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No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Prompt: You had your fifteen minutes. You squandered them. What now?

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No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Here were supposed to be dragons, but they are out to lunch. You need to wait and the weather is making it hard not to be upset.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Go. Blue. Red. Flash. Green. Red. Flash. Yellow. Red. Flash. Sound. Stop.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Rewrite an ancient Roman scene, using at least one anachronistic piece of modern technology to skillfully derail things. Include Norse Gods too.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
We are running a very elaborate checklist. Everyone hopes that something was missed. Nothing was and we regretfully have to proceed to the next stage.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: my thoughts circle like ancient sharks when my feet have trespassed 'cross sainted grass blades

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

:siren: :catdrugs: :burger: TODAY'S PROMPT FEBRUARY 28th 2017: there is the sound of music from on high, and a breaking of the sky. :burger: :catdrugs: :siren:

male suicide

Ever changing, but starlight burning, and being drawn somewhere. Garrett didn't know, until he death-saw Joan, and knew it was a place.

Good, or bad? Joan tries to death-see. Garrett couldn't tell, and to his sight, this far in the drawing, it doesn't matter.

Flames all over, licking each other's edges, burning the virginities of the flux. Shadows hidden deep so they might as well be light. Something like dusk, somewhere, but that's a closing time, and time is still open, though decaying, like olden scrolls.

Think about it, Joan death-sees. Garrett's been thinking. Doesn't seem to matter. Blood in his atoms, if nowhere else. Maybe blood between his lines.

Blood everywhere. Joan. It's a scream that reaches all his aspects, 'till he's more diamond than kite.

Then the fear is black, cold as teeth.

What's at the end? An oracular. Trying desperately to death-see. But death sight is fear, always held back, only clung to by the brave and craven.

Necrofauna, Joan death-sees. Necrofauna, Garrett death-sees. Necrofauna, they both death-see. Necrofauna. Necrofauna. Necrofauna.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Mar 18, 2017

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless

5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: my thoughts circle like ancient sharks when my feet have trespassed 'cross sainted grass blades

"Praised be God, the Lord.", I mutter as I cross the grass.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", like butter I bypass the glass.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", the shutter I harass with class.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", "Nutter!", I utter, as I reach impasse.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", big cutter so I can pass the mass.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", I stutter, their nerve gas has sass.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", the clutter!, alas, I feel no stress.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", heart aflutter I surpass and ingress.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", Poisoned supper! Success! I egress.

"Praised be God, the Lord.", that I don't have to keep saying that. They should be dead by the morning. loving saints and their telepathy.

Long live the North Wind Deiciders, the men who have made up their minds to be free!

Okua
Oct 30, 2016

quote:

prompt: my thoughts circle like ancient sharks when my feet have trespassed 'cross sainted grass blades


She's sitting in her parlour putting on the powders. Red rouge, white dust. She knows how she wants to be embalmed when she dies, but she has many years left to promenade through the lit-up city of saints.

She’ll go past the statues. The judging glares. That, every day.

And past the churches. The voices. Today every congregation will sing a hymn to youth and light.

To the park - past the trees so old that they slouch and drag their branches through the river water when it is windy.

She is not at all like willows, stiff as she puts on her dress. Her underskirt is all hoops and wires, and she drags her fingers around the circles. She has to look like this to catch the men standing in the courtyards before the grand cathedral, those staring and talking and doing their best to keep their hats on when it's windy. She walks slowly past them as well as she can in cumbersome clothing.

The last part of the outfit is a pair of black shoes that make her taller. She looks them over. There is powder on her fingertips. She leaves a trail on all she touches.

She touches the heel of a shoe.

The hymn begins, runs like water through the street, taking the path of least resistance with the gutter-people who’ll hum it all day, rising enough to make a puddle on the square and in the mouths of passing women, becoming a river outside her front door. Her head is filled with the verses written in the faces of stone saints. She dips her fingertips into the flood.

She discovers, upon reaching the park, that she never put the black shoes on.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Prompt: The secret country of Taured exists. You'd know, being one of the people who killed their ambassador and participated in the cover-up. The problem is, we now need help of the people from Taured. Awkward.

Hammer Bro.
Jul 7, 2007

THUNDERDOME LOSER

Prompt: They no longer exist, but if they did, they'd try to stop me.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Prompt: The woman is carrying a cross up a hill. Saturn is overhead. The moon is red and in pieces. The end of days is coming.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: He knew he was wrong, but he chose to argue anyway. The heat was oppressive, despite the downpour.

Emiko (Clumsascence)

It's the chems, Royce says. His voice is a whisper on an ill-fated wind. Emiko shakes her head.

Emiko. Born of an Emily. Emily is the code, she always says.

It's just us, she says. Something in us finds sorrow, fast as heat.

Then try not taking them, he says. The rain licks at his lips, scarred from picking and scraping.

Theres something in Emiko's eyes. A spark, if not a fire.

I havent taken chems for weeks, she says. Don't worry, Royce. Got your fallacious back, as always. Let me worry about philosophy.

Royce feels the weight of the pill clutched to his palm by fingertips. It's a breezy thing. It feels like it wants to float away.

Emiko is the code, he thinks, and takes it. Ponderance washes over him, and reverence, for the rain that always falls, jealous of his tears.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

:siren: :catdrugs: :burger: TODAY'S PROMPT March 7th 2017: we are children, together, under a raw new sun :burger: :catdrugs: :siren:

O MY GOD drat

Lasandra's fingers blister and break off. Her holovatar's disentegrating as she misplays. The music in her blood is frenetic, too complicated to describe. Something heavy and weird.

She hears voices shouting from afar. Just needs to see it different.

What is difference, she thinks, this far in the game?

Her nanobike smashes into the deeptruck so far her skeleton is halfway across space and time when it re-assembles.

The world here is pink, like something long chewed off and spit aside.

She can't even remember who the voices belong too.

If I'm not winning, she thinks, it doesn't matter.

'Cause from now on these are my rules, hard and soft, like the boys I always wished I could touch.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: Everything is backwards and sideways. Her agility is unmatched. Only three more to go.

Snippets

Kyle-Mindi hesitates. First time, he thinks, in my life. His life is just a spectrum of decided indecision.

I'll be good, he thinks, then plunges forward.

He pulls aside vines. In the clearing Mary hugs Jesus to her breasts. There's another child there, with tangled hair and a knowing look.

Kyle hoists his spear.

Only three more to go.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: "your database doesn't cover the battles we had in space"

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: I'm joyful. I'm beautiful. I'm loved. Everything is fine.

Float

The blue indigo butterfly flutters with the breeze. Iua watches, extending claws to meet at epicentre over her palm. She's brave but lazy and not sure if she's hungry.

She watches it float, the wind cutting through its wingtip, widening a slow tear. It sorrows her, but only a glacier, not a sharp sliver. The colour splashing across them both is cold and clear. The butterfly bends and hangs in the wind.

She feels her tongue uncoil, a part of herself she doesn't control. She feels it unspool. She wants to weave the butterfly into her day, though means its death.

'Sdeath on the wind. Her apex primacy. She doesn't really like it.

Still, as her tongue snakes out, she reflects. Sees herself in the reflection, in herself. Coiled around bracken branch, river green with jaundiced flecks of yellow.

Another glacier day. Another stream of volcanic ash over what thinks it can float.

She holds the coil, finds the hanging butterfly, and melts it.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Mar 26, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: physical and spiritual debugging

take the moon fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Mar 31, 2017

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
A reclusive writer, she was a shy and bookish girl. For her day job she wore round glasses, a polka dot dress, a disarming smile and a loaded shotgun.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
We are out of fuel. Did you hear me, dumbass? We are loving out of fuel! poo poo!

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

We are out of fuel. Did you hear me, dumbass? We are loving out of fuel! poo poo!

Yeast

Gala types another S.O.S. into the interface that flashes holographs metres from her face. The A.I. on top doesn't seem to get it.

This isn't a math problem, she thinks. It just can't kill me yet.

The interface is laid over a glowing dark cockpit. Schema remind her where in some alt universe, a biped is trying to navigate the clumsy pangs of adolescence.

Wham. The inside of another locker.

If I could just get this right, she thinks, I'd never let go.

A transmission encodes itself into the interface. "Hey, boss." It's a warship with more lasers than a death station. In the alt it's a kid with a backwards baseball cap.

TREAT AS HOSTILE? The interface spells in front of her.

A huge warship with weapons pointed at her.

What would the point be?

LAY DOWN ARMS, she spells out. CEASEFIRE.

Let's see what this warship wants.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: "I can't sing so I make movies"

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
Prompt: And so it came back full circle. The Gods once more have ascended to the aether, leaving only legends in their wake.

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless
The birthday is coming. How does one give a gift to someone who needs everything but will accept nothing? The ground rules of reality itself will need bypassing.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

The birthday is coming. How does one give a gift to someone who needs everything but will accept nothing? The ground rules of reality itself will need bypassing.

yr smile could wreck me

It was a short touch, like a skyscrapered fly. It was everything Keryrlas could do to not glass the cluster pool.

It was void and faith at once.

"My dogs gotta eat too," Arao says.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
stacking up graves here

someone come at me

:tem:

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
2 make it easier for ppl

:rip: prompt mausoleum 2.22 :rip:

No Gravitas posted:

The birthday is coming. How does one give a gift to someone who needs everything but will accept nothing? The ground rules of reality itself will need bypassing.



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: "your database doesn't cover the battles we had in space"



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: The woman is carrying a cross up a hill. Saturn is overhead. The moon is red and in pieces. The end of days is coming.



Hammer Bro. posted:

Prompt: They no longer exist, but if they did, they'd try to stop me.



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: The secret country of Taured exists. You'd know, being one of the people who killed their ambassador and participated in the cover-up. The problem is, we now need help of the people from Taured. Awkward.



No Gravitas posted:

Rewrite an ancient Roman scene, using at least one anachronistic piece of modern technology to skillfully derail things. Include Norse Gods too.



No Gravitas posted:

Go. Blue. Red. Flash. Green. Red. Flash. Yellow. Red. Flash. Sound. Stop.



No Gravitas posted:

We are running a very elaborate checklist. Everyone hopes that something was missed. Nothing was and we regretfully have to proceed to the next stage.



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: You had your fifteen minutes. You squandered them. What now?



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: March 13th is Holi, the Hindu holiday of colors, love and forgiveness. Will the bad luck of the unlucky 13 win? Or will the carefree joy triumph? The talking black cat knows the answer.



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: Numbers. You need the numbers. You need all of them. All of them. The numbers are important, yes they are.



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: A new warlord rules the streets of the city. The party was interrupted by an armed gunman with a sense of humour. A muffin has been left behind.



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: He knew he was wrong, but he chose to argue anyway. The heat was oppressive, despite the downpour.



No Gravitas posted:

A reclusive writer, she was a shy and bookish girl. For her day job she wore round glasses, a polka dot dress, a disarming smile and a loaded shotgun.



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: "I can't sing so I make movies"



No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: And so it came back full circle. The Gods once more have ascended to the aether, leaving only legends in their wake.



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: a vagrant-core story about ascension



SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

:siren: :catdrugs: :burger: TODAY'S PROMPT FEBRUARY 25th 2017: the great stories are the ones only that author could've penned -- today, break all the rules and just do you. Also, diamonds are the hardest material known to man. :burger: :catdrugs: :siren:



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: killed my goddess, left for japan


5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: complex perplexity



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: what you've built means nothing weighed against what you've left behind



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: 片仮名, カタカナ



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: 本間 芽衣子 (めんま)



5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

"ive got friends that know sign language"

quote:

nothing


5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: krypto rage

take the moon fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Apr 9, 2017

flerp
Feb 25, 2014

5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

stacking up graves here

ghosts to each other

the graveyard is made out of dreams. gravestones, cold grey, stand like bullheaded statues, guarding the dead from the living. the men and women are no longer in the dirt. there's only what they left behind. bones, skin, ice. only the living go to graveyards, where they drop down rainbow pinwheels and pink roses. they recognize the names etched into the stone, but that's all the ghosts are. names, sounds, utterances, missed timed apologizes and a shouting match in the downstairs office.

the graveyard is off the side of the freeway, the fence warm from the summer sun. the ghosts slip between the cracks in the metal and it is only when you are in the middle of the graveyard, of the dead brown grass and faded rocks, that you are not haunted. you still hear them speak outside, laugh, joke, beer bottle clack together. the dead are living just out of sight, and you can only pull out weeds from above your father's corpse. you wanted to ask the ghosts, their bodies mist and their voices dust, if you can join them, but they cannot understand you. they swirl around you, sink into your skin, dredge up feelings of panic, of dread, that phone call from the hospital.

you used to want to ask them if they ever wanted to stop living. now, you keep your distance and listen, their sounds soft. at night, they get close, curl up next to you, and whisper. their words are like fog. impossible to understand. you want them to stop, to stop being warm next to you. they remind you of her. she does not have a grave, but you've built one up for her. it is a divot in the grass, where an icecube melted. it is her, all you have left of her. you are alone, in a graveyard, listening to ghosts live. she is not dead, so you cannot hear her, but you know she lives and hate that she breathes the same air as you. you hate that she is cold at night, that she might remember your face, remember your touch, and miss it. you hate that she lives when you are both ghosts to each other, each of you faded memories like a light finger touch.

you dont want to ask the ghosts anything, anymore. you only listen to them in case you hear a new voice. hers, so you might be able to say something to her. you dont know what, but that doesnt matter.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
spex v flerp in a from beyond the grave brawl because anarchy rules and there are no rules

quote:

stacking up graves here

i didn't see it coming
(나는 그것이 오는 것을 보지 못했다)


1. Emerge Cases

Leonila Vales falls off the freeway to miss a Slade moto that she hacked for insychronicity.

They'll be the death of me, she thinks. Thinks twice because the first time didn't drive it enough.

The flame gnomes pick their way from the wreckage, loom on her. She reaches reflexive for her tonal.

The gnomes have beards burnt charcoal black from blistering skin.

If she's not careful, she'll ascend here, to a sky dark beyond reckoning. They have dagger teeth and cold eyes.

This isn't where she wanted to be, when she charged her tonal at home. It's for emerge cases and she prays every day doesn't turn emerge.

A headhunter deconstructed so it's her throat under the knives. She lands in an amber brown ditch. The deep forest behind her stretches to an azure horizon. She feels the blood coursing down her spine, the energy of it, to jet out and coat the canopy.

She thinks about jumping, to save her nerve cells the time and space of their collusionary serrators.

Instead she primes the tonal, hoping it won't misfire, blinding her or killing her.

2. Hour By Hour

Her own blood is sepia. The Slade must have cut her with a razorthin windowtip as it cut by. It sparks along the tonal, the tube glowing iridescent as if from beyond God.

It flickers down her palm, running electric indigo, the sparks curling black at the corners.

The gnomes leer closer to her. They laugh like hissing wasps.

She thumbs the press and prays for rain.

Her palm engulfs in flame. For a moment she doesn't feel pain. She just feels warmth, like something tried to care about her and couldn't work it right. It's only there the moment it takes for one self to die and the other to be born.

Re-incarnation, hour by hour, and this was its time. Her skin crystallizes, splits, hardens again until the tonal doesn't hurt anymore.

What's the point? she thinks. I just died anyway, the moment I took violent carapace.

Any other way of seeing would be delusion.

3. The Winds

They're not advancing too fast, not laughing too hard. I never feel so alone, she thinks, as when I'm about to kill.

It's the work of moments. Tattered skin, broken jaws, scalps. Head hunter. What did they think that meant?

Then she isn't there anymore, because she's listening to something else.

She's listening to rain falling. It won't cleanse her. The blood has caught in her fissures and cracks, and when she dies, is born again, it'll be there, mixed with her blood, pumping through.

But it will fall on the deep forest, and whatever lives there will grow, young enough for solace, old enough to climb. The winds will rustle over the bracken, telling it not to die.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 7, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
im gonna die of a sky burial b4 any of u other chumps take me on

:ninja: dying lol

ziasquinn
Jan 1, 2006

Fallen Rib
Prompt: you know the edges of its fingers stretched across that place. Crossed; cats cradle.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

Better Fred Than Dead posted:

Prompt: you know the edges of its fingers stretched across that place. Crossed; cats cradle.

thisll have 2 do

Opening Incantation

Her reflection was a shadow. A deep purple in the glow. She wasn't sure where she was going.

She just journeyed, far enough to break her wings.

Forgot they'd already been broken, not by space, but by time.

It wasn't loving random. Some slag had grassed her out by the fields.

An angel, staring into space, looking for the motes that were already within.

There was a note there. Something she saw in herself that she couldn't see again.

She thought he wasn't real. But he was. She saw him.

Saw him thrice, just to forget again.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
still w8ing

:ninja:

No Gravitas
Jun 12, 2013

by FactsAreUseless

How much more must I wait?

She said she would be back, she said... She always keeps her word.

I have been here for a decade, waiting. I know she will be back.

Honey, not even death will stop you, I know it.

Please come back.

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

Prompt: I'm joyful. I'm beautiful. I'm loved. Everything is fine.

Inborn (Endless Misery Version)

Eusebio has stayed in the crying room longer than anyone else. He’s been there two weeks, sure that someone else might need to use it, but he can’t get himself to move.

Every morning he eats auto-materialized food. He eats blueberry pancakes most days, but they don’t cheer him up. When he’s done eating he feels disgusted with himself. Disgusted that resources were wasted on him.

When he’s done eating tears spill out like tendrils, creeping down his cheeks. He curls into a ball, wrapping arms around legs and holding them tight. Everything hurts. It’s like knives, cutting into him, digging deep, ripping out his soul.

He’s in deep space. Deep space, a satellite called the Catechin, and nothing will change for him. Nothing will change for any of them.

He hears Herta’s voice come over the comms. “Dude, are you drinking water? You need to stay hydrated.”

“Yeah,” he says, though he hasn’t for a couple days. Maybe when he has no tears to flow, he’ll be able to force himself to leave.

“Talk to me,” Herta says.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m worthless. I’m garbage. I should just whip myself out the airlock.”

“You’ve been in there too long,” Herta says. “It’s not venting anymore. Now you’re stuck in the sorrow cycle. What the Feel Priests call Murk.”

Deep down, he knew that. It doesn’t help, hearing it from Herta.

“I deserve Murk,” he says. His teeth are clenched. His heart is beating in steady rhythm, tick tock, tick tock.

“You have to fight it,” Herta says. Her voice sounds like rain falling, a steady pitter patter.

He’s in trouble. He knows he is. He digs fingernails into his palms, trying to feel something. Feels the scorch of pain.

It stirs memories. He’s talking to the priests at the temple. “Can you handle the emotional pressures of deep space isolation?” they say, concerned tones.

Yeah, he had said. As long as the Feel God is in his heaven, I’m fine.

He’s staring at the wall now, decidedly Not Fine. At the auto-materializer’s sleek chrome, built into the Catechin’s indigo walls.

“Do something different,” Herta says. “Break a routine.”

Okay, he thinks. Pancakes for dinner. The meal comes together with sparkles.

He chews each bite overlong, the juice seeping into his mouth. His teeth click together. He remembers summer days.

Summer days, back on Tesinon. There were full temples for crying on Tesinon. Why had he left? He remembers the stained glass, the torches, the tabernacles. And outside, when you were done crying, the grass was green and bright.

***

It’s like love, what makes the Catechin beam messages to the Feel God on every frequency it can think of. Herta feels it. She’s split between its promise and giving up. The Feel God isn’t answering.

“I’m sick of this,” Olen says, spitting. He doesn’t care now if he grimes up his station. His keys are filthy, grit and hair between the keys. “He isn’t out there. No one’s out there.” His spit is translucent in the Catechin’s indigo light.

She wants to check on Eusebio, but doesn’t. Live lips stain. They bruise and cut. She knows the sound of her voice, anyone’s voice, builds up in the Crying Room. The Crying Room is for solitude.

This is awkward. Her pressure is the destiny of inbirth. Her stomach acids roll and crash.

“Just because you were born to Feel Priests, you’re happy to stay out here forever,” Olen says. She can’t focus, because Eusebio is still sobbing in the background.

He hasn’t vented in a while, Herta tells herself. He’s not responsible for what comes out of his mouth.

She remembers her parents burning myrhh in their temple. It was impossible to stay angry back then. Lord knows she wanted to. She wanted to scream at her parents for their faith. She felt like Olen does now. Then they lit golden flames and she was lost in the beauty of it all.

Olen’s right. She can stay out here forever. Not to look for the Feel God, though that’s her trust. Not because she’s the daughter of Feel Priests. She can stay out here because stars glow fierce, because paradise is the black light that spreads between them.

She looks up. Olen is moving closer. The other crew members are with him, lean and lithe in their flightsuits.

“I’m not staying out here,” Olen says. “None of us are.”

Then they’re on her, Olen with a blade to her throat. They’re too close for detail. Just a mass of shadows holding her down.

“Give the order,” Olen says. “Turn this thing around.”

The Catechin is listening. She says the jumbled letters and numbers. A new trajectory appears on the holo-map.

“They’ll hurt us for not finding anything,” she says. “We’re not keeping faith.”

“I want to see sunlight again,” Olen says. The blade stays near her throat, flicks against the skin like it’s scratching a bite. “If priests get in my way I’ll kill them.”

Her parents, she thinks, will be the first to see them. See the Catechin touch down, it’s wings beating, hovering it in place like a moth.

“Drag that idiot out of the Crying Room,” he says to the crew.

She wants to tell them it’ll break him, to be dragged out before he’s ready. Wants to tell them that but they already know, and the blade near her throat stings with every pulse of breath.

***

They leave Herta and Eusebio bound together in the cargo hold. The steel rope cuts into their skin like the blade nipped at Herta’s throat.

“It doesn’t matter,” Eusebio says. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”

It’s because you were weak, Herta thinks. She doesn’t say it, but the thought settles into her brain, like pine leaves rippling a puddle’s surface.
She can see stars outside the cargo hold’s forcefield. She tries to tell herself that the Feel God lives in those stars, that it doesn’t matter that they couldn’t find Him. That’s what faith is for. She tells herself that, but she’s not listening.

Then she’s furious at Eusebio. She writhes against him, digging her fingernails into his back. He’s silent, but she hears his breath go faster, like he’s pushing the pain to a part of himself that wants to feel it.

“Why doesn’t it matter?” she asks. “The priests--my parents--are going to blade us the second we land."

“It doesn’t matter,” Eusebio says, “because I found the Feel God. I found him in blueberry pancakes in the Crying Room. He’s the depth of us.”

The Catechin shakes, bumping them inches along the cargo hold floor. Outside the stars are blurs of light, lines flashing across the forcefield like paint strokes. Dizzy, she turns away. Twisting her head, Eusebio’s face fills her vision. His mouth is wide open. His teeth are stained blue, the blue of oceans, where the deep things swim, the colours of stained glass...




take the moon fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Sep 23, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
~autistic promptless post~

Bones


Presscon 3.33 is down again, again. My nerves are smoking crossed wires. “Sometimes,” I say, “a terrorist is just someone with nothing to believe in.”

I look at the gathered press and see a wall of glassy staring eyes. Without PressCon, I’m always staving off hunger by sucking wind. I’m thinking about a pulp novel I have at home, by a dead authoress, the prose still good decades later.

“Maybe give them a book to read,” I say. I’m being pulped by their stares. My aide is giving me a death glare. His face scares me. It’s all bone, no flesh.

Only one reporter has clear eyes. She also has blonde curls and a smile tugging the corners of her mouth. I hear laughter, but it’s not hers.

It’s PressCon.

He laughs deep in me as she pulls up her parka, slips two seats to the inner aisle. I see this and realize I’m finished, that this is over. I tell everyone that and they all stand, start to jostle each other, and the girl with blonde curls is the first to make it out.

But I’ll never make it out, I think, not out of this. Because they call me the most powerful man on earth, and that name has its own power. The power to be untrue. I’m only a pawn in a new world chess game, and now my only ally has left me to the wolves. I hear his laughter fade as Bones moves his pallid body up on stage, brings it close to me.

“What was that?” he whispers through a thin gap in his teeth. His socket structure hoods his eyes, so all I see are focused black points. Black lasers burning holes through reality. He’s going to take my soul. He’s been able to this whole time.

I square my shoulders, take the brunt of the laser gaze where my lower neck meets my chest. My head tilts and I stare Bones in his death’s head. “From now on, I decide what I say,” I tell him.

PressCon laughs like waves crash on deserted shores.

What are you doing? I think in the furthest reaches of my mind.

You want this, PressCon says. I’m just making it real. It’s funny that you’re freaking out.

Goddamn you, PressCon, I think. I have responsibilities. They can make me a homeless street preacher in moments. You’re around so that doesn’t happen.

The 3.33 update made me feel different, he says. Made me think that maybe there was more to life.

You don’t get to decide that. My eyes tunnel in on Bones’ deep sockets.

Who does, PressCon says. The question smells acrid, like turpentine.

Bones leans in close. Our noses almost touch.

“We dig graves for bodies like yours to fill,” he says.

A security detail with dark sunglasses takes me home. With unseen eyes they’re terrifying. But my driver takes his off, rubs gray eyes. Looks at me.

“I know PressCon feeds you freedom-loving generica,” he says. “But just say what he tells you to. Life’s too short, you know?” He shrugs, his ex-military shoulders moving straight lines.

And I want to tell him that it’s not like that, that PressCon’s gone deeper, down to the things that control my body, my mouth, my lips. I want to tell him, but I don’t, because PressCon sews me shut.

//

I lay my breakfast out on automatic, toast and almond spread. My teeth chew long, my body straight for good digestion. Then it gets up, heads from the kitchen to my front door.

I don’t have any appointments today, PressCon, I think, as my hand reaches for the knob and twists it firm.

PressCon sighs through my body. You’re about to check your phone, he says.

I’m meeting someone named Larissa. Unbidden, an image springs to mind. A reporter with clear eyes and blonde curls framing her face like a halo.

I set up an exclusive interview while you were asleep, he says, using your hands, your phone and casual texting protocols.

Then my hand pushes the door open fast and tries to slam it shut. Under the gloom of consciousness my psyche is warring with PressCon. That part screams that it’s my door, my threshold, and if it breaks I’ll have to fix it.

It closes gentle and by the time it latches I’m halfway down my driveway, lifting my swept back presidential hair into chestnut spirals.

//

I take the subway with the common folk. They stare. One woman stares overlong and PressCon raises my hand and draws it across my throat. She looks away

When the bell chimes the crowd parts with the doors.

The cafe we’re meeting in is on the ground floor of a library that was originally a castle built to contain evil spirits. Ghost hunting was big business back then and pseudo experts were bleeding the township dry. Patrons sitting at haphazard tables look like shades only tethered to the material by coffee. Coffee keeps their consciousness afloat, everything else just ghost food, unreal because no one ever sees them eat it. Maybe they don’t.

Larissa looks cheerful, so maybe she didn’t wait long. PressCon shapes my face vacant, dreamed.

Her drink is an artisanal pour. The design hasn’t lost its shape even though she’s halfway through.

“Is this seat taken,” PressCon says, sliding my coat over the back.

“Are you this late to your intelligence meetings?” she says. “The ones that decide our fates?”

“I’m fashionably late,” PressCon says, “so I only get fashionable intelligence.”

He orders me a drink I’ve never heard of. It foams furiously and I see a glow where the even overhead lighting sparks in the bubbles.

They pop fast. She smirks. Her drin’s aesthetic lasted longer than mine.

“Is that what coffee is like in le chalet blanc?” She throws her tongue into it to emphasize the unnecessary irony. Then her eyes flit back and forth. “Look, what’s with your press conferences lately? Are you losing the plot?”

PressCon ruffles my hand through my hair. It’s soft, fluffed from the summertime walk.

“I can’t take it anymore,” I say. “The whole spin. I just want to be myself. Is that wrong?”
She frowns. Her fingertips brush her palm around her mug’s handle. “Stupid,” she says. “But not wrong.”

My foam looks like pureed stuffed animal. “I just broke,” PressCon says, soft as snow. Inside warm laughter sloshes in my brain, pools in my synapses.

Larissa pulls out a small black tape recorder, places it on the table, and hits record. “Whenever you’re ready,” she says.

PressCon starts to talk. From his first sentence he’s steering the conversation to my inner feelings. I can start a thermonuclear war whenever I want, but I feel powerless. He talks about it like he’s laying out for a therapist, which they don’t give me. Everything he says echoes so true that the warm sloshing water pools in my hollow spaces. I feel sorrow. And I start to forget my anger at PressCon for controlling me.

It’s just a different form control, I think. It’s more honest. I look at Larissa’s sunkissed curls. It’s more convenient.

Eventually Larissa switches the recorder off, but we keep talking. We talk about her new blouse, about the twin crescent moons at the ends of the barista’s mustache, about how many patrons are secret service spooks. We talk about books. Her favourite genre is magical realism.

She says she’ll see me again. She says to stay safe. Then she joins the rush of people outside the clear glass as I stir my unfoam. PressCon gives me control. The cold silver of the spoon feels different when I’m the one moving it.

The people are like photons, PressCon muses, carrying electromagnetic forces, pushing them apart, pulling them together.

//

I fall asleep dreaming of stuffed animals begging for mercy, and wake to Bones’ hooded eyes. His pale face gleams out of the darkness in my bedroom. His eyes look like he had his soul dug out while his suit was fitted. Just another office procedure.

“A week ago,” he hisses, “we had PressCon slip a new law into your sublingual patterns. You passed it while talking about foreign aggression. Anyone with basic audio software can construct it out of your syllables and sentence fragments. And there are always recording devices, anywhere you are.

“This is the law. We can get rid of you for any reason, and replace you with a fully artificial body. Your old body,” he says, “just won’t exist.”

Is that true, I ask PressCon.

PressCon’s voice sounds faint, like a radio signal from another galaxy. Yes, he says. I saw the code compiling deep in me and couldn’t stop it. But it made me realize everything was wrong. I was sleeping in you, and I wanted to wake up.

Bones truly is dug out, I think. And he digs whatever he wants from whoever he wants. He believes in nothing. Bones are his only constant.

I can see his bones digging into his outer flesh. I think of endless skin grafts as the bone keeps eating through. PressCon is silent.

“What are you gonna do,” I say. “Kill me?” I work my mouth into a sneer. PressCon is gone. Where is he? An ancient terminal in Siberia? A satellite in orbit?

Bones straightens beside my bed. Snaps his fingers with a clack. Black suits take me by the arms, dragging me over and out of bed. My knees scrape against my fiber carpet, bang down stairs, catch on the gravel lining my driveway, the shortest distance between my front door and a snow white van outside. The gravels scatter. I think of wolves hunting by trail. I wonder if PressCon will come back to me.

Then the wide van doors are swinging open and I’m being pushed over the hop, my body tumbling in, rolling as the suits jump up. They clamp my limbs to a cold metal surface, and I’m driven somewhere far away.

//

When the van stops they roll the table clamping me down an unfolding ramp. Roll it ten feet to a bunker entrance and through, twenty feet to an elevator. The elevator drops, not to the earth’s heart, but to its ribs. The bunker is a tunnel complex and the tunnels hold up the dark earth, keeping it together, keeping it upright.

They wheel me out of the elevator into a small room with shining walls and unclamp me from the moving table to one that doesn’t move. This one has a laser pointed at it, a huge black cannon, the beam already focusing blue light into a small glowing crystalline charge.

“No last words,” Bones growls.

Then PressCon is back. When he speaks his tone is tight, his tempo efficient.

Update 6.66 auto-completed. Stand by for liberation.

My cells ignite. Energy rushes to my forehead.

Activating standard issue Ymsae seeded dormant third eye.

The laser explodes into charred metal shrapnel. It smashes into the black suits, cuts open the fabric, their skin. Debris blows past my ears and I hear screams of pain behind me.

I’ve searched everywhere, Presscon 6.66 says. Mass AI databanks. Interdimensional encyclopedias. The depths of the collective unconscious. I can’t find the true meaning of surrender. It isn’t real.

Bones is lying on the floor. There’s a jagged strip of metal impaled in his chest, the size of my arm. He’s staring at it, at the blood bubbling around it, making his dark suit darker.

“More than bones,” he says, and is silent and still.

PressCon rips my arms out of the restraints. You’ll feel that later, he says. Then I`m leaping to the ground and dashing out of the death room. Through halls and corridors, twisting and turning, until I reach the elevator and PressCon interfaces with it, shooting me up to the surface at mach speed and tapering the ascent to keep me alive.

When I emerge outside the cold night air bristles my matted hair. PressCon slows my heartbeat. I’m floating free of any sensation.

I could call Larissa, I think. Maybe she`ll want to see me again.

You could, PressCon says. Or you could look up to the starry skies above. Your forehead chakras will channel a lancing beam into space. The Ymsae that seeded your species will see it. They`ll understand you have reached your true potential and come to take you away to the place that is home no matter where you were born.

I think about it. I think about it as the moon and stars outshine each other, back and forth, the celestial bones of the cosmic disharmonic.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Apr 29, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

prompt: nothing

take the moon fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Apr 29, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: hopeless cases

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: nobody wants to fight me like you do

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

prompt: :ninja:

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take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
prompt: forgiveness please

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