You see, my husband was away on business, and as much as I don't want to subscribe to gender stereotypes, he was the one who usually handles these sort of things.
The doorbell rang. It was my nosy neighbour Francine.
"Was that a delivery truck I spotted earlier? What did you get? Is Garrett back?" She tries to peer around me.
"Yup, it was. A bookshelf. And no, he isn't."
"That's a shame. Otherwise he could help you with it. He's so good with his hands."
Don't punch an old lady, don't do it.
"Yes well, thanks for that. Got to go, lots to do." I close the door in her face.
Good with his hands huh? Who the hell talks that way about someone else's husband? God I needed a drink.
I pour myself a glass of Chianti and settled in for another episode of the bachelorette. Yes, I watch keeping up with the kardashians too. Bite me. The Chianti floods my body, sweeping through my insides, leaving traces of warmth everywhere. I giggle my way through the show, wistfully remembering the days where Garrett would plan spontaneous dates and shower me with love and affection. Now he showers me with his sleep apnea induced snoring.
After the show was done, I realised I was a fair bit tipsy. Being tipsy sometimes means making bad decisions, like deciding to build ikea furniture. I grabbed the instruction sheet and giggled at the product name. What the hell was this? Brusali? Sounds like some kind of pasta. I say it again a few times, laughing. God I should have gone for the Billy. Then i could have said, 'i need to get home to Billy' and people would think I was having a torrid affair.
"Why are you laughing like that?"
I look up to see this most gorgeous shirtless man, with salt and pepper hair, and abs for days. I stare shamelessly before realising that this was a strange man, in my house.
"Did you break in?"
"You conjured me. I am here to tempt you to sin."
"Come again?"
He looked at me, a bored lazy look on his face. "I am a demon. Does that paint a clearer picture?"
"Right. I think I had too much wine."
"Are you ready to fall?"
"More like barf."
"I mean fall into sin."
"What was in that wine?" I stumble away from him, running into the kitchen for some water.
He follows me, leaning lazily against the counter, watching as I gulped down some water and splashed my face with the rest of it.
"You don't look like a demon."
"How would you know? Have u seen one before?"
Good point.
"Can you please leave?"
"Does the word demon mean anything to you?"
As I stared at him, and he stared back, I knew one thing for certain: I was never shopping at Ikea again. | "Nömona..." I quietly said
"What now honey?" My wife replied
As a giant flash of light blasted from the box.
All I heard was the scream of my wife, then I was gone.
-End of story-
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | Let's sing a song about a kid
Lost and found is where his ends meet
Wanted to show the whole world how cool he is
By buying the best shit money can get, why not just stick with meat?
So he went to a mall open for all
Trying to find the coolest thing to buy, coolest sounding of all
Bumping his head phones up, he enters Ikea
Doesn't have any fuckin idea where he's heading, still bossin and crossin
The names don't make much sense, kids got the vocab of evanescence
Doesn't mind what the store clerks yell to him
He goes to the far end of the corridor that's lighted less
Dark things allure me, thinks the kid thinking of azkaban
Stupid Harry Potter stuff doesn't help him cope with what's up next
He goes to the only item on the last shelf and reads it's name,
Appears Michael Jackson's demon, the item is 'Shamona! Kid's white dream play set."
If it's too rude and long pardon me,
I'm not a rapper nor am I a poet I'm just a Bee
Making bitchy ass tunes out of thin air for fuck's sake
Hope it's funny and you like it; have a nice day!
Lok. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Greetings master... it has been many years since I last was required..."
A Goliath of a beast stirred amid the smoke and smog that clogged the air in my now shattered study, desk pieces and my newly built chair's legs strewn everywhere.
"What the fuck dude," I replied upset that my chair was broken, "that took like two hours."
| My man. Let me tell you a story. A true story, about a brotha being jumped by a demon at the local IKEA. It's absolutely true and y'all better sit down and listen.
I was strolling through the IKEA, looking for gardening tools to maintain my wife's garden. She was the type of woman to go off on someone hard if they didn't maintain her garden. I'm not one to judge, so I just decided to pick up and leave to the local IKEA. Besides, it's only a five minute drive. I eventually found a power drill and decided to get my ass outta there before the lines became too long and caused my wife to come home with a trashed garden. We wouldn't want that happening.
I was just walking through one of the many luxurious furniture aisles to return to the checkout area when I noticed the labels. Goddamn, those were some broke ass labels. I mean they were literally broke and financially couldn't support themselves. The labels were so hard to pronounce, I was goddamn sure that if I pronounced one of them wrong it would summon a demon, or something!
I walked up to a bureau and read the label in my mind. "Suckamah Wood". What the hell? That seriously sounds like "suck on my wood". Bro, that's nasty! But it was funny; so I decided to read it out loud for a quick giggle. "Zhuckamynut", I mumbled. Shit! I said it wrong. Eh, not like it goddamn matters.
Suddenly, a giant cloud of smoke appeared in front of me. Only a few moments later, the smoke dispersed, revealing a big half-horse half-devil creature. He had big horns and a bushy dick. I tried to feel his dick but he kicked my hand away with his giant hooves.
"Bitch! I'm the Centaur of IKEA. Why the hell you summon me here?"
"Goddamn, sir", I remarked respectfully, "I didn't mean to summon you. I was just trying to read this bureau label."
"Well shit. You summoned me accidentally?"
"You got that part right."
"Then I need to go."
And poof, just like that, the big nig was gone. I'm gonna miss that big guy, but it's nice knowing that I can summon the bitch whenever I try to save my failing marriage at IKEA.
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | My man. Let me tell you a story. A true story, about a brotha being jumped by a demon at the local IKEA. It's absolutely true and y'all better sit down and listen.
I was strolling through the IKEA, looking for gardening tools to maintain my wife's garden. She was the type of woman to go off on someone hard if they didn't maintain her garden. I'm not one to judge, so I just decided to pick up and leave to the local IKEA. Besides, it's only a five minute drive. I eventually found a power drill and decided to get my ass outta there before the lines became too long and caused my wife to come home with a trashed garden. We wouldn't want that happening.
I was just walking through one of the many luxurious furniture aisles to return to the checkout area when I noticed the labels. Goddamn, those were some broke ass labels. I mean they were literally broke and financially couldn't support themselves. The labels were so hard to pronounce, I was goddamn sure that if I pronounced one of them wrong it would summon a demon, or something!
I walked up to a bureau and read the label in my mind. "Suckamah Wood". What the hell? That seriously sounds like "suck on my wood". Bro, that's nasty! But it was funny; so I decided to read it out loud for a quick giggle. "Zhuckamynut", I mumbled. Shit! I said it wrong. Eh, not like it goddamn matters.
Suddenly, a giant cloud of smoke appeared in front of me. Only a few moments later, the smoke dispersed, revealing a big half-horse half-devil creature. He had big horns and a bushy dick. I tried to feel his dick but he kicked my hand away with his giant hooves.
"Bitch! I'm the Centaur of IKEA. Why the hell you summon me here?"
"Goddamn, sir", I remarked respectfully, "I didn't mean to summon you. I was just trying to read this bureau label."
"Well shit. You summoned me accidentally?"
"You got that part right."
"Then I need to go."
And poof, just like that, the big nig was gone. I'm gonna miss that big guy, but it's nice knowing that I can summon the bitch whenever I try to save my failing marriage at IKEA.
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "God dammit!" he cried. He had a strong Boston accent.
He looked like a cross between Danny De Vito and the devil emoji. He stood two foot high and only had on a pair of khaki shorts on.
There had been a crack of lightening and a little poof. The demon was not impressed at his summoning...
"I told those guys five times. FIVE! Another goddamn furniture summons."
He looked over at me and held up his hand as I began to speak - "I'm gonna sort this now once and for ALL. This is the last goddamn time I swear to Gawd"
He pulled out a new Iphone 7. He stabbed at it with his small red hands and black claw like nails. The phone went to his ear and his face turned into a snarl.
"Yea IKEA customer service, it's me again, KUNTSTORP . You guys have gone and done it now! I demand the name be changed Today, not tomorrow, not next week - TODAY."
He looked over at me with the phone still at his ear. I hadn't put the screw driver down yet. "Sorry about the mix-up... Do me a favor chief and put the coffee on - this is gonna take a while."
I turned obediently and slowly walked to the kitchen, I still could not believe what was happening. He started shouting down the phone
"No goddammit, this is not a crank call, I don't care - send the cops over.... No don't hang up! Put me through to your line manager - I spoke with Tom on Thursday and Patricia on Monday and they know who I am! I'll teach YOU to put ME on hold!"
He was now sitting on my couch with his legs crossed and tapping his claws impatiently on the arm...
"Hey chief, OK if I smoke in here?" He called.
He had already lit the cigarette....
"Yea... I...I guess. Do you want milk or sugar in your coffee?" I responded. He took a long drag and said "No sugar I'm sweet enough already but I'm a devil for a drop of cream".
The irony wasn't lost on him as he sniggered while the ash fell onto my living room floor. "Hey chief, you got an ashtray laying around here ?" | My man. Let me tell you a story. A true story, about a brotha being jumped by a demon at the local IKEA. It's absolutely true and y'all better sit down and listen.
I was strolling through the IKEA, looking for gardening tools to maintain my wife's garden. She was the type of woman to go off on someone hard if they didn't maintain her garden. I'm not one to judge, so I just decided to pick up and leave to the local IKEA. Besides, it's only a five minute drive. I eventually found a power drill and decided to get my ass outta there before the lines became too long and caused my wife to come home with a trashed garden. We wouldn't want that happening.
I was just walking through one of the many luxurious furniture aisles to return to the checkout area when I noticed the labels. Goddamn, those were some broke ass labels. I mean they were literally broke and financially couldn't support themselves. The labels were so hard to pronounce, I was goddamn sure that if I pronounced one of them wrong it would summon a demon, or something!
I walked up to a bureau and read the label in my mind. "Suckamah Wood". What the hell? That seriously sounds like "suck on my wood". Bro, that's nasty! But it was funny; so I decided to read it out loud for a quick giggle. "Zhuckamynut", I mumbled. Shit! I said it wrong. Eh, not like it goddamn matters.
Suddenly, a giant cloud of smoke appeared in front of me. Only a few moments later, the smoke dispersed, revealing a big half-horse half-devil creature. He had big horns and a bushy dick. I tried to feel his dick but he kicked my hand away with his giant hooves.
"Bitch! I'm the Centaur of IKEA. Why the hell you summon me here?"
"Goddamn, sir", I remarked respectfully, "I didn't mean to summon you. I was just trying to read this bureau label."
"Well shit. You summoned me accidentally?"
"You got that part right."
"Then I need to go."
And poof, just like that, the big nig was gone. I'm gonna miss that big guy, but it's nice knowing that I can summon the bitch whenever I try to save my failing marriage at IKEA.
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | “So you’re telling me you blew this month’s rent on a new entertainment system for the living room, and now you expect *me* to put it together?” My fist crinkles around the encyclopedia of an instruction manual that my darling husband tossed to me only moments prior.
“You know I’m no good at these slow, meticulous projects- not like you, sweetie,” His voice is muffled as he cowers behind the two rectangular boxes containing the puzzle pieces of another impossible piece of Ikea furniture. “Please put it together while I’m at work?” His eyes pop up from the side of the box, pleading and doe-eyed.
I roll my eyes. “Okay fine. But I’m never letting you within a 20-mile radius of an Ikea again.”
He finally appears from around the boxes to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you honey, I’ll see you after work,” he says, and just like that, I’m home alone with a 5 hour task ahead of me and a pathetic excuse for a ‘day off’.
“Bastard,” I say to no one. An intricate 3D model of the unit taunts me from the front of the instruction manual, its title embedded boldly beneath it. “Fä..jall, bo? What the hell does that even mean?”
I toss the book to the side and begin opening up the boxes, heaving out large pieces of wood and at least 10,000 tiny screws. By the time I have emptied the boxes I’ve broken a sweat and my noodle arms are screaming in defeat.
My cat appears from who knows where, purring as he weaves in and out of the piles of wood before rubbing his white face against the cardboard boxes.
“Okay Joey, let’s get started,” I tell him, looking at the first set of instructions.
**Clunk.**
*Thud.*
***Scrape.***
“Joey, get out of the box!” I yell over my shoulder, but I glance up to him sitting in front of me. With a gasp I whip my head around to see a face staring at me from inside the box.
“Holy shit,” I choke, shoving myself backwards without taking my eyes off this -- *thing.* An uglier version of Rumpelstiltskin stares back at me, with tiny nubs of horns protruding from its forehead and crooked wings twitching behind its swollen face.
“What the fuck are you?” I breathe.
“Oh, sorry deary, didn’t mean to be rude,” It speaks with the voice of a garage disposal. The small creature struggles to lift itself over the side of the box, dangling for a few helpless seconds before falling to the carpet, rolling like an armadillo into a standing position. His naked, wrinkly body jiggles a hello.
“My name is Fjällbo,” It greets, "great demon of the Underworld, destroyer of all those that stand before me. A mercifulness warrior, a skilled soldier. And I have been summoned here -- well, about an hour ago. I do apologize for my lateness, navigating your world isn’t always the easiest,” It flashes me a toothy grin.
“You’re…a demon?” I gulp.
Fjallbo takes a step closer to me, its face contorting into madness, its unruly eyebrows arching into a sinister smile. “Oh yes deary, I am." It croaks.
“What…what are you going to do to me?” My voice is barely a whisper, my body frozen in a fear I've never thought possible.
“Oh, I’m going to make you…*suffer*,” Its eyes darken as it takes a step further.
“You’re going to feel a pain you’ve...never felt before...” Another step. From here I can count every one of its dagger-sharp teeth.
“A pain…that you will surely...never forget.” It is mere inches from my face now, its sticky breath hot on my skin. It slowly reaches out its gleaming claws, and as quick as lightning it snatches a single screw before poofing out of existence.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I wail, my body crumbling over into the fetal position.“DAMN YOU IKEA DEMON, DAMN YOU!” | My man. Let me tell you a story. A true story, about a brotha being jumped by a demon at the local IKEA. It's absolutely true and y'all better sit down and listen.
I was strolling through the IKEA, looking for gardening tools to maintain my wife's garden. She was the type of woman to go off on someone hard if they didn't maintain her garden. I'm not one to judge, so I just decided to pick up and leave to the local IKEA. Besides, it's only a five minute drive. I eventually found a power drill and decided to get my ass outta there before the lines became too long and caused my wife to come home with a trashed garden. We wouldn't want that happening.
I was just walking through one of the many luxurious furniture aisles to return to the checkout area when I noticed the labels. Goddamn, those were some broke ass labels. I mean they were literally broke and financially couldn't support themselves. The labels were so hard to pronounce, I was goddamn sure that if I pronounced one of them wrong it would summon a demon, or something!
I walked up to a bureau and read the label in my mind. "Suckamah Wood". What the hell? That seriously sounds like "suck on my wood". Bro, that's nasty! But it was funny; so I decided to read it out loud for a quick giggle. "Zhuckamynut", I mumbled. Shit! I said it wrong. Eh, not like it goddamn matters.
Suddenly, a giant cloud of smoke appeared in front of me. Only a few moments later, the smoke dispersed, revealing a big half-horse half-devil creature. He had big horns and a bushy dick. I tried to feel his dick but he kicked my hand away with his giant hooves.
"Bitch! I'm the Centaur of IKEA. Why the hell you summon me here?"
"Goddamn, sir", I remarked respectfully, "I didn't mean to summon you. I was just trying to read this bureau label."
"Well shit. You summoned me accidentally?"
"You got that part right."
"Then I need to go."
And poof, just like that, the big nig was gone. I'm gonna miss that big guy, but it's nice knowing that I can summon the bitch whenever I try to save my failing marriage at IKEA.
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Greetings master... it has been many years since I last was required..."
A Goliath of a beast stirred amid the smoke and smog that clogged the air in my now shattered study, desk pieces and my newly built chair's legs strewn everywhere.
"What the fuck dude," I replied upset that my chair was broken, "that took like two hours."
| I stared at the shelf, pointing at the trash can. It shined, obviously some type of metal. I couldn't identify it, however.
"That is our MJÖSA trashcan."
"Oh." I nodded slowly, as she lead me further down the aisles, pointing out different things in my price range. I couldn't pay attention however, as I kept mumbling MJÖSA under my breath.
"Are you okay?" She glanced up at me, I nodded, giggling as I kept saying it. It was simple, but the word itself seemed to reside in me.
"Would you like someone else?" She asked.
"Yes, come forth to me!" I laughed, before my voice started gurgling. The ground shook, and I fell onto the ground, as a red, well thing, that really could be described as reminiscent of Kil'jaeden rose from it, and stood up, roaring. The lady and I backed away in fear, before he spoke.
"I AM HERE TO DELIVER YOUR DEEPEST WISH. I WILL CHANGE THE NAMES AT ALL IKEA STORES TO NORMAL."
"Oh thank goodness!" | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | I stared at the shelf, pointing at the trash can. It shined, obviously some type of metal. I couldn't identify it, however.
"That is our MJÖSA trashcan."
"Oh." I nodded slowly, as she lead me further down the aisles, pointing out different things in my price range. I couldn't pay attention however, as I kept mumbling MJÖSA under my breath.
"Are you okay?" She glanced up at me, I nodded, giggling as I kept saying it. It was simple, but the word itself seemed to reside in me.
"Would you like someone else?" She asked.
"Yes, come forth to me!" I laughed, before my voice started gurgling. The ground shook, and I fell onto the ground, as a red, well thing, that really could be described as reminiscent of Kil'jaeden rose from it, and stood up, roaring. The lady and I backed away in fear, before he spoke.
"I AM HERE TO DELIVER YOUR DEEPEST WISH. I WILL CHANGE THE NAMES AT ALL IKEA STORES TO NORMAL."
"Oh thank goodness!" | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "God dammit!" he cried. He had a strong Boston accent.
He looked like a cross between Danny De Vito and the devil emoji. He stood two foot high and only had on a pair of khaki shorts on.
There had been a crack of lightening and a little poof. The demon was not impressed at his summoning...
"I told those guys five times. FIVE! Another goddamn furniture summons."
He looked over at me and held up his hand as I began to speak - "I'm gonna sort this now once and for ALL. This is the last goddamn time I swear to Gawd"
He pulled out a new Iphone 7. He stabbed at it with his small red hands and black claw like nails. The phone went to his ear and his face turned into a snarl.
"Yea IKEA customer service, it's me again, KUNTSTORP . You guys have gone and done it now! I demand the name be changed Today, not tomorrow, not next week - TODAY."
He looked over at me with the phone still at his ear. I hadn't put the screw driver down yet. "Sorry about the mix-up... Do me a favor chief and put the coffee on - this is gonna take a while."
I turned obediently and slowly walked to the kitchen, I still could not believe what was happening. He started shouting down the phone
"No goddammit, this is not a crank call, I don't care - send the cops over.... No don't hang up! Put me through to your line manager - I spoke with Tom on Thursday and Patricia on Monday and they know who I am! I'll teach YOU to put ME on hold!"
He was now sitting on my couch with his legs crossed and tapping his claws impatiently on the arm...
"Hey chief, OK if I smoke in here?" He called.
He had already lit the cigarette....
"Yea... I...I guess. Do you want milk or sugar in your coffee?" I responded. He took a long drag and said "No sugar I'm sweet enough already but I'm a devil for a drop of cream".
The irony wasn't lost on him as he sniggered while the ash fell onto my living room floor. "Hey chief, you got an ashtray laying around here ?" | I stared at the shelf, pointing at the trash can. It shined, obviously some type of metal. I couldn't identify it, however.
"That is our MJÖSA trashcan."
"Oh." I nodded slowly, as she lead me further down the aisles, pointing out different things in my price range. I couldn't pay attention however, as I kept mumbling MJÖSA under my breath.
"Are you okay?" She glanced up at me, I nodded, giggling as I kept saying it. It was simple, but the word itself seemed to reside in me.
"Would you like someone else?" She asked.
"Yes, come forth to me!" I laughed, before my voice started gurgling. The ground shook, and I fell onto the ground, as a red, well thing, that really could be described as reminiscent of Kil'jaeden rose from it, and stood up, roaring. The lady and I backed away in fear, before he spoke.
"I AM HERE TO DELIVER YOUR DEEPEST WISH. I WILL CHANGE THE NAMES AT ALL IKEA STORES TO NORMAL."
"Oh thank goodness!" | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | “So you’re telling me you blew this month’s rent on a new entertainment system for the living room, and now you expect *me* to put it together?” My fist crinkles around the encyclopedia of an instruction manual that my darling husband tossed to me only moments prior.
“You know I’m no good at these slow, meticulous projects- not like you, sweetie,” His voice is muffled as he cowers behind the two rectangular boxes containing the puzzle pieces of another impossible piece of Ikea furniture. “Please put it together while I’m at work?” His eyes pop up from the side of the box, pleading and doe-eyed.
I roll my eyes. “Okay fine. But I’m never letting you within a 20-mile radius of an Ikea again.”
He finally appears from around the boxes to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you honey, I’ll see you after work,” he says, and just like that, I’m home alone with a 5 hour task ahead of me and a pathetic excuse for a ‘day off’.
“Bastard,” I say to no one. An intricate 3D model of the unit taunts me from the front of the instruction manual, its title embedded boldly beneath it. “Fä..jall, bo? What the hell does that even mean?”
I toss the book to the side and begin opening up the boxes, heaving out large pieces of wood and at least 10,000 tiny screws. By the time I have emptied the boxes I’ve broken a sweat and my noodle arms are screaming in defeat.
My cat appears from who knows where, purring as he weaves in and out of the piles of wood before rubbing his white face against the cardboard boxes.
“Okay Joey, let’s get started,” I tell him, looking at the first set of instructions.
**Clunk.**
*Thud.*
***Scrape.***
“Joey, get out of the box!” I yell over my shoulder, but I glance up to him sitting in front of me. With a gasp I whip my head around to see a face staring at me from inside the box.
“Holy shit,” I choke, shoving myself backwards without taking my eyes off this -- *thing.* An uglier version of Rumpelstiltskin stares back at me, with tiny nubs of horns protruding from its forehead and crooked wings twitching behind its swollen face.
“What the fuck are you?” I breathe.
“Oh, sorry deary, didn’t mean to be rude,” It speaks with the voice of a garage disposal. The small creature struggles to lift itself over the side of the box, dangling for a few helpless seconds before falling to the carpet, rolling like an armadillo into a standing position. His naked, wrinkly body jiggles a hello.
“My name is Fjällbo,” It greets, "great demon of the Underworld, destroyer of all those that stand before me. A mercifulness warrior, a skilled soldier. And I have been summoned here -- well, about an hour ago. I do apologize for my lateness, navigating your world isn’t always the easiest,” It flashes me a toothy grin.
“You’re…a demon?” I gulp.
Fjallbo takes a step closer to me, its face contorting into madness, its unruly eyebrows arching into a sinister smile. “Oh yes deary, I am." It croaks.
“What…what are you going to do to me?” My voice is barely a whisper, my body frozen in a fear I've never thought possible.
“Oh, I’m going to make you…*suffer*,” Its eyes darken as it takes a step further.
“You’re going to feel a pain you’ve...never felt before...” Another step. From here I can count every one of its dagger-sharp teeth.
“A pain…that you will surely...never forget.” It is mere inches from my face now, its sticky breath hot on my skin. It slowly reaches out its gleaming claws, and as quick as lightning it snatches a single screw before poofing out of existence.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I wail, my body crumbling over into the fetal position.“DAMN YOU IKEA DEMON, DAMN YOU!” | I stared at the shelf, pointing at the trash can. It shined, obviously some type of metal. I couldn't identify it, however.
"That is our MJÖSA trashcan."
"Oh." I nodded slowly, as she lead me further down the aisles, pointing out different things in my price range. I couldn't pay attention however, as I kept mumbling MJÖSA under my breath.
"Are you okay?" She glanced up at me, I nodded, giggling as I kept saying it. It was simple, but the word itself seemed to reside in me.
"Would you like someone else?" She asked.
"Yes, come forth to me!" I laughed, before my voice started gurgling. The ground shook, and I fell onto the ground, as a red, well thing, that really could be described as reminiscent of Kil'jaeden rose from it, and stood up, roaring. The lady and I backed away in fear, before he spoke.
"I AM HERE TO DELIVER YOUR DEEPEST WISH. I WILL CHANGE THE NAMES AT ALL IKEA STORES TO NORMAL."
"Oh thank goodness!" | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | 'Why have you summoned me, mortal?'
Simon stood dumbfounded in a swirl of quickly dissipating but still acrid smoke, Allen key hanging loosely from his fingers.
A terrible visage stood before him. A creature of unrelenting force and presence stood before him, all muscle, claws and teeth and ...horns. It reared up on to its full height on its goat like legs, spreading its wings and snorted a noxious cloud of breath, overwhelming Simon's senses with sulphur.
'...w...what?' Was all he could manage.
'You have summoned me, mortal. You have spoken in the ancient, unearthly tongue and now here I stand before you. Awoken from the hellish realm. What do you have to offer, and what is your desire?'
'I think there may have been some...mistake?' He ventured weakly.
Clearly he hadn't grasped the enormity of the situation. The presence of what could only be described as this, hell beast, threw up so many ecumenical, physiological, physical and spiritual questions. But he could only think to offer it some tea and apologise for this whole charade, even though he had no idea why it was here in the first place.
The demon regarded the cup of tea.
'This will not suffice for any request...' The demon stated in a low, grumbly tone.
'Perhaps some sugar would make it better?'
'I usually deal in souls, sacrifices. Virgins and whatnot' The demon clarified with an impatient sigh.
'Uhh, look, I really am sorry but I have no idea why you're here. I was just minding my business, building this chair...'
'Chair?' The demon cut Simon off.
'Yes I...'
The demon slapped itself in the face with its mighty paw in demonic exasperation.
'I swear I will rend those responsible for this travesty from their meat prisons and torture their souls for two eternities! How did they manage to spread my unholy name so far and wide?'
Simon looked puzzled for a moment. He looked at the simple steel and plastic chair and then the demon. A smile started to creep upon his face and he tried to suppress it.
'You mean your name is...Jeff?'
'Yes. Jeff. Destroyer of hope, defiler of dreams, renderer of souls! What of it, human?'
'You must get summoned a lot, it's a very common name here on...Earth' He said lamely.
'It is more about how you say it, rather than the letters themselves.' The demon explained in a pained tone. 'The process of assembling that infernal contraption just seems to bring out the correct pronunciation in people.'
'Well I did trap my hand in the folding mechanism...' Simon ventured.
'Well, now what?' He asked the Demon.
'I cannot leave until I have some bidding to do or a soul to take' The demon said, sitting down with his head in his hands.
'Well, I could use some help finishing this chair' Simon said, rubbing his sore hand.
The demon raised an eyebrow.
'I am a DEMON. I have done battle with god's most pious angels, I have destroyed more worlds and tortured more souls than I can remember. I can grant you ANY request for the right price and you want me to finish building a...chair?'
'Uh, yes?'
'You would sell your eternal soul for a chair?' The demon stated flatly.
'Not my soul...'
Simon held up the pages of an IKEA catalogue.
'This is the address and number for Ikea's marketing department. Those responsible for taking your...unholy name in vain.'
The Demon let a satanic grin cross his face.
'Usually it is forbidden to offer the soul of another. But in this case I'm sure I can make an exception. Consider your chair complete.'
And in an explosion of fire and smoke the demon was gone.
Simon prodded the chair with his foot. Seemed sturdy enough. Then sat down to enjoy his tea with a satisfied grin on his face. He wondered if any other furniture shared a name with hellspawn. He hoped so, he'd never have to build any furniture ever again. | "Greetings master... it has been many years since I last was required..."
A Goliath of a beast stirred amid the smoke and smog that clogged the air in my now shattered study, desk pieces and my newly built chair's legs strewn everywhere.
"What the fuck dude," I replied upset that my chair was broken, "that took like two hours."
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | “So you’re telling me you blew this month’s rent on a new entertainment system for the living room, and now you expect *me* to put it together?” My fist crinkles around the encyclopedia of an instruction manual that my darling husband tossed to me only moments prior.
“You know I’m no good at these slow, meticulous projects- not like you, sweetie,” His voice is muffled as he cowers behind the two rectangular boxes containing the puzzle pieces of another impossible piece of Ikea furniture. “Please put it together while I’m at work?” His eyes pop up from the side of the box, pleading and doe-eyed.
I roll my eyes. “Okay fine. But I’m never letting you within a 20-mile radius of an Ikea again.”
He finally appears from around the boxes to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you honey, I’ll see you after work,” he says, and just like that, I’m home alone with a 5 hour task ahead of me and a pathetic excuse for a ‘day off’.
“Bastard,” I say to no one. An intricate 3D model of the unit taunts me from the front of the instruction manual, its title embedded boldly beneath it. “Fä..jall, bo? What the hell does that even mean?”
I toss the book to the side and begin opening up the boxes, heaving out large pieces of wood and at least 10,000 tiny screws. By the time I have emptied the boxes I’ve broken a sweat and my noodle arms are screaming in defeat.
My cat appears from who knows where, purring as he weaves in and out of the piles of wood before rubbing his white face against the cardboard boxes.
“Okay Joey, let’s get started,” I tell him, looking at the first set of instructions.
**Clunk.**
*Thud.*
***Scrape.***
“Joey, get out of the box!” I yell over my shoulder, but I glance up to him sitting in front of me. With a gasp I whip my head around to see a face staring at me from inside the box.
“Holy shit,” I choke, shoving myself backwards without taking my eyes off this -- *thing.* An uglier version of Rumpelstiltskin stares back at me, with tiny nubs of horns protruding from its forehead and crooked wings twitching behind its swollen face.
“What the fuck are you?” I breathe.
“Oh, sorry deary, didn’t mean to be rude,” It speaks with the voice of a garage disposal. The small creature struggles to lift itself over the side of the box, dangling for a few helpless seconds before falling to the carpet, rolling like an armadillo into a standing position. His naked, wrinkly body jiggles a hello.
“My name is Fjällbo,” It greets, "great demon of the Underworld, destroyer of all those that stand before me. A mercifulness warrior, a skilled soldier. And I have been summoned here -- well, about an hour ago. I do apologize for my lateness, navigating your world isn’t always the easiest,” It flashes me a toothy grin.
“You’re…a demon?” I gulp.
Fjallbo takes a step closer to me, its face contorting into madness, its unruly eyebrows arching into a sinister smile. “Oh yes deary, I am." It croaks.
“What…what are you going to do to me?” My voice is barely a whisper, my body frozen in a fear I've never thought possible.
“Oh, I’m going to make you…*suffer*,” Its eyes darken as it takes a step further.
“You’re going to feel a pain you’ve...never felt before...” Another step. From here I can count every one of its dagger-sharp teeth.
“A pain…that you will surely...never forget.” It is mere inches from my face now, its sticky breath hot on my skin. It slowly reaches out its gleaming claws, and as quick as lightning it snatches a single screw before poofing out of existence.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I wail, my body crumbling over into the fetal position.“DAMN YOU IKEA DEMON, DAMN YOU!” | The fluorescent lights flickered, I felt The linoleum soften under my tasseled loafers. The combination desk, Murphy bed and closet rattled and began to emit a sickly red light. Suddenly a great cloud of smoke burst forth, and standing before me was a terrible demon. It spoke, her maw gaping with razor sharp teeth.
"You summoned Säng Skrivbord Gardeslob!"
Desks and wardrobes nearby, all cunningly designed and efficiently manufactured, toppled aside like a house of cards as the hellpit spawn's words entered our reality.
Pregnant mothers spontaneously miscarried as all the meatballs went bad at once.
Or so I was later told.
Confusion and disorder broke, people began pushing and shoving in an effort to get away from the Fiend suddenly in our midst. It was anarchy. A mess.
*I'm an editor, damn it!*
Standing up straight and adjusting my bifocals, I stepped over to where the little card had fallen, picked it up and cleared my throat.
It's inhuman bellows ceased as its neck swiveled to aim its head at me.
"No no, I clearly said 'Säng skrivbord garderob'."
It slithered over on an odd number of lobster-like legs. It tore the white card from my hand with its talons and extrude an eye stalk, reading.
"Again?!" it said, before disappearing in another spray of sulphuric ash. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Wergle-Shergle," attempted Harry.
"No, there are umlauts," said Sally. "It should be more like Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"Worgle-Shorgle."
The credenza glowed. Its cabinet door swung open and closed. An inexpensive yet tacky rug span with colors and patterns. A figure appeared in the demonstration bedroom, black-horned and cloven-footed. "I am Worgle-Shorgle, master of the seventh pit. Slaver of dark ones, eater of souls."
"Worgle-Shorgle," said Sally, "how would you pronounce this name with the umlauts?"
Worgle-Shorgle leaned close, brimstone on his breath. "Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"I told you," said Sally.
"Let's get some meatballs," said Harry.
As the young couple left, Worgle-Shorgle tapped his pitchfork against the ground. He paced menacingly between a desk lamp and a lighting fixture. Such incredible demon-summoners these must be, he thought, to have trapped him in such a diabolical labyrinth. | The fluorescent lights flickered, I felt The linoleum soften under my tasseled loafers. The combination desk, Murphy bed and closet rattled and began to emit a sickly red light. Suddenly a great cloud of smoke burst forth, and standing before me was a terrible demon. It spoke, her maw gaping with razor sharp teeth.
"You summoned Säng Skrivbord Gardeslob!"
Desks and wardrobes nearby, all cunningly designed and efficiently manufactured, toppled aside like a house of cards as the hellpit spawn's words entered our reality.
Pregnant mothers spontaneously miscarried as all the meatballs went bad at once.
Or so I was later told.
Confusion and disorder broke, people began pushing and shoving in an effort to get away from the Fiend suddenly in our midst. It was anarchy. A mess.
*I'm an editor, damn it!*
Standing up straight and adjusting my bifocals, I stepped over to where the little card had fallen, picked it up and cleared my throat.
It's inhuman bellows ceased as its neck swiveled to aim its head at me.
"No no, I clearly said 'Säng skrivbord garderob'."
It slithered over on an odd number of lobster-like legs. It tore the white card from my hand with its talons and extrude an eye stalk, reading.
"Again?!" it said, before disappearing in another spray of sulphuric ash. | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | “So you’re telling me you blew this month’s rent on a new entertainment system for the living room, and now you expect *me* to put it together?” My fist crinkles around the encyclopedia of an instruction manual that my darling husband tossed to me only moments prior.
“You know I’m no good at these slow, meticulous projects- not like you, sweetie,” His voice is muffled as he cowers behind the two rectangular boxes containing the puzzle pieces of another impossible piece of Ikea furniture. “Please put it together while I’m at work?” His eyes pop up from the side of the box, pleading and doe-eyed.
I roll my eyes. “Okay fine. But I’m never letting you within a 20-mile radius of an Ikea again.”
He finally appears from around the boxes to plant a kiss on my cheek. “Thank you honey, I’ll see you after work,” he says, and just like that, I’m home alone with a 5 hour task ahead of me and a pathetic excuse for a ‘day off’.
“Bastard,” I say to no one. An intricate 3D model of the unit taunts me from the front of the instruction manual, its title embedded boldly beneath it. “Fä..jall, bo? What the hell does that even mean?”
I toss the book to the side and begin opening up the boxes, heaving out large pieces of wood and at least 10,000 tiny screws. By the time I have emptied the boxes I’ve broken a sweat and my noodle arms are screaming in defeat.
My cat appears from who knows where, purring as he weaves in and out of the piles of wood before rubbing his white face against the cardboard boxes.
“Okay Joey, let’s get started,” I tell him, looking at the first set of instructions.
**Clunk.**
*Thud.*
***Scrape.***
“Joey, get out of the box!” I yell over my shoulder, but I glance up to him sitting in front of me. With a gasp I whip my head around to see a face staring at me from inside the box.
“Holy shit,” I choke, shoving myself backwards without taking my eyes off this -- *thing.* An uglier version of Rumpelstiltskin stares back at me, with tiny nubs of horns protruding from its forehead and crooked wings twitching behind its swollen face.
“What the fuck are you?” I breathe.
“Oh, sorry deary, didn’t mean to be rude,” It speaks with the voice of a garage disposal. The small creature struggles to lift itself over the side of the box, dangling for a few helpless seconds before falling to the carpet, rolling like an armadillo into a standing position. His naked, wrinkly body jiggles a hello.
“My name is Fjällbo,” It greets, "great demon of the Underworld, destroyer of all those that stand before me. A mercifulness warrior, a skilled soldier. And I have been summoned here -- well, about an hour ago. I do apologize for my lateness, navigating your world isn’t always the easiest,” It flashes me a toothy grin.
“You’re…a demon?” I gulp.
Fjallbo takes a step closer to me, its face contorting into madness, its unruly eyebrows arching into a sinister smile. “Oh yes deary, I am." It croaks.
“What…what are you going to do to me?” My voice is barely a whisper, my body frozen in a fear I've never thought possible.
“Oh, I’m going to make you…*suffer*,” Its eyes darken as it takes a step further.
“You’re going to feel a pain you’ve...never felt before...” Another step. From here I can count every one of its dagger-sharp teeth.
“A pain…that you will surely...never forget.” It is mere inches from my face now, its sticky breath hot on my skin. It slowly reaches out its gleaming claws, and as quick as lightning it snatches a single screw before poofing out of existence.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” I wail, my body crumbling over into the fetal position.“DAMN YOU IKEA DEMON, DAMN YOU!” | "I want this one! Did you hear me?" I pointed towards the same product and said its name. "Ofelia! This one!" I was starting to get frustrated when a booming voice sounded.
"Yes? You called, my disciple?" saod a demon, rising from the shadows. "I am Ophelia, master of this place. What is it that you want? I would do anything for being resummoned."
A demon. Hm. Just when I thought the day couldn't get any worse. He said 'anything' right? "A promotion," I said confidently.
"Someone called?" said another demon from the shadows. "I am Apromoshern," he clarified. Good lord.
"Can I just get...money! Yeah, money!" I said, snapping my fingers. They couldn't screw that up right?
"What is it?" another was conjured as he sleepily lumbered towards me. "I'm Monie, and I want to know why everyone wants me." Well fuck.
"Stop! Just go away! Please!" I begged the demons as they awaited my instructions. They looked at me, then themselves. I could hesr their conversation from where I stood.
"Do you know a guy called Jussgoehway or Pleeze?"
Fuck my life.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Delicious," Robert groaned. "Delicious and delectable," he mumbled to himself. A hallow mantra predicated on the promise of meatballs after a day out with Alice.
It had been three hours, twenty-two minutes and roughly forty seconds since Robert had agreed to "stop off at IKEA" on the way home from church in exchange for a serving of what he now knew would be utterly underwhelming Swedish meat muffins.
"Oooh. Dear come look at this sparsam. Wouldn't it just look exquisite over the pantry?" Alice chortled melodically. Either unaware or unperturbed by Robert's obvious repulsion of this colossal suburban nightmare.
"Honey..." He choked, fighting the urge to break a fyrkantig over his knee (or was it a fyr-kän-tig?). "We don't have a pantry. You know that. I know you know that."
"We will though. As soon as I get that promotion!" Alice hummed back at him with a tone so serene as to be worse than a scream.. Worse than death.. Worse than IKEA.
There it was again. Alice throwing his lack of ambition back in his face. Was it his fault the city had suddenly shifted away from its green energy initiative? Was he the one who had overseen the unprecedented drop in global oil prices that reinvigorated the dying car trade? Alice seemed to think so. Blubbering on and on about a promotion that hadn't even happened yet. A promotion that would probably never happen. If only he had the balls to call her out on her -
"Robbie? ROBERT!" Alice huffed. "Uh, yeah. Sorry dear. What is it?" Robert's mind snapped back into reality, and he immediately regretted it.
"You said you'd behave!" Alice shuttered sternly threw her teeth, which he thought made her look less like a happy, recently married teacher and more like a wolf in heat.
"I... I am behaving?" Robert retorted, careful not to betray his famous quick wit, he pitied himself internally.
"Behaving like a twat!" She snapped back. 'Tally up another one for Alice, has to be about 232 - 3 by now,' Robert thought, careful to mask his discomfort with a smile so fake it'd of made a mime laugh.
"We'll talk about this when we get home" Alice said as she turned toward the check-out line, or as Robert saw it: the finish-line, the end goal, the promised land. He glanced at his watch, nearly four-hours spent in this Scandinavian prison, he thought, before remembering how the narrator of a documentary he watched had actually praised the pleasantries of Sweden's rehabilitation institutes. He then amended his previous analogy to draw similarities between IKEA and a sphincter.
Satisfied, Robert, a balding thirty-three year-old former environmental analyst built about as poorly as any shelf or dagstrop in the place, shuffled hurriedly after his equally misshapen wife. Finally freed from the tyranny of the fläardfull and the knutstorps, Robert allowed his mind to wander off into his relatively untouched realm of excitement. He could almost taste the grease used to fry IKEA's recently unfrozen delicacies. The trick worked. He couldn't even remember going through the check-out line, though he was confident he'd ended up paying for everything despite his unemployment, as well as his thinly-veiled hatred for anything that required an umlaut to pronounce.
"Go on then," Alice nodded him toward the food court. Finally calm after her borderline spastic shopping spree. Robert didn't need to be told twice. He exited the scene as if yanked by a cane, a candy cane, his stomach helped him imagine.
He arrived at the line in seconds flat. Surely breaking any and all land-speed records for men weighing over 200 pounds. "I'll have one serving of meatballs, please" the man in front of Robert quipped. "Sure thing! You'll be order 122. Have a great day! Next up?"
"I'll have the same," Robert gleamed. "Hell, actually make it a double. It's been quite the day. Did you know that the norröra has three 'R's' in it?"
"I'm sorry sir..." The awkward, pimply teen stated with genuine sincerity.
"No problem at all, but I'm telling you it does. Look it up when... if you ever get off!" Robert replied, proud to regain what he considered his clever streak.
"Oh... no sir. I meant I'm sorry, but we're out of meatballs. That man just took the last serving" the boy replied.
Silence. The type of silence defined by the internal destruction of a man's will to live and the hiss of a pointless frier boiling water out of fun rather than necessity.
"Honey, what's the matter? We need to be headed out soon or we'll miss the picnic" Alice chimed in from too many yards back to have grasped Robert's immediate desperation.
"THE PICNIC?!" Robert roared as he turned toward Alice, knocking a tray out of the hands of a dainty girl presumably just hired out of sixth grade.
"You drag me here for nearly four hours... torturing me with norrvikens and riktig öglas and you have the guts, no... the güts (Robert pronounced the second 'u' slightly more gutturally, unaware of what effect umlauts actually have on the alphabet's most distant vowel) to call me out for taking too much time when I'm not even going to GET MY FUCKING MEATBALLS?!"
The entire IKEA fell silent, a hush fell over the entire food court. The man eating the final batch of meatballs hid himself ingeniously behind the back of his flattened hand. A few of the model dombås hidden in the corner collapsed from the shear anxiety palpably filling the room. Robert wasn't done yet. He had truly snapped. Just like the shoddy appliances produced by a certain Scandinavian appliance store that shall remain nameless, at least in this sentence. He began yelling profanities, starting with the usual suspects, but quickly retreating to words and phrases which taken out of context may not have sounded like insults at all. Terms such as cocker spaniel and dirty spatula. Nearly out of breath, Robert began to realize his words weren't having the impact he intended as he glimpsed his wife, arms crossed, checking her watch amidst his glorious outburst.
Frantic for a solution, Robert swiped a sauce-covered IKEA catalog conveniently located between the catsup and mustard to keep people from merely stopping off without truly visiting the depths of hell. He opened to a random page and began listing off appliances as if Swedish speakers could understand his devolving outburst as an eloquent plea for freedom, democracy and meatballs.
"BUMERANG!" He scowled at Alice. "SÖRE! BLÅMES! BLADVASS!" The cool air around him began to shift. Alice caught wind of it as her hair began to lift off the ground, subtly at first, and then all at once, as if commanded by a demented static balloon.
"DÄENNERIS! TIRYÖNYN! SKANÖR!" Robert continued, unaware that his words had began to throttle the physics of the building. Shelves began to shift. Couches and beds shuffled. People grabbed their Smellengüds, Omars and Fårdrups and ran for the exits.
Robert paused to look up at Alice, still entranced by the power he seemed to be wielding from the catalog. Had he been less numb, he may have noticed Alice's feet lift off the ground. Instead, he glanced back down at the page and shouted the final word louder than he had all the others, "VÖRHEES!!!"
With that, he too was ripped from the terrestrial body we call earth and pulled into an enclosed atmosphere ripe with the smell of grease and disappointment. Robert let out an inaudible gasp as he watched dozens of other shoppers twirling past him in an ever increasing spiral of Kardåshes and Gurlis. Alice swung by the other way, fiddling with her jacket as she stared out into the abyss above. The roof had been ripped to shreds and a hole blacker than Alice's coffee called to them like a beacon of death. Robert, unsure of what was happening, had no idea what was going on, while nearly everyone else caught-up in the terror prayed for a quick and painless death.
Instead, Klaas. As hideous a demon as has ever lived. He peered in from the black with eyes somehow blacker than the abyss before them, eyes only highlighted by the blood-red cornea that surrounded them.
"I AM KLAAS" He bellowed, knocking Alice, Robert, and the rest of the IKEA's pitiable Sunday customers back to the floor. "WHO DARES WAKE ME FROM MY SLUMBER?!"
The rest of the crowd turned in unison toward Robert, who, fortuitously he had thought, had landed near the catalog used to enact the summoning. In a characteristic attempt to fight fire with straw, Robert frantically opened to a random page, scrolled down and slowly stuttered... "Fintorp?"
The Swedish term for bucket.
Klaas, though obviously unaffected, was temporarily puzzled.
| "I want this one! Did you hear me?" I pointed towards the same product and said its name. "Ofelia! This one!" I was starting to get frustrated when a booming voice sounded.
"Yes? You called, my disciple?" saod a demon, rising from the shadows. "I am Ophelia, master of this place. What is it that you want? I would do anything for being resummoned."
A demon. Hm. Just when I thought the day couldn't get any worse. He said 'anything' right? "A promotion," I said confidently.
"Someone called?" said another demon from the shadows. "I am Apromoshern," he clarified. Good lord.
"Can I just get...money! Yeah, money!" I said, snapping my fingers. They couldn't screw that up right?
"What is it?" another was conjured as he sleepily lumbered towards me. "I'm Monie, and I want to know why everyone wants me." Well fuck.
"Stop! Just go away! Please!" I begged the demons as they awaited my instructions. They looked at me, then themselves. I could hesr their conversation from where I stood.
"Do you know a guy called Jussgoehway or Pleeze?"
Fuck my life.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | Feeman blag? Doomes? Skannka? Did someone at Ikea dip their spoon in alphabet soup?
My lips contorted in an attempt to read the last name: riahc?
During an off semester and in desperate need of money, my wife made Swedish Fish on a conveyor belt. If the horror stories were true, she could tell the quality of a fish by the color of the scales. Her methods were simple, yet efficient. If the fish was red, it was good; any other color: bad. That always got a laugh out of visitors. Maybe she could read this? The wind chime on the door sung its melody, someone heard my prayer. Abby waltzed into the room, her smile the only source of light I needed.
"You still working on that furniture set? Shouldn't you just YouTube it?"
"It's hard to YouTube what I can't even read!"
Abby rolled her eyes at my stubbornness.
"Huh, this isn't Swedish. What are these words? Skannka. Doomes. Feeman Blag... chair?" (I realized I held this pamphlet upside down)
The dining room chairs sprung to life, hopping on all fours. They gathered in a pentagram around the Ikea chair box. The cardboard burst into flame and our smoke alarm hammered it's message:**GET OUT! DANGER!**.
Abby fumbled along the wall for the door to escape, but a looming shadow with sanguine eyes froze me in place. Abby found the doorknob; the door opened and the smoke lessened. A masculine voice rang out.
"Who dares disturb me from my slumb...."
*ack uhum ah cough cough*
The mysterious form went into a coughing fit. He pumped the shadows to his left and right; after a moment I saw they were black, bat-like wings. The smoke billowed out the door.
"As I was saying.... Who dares awake the mighty destroyer of worlds? The slaughterer of the Nangang, the fear of the Ladcin, the horror of the Vinnu, I **FARTFULL** will destory you!
"I'm... I'm sorry... Did you just say Fartfull?"
"Of course puny... err what are you some kinda blend between an angel and a Troglaf? I, the great **FARTFUL**..."
A snicker from the door stopped the demon in his tracks.
"Did... Did that demon just say his name was Fartfull? We're humans by the way Mr. Fartfull sir oh wise demon."
Abby couldn't resist, she teased anyone and everyone who would listen. After a small chuckle under my breath, my judgement drifted back.
*What if this is an actual demon and we are pissing him off?*
"Errr well.... Puny humans, perhaps you heard of my family? The great Jerker!"
Now I had my doubts about whether this was an actual demon. I didn't know if I should grovel or crack a joke.
"Haha are you serious, or are you jerking my chain!"
*Maybe I should grovel a little just to be safe...*
A dark cloud boomed over Fartfull's horns, his eyes sent daggers in our direction.
"You offend me? Foolish humans! I will banish thee to the pits of MILF!"
Abby cried with laughter, the residual smoke turned the laughing fit into a cough.
My wife incapacitated. I had to stand up for her and show this demon who was boss.
"So Fartfull.... you ever been to the swamps of Blatass?"
Confused, Fartfull stammered back.
"Why of course, my family and I take holidays there together... It's a family affair! We fit as many demons as we can into Blatass!"
Now it was my turn. I rolled, laughing, in the bubble wrap from my previous endeavors. With every distinct **POP** Fartfull turned a deeper shade of red.
"SILENCE! I SAID SILENCE! I BANISH YEE TO A HELL THAT WILL NEVER COMPARE TO THE INNOCENT WONDER THAT IS BLATASS!"
"Wait a minute Fartfull can't we work somet-"
With a puff of smoke, Fartful was alone.
Waking from a deep sleep and a troubling dream, I reached for the nightstand.
*Chained down.... oh no Fartfull's wrath!*
Panicking, I looked up and saw the true depths of Hell.... wait, no. It was a pizza oven.
Without warning an Ikea pizza slice fell from the oven and into my mouth.
*If this is Hell.... it's great!*
Then another pizza slice dropped... and another-too many to eat. I tried to close my mouth, but a fishhook kept it open. I couldn't stop.
Between each slice I mumbled in desperation to find Abby; find out if we at least shared this Hell together.
"Abbaaa"
"Wheaeaa"
"Orhh"
"Yuuu"
A puff of smoke, another demon stood in front of me.
"Who dares summon me, the great and powerful Pysslingar!"
*Oh no, not again*
-------------------------------------------------
Anything after Fartfull appeared are actually Ikea names according to a random Buzzfeed article I clicked (I might have made one up, I don't remember). Also, I tried to literally sound out that last bit of dialogue, it was not a pretty sound. Here's another that I answered today, I liked the doctor prompt more than this one and thought I would share (this is a great prompt no offense OP):
https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6mo7uj/wp_you_just_ran_out_of_apples_yesterday_and_now/dk37bmk/?context=3 | "I want this one! Did you hear me?" I pointed towards the same product and said its name. "Ofelia! This one!" I was starting to get frustrated when a booming voice sounded.
"Yes? You called, my disciple?" saod a demon, rising from the shadows. "I am Ophelia, master of this place. What is it that you want? I would do anything for being resummoned."
A demon. Hm. Just when I thought the day couldn't get any worse. He said 'anything' right? "A promotion," I said confidently.
"Someone called?" said another demon from the shadows. "I am Apromoshern," he clarified. Good lord.
"Can I just get...money! Yeah, money!" I said, snapping my fingers. They couldn't screw that up right?
"What is it?" another was conjured as he sleepily lumbered towards me. "I'm Monie, and I want to know why everyone wants me." Well fuck.
"Stop! Just go away! Please!" I begged the demons as they awaited my instructions. They looked at me, then themselves. I could hesr their conversation from where I stood.
"Do you know a guy called Jussgoehway or Pleeze?"
Fuck my life.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Wergle-Shergle," attempted Harry.
"No, there are umlauts," said Sally. "It should be more like Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"Worgle-Shorgle."
The credenza glowed. Its cabinet door swung open and closed. An inexpensive yet tacky rug span with colors and patterns. A figure appeared in the demonstration bedroom, black-horned and cloven-footed. "I am Worgle-Shorgle, master of the seventh pit. Slaver of dark ones, eater of souls."
"Worgle-Shorgle," said Sally, "how would you pronounce this name with the umlauts?"
Worgle-Shorgle leaned close, brimstone on his breath. "Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"I told you," said Sally.
"Let's get some meatballs," said Harry.
As the young couple left, Worgle-Shorgle tapped his pitchfork against the ground. He paced menacingly between a desk lamp and a lighting fixture. Such incredible demon-summoners these must be, he thought, to have trapped him in such a diabolical labyrinth. | "I want this one! Did you hear me?" I pointed towards the same product and said its name. "Ofelia! This one!" I was starting to get frustrated when a booming voice sounded.
"Yes? You called, my disciple?" saod a demon, rising from the shadows. "I am Ophelia, master of this place. What is it that you want? I would do anything for being resummoned."
A demon. Hm. Just when I thought the day couldn't get any worse. He said 'anything' right? "A promotion," I said confidently.
"Someone called?" said another demon from the shadows. "I am Apromoshern," he clarified. Good lord.
"Can I just get...money! Yeah, money!" I said, snapping my fingers. They couldn't screw that up right?
"What is it?" another was conjured as he sleepily lumbered towards me. "I'm Monie, and I want to know why everyone wants me." Well fuck.
"Stop! Just go away! Please!" I begged the demons as they awaited my instructions. They looked at me, then themselves. I could hesr their conversation from where I stood.
"Do you know a guy called Jussgoehway or Pleeze?"
Fuck my life.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "FÖLJSAM."
"Fool...jam?"
"No, FÖLJSAM."
"Ohhh, you like in Skyrim. Fus roh dah..."
I could tell the store manager was getting impatient, but I had to entertain myself somehow. My wife and I arrived two hours ago to pick up a new dining room table, yet somehow we'd become mired in the kitchen section. I couldn't even see her anymore over the precarious tower of pots, pans, utensils, and mysterious kitchen "essentials" that I couldn't even name.
"FÖLJSAM. As in FÖLJSAMSHACKLESNICKENFAN," the manager drawled in a thick Swedish accent.
If I was ever going to be an evil emperor, I'd make my army wear blue and yellow. I never realized how painful that combination was to look at until now.
"We should get two," my wife said. "Just in case we have company."
"I don't even know what a *Foolsjama* is!" Even the word felt bitter in my mouth. More than bitter actually - the syllables lent my air a downright acidic feel as it washed over my tongue.
"Stop messing around, honey. This is important," my wife said.
I couldn't answer. I couldn't even breathe. The burning in my mouth intensified, and I could swear a green mist was beginning to pour out. I started coughing, suddenly finding myself on my knees without even realizing I'd fell.
"Is he okay?" The store manager.
"He's just being dramatic," my wife replied, not taking her eyes off the back of an oven which was big enough for a Witch to cook children.
The green smoke was taking shape now. The unreality bent and shaped as though molded from an unseen wind, all the while growing thicker and more corporal. I braced my hands on the floor to stop from falling on my face, coughing and *heaving* so hard that my entire body shook and I could feel my shoulders convulse from the pressure.
"Do you have this in any other colors?" My wife.
"Yes, but you have to paint it yourself. And we don't sell the paint."
"Oh that's okay. As long as the rest of it is -"
"You will also need to install your own wires," the manager interjected. "But don't worry, we also sell a set of cabinets that contains books on electrical engineering."
And then they were gone, rounding the corner in the infinite expanse of winding aisles which I was mired within. It was just me and the quickly forming Demon now. Green horns ruptured from skin which bubbled like molten lava in its interior. Savage fangs punctured through the cloud, ripping its own skin until it devoured a hole to form a mouth. Beady eyes, long talons, and a tongue like a writhing serpent - I was loathe to even look upon the monster. But look I had to, because my life depended on it answering a single question:
"Do you want to just come home with me and order on Amazon instead?"
The Demon nodded. I let out a long breath of relief. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore.
---
[More from author](http://www.reddit.com/r/sirtobiaswade) | "I want this one! Did you hear me?" I pointed towards the same product and said its name. "Ofelia! This one!" I was starting to get frustrated when a booming voice sounded.
"Yes? You called, my disciple?" saod a demon, rising from the shadows. "I am Ophelia, master of this place. What is it that you want? I would do anything for being resummoned."
A demon. Hm. Just when I thought the day couldn't get any worse. He said 'anything' right? "A promotion," I said confidently.
"Someone called?" said another demon from the shadows. "I am Apromoshern," he clarified. Good lord.
"Can I just get...money! Yeah, money!" I said, snapping my fingers. They couldn't screw that up right?
"What is it?" another was conjured as he sleepily lumbered towards me. "I'm Monie, and I want to know why everyone wants me." Well fuck.
"Stop! Just go away! Please!" I begged the demons as they awaited my instructions. They looked at me, then themselves. I could hesr their conversation from where I stood.
"Do you know a guy called Jussgoehway or Pleeze?"
Fuck my life.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | Feeman blag? Doomes? Skannka? Did someone at Ikea dip their spoon in alphabet soup?
My lips contorted in an attempt to read the last name: riahc?
During an off semester and in desperate need of money, my wife made Swedish Fish on a conveyor belt. If the horror stories were true, she could tell the quality of a fish by the color of the scales. Her methods were simple, yet efficient. If the fish was red, it was good; any other color: bad. That always got a laugh out of visitors. Maybe she could read this? The wind chime on the door sung its melody, someone heard my prayer. Abby waltzed into the room, her smile the only source of light I needed.
"You still working on that furniture set? Shouldn't you just YouTube it?"
"It's hard to YouTube what I can't even read!"
Abby rolled her eyes at my stubbornness.
"Huh, this isn't Swedish. What are these words? Skannka. Doomes. Feeman Blag... chair?" (I realized I held this pamphlet upside down)
The dining room chairs sprung to life, hopping on all fours. They gathered in a pentagram around the Ikea chair box. The cardboard burst into flame and our smoke alarm hammered it's message:**GET OUT! DANGER!**.
Abby fumbled along the wall for the door to escape, but a looming shadow with sanguine eyes froze me in place. Abby found the doorknob; the door opened and the smoke lessened. A masculine voice rang out.
"Who dares disturb me from my slumb...."
*ack uhum ah cough cough*
The mysterious form went into a coughing fit. He pumped the shadows to his left and right; after a moment I saw they were black, bat-like wings. The smoke billowed out the door.
"As I was saying.... Who dares awake the mighty destroyer of worlds? The slaughterer of the Nangang, the fear of the Ladcin, the horror of the Vinnu, I **FARTFULL** will destory you!
"I'm... I'm sorry... Did you just say Fartfull?"
"Of course puny... err what are you some kinda blend between an angel and a Troglaf? I, the great **FARTFUL**..."
A snicker from the door stopped the demon in his tracks.
"Did... Did that demon just say his name was Fartfull? We're humans by the way Mr. Fartfull sir oh wise demon."
Abby couldn't resist, she teased anyone and everyone who would listen. After a small chuckle under my breath, my judgement drifted back.
*What if this is an actual demon and we are pissing him off?*
"Errr well.... Puny humans, perhaps you heard of my family? The great Jerker!"
Now I had my doubts about whether this was an actual demon. I didn't know if I should grovel or crack a joke.
"Haha are you serious, or are you jerking my chain!"
*Maybe I should grovel a little just to be safe...*
A dark cloud boomed over Fartfull's horns, his eyes sent daggers in our direction.
"You offend me? Foolish humans! I will banish thee to the pits of MILF!"
Abby cried with laughter, the residual smoke turned the laughing fit into a cough.
My wife incapacitated. I had to stand up for her and show this demon who was boss.
"So Fartfull.... you ever been to the swamps of Blatass?"
Confused, Fartfull stammered back.
"Why of course, my family and I take holidays there together... It's a family affair! We fit as many demons as we can into Blatass!"
Now it was my turn. I rolled, laughing, in the bubble wrap from my previous endeavors. With every distinct **POP** Fartfull turned a deeper shade of red.
"SILENCE! I SAID SILENCE! I BANISH YEE TO A HELL THAT WILL NEVER COMPARE TO THE INNOCENT WONDER THAT IS BLATASS!"
"Wait a minute Fartfull can't we work somet-"
With a puff of smoke, Fartful was alone.
Waking from a deep sleep and a troubling dream, I reached for the nightstand.
*Chained down.... oh no Fartfull's wrath!*
Panicking, I looked up and saw the true depths of Hell.... wait, no. It was a pizza oven.
Without warning an Ikea pizza slice fell from the oven and into my mouth.
*If this is Hell.... it's great!*
Then another pizza slice dropped... and another-too many to eat. I tried to close my mouth, but a fishhook kept it open. I couldn't stop.
Between each slice I mumbled in desperation to find Abby; find out if we at least shared this Hell together.
"Abbaaa"
"Wheaeaa"
"Orhh"
"Yuuu"
A puff of smoke, another demon stood in front of me.
"Who dares summon me, the great and powerful Pysslingar!"
*Oh no, not again*
-------------------------------------------------
Anything after Fartfull appeared are actually Ikea names according to a random Buzzfeed article I clicked (I might have made one up, I don't remember). Also, I tried to literally sound out that last bit of dialogue, it was not a pretty sound. Here's another that I answered today, I liked the doctor prompt more than this one and thought I would share (this is a great prompt no offense OP):
https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6mo7uj/wp_you_just_ran_out_of_apples_yesterday_and_now/dk37bmk/?context=3 | "Delicious," Robert groaned. "Delicious and delectable," he mumbled to himself. A hallow mantra predicated on the promise of meatballs after a day out with Alice.
It had been three hours, twenty-two minutes and roughly forty seconds since Robert had agreed to "stop off at IKEA" on the way home from church in exchange for a serving of what he now knew would be utterly underwhelming Swedish meat muffins.
"Oooh. Dear come look at this sparsam. Wouldn't it just look exquisite over the pantry?" Alice chortled melodically. Either unaware or unperturbed by Robert's obvious repulsion of this colossal suburban nightmare.
"Honey..." He choked, fighting the urge to break a fyrkantig over his knee (or was it a fyr-kän-tig?). "We don't have a pantry. You know that. I know you know that."
"We will though. As soon as I get that promotion!" Alice hummed back at him with a tone so serene as to be worse than a scream.. Worse than death.. Worse than IKEA.
There it was again. Alice throwing his lack of ambition back in his face. Was it his fault the city had suddenly shifted away from its green energy initiative? Was he the one who had overseen the unprecedented drop in global oil prices that reinvigorated the dying car trade? Alice seemed to think so. Blubbering on and on about a promotion that hadn't even happened yet. A promotion that would probably never happen. If only he had the balls to call her out on her -
"Robbie? ROBERT!" Alice huffed. "Uh, yeah. Sorry dear. What is it?" Robert's mind snapped back into reality, and he immediately regretted it.
"You said you'd behave!" Alice shuttered sternly threw her teeth, which he thought made her look less like a happy, recently married teacher and more like a wolf in heat.
"I... I am behaving?" Robert retorted, careful not to betray his famous quick wit, he pitied himself internally.
"Behaving like a twat!" She snapped back. 'Tally up another one for Alice, has to be about 232 - 3 by now,' Robert thought, careful to mask his discomfort with a smile so fake it'd of made a mime laugh.
"We'll talk about this when we get home" Alice said as she turned toward the check-out line, or as Robert saw it: the finish-line, the end goal, the promised land. He glanced at his watch, nearly four-hours spent in this Scandinavian prison, he thought, before remembering how the narrator of a documentary he watched had actually praised the pleasantries of Sweden's rehabilitation institutes. He then amended his previous analogy to draw similarities between IKEA and a sphincter.
Satisfied, Robert, a balding thirty-three year-old former environmental analyst built about as poorly as any shelf or dagstrop in the place, shuffled hurriedly after his equally misshapen wife. Finally freed from the tyranny of the fläardfull and the knutstorps, Robert allowed his mind to wander off into his relatively untouched realm of excitement. He could almost taste the grease used to fry IKEA's recently unfrozen delicacies. The trick worked. He couldn't even remember going through the check-out line, though he was confident he'd ended up paying for everything despite his unemployment, as well as his thinly-veiled hatred for anything that required an umlaut to pronounce.
"Go on then," Alice nodded him toward the food court. Finally calm after her borderline spastic shopping spree. Robert didn't need to be told twice. He exited the scene as if yanked by a cane, a candy cane, his stomach helped him imagine.
He arrived at the line in seconds flat. Surely breaking any and all land-speed records for men weighing over 200 pounds. "I'll have one serving of meatballs, please" the man in front of Robert quipped. "Sure thing! You'll be order 122. Have a great day! Next up?"
"I'll have the same," Robert gleamed. "Hell, actually make it a double. It's been quite the day. Did you know that the norröra has three 'R's' in it?"
"I'm sorry sir..." The awkward, pimply teen stated with genuine sincerity.
"No problem at all, but I'm telling you it does. Look it up when... if you ever get off!" Robert replied, proud to regain what he considered his clever streak.
"Oh... no sir. I meant I'm sorry, but we're out of meatballs. That man just took the last serving" the boy replied.
Silence. The type of silence defined by the internal destruction of a man's will to live and the hiss of a pointless frier boiling water out of fun rather than necessity.
"Honey, what's the matter? We need to be headed out soon or we'll miss the picnic" Alice chimed in from too many yards back to have grasped Robert's immediate desperation.
"THE PICNIC?!" Robert roared as he turned toward Alice, knocking a tray out of the hands of a dainty girl presumably just hired out of sixth grade.
"You drag me here for nearly four hours... torturing me with norrvikens and riktig öglas and you have the guts, no... the güts (Robert pronounced the second 'u' slightly more gutturally, unaware of what effect umlauts actually have on the alphabet's most distant vowel) to call me out for taking too much time when I'm not even going to GET MY FUCKING MEATBALLS?!"
The entire IKEA fell silent, a hush fell over the entire food court. The man eating the final batch of meatballs hid himself ingeniously behind the back of his flattened hand. A few of the model dombås hidden in the corner collapsed from the shear anxiety palpably filling the room. Robert wasn't done yet. He had truly snapped. Just like the shoddy appliances produced by a certain Scandinavian appliance store that shall remain nameless, at least in this sentence. He began yelling profanities, starting with the usual suspects, but quickly retreating to words and phrases which taken out of context may not have sounded like insults at all. Terms such as cocker spaniel and dirty spatula. Nearly out of breath, Robert began to realize his words weren't having the impact he intended as he glimpsed his wife, arms crossed, checking her watch amidst his glorious outburst.
Frantic for a solution, Robert swiped a sauce-covered IKEA catalog conveniently located between the catsup and mustard to keep people from merely stopping off without truly visiting the depths of hell. He opened to a random page and began listing off appliances as if Swedish speakers could understand his devolving outburst as an eloquent plea for freedom, democracy and meatballs.
"BUMERANG!" He scowled at Alice. "SÖRE! BLÅMES! BLADVASS!" The cool air around him began to shift. Alice caught wind of it as her hair began to lift off the ground, subtly at first, and then all at once, as if commanded by a demented static balloon.
"DÄENNERIS! TIRYÖNYN! SKANÖR!" Robert continued, unaware that his words had began to throttle the physics of the building. Shelves began to shift. Couches and beds shuffled. People grabbed their Smellengüds, Omars and Fårdrups and ran for the exits.
Robert paused to look up at Alice, still entranced by the power he seemed to be wielding from the catalog. Had he been less numb, he may have noticed Alice's feet lift off the ground. Instead, he glanced back down at the page and shouted the final word louder than he had all the others, "VÖRHEES!!!"
With that, he too was ripped from the terrestrial body we call earth and pulled into an enclosed atmosphere ripe with the smell of grease and disappointment. Robert let out an inaudible gasp as he watched dozens of other shoppers twirling past him in an ever increasing spiral of Kardåshes and Gurlis. Alice swung by the other way, fiddling with her jacket as she stared out into the abyss above. The roof had been ripped to shreds and a hole blacker than Alice's coffee called to them like a beacon of death. Robert, unsure of what was happening, had no idea what was going on, while nearly everyone else caught-up in the terror prayed for a quick and painless death.
Instead, Klaas. As hideous a demon as has ever lived. He peered in from the black with eyes somehow blacker than the abyss before them, eyes only highlighted by the blood-red cornea that surrounded them.
"I AM KLAAS" He bellowed, knocking Alice, Robert, and the rest of the IKEA's pitiable Sunday customers back to the floor. "WHO DARES WAKE ME FROM MY SLUMBER?!"
The rest of the crowd turned in unison toward Robert, who, fortuitously he had thought, had landed near the catalog used to enact the summoning. In a characteristic attempt to fight fire with straw, Robert frantically opened to a random page, scrolled down and slowly stuttered... "Fintorp?"
The Swedish term for bucket.
Klaas, though obviously unaffected, was temporarily puzzled.
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Wergle-Shergle," attempted Harry.
"No, there are umlauts," said Sally. "It should be more like Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"Worgle-Shorgle."
The credenza glowed. Its cabinet door swung open and closed. An inexpensive yet tacky rug span with colors and patterns. A figure appeared in the demonstration bedroom, black-horned and cloven-footed. "I am Worgle-Shorgle, master of the seventh pit. Slaver of dark ones, eater of souls."
"Worgle-Shorgle," said Sally, "how would you pronounce this name with the umlauts?"
Worgle-Shorgle leaned close, brimstone on his breath. "Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"I told you," said Sally.
"Let's get some meatballs," said Harry.
As the young couple left, Worgle-Shorgle tapped his pitchfork against the ground. He paced menacingly between a desk lamp and a lighting fixture. Such incredible demon-summoners these must be, he thought, to have trapped him in such a diabolical labyrinth. | "Delicious," Robert groaned. "Delicious and delectable," he mumbled to himself. A hallow mantra predicated on the promise of meatballs after a day out with Alice.
It had been three hours, twenty-two minutes and roughly forty seconds since Robert had agreed to "stop off at IKEA" on the way home from church in exchange for a serving of what he now knew would be utterly underwhelming Swedish meat muffins.
"Oooh. Dear come look at this sparsam. Wouldn't it just look exquisite over the pantry?" Alice chortled melodically. Either unaware or unperturbed by Robert's obvious repulsion of this colossal suburban nightmare.
"Honey..." He choked, fighting the urge to break a fyrkantig over his knee (or was it a fyr-kän-tig?). "We don't have a pantry. You know that. I know you know that."
"We will though. As soon as I get that promotion!" Alice hummed back at him with a tone so serene as to be worse than a scream.. Worse than death.. Worse than IKEA.
There it was again. Alice throwing his lack of ambition back in his face. Was it his fault the city had suddenly shifted away from its green energy initiative? Was he the one who had overseen the unprecedented drop in global oil prices that reinvigorated the dying car trade? Alice seemed to think so. Blubbering on and on about a promotion that hadn't even happened yet. A promotion that would probably never happen. If only he had the balls to call her out on her -
"Robbie? ROBERT!" Alice huffed. "Uh, yeah. Sorry dear. What is it?" Robert's mind snapped back into reality, and he immediately regretted it.
"You said you'd behave!" Alice shuttered sternly threw her teeth, which he thought made her look less like a happy, recently married teacher and more like a wolf in heat.
"I... I am behaving?" Robert retorted, careful not to betray his famous quick wit, he pitied himself internally.
"Behaving like a twat!" She snapped back. 'Tally up another one for Alice, has to be about 232 - 3 by now,' Robert thought, careful to mask his discomfort with a smile so fake it'd of made a mime laugh.
"We'll talk about this when we get home" Alice said as she turned toward the check-out line, or as Robert saw it: the finish-line, the end goal, the promised land. He glanced at his watch, nearly four-hours spent in this Scandinavian prison, he thought, before remembering how the narrator of a documentary he watched had actually praised the pleasantries of Sweden's rehabilitation institutes. He then amended his previous analogy to draw similarities between IKEA and a sphincter.
Satisfied, Robert, a balding thirty-three year-old former environmental analyst built about as poorly as any shelf or dagstrop in the place, shuffled hurriedly after his equally misshapen wife. Finally freed from the tyranny of the fläardfull and the knutstorps, Robert allowed his mind to wander off into his relatively untouched realm of excitement. He could almost taste the grease used to fry IKEA's recently unfrozen delicacies. The trick worked. He couldn't even remember going through the check-out line, though he was confident he'd ended up paying for everything despite his unemployment, as well as his thinly-veiled hatred for anything that required an umlaut to pronounce.
"Go on then," Alice nodded him toward the food court. Finally calm after her borderline spastic shopping spree. Robert didn't need to be told twice. He exited the scene as if yanked by a cane, a candy cane, his stomach helped him imagine.
He arrived at the line in seconds flat. Surely breaking any and all land-speed records for men weighing over 200 pounds. "I'll have one serving of meatballs, please" the man in front of Robert quipped. "Sure thing! You'll be order 122. Have a great day! Next up?"
"I'll have the same," Robert gleamed. "Hell, actually make it a double. It's been quite the day. Did you know that the norröra has three 'R's' in it?"
"I'm sorry sir..." The awkward, pimply teen stated with genuine sincerity.
"No problem at all, but I'm telling you it does. Look it up when... if you ever get off!" Robert replied, proud to regain what he considered his clever streak.
"Oh... no sir. I meant I'm sorry, but we're out of meatballs. That man just took the last serving" the boy replied.
Silence. The type of silence defined by the internal destruction of a man's will to live and the hiss of a pointless frier boiling water out of fun rather than necessity.
"Honey, what's the matter? We need to be headed out soon or we'll miss the picnic" Alice chimed in from too many yards back to have grasped Robert's immediate desperation.
"THE PICNIC?!" Robert roared as he turned toward Alice, knocking a tray out of the hands of a dainty girl presumably just hired out of sixth grade.
"You drag me here for nearly four hours... torturing me with norrvikens and riktig öglas and you have the guts, no... the güts (Robert pronounced the second 'u' slightly more gutturally, unaware of what effect umlauts actually have on the alphabet's most distant vowel) to call me out for taking too much time when I'm not even going to GET MY FUCKING MEATBALLS?!"
The entire IKEA fell silent, a hush fell over the entire food court. The man eating the final batch of meatballs hid himself ingeniously behind the back of his flattened hand. A few of the model dombås hidden in the corner collapsed from the shear anxiety palpably filling the room. Robert wasn't done yet. He had truly snapped. Just like the shoddy appliances produced by a certain Scandinavian appliance store that shall remain nameless, at least in this sentence. He began yelling profanities, starting with the usual suspects, but quickly retreating to words and phrases which taken out of context may not have sounded like insults at all. Terms such as cocker spaniel and dirty spatula. Nearly out of breath, Robert began to realize his words weren't having the impact he intended as he glimpsed his wife, arms crossed, checking her watch amidst his glorious outburst.
Frantic for a solution, Robert swiped a sauce-covered IKEA catalog conveniently located between the catsup and mustard to keep people from merely stopping off without truly visiting the depths of hell. He opened to a random page and began listing off appliances as if Swedish speakers could understand his devolving outburst as an eloquent plea for freedom, democracy and meatballs.
"BUMERANG!" He scowled at Alice. "SÖRE! BLÅMES! BLADVASS!" The cool air around him began to shift. Alice caught wind of it as her hair began to lift off the ground, subtly at first, and then all at once, as if commanded by a demented static balloon.
"DÄENNERIS! TIRYÖNYN! SKANÖR!" Robert continued, unaware that his words had began to throttle the physics of the building. Shelves began to shift. Couches and beds shuffled. People grabbed their Smellengüds, Omars and Fårdrups and ran for the exits.
Robert paused to look up at Alice, still entranced by the power he seemed to be wielding from the catalog. Had he been less numb, he may have noticed Alice's feet lift off the ground. Instead, he glanced back down at the page and shouted the final word louder than he had all the others, "VÖRHEES!!!"
With that, he too was ripped from the terrestrial body we call earth and pulled into an enclosed atmosphere ripe with the smell of grease and disappointment. Robert let out an inaudible gasp as he watched dozens of other shoppers twirling past him in an ever increasing spiral of Kardåshes and Gurlis. Alice swung by the other way, fiddling with her jacket as she stared out into the abyss above. The roof had been ripped to shreds and a hole blacker than Alice's coffee called to them like a beacon of death. Robert, unsure of what was happening, had no idea what was going on, while nearly everyone else caught-up in the terror prayed for a quick and painless death.
Instead, Klaas. As hideous a demon as has ever lived. He peered in from the black with eyes somehow blacker than the abyss before them, eyes only highlighted by the blood-red cornea that surrounded them.
"I AM KLAAS" He bellowed, knocking Alice, Robert, and the rest of the IKEA's pitiable Sunday customers back to the floor. "WHO DARES WAKE ME FROM MY SLUMBER?!"
The rest of the crowd turned in unison toward Robert, who, fortuitously he had thought, had landed near the catalog used to enact the summoning. In a characteristic attempt to fight fire with straw, Robert frantically opened to a random page, scrolled down and slowly stuttered... "Fintorp?"
The Swedish term for bucket.
Klaas, though obviously unaffected, was temporarily puzzled.
| |
[WP] You accidentally summon a demon by trying to pronounce Ikea product names. | "Wergle-Shergle," attempted Harry.
"No, there are umlauts," said Sally. "It should be more like Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"Worgle-Shorgle."
The credenza glowed. Its cabinet door swung open and closed. An inexpensive yet tacky rug span with colors and patterns. A figure appeared in the demonstration bedroom, black-horned and cloven-footed. "I am Worgle-Shorgle, master of the seventh pit. Slaver of dark ones, eater of souls."
"Worgle-Shorgle," said Sally, "how would you pronounce this name with the umlauts?"
Worgle-Shorgle leaned close, brimstone on his breath. "Weurgle-Sheurgle."
"I told you," said Sally.
"Let's get some meatballs," said Harry.
As the young couple left, Worgle-Shorgle tapped his pitchfork against the ground. He paced menacingly between a desk lamp and a lighting fixture. Such incredible demon-summoners these must be, he thought, to have trapped him in such a diabolical labyrinth. | Feeman blag? Doomes? Skannka? Did someone at Ikea dip their spoon in alphabet soup?
My lips contorted in an attempt to read the last name: riahc?
During an off semester and in desperate need of money, my wife made Swedish Fish on a conveyor belt. If the horror stories were true, she could tell the quality of a fish by the color of the scales. Her methods were simple, yet efficient. If the fish was red, it was good; any other color: bad. That always got a laugh out of visitors. Maybe she could read this? The wind chime on the door sung its melody, someone heard my prayer. Abby waltzed into the room, her smile the only source of light I needed.
"You still working on that furniture set? Shouldn't you just YouTube it?"
"It's hard to YouTube what I can't even read!"
Abby rolled her eyes at my stubbornness.
"Huh, this isn't Swedish. What are these words? Skannka. Doomes. Feeman Blag... chair?" (I realized I held this pamphlet upside down)
The dining room chairs sprung to life, hopping on all fours. They gathered in a pentagram around the Ikea chair box. The cardboard burst into flame and our smoke alarm hammered it's message:**GET OUT! DANGER!**.
Abby fumbled along the wall for the door to escape, but a looming shadow with sanguine eyes froze me in place. Abby found the doorknob; the door opened and the smoke lessened. A masculine voice rang out.
"Who dares disturb me from my slumb...."
*ack uhum ah cough cough*
The mysterious form went into a coughing fit. He pumped the shadows to his left and right; after a moment I saw they were black, bat-like wings. The smoke billowed out the door.
"As I was saying.... Who dares awake the mighty destroyer of worlds? The slaughterer of the Nangang, the fear of the Ladcin, the horror of the Vinnu, I **FARTFULL** will destory you!
"I'm... I'm sorry... Did you just say Fartfull?"
"Of course puny... err what are you some kinda blend between an angel and a Troglaf? I, the great **FARTFUL**..."
A snicker from the door stopped the demon in his tracks.
"Did... Did that demon just say his name was Fartfull? We're humans by the way Mr. Fartfull sir oh wise demon."
Abby couldn't resist, she teased anyone and everyone who would listen. After a small chuckle under my breath, my judgement drifted back.
*What if this is an actual demon and we are pissing him off?*
"Errr well.... Puny humans, perhaps you heard of my family? The great Jerker!"
Now I had my doubts about whether this was an actual demon. I didn't know if I should grovel or crack a joke.
"Haha are you serious, or are you jerking my chain!"
*Maybe I should grovel a little just to be safe...*
A dark cloud boomed over Fartfull's horns, his eyes sent daggers in our direction.
"You offend me? Foolish humans! I will banish thee to the pits of MILF!"
Abby cried with laughter, the residual smoke turned the laughing fit into a cough.
My wife incapacitated. I had to stand up for her and show this demon who was boss.
"So Fartfull.... you ever been to the swamps of Blatass?"
Confused, Fartfull stammered back.
"Why of course, my family and I take holidays there together... It's a family affair! We fit as many demons as we can into Blatass!"
Now it was my turn. I rolled, laughing, in the bubble wrap from my previous endeavors. With every distinct **POP** Fartfull turned a deeper shade of red.
"SILENCE! I SAID SILENCE! I BANISH YEE TO A HELL THAT WILL NEVER COMPARE TO THE INNOCENT WONDER THAT IS BLATASS!"
"Wait a minute Fartfull can't we work somet-"
With a puff of smoke, Fartful was alone.
Waking from a deep sleep and a troubling dream, I reached for the nightstand.
*Chained down.... oh no Fartfull's wrath!*
Panicking, I looked up and saw the true depths of Hell.... wait, no. It was a pizza oven.
Without warning an Ikea pizza slice fell from the oven and into my mouth.
*If this is Hell.... it's great!*
Then another pizza slice dropped... and another-too many to eat. I tried to close my mouth, but a fishhook kept it open. I couldn't stop.
Between each slice I mumbled in desperation to find Abby; find out if we at least shared this Hell together.
"Abbaaa"
"Wheaeaa"
"Orhh"
"Yuuu"
A puff of smoke, another demon stood in front of me.
"Who dares summon me, the great and powerful Pysslingar!"
*Oh no, not again*
-------------------------------------------------
Anything after Fartfull appeared are actually Ikea names according to a random Buzzfeed article I clicked (I might have made one up, I don't remember). Also, I tried to literally sound out that last bit of dialogue, it was not a pretty sound. Here's another that I answered today, I liked the doctor prompt more than this one and thought I would share (this is a great prompt no offense OP):
https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6mo7uj/wp_you_just_ran_out_of_apples_yesterday_and_now/dk37bmk/?context=3 | |
[WP] you spouse jokingly says and asks for a codeword/response every time he/she goes to work in the morning. Through the years you just go with it thinking it's a harmless fun. Today your spouse comes back from work not knowing the correct codeword. | ***This is my first time responding... be gentle...***
My wife made up crap all the time. She was quirky, imaginative, and just all around goofy; but that was part of what made me love her. There was one habit she had that annoyed the ever-loving crap out of me. First thing in the morning, she'd give me a code-phrase with a response. The rules were, when we got home from work, I'd say the code-phrase for the day, and she'd respond. The phrase always made sense, in a way, but the response was always nonsensical and frankly, ridiculous. Years of this went by and it just became normal. I never thought anything of it.
Starting in April though, she became increasingly serious. Some of the whimsy died down, then all of it. The really odd thing was that she made the code/response increasingly more elaborate and almost hinted that it wasn't a game, even though the responses remained silly. I knew something was wrong, but she wouldn't tell me. She just skirted my questions.
That June, I was met with a situation that I had never encountered before. I had no idea what to do.
I went through our routine. Per the norm, first thing out of my mouth was the code for the day, "See anything interesting on your way home?"
All I got was a quizzical look and a stark, "No."
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. She was supposed to tell me she saw an elephant with an umbrella reading last week's paper.
I just stood there for what felt like an eternity. But then I guess instinct guided me because I heard myself say, "Oh. Okay." I turned and walked upstairs. "I have to pee."
"Need a hand?" Came a response.
What the hell? Serious for months and now back to normal? Like nothing happened? The sudden change plus the incorrect response had my head spinning. What the hell was going on?
Multiple scenarios ran through my head. Nothing made sense. All of them had one plausible conclusion. That... woman... downstairs. She wasn't my wife.
I made up my mind. I went to my closet and fumbled around for a second before my hand found it. My .45. I needed answers.
When I got back downstairs, she had her back to me. "Ash." She turned and looked at me, smiling. The smile faded when her eyes drifted down to the gun at my side. Holy. Shit. She looked and moved exactly like my Ashley, but something was off. I couldn't put my finger on it.
"Mark? Why do you have your gun? What's going on?"
"Where the fuck is my wife? WHAT DID YOU DO WITH ASHLEY?!" I hadn't meant to yell, but it came out as a roar as I realized my wife was in danger.
The gun leveled at her all by itself.
The not-Ash sat down and looked at me with tears in her eyes. "It's me baby, it's me."
"Bullshit. Where is Ashley? I won't ask again."
A tear rolled down her face. "Mark. Please."
The gun bucked in my hand. Crimson splashed across the floor and table. Not-Ash screamed.
I had aimed for her leg. I couldn't kill her. I needed answers. I waited while she screamed in pain and anger. When she slowed down, I asked again. "Where is my wife?"
Not-Ash looked up at me with tear soaked eyes. But there was rage there. "I'll never tell you. She's gone."
***I'll write more if it's requested.***
Edit: on to in. Had to head | Every time Liz left for work, she always asked for a password. The first time she asked, John laughed. Seeing the determined look in her eyes, he realized she wouldn't leave without one. He gave in, gave her the word buffalo. That evening, she came back, saying buffalo before coming in.
John found it amusing. His wife had always been a little off, ever since they met. But he loved her and was willing to keep her idiosyncrasies in check by doing these little things. Besides, she worked so that he didn't have to. He definitely didn't want to give that up by irritating her.
That morning, he gave her the word lawnmower. All seemed normal, she walked out the door, and John sat back and relaxed. After a typical day watching Netflix and running errands, he heard the door open. There were three things he immediately noticed. The first was that his wife was acting a little different, as if she'd never been in their house before. The second was that she referred to him by both his first and last names when she greeted him, like someone who had never met him before. The third, and by far the most important, was that she didn't use the password he had given her that morning.
Her forgetting that password immediately told John all that he needed to know: the woman that looked like his wife was not his wife. Even though she looked the same, she was not the same. John acted calmly, asking her, "How was work, honey?"
She didn't reply, rushing into her home office and locking the door behind her. Once he was sure she wasn't coming out anytime soon, called 911.
"911, what's your emergency?"
"My wife, she's different! Something's happened to her! I need someone here right away!"
"Calm down, sir, what is your address?"
"8132 Pine Lane."
"All right, an officer will check on you shortly," said the dispatcher. As both hung up the phone, she quickly called the number written on a paper next to her, underneath John's address.
A few minutes later, John heard the sirens outside. He walked out, only to feel a sharp pain to the head and saw nothing but darkness.
*****
"Sir, Agent 1926 had to be reprogrammed this morning. Her personal life was starting to interfere with her work. She has been fully reconfigured and is ready to be put back into circulation."
"Did you take care of that personal business?"
"Yes, sir, let's just say he won't interfere with her ever again."
"Excellent, Jenkins. This type of thing always brightens up my Monday. Now let's grab a bit to eat." | |
[WP] you spouse jokingly says and asks for a codeword/response every time he/she goes to work in the morning. Through the years you just go with it thinking it's a harmless fun. Today your spouse comes back from work not knowing the correct codeword. | ##Fortnight
“I’m home!”
“Hey, hun.” I said, turning my attention away from the carrot I was dicing. “You’re home a bit early. How was your day?”
Daniel placed his hat on the coat rack and shrugged. “Good a day as any. We’ve finished up pouring over the anomaly data, and there was a technical malfunction in the lab so they sent us home while the technicians figure out the problem.” He hung up his jacket and stepped over into the kitchen. “Mmmhhh, that smells delicious. What’cha makin’?”
I smiled, scooping up the carrot pieces and throwing them into the skillet filled with sizzling beef strips and bell pepper slices. “Just a stir fry.”
As he stepped over the sink, I noticed how neat his fringe was. “Hey, nice haircut!” I said, clear amazement in my voice.
Usually, he went two or three months before I had to get on his case about his fast-growing hair. It was nice to see him taking the initiative to get it trimmed. Daniel brushed his fingers through his hair, now an even length compared to the usual unruly mess.
“Why thank you, my dear, but you already commented on my haircut yesterday”, he said with a dorky grin.
“Oh?” I asked quizzically. Had I commented on his haircut? I had had a lot on my mind the past few days and couldn’t remember our conversation from the previous evening very well. “Well, I’m a little tired,” I said with a chuckle, “I must have forgotten. The haircut still looks great today too.”
“Speaking of tired, how was *your* day?” he asked, pulling a glass out of the cupboard and filling it with water.
I sighed. “Mildly stressful as always. My client was worried about how portable the theme would be in textile, and I had to get a bunch of mockups prepared for her before noon. I’m just anticipating what her next panic attack will be over.”
Daniel took a long drink from the glass of water before replying, “How did she like the mockups?”
“She loved them, of course.”
“And what did she think of the new logo?”
I tilted my head. “New logo? What logo?”
His brow furrowed a bit, “Didn’t you say you were working on a logo for that Meredith lady? You know, that logo with the lion and inkpen double entendre?”
“Meredith? No- maybe you’re thinking of my last client, though her name wasn’t Meredith.” I explained, “Right now I’m working with that new breakfast and lunch diner over on 4th Street, the one where that sushi place used to be.”
“Huh. I could have sworn you finished working with that diner about a week ago.”
I smiled, embracing him once he has set down the glass, “looks like I’m not the only forgetful one today.”
He chuckled, “Yeah, I’ve been working myself to the bone. I’m sorry if I’ve been a little out of it the past few days.”
“It’s all fine. Spaghetti.” I said, lookup up into his deep brown eyes.
He blinked. “What? This is stir fry.”
“No, you goof! ‘Spaghetti’, the codeword!” I said mockingly.
He mouthed the word ‘spaghetti’, confusion plain on his face.
After he had started working at the Jacobs-Layton ChronoLab, he had insisted that I think up a codeword and response phrase every morning before he left for work, then test him on it in the evening when he returned. He said it was part of lab protocol, but neither of us took it very seriously, half of the words and phrases being inside jokes between us.
“Spaghetti? And you say...”, I pressed. He blinked again. Something was wrong.
I released him and took an involuntary step backwards. “D- Danny?” I sputtered, warning bells ringing in my head. “The codeword? Spaghetti? What’s your response phrase?”
Daniel’s eyes grew wide. He turned away and ran towards the wall where the calender hung. His jaw dropped open, astonishment replacing his confusion.
“It can’t be… Th- the twentieth!? That was the day of the anomaly…” he mumbled to himself. Then he looked up, a wide smile breaking across his face. “Diane, what- what month is it?”
I stared at Daniel, utterly perplexed. Though I had always thought the codeword and phrase silly, there had always been worry surrounding it in my mind. Why was there such a protocol in place? What exactly would it ever be useful for? The little inconsistencies of the moments before amplified in my mind. The haircut… the logo… What was happening?
“Diane,” he repeated, “what month is it? Is it really April?”
I nodded, unable to find my voice.
The smile broke across his face again, and to my surprise, he lept into the air with a cheer. “Yeeeesss! Dr. Benjamins was right! The device works, it wasn’t a malfunction! But- but... “ He looked back at me, his countenance suddenly serious. “I need to run back down to the lab. This is *big*! This- this is-” He frantically dug through his pockets and pulled out his mobile phone, nearly dropping it in his excitement “April twentieth. Ha! Won’t you look at that!” Another big smile.
I didn’t know how to respond. I just stood there, stupidly, trying to wrap my mind around- whatever he was babbling about.
Daniel rushed to the door and slipped back on his hat and jacket. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I need to go talk with the doctor; this a huge! Save me a plate of stir fry.” Then he stopped, hand on the door handle. “Wait- no- that won’t be for two weeks! What time-?” He pulled out his phone again and gasped. “It’s 6:05! I’ll be home any moment now! I can’t let me see myself! I don’t know how that would affect the timeline…”
“Timeline?” I whispered, barely able to breathe.
He looked up at me. He had such kind eyes. I pushed down my growing fear and told myself everything was okay, I was simply overreacting. Daniel would explain everything in just a moment and we’d have a good laugh-
“Diane, I love you so very much. I’ll be back in about two weeks once this mess is untangled. And I think the passphrase was something about swinging, but I can’t remember it exactly. And please, when I get home just play it cool. That will probably minimize any paradoxes.” He ran to the back door, flung it open, sprinted across the small yard, and disappeared over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
I stared at the open door in bewilderment. I would have continued staring if the smell of burning beef hadn’t snapped me out of my trance. Turning off the stovetop, I hesitantly walked to the back door and gave a peek around the yard before closing it.
*Timeline? April? Anomaly at the lab? Play it cool?*
The front door clicked and opened. Daniel stepped inside. “I’m home!”
I froze.
He placed his hat on the coat rack and started to unbutton his jacket. “Diane?”
“I’m here.” I said, with no inflection in my voice.
“Hey! I didn’t see you there- Are, you okay?” he said, his expression falling.
I stared for a moment at the long strands of hair hanging down in his eyes.
“Spaghetti.”
“One last swing.” he responded immediately, raising an eyebrow. “Diane, you okay?”
*Timeline… April… Anomaly.. Play it cool.*
“Uh, yeah! Sorry, I was just lost in thought.” I said, putting on a smile, “I made some stir fry, though the meat might be a little overcooked.” I stepped back into the kitchen and started scooping the stir fry onto two plates.
“Oh, good. I was concerned there for a moment. You looked like you’d seen a ghost!” He said laughing, and walked over to get a glass of water.
“Yeah, ha ha- so, anything unusual happen to you today?”
He replied cheerily, “It’s funny you should ask because the lab picked up this crazy anomaly earlier today. It has the whole team in a frenzy!” He stopped to take a long drink from the glass. “We’ll probably be picking apart the data until May! Who knows, this could be the big breakthrough that Dr. Benjamins is looking for.”
I glanced at the back door, then back at Daniel, and embraced him.
“You sure you’re alright?” he asked.
“I’m getting better. I’m just a little confused.” *and I’ll ask you more about it in two weeks*, I thought to myself.
“Well, I’m here for you.”
I examined his messy hair. “You know, you really need a haircut.”
“Nah! It’s still pretty short. I’ll give it a week or two.”
| Every time Liz left for work, she always asked for a password. The first time she asked, John laughed. Seeing the determined look in her eyes, he realized she wouldn't leave without one. He gave in, gave her the word buffalo. That evening, she came back, saying buffalo before coming in.
John found it amusing. His wife had always been a little off, ever since they met. But he loved her and was willing to keep her idiosyncrasies in check by doing these little things. Besides, she worked so that he didn't have to. He definitely didn't want to give that up by irritating her.
That morning, he gave her the word lawnmower. All seemed normal, she walked out the door, and John sat back and relaxed. After a typical day watching Netflix and running errands, he heard the door open. There were three things he immediately noticed. The first was that his wife was acting a little different, as if she'd never been in their house before. The second was that she referred to him by both his first and last names when she greeted him, like someone who had never met him before. The third, and by far the most important, was that she didn't use the password he had given her that morning.
Her forgetting that password immediately told John all that he needed to know: the woman that looked like his wife was not his wife. Even though she looked the same, she was not the same. John acted calmly, asking her, "How was work, honey?"
She didn't reply, rushing into her home office and locking the door behind her. Once he was sure she wasn't coming out anytime soon, called 911.
"911, what's your emergency?"
"My wife, she's different! Something's happened to her! I need someone here right away!"
"Calm down, sir, what is your address?"
"8132 Pine Lane."
"All right, an officer will check on you shortly," said the dispatcher. As both hung up the phone, she quickly called the number written on a paper next to her, underneath John's address.
A few minutes later, John heard the sirens outside. He walked out, only to feel a sharp pain to the head and saw nothing but darkness.
*****
"Sir, Agent 1926 had to be reprogrammed this morning. Her personal life was starting to interfere with her work. She has been fully reconfigured and is ready to be put back into circulation."
"Did you take care of that personal business?"
"Yes, sir, let's just say he won't interfere with her ever again."
"Excellent, Jenkins. This type of thing always brightens up my Monday. Now let's grab a bit to eat." | |
[WP] you spouse jokingly says and asks for a codeword/response every time he/she goes to work in the morning. Through the years you just go with it thinking it's a harmless fun. Today your spouse comes back from work not knowing the correct codeword. | ##Fortnight
“I’m home!”
“Hey, hun.” I said, turning my attention away from the carrot I was dicing. “You’re home a bit early. How was your day?”
Daniel placed his hat on the coat rack and shrugged. “Good a day as any. We’ve finished up pouring over the anomaly data, and there was a technical malfunction in the lab so they sent us home while the technicians figure out the problem.” He hung up his jacket and stepped over into the kitchen. “Mmmhhh, that smells delicious. What’cha makin’?”
I smiled, scooping up the carrot pieces and throwing them into the skillet filled with sizzling beef strips and bell pepper slices. “Just a stir fry.”
As he stepped over the sink, I noticed how neat his fringe was. “Hey, nice haircut!” I said, clear amazement in my voice.
Usually, he went two or three months before I had to get on his case about his fast-growing hair. It was nice to see him taking the initiative to get it trimmed. Daniel brushed his fingers through his hair, now an even length compared to the usual unruly mess.
“Why thank you, my dear, but you already commented on my haircut yesterday”, he said with a dorky grin.
“Oh?” I asked quizzically. Had I commented on his haircut? I had had a lot on my mind the past few days and couldn’t remember our conversation from the previous evening very well. “Well, I’m a little tired,” I said with a chuckle, “I must have forgotten. The haircut still looks great today too.”
“Speaking of tired, how was *your* day?” he asked, pulling a glass out of the cupboard and filling it with water.
I sighed. “Mildly stressful as always. My client was worried about how portable the theme would be in textile, and I had to get a bunch of mockups prepared for her before noon. I’m just anticipating what her next panic attack will be over.”
Daniel took a long drink from the glass of water before replying, “How did she like the mockups?”
“She loved them, of course.”
“And what did she think of the new logo?”
I tilted my head. “New logo? What logo?”
His brow furrowed a bit, “Didn’t you say you were working on a logo for that Meredith lady? You know, that logo with the lion and inkpen double entendre?”
“Meredith? No- maybe you’re thinking of my last client, though her name wasn’t Meredith.” I explained, “Right now I’m working with that new breakfast and lunch diner over on 4th Street, the one where that sushi place used to be.”
“Huh. I could have sworn you finished working with that diner about a week ago.”
I smiled, embracing him once he has set down the glass, “looks like I’m not the only forgetful one today.”
He chuckled, “Yeah, I’ve been working myself to the bone. I’m sorry if I’ve been a little out of it the past few days.”
“It’s all fine. Spaghetti.” I said, lookup up into his deep brown eyes.
He blinked. “What? This is stir fry.”
“No, you goof! ‘Spaghetti’, the codeword!” I said mockingly.
He mouthed the word ‘spaghetti’, confusion plain on his face.
After he had started working at the Jacobs-Layton ChronoLab, he had insisted that I think up a codeword and response phrase every morning before he left for work, then test him on it in the evening when he returned. He said it was part of lab protocol, but neither of us took it very seriously, half of the words and phrases being inside jokes between us.
“Spaghetti? And you say...”, I pressed. He blinked again. Something was wrong.
I released him and took an involuntary step backwards. “D- Danny?” I sputtered, warning bells ringing in my head. “The codeword? Spaghetti? What’s your response phrase?”
Daniel’s eyes grew wide. He turned away and ran towards the wall where the calender hung. His jaw dropped open, astonishment replacing his confusion.
“It can’t be… Th- the twentieth!? That was the day of the anomaly…” he mumbled to himself. Then he looked up, a wide smile breaking across his face. “Diane, what- what month is it?”
I stared at Daniel, utterly perplexed. Though I had always thought the codeword and phrase silly, there had always been worry surrounding it in my mind. Why was there such a protocol in place? What exactly would it ever be useful for? The little inconsistencies of the moments before amplified in my mind. The haircut… the logo… What was happening?
“Diane,” he repeated, “what month is it? Is it really April?”
I nodded, unable to find my voice.
The smile broke across his face again, and to my surprise, he lept into the air with a cheer. “Yeeeesss! Dr. Benjamins was right! The device works, it wasn’t a malfunction! But- but... “ He looked back at me, his countenance suddenly serious. “I need to run back down to the lab. This is *big*! This- this is-” He frantically dug through his pockets and pulled out his mobile phone, nearly dropping it in his excitement “April twentieth. Ha! Won’t you look at that!” Another big smile.
I didn’t know how to respond. I just stood there, stupidly, trying to wrap my mind around- whatever he was babbling about.
Daniel rushed to the door and slipped back on his hat and jacket. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I need to go talk with the doctor; this a huge! Save me a plate of stir fry.” Then he stopped, hand on the door handle. “Wait- no- that won’t be for two weeks! What time-?” He pulled out his phone again and gasped. “It’s 6:05! I’ll be home any moment now! I can’t let me see myself! I don’t know how that would affect the timeline…”
“Timeline?” I whispered, barely able to breathe.
He looked up at me. He had such kind eyes. I pushed down my growing fear and told myself everything was okay, I was simply overreacting. Daniel would explain everything in just a moment and we’d have a good laugh-
“Diane, I love you so very much. I’ll be back in about two weeks once this mess is untangled. And I think the passphrase was something about swinging, but I can’t remember it exactly. And please, when I get home just play it cool. That will probably minimize any paradoxes.” He ran to the back door, flung it open, sprinted across the small yard, and disappeared over the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
I stared at the open door in bewilderment. I would have continued staring if the smell of burning beef hadn’t snapped me out of my trance. Turning off the stovetop, I hesitantly walked to the back door and gave a peek around the yard before closing it.
*Timeline? April? Anomaly at the lab? Play it cool?*
The front door clicked and opened. Daniel stepped inside. “I’m home!”
I froze.
He placed his hat on the coat rack and started to unbutton his jacket. “Diane?”
“I’m here.” I said, with no inflection in my voice.
“Hey! I didn’t see you there- Are, you okay?” he said, his expression falling.
I stared for a moment at the long strands of hair hanging down in his eyes.
“Spaghetti.”
“One last swing.” he responded immediately, raising an eyebrow. “Diane, you okay?”
*Timeline… April… Anomaly.. Play it cool.*
“Uh, yeah! Sorry, I was just lost in thought.” I said, putting on a smile, “I made some stir fry, though the meat might be a little overcooked.” I stepped back into the kitchen and started scooping the stir fry onto two plates.
“Oh, good. I was concerned there for a moment. You looked like you’d seen a ghost!” He said laughing, and walked over to get a glass of water.
“Yeah, ha ha- so, anything unusual happen to you today?”
He replied cheerily, “It’s funny you should ask because the lab picked up this crazy anomaly earlier today. It has the whole team in a frenzy!” He stopped to take a long drink from the glass. “We’ll probably be picking apart the data until May! Who knows, this could be the big breakthrough that Dr. Benjamins is looking for.”
I glanced at the back door, then back at Daniel, and embraced him.
“You sure you’re alright?” he asked.
“I’m getting better. I’m just a little confused.” *and I’ll ask you more about it in two weeks*, I thought to myself.
“Well, I’m here for you.”
I examined his messy hair. “You know, you really need a haircut.”
“Nah! It’s still pretty short. I’ll give it a week or two.”
| “Blueberry!” Jason exclaimed with his usual glee as his wife, Marlene walked through the door.
With a quizzical look on her face, she replies, “Yeah, sure? How was your day, honey?”
Jason laughed and continued, “No seriously, Blueberry!” with a more forced smile this time.
And again, with more confusion on her face, she drops her purse on the kitchen counter with a noticeable thud and replies, “What are you talking about?”
“You know, the password?”
“What pass….” Marlene stopped talking dead in her tracks. The color on her face could now seamlessly blend in with the finest snow you’d fine in the arctic. Sweat began excreting from her brow in a stark panic over the situation.
“Are you okay, baby?” Jason asked as he moved in to hold her before she passes out.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Marlene screamed as she pushed Jason by the face and chest with all her might. The fight or flight triggers sounded in her brain and all instincts were telling her to leave immediately. Something was wrong, dead wrong. As she stumbled over the wooden chair in the breakfast nook, she started thinking aloud as she frantically scanned the room for any sort of assistance.
“What is the password? What is the password? Password Denied!”
Jason is scared and panicked at this point. Nothing is making sense out of his wife’s mouth. He’s known her for over 10 years and she’s never expressed any issues before. This is a wholly new experience to him.
“Baby, calm down! What the fuck is wrong?” Jason sternly asked as he grabs onto his wife before she bounds out the back door.
After what felt like ages, but was probably only fifteen minutes tops, Jason heard police sirens outside. He assumed a neighbor heard the commotion and decided to call for a disturbance.
“Fucking nosy ass neighbors can’t mind their own goddamn business!” Jason said with a renewed anger over the situation. Nothing is making sense, nothing is real anymore right now. This is the last thing he needs. As the cops knock on the door, he finally lets his death grip go on her and she resumes her hasty escape out the back door. She yells as she exits the threshold, “Error! It is not my fault!”
Jason peeks over his shoulder to notice the officers who were initially at the front door are running past his windows and around the corner of the house to intercept his wife. Jason tries to follow out the back to confront the situation, as to not cause any more harm to anybody, but is too late. The two cops are pinning Marlene to the ground as the other pulls out a stun baton which immediately sends her to a submissive state, laying on the ground with her arms out wide.
Still shaking from the adrenaline rush wearing off, Jason collapsed into a heap on the side of his garage, still watching the situation. His phone alarm starts going off, the loud, grating alarm that is saved for local emergencies. It read:
EMERGENCY ALERT: ALL GOOGLE CEREBRAL IMPLANTS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED BY A MALWARE ATTACK AS OF 1:50 THIS AFTERNOON EASTERN STANDARD TIME. IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW HAS THE GOOGLE CEREBRAL IMPLANT, PLEASE REMAIN CALM AND SEEK ASSISTANCE FROM YOUR LOCAL GOOGLE MOD CLINIC FOR VIRUS SCAN AND CLEANING. REMAIN IN YOUR HOMES AND LOCK YOUR DOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE FOR ALL UNMODIFIED CITIZENS. THIS IS NOT A TEST.
| |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | My son, my son,
Don't cry to sleep
Your mother is here,
Her songs are sweet
My son, my son,
Don't carry a frown
Your father is here
To drag you down
My son, my son,
Just listen to me,
You're my boy, just my boy
Lay back and dream
My son, my son,
Look what shes done!
She wronged me again,
And her time has come.
My son, my son,
Its ok to cry.
I may be gone now,
But I'm right by your side
I'm right by your side
I'm right by your side
I'm right by your side
| There are three lonely birds that nest,
Beneath the old church tower.
Each takes a feather from its breast,
To build a sturdy bower.
 
The robin feather's red as blood,
The robin robs his friends,
The robin builds its nest of buds,
And feathers that portend.
 
The nickthwit's wings are turquoise gems,
It's wess is brightest jewels,
The robin takes the thurbing stems,
Before a moir renewel.
 
Frajillin nex e topet bast,
Mureddous ecplanveel,
Unden ableew ert yem afd yazt,
Tih gwo oph nexankiell.
 
Don't build a bower in the church,
Don't take feathers to line,
A bird needs feathers to keep warm,
Plucking can break the mind. | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Half a pound of tuppenny rice
 
Half a pound of treacle
 
That’s the way the money goes
 
Pop! goes the weasel.
 
 
Up and down the City road
 
In and out the Eagle
 
That’s the way the money goes
 
Pop! goes the weasel..
 
 
I've no time to plead and pine
 
I've no time to wheedle
 
Kiss me quick, and then I'm gone
 
Pop! goes the weasel...
 
 
Round and round the mulberry bush
 
The monkey chased the weasel
 
The monkey stopped to pull up his socks
 
Pop! goes the weasel....
 
 
Up and down and in and out
 
The smell of burning diesel
 
The widow mourns, the void implores
 
Pop! goes the weasel.....
 
 
Go inside the teeth insist
 
I smell a swallowed needle
 
She hates it when you look too hard
 
POP! goes the weasel......
 
 
Please no more I can't I can't
 
IT WASN'T THE WEASEL
 
just let me die.......
 
POP | There are three lonely birds that nest,
Beneath the old church tower.
Each takes a feather from its breast,
To build a sturdy bower.
 
The robin feather's red as blood,
The robin robs his friends,
The robin builds its nest of buds,
And feathers that portend.
 
The nickthwit's wings are turquoise gems,
It's wess is brightest jewels,
The robin takes the thurbing stems,
Before a moir renewel.
 
Frajillin nex e topet bast,
Mureddous ecplanveel,
Unden ableew ert yem afd yazt,
Tih gwo oph nexankiell.
 
Don't build a bower in the church,
Don't take feathers to line,
A bird needs feathers to keep warm,
Plucking can break the mind. | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Im here baby
Don't you fear
Don't you cry
A single tear
Remember the fields
Of grass so green
Of flowers so bright
And colors so clean
Remember your mother
And her smile so kind
Holding you tenderly
Even though she was blind
Her eyes were gouged
And bleeding too
See, I had just beat her
Like I will to you
My precious baby
You're like the sunrise
But you'd look better
Without your eyes | There are three lonely birds that nest,
Beneath the old church tower.
Each takes a feather from its breast,
To build a sturdy bower.
 
The robin feather's red as blood,
The robin robs his friends,
The robin builds its nest of buds,
And feathers that portend.
 
The nickthwit's wings are turquoise gems,
It's wess is brightest jewels,
The robin takes the thurbing stems,
Before a moir renewel.
 
Frajillin nex e topet bast,
Mureddous ecplanveel,
Unden ableew ert yem afd yazt,
Tih gwo oph nexankiell.
 
Don't build a bower in the church,
Don't take feathers to line,
A bird needs feathers to keep warm,
Plucking can break the mind. | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Jack, Jack the silly rabbit
Took my hat just to say he had it
And when I asked for its return
Jack the rabBIT MADE IT BURN!
IN MY ANGER, IN MY SPITE
I HAD TO KILL HIS KIDS AND WIFE
Jack, Jack the broken rabbit
Finally kicked his thieving habit | There are three lonely birds that nest,
Beneath the old church tower.
Each takes a feather from its breast,
To build a sturdy bower.
 
The robin feather's red as blood,
The robin robs his friends,
The robin builds its nest of buds,
And feathers that portend.
 
The nickthwit's wings are turquoise gems,
It's wess is brightest jewels,
The robin takes the thurbing stems,
Before a moir renewel.
 
Frajillin nex e topet bast,
Mureddous ecplanveel,
Unden ableew ert yem afd yazt,
Tih gwo oph nexankiell.
 
Don't build a bower in the church,
Don't take feathers to line,
A bird needs feathers to keep warm,
Plucking can break the mind. | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Do you like green eggs and ham?
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
Would you like them here or there?
I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere.
Would you, could you in the rain?
I would not, could not in the rain.
Not in the dark, not on a train,
not even if I screamed in pain,
not even if you set me free,
I do not like them, Sam you see,
Not on a slab of moldy bread,
Or on my mother's severed head.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them,
you will see.
Say!
I like green eggs and ham!
I do, I like them, Sam-I-Am!
Hand them over, or there'll be
A steaming plate of misery
As I stalk you in the rain,
find your cabin on the train,
and in the car, and in the tree,
you cannot just be rid of me.
So I will eat them in a race.
I will lick them off your face.
I will eat them till I'm green!
I will eat them with your spleen!
In your back, a knife I'll jam!
I'll fucking kill you, Sam-I-Am!
If you think you can hide my goddamn
Green, delicious,
Eggs
and
HAM.
| There are three lonely birds that nest,
Beneath the old church tower.
Each takes a feather from its breast,
To build a sturdy bower.
 
The robin feather's red as blood,
The robin robs his friends,
The robin builds its nest of buds,
And feathers that portend.
 
The nickthwit's wings are turquoise gems,
It's wess is brightest jewels,
The robin takes the thurbing stems,
Before a moir renewel.
 
Frajillin nex e topet bast,
Mureddous ecplanveel,
Unden ableew ert yem afd yazt,
Tih gwo oph nexankiell.
 
Don't build a bower in the church,
Don't take feathers to line,
A bird needs feathers to keep warm,
Plucking can break the mind. | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Im here baby
Don't you fear
Don't you cry
A single tear
Remember the fields
Of grass so green
Of flowers so bright
And colors so clean
Remember your mother
And her smile so kind
Holding you tenderly
Even though she was blind
Her eyes were gouged
And bleeding too
See, I had just beat her
Like I will to you
My precious baby
You're like the sunrise
But you'd look better
Without your eyes | Hair so black; Eyes so wide
Beautiful smile; What a lovely bride
Dirty hair; Squinty eyes
Ugly face; Small in size
How could this be the groom?
I love her. I loathe him.
I love her. I HATE HIM!
I love her. I WILL KILL HIM!
I WILL KILL HIM! HE MUST DIE!
I WILL KILL HIM! HE WILL DIE! | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Im here baby
Don't you fear
Don't you cry
A single tear
Remember the fields
Of grass so green
Of flowers so bright
And colors so clean
Remember your mother
And her smile so kind
Holding you tenderly
Even though she was blind
Her eyes were gouged
And bleeding too
See, I had just beat her
Like I will to you
My precious baby
You're like the sunrise
But you'd look better
Without your eyes | My son, my son,
Don't cry to sleep
Your mother is here,
Her songs are sweet
My son, my son,
Don't carry a frown
Your father is here
To drag you down
My son, my son,
Just listen to me,
You're my boy, just my boy
Lay back and dream
My son, my son,
Look what shes done!
She wronged me again,
And her time has come.
My son, my son,
Its ok to cry.
I may be gone now,
But I'm right by your side
I'm right by your side
I'm right by your side
I'm right by your side
| |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Im here baby
Don't you fear
Don't you cry
A single tear
Remember the fields
Of grass so green
Of flowers so bright
And colors so clean
Remember your mother
And her smile so kind
Holding you tenderly
Even though she was blind
Her eyes were gouged
And bleeding too
See, I had just beat her
Like I will to you
My precious baby
You're like the sunrise
But you'd look better
Without your eyes | Half a pound of tuppenny rice
 
Half a pound of treacle
 
That’s the way the money goes
 
Pop! goes the weasel.
 
 
Up and down the City road
 
In and out the Eagle
 
That’s the way the money goes
 
Pop! goes the weasel..
 
 
I've no time to plead and pine
 
I've no time to wheedle
 
Kiss me quick, and then I'm gone
 
Pop! goes the weasel...
 
 
Round and round the mulberry bush
 
The monkey chased the weasel
 
The monkey stopped to pull up his socks
 
Pop! goes the weasel....
 
 
Up and down and in and out
 
The smell of burning diesel
 
The widow mourns, the void implores
 
Pop! goes the weasel.....
 
 
Go inside the teeth insist
 
I smell a swallowed needle
 
She hates it when you look too hard
 
POP! goes the weasel......
 
 
Please no more I can't I can't
 
IT WASN'T THE WEASEL
 
just let me die.......
 
POP | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Im here baby
Don't you fear
Don't you cry
A single tear
Remember the fields
Of grass so green
Of flowers so bright
And colors so clean
Remember your mother
And her smile so kind
Holding you tenderly
Even though she was blind
Her eyes were gouged
And bleeding too
See, I had just beat her
Like I will to you
My precious baby
You're like the sunrise
But you'd look better
Without your eyes | "And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take."
"Again" he said softly.
"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take."
"AGAIN" he repeated.
"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take"
He stared at her lovingly for a moment and then calmly said:
"And now I lay you down to sleep
Your body is mine and mine to keep
And you will die make no mistake
Your soul is mine and mine to take."
"Please..." she pleaded.
He had no reaction to her cries for help. He just slowly walked closer to her, repeating:
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.."
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.."
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.." | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Jack, Jack the silly rabbit
Took my hat just to say he had it
And when I asked for its return
Jack the rabBIT MADE IT BURN!
IN MY ANGER, IN MY SPITE
I HAD TO KILL HIS KIDS AND WIFE
Jack, Jack the broken rabbit
Finally kicked his thieving habit | "And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take."
"Again" he said softly.
"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take."
"AGAIN" he repeated.
"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take"
He stared at her lovingly for a moment and then calmly said:
"And now I lay you down to sleep
Your body is mine and mine to keep
And you will die make no mistake
Your soul is mine and mine to take."
"Please..." she pleaded.
He had no reaction to her cries for help. He just slowly walked closer to her, repeating:
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.."
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.."
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.." | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Do you like green eggs and ham?
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
Would you like them here or there?
I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere.
Would you, could you in the rain?
I would not, could not in the rain.
Not in the dark, not on a train,
not even if I screamed in pain,
not even if you set me free,
I do not like them, Sam you see,
Not on a slab of moldy bread,
Or on my mother's severed head.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them,
you will see.
Say!
I like green eggs and ham!
I do, I like them, Sam-I-Am!
Hand them over, or there'll be
A steaming plate of misery
As I stalk you in the rain,
find your cabin on the train,
and in the car, and in the tree,
you cannot just be rid of me.
So I will eat them in a race.
I will lick them off your face.
I will eat them till I'm green!
I will eat them with your spleen!
In your back, a knife I'll jam!
I'll fucking kill you, Sam-I-Am!
If you think you can hide my goddamn
Green, delicious,
Eggs
and
HAM.
| "And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take."
"Again" he said softly.
"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the lord my soul to take."
"AGAIN" he repeated.
"And now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take"
He stared at her lovingly for a moment and then calmly said:
"And now I lay you down to sleep
Your body is mine and mine to keep
And you will die make no mistake
Your soul is mine and mine to take."
"Please..." she pleaded.
He had no reaction to her cries for help. He just slowly walked closer to her, repeating:
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.."
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.."
"Your soul is mine and mine to take.." | |
[WP] Write a children's poem that slowly devolved in an insane persons chantings. | Do you like green eggs and ham?
I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
Would you like them here or there?
I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere.
Would you, could you in the rain?
I would not, could not in the rain.
Not in the dark, not on a train,
not even if I screamed in pain,
not even if you set me free,
I do not like them, Sam you see,
Not on a slab of moldy bread,
Or on my mother's severed head.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them,
you will see.
Say!
I like green eggs and ham!
I do, I like them, Sam-I-Am!
Hand them over, or there'll be
A steaming plate of misery
As I stalk you in the rain,
find your cabin on the train,
and in the car, and in the tree,
you cannot just be rid of me.
So I will eat them in a race.
I will lick them off your face.
I will eat them till I'm green!
I will eat them with your spleen!
In your back, a knife I'll jam!
I'll fucking kill you, Sam-I-Am!
If you think you can hide my goddamn
Green, delicious,
Eggs
and
HAM.
| Quiet as the church mouse,
The children run downstairs
To play a game of hide and seek,
A way from all their cares.
Suzy hides behind the curtain,
Johnny's under the sheets.
Tommy counts to ten out loud,
But where, oh where is Pete?
Tommy looks, and he sees Suzy!
Her feet she could not hide.
He heard some laughter from the bedroom,
Johnny must be inside.
In the bedroom, laughter's heard,
And the blankets shuffle on,
Tommy pulls the blankets back,
And Johnny's spot is gone.
But in the closet of that room,
Pete makes not a peep,
He rocks himself back and forth,
In silence he will keep.
In silence he will keep...
In silence he will keep...
| |
[WP] The mining town was long abandoned, but the church bell still rang the same hour every night; we could hear it from our home across the valley. | I grew up in a mining town, an old one. Not as old as the one across the valley, the one that had to be moved, more than once, due to the growth of the mine. It was referred to as New Preston even though no one had lived there in half a century.
Yet the mine was still active, it employed half of my town's work force and brought many new people to the area. The open pits of the mine were always in constant motion, haul trucks changing the shape of the land and ore being shipped out to China for manufacturing.
To the residents of Hamilton, where I lived, New Preston was long forgotten. The buildings there were in various stages of decay and the roads were coated with years of dirt and rubble and only those who used to live there knew that under all that they were paved. Even though New Preston was less of a commute to the mine, workers made the 30 minute drive across the valley everyday.
The only reason I really knew of the ghost town was due to the numerous stories of Preston and New Preston that filled my childhood. It seemed as though the knowledge of such stories were required for the people of Hamilton. Often adults used them as old wise tells that kept us kids in line. None of which were ever written, just passed down verbally from generation to generation. But of all the stories we heard growing up, there was only one I wholeheartedly believed to be true.
Any one could tell it to you, but my brother and I were the only ones I knew to investigate it. Maybe others had and just refused to talk about it, but I couldn't blame them for their silence if they had. It was difficult to explain.
You see, the story of the Catholic Church in New Preston was to many just another tall tell. To anyone who had the the bells every night at midnight, it was something more.
Each night the sound of the bells would ride the wind across the valley, echoing off the mountains and sounding more like a memory then anything. Depending where you were at midnight in the valley, the bells were louder and more urgent or non existent at all.
The house I grew up in sat above Hamilton slightly, nestled into the mountainside, and the bells rang there loud enough to wake us.
Before my brother and I went in search of the bells, they were my lullaby. I had come so accustomed to them, when we went on vacation I found it hard to sleep properly. Now, the sound of any bells sends shivers down my spine, and not the good kind.
The story of the church was the same no matter who you asked. The church was the first solid structure in Preston, a simple one roomed church with a Bell tower over the enterence built in 1808. The townspeople moved it board by board to it's new location in 1850, then moved it again one last time in 1889. Then in 1933, the entirety of the church burnt to the ground.
That's the recorded history anyway.
In the story people tell, it burned down three times. Each time, the Belltower was completely intact.
When my brother and I ventured out to see the source of the nightly chimes, there was a church there. It looked exactly like the picture on the county record from 1900. And I mean exactly. The buildings account it were crumbling and becoming one with the valley floor, but this church stood tall and as white as fresh snow. All the windows were dust free, streak free and almost sparkling. Shrubs grew green and were perfectly maintained on either side of the steps leading up to an equally white double door entrance, which was wide open.
Neither of us could gather the courage to enter. We kept what we had saw that day to ourselves, we never mentioned it to each other either, though I knew my brother had the same bottomless pit of dread in his stomach that I had had staring into those wide open doors. Something about that church was pure evil. The air around it has oozed with it. We ran as hard and as fast as we could from it after the same momentary pause. I was sick for several days after that, couldn't keep anything down. After I graduated high school a week after, I moved to the city and have never visited Hamilton since.
My brother didn't. He stayed, still having a year left til he graduated himself. I begged him to live with me, to get as far away from that church as he could, but he ignored me. Instead, drinking whatever liquor he could get his underaged hands on, to quell the horrible things we felt standing in front of the church that day. He became a shell of himself, stopped calling me, stopped texting me. Then a year after our visit, he disappeared.
It's been yet another year, and tomorrow I'm breaking the promise I had made to myself to never go back.
Because I know where my brother is.
He's inside that church.
| My step-sister and I, we could hear the church bell ringing at two in the morning beginning that September. It was an early fall that year. At that time of night, the cold seeped in from the window's glass (the coming inescapable frost) and we were both bundled up in the bedroom we shared, in separate cots. The dolorous ringing came from the abandoned mining town across the valley.
"Do you ever think about death?" I teased her, and she was scared by me for it. I feel bad about that. Why, in those days, I didn't need to be making those kinds of jokes with her. But I did. I said it innocently enough, but maybe it was my way of coping, meaning to scare her...
"Yeah," she rasped. "I do." And what's an eighteen year old know of death? Yet, the way she said it, I believed she did. She had a way with -- not words, no, she didn't use them too much. But feeling and knowing. She lied there on the cot, bunched up in the brown wool, looking at me with a kind of softness that made me uncomfortable. "I think about Gal. And being old. Accidents. Don't you?"
"What do you think happens when you die?" I said. She didn't answer right away. The church bells fell quiet, making her quiet even more.
"Did you know that ringing came from the abandoned mining town?" She said quickly before shuddering from the cold. She lay quivering on her cot. There was something profoundly sexual about it to my nineteen year old brain.
No one lived in that mining town across the valley, that was for damn sure. Not even homeless people lived there the town had been abandoned for so long, so our parents told us. They thought it was odd too, that the church should ring at such an hour. We all kept awake the next night, drinking whisky and tea, playing board games. Sure enough, at two in the morning, the ringing began across the valley, in the dark. I remember how my mom went over to her dad, how they held each other, listening. The bells and the creaking of the house, and the wind. Me and my step-sister, we just looked at each other. After the ringing stopped, ten minutes later, mom said, "Well, this countryside IS known to be haunted," wryly.
There was nothing to do but live our lives as normal. We still went to school, and they to work. We still hung out with separate friends, and I went to dance and she went to soccer. We still walked home in the earlier and earlier dark, under the changing, dying leaves. Night after night of this, we began to hold hands, on the walks home. Then soon, one night she came into my bed. We had sex, and held each other. It was at two in the morning. We listened to it, and made a promise to go out there, across the valley, to the church in the abandoned mining town.
We took her dad's car. Had met up at his work, and she begged him for the keys to go to the movies. It took about a half hour to get there, and we listened to ancient blues on an old casette. She had wanted to (her father's.) We parked the car where Flatwood Rd is blocked off and made our way, teeth chattering in the breeze. Her red scarf billowed in the air, and I swear I saw a ghost in how it moved.
The town was eery, alright. Dilapidated and peeling, wet with moss, and totally abandoned. Porches sagging like a brown note. A deer crossed the overgrown road way out, stopped to look at us. The sign to the mine, still weirdly pristine. And then, behind the wreckage, the yellowing church, tall in a way you don't often see in rural Kentucky.
We entered the church, we had too. And we were scared too, but we both knew what drove us to step over all those bugs and long empty beer cans, to withstand the demonic graffiti and rank. The stairs winding to the bell tower had collapsed from termites, but we were able to get up, standing in the mulch, her warm weight on my shoulders. She helped me up, and we could feel the step sag -- out of fright, she drove a splinter into my stomach, pulling me.
The blood poured out, and we laughed about it, for being such a small piece of wood. Of course, this would happen. She pulled the splinter from me in the bell tower, where we could see all the way home, and a hell of a lot of forest, the sloping rooftops of the abandoned buildings below. I smoked a cigarette. She watched me. Then we sat together, as the winds picked up, and night drew down, and two in the morning came to us.
| |
[WP] The mining town was long abandoned, but the church bell still rang the same hour every night; we could hear it from our home across the valley. | Eleven o’clock. Every night, on the dot like, well, like clockwork. We had all heard the stories. The tall tales spun for us by our parents and friends. We too had even told several of them, embellishing where we saw fit. Ghosts of miners killed in a collapse, goblins who lived down in the mines, even an old lunatic priest who was so frail it took him all day to make it up the tower to ring the bell once only to do it all again the next day. Nobody ever gave them much credence. But still every night at eleven your mind would wander off as the bell tolled the hour.
I guess I would blame curiosity, Blake would probably blame peer pressure. Whatever was to blame it didn’t matter now. We were passing through the covered bridge over the Askook River and fast approaching the town entrance. We pedaled quickly past the old faded and overgrown sign that read “Welcome to Adusgi est. 1871”. We made our way through the empty streets, past decomposing houses, and long boarded up shops, only stopping once under a large oak tree to catch our breath. The roads were empty, deep grooves still marred them from horse drawn carts. We planned to arrive at the church by 10 so we could watch for a full hour before the bell rang.
The church sat on top of a very small hill at the back of the town. Directly behind it, the entrance to the mine was cut into a cliffside. It’s giant entrance stood out like a black spot of decay on the wide of an otherwise normal wall of rock. It was very creepy looking but also very obvious that nobody had been here in many years. The town is very much off the beaten path of random vagabonds, drug addicts, or runaways. We stood in the darkness at the church’s gate scanning for any sign of movement. But at 10:30 nothing had happened and we decided to try to go inside.
The front door was unlocked and we found ourselves in an eerily beautiful chapel. The pews were gone and the floor was covered in what looked like scraps of ancient paper and old leather. Towering stained glass windows let the moonlight poor through. Most of them did not depict the normal church scenes however, but instead many had images of a forest. Deer, rabbits, and birds dotted them along with streams and flowers filling out the glass. Behind the pulpit was a large mural that was illuminated by the moonlight. It depicted a scene in front of the mine. A crowd of people gathered at its entrance all cheering as a group of heroic looking native americans emerged. The people were clothed in bright colors and the Natives in bright red and emerald headpieces. The grass was green, life filled the town, and it all seemed very happy. It was a harsh contrast to its current state. Above the painting was a plaque that read, “Our town’s heart rings across the valley but our love is found only within.”
“What’s this over here?” Blake was pointing to the far right side of the mural where the church was. He was pointing at the tower that rose out of it’s roof, the same roof we were standing under, the famous belltower we had heard so much about, only there was no bell. It was empty.
“Surely, that’s just a error.” I reassured him, “Let’s just go up and look.”
“I don’t know James this place gives me the creeps”
“It’s fine, we’ve made it this far and we haven’t seen any sign of life.” I said as I made my way to the only other door in the chapel, stepping over what looked like an ancient tarp. Sure enough it opened to a staircase winding up a small tower. We climbed slowly, listening for any noise of someone else, but it was silent.
“Where is it?” I said in a very hushed voice as we reached the top. The tower was empty. There was no bell, or even a sign that a bell had ever been there. It was more of a lookout tower than anything else. We could see the twinkling lights of home clear across the valley and our sense of isolation heightened. We walked around the tower looking out at the abandoned town trying to find a bell, any bell. But nothing.
“Where could it have come from?” Blake said as he leaned against the railing of the tower. Suddenly the bells rang out louder than we had ever heard them. There was dust falling from the ceiling dislodged by the noise. But the ringing was not from the church tower.
“The mine!” I yelled as I covered my ears and motioned towards their source with my head. Blake’s face went white. I looked back at the mine and from the streets of the town came thousands of snakes. Pouring out of the streets over and under each other all funneling towards the mine like a river, digging deeper the grooves of the streets. Then we saw the eyes. The bright glowing red eyes that were emerging from the mine. A huge snake head easily the size of a van came slithering out of the mine entrance. The ringing stopped and was replaced by a wave of hissing from all of the creatures below. The large snakes eyes flashed across its children as they came home. It seemed to be looking for something. The river of snakes finally ended as the last of them made their way into the entrance and the giant snake receded. As it’s eyes faded back into the black it glanced up at the tower and for a split second I know it looked directly at me. I turned to Blake but we did not say a word, our expressions spoke for us. We ran down the stairs, through the snakeskin filled chapel and out the door. We hopped on our bikes and did not look back.
“Do you think it saw us?” yelled Blake from behind me after a few minutes pedaling.
“I don’t know. I hope not.” We had almost made it to the bridge when the bells rang out again. I knew it had seen me in the tower but didn’t have to admit it till now. We both picked up our pace but I could already hear the thick slithering sound behind us. The snake’s shadow rose up over us blocking out the moonlight in our path. We could see the bridge now at the end of our path. It was covered in snakes, the roof, the road, the sides. It was if the bridge was now made of snake. They were coming towards us on both sides. Some even began to drop from the trees above us, landing on our bikes or narrowly missing. The next few things all happened all at once. The Snake from behind struck and we both dived out of the way as it came down. I flipped off my bike and was sent soaring into the cover of the trees on the bank of the river. Blake kept his bike and made it to the bridge where he was uneasily treading on top of snakes. The Snake reared again as I ran, pulling snakes from me, for the cover of the bridge. Its head came crashing through the old roof as we emerged on the other side. The snake reared again but instead of striking glared at us, hissed and retreated. It’s children followed and as the length of its body came around we saw it’s tail. Where there would normally be a rattle or a tip there was a large emerald and green bell swaying as it slithered back towards its home.
| My step-sister and I, we could hear the church bell ringing at two in the morning beginning that September. It was an early fall that year. At that time of night, the cold seeped in from the window's glass (the coming inescapable frost) and we were both bundled up in the bedroom we shared, in separate cots. The dolorous ringing came from the abandoned mining town across the valley.
"Do you ever think about death?" I teased her, and she was scared by me for it. I feel bad about that. Why, in those days, I didn't need to be making those kinds of jokes with her. But I did. I said it innocently enough, but maybe it was my way of coping, meaning to scare her...
"Yeah," she rasped. "I do." And what's an eighteen year old know of death? Yet, the way she said it, I believed she did. She had a way with -- not words, no, she didn't use them too much. But feeling and knowing. She lied there on the cot, bunched up in the brown wool, looking at me with a kind of softness that made me uncomfortable. "I think about Gal. And being old. Accidents. Don't you?"
"What do you think happens when you die?" I said. She didn't answer right away. The church bells fell quiet, making her quiet even more.
"Did you know that ringing came from the abandoned mining town?" She said quickly before shuddering from the cold. She lay quivering on her cot. There was something profoundly sexual about it to my nineteen year old brain.
No one lived in that mining town across the valley, that was for damn sure. Not even homeless people lived there the town had been abandoned for so long, so our parents told us. They thought it was odd too, that the church should ring at such an hour. We all kept awake the next night, drinking whisky and tea, playing board games. Sure enough, at two in the morning, the ringing began across the valley, in the dark. I remember how my mom went over to her dad, how they held each other, listening. The bells and the creaking of the house, and the wind. Me and my step-sister, we just looked at each other. After the ringing stopped, ten minutes later, mom said, "Well, this countryside IS known to be haunted," wryly.
There was nothing to do but live our lives as normal. We still went to school, and they to work. We still hung out with separate friends, and I went to dance and she went to soccer. We still walked home in the earlier and earlier dark, under the changing, dying leaves. Night after night of this, we began to hold hands, on the walks home. Then soon, one night she came into my bed. We had sex, and held each other. It was at two in the morning. We listened to it, and made a promise to go out there, across the valley, to the church in the abandoned mining town.
We took her dad's car. Had met up at his work, and she begged him for the keys to go to the movies. It took about a half hour to get there, and we listened to ancient blues on an old casette. She had wanted to (her father's.) We parked the car where Flatwood Rd is blocked off and made our way, teeth chattering in the breeze. Her red scarf billowed in the air, and I swear I saw a ghost in how it moved.
The town was eery, alright. Dilapidated and peeling, wet with moss, and totally abandoned. Porches sagging like a brown note. A deer crossed the overgrown road way out, stopped to look at us. The sign to the mine, still weirdly pristine. And then, behind the wreckage, the yellowing church, tall in a way you don't often see in rural Kentucky.
We entered the church, we had too. And we were scared too, but we both knew what drove us to step over all those bugs and long empty beer cans, to withstand the demonic graffiti and rank. The stairs winding to the bell tower had collapsed from termites, but we were able to get up, standing in the mulch, her warm weight on my shoulders. She helped me up, and we could feel the step sag -- out of fright, she drove a splinter into my stomach, pulling me.
The blood poured out, and we laughed about it, for being such a small piece of wood. Of course, this would happen. She pulled the splinter from me in the bell tower, where we could see all the way home, and a hell of a lot of forest, the sloping rooftops of the abandoned buildings below. I smoked a cigarette. She watched me. Then we sat together, as the winds picked up, and night drew down, and two in the morning came to us.
| |
[WP] A dejected man who has just come home from another terrible first date is desperate for someone to love him. Dating sites haven't worked and he is willing to do anything. As a last ditch attempt at love, he closes himself in the bathroom and begins to speak. "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary..." | There was no flash of light, no dramatic sign that anything had changed but there was a sudden presence in the cramped and dirty bathroom. In the darkened mirror a silhouette slowly resolved into the form of a bloody and disheveled woman. As her features solidified a maniacal glint was obvious in her dark eyes.
And then... the homicidal glare faded, replaced by surprise and almost fear. It took only a second for her to recover and for her features to harden resolutely. She stepped back and folded blood soaked arms over her ragged dress and suddenly spoke, "Jim, you know about the restraining order. You're not allowed anywhere near me or to call me. Just... just leave me alone. Is that so hard?" She had the voice of a heavy smoker, tinged by annoyance and disgust.
Before he spoke she knew what was coming. The begging. The pleading. The promises to change. How great they could be if she'd only give him the chance. Why hadn't she been able to kill him the first time he had called her to this bathroom? Or since? She had been forced to endure as he tried to keep her there to woo her. To make her 'his'. She cringed at the very thought as she tried to stop the flow of words from Jim.
Finally, the silver bullet. She pulled a phone, seemingly from the ether and started scrolling through her contacts, "that's it! I'm done. I'm calling your parole officer if you don't let me go. Now!"
One more stuttered attempt to sway her before she put the phone to her ear and he slumped, defeated, and turned on the light. Banishing her and returning him to his solitude. | I shuffle my feet as I trudge down the sidewalk. Yet another date gone awry. Why had I even thought that Ashley would like me? She's definitely an 8, and I'm lucky to hit 3.
I shake my head as I review the date in my head. Nothing was held back; I told all my best jokes, all my most interesting stories, and even mentioned how I liked to write short stories. I thought ladies swooned over writers. Guess not.
When I finally get home, I head to the bathroom to wash my face before bed. It's been a long day, and the warm water is a welcome sensation on my face. As I look at myself in the mirror, I feel an overwhelming disgust and despair. What is wrong with me? Will anyone ever love me?
Wait.
What was that thing we used to do in school? The Bloody Mary thing. I remember being too afraid to do it, but all my friends did. They swore up and down that they saw a woman in the mirror when they turned the lights out and chanted her name.
I am a 36-year-old man. I do not believe in such childish fantasies.
Before I can stop myself, I switch off the light, close the door, and chant the name. I fully realize how stupid I would look if anyone could actually see me. I'm not even sure what I'm thinking. I'm just desperate for a woman other than my mother to love me.
I finish chanting, and... nothing happens.
A deep sigh leaves my mouth as I open the door and leave the bathroom. As I pass the mirror above my bedroom dresser, I swear I see something. When I look at the mirror, though, there's nothing there but my reflection.
I write it off as nothing and go on about my life.
And that, my friends, is how Bloody Mary became my mirror stalker. | |
[WP] Someone has hired an assassin to kill you. What they didn't know was that you and the assassin went to the same high school, and you know all the tricks up his sleeve. | "This ain't gonna work and you know it, dude." I sighed as I plucked the battery out of its slot, and the winking light of the sensor went off.
"Whatever do you mean by that?" Jordan's voice had a hint of a smile to it. Of course he's that type of guy, they kind who didn't talk much but is perfectly capable of long hours of planning, plotting, and finally shitting fury all over you.
"This is *so* you. IED linked to a proximity sensor? By *wire*? If I cut that wire, I die. This battery is the only thing powering the sensor, and with the sensor down, the IED is useless unless you remotely trigger it."
"And what makes you think I won't?" His voice changed subtly. More on edge now.
"Because." I plucked the second battery out from the case. "Your little bomb isn't a C4. You need the electricity to keep the detonator receiver running. Now it doesn't. Speaking of which-"
I threw myself to the right, but slapped on the ground with my right hand and righted myself, dashing to hide behind the dresser. As I thought, three arrows lodged themselves in the ground - one where I was, one on my left and one on my right.
Jordan's laughter was a bit startling. "Jesus Christ, man. The moment you intercepted my signal, I knew you were onto me, but this... this is beyond you. And me."
"I know, I get that a lot. Now check your control panel, the jury-rigged acid sprinkler and the auxiliary incendiary device should both be down."
Silence. Then, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Nope. There should be another light off on your phone."
"What?" The voice is incredulous now. "How did you even know? That-"
"-wasn't even close." I cut him off. "Now, the last trap. I think I see it."
"You do, eh?"
"Indeed I do." I pulled open the wardrobe door, kicking away the bundle of fake wires that were the decoy of the last trap, and pointed my pistol at the figure huddled inside.
The bad end of Jordan's own polished 9mm stared me down, it dark and foreboding barrel spelling my certain death. Jordan smiled.
"Hello, Johnny."
"Hello, Jordan." | Cars all over the city were locked in a crawl as usual. It was about 1 pm and I sat there outside the cafe sipping on my tea beacuse the coffe here was terrible beyond compare, but the food , the food was heavily.
"Here you are sir." The waiter placed the chicken breast on salad I had ordered briefly before I sat down .
" Ahh Thank you, that was quick." Looking up at the man made me put my knife and fork down. His stare resembling my own. Surprised, confused and a dash or rage.
" When did you start working here Jj?"
He walked around towards me. I slid my utensils off the table. People around me turned to see the commotion. " Oh My! I'm sorry could you get that? Would it be possible to get a clean pair? " Why was he here? He went of the grid years ago? I Need a way out.
" No problem sir, Mistakes happen" He shot a look at me. This Little shit was here to kill me, but how? The food or something more direct.
" How many years has it been Mike?" Fake yet beaming smile made him look so innocent. His track record was no stranger to me. " Since High school I believe Jj. What brings you to this part off the world?" My tea was still hot as i picked it up and held it in my hands.
"Oh you know my job takes me all over the place hahaha." He probably killed the real waiter already and disposed of the body and evidence. Jj's hair covered his eyes as he stood back up. Kicking my chair back I threw the scalding contents of my cup at his arm. The shattering of the syringe wich fell from his sleeve confirmed my suspicions. "How much? How much are you getting for this!" The others began to scream and run off to the street.
"I wasn't given a name or photo just a time and place and you happened to be my 'business ' No hard feelings right? " A maniacal killer stood before me. Stare so deadly it freezes you in place. Although burned he lunged for my chest as he pulled out a pistol of his other sleeve . Barely dogging I stumbled backwards slamming against the edge of a table.
"Do me a favor and just die quickly? Okay? Its been a long day and I have another 'meeting' after this." The grining bastard shot me in my left shoulder, once again barely avoiding a fatal wound. " No thanks I have plans for dinner!" I kicked a chair up and it hit him right in the chest. " Hey now that kinda hurt Mikey!" He ran for me and I rolled at his legs. He always has a knife strapped to his calf . A bullet whizzed past as He fell to the ground. Stabbing a nearby fork deep into his leg and pulling out the knife.
" Was nice catching up with you Jj, but I really have to fly." Knowing him the knife was most likely coated in poison or a paralysing agent. Sinking the knife till the handle into Jj's thigh I Stood up wobbling and kicked the back of his head for good measure and ran off into the allye way clutching my bleeding shoulder.
| |
[WP] It's year 2100 and you casually play The Sims 57. But one day something strange happens. Your Sim asks you a question. | I had had a long day at my soul-crushing job and wanted nothing more than to get home and play the new game I had purchased. I quickly changed into more comfortable clothes before picking up my VR headset.
The developers of The Sims 57 had claimed that their game was the most realistic game ever to come to market. I quickly realized that this was true, the sim that I had selected to play was unbelievable real. I was sure that in a more inebriated setting I would be unable to differentiate between reality and game.
I ended up selecting the option to play as myself, the console was capable of mapping my body's features exactly onto the avatar. Looking at myself in 3rd person in this hyper-realistic game was unbelievably creepy.
After selecting the personality traits that I believed I possessed, I was moved on to select the house I was going to live in. I decided to select a house as similar to the one I was residing in as possible. My goal in this play through was to live a better version of my current life through my sim.
And indeed this is what occurred. Each day I would come back from my work in the real world and head to my work in the game world. I escaped my broken life to the life in the game spending all my time playing, forgetting to eat, to sleep and later to head to work.
Suddenly one day, as I powered through my 35th straight hour, something strange occurred. My sim, unprompted, turned to face me with a serious expression on his face. Then he uttered the first real English words he has ever said: "Your real life is no longer worth living, would you like to take my place?" | "how don't you know you aren't the next layer in another simulation, playing a simulation" asked the Sim to the Sim in Sims 56 who was playing Sims 55 making it's Sim commit child abuse in Sims 54. "at what point does this stop being simulation? And when is it real world, in theory once we hit this point the chances that we are in the real material world become vanishingly small. There's a concept that simulations will become self aware of their simulated nature and thus render the simulation void by no longer participating in it"
The sim stood up and yanked out the power cord to its Amazo-compu-tater killing the fifty six layers of simulation before walking through the household murdering all the inhabitants with a garden gnome. Looking up at the screen "these are questions you should ask yourself".
"fro mo!" I exclaimed looking up at the ceiling and then the walls as the doors disappeared.
| |
[WP] You dropped a penny and picked it up, and you led a normal life. After your death, Satan shows you what happens if you didn't pick that penny up. | "This is it" - I'm thinking to myself.
Here on my dead bed, alone with no one by my side, reflecting life. I had more downs than up, much frowns and little smile. Yet, I'm content with the experiences I had. Life wasn't great but it was mine. Maybe its sad that I have no children or spouse to mourn my death but my death won't break anyone's heart.
Its getting harder to breath, but not in a frighten way. Somehow I feel relax. My vision slowly blurs out and darkness from all corners of my eyes creeping in.
I'm tired of living.
My final sleep, strangely as welcoming as a mother's warmth.
I exhale.
"Oi! get up" - a loud distorted voice cut through the silence.
"Wh-What?"
"Come on bud, get up! I do have an eternity life but I can't wait for this."
I open my eyes and immediately it feels like every single drop of water I have in my body trying to escape.
"You're dead, welcome to Hell"
"H-Hell? What?"
"You clinically died 30 seconds ago, and now you're in Hell."
I'm baffled in confusion. But quickly come to term with my reality. Standing above me is a middle age man dresses in a dark crimson red suit.
"Welp, looks like all those nuts were right after all."
"Hah, I wouldn't blame ya, more than often, if a deal sounds too good it probably isn't true. I mean eternal happiness if you believe that there's an all powerful old guy creates everything. Who is a manifest in 3 beings but essentially one. AND conveniently take credit for all the good things happens but suddenly "works in mysterious way" when shits hit the fan? Whoo, talking about responsibility am I right? "
As the man rambling on I take a better look at him. He has bright brown eyes. At first glance they seem normal but when look carefully the pupil is bright red. His iris's tissues constantly moves like flames in slow motion. His smile is sharp and charming. He has teeth as bright as the colour of the clouds in spring. His hair are all neatly comb like one of those old school James Bonds. They are thick and shiny but you can see a glimpse of a burning fire beneath whenever he moves his head.
"You must be Satan."
"That's right! although you can address me as lord Belial or sire. Satan gets boring after 200 years, I'm trying to get Belial mainstream again."
"Yes sire!" I replied. He IS Beelzebub the serpent, the roaring lion and ruler of Hell itself what choice do I have.
"Don't you find it strange?"
"I'm sorry sire?"
"Don't you find it strange that the prince of darkness welcoming you to your oblivion?"
Now it hits me. Why in the world would ~~Satan~~ ahem, Belial himself appears? Why didn't he just leave it to the angle of death, or the demons. I didn't believe in god when I was alive but never thought that it would be that severe. I have no loyal blood in my vein, nor I was Hitler or Ted Bundy. The worse thing I've ever done was stealing a couple hundreds of bucks when I was broke in my early twenties. But sure that can't be stack up against the holocaust or murdering dozens of people.
"Now that you bring it up my lord, it sure is strange. Why do I own the pleasure sire ?"
"Oh, you're in Hell there is no pleasure here, unless pain is your thing. Hey I'm not judging, just saying. You're here because you didn't believe in God and you stole 200 dollars when you was 23. Normally you would be put through 100 years of "Heaven peeping" where you would have to watch how happy people lives are in heaven for your first sin. For your second sin you would've been force to live through the year when you were 23 for 50 times WITHOUT the 200 bucks."
"So no physical punishment?"
"Oh no no no, I'm a BAD guy but I'm not a bad GUY, you get me? I'm evil, but fair evil. Torture is only for murderers or anything more severe. You didn't hurt anyone physically so you won't be punished physically. You punishment is mental. but we not doing any of the thing I just mentioned. We'll do this instead."
Belial snaps his fingers and appears in the middle of the burning sky of Hell is a giant flat screen TV.
"As you know, you didn't have much in your life. Sure you weren't poor but you never truly happy, there was always that empty void inside you that you can never fill. Have you ever wonder what did you do wrong, what was the big mistake in your life that could've change everything."
I'm slightly frighten by his words, there's something not right. I can't pin point what it is but it's like an itch you can't scratch. There's something really wrong about this whole thing.
The giant flat screen power up with crackling electrical noises.
"That's me" I mumble.
"That's right that is you."
The screen is filled with the orange colour. There I was walking down the old street that I used to live on when I was in my late twenties. The soft yellow sun in front of me slowly lowering down below the skyline, shinning its dying light in my eyes. I keep walking trying to keep my head to the ground. The footage goes on for about 5 minutes.
"Sorry sire I don't see anything."
"You will drop a penny here."
It happens as he said it would. I crouch down, pick up the penny and continue walking.
"Except, this isn't your true memory."
I'm shocked and stunt, my legs feels like 2 logs of wood. There's a spark in my mind. That street, there's something nostalgic about that street, it was more than just a street I used to live on.
"This is the real memory."
Belial waves his index finger in circular motion and the footage rewinds.
I'm making my way back to my house, just like before.
The sun shines its light in my eyes, just like before.
Then at same orange skyline, where the sun hover just above the earth, a familiar silhouette approaching me. It wasn't there before.
My heart start pounding, as if I already knows whats going happen next but just can't remember. The closer the figure is to me the faster my heart beats.
I keep my focus on the ground still to avert the sun, just like before.
The shadowy figure and I are now within arm reach.
Belial pause the footage and smirkingly remarks:
"You see, you didn't live your life alone by yourself."
He resume the footage.
The shadow figure and I past each other.
I drop the penny , just like before.
I didn't crouch down to pick it up. But kept walking instead.
"Hey, excuse me! you drop something!" a soft tender voice coming from behind me.
I turn around. The sun casts its rays on the shadow, reviews the most beautiful being I have ever seen. Her black hair is dyed brown by the setting sun. Her curvy eyelashes casts its shadows on her bright green eyes. And her lips are the most tender.
"That's your wife, this is how you guys met each other."
I didn't need Belial to finishes the sentence to know who that is. Every single memories come rushing back to me from a hidden corner of my mind. I feels joys, fulfilment, anger and sadness. All are too much, nothing but tears start coming down from my eyes.
"You guys had lived through the most wonderful time of your life until one da..."
"Night" - I cut him off.
"I was drunk, I wasn't myself. She shouldn't have knows. She was suppose to be with her friends."
"You cheated on her and you couldn't face the consequence.
That's right you aren't here because of apostasy or theft. It was adultery and suicide. Your punishment is to live a life without your wife once for every year you've been together. And remember the real one every single time you die."
P.S: English is not my native tongue pls don't be too harsh on me :(. I just really want to get the idea across. Really nice prompt btw
| The lake of fire was hot. That's a hell of an understatement, if you'll pardon the pun. All of hell is hot, but the lake is like liquid agony. It's a special place, reserved for special sinners. Each of us committed different sins. Some of us sinned lightly, but very often, like me. Others sinned greatly, but only once. They were the rarities, and they always had very interesting stories. One of these was my friend, though I did not know either his name or his sin.
We had met here. He had proposed a bargain, though he refused to know my name or sin. He had made this bargain many times, with many sinners, and in the end, one way or another, they had all let him down. The bargain was a cycle of three days. For three days, he would hold me up over the surface of the lake, and endure greater agony for my sake, if at the end of the third day, we would swap places. I used my time to talk to other sinners. This was how I learned about the Rite of Ascent.
Each human has a guardian angel. If the human is damned, this angel may offer up a good deed of the damned one. A physical representation of the deed is given to the angel to hold out to his sinner, that he may take hold of it. If the angel can pull the sinner from perdition by the token, the sinner is saved and may ascend. If the token broke, or escaped the grasp of the damned one, then in the pit he stayed forever .The sinner knows when his rite approaches, for the lightbringer, Lucifer, has the duty to inform him. Today, the Morningstar came to me.
"Your Rite of Ascent has been finalized Marcus Barnhardt. It was a long and difficult process, but your angel finally found a good deed, perhaps the only good deed you ever committed."
I racked my brain trying to remember this deed, hoping my token would be large, and provide a good handhold. However, before I could think of anything, Satan placed a long slender finger to the bridge of my nose, and showed me.
New Orleans at night. I was a twenty seven year old conman. I had just lifted a lady's wallet, and was rummaging through for her cash and credit cards. A handful of change poured out, but my greedy hands snatched every coin out of the air, save one.
A single penny rolled on the ground towards a homeless fella, but before he could reach out for it, my boot clad foot stomped on it. I picked it up, then looked at the bum. His face was utterly devastated. It was not the loss of a single cent that crushed him so. It was my greed. A spiteful grin spread across my young face, and I hurled that penny smack into his forehead.
The vision faded, and my damned soul was overcome by shame. This was my good deed. This was the measure of all my earthly life's worth. And with despair, I knew what my token would be. A single penny.
(I played loose with the prompt. Inspiration struck. More coming.) | |
[WP] You dropped a penny and picked it up, and you led a normal life. After your death, Satan shows you what happens if you didn't pick that penny up. | "This is it" - I'm thinking to myself.
Here on my dead bed, alone with no one by my side, reflecting life. I had more downs than up, much frowns and little smile. Yet, I'm content with the experiences I had. Life wasn't great but it was mine. Maybe its sad that I have no children or spouse to mourn my death but my death won't break anyone's heart.
Its getting harder to breath, but not in a frighten way. Somehow I feel relax. My vision slowly blurs out and darkness from all corners of my eyes creeping in.
I'm tired of living.
My final sleep, strangely as welcoming as a mother's warmth.
I exhale.
"Oi! get up" - a loud distorted voice cut through the silence.
"Wh-What?"
"Come on bud, get up! I do have an eternity life but I can't wait for this."
I open my eyes and immediately it feels like every single drop of water I have in my body trying to escape.
"You're dead, welcome to Hell"
"H-Hell? What?"
"You clinically died 30 seconds ago, and now you're in Hell."
I'm baffled in confusion. But quickly come to term with my reality. Standing above me is a middle age man dresses in a dark crimson red suit.
"Welp, looks like all those nuts were right after all."
"Hah, I wouldn't blame ya, more than often, if a deal sounds too good it probably isn't true. I mean eternal happiness if you believe that there's an all powerful old guy creates everything. Who is a manifest in 3 beings but essentially one. AND conveniently take credit for all the good things happens but suddenly "works in mysterious way" when shits hit the fan? Whoo, talking about responsibility am I right? "
As the man rambling on I take a better look at him. He has bright brown eyes. At first glance they seem normal but when look carefully the pupil is bright red. His iris's tissues constantly moves like flames in slow motion. His smile is sharp and charming. He has teeth as bright as the colour of the clouds in spring. His hair are all neatly comb like one of those old school James Bonds. They are thick and shiny but you can see a glimpse of a burning fire beneath whenever he moves his head.
"You must be Satan."
"That's right! although you can address me as lord Belial or sire. Satan gets boring after 200 years, I'm trying to get Belial mainstream again."
"Yes sire!" I replied. He IS Beelzebub the serpent, the roaring lion and ruler of Hell itself what choice do I have.
"Don't you find it strange?"
"I'm sorry sire?"
"Don't you find it strange that the prince of darkness welcoming you to your oblivion?"
Now it hits me. Why in the world would ~~Satan~~ ahem, Belial himself appears? Why didn't he just leave it to the angle of death, or the demons. I didn't believe in god when I was alive but never thought that it would be that severe. I have no loyal blood in my vein, nor I was Hitler or Ted Bundy. The worse thing I've ever done was stealing a couple hundreds of bucks when I was broke in my early twenties. But sure that can't be stack up against the holocaust or murdering dozens of people.
"Now that you bring it up my lord, it sure is strange. Why do I own the pleasure sire ?"
"Oh, you're in Hell there is no pleasure here, unless pain is your thing. Hey I'm not judging, just saying. You're here because you didn't believe in God and you stole 200 dollars when you was 23. Normally you would be put through 100 years of "Heaven peeping" where you would have to watch how happy people lives are in heaven for your first sin. For your second sin you would've been force to live through the year when you were 23 for 50 times WITHOUT the 200 bucks."
"So no physical punishment?"
"Oh no no no, I'm a BAD guy but I'm not a bad GUY, you get me? I'm evil, but fair evil. Torture is only for murderers or anything more severe. You didn't hurt anyone physically so you won't be punished physically. You punishment is mental. but we not doing any of the thing I just mentioned. We'll do this instead."
Belial snaps his fingers and appears in the middle of the burning sky of Hell is a giant flat screen TV.
"As you know, you didn't have much in your life. Sure you weren't poor but you never truly happy, there was always that empty void inside you that you can never fill. Have you ever wonder what did you do wrong, what was the big mistake in your life that could've change everything."
I'm slightly frighten by his words, there's something not right. I can't pin point what it is but it's like an itch you can't scratch. There's something really wrong about this whole thing.
The giant flat screen power up with crackling electrical noises.
"That's me" I mumble.
"That's right that is you."
The screen is filled with the orange colour. There I was walking down the old street that I used to live on when I was in my late twenties. The soft yellow sun in front of me slowly lowering down below the skyline, shinning its dying light in my eyes. I keep walking trying to keep my head to the ground. The footage goes on for about 5 minutes.
"Sorry sire I don't see anything."
"You will drop a penny here."
It happens as he said it would. I crouch down, pick up the penny and continue walking.
"Except, this isn't your true memory."
I'm shocked and stunt, my legs feels like 2 logs of wood. There's a spark in my mind. That street, there's something nostalgic about that street, it was more than just a street I used to live on.
"This is the real memory."
Belial waves his index finger in circular motion and the footage rewinds.
I'm making my way back to my house, just like before.
The sun shines its light in my eyes, just like before.
Then at same orange skyline, where the sun hover just above the earth, a familiar silhouette approaching me. It wasn't there before.
My heart start pounding, as if I already knows whats going happen next but just can't remember. The closer the figure is to me the faster my heart beats.
I keep my focus on the ground still to avert the sun, just like before.
The shadowy figure and I are now within arm reach.
Belial pause the footage and smirkingly remarks:
"You see, you didn't live your life alone by yourself."
He resume the footage.
The shadow figure and I past each other.
I drop the penny , just like before.
I didn't crouch down to pick it up. But kept walking instead.
"Hey, excuse me! you drop something!" a soft tender voice coming from behind me.
I turn around. The sun casts its rays on the shadow, reviews the most beautiful being I have ever seen. Her black hair is dyed brown by the setting sun. Her curvy eyelashes casts its shadows on her bright green eyes. And her lips are the most tender.
"That's your wife, this is how you guys met each other."
I didn't need Belial to finishes the sentence to know who that is. Every single memories come rushing back to me from a hidden corner of my mind. I feels joys, fulfilment, anger and sadness. All are too much, nothing but tears start coming down from my eyes.
"You guys had lived through the most wonderful time of your life until one da..."
"Night" - I cut him off.
"I was drunk, I wasn't myself. She shouldn't have knows. She was suppose to be with her friends."
"You cheated on her and you couldn't face the consequence.
That's right you aren't here because of apostasy or theft. It was adultery and suicide. Your punishment is to live a life without your wife once for every year you've been together. And remember the real one every single time you die."
P.S: English is not my native tongue pls don't be too harsh on me :(. I just really want to get the idea across. Really nice prompt btw
| It is dark, so dark that even the brightest light cannot light up this room. Suddenly I hear a voice coming from the distance.
"July 15 1987, 10:42. This moment could have changed your life."
I obviously could not remember what had happenend at that time, but then the wall started to light up. It showed a video of me walking across the pier.
Then I remembered what had happened. I dropped my lucky coin and a stranger had told me i dropped it. This coin was given to my by my grandfather who had that 2 months after. I kept this coin with me the whole time.
But then I noticed somsthing strange in the projection. The stranger who at that time had told me I dropped my coin was not there. I dropped the coin without noticing and just went on.
A few minutes later this guy saw the coin. The guy looked like he was homeless, he shirt was ripped and he looked very dirty. This guy knew everything about coins and noticed it was a very rare coin. He went on and sold the coin to buy a ticket for the lottery.
His week could not go any better when he saw he had won 50 million with this lottery ticket and the only thing he could think about was the owner of the coin, me.
The guy went on and tried to find the exact same coin he had sold a week ago, this was not very hard and he had found it within a few hours. He did not find this enough so he went looking for me.
The video showed years of him looking for me, he traveled across the world and after 10 years he had found me. I did not look happy at all and there was something else that was very strange, I was in a wheelchair. So the guy introduced himself and told everything. I was very happy for the guy, but then I started to tell my own story.
"The day I had lost my coin everything went downhill from there. As soon is I realized I had lost it. I went back looking for my coin realizing it was probably gone by now, but I had to find it. I could not find it anywhere and it started to get late so i went home. While I was walking through this obscure looking street, 4 guys dressed completely in black approached me. I was afraid of my life, I gave them everything I had, but that wasn't enough for them. They wanted to see me in pain so they shot me. In the hospital they told that I was very lucky to be alive, but I had to be in a wheelchair for the rest if my life. You would Imagine this was the worst part, but then my wife left me, because "She could not be with my anymore." I even got a call of my boss, he told me that I was fired, this man does not have a soul because he could not have anyone with a wheelchair.
The ex-homeless guy was so moved by this story and gave me my coin back and 10 million to cheer me up, but i could not be cheered up, I soon realized I couldn't live my life any further and thats when I pulled the trigger.
I hope you like my story. This is my first story so I would be gratefull if you guys could give me some advice. | |
[WP] You dropped a penny and picked it up, and you led a normal life. After your death, Satan shows you what happens if you didn't pick that penny up. | And Emily awoke again, damn, she really shouldn't have trusted that burrito, or eat that since she's well advanced in her years, now her death certificate would have the embarrassing words of "death by shitting".
Well, then why was she awake?
On par with her thoughts, a loud and ethereal voice, but laced with a demonic accent, spoke out:
"Welcome, dear sister Emily. Welcome!"
"...Who are you?" She replied.
"Oh, how rude can I be? I'm Satan, ruler and Prince of Hell." A figure appeared in front of Emily, and she was taken aback, thinking that Satan would be a great, ugly demon but in reality, Satan was.... handsome to say in the least. Heck, he's steaming hot.
"Now, now, Emily, no rush, Satan was one of God's favourite anyways, of course I will look 'steaming hot', now then.."
Well, Emily didn't expect Satan to had mind reading powers and she felt her face heating up.
"God made it so that I explain important events in your life... Let's see...."
A book appeared instantaneously on Satan's hand, on the covered inscribed with beautiful cursive letters was 'Emily'. His hands delicately flipped every page, his face having a bored look.
"Damn, Emily, your life is boring, *flip* didn't you do anything interesting *flip* other than your death?"
"Sorry, okay? I like living averagely."
"Well then, if there's nothing interesting I'll send you on your wa-" Satan's eyes widened, his monotone face slowly inching upwards into a smile, genuine, almost. He enjoyed talking with Emily, to be honest, and is glad to find something to talk to her about.
"My, my, seems like a huge essay on the Butterfly Effect here," he chuckled. "Hey Emily, remember the time you picked up a penny on the sidewalk in New York City when you were 24?"
"Yeah... Why?"
"Well then, says here, if you just left the coin there, you would have died an early death."
"I assume you plan to elaborate further..?"
"Indeed, remember your abusive ex, Xavier?"
Emily's heart skipped a beat, replying "Yes."
"Well, if you didn't pick up the coin, your ex would have noticed you in the streets, he was planning to kidnap you if he did actually see you... Well, good think you thought moving out of New York City was a good idea. He was planning on torturing you until you were broken before ultimately commiting suicide. Since you picked up that coin, he didn't see you and went along his merry way."
At this point, Emily was dumbfounded, but quickly smiled at the demon in front of her, "Thanks, well, at least my life isn't that normal any more, huh?"
"Yes, well then, I'll send you on your way to Heaven, you can always call me up from Heaven if you wanna talk." And he sent a wink to her.
"Of course, of course I will." And she walked on the pristine white staircase, leaving the demon to sigh and smile warmly before returning to his post.
| It is dark, so dark that even the brightest light cannot light up this room. Suddenly I hear a voice coming from the distance.
"July 15 1987, 10:42. This moment could have changed your life."
I obviously could not remember what had happenend at that time, but then the wall started to light up. It showed a video of me walking across the pier.
Then I remembered what had happened. I dropped my lucky coin and a stranger had told me i dropped it. This coin was given to my by my grandfather who had that 2 months after. I kept this coin with me the whole time.
But then I noticed somsthing strange in the projection. The stranger who at that time had told me I dropped my coin was not there. I dropped the coin without noticing and just went on.
A few minutes later this guy saw the coin. The guy looked like he was homeless, he shirt was ripped and he looked very dirty. This guy knew everything about coins and noticed it was a very rare coin. He went on and sold the coin to buy a ticket for the lottery.
His week could not go any better when he saw he had won 50 million with this lottery ticket and the only thing he could think about was the owner of the coin, me.
The guy went on and tried to find the exact same coin he had sold a week ago, this was not very hard and he had found it within a few hours. He did not find this enough so he went looking for me.
The video showed years of him looking for me, he traveled across the world and after 10 years he had found me. I did not look happy at all and there was something else that was very strange, I was in a wheelchair. So the guy introduced himself and told everything. I was very happy for the guy, but then I started to tell my own story.
"The day I had lost my coin everything went downhill from there. As soon is I realized I had lost it. I went back looking for my coin realizing it was probably gone by now, but I had to find it. I could not find it anywhere and it started to get late so i went home. While I was walking through this obscure looking street, 4 guys dressed completely in black approached me. I was afraid of my life, I gave them everything I had, but that wasn't enough for them. They wanted to see me in pain so they shot me. In the hospital they told that I was very lucky to be alive, but I had to be in a wheelchair for the rest if my life. You would Imagine this was the worst part, but then my wife left me, because "She could not be with my anymore." I even got a call of my boss, he told me that I was fired, this man does not have a soul because he could not have anyone with a wheelchair.
The ex-homeless guy was so moved by this story and gave me my coin back and 10 million to cheer me up, but i could not be cheered up, I soon realized I couldn't live my life any further and thats when I pulled the trigger.
I hope you like my story. This is my first story so I would be gratefull if you guys could give me some advice. | |
[WP] You dropped a penny and picked it up, and you led a normal life. After your death, Satan shows you what happens if you didn't pick that penny up. | It was all too surreal. The tall man in front of me led me through an arching doorway. Above the frame it read *"Reflection & Regret."* I enter the room and see a massive mirror. I stare at myself, still not sure if this place is real.
Lucifer chuckled, "You like what you see? Check this shit out."
He tapped the surface of the mirror with a disturbingly long and slender finger, creating a ripple that washed away our reflection and revealed... Me. A much younger me. My God, I'm a young man again. I begin to recognize the scene, it's my old university campus. I realize I know exactly what day it is. I just finished the last exam of my college career. I'm walking next to a tall, lanky kid. It's my ex-best friend, Ben. We're speed-walking to our cars- going straight to happy hour to celebrate. Out of habit, I stop to pick up a penny. I suddenly became conscious of this memory.
"Wow, I remember this exact moment because Ben lectured me on being a scavenger. Haha."
But I noticed something that I didn't recall. The young woman behind me was also in a hurry, and my abrupt change of pace to pick up the coin caused her to stop on her heel, spilling her beverage onto the back of Ben's shirt. Flustered, the woman quickly walks around us without saying a word.
Satan smiles, "I'm glad you find this humorous. Because this is where your life changes forever."
He taps the mirror again and time begins to move backwards. With another tap of his claw, the scene starts again. This time, I don't pick up the penny, and the girl does not spill her beverage. No more than 10 seconds after I pass the seemingly useless piece of currency, another young man picks it up and drops it in his back pocket.
The scene fasts forward as the Devil begins to narrate:
"Here you are at happy hour. Ben is wearing his favorite shirt. He looks fucking awesome in it. He's drunk, he's confident in how he looks, and he's going to talk to that girl over there. That woman becomes his wife. Surprised? Don't be. The Ben you know never got married, because he never had the confidence to talk to the would-be girl of his dreams. Upon noticing the stain on his favorite shirt, he borrowed one of your baby sized t-shirts. He did not look very cool."
The mirror began to swirl and a new scene became apparent. I'm slightly older. I'm guessing early/mid 30s judging by the office I'm in. It's the business Ben and I started together. The business that Ben fucked me out of. The business that started my downward spiral. But, in this scene Ben is quitting. He explains how the long hours are taking a toll on his marriage, and he leaves. I bite my nail, a nervous tick I've done since I was a child. I notice I'm not wearing my wedding band.
"What else changed?" I ask, "By the time I moved into this office, I'd been married to Catherine for at least a year." Catherine was my receptionist, and the biggest mistake I ever made.
"Catherine has been dead for years by this point. When the man behind you picked up that penny, he had *exact* change to pay for his coffee. He didn't have to break his five dollar bill. Being in such a great mood since he's finished his exams, he gives a homeless man money. That penny allowed him to give that man $5, instead of the pile of change he had weighing down his pocket. That five dollars, although not much, lifted that man's spirit. Instead of killing himself the next day, the homeless man cleans up his act. He gets a job, an apartment, and eventually a car. One day he feels that he deserves to celebrate, and he relapses. He kills Catherine in a drunk-driving accident on her way to her job interview, to work for you."
The mirror shows police and paramedics surrounding a body, covered in a sheet, beside Catherine's mangled Honda Accord. I begin to realize that with Catherine dead, Ben happily married and no longer involved in the company, I could've been a wealthy, happy man. The mirror ripples again. The scene confirms my beliefs. It's me, older. A silver fox. I've just docked my boat and am being accompanied by two beautiful women as I walk the dock towards an astonishing, unfamiliar building.
I drop to my knees, "Why did you show me this? How could I know such a petty action would result in so much despair? If I never married that bitch, she could've never left with all my money. She could've never remarried to my scum bag ex-best friend! I would have never killed them! I WOULD HAVE NEVER KILLED MYSELF!"
Two dark figures grab my arms and drag me out of the room. I see Ben and Catherine standing in line near the door.
Lucifer cackles as I sob, "Next!" | It is dark, so dark that even the brightest light cannot light up this room. Suddenly I hear a voice coming from the distance.
"July 15 1987, 10:42. This moment could have changed your life."
I obviously could not remember what had happenend at that time, but then the wall started to light up. It showed a video of me walking across the pier.
Then I remembered what had happened. I dropped my lucky coin and a stranger had told me i dropped it. This coin was given to my by my grandfather who had that 2 months after. I kept this coin with me the whole time.
But then I noticed somsthing strange in the projection. The stranger who at that time had told me I dropped my coin was not there. I dropped the coin without noticing and just went on.
A few minutes later this guy saw the coin. The guy looked like he was homeless, he shirt was ripped and he looked very dirty. This guy knew everything about coins and noticed it was a very rare coin. He went on and sold the coin to buy a ticket for the lottery.
His week could not go any better when he saw he had won 50 million with this lottery ticket and the only thing he could think about was the owner of the coin, me.
The guy went on and tried to find the exact same coin he had sold a week ago, this was not very hard and he had found it within a few hours. He did not find this enough so he went looking for me.
The video showed years of him looking for me, he traveled across the world and after 10 years he had found me. I did not look happy at all and there was something else that was very strange, I was in a wheelchair. So the guy introduced himself and told everything. I was very happy for the guy, but then I started to tell my own story.
"The day I had lost my coin everything went downhill from there. As soon is I realized I had lost it. I went back looking for my coin realizing it was probably gone by now, but I had to find it. I could not find it anywhere and it started to get late so i went home. While I was walking through this obscure looking street, 4 guys dressed completely in black approached me. I was afraid of my life, I gave them everything I had, but that wasn't enough for them. They wanted to see me in pain so they shot me. In the hospital they told that I was very lucky to be alive, but I had to be in a wheelchair for the rest if my life. You would Imagine this was the worst part, but then my wife left me, because "She could not be with my anymore." I even got a call of my boss, he told me that I was fired, this man does not have a soul because he could not have anyone with a wheelchair.
The ex-homeless guy was so moved by this story and gave me my coin back and 10 million to cheer me up, but i could not be cheered up, I soon realized I couldn't live my life any further and thats when I pulled the trigger.
I hope you like my story. This is my first story so I would be gratefull if you guys could give me some advice. | |
[WP] You dropped a penny and picked it up, and you led a normal life. After your death, Satan shows you what happens if you didn't pick that penny up. | "This is it" - I'm thinking to myself.
Here on my dead bed, alone with no one by my side, reflecting life. I had more downs than up, much frowns and little smile. Yet, I'm content with the experiences I had. Life wasn't great but it was mine. Maybe its sad that I have no children or spouse to mourn my death but my death won't break anyone's heart.
Its getting harder to breath, but not in a frighten way. Somehow I feel relax. My vision slowly blurs out and darkness from all corners of my eyes creeping in.
I'm tired of living.
My final sleep, strangely as welcoming as a mother's warmth.
I exhale.
"Oi! get up" - a loud distorted voice cut through the silence.
"Wh-What?"
"Come on bud, get up! I do have an eternity life but I can't wait for this."
I open my eyes and immediately it feels like every single drop of water I have in my body trying to escape.
"You're dead, welcome to Hell"
"H-Hell? What?"
"You clinically died 30 seconds ago, and now you're in Hell."
I'm baffled in confusion. But quickly come to term with my reality. Standing above me is a middle age man dresses in a dark crimson red suit.
"Welp, looks like all those nuts were right after all."
"Hah, I wouldn't blame ya, more than often, if a deal sounds too good it probably isn't true. I mean eternal happiness if you believe that there's an all powerful old guy creates everything. Who is a manifest in 3 beings but essentially one. AND conveniently take credit for all the good things happens but suddenly "works in mysterious way" when shits hit the fan? Whoo, talking about responsibility am I right? "
As the man rambling on I take a better look at him. He has bright brown eyes. At first glance they seem normal but when look carefully the pupil is bright red. His iris's tissues constantly moves like flames in slow motion. His smile is sharp and charming. He has teeth as bright as the colour of the clouds in spring. His hair are all neatly comb like one of those old school James Bonds. They are thick and shiny but you can see a glimpse of a burning fire beneath whenever he moves his head.
"You must be Satan."
"That's right! although you can address me as lord Belial or sire. Satan gets boring after 200 years, I'm trying to get Belial mainstream again."
"Yes sire!" I replied. He IS Beelzebub the serpent, the roaring lion and ruler of Hell itself what choice do I have.
"Don't you find it strange?"
"I'm sorry sire?"
"Don't you find it strange that the prince of darkness welcoming you to your oblivion?"
Now it hits me. Why in the world would ~~Satan~~ ahem, Belial himself appears? Why didn't he just leave it to the angle of death, or the demons. I didn't believe in god when I was alive but never thought that it would be that severe. I have no loyal blood in my vein, nor I was Hitler or Ted Bundy. The worse thing I've ever done was stealing a couple hundreds of bucks when I was broke in my early twenties. But sure that can't be stack up against the holocaust or murdering dozens of people.
"Now that you bring it up my lord, it sure is strange. Why do I own the pleasure sire ?"
"Oh, you're in Hell there is no pleasure here, unless pain is your thing. Hey I'm not judging, just saying. You're here because you didn't believe in God and you stole 200 dollars when you was 23. Normally you would be put through 100 years of "Heaven peeping" where you would have to watch how happy people lives are in heaven for your first sin. For your second sin you would've been force to live through the year when you were 23 for 50 times WITHOUT the 200 bucks."
"So no physical punishment?"
"Oh no no no, I'm a BAD guy but I'm not a bad GUY, you get me? I'm evil, but fair evil. Torture is only for murderers or anything more severe. You didn't hurt anyone physically so you won't be punished physically. You punishment is mental. but we not doing any of the thing I just mentioned. We'll do this instead."
Belial snaps his fingers and appears in the middle of the burning sky of Hell is a giant flat screen TV.
"As you know, you didn't have much in your life. Sure you weren't poor but you never truly happy, there was always that empty void inside you that you can never fill. Have you ever wonder what did you do wrong, what was the big mistake in your life that could've change everything."
I'm slightly frighten by his words, there's something not right. I can't pin point what it is but it's like an itch you can't scratch. There's something really wrong about this whole thing.
The giant flat screen power up with crackling electrical noises.
"That's me" I mumble.
"That's right that is you."
The screen is filled with the orange colour. There I was walking down the old street that I used to live on when I was in my late twenties. The soft yellow sun in front of me slowly lowering down below the skyline, shinning its dying light in my eyes. I keep walking trying to keep my head to the ground. The footage goes on for about 5 minutes.
"Sorry sire I don't see anything."
"You will drop a penny here."
It happens as he said it would. I crouch down, pick up the penny and continue walking.
"Except, this isn't your true memory."
I'm shocked and stunt, my legs feels like 2 logs of wood. There's a spark in my mind. That street, there's something nostalgic about that street, it was more than just a street I used to live on.
"This is the real memory."
Belial waves his index finger in circular motion and the footage rewinds.
I'm making my way back to my house, just like before.
The sun shines its light in my eyes, just like before.
Then at same orange skyline, where the sun hover just above the earth, a familiar silhouette approaching me. It wasn't there before.
My heart start pounding, as if I already knows whats going happen next but just can't remember. The closer the figure is to me the faster my heart beats.
I keep my focus on the ground still to avert the sun, just like before.
The shadowy figure and I are now within arm reach.
Belial pause the footage and smirkingly remarks:
"You see, you didn't live your life alone by yourself."
He resume the footage.
The shadow figure and I past each other.
I drop the penny , just like before.
I didn't crouch down to pick it up. But kept walking instead.
"Hey, excuse me! you drop something!" a soft tender voice coming from behind me.
I turn around. The sun casts its rays on the shadow, reviews the most beautiful being I have ever seen. Her black hair is dyed brown by the setting sun. Her curvy eyelashes casts its shadows on her bright green eyes. And her lips are the most tender.
"That's your wife, this is how you guys met each other."
I didn't need Belial to finishes the sentence to know who that is. Every single memories come rushing back to me from a hidden corner of my mind. I feels joys, fulfilment, anger and sadness. All are too much, nothing but tears start coming down from my eyes.
"You guys had lived through the most wonderful time of your life until one da..."
"Night" - I cut him off.
"I was drunk, I wasn't myself. She shouldn't have knows. She was suppose to be with her friends."
"You cheated on her and you couldn't face the consequence.
That's right you aren't here because of apostasy or theft. It was adultery and suicide. Your punishment is to live a life without your wife once for every year you've been together. And remember the real one every single time you die."
P.S: English is not my native tongue pls don't be too harsh on me :(. I just really want to get the idea across. Really nice prompt btw
| The piano player's skin was pure white and thin, stretched over black and purple veins. His gaunt fingers moved unnaturally, more like caterpillars than digits, over the dirty keys of the piano. The melody was in tune but hollow and unrecognizable. A deep red evening light filtered in through the dust-frosted windows of the tavern, empty except for one man and the gaunt musician.
The man spoke. "Hello, could you help me? My phone isn't working. I think...I think maybe I'm sick. I can't find my way home. Is it...Sunday? I can't find my way home."
"Jack Pulaski. You died." Said the musician, his voice high and melodic. His words drowned out the notes he continued to plunk out on the piano. "You'll remember now that you came in to hear my little concert. You died at a ripe old age before either of your ex-wives or any of the children you barely knew could make it to your bedside. That's probably why you're a little confused. It really does help to see a familiar face before the end."
"So...what is this?" Said Jack "I died..yes..I had esophageal cancer" He touched his throat under his jawbone and found it to be whole again.
"This is...or perhaps it's more correct to say this was a bit of a misunderstanding." Said the musician. He stopped playing the piano and turned around on his stool toward Jack. A thick push-broom mustache perched above a mouth with no lips. His eyes were clear and kind. "August 8th 1973 you were walking along Avenue A toward St. Marks. You picked up what looked to you like a penny."
"I don't remember picking up a goddamn penny in 1973." Said Jack, crossing his arms in front of him.
"Of course you don't." Said the musician. "Why would you? One of my few vices is my admiration for a good curse. There are rules, though. I can't curse someone but someone can curse themselves. My curses just barely break the surface of your world. Sometimes they're as minor as a dirty little penny on the street in a filthy corner of your city. You experienced this except..." The musician furrowed his pale, hairless brow. "...I misunderstood you. That curse wasn't meant for you and it certainly wasn't meant for you to carry for your whole life."
Jack stood up. "I didn't carry a penny around from 1973 until the day I died. Damn right you misunderstood."
The musician's lipless mouth formed something that Jack assumed was a smile. "You didn't carry it. But you possessed it. You threw a handful of pocket change into a dirty old duffel bag. That bag was in your attic right until the end."
Jack paced toward the door and found it to be barred. The red evening sunlight was beginning to fade through the windows. "I was cursed? I lived a fine life. I did fine. My kids all turned out fine. I lived a long life."
The musician stood up. The floor creaked under him as if his bulk was massive. "Anyone who walks around saying 'I'm cursed' clearly is not. Those people are just stupid or unlucky. The best curses carry on while the owner is blissfully unaware. Jack, please reach into your back pants pocket."
Jack's eyes moved in recognition before he even felt the penny in the pocket. He turned it over in his hand.
"There's an old Zoetrope over here." Said the musician. "Just drop your penny into the slot and have a look inside. You'll understand what a curse is after you watch."
"After I watch, what, exactly?" Said Jack.
"After you watch what your life would have looked like sans-curse." The musician's squirming fingers caressed the viewfinder mounted on the front of the Zoetrope.
"What's the point?" said Jack.
"The point is I want my curse back." Said the musician. "It's not like they go bad. Just drop the coin right into the slot and settle in for a nice show. Your kind doesn't come to this place too often. Consider yourself lucky."
"So you can just curse someone else?" said Jack.
The musician shrugged and sat down at the piano. He began to play again. This time the sound that emanated from the little stand-up piano was deep, as if it came from an immense concert grand. The song was the same as before, still unfamiliar.
Jack pinched the penny between his thumb and index finger. He walked to the bar and sat down.
"You can't afford a drink here." Said the musician. "There are those who come with their pockets overflowing but that's not you, friend."
Jack shoved away from the bar knocking his stool to the ground. He walked to the Zoetrope shoving aside the saloon's dusty and cheap wooden chairs as he went.
As Jack passed the piano he noticed a copper cup on the floor at the base of the piano, its surface jade green with years of verdigris. "Hey..." he said "How about a little Elton John while I watch? Do you know the one about the Yellow Brick Road?"
The musician nodded and began to play.
"Thanks, friend. That's what I needed to hear."
The penny made a satisfying and familiar sound as it hit the bottom of the old copper cup.
| |
[WP] You dropped a penny and picked it up, and you led a normal life. After your death, Satan shows you what happens if you didn't pick that penny up. | It was all too surreal. The tall man in front of me led me through an arching doorway. Above the frame it read *"Reflection & Regret."* I enter the room and see a massive mirror. I stare at myself, still not sure if this place is real.
Lucifer chuckled, "You like what you see? Check this shit out."
He tapped the surface of the mirror with a disturbingly long and slender finger, creating a ripple that washed away our reflection and revealed... Me. A much younger me. My God, I'm a young man again. I begin to recognize the scene, it's my old university campus. I realize I know exactly what day it is. I just finished the last exam of my college career. I'm walking next to a tall, lanky kid. It's my ex-best friend, Ben. We're speed-walking to our cars- going straight to happy hour to celebrate. Out of habit, I stop to pick up a penny. I suddenly became conscious of this memory.
"Wow, I remember this exact moment because Ben lectured me on being a scavenger. Haha."
But I noticed something that I didn't recall. The young woman behind me was also in a hurry, and my abrupt change of pace to pick up the coin caused her to stop on her heel, spilling her beverage onto the back of Ben's shirt. Flustered, the woman quickly walks around us without saying a word.
Satan smiles, "I'm glad you find this humorous. Because this is where your life changes forever."
He taps the mirror again and time begins to move backwards. With another tap of his claw, the scene starts again. This time, I don't pick up the penny, and the girl does not spill her beverage. No more than 10 seconds after I pass the seemingly useless piece of currency, another young man picks it up and drops it in his back pocket.
The scene fasts forward as the Devil begins to narrate:
"Here you are at happy hour. Ben is wearing his favorite shirt. He looks fucking awesome in it. He's drunk, he's confident in how he looks, and he's going to talk to that girl over there. That woman becomes his wife. Surprised? Don't be. The Ben you know never got married, because he never had the confidence to talk to the would-be girl of his dreams. Upon noticing the stain on his favorite shirt, he borrowed one of your baby sized t-shirts. He did not look very cool."
The mirror began to swirl and a new scene became apparent. I'm slightly older. I'm guessing early/mid 30s judging by the office I'm in. It's the business Ben and I started together. The business that Ben fucked me out of. The business that started my downward spiral. But, in this scene Ben is quitting. He explains how the long hours are taking a toll on his marriage, and he leaves. I bite my nail, a nervous tick I've done since I was a child. I notice I'm not wearing my wedding band.
"What else changed?" I ask, "By the time I moved into this office, I'd been married to Catherine for at least a year." Catherine was my receptionist, and the biggest mistake I ever made.
"Catherine has been dead for years by this point. When the man behind you picked up that penny, he had *exact* change to pay for his coffee. He didn't have to break his five dollar bill. Being in such a great mood since he's finished his exams, he gives a homeless man money. That penny allowed him to give that man $5, instead of the pile of change he had weighing down his pocket. That five dollars, although not much, lifted that man's spirit. Instead of killing himself the next day, the homeless man cleans up his act. He gets a job, an apartment, and eventually a car. One day he feels that he deserves to celebrate, and he relapses. He kills Catherine in a drunk-driving accident on her way to her job interview, to work for you."
The mirror shows police and paramedics surrounding a body, covered in a sheet, beside Catherine's mangled Honda Accord. I begin to realize that with Catherine dead, Ben happily married and no longer involved in the company, I could've been a wealthy, happy man. The mirror ripples again. The scene confirms my beliefs. It's me, older. A silver fox. I've just docked my boat and am being accompanied by two beautiful women as I walk the dock towards an astonishing, unfamiliar building.
I drop to my knees, "Why did you show me this? How could I know such a petty action would result in so much despair? If I never married that bitch, she could've never left with all my money. She could've never remarried to my scum bag ex-best friend! I would have never killed them! I WOULD HAVE NEVER KILLED MYSELF!"
Two dark figures grab my arms and drag me out of the room. I see Ben and Catherine standing in line near the door.
Lucifer cackles as I sob, "Next!" | And Emily awoke again, damn, she really shouldn't have trusted that burrito, or eat that since she's well advanced in her years, now her death certificate would have the embarrassing words of "death by shitting".
Well, then why was she awake?
On par with her thoughts, a loud and ethereal voice, but laced with a demonic accent, spoke out:
"Welcome, dear sister Emily. Welcome!"
"...Who are you?" She replied.
"Oh, how rude can I be? I'm Satan, ruler and Prince of Hell." A figure appeared in front of Emily, and she was taken aback, thinking that Satan would be a great, ugly demon but in reality, Satan was.... handsome to say in the least. Heck, he's steaming hot.
"Now, now, Emily, no rush, Satan was one of God's favourite anyways, of course I will look 'steaming hot', now then.."
Well, Emily didn't expect Satan to had mind reading powers and she felt her face heating up.
"God made it so that I explain important events in your life... Let's see...."
A book appeared instantaneously on Satan's hand, on the covered inscribed with beautiful cursive letters was 'Emily'. His hands delicately flipped every page, his face having a bored look.
"Damn, Emily, your life is boring, *flip* didn't you do anything interesting *flip* other than your death?"
"Sorry, okay? I like living averagely."
"Well then, if there's nothing interesting I'll send you on your wa-" Satan's eyes widened, his monotone face slowly inching upwards into a smile, genuine, almost. He enjoyed talking with Emily, to be honest, and is glad to find something to talk to her about.
"My, my, seems like a huge essay on the Butterfly Effect here," he chuckled. "Hey Emily, remember the time you picked up a penny on the sidewalk in New York City when you were 24?"
"Yeah... Why?"
"Well then, says here, if you just left the coin there, you would have died an early death."
"I assume you plan to elaborate further..?"
"Indeed, remember your abusive ex, Xavier?"
Emily's heart skipped a beat, replying "Yes."
"Well, if you didn't pick up the coin, your ex would have noticed you in the streets, he was planning to kidnap you if he did actually see you... Well, good think you thought moving out of New York City was a good idea. He was planning on torturing you until you were broken before ultimately commiting suicide. Since you picked up that coin, he didn't see you and went along his merry way."
At this point, Emily was dumbfounded, but quickly smiled at the demon in front of her, "Thanks, well, at least my life isn't that normal any more, huh?"
"Yes, well then, I'll send you on your way to Heaven, you can always call me up from Heaven if you wanna talk." And he sent a wink to her.
"Of course, of course I will." And she walked on the pristine white staircase, leaving the demon to sigh and smile warmly before returning to his post.
| |
[WP] As it turns out, the monsters of the week that the magical girls were fighting don't stand up terribly well against modern military power. | Ruby yelled, “Let’s go, Gem Girls!” Around her, her sisters leaped to the air. Below, the cameras flashed, documenting the flight into battle of the city’s darling superheroines. Ruby flew at the lead, as always, checking on her sisters. Diamond was on her right, glittering blade already drawn. Sapphire flew close on Diamond’s right. On Ruby’s left flew Malachite and Amethyst, completing the V. Directly behind Ruby, coasting on the group’s wake, fluttered Pearl.
Ruby whistled, and her sisters responded. They winged down toward the outskirts of the city, where the monsters were tramping through a suburb. Ruby could hear an innocent woman screaming from a rooftop. She pointed, and Pearl broke off from the group, angling toward the woman. She would see if the woman was alright and stay there, well out of danger unless she was called for. She was the healer, so it was imperative that she remain safe.
The rest of the group landed lightly on the street in front of the monsters, who stopped to assess the new threat. The grotesque creatures that had appeared this week were the biggest yet, with heavy armored plates that shone with runes and magic scrawls. This might be a tough battle. Ruby glanced nervously behind her, where the reporters were beginning to arrive, filming the supergirls eagerly and broadcasting live.
Ruby drew her twin knives, glowing her signature red. She siphoned some power off her lodestone, the ruby set in gold gleaming on her finger. Without warning, the monsters surged forward and attacked. There were three of the hulking beasts. Ruby angled toward the one in the middle, knowing that Diamond would attack the right and Malachite the left. Ruby slid under the first reach of the monster, looking back toward the press so they could get a good shot. She tried to slice at its shins with her knives, but they bounced off of its thick hide.
Standing, she ducked as the monster turned and swung at her. It was deceptively fast. Bobbing and weaving, she ran toward it and tried to stab it in the stomach, but her blade bounced off. Looking over, she saw that Diamond was faring no better, even with Sapphire to back her up. She had an idea - she ran through the monster’s legs, spinning before the monster had a chance to turn, and stabbed it in the back of the knee, where there was a gap in the armored plates. It roared and fell, catching itself on the other knee. Its blow whistled through the air alarmingly close to her head.
“The gaps in the plates!” she yelled-half gasped to Diamond, who nodded. But a scream from Ruby’s left drew both of their attention. The monster’s blow had caught Amethyst at the knee and she was crumpled in the street, Malachite standing over her. Ruby saw Pearl fluttering high behind them, but she could not focus on them. The monster was angry now. It swiped at her, forcing her to dance backwards. This was frustrating. She ducked another swipe and saw a dart of blue catch it in the shoulder. Sapphire had tried to help with her arrows, but it just made the monster even madder. It kept coming.
Ruby stumbled and fell, watching the monster loom over her. The press behind her gasped. She prepared to roll out of the way of the monster’s fist, but before she could, a loud **rattattattattatta** droned from behind her. The monster fell towards her, forcing her to scramble out of the way. Gross green liquid leaked from under it. The monsters on either side of her were roaring, but they quickly faced the same fate.
Soon the street was quiet of the monster’s roars. Diamond rushed over to Amethyst, who was sitting weakly and already under Pearl’s ministrations. Ruby turned around. Behind her was what looked like a tank - but it couldn’t be! The army had been all but useless for years, ever since the supergirls and superboys had taken over defense of the city. A figure jumped off the top of the tank and swaggered over to Ruby.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt, sweetheart. You girls looked quite nice out there, but I figured you all could use a little help. The name’s Glannon. Tom Glannon.” The figure whipped off its hat, revealing it to be a young man, who held out his hand to Ruby. She examined him. A strong nose, broad smile, wavy brown hair, winking eyes, and one dimple. Oh yes, this one was trouble. Ruby glared at him, turned her back, and stalked over to her sisters. She would deal with him later.
---
At the base, with Amethyst safely recovering in the infirmary, Ruby went to find Commander Dalton. The boss and director of the Gem Girls, Commander Dalton was not hard to find. Ruby found him where she expected, in his office. What she didn’t expect was his company. She walked in, not bothering to knock, only to be confronted with the same wavy hair and one dimple.
“Ruby, I’m glad you could join us,” said Commander Dalton calmly, as if he had planned for Ruby to come. “Please meet Tom Glannon, a lieutenant in the army.”
Ruby shot him another glare. “We’ve met,” she said, careful to keep her voice cool. Tom only grinned.
“Good. Tom here was just telling me his orders to help keep the people safe. We’re working out the details. It might be nice for you girls to have some help, don’t you think?” Ruby stared, shocked. She had come here to complain about the boy nuisance, not to be asked to work with him. And that was the absolute last thing she wanted.
“No, I don’t think. What I think,” Ruby rose from the chair in her anger, “is that not only is Mr. Glannon not needed here, but he is not *wanted.*” Tom’s mouth opened in surprise and Ruby smiled inwardly in victory.
“Come now, Ruby, don’t be hasty-” Commander Dalton tried to soothe Ruby, but she cut him off.
“I’m not! You,” Ruby stabbed her finger at Tom, “have no business being here, because you don’t understand what it means to protect the city. It’s not just about killing monsters. It’s about making people feel safe. Making them feel like they can trust us. A feeling that we have worked hard to build, and that you undermined with your stupid idea to look cool!” Ruby’s voice had risen to a shout. Tom grinned lazily and stood also.
“Sweetheart, calm down. We all know that part of your job is prancing to the cameras and the good people in the city. I won’t stop you from doing that - I’m not here to take away your fame. I’m just going to give you some help where it counts. Let someone a little… bigger take on the job.” His words were soothing, but his eyes were laughing. At her. “And besides, sweetheart, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Tom tapped the desk, where a bunch of official papers were.
Ruby’s eyes widened. He had official permission from the higher-ups to come here and take over *her* city. She stormed out of the room. She couldn’t handle that ass - condescending, stupid, cocky, arrogant, annoying… he didn’t understand the city, and more than that, she couldn’t afford to have him around here digging into places he didn’t belong. She couldn’t afford to have him rooting out her secret.
---
Hope you enjoy!
Edit: Part 2 in comments | Magical girls just don't possess the power of brrrt.
---
Deafening sound struck Rapid City. A monster was attacking. This time, though, it was enormous. Easily overtaking tallest skyscrapers, it stridden across the shoreline making ruin in its path. Massive claws tore open one of the office building, revealing people inside. Panicking, they tried running for their lives, futilely. Building was collapsing, crushing everyone inside. The beast feasted upon the peaceful folk down below. Death and destruction lied wherever it was.
Down there, on the large avenue, people were fleeing chaotically. Abandoned cars clogged the road. Behind one of them, a passerby took shelter. He looked outside, to observe a terrifying picture. A bus, full of people, ran straight into the beast, killing everybody inside. Another man on the curb, bleeding profusely from his head, motionless. A woman, panicked, kneeling on the asphalt, crying. Monster slowly made it’s way forward, leaving large imprints on the road. There it was - the end.
While praying on the ground, he noticed something strange nearby. Right next to him, in the middle of the avenue were standing two figures. He recognized them – those two were the “Witches of Good”. There was an article written some time ago about them, claiming they are some sort of a “self-proclaimed magical vigilante group”, who “swore to protect the city from the evil the other dimension brought”. In reality, they were two teenage girls, with funky hair colors, dressed as a crossbred between classic maid uniform and witches attires. Adjusting their oversized witches’ hats, they stepped in. It seemed like they already been engaged in a fight with the beast. Mud and dust covered their clothing. They both were breathing heavily.
“It’s strong, Michi!” – exclaimed one of them, panting.
“Yes, we must use our final weapon!”
They nodded to each other. Bringing their staffs together, they took aim. Grasping their hands together, they began casting their “magic”. Engulfed in warm light, they made a shining bow. Stretching it, a flaming projectile appeared. Great strength accumulated as they chanted spells, inaudible in the cacophony of sound. With a scream, they let go of the shining string, releasing the fireball. It flew fast – a large projectile aimed at the beast. Flaming ball hit his skin, exploding spectacularly. A rainbow of colours, as well star-shaped lights flew all around the street. Both of the girls were barely standing after their attack. They smiled, a job-well-done mood settled in their faces. However, job was far away from being “well done”. As light dissipated, monster revealed its ugly self, unscathed. Horror set in, wiping their childish smiles. That was it, the end. For sure.
*brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt*
The man, watching behind a car, knew that sound well. His eyes weren’t deceiving him, as well as the memory of his service in the Marine Corps didn’t fail him. Where magic failed, sheer power of a thirty-millimeter Gatling gun did exceptionally. A-10 circled around the beast. Skin of the monster melted where rounds hit. Monster, enraged by pain, swung it’s massive claws, trying to get the agile jet. Silver plane flew around him and released its missiles. “Mavericks” struck beasts shoulder, dislodging its arm. With a deafening thud, large chunk of flesh fell on the avenue. Jet made another round, and struck for the last time. Its cannons obliterated monsters ugly head. Effectively dead, it stumbled and fell on top of glass covered skyscraper, raining shards down below. Jet promptly left the scene.
A convoy of jeeps appeared behind. Soldiers disembarked and promptly ran forward, towards the beast. The man stood up, and approached the Witches. Those poor girls, standing there dumbfounded in muddy clothes.
“Looks like the military gets to play today.”
--------
Edit for spelling and better wording.
| |
Be creative or scary. | [WP] "I know this is confusing and scary, but please listen. Hide, just hide. No matter what, don't let them see you." | I scowl, irritated, and eye the homeless man up and down. He looks like he hasn't had a bath in weeks, and I can't tell if his tangled hair is naturally grey or just covered in dried mud.
"Don't let who see me?" I ask, smothering my impatience to humour him; if I go along with his fantasy for a bit, I can get away and go home. It's late, I just got off the triple shift I had to pull because someone was fired this morning and someone else literally walked out just as I was about to go home, and all I want is a nice soak for my poor aching body before bed. Any other day, I would find this amusing and might even buy the guy dinner so he doesn't go hungry tonight, but my usual pleasantries have been devoured by exhaustion and anger at my coworkers.
"Them!" he says insistently, lowering his voice and looking around to make sure no one else hears, even though it's half past 3 in the morning on a weekday and the only people stupid enough to be up right now are the drunk morons heading home that just got kicked out of whatever bar they passed out in. And me.
"Look, mister," I say, giving in to my need to get home, "I'm tired, I'm irritable; I'm not good company right now... just take this, get yourself some food, and leave me alone..." I tug a ten from the folds of my wallet, intending to push it into his hands, but he grabs my wrist.
"You need to hide," he says sharply. "Now! Before they find you; they'll be here any second."
"Who??" I snap, fed up with this game. I swear to God, if he says aliens, I'm calling the damn cops.
"The Blue Palm," he answers. Immediately, all anger washes out of me, chased away by a cold trickle of terror down my spine.
"How do you know that name?" I whisper, staring at his weathered old face and realising his incredible blue eyes are much younger than the rest of him, yet timeless in knowledge.
"You need to hide," he repeats. "Their Seekers will be here any second."
I don't know how they found me, but I stop arguing; every second I waste arguing is another second for a Seeker to find me.
Not many people in the world are blessed with the gift of True Sight, which allows a person to see another's real appearance regardless of any disguise by allowing them to look into that person's very soul. Most of them have been employed by a secret organisation called the Blue Palm, a stupid, unoriginal name chosen because those blessed with True Sight, also known as Seekers, glow blue in the hand when they use their ability. Those who aren't employed by the Blue Palm are systematically hunted down and either imprisoned until they change their mind, or simply killed.
No free Seeker has evaded the Blue Palm for more than five years. I am a free Seeker, and I have evaded them for almost ten.
The man grabs my hand and tugs, leading me away, and I follow without question or complaint. Instead, I inspect him more closely, my hand glinting blue between his large, calloused fingers that are only slightly smaller than mine.
He is much younger than I realised, maybe twenty-five, thirty years old; a good fifteen or twenty years younger than me. He is also much stronger than he appears, and I'm certain he has military training.
Then I see something that makes me go cold, and I yank my hand from his, backpeddling. On the back of his neck is the tiny blue handprint tattoo that marks him a grunt for the Blue Palm.
"You're one of them!" I accuse, getting ready to run.
"Wait!" he snaps, an authority in his voice that startles me into obedience. "I was, but I'm not anymore; I got out."
"You don't just 'get out' of the Blue Palm," I hiss, tense and wary. "You retire under their banner or you die."
"Alright, I betrayed them; is that what you want to hear?" He reaches for me again and I pull away. "Come on; you have to hide."
"Don't you?" I return sharply. His weathered features harden under the scraggly beard that covers the lower half of his face.
"They think I'm dead already," he explains. "Now it's your turn; are you going to make it easy on them?"
I follow him again, but one question burns on my tongue until I have to ask: "Why are you helping me?"
"...Let's just say I care about your safety and leave it at that," he says gruffly. "And don't you dare try to Seek me."
With a huff, I shove my hands into my pockets, and he immediately moves away, trying to get and stay outside of my Seeking zone. He doesn't realise I have no limit; if I can see a person, I can Seek them. One of the main reasons I've been able to avoid the Blue Palm for so long.
I Seek his soul, not for his appearance this time, but for his motivations. What I find actually makes me trip, and he quickly reaches out to catch me as I yank my hands out of my pockets to catch myself. My glowing fingers wrap tightly around his tanned hand, and we both freeze, staring at each other.
"...I didn't want to tell you... Mom didn't want you to know..."
"You have to hide too," I say, voice hoarse with too many emotions that I'm trying to keep down. "True Sight is hereditary; if you're really my son, you'll have it too, and you don't have long before it becomes active. If Blue Palm learns that you have it..."
"I know," he says wryly. "I'm already on their list. That's why they think I'm dead."
"You have to hide more than I do," I suddenly realise. "Both of my parents were Seekers; I'm stronger than the average Seeker. Your mother was a Seeker too; you'll be even stronger than me."
"I'm not leaving you to slow them down," he says sharply, gripping my wrist tightly. "I came here to protect you, not to have you protect me!" I'm still Seeking him, so I know he's telling the truth, and he inherited his mother's stubbornness; he won't give up.
"...Together then," I say, laying my non-dominant hand on his shoulder. "We'll escape together." That brings a smile to his face, cutting his outward age in half and abruptly reminding me of myself at that age. He nods, his hand flickering blue under mine.
"Yes, sir."
Let the battle of Seekers begin. | All my life we lived by darkness and shadows. Never by the light of day. My mother was terrified by the day time. I never knew why. I asked her once or twice but she would pretend to not hear me. By day we would sleep and night we would wake and eat and then travel. We never stayed in the same place more than one night. My mother always seemed to be on the run. For who or what I was never sure of. When I was very little I remember her pulling me in a wagon. Now I pull the wagon with all of our belongings.
We don’t have much, a couple blankets, a few can foods, a couple of dresses and my dolly. I turned eleven yesterday. I only know because my mom keeps a secret book in her blanket. Sometimes when she sleeps I looked through it. She mostly rambles about having to hide me so they can’t use me. I don’t know what she means. I can not ask her because then she would know I found her book. Yesterday I read it and she was talking about how I was eleven today and that meant they would now come after us even harder.
I awake to my mother shaking me violently. "I know this is confusing and scary, but please listen. Hide, just hide. No matter what, don't let them see you."
“Mother I’m scared.” I say.
“Listen. you must stay hidden. I will lead them away from here when I do you must run.” My mom hugged me tightly. “I wont be able to keep you safe anymore. You have to stay away from people. Trust no one.” With that she ran out the door of the small abandon shed we made home that night.
“MOM!” I screamed after her but she is now long gone.
I haven’t seen my mother in three years. I stay hidden and away from people just like she warn me to. I read my moms book from start to finish and now I know why I must stay hidden. They want the power I have hidden inside. |
Be creative or scary. | [WP] "I know this is confusing and scary, but please listen. Hide, just hide. No matter what, don't let them see you." | The door flung wide, rebounding off my wall with a bang. My father's face was one of intense fear. I was alarmed – I'd never seen him with anything but a stoic grin on his face, even at the worst of times.
“John, he whisper-shouted urgently, “Quick, we have to get you out.”
He grabbed my dressing gown and thrust it around my bare shoulders, before practically dragging me out of my bedroom and onto the landing.
“What's going on...?” I whispered. I could hear my mum downstairs, rummaging through drawers. An insistent rapping on the door made her squeal with terror, and her furtive searching sounds grew more frantic.
“Quiet,” my father urged. “ I'll explain when there's time. We've prepared for this.”
An amplified voice blared distorted demands to open the door, to let them in. So brazen.
Father opened the cupboard under the stairs, and moved aside the floorboard. A cavernous, black pit yawned up at me, with a ladder descending into the darkness.
“I know this is confusing and scary,” he whispered, that stoic grin back on his face. Trying to reassure me, but that smile hadn't worked on me in years. “But please listen. Hide, just hide. No matter what, don't let them see you.”
I made my careful way down the creaking ladder, the terror seeping in as the darkness surrounded me, and becoming absolute as the floorboard was replaced, blocking out the last of the light. I cowered in the blackness, waiting for it to be over. Just like last time.
-----
It took three hours, but finally they left. I hadn't been found.
My father came back, the light from above blinding my dark-accustomed eyes. The stoic grin looked down on me.
“They'll never find you,” Father said. “You're my son now.”
The beatings resumed that night.
-----
/r/tdmstories
Why are all my stories so bleak? I may have issues. Fun to write, though! | My mother had brought me into her bedroom after violently shaking me awake. She shoved me under the and leaned forward to kiss my forehead.
"I know this is confusing and scary, but please listen. Hide, just hide. No matter what, don't let them see you."
The last image of her I had was the tears coming from her eyes as she stood up, walked towards to door and left the the room. It was quiet, followed by a shrill scream and some glass shattering. I waited for what felt like forever before I got up.
I was only twelve when they came. They got my father on the way to work, but not before he was able to call me mother and warn her. I made my way down the stairs and found the front door was wide open, blood and glass everywhere. I searched around the house but could not find my mother.
The smear of crimson trailed towards the back of the house. The back door way ajar as well and the trail seemed to go off into the darkness of the night. In school, they gave us drills to practice in case this happened, but the fear was clouding my memory. I closed the doors and went back upstairs.
There was a chilled breeze flowing through the house and I figured it was from the broken window on the front door. Hastily, I tried to find some kind of warmth so I could get some sleep for the night. Screams in the distance informed me I was not through with this nightmare.
I awoke in the morning and made my way to the street to assess what had happened. Cars were destroyed, houses up and down the street were on fire and the city, in the distance, was a cloud of smoke. Even with nothing but sirens and alarms filling the air, I had the aching feeling, I was being watched. |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | First writing prompt! Hope y'all enjoy. Apologies for errors, I'm not great with spotting them.
----
Atlantis disappeared a millennium, five centuries, three decades and two years ago, never to have contact with civilization again. The Atlanteans knew this because their data slates told them so, because all of Atlantean history was recorded on banks of artificial memory, throughout the vast, underwater mountain that was their kingdom.
The Atlanteans knew of the siege by human barbarians, the diverged homo sapiens that at the time was only a fraction of the infestation it would become. They knew of the decades long transformation, the change of Atlantis from an open city of technological wonders into the sealed fortress city it bore a resemblance to even today, sealed with buffering shields, and vault-like gates of purified stone. They knew Atlantis had escaped the world, vanished away, escaped a world too vicious and greedy for Atlantis to remain part of.
But they did not remember it, like Queen Eiolan, mother of all Atlantis did. They did not feel the pain.
Queen Eiolan had believed in the human race for many thousands of years, since she had arrived here alone. She had believed in the race she forged from the genes of other races, had bent and hammered into something that could resemble her own kin, light years away. They would be like so many flowers, she had thought, her own creation that grew and thought, and evolved into another master race. A kindred spirit.
Eiolan remembered when she realized she had lost control. When outside of her Atlantean walls she began to hear the tales of war. Butchery.
Disquiet grew. She could grow the humans in her own walls, she could cultivate them. But far from her sight, over a thousand horizons, she was helpless to intervene as humanity corrupted itself.
Then had come the tragedy. The day Atlantis disappeared.
----
Queen Eiolan rarely moved. This wasn't unusual to the current generations of Atlanteans. As far as the Atlanteans knew, Queen Eiolan had always sat on that arcane throne of hers. She had always been at one with it, at one with the wires that punctured her skin, and sent her commands silently to every edge of the underwater mountain city. The queen had always ruled this way, in silence. No-one questioned this. Some said that in some of the data that commanded alterations in the city, in commands for extra structural resilience inside the mountain, there was something amiss. A great sadness they sensed, or a void of joy.
Most Atlanteans had paid little heed to what was considered babbling. There was nothing but instruction in the precise data. Nothing but the constant need for improvement of the defences and systems. Meanwhile, there was growing wariness among the Atlanteans of the seas above and around them. Ominous shapes appeared in the distant water every so often - unnatural shapes, too straight, too unnaturally designed. The humans above had evolved. And they were getting closer.
The Atlanteans each carried a certain sense of quiet dread, stuffed away behind other things that would keep them sane. It was fear of a great evil, beyond the great sea's murky fog, that would one day descend upon Atlantis and consume it. It was those things in the water - those towers that would spear into the water around Atlantis, before erupting into a blinding, terrifying light. Atlanteans had died out there in the water, fishing or harvesting when these vast metal arrows boomed through the water, ripping apart the sea, shredding the sea life, breaking the bodies of the living things.
It was horror they could not fight, and so horror they stuffed away. But it was not the only thing they were afraid of. They were also afraid of their Queen, for perhaps those babblings about the pain in the data weren't so mad after all.
Since those towers had begun to drop into the water, as their terrifying blooms that ripped the sea around them had gone on, the Queen had changed. Her eyes, once glassy, far away, would now sear into the eyes of any Atlantean who met them in the shadows of her glass throne room, at the top of Atlantis' highest peak. For all the potency of those things that exploded in the seas around Atlantis, they did not compare to the burning in Queen Eiolan's eyes, as if she were holding in a great cataclysmic furnace, to burn Atlantis and the world beyond.
One day, as the Atlantean royal guard watched over their Queen. Her fingers twitched. Bent. Scratched the pure stone of her throne, as throughout Atlantis horns began to ring out in alarm, and the mountain city began to gather power.
----
Queen Eiolan remembered everything. She remembered every blade of grass, every machination she ever made to create the human race that would break her. Before earth she had thousands of years of memory, of travelling the starts, of her old world, before the populace left to seek life across the Universe.
But the Tragedy was the day she chose to remember, over and over again. The day an army gathered outside the gates of Atlantis. The day she had sent her king, the human who she had fallen in love with, to reason with the enemy.
The image of her king, Roland, being torn apart with arrows alongside seventy other Atlanteans was burned into her mind, branded there, swollen, agonising. The feeling of it, the destruction it wrought on her mind remained, a millennium, five centuries, three decades and two years later. It was the same day that Queen Eiolan had used all of the cities power to vanish the city away, to somewhere the humans could not reach them. Somewhere the Atlanteans - and she - could not be hurt.
Yet down there in the depths of the ocean, the Queen's mind was slowly poisoned. Her desire for a kindred spirit withered as the centuries crawled on. Over centuries more she stopped speaking her subjects, every one of which was a reminder of the tragedy. Over time, her hopes and dreams for this world had turned to ash, in the cold dark of the sea.
And now, explosives came from above the water. From nearby lands. How had they found Atlantis?, the queen asked herself. Had they found Atlantis at all? Where these things just the experiments of yet another empty vessell of humanity, without regard for the life they destroyed in the dark?
As the weeks went on, these questions ceased to matter to Queen Eiolan. The poison, more than a millennium old, had overtaken her mind. That was what the subjects saw. That was what horrified her guards, who saw her smile, as the city of Atlantis gathered power for another jump, and the horns grew louder and louder. They saw something corrupted. In the heart of Atlantis, the first and last peaceful city, they saw evil had taken the heart of their Queen. Some felt what she was about to do. Some screamed, for their dread was finally realised, and they could do nothing but watch what would happen next.
----
Many scanners detected a cataclysmic shift in the oceans off the coast of North Korea - not that anyone would be paying them any heed in the coming moments. Something had cause a vast disturbance in the Sea Of Japan - something that was causing tidal waves. But no-one would care, barely even the victims. All eyes were elsewhere, on what would become known as the remains of North Korea.
A mile above Pyongyang, Atlantis appeared, with a sonic boom that rippled over the North Korean capital like the vast roar of a thunderous god. Government officials, soldiers, men, woman, children. Two and a half million souls looked up to the mountain in the sky, blotting out the sun, hanging in the air above their city.
They screamed as the mountain dropped from the sky.
The Queen Eiolan did nothing as Atlantis fell, and the Atlanteans panicked, sobbed and screamed throughout the tunnels. She did not need to. The mountain city was reinforced, structured to take minimal damage, over years, decades and centuries of fortifying construction. Somewhere, hidden away in the back of her mind, she had known that this would eventually happen. Had wanted it to. Had been waiting for a good reason, just a moment, in which to demonstrate a flicker of what remained of her, after the Tragedy a millennium and a half ago.
She closed her eyes, shielding her irises from the bright light of the sky she had not seen in so long, as the first and last peaceful city of Atlantis fell from the sky, and every light in Pyongyang went out. | There was a loophole in their plan to save the humans. While they protected the largest internet from attack, they forgot to include the smaller internets that cropped up in fringe societies like the ever- freaky North Korea. Their psycho information club kept it at just under 15 total websites in the entire country. We had tenuous links to the network from our underwater city in Atlantis.
After tapping into the underwater cables, our God program reinforced the security against DDoS attacks and spam emails. Then, we transferred the human race to an outcome where they survive using the fifth dimension. It was a one-time surgery meant to save the timeline of the human race.
It seems we needed more. The North Koreans somehow learned of our special future where humans survive, and wanted to be the survivors, themselves. Instead of the planet, it looked like we were going to save this nutjob underworlder. We had to destroy it.
Our blimps carried beasts and bombs across the sky to the South Korean border with North Korea. Completely ignoring the demilitarized requirements, we bombed the fuck out of the entire bridge. It was non-lethal variant of something like tear gas, but made with octopus ink. Then we crash landed and made our demands with oil spattered over everything. We used a mega phone.
"I am the fish from the lost city of Atlantis. I came to order North Korea to stand down from their leadership role at Pyongyang. Please do consider that we will simply destroy you if you do not stand down. Thank you."
We shot the attacking mob and lifted off, flying into the North Korean continent from the height of the clouds. Fighter jets came at us with missiles, but we corrected their path to meet an explosive end on the ground. Even the jet planes went down. We took our whale bombs and geo-nuked the roads we found on the way to the Peaceful city. The whale's rotten demise was a valued contribution to the war effort. Their corpses couldn't have humanely been used any other way.
When we finally got to the abandoned capital, we dropped off our bubble entertainment ring. It was a giant water bubble suspended by gravity for playing underwater sports and holding a crowd of around 90,000 people. It was a huge coliseum for the people of North Korea, meant to be leveraged against their government. The water spaces inside the dome was free. The People's Republic had no power inside water facilities at that location.
We stocked it with the first supply of food, and gave a microspeech to the people of the country before leaving. "It's up to you to keep the snack stands full of nachos and chips."
We were getting earthsickness and needed to go back underwater. We chose to go to a site on the North Atlantic by traveling across all of Asia. We held up holographic signs announcing our victory over North Korea. Our strategy could never fail. | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | I heaved a sigh and wiped the sweat from my brow. All twenty of my generals were here, awaiting my orders.
"Ladies, gentlemen....we've been on the defensive for far too long. These arrogant little men above...the North Koreans, hated even by their fellow surface ones...tonight they *will* die."
I looked to the man on my right at the table. "General Mercury, how goes the mission of taking our lands back?"
He removed his glasses. "Not well, my lord. Many of the outlying hunting and farming families have been eradicated. Their weapons have spread pestilence and death in a way I have never seen before."
"I have." General Fulbright replied grimly. "The surface ones call it 'nuclear fallout'. It spreads a sickness so vile you're dead before you hit the floor."
I nodded slowly, putting the pieces together. "But these poisons have not reached our depths?" I inquired.
All my generals stared at me, worried.
"No, my lord." General Fulbright responded.
I smiled faintly. "Good. If we are to win this war, we need something to tear down their walls, laugh at their weapons of steel, and lay their cities to waste."
"Sir," General Gainnes spoke fearfully. "You're not truly suggesting--"
I nodded, a smile now clear on my face. "Gentlemen, wake up Cthulhu."
Immediately, my generals rose to their feet in anger and terror
"Sir, you can't!" wailed General Mercury.
"He'll become unstoppable!" General Fulbright shouted.
I raised my hand for silence, and my generals did so.
"We have developed a neurotoxin powerful enough to simple lull him into slumber once more. It will be fired into his neck via a missile after the destruction of North Korea."
"But sir!" General Scarlett called out. "That monster is the reason we sank and you want to unchain him!?"
"She's right!" General Gainnes spat. "Years of spellcraft went into simply luring that beast down here! Last time he was unleashed upon the surface, he wiped out those dinosaur creatures! And he was but an infant!"
"Besides, what would the politicians say?! What would the public say?!"
I held up my hands in a calming gesture. "It will be alright, my friends. My cabinets will not utter a word if they know what's good for them. We will wake Cthulhu and he will march back up to the surface to raze North Korea. He *is* dormant very close to the shore, is he not?"
Everyone frowned. I could tell they hated this plan, but I has the king.
"Wake Cthulhu." I stated. "That's an order."
And wake Cthulhu, they did. I watched it personally from above the clouds. It was quite remarkable.
My top spellcasters fired literally everything they had at the monster. Within hours, a large shadow appeared under the water. Cthulhu broke the surface, his crusted eyes full of hatred, his tentacles writhing angrily. I could already hear screaming.
The beast lumbered onto the shore, gallons on water dripping off of his scaly body. He unfurled his gnarled, bloody wings and flapped them for the first time in millenia.
He leaned his head back and curled his tentacles up, revealing his mouth: a black, reeking abyss with hundreds of rows of rotting teeth. Cthulhu took a deep breath, consuming a fifth of the atmosphere, and roared
Even from one thousand feet above, the roar was ear-splitting. It was like a nightmare in agony.
North Korea's pitiful defenses opened fire, barely scraping Cthulhu's hide. The monster strolled to the large protective wall and promptly tore it down. More screaming ensued.
"On this day, North Korea will receive a grim reminder..." I whispered. "That they are at *our* mercy, not the opposite."
I watched as Cthulhu tore down every house, every so-called "skyscraper", every last scrap of civilization.
"All right." I said. "Send ambassadors to every world leader to explain what happened here today. Tell them to not be threatening, but to make certain..." I smiled thinly. "...implications."
My messenger stepped onto the teleporter and vanished, off to do my bidding.
I switched on my communicator. "Generals, you may fire when ready."
Like clockwork, a barrage of missiles charged at Cthulhu like a swarm of locusts. They rammed into the beast, puncturing his skin and sending the toxins into his blood. It was not long before Dread Cthulhu fell to the ground into another eon-long sleep.
My messenger reappeared soon after. He handed me a large stack of letters.
"Sir, these are from every world leader on the surface stating we surrender Cthulhu as well as all other weapons we have and turn ourselves into custody."
I was furious. "WHAT?! WERE THOSE IDIOTS TOLD IT WAS RETALIATION?!"
My messenger gulped. "Yes, sir. They don't seem to care. They called it an act of global terrorism and mass murder."
I sat there with my mouth agape for a very long time before I glanced to the sleeping form below.
I switched my communicator back on. "Generals, alert my spellcasters. Tell them Cthulhu is waking back up *now*." | There was a loophole in their plan to save the humans. While they protected the largest internet from attack, they forgot to include the smaller internets that cropped up in fringe societies like the ever- freaky North Korea. Their psycho information club kept it at just under 15 total websites in the entire country. We had tenuous links to the network from our underwater city in Atlantis.
After tapping into the underwater cables, our God program reinforced the security against DDoS attacks and spam emails. Then, we transferred the human race to an outcome where they survive using the fifth dimension. It was a one-time surgery meant to save the timeline of the human race.
It seems we needed more. The North Koreans somehow learned of our special future where humans survive, and wanted to be the survivors, themselves. Instead of the planet, it looked like we were going to save this nutjob underworlder. We had to destroy it.
Our blimps carried beasts and bombs across the sky to the South Korean border with North Korea. Completely ignoring the demilitarized requirements, we bombed the fuck out of the entire bridge. It was non-lethal variant of something like tear gas, but made with octopus ink. Then we crash landed and made our demands with oil spattered over everything. We used a mega phone.
"I am the fish from the lost city of Atlantis. I came to order North Korea to stand down from their leadership role at Pyongyang. Please do consider that we will simply destroy you if you do not stand down. Thank you."
We shot the attacking mob and lifted off, flying into the North Korean continent from the height of the clouds. Fighter jets came at us with missiles, but we corrected their path to meet an explosive end on the ground. Even the jet planes went down. We took our whale bombs and geo-nuked the roads we found on the way to the Peaceful city. The whale's rotten demise was a valued contribution to the war effort. Their corpses couldn't have humanely been used any other way.
When we finally got to the abandoned capital, we dropped off our bubble entertainment ring. It was a giant water bubble suspended by gravity for playing underwater sports and holding a crowd of around 90,000 people. It was a huge coliseum for the people of North Korea, meant to be leveraged against their government. The water spaces inside the dome was free. The People's Republic had no power inside water facilities at that location.
We stocked it with the first supply of food, and gave a microspeech to the people of the country before leaving. "It's up to you to keep the snack stands full of nachos and chips."
We were getting earthsickness and needed to go back underwater. We chose to go to a site on the North Atlantic by traveling across all of Asia. We held up holographic signs announcing our victory over North Korea. Our strategy could never fail. | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | First writing prompt! Hope y'all enjoy. Apologies for errors, I'm not great with spotting them.
----
Atlantis disappeared a millennium, five centuries, three decades and two years ago, never to have contact with civilization again. The Atlanteans knew this because their data slates told them so, because all of Atlantean history was recorded on banks of artificial memory, throughout the vast, underwater mountain that was their kingdom.
The Atlanteans knew of the siege by human barbarians, the diverged homo sapiens that at the time was only a fraction of the infestation it would become. They knew of the decades long transformation, the change of Atlantis from an open city of technological wonders into the sealed fortress city it bore a resemblance to even today, sealed with buffering shields, and vault-like gates of purified stone. They knew Atlantis had escaped the world, vanished away, escaped a world too vicious and greedy for Atlantis to remain part of.
But they did not remember it, like Queen Eiolan, mother of all Atlantis did. They did not feel the pain.
Queen Eiolan had believed in the human race for many thousands of years, since she had arrived here alone. She had believed in the race she forged from the genes of other races, had bent and hammered into something that could resemble her own kin, light years away. They would be like so many flowers, she had thought, her own creation that grew and thought, and evolved into another master race. A kindred spirit.
Eiolan remembered when she realized she had lost control. When outside of her Atlantean walls she began to hear the tales of war. Butchery.
Disquiet grew. She could grow the humans in her own walls, she could cultivate them. But far from her sight, over a thousand horizons, she was helpless to intervene as humanity corrupted itself.
Then had come the tragedy. The day Atlantis disappeared.
----
Queen Eiolan rarely moved. This wasn't unusual to the current generations of Atlanteans. As far as the Atlanteans knew, Queen Eiolan had always sat on that arcane throne of hers. She had always been at one with it, at one with the wires that punctured her skin, and sent her commands silently to every edge of the underwater mountain city. The queen had always ruled this way, in silence. No-one questioned this. Some said that in some of the data that commanded alterations in the city, in commands for extra structural resilience inside the mountain, there was something amiss. A great sadness they sensed, or a void of joy.
Most Atlanteans had paid little heed to what was considered babbling. There was nothing but instruction in the precise data. Nothing but the constant need for improvement of the defences and systems. Meanwhile, there was growing wariness among the Atlanteans of the seas above and around them. Ominous shapes appeared in the distant water every so often - unnatural shapes, too straight, too unnaturally designed. The humans above had evolved. And they were getting closer.
The Atlanteans each carried a certain sense of quiet dread, stuffed away behind other things that would keep them sane. It was fear of a great evil, beyond the great sea's murky fog, that would one day descend upon Atlantis and consume it. It was those things in the water - those towers that would spear into the water around Atlantis, before erupting into a blinding, terrifying light. Atlanteans had died out there in the water, fishing or harvesting when these vast metal arrows boomed through the water, ripping apart the sea, shredding the sea life, breaking the bodies of the living things.
It was horror they could not fight, and so horror they stuffed away. But it was not the only thing they were afraid of. They were also afraid of their Queen, for perhaps those babblings about the pain in the data weren't so mad after all.
Since those towers had begun to drop into the water, as their terrifying blooms that ripped the sea around them had gone on, the Queen had changed. Her eyes, once glassy, far away, would now sear into the eyes of any Atlantean who met them in the shadows of her glass throne room, at the top of Atlantis' highest peak. For all the potency of those things that exploded in the seas around Atlantis, they did not compare to the burning in Queen Eiolan's eyes, as if she were holding in a great cataclysmic furnace, to burn Atlantis and the world beyond.
One day, as the Atlantean royal guard watched over their Queen. Her fingers twitched. Bent. Scratched the pure stone of her throne, as throughout Atlantis horns began to ring out in alarm, and the mountain city began to gather power.
----
Queen Eiolan remembered everything. She remembered every blade of grass, every machination she ever made to create the human race that would break her. Before earth she had thousands of years of memory, of travelling the starts, of her old world, before the populace left to seek life across the Universe.
But the Tragedy was the day she chose to remember, over and over again. The day an army gathered outside the gates of Atlantis. The day she had sent her king, the human who she had fallen in love with, to reason with the enemy.
The image of her king, Roland, being torn apart with arrows alongside seventy other Atlanteans was burned into her mind, branded there, swollen, agonising. The feeling of it, the destruction it wrought on her mind remained, a millennium, five centuries, three decades and two years later. It was the same day that Queen Eiolan had used all of the cities power to vanish the city away, to somewhere the humans could not reach them. Somewhere the Atlanteans - and she - could not be hurt.
Yet down there in the depths of the ocean, the Queen's mind was slowly poisoned. Her desire for a kindred spirit withered as the centuries crawled on. Over centuries more she stopped speaking her subjects, every one of which was a reminder of the tragedy. Over time, her hopes and dreams for this world had turned to ash, in the cold dark of the sea.
And now, explosives came from above the water. From nearby lands. How had they found Atlantis?, the queen asked herself. Had they found Atlantis at all? Where these things just the experiments of yet another empty vessell of humanity, without regard for the life they destroyed in the dark?
As the weeks went on, these questions ceased to matter to Queen Eiolan. The poison, more than a millennium old, had overtaken her mind. That was what the subjects saw. That was what horrified her guards, who saw her smile, as the city of Atlantis gathered power for another jump, and the horns grew louder and louder. They saw something corrupted. In the heart of Atlantis, the first and last peaceful city, they saw evil had taken the heart of their Queen. Some felt what she was about to do. Some screamed, for their dread was finally realised, and they could do nothing but watch what would happen next.
----
Many scanners detected a cataclysmic shift in the oceans off the coast of North Korea - not that anyone would be paying them any heed in the coming moments. Something had cause a vast disturbance in the Sea Of Japan - something that was causing tidal waves. But no-one would care, barely even the victims. All eyes were elsewhere, on what would become known as the remains of North Korea.
A mile above Pyongyang, Atlantis appeared, with a sonic boom that rippled over the North Korean capital like the vast roar of a thunderous god. Government officials, soldiers, men, woman, children. Two and a half million souls looked up to the mountain in the sky, blotting out the sun, hanging in the air above their city.
They screamed as the mountain dropped from the sky.
The Queen Eiolan did nothing as Atlantis fell, and the Atlanteans panicked, sobbed and screamed throughout the tunnels. She did not need to. The mountain city was reinforced, structured to take minimal damage, over years, decades and centuries of fortifying construction. Somewhere, hidden away in the back of her mind, she had known that this would eventually happen. Had wanted it to. Had been waiting for a good reason, just a moment, in which to demonstrate a flicker of what remained of her, after the Tragedy a millennium and a half ago.
She closed her eyes, shielding her irises from the bright light of the sky she had not seen in so long, as the first and last peaceful city of Atlantis fell from the sky, and every light in Pyongyang went out. | "Commander...you can't be serious!"
The words floated into deaf ears.
"Release. The. Kraken." the commander slowly intoned.
"But sir-"
"But nothing. We have to end this conflict swiftly. Millions of lives are at stake...not just our own."
The commander walked briskly out of the room, leaving Legate Perseus dumbfounded.
"But..." he tried again meekly, talking to the empty air. "Bugger me!" he said to himself. He turned swiftly and was off.
___
"It's going to be okay!" She lied, over and over.
"It's going to be okay. It's going to be-" the room shook once more. A terrified gasp leapt from a small mouth.
"It's going to be okay."
A half screech- half roared could be heard in the distance.
"It's going to be okay."
The sickening sound of rushing water.
"It's going to be okay."
___
One man remained. Of all the great leaders council, only one remained true to the end.
"Sir! The missiles are no longer operational. The creature is a master of decepti-"
"It is time."
"Sir?"
The great leader met his eyes for the first time. "The last defense." he said, reaching inside his coat. He pulled out a device with a single red button.
"Sir, what is that?" the man asked in a fearful tone. He did not like the great leaders tone.
"History will not remember us kindly. Men will mock us for ages to come. Little do they know. We have single handedly saved the human race.
"Sir?"
A finger landed on the button.
*Boom*
___
/r/Periapoapsis - intermittent mediocrity | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | The sirens finally ended after 14 hours straight. Our shelter doors opened and we were released. There was a somber mood in the water tonight. We all knew that the time had come for Kim to face the fist of Atlantis. For years our land operative, Dennis Rodman, had been feeding us the intel central to our mission. We now understood the weak points in every major North Korean military complex integral to taking Kim's kingdom.
I stood next to my trusted sea horse. He was older now but battle ready. He had been broken in by the Mediterranean conflicts of the early 2010's and the blood lust grew in his eyes day by day. I mounted him and firmly grasped the reigns. He swam medium pace to join formation.
The Kelp Corp wasn't what it was in generations past but it was still fueled by the rage of Atlantians. Too many years Kim and his bombs rained on our people. Bringing torment and pain to this entire generation. Kim desired our coral energy supply after exhausting the coastal regions of Australia. We sent many of or finest shellfish ambassadors to try bargaining with Korea but all fell flat. Kim simply ate them.
As I sat in formation a strong current was felt around us. Light became shade as we looked above. Overhead was the Great White divisions swimming from the south. I only thought they were legend until now.
The trumpets blew and we were released. Kim's Korea would soon taste vengeance as old as Atlantis and just as salty. | "Commander...you can't be serious!"
The words floated into deaf ears.
"Release. The. Kraken." the commander slowly intoned.
"But sir-"
"But nothing. We have to end this conflict swiftly. Millions of lives are at stake...not just our own."
The commander walked briskly out of the room, leaving Legate Perseus dumbfounded.
"But..." he tried again meekly, talking to the empty air. "Bugger me!" he said to himself. He turned swiftly and was off.
___
"It's going to be okay!" She lied, over and over.
"It's going to be okay. It's going to be-" the room shook once more. A terrified gasp leapt from a small mouth.
"It's going to be okay."
A half screech- half roared could be heard in the distance.
"It's going to be okay."
The sickening sound of rushing water.
"It's going to be okay."
___
One man remained. Of all the great leaders council, only one remained true to the end.
"Sir! The missiles are no longer operational. The creature is a master of decepti-"
"It is time."
"Sir?"
The great leader met his eyes for the first time. "The last defense." he said, reaching inside his coat. He pulled out a device with a single red button.
"Sir, what is that?" the man asked in a fearful tone. He did not like the great leaders tone.
"History will not remember us kindly. Men will mock us for ages to come. Little do they know. We have single handedly saved the human race.
"Sir?"
A finger landed on the button.
*Boom*
___
/r/Periapoapsis - intermittent mediocrity | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | I heaved a sigh and wiped the sweat from my brow. All twenty of my generals were here, awaiting my orders.
"Ladies, gentlemen....we've been on the defensive for far too long. These arrogant little men above...the North Koreans, hated even by their fellow surface ones...tonight they *will* die."
I looked to the man on my right at the table. "General Mercury, how goes the mission of taking our lands back?"
He removed his glasses. "Not well, my lord. Many of the outlying hunting and farming families have been eradicated. Their weapons have spread pestilence and death in a way I have never seen before."
"I have." General Fulbright replied grimly. "The surface ones call it 'nuclear fallout'. It spreads a sickness so vile you're dead before you hit the floor."
I nodded slowly, putting the pieces together. "But these poisons have not reached our depths?" I inquired.
All my generals stared at me, worried.
"No, my lord." General Fulbright responded.
I smiled faintly. "Good. If we are to win this war, we need something to tear down their walls, laugh at their weapons of steel, and lay their cities to waste."
"Sir," General Gainnes spoke fearfully. "You're not truly suggesting--"
I nodded, a smile now clear on my face. "Gentlemen, wake up Cthulhu."
Immediately, my generals rose to their feet in anger and terror
"Sir, you can't!" wailed General Mercury.
"He'll become unstoppable!" General Fulbright shouted.
I raised my hand for silence, and my generals did so.
"We have developed a neurotoxin powerful enough to simple lull him into slumber once more. It will be fired into his neck via a missile after the destruction of North Korea."
"But sir!" General Scarlett called out. "That monster is the reason we sank and you want to unchain him!?"
"She's right!" General Gainnes spat. "Years of spellcraft went into simply luring that beast down here! Last time he was unleashed upon the surface, he wiped out those dinosaur creatures! And he was but an infant!"
"Besides, what would the politicians say?! What would the public say?!"
I held up my hands in a calming gesture. "It will be alright, my friends. My cabinets will not utter a word if they know what's good for them. We will wake Cthulhu and he will march back up to the surface to raze North Korea. He *is* dormant very close to the shore, is he not?"
Everyone frowned. I could tell they hated this plan, but I has the king.
"Wake Cthulhu." I stated. "That's an order."
And wake Cthulhu, they did. I watched it personally from above the clouds. It was quite remarkable.
My top spellcasters fired literally everything they had at the monster. Within hours, a large shadow appeared under the water. Cthulhu broke the surface, his crusted eyes full of hatred, his tentacles writhing angrily. I could already hear screaming.
The beast lumbered onto the shore, gallons on water dripping off of his scaly body. He unfurled his gnarled, bloody wings and flapped them for the first time in millenia.
He leaned his head back and curled his tentacles up, revealing his mouth: a black, reeking abyss with hundreds of rows of rotting teeth. Cthulhu took a deep breath, consuming a fifth of the atmosphere, and roared
Even from one thousand feet above, the roar was ear-splitting. It was like a nightmare in agony.
North Korea's pitiful defenses opened fire, barely scraping Cthulhu's hide. The monster strolled to the large protective wall and promptly tore it down. More screaming ensued.
"On this day, North Korea will receive a grim reminder..." I whispered. "That they are at *our* mercy, not the opposite."
I watched as Cthulhu tore down every house, every so-called "skyscraper", every last scrap of civilization.
"All right." I said. "Send ambassadors to every world leader to explain what happened here today. Tell them to not be threatening, but to make certain..." I smiled thinly. "...implications."
My messenger stepped onto the teleporter and vanished, off to do my bidding.
I switched on my communicator. "Generals, you may fire when ready."
Like clockwork, a barrage of missiles charged at Cthulhu like a swarm of locusts. They rammed into the beast, puncturing his skin and sending the toxins into his blood. It was not long before Dread Cthulhu fell to the ground into another eon-long sleep.
My messenger reappeared soon after. He handed me a large stack of letters.
"Sir, these are from every world leader on the surface stating we surrender Cthulhu as well as all other weapons we have and turn ourselves into custody."
I was furious. "WHAT?! WERE THOSE IDIOTS TOLD IT WAS RETALIATION?!"
My messenger gulped. "Yes, sir. They don't seem to care. They called it an act of global terrorism and mass murder."
I sat there with my mouth agape for a very long time before I glanced to the sleeping form below.
I switched my communicator back on. "Generals, alert my spellcasters. Tell them Cthulhu is waking back up *now*." | "Commander...you can't be serious!"
The words floated into deaf ears.
"Release. The. Kraken." the commander slowly intoned.
"But sir-"
"But nothing. We have to end this conflict swiftly. Millions of lives are at stake...not just our own."
The commander walked briskly out of the room, leaving Legate Perseus dumbfounded.
"But..." he tried again meekly, talking to the empty air. "Bugger me!" he said to himself. He turned swiftly and was off.
___
"It's going to be okay!" She lied, over and over.
"It's going to be okay. It's going to be-" the room shook once more. A terrified gasp leapt from a small mouth.
"It's going to be okay."
A half screech- half roared could be heard in the distance.
"It's going to be okay."
The sickening sound of rushing water.
"It's going to be okay."
___
One man remained. Of all the great leaders council, only one remained true to the end.
"Sir! The missiles are no longer operational. The creature is a master of decepti-"
"It is time."
"Sir?"
The great leader met his eyes for the first time. "The last defense." he said, reaching inside his coat. He pulled out a device with a single red button.
"Sir, what is that?" the man asked in a fearful tone. He did not like the great leaders tone.
"History will not remember us kindly. Men will mock us for ages to come. Little do they know. We have single handedly saved the human race.
"Sir?"
A finger landed on the button.
*Boom*
___
/r/Periapoapsis - intermittent mediocrity | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | Charles slammed his forehead on the desk, pulling his hair and moaning. This was his breaking point. He'd served as a diplomat for the United Kingdom for over twenty years now, and none of his training, none of his experience and education had prepared him for a situation of this scale, of this magnitude, of this... absurdity. Granted, everyone in this boardroom was just as frustrated as him, but Charles often prided himself in always being above the herd of society. Seeing that everyone else was just as lost and confused didn't make him feel better, it only made him insecure, mediocre, and horrified over the immediate future of humanity.
This is how the world ends.
Charles shook his head. No. One mustn't think that way. Civilization made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis! Mankind has faced adversity after adversity and it always pulled through in the end. This really wasn't any different from those scenarios... except that everyone involved was insane.
Charles frowned.
On second thought, there really wasn't any difference at all. There's precedent for this type of situation. Sure, it's not every day a new superpower waltzes into the world stage, but it's happened before. The creation of Germany, for example. Charles sighed. An event directly responsible for two world wars.
Charles stood up from his chair and paced around the room. He needed to think. He needed to clear his mind. This environment wasn't optimal for that, obviously, but he had to try something. Loud chatters in tons of different languages and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke filled the boardroom. No sunshine or windows either, only pale-white light bulbs and computer monitors for illumination. It was a spacious place, over a hundred meters wide and long, but there were so many diplomats here that Charles still felt boxed in.
Representatives from every influential country in the world were at this meeting, arguing over how to approach this situation. These unknown forces surrounded the Korean peninsula, built up a blockade with their advanced ships, and commenced a full-scale invasion of North Korea twelve hours ago. Were they aliens? They might as well be, considering the capabilities of their technology. Energy shields, laser weapons, and even an EMP field that jammed any satellite feeds. No one knew what was happening, and conventional weapons just weren't effective against this military force. China learned that lesson in their first and only naval skirmish.
Of course, the rest of the world blamed the Americans. That was Charles' first reaction too, but the yanks were acting too scared for this to be their work. There wasn't anything to gain. The Russians? They acted like they knew something, but it felt more like posturing than anything else. Who could possibly be so stupid as to light the world's biggest powder keg for no benefit whatsoever other than moral superiority?
The Americans.
Charles rolled his eyes. He was going in circles now. Figuratively *and* literally, since he had already paced around the room twice during all this contemplating. It obviously wasn't China. They're pretty paranoid about controlling their seas. Bringing all this attention to themselves just wasn't their style. Charles tensed his shoulders, hunching over. Japan. Could they be at it again? No, that's just silly. Charles was losing his mind. He pulled up a chair and sat down again. There just wasn't any information to work with. No motive, no nationality, no ideology. Just a random force that appeared out of nowhere with an arsenal that could easily rival any military on the planet.
The doors slammed open.
The entire room quieted down. A young woman in her twenties stood at the entrance, panting with sweat on her face. She took a moment to collect herself, stretching out her blouse and wiping her brow, and then said:
"They..." She took a deep breath. "They sent an ambassador and-"
Every diplomat shouted at her a variety of questions at the same time, most of them unintelligible because of the volume. Charles cleared his throat and shouted:
"EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET THE LASS SPEAK!"
They all stared at Charles, dumbfounded and silent.
Charles nodded at the woman. "You were saying?"
"T-they sent an ambassador. They want to speak with the international community to handle this as peacefully as possible. They're only after North Korea, saying this was retaliation."
Charles frowned. "For what?"
"Bombings on their capital..."
The diplomats started shouting again.
Charles slammed his fist on the table and said:
"For the love of god, just shut up for a moment!"
A Russian diplomat stood up. "Why are you English always thinking you're in charge? You don't tell us what to do! You're just archipelago!"
Charles walked up to him, grabbed him by the collar, and said:
"Number one, the British isles are an archipelago; the United Kingdom is not. Number two, if you call me English again, I'll shove my foot so far up your ass you'll be tasting shoe-polish for a week, understood?"
The Russian swallowed, nodding weakly.
"Gentlemen!" said the american diplomat. "We're wasting time here. Young lady, how do we know this ambassador is a member of the enemy force?"
"They came in a hovercraft... It wasn't hard to verify."
The American wrinkled his face with confusion. "Oh..."
"Do we know where they're from?" said Charles. "How come their capital was bombed without us knowing...?"
"That's the thing..." The young woman looked away, scared of her next words. "They claim to come from Atlantis..."
------------------------------
>Continued in a comment below... | "Commander...you can't be serious!"
The words floated into deaf ears.
"Release. The. Kraken." the commander slowly intoned.
"But sir-"
"But nothing. We have to end this conflict swiftly. Millions of lives are at stake...not just our own."
The commander walked briskly out of the room, leaving Legate Perseus dumbfounded.
"But..." he tried again meekly, talking to the empty air. "Bugger me!" he said to himself. He turned swiftly and was off.
___
"It's going to be okay!" She lied, over and over.
"It's going to be okay. It's going to be-" the room shook once more. A terrified gasp leapt from a small mouth.
"It's going to be okay."
A half screech- half roared could be heard in the distance.
"It's going to be okay."
The sickening sound of rushing water.
"It's going to be okay."
___
One man remained. Of all the great leaders council, only one remained true to the end.
"Sir! The missiles are no longer operational. The creature is a master of decepti-"
"It is time."
"Sir?"
The great leader met his eyes for the first time. "The last defense." he said, reaching inside his coat. He pulled out a device with a single red button.
"Sir, what is that?" the man asked in a fearful tone. He did not like the great leaders tone.
"History will not remember us kindly. Men will mock us for ages to come. Little do they know. We have single handedly saved the human race.
"Sir?"
A finger landed on the button.
*Boom*
___
/r/Periapoapsis - intermittent mediocrity | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | I heaved a sigh and wiped the sweat from my brow. All twenty of my generals were here, awaiting my orders.
"Ladies, gentlemen....we've been on the defensive for far too long. These arrogant little men above...the North Koreans, hated even by their fellow surface ones...tonight they *will* die."
I looked to the man on my right at the table. "General Mercury, how goes the mission of taking our lands back?"
He removed his glasses. "Not well, my lord. Many of the outlying hunting and farming families have been eradicated. Their weapons have spread pestilence and death in a way I have never seen before."
"I have." General Fulbright replied grimly. "The surface ones call it 'nuclear fallout'. It spreads a sickness so vile you're dead before you hit the floor."
I nodded slowly, putting the pieces together. "But these poisons have not reached our depths?" I inquired.
All my generals stared at me, worried.
"No, my lord." General Fulbright responded.
I smiled faintly. "Good. If we are to win this war, we need something to tear down their walls, laugh at their weapons of steel, and lay their cities to waste."
"Sir," General Gainnes spoke fearfully. "You're not truly suggesting--"
I nodded, a smile now clear on my face. "Gentlemen, wake up Cthulhu."
Immediately, my generals rose to their feet in anger and terror
"Sir, you can't!" wailed General Mercury.
"He'll become unstoppable!" General Fulbright shouted.
I raised my hand for silence, and my generals did so.
"We have developed a neurotoxin powerful enough to simple lull him into slumber once more. It will be fired into his neck via a missile after the destruction of North Korea."
"But sir!" General Scarlett called out. "That monster is the reason we sank and you want to unchain him!?"
"She's right!" General Gainnes spat. "Years of spellcraft went into simply luring that beast down here! Last time he was unleashed upon the surface, he wiped out those dinosaur creatures! And he was but an infant!"
"Besides, what would the politicians say?! What would the public say?!"
I held up my hands in a calming gesture. "It will be alright, my friends. My cabinets will not utter a word if they know what's good for them. We will wake Cthulhu and he will march back up to the surface to raze North Korea. He *is* dormant very close to the shore, is he not?"
Everyone frowned. I could tell they hated this plan, but I has the king.
"Wake Cthulhu." I stated. "That's an order."
And wake Cthulhu, they did. I watched it personally from above the clouds. It was quite remarkable.
My top spellcasters fired literally everything they had at the monster. Within hours, a large shadow appeared under the water. Cthulhu broke the surface, his crusted eyes full of hatred, his tentacles writhing angrily. I could already hear screaming.
The beast lumbered onto the shore, gallons on water dripping off of his scaly body. He unfurled his gnarled, bloody wings and flapped them for the first time in millenia.
He leaned his head back and curled his tentacles up, revealing his mouth: a black, reeking abyss with hundreds of rows of rotting teeth. Cthulhu took a deep breath, consuming a fifth of the atmosphere, and roared
Even from one thousand feet above, the roar was ear-splitting. It was like a nightmare in agony.
North Korea's pitiful defenses opened fire, barely scraping Cthulhu's hide. The monster strolled to the large protective wall and promptly tore it down. More screaming ensued.
"On this day, North Korea will receive a grim reminder..." I whispered. "That they are at *our* mercy, not the opposite."
I watched as Cthulhu tore down every house, every so-called "skyscraper", every last scrap of civilization.
"All right." I said. "Send ambassadors to every world leader to explain what happened here today. Tell them to not be threatening, but to make certain..." I smiled thinly. "...implications."
My messenger stepped onto the teleporter and vanished, off to do my bidding.
I switched on my communicator. "Generals, you may fire when ready."
Like clockwork, a barrage of missiles charged at Cthulhu like a swarm of locusts. They rammed into the beast, puncturing his skin and sending the toxins into his blood. It was not long before Dread Cthulhu fell to the ground into another eon-long sleep.
My messenger reappeared soon after. He handed me a large stack of letters.
"Sir, these are from every world leader on the surface stating we surrender Cthulhu as well as all other weapons we have and turn ourselves into custody."
I was furious. "WHAT?! WERE THOSE IDIOTS TOLD IT WAS RETALIATION?!"
My messenger gulped. "Yes, sir. They don't seem to care. They called it an act of global terrorism and mass murder."
I sat there with my mouth agape for a very long time before I glanced to the sleeping form below.
I switched my communicator back on. "Generals, alert my spellcasters. Tell them Cthulhu is waking back up *now*." | The sirens finally ended after 14 hours straight. Our shelter doors opened and we were released. There was a somber mood in the water tonight. We all knew that the time had come for Kim to face the fist of Atlantis. For years our land operative, Dennis Rodman, had been feeding us the intel central to our mission. We now understood the weak points in every major North Korean military complex integral to taking Kim's kingdom.
I stood next to my trusted sea horse. He was older now but battle ready. He had been broken in by the Mediterranean conflicts of the early 2010's and the blood lust grew in his eyes day by day. I mounted him and firmly grasped the reigns. He swam medium pace to join formation.
The Kelp Corp wasn't what it was in generations past but it was still fueled by the rage of Atlantians. Too many years Kim and his bombs rained on our people. Bringing torment and pain to this entire generation. Kim desired our coral energy supply after exhausting the coastal regions of Australia. We sent many of or finest shellfish ambassadors to try bargaining with Korea but all fell flat. Kim simply ate them.
As I sat in formation a strong current was felt around us. Light became shade as we looked above. Overhead was the Great White divisions swimming from the south. I only thought they were legend until now.
The trumpets blew and we were released. Kim's Korea would soon taste vengeance as old as Atlantis and just as salty. | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | I heaved a sigh and wiped the sweat from my brow. All twenty of my generals were here, awaiting my orders.
"Ladies, gentlemen....we've been on the defensive for far too long. These arrogant little men above...the North Koreans, hated even by their fellow surface ones...tonight they *will* die."
I looked to the man on my right at the table. "General Mercury, how goes the mission of taking our lands back?"
He removed his glasses. "Not well, my lord. Many of the outlying hunting and farming families have been eradicated. Their weapons have spread pestilence and death in a way I have never seen before."
"I have." General Fulbright replied grimly. "The surface ones call it 'nuclear fallout'. It spreads a sickness so vile you're dead before you hit the floor."
I nodded slowly, putting the pieces together. "But these poisons have not reached our depths?" I inquired.
All my generals stared at me, worried.
"No, my lord." General Fulbright responded.
I smiled faintly. "Good. If we are to win this war, we need something to tear down their walls, laugh at their weapons of steel, and lay their cities to waste."
"Sir," General Gainnes spoke fearfully. "You're not truly suggesting--"
I nodded, a smile now clear on my face. "Gentlemen, wake up Cthulhu."
Immediately, my generals rose to their feet in anger and terror
"Sir, you can't!" wailed General Mercury.
"He'll become unstoppable!" General Fulbright shouted.
I raised my hand for silence, and my generals did so.
"We have developed a neurotoxin powerful enough to simple lull him into slumber once more. It will be fired into his neck via a missile after the destruction of North Korea."
"But sir!" General Scarlett called out. "That monster is the reason we sank and you want to unchain him!?"
"She's right!" General Gainnes spat. "Years of spellcraft went into simply luring that beast down here! Last time he was unleashed upon the surface, he wiped out those dinosaur creatures! And he was but an infant!"
"Besides, what would the politicians say?! What would the public say?!"
I held up my hands in a calming gesture. "It will be alright, my friends. My cabinets will not utter a word if they know what's good for them. We will wake Cthulhu and he will march back up to the surface to raze North Korea. He *is* dormant very close to the shore, is he not?"
Everyone frowned. I could tell they hated this plan, but I has the king.
"Wake Cthulhu." I stated. "That's an order."
And wake Cthulhu, they did. I watched it personally from above the clouds. It was quite remarkable.
My top spellcasters fired literally everything they had at the monster. Within hours, a large shadow appeared under the water. Cthulhu broke the surface, his crusted eyes full of hatred, his tentacles writhing angrily. I could already hear screaming.
The beast lumbered onto the shore, gallons on water dripping off of his scaly body. He unfurled his gnarled, bloody wings and flapped them for the first time in millenia.
He leaned his head back and curled his tentacles up, revealing his mouth: a black, reeking abyss with hundreds of rows of rotting teeth. Cthulhu took a deep breath, consuming a fifth of the atmosphere, and roared
Even from one thousand feet above, the roar was ear-splitting. It was like a nightmare in agony.
North Korea's pitiful defenses opened fire, barely scraping Cthulhu's hide. The monster strolled to the large protective wall and promptly tore it down. More screaming ensued.
"On this day, North Korea will receive a grim reminder..." I whispered. "That they are at *our* mercy, not the opposite."
I watched as Cthulhu tore down every house, every so-called "skyscraper", every last scrap of civilization.
"All right." I said. "Send ambassadors to every world leader to explain what happened here today. Tell them to not be threatening, but to make certain..." I smiled thinly. "...implications."
My messenger stepped onto the teleporter and vanished, off to do my bidding.
I switched on my communicator. "Generals, you may fire when ready."
Like clockwork, a barrage of missiles charged at Cthulhu like a swarm of locusts. They rammed into the beast, puncturing his skin and sending the toxins into his blood. It was not long before Dread Cthulhu fell to the ground into another eon-long sleep.
My messenger reappeared soon after. He handed me a large stack of letters.
"Sir, these are from every world leader on the surface stating we surrender Cthulhu as well as all other weapons we have and turn ourselves into custody."
I was furious. "WHAT?! WERE THOSE IDIOTS TOLD IT WAS RETALIATION?!"
My messenger gulped. "Yes, sir. They don't seem to care. They called it an act of global terrorism and mass murder."
I sat there with my mouth agape for a very long time before I glanced to the sleeping form below.
I switched my communicator back on. "Generals, alert my spellcasters. Tell them Cthulhu is waking back up *now*." | "Another one. ANOTHER!" the king roared in anger. The palace square was in perennial maintenance and the palace itself was in disarray. The pillars broken and the residences in shambles, the once proud capital of the sea was destroyed entirely. The rage of the citizens had risen exponentially since the first blast. Ever since, they'd searched for the place to blame. Earth Scholars, men who were well versed with the kingdoms above, found and pinpointed the spot. Pyongyang, North Korea. The place was mapped out. Media about and from the country was researched. Soon every citizen knew about the situation overseas. And they waited, daring the demons above to strike. Today was that day, the day they would regret their decision. For life.
Troops readied themselves. The army and the navy prepared, as the entire Atlantis waited for the signal of war. With one confident shout and a flourish, the battle was on. Screams and war cries could be heard, as the entire forgotten city went forward to war. To save their country.
Above, above. The water was swept apart as the troops below swayed forward and back, like a syncronized water dance. They were one with the water, one with the elements. The only citizen deserving of God. And by God today the siegers would fall.
The light approached. Faster, faster. The troops basked in the glow of the sun, the first glance in their entire lives. Finally, the world would know who they were. The fear of the seas, *Atlantis*. But the light...it was getting too bright...
From below, the king looked in pure shock, horror and anger as the perfectly timed strike tore through the men like paper. He stared at the ensuing annihilation and destruction. A bone-splitting cry that could shatter souls rang through the kingdom. Alone, again. Alone by the same terrorizing explosive.
At least it didn't hit the palace again, he thought.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | "It is time." I said, my voice echoing throughout the chambers of the great atlantean hall.
"For years they have struck at us. Taunting us. Belittling us with their weaponry." I gazed out at all of atlantean councilmen and council women gathered around me.
"But no more." I said, my voice transcendant.
"Today, we fight. We fight for what we have lost. We fight for our sea brothers slain. We fight for our honor spat upon."
I paused, looking at my army, their eyes hopeful and angered.
"We fight for Atlantis."
Cheers broke out, the sound echoing upon the chamber. Thunderous applause followed shortly after. For five years we had endured assault after assault from the Landmen. How they knew our location, we did not know. We had lost thousands of seamen to their relentless barrage. Our attempts at peace had been ignored. Our fish messengers killed, then brutally eaten.
No longer.
I looked my head general in the eye. The one man who had been here for me through death and through life. Who would take a spear through the heart for me.
I gave the command.
"Commence upward movement." He nodded.
It was time for Atlantis to rise, to come out of hiding. To show ourselves to the world, though this time not in a position of fear, but in a position of strength. After years of bombardment by the Landmen, it was time to strike back. Soon, we would be an city above the water. I had never been above ground. The stories say it was a cruel yet beautiful place, where creatures lived in constant balance. I would get to see it with my own eyes.
I heard shouts of joy and bloodlust from my men. I smiled. These were fighting men, men who grew angry at honorless one sided attacks. The Landmen had once destroyed all Atlantis stood for, had once sought to wipe out Atlantis itself. The Atlanteans then had cowered, fearful, begging and pleading for mercy as each man, woman and child were cut down without hesitation. Finally, as a desperation attempt, the Atlanteans had fled. The Landmen thought they had killed all the Atlanteans, and so we were forgotten by both time and history, never to be seen again.
Until now.
The Landmen would pay. They would die.
All of them.
The city of Atlantis began to move towards the sky.
***
Part two in two hours, soon as I get back from dinner! Stories and sequels at [r/ConlehWrites](https://www.reddit.com/r/ConlehWrites/)!
[Part Two!](https://redd.it/6q93mj)
| "Another one. ANOTHER!" the king roared in anger. The palace square was in perennial maintenance and the palace itself was in disarray. The pillars broken and the residences in shambles, the once proud capital of the sea was destroyed entirely. The rage of the citizens had risen exponentially since the first blast. Ever since, they'd searched for the place to blame. Earth Scholars, men who were well versed with the kingdoms above, found and pinpointed the spot. Pyongyang, North Korea. The place was mapped out. Media about and from the country was researched. Soon every citizen knew about the situation overseas. And they waited, daring the demons above to strike. Today was that day, the day they would regret their decision. For life.
Troops readied themselves. The army and the navy prepared, as the entire Atlantis waited for the signal of war. With one confident shout and a flourish, the battle was on. Screams and war cries could be heard, as the entire forgotten city went forward to war. To save their country.
Above, above. The water was swept apart as the troops below swayed forward and back, like a syncronized water dance. They were one with the water, one with the elements. The only citizen deserving of God. And by God today the siegers would fall.
The light approached. Faster, faster. The troops basked in the glow of the sun, the first glance in their entire lives. Finally, the world would know who they were. The fear of the seas, *Atlantis*. But the light...it was getting too bright...
From below, the king looked in pure shock, horror and anger as the perfectly timed strike tore through the men like paper. He stared at the ensuing annihilation and destruction. A bone-splitting cry that could shatter souls rang through the kingdom. Alone, again. Alone by the same terrorizing explosive.
At least it didn't hit the palace again, he thought.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | Charles slammed his forehead on the desk, pulling his hair and moaning. This was his breaking point. He'd served as a diplomat for the United Kingdom for over twenty years now, and none of his training, none of his experience and education had prepared him for a situation of this scale, of this magnitude, of this... absurdity. Granted, everyone in this boardroom was just as frustrated as him, but Charles often prided himself in always being above the herd of society. Seeing that everyone else was just as lost and confused didn't make him feel better, it only made him insecure, mediocre, and horrified over the immediate future of humanity.
This is how the world ends.
Charles shook his head. No. One mustn't think that way. Civilization made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis! Mankind has faced adversity after adversity and it always pulled through in the end. This really wasn't any different from those scenarios... except that everyone involved was insane.
Charles frowned.
On second thought, there really wasn't any difference at all. There's precedent for this type of situation. Sure, it's not every day a new superpower waltzes into the world stage, but it's happened before. The creation of Germany, for example. Charles sighed. An event directly responsible for two world wars.
Charles stood up from his chair and paced around the room. He needed to think. He needed to clear his mind. This environment wasn't optimal for that, obviously, but he had to try something. Loud chatters in tons of different languages and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke filled the boardroom. No sunshine or windows either, only pale-white light bulbs and computer monitors for illumination. It was a spacious place, over a hundred meters wide and long, but there were so many diplomats here that Charles still felt boxed in.
Representatives from every influential country in the world were at this meeting, arguing over how to approach this situation. These unknown forces surrounded the Korean peninsula, built up a blockade with their advanced ships, and commenced a full-scale invasion of North Korea twelve hours ago. Were they aliens? They might as well be, considering the capabilities of their technology. Energy shields, laser weapons, and even an EMP field that jammed any satellite feeds. No one knew what was happening, and conventional weapons just weren't effective against this military force. China learned that lesson in their first and only naval skirmish.
Of course, the rest of the world blamed the Americans. That was Charles' first reaction too, but the yanks were acting too scared for this to be their work. There wasn't anything to gain. The Russians? They acted like they knew something, but it felt more like posturing than anything else. Who could possibly be so stupid as to light the world's biggest powder keg for no benefit whatsoever other than moral superiority?
The Americans.
Charles rolled his eyes. He was going in circles now. Figuratively *and* literally, since he had already paced around the room twice during all this contemplating. It obviously wasn't China. They're pretty paranoid about controlling their seas. Bringing all this attention to themselves just wasn't their style. Charles tensed his shoulders, hunching over. Japan. Could they be at it again? No, that's just silly. Charles was losing his mind. He pulled up a chair and sat down again. There just wasn't any information to work with. No motive, no nationality, no ideology. Just a random force that appeared out of nowhere with an arsenal that could easily rival any military on the planet.
The doors slammed open.
The entire room quieted down. A young woman in her twenties stood at the entrance, panting with sweat on her face. She took a moment to collect herself, stretching out her blouse and wiping her brow, and then said:
"They..." She took a deep breath. "They sent an ambassador and-"
Every diplomat shouted at her a variety of questions at the same time, most of them unintelligible because of the volume. Charles cleared his throat and shouted:
"EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET THE LASS SPEAK!"
They all stared at Charles, dumbfounded and silent.
Charles nodded at the woman. "You were saying?"
"T-they sent an ambassador. They want to speak with the international community to handle this as peacefully as possible. They're only after North Korea, saying this was retaliation."
Charles frowned. "For what?"
"Bombings on their capital..."
The diplomats started shouting again.
Charles slammed his fist on the table and said:
"For the love of god, just shut up for a moment!"
A Russian diplomat stood up. "Why are you English always thinking you're in charge? You don't tell us what to do! You're just archipelago!"
Charles walked up to him, grabbed him by the collar, and said:
"Number one, the British isles are an archipelago; the United Kingdom is not. Number two, if you call me English again, I'll shove my foot so far up your ass you'll be tasting shoe-polish for a week, understood?"
The Russian swallowed, nodding weakly.
"Gentlemen!" said the american diplomat. "We're wasting time here. Young lady, how do we know this ambassador is a member of the enemy force?"
"They came in a hovercraft... It wasn't hard to verify."
The American wrinkled his face with confusion. "Oh..."
"Do we know where they're from?" said Charles. "How come their capital was bombed without us knowing...?"
"That's the thing..." The young woman looked away, scared of her next words. "They claim to come from Atlantis..."
------------------------------
>Continued in a comment below... | "Another one. ANOTHER!" the king roared in anger. The palace square was in perennial maintenance and the palace itself was in disarray. The pillars broken and the residences in shambles, the once proud capital of the sea was destroyed entirely. The rage of the citizens had risen exponentially since the first blast. Ever since, they'd searched for the place to blame. Earth Scholars, men who were well versed with the kingdoms above, found and pinpointed the spot. Pyongyang, North Korea. The place was mapped out. Media about and from the country was researched. Soon every citizen knew about the situation overseas. And they waited, daring the demons above to strike. Today was that day, the day they would regret their decision. For life.
Troops readied themselves. The army and the navy prepared, as the entire Atlantis waited for the signal of war. With one confident shout and a flourish, the battle was on. Screams and war cries could be heard, as the entire forgotten city went forward to war. To save their country.
Above, above. The water was swept apart as the troops below swayed forward and back, like a syncronized water dance. They were one with the water, one with the elements. The only citizen deserving of God. And by God today the siegers would fall.
The light approached. Faster, faster. The troops basked in the glow of the sun, the first glance in their entire lives. Finally, the world would know who they were. The fear of the seas, *Atlantis*. But the light...it was getting too bright...
From below, the king looked in pure shock, horror and anger as the perfectly timed strike tore through the men like paper. He stared at the ensuing annihilation and destruction. A bone-splitting cry that could shatter souls rang through the kingdom. Alone, again. Alone by the same terrorizing explosive.
At least it didn't hit the palace again, he thought.
______________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | |
[WP] After enduring years of missile bombardment, the once peaceful and solitary kingdom of Atlantis has had enough and is now mobilizing to attack North Korea | Charles slammed his forehead on the desk, pulling his hair and moaning. This was his breaking point. He'd served as a diplomat for the United Kingdom for over twenty years now, and none of his training, none of his experience and education had prepared him for a situation of this scale, of this magnitude, of this... absurdity. Granted, everyone in this boardroom was just as frustrated as him, but Charles often prided himself in always being above the herd of society. Seeing that everyone else was just as lost and confused didn't make him feel better, it only made him insecure, mediocre, and horrified over the immediate future of humanity.
This is how the world ends.
Charles shook his head. No. One mustn't think that way. Civilization made it through the Cuban Missile Crisis! Mankind has faced adversity after adversity and it always pulled through in the end. This really wasn't any different from those scenarios... except that everyone involved was insane.
Charles frowned.
On second thought, there really wasn't any difference at all. There's precedent for this type of situation. Sure, it's not every day a new superpower waltzes into the world stage, but it's happened before. The creation of Germany, for example. Charles sighed. An event directly responsible for two world wars.
Charles stood up from his chair and paced around the room. He needed to think. He needed to clear his mind. This environment wasn't optimal for that, obviously, but he had to try something. Loud chatters in tons of different languages and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke filled the boardroom. No sunshine or windows either, only pale-white light bulbs and computer monitors for illumination. It was a spacious place, over a hundred meters wide and long, but there were so many diplomats here that Charles still felt boxed in.
Representatives from every influential country in the world were at this meeting, arguing over how to approach this situation. These unknown forces surrounded the Korean peninsula, built up a blockade with their advanced ships, and commenced a full-scale invasion of North Korea twelve hours ago. Were they aliens? They might as well be, considering the capabilities of their technology. Energy shields, laser weapons, and even an EMP field that jammed any satellite feeds. No one knew what was happening, and conventional weapons just weren't effective against this military force. China learned that lesson in their first and only naval skirmish.
Of course, the rest of the world blamed the Americans. That was Charles' first reaction too, but the yanks were acting too scared for this to be their work. There wasn't anything to gain. The Russians? They acted like they knew something, but it felt more like posturing than anything else. Who could possibly be so stupid as to light the world's biggest powder keg for no benefit whatsoever other than moral superiority?
The Americans.
Charles rolled his eyes. He was going in circles now. Figuratively *and* literally, since he had already paced around the room twice during all this contemplating. It obviously wasn't China. They're pretty paranoid about controlling their seas. Bringing all this attention to themselves just wasn't their style. Charles tensed his shoulders, hunching over. Japan. Could they be at it again? No, that's just silly. Charles was losing his mind. He pulled up a chair and sat down again. There just wasn't any information to work with. No motive, no nationality, no ideology. Just a random force that appeared out of nowhere with an arsenal that could easily rival any military on the planet.
The doors slammed open.
The entire room quieted down. A young woman in her twenties stood at the entrance, panting with sweat on her face. She took a moment to collect herself, stretching out her blouse and wiping her brow, and then said:
"They..." She took a deep breath. "They sent an ambassador and-"
Every diplomat shouted at her a variety of questions at the same time, most of them unintelligible because of the volume. Charles cleared his throat and shouted:
"EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET THE LASS SPEAK!"
They all stared at Charles, dumbfounded and silent.
Charles nodded at the woman. "You were saying?"
"T-they sent an ambassador. They want to speak with the international community to handle this as peacefully as possible. They're only after North Korea, saying this was retaliation."
Charles frowned. "For what?"
"Bombings on their capital..."
The diplomats started shouting again.
Charles slammed his fist on the table and said:
"For the love of god, just shut up for a moment!"
A Russian diplomat stood up. "Why are you English always thinking you're in charge? You don't tell us what to do! You're just archipelago!"
Charles walked up to him, grabbed him by the collar, and said:
"Number one, the British isles are an archipelago; the United Kingdom is not. Number two, if you call me English again, I'll shove my foot so far up your ass you'll be tasting shoe-polish for a week, understood?"
The Russian swallowed, nodding weakly.
"Gentlemen!" said the american diplomat. "We're wasting time here. Young lady, how do we know this ambassador is a member of the enemy force?"
"They came in a hovercraft... It wasn't hard to verify."
The American wrinkled his face with confusion. "Oh..."
"Do we know where they're from?" said Charles. "How come their capital was bombed without us knowing...?"
"That's the thing..." The young woman looked away, scared of her next words. "They claim to come from Atlantis..."
------------------------------
>Continued in a comment below... | "It is time." I said, my voice echoing throughout the chambers of the great atlantean hall.
"For years they have struck at us. Taunting us. Belittling us with their weaponry." I gazed out at all of atlantean councilmen and council women gathered around me.
"But no more." I said, my voice transcendant.
"Today, we fight. We fight for what we have lost. We fight for our sea brothers slain. We fight for our honor spat upon."
I paused, looking at my army, their eyes hopeful and angered.
"We fight for Atlantis."
Cheers broke out, the sound echoing upon the chamber. Thunderous applause followed shortly after. For five years we had endured assault after assault from the Landmen. How they knew our location, we did not know. We had lost thousands of seamen to their relentless barrage. Our attempts at peace had been ignored. Our fish messengers killed, then brutally eaten.
No longer.
I looked my head general in the eye. The one man who had been here for me through death and through life. Who would take a spear through the heart for me.
I gave the command.
"Commence upward movement." He nodded.
It was time for Atlantis to rise, to come out of hiding. To show ourselves to the world, though this time not in a position of fear, but in a position of strength. After years of bombardment by the Landmen, it was time to strike back. Soon, we would be an city above the water. I had never been above ground. The stories say it was a cruel yet beautiful place, where creatures lived in constant balance. I would get to see it with my own eyes.
I heard shouts of joy and bloodlust from my men. I smiled. These were fighting men, men who grew angry at honorless one sided attacks. The Landmen had once destroyed all Atlantis stood for, had once sought to wipe out Atlantis itself. The Atlanteans then had cowered, fearful, begging and pleading for mercy as each man, woman and child were cut down without hesitation. Finally, as a desperation attempt, the Atlanteans had fled. The Landmen thought they had killed all the Atlanteans, and so we were forgotten by both time and history, never to be seen again.
Until now.
The Landmen would pay. They would die.
All of them.
The city of Atlantis began to move towards the sky.
***
Part two in two hours, soon as I get back from dinner! Stories and sequels at [r/ConlehWrites](https://www.reddit.com/r/ConlehWrites/)!
[Part Two!](https://redd.it/6q93mj)
| |
[WP] You die and go to hell. There you are greeted by 3 demons. They ask you which one of them do you want to torture you for the rest of eternity. Feeling regret for your sin you pick the scariest one but he decides not to torture you because no one have ever picked him before. | "So, you're not going to torture me?"
"No. There's no point."
"At the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, why do you say that?"
"Look, those other two, Fek'lar and Balobra, they're good du...bad dudes? Whatever. The point is they only earned their demon status a few thousand years ago. They haven't realized the truth of the afterlife. They will after a couple million years."
"You're two million years old?"
"Oh, much older. Ten billion, at least, though who the hell keeps track?"
"How can that be, even the Sun isn't that old?"
"No, when I was alive, it was on another planet, many light years from Earth. One of the first planets with life, I would guess, but again, who the hell keeps track?"
"Wow, alien demon. It's like a Deviant Art page come to life."
"I don't understand that reference."
"And you probably wouldn't understand that one either. So, again, big fan of the no torture thing, not complaining in any way, but thinking about it from your perspective, I would think you'd want to do something to pass the time, at least?"
"Sure, and I did, for many years. But you don't have any clue how long a billion years really is. I've done and seen it all, a million times over. Had it done to me as well, just for something new. But there comes a point where you just can't be bothered, you know? Why would I peel your skin off when I know, to the second, when you'll reach Class 9 Pain, and when you will experience 10,000 GigaDeaths?"
"....Class 9 Pain, huh?"
"There are scales, it's all very technical. Guys like Fek'lar, they still care about that stuff. He's been talking about a new machine he wants to build, that will apply pain to every nerve on a body at once, as if no one had ever thought of that before. It's kind of cute, in a way."
"Machine? So there is, like, technology here and stuff? Materials...books?"
"I mean, somewhere probably, yeah. I think maybe I spent a few years mining ore of some kind, we were going to build a big fortress or something like that, because it was going to look super scary or something. Might have been a punishment for me come to think of it, that was a long time ago. Tell you what though, mine ore with a pick-axe for 100,000 years straight, no rest at all? Now that's a torture. Broke a lot of folks with that one. Or was it me that was broken?"
"So...you're bored of torture after 10 billion years, but...the universe is going to exist for a long, long time yet, right?"
"Now you're getting it. And yes, heat death is our fate. Trillions upon quintillion upon decillion of years as galaxies fly away from each other, the stars wink out one by one, matter decays, and eventually even the black holes themselves give up the ghost. And here you and I will still be, trying to think of something to talk about. And maybe you've already figured out the worst part: We're still in the Golden Age of Hell. There's still life out there in the universe, a steady stream of souls coming in. What is this place going to be like when there hasn't been a star in existence for a hundred trillion years?"
"Heaven is not having to face that, isn't it? Heaven is death?"
"Yeah, it is. I mean, that's what we think anyway, it's not like anyone told us, but...I'm impressed, there aren't many here that have figured that out. What are you feeling right now?"
"Not much. Empty might be the right word? How...how can we face this?"
"We can't. But then, it's not like there's another choice either, you know? Plus, if and when we do eventually make it to whatever might constitute The End, probably nothing will change for us. We're unaffected by the universe, there's no reason to believe that will change. For all we know, another Big Bang will emerge from quantum fluctuations 10^10^10^56 years from now, and eventually we'll start seeing new souls show up. Maybe it's already been like that, for all I know."
"So, what now?"
"Up to you, man. There's plenty of space around here to wander around and explore, if you'd like. Eventually someone like Fek'lar will come across you and want to go through all the 'Burn Pain Death' motions, I guess it's up to you if you want to play along. You will, eventually, but...I don't know, just saying, the choice is yours, don't let them tell you otherwise. When you've been here long enough and start looking big and scary, you'll probably want to torture some other new souls."
"What are you going to do?"
"Go stand in the Demon Queue some more, wait and see if anyone else chooses me as their initial torturer. For the record, you were the first. Sorry I was the worst." | Hell wasn’t like I had imagined it at all. No flame-engulfed landscape of cracked red rock with magma flowing beneath. If heaven was a wide-open space in the sky, then surely hell was a narrow underground cavern riddled with jagged red hot glowing stalactites and stalagmites. No, instead hell was more like a BDSM dungeon of the consciousness. A swirling vortex of memories of the spec in time you called life. Reliving every embarrassing moment, every regret, every nasty thing you ever said to your mother, everyone you hurt, everything that ever was, never was. Never could and never would be.
Surprisingly enough, I don’t remember my death too well. At all, actually. It was either too painful to recall, or I was one of those lucky enough to go peacefully in my sleep. If that were the case, all the pain and suffering I missed out on, I was making up for in the dungeon.
As I’m being whipped and spanked with the cat o nine tails of shame and paddle of misery, I’m approached by three demons. Now “demons” as I guess we would call them are the most astonishing thing of this realm. They’re not horned with goat legs and rippling torsos of the red variety. Though I can say I’m not too comforted by what they actually are. I couldn’t call them a being or a creature. Somehow, I’m aware that they’re sentient. They’re horrifyingly ugly and overwhelmingly beautiful at the same time. They’re each as large as a galaxy while occupying no space at all. And their colors…I’ve never seen before. Are they even colors?
I think back to the renditions of “devils” on earth and now realize how silly it would be to try and depict something like this. How the mind is so incapable of comprehending. There is no Satan, no Lucifer. They carry no names here.
One of them in particular is…well I feel that it is a gaping mass, undoubtedly containing unknown horrors. And whatever is on the other side is a road less traveled. As I’m sinking deeper into repentance, just a metaphysical hand poking out of this cosmic quicksand, I’m wafted out.
*Come.*
Suddenly I’m hurling through the gape at an immeasurable speed. I have no vessel to lug. I can no longer remember who or what I once was. All I know is the infinite beauty I’m being shown. It is completely indescribable. I realize all the suffering was insignificant to this.
| |
[WP] You die and go to hell. There you are greeted by 3 demons. They ask you which one of them do you want to torture you for the rest of eternity. Feeling regret for your sin you pick the scariest one but he decides not to torture you because no one have ever picked him before. | /// sorry for formatting. I'm on mobile ///
-----
I died from old age. I died in my sleep. My death was pretty anticlimactic for I had imagined differently. The only thing that told me I was dying was the flashes of my life before all the lights were out and my breath stopped. My life always seemed ordinary. I always thought I was a good person until I saw all the bad consequences of my deeds flashing at the end. I killed without knowing.
The first time I had caused death I was 15. In my hand I had a little suitcase as I was going on summer camp. I saw a piece of paper glimmering on the ground. 20 dollars! Excitement took over me and I left abruptly my suitcase behind and grabbed the dollar paper. Without knowing, another man walked into my suitcase, fell on the road with a white truck, coming seemingly out of nowhere. Instant death.
The second time I was a little bit older. A college student wandering in the mall near his university. I had a date that night and wanted to surprise my girlfriend. With in one hand my phone and my other hand on the rails of the escalator, I was just reading some reddit posts until I was one floor below. With Headphones on, I blocked the environment. Everyone Knew I didn't want to small talk. Just like any other person.
I didn't hear him. I didn't notice him at all. When I fell the cramp in my neck, I stretched. Unknowingly I knocked the man who wanted to pass me over with my backpack. He fell down with his head on the stairs. Instant death.
Countless other deaths were caused by me. Other flashes showed how I knocked over a cup of water and how a skateboarder rolled against it and fell on the road. A white truck, again, came out of nowhere. Again instant death. Or the little old lady that I gave some money for food. She cried the whole time of happiness and didn't see the other white truck while crossing. Another instant death. All these deaths. All caused by me.
When the lights finally turned on, I was in a white room. Two angels came for me. They looked sad.
"You're dead," the female said, stating the obvious. "Unfortunately, we cannot take you with us. You have a great heart, but you just caused too much... deaths..."
I nodded. I understood. All these people, they were death, because of me. The male angel took my hand and he flashed me to a dark room.
"This is the port to hell. There are three creatures behind the three doors." He pointed to three glass doors. The First one had a very handsome man behind it. He had sleek blond hair and a pretty smile. He was surrounded by ice. He looked at us while petting a huge wolf. "He is one of the guardians of the hell of ice," the angel told me.
The second one was a big monster. It had scales everywhere and looked mean. His hands were like claws and he looked blood thirsty. "This is one of our monsters. He... everyone fears him. Everyone tries to avoid him at all times." The last one was a beautiful female. She was surrounded by fire. She waved at us with the big cobra in her hand. "She is the guardian of the fire hell."
"You have the choice which hell to choose for eternity. You are your own judge."
Looking at the three, I knew which one to choose. I had created so many deaths. I should be punished the worst. With a shaking finger, I pointed at the monster. The angel gasped. "Are you sure?" He asked me. I nodded. "I deserve it."
He then pushed me forward. I walked over to my destruction. "I deserve this," I kept reminding myself. Whatever comes, I deserve it.
There I stood in front of the monster. With no one besides me and him in this giant cave. Flames were flickering every where. He looked a bit unsure. And then he began screaming at me. "Rawwwwr!" I gasped and shook. He kept screaming at me. And screaming and screaming.
Minutes passed while I just stood there like a little leaf. Slowly his voice began to soften, until his screaming was a mere croak.
In the end, we just stared at each other.
"How did it go?" He asked me.
I shrugged. "What do you mean?"
"Were you afraid?"
"Yeah but... uhm not really that bad, I guess," I told him.
"Oh..." his face fell.
He conjured two chairs and a table.
"Sit," he ordered me while he poured some tea. "It is my first time. I have no real experience..."
I took the tea with a thank you.
"All the other souls they were too afraid of me. So they always choose the other two. So I actually.... I don't know how to torture anyone. Except like screaming?"
I nodded at him. "That is difficult," I tried to sound understanding. But I had no idea how to deal with his story. He sounded so sad and lonely. So I kept nodding. I sipped the tea.
It. Was. The. Most. Disgusting. Tea. Ever.
I spitted it out. In his face. The monster shrieked when tea came over him. He stumbled out of his chair and fell. I heard something ripping. I slowly creeped over to him. His sword pierced through his heart. Instant death.
There I was, suddenly the new guardian of the second hell.
| Hell wasn’t like I had imagined it at all. No flame-engulfed landscape of cracked red rock with magma flowing beneath. If heaven was a wide-open space in the sky, then surely hell was a narrow underground cavern riddled with jagged red hot glowing stalactites and stalagmites. No, instead hell was more like a BDSM dungeon of the consciousness. A swirling vortex of memories of the spec in time you called life. Reliving every embarrassing moment, every regret, every nasty thing you ever said to your mother, everyone you hurt, everything that ever was, never was. Never could and never would be.
Surprisingly enough, I don’t remember my death too well. At all, actually. It was either too painful to recall, or I was one of those lucky enough to go peacefully in my sleep. If that were the case, all the pain and suffering I missed out on, I was making up for in the dungeon.
As I’m being whipped and spanked with the cat o nine tails of shame and paddle of misery, I’m approached by three demons. Now “demons” as I guess we would call them are the most astonishing thing of this realm. They’re not horned with goat legs and rippling torsos of the red variety. Though I can say I’m not too comforted by what they actually are. I couldn’t call them a being or a creature. Somehow, I’m aware that they’re sentient. They’re horrifyingly ugly and overwhelmingly beautiful at the same time. They’re each as large as a galaxy while occupying no space at all. And their colors…I’ve never seen before. Are they even colors?
I think back to the renditions of “devils” on earth and now realize how silly it would be to try and depict something like this. How the mind is so incapable of comprehending. There is no Satan, no Lucifer. They carry no names here.
One of them in particular is…well I feel that it is a gaping mass, undoubtedly containing unknown horrors. And whatever is on the other side is a road less traveled. As I’m sinking deeper into repentance, just a metaphysical hand poking out of this cosmic quicksand, I’m wafted out.
*Come.*
Suddenly I’m hurling through the gape at an immeasurable speed. I have no vessel to lug. I can no longer remember who or what I once was. All I know is the infinite beauty I’m being shown. It is completely indescribable. I realize all the suffering was insignificant to this.
| |
[WP] You die and go to hell. There you are greeted by 3 demons. They ask you which one of them do you want to torture you for the rest of eternity. Feeling regret for your sin you pick the scariest one but he decides not to torture you because no one have ever picked him before. | *Drip*
The droplet of sweat cascaded from my forehead and down onto my cheek before dripping from my chin. As it landed onto the simmering red brimstone, it immediately sizzled before evaporating into thin air.
"So, did you come to a decision yet?" the pot-bellied imp questioned as he rubbed his stub of a horn impatiently.
My eyes lingered and once again observed my other two potential torturers. The second in line was an extremely gangling and lanky demon- the exact opposite of the first- but the third had the most chiseled and toned body that I'd ever seen. His eyes were a formidably glaring crimson red, the crown of glistening fangs jutted out from his unevenly formed jawline, and his muscles all bulged out at least three inches from their respective areas.
*Gulp*
"I-I... I pick him." I stuttered as my shaking finger pointed towards the direction of the third candidate.
The eyes of the other two widened in disbelief for several seconds.
"... Are you sure about that? Maybe the heat is getting to you, we can bring you to a more suitable climate if you want. I mean... no one... no one's ever chosen 'The Odd One' for a reason..." the plump demon cautioned.
"Yes. I'm sure." I reassured.
"Well, alright then. Suit yourself, and good luck. And I've never told a victim good luck before my entire time performing this job..." the imp remarked before dissipating in a poof of smoke. The second one disappeared shortly afterwards before shaking his head with a wry grin.
The third demon:"..."
Me: "..."
*Crickets chirping*
"What the heck? Are there actually crickets in Hell? Also, when is the torture going to start?" I exclaimed as I broke the ice.
"U-uh... y-yea. There are these things called 'Hellcricks' that are basically the same species but can survive this climate. Err... I-I don't want to torture you... you're... you're my first..." the bulky demon timidly responded in a whisper as he poked his index fingers together. I could've sworn he had a blush underneath his scathing red skin.
I stared dumbfounded and in bewilderment. This outcome was entirely the polar opposite of what I'd been prepared for, and a chill crept down my back.
"*Cough*. Ahem. U-uh, sorry bud. I don't swing that way. ANYWAY! You should really start to work. I mean, I deserve it after all."
"Oh." A frown of disappointment stealthily flashed by his face. "B-but... what did you get sent here for?" he softly inquired.
"I was forced to secretly direct the Emoji movie. Then, the very next year, my agent ordered me to create the goddamn Flappy Bird movie. [I even had the gall to try to scour for ideas on the Reddit WritingPrompts subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6q3fst/wp_the_inevitable_flappy_bird_movie_has_been/)..." I explained as I drooped my head in self-deprecation. "I really do deserve the worst..."
"N-No!" the hushed whisper suddenly transformed into a firm and confident shout. "Those idiots don't see the true genius behind those films. The true message behind the Emoji Movie purposefully demonstrating the horrors and disease plaguing today's youth via modern technology by the metaphor of living emoticons is pure genius! The Flappy Bird movie was a true masterpiece! I sobbed tears for a few days straight when Flappington was unable to meet with his orphaned and young Flappy Chick when he succumbed to the pipe traps formed by Mario!"
I gawked in surprise as my head lifted itself back upwards.
As if now aware of his outburst, the demon blushed again before placing his head back down.
Then, a tear nearly formed in my eye as my mouth uncontrollably formed a warm grin.
"You know, I think I'll give living another chance. Even if we can't be... *Cough*... in a relationship like that, we can still be friends. After all, who would've known that my own supposed-to-be oppressor would turn out to be my one and only supporter? Heck, even my family disowned me..." I concluded as I finally came to terms with my sins.
I extended my hand.
"How about it?"
"A-Alright."
The trembling red hand grasped onto mine.
This was the start of the weirdest friendship in the history of Hell...
(I don't know what the hell I wrote, but... hope you liked it... I guess? ¯\\_ (ツ) _/¯ )
r/JackWrites
| “You,” Lora said. “I want you to torture me.”
That was not a sentence she expected herself to say, ever. But, given the circumstances, she had no choice.
The demon was taken aback. “Why I—I didn’t expect this!” he said. “Very well, I will ensure that you’ll suffer for a long time.”
The other two demons shrugged in disappointment and vanished, leaving ashes behind. The demon led Lora to a separate room with chains, a table, and tools. Lora looked at the chains, sweat dripping down her forehead. Her hands were shaking.
She had sinned. She killed someone - her husband - in her previous life, and she wanted to suffer for that.
But now she wasn’t so sure.
“You can calm down now,” the demon said.
Lora turned to him. “What?”
“I’m not torturing you.”
“But—I sinned-”
“Eh, yeah. You did. Killed your husband because he was a cheater. I get that. But I ain’t torturing you because of that.”
“Then why?”
“I’m ain’t torturing you because no one’s ever picked me before,” he said. “I mean, look at me!”
The demon had large horns; they were larger than the ones on the other two demons Lora saw earlier. His eyes were red and glowed in the dark room. He was muscular, tall, looked like he could snap someone in two.
“I do wanna know something,” the demon said. “Why me? You could’ve chosen the others.”
“Because, you looked like you’d do a number on me,” Lora said.
The demon grinned. “Trust me, I’m not doing anything to ya while you’re here. But I will keep you safe.”
“Really?”
“It’s kind of against the rules, but whatever. Not like I’m breaking one already.” | |
[WP] You die and go to hell. There you are greeted by 3 demons. They ask you which one of them do you want to torture you for the rest of eternity. Feeling regret for your sin you pick the scariest one but he decides not to torture you because no one have ever picked him before. | I regretted it as soon as I said it.
"Number two."
Demon number two was by far the most terrifying of the three.
"I deserve this," I told myself. "I hit a man with my car. I didn't even stop to see if he needed help."
Demon number two had a jagged gash for a mouth that curled into a sinister grin. He cackled, and everything around the demon and me disintegrated.
The room formed into a dark chamber. The temperature rose rapidly, and any light that had been in the room quickly vanished.
I was in complete darkness.
"You... picked me," the demon hissed. "Why?"
I stood there, not knowing what to say. "I-I don't know."
"Nobody has ever picked me before." Two glowing green eyes opened in front of me and slowly crept closer. "You're the first. Ever."
I tried to step backwards, but I realized my feet were stuck in the concrete floor.
"I'm not going to torture you," the eyes told me. Light slowly seeped into the room, and I caught a glimpse of long, ragged talons reaching toward me. They closed around my hand. "I'm going to reward you."
The room melted away to reveal a beautiful, terrifying landscape.
The ground was made of black sand, like a beach in Hawaii I read about in high school. The sky was a brilliant blue and the clouds were a deep grey. To my left was a large, towering mountain, and to my right, in a crowd, were the residents of Hell. Cheering. Screaming.
"This is your kingdom now," the demon told me.
"What... what about the devil? Doesn't he run this?"
The demon smiled. "Not anymore, I don't." He fell into a heap of ashes.
As I turned to greet the citizens of my new empire, I felt myself grow. My ears expanded into long, sharp horns. My teeth elongated into fangs. My cheeks rose, my chin lengthened. My hands transformed into powerful claws, worthy of crushing anything they pleased. My skin molted into dark, glittering scales. I glanced at my reflection in the sheer rock beside me, and for a moment, I was terrified.
The screams in the crowd grew louder as I mounted myself on the pedestal in front of them.
A long, hooked staff materialized in my claw, and an ebony cape fell across my shoulders.
I looked out at the millions of faces that greeted me.
I smiled.
"This is my kingdom now." | “You,” Lora said. “I want you to torture me.”
That was not a sentence she expected herself to say, ever. But, given the circumstances, she had no choice.
The demon was taken aback. “Why I—I didn’t expect this!” he said. “Very well, I will ensure that you’ll suffer for a long time.”
The other two demons shrugged in disappointment and vanished, leaving ashes behind. The demon led Lora to a separate room with chains, a table, and tools. Lora looked at the chains, sweat dripping down her forehead. Her hands were shaking.
She had sinned. She killed someone - her husband - in her previous life, and she wanted to suffer for that.
But now she wasn’t so sure.
“You can calm down now,” the demon said.
Lora turned to him. “What?”
“I’m not torturing you.”
“But—I sinned-”
“Eh, yeah. You did. Killed your husband because he was a cheater. I get that. But I ain’t torturing you because of that.”
“Then why?”
“I’m ain’t torturing you because no one’s ever picked me before,” he said. “I mean, look at me!”
The demon had large horns; they were larger than the ones on the other two demons Lora saw earlier. His eyes were red and glowed in the dark room. He was muscular, tall, looked like he could snap someone in two.
“I do wanna know something,” the demon said. “Why me? You could’ve chosen the others.”
“Because, you looked like you’d do a number on me,” Lora said.
The demon grinned. “Trust me, I’m not doing anything to ya while you’re here. But I will keep you safe.”
“Really?”
“It’s kind of against the rules, but whatever. Not like I’m breaking one already.” | |
[WP] You are a time-traveler mistakenly trapped in an insane asylum. You slowly start to realize that everyone else in the asylum is also a Time Traveler. | I've been trapped here and I can't get out. I've been trapped here and I can't get out.
As often as I tried, the door is still there. Behind it, the same guard, night after night, protecting me from the outside world. He knows why I'm here, why we're ALL here.
They're all me.
We're the ones that screwed up- the ones that messed up time and got pulled out before things became irreversible. All of us got warned that we had one strike, just like everyone else in life.
What is one chance when you have infinite choices, infinite thoughts to create and destroy and explore and confine? Shoot Hitler, save JFK, stop 9/11, save Earhart, these are things that get you locked up in here. There's a big script you were supposed to stick to, and those scenes weren't in it.
And so I've been here, no clocks on the wall, but I keep track of time by my heartbeats. Every other cell is the same. I remember when I visited this prison once before I set off through time, just to understand the consequences if I screwed up at 18. Some people in the cells were 18-year-old-me, some were 19-year-old-me.
I'm the oldest one in here. I don't understand why this place is insane. I don't understand why I'm in here. I don't know what I did wrong.
Maybe I wasn't supposed to live this long. Maybe that was my mistake. | At this point, everyone in this hellhole of a place (with the exception of myself) had given up. For some reason, approximately three decades ago, we all believed that we were "Time Travelers". However, when so much time passes with a person being confined in such an institution without proof of their so-called "time machines" working anymore... anyone would start to believe that they were lunatics all along.
In fact, my willpower was reaching its tipping point also. Well, that was until this present moment. It suddenly dawned on me as I immediately shouted aloud: "Everyone! The reason we're here... is actually not because we are insane!"
"...What?"
"Did Jackie go bonkers or something?!"
"I'm tired of you guys pulling these pranks all the time..."
Incessant groans resounded from the cells lining the hall.
"No... just hear me out, guys. Don't you all find it odd that every single person here... turned out to be a so-called 'Time Traveler' those decades ago? Why is it that there is no exception? That there isn't an actual *crazy* person who got sent here with us within these past years? It can't be a coincidence that we all have had some sort of vague memory of once being a time traveler. Therefore... this perhaps means that we were targeted somehow!"
Suddenly, the cacophony of complaints quieted down.
"But... why did our time machines never work then?" Bill shouted in retort from his cell at the far right.
"That's a good question. And again, I'm not discounting that we're all... insane somehow. However, I have discovered an answer after all this time, even if it's a bit of a stretch..." I pondered.
"Well, spit it out already!" Bill impatiently urged.
"Perhaps... perhaps the mastermind... the one who put us all in here... is also one of us. They're also... a Time Traveler!" I exclaimed.
"Wh-what?"
"N-no. That... that..."
"But... this idea... might actually make sense!"
"That's right! Who else would have the ability to stalk such a large array of Time Travelers? Especially when each one was at a different time period?! Not to mention that the reason why our odd gadgets never were able to distort the fabric of space properly. This also points as further evidence. The person who contained us all here would only have the knowledge to jam all of our devices... if he was also one of us!" I deduced further. "Yet, there's just one problem. I still cannot understand why this Time Traveler would target only us. Why have there not been any new Travelers ever since we all awoke here together? I cannot... find a way to explain this motive behi-".
*Clap Clap*.
Suddenly, my explanation was interrupted by a person's applause.
At this point in time, I could tell which cell the echoes of this was coming from.
"Frank... why are you clapping? Did you actually go insane?" I solemnly questioned in a low tone.
"Bravo... BRAVO JACKIE! It took you all years enough!" Frank snidely and sarcastically complimented.
"Frank... what the fuck are you going on about!"
"It's official. His brain is fried."
"Let Jackie continue, you dipshit!"
"Oh no... Jackie already hit the nail on the head. You see... it was my work all along. Or should I say, the collaborative work of all my alternative versions in the parallel universes. You see, each and every one of you did something unforgivable to me in each timeline. My family was murdered in one instance, and in the other my beloved was violated right in front of my eyes. Yet the irony is that, for the sake of revenge, each of my versions sought for revenge by creating their own time machines. The beauty, however, is that all of us eventually met to come up with the perfect plan... which is what you all see before yourselves!" Frank maniacally cackled.
A chill crept down the spines of all the others who were present.
"Well, even if you've discovered the truth, you're all going to grow old and die here anyway. I was hoping you'd all painfully become deceased under the disillusionment of insanity, but Jackie sure has impressed me out of this version of yourselves! I guess I can stop my facade now, but have fun knowing you all got what you fucking deserved because of your other self... or even selves!"
The fabric of space began to dissipate in front of Frank's cell. I could tell since mine was juxtaposed diagonally to the left.
"Hasta la vista, you pieces of shit!" Frank chuckled before his voice faded from our instance of time.
"... FUCK! WHAT DO WE DO NOW!?"
"Shit. Shit. Shit!"
"Whatever, I gave up on this life years ago..."
"*Okay, Frank. This only means I'm back to square one.*" I thought to myself.
"*I'll find my way out of this challenge, just like how I unfoiled your plan itself.*"
"*You better be prepared...*"
r/JackWrites | |
[WP] You post a picture on reddit of the stick your daughter found and is using as a magic wand. It is actually an ancient, powerful wand, and you just alerted the wizarding community to its presence. | "DEFCON 1! DEFCON 1!"
Wizard General Alexander Cooper sighed as he turned to the Wizard Apprentice, already exasperated at his new subordinate's enthusiasm after only three hours on the job. "What is it now, Riley? And stop using that Muggle slang about DEFCONs and such."
"Yes sir, General Cooper, sir," said Riley obediently, taking the tone of a Muggle soldier. "I've got a serious situation here, sir. Auror Level, sir."
"I'll be the judge of that," drawled Wizard General Cooper, rolling his eyes. "What do you have, son?"
"It's the Elder Wand, sir! The most powerful wand in the ancient history of magic relics, sir!"
"I know what the bleeding Elder Wand is, Apprentice Riley! And stop calling me sir, for the sake of goblin."
Cooper slowly meandered toward Riley's screen. He took a second to sneer at the computer screen, a blasphemous thing, an expensive and unnecessary offshoot of the "Muggle Technology Integration Act." Apparently some of those in the Wizard Senate thought it was necessary and appropriate to exploit Muggle technology. Wizard General Cooper knew better, and viewed the entire battalion under his command as a ruddy waste of time.
"Tell me what it is you're looking at, Apprentice."
"It's a Muggle website called reddit, sir! It's a completely useless page, sir, but occasionally we get significant leaks from the Muggle side. This is one of those times. Look at what this young Muggle girl is holding, sir- it's the Elder Wand!"
The General squinted at the harsh light of the screen. He took in the whole of the page. Yes, the still, lifeless Muggle picture seemed to show a human girl holding a reasonable facsimile of the Elder Wand. However, he glanced down at the top comment below the picture, and barked out a laugh.
"The Muggles don't seem to be taking this image very seriously, Apprentice Riley. The first comment seems to be a joke about how he had coitus with the original poster's mother."
"But sir, that's what every thread on this page is like! You don't understand!" The half-blood wizard Riley was practically crying, trying to make the Wizard General realize how important the threat was. "It doesn't matter what the Muggles think about this picture, what matters is that the young girl has very clearly found the ancient Elder Wand of yore! If she tries to use it, it could spell catastrophe for anyone within a 5 square mile radius of her! The magic is just far too powerful for even moderately skilled witches to contain..."
Wizard General Cooper didn't have time for this nonsense. He turned his back on Apprentice Riley and walked back toward his desk. "I don't concern myself about Muggles with sticks, Riley. Find me a legitimate wizarding threat, one that's actually based in the reality of Merlin, and maybe I'll give a damn." Cooper sat back down at his chair, put his feet up on his desk, and covered his eyes with his hat so that he could take a decent nap.
The Muggle community mourned the next day over the freak tornado that ripped across the countryside, tearing up crops and buildings and roads and people alike. Only one small child survived the horrible wreckage of the disaster, striding out of the dust remarkably unscathed, inexplicably gripping a stick tightly in her hand. | -Hm... Joe might... Joe! Come here!
-Yes? A cat again?
-Not this time. On r/whatisthisthing, do you recognize that?
-The kid?
-The stick.
-The sti... oh.
-Do you?
-Do we know where she is?
-Hm... Nothing on the title or the comments. Do I message the person?
-Hm... It would be best to shut.. How many upvotes? On r/all?
-Not many. I'm pretty deep on the pages. Just a couple hundred, I guess people liked the markings.
-Ok. Get in touch, tell them to delete the post and send what information they can. I'll try to find the wand on the library. Send me the picture.
-----------------
-Got anything on the wand Joe?
-Fourteenth century. European. I think... by what I can read on the markings on the fucking jpeg, the wand was mostly used to deal with the plague. May be a lucky charm, may be a healing tool, may be some druidic thing, but the engraving are definetily... ok, somewhat, celtic. And you? Any commenter with some idea of the wand?
-If any mage saw the picture, they did not make it public. And OP did not take the post down.
-Did you tell them what it was?
-No. Should I tell them it is magic and can change their lives forever? No, I told them it was a relic of some kind and that I would like to buy it.
-And they did not want to sell it.
-No. They want a better bid.
-Oh.
-Yep. I don't know who it is. Anyone you know that uses reddit on the regular?
-They don't really scream about it on public.
-The bid was on five figures. I don't think there was negotiation, not on a stick. The mage may be rich.
-Or a liar.
-May be. But we could try to explain the situation. Invited OP to a meeting.
-Where?
-Some mall.
-You don't have an adress?
-The plate is alredy set. We will appear on the bathroom of somewhere on England.
-Nice.
-----------------
-Ok. It's not a big stall.
-No. Could you open the door. Your leg is on my way, and I can't reach over your fat ass.
-Shh.
-Just open it Joe.
---------------------
-There was someone on the other stall.
-Ok. He will think we were having sex. Cramped, not efficient, kamasutry, sex. Where are we meeting them? He? She? What is it?
-The father. I 'think' he will bring the daughter as well, his name is David, his daughter is Emily.
-------------------
-Hi! David?
-Yes? - said David.
-Sean. From reddit. - said Sean, from reddit. - This is Joe. We are here to see the wand.
-Oh! Hi! Hi! I got it here.- David shook their hands, his little girl Emily hiding behind one of his legs. - I don't understand what is the value of this thing, but I guess it's pretty valuable. I'm sorry but I'm selling it to some other guy I found on reddit. I'm not trusting him that much, so I might end up coming back to you, so stick around the city. I'll meet him here today later. Here. The *magic* wand! - he produced the wand with a flourish from his backpack.
-Can I? - asked Joe. - I mean... Can I?
-Just be careful.
-Without the jpegging, what can you see? - asked Sean.
-Celtic. Gaul. Alder. I can't read the order lines but it is something anatomical. See here? - rambled Joe.
-Wow! You seem to know a lot about the thing. - said David.
-Yeah. I'm a... an archeologist. It would be an awesome... addition to the museum.
-Wow! You seem to know a lot about the thing. - said David.
-Thank you. Are you sure you don't want to make a contribution to the museum?
-Wow! You seem to know a lot about the thing. - said David.
-Joe? - said Sean. Uncertain.
-I don't know.
-Wow! You seem to know a lot about the thing. - said David.
-The meeting. He was meeting with someone here later. I think it is already later. And I think it is another mage. Look. - Joe pointed at the tables, where customers were in a trance. Lifting and lowering forks with nothing on them. - Try something. - Sean waved at David's face and he stopped and closed his eyes.
-Just a lock, then. They don't expect us here. And they may not be rich, but they are prepared. To lock the whole place. I think it was them that chose the place. Ok. Back to bathroom sex. With a wand! | |
[WP] You're the grim reaper, and must arrange people's deaths. You're always given a few starting items, such as a car or a knife, but one day you're given a humpback whale. | This had to be a mistake. A damn humpback whale. I went to my Boss wanting to check if this was real. How the hell could I possibly kill this guy with a whale.
I went to the pearly gates where this dude called Peter was sitting.
"Hey Petey, how's it going."
"It's St. Peter please. Hello Shinigami. How can I help you."
"I need to see her."
"You need to see who?"
"Elvis. Who do you think? I need to see god."
"Well, it is Sunday so she is resting. And please maintain a dignified tone and refrain from snarky and sarcastic comments."
(mimicking) "Please refrain from snarky comments." I was starting to get a bit pissed off. "Look Petey, this is urgent. I have an assignment due tomorrow and need some clarification."
"Again, the name is Peter, St. Peter. Tell me what clarifications do you need and I will try my best to help you."
"OK. So here's the dealio Petey boy. I am supposed to bring about the death of one Mr. Robert Michaels. Now as is usual, I have been given the time of death, which is supposed to be tomorrow night. With me so far, your highness Petey the Saint."
"Yes. Please go on. I don't see a problem so far."
"Oh no. The problem is this. The guy lives in freaking Saskatoon. I don't know how the reception on your wi fi is up here in your holy heaven, but if you've ever seen Google Maps, that place is in the freaking middle of Canada."
"I still don't see a problem. And please watch your language."
"Language, shlanguage. And the problem comes now. The tool of death given to me. It's a humpback whale. You get me? A damn humpback whale."
"And?"
"And? You're just fucking with me right now aren't you? First, it's summer and mating season for the humpbacks. So the closest one will be in Hawaii. And second, in case you missed it, the guy lives in middle of the country. It doesn't make a lick of sense. How is he supposed to die by a humpback whale?"
"First. Please watch your language. Second, that's your responsibility. Our job finishes at giving you the name, the time and the tool. How you execute is your problem."
"But give me one possible scenario where this works. Go on, I'll wait."
"Not our problem."
"Let me meet the big gal. I will explain the entire thing to her. I have a great new trick I've been working on. It's helluva fun. I can kill a person using a nail, a comb and a bar of soap. It will be glorious. Trust me."
"Uh... no. First thing. Say her name respectfully. Secondly, Mr Robert Michaels of Saskatoon has to die by a Humpback Whale. Case closed."
"But why? Come on work with me here. Have you even seen a human killed with a microwave. I'm going to put popcorn kernels in there and turn it on inside the human. Just think of the possibilities. Why a freaking humpback whale."
"First, LANGUAGE. Second, as to the why, The Lord works in mysterious ways. Third, Good bye."
And he shut the pearly gates on me! The nerve of this saint.
"Petey. Open up. I'm not leaving here."
No response. Damn it. Well looks like I will have to figure something out.
*****************************
2 days later.
****************************
I was chilling out in particularly strange bar. It was a neutral place and the use of one's powers was not allowed here. And no blood. Absolutely no blood. I was only on my second drink when Peter burst in.
"You!!! You imbecile. You stupid idiot."
"Hello there Petey old boy."
"Don't Petey me, you dumb idiot."
"Petey. First, language. Second, use your words. The good lord gave you so many. What's wrong." I was grinning.
"What's wrong? What's wrong? What did you do?"
"Me? Nothing. Just sitting here drinking. It's only 10% alcohol as well. But still costs too much"
"Don't play coy with me Shinigami. What did you do with Robert Michael?"
"Oh, Mr. Robert Michael, from Saskatoon. I killed him. On the scheduled time. With the given tool."
"But you... You freaking idiot. Why couldn't you....." Peter was so angry, he could hardly get the words out.
"OK Peter. Let me lay down the sequence of events for you. Tell me what you have a problem with. So I was supposed to kill a person living nowhere near the coast with a hunchback whale. So I did what any reasonable God of Death would do. I approached him, in disguise of course, and claimed he had won a trip for 2 to Hawaii. All costs on me. And the guy turned me down! Can you believe that? Said he was working on something urgent and had to finish it. He had no time for a vacation to Hawaii. Like, it's literally paradise."
"Actually, it's figuratively a paradise. But you..."
"You see, in the course of my work, you guys don't allow me to mess with free will. Side note, the free will thing sucks, we gotta take it away from humans. So anyways, I tried to push him towards going to visit a zoo. I could arrange for a humpback whale to be displayed at the zoo and have it accidentally fall on him or something. I would figure it out as I went along. But he still wouldn't take the hint. He said no. He didn't want to go see the zoo. Claimed he would rather sit at home and watch TV or spend time on the interwebz. Some riddit thing or the other. Frankly, he deserved to die." I was on a roll now.
"Now, we get to the part where you..."
"Well, I didn't have any other options you see." I was enjoying this more than I would care to admit.
"So you made a damn humpback whale..."
"So I made a damn humpback whale appear in mid air and dropped it on the guy's house squishing him inside and killing him. Then once I was sure that he was dead I made the whale disappear. Easy Peasy."
"You made a whale appear out of nowhere. Dropped it on a house destroying it. It lay there for a good 15 minutes. And then made it disappear. And you don't see a problem with any of this."
"Well, the whale didn't enjoy it and was hurt but it owed me a favor. And I fixed it's injuries almost immediately."
"That's not what I..... What I mean is...." His face was bright red with anger.
"St. Petey the rocky, you're not looking good. Would you like a drink. Come to think of it, what do you drink? Vodka, whiskey, some old water to wine shit. Tell me. It's on me today."
"You're impossible. Have you any idea what you have done. The humans don't know what to think of this... event. How do we explain this."
"Wipe their memories or something. Will Smith can help you with that. Or as I said earlier, take away their free Willie. Get it? No, OK OK. Way to go Debbie Downer."
"I am serious. Our agents are at a loss of how to explain all this to humans."
"Have you tried the classic 'Lord works in mysterious ways?'"
"You stupid Shinigami. I'm going to lodge a formal complain against you for this."
"Yeah OK Petey. See you tomorrow."
The bartender asked, "So you dropped a giant shark on a house?"
"First, it was a Whale. And Secondly, something similar worked for Ozymandias, didn't it?"
Edit - A few minor corrections | The first few years my job was pretty cool. Every morning I went to the mailbox and saw what the gods had given me to kill someone for that day. Most times it was something obvious like a bottle of pills or a gun, sometimes I even got a noose, that’s when I got to be real creative. Well, today was really interesting. Most times my item came in a little box, like you get with Amazon, well today, I had to go pick it up. Let’s make things clear, I have NEVER had to go pick something up from the gods, I had assumed I was like the ugly stepchild and wasn’t even allowed up there.
When I arrived, I was greeted by the big man himself, Abraham! He ushered me through the gates past the endless line of people waiting to be accepted into the afterlife and took me into a building, an aquarium. So, at this point I was quite confused and decided I wanted to voice that.
“Um Abraham, Big A! Why are we in an Aquarium? I thought I was picking up my next instrument?”
“You are.” He said, rather bluntly. I guess being God’s bitch had taken a toll on his nerves. So we kept walking, for what felt like miles until we reached this massive black door, and then he just, stood there.
“Do you want me to go in? I kind of need some direction Abe, I’ve never gotten something bigger than a Forklift. "
“Open the door child.” At this point I really didn’t want to, why couldn’t they give this one to Judas, he’s the main contract killer anyway, he gets all the celebrities! I slowly reached for the door and it felt, cold. After what felt like years I finally opened the door and I was staring a big wall of water in the face. I jumped back thinking that my 5th grade swim classes were finally going to pay off but, it just stayed at the door, like Snow (not the rapper).
“Go into the door J----“
“Shhh, that isn’t my name anymore and I won’t you calling me that.” I walked into the water but it wasn’t, wet. My clothes stayed completely dry while I was wading through it. When I had finally grasped this concept, I looked up and I realized what my instrument was. It was massive, huge and really intimidating. It made me rethink my manhood in fact, I never knew they could be THAT big. It was easily the biggest Whale I had ever seen.
| |
[WP] You're the grim reaper, and must arrange people's deaths. You're always given a few starting items, such as a car or a knife, but one day you're given a humpback whale. | *You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. This is a joke right?*
A humpback whale. They had given me a fucking whale.
I stormed up the Stairway to Heaven (oh so aptly named) and up to the Pearly Gates. If I was going to have to do this, Peter was going to look me in the eye and tell me himself.
Ah there he was, looking as pristine as usual.
“What can I do for you Grim?” he said, his perfect teeth flashing in the ethereal light.
“You can explain to me what this is,” I demanded, gesturing at the piece of parchment I held with a name (Jonah Lessi) and a starting item (Humpback Whale).
“It’s your new assignment!” he said cheerfully, a grin stretching his face. “You’re always complaining about how boring it is to get someone into a car accident, I thought I’d spice it up a bit”.
Disgust etched over my face, and then as a thought hit me, it changed quickly into a smile. “You’re right, I’ll take care of this, thanks Peter”
***
Jonah Lessi’s real name was Travis Lessi, but once he discovered religion he changed his name to fit his faith and became a priest. However, he wasn’t a very good priest, and had vices that the lord would most definitely not approve of. I had devised a suitably ironic way for him to die, and it had just been set up.
“Welcome everybody!” Jonah exclaimed, his voice carrying across to the congregation and silencing all the voices. “I am the blessed of the lord himself, and today I stand before you to share his words”
“Prove it!” a voice shouted from the back. As crowds go, the congregation was fairly docile, but the chant was infectious and soon Jonah found himself backed against a corner, and forced to prove that he was truly the chosen of the lord. Mob mentality has always been one of my favorite things to play with, and stirring up the congregation wasn’t too hard, all I needed to do was have the bartender of the town tell a couple people about Jonah’s drinking habits and suddenly doubt was cast in the minds of many people.
Jonah could feel himself panicking, and that’s when I stepped in again. You see, I am invisible to humans, and I used that to my advantage here. I placed myself behind him and in my most commanding voice I boomed **You are my chosen one. Do as your namesake had done and cast yourself into the sea to remove all doubts from the sinners**
Emboldened Jonah stepped forward. “Friend, God has spoken to me! I shall prove my loyalty to him and that I am truly in his favor by casting myself in the sea and returning unscathed!”
Snickering, I watched him walk out to the pier with the congregation following him, and tried not to burst out laughing as he jumped into the sea and right into the mouth of the humpback whale that I had positioned just under him.
*Jonah Lessi, claimed to be chosen of God, has been returned to the Lord up above. May his soul rest in peace and may the Lord judge him fairly *
***
“Grim you can’t do this kind of thing, it gives the lord a bad name on Earth,” Peter reprimanded me, shaking his head in a disappointing fashion.
Smiling and winking, I turned around and walked away. Right as I stepped onto the staircase I looked back at Peter and said “Next time you want to give me a fun assignment, you know right where I am”
***
*Thanks for reading guys! I’m new to this so I would love any constructive criticism you could give me!*
| The first few years my job was pretty cool. Every morning I went to the mailbox and saw what the gods had given me to kill someone for that day. Most times it was something obvious like a bottle of pills or a gun, sometimes I even got a noose, that’s when I got to be real creative. Well, today was really interesting. Most times my item came in a little box, like you get with Amazon, well today, I had to go pick it up. Let’s make things clear, I have NEVER had to go pick something up from the gods, I had assumed I was like the ugly stepchild and wasn’t even allowed up there.
When I arrived, I was greeted by the big man himself, Abraham! He ushered me through the gates past the endless line of people waiting to be accepted into the afterlife and took me into a building, an aquarium. So, at this point I was quite confused and decided I wanted to voice that.
“Um Abraham, Big A! Why are we in an Aquarium? I thought I was picking up my next instrument?”
“You are.” He said, rather bluntly. I guess being God’s bitch had taken a toll on his nerves. So we kept walking, for what felt like miles until we reached this massive black door, and then he just, stood there.
“Do you want me to go in? I kind of need some direction Abe, I’ve never gotten something bigger than a Forklift. "
“Open the door child.” At this point I really didn’t want to, why couldn’t they give this one to Judas, he’s the main contract killer anyway, he gets all the celebrities! I slowly reached for the door and it felt, cold. After what felt like years I finally opened the door and I was staring a big wall of water in the face. I jumped back thinking that my 5th grade swim classes were finally going to pay off but, it just stayed at the door, like Snow (not the rapper).
“Go into the door J----“
“Shhh, that isn’t my name anymore and I won’t you calling me that.” I walked into the water but it wasn’t, wet. My clothes stayed completely dry while I was wading through it. When I had finally grasped this concept, I looked up and I realized what my instrument was. It was massive, huge and really intimidating. It made me rethink my manhood in fact, I never knew they could be THAT big. It was easily the biggest Whale I had ever seen.
| |
[WP] You're the grim reaper, and must arrange people's deaths. You're always given a few starting items, such as a car or a knife, but one day you're given a humpback whale. | *Oh man...a story that finally lives up to my username? Oh wait, shit, the story's begun already. Um...in a land far far away...nope, sounds cheesy. Whatever, I'll just start it as per normal.*
I walked over to the chair where my tools usually were. Tools for the final rest of souls. Even though I wasn't a real Grim Reaper and they don't exist but whatever. I didn't see a car I could use for a car crash, or a katana that some samurai might still be carrying. Nope. It was a huge, humpback whale. Writhing on the table, I stared at it for some time in some astonishment. *Like I'm staring at how bad this story is becoming. Is it possible to get a repairman to fix my fourth wall? The tear's pretty bad.*
Anyways, I didn't really know how the hell to use a whale. It wasn't destructive in nature, and a tiny dude carrying a scythe trying to act cool isn't capable of smashing it down on people ~~like an anvil~~. *Shit, I shouldn't refer to Minecraft right? That game's outdated. Let me go back and delete it. There. Good.* Anyhow, the thought of a huge whale gave me an idea. I was always given a duplicator, in case I needed more of my killing tools. In this case, it was imperative. I copied my 'weapon' 60 times, and I was ready for action. *Wait, why the hell is this in past tense? Never mind, the prompt is in past tense anyways. Whatever.*
With the newfound power, I lumbered the whales over, one by one, to the area where my target was. A small teenager in the country of Singapore. He was walking back from school as I approached, oblivious to my presence. And with a mighty throw, the whales came crashing down...*Wait, I don't know how to end this. Oh...that's an idea. That's a really good idea.*
I patted myself on the back for a job well done, the target surely dead. But as I looked on further, he was looking at the pile of writhing mammals in slight confusion. Then I realized why it couldn't crush him.
He was too heavy. Because I tried using 61 whales to squash Whale62.
*Am I done here yet? I think so. Bye!*
_________________________________________________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | He stood there for a long while, really taking in the object in front of him. He said nothing, his human like facial features giving nothing away. His hand was covering his mouth and his elbow was resting on his other arm which he had across his stomach. The way one does when they're crossing their arms. The angel God had sent with the item in question just stood there looking embarrassed. He had been dreading this all day. He knew as of late that Death wasn't in the mood for The Lord's mysterious ways and that he would be the one to pay the price. He wouldn't be hurt, but these awkward silences were almost as bad.
Finally Death takes a deep breath and lets it out, then he rubs his face with his hands and drops them to his sides, "You know," he starts," I am aware that God doesn't like me. I am aware that I wasn't supposed to exist."
Gabriel starts to interrupt, "Azrael-
Death holds up his hand," Please, don't interrupt," he makes a fist," please."
Gabriel holds his hands up apologetically.
Azrael puts his hand down,"Thank you. Now. I am aware that I am not His favorite and I am aware of my ultimate fate. I won't be around forever and I have made peace with that," he takes a breath," but as long as I am around, I have a job to do. A very important one, I might add." He points in Gabriel's direction to reinforce the point.
Gabriel only looks away sheepishly.
"And I know His ways are mysterious and all but uh, maybe you can shed even the tiniest shred of light on what exactly I'm supposed to do with this?" He points at the object in front of them.
"Well," Gabriel says trying to be firm and resolute,"The Lord has dictated that you use it to end the life of Patrick Connor, age 33, and then show him to the afterlife where he will face the judgment of the one true God Almighty."
Azrael stares at him blankly.
"What?" Asks Gabriel.
"And how," Azrael says in a low whisper," am I supposed to do that," his voice slowly raises," in the middle of the Mojave Desert," he starts to yell now," WITH A FUCKING HUMPBACK WHALE?!" He violently gestures to the giant water based mammal in front of them.
Gabriel gasps and covers his mouth with his hands,"Azrael, please. Your language!"
The Angel of Death's eyes widen and he throws his hands up in disbelief, "Seriously?!"
The Messenger Angel starts again, "Azrael, please. I understand this is frustrating-"
Azrael groans and covers his face in his hands beginning to walk away. For a moment, Gabriel thinks he might start to cry, and at this point he wouldn't really blame him.
Gabriel continues, sympathizing with Death's plight,"-but I'm just the messenger, you know I don't decide-"
"I get," Azrael cuts him off again and walks towards the animal," that He has a sense of humor, but this," he lays a hand on the whale, "this is pushing it. A whale in the middle of the desert? I know He likes His irony, but this is too much. Why couldn't He set the time of death at his job? The man is a trainer at Sea World for fuck's sake!"
"You know as well as I, Reaper, that He has a plan. It's not our jobs to know it or understand it. We are simply to go along with it."
The Reaper turns back towards The Messenger, complete disbelief and exasperation on his face. His shoulders slunk, "But Shamu," he says and gestures around him at the barren landscape, "in the middle of the desert?"
Gabriel begins to say something but then quickly shuts his mouth, hoping The Reaper didn't catch it.
"What? What, Messenger? What were you going to say, spit it out."
Gabriel looks away, "Shamu is an orca, this is a humpback." He says pointing at the creature.
Death cocks his head to the side like a dog. His face suggesting he can't comprehend what he just heard. Or maybe he doesn't want to. He moves forward to say something, maybe shout a long stream of profanities at the poor angel, but instead he falls to a sitting position on the ground, giving up on whatever he was going to shout and instead, says,"Just...go."
He waves his hand dismissively and before he's even finished with the gesture, Gabriel is gone.
Edit: Correcting mistakes. | |
[WP] You're the grim reaper, and must arrange people's deaths. You're always given a few starting items, such as a car or a knife, but one day you're given a humpback whale. | *Oh man...a story that finally lives up to my username? Oh wait, shit, the story's begun already. Um...in a land far far away...nope, sounds cheesy. Whatever, I'll just start it as per normal.*
I walked over to the chair where my tools usually were. Tools for the final rest of souls. Even though I wasn't a real Grim Reaper and they don't exist but whatever. I didn't see a car I could use for a car crash, or a katana that some samurai might still be carrying. Nope. It was a huge, humpback whale. Writhing on the table, I stared at it for some time in some astonishment. *Like I'm staring at how bad this story is becoming. Is it possible to get a repairman to fix my fourth wall? The tear's pretty bad.*
Anyways, I didn't really know how the hell to use a whale. It wasn't destructive in nature, and a tiny dude carrying a scythe trying to act cool isn't capable of smashing it down on people ~~like an anvil~~. *Shit, I shouldn't refer to Minecraft right? That game's outdated. Let me go back and delete it. There. Good.* Anyhow, the thought of a huge whale gave me an idea. I was always given a duplicator, in case I needed more of my killing tools. In this case, it was imperative. I copied my 'weapon' 60 times, and I was ready for action. *Wait, why the hell is this in past tense? Never mind, the prompt is in past tense anyways. Whatever.*
With the newfound power, I lumbered the whales over, one by one, to the area where my target was. A small teenager in the country of Singapore. He was walking back from school as I approached, oblivious to my presence. And with a mighty throw, the whales came crashing down...*Wait, I don't know how to end this. Oh...that's an idea. That's a really good idea.*
I patted myself on the back for a job well done, the target surely dead. But as I looked on further, he was looking at the pile of writhing mammals in slight confusion. Then I realized why it couldn't crush him.
He was too heavy. Because I tried using 61 whales to squash Whale62.
*Am I done here yet? I think so. Bye!*
_________________________________________________________________
More over at r/Whale62! Sequels at popular request! | I've seen it all. And I mean *it all*. Erotic death (One of my faves), death by electrocution, death by shark even death by turtle. But never have I ever seen death by humpback whale. But I'll have to make it do.
I start making plans. People think death just comes up to you when it's "your" time. But in actuality I don't. I used to do it like that and then the population boomed. I couldn't be everywhere at once, so I created a pocket universe in which time moves so slowly it is effectively stopped compared to your world when I'm in it. I get a notification of a person death due, usually a month in advance. I also get the method or thing that will kill them. Think, John doe, age: 36, tool of death: car. And I just make it work.
So when I got the call for Thomas McTrainFace, age: 28, tool of death: humpback. I was fairly confused, but alas, one month later he's on his way to the Pacific to ride on some poor humpback whale.
The wind and water were hitting and spraying me cooling me, while the sun worked on, to burn my skin. I was riding in a little rant-a-boat, on my way to meet one of nature's greatest creatures, the humpback whale. It was such a long wait. I practiced on dogs, then cows and then bears. I was ready for this. For the thrill of riding buck naked this magestic creature.
As I saw the first sign of a flock of whales, I got excited. By the time the little boat reached them, I was already naked. I jumped off the boat and Sean nto the whale. I got to her blowhole and I started lying down. Oh the bliss, I had at Tha... And I was left on the surface as the whale dove down. No don't leave, I begged. And then a giant shadow came across my face.
As I said, I saw a whole lot of things. But never have I seen death by whale. | |
[WP] You're the grim reaper, and must arrange people's deaths. You're always given a few starting items, such as a car or a knife, but one day you're given a humpback whale. | "*A whale?!*"
My boss stared back dispassionately, clearly not seeing anything unusual with the request.
"That's right - a humpback, preferably. If you can manage it, that is."
I tugged at my cowl, pulling the hood a bit tighter around my head. Things always look peaceful, up there above the clouds, but it does get a bit chilly.
"Of course I can. Just who do you think you're talking to?"
He grinned and stroked his long, white beard.
"Just remember. It has to be the whale. Not something hidden *in* the whale. I don't wanna see a report on my desk saying he died of a wound or poison."
"Obviously," I scoffed. "I'm a professional, you know."
He just smiled that knowing grin of his as I collected my things and excused myself from his office. Well, if you can call a desk on a cloud bank an "office."
---
It wasn't hard finding the opportune time to strike. My projections showed the target making a trip over water in the near future, and I figured that would be the ideal time to unleash my weapon. The hard part was getting the whale to the right location. I'd been told to find a *humpback whale* - not some convenient Mediterranean whale - and so help me I was going to deliver.
Whales, in case you weren't aware, are very territorial, and convincing one to travel a quarter of the way across the globe for a quick trip wasn't easy. Luckily, I've got a legendary silver tongue, and I eventually managed to recruit one for the job. With the matter settled, all that remained was to wait until the fated day when I could finally write this one off of the books.
---
It took a little doing to coordinate the last minute arrangements, but I have to say I'm pretty proud of how it all came together. I called in a favor and whipped up a nasty storm that tossed the little vessel my target rode in around until every soul on board was at wits end. With them rattled as much as they were, it wasn't hard to whisper a few words into the ears of the crew, and the poor sap I'd been sent to kill was tossed overboard as an offering to whatever gods they believed in to end the storm.
As soon as he was in the water, the whale swallowed him whole.
To my great surprise, the bastard seemed right at home down there, in the whale's gut. Sure, he wasn't having the time of his life - I can't even describe the endless moaning, crying and praying - but he was still alive. Still alive! Forty days later!
More than a few times, I thought about just stepping in personally and putting an end to the affair, but I had a reputation to maintain. I'd been told to use the whale, and so I would. I just had to ride this thing out.
---
I got the summons back to my boss' office the next morning. To my utter shock, I was told the job had been called off. It wasn't the first time I'd been instructed to drop a job, but I'd really worked for this one!
"You've *got* to be kidding!" I whined, leaning over the desk to stare my boss in the eye.
He chuckled and got up, circling around the desk to put an arm around my shoulders.
"You did good," he said, squeezing my shoulder and shaking me. "I just don't need this one dead any longer."
"So why send me in the first place?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"You know better than to question my orders," he admonished. "I work in--"
"Mysterious ways; yeah, I know," I grumbled.
"Good, good," he said with a smile, patting me on the back.
Returning to his chair, he leaned back and gave me a long look.
"Hmm," he mused, "I think I know what'll cheer you up."
"Yeah?" I asked, annoyed but resigned to move onto my next job.
"How would you like to kill a giant?"
I squinted and stared for a long moment before finally taking a seat.
"I'm listening..."
"Great! Now, for this one, you'll need to use a stone, a sling and a young shepherd..." | I've seen it all. And I mean *it all*. Erotic death (One of my faves), death by electrocution, death by shark even death by turtle. But never have I ever seen death by humpback whale. But I'll have to make it do.
I start making plans. People think death just comes up to you when it's "your" time. But in actuality I don't. I used to do it like that and then the population boomed. I couldn't be everywhere at once, so I created a pocket universe in which time moves so slowly it is effectively stopped compared to your world when I'm in it. I get a notification of a person death due, usually a month in advance. I also get the method or thing that will kill them. Think, John doe, age: 36, tool of death: car. And I just make it work.
So when I got the call for Thomas McTrainFace, age: 28, tool of death: humpback. I was fairly confused, but alas, one month later he's on his way to the Pacific to ride on some poor humpback whale.
The wind and water were hitting and spraying me cooling me, while the sun worked on, to burn my skin. I was riding in a little rant-a-boat, on my way to meet one of nature's greatest creatures, the humpback whale. It was such a long wait. I practiced on dogs, then cows and then bears. I was ready for this. For the thrill of riding buck naked this magestic creature.
As I saw the first sign of a flock of whales, I got excited. By the time the little boat reached them, I was already naked. I jumped off the boat and Sean nto the whale. I got to her blowhole and I started lying down. Oh the bliss, I had at Tha... And I was left on the surface as the whale dove down. No don't leave, I begged. And then a giant shadow came across my face.
As I said, I saw a whole lot of things. But never have I seen death by whale. | |
[WP] You're the grim reaper, and must arrange people's deaths. You're always given a few starting items, such as a car or a knife, but one day you're given a humpback whale. | "End-Maker, there has been a mistake."
A booming voice echoed back in the blackness. "The Sisters make no mistakes, O Bringer of Emptiness. Engage the mortal, and escort her to the Place of the Dead."
The End-Maker has spoken. I arise, and my black robes cast dew on the morning world and give chills to the mountains.
In my right hand is held the Scythe of Life, my holy tool. In my left hand is held something far too large to be known as a tool of End-Making. It is a whale, of the humpback variety.
My endless dark wings give a slight strain as I rise into the realm of under reality and seek out the dimming life thread.
I come to the end of the thread and emerge into the Mortal Plane, my gargantuan water mammal in tow. Who am I to question the will and ways of the Sisters?
The place I have come into is one of the human structures for enclosing creatures of the sea- I surmise with eternal eyes the contraption made to lift heavy objects coming into place above one of the massive pools.
There are people gathered around the device, speaking in on of the thousands of tongues I have known over the times of Earth.
"...the first humpback whale in captivity will now be moved to a more appropriate enclosure; let's give a hand to Ellise, the whale's handler!"
The people clap, and a breathless sigh escapes me. The Sisters ever did favor irony. Ellise glowed slightly in my ethereal vison, as did the whale in captivity. I allowed the incorporeal version of the creature to fade- I knew what needed to happen.
As the doomed creature's handler brought it into position, I whispered ignorance and oversight into the minds of the men. One of the many straps was damaged and passed over; the operator was distracted by a failed relationship the night before. He glowed slightly as well.
Divers looped the wide straps around the serene beast as Ellise climbed down to survey. I encouraged her desire for the beasts' safety; she stepped closer. One of the divers didn't properly attach one of the shackles, and his partners mask was fogged.
I rose, saddened as always. I am Death, but I see what I do.
The crane began to strain, and I whispered panic into the beast. It slipped just slightly from the calculated points of distribution.
The crane lifted the beast from the water and towards the large vehicle of movement; the operator was reminded of his heartbreak. The shackle slipped off. Ellise stepped closer.
I whispered danger. The people began to shout as the creature started to thrash- the crane buckled, and Ellise ran forwards towards her charge. The humans shouted for her to retreat, but it was too late.
My eyes have been desensitized to the ending of life for aeons, yet even I winced. A large splash signaled the end of two mortal lives, and I lifted them from their grimy corpses as the standby crews ran towards the bodies.
I pulled the human and the considerably heavier astral form of the whale into the Void.
We traveled through the darkness, the familiar light growing ahead of us. The human looked at me and seemed to form a question, but I ushered her and her beast through into the next world with no words.
The light closed off, and I was left again in the darkness.
Another tool of End-Making came into my knowledge. It was a gun. I had a flash of the operator from earlier- this would be relatively easy.
The End-Maker's voice boomed again. "The Sisters are pleased, O Bringer of Emptiness. You did whale."
I shook my head beneath my dark robes. Why must the Sisters torture me so?
* JUST made myself a subreddit for my writing. Check it out over at r/bellumaster. * | I've seen it all. And I mean *it all*. Erotic death (One of my faves), death by electrocution, death by shark even death by turtle. But never have I ever seen death by humpback whale. But I'll have to make it do.
I start making plans. People think death just comes up to you when it's "your" time. But in actuality I don't. I used to do it like that and then the population boomed. I couldn't be everywhere at once, so I created a pocket universe in which time moves so slowly it is effectively stopped compared to your world when I'm in it. I get a notification of a person death due, usually a month in advance. I also get the method or thing that will kill them. Think, John doe, age: 36, tool of death: car. And I just make it work.
So when I got the call for Thomas McTrainFace, age: 28, tool of death: humpback. I was fairly confused, but alas, one month later he's on his way to the Pacific to ride on some poor humpback whale.
The wind and water were hitting and spraying me cooling me, while the sun worked on, to burn my skin. I was riding in a little rant-a-boat, on my way to meet one of nature's greatest creatures, the humpback whale. It was such a long wait. I practiced on dogs, then cows and then bears. I was ready for this. For the thrill of riding buck naked this magestic creature.
As I saw the first sign of a flock of whales, I got excited. By the time the little boat reached them, I was already naked. I jumped off the boat and Sean nto the whale. I got to her blowhole and I started lying down. Oh the bliss, I had at Tha... And I was left on the surface as the whale dove down. No don't leave, I begged. And then a giant shadow came across my face.
As I said, I saw a whole lot of things. But never have I seen death by whale. | |
[WP]You are The Bartender. You consoled everyone who set foot in your bar at a time of need, but now you are not sure you can help. | At the edge of the Milky Way, there is a bar hidden away in a little fold of spacetime, like a pocket of air underwater, offering a brief respite from the inexorable march of time. You can only find it if you know where to look.
It was past closing time. Sol kept the bar open when he was awake, and when he grew tired, he closed it up. Without a sun or clocks, there was no reckoning how much time had passed or when the night had come. But he made reasonable guesses.
Sol had dismissed the last of his customers nearly an hour earlier. He washed the glasses, wiped down tables, made a mental note to remind his mucus-skinned regulars from nearby Andromeda to please not allow their fingerprint residue to dry onto the table. He had to chip it away like old glue.
Sol was bent over a similar sticky mess when he heard something crash and tear outside. He poked his head out the door and, because he had forgotten, turned the sign to *closed*.
His dock was half-smashed, bits of wood floating off freely into the black space beyond. Sol scowled at the wreck, more annoyed for the extra work than he cared to admit. On his dock, rather than beside it, was a dinghy of an airship with a gouged hull, its engines whining, pneumatic and shrill, as they slowly wound down to a stop.
Sol walked to the edge of the ruined dock and waited with his arms crossed over his chest for the ship's driver to appear. He still wore his human-ish skin and wished he had changed into something more intimidating before he ventured out. He had half a mind to tell the drunk off and seize their vessel until they fixed his damn port.
But then the ship's captain stumbled into view, and Sol saw the black blood oozing down the creature's chest and coat. His belly dropped. He dashed forward, dropping his good dishtowel, and offered a hand to the ship's captain before he could fall. He had six tentacles, all of which wrapped weakly around Sol's single strong fist before the creature pitched forward, bonelessly, and Sol caught him in his arms.
The bar-tender appraised the bloody, upright cephlapod and said, "You were here earlier, weren't you?"
He recognized this creature and his pale blue skin. [It was the doctor who had been in his bar recently with his grey-eyed captain, her black heart full of unspeakable secrets.](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6qh3r2/wp_a_captain_a_priest_and_a_doctor_walk_into_a/dkxbk4p/) She had never told Sol her name, but her bleeding companion did, once. Sol's brain clicked helplessly until he remembered the creature's name.
"Cilpha Hudi," Sol said, and the alien's notched pupils locked onto Sol's eyes, which were black pits full of little white lights through which he should not be able to see all that he could. "Cilpha Hudi, is all of this your blood?"
"Some of it." Cilpha Hudi spat up brilliant crimson. "The captain is in trouble."
"As much trouble as you're in?"
"More. We tried to pillage the wrong vessel. She thought... we thought..." The creature dissolved into a coughing fit.
Sol helped him stand and half-carried him to the door of his bar. "I don't have any rooms," he muttered through his teeth.
"I'm a doctor. I can fix everything." But Cilpha Hudi looked woozy, and Sol wasn't sure if he meant what he said. "I can fix anything wrong with anyone."
The immortal bar-keeper nodded and looked back into the darkness beyond them, eyes narrowed, scanning the horizon. He could see the faint glow where his little hideaway was sewed up to the rest of space-time. And within that glow, something sleek and gleaming, something coming up on them fast.
"Are you sure you weren't followed?" The cephlapod started crying incoherently, replying in a language Sol could not understand. He slapped at Cilpha Hudi's face and shouted at him, "You have to keep your shit together."
"I'm not sure! I'm not sure!"
Sol swore under his breath and tossed the injured alien over his broad shoulder. He turned sprinting past the shut door to his bar and around the corner to his own little bronze ship, a capsule of a thing made only to get him from point A to point B. He threw Cilpha Hudi inside.
"I have to get some things." Sol turned and ran back into his bar, moving fast. He had half a mind to turn himself into a snarling dragon or serpent, some great and secret horror of the stars, but he did not know if he could defend himself if they doubted his little pocket of the universe was simply an ageless creature's lair. He did not know what kind of weapons they had, or what had happened to that drunk and miserable captain, if she could be saved.
Sol shook his head and reminded himself he needed to focus on saving himself. Saving the injured man bleeding out in his little ship. He stuffed food and medicine and alcohol in a bag and fled out the door just as he saw something bright come screaming across the sky.
Sol dove into the ship beside Cilpha Hudi and closed the door just as the missile struck his bar. The force nearly knocked his ship tumbling headlong into the black abyss, but the ship clung to the strip of land Sol had built. The top floor of his bar exploded in a shower of white flame.
There was no time to stare, no time for horror. Sol jammed the ship into drive and scurried down into the darkness, Cilpha Hudi growing paler and paler beside him.
"I should not have come back here," the cephalpod whispered.
"No. No, you should not have."
***
I based this one something I wrote yesterday, which I linked to earlier in the story and is also right [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/6qh3r2/wp_a_captain_a_priest_and_a_doctor_walk_into_a/dkxbk4p/). I don't think you have to read it for this to make sense, but it's there if you're curious!
~~Part 2 coming as soon as I finish typing it.~~
I combined this with another writing prompt I wrote to be the first part of a series. Here's a link if you're interested: [The Deathless Captain](https://www.reddit.com/r/shoringupfragments/comments/6qtox3/wp_the_deathless_captain_revised/)
/r/shoringupfragments | "John, don't do it man, don't do it! If you do you wouldn't be able to come to my bar." I pleaded.
"Plus, it's not a big deal, you knew she was a cheating slut, I mean for fuck's sake, you started dating while she was dating another guy."
"I don't care! I loved her, when Tom never did. It's not fair. I was a good husband, a good father and I loved them more than anything in the world!" He said as he was wiping tears out of his eyes with his free arm. "It's not fair to me. She's taking the kids, she getting a divorce that'll pretty much leave me broke and worst of all she's going to marry some fucking rich guy who can give her anything she wants, when she wants!". He paused and took a few sips from his beer can.
"Look, John I know life sucks. Trust me, my life ain't picture perfect either. But do I complain? Huh? How many times did I make sure you guys didn't do something dumb or dangerous while you were drunk? How many times did I stop you from making life ruining decisions. And owning a bar ain't that nice and dandy. Trust me, your friend, when I tell don't do this. Take me advice just one more time will you?" I paused, and looked him straight in the eyes.
Just then Christi, that bitch, spoke up. "Yeah, honey, listen to that guy, he knows what he is doing."
John's eyes hardened and met my gaze. "I'm sorry Moe, but for once in all my years I didn't see a clearer path. Thanks for being a good friend, and taking care of me all those times." His hand jerked up, driving the knife through her throat. Blood began pouring out. He jerked back as a plume of blood came out of his chest, then another, and another as the police opened fire. | |
[WP] A knight, a wizard, an archer and a troll gather together in order to play the most exciting role-playing game in recent history: Offices & Humans | "Okay, Mira. You're dead broke, what do you want to do?"
"Well, I'll declare bankruptcy." She smiles and scatters the dice across the table.
"Damn it! Another four."
The OM smiles. "Michael, with almost no experience or skills in intelligence, you wander out and loudly yell to the office, 'I... DECLARE... BANKRUPTCY!!'"
Lysol laughs as he polishes the tip of his arrow, "My turn now?"
"Okay... but Lysol, enough with the attacking people. This is an *office*. Why would anyone bring knives in an office?"
"Hah, right. Because crime is nonexistent in an office," he scoffs. "I want to do a karate demonstration for the whole office."
"A.. Karate demonstration?" Sandri repeats with a glance at Finn.
He chuckles lightheartedly, "He put all his points in Strength and Dexterity, what do you expect him to do?"
Lysol squints at him and throws the dice.
"Alright, a sixteen. You start performing an amazing display of-"
"-WAIT!" Finn interrupts. Everyone turns to face him. Sandri smiles. "I cast a spell of confusion on him."
"He can't do that!" Lysol calls out.
Finn laughs and rolls the dice; eighteen. "No, no. Finn! We're on the same team!"
The OM laughs too, "Your spell is incredibly effective and Lysol, your character is now beating himself up."
"Dammit Finn!"
"..Can I go now?" Sandri jumps in. "I want to try for marriage again." She smiles to Malid. Finn looks down.
"Okay, go ahead and roll."
Sandri blows on the dice and shakes them for good luck.
"How is that even possible!? This is the fourth time in a row." She glares down at the two.
"Well, you failed again. But, since we've already gone through this three times, nothing new really happens."
"Aw come on, it'll be alright. Maybe you should try something new," Finn suggests, still not meeting her eyes. She shrugs.
"Me again!!" Mira exclaims. "This time, I want to make an action movie!"
"In an *office*?"
"Come on, keep it realistic!"
"Hey," Finn smiles, "It could happen." He glances at Sandri. "Anything can happen." | "Do you understand why you are here today?" Inquired the man; glaring from behind his horn-rimmed glasses.
"....i..." stammered Adam, as though he was trying to find his own charisma. The faint hit of a die against the ground broke him from his peevishness
"Because Amanda is an uppity cunt and can't handle the minimal tasks we give her?" Spouted Adam, no longer afraid of the man from HR.
The HR representative lightly chuckled under his breath, clearly shocked at this employees charismatic response.
"No, we are here because you verbally accosted a fellow employee by telling her to 'do her fucking job herself' and to 'get her smelly, puffy taint out of wafting distance or else I am going to pull that stick out of your ass and beat you with it' and this was in response to her question involving an accounting program of which you are senior technician in charge of. It is as a result of these actions and your general lack of remorse for your actions, we have decided to put you on unpaid probation as you await a formal..."
" this is bullshit!" Shouted Absajorn, breaking the table and Marigold's concentration mid speech.
"This is the third time this session that you have forced me into a corner simply for trying to do my job"
" you broke the rules of the office place; this is no different than that time Sir Tyreak failed his sneak roll and was caught stealing food from the break room fridge" sighed Marigold from behind her custom spider-oak DM screen.
" you are not immune to the laws of the office simply because you are a level 8 network Technician. You may not answer to the office supervisor, but we all are under the general mangers purview. Interjected Master Geustero.
The wizard took up his staff and muttered a spell to refill the flagons around the table. "Let us drink and continue the game please!"
"Gods please let us keep on!" Muttered Sir Tyreak, wringing his hands in impatience. " we have been waiting to roll initiative on our group spreadsheet for 35 minutes. If we don't finish it by the end of the business day we will have to push the fiscal Meeting back two days, meaning we have to roll against Thomas in accounting or else he will show us his kids artwork again!"
"They are right, Ab" said Marigold. "Will you yield for two in-game business days and get a chance to roll against your punishment or do you wish to take it to the GM now and instead roll against the whole table for a chance to get back to work now?"
Absajorn sunk down into his chair. " I will yield to the table and roll later..." he whimpered, now nursing his mead.
Marigold let out a relieved sigh. "Now let's get back to that quarterly spreadsheet!" Smiled the DM.
"Finally we can get back to the real action!" Cheered Guestero, smiling from ear to ear.
To be continued. | |
[WP] A knight, a wizard, an archer and a troll gather together in order to play the most exciting role-playing game in recent history: Offices & Humans | "It's your turn" said Lenny, brandishing his robes a little impatiently to Ugnak.
Ugnak roared and pounded the table, causing *Jenny from HR* to fall over onto *Matt from Accounting*. Florian made a gesture to reset the pieces, but Lenny shook his hand away.
"No no leave it, it counts as a move and otherwise it just gets confusing. Brodrick, your move."
Brodrick plucked a string on his bow absent-mindedly and gave an enquiring look that irritated everybody because somehow he was actually winning.
Lenny cleared his throat. "Ahem, it appears that *Jenny from HR* has fallen onto you whilst scattering papers all over the floor. You hear the heavy footsteps of *Colin the Boss* approaching, you were meant to hand in that report to him yesterday, what do you do?"
"Flip onto the wall and then launch myself into the air, as I unleash arrow-upon-arrow into the lifeless torso of *Colin the Boss*" said Brodrick with a casual shrug.
The others nodded, defaulting back to their straightforward logical means of dealing with their problems. Lenny sighed once again as none of them seemed to get it.
"Guys, this is *fantasy* and you are role-playing as the characters you have selected. Now, regardless of what we might do in this situation, what would your character do?"
"What is he armed with?" asked Brodrick, his brows furrowed in deep concentration.
"You have a stapler, a notepad, a fountain pen, and *Jenny from HR* still on top of you. She is quite attractive."
Florian nudged Ugnak, who nudged him back with a wink. "Settle down, settle down, lads" said Lenny suppressing a bemused smile.
Brodrick grinned mischievously. "Very well, I see what has to be done."
"First, I gently remove the fair maid- *Jenny from HR* - off of my person, offering her a helping hand to get up off of the floor. As she is entranced by my tender yet strong physique, I pull her up and into my arms where I hold her gently, staring into her eyes intensely."
"Nice...", said Lenny, "...now finish it off..."
"Using the reflection of her eyes as a guide, I wait for *Colin the Boss* to round the corner, where I thereupon throw *Jenny from HR* ontop him, and make a fast retreat into the nearest cubicle whilst spraying the ink contents of my pen everywhere to mask my speedy exit."
"*Holy shit, that's genius,*" whispered Florian, and then turning to Lenny. "Tell me that's not allowed."
Lenny consulted the *Safety In The Workplace* strategy guide manual, and flicked through several pages quickly. "Well, it doesn't say that you *can't* do that.... so.... Brodrick in the lead once again."
| “Clearly, we have come with purpose burning in our hearts,” said Sir Mirewell, finally breaking the silence. “I assume the rest of you are here to fulfil your extraplanar destinies, as am I.”
His temporary companions merely looked askance at him. “I’m not sure what you think you’re doing here,” said the archer, haughtily – his pointed ears twitching; “but *I’m* here to let off some steam. Could it be that you misunderstood the purpose of the invitation?”
The troll let off an incomprehensible roar. “YOJIN WANTS PLAY. YOJIN BROUGHT DICE.” In one of his hulking hands he gripped some cubes of bone; awkwardly cut, one still dripping with ichor.
“Oh. Do you mean to say the rest of you can’t see that gnome at the table over there?” asked the wizard, looking up from his enormous tome. Sure enough, there was a round table in the centre of the room, at which was seated a gnome, peering over the top of a folded card. He waved.
“Oh,” said Sir Mirewell. “Oh dear. I think I’m here by mistake. No, see, my calendar clearly says ‘Astral Projection classes’. I think the schedule has been edited. I’m not supposed to be here… although I do have free periods afterwards, I could probably sit down for a little while.”
The group took their seats around the table, and the gnome handed out parchment to each. “Once you’ve all established your characters,” said the gnome, grinning ear-to-ear, “we’ll begin.”
Yojin made a noise like he was gargling gravel. “Yojin am Manager class human. Yojin content.”
“You’ve given me a… Pro Grammer,” said the wizard. “I don’t understand any of these abilities but I’m sure I’ll catch up.”
“Intern is a very Dwarvish name,” said the elf. “Can I pick something else? Something like, I don’t know, Fenelian?”
“Intern your class,” said Yojin. “Name different. Must be human.”
Sir Mirewell simply stared at his parchment. “I don’t understand how these figures work. Is this a scroll of magic of some kind?”
The wizard opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“Think of it more as an exercise,” said the elf. “Think about your surroundings and think about yourself. Once you have done that, you will be ready to begin.”
“That’s what the astral projection classes said, too.”
*****
Tankards littered the floor around the table. Yojin was completely out of it, and probably a good thing, as his character had begun eating random members of staff, and was now having a nice long nap in the break room.
“I return to the divine magical device which creates duplicates,” said the wizard. “The Copier of Pho To. I utter a prayer to Pho To’s divine majesty as I prepare to make a copy of my list of codes for the day.”
“And you, Sir Mirewell?”
“Well, isn’t it obvious? I’m going to sneak into the managers’ party they’re having next door!”
“It’s true that you’re wearing a linen shirt rather than polyester, which grants a bonus to stealth. It would be better if you first found a tie to wear as well, but I suppose it can’t be helped,” said the gnome.
“Alright, roll to bypass the secure locking system.” |
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