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Jan 6, 2022 22:20
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no prompt Endosymbiont ~905 words The spongy red tissue gives beneath your pereopods as you scuttle upward. With each step, a tiny blot of blood births from the firmament, blossoms into a red flower, and then is swept away as the Host draws another watery breath across its gills.. Your journey will not be long, but you are weary from battle with the Other, and carefully place each barbed talon as you ascend. The current against you brings the scent of your destination. Each downward flick of your antenna elicits strong odors of brine soaked enzymes and bacterial refuse. The Host’s mouth is not far. The Other, safely behind, can only wait, clamped onto the gills--a tiny, armored lump, unfit for the journey you now undertake. For now. Steady, plodding progress and the pliant gills give way to a fleshy firmament of mucus coated cartilage. You pass into the pharynx. Here the scent is stronger, intoxicating, but with it comes a quickening of the current. You sense a ripple of electricity pass beneath your claws: tactile receptors ping the Host’s brain with each of your steps. The Host, for the first time, senses you. Ahead, the water brightens as a mouth opens wide, drawing a percussive blast of water towards you. You hunker down, pressing the edges of your carapace tight against the Host’s flesh, pereopods digging for purchase. The brine washes over you, demanding to dislodge your invasion, but you are stronger. That is why you, and not the Other, makes this journey. You hold fast, then resume your climb. The outer rim is where you’d first met the Other. You burrowed into the pink feathery gills, a warm, capillary embrace after many weeks of hunting the plankton. The Host’s blood coursed around you, a soothing rhythm to replace the pelagic maelstrom of your early, desperate existence. You felt your exoskeleton broaden and flatten, your limbs reshaping themselves for grip, trading paddles for hard talons. There, you detected the presence of The Other. Like you, an invader. Chemical signals brought you to him. A confrontation. You can still taste the the Other’s blood in your mandibles. The battle was violent yet short. Farther along in your metamorphosis than him, your razor sharp pleopods and maxillipeds cut easily through his soft exoskeleton. Defeated, the Other scuttled back to the outer rim. A hillock of dark tissue rises ahead. From a place deep within a vibration builds: your destination is close. Another pulse of water rocks you back, but your grip holds firm. You scrabble forward and mount the fleshy hillock of the Host’s tongue. Your maxillipeds poke and prod the muscular mass. The flesh here is sweet, intoxicating. You feed, mandibles cutting through the base of the tongue, down into the nest of nerve fibers beneath. Millions of years of evolution guide your pincers through the minced flesh to a central artery. You clamp down, and feel the Host’s blood urgently press against the dam you’ve made. The artery hardens as it clots, further cutting off blood. You bear down against the rush of current around you and the desperate writhing of the Host’s tongue. Soon, the thrashing stops. You wait. You are patient. You gorge on blood and mucus, grow, and transform. It takes days, but beneath you necrosis does its deadly work, and the tongue blackens and dies. No tongue, no problem—you are perfectly adapted to play that role for the Host, who goes about life unhindered. Days turn into weeks, and hormones sweep through your tissues as new genes switch on. Testes ripen into ovaries and swell with unfertilized eggs. You grow, too, soon filling the oral cavity of the Host. Still you dig into the tissue, curious about the mass of nerves that lies just beneath. Evolution again guides you. Delicately you press appendages into the cluster of nervous tissue, prodding and feeling until you find the central ganglion. Electricity ripples from it in waves, telling you you’ve arrived. Another vibration rises within you, and you spear the ganglion with your maxillae. An explosion rips through your mind. In an instant your consciousness flexes, then expands. You see through the eyes of the Host, drinking in a sudden world of color and depth. New scents and tastes crowd your olfactory lobe. You feel the press of the water along your sides, the subtle vibrations that tells you others are near. You respond by flexing your myomeres left, then right, then left again, propelling yourself forward. You feel the Host trying to peel back the edges, work its way back inside. Effortlessly, you push aside the Host’s former consciousness for your own. Then you kill it. Languidly, you drift through the reef. Your new form is agile and strong. You find others like you, and together you spend days and weeks cruising the sunlit ocean, devouring shrimp and mollusks by day, hiding in the rocks at night to avoid predators. Your new form pleases you, but you do not forget yourself. The Other is there to remind you. A constant presence, his chemical signals become more urgent. One quiet morning you sink back into your former self and send a pulse of pheromones towards him. A chemical cue for the Other to make the journey you once did. The cycle must continue, after all. Much later, inside the mouth, you and the Other furiously mate. There are more Hosts to conquer. More Hosts to become. .
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Jan 10, 2022 06:38
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Mar 15, 2022 21:13
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Bullets on the Horizon ~1180 words It was a classic standoff. Hoke Winchester lightly touched the mother-of-pearl handle of his trusty Colt revolver and stared, steely-eyed, across the event horizon. The Italian stared right back, gaze unwavering, left hand similarly positioned. One twitch and it would be over. This wasn’t Hoke’s first rodeo: he’d been here before and lived to tell the tale. But he knew one thing: in this place, you were either quick, or you were spaghetti. The Shwartz child had started it all. Darlene, his mother, had been holed up with him in the barbershop when the Italian and his gang arrived, hootin’ and shootin’ their way down the relativistic jet. Hoke had been minding his own business, polishing glassware behind the bar, when one of the Italian’s men had gotten extra rowdy and shot ol’ Stumpy Pete right in his rocking chair. Now, not only is that kind of behavior is frowned upon, it’s also bad for business. Can’t have paying customers getting perforated on the front porch of your saloon. So Hoke ambled out from behind the bar and was about to have words with the Italian when he spied the Shwartz child waddle out into the middle of the accretion disc. Right into the trajectory of the Italian and his cronies. Now he and Darlene had a few flings and though he was pretty sure the kid wasn’t his, Hoke still felt mighty protective over the little mutt. Under a tousle of red hair a constellation of freckles orbited his cherubic cheeks. Real cute. But not real bright, Hoke thought, as he watched the little varmint wave at the Italian and his men as they thundered towards him. Gravity doing as gravity does, the boy didn’t stand much chance against the momentum those Italian boys were bringing. So Hoke did as Hoke does, which was stick out his neck to help out somebody in need. He pulled the star from his pocket, slapped it on, and stepped out of his saloon to address the matter once and for all. Darlene chose that moment to burst from the barbershop, screaming for her baby. The Italian whistled his boys to a stop, which took quite a bit of doing. Hoke was then paralyzed between grabbing the boy, pulling Darlene to safety, or castigating the Italian and his gang for ventilating one of his paying customers. In the end, he did an approximate job of all three. An altercation ensued. Amidst a lengthy row of shouting, tears, and cussing, Hoke garnered the Schwartz child might in fact have been sired by the Italian himself. A story for another day. Regardless, that didn’t abdicate his responsibility to the boy, to Darlene, and lest we forget, Stumpy Pete. So he challenged the Italian to a duel. Hoke felt gravity tug at his boots. The black hole was trying to pull them off, but Hoke curled his feet up to resist. He figured the Italian was feeling the same effect, but his olive eyes gave away nothing. A bead of sweat rolled down Hoke’s forehead. The Italian had a history that stretched eons, and Hoke suspected he was overmatched. But, anything for honor, right? And duty. All that poo poo. So he held firm, hand hovering over his Colt, waiting for the Italian to make his move. The pull on his boots grew more insistent. As they orbited downward toward the singularity, the tidal forces across his body escalated. At first Hoke didn’t mind. The stretching felt real good on his back and shoulders, rusty with age and long hours behind the bar. But as they descended, Hoke’s body began to elongate as the intense gravity on his boots competed against the lighter gravity on his hat. Competed, and won. Hoke was normally a generous six foot. But he reckoned the relentless gravitational gradient had already pushed him to six foot three with change to spare. The Italian, suffering the same tidal forces, still refused to draw. Eyes and face granite, he showed no sign of distress or even a speck of discomfort. Hoke was not so stoic: sweat dripped into his eyes, causing them to sting and burn. He squinted to clear his vision. Things were getting weirdly hot and bright as photons rose up from the plasma to encircle them in a glowing ring of Hawking radiation. Still the Italian held. Hoke would never draw first. He was a gentleman, not a killer, even faced with villainous scum like the Italian. So as they circled the black hole and gravity pulled his torso and limbs into long, ropy noodles, he held firm. The ever-increasing tidal forces yanked his boots off his feet. Hoke frowned as they spiraled downward into oblivion. There went his favorite pair. To make things worse, his hat popped off the top of his head and disappeared somewhere above him before he could grab it with his free hand. This was not going well. By now both he and the Italian were fully spaghettified, their bodies strung out like long handfuls of Grannie’s yarn. Still the Italian held his steely gaze even as his body distended to double, then triple, eventually ten times its original length. A thundering sound filled Hoke’s ears as a comet roared down from above. Caught in the same gravity well, it passed right between them in a brilliant flash of dust and ice before falling into the event horizon. It was in the sudden silence afterward that the Italian reached for his gun. Millennia of slinging pints down a wood plank bar had taught Hoke all the little permutations and perturbations brought on by the gravity of a black hole. So when Hoke drew his trusty Colt and pulled the trigger, he aimed high. Real high. The Italian was faster, but his bullet, fired straight across the event horizon, dropped as quick as a dead horsefly in a drainage ditch. Hoke’s bullet rose gracefully into the ergosphere, then dropped straight down and through the Italian’s shoulder. Not a mortal wound, but enough to teach him a lesson. Hoke was, after all, a gentleman. But regardless, you can’t shoot a paying customers without paying a price yourself. Things got a lot more peaceful after that. Getting shot and falling through the black hole seemed to calm the Italian a bit, and he and Darlene even tried to make a go of it raising their kid together. The Italian took a job at the general store in town, stocking shelves and sweeping the floor. Hoke returned to the saloon and resumed pouring and polishing. On occasion, Darlene and the Italian would even have Hoke and Stumpy Pete over for Sunday night supper. Over heaping piles of spaghetti, Hoke and the Italian would sometimes catch each other’s eye, and that steely glare would briefly return. But then the Schwartz child would say something silly or snort a noodle up his nose, and they’d all share a good laugh. In the end they were just simple folks, living simple lives, biding their time until the heat death of the universe.
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Mar 21, 2022 01:08
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In, and I would like a card.
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May 26, 2022 05:13
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Prompt: The Sun The Formicarium ~990 words Climbing the cramped corridors of the Very Large Solar Array control station a million miles from Earth, Marcus pondered whether to be happy or sad. Happy that it would soon be over. Sad that his life’s work would be over as well. He considering these contrasting emotions, then, after painfully banging his elbow on a metal hatchway, he decided he mostly just felt cramped. The tunnel wound its way through a series of zig-zag switchbacks that would be exhausting if it weren’t for the half-gee gravity. He felt like one of the worker drones from his childhood ant farm, laboriously tunneling and hauling, tirelessly working for their queen. Marcus didn’t have to dig a tunnel, but he did carry precious cargo: a tiny SIM card. And he served no queen. He served no master but one: revenge. The ant farm—properly called a formicarium, as he’d correct anyone who used the wrong terminology—was his strongest memory from an otherwise lovely childhood. Marcus had no siblings or friends. Instead he spent hours watching his ants toil, their repetitive motions a placid respite from the volcanic eruptions of his stepfather and mother in the next room. Every night was a race to see who could get drunker, quicker—she on cheap wine and he on cheaper whiskey. Only nobody ever really won, did they? A slammed door or shattered vase signaled a hiatus, only to be continued the next night. So Marcus watched his ants. They never raced, never complained about their jobs, their friends, their spouses, never accused each other of sleeping around. The ants just worked. Tirelessly. So that’s what Marcus did. As soon as he was old enough, he fled, moved to the city, got a job and entered university. A prodigy, his genius was noticed early and cultivated with prestigious internships and opportunities. A doctorate, a plum research job, share of a Nobel prize for his work creating the VLSA. Thousands of sodium metal mirrors precisely arranged in space that could deflect portions the suns rays, freeing the Earth from the ravages of global warming once and for all. Just like his ants, each mirror played a small role to achieve a greater purpose. Marcus never forgot about his formicarium, and his precious ants. And he never forgot what happened to it. Fridays in Mrs. Mushler’s fourth grade was class show and tell. Marcus carefully wrapped his formicarium in a ratty bath towel and carried it, pressed to his chest like a newborn child, the half-mile walk to school. The usual thugs were hanging around the swing set. “Hey fuckface!” a particularly annoying red-haired brute named Stephen called out. “Whatcha got there? Your fart collection?” Marcus bee-lined for the school doors but the boys quickly surrounded him. His precious cargo was punched from his hands and crashed to the ground, cracking and spilling ants and sand and shards of glass across the asphalt. “Ooh, nice,” Stephen crooned. “That will go perfect with my show and tell.” He pulled out a large magnifying class from his pocket. The other boys grabbed Marcus and held him in place as Stephen positioned the lens over the scattered ants, using the hot desert sun to roast them, one by one. Marcus tried not to cry, his eyes shamefully welling with tears as Stephen’s cronies twisted his arm behind his back. “Oh look! Baby’s gonna cry! Cry, baby!” Stephen jeered as another worker ant crinkled under the magnified rays of the sun. The other boys laughed. “Oh poo poo, look at this one.” The queen ant emerged from the rubble. Ten times the size of the workers, her bulbous abdomen shimmered iridescent as she raised her head and her antennae licked the air, tasting it. Steven grinned at Marcus. “Watch this.” The tears came freely now, mixing with snot and drool and blubbering. Helpless as his queen burnt down to nothing, a black lump of scorched organic matter amongst the scattered sand on the asphalt. Somewhere in the distance the morning bell rang and a teacher’s voice rang out towards them, but it might as well have been been a million miles away. Marcus punched his keycard into the slot and pushed into the control room. He moved to the console, entered his access code, and checked that the VLSA was online. All green. He pulled out the SIM card that contained the new calculations, his life’s work. Solar activity, the rotation of the Earth, the precise angle of each mirror in the array—all accounted for. It was never going to be as precise as he’d once hoped, but a little collateral damage was a small price to pay for his revenge. A square mile was the best he could do. It was almost poetic justice that his childhood tormentor had grown up and moved into the same dingy trailer park near his own mother and stepfather. He’d even started a family, apparently. Somehow, despite the years of whiskey and wine, his mother and stepfather were still there, too. Collateral damage. He pushed the SIM card into the slot and the transmitter blinked new instructions to the solar array. A million miles away, in a small New Mexico town, a girl digs in the dirt behind her father’s trailer. The hot sun prickles the exposed skin on her back as she jabs a sharp stick into an anthill. Tiny ants emerge and swarm her toes, tickling her feet. She giggles, but it’s also a little gross, so she stands up and does a little dance to get them off. Around her the harsh buzz of insects suddenly increases in pitch, then falls dead quiet. In the space between heartbeats the sun above swells to double, triple, ten times its normal size. The air tastes funny now: sharp, like ozone. She sticks out her tongue and taunts the ever-expanding orb of whiteness above, until the sun swallows the whole sky.
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May 30, 2022 03:21
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Thunderdome DXIII – The World After This week we will write stories set in a world after the Singularity – the moment when machine intelligence outstrips that of humans. Many scientists predict this moment may occur in the next few decades, and there are many theories of that that might mean. Will it help solve humanity’s problems, or make them worse? Will we enter into an out-of-control positive feedback loop where computers become infinitely smarter than us? Will our machines become benevolent overlords, freeing humans from a lifetime of labor, or will they enslave us to harvest our bodily energy, Matrix-style? What does ordering a pizza look like when your phone is smarter than you? You do not have to write about the Singularity itself, just a story set in a world that has passed this event horizon. In other words, it should inform your story, but does not necessarily have to be the focus of it. Also, in honor of the very first Thunderdome I entered (Week 217), your story must pass the Bechdel test, and none of your characters can be straight, white males. And if your story happens to be metal as gently caress, that never hurts. No genre restrictions, but please no Google docs, porno, or fanfic. Word limit – 1200 Deadline to sign up – Friday Midnight MST Deadline to submit – Sunday Midnight MST Judges- Me …? …? Entrants: sephiRoth IRA The man called M Nae derp Thranguy Albatrossy_Rodent Beef Supreme hard counter Hawklad fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 16:01
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Albatrossy_Rodent posted:In. Though no flash rules were offered, I would like one, if possible. Certainly! Your story must take place primarily underwater.
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Jun 1, 2022 00:03
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Amidst all this bloodshed, I wanted to drop a reminder that deadline to sign up for TD513 is tonight. Also looking for a judge buddy or two if you're too lazy to write about THE FUTURE OF HUMANKIND this weekend. edit: okay, signups closed! Hawklad fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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Jun 4, 2022 01:33
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Submissions closed. Still up for co-judges if anyone wants to help out, pm me.
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Jun 6, 2022 07:26
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Thunderdome DXIII Results Overall this was a smallish but high quality week. Most everyone took a different approach to the prompt, some breezy and humorous, others more serious and poignant. I appreciate the diversity of characters and viewpoints and nearly everyone hit the prompts. Many thanks to my co-judge Chernobyl Princess, who's assessment closely mirrored mine regarding most of the stories. DQ to Abatrossy_Rodent for a late submission, but I wrote a crit for you anyways. There are no DMs, but the loss is awarded to The man called M. Your story had funny bits and a humorous premise, but it bogged down in the delivery and in a very good week it stood out as a cut below the rest. HMs go to Nae and derp. A comical romp of dark humor that underscored a rather terrifying tale of an incompetent, murderous AI, and a sweet little love story with pushy robots. Win for this week goes to The Cut Of Your Jib. Your story forced me to slow down and think, with its dense world-building, philosophical ramblings, and pretty words. And with all the tattoos and chainsaws and poo poo it was by far the most metal  Congrats and welcome back to the throne!Thanks to all who participated and thanks again to CP for stepping up to help judge. Crits incoming. edit: hosed up and forgot one of my HMs! Hawklad fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Jun 6, 2022 |
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Jun 6, 2022 22:43
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Gods of the Southern Sea A sense of quiet regret permeates this story. Hai’s regret about her transformation, the choices she made that brought her to this place and this existence, the limits of her new form. A longing for the world that was. The writing is very clear and functional. You pack a lot of ideas into a small space, creating a pretty well fleshed-out world (no irony intended) with the words you were given. Passes the Bechdel test and the NSWM test easily. I think the story hiding beneath this story – humans forced to the sea to survive the Singularity – is the really interesting one, and using Hai’s perspective only scratches the surface of what is possible in the setting you’ve created. Even in a short story things should happen, or characters should change, and this story suffers from a lack of either. Still, I liked this world you’ve created and if this were a prologue to a larger piece I’d be hooked to read on, uncover the mystery of homo oceanus, and the inevitable conflict that would develop between these two groups of very different humans. Still a strong story here, so I gave it a 7/10 (I Always Feel Like) Somebody's Watching Me This was a fun and entertaining read, the accelerating absurdity punchlined with a gruesome ending that worked well. The premise of the all-knowing bots breaking down, the corrupted algorithm, was a little thin but it didn’t need to be real deep to accomplish the goals of this story. The idea of the corn sombrero and the eyed potato thing dropping from the ceiling was funny, and the two woman discussing revolution at this banal restaurant overseen by mercurial, broken bots was great. The story was largely dialogue, which gave it good pacing and advanced the narrative as well as passing the Bechdel and NSWM tests. The ending gave me a grim chuckle, tying a little bow around the absurdity. Definite candidate for an HM at least, so an 8/10 A Heap of Grains This is one of those stories that could have begun after the first break. The first few paragraphs of exposition feel like they could be tightened up or discarded altogether. When she wakes up in the Cloud Betwixt is where the story really takes off. The concept of meeting your other self, one you feel like you’ve discarded but really has been there the whole time, lost and alone, is interesting and has a lot of potential. I didn’t love that this story had a ‘happy’ ending, although I’m not sure what ending I would have preferred; the bleakness of offloading your brain into a implant your entire life and then just *merging* with your true self seems a bit too pat. I think more could have been made of the interaction between the protag and the other version of herself – instead of her being a pathetic, shambling monster, maybe she feels anger at being abandoned, vengeful? Does she hate this other version of herself? Could have created some good narrative tension here. You are a good writer, the sentences flow well and word choice suits the tone of the story. Does this story pass the Bechdel test? I’m not sure, since it didn’t have dialogue in the traditional sense. There was interaction between the two iterations of the protagonist that could qualify, however, so I’ll give it a pass, and a 7/10 Sensu Eminenti Vivid imagery and prose permeates this piece. The metaphor of the strawberry and the thread help anchor all the wonderful weirdness of this story. The scrappy human protagonists feel like they have a real story to tell, a nice balance between reflecting on what was (Roz) and how the threads connect to the present day (Lindy) through our protagonist’s eyes. The nerdlingers and the crazy rear end machine they are building to bust through the false reality in which they live is metal as gently caress. This piece is dense, giving a sense of a much larger story and an interesting world around the edges that is hinted at but not fully explained. It is a very human story, featuring protagonists who do not accept the world they way it is—one they played a hand in creating--but instead seek to understand it, and then break it. What could be more human than that? The writing is evocative and well-paced, creating a rich world in few words. Bechdel and NSWM tests passed with flying colors. Overall I really liked this piece, so I gave it 8/10 The Butlerbot's Research This story suffers from a dire lack of protagonist. A1 exists only to tell us the story of this world, does not itself have any agency, or learn anything about itself. The central conceit of this tale, that the singularity happens not due to machine advancement but instead due to humans becoming stupider, is darkly comic in an Idiocracy-type fashion (and seems rather prescient, I have to admit) and could have legs. But the way this story presents it as a A1 reciting historical events with an arch tone feels a little flimsy. There’s some funny bits to be sure (President Sweet Divine, the KKK author, the Bryzgalov quote) but the delivery is a little to ham-handed to be effective. Obviously this story was not going for the deeper, more nuanced take on the Singularity, which is fine—but its shallowness stood out in a week of more thoughtful submissions. The writing was clear and direct, if a bit too on the nose. A few awkward sentences and typos sprinkled throughout. Sadly, your story fails the Bechdel test completely., as it lack both dialogue and a female protagonist. Despite some funny bits and an overall funny concept, I have to give this one a 4/10 Excerpts from a found journal, early first century PS The voice in this one stands out, giving the protagonist an endearing naivete as he tries to navigate this world where robots dictate everything. I like that the robots are never described, which gives this piece an almost magical realism that works well. The delivery of the prose as a series of journal entries at first felt jarring, but once the narrative took off I barely noticed it. The cute little love story being pushed upon them by these faceless robots, while predictable, was strangely endearing. They know they ultimately have no choice, as there is no point in going against what the robots want. Because you never really explain the robots—they are just always there, guiding the humans—they felt more like a metaphor for free will than actual, physical entities. A good choice on your part. The writing was fine, capturing a sort of idealized innocence on the part of the narrator. Bechdel test and NSWM tests were not explicitly passed, since the dialogue was only described, not shown. Overall I enjoyed this piece and rate it a 7/10 Touching Grass The concept here is good, three friends out for a stroll in a forest of dicktrees in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. I did find it confusing at first sorting out who was who—that you dropped like seven names in the first couple of lines didn’t help, as well as the “’Ellie’ That was me” line which can be read several ways. Once I got my footing the story flowed better, but ultimately it felt a little thin and short on substance. A few girls gossiping about boys and their futures, reflecting on some horrible atrocity in the past in a breezy fashion, just didn’t quite land for me. I wanted a little more meat, some conflict, some revelation that just wasn’t there. The protagonist and her friends seemed interchangeable, lacking distinction or motivation. Perhaps that was your intent, emphasizing humans seeking normalcy in a strange, orange-skied world of phallic plants. It’s always challenging to write dialogue heavy prose involving more than two characters due to attribution becoming unclear. Did you need three characters to get your ideas across when two would have sufficed? You flirted with failing the Bechdel test with all the boy- and dick-talk, but I’ll give it a pass for the second half of the story as they reflect on larger issues. Overall this was fine, but there needed some more meat on them bones, so I’ll give it a 6/10 Rodent’s Unfinished redemption This one starts a little slow, I think the first 200 words could be tightened up quite a bit, as the story doesn’t start until they bring in the drone. Not too much depth to the relationship between the mother and the daughter, perhaps some narrative tension would be in order here – does the daughter suspect her mother is holding something back from her? There’s also some hand-waving of why the Station is dying, and it seems unlikely a few chips from the drone would be enough to sustain it, but that’s not necessarily central to the story. The real conflict of the story doesn’t happen until near the very end, when she realizes she’s going to have to take the drone apart. There’s the meat of the story – the agonizing decision to destroy something that is the first ‘new’ thing they’ve seen in a generation, just for parts—but then the drone just sort of is like “okay no problem, I’m cool with that, have fun” and it drains any tension from the scene, and, unfortunately, the story. No grade since it was unfinished.
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Jun 6, 2022 22:45
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IN. Vanilla. Spin-o-rama for a hellrule. Judges fill me blanks.
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Aug 1, 2022 22:04
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Prompt: A [skeleton] agonizes over [the new highway being built] Hellrule: Story must end with “HAPPY HALLOWEEN, BILLY!” Old Bones ~800 words Ever since a hatchet split his head open a century ago, Artemis never knew a moment’s rest. There was quite a ruckus after it happened. Even in the Antebellum South it was generally agreed that murder of a slave was still murder, after all. A lot of yelling and shouting ensued, but it died down quick once they’d wrapped him up and dropped Artemis into an unmarked hole at the Negro cemetery. It wasn’t so bad at first. Peaceful. Quiet. Still, the scrabbling of insects and itchy creep of fungus made rest difficult. But having his flesh picked clean wasn’t the worst of it. At first it was all the digging. By day it was folks putting fresh bodies in. And there were a lot of them in those days, hundreds each year. Every night a few got pulled back out as students from the medical college harvested his new neighbors before they had a chance to settle into the clay. Pretty soon they built a road, and the rumble of horse and carriage bouncing overhead kept his bones disturbed. Then came the almshouse, all slamming doors and drunken fights and desperate men blaming everyone and everything but themselves. Years passed and the Negro cemetery all but disappeared from the town map. Artemis measured time by the never-ending drumbeat of progress: the almshouse fell into ruin and burned down, replaced by a gas station and a motel. And more roads. Jalopies and Model T’s and then heavy trucks and other iron monsters rumbled overhead. More development, more noise, more vibration, more sound, more everything. But never any rest for his old bones. Through it all Artemis endured. But when they proposed building that turnpike he began to think it might be time to do something about it. A century ago the boy on the other end of that hatchet was one WIlliam Morse, son of the slavemaster himself. William Morse was mean and never shy with the whip or the brand. All this Artemis endured, until he found the boy forcing his way onto his eldest daughter behind the house. He pulled him away, cursed him fierce, and gave him a wallop across the head. Artemis was consoling his daughter when the boy returned and buried a hatchet into the back of his skull. So he’d kept one worm-filled eye socket on William Morse all these years. The boy grew up, married up, and eventually got himself elected to the United State Senate. Once a family has money and power, it’s drat near impossible to take it away from them. It flows down the generations with no regard for morals or virtuous character. So William had a son who had a son who grew up to become a senator again. William Morse the Third. And the new I-96 corridor, to be built right over the old Negro cemetery, was his signature legislation. Maybe it was the power cables they buried through the old graveyard that did it. Or the righteous fire for vengeance, burning in his rib cage for a hundred years. Whatever it was, one night in late October Artemis decided his old bones had had enough. He got up, dusted most of the clay from his brittle frame, and set off towards the plantation house. Artemis got a few curious looks as he shambled along, but he mostly stayed in the shadows and blended in pretty well. Halloween was a night for monsters, after all. Much of the plantation was long gone but the main house still stood. It was lit with colorful lights and the music and laughter of a party spilled from it onto the darkened streets. Artemis shuffled around to the back, rummaged through a garden shed, and soon came to stand at the very spot where William Morse had split apart his skull so many years ago. There he waited as the party inside began to die down. The back door swung open with a clatter and out staggered William Morse, the senator himself. He stumbled down the length of the porch, swerved into the railing, and proceeded to empty his stomach into the chrysanthemums. As he wiped his mouth clean and regained his bearing, he turned to find Artemis standing behind him. The ravaged skeleton, bones blackened with age, drew itself up to full height. The jaw unhinged, dropping into a toothless mockery of a smile. As the shovel connected with the side of the drunk man’s head a hissing rasp, smelling of old blood and bones and red clay, formed the last words William Morse would ever hear. “HAPPY HALLOWEEN, BILLY!”
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Aug 7, 2022 21:48
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JABC Crit-a-thon Noticed you didn’t have any crits yet, so here you go: The Lane Omega Prompt #1: A [mech pilot] agonizes over [their commute] Tight word count makes it hard to fully realize the setting in this one. We get some history of Antares’ being some sort of legendary ‘roid ‘rangler and you throw in a few other nuggets about a big competition coming up and then she can’t get there. Why not? Well someone random dumped a bunch of space debris in front of the jump gate. Now, this seems like a perfect opportunity for our protagonist to demonstrate some of those wranglin’ skills, but, no. She just sort of sits there and waits for someone else to clean it up and whines about it brattishly. So in the end you set up a semi-interesting scene and then it goes nowhere because nobody actually does anything. Pretty unsatisfying. Why wasn’t the cargo dumper a rival trying to slow her down? Why didn’t she move the debris herself? Who was her coach and why was he serving her dinner? So many questions. A Wonderful Day Omega Prompt #1... again? A [beloved member of the community] agonizes over [a bottle of oil] Flash Rule: Your protagonist seeks revenge on whoever murdered them in a past life This story kicks off after all the action. The sudden change in tone between the first paragraph and the murder reveal in the second is the most effective part of the story (and I see you picked up that original tone in the ‘epilogue’ section at the end, not bad). But the middle section is sodden with exposition, as we get a history lesson and then basically the guy gets murdered off screen (the explanantion is literally “one thing led to another”). How much better it might have been if our villain had some sort of motive that formed a thread through all the years? It seems like our hero finally got the jump on him, and that’s cool, but exactly how this time was different was just handwaved away. Expand on that, and the actual resolution of that conflict, and this would be a better story. Old mountain road Omega Prompt #2 So much setup! The conversational tone is all right, but I’m three paragraphs in and nothing has happened. This is flash fiction, get into the meat of the story and skip all but the most essential exposition and history lessons. About halfway through the story I started glazing over at the geography lessons and lost the thread of what the point of the operation even was. I guess building a road? Unfortunately I’m beyond caring at this point, too many words clogged up the first half of the story. Feels like a too-long story someone is rambling on about at a bar and all I can do is pretend to listen while desperately motioning for the bill. I guess the point is the Ukrainians get poo poo done and have the last laugh but to be honest it just seemed a bit too long-winded to be effective. Big Omega Prompt #3: Wonder Okay now this one is the exact opposite of the last story. Short, sweet, and evocative. The child’s relationship with the father is adorable, and the childlike wonder she expresses is well constructed. The line about ancient bones roaring again is cool and you did a good job with this little piece! Property Rights Omega Prompt #4: Bog wizard. Flash rule: must include a necromancer. This one is pretty decent, well written and enjoyable. I mean, more could have been done with it rather than it all being a big misunderstanding. I mean, you put too cool wizards in a story but they don’t really do anything other than bicker. I was hoping for some treachery or magic or something. The “You Like Me” line fell flat (not just because of the odd punctuation) as it jarred me right out of the story. It was very unsubtle and anachronistic to the tone of the rest of the piece. Overall this one was pretty fun to read, but again all the ‘action’ took place prior to the story so in the end it was just them talking about poo poo they already did.
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Aug 11, 2022 03:20
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