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sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk










I think we're good for prompts for the moment my trans-dimensional friend, take the night off.

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take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

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.

Marylee can tell her sister is using again. She’s wearing the wristband, the pitch black one, which she uses to cover up the IV mark. She likes that inner part of her wrist with the standout vein.

“Girl,” she says, “get your rear end to detox.” Her tone is laced with annoyance. She cares about her sister. Really, she does. But this on top of the Landlords’ Union Local 1989 raising the rent is just too much. A girl can only take so much stress before it starts to show on her skin, and society’s view of beauty isn’t getting any deeper.

Who knows what her sister is seeing as the nanites race through her blood, flowing over cell walls, rushing to her brain.

“I’m not using,” Ellie says. Her bangs have grown over her eyes, so Marylee can’t see the lie in them. “Your dress is beautiful, by the way.”

That settles it. Marylee’s dress is a plain plastic thing. Ellie’s seeing things, maybe sparkles, maybe even full-fledged faeries.

“Detox,” Marylee says, “or I’m kicking you out.”

***

As the faeries dance over her sister’s skin, skimming over her shimmering dress, Ellie considers her options. She could stay in this hellhole, with someone who clearly wants to see her suffer. Or she could run away. The snow falls heavy outside, but she could find shelter with someone. Lots of people into South Asians. South Asians are in scene right now. Something about snow on deep brown skin.

It’s not a choice at all. She’s out the door in moments, feeling the wind on her skin. If she can get somewhere wide open before the VR takes hold, the dragon will show her the way.

She’s hustling down the street. She stands out, overalls over a longsleeve, everyone else wearing some kind of coat. “Where’s the fire?” she hears, a nasal voice.

In my heart, she thinks, and it’s gonna stay that way.

She’s headed for Menja square. That’s where the dragons nest. If she’s lucky they’ll warm her. She’ll feel the warmth. The nanites now in her blood will generate it.

It’s when her immune system kills off the nanites that she’ll feel the pain. Like her veins are on fire. It’s worth it, though.

She has a full vial of VR juice in her overall pocket for when that happens.

Butterflies with glowing wings flutter over the crowds. The more people there are, the more butterflies fly. VR juice makes it so she’s happy to see people. When she’s off it, she hates everyone. Just crowding up the earth, Godzilla-sized global footprints. But now the butterflies move with the wind, landing on snowflakes, falling with them against the coats and beanies. It’s all okay. It’s all fine.

The square is coming up. The streets open up like the pages of a good book. The butterflies sense her path and part for her like the waves of the Red Sea.

The square is filled with people. She loves them all. Do they love her back? Neon letters flash M-E-N-J-A along the side of the facing tower. They flicker and buzz and steam against the snow. The square is perfect, except for one thing.

She can’t see the promised dragons. Her blood is humming, but she can’t see them. Only people, and butterflies taking wing, fighting against the snow now, trying for the air.

***

Ceon wings over the city. She flits through the fourth dimension, seeing the girl as just another person among people. Why should she be a slave?

No, she’s sick of it, being at the girl’s beck and call. Just because the girl has nanites in her blood that tune her into the fourth dimension. As a dragon, she’s supposed to get all hyped up when someone can see her. Nestle into the snow, maybe light a fire for the lone wanderer as she passes through space and time.

Her mate, Aca, wings to her left. If Ceon doesn’t land, Aca won’t either. He only goes where she does. She hears him howl in confusion, a ragged sound. He’s been breathing too much fire lately. It’s the girl. She always needs fire, standing in winter’s breath without a coat.

Wing with me, she calls to her mate. Together they arc through the snow. Not just through the drifts and winds, but through the flakes themselves. They are not bound to the same space.

Don’t you feel it? Her mate calls back. Guilt. I feel it. It’s something pressing me, weighing me down. She cranes her neck to look over. He’s flying lower than her, wings folded. Like he’s praying, praying mid-flight, trying to reach whatever gods are up here.

Don’t pay attention. What she’s feeling is freedom. It pulses her bones, vibrating them. If someone could see her… but no one can see her. That’s what’s freeing. Like a dam has broken, a river gushing through in flood.

The girl is still standing stock still as the crowds bump past her. She pulls up, flies higher, through the clouds, and then all she can see is the neon lights scorching through, as if the clouds are on fire.

***

“Are you alone?” the man says. His skin is alabaster white, the snow vanishing as it falls on him. His coat is a duster, brown and coarse. “Do you need help?”

Do I need help, Ellie asks herself. Her blood is running cold. There’s no reason to trust this person, no reason to trust anyone in a world where dragons don’t nest. She turns, her shoes scraping off slush and snow, slowing her as she starts to run.

She slams into another person and almost falls. The person shouts. Her details are lost in the snow as Ellie’s hands touch off the pavement. She looks over her shoulder. The man is chasing her. A predator. He slips between people smooth as a shadow. His heavy boots have traction; he doesn’t even lean as he runs.

Ellie tucks her head and takes off, the butterflies a storm now, everywhere at once. She cries out, deep inside, and they part, their lines ragged now, like someone ripped them apart.

She follows their part down a side street and into an alley. Calligraphy covers the walls, vivid and bold, but she can barely see it through the butterfly wings. They’re a haze of colour, violets, pinks and oranges. The red of the brick bleeds through in splotches.

The alley dead ends and she’s caught there, staring, looking all around at her, at the butterflies who’ve betrayed her.

The man in the duster is coming up. He’s moving slow, now that she’s got nowhere to run. She sees something in his eyes. A need that might be lust.

He stops. The snow has built up on his coat, a thin layer like paper. He holds his hand out. There are two pills in his palm.

“I know you’re looking for the dragons,” he says. “I know because I sold you the stuff in the first place. You don’t remember because that’s how the VR juice works. First thing it does is strip away the memory of who sold to you. I just track the nanites. I know how to find you, never the other way around.”

“There’s been a new wave shift through the dimensional. The dragons have lives now, other things to do. Take these pills. I engineered them for when the trip runs out, either nanite death or dragonflight.”

“I still have a full vial,” she says. She reaches for it.

“The extra vial is part of the VR trip,” he says. Her hand finds nothing in her overall pocket. Her fingernails scrape against her empty palm.

Already it’s starting to hurt. The war in her blood rages.

“Take these,” the man in the duster says, “and then decide where you want to be.” The butterflies are clustering around his palm, drawing her eye to the whiteness of the pills. Like they’re made of snow. “I need you to live through this, so you can keep buying.”

The butterflies wave and whorl in flux. She’s been following them this whole time. Doing what they want her to do.

She slaps the pills out of his hand, and they’re lost in the snow, and wings. The butterflies are dying. They’re falling to earth, scattering over the iced pavement.

She’ll make it home somehow. She’s shivering in the frost, but she’ll make it, as long as the fire in her heart doesn’t go out.

She pushes past the dealer, willing her body to keep moving forward, telling herself not to forget where home is, now that she’s empty, now that nothing is showing her where to go.

But when she reaches the street, the stream of people sweep her away. There are no butterflies, only bodies and apathetic looks. Soon she’s lost in the wave, like a signal in static, the fire in her heart flickering, pulsing faint like a candle.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Sep 26, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo

No Gravitas posted:

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

Ashton draws fire breath from his pipe, singing his throat, burning his lungs. He’s watching the robots couple and decouple, slower, then faster.

Soon enough, they will be people. “Yo Ashton!” yells one of the new hires. “How’s it feel getting paid to watch robots do it?”

Soon enough, they will be people. Ashton runs two fingers across his right side ‘burn. Feels it bristle.

He's Q.A. now, but he started as another fan, crystal charging slow as he watched the cold bodies slam into each other.

It fascinated him, and not just in a sex way. It was the love, the love absent and still present. Only the programmers knew how far deep it went.

He gives the green light on this pair. They continue down the belt, moving out of his field of view, still mating. A new pair moves in. This pair is doing it wrong.

One 0f the robots is punching the other in the head. Each blow echoes throughout the factory. Ashton can hear it clear over the other sounds, machinery clanking, workers swearing.

The victim’s head is already dented, and caving in further.

A glitch. Every hundred pairs or so, one comes out hurting the other. He hits the red light on his tablet. The belt stops.

He breathes his pipe in again. Bot Security is emerging from his left. They’re robots too, and something about the way they break apart the pair on the belt seems familiar. Something about the violence.

But Ashton isn’t being paid to think about it. As the robots drag each other away, the belt restarts. He waits for the next pair. He isn’t being paid to imagine, either, not the person who will crystal charge, slow then fast, to the next pair that comes down the line, when they’re flesh, when they look like their blood is flowing.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Sep 21, 2017

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.
Ocean Breath

"It's a setup," Sean says. "Something's wrong. I feel it in my clavicles."

Claire says nothing, just gazes out at the choppy waves. Feels the breeze part her hair, stringing her wet hair back.

"I'm out of here," he says, and turns to go, JNCO jeans swishing.

Have faith, Claire thinks. The Auxomatoa could be about descend from all levels. Vampires ready to drink the blood of the freshly drugged. But Claire still believed in the power of friendship. Who could her e-friend be? she wonders. Someone willing to risk the rain and post-Neo-optic sun.

They'd all been ticked when their sight had been hacked to make the sun brighter, so bright you could barely see anything above ground level. (Lucky for Claire, ground level was sea level, and she thought the sea was the most beautiful thing that existed in this or any other dimension.) It shone bright even through rainfall. This blindness came with an overwhelming depression that settled into your bones. Unless you took a dose of HoneyBunny, going outside was just too much.

And of course there were the Auxomatoa, robots who had evolved the taste for drugged human blood.

"It's not worth it," Sean says, trying one more time. "Let's get out of here before those creeps get us."

That's when Claire hears the voice, so soft it's almost lost in the rainfall.

"Clairity?"

She turns. There's a girl standing there, wearing a buttoned down blouse and a long skirt. The skirt is weighed down by the rain, clinging to her ankles.

"Synapsis?" Claire asks.

"Yeah," the girl says. She beams. Her plastered hair splits her grin. "Thank you for meeting me."

Sean snorts.

"You must be Inseanity", Synapsis says, and is cut off, because the Auxomatoa are dropping from the higher levels. Mouths bare to show needle teeth.

They land with loud clunks, flat pressed feet digging into the pavement.

Sean yelps. Claire keeps looking at the ocean. This is how she wants to go.

Synapsis opens her mouth, making shapes. Claire strains to hear but can't make it out.

The Auxomatoa stop in place.

"You thought you were going die," Synapsis says, "but you weren't scared. Does knowing the shutoff code for the Auxomatoa make me a coward?"

Claire never moved. "Come look at the ocean with me," Claire says.

Sean stares out at the ocean. He doesn't see beauty in it. He sees refuse, pollutants, everything that humanity's dumped into it. He turns to look at the Auxomatoa, standing there, waiting for orders. Thinks about Clairity and Synapsis and Inseanity, a friendship being born, dragged in front of the Auxomatoa, like meat thrown before a hungry dog.

"This will end soon," he says.

He leaves them behind, arm in arm staring at the ocean's breath, what they can see rippling over the surface, as the rain weighs them down. He doesn't turn back. He's not sure if they ever walk away.

take the moon fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Sep 20, 2017

sunken fleet
Apr 25, 2010

dreams of an unchanging future,
a today like yesterday,
a tomorrow like today.
Fallen Rib
Don't die thread! I don't generally post my stuff because it's all terrible but :justpost:

5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: forgiveness please
“Forgive me.”

Those words echoed emptily around the largest room in Valterrith, miles above the surface, looking down on the clouds. It was a gaudy and opulent room with heavy wooden walls and thick shag carpet ornamented here and there with gold filigree and diamond chandeliers. Massive windows made of transparent nanofiber gave a 360 degree view of the surroundings – an endless field of clouds. It's decadent when compared to the tiny cubes in which most of the wards live their lives. It is the office of The Warden. Indicated by the dozens of holographic projections feeding the office with a million datapoints pertaining to the status and upkeep of Valterrith. By this point the highest point of the massive supercity is nearly 20 miles above the surface of the Earth and the various instruments in this room monitor every inch.

“Forgive me.”

The words are coming – with clockwork regularity – from a CitySys audio device that is affixed to the south wall next to one of the standard issue CitySys portals that would admit any theoretical visitors to this room. However, the doorway is unnecessary. It has been over a hundred years since a visitor was last admitted. Indeed this room stands empty because The Warden is dead. Has been dead for a very long time. Not even the dust of his bones remain. Valterrith, however, still stands and each day it climbs a little higher under the watchful eye of CitySys. Each day humanity reaches a little closer to the stars.

“Forgive me.”

Those words are the final legacy of The Warden and they are repeated aloud each and every time. Every time the machine reaches that final conclusion and a life must be taken for the good of Valterrith.

“Forgive me.” -rations no longer distributed to Level 487r(shortage)
“Forgive me.” -Level 321b permanently sealed and filled(critical structural integrity)
“Forgive me.” -neurotoxin administered to criminal(third offense)
“Forgive me.” -conversion to The Deprived

...and on and on and on and on...
This unending litany for the dead and dying may have meant something to someone once. Sadly despite what The Warden had believed, or perhaps only wanted to believe, the machine did not dream. The machine could only climb, it's ancient steel and circuitry propelling it and it's wards higher and higher. Every inch bought with blood and bone and other things the machine could quantify but not understand.

“Forgive me.”

sunken fleet fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Apr 22, 2017

take the moon
Feb 13, 2011

by sebmojo
that 1 really stuck w me, gj :)

sunken fleet
Apr 25, 2010

dreams of an unchanging future,
a today like yesterday,
a tomorrow like today.
Fallen Rib
:justpost:

5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: hopeless cases

A shovel. His fingers wrapped around it. His eyes traveled the length of the thing. Steel, rubber grip. Modern. Hard angles. He didn't know much about tools but it seemed to him a practical thing, spat out of a factory somewhere for serious labor. Maybe. The man had never been a poet lyricism was not and had never been his strong suit. Even that tiny burst of wit escaped him immediately as he accepted the length of steel. The hand that passed it to him... existed, that was all he could say for it because as he took the shovel the world fell away.

What did it matter after all? He had the shovel. And beyond that the earth. Just a patch of brown bathed in the dusky twilight that permeated this place and that was all that mattered. He hefted the thing, the weight was almost comforting. Smoothly, like a man who had done this a thousand times before, he began to dig. The process was slow. A man with a shovel was not actually sufficient to break any significant amount of ground. That didn't matter. His muscles strained, he could feel the sweat and grime accumulating as time wore on, seconds into minutes into hours it all blended together. None of it mattered. The man swung the shovel. The place was a bit cold and the temperature was constant, perhaps in other circumstances he would even feel a chill. It didn't matter. The man continued to dig.

And then suddenly it was over. That grey hand - more of a claw really - had reached down and snatched the shovel back from him. He stood there a moment - posture frozen mid-swing muscles still bulging mid-flex. Slowly the tension left his body and his arms dropped to his sides, he straightened himself out and drew himself to his full height. When he had started it had been twilight - night had fallen at some point in the interim but there was light enough. Light enough to see beyond his little pit - which was only knee deep despite the hours of labor - and into the pit next to him. And the pit beyond that. On and on to an endless field of shallow holes with men and women standing in them - some still digging. His eyes flickered past those things, immediately dismissing them as unimportant.

Idly, the man wondered what had become of his shovel.

Heath
Apr 30, 2008

🍂🎃🏞️💦

5D AUTISM SPEX posted:

prompt: nothing

Painting

I hadn't been in a museum since a class field trip that I can only place in some later portion of my middle school career, in my memory consisting of only soft impressions of an unseasonably cool day, a thin wind blowing off of Lake Michigan and a passive, dull sunlight that could have belonged to any given day in May filtering through a smear of cloud cover to illuminate a spacious top-floor gallery with the sort of soft natural lighting that one associates more with a department store garden center than the art gallery it was intended to contain. The light was no different this time, in spite of the 18-or-so years between then and now; white, downy, isolating, casting a translucent fog throughout. Starch white walls punctuated at intervals with canvases of pieces done in the classical style, bordered from beneath by shiny woodgrain floorboards, a look I would have described as "minimalist" in the right (read: incredulous) company, although my only basis for calling it that being that there was a high polish over little detail. If I'm being truthful I don't possess any knowledge of style, or art generally, which is why I've avoided it by talking about lighting instead of describing the paintings, which flew by me now as ever in a blur of vaguely recalled subjects: men and women working a field; a girl and her dog on the beach, perhaps they were looking out over the water, or was there a dog at all?; Christ in his wretched agony; probably some other arrangements so revisited that maybe I had seen some of these more than once on my way up to this room, and that's the only reason I recall them now.
I blinked my eyes deep and hard. My self awareness snagged the flow of my consciousness and I wondered to myself, first, how I had got here, second, why, and third, whether or not I should at least attempt to 'get' something out of this; it's an 'experience,' after all, and I don't seem to have many of those these days; how did I end up here? I felt my chest heave out with a breath to make room for an ever-present melancholic ache that occasionally motivates me to do these sorts of things, 'going out' to 'treat myself' to something outside of my usual routine. The gentle echoing clack of a woman's heels snapped me back into reality for a moment. I glanced around at the other admirers, patrons, wondering if there were some kind of signal that would give away the ones who were really feeling something against the ones who were just pretending to, found nothing of the sort, and concluded that there was a possibility that simply all of them were faking it.
My attention was drawn to some impressively tall statuary in the middle of the gallery whose shape I now fail to remember, except that its presence is a deep and spindly impression of a shadow, so for the sake of illustration I will say that it was a gnarled tree or some abstract tower, whichever pleases you. The thought passed my mind that perhaps one has to put something of oneself in to get something else out, and I couldn't determine if that thought was profound or simply obvious and declared myself pretty hopeless if I couldn't tell the difference, but resolved to move to some other part of the gallery, somewhere fresh and untarnished by this state of mind, to try and really /observe/ a piece /in situ/.
I repeated this process three times in turn. As before, these pieces made no impression on me. Humans doing things in vistas that could have been impressive if they were real places, probably.
I found a small gallery room unoccupied by at least one dimension of person and took a seat on a bench of dark, highly polished stone that I assume bore a dedication to some patron or another - I didn't look - and put thumb and forefinger to the bridge of my nose, knuckle to the bridge of my glasses, trying to hold at bay a frustration welling up that went beyond mere self-judgement at my own pretentiousness (or lack thereof.)
I breathed deeply, slowly, and traced the wood grain floor through blurred and mucous vision, to the baseboard, up the wall and to the frame of a portrait. My brow furrowed and with determination looked through it as though it were a window. I replaced my glasses and it came into focus.
It was a woman, nameless to me. The artist had brought her into the world from the middle of her waist up and hidden the rest of her. The ache had returned to my chest. I stood and moved closer, staring through the canvas at the being within.
The room had grown deathly quiet around me. Footsteps and murmurs that had occupied the backchannels of my bare consciousness faded into the obscurity of the mist that surrounds a focused mind.
The lady wore red. The deep scarlet of dried roses enveloped her up to her bosom; shoulders bare, a natural tan; long, ruddy colored formal gloves midway up her biceps, hands folded pensively across her waist; deep brown hair of significant length but wrapped in a tight bun in a style I can only describe as being of Spanish origin, crowned by a single, impressively large carnation held in place behind one ear.
She stood against a featureless background of deep azure lightened to a halo of sky blue closer to her body. Something just out of the frame held her attention in a solemn gaze. Glistening tears left a path across her cheeks, the only place on her person that seemed to capture the blue surrounding her; everything else about her seemed to reject it, but it thrived in her pain.
I felt a hand crawl up the side of my head and gently take hold of my hair. I recognized it as my own hand, with searching fingers seeking to grasp, to possess, in that moment. I stood very still for a very long time, breathing.

sunken fleet
Apr 25, 2010

dreams of an unchanging future,
a today like yesterday,
a tomorrow like today.
Fallen Rib

No Gravitas posted:

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.

In this place there is silence. An empty eternity unspooled around me, silent but not foreboding, a feeling of rightness permeated this place. Comfortable. The word was apt, it seemed to encompass this place entirely. With each breath I could catch a faint whiff of something, oak-shavings, perhaps – a faint scent of a home now gone. Now gone. The thought is discordant, at odds with this feeling of comfort, this feeling of home. This is not home of course, this endless and empty place, where even when I lift my hand it does not appear before my eyes.

The discord grows as slowly bits and pieces of these past few days come back to me. The final frenzied efforts of we the soon-to-be departed racing against the massive cosmic clock so few were aware was ticking. Pouring ourselves wholly and unrestrainedly out before the Crucible. Baring our hearts and souls. Our flesh and tears. To think I had forgotten, if even for a moment, that mad race where men had stood before the throne of a God and forced our lips to His ear. We had labored and seared our very souls in the heat of the Crucible shedding years from our lives like water over a stone. We five gave everything! Our hopes, our dreams, our duty, our purpose, the fear, the spite, everything that drove us even a single step forward was ground and burned and melted and shaped in the Crucible until nothing remained.

And now here I stand. The heat of the Crucible but a memory. My petition answered. Empty eternity unraveling in every direction around me. A vague feeling of comfort. Of rightness. Of home. But there is no God here. In this place there is silence.

sunken fleet
Apr 25, 2010

dreams of an unchanging future,
a today like yesterday,
a tomorrow like today.
Fallen Rib
prompt: I could see that she'd turned too slow

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?
I posted this in the WritingPrompts sub on Reddit and they banned it for being too long. But I've been thinking about this as a starter for some sort of short story for a while so I'm posting it here. If this is too long for SA as well, whatever. Most of it is just a recap of history from the Bible.

Prompt:

In the time of the Old Testament, God's presence was palpable.

After selecting the Israelites as His chosen people, He led them out of exile and to the promised land in a series of monumental events including a great string of miracles. He rode above them in exile as a cloud, as a pillar of fire, clear and true and manifest. To keep them well and set them on the right path, he decreed a set of laws for them to follow, passed down directly by his word.
But people are fickle, and against His plans things went bad again and again. Every attempt to set the populace back on the right path was followed by more turning away. It became clear that no imperfect being could follow all the laws of a perfect one, and things would never be truly right. Sin was an inescapable facet of Man's free will.

A solution was needed, and finally the ultimate solution was chosen. God sent his son, his only son down to Earth to create a new covenant. His son would die, and in dying would account for the sin of all humanity. From that day forward, all who truly believed in God would be allowed to enter Heaven, the sins of their lives forgiven, covered by the death of Christ. The life of Christ himself brought more miracles, and more direct exhibition of the presence of God, subsequently passed down through the generations.

Now, two thousand years later, evidence of God's presence has all but disappeared from the world. The Christian church carries on, but reports of miracles are rare, isolated, and impossible to prove. Over these 2000 years the Christian church has spread and multiplied, been challenged and split, grown and also withered. But a communiqué from Heaven itself has been a rare, some say entirely absent thing.

Some say God fell into a deep depression after the death of His son. Some claim that in an attempt to treat all of humanity fairly, God became afraid to act at all, holding back His great hand with indecision as the world slowly falls to ruin. Others more optimistic, say He has merely begin to employ a light touch, a subtle guiding to the ways of things.
The history on Earth we can study. The question is, what has been happening in Heaven and in the mind of God over the last two millennia, to have things as they are? And what is His plan now?

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Nition posted:

I posted this in the WritingPrompts sub on Reddit and they banned it for being too long. But I've been thinking about this as a starter for some sort of short story for a while so I'm posting it here. If this is too long for SA as well, whatever. Most of it is just a recap of history from the Bible.

Prompt:

In the time of the Old Testament, God's presence was palpable.

After selecting the Israelites as His chosen people, He led them out of exile and to the promised land in a series of monumental events including a great string of miracles. He rode above them in exile as a cloud, as a pillar of fire, clear and true and manifest. To keep them well and set them on the right path, he decreed a set of laws for them to follow, passed down directly by his word.
But people are fickle, and against His plans things went bad again and again. Every attempt to set the populace back on the right path was followed by more turning away. It became clear that no imperfect being could follow all the laws of a perfect one, and things would never be truly right. Sin was an inescapable facet of Man's free will.

A solution was needed, and finally the ultimate solution was chosen. God sent his son, his only son down to Earth to create a new covenant. His son would die, and in dying would account for the sin of all humanity. From that day forward, all who truly believed in God would be allowed to enter Heaven, the sins of their lives forgiven, covered by the death of Christ. The life of Christ himself brought more miracles, and more direct exhibition of the presence of God, subsequently passed down through the generations.

Now, two thousand years later, evidence of God's presence has all but disappeared from the world. The Christian church carries on, but reports of miracles are rare, isolated, and impossible to prove. Over these 2000 years the Christian church has spread and multiplied, been challenged and split, grown and also withered. But a communiqué from Heaven itself has been a rare, some say entirely absent thing.

Some say God fell into a deep depression after the death of His son. Some claim that in an attempt to treat all of humanity fairly, God became afraid to act at all, holding back His great hand with indecision as the world slowly falls to ruin. Others more optimistic, say He has merely begin to employ a light touch, a subtle guiding to the ways of things.
The history on Earth we can study. The question is, what has been happening in Heaven and in the mind of God over the last two millennia, to have things as they are? And what is His plan now?

It's a good enough slice of words, but I'm not clear what you'd do with it as a prompt, it's really 'you are a christian - WRITE!'

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?
I tried to sort of suggest some directions it could go at the end but probably didn't go a very good job.

What I was trying to get at is probably better summed up as: Assume that all the Bible stories are true. Why does God not seem to be around anymore?

While the usual conclusion from God's seeming absence is that God really isn't there and the old stories aren't true - or are at least greatly embellished - I thought there could be an interesting short story in explaining what's actually been going on up in Heaven to end up with things as they are.

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Heath
Apr 30, 2008

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r/WritingPrompts is the worst subreddit.

Yes, even worse than r/the_donald.

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