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Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
in.

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Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
no prompt assigned

Portulaca Oleracea
730 words

The seed that will become you falls from the cloaca of a bird and lands between the teeth of a cracked sidewalk. It’s a remarkable start—you might’ve fallen an inch to the left or right and never taken root. But you fell into that clammy little crevasse, where generations of moss and lichen had churned concrete into just enough soil to germinate a hardy little seed, and began to grow.

You are a purslane sprout, capable of growing almost anywhere, and your resilience is your cage. You emerge from between concrete teeth in a star-shaped splay of stems clustered with cheery ovoid leaves, the only leafy green thing for many yards. Everything around you rumbles and stinks. The rainwater that drips into your crevasse tastes of oil and salt.

In the distance, a raised flower bed houses a few cynical old shrubs. You extend your roots toward the faint emanations of plant-consciousness, following an instinctive drive to commingle with other growing things, but you’re walled in by solid concrete in every direction.

The moss and lichen are content to steadily chew at the concrete, throwing generation upon generation of themselves at the slow, steady dismantlement of your prison. You don’t have that kind of time. You were meant to grow and die with your thousands of siblings in great waves, a kind of vanguard for other plants.

You and your companions are baking under an indifferent sun. The concrete around you sends up wavering thermals. The moss has gone dry and spongy on top, even as its moist underlayers continue to chew. The lichen remembers hotter suns and harsher climates. Heat and drought are part of life. Your body undergoes a series of molecular changes that allow you to operate more efficiently in drought conditions. You can neither thrive nor die, so you persist in a frail, thirsty limbo.

When the first trickle of water comes, your roots swell with it. Chemical signals within your body give the all-clear to photosynthesize like normal. You don’t have the ability to wonder why this cloudless day has produced so much water.

Then comes the deluge. Then the gnashing, ripping column of water that stabs down into your little crevasse, uproots you from your shallow plot of dirt, and sends you sprawling across the pavement. Chunks of moss land around you. Only the lichen is left in the crevasse when the apocalyptic spray moves on. The ancient organism continues to slowly and serenely chew at the pavement, barely marking your absence.

You dry out. You die. Your body skitters across the concrete according to the whims of the wind.

And then, somehow, you’re alive again.

The cellular structures and chemical signals that previously defined you are gone, but something of you persists in a sprawling new form. Something has bonded with your material essence, taken your death into itself, and metabolized it into new life. It’s like being inside that faint web of plant-consciousness that told you of your proximity to the cynical shrubs, but bigger. All-encompassing.

Your new body is alive with the ghosts of other plants and animals, rich with strange carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. You encompass a long strip of earth between the sidewalk and a drainage ditch. Your physical corpus is made of millions and millions of fine white filaments, just like the ones that wrapped your old body in their digestive web.

Beyond the physical network of your body, you feel others like yourself: sprawling composite lifeforms made of living death. Some of them are huge, spanning entire forests.

Your new body remembers being a single spore, drifting away from one of those huge forest bodies. It remembers landing in a clammy patch of earth between a sidewalk and a drainage ditch where it underwent the miracle of mitosis. It remembers consuming others like you: hardy little purslane plants uprooted from sidewalks and parking lots and gardens. Your old companion, the moss, is there too, woven into the stuff of your body.

You are not really dead. You were never going to die. From spore to seed to crevasse to soil and back again, you are one and the same as everything else, part of an indelible whole.

In the nearby distance, the wizened old lichen contentedly chews concrete. The world rumbles and stinks. Seeds fall and grow and die and live, and all is well.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
td w493: Hope is Absurd



Main prompt: I want stories about protecting things, building stuff at the end of everything, holding on to what matters. I won't mandate happy endings, but if you write me a bummer of a story, I'm probably going to roll my eyes at you.

Optional sub-prompt (must request upon signup): I will give you a weird, absurd, or possibly nonsensical excerpt, premise, or hook. How you use this is up to you. Don't ask if you're just going to blow it off, though.

Sample sub-prompt:

quote:

The moon shone like cooking mice, making Robert healthy. Robert grabbed a warped newspaper that had been strewn nearby; he massaged it with his fingers.

Note that you don't have to use the character names generated with these prompts.

Toxx bonus: You may :toxx: to crit a number of submissions from this week only (week 493) for extra words. That means you are toxxing to do crits before you see the stories.

:toxx: for 1 crit: 150 extra words
:toxx: for 3 crits: 300 extra words
:toxx: for 5 crits: 500 extra words.
:toxx: for ALL crits: 1000 extra words.

You must toxx before signups close. No exceptions. The options above are the only available options—e.g. writing 7 crits doesn't get you more words than 5. Crits must be posted within 24ish hours of judgment. To help you out, I will tell you right now that it's very unlikely I'll judge before Tuesday night (PST) meaning you would likely have until Wednesday night to post your toxx crits.

Base word count: 1100
Signup deadline: Friday the 14th at 11:59PM PST
Submission deadline: Sunday the 16th at 11:59PM PST

Judges:

me
chairchucker
Nae

Participants:

Noah - :toxx: to crit all stories, +1000 words. They looked at each other with sparkly feelings, like two spitezabbling, solid snakes eating at a very grateful wedding, which had flute music playing in the background and two cute uncles walking to the beat.

Flerp - :toxx: for all crits, +1000 words, :toxx: to submit. When a tutor from Tuckahoe decides to rob a bank, not everybody is supportive. However, his fortunes improve when his gardener find a misplaced key. In the end, the tutor becomes a better person and is admired by all.


Sebmojo - Jenna looked at the roof on the closest house and wondered if it would be rude to eat somebody else's chimney. Obviously it would be impolite to eat a whole house, but perhaps it would be considered acceptable to nibble the odd fixture or lick the odd fitting, in a time of need.


Antivehicular - Passengers hire a drifter with unusual powers in Montana.

Thranguy - :toxx: for 3 crits, +300 words. I don't feel I was particularly wise on the night that I died.

Muffin - :toxx: for all crits, +1000 words. After leaving the weathered planet Mars, a group of robots fly toward a distant speck. The speck gradually resolves into a weathered, space abbey.

Rohan - :toxx: to submit 5 stories, +500 words. (accidentally gave two prompts, Rohan may choose to use either or both)

Having heard of but paying little attention to the prophecy of the Hero, the main character must fight to protect what they love when they accidentally unleash a previously sealed away entity that wishes to rule the world and all within it.

and/or:

Soon, she has all the cosy toast she needs and begins secretly applying for private detective jobs. She soon realises that clumsy wizards plan to sabotage her new career prospects and decides to take action.

Yeah ok ok Yeah - Lest not forget the magnificent, massive mood of a mammoth mountains deeply singing.

Captain_indigo - :toxx: for all crits, +1000 words

The man called M - The kettle had chilly feet and wide lakes. It didn't look dangerous. Not even its backward trees warned me of my fate. I should have sensed the danger in its mouths

My Shark Waifuu - "It's time for begrudgingly walking!" whispered the goblin that lives on my warts.

Chernobyl Princess - :toxx: to crit everyone, +1000 words. Honey admired the newspaper's old-fashioned trees, breath held tight.

Mumble!

With help from a solid guillotine, the newspaper saved the world.


organburner - A young wizard learns the value of honesty in high school.

a classy ghost - A young apprentice with much still to learn, the peaceful life the main character once knew slowly fades away when a mysterious character forces them into a situation well outside their control; it threatens to destabilise their family.


Ceighk - :toxx: for 5 crits, + 500 words. Having only ever heard of these struggles in bedtime stories, the main character loses what's dearest to them when they discover that the uneasy peace that holds across the land will soon collapse and plunge the world into a chaos; it requires them to re-evaluate their current lifestyle.Refusing to back down, the main character, without thinking ahead, becomes involved in the situation to resolve it from the inside.

staggy - :toxx: to crit all entries, +1000 words

GrandmaParty - :toxx: for three crits, + 300 extra words

Tyrannosaurus - A farmer finds a good friend on an airship.


Idle Amalgam - :toxx: to submit. Regretting decisions made in the past, the main character loses what's dearest to them when, in the wrong place at the wrong time, they end up in a situation that requires them to give up their current lifestyle.Secretly, the main character, unsure of what it all means, ends up taking things into their own hands.

Albatrossy_Rodent - "Do you think my tentacles are like a grand hat?"


Taletel

Crabrock - :toxx: to submit, :toxx: for 5 crits, +500 words. In an empire of necromancy and mystery, in a time of lies, five librarians quest for the ultimate weapon.

CaligulaKangaroo - The story is about a cyberpunk. It starts in a distant fiefdom. The story begins with the passing of a test.

Sitting Here fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jan 17, 2022

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
And to get things off on the right foot, I will :toxx: to post my crits within 24 hours of judgment also

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Noah posted:

In. Subprompt please.

They looked at each other with sparkly feelings, like two spitezabbling, solid snakes eating at a very grateful wedding, which had flute music playing in the background and two cute uncles walking to the beat.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Note that you don't have to take any of this completely literally. I don't expect you to necessarily use names, locations, or direct quotes from your prompt.

flerp posted:

in give me a subprompt

:toxx: to crit however many stories there idk what words that give me

I'm making an addendum to the OP. Critting ALL the stories gets you 1000 extra words. Prompt:

When a tutor from Tuckahoe decides to rob a bank, not everybody is supportive. However, his fortunes improve when his gardener find a misplaced key. In the end, the tutor becomes a better person and is admired by all.

sebmojo posted:

In, prompt me

Jenna looked at the roof on the closest house and wondered if it would be rude to eat somebody else's chimney. Obviously it would be impolite to eat a whole house, but perhaps it would be considered acceptable to nibble the odd fixture or lick the odd fitting, in a time of need.

Antivehicular posted:

In, with a prompt please

Passengers hire a drifter with unusual powers in Montana.


Thranguy posted:

In with prompt

I don't feel I was particularly wise on the night that I died.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

ye cool in and I'd love a subprompt

After leaving the weathered planet Mars, a group of robots fly toward a distant speck. The speck gradually resolves into a weathered, space abbey.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

rohan posted:

in, prompt please

Having heard of but paying little attention to the prophecy of the Hero, the main character must fight to protect what they love when they accidentally unleash a previously sealed away entity that wishes to rule the world and all within it.


yeah ok ok yeah posted:

I want in again! Hit me with a prompt, please.

Lest not forget the magnificent, massive mood of a mammoth mountains deeply singing.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

The man called M posted:

In, prompt please.

The kettle had chilly feet and wide lakes. It didn't look dangerous. Not even its backward trees warned me of my fate. I should have sensed the danger in its mouths

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Albatrossy_Rodent posted:

In with subprompt

"Do you think my tentacles are like a grand hat?"

Idle Amalgam posted:

In with :toxx: for not submitting last week and I'd also like a sub prompt, please.

Regretting decisions made in the past, the main character loses what's dearest to them when, in the wrong place at the wrong time, they end up in a situation that requires them to give up their current lifestyle.Secretly, the main character, unsure of what it all means, ends up taking things into their own hands.

Tyrannosaurus posted:

In with subprompt please.

A farmer finds a good friend on an airship.

Ceighk posted:

in with a prompt please, and i'll :toxx: for 5 crits

Having only ever heard of these struggles in bedtime stories, the main character loses what's dearest to them when they discover that the uneasy peace that holds across the land will soon collapse and plunge the world into a chaos; it requires them to re-evaluate their current lifestyle.Refusing to back down, the main character, without thinking ahead, becomes involved in the situation to resolve it from the inside.

A Classy Ghost posted:

In, prompt me!

A young apprentice with much still to learn, the peaceful life the main character once knew slowly fades away when a mysterious character forces them into a situation well outside their control; it threatens to destabilise their family.

organburner posted:

Been a hot minute since I participated in this, I'm In with a prompt.

A young wizard learns the value of honesty in high school.

My Shark Waifuu posted:

In, prompt please!

"It's time for begrudgingly walking!" whispered the goblin that lives on my warts.

Chernobyl Princess posted:

In, prompt, :toxx: I will crit everybody

Honey admired the newspaper's old-fashioned trees, breath held tight.

Mumble!

With help from a solid guillotine, the newspaper saved the world.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Thank you for the crits, judges!

crabrock posted:

:toxx: for my in, subprompt me real good, and :toxx: for 5 crits

that's right, a double toxxin

In an empire of necromancy and mystery, in a time of lies, five librarians quest for the ultimate weapon.

CaligulaKangaroo posted:

In! Prompt please!

The story is about a cyberpunk. It starts in a distant fiefdom. The story begins with the passing of a test.

rohan posted:

Adding a :toxx: to crit five stories

Soon, she has all the cosy toast she needs and begins secretly applying for private detective jobs. She soon realises that clumsy wizards plan to sabotage her new career prospects and decides to take action.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Signups are closed! That means that you cannot get extra words for a crit toxx. Thank you to everyone who DID toxx! Good luck!!!

:siren: if you are absolutely stuck on your prompt, you may ask for one(1) reroll and i will issue a new prompt :siren:

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Submissions closed. Whiled DQed entries and redemptions are very welcome, people who toxxed to crit all of the stories only need to crit the ones already posted to meet their toxx.

failures are a few days older and have no story to show for it.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
:siren: Week 493 Judgment :siren:

Judgment notes:

Lots of variation in the judge's HM picks. There was something for everyone! It took some time to agree on our top picks, which IMO reflects well on the entries. The DM picks were completely unanimous, though the bottom three stories were all very different from each other.

No one wrote a total bummer, though we struggled to see how some stories related to the main prompt of the week.

Dishonorable mentions:

organburner - This one needed some more time to marinate. A few too many things didn't make sense, and the judges weren't totally sure how the story related to the main prompt.

Idle Amalgam - The writing was fine, but this was barely a story. It was pretty much just a straightforward account of the emergence of crypto and NFTs.

Loser

A Man Called M - Are you having anyone crit your entries before you post them? It might help!

Honorable mentions

Ceighk - You wrote an absolute banger of a narrator, a spymistress after my own heart

Antivehicular - Cool protagonist, worldbuilding drawn with a light touch

Chernobyl Princess - A sweet story with an interesting problem

Tyrannosaurus - Whimsy and wisdom that does interesting stuff with the sub-prompt

Winner

This story was already getting out of its chair to accept the win before the winner was announced. This week's victor is of course Muffin, who wrote a densely woven meditation on persistence in a universe of endings.

Welcome back to the bloodthrone. Old blood good blood.

:toxx: to have my crits in before 11:11PM tomorrow night.

:siren: if you toxxed for crits :siren: you have until Wednesday, 1/19 at 11:59PM PST to complete your crits

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
493 crits

organburner - Royce at the End of the World

Tip for next time: your protagonist should ideally be the most interesting person in the story. Royce kinda just bumbles around while things happen to him. Meanwhile, Principal Grundwisser is notably young for his post and is challenged with trying to manage a magical student body while protecting an absurd powerfully artifact. I know whose head I’d rather ride around in! As for the rest of it, I dunno. I wish Royce had learned something, or cared about something. As it is, he’s kind of a dud.

Ceighk - Johan, Johan!

Oh I adored this so much. I love Cordelia! She is clever and competent and yet you still found a way to confront her with a problem she couldn’t solve with pure cunning. There were so many bits that made me chuckle (Hello Johan!). I am an absolute sucker for charming spymasters. I want to read this book! Write a book, Ceighk.

Staggy - The Monument

This is a nice mood but I think it lingers too long on the same sentiment. I’m completely here for the themes, but this could have been a 500 word vignette.

Surreptitiousmuffin - To Those Who Came After

I’m struggling to articulate my feelings about this piece. It’s very very good and prompty. The story is explaining its goodness to me in slow, patient terms with swelling music in the background (in my head it’s the Sunshine soundtrack). “You belong in a magazine,” I tell the story, and the story smiles a soft, sad smile, as befits a piece so evocative of the beautiful futility of sapient striving. It knows.

You might feel a ‘but’ coming, because there is!

There’s a certain voice endemic to all stories that know they’re pretty. I do it. You do it. Other authors are doing it right now. I would characterize this voice as distant, possessed of the remoteness we might ascribe to a sage or a god. It speaks of universal truths with poetic authority, with humble hauteur, with unassuming grandiosity. The characters are always the exact perfect mix of irreverent and deeply wise or poignant. There are no truly tragic shitheads in these tales; the characters are always joking and singing and crying and fighting and

Oh, and we love the unpunctuated run-on sentence before the paragraph break, don’t we? I see you. I am you. We love using ‘and’ when a comma would do just fine. But, ho! We have range. We also love the comma splice. We take it home, kiss it softly, whisper many tender things to it.

This story will possibly win. It will absolutely HM. But for me, it hits on too many things I’m trying to get away from as I craft my own writing voice. And I think you’re at the point in your craft where you’re just hands down really loving good and most critique is going to come down to personal preference on the part of the readers. I think we owe it to ourselves to continue to challenge one another in the development of voice, themes, and style.

Noah - Don’t Forget the To-Go Plate

I feel like I missed something here. Taking the first sentence at face value, this wedding takes place at the end of the no-poo poo afterlife. The bride is postponing the inevitable end of the Afterlife by being a low level bridezilla. This keeps everyone sort of stuck in the comfortable purgatory of the hours leading up to a wedding. If I’m wrong, then I am not sure what you were going for! I think the issue is that there are too many characters with speaking roles and not enough time given to what is “actually” happening. There are little details I like, like the bridal fathers hanging out and sipping beers while enjoying not fixing the heat lamps. I dunno, this is interestingly weird, but its lack of grounding makes it weaker than it might’ve been.

My Shark Waifuu - Goblin-mother

This story makes me wonder: how am I meant to feel at the end? Happy for Griselda? Relieved for the goblins? As I was reading, I was hoping that she and the young adventurers would come to some sort of mutual understanding, but nope—they die unceremoniously. It might help if we knew a bit more about why Griselda was so set on raising goblins. There’s kind of an ecological message, I suppose, but it’s undercut by the fact that Griselda is fostering an increasingly invasive species. So am I supposed to feel bad for the adventurers? I get that this is a story about a villain, and of course most “villains” don’t believe they are doing anything intrinsically wrong. But she doesn’t have especially sound logic behind her villain MO.

Albatrossy_Rodent - The Sea Turtle and the Octopus

Gosh, I wasn’t expecting to like this as much as I did. It’s sweet and silly with a dash of worldbuilding and a nod toward the very real problems of extinction. The octopus’s dialog at the end needs to be rewritten a bit, but otherwise I thought this was exactly the vibe I was hoping for this week. Good job!

Idle Amalgam - Super Crypto Bros

You know, the whole time I was reading this story I was waiting for the pivot. It genuinely did not think it was going to be a stark retelling of the rise of crypto and NFTs. I’m not usually a stickler for the prompt, but I’m not really sure how this relates to the overall theme of the week. Your sub-prompt, sure, but not the other stuff I asked for. It’s just…one guy’s point of view on stuff that actually happened. And he doesn’t even have a personality to speak of, so it’s not like a character portrait. ‘Pete’ is completely one-dimensional; if you’re going to do a cliche, do it with panache. Don’t just check familiar boxes. The only moment of any interest is when the protagonist realizes with mounting horror that he could have been a millionaire, which causes him to undergo a complete 180 in spite of himself.

The more I look at this piece, the more I’m in awe of how much it’s working against you. The format, the POV (2nd person), and the subject matter are all challenging things to pull off. You chucked them all together like a kid playing scientist with the chemicals under the kitchen sink. I kind of have to give a respectful nod to the hubris.

The only thing I’ll give passing marks to is the writing itself. It’s competent and self-assured, no frills.

GrandmaParty - Priorities

This is well-written and I like the characters. That said, it feels very explainy, almost patronizing. Almost. And yet I managed to read it all in one gulp, and felt some genuine feelings for the characters. The end got a soft snrk out of me. I think having Slow Hand and his crew take the crafty way out was a good choice because it shows he really stands behind what he told Davis.

Chernobyl Princess - Paper Hearts

There’s a lot to like here. The small, mundane magic of the dolls. The overall sweetness of the premise. The beginning felt a little As You Know, Bob—characters explaining stuff they already know. Still, I wanted to know more about this world of living paper dolls, so it was okay. I also kind of wish the characters introspected a little more—what does it mean to be a paper automaton? What does it mean to bring a baby into the world when their creator is dying? I think you left some interesting questions on the table, but overall this was a nice read.

Tyrannosaurus - in front of a funky green sky, a banjo player gets some bad news

Haha this rules. It starts out whimsical, gets absurd, throws in some cool worldbuilding that is deeply relevant to the characters, and then continues to spin the characters against each other like two well-oiled gears. Every few sentences you introduce a new thing that delights me. When the dog busts out a long chunk of dialog about the nature of success, I don’t mind because it’s grounded wisdom in the middle of a story that has its head way in the clouds. I love how the idea of surprise is woven into this—bad surprises, happy surprises, whimsical surprises, surprises that don’t give a gently caress who you are or what you were doing a moment ago. I think surprise is one of the most hope-inducing qualities in the universe.

Antivehicular - The Ride-Along

This is one of those stories where I really love all the stuff it doesn’t say. I am so curious about the version of the world these characters inhabit, but I’m glad you don’t use up a bunch of words telling me about it. The writing is great. The only quibble I have is that Dee is pretty easily convinced to change her ways—which makes sense, she’s tired and lonely and wants to settle down. But I don’t know why it’s this ride rather than a different one. Stuff happens a little too easily. I’m completely here for a low-conflict story, I just needed Dee’s change of heart to feel a little more hard-won, or like it’s a long time coming. The story begins with Dee feeling restless, ready to hit the open road, so I had her in my head as someone who has trouble settling down. What changes about her on this particular ride? How could that be played up more? Just some food for thought.

Thranguy - The Basilisk Score

Conceptually: I love this. Planning a heist with Roko’s Basilisk to help it conceive of a literal galaxy brain heist in the real world. The insane hubris! It’s hopeful in its own way; the protagonist has cause for some hope, and spending eternity planning heists with a galaxy brain sounds a lot more interesting than other conceptions of hell. The only thing that didn’t land for me was like…I didn’t really see why this moment was the one the two characters chose to have this very huge, important discussion (namely, the persistence of self in a simulation, the revelation that there are other galaxy brains out there possible doing even more inscrutable things). It’s one of those things where I love the premise, but the execution is kind of just a teaser of how cool the premise could be rather than an exploration.

the man called m - How Andy Became a Man

This story shifts between present tense and variations on past tense. You should enlist the aid of a proofreader before you post. Hell, next time you plan on submitting, send your piece to me.

As for the subject matter: I wasn’t super into the plot. Andy was sympathetic, but you have to be doing something really savvy with either your character or your description to make me care about sledding. On top of that, you throw in some corpses, which Andy for some reason has time to forensically examine even though he’s presumably speeding past them at tens of miles per hour. There are a bunch of details in this story that never really pay off or go anywhere in particular.

Also…it’s 2022, and while outdated definitions of masculinity are certainly still around, I personally don’t like reading stories where manhood is defined as a willingness to do stupid hubistic things to prove one’s toughness. I wouldn’t care, except the story doesn’t really make any allowance for the fact that Andy is a man regardless of what Chad or anyone else thinks. If you’re going to make a point of writing about people who are trans (i don’t know how you identify so ignore this if the word “trans” in any way describes you) you should at least be current with the discussion on gender. That said, this story doesn’t feel especially transphobic—just well-meaning with a bit of ignorance. Sort of like if I tried to write a story about, idk, a Jainist.

I’ll close on sort of a subjective observation note. Most of the people who have success in Thunderdome and beyond are those who tap into something that’s true and real or at least meaningful to them. It’s what give their stories a kernel of universality, food for thought. I think you would benefit from writing a little closer to home.

Yeah ok ok yeah - “Deep Rich”, Excursion 385

This is pretty cool. I’m not totally sure I understand the nuances. I get the broad strokes: some sort of genetically engineered cybercat is communicating with an exploratory AI. All the humans have been killed, but maybe they’ve created something that survives them? I think you spent too much time on exploration and not enough on the cool part of your story, and the dialog between deep rich and the…cat? Is a little hard to follow at times. That said, I did enjoy Deep Rich’s POV.

A classy ghost - The Dead City Marches On

I really like the setting and premise of this piece, but this story is caught somewhere between sincere fantasy and parody. There’s this thing in short fiction where authors mash together two words and call it worldbuilding (eg murderwitch). It’s easy shorthand, but it leaves me feeling like the author isn’t taking their own setting very seriously. Which is a shame because I think your setting would make for a great novel!

I used the word “parody” above because while the automation of jobs is certainly an issue, this story kind of addresses it on a very surface level. So it doesn’t feel like a full-fledged theme, more like the story is pointing at an existing thing and going (late night talk show voice) “You seen this? Automation. You head about this? They're giving jobs to bugs."

CaligulaKangaroo - Final Exam

This is one of those stories that I think I should objectively like except I kept bouncing off of it. Rereading it now, I find my eyes skimming a bit. I think it’s because you offer a lot of description, with the plot-crucial stuff intermixed with the dense set details. There’s almost a little too much technical detail. I wasn’t entirely sure why it was so important to complete this test in spite of the critical danger. I wasn’t sure who Eddie was, or what the significance of the tickets were. A lot of stuff just kinda comes up and then isn’t brought up again.

It’s a shame because reading each line, it’s very vividly dystopian. But put together, it’s a parade of details that I don’t really connect to.

Crabrock - Liebrary

I really like the first few paragraphs of this because it reminds me of the intro voiceovers to lovely 90s/early ‘00s scifi shows. This isn’t a good story but it’s not pretending to be.

flerp - To the Reclaimers

I really liked this piece even if it’s not a traditional narrative. It’s a lovely reflection on endings and continuations from the point of view of someone who has truly accepted their small role in the comings and goings of the universe. It’s absolutely melancholic, but it doesn’t make me sad.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
gently caress it, old me im in

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
prompt: dig dig dig, there's no digger bigger, if you want a hole, this oldie's the soul (you need)

Updown
1200 words

They used to let me teach the young ones, but then the young ones went funny: eyes like bulbous white mushroom caps, noses upturned with flared nostrils like the mouths of caves. Everyone stopped talking about escaping Oubliette.

This is a gift from Roshu, they say now. This is a sign that our atonement is working. Our strange, beautiful children will walk with the gods again soon.

Except our strange beautiful children are adapting to caves, to the dim blue glow of lichen and mushroom, to narrow passages stooped postures. They can smell water from ten caverns away—what use do they have for the world of the gods?

I live in a small grotto carved by a long-dead stream. They don’t let me teach the young ones anymore. Not since they went funny. Not since I forgot which was up and which was down.

I told the children one day—I told them Roshu cast us up into Oubliette. Up, not down. A simple slip of an old woman’s tongue. Roshu cast us down, of course. The children already knew that. They corrected me, I laughed, and that might’ve been the end of it, except Dima Abergne happened to be passing by my grotto.

She had words with me after the children left.

Up is the gods. Up is light, truth, memory, and redemption. Down is Oubliette—the caves, the sin, the darkness, the humanity. I promised Dima Abergne I’d remember these things, but she took the children away from me anyway. I remember when she was born. I remember her wailing echoed through the caves for hours after her mother sung her to sleep.

My first memory is of the fall that broke my legs. The Dima says I was present for the expulsion of humanity from the world of the gods, that my legs were broken when Roshu cast us down. But I remember climbing up. My mother was there—her voice urgent, words indistinct after so much time. I remember trying to heed her words, whatever they’d been. And then I fell. It was the last wind I ever felt against my skin.

There was pain, and then the rest of my life happened. No more mother, no more upward climbs. Teaching the young ones helped distract from the residual trauma, but now that’s gone, too. It’s just me in my grotto, propped against the wall with my legs splayed out like two withered roots.

The young ones come by sometimes, look at me with those bulging white mushroom cap eyes. I smile at them and they dart away. After all, I’m the strange one. The one who can’t remember the difference between up and down. The one who said Roshu cast us up into Oubliette.

The adults whose duty it is to feed and clean me no longer speak when they come to my grotto. They all quietly wish I would just die. I’m the only living link to the world above, to whatever sin caused Roshu to cast us down.

I remember climbing upward with my mother, but I need to remember it as falling down. I remember falling into darkness, but only after I’d tried and failed to climb. I remember the smell of my own blood in the air, knives of stone in my skin. But I can’t remember that up is up and down is down.

They don’t let me teach the little ones anymore, so I wait until the others are asleep and drag myself out of the grotto.

It’s been so long since I’ve been in the larger cave that serves as our village square. I smell fresh picked mushrooms and human waste. High overhead, the cave ceiling is thick with glowing lichen and fungus, bright enough to make me squint after so long in the relative darkness of my grotto.

My arms are still strong. I’ve seen to that. There’s little to do in the grotto except think, exercise, remember, and forget. I drag myself across the main cave, into a tertiary side passage that no one uses. As I progress, the passage narrows until it's just big enough to accommodate my body.

I arrive at the reason for this passage’s disuse: a sudden drop that I feel more than I see. The passage opens up onto a chasm whose dimensions I can’t even guess. High overhead, I see the glowing fungus clinging to the roof of this vast cave. That roof goes on and on, described in the glow of millions of fungal caps, extending well beyond my fading line of sight.

I need to know that down is down, that the bottom of Oubliette is the bottom of the world. I need to know there’s nothing to climb down to.

I roll onto my back, reach up, and grip the top of the opening with both hands. I pull myself out over the chasm, supporting the dead weight of my body with my strong fingers. And then I begin the long, agonizing climb down.

As I lower myself hand over hand, I hear things. The soft pat of flesh on stone, the puff of small bodies breathing. I can smell them more than I can see them: the strange children with their huge eyes and flared noses and thick fingers made for climbing.

And when I miss my handhold, when I make the small, critical mistake that should send me plummeting to the bottom of the world, small hands find me in the darkness, steady me. And then the children and I continue the climb down together.

When we reach the bottom, I slump onto the floor like a length of rope, my legs folding under me at weird angles until the children prop me up against the chasm wall.

The blackness here at the bottom of the world is absolute. I hear the children clustered around me, their bare feet crunching on shards of broken stone. They don’t feel it; their skin is thick enough for Oubliette.

And then I see it: a hair-thin strip of light the width of an adult's extended arm. Not the pale blue of the mushrooms and lichen, but true yellow light of the kind that exists only in my most primordial memories. My heart pounds dangerously in my chest.

Up is light. Up is Roshu and his court. And yet here at the bottom of everything is light of a kind that by its nature can’t exist in Oubliette.

“It’s too bright,” one of the children complains, and the others agree.

I drag myself across the chips of stone, ignoring the pain in the front of my body. The strip of light is coming from the seam between the stone floor and a door—the first door I’ve touched since humanity was cast into Oubliette. I caress it with my fingers, rest my shoulder and cheek against the cool metal.

The doorknob is rusted in place, because of course it is. Of course it is. But we’ve found the light of Roshu at the bottom of the world, and now these strange, beautiful children can decide for themselves the meaning of up and down.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Tyrannosaurus posted:

Good on you for coming clean. You can pay :10bux: or you can write crits for all of this week's entries, due with 72 hours of judgement.

I'll honor this because I've been admittedly slack about keeping up on toxxes, HOWEVER if you :toxx: please do not necessarily expect this sort of clemency. More crits, however, are good crits.


MUFFIN. SEBMOJO. YORUICHI.

Thank you so much for taking the time to record your critical feedback :) It was nice to hear the reasoning behind your judgment. Because your reasoning sucked. While the winning story absolutely deserved its spot at the top, it's tiresome to have to wade through yet another discussion on whether "sitting here" sitting here'd too sitting herely. Therefor I challenge ALL of you to an anonymous brawl.

We'll need two people: a judge and someone who will post the stories on our behalf. All of us will agree to send our stories to this liaison. Whoever steps up to judge (assuming my venerable colleagues accept), please don't create a prompt until you've got a liaison to help you out.

:toxx:

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Zurtilik posted:

But since this never got directly addressed. On future toxxes should I be doing something to sort of tell on myself or should I just be expecting the admins to do it and if they don't I just shrug and move on like I did last time?

It helps me if you tell on yourself and others! But it's something I should be keeping track of better than I have been :) To that end, I'm going to go back and make sure all recent toxxes have been fulfilled or enforced.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Yup, like Staggy said, :siren:week 500 will obviously be a special prompt:siren: so if you enter this week, prepare your brain for the idea that you might be judging the week after next.

If that doesn't work, you can always abdicate to someone else to create and run a prompt.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
oh also im in

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
TD Week 500: 500DRED WEEKS OF THUNDERDOME

500 weeks of Thunderdome.

500 weeks of Thunderdome.

:black101: 500 WEEKS OF THUNDERDOME :black101:



We’ll save the sentimental carrying on for Thunderdome’s tenth birthday in August. For now, let’s all bask in the terrible glory of 500 weeks of the greatest flash fiction contest on Earth.

Before I share the prompt, I want to tell you what the judges want from this week: Give us your madness, your hijinks, your collaborations, your best solo work. Don’t worry too much about doing things right. If this is your first week, jump in and go nuts. You’re still expected to submit pieces that are worth the judge’s time, but don’t overthink what you’re “supposed” to do. This week we are channeling purestrain :justpost:

Judgment will be a little different from the typical week, too. Prizes! Fun mention categories! Surprise upsets! All of this and more can be yours this week. So that brings us to…


The 500th prompt.

  • Below this post is a 500 word story written by Crabrock. You will read that story and write a sequel that is also 500 words or fewer.

  • You may write as many sequels as you like. There is no limit on how many submissions you can enter this week—but they should all be 500 words or fewer.

  • You are actively encouraged to write sequels to other people’s entries. Branching and competing timelines are welcome! As are collaborations, sabotage, parodies, and anything else that you can accomplish while following the very minimal rules of this prompt.

  • Each story must be in its own post.

  • When you write a sequel, please quote the story(ies) that come immediately before it. If you’re responding to a chain of stories, you don’t have to quote all of them. Just the one(s) that comes immediately before your story.

  • There are no genre restrictions! Your story(ies) doesn’t even have to be the same genre as the one(s) that came before it.

  • We still don’t want your google docs or political screeds. Poetry is okay, but keep in mind that's a hard sell in a week like this.

  • Feel free to :toxx: for a certain number of entries or whatever other zany thing your heart desires.

Flash rules!


You can ask for two kinds of flash rules! For inspiration, you can ask for something from Dr. Cindy's box (this will make sense later). For those whose buttholes are truly hardened to the harsh coruscations of the 'dome, you may ask for a hellrule from Sebmojo.

Once a flash rule is in play, anyone may use it for their story! Please note all flash rules in your post for archival purposes.

Word count: 500 words per story, no limit on number of entries.
Signup Deadline: NONE (please do sign up if you intend to write, though. It will help us estimate how many stories to expect)
Submission deadline 11:59:59PM PST on Sunday the 6th
Judges:
Sh
Sebmojo
Crabrock

500hunders:


A special message about writing, the world, and you: It’s understandable that everyone is having trouble being creative right now. History is rarely kind to artists, even as it creates the context for the art we make. For those of you whose hearts are breaking for the world, I encourage you to make this your momentary respite from reality.

If now isn’t the time, then know that writing, and Thunderdome, will be there for you when you’re ready.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
:siren: :siren: This is the first story in the story chain. Who will write the first sequel? What crazy branching timelines will you drag the judges through??? :siren: :siren: :siren:

Written by Crabrock.

WEEK 500DRED Prologue
500 words

“Might wanna stand back,” said the old man I’d contacted on Craigslist.

He opened his garage door and a few obsolete chaos generators tumbled out onto the driveway. He kicked them to the side and pulled out the reason I’d contacted him: the RealitySmasher500. They only made three prototypes before it was deemed too powerful. It’d taken me nearly ten years to track this one down.

A few pieces fell off the device, which resembled a giant french horn with a lot of knobs and superfluous circuitry.

“I was on mushrooms when I designed this thing.” He picked up a loose circuit board, scratched his head, and shrugged. “You know it won’t work without a gem, right?”

I nodded. “I found another seller in Milwaukee with a whole box of gems.” Mostly gems, anyway. I hadn’t bothered to sort the random garage junk from the useful stuff yet.

The old man smiled ruefully. “I’ve only tested it with quartz. No idea what’ll happen if you put something less stable in it—like hackmanite or, god forbid, icosahedrite—so I’d strongly advise against it.”

I peered into his garage, saw several items I’d have liked to get my hands on. Maybe later.

I drove the RealitySmasher500 back to the lab. A few hours of scrubbing and the device shone like new…ish. The superfluous circuitry was hard to clean.

Dave, my assistant, walked in eating an apple. “Hey Dr. Cindy, want one?” he asked with his mouth full.

I accepted the apple. “Anybody call while I was out?” I asked hopefully.

“Sorry, doc. Still nothing.”

Dammit. That call was too important. I wouldn’t be able to focus until it came. I occupied myself by explaining the different functions of the RealitySmasher500 to Dave.

“And this,” I said, “ is the time-scale dial. Determines where the alternate timeline branch is created.”

“So if I spin it far enough to the left, I can gently caress with some dinosaurs?”

“Let’s not just yet.” I walked him through some of the other knobs. “This one affects the fundamental laws of physics, this one reverses polarity.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything.”

“Huh!” he said. “But not for us, right? Just for some other timeline.”

I shrugged. “It’s all the same, really. Each new timeline contains a complete copy of the timeline it branched off from. So let’s leave this one set to default, for the sake of our other selves,” I said. I looked at my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed any calls. Nothing.

Dave was saying, “And this only takes crystals, right? So if I took your uneaten apple and put it in this receptacle here…then push that button there…nothing’ll happen, right?”

Distracted, I didn’t register Dave’s question until I looked up, saw my apple in the gem slot and Dave’s finger depressing the big red BISECT TIMELINE button.

“You idiot, what did you do!?” I cried, every hair on my body standing on end.

Just as the room filled with bright light, the phone began to ring.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Chairchucker posted:

Dr Cindy's box pls

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...a diamond made from the cremated ashes of some sort of pirate (Dave is pretty sure it's some sort of pirate)

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Chernobyl Princess posted:

I would like something from Dr. Cindy's Box please!

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...A Faberge egg full of sand

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

sparksbloom posted:

In toxx Cindy box

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...An old, worn-out locket with something stuck inside

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
:siren: More stuff from Dr. Cindy's box :siren:

flerp posted:

give me a box thing idk i havent read the prompt over my 400(!!!!) weeks and im not starting now

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...A box of markers that's missing a marker

Yoruichi posted:

Gimme a thing from Cindy's box and a hellrule, I've been doing this for 232 weeks, you don't scare me

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...A spool of extremely pretty ribbon. It's SO pretty. Dave can't even.

rohan posted:

what’s in the box?

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...A piece of especially blue lapis lazuli

The Saddest Rhino posted:

cindy's box pls

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...An extremely rude item made of muddy pink rhodochrosite. Dave won't look at it.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Nikaer Drekin posted:

I'm in, and give me something from Dr. Cindy's Box!

Dave reaches into Dr. Cindy's box and hands you...A preserved head with buttons for eyes. Dave comments that it looks friendly.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
:siren: alright timefuckers, you have roughly 5 more hours, dig deep! :siren:

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Woops. Entries are officially closed. Seafood, post wee 501 at your leisure. Look for week 500 results in a couple days!

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Thank you, Chairman Mouse!

And thank you in advance, Thunderdome, for your patience during this exciting merger*! As we now have new investment opportunities, we will be taking the opportunity to fully monetize Thunderdome, allowing us to offer truly premium experiences at a remarkably accessible price point!

FREE accounts will include:

  • Personalized ads between stories
  • Customizable product placement—see the brands YOU love in the stories you hate!
  • 50% off your first ten critiques—wow!
  • Weekend access to the community Slack.

PREMIUM accounts will include:

  • Weekly massages from Crabrock, developer of the Thunderdome archive**
  • Ten free weekly critiques, plus 30% off all other critiques.
  • Unlimited access to the community Slack.
  • The option for a nearly ad-free experience.

SUPER DOUBLE PREMIUM accounts are entitled to all the perks of the PREMIUM account, plus:

  • All judges will understand your genius.
  • Unlimited freedom to post erotica, political screeds, poetry, and Google docs.
  • Ock ock ock.

I am thrilled to embark with you all on this thrilling new chapter in Thunderdome history!

*It's really an acquisition, but merger sounds less hostile takeover-y.
**We will be sending a Cease and Desist to the archive, as it now contains millions of words of stolen intellectual property. As such, Crabrock will be re-trained as our in-house masseuse.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Yoruichi posted:

Dear Sitting Here, Fight Me
34 words


There once was a woman here sitting
Whose views on Thunderdome weren't quite fitting
She threatened it with an ax
But she can't argue with facts
And so against her myself I am pitting.

Yoruichi crows
Wind stirs leaves, the tree remains
I consent to brawl.







:toxx:

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
I choose Luna!

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
ok then, give me your dream

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Prompt

My brother and I are floating down the river on a makeshift raft, the kind that's just logs of wood crudely tied together with rope. We're escaping from something. It's raining hard. So hard that I can barely see him even though he's right next to me. He's laying on his back with his head under his arms and he's wearing sunglasses. He's drunk again at another inappropriate time. It's night. I'm trying to keep our raft together but the river is choppy from the storm and it's making the ropes come undone. I keep grabbing rope and tightening it but as soon as I fix one two more come undone. I'm yelling for my brother to help but he just keeps laying there. Logs separate underneath me and I'm plunged into the cold water. I hold on to two pieces of the raft, the side I'd been sitting on and the side my brother is laying on. The strain is making my muscles burn and I don't know how much longer I can hold it together. My brother looks at me, lifts up his sunglasses, rolls his eyes, and says, "Just let go already."

My thoughts

You're a very legible dreamer, aren't you? I have a lot of dreams like this. I don't know the real world context; if your brother is deceased, then the dream takes on a very literal interpretation. But if he's not, I wonder if he's a stand-in for people in your life who make you feel like they're just watching you flail around, half drowning. The river and torrents of rain definitely add to a feeling like there's no control. When you're on or in a river, you're at the mercy of the current, and the rain obscures your view.

It's a lot easier to tell someone to let go than it is to really let go. This makes me curious about your brother--is he alive? Is he estranged? Does he frustrate you? Or is it like I supposed above, where he's a stand-in for people in general? The splitting of the raft suggests a divide, but it also feeds into this idea of control. If you don't hold everything together, no one will. My take is that, while that's true sometimes, a lot of the time the obligation to hold on is mostly in our heads. Most things work out ok on a long enough timeline. Or you die, and that's that.


big stick ideology
1663 words

I knew the exact moment my sister became obsessed with the big stick in the village square, even though she was ten and I was only six and it was her job to know what I was feeling, not the other way around.

Every season had a celebration to honor the big stick, to thank it for holding up the golden knotwork sky. The stick, while taller than anything else in the world, was thin as a young child’s arm; when you tilted your head back, it seemed to taper away to almost nothing, as if a thread were holding up the sky.

This was the summertime celebration of the stick, which was my favorite because it happened right at dusk, when the whorls and coils of the sky softened from brilliant gold to a low, molten color, and the village was gauzy with lantern light.

My sister always hated it. The adults drank and cavorted near the stick, which was protected from the crowd by nothing more than a square of velvet rope. She watched them with the fierceness she usually reserved for minding me, and I stood silently by her side, even though I wanted to go play with the other kids.

And then it happened. One of the drunk adults stumbled, tripped over the protective velvet rope, threw out his arms, and caught himself hard on the base of the big stick. He recoiled immediately, rebounded away from the thing like it was made of rubber.

In the silence that fell over the village, my sister took my hand and squeezed hard. We all stared up at the stick. No one breathed. Then someone made a joke, and everyone chuckled, and the tension dissolved.

I squinted at the big stick. It looked the same as it always did, tall and thin, disappearing into a particularly dense whorl in the molten sky. The adults were all laughing. But my sister hadn’t let go of my hand.

Even at ten years old, her grip was strong. The bones in my hand felt too close together, but I was scared to pull away from her, to disrupt the terrible rapture I saw on her upturned face. I looked at our parents, hoping they would glance our way, see my sister’s quiet distress, but now the party was back in full swing, and Mom was pulling Dad into a group of dancers.


Our house was empty when I woke up the next day.

I found another crowd gathered in the village square, but this time they were all there to gawk at my family. I was small enough to wriggle between the adults’ legs on all fours; when I got to the center of the crowd, I found my sister clinging to the big stick, wrapped around the base of it like a creeping vine.

“But how are you going to sleep, sweetie?” Mom was asking. “Where are you going to go to the bathroom?”

“I’ll figure it out,” my sister said through bared teeth.

At first I thought she was grimacing, but then I realized: held between her teeth was a small, violently blue soulcap mushroom. If she swallowed the cap, she would vomit ancestral ghosts. She’d vomit until her body gave out and she joined the ghosts she’d expelled. No one wanted a dead child or a town full of nosy, judgmental ghosts, so my sister was safe, for the moment.

For weeks, my parents pleaded with her. Our neighbors, the village elders, and the mayor all did their best to convince my sister to let go of the big stick.

“The stick was fine before you were born,” they told her, “and it’ll be fine after you die. Let it go.”

Sometimes I’d sit with her, not saying anything because I was afraid if we talked, she’d accidentally swallow the soulcap and puke up a bunch of ghosts and die. I didn’t know how to tell her that I understood, that I had seen fear crystalize inside of her the moment the drunk had stumbled into the big stick.


Weeks turned into months, months turned into years.

My sister became as much a feature of the village square as the big stick itself. She grew into an adult; I grew into a teenager, and with adolescence came a sense of shame. We were the family with the crazy sister who thought she needed to hold up the stick that held up the sky, who only went to the bathroom at night, when everyone was sleeping. A sister who survived off scraps from pitying villagers, eating carefully around the soulcap between her lips.

I came to hate her.

Some nights, I would sneak out to jeer at her. Torment her. On those nights, my hand throbbed like she was still crushing it in her fear grip. I hated myself, too. I fantasized about going away, finding another village where I wasn’t the girl who harassed her crazy sister.

Fifteen years later, my sister’s hands had become like lobster claws. The sky had changed, too.

In the entire history of the village, the iridescent whorls of knotwork had reflected the surrounding forest, green trapped in coils of gold. Now we saw new things reflected where the sky met the horizon: stoplight red, even though the village had no stoplights. Neon light, even though no one had ever heard of neon. Blinking strips of airport tarmac, though the village didn’t have an airport.

And then there was the roar. As it drew closer, we could hear the individual textures in the sound: falling trees and cracking earth. And something else, maybe. A murmur, a sliver of song.

The sky was horrible. Whatever was coming was all around us, closing in our village, visible to us only as warped grey reflections spattered with neon. Our gold was gone.

I spent my days on the roof of our house, where I could watch the hideous dust clouds rolling toward the village from every direction, swallowing the sky in a big doughnut of destruction. I think we all kept waiting for it to roll back like a wave. The village had always been. Nothing like this had ever happened.

One morning I awoke, took up my station on the roof, and looked toward our impending doom. My stomach lurched. Bile burned the back of my throat. At some point in the night, the clouds of destruction had crossed the threshold from distant to near.

There were roiling masses of skyscrapers, coils of highway, nervous system clusters of cable and wire. It was incredible. It was terrible. Now I was certain I could hear music underneath the roar of destruction—cataracts of song from a thousand times and places, all competing with the crash of treefall and earthshatter to batter my eardrums with too much.

Two voices screamed my name, telling me to come down to safety. The first was Mom, who stood below the eaves of our house, begging me to come down into the basement with her and Dad. As if a little wood and concrete would protect us from what was rolling in.

The other voice I almost didn’t recognize, until I realized where it was coming from. From my position on the roof I could see my sister in the village square, her hands still locked around the big stick. She was looking at me for the first time in almost two decades, her eyes wide and pleading, almost as bright as the soulcap between her lips.

I went to my sister, knelt beside her. There was so much I should have said, or asked, or apologized for. But as I looked into her face for the first time as an adult, suddenly I felt small again. I was a little sister, trusting and needy.

I said, “I don’t want to die.”

My sister raised an elbow invitingly and I crawled into the circle of her arms, nestled myself between her and the big stick. She was weathered and bony, and smelled of rain and dust. The soulcap glowed softly between us.

When the new world hit the village, it was with the force of a thousand-thousand trains, the roar of a hundred stadiums. It was hard as concrete, cold as steel, cutting as glass.

Just before the wave closed around my sister, the big stick, and I, she swallowed the soulcap mushroom. The effect was instant; her eyes rolled up in their sockets and her head jerked back with neck-breaking force. Her jaw opened wide, then distended, and from her throat erupted an electric blue fountain of amalgamated ghosts. They separated as soon as they hit the air, vague balls of light resolving into a horde of ancestors.

I screamed, and struggled, but my sister’s arms were tight around me, and her grip on that stick was reinforced with the iron of years.

With nowhere else to go, the ancestral ghosts clung to my sister and I, layering themselves over us like the plates on an armadillo’s back. The new world closed in around us, and there was a horrible crackling sound where highrises and road signs and car tires collided with the luminous forms of the ghosts. But the ghosts did not break; chaos broke against them, and rolled back.

I saw my sister among those ghosts, grinning madly at me, her eyes bright with the fierce love I remembered from our childhood.

When the world settled, my sister’s body was cold. I had to struggle to detangle myself from her arms. Strange shadows had fallen over us; when I looked up, I saw towers—a new kind of forest—that stretched toward a distant blue sky.

Our big stick had been gnawed to pieces, which lay scattered around us. I picked up a likely piece, tested my weight on it, and took my first steps in the new world, trailed by a procession of ghosts like little sisters.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Thunderdome Week 510: Oops All Cozy



I'm really tired Thunderdome. Like on a level I didn't know a person could be tired until recently. This week, I want stories about taking a rest. Maybe your character is having a momentary respite from a conflict, or maybe they're just cozy and content and it's all fine. Yes, you can have conflict within the story, but it should be small and manageable. Like if we're measuring conflict on a scale of 1-10, the onscreen conflict in your story should be a 2, max. Implied offscreen conflict should not overshadow your cozy moment.

If you absolutely must have a conflict but you want to make sure it's sufficiently small, you can request a cozy conflict and I'll give you something prompt-appropriate. Nothing super detailed, just a few words to get you started. This is optional.

If you would like some inspiration, you can also request a cozy picture, like the one I used for the prompt image. I don't have a repository of these. I'll just be looking around the internet for stuff I like. If you know there's a cozy whimsical luminous fantastical image you'd like to use, feel free to post it with your signup. This is also optional.

Again, I really don't care about big conflicts right now. I just want to chill out and read some stuff that's not super melodramatic.

Word limit: 800
Signup deadline: Friday the 13th at 11:59:59 PM PST
Submission deadline: Sunday the 15th at 11:59:59 PM PST
Judges:
me
????
???????????YOU????

Cozy people


:siren: SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT :siren:

Just 12 weeks from now, Thunderdome will be putting on its 10th birthday party! We're going to try to make it something truly special.

There's a catch. It seems that in a decade of Thunderdome, the blood god has grown thirsty again. In the weeks leading up to Thunderdome's tenth birthday, we are going to try and post a total of at least 222 stories. If we can do this, the blood god will bless another ten years of Thunderdome!

There will be a dedicate post coming soon, but I wanted to get the ball rolling on this, because we're going to start counting stories...........................................................now.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
I don't own the images I'm using and I'm shamelessly just pulling them off Google. If you know the original artist and feel like linking it, go for it.

rohan posted:

I am in and will take a cozy conflict please.

Dropped items always end up in the weirdest spots

Antivehicular posted:

In, will take a cozy conflict

I can hear it, but I can't find it.

steeltoedsneakers posted:

In. Gimme a pic.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Thanks for the crits, Rohan!

Once again, I don't own these images. Most of them have watermarks from the artist so look them up if you like them

Thranguy posted:

In, I'll take a pic.




Bad Seafood posted:

In, gimmie a pic.

Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007

Uh thanks for the crit, but your crit of Jib is pretty uncalled for. I'm going to edit out the last three lines because they aren't a crit, it's just a really weird and potentially upsetting thing to say.

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Sitting Here
Dec 31, 2007
Thanks for the crit flerpo

As usual, pics do not belong to me. If there is a watermark, go check out the original artist! Also please note that if your image has an animal subject, that doesn't mean I necessarily expect you to write about animals (although that is certainly welcome). Likewise, if your image has a human subject, don't feel like you have to write about a human! The main thing is the vibe.




Nae posted:

I'm in, gimme a cozy pic.



The man called M posted:

In. Picture, please.



Nethilia posted:

I'd like to be comfortable for once.

in, wrap me in a cozy picture blanket.

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