|
The cryptids have lured me into the Dome, for the first time. Give me a clue and a creature!
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2020 09:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:14 |
|
|
My sister very briefly worked for a small-town Australian newspaper that breathlessly reported bunyip, giant panther and min-min sightings every few weeks. It was just exuberantly awful.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2020 01:36
|
|
|
 Thunderdome CDXXXIV: Cryptic Cryptids Prompt: Jersey Devil // "Wild party following opening of Grant's tomb." (5) Answer: Grave “Star Flame Grave Wing” 1388 words My Ship drops out of blinkspace, and all I can see is blood and smoke and flailing tentacles. “Gosh!” Everything is spinning. My Ship screams. I rub thoughtfully at my chin, and lean forward in my harness to wipe nameless fluids from the monitor. What I expect to see is the glittering trellis of the Home Orbital. What I can actually see is black space and the blue disc of some watery planet. It is spiralling closer, quickly. “That’s not optimal,” I murmur, as the cockpit floor begins to melt. I glance at my arm. A medi-slug is there, quietly filling my veins with soothing drugs. But I need my mind sharp and clear. So I toss the slug into its pond, while the blue planet fills the monitor. The warm haze drops away. I feel nothing, just for one blessed moment. Then the Ship screams and I scream and the Ship screams and- *** -awake. Again. Nothing is on fire this time. The walls aren’t bleeding. All tentacles are where they should be. The cockpit lights are on, but the monitor is blank. The scans make no sense. “Ship? Are you there?” The Ship is happy to see me awake. It has an update for me: after we spasmed out of blinkspace, we managed a barely-controlled crash into the blue planet. The Ship’s exoskeleton was shattered. It had to spend a long, long time regrowing itself, extruding new ligaments and vesicles. And then the medi-slugs, over long years, rebuilt my body from various fragments they found smeared across the cockpit. “…right,” I mumble. It’s hard not to escape the feeling that I’ve been rebuilt last along with other non-essential ship components, like the algae vats and the lamp-fungi. Also, murmurs the Ship, our crash left us buried a hundred metres underground. Sorry. “Right.” …and with the sunforce generator crippled by gravity, the Ship can only keep me conscious for an hour at a time. Then it has no choice but to let the planet’s ambient psychic field disperse my thoughts like dry leaves on a cold wind, while the Ship recharges its own energy reserves… Blank-faced, I chew on a spiced polyp. “I see. And how long does your recharging process take?” A decade, announces the Ship apologetically. This planet’s mind-field really is very strong, you see, and it’s getting stronger all the time. In fact, if ever you ventured onto the surface- says the Ship over the roaring noise in my ears- your consciousness would be pulverised instantly… I blink. Emptiness. Not a drug-induced blankness, but the gnawing blasted nothing felt by any sentient being a long way from home. There are certain thoughts I must not think. I must keep busy. “Ship, grow me a drone. I want to see what’s going on up there.” Ship notes that- during our mad final plunge- its external eyes managed to grab a few fractured glimpses of the local life-forms. Blurred images appear on my monitor: horns; a tail; membranous wings; a long hair-trailing face with a herbivore’s mouth. And so on. “Weird-looking creature,” I mutter. “Right. Put these fragments together- properly!- and grow me a drone based on that model. The drone can dig its way to the surface, and I’ll pilot it when I’m awake.” This will take some time, says Ship cautiously. I roll my eyes and take a big gulp from a nutrient sac. “Time,” I mutter. I go under. Ship gets to work. *** Awake, again, after nine years of nothing. I’m back in the warm humming darkness of the cockpit. Lights blink, fans whir, fibres twitch. I grope for the new drone’s ganglions and slide them under my eyelids- And I can fly! I send my splendid new drone high over a dark landscape of pointed trees. The drone runs through the forest and soars over a landscape shining silver in the moonlight. I exalt in flight and freedom. I spot a cluster of two-legged animals. I descend. The creatures scream and flee. I grin, as sleep claims me. *** Awake, again, and again, and again, and again. I remain stuck in a bubble of blinking blue lights under a million tonnes of rock. If ever I stood on the surface, the combined psychic onslaught of the planet’s minds would shred my brain. Ship theorises that this world reached some threshold; that enough creatures on this planet gained sentience to impinge on blinkspace and nauseate Ship’s navigation computers as we passed by, thus dumping us out into real space… Makes sense. I guess. I wonder if anyone else has met with this fate, or if my Queen has had lighthouses erected. Still. I love my drone. I love piloting it around the forest. Actually, as the decades pass, the forest is shrinking. Tracks slash through it; fields take nibbles and then great bites from its edges. Smoke plumes rise from little buildings, little villages, little cities. Big cities. Cloth-wrapped bipeds seem to be everywhere, now. They don’t always see me. When they do, they scream or run or shoot. For some reason I never spot any creatures that look entirely like my drone. Awake again. And asleep again and again and again and- *** Awake. This has been happening less and less frequently. The psychic weight of this planet’s population is staggering; there must be hundreds- even thousands!- of minds up there. By chance, I must have wound up under the capital of this world. And, though I would never comment on it, Ship's own systems must be running down. Brittle membranes, sluggish tendons. Little errors in cell replication building up… But the locals have developed electronic communications. Ship has been listening and watching. While I sleep, maybe Ship can learn to translate. Even communicate. “That’s great news,” I tell Ship. I’m not sure how to feel about this, really. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt anything new. I brush a medi-slug from the console, and reach for the drone’s controls. *** Awake. Ship has been learning and listening. Ship has kept me asleep for century, while using the drone to scout. Ship has accessed something called the Human Genome Project, and had the medi-slugs deconstruct my body. Ship has rebuilt me along a new pattern more closely matching that of the locals. I will be able to crawl through the drone’s tunnel and walk freely on the surface for the first time, unhindered by the psychic weight of so many sentient humans. Really, I’m one of those humans now. I seem to be hurting Ship. And I should resent Ship for keeping me under for a hundred years. I should be nauseated at the thought of my limbs and organs and tissues floating in a hundred separate vats of nutrient slurry. I should be horrified by this new two-legged, two-eyed body. I should curse the universe that has left me trapped a hundred lightyears from home. But my human body has heard mention of sunlight and fresh air and other humans. I find myself feeling excitement, and even joy. It has been a long time… I crack the hatch; it sticks a bit, after four hundred years. Rock shards patter down. A long hard climb is ahead. I feel my face shifting strangely in a new human smile. I go up. Ship’s lights dim behind me. *** Indica glares at the graveyard, at the BORED crowd, at the TACKY Halloween decorations that some moron’s draped over trees and tombstones. Like it’s a GRAVEYARD, you shouldn’t have to ADD Halloween stuff to make it SPOOKY. They can’t even have music at any kind of volume in case someone calls the COPS. Like THREE people are dancing and they are, yeah, DEFLATING by the second. People have their PHONES out, flipping through messages, searching for some party that doesn’t SUUU- Rustling. Movement. Grass shifting, by a gravestone. People shriek and point. Phones up and out. Indica feels blood pound at her temples and adrenaline’s acid spike. A hand thrusts up from the grave. An arm follows, and a head. And a completely nude guy clambers up from out of the ground, blinking and staring. Everyone screams. Indica feels a slow and terrible smile grow across her face. “Buddy,” she shouts, “where did YOU come from!?”
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2020 04:41
|
|
|
Interprompt: end of year festival 288 words It was December 28, again. The cone-shaped Ender’s Hat sat uncomfortably on my head. Whoever had made it hadn’t done a particularly good job, and raggedy fabric-ends itched at my ears. I swapped a sick-looking grin with the rest of the congregants, all wearing their Cones. All except _______, who was this year’s Wearer of the Judgement Veil. ______ had been lucky enough, this year, to open the envelope shoved under her door on the 27th, and find it empty. The rest of us had received horizontally-stretched printouts of the Mona Lisa, made by a printer that had run out of blue about halfway. I was third in the circle. Ryan was weeping; Jack looked at peace. _____ approached me, and reached into the Sack of Finality. She pulled out three pages of a failed screenplay, ending in the words “It was then I realised that adfasjjjlkjdfasdfasdfasdf.” “You said you would finish it,” intoned ______. “I did not finish it,” I replied, and the screenplay went into the big rusty barrel. Next came a dog-eared book entitled Guitar for Beginners. “You said you would finish it.” “I did not finish it,” I replied, wincing. This too was dropped into the barrel. Then came the half-done poem. And two pages of a novel. Then a gym membership, a Warhammer dude with a basecoat and nothing else, a guide to caring for tropical fish, a suspiciously clean shovel and packets of unplanted vegetable seeds. And three blank pages, symbolising three entries into fiction competitions that I never even started. “You said you would finish it,” boomed ______. “I did not finish it,” I sobbed. _______ gestured at the barrel. She threw me a lighter. “Then finish it now.”
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2020 05:01
|
|
|
I've never written a love story and have no idea who Magnet Field are, but I'm in! Song plz.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2020 09:20
|
|
|
Crazy for you [but not that crazy] 1049 words It was a matter of music. Our state went into lockdown, and after one week we all started on new hobbies. It was that or go mad. People tried painting, or learnt baking, or took up knitting, or grew disappointing vegetables. And some people tried music. So you can imagine my shop. My life. Six weeks of: mail-order madness all day, and ghastly news trickling in all night. And then, when the lockdown wound back, we were flooded. Skinny guys with weird eyes and weirder odours would ask if I wanted to jaaam. People kept hooting “ooh, bongos!” while pointing at my djembes and tablas. Kids moved goggle-eyed up the long rows of electric guitars while their parents ushered them towards some $10 plywood acoustic... I started longing for 5pm, when the crowds would finally bugger off home, and I could close up the shop, and there’d be s i l e n c e . Anyway. One day I heard a sound. It was a woman, playing one of my clarinets. This was a big no. Even before covid. But three things stopped me stopping her: First, she was cute. (I know, I know.) Second, it was five minutes til close, after a long day of retail hell. I was all out of shout. Third, she sounded great. She was swooping through the melody from Ravel’s Bolero. There was a lovely liquid glide to her high notes. There was a deep woodiness to her lower tones that brought to mind timbered dells and limpid pools. Though I’m not sure what a dell is or what limpidness looks like. So I watched. Listened. Breathed out. Her music was just exactly like the sweetness that comes to the ear when a truck engine stops, or when a builder’s drill winds down. I felt the melody slide cool, dry fingers through the hot and tangled mess of my brain. I breathed. I stood straighter and felt my shoulders crunch. I opened my eyes again. The musician was just beautiful, in that heartbreaking way shared by all momentarily-glimpsed strangers. She had darkish skin, darkish long-lashed eyes, and thick chopped bleached hair. And a marvellous expression of concentration. There’s that thing, you know, when a person is beautiful, and you find yourself picturing them making breakfast, or arriving home at night, and you imagine the quiet beauty and primal joy that must surely suffuse each of these moments… Maybe that’s just me? And then the phone rang. I dashed out to grab it and when I came back the woman had left already. I stood there for a while, then set about sanitising the clarinet. I closed up the shop in a bit of a daze. I went to bed thoughtful. And I trudged through the next day. (Partly because of heartache; mostly because of retail.) “How about Melbourne?” asked every customer. “Looks like it’s getting bad. Did you see what the infection rate’s up to down there?” “It really seems to knock the oldies around. Once it gets in a nursing home…” “You know, I was supposed to be in New Zealand this week.” I opened crates, stocked shelves, answered phones, sprayed sanitiser. And five minutes before close, someone started on a guitar. I drifted over. It was the clarinet girl from yesterday. Picking her way through something lively and Celtic. She wore that same expression of dreamy concentration. “Excellent!” I called, when she finished. “You play clarinet too, right?” She shot me a smile that nearly killed me. “I do my best,” she said. She uncurled from her chair, set aside the guitar, and left. I sort of drifted towards the bus stop, through a grey blustery evening of dried leaves and eye-stinging dust. I blinked and found myself at home. There had been a lot to think about, apparently. The next day was an eight-hour slog of receipts, sales, invoices, sanitising, and I need to return Timothy’s trumpet because look, this one has gotten all bent somehow, no I don’t have a receipt, where is your manager? And then at ten to five, the clarinet lady returned. Only this time, she sat herself at our piano and launched into selections from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini. I watched with my mouth hanging open. Somehow she was great on clarinet and guitar and piano. Plus, she was beautiful, in case I haven’t mentioned that yet. Such a level of talent seemed unfair. I- And again. The next day: trumpet. Film scores. Played magnificently. I smiled and breathed out as the year’s troubles took on some kind of grand and heroic significance. More music: Clarinet Lady remained polite, but cut short any attempts at conversation. I guess that’s an important skill for beautiful people to have. So at home I peered in the bathroom mirror and practiced my urbane chuckle, which went about as well as you’d expect; and I tried out various intelligent-sounding lines. Ironic that Ravel should be most famous for a piece of music based on repetition, no? -another day. Grey sky, petrol fumes, eight hours of fat loud angry people treating my shop like an Amazon showroom, and then: Harmonica, 4:57PM. “It’s beautiful,” I murmured, “and I don’t even like harmonicas. Umm, harmonicae-?” Departing smile from the girl. Then: close shop, doomscroll on bus home, reheat lasagne, patchy sleep. Coffee for breakfast. Next, another day of customers and credit and just on closing time, the clarinet girl arrives, grins from under that ash-white fringe, and finds herself a drumkit. Polyrhythms. The next day: work. The night: bad sleep, wake exhausted. Clarinet girl again: she plays bass trom (Bruckner) then flute (Herbie Mann?) then bass guitar (some weird Primus thing). Fluttering of fingers, flow and tension of arms, heaving of the ribcage, utter focus on the face. Guitarist’s grin, cellist’s glare. And later: sax, cornet, steel drum, theremin. Then ocarina, morin khuur, double bass, euphonium. Then lagerphone, fiddle, synth, dulcimer, didgeridoo, haegeum, flute, alphorn, church bells, pipe organ- And every time, that little smile: that little flash of beauty that belongs only to passing strangers, that takes some grey from the world-
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2020 14:35
|
|
|
I'm in. I'm going to try this. Week #338 - "Places of Power" - "what madness are mountains to an imprisoned moon?" Damnit, I am going to learn to write stories with an actual ending. Rather than-
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2020 21:02
|
|
|
Happy Festivus. Your awful jiggling gif has made me long for death. Week 338, Places of Power. "Give me your ending first and then show me how we got there" The Darkhouse Keeper 1466 words Moth-Pope leapt from his rhinoceros and barrelled into the riot police. He swung his fists and splintered shields, glaring righteous hate at all those fat pale faces gaping behind their stupid fascist visors. Some clutched guns, and suffered. Trevor took the flank, hurling cats. The Kythera spun up and over the wall of riot shields, hammering into the line of patrol cars and ripping them into razor shreds. The shield wall buckled and peeled back; one cop was running, and then two, and then the whole drat herd scrabbled backwards squealing, stumbling on dropped guns and fragments of car. There was silence, for a moment. Moth-Pope stood, breathing hard. His left arm hurt worse and his right leg did not feel right at all. He was afraid now to look at it. Trevor lay on the ground like a discarded sock, his cats scattered. The Kythera, dented, had retreated. “The cops’ll be back,” groaned Trevor. “It’s kind of their thing.” “I know,” mumbled Moth-Pope. He really wanted a drink. He strained for some glimpse of his home. He couldn’t see it. Too much dust, too much smoke. Too much teargas- “Look at ‘em, hiding behind their cars,” spat Trevor. He sneezed violently; the meds were wearing off. “I don’t think we-” And an ornate timber foot, about the size of a VW beetle, thudded into the dirt by the Pope’s head. He stared blearily up at it, mouth hanging open. A huge angular shape bulked up into the fog. A hatch sprung open. The Vinewitch’s dreadful face appeared. “Get in, losers!” she shouted. “We’re taking this thing on the road.” Trevor made a series of spluttering sounds. “It’s powered by compost,” continued the Vinewitch. “So, you know. Breath through your mouth! But we’re mobile now.” The big shape shifted and hummed. A hatchway creaked open, spilling light. The Pope of Moths stared, a big dumb grin rearranging his face. “Mobile,” he said. “Every time we cross a boundary, we’ll make another snarl of paperwork. They’ll never be able to track us. We’ll be free!” “Wonderful,” said Trevor, grabbing armfuls of cats. “Uhm, can we stomp on a few more cop cars before we go?” They considered this. “Yes,” said Bronson Hayes. THE END DARKHOUSE KEEPER, by Tree Bucket The world is a net of eyes, a grim grey patchwork of surveillance and paperwork and budgetary constraints. It is a cunning weave of labels, incarceration and executive bonuses. But there are places that the signals can’t reach- lands the economy has forgotten to monetise- roads which fall outside every jurisdiction. And- On a hill, surrounded by sibilant acres of grass, stood the Darkhouse. It was a modest timber home, handcrafted and pleasantly proportioned. It was a pity, then, that the builder really hadn’t known when to stop and had spent decades metastasising rooms, towers, awnings, stairways, minarets and buttresses. All built of planks hand-sawn from fallen trees. The Darkhouse violated every single building code, just by existing. To adequately describe its Groverian awfulness, new codes would have to be written so that it could break them too. High in one of the more stable towers, the Moth-Pope lurched out of sleep. “Car!” repeated Trevor. He shoved a cat away from his telescope and peered through the eyepiece. “Hhhmm?” went the Pope. “Another one for you,” Trevor said at last. “Sorry.” Moth Pope wandered over, scratching at his great big jaw with his great big hand. He frowned a bit and squinted at nothing- The Darkhouse was a special place. The reasoning was clear enough: there were lighthouses, so, obviously, there must be some kind of darkhouse to balance them out, right? Satellites could not see the Darkhouse. Computers, brought close, spat magic smoke. Paperwork had been known to quiver and flex into paper-crane shapes. And writs, affidavits and summons- well… “The Visitor’s staring at his phone now,” commented Trevor. “He’s wondering,” grunted the Pope, “why he has no signal.” “And now he’s shouting at his phone.” “Just went from max battery to zero,” replied the Pope, jaw clenched. “He’s not giving up!” said Trevor, a touch admiringly. “Do we know who this guy is? Real estate? Safety inspector? Mining company?” “Does it matter?” “There! He’s retreating,” said Trevor smugly. He was the Prince of Cats, and something of their attitude had rubbed off on him. “Our Visitor just forgot which sub-department he works for,” said the Pope, with some satisfaction. “Also his pen’s leaking pretty bad, and his security swipe card’s now an Ace of Hearts.” “Excellent,” purred Trevor. He really was good at smug. Capricious Fate had granted him a psychic bond with all felines, paired with a raging cat allergy! Hilarious! But modern science supplied Trevor with hayfever medication. Destiny was for losers. Moth-Pope swept aside a drift of empty cans and sank back into his horrible armchair. He winced as his sweat-soaked shirt pressed against his back. “You know,” he said loudly, “it’d be grand if Vinewitch could deal with some of these Visitor types, like she used to…?” “Says she’s working on a project,” said Trevor, brushing three cats off his chair. Trevor was an eczema-haunted deviant with arms about the thickness of broom handles; he believed in the cautious approach. “Something about harnessing the power of compost?” “Yikes.” “Well.” “I’m the Darkhouse Keeper,” rumbled Moth-Pope. “I could order her to help.” They both paused and pictured the Vinewitch: tall and quick, with big hair and a laugh like a sack of bottles hurled down a gravel track. And very friendly with the local grasses and lichens. “Or not,” finished the Pope. “Or not,” agreed Trevor, Prince of Cats. The Pope grimaced and wandered off to finish the morning chores. There were repairs to carry out, coffee to brew, rituals to observe. Mostly, though, Moth-Pope’s routine consisted of looking after the other inmates. Residents. Whatever. The Darkhouse was a place of calm, and very definitely off every radar. It tended to accumulate denizens as the centuries went by. There was Trevor, and Kai, and Kai’s ghost, and several escaped zoo animals, and an old lady who ate electricity, and an accountant who was invisible on Tuesdays, and a big clanking doom-wheel named the Kythera that the ancient Greeks had tried to fight with some kind of mechanism, and- And there was himself, of course. “Yo, Vinewitch! You keeping an eye on the rhinoceros? Helloooo?” He was the Darkhouse Keeper. If he concentrated (or forgot to concentrate) his aura could unravel bureaucracies, kill paperwork, shred networked technology. He had to buy a new TV every couple of weeks. “Vinewitch! Come on, the wombat needs feeding!” He had been Bronson Hayes. Ten years back he’d given up his plans and his hopes and his name. Severed every cord. Except his gym membership. It was the only way he could devote himself to life as the Darkhouse Keeper, and quiet the clamour of the world. His predecessors had taken all the good titles: ShadowLord and NightQueen and Emperor of Mists. It was forbidden to re-use these titles, so for the big dumb guy formerly known as Bronson, it’d been a choice between Moth-Pope and Chief Eunuch of Toads. He had chosen accordingly… Someone had to do it. The next day, Moth-Pope woke to find the House surrounded by thick fog, and about forty riot police. They were glaring the glares of men who have just discovered their guns and megaphones no longer work. They weren’t sure what was happening, and wanted someone to suffer for it. The Visitor from yesterday was there. Scowling. Moth-Pope squinted until the man’s security pass turned into an origami frog. Their guns wouldn’t work here. But the Darkhouse had no power against the brute simplicity of forty angry men with sticks. The Visitor stood and shouted something about building codes or late bills or outstanding writs. But the Darkhouse refracted his words: “This place is a wound on the face of Economy. We will remove it!” And the cops stomped forwards. Moth-Pope rubbed at his eyes. He heard Trevor announce his arrival with his usual explosive sneeze. “Here comes the cavalry,” he muttered. What, then, if he took it easy, stayed Bronson? Opted for normality? Let the House look after itself? Streamers of tear gas arced over the shield wall. -but then, there’d be no Keeper, no one to close the eyes of the world. No one to feed the rhinoceros, or give Trevor dating advice, or wind the Kythera’s key every solstice. “Let’s do this,” spat Trevor, jigging from foot to foot. He was surrounded by a hissing ginger nimbus of angry housecats. “You’ll get creamed, Trevor,” sighed Moth-Pope. “Oh yeah? Well: cats like cream.” “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said,” declared Moth-Pope. He shrugged, and whistled for his rhinoceros. “Let’s keep things weird.”
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2020 03:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:14 |
|
|
I'm in. I’ll grab a flash rule, thanks. 2021, here we come.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2020 11:59
|
|