curlingiron posted:

I hate you.

derp posted:

My deepest apologies for my pathetic failure. Maybe I'll return someday, but if td can't inspire me to write I don't know what will. Good luck, and God speed

ThirdEmperor posted:

Yoruichi's The new guy

Oh god. Blegh. Bleeeegh. I pray to god I never read anything as utterly foul as this, as contemptibly bare of talent; there is no future for the soulless automaton who extruded this one out of their metallic robo-behind. My only hope is, sufficiently shamed by their own inadequacies, the 'author' of this 'story' will retreat to some cave in the desert and never again write.

Sitting Here posted:

Can i get a flash rule when one of our extremely cyber judges has a cyberminute

sebmojo posted:

Surreptitious Blowout Fungal Butt Brawl



Fungi are very weird aren't they, yes they are don't answer me it was a rhetorical question.

Write me up to 10,000 words on three characters in a world where the fungi have won. It can be neither bleak, nor grim, nor depressing.

Sitting here will help judge bc she is more mushroom than woman, these days

28 Feb 2359 PST, toxx up

Mercedes posted:

BRAWL SUBMISSION BIOTCHES

Love of Our Lifetimes

“I looked at Kelly Miller ‘s face. Covered with spiders. Laughing like an idiot. She didn ‘t care that one of those bugs could crawl into her mouth. Hell, she didn ‘t even care that we were inside a car plummeting off the side of a cliff. She was living in the moment, with me. This is a great opener, down to the commas in the last sentence, loads of good voice and sets out the frankly insane premise of the story with panache

“Some context for those who weren ‘t there for our engagement party. You see, Kelly Miller, the prankster that she is, cut the brake lines and somehow replaced the airbags with a pound of live I think you mean ‘the livest’, angry spiders I ‘ve ever seen,” Cameron chuckled wistfully. This is a rare example of a good adverb, in that the sentence would mean something slightly different without it “Black Widows. I think at least twenty of them bit me before the car exploded at the bottom of the ravine.”

The crowd murmured with polite laughter.

“I couldn ‘t let that stroke of brilliance go by without trying to top it, so later that year we went skydiving. The look on your face when kitchen utensils came spilling out of your pack, Kelly Miller, was prime.” Cameron sighed theatrically this also passes the adverb check and turned to smile at Kelly who also had a bright smile across her face. “I wish you were there to see my face when I realized you stuffed my parachute with more poisonous spiders. I Brown Recluse. I was dead before I hit the ground. The clone facility told me there were proximity mines all over the landing zone so it took them a few days to recover all the body parts. Prime!” The spiral of tall tale exaggerations is still charming, you need to keep this kind of story moving fleetly and you're doing it well

The crowd laughed and golf don't like this, a golfclap is a polite clap already - i'd cut 'golf' clapped politely.

Cameron continued when the crowd quieted down. “That ‘s what I love about you Kelly Miller. You think ahead, you ‘re thorough and you pay attention to detail. But most importantly, you ‘re extremely rich, just like me.”

Kelly smiled warmly and fanned her eyes, blinking back tears. “He ‘s right,” she mouthed to the watching audience.

“I want to thank everyone here for allowing the two of us to pamper all of you. I know it ‘s hard being relatively poor and I ‘m honored we were able to save you from that drudgery, if at least for only a month.” Cameron raised his glass and everyone in attendance did the same. “To us. May we live forever!” and the rest of the plot arrives, such as it is, but it's enough

Everyone sipped from their champagne flutes.

Kelly burst into sudden laughter, flecks of bloody spittle staining the priceless linen on loan from the Louvre. Cameron giggled like a child holding on to the funniest secret.

“What kind of wine is this?” Kelly gurgled, blood foaming up out of her mouth.

Cameron hid his smile behind his hands, his shoulders shaking with glee. “It ‘s all liquid cyanide!”

The crowd collectively cried out in horror and spat out their drinks. One guest slapped the drink out of his wife ‘s hand. Another guest vomited and sobbed loudly.

Kelly slapped the table. “Prime!” she shouted. Her head lolled forward and her mouth hung agape. A line of bloody drool dripped from her mouth. Dead. Many wedding guests are instantly on their feet, shouting incoherently and pointing at the newly made corpse.

Cameron stood up with hands in a placating gesture. “Alright everyone, relax. I know no one else in here can afford clones. Your drinks are fine,” he said dismissively. He snapped his fingers and held his hand out in wait this is a strange and terrible construction you have inflicted on my eyes this day merc. A server came and handed Cameron a knife in an ornate sheath. He slid the knife out, a priceless artifact dating back to the Roman Empire and tossed the scabbard past the server’s hands.

“Time to cut the cake and keep this party going,” Cameron said. With practiced efficiency don't really like this phrase, it's not the sort of activity you need to be practiced or efficient at - why not 'with a flourish' or something?, he slid the knife into the six foot cake; and like squeezing an overripe fruit, it's a good simile but you don't deploy it quite right - he's not squeezing the cake and the spiders are like the juice rather than the act of squeezing angry Brazilian Wandering spiders exploded out in a brown quivering mass and swarmed him. I like your attention to variety in horrifically venomous arachnids

The wedding hall erupted in panic. Chairs and tables are TENSE YOU ILLITERATE BUFFOON overturned in the rush to escape the venomous horde. The cries of children cut through the cacophony. The elderly were shoved to the floor as a means to slow down image is great, grammar is a bit awk the sea of chittering creatures.

Cameron, ignoring the pandemonium happening all around him, guffawed, looking down through swollen eyelids at his painfully erect penis. “Kelly Miller. Always paying attention to the details.” The muscles in his legs gave out and he collapsed to the floor, crushing some spiders into a priceless rug from the Ming Dynasty. “drat do I love that woman.” and, story has run out of things to do so let's close it off, gj. no one learns, no one changes, and do you know what that's absolutely fine - it's fast and funny and enjoyably dumb with a whiff of social comment. I liked this a lot, though there are a few sloppy bits.

Uranium Phoenix posted:

I'll take flash rules from up to two judges and sebmojo can throw me a picture if he wants

Exmond posted:

Seed Migration

BirdOfPlay posted:

I'm in. 2020 is the word count without flash, correct?

Also, do I need to toxx? I haven't done this in a while, but have failed to submit previously.

Exmond posted:

Seed Migration
1,488 words


Act 1: Potting the soil

Did you know that a single strand of DNA can hold 215 petabytes of data? All it takes is a few extra strands of DNA, and you have a child that can store the entirety of humanities Humanity's knowledge, and with enough spare space to upload a few billion Youtube videos. There's a pleasing lunacy to the human hard drive idea you're running but it really doesn't make much sense at all; sure you can store information in DNA, but why would that mean you can access it? why is that better than a really big future harddrive? But that's ok, it's fine as a crazy premise.

Survival isn’t guaranteed of course but the government, or what was left of it, rationalized it to my family this is an incomplete sentence, you need 'rationalised it as/by...'. So I grew up with the weight of humanity’s hope and dreams on my shoulders along with a head the size of a basketball and a few extra webbed toes. My mother’s nursery rhymes always made me giggle - This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy held the entire history of the world.

Out of the hundreds of children selected for DNA informational imprinting only eight of us survived to reach our teenage years. Some died due to genetic complications, but most of them died due to famine. you gesture at the utterly world destroying level of catastrophe (that you then fake out with the sun blowing up lol) but it makes no sense at all that any kind of government capable of hyper advanced DNA surgery couldn't find a few bucks for some pot ramen and peanut butter or w/e. you didn't need this and it's absurd, so cut - a better option would have been something like riots about genetic freaks or something.

I felt guilty, and so did Melissa, another one of the “seedling libraries” the government called us. I think it was our shared guilt, our need for redemption, that drew us together. thank you william tell I met her almost by accident, I was at the incubator, splitting the nucleus in my blood sample to extract the works of Vonnegut when I tripped. I was horrified and watched my sample fly in the air and spill all over Melissa’s lab coat. is this a jizz joke The whole classroom fell silent, and I wanted to disappear. weak cliche

Then Melissa started to laugh. It was a melodic laugh that danced like the music in Concerto G Major this is a nonsensical musical reference you can't refer to music in a concerto because it's all music that's literally what the entire thing is made of, and there are hundreds of concertos in G and soothed like Freie Fantasie. After she had cleaned up, and had a cig I asked her if she liked Carl Bach I haven't heard him called that it's normally CPE but I'll allow it and she just smiled. Later she played the flute as I accompanied her on the piano, both of us trying to imitate the masters. She always looked up at me, if he's playing piano and she's playing flute she'd be looking down or across at him, flautists sit or stand, pianists sit and instead of seeing a mutant freak, she saw the best of humanity: Someone this shouldn't be capitalised trying, tripping and falling in love. this is terribly twee but is just about the right kind of twee, so i will allow it


Act 2: Ballistic Dispersal

Melissa and I were in orbit when the earth died. Our bodies could handle the stress of re-orbit and we were learning hte tsk operational procedures of the long-distance probe. Each probe could only fit two people and even then you we had to lie side by side staring up at the controls. Several dozen tubes were inserted into you, providing nutrients and oxygen to ensure that humanities knowledge would persevere. When it came to survival, comfort came last. i presume survival came first? this is a contorted way of saying something that probably didn't need to be said

Classes still took place, weird passive phrasing, I have no idea what classes taking place looks like to these space dweebs and the weight of humanity’s hopes still pressed on our shoulders. Zero-G did little to lessen the load. Memories of my family had been overwritten with complex math theorems alongside thirty different ways to explain the teachings of Fibonacci. We would recite chemistry equations, describe the social pressure of religion to each other and when the moon blocked out communication to earth and we had a few minutes of privacy, we explored other, more human delights hosed . It was after one of our aptly named “Adam and Eve” ugh sessions, when I was telling Melissa I was so happy I fell for her, that the earth died. i like this dropped in at the end but what a tangled skein of verbs you used to get there

It wasn’t a world war nor was it climate change that ended the world. We were coasting in orbit, cresting earth’s horizon, when we saw the sun’s last dying gasps. cliche A final wave of flames lit up space, and then its molten core died. i'm legit baffled by your decision to have the end come by sunquake, the point of the story is that humans are dumb and garbage though sort of cute, so why have their end come by something 100% out of their control? Somewhere in the back of my mind I acknowledged the fact that 1.5 million this is a strange number, because it means the earth's population is like .00001 of what it used to be, which i think you could have mentioned before hand idk what do you think, relevant? people were going to die.

Melissa radioed our instructors as I planned our route. Our motions were practiced and robotic. Our mission had begun: Preserve humanity’s knowledge, fly to other worlds and sprout your shlong of knowledge. I look tense over to Melissa, and reach for her hand. She grabs mine, squeezes it and looks at me. She’s ready. We have been training for this moment all our lives, but nobody told me it would be so scary. tenses are wacky, and you're being extremely cliche and bland with the description of species ending horror

“Let’s go,” she says.

With a press of a button the probe’s engines roar to life cliche and we propel ourselves weak verb away from a dying planet. Right now my family would be going into a submarine, to dive deep into the ocean to try and survive. Encoded in our very essence is humanity’s knowledge, hopes and dreams. i feel like you're straining to give your insane premise some weight, but it's really not landing for me. As I lie down into the pod, my body feeling heavy as my metabolism slows down, I say one last goodbye to the earth.


Act 3: Sprouting Seedlings

We were floating at the tail edge of the milky way, just another piece of metal drifting among the asteroids of Scutum-Centaurus, this is around 10-60 thousand light years from earth, so our dudes have been asleep anything up to a million years, depending how fast their probe got them going when we were woken up from our deep sleep. Melissa groggily addressed the alarms on her readout and motioned weak verb for me to slow the probe down. My heart sped up, and not due to the adrenaline pumping into it. whaaaaat My display read one object outside, directly in front of us, moving under its own propulsion - an alien ship. I turned on the cameras. It was made out of glass shards that dwarfed our small probe, and it deliberately smashed into asteroids, and sucked up the debris inside itself. so let's see their plan, as two of the 8 supragenius humans upon whom the poorly defined hope of humanity was laid, was to just shoot off in a random direction in space for a million years and hope they'd run into some aliens or something maybe?

Our training kicked in. this language is bland and cliche, something most of the descriptions suffer from Melissa sent bursts of radio traffic as I flicked the probe’s lights on and off. We were in tandem: one, three, five. i feel like the most brilliant products of the human race should have a better plan than turning the lights on and off Please, notice us senpai. We put our trust in Fibonacci that whomever was out there would differentiate us from the unintelligent rocks.

The glass ship shuddered and turned, letting us pass and then following our trajectory. It picked up speed, getting closer, and I saw the center of the ship split open. The giant maw of the ship enclosed around us, enclosed is an adjective not a verb and we saw the interior of the ship was made out of mountainous biomes, somehow staying anchored to the ship.

Gravity took hold of the probe gravity doesn't work like that and I activated the landing system. We skidded to a halt on rocky ground and immediately we started scanning the outside: oxygen, a little more acidic than normal, inadvisable to stay here long-term, but short-term survival was not life-threatening. Melissa squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back. We opened the pod, the first humans to meet extraterrestrial life. they seem p chipper for having been asleep for hundreds of thousands of years

It was hard not to laugh and yes I know tense in my mutated state I am tense being hypocritical. The aliens towered above us, their small heads rolling on tall, serpentine-like necks. Their necks had several holes in them and they would close and puff out musical notes as they excitedly chatted to each other. Their neck ended on a small body, not unlike a corgi, but where there would be fur there was rough patches of jagged glass, similar to the exterior of the ship. They were like a giraffe mixed with an adorable rock-corgi and I giggled. Melissa shoved my tsk in the ribs as they pulled out a device and scanned us.

A few awkward attempts at communication later and the four of them turned away from us, pipping and whistling. They reached a decision and led us over a rocky outcropping to a large cave, where there was a basket. They sat down and pulled an odd looking pellet from it and nibbled at it, before rolling it over to us and offering it.

Melissa and I were too busy excitedly discussing what we would show them next, these guys are the worst space explorers to notice them leaving. To notice that the cave had no exit, that it had small observational cameras attached at each corner. We did notice the bars slamming down at the entrance. I rushed forward, grabbed one of the bars and yelped back is this like a holla back if so yeeet in pain as it cut me.

The aliens understood us; we knew that much. We pleaded for them to let us out, and they just nodded. We listed off prime numbers in Spanish and they managed to communicate 1171 before us. They even interrupted our calculus class with matrices. On some fundamental level we were communicating, they just weren’t impressed. Every time we tried to show what humanity had to offer, every time we asked for mercy, they would throw us more of their food pellets and raise their heads up and down, as if clapping in appreciation. But they still would not let us out. This is a fundamentally dumb story but i do actually like this bit, it's funny

I knew deep down cliche that we would stay here forever. My family, freezing in the earth’s cooling ocean, THEY HAVE BEEN TRAVELLING FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS that SHIP HAS SAILED would stay there until they died. if you think about it everyone stays where they are until they die Caged on a dying planet, or caged on an alien ship, humanities destiny was to be trapped forever. !!!!

Melissa lied LAY down beside me, the improvised flute lying beside her, her rendition of Bach what, his entire opus? done. For her efforts we got more food pellets thrown at us, they bounced on my massive head. She lied LAYYYY beside me and cried and there wasn’t anything I could do to help. A realization hit me. CLICHE

We were the best humanity had to offer. The smartest, the most knowledgeable and the universe simply did not care. ok yes i like this ending, it's good and funny it is a pity that the sotry behind it is nonsensical and dumb and larded with terrible bland wordS and cardboard characters.

ThirdEmperor posted:

Tiger Tiger
1500 words and a microscopic umaru hidden somewhere in the text for that anime spice


The day seemed too beautiful to last as Cynthia crossed swords with Harper Anise Mallory, the sun sending ripples of gold down the fencing foil's blade. In the willow-shaded courtyard of Solemn Mercy Preparatory for Young Witches, staid walls of mossy stone caught and echoed their laughter for an evening; the chime of their blades punctuated the gossip of the girls on the sidelines and the birdsong from the branches that dappled their sun. Ok in my head I am seeing elegant curly anime style art like FF cover art so I'm nodding about your prompt fulfilment at this time, it's lush and melodramatic

Their feet slashed and stomped at the dust of the dueling ring as they danced, slashed, struck out lame verb . Arcs of silver intersected and rang like bells as Cynthia pressed forward, chasing Harper to the edge of the ring and clawing for that last defeated step ehh, that seems a strange way to characterise winning a fight in a furious swirl of bladework. The crowd had gone silent; the fury of the moment had scattered the birds to the winds; the clash of swords had become so regular that Cynthia heard, in their duet, the ticking of a clock. feels like this needs another para in between these two, it's a bit clumsy going from dum de doo fighting to RAAA

Of course Cynthia was in love with Harper. this needs an action or moment to convey The stunningly obvious truth hit her hard just then, her heart thudding clumsily and her blade falling out of rhythm.

In a split second she took an elbow to the stomach. I'm really not visualising this swordfight, though i like the set dressing A flick of silver snapped at her collarbone, and then Harper was helping her up with a fierce smile on her face. None of this helped her put the sudden rebellion of her heart aside. It was terminal. the idea of this opener was strong, but you didn't nail the execution

The war seemed far away when they walked together the next few days, Cynthia doing her best to restrain the rough edges of her accent and the empty spaces in her vocabulary. To restrain a constant and giddy smile. She could, days or even weeks later, still recreate any of those moments in memory, down to the smallest detail of how Harper's hair looked as sunlight combed through the red strands or the way her smile slowly developed. see that's really nice

What she could not do was fully convince herself that this effigy, seen through a love drunk haze, contained any more truth of the real article than the dossiers of trivia she had been given to study, full of Harper's beloved books and favourite cafe haunts laid out in a clinical dissection that had missed so, so much.

Maybe, Harper existed somewhere between the two, the enchanting glimpses of beauty and the pages and pages of cold observation. Cynthia suspected not. It was hard to truly know a human heart, unless they let you do so.

Cynthia did not want to let her, anymore. hang on, don't you have these people the wrong way round? it woudl be harper who would not want to let her

When she thought of Harper Anise Mallory, she thought first of those walks, but then her thoughts always turned to the day fencing in the courtyard; as those moments were pressed deeper into her mind, polished under constant remembering, the resemblance of the clashing blades to a clock’s ticking grew stronger and stronger. The hope in her heart turned sour. ehhhhh this needs a polish but it's pretty authentically lush and heaving so I'll give you a pass


Things progressed like clockwork.

They paused at expensive cafes, where half the people were speaking, so excitedly, of the end of the war, and the other half speaking of a war on wars that would topple all gods and masters; two weeks and she was invited to meet those masters, to come spend a weekend with Harper at the prime minister’s estate.

The ride was ominous, the countryside of grey stone and dull heath smearing by outside the limousine windows. The man himself was less than impressive. The chubby red-tinged warmask of a face he wore for the cameras seemed to deflate, in his private life, to sagging bulldog jowls and a pinched mouth. She survived dinner with her fingers white-knuckled and asked to be excused going from a general period of time (dinner) to a specific period of time (asking to be excused) is helped by a little more orientation, e.g. she put down her fork neatly and asked to be excused or w/e.

She knew exactly where she was going. Cynthia had been through this moment so many times, so exactly, that she could not tell the present moment from a memory.

Up the stairs. Three doors down. She drew the flower-pin from her hair and touched it to the lock. There was a surge of magic oh wait so this is magic girl sword academy? could have positioned that earlier that stung her fingers and a clunk as the tumblers fell into place.

She spent the last of the tool’s magics on the desk, dug into the papers and shoved everything secret and vital she could find into her petticoat jacket.

There was one last step in the dance. A premonition that had struck her as she rehearsed the moment in her head for the millionth time, only days before she would realize she’d fallen in love with Harper Anise Mallory. It had come first as an idle twist of imagination on the old routine and clung on with a sudden certainty. Maybe if Cynthia had been able to put it from mind, if Cynthia could only have believed hard enough that any other sequence of events was possible, maybe she could have willed some other ending into being.

She turned, and was not surprised. Harper stood in the doorway, her face stricken with a paralytic grief that hardened the betrayal and the anger of that first moment of discovery for long enough that Cynthia could take every detail into memory. It didn’t take long. OHH, THE RAGING TUMULT OF EMOTIONS

After the moment passed, Harper slapped her hard across the Cynthia's cheek and demanded in angry whispers the letters back; caught her by the shoulders and refused to let her slip free until she finally relinquished the papers. They broke apart, Harper hugging the letters to her chest and Cynthia hugging her arms to her shoulders.

Neither would speak afterwards. Harper left first, and then Cynthia, wiping her face clean and composing a mask of defiance as she descended the stairs to the dining room. She found everything as she left it. She saw no comprehension of what had happened on the minister’s face as he sucked up clam chowder.

Cynthia returned to the seat she had occupied a lifetime ago. Harper sat opposite, eyes down, saying nothing.

There was only one traitor there. i feel like this is supposed to be clever but i don't understand it, poss bc dumb


It was the second letter that surprised her.

The first was the coded missive in close-set type that she had expected.

She was a disappointment. Cynthia accepted that. She had failed. Cynthia could not argue. She had lost control. Cynthia could not agree more. i like this, though I don't see how the whole love thing is relevant

It was not too late. They could fix her, remove this infatuation.

At the bottom of the envelope was a slim vial of some liquid as black as night. Just touching the glass she felt the bitter cold of the contents, the power of its magic. Every moment since that moment, the same faculties that had once rehearsed her one task had been devoted to reliving, instead, the hungry and all-consuming hurt. She could be free of that.

They could fix her, and they still had use for her. If they couldn’t steal the minister’s secrets they would take his daughter hostage.

The second letter was from Harper.

It offered her nothing but more heartache.

The day the invaders came to Solemn Mercy Preparatory, they didn’t find the minister's daughter. She was far away, hidden in the countryside, safe. Cutting through the wards and cutting down the guards, they found their own wayward spy waiting for them. The vial still clutched in her hand, the spellwork of it carefully unpicked, reversed; she had made it into a weapon to settle all debts.

She had chosen to drown in her own sorrows.

Cynthia drank and her heart broke open like an atomic bomb, unfurling across the city a blanket of gray mist that rendered the world, for a panicked second, lightless and stark. There was not a sound in the world until the colors crept back in, sweeter and more beautiful than ever; people laughed, or heaved out gasps of relief, and felt for a moment sure it was over and that they were safe. this is just wildly anime and incredibly visual and i like it a lot

The joy of being alive made the colors seem brighter, the sky more, they thought to themselves.

A dandy's emerald vest began to sizzle. A hawker's fruitcart became a spray of rainbow shrapnels as ripe apples and dark pomegranates collapsed inwards with the weight of their own colors, condensing to boiling blots. Then they burst apart, waves of corruscating pulp catching up the people on the street and tearing through them. They, too, burst into pulp, into a searing mass of red that boiled up into a rolling crimson fog. as is this she just akira-ing it up like it ain't no thing

There were still people on the outskirts who were caught in the act of turning, or raising a hand to their eyes to They understood something was wrong but had yet to process the human shapes contorting within the splendor of beauty and motion. The fog enveloped them. They left behind ghostly trails of blue, green, hazel; the colors of their eyes smeared against the air as their lungs filled with searing beauty and they clawed more red from their throats.

The city was laced with bright promises, plastered with advertisements on rain-worn posters, in the flowers that lined shop windows, in the peacock plumage of young men and the dresses of the women they adored.

They burned. Bright, beautiful, bold, they all burned. this is all extremely gorgeous, and you just about justify it with the intense/lush/heaving intensity of our girl's ladycrush, but it's also a bit out of nowhere because it's not as clear as it could be how this exceptionally beautiful suicide bomb relates to the rest of the story, i.e. why does her heaving love mean she can't steal some papers; I think you could have fixed it with a little well chosen dialogue between cynthia/harper.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Curlingmojo brawl results

Both of these stories are worthy contenders, but only one is a valid entry! Sebmojo is disqualified for writing a grippingly dramatic exploration of Okinawan culture, which even he distinguishes from Japanese culture in the story. Congratulations on your victory, curlingiron.

Crits by the end of the week.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

All righty.

onsetOutsider posted:

ok sebmojo give me a hellrule

(regrets decision before even posting)

The Saddest Rhino posted:

One sebmojo rule pls

Bad Seafood posted:

sebmojo posted:

Surreptitious Blowout Fungal Butt Brawl



Fungi are very weird aren't they, yes they are don't answer me it was a rhetorical question.

Write me up to 10,000 words on three characters in a world where the fungi have won. It can be neither bleak, nor grim, nor depressing.

Sitting here will help judge bc she is more mushroom than woman, these days

28 Feb 2359 PST, toxx up

Yoruichi posted:

In. Do your worst.