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Nobody Could Think of a Good Hashtag, Though 1200 Words Prompt: Volcanic Eruption Flash Rule: A Happy Ending Fafnir smelled trouble, over the salt surf and slightly sulfuric smoke coming off the mountain. All was well with his other senses. He saw the surfers riding the waves in, heard the ocean and the low seismic rumbles of the mountain, felt the warm sun and the prickling of his slowly regenerating wing-stubs on his back. “If you're here for a fight,” he said without turning around, “Can it wait a few days? I'm on vacation.” “No.” It was a young woman's voice. “What made you think-” Farnir turned around. “I can smell your dad's powers and weapons on you,” he said. “You're the new Dragonslayer, right?” She nodded. “So why else would you track me down?” “Honesty,” she said, “I still don't get why you and he fought so much. I mean, you're both heroes, right.” “What they tell me,” said Fafnir. “I never knew him, you know. Didn't even know who he was until I woke up with powers and the Sharpest Sword and Unbreakable Shield crashing through my window. I guess I just wanted to talk to someone who did.” “All right, Grab a couple of beers and sit down- wait, you are old enough to-” “I'm twenty-five,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Also, like more than half of both of our twitter followers have been shipping us since I went public, a sort of Buffy/Angel kind of thing, so I thought I should at least meet you.” “Let's make a deal: I'll pretend to understand more than half of those words if you promise not to explain them.” * * * “Thing about your father, he was a bit of an rear end in a top hat. Also gullible as hell, ready to believe whatever anyone pretending to be with the government said about me. Blamed me for his own father's death, which is fair, but your grandfather, the first Dragonslayer, was a loving Nazi so I've never even felt bad about that one. And a couple of times your dad was possessed by his dad's ghost.” * * * “I mean, I knew Mom had a wild life before I came around, was a major cape-chaser, but I never knew which one she managed to catch. So why here?” “What?” “Why did you go here for your vacation?” “Oh,” said Fafnir. “Well, I spent a year or so here back in the seventies. Got cursed, transformed into a human with no powers, so I laid low. Watched the beach. Learned to surf. Just about the only thing I missed when it wore off.” “Why can't you surf now?” “Too heavy. I'd sink the board.” Fafnir sat up. “You hear that?” The Dragonslayer shook her head. “Someone in trouble, on the slope.” He ran toward the mountain slope, and she followed. * * * “God drat it,” said Fafnir. “Recording. Got to be some kind of trap.” Sure enough, four orange-metal robots stepped out from behind a small outcropping and attacked. The Dragonslayer swung the Sharpest Sword at one, taking it in the arm. The blade stuck in, and the robot fired a laser beam from its other hand at her. “That stings!” she said. “Then use your shield,” said Fafnir, punching one of the robots in the chest. The metal dented, then reformed. “None of you ever did use the shield enough.” “Say,” she said, “After this is over, you want to grab dinner or something?” “Are you asking me on a date?” asked Fafnir, pulling on a robotic arm, stretching it a few inches but not getting it loose. “Wouldn't want to disappoint the fans,” she said, wrenching her sword free. “You don't want to go out with me. My track record there ain't good.” “Please,” said the Dragonslayer as she sliced off the robot's laser finger, “Out of us, I'm the disaster.” “Nora Wilde, first girl I met in modern times. Dead.” Fafnir leaped into a robot, knocking it down and standing on its chest. “Cory Grisham. First guy I dumped, killed himself two weeks later. Mentioned me three times in the note.” “Liz Cole. Died, then undead, then regular dead again.” “Sam Ligget. Dumped me for his quarterback, came back saying he thought he might be bi, then decided he was all the way gay.” “Ravenshadow. Joined up with her ex and became a supervillain.” Fafnir, still standing on the robot's torso, grabbed an arm and started pulling. “George Gamil, Ed Blevin, March Loris. Same deal, without the super-” She brought the shield up and bashed one robot into another. “These are pretty tough for robots, aren't they?” “Yeah,” said Fafnir. “Circuitry, Alchemy, and Sorcery. Babel tech, this has to be The Tower's trap.” The arm pulled loose, and he started swinging it at the robot's head. “Where was I? Right. The Moment. Supervillain all along.” “Bill Baker. Same.” “Supervillain?” “Well, he dealt cocaine. What's the Tower want from this? I mean, these things couldn't actually beat you-” She was interrupted by an explosion that would have liquified her eardrums before she got the Dragonslayer's powers, as the mountain erupted. “drat!” said Fafnir. He looked at the outcropping the robots had hidden behind. Not tall enough. He grabbed the stone and lifted, using all of his draconic strength to pull a chuck of stone out of the mountainside. The lava, flowing in waves faster than natural, parted around it and left them safe for the moment. “So, um,” said the Dragonslayer. “How dangerous is lava? I mean, to us.” “Dangerous enough to kill you. You or just about anyone short of the Paragon Family. Me, well, worse than death. I fell into lava once. Burned to the bones, then kept trying to regenerate for centuries with no space to grow. When people finally cracked those rocks and brought me back, I went full-on berserk, killed everyone for miles around.” “Really?” “Yep. Now, turns out they were all loving Nazis, so I don't lose much sleep over it or nothing. We're in some trouble here. Too far to jump to safety, and this rock isn't going to survive the next wave.” “Is there going to be a next wave?” asked the Dragonslayer. An explosion from the mountain answered her question. “I have an idea.” * * * Fafnir shot the curl, surfing the wave of lava with the young blonde Dragonslayer on her back, riding her Unbreakable shield on the molten earth, the joy of it outweighing the burning sting of the occasional droplet of lava. They reached the water where the molten rock turned merely scorching and got down. “Lots of people going to need help,” said Fafnir. “You go left, I'll go right.” “Gotcha,” said the Dragonslayer, handing him a card. “Here's my contact. When you track down the Tower, call me. My fight too.” “Sure,” said Fafnir. “Great, Faffie, it's a date!” Faffie? “It's not a-” he said, but she was out of hearing, especially after the blasts. He smelled trouble, speeding away.
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Dec 12, 2016 06:42
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In. and I'll take a flash rule from one of you.
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Dec 13, 2016 08:36
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Empty 797 words Flash: Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.) You cut a haunch of meat from my thigh. I scream, but do not die. The flesh, fully separated from my body and exposed to the air of this fallen world putrefies into a mass of greasy black rot and squirming maggots. You leave, disgusted, frustrated, nervous. You return, with your employer, the sorcerer Zagras. You demonstrate the problem, using a far smaller piece. “Do you know what he screams?” asks Zagras. You do. I scream in a language older than man, old as creation. You don't know a word of it, and yet- “Empty,” you say. “The throne is empty.” “Just so,” says Zagras. “The angel blasphemes, denying God. And yet it does not fall.” He fills a pan with corn oil, dips my left hand into it. “Only one possibility. It must be true.” He reaches for your butcher's knife and swings it, taking my fingers at the second knuckle. They sink without rotting. “You'll need to do the entire preparation under oil. I'll have a suitable quantity delivered.” He walks away. You wait for him to turn, to chastise you for not knowing this already, for wasting meat, but he doesn't. Your deceit lives another day. 'The man who can cook anything'. At the start, all it meant was that you were willing to serve horse and cat and dog, but your reputation spread in dark circles. Lion. Panda. Orangutan. Easy enough to fake a skill for rich fools with no idea how these should be prepared. When customers arrived with butchered meat of provenience unspoken, you told yourself, perhaps an enemy's beloved pet. But you didn't believe it. Why else would you stop tasting while you cooked? Then came Zagras. For him you cooked yeti, cockatrice, mermaid, and whenever you balked he found your price and paid it. You cut and slice the meat of my other leg, under oil, frying until tender. Zagras serves it to his guests. Billionaires, heads of state, and anonymous people of power, all in search of ultimate sensual pleasure, all convinced that they are strong-willed beyond addiction. It is everything they dreamed, everything they've missed in their lives. They cannot keep it down, spewing their stomachs across the table. Zagras's men recover the morsels, storing them in Tupperware tubs. They will to anything to eat their bite of me again, and again. He sends the tubs to his allies, those who helped him to draw me down, that they might gain power or money or fulfill specific humiliation fantasies. Zagras has no need for temporal power. He tells you his plan, what you must do. My heart, liver, and lungs, wrapped in my stomach.. An angel haggis, to let him breach barriers between worlds and seize the empty throne. An ambitious plan. A plan that might have worked, even, had you known more of haggis than what a few furtive internet searches told. You, well, I cannot say you do your best. But you behave in accord with your nature. You remove the organs, and still I did not die. My Creator did not provide for that mercy. You prepare them, and Zagras does his rituals. He looks on it and smiles. He lifts the hot pudding to his head. His smile grows wider than his mouth, and he unhinges his jaw like a serpent and swallows it whole. Power pulses in him, glowing purple in waves from his gut. Then his face drops with pain as he starts to burn from the inside out. His gut implodes into incandescent red negative space, leaving legs and arms and head to twitch on the floor and die. A pocked of air, trapped in the lungs, and all was undone. You hear snapping chains as things no longer bound seek their freedom. You could escape with them. Instead you return to me, to my bath of oil. You pluck out my eyeballs, sealing them in glass vials, then crack my skull and fill a sous vide bag with angel brains. You know how to reach Zagras' allies, know what they could pay. And still, I do not die. The future is usually not mine to see, but when things are inevitable, I know. And it is inevitable that you will make some small error: a nick with a knife, an absent-minded taste or licked finger. You will consume a piece of me, just enough to let me speak to you, show you these events from my perspective every night and inattentive moment. And I will tell you other things. I will tell you how the throne came to be empty, and you will fear death too much to contemplate suicide's escape. And that will be justice, and justice is all that is left to me.
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Dec 19, 2016 05:09
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In
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Dec 19, 2016 20:43
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 http://writocracy.com/thunderdome/?story=4446&title=Corn%21
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Dec 21, 2016 21:12
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Crit of farchanter's To Capture the Clouds This is not a very good opening line/opening paragraph at all. Very weak and muddled. Let me line crit here: quote:Ever since his fourteenth birthday a month ago, Stéfan had felt a worry gripping him. Not a good hook at all. 'felt' is a weak first verb. Even 'worry gripped Stefan' would be better, although I'd prefer starting with something less abstract. It weighed on him like a lead weight weighed like a weight? An anchor might be cliché, but would be better than the repetition. tied around his neck, creating an awful pressure at the The second paragraph could probably also be compressed to a single line. Or, for that matter, you might just cut the first two paragraphs entirely, start with the balloon ride. There's no real need to pre-declare the protagonist's mental state, really. Actually show us Stefan and his friend's conversation with those words instead. After the troublesome start, once you start actually telling the story it works much better. There's not quite enough opposition or peril, though. And the ending feels like it's pulling in two different directions at once, but two directions that are too close together. The urge to explore form seeing the world from a great height does the job for Stefan's ambitions, so being closest to the Aurora doesn't add much. I suspect this story could do with a second plot, something involving Stefan's personal relationships among his community, and the closing dialog could then be used to have him moving forward against whatever his problems are in that area, in some way that ties into their journey.
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Dec 23, 2016 22:00
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A Snowball's Chance 1019 Words No fooling, there I was, the morning of Christmas Eve with almost a foot of snow on the ground. This was back in my old neighborhood, up in Indiana were you actually get that kind of snow that time of year sometimes. I put the call out to the rest of the squadron and got kitted up. Winter gear, hoods, boots and gloves. We met on the white fields, surveyed territory, divided labor. The only place to build was the top of the hill. Anything less ran the risk of being battered down by enemy sleds. Joel and Alice handled the architecture and started construction while Tyler and I gathered ammunition, piling snowballs high in flying saucer sleds. The walls of packed snow came up just in time. The enemy was prompt. Brutus and Luke and Colsen, and their followers of the day. They were older than us, and meaner and more numerous. They fired the first volley. Our walls held. We returned fire, scoring several direct hits. The battle was on. They probed our defenses, advancing under shield or at a run. We fought them back, made them pay for every inch so dearly that they had to retreat. Our tactics were solid. Our strategy was sound. Our logistics, on the other had, were deeply lacking. To restock our ammo stores meant exposing ourselves to a vicious enemy counterattack. With covering fire, and with the fact that they didn't have enough soldiers to watch every side, we managed to stay stocked. A truce was called near noon, and the nurses came out to us. I know it's wrong, that each one of them was some other soldier's mom (those lucky, lucky souls) but when an angel of mercy like Marie with a big smile on her perfect face and snowflakes in her short dark hair and hands you a crisply-cut sandwich and a cup of hot cocoa, well, it would take a heart of stone not to fall in love just a little bit. The truce was short, and when we got back to our stations there was worse news. The enemy had reenforced, almost doubling their numbers. Our ammo stocks were good, thanks to Tyler wolfing his lunch and spending the time making balls, but our long-term prospects weren't good. The battle slowed down. The ground surrounding our fort was a no man's land where neither side could go without coming under concentrated fire. A few brief probes proved that. We settled in for a long siege. Tyler couldn't take the pressure. He snapped, grabbed a snowball and snap-shot it at my head, giggling to himself. He threw more at the rest of our team until Joel secured him. Military justice was swift and severe. Alice read the verdict. For trying to frag his offices, Tyler would get three snowballs. One down the back of his shirt, two in his pants. We carried out the sentence. Tyler tried to keep a brave face, but when the cold snow reached his family jewels he broke, running home, not caring about the hits he took on the way. His war was over, and he was coming home to central heating and a warm bath. He was the lucky one. There was dissent in the enemy ranks as well, with pitched battles breaking out between two camps. We tried to take advantage of their misfortune. Alice took a sled and went out for an ammo run. She managed to fill it full of snowballs stacked three high before they realized what she was doing. Under fire, she pulled it up the hill towards the fort. Then three balls hit her at once and she lost her grip. The sled slid downhill, hitting a tree and spilling much of its precious cargo. Alice limped into the fort. She had a strained ankle, wouldn't be making ant more runs, would be lucky to manage to provide covering fire. Joel was our best shot, he had to keep the enemy at bay with the snowballs we had left. It was up to me. I charged down the hill, trying to reach the ammo sled before the enemy. Balls flew past me, to my left, to my right. Then one hit me square in the head, hard and sharp. I fell to the ground. My focus narrowed, and I realized I was only looking out of my right eye. I put my hand to my head, then let it fall in front of my good eye. My gloves were covered in bright red blood. It must have taken some time for the ambulance to come and medevac me, but that's not how I remember it. I remember getting hit, seeing the blood, and then being loaded onto the ambulance, my father beside me, helping me stay awake. Then I remember the hospital, the doctor telling me that if I'd been hit just half an inch lower I'd probably have lost the eye. As it was, sixteen stitches, and a scar that would have me in bangs for years. We never did learn the truth about that Geneva-Conventions-Violating snowball: who threw it, who made it with the rock inside, who knew about it. It wasn't the kind of war where the victors got to put the losers on trial for war crimes. It was the kind where the peace is just a long uneasy truce and the whole neighborhood litigated those questions fruitlessly for years. Probably still are now. Only the guilty knew the truth, and they weren't talking. So that's why I don't do any kind of sports involving balls without wearing these. How I came to get the nickname 'goggles', which isn't so awful as nicknames go. I mean, I could say it's dad insisting on that, and that wouldn't be a lie, but the fact is I want them to. Something comes near my face without them and I'm back on that field, under fire, the flinchiest flincher that ever was. It changes you, being in a war. You don't ever leave, not really. And war is Hell. And Hell is cold.
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Dec 25, 2016 10:13
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In with Get Insurancequote:Whether it’s renter’s insurance, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, or life insurance, there is a certain peace of mind knowing that you’re covered in an unexpected event.
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Dec 27, 2016 03:22
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http://writocracy.com/thunderdome/?story=5376&title=Lantern-Fish
Thranguy fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Jan 3, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 08:18
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Thunderdome 2017teen: Running this one into the ground way past 2020ty
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Jan 3, 2017 04:16
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