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SMEGMA_MAIL posted:Dealer choice punk Dieselpunk
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# ¿ Feb 6, 2025 15:11 |
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This is Judgepunk You know, if I had wanted industrial emo week I'd have asked for it. -punk ought to have one hand giving the finger, one ready to punch in a smug face, and a face full of insolence. Too many of you brought hands stuffed into pockets and a face staring at the floor and sighing. Okay. Results. The loss goes to seaborgium's New Beginnings . The sole DM goes to tosk's Heaven's Door On the brighter side: staggy's Warp and Weft earns an HM on the strength of the opening paragraph, mainly. It was a very close top three. But in the end, Tyrannosaurus's Welcome Friends Open and Dr. Klocktopussy's Cinderella, but with swords walk away with HMs, and... Sailor Viy's Dig Deep for Victory takes the win and the blood throne.
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And This Is Critpunk Smegma Mail,Untitled Dieselpunk story The opening is okay. A bit heavy-handed with the exposition but you're introducing plot, character, and setting efficiently. I wouldn't repeat 'grime' so many times in short succession, wouldn't have the narrator dwell so much on the fashion trend. It's a good detail but one that works better as a quick gloss. The main problem with this story is that there's no opposition to the nameless protagonist, they don't encounter any peril or have to make any choices along the way. The second problem is that they're underdefined, undermotivated. The world is a hellscape, sure, but it doesn't really get personal. Middle-low Brotherly, How to Change Stone into Bread A strong opening. We're getting a lot of setting, a little character, but not much plot from it. That comes later, and we get a solid little heist here. The biggest problem here is the ending. It's too abrupt, and a little confusing. (It leads the reader to think he doesn't have the recipe on first read.) Middle-high Simple Simon,The Faceless Artist There are reasons why metaphor is stronger than simile, and one of those is that with an extended metaphor you wouldn't have to repeat "like a" three times in an opening sentence. It's a good image, though. "Where people tried to desperately sell..." It's not actually a bad thing to split infinitives. But in this case the adverb is misplaced, since it logically wants to modify 'tried' rather than 'to sell'. There's certainly a trend of gratuitously bleak endings going on so far. Middle Tosk, Heaven's Door You go almost four paragraphs, three of them very large, before even starting to introduce a character. That's rough, made even rougher by the fact that the voice of that exposition is so clinical, so tedious. It's all description, and anything that might have been interesting imagery gets buried under the prose. What this most needs is another character, someone to contrast Silky against and let them develop the world more through dialog and, you know, things happening. Low Staggy, Warp and Weft See, now this is how to do an extended metaphor. You've established a central conceit, drawn a few characters, and put the into an interesting situation. This had a lot of potential, but it sort of descends into talking heads and plan making and ultimately a lack of active opposition. "This is impossible, but maybe it's not, and then it's easy." I think this needs a third character. A lot of it seems to be leaning that way, there's a lot of "two isn't enough", and maybe you resisted the obvious mythic resonance here on purpose, but they're powerful for reasons. And if you didn't go that way, then having a personalized face of their enemy would also help. high Sailor Viy, Dig Deep for Victory As far as maximum dystopian settings go this is well written. You establish world and characters deftly, and get some seeds of conflict emerging. I'm not sure what the point of Zeah was. I think there might have been a more efficient way to rule out flight, or else a way to bring her back and make her more significant. Another bleak and O Henry kind of ending. High Tyrannosaurus, Welcome Friends Open Strong opening, centering on character but dropping in setting and opening a strong door to plot. This is good. Very good. Not perfect, I think the main weakness is that Mallet doesn't get enough personality to make his decision seem like a decision at all. Still, high My Shark Waifu, Underground Resistance Another alternatech industrial hellscape, okay, I guess I asked for this. The opening does a good job establishing it. I wonder at the credulity of a labor movement that thinks that murdering bosses one at a time is going to turn out well for them. Neve becomes Never a few times and I'm guessing that's autocorrect rather than a nickname situation. And I don't see how Liam could be alive. Still, the ending works better for me than most. Rage is always more punk than despair. Middle high Flerp, the future is closer than you think This one is a big too monologuey fit my tastes. There's some interesting setting work, but it's incomplete and inconsistent. It's unclear, for example, whether either character is part of any kind of community. If all ten faces are dead. There's not enough despair if they're the last generation, physically alone. There's too much ability to act recklessly if he does have others to risk. Overall I found it flat, answering despair with a shrug. Middle low Pththya-lyi, Untitled Knitpunk Pretty good opening,character focused and with a quick establishment of a historical setting. I think I know where you're going as soon as the train. And yeah, correct. It's a clever bit, sure, but obvious enough that it wants a bit more camouflage to hide in, and there little here that doesn't serve that single bit of business and the narrator's minor change in attitude. Middle seaborgium, New Beginnings The opening line has a missing word, to or of I think. Not a great start. A lot of comma splices. And this is nothing. No plot. Just, I guess a TED talk about an engineering breakthrough, with harmless ghosts getting exploited in ways that could be made ethically interesting but aren't. Low Dr. Klocktopussy, Cinderella, but with swords Interesting opening. Establishes a voice and a conceit rather than a setting, but it works. The main weakness here is in character. The narrator has a strong voice, but not much depth, and literally every other character is there for her to snark on and little more. Still, successful humor is hard to pull off. High.
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Diamonds and Chains 1330 words The Antwerp job had been clean as the dew off the shady side of morning clover. The Red Diamond that had recently belonged to the old summer queen was safely in the luggage, concealed in a bar of soap with a density match good enough to make it invisible to the machines at customs. I was paying through the airline magazine, wondering who ever bought any of this stuff. Pink was in the next seat, her head lolling against the window, her already wild blonde hair mashing into the glass, a tiny drop of drool slowly descending the right-hand side of her chin. I almost did see the knife in the stewardess' left hand as she came forward with a bloody mary in her right had to time my countermove carefully. She lunged at my exposed neck. I intercepted the hand, striking from above and knocking the blade loose. It fell, bouncing off the unoccupied cushion. I grabbed it with my free hand, then thrusted with it underneath her right, poking gently inches below her armpit. "Tell me who sent you," I said. "You'll just kill me anyway," she said through gritted teeth. "I might," I said. "But that would mean wasting a perfectly good drink." Her grip on the glass wasn't as tight as I would have wanted, but she adjusted, made sure it didn't slip any further. She looked down so far her pupils almost vanished. "It was the Arch-" And that's when things got weird. One minute we were in an intercontinental jet plane, then next we were in a giant open wicker basket, carried by a huge winged beast. By a dragon, red-scaled and ancient, steel cables and chains connecting it to the basket. "I wasn't asleep," shouted Pink as she nearly jumped back from the rope line. The stewardess, now sporting cat ears and a generally feline appearance, twisted away from the knife and broke my grip. She let go of the drink and ran into the basket, climbing over the passengers who had started to crowd the aisle. It wasn't a total loss. I caught the drink. I only ever have bloody marys on airplanes. Strange. They're damned tasty and get the job done, but I never seem to want one other than when I'm thousands of feet in the air. "Alys, What's happening?" asked Pink. "We've got a new enemy, looks like," I said. "You mean other than Queen Vestria?" "Not her," I said. "Someone else. Also, the airplane seems to have transformed into a dragon." "Also?" "I don't know if they're related. The assassin seemed as surprised as I was." Pink took off her gloves. No point hiding the extra knuckles in this mess. She started a few basic impossible gestures, gathering up magic power and letting the violet in her eyes come out. "No illusions," she said. "This is real. We're still in the prime plane, too. There's a field surrounding the basket." I looked past her and saw it, a shimmer in the air. "Air pressure regulation. Clever little spell." A sound started to emerge from the horns that had replaced the airline speakers. A tin-whistle tune we were both familiar with. Pink curled her ring finger into a tight spiral and flicked it out, weaving a countercharm around the two of us, so we didn't fall asleep like nearly everyone else in the basket. Still awake were the staff. I spotted five catgirls coming from the rear of the plane, and five more, including the original assassin, from the front. Not great odds, even worse with my only weapon being an unfamiliar knife. I looked at Pink. She looked at me, and then the rope line. I nodded, and we both grabbed the top rope and swung up, switching out hands around at the handstand position, and swung around down to the bottom side of the basket. Lots of places to grab, an easy catch for both of us. We scrambled down quickly, looking for a hatch of some sort. We found it, in twisted wicker that Pink could unwind with a simple unbinding spell. "Right," I said. "First, let's find our luggage." Pink was ahead of me, a tiny firefly leaping from her hand and seeking out the bag. I followed it and picked it open, faster than the key with the kind of locks they let you use on planes. I had a nice short sword in there. Pink had her rings. And of course there was the Red Diamond itself. "What does the Red Diamond do, anyway?" I asked. "Do?" said Pink? "It does nothing, not for us. We give it to Delphine, and she gives us an unreasonable amount of money. We do that not only because we really like money but because Delphine is a powerful sorceress known to take her good long time dealing with double-crossers." "Ah, she likes us." I said. "She likes you," said Pink. "Me, I think she mostly despises." "She likes me a lot, though," I said. "If it can get us home safely, I'll take my chances with her rather than a thousand foot fall into the ocean." "Nothing like that," said Pink. "It cuts through glamours is all." "Really?" I said. "Like, on an absolute scale. You could see Mab or Titania or Oberon as they really are with it." "I don't think I'd want to," I said. Elder Fae without their illusions redefine ugly, and those ones are older than sin. The catgirl assassins came charging down the stairs, in force, with knives and crossbows. We'd be targets climbing back up the side. But we had our proper weapons. "How many can you take?" asked Pink. I readied the sword, shaking off the peace bonds. "Five, I said "Maybe six with a little luck. You?" "Four, if my aim holds," she said. "I count at least a dozen," I said. A twang announced a crossbow bolt from one of the lead catgirls. It flew wide left. "Now," said Pink, "Would be a good time for a clever plan." "I have a desperate one, is that good enough?" I said. Pink sighed and readied her rings. "Brace yourself," I said. I only have barely enough magical talent to activate enchanted items. But that doesn't mean I didn't pay attention at school. I know seventeen languages, although most of them I've never spoken to a native speaker. The professors said I had the right intonations. Time to find out. I shouted at full blast a question in high Draconic. There was a roar in response that I think was a common ritual greeting: "What's in it for me?" I shouted the word for 'freedom', and the entire room lurched. I charged, sword first at the off-balanced enemies. Each time they threatened to regain advantage I shouted a direction and the hold shook again. They barely had a chance. After, we rode the top of the great beast, of Flaxolithicus the Red. It took most of the flight to loose the chains. They had magical locks that Pink has to unspool, and simple steel ones that I had to patiently pick, and there were dozens of them. We left the cable harness in place until we landed outside of Boston, and parted ways after. "So I have a question," said Pink. " Who the new enemy is? Arch-something, ring any bells?" "No, that will take care of itself." "Then what?" "The only way this makes sense is if the plane was the dragon all along, covered with a powerful glamour," she said. "Agreed," I said. "So did that just happen to be this plane?" she asked. "Or are all jetliners actually chained dragons?" She was frowning. Pink didn't like chains. "Good question," I said. "We should ask Delphine." Delphine grinned. "You've got it bad for Delphine, don't you?" I don't think I blush that easily. "An unreasonable amount of money," I said, which brought warmth to both of our souls.
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In the Shadow of Three Giants ![]() 3790 words Overview A doom is coming to these lands. Not so great a doom as the one just beyond living memory, the one that remade the world. But no less deadly to those living here. Three mountains rumble and smoke, and the mystics and scientists for once are in agreement: they will erupt, with force enough to blanket these lands in ash, to poison air and water and land and bring a long, cold winter. And even then most people underestimate the danger. This has always been a rough part of the world. While food and water are plentiful, law and safety are rare. Beyond the borders of a few settlements, banditry is rampant. To maintain trade and communication armed escorts are necessary. On the seas, no navies patrol or root out pirate dens. The people are disunited and quarrelsome, always near the point of war. The coming disaster has not changed this, not for the better. Many wish to escape, to flee their homes before the eruptions. But where to go? There is no good answer. To the west is the Ocean of a Hundred Typhoons. No ship has made it across in ages. To the south are the badlands, irradiated and lifeless. To the east are deserts, tough to cross and downwind of the mountains, like as not to suffer as badly as here when the end comes. And to the north is the powerful Vesh Confederation, who have closed their borders and sealed their city gates, turning back refugees without mercy. Arriving For a new campaign, the easiest way to introduce characters to this region is to have them come from it. Existing characters can arrive in many ways: ** Shipwreck. The western ocean is famously prone to storms. The eastern sea is the opposite, subject to doldrums. Not are wracked with piracy. Travel by sea could result in a disaster and washing up on any shore hex. **Exile. The Vash Confederacy punishes a wide array of crimes in this manner, and is corrupt enough that anyone with enemies might find themselves outside the gates in Hex 1501. **Exploration. The characters may have travelled from the East, across the desert or by sea or strait. There is little trade along that route, making these regions unknown terrain to the people on the other side. Campaign Focus Ideally the players will form their own goals in reaction to the situations they find. There are some broad directions that are likely to be explored, though: **The Optimists. They may attempt to stave off the doom and prevent the coming mass eruption. This likely means inducing early, less intense eruptions to relieve the magma pressure. Stopping all three will be extremely difficult, nearly impossible, but partial success can be achieved. **Nation Building. They may try to bind the communities together into something more suitable to surviving the coming doom. But under whose rule? **Migration. They may lead most of the people out of the region, perhaps forming a Pledged Legion for the Vash, or perhaps crossing the desert or badlands. **Escape. They may be only interested in their own safety, perhaps after acquiring some of the richer treasure to be found here. General Notes Hexes are six miles across (point to point), a day's travel with favorable terrain. The water separating islands are not rivers but straits: wide, saltwater, subject to tides, and often treacherous to navigate or cross. In the winter they freeze over, then the tidal pressure breaks and crushes then ice into chaotic and treacherous terrain. This region has been seismically unstable for decades. The unsteady ground should be a constant presence in the campaign before the eruptions. Do not let many days go by without at least a tremor, and don't hesitate to use strong quakes to punctuate dramatic moments or shift the ground, literally, of a combat. The Vashan dollar is treated as hard currency in this region, though some businesses prefer gold and silver. Hexes are quite large, and many encounter areas are multiple hexes. In most cases the suggested encounter need not be the only thing of note in that hex. If your campaign style allows you to nudge the party in a particular direction, it may be good to arrange for them to visit Racehorn(0611) or Asteria Library(1511) early. Volcano Time The timing of the eruptions should be chosen for maximum drama. If the players are attempting to stop them they should be given enough time to have a fair chance of at least mitigating the damage. These volcanoes, combined, are not as large as a supervolcano like Yellowstone, are not a world or continent scale catastrophe but are still significantly larger than anything in recorded history. When they do erupt, the impact will be devastating for anything within three hexes of the volcano; only the most well-sheltered have a chance of survival and even they may find themselves buried under massive drifts of ash and debris. After the explosion the region will see massive crop failures and animal die-offs. Communities as a rule have extensive food stored away, but food and clean water will become expensive, with most holders reluctant to part with much at any price. Newman City(0504), Forgefire(0906), and Quentin Smythe's Smoke-eaters(1613) all will aim to conquer the region in that aftermath unless the PCs have already quashed those ambitions, and other survivors will be caught between those armies. Hex Key 0401-0502: Plato's Island, a place populated by gigantic animals, from Man-sized Ants to Huge Sealions. The only human present is the giant Plato , whose parents have died years ago. Plato speaks English well enough, but is quite out of practice. He is lonely but unwilling to leave, considering himself the guardian of the other animals. He particularly despises hunting parties from Newman City(0504). 1401: The Vash Confederation patrols this strait and still maintains a ferry service crossing it. Transporting exiles and would-be refugees southward is done without charge, while northbound trips require a small fee. 1501: Pennyblade, the southernmost outpost of the Vash Confederacy. Until recently a commercial hub, but now the gates are closed to all but Vashan citizens. There is an open-air market outside the gates where some trade continues. The only way to gain entry into Vash territory is by arriving with at least a thousand fighting men or women willing to swear oaths to the Confederation and become a Pledged Legion and fight in their wars in the north. At the end of a three year tour soldiers are settled on the conquered land. Noncombatant relatives may be given permission to reside inside the Confederation only after payment of a significant bribe. 0302: The permanent whirlpool here marks the spot of the Mu-Theta Site , an underwater facility only accessible by a high tech submarine like the Panther (see 0106). This site is rich with high-tech treasure, guarded by devious traps, mechanical guardians, and the mutated descendants of the original staff. If the PCs reach this site it is likely to be the endgame for the campaign: the treasure should represent a clear solution to their major problems, a key to their goals. The dungeon guarding it should be challenging and provide a suitable climax, as making use of it may wind up more denouemant to the overall story. 0203: The Cannery, see Antivehicular adventure module TD-5 1303: The Library, see mockingquantum adventure module TD-3 0504: Newman City, which does not quite compare in size to even the smallest cities of old, or to the cities in the Vash Confederation, but is still a quite large settlement. The doctors here specialize in xenografts and nearly every adult in town has replaced a hand with a stronger or more dextrous animal's claw, pincher, or tentacle. These treatments require hard to find materials, as well as live animal specimens, and PCs may be recruited to assist procuring them. The leader of the city, Boss Fincus, has the left hand of a red-furred bear and has led for more than a decade. He has imperial ambitions that will be unleashed after the disaster. 0905: Monkey Skull Crypt, made more curious by the otherwise absence of monkeys and apes in the region. This is an underground tomb full of menacing traps, false walls, and, beyond them, undead monkeys, including animated taxidermied chimpanzees and skeletal great apes, all protecting a treasure of gold, gems, and rare books. 0106: Beneath the surface here is the remains of the U.S.S. Panther, a diesel-fueled nuclear submarine. It is close to shore, on a fairly shallow seabed, just barely visible from the surface in rare calm conditions. It's more likely for the PCs to learn of its location and seek it out than to stumble upon it. The hull is in fair shape, with a few holes in need of repair but overall still structurally sound. The engine is a wreck, in need of full replacement. The torpedo bay has already been thoroughly looted, leaving only four missiles that were already loaded and locked into tubes: three conventional ship to ship weapons, and a single nuclear device. Salvaging them will require raising the entire submarine. Rebuilding the submarine or salvaging the missiles will involve a massive engineering effort, needing help from at least one of the more technologically advanced communities. It will be necessary to rebuild the hull, replace the engine, possibly building a diesel or ethanol engine from scratch, acquiring fuel, and creating instruments and controls and integrating them with other components. It may be easier to disassemble the missile and build a new device from the fissile material within than to bypass the launch controls. 0606: Mutos Lab, see Simply Simon adventure module TD-2 "Rod of Mutos" 0906-1006-0907: Mount Fear. This large Volcano is home to the underground city of Forgefire. Discovering it may require luck or insider knowledge, though. The community is isolationist and decadent, making extensive use of geothermal power to heat forges and even generate limited amounts of electricity. There is a consensus among the people here that they can use a series of magma vents to forestall the eruption of Mount Fear. A character with solid science and engineering skills will be able to determine that they are wrong, but considerably more persuasion would be needed to change their minds. If persuaded, though, they have the technical ability to cause an early eruption of the mountain without additional equipment. They would become displaced people with a huge, well-armed army at that point. The leader here is King Sabra, who is a peaceful and reasonable ruler. He has an ambitious advisor, Dethric, who will attempt and likely succeed in a military coup, especially if the community is already migrating. He will favor a policy of conquest to find a new home. Sabra's legitimate heir is Villa, and she is likely to escape capture and, if she has met them before, seek out the PCs for help. 0307: This appears to be a bandit camp, and has certainly been raiding the surrounding small farms and villages as though it were one. But it has a larger wall and fort than might be expected, and makes a lot of effort to keep people away. This is because it is actually the camp of the Second Newman Legion, soldiers serving under General Affheyer, readying to assist Newman City(0504) in conquering the region. Affheyer considers himself Boss Fincus' natural successor, but would not move against him unless the PCs deliberately work to drive a wedge between the two. 1307: Crossways, see Sitting Here Adventure Module TD-4, The Flagon's End 0408-0309: Direwind Canyon The bottom of this canyon is unusually warm and is the range of a large herd of Carnivorous Horses. These are prized as mounts but impossible to tame as adults. A foal raised from near birth will often bond with a single rider, more easily with a child or adolescent than an adult, and will still be a danger to any other human that approaches it. It would be possible to create a new volcano here by breaking the thin crust at the bottom with a nuclear device, releasing enough pressure that one of the existing volcanoes need not erupt at all. 0210: Storage Bunker Alpha This is not a place of honor... A hastily constructed facility for storing nuclear materials in the immediate aftermath of the great disaster, this site is intact due to its massive concrete shell and steel doors, as well as a background radiation hazard. If breached,there is a gauntlet of warnings, traps, and Mechanical Golems still in working order (the batteries powering them will only run for a week if the PCs think to wait then out) to be passed. Beyond it can be found sufficient plutonium to construct a single crude nuclear weapon with the refining tools available in this region. There is also a fully intact nuclear submarine engine, which could be used to rebuild the Panther, salvaged for material to make a second crude nuclear device, or used to provide electricity for a midsized community for years. If word of its recovery spreads almost every faction in the region will want it for one reason or another. 0611: Racehorn, a port town on the north end of the road. The Astera Library is here but in the process of moving to a new location and may hire PCs as caravan guards. The loss of prestige from the library is causing tension in town and there is a rising war fever against the town of Bluebell(0715). The elders and residents believe themselves a safe distance from Mount Hell. If convinced otherwise, they will migrate, planning to rebuild on (1110), which will also be the favored site of a migrating Bluebell 1511: Astera Library. The ancient bunkers here are now the new home of a library with the mission to survive and preserve knowledge. At the beginning of the campaign they are still in the process of moving their books from Racehorn(0611) to this new facility, and may recruit visiting PCs to help escort shipments. They also will be a possible buyer for any rare and ancient books that might be recovered. They have some currency to pay with but can also pay in knowledge. One contact here is Academician Dora Thane, who will attempt to recruit visitors to help with her research into the coming volcanic crisis. Her first set of requests is for scientific readings from as many of the three volcanoes as possible. With one set of data she will learn how violent the disaster will be, and provide a report that will help persuading leaders that they must take action. With a second set she will explain that prematurely causing eruptions of the volcanoes will prevent the full scale disaster. (A premature eruption will only cause destruction in the adjacent hexes, and if all three erupt early the climactic impact will be less, just a single full year of winter in the region.) She doesn't know anything short of a nuclear device that would be enough to cause the eruption. With the third set she will be able to calculate the time of the eruption, and also provide plans to detonate one with only conventional explosives. Other researchers here can give information on most hexes, if the PCs know enough to ask the right questions. 0812-0713-0813: Lake Vesper, the region's only freshwater lake. The lake is home to several colonies of Giant Midges, who are predated by Mammoth Toads, who in turn are prey for the Gargantuan Lake Serpent 0413-0513-0514: Mount Hell Settled into the area around this volcano and sulfur lake are the Order of the Ashen Face, a hedonistic death cult that is growing in numbers. Their leader, Brother David preaches a gospel of love and violence and an eagerness to embrace the coming end of the world. The PCs may be sent from any nearby community to attempt to bring back a family member who has run away and joined this cult, which may be accomplished by stealth, persuasion, or carefully applied violence. Brother David has loyal disciples to take over if he is killed. If they are coming to prematurely cause Mount Hell to erupt, they will either need to fool the cult into allowing it, which will be difficult as their doctrine does not allow interfering with the volcano in any way, or they will likely need to bring a small army, as the cult commands around three hundred fanatics, all fierce in combat. 0913: Toadrider Camp, a group of several dozen bandits who ride tame Mammoth Toads as they raid caravans and lone travellers on the road on the west side of Lake Vesper. Their leader is Big Nell, who has ambitions of becoming leader of a larger community, by growth or by conquest. They may end up being recruited by another faction with the promise of land. 1613: Fort Smythe The ruler here, Dr. Quentin Smythe , does not often receive guests but may invite the PCs if they have something he wants. He is never without a contingent of cloaked bodyguards. Smythe is raising an army in the labs beneath his tower, an army of Smoke-eaters, univing soldiers with metal jaws, teeth, and sharp armblades adapted to thrive in the ashen conditions after the eruptions. He means to unleash them in the immediate aftermath, converting corpses to soldiers as he conquers. If the PCs are having any success against the disaster he will begin taking actions against them, which may lead them back to this lair. In addition to the large number of Smoke-eaters, about a dozen assistants live here, along with his family: his wife and partner Gloria Smythe, who may try to carry on his work should he die, and his adult children: loyal Crispus Smythe, ambitious Francis Smythe, rebellious Xenia Smythe and innocent Garland Smythe. 1214: Mad Mountain, this volcano is a difficult climb with no easy landing anywhere on its rocky shores. The mountain itself has steam vents and mini-geysers where thermophilic microbes have infused the gas with psychoactive chemicals that will cause disorientation and hallucinations. The mountain is also home to many monstrous birds, including Firewings, Great Grey Condors, and a nest of Rukhs near the caldera. 1414: An empty island, or insert a GM's choice island adventure here 0715: Bluebell, this town is in crisis and being driven toward war. There have been a series of sabotage attacks on the town's food stores. The PCs may be hired to investigate and protect the remaining supplies. The sabotage is being done by agents of Newman City(0504), but no natives from there with the distinctive exografted limbs. Their agents are largely Racehorn(0611) residents, with evident ties to that town in their possession and payments traceable to a local moneychanger. Only a successful interrogation of live, captured saboteurs can lead to the true culprit. 1415: The Flagless Islands, the largest pirate haven in the region. On Hangman's Tooth serious business is done, accepting ransoms and arranging to trade stolen goods through trusted merchant ships in Bluebell(0715) or ports further east. On Captain's Smile shipbuilding and repairs are done, though lumber supplies are growing scarce and there is rarely enough metal to consider steel hulls when cannon and balls are more in demand. And on Deviltongue the taverns never run out of rum. 0116: Tall Town, see Crabrock adventure module TD-1 0316: The Pit, see Sebmojo adventure module TD-6 0916: The Tower , see Idle Amalgam adventure module TD-7, "Tides of Change 1217: An abandoned watchtower, or insert a GMs choice land or tower based adventure here 1517: The Paranus Archipelago holds dozens of small islands for the GM to use as they desire: destinations for treasure hunts, homes for dangerous exiles, castaways wanting to be delivered home, where home is a place that visiting would serve the story, monsters to defeat for treasure or useful organs, and so on. 1617: The Strangle The sails of this unusual sargasso are visible from shore: dozens of ships, held in place by a variety of extremely aggressive kelp vines that may attack vessels and swimmers alike. They create and plug holes in any wooden hull, leading the ships to take on water should they force themselves free. Thin metal boats will be bored through and sink immediately. Thick metal hulls will survive. A handful of survivors remain aboard the Frondwind, having sailed from the far east. They will be grateful for rescue, though they have little to offer as reward apart from a few books from those lands. A fair amount of gold and other treasure can be looted from the other ships, but there is risk of attack by Vegetable Zombies of vengeful sailors. Encounter suggestions for unkeyed hexes: Desert Sandstorm Great Desert Worm Gargantuan Scorpions A caravan under attack by raiders True oasis Wind-uncovered tomb or minor ruin Plains A flashfire threatening a small farm A swarm of rabbits so thick they blot out the ground, and is that blood on their mouths? A party from one farm carrying out a blood-feud against their neighbor stampeding cattle after an earthquake A false inn run by murderers Rough Large bat cave with harvestable guano for saltpeter Landslide or avalanche Lonely goatherder willing to trade rumors and stories Deep cool cavern with fresh water pools Box canyon ambush by bandits Sulfur spring Forest Cyber-bears Timber camp Traveller under attack by bandits A single talking squirrel who claims to have a valuable secret A grove of Giant carnivorous plants A faerie circle of hallucinogenic mushrooms
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Constellations 720 words Winter comes on quickly, by policy. One day the municipal trickle charge is budgeted to light, the next to heat. You don't like winter. The darkness and silence is unsettling. You remember traffic sounds, the buzz of a dying streetlight's ballast. You're glad to be rid of them, in your head. But when the sun goes down earlier and earlier and the white-grey shroud turns to coal black, you miss the moon. You miss the stars. Peter is there, outside the archive, waiting for you. He's been there most days, lately. There with a cool chemical lantern and a smile. You look at him, at the touch of grey in his roots. He's getting old. Almost thirty years younger than you and he's getting old. "You don't have to keep doing this," you say. "I can make it home on my own." "No doubt," he says. "But I'd be lost without you." You stare. "We all would." "There's plenty trained to work the archives," you say. You never meant to be a teacher, but every few years a kid fresh from school spends a few months learning what you can teach about operating the machines, about swapping out old tired storage, about the strict policy on using the archives trickle charge, the stricter ones on paper and ink. About navigating the old stacks, too. Someday one of them will replace you. "Not so many who remember, though," he said. You never should have started telling him stories. "You should be making your own stories, Peter," you say. "I have," he says. "I am. Can I show you something? It will mean a half hour's extra walking." "My legs can take it," you say. So you turn left on Haven Street instead of going straight, and walk through parts of the town you haven't visited in a long time. There's nothing to see, so he talks as you walk. He tells you about his marriage, ten years dead and gone. She left him for another. Their daughter left heading south. They exchange short messages in the yearly missives up and down I-75. "Lucia died," he says, looking down. "Three years ago." "I'm sorry," you say. "Her husband, he put in a letter. I didn't have to read it to know what had happened. I almost didn't." You walk along in silence for a while, crossing Gail and Henrietta and Isolde streets. Finally, he says "In, you know, then. You would have made a trip. Visited your daughter. Helped her through it." "You still could," you say, feeling foolish even as the words escape. Three week's travel. A major disruption. It's not quite forbidden by policy, but nobody travels anywhere that far except to stay. "I almost did," he says. "I hope I wasn't the reason," you say. He's been in your life for five years, although you weren't nearly that close then, when he came by to research biochemistry and genetics, in the stacks and with what brief consultations with other archives policy allowed over the trickle. He laughs a little. Not a cruel laugh. "No," he says. "It was work. Come on, it's just another block." You start to hear it, the low, growling coos from ahead. You realize that you haven't heard that in a long time. "Are those.." "They migrated back here last week," he says. "Our first big success in shroud-adapted wildlife. The colony has even grown a little." Darrin Park is full of pigeons, walking along the dirt, their entire bodies glowing like fireflies as they bob their heads up and down. You approach, and they take flight, vanishing into the dark sky until only the yellow blinking light above could be seen. And you smile, like you haven't in a long time, not since your own tragic little family life ended. "Life's too short," you mumble too softly to be heard. "What?" says Peter. "Life is too short," you say, and try hard to give signals you're afraid that you've long since forgotten. He leans in, and you know you were right, that life is too short to pass up second chances for good conversation and companionship and maybe more, too short to dwell on the dead and decadent past. And above all, too short to not fill with stolen kisses under the fluttering birdlight.
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In, All I Know So Far
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All I Know So Far P!nk Pull the Mask Off 814 words The train squealed to a halt, not at any scheduled station stop. The speakers crackled like the conductor was about to make an announcement, but there was only silence and light static on the line. Pauline squeezed my hand, a firm grip with those bony fingers. Kevin was breathing ragged, near hyperventilating. He knew, at six, more than I did at fourteen, what was going down. The rest of the passengers in our were murmuring among themselves, mostly complaining about the delay. Then there were sounds from the next car down, meaty smacking sounds, and everyone got quiet. The doors between cars are narrow and have to be held open. They're what we would call a strategic chokepoint. One person with any kind of weapon, heck, with a decent-sized textbook could hold off a dozen guys there. But nobody was thinking that way then. Everyone was sitting in their seats, some of us craning necks around to see. The doors opened. They came through in a rank, six of them, each in black denim jeans, red long sleeved shirts, and latex gorilla masks. APEs. We never thought they'd come this far north and west until they did. American Preservation Enterprise. They barked orders. They open carried, not all with guns, there was a taser and a few billy clubs. Standard police issue. They oozed menace like the sweat dripping out from the seams between mask and neck. They went up the aisle, doing the same at each seat. Order everyone to stand up and present their hands. Zip-tie them to the back of the seat, giving a little extra tug to make sure it hurt. That was the adults. The kids they shuffled back towards that doorway, back towards their vans. Now, we didn't know their plans. Nobody did. You just assume the worst, that kind of thing, and when it turns out not to be that you feel relieved, even though you probably shouldn't. I met a couple people who wound up taken by APE, or by Apex or TruRed or any of the other militias. To them it was sort of a joke. Sat down in a tent with a screen and speakers, forced to watch three hours of badly-made propaganda, then either swear their loathsome oath or take a beating. Most of them made other kids do the violence. Then they left them there, another two hours before the police found the tent. The ones I talked to said it was a joke, but the ones who ended up with nightmares every night forward, or the ones who joined up wouldn't ever wind up talking to me. That wasn't me, though, nor Kevin. When they got to our seat and ordered her to stand, our grandmother Pauline just looked at the person in the gorilla mask and quietly said "No, I don't think I will." "Are you crazy?" said the APE. A woman's voice under there. She pulled Pauline up. Pauline reached for her neck and yanked the mask up. There's pictures. She turned out to be related to some semi-major politician, a mayor or city council president somewhere. She was famous for a while, mask hair and all. In jail for a while too, though not near enough, then sort of famous again. She pulled back, drew her pistol, and shot Pauline in the chest. "This wasn't part of the plan," said another APE. "I, I mean, I didn't-" said the one who shot Pauline. The other one slapped her hard. There's pictures of that too. "Put your damned face back on." She picked up the mask and put it on her face. There was blood on it, likely inside too. "Now get out of here," he said, and they ran back out the door they'd come from. Pauline lived, lived a good fifteen more years after that. I had my shirt off for a bandage and was applying pressure, and the bullet missed her heart and major arteries by millimeters. The paramedics came quickly, and did their jobs. I never really got a great answer for why she did it. Lots of other parents stood up for the tie. She'd sometimes say she lived a full life, and didn't have too much to lose, but we both knew that wasn't true. She had me, and Kevin, and dad and both of his ex-wives, even though they never really got on that well. She had family, lots of it. But now that I'm getting nearly as old as she was then I get it. There's a point when you've been through enough, made enough bad decisions and watched them come back for a haunting, when you know what you can and can't do and live with yourself after. I wish I'd known sooner, but I feel lucky to have been taught well enough to have gotten there by now.
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In
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Would a Rose 915 Words Her tendrils embrace me, tender shoots slowly intruding down into my throat. Warm oxygen, fresh from the blue and violet flowering bodies that line her tall branches fills my lungs, and I will not die today. - This was never meant to be a survey mission. Daleth four is on interdict. Make no landings there, proceed directly to the gate on five in a standard transfer orbit. Practically routine, as much as a leg on a two year journey can be, until an indicator silently shifted from blue to amber to red over a few seconds. Six minutes later my captain and crew were dead and I was alone on a slowly falling rock. - She exudes comfort, safety, care. I can feel it, from my bones to my skin. It can't be mere chemistry; our physiologies and biochemistries evolved down separate paths from the eukaryotic seeds the Builders sowed eons ago. The odds of her pheromones matching my receptors perfectly are close to infinity to one against. So not chemical, then. Psychic. Brain chemistry and neuroelectricity must also be different, but there's something in us other than mere matter, according to some of our allies. Mind to mind. I try to feel, to broadcast gratitude, try not to do harm as the memories come. - The Lilting Sonata was not designed for emergency landings, for any kind of landings at all. Carved out of an asteroid, strictly station to station, over engineered for cargo space and speed. I happened to be there, in the holds, airlocks apart from the part of the ship now open to vacuum. Comms did not go down when the drive exploded. I heard them, panicking, screaming. Saw them scramble for the exosuits. Dylan made it to one, sealed himself in. He almost reached the outer bay door before the second explosion. Something almost like words are coming across. "You're a strange one," she says. I smile, which hurts my face in three places. "You're beautiful," I try to think at her. She is. What I call her face is like a fractal rose, bright yellow with fringes that cycle through pink and violet and blue. She's laughing, in my head. A high trilling sound. Warm. "You talk like an infant," she says. She moves soft leaves onto my burns and leaves gel on my skin, cool and burning. - Dylan drifted freely. We talked. I'd tell him stories, from my life, then from books he hadn't read. He read poetry. A little from Shakespeare. Traditional Japanese poems translated by his mother. And his own. He was a beautiful poet. There were places we'd both been, the shattering rocks of Bridegroom three, or the ethane geysers of Serendib six. I'd seen them with my eyes, but I hadn't really seen them, couldn't remember them properly, until I'd heard him describe them. "You should have shared these earlier," I said. "Mom always said you should read poems to family or people you're trying to sleep with," he said. Slowly, with irregular pauses. There wasn't much time left. His suit only gave him air, no water or food. "You might have managed it," I said. "That would have made this even worse, no?" I stayed on the comm with him, to the end. I didn't let myself cry until he was gone, until I was sure. Then I screamed until I couldn't. - "Are there others?" I feel the corrections to the grammar of thought in my head before her reply. "There are," she said. "Far from here. Best we stay away, until you can-" She had no word, no thought pattern for 'walk', and I hadn't been able to explain it terribly well. In her transmitted thoughts it was a comic endeavor, a clown show slapstick routine of one near fall after another. My broken leg was still healing. "Tell me a story," I said. "Something your people all learn." She smiled, ribbons of rose quartz pink across her petals. "Six-thorn was a short and sullen child, but her father loved her very much. When she could barely uproot herself for a day, she decided to cross the wife-grass to Aeld..." - The Lilting Sonata was not designed to land, but like a meteorite it landed anyhow. Dylan and I had calculated the decaying orbit. I arranged the cargo around me, for maximum cushioning, and waited to find out if the shipyard had left enough rocky shell to survive the impact, if I would burn or melt or be atomized on impact. I waited. I told myself that I'd probably die instantly. I had not prepared myself, had not really anticipated nearly as much pain as there was, when it came. I didn't at all expect to survive the impact only to be left unable to move as sea-water began to fill the hold. - I will never go home again. I know that. Even if someone comes to investigate and salvage, even if they break the interdict rules to contact the pre-technological society here, even if I face rescue rather than arrest, the mandatory quarantine would last longer than my natural life. But none of that will happen. The cargo was boring, mundane, and now ruined. If it was sabotage the evidence is gone and drowned. I start to hear other voices, tentative, probing. Her cousins, she says. They've come to see me walk. I may yet come to call this world home. I can no longer imagine a home without her.
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Reroll
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![]() Perilous 899 words About ten years back they tore Chapel High down. Me and DeeCee and Trip all watched, came for the controlled demolition of Paige Hall and stayed to see the a giant steel-reenforced concrete wrecking ball take out the north wall. Hell of a time. Trip poured out a forty for the good times, but we were mostly glad to see it gone. The year after, back in town for Christmas I drove out to the construction site, jumped the fence and found the spot where Callie Van Leuten shaved my hair after class while her minions held me down. Easy to find. They sawed through the old flagpole rather than digging up the concrete, leaving the steel stump in the middle of a divider. I stared for a while, then spat on the ground. Then I left, and never went back. So I was more than a little surprised when, during my latest expedition on Othermars, right in the middle of the Emphora Northroad, there it was. Chapel High, right down to the rips on the tattered old flag. I was already in a bad mood. I'd been traveling alone since Larwic the Large decided to settle down in Lower Emphora. I don't like to travel alone, I was already tired of the craggy red terrain, and now this. I sighed, drew the electrorapier I'd picked up in the High Emp Market, and walked up to the glass double doors to the main hall. I was ready to kick them down when I heard the voice. "Danika Dee?" I turned to look. "You," I said. It was Callie, Callie all grown up with her blonde hair short-cropped, in a business suit with big shoulder pads. Full of Othermars new-arrival wild eyed blinking. "Is this some kind of dream?" said Callie. "God, it's going to take weeks with Doctor Lane to unpack this one. Danika freaking Dee as a hot leather barbarian babe. What the living poo poo is my subconscious up to now?" "I see you still can't shut up to save your life," I said. "No. Not a dream. And thinking like that is a good way to get killed." I heard the screech just after. Owl. They grow big here. Big enough that you see skulls in the pellets sometimes. "Inside," I said, and shoved at the doors. The chain lock around them on the inside didn't give. Callie swung her briefcase hard and the safety glass shattered into spiderwebs. Another whack and the plastic tore open, cubes of glass spilling inside the door. A few more shoves and the opening was big enough to crawl through. "Are you sure this isn't a dream?" Callie said. "It's real," I said. "I've been here a few times. Brought back gold and jewels from a mad emperor's vaults one time. Caught a moongate that put me on another continent one time." "I'll be sure to grab a souvenir," she said. "Until I'm back and it's in my hands, color me unconvinced." She gestured around at the entry, at the trophy cases and the moth-bothered banner. "I mean, Chapel High?" I shrugged. "This is new, I'll admit." Callie walked up to the trophy and swung her briefcase again. She jumped back when it hit. Regular glass, spraying sharp shards small and large. "What's in that thing, bricks?" I asked. "Contracts," she said, reaching carefully inside. There was an old baseball bat in there, cedar with the school name and '1998' burned onto the wood. She set down the briefcase and held the bat ready. We walked forward. Just beyond the entry was a huge red-stone stairway rising upwards. "That wasn't there," said Callie. "You know. Then." "Nope," I said. We cautiously climbed, each landing a bit cooler and darker. Six flights up we reached a large chamber, cool stone with stalagmites, lit by a dull red glow from above. Something attacked us, with a hiss. Green skinned and winged, twice as big as a person. It reached out a hand and a whip extended. I blocked it with my left hand. It sliced through the leather and bruised my skin, tore it at the very center. I raised my rapier and fingered the switch in the hilt. Blue electricity crackled up the metal. Callie raised the bat, ready to swing "What the hell is that?" she said. "It's, uh, probably you," I said. She turned to me, guard down. The thing extended another whip toward her. She batted it down just in time. "Like, a metaphorical you. From back then." I went on the offensive, thrusting, jumping around to put it between us. It winched at the shocks, but kept attacking, nearly knocking Callie down with a wing buffet. "I was a bit of a monster," she said. I attacked again. The second switch, all the electricity stored in those Other Martian batteries at once. It reeled back, and Callie connected full strength, the bat to its head. It went down. *** "How long to this moongate?" Callie asked. Again. "Three days," I said. "Assuming no stops on the way. Which never happens." "I wish I had my electric clippers," she said. I stared. "Seriously," she said. "You'd rock it. Half shaved, the other half you dye. Blue, maybe violet. Go a lot better with the look that the mom-do you have now." It was going to be a long walk home.
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https://cfa.org/birman/ and https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/kromfohrlander/ Ruins and Battlefields 877 words This is a story about a war, but it is not a war story. Soldiers may fight and struggle to survive, but they are far from here and scarcely notice the moment passing between two orphans in the wet mud bed of a crater from the early days, the early moments of the conflict. Jack was eager, at attention, looking skyward for paratroopers to engage with the imagined rifle that a stiff tree-branch has become in his hands. Mo was more wary. When she scanned the skies it was for those few seconds head start toward shelter she might win. When she imagined a rifle against her shoulder her thoughts were singular, and each imagined enemy soldier in her sights had the same face. They were both thirteen, for then. Eleven months separated their birthdays. The war was four months older than her. A siren wailed briefly then cut off. Jack turned his eyes downward, looking for motion in the ruins, and saw the rising wisp of black smoke from the tower. These blocks were unoccupied save for strays and stragglers like the two of them. Not of strategic value, likely to be spared further destruction. But movement was coming, and armies might move through here en route to somewhere that matters. He met Mo's eyes, and they agreed. Time to hide. This is a story about growning up, but it is not a coming of age story. There was no moment of lost innocence: Jack and Mo were born to this world. Each lost their parents before they found words, Jack to the front lines and Mo to explosions behind them. There was never a time when they didn't understand that adults were, if not outright predators, at the least not to be trusted, not to be relied upon. There was Jianni, two years older and self-designated protector and provider, leader or the scrounging gang. Independence was their rule, from day one. There was no rite of passage, no figure whose approval had to be won. Jianni took tax and gave what protection he could, up to the day they made him a soldier and sent him south. The gang fell apart after, into solitaires and dyads. The pickings were slim enough by then that the predators moved on. A letter arrived one day, drone-delivered and addressed to Mo. From Jianni's commanding officer. When he was fifteen, Jack snuck into Mo's room while she was out foraging to try to read it for himself, but the officer's script might as well have been hieroglyphs to his screen-taught eyes. He took pictures of it, spent a month of nights learning cursive from old dead videos stored on archives that still took connections, wondering where Mo had picked it up, if she had done the same, if she had just inferred everything from the fact of the letter. There wasn't much there. The officer had only known Jianni for five months. Some time, a month or two later, Mo knew. There was some tell, he let on to some fine point about Jianni's death that she had never told him. Their first fight. No words. Just looks. One of disappointment and betrayal. One of resentment for keeping the secret in the first place. Forgiveness took words. Forgiveness came much later. This is a story of the apocalypse, or its aftermath. There had been no end to history, just more history. No final days, just bad days. A generation of bloody civil war and desperate migrations, of breakdown and collapse. A generation of forgotten children left in the ruins and lands outside. There was an end to it, though. A truce, then a peace, then a new union on better terms. The loudspeakers had been silent for years, but they sprung to life to spread the news, and played songs old and ancient to celebrate. Soldiers came again, dressed as police this time. Mo still didn't trust it, thought it was one more trick to draw them out for recruitment. "Well," said Jack, "If it is then we'll go and fight." They weren't recruiters. They were surveyors, mapping the land for rebuilding, measuring out the compensation due to displaced squatters like Jack and Mo. They promised the two that they would be resettled together, and though the next weeks were a nightmare of bureaucracy and medicine, every possession burned to flush parasites, days spend wandering bright white corridors, at the end the promise was kept. They were nearly neighbors, living in apartment towers two blocks apart. This is a story about love but it is not a love story. Jack and Mo were close, intimate even, through those years, but never romantically, never sexually. Not like brother and sister either. But they loved. When Mo was sick Jack starved to keep her fed. When Jack mangled his left arm Mo found a doctor from the deep wild to come and save him from rot or amputation. There was nothing either would not give. They both married, after. Stood up at each other's weddings. When they visited each other's large and growing families, they never touched. Jack would carry Mo's children on his shoulders and Mo would hug Jack's like the last doll on Earth, and they both smiled.
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In, bird me.
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https://twitter.com/AurasBirds/status/1411791933958094849 How To Make a New Friend 825 words "This is going to be easy," said Lise Thackeray. "The hard part is already done." The hardest part of stealing a suitcase full of cash was knowing that there was going to be a suitcase full of cash in the first place. Next to nobody uses cash for anything these days. Even kidnappers and extortionists take bitcoin. "Meet Jason Vangelis," said Sharon Li. She cast a slide into the television screen and he appeared, another besuited techbro with a briefcase walking across Market Street. "Officially a lobbyist. Unofficially the middleman for Representative Aaron Victor Gayle." Mary Margaret Alexandria looked at the picture. She was the audience here, the third member of the crew. The one who needed convincing. "This guy is walking around with six figures?" "Not all the time," said Lise. "Not in this picture," said Sharon. She swiped right and another picture appeared. "This one. You can see the added weight." "We've been watching for a while," said Lise. "At first we thought it was simple graft, but there's too much money involved." "So what is it then?" asked Mary Margaret. "Laundering," said Sharon with another swipe, and a diagram appeared with boxes and lines. "Dirty cash goes in, gets turned into small donations to one of Gayle's political action committees or charities, then goes back out as clean salaries for the officers." "The hard part was finding him," said Lise. "The next harder part was figuring out when and where he was going to have it on him. The rest will be easy, with your help. Are you in?" *** It wasn't easy. Lise knew she really had to stop saying things like that. It was like a compulsion, and it always drew the same result. There was another guy. Following Jason Vangelis. Not easy to spot, either, but Lise had the eye of a wanted criminal. Pre-training, she thought to herself. She had a few exes who could turn stalker any time, and one of them was a cop, had cop friends. She learned to spot cops, and that's what this guy was. Plain clothes. Expensive plain clothes. She guessed FBI. The easy thing would be to abort. She had signals. She could call it all off in a second. But she didn't. She'd already committed two different strings of major felonies and had nothing more to show for either than her freedom. Sharon was part of the most recent, too. It was time to get paid. Lise stumbled, falling right into the man's chest. "Excuse me, ma'am," he said. She pulled herself up against his arm. "I'm sorry," she said. "Are you drunk?" he said, trying to look around her. "No," she said. "It's just, well, it's just," She let go, then stepped down on his foot. Not a stomp, but with a good portion of her weight on it. "Jesus," he said. "Listen, I'm going to have to ask you to back off." He looked around. "God drat it." She backed away, then turned, did a little stumble for show, then went around the corner. The whole thing cost precious minutes. The motorcycle was still where she had parked it. The biggest risk in the plan, really. It was a good lock, one of the few on the market she couldn't defeat in minutes, but she wasn't the only thief in town. "Wheels are go," she said. "You're behind," said Sharon. Lise pulled her helmet out of the lock shackle and put it on, then started the vehicle and headed down the street. The next part worked like clockwork. Sharon was leading Jason, watching him in reflections. Mary Margaret was behind. She was the muscle, worked as a bouncer at a couple of bars and clubs. Strong and fast and impressive. When she grabbed Jason's arm and yanked the briefcase out of it, he didn't give much resistance. Neither did the case, in spite of it holding twenty pounds of cash in it. "Don't turn around," she said. Jason didn't. Lise slowed down. Mary Margaret set the case in the cargo basket and got on behind Lise, and they merged into traffic, deep into the maze of streets. Sharon watched Jason for a while longer, then met up with the others. "He didn't call the police," she said. "Didn't call anyone. Eventually someone called him. He just stood there, looking defeated." "He should thank us," said Mary Margaret. "Now he'll change it up and stay ahead of the FBI." "Not how it works," said Lise. "When you start changing the routine things get sloppy. He'll be in the headlines in a month." She worked the pick and tensioning tool in the briefcase lock, feeling the last pin fall into place. The lock slapped open, and she lifted the lid and smiled at the neatly aligned stacks of twenty dollar bills. Not life changing money, not split three ways, but enough to make for a good year. A very good year.
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In, word
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Dungeon The Delve 1550 words There's four left of us, me and Dom and Rebekah and Gullman, and Gullman's hanging on by a thread. Four out of twenty, plus Makli and Dot back on the Endeavor. Five kilometers between us and the airlock, including half a klick of vertical climb. All vacuum now, and the last bit a bath in hard radiation now that the outer cladding's stripped itself off. "Forward, then," said Dom. I nodded. "Agreed," said Rebekah. "Decent odds Makli's gone after that chunk of shell and then straight to the wormhole." About a tonne of Mapmaker structural material. Enough to set them up for life. A successful retrieval would make it look like chump change though. "He's too greedy to cut out this soon," I said. "Dot's not, Chess," said Rebekah. "You're a fool if you think otherwise." "If it's about me," said Gullman, "Don't. Decide as if I'm already gone." "Not happening," said Dom. "Not relevant," said Rebekah. "She's right," I said. "The way I see it, our best chance is to find a bigger Mister down there. Industrial size. And put together something spaceworthy." Gullman started coughing, which turned into a laugh. Maybe it had been all along. "Sure, and maybe-" He stopped for another round of coughing. "Maybe find out, find out what'd happen." *** We found D7 by chance, on a standard salvage run in Gilead system. This was a scourgewracked system, no life remaining on either the primary or the secondary, but rich in orbiting artifacts and metal. Honest money, not too easy, not too hard. Until we picked up the signal, a brief repeating mathematical sequence on a tight beam toward Gilead 2, the primary. It came from deep in the outer system, a dwarf planet far away from the wormhole network. And our telescopes could tell that the source couldn't have been manufactured by the local civilization. Our telescopes plotter out the distinctive absorption spectra of exotic particle alloys. Precursor technology. "We report to the fleet and the finder's fee would double our take on this trip," said Makli. "Or we stake our own claim." "We have enough fuel for it," I said. "About a year to reach it. A little budget for emergency maneuvers, and enough for a drift course back with full cargo holds, two years' trip." "It's a lot longer than we've signed on for," said Dot. "But I don't have to tell you how much the reward could be." There was a vote. Twenty-one ayes and one abstention. *** We found the next Mister just in time. "Are you sure you want to do this?" asked Dom. Gullman was past talking, on full oxygen makeshifted from his exosuit. He could nod, though. We carried him over the threshold, onto the Mister's main table. I waved up the machine's interface, and carefully touched the series of floating glyphs that meant 'repair'. It's not been difficult learning alien languages from the living, not teaching them ours. From the dead, though, that's another story. Years, no, decades of research have been done across hundreds of universities into each dead language, and we barely know the preschool level of the words of the ghosts of Acheron and Asgard, the two dead systems nearest Earth along the wormhole network. Here at the frontier, next to nothing at all was known of the Gileadean's words. And at least they had something in common with us, were cousins via that ancient panspermia event that accompanied the Builder's reign. They had been organic. The precursor races, if they had ever been, were not. They had as much in common with us as we do with ants. With microbes. With prions. And yet, somehow, we have learned a few words of the Mapmaker language. At least a language of theirs. Rebekah thinks that it is the language they use to talk to pets or to program simple computing machines. It's the language that the Misters use, these devices that harness Mapmaker technology. Not nanotech, think smaller. Yoctotech, or beyond that; so far as we understand it at all it involves manipulation of matter at the quantum level. We learned the elements and their isotopes and how to describe simple compounds. We told the system of our atmospheric needs, and it has filled the levels of the complex with a perfectly homey oxygen-nitrogen blend. And we've learned some more abstract concepts, like the one I just selected. We'd never tried the repair glyph on anything living, on a person before. A transparent capsule extruded from the sides of the table and surrounded Gullman, somehow forming a perfect seal at the top. Violet mist filled it, obscuring him from view. *** We earned out the mission almost as soon as we set foot inside the complex. There it was, in the first chamber. A map, of this system and everything connected to it at a depth of twelve gates. The shape of the network, and the positions they occupied in real space, in the six galaxies known to be part of the Builders' network. This was a Mapmaker facility, then. The seventh known so far, and with the deepest map we'd seen yet. A beautiful and inaccurate picture of the universe. The Mapmakers were the second of the three precursor races. Before them were the Builders. After them, though, were the Tricksters, and the Tricksters changed about half the gates around, remapping the universe, turning the Mapmaker's project to from fact to fiction. A half-accurate map was better than none, though, especially if you knew the issue beforehand. This was a great prize, and unlike D1 through 6, D7 had more to explore below. *** "How do you feel?" I said. "Like I'm twenty-one again," said Gullman. "A little dumber, a lot more randy. And blue, for some reason." He hadn't been blue when he first came out of the Mister. It had been gradual, as the blood substitute flowed through his repaired body. By now it has reached a final, bright hue on his skin and was working through his hair, roots upward. We were close to the bottom. I managed to get the Mister to generate the parts I needed to make a radio that could reach the Endeavor , and we found that Makli and Dot were still in orbit, still waiting. They'd sent a formal claim and distress signal to the relay, after the disaster. The navy was coming, in a few years. We could probably survive here, with the Misters' help. It would still be better to reach the last level, to find a way back to the Endeavor if there was one. So we pressed on. *** The four of us were pressing onward, into the level beneath the great vertical shaft, when it happened. I told the others that there were no video logs, that what I thought happened was only a guess from text and audio. I was lying. The rest of the expedition, while we were pressing ahead, they found a hidden chamber, not much bigger than a closet. And it was full of machinery. Not Mapmaker technology. The Gilead people, before their demise? Or some other visitor? No way to tell now. As soon as they uncovered it, it began to scream. Audio, red flashing visual light, sulfurous odors, likely also signals along the psionic spectra as well. All signalling 'danger' loudly enough to transcend any communication barrier. They did not heed the warning. They did not call us back. Part of me wonders if the device was that sophisticated, that if we had turned back it would have given enough time for us all to escape. I knew what happened. The others did not have to see those images. *** There is a door, at the bottom of the facility. A door, and a small room on the other side of it. It would be easy to open it. Communication is easier with the living. There is someone alive on the other side of the door, and I have learned so much of the Mapmaker language, this talking-to-primitives language now. It would be easy to open. But we'd have to kill or disable Gullman first to do it. Dom tried to open it and Gullman left him with two shattered vertebrae. Right now he's content to sit. If Dom goes into the Mister we'd have to go through him, too. Rebekah and I could probably take Gullman if we tried. He's strong, but not superhuman. But I don't think I want to. The person behind the door is very persuasive. As soon as I realized that this wasn't a sleep capsule, not a survival pod for his kind, but rather a prison, he gladly admitted it. And assured me that his crimes were justified, even if beyond my ability to even comprehend let alone judge. Part of me wants to leave. I know enough Mapnaker-Mister language to build a ship, not just a shuttle but something faster and more grand than the Endeavor . Leave, be rich, and leave the decision entirely in the navy's hands. But not one of us really trusts the navy to do the right thing, not if left alone with a few written and recorded logs. We took a vote. There were no abstentions this time.
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In. Give me a villain song.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi58pN8W3hY Intangibles 1257 words Lunch time is market time at Glencross High, and that's where I'm at my best. Always have been, ever since third grade. Give me a spare box of raisins at the start of the period and I'd turn it into three apples, half a turkey sandwich, a buck fifty and the answers to the last three questions on Miss Neff's math homework. Nowadays, I deal in intangibles. Smooth-talking Sidney's settled down with a permanent sweetie, and there's five different awkward lads ready to put in bids on his gift of gab. Darren's given up music to focus on football, but the band still needs someone with his mad bass shreds and slaps. And then there's the stuff nobody wants, a hopeless crush, an embarrassing memory, old grudges and dreads. If someone wants to let go of that old trash they come to good old Sam Hayes. I've got the contacts on the other side of the sunrise. I make it happen. And everyone winds up better off. Sure, including the man in the middle. I get my cut. Because nobody else can do the things I do. Until today. Until her. Bella Teal. She's new, one or the transfers from Westfall. And when I came to collect Marcus Messleman's unresolved complicated emotions concerning his birth father, she had gotten there first. "Bella," I said. We'd been introduced but hadn't spoken more than that. "Samuel," she said. Nobody used the full name. "You have something of mine," I said. "Do I?" she said, eyebrows raising just enough to notice. "That doesn't seem likely. If I have it, how can it possibly be yours?" "The Messelman package," I said. "Do you have a price?" "No, I have a use. And you're on your own." She looked at her wrist, mining a watch. She was right. Shockingly well-informed. She flashed a cruel little smile before turning away. This particular bit of intangible I promised to Sir Petrifax. No substitutions other than the source, and the agreed forfeit clause was harsh as the old Queen's scorpion lash. I was looking at a year and a day as that spindly old sadist's toy if I couldn't come up with something close enough by dusk. I knew where to start. Thomas Malloy had the same kind of emotional tangle that I needed. It was an ex rather than a parent, and not dead but living in another state and way back in the closet. Not the exact same, but it would fit in the same vessel. It would do. Trouble is, Thomas was a tough sell. I've tried. Explained that this isn't a memory thing, that I wasn't asking him to forget his first time. Memory things, major memory things are bad news. I stay away from that part of the business. I mean, I'll gladly bargain for a few seconds of social embarrassment, those horrifying moments that rise up unbidden years later. Some of the folks on the other side can't get enough of cringe. But a first time, a first kiss, a birthday party or a regional championship, no. Deal in that kind of intangible and you get noticed, on both sides. So I'd have to offer something big for Thomas. And I didn't have time to set up a complicated seven-way trade. I'd have to go to the reserves, offer him a day of raw fae luck. There wasn't much lunchtime left. I ran him down, only to find him deep in conversation with the other two Westfall transfers, Sonny and Celia. The twins. Fraternal. Look nothing alike, but close your eyes and listen to the way they talk and you'd see it. I started to sweat. More competitors? I didn't have a third option, and the last thing I wanted was to get into a bidding war. "It's like this, Tommy," said Celia. "I can call you Tommy, right?" She didn't pause for an answer. "Sonny and I have a little wager." "She thinks that beauty is better than truth, while I hold the opposite view, and we'd like you to settle it for us." "What if they're, like the same think? Like that Greek urn guy said?" said Thomas. "Keats," I said. "Listen, we need to talk." "Poets," scoffed Celia. They both moved away. If you just looked at them from the waist up you'd have sworn that they were skating. Him roller, her ice. I had to glance down at their feet just to be sure they weren't. I got to work on Thomas. I was in a bind, so I used that angle, played it for sympathy. Plus I was offering solid product. With this kind of luck you could take a few steps, get roped into a poker game and walk away with one of the guys in it's car, and not some old junker or tiny import. A serious cat. That's how I got the 'vette. That's 'Cor-', not 'Che-', thank you. I worked my words and got him around, filled that steel-glass phial with what I needed. But the day wasn't done with me yet. It was right after the bell. Two hours to dusk, so I had a little time to kill, waiting for everyone else to clear out. I spotted Sonny and Celia again, talking to a small group of first and second years. The same business as before, with their bet. I reached into my pocket for a charm, a simple invisibility glamour. I snapped the ceramic disk and faded into the hedge as they continued their interrogation. "They always choose beauty," said Bella. I nearly jumped. "You can-" "Obviously," she said. "They always choose beauty, and the borders of our worlds shift." She stared at me. "This is your fault, you know." "My fault?" I still hadn't gotten over the charm failing. "Bring the goblin market to mortal lands and the rest of the Kingdom follows. You'll do well enough, I'm sure. You're more than half goblin yourself by now." "You're saying they can take the whole school-" "The whole town. Fresh children for the tiend. Fools and thralls out of the rest. As soon as seven and seventy choose beauty," she said, showing disappointed eyes. "Unless..." "Unless what?" I said. She moved closer, face to face, and produced that vessel. She etched flowery glyphs in it with her fingernail. "There," she said. "A sympathy. Break one, unbind all. Choose truth. Break the glass." She dropped it into my pocket and kissed me on my forehead. "Or fulfil your bargain with Sir Petrifax." She vanished, with a better invisibility charm than mine. Her kiss still burned the skin of my brow, burned like strong peppermints. It wasn't that hard a decision. I winced as I threw it, though. A hundred deals, undone at a moment. All those dealt-with emotions returning at once, attenuated by their time behind the sunset. I served my time. A year and a day on that side is a lost weekend bleeding into Monday over here, so my life wasn't disrupted too much. I came back older, if not wiser, and, with a year as Sir Petrifax's goblin behind me, got back to work. More carefully. Most of those old skills and talents and intangibles came back with a strange comfort, and would not be dealt with again. A few, though, won't be missed. I've got Bella around now to make sure things don't get out of hand, and I'm doing fine. There's always a huge market on both sides of the sky for cringe.
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In. Taking a k drama trope and a marginalia and a name as well as Your story is split into more than ten scenes but no scene can have more than 50 words
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Taletel posted:In. "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:"
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Cake (someone's birthday) Pizza: ![]() Pizza:Love triangle? Love triangle. Pizza: Artemisia Gharial Alcohol: Your story is split into more than ten scenes but no scene can have more than 50 words Nineteen Moments of Eternity 999 words Memory Sometimes Autumn remembers: fighting off boarders on a ship in the South China Sea, rapier wet with blood and spray. A bed of rose-red cushions set out in a walled garden, feeling like the inventor of sex itself. Drowning slowly in a white hospital bed. Remembers. She does not imagine. Mythology In the beginning was a line, and a spark. And there was motion. The spark shot down the line, burning, hissing, sweating heat and smoke. And so it burned for a long time. The line was long, but not infinite. It had an end, and the spark raced toward it. As One Does Artemisia Gharial buried the wavy-bladed ceremonial dagger into the head archon's gut. It was not a practical weapon. She had to apply far more force to pierce skin, muscle, organs. His mouth, underpopulated in teeth by half, slipped open and bathed her in swamp stenches. She left it inside him. Ministry of Health Gabriel Florence listened to the intern as he described the situation outside. Not coherent, but it painted a picture, mostly in red. "The street," the boy said. "Well, I mean the pavement. Burst upward, like stalactites. No, that's not. But right up through, you know, his chest." Again, he thought. Perspectives on the Fall of Rome Autumn Chanterelle has mastered the knack of sleeping silently behind her glasses as her teacher drones on. She's done the reading. Beyond the occasional pop quiz she has no use for the lecture. Autumn dreams sensual dreams beyond her experience, of being railed vigorously by legionaries fresh from the wars. Fixations Artemisia spent six days lying still in her grave, hoping she could fool some reaper on other business into taking her as well. She learned that while she eventually stopped being thirsty, hunger remained. On the seventh day she heard noises. Ear-worms? No, only Gabriel come round with a shovel. Mythology Again The spark flew down the line. The thief was there, uninvited. They had no name; this was before names. This was before hands, too. The thief invented one and grabbed at the spark. It burned. The thief made another hand, proof against heat, and stole a piece of the spark. When is a Crypt At the deepest part of the ocean, at the bottom of a trench too narrow to have a name, there is a tunnel. Strange fish live there, in utter darkness. At the deepest part of that cave is a basalt chest. Inside that chest is Gabriel Florence's true crystal heart. Emergence The ground first opened up during the Great War. They were there, were impaled by the stone spikes. For one, a mere insult to dead flesh. One felt every pain but knew healing would come. The third, dying, turned from face to face for comfort before their soul sought rebirth. One Must Imagine Prometheus Happy This was Artemisia's thought, hearing the myth from Hesiod for the first time. She remembered her own time on the rock, punished for that first crime. There was no moment she could not have wrenched the nails out of the rock and driven them through the neck of the eagle. Twenty, or Two Hundred Thousand Something On her twentieth birthday, early in the evening, Autumn remembers everything. Lives upon lives, from joyous hunts in the days before language to the topless towers of Illium to secret tunnels on the moon. She remembers all, and remembers remembering, nearly endlessly cascading twentieth birthdays. She remembers every death, too. The Adversary In the empire before this civilization, on now-sunken lands they first came together, truly. They had met before, in times before names and words, each recognizing the other. But this was they first time they could trade words. What they said is: "Here is our enemy. Let's go kill them." Careenium Autumn reels under the weight. The tindance waits her here hereafter. Phoenix phones callert and cavort. The legs cannot hold. Autumn roughly slouches toward couches, feinting at a fall. So many memories coloiding and painting the grey matter red. And in it: two frenzies, sometime raveling and levering longlife loose. Cavalry Gabriel led the charge, mounted on a dappled longbeast and armed with an alchemic pistol-axe. Artemisia was just behind on her own dozen-legged beast. This was a day to avenge her, now no doubt quickening in some womb continents away. The enemy's line was vulnerable. He spurred the beast faster. The Wyrm It stood taller than houses. It was clad in steel-tough scales. Claws to tear and rend, a mouth to chew or devour. The scales were not unbreakable, but each one that touched dirt spawned a soldier, ready for the fight. With arms and magic joined, Artemis and Gabriel pushed forward. A Quiet Moment "It seems like I'm always pulling you out of some grave." "You don't have to, you know." "Don't I?" "If I didn't know it wouldn't work I would even try. Well, not often." "I like to think I'm worth living for." "Of course you do." "Am I not?" "She is." Digits It took some time, but Autumn's mind was able to correlate its merciless contents, including two strings of digits. Landline numbers. She wondered if they still kept them. She wasn't ready to call. She turned on the television, seeking escape. Two minutes into the news she was dialing his numbers. Three Against The Wyrm was bigger, faster, more dangerous. And the clumsy modern armies had, in failing to defeat it, spawned a small army of scalespawn. Against it were three immortals, or nearly so, in a convertible Mustang, roof down to accommodate the rocket launcher on Artemisia's shoulder. Autumn floored the gas. Mythology, Ultimate The Spark, as ever, travels down the line as fast as logic will allow. The line is not infinite. It has an end. And at the end is the explosive death at the end and beginning of all things. Some day the spark will reach the end. But not today.
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In, photo please
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![]() Owls and Matchsticks 775 words "See, Cinn" said Jeb. "Now ain't that the most drat wood you've ever seen all in one place." I was a bit relieved that it hadn't been some kind of innuendo, to be honest. Not that I wouldn't be down, but outdoors, in the snow wasn't my scene. I shouldn't have worried, though. With Jeb it's always just one meaning at a time. You could count on it. He tells you he's found a huge pile of wood and he's going to show you about a hundred huge trees all piled up in a clearing. "What are you thinking?" I asked. "You know what I'm thinking," he said. "I don't," I said. Then I started thinking, trying to think like Jeb. "Wait, you don't-" "We should steal it," he said. I was silent for a good four minutes, watching him grin. "How?" I said finally. "You want to pull it all the way to the river, walk on the logs down to the next town like you're some kind of cartoon?" "That's not how they move them, not nowadays," he said. "It's closer to the railway track. They load them on a flatcar and go." "Honey," I said, "If you and I are ever going to hijack a railroad train, it's not going to be just to pull a flatcar of lumber around." "I know. And I know it isn't practical. But it's the principle of the thing. They've got enough wood to build a drat house over there and they got nothing more guarding it than a scarecrow and the local owls." I nodded. "I mean, there's got to be a dozen people they could hire, pay minimum wage to sit around through the night listening to podcasts and keeping an eye on the logs." So we came back the next night with my pickup truck loaded up. Jeb climbed up the triangle and pushed on the top log until it got rolling, rolled right down and another twelve feet until the snow bogged it down. Jeb tried to lift the ends himself, but we wound up using the jacks instead. Stuck four dollies under it, lashing each one to it with about a dozen bungee cords, then tied the nearest end to the back of the pickup. I don't like driving when we've got something hooked up in back, so Jeb took the wheel. He is better at it. Except he knows it, which is why he went a good ten miles and hour faster than I would have when we were making our getaway down those old country back roads. About forty was what we were doing when we caught this huge owl, had to be as big as a four year old kid that owl, all stretched out like it was going after some tasty squirrel on the ground, except it was right in front of us. Jeb swerved right to avoid it, and that log, that more than forty foot log kept right on swinging, right up to where it swung right into a tree. You ever have your whole skeleton rung like a bell? So there the pickup was, turned sideways by the impact that travelled up the tree. Jeb had the sense to let off the gas, but we were still going forward, and those tires screamed as we went twenty feet sideways. We probably left half the tread on the road right there before we stopped. We were damned lucky it didn't flip over. We got it started again, slowly pulled the log straight. I was driving now. We were both probably half concussed, but he was spooked on top of that. Jeb wound up working that thing all summer. Put in more time than he ever did with a straight job cutting it and stripping the bark and curing and carving and all of that. He brought his grandfather in to teach him how to whittle properly, and they made all kinds of things to sell on Etsy. Turns out he's got the soul of an artist, though he says it wouldn't be the same if we just bought wood to start with. We kept a few things too. First off was the owl. He carved it, in a more traditional owl pose on account of the log wasn't big enough to do it in flight. Looks real nice in the living room. And the other thing was from the scraps, he made a lifetime's supply of matchsticks. Except the phosphorus dip we got was a dud so most of them won't light up properly and we end up just using the gas lighter gun instead.
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In
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Encrypted Relay-Packets from the Edge 975 words The first star I saw was a blue one, which became a scarlet one, and then a gold one, and green, and finally a yellow one, which for some years afterwards seemed to be an ebony one, or even a bubbling mass. Then white, then blue again and I had a brief minute of hope. But there was no return of the Ganymede, no signal returned from the relay's pings. I think that may have been when I began to go mad. We may have been all a bit mad when we got to Kitesh system. Or before that. Normal, well-adjusted people don't sign up for the scout corps, to travel outwards, year after year and wormhole after wormhole, until you die of old age or stumble across a gate that closes a loop back into known space. We were twenty years in, sixteen gates and seventeen long trips planet to planet. And we found something extraordinary. The scout corps purpose is twofold. First, we're looking for trouble. And we know it's out there, somewhere. Every world in known space is a ruin, war-wracked systems devastated by some scourge tens of thousands of years past. Whatever was responsible is out there somewhere. If a scout ship finds them, we can send the signal down our trail of relays, each one self-destructive after passing down the alarm. Hasn't happened yet, but when it does Earth will know which direction to point our defenses, which direction not to run. And second, we're looking for tech. Ways to fight them. Precursor ruins, and that's what we found, and not just a Mapmaker outpost or Trickster tessalisk, but an honest to goodness Builder site. And not off in an asteroid belt but orbit-linked to a wormhole. "Don't you see?" said Captain Shardess. "That must be a Builder system, on the other side." She was impatient. Protocol suggested a longer wait at the site, following directions sent down the relay chain, doing archaeology by proxy with week-long communications lag. I agreed with protocol. She wanted to go quickly. The decision was made to split up, for the Ganymede to return for me after a survey of the world on the other side. We were all more than a bit mad, I think. If we had waited another week we would have seen the star shift on the living map. Any wormhole can be a time machine. Is one, in fact. It's just of no practical use. There are no loops short enough to use that way, to accumulate time differences from normal galactic motion, and moving gates, accelerating them to near light speed means moving planets, maybe moving stars. Far beyond anyone's power. But for the Builders... It was the big brains in the think tank on Earth that figured it out. This gate switched from era to era, letting the Builders experiment across cosmic time in that system. We hoped that when it rolled around to blue again that it would be again connected to the time the Ganymede was in, that they would return. But stars burn blue for a very, very long time. We're not meant to be alone. Humans. And the low bandwidth messages from home aren't enough contact for us. Maybe for months. Not years. Not the decades it will take for the Archaeology team to arrive. The shuttle docked to the station can keep me alive indefinitely. Air, water, and food are no problem. Entertainment, even. The autodoc can do preventative care, and fix most medical problems. A heart attack or stroke when I'm not in the same room would get me, but nothing less than that. There's a psych system, part of the autodoc. It's not very good. It tries to engage me in conversation, not much more convincing than a bit from the dawn of computing. "You keep covering the scars," it said. "What does that mean?" I asked. "That you're ashamed." "Of what?" "What do you think?" See, a meaningless stock response. "That I tried to kill myself," I said. "Come on, we both know that I'm mad." "Is that really how you feel?" We put meaning in meaninglessness. It's what you do, when you're mad. Or human. "Not that I tried. That I couldn't, in the end. That I'm too mad to give up hope, that I cling to misery." *** Another five years gone since I last felt moved to journal, but now there is something to record. The fourth time around, when the gate went blue, there was a signal. Not the Ganymede, but a relay, waiting patiently for millennia, at the end of it's mechanical lifetime, transmitting Captain Shardess's final logs, a lifetime of exploration in that system. She never went further. The builders had put guardians at each gate, allowing only signals to pass, not trusting any of their successors with time travel. Even if the timelines lined up perfectly, the Ganymede would never have returned. This system, she named it Aeden since another scout had claimed Eden in the first run of exploration, was where the builders developed the bio-seeds that proliferated every world with life. Each planet an evolutionary experiment. She documented some of the monstrous failures along the line, sent pictures of the beautiful but sterile end-states of failed biochemistries. I laughed like a monkey, like a wild animal when the message alert first came. A minute into listening to the logs I found I could not abide the computer voice saying her words, then realized I had very nearly forgotten how to read. I howled in frustration. But it came back to me. Then I read. Then I mourned for those who I had known, who died nearly a billion years ago. The archaeology team is five years out, now. I think I can make it that long.
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Tomorrow 1198 words Eldren are always, like, let me tell you about my white hot burning rage face-flames and you've got to remind them when you were born, got to tell them you've never felt anything else. You show them the scars you got fighting redcaps and they're all "Back in my day you couldn't just stab those wee fucks in the eyeball," and you're sure that must have sucked raw red rocks and you tell them that and they start to go on about civility and niceties and you want to put your scalpelstick through their wet socket. But you don't. Because you've got to respect your eldren. My first time? Well, if you count mobjobs, and you sort of gotta, that would be when I was eight or so. Just cheering on shoulders that time. When I was twelve was when I helped building the stage, that counts for more. Fifteen was when it was for reals, just me and Bobby Nuckols and two lead pipes and an old-rear end redcap on the list. We sorta made out a bit after, also a first. Kissed the blood off each other's lips. The old man was on the list, so they didn't even bother trying to try it. Any jury woulda wound up hung or hanged and they all knew it. So we went on the other list with a big 'pb' stamp. Post-bellum. Peanut butter and jail. If we live that long, which is lol. Bobby sure didn't. That was a firebugging. They, and by they I mean the standbyers too fraid to make either list, they say both sides do firebugs as much as each other, but I don't buy it. Anyway, Bobby's duplex went up with redcaps and white hoods watching the exit with spiked bats, and it's not like we were going to let that stand. They call it all one war. But it's not the same, hunting down listers as you see 'em one by one and real action. That was my first stand up fight, the September 7 block wars. They give you a gun and the first thing you've got to know is to get a better one as soon as you can. It's going to be a fabjob, printed ceramics and plumbing pipe slapped together with nails and superglue. It won't aim true and it's going to backfire or explode sooner or later. Most of the enemy's are no better, so it may be a while before you can trade up with a corpse, and the worst thing you can do is grab on to some shiny hunk of steel that doesn't take standard ammo. You'll go through the cartridge in a few minutes and you're left with the world's least satisfying dildo. Block wars are quick. They're all about that. Gather the squad, surround the target, and start going house to house. Do as much damage as possible, run up the count, then get out before they can reinforce, or before the national guard peacekeepers show up. It's easier. No need to check the list. If they're armed, it's self-defense. And if they're unarmed it's because they're too young to hold a knife. I once had a commander who tried to be all Deus Vult, even actually said the 'Nits make lice' line. Not at September 7, this was later. It wasn't me who wound up fragging his rear end, but that just came down to chance. Opportunity. So like I said, the standard issue rifle was a joke. Only part that worked was the bayonet. Close in, indoors, that's what you want. We shot out a big front window, knocked the grill right out of the drywall and plasterboard, and went in, three at a time. The guy inside the room was probably a boomer, white hair and red cap and a vintage assault rifle. He shot Jess, three round burst near her thigh, and I was already charging hard. Gutted him with that ceramic bayonet blade. Drove it right through him and into the wall. The rear end in a top hat spat in my hair while I was going through his pockets for clips. Made me appreciate the classic buzzcut, that did. And then his kid came running from the next room with a kitchen knife. Grandkid maybe? We never saw his wife. I say kid, but he was my age, sixteen. I'd seen him before, he played high school basketball. I booed him on the free throw line and he still made the point. He was the first person I shot. A clean center of mass hit, the Commander was proud. And his son Wayne noticed that, noticed me. When it was over, when we were riding back to our clave, when Jess was patched closed and strong enough to hold up two fingers and almost grin, Wayne and I started talking. And that night was, you know, my first time. Sometimes I wonder if I'll be able to, you know. Finish. After the war ends. Most of the time I'm sure I won't live so long, or if I do it'll be because we lost and I'll have all kinds of other stuff to worry about. One more story. You want to know about the scar, don't you. Okay. This was when I was nineteen. I'd been an officer, sort of, but they'd just reorganized the militia, we had gotten formal support from the Governor, and they flattened the chain of command. So I was just another soldier, but the men and women were used to taking orders from me. I was out on night patrol, a squad of four. Three of us in the open, Carl stalking behind in the shadows. We were expecting infiltrators, someone planting IEDs on the roads, that kind of thing. What we found was an ambush. Carl signaled just in time. They had us three to one, but Carl knocked that down before the first one of them could finish aiming. Then their sniper shot right back. I heard him scream on our comms. Firefights like that you can't really describe. Maybe if they were caught on camera and you can look at each frame, but this one wasn't. Everyone was shooting, using what cover we could find. There were more of them, and they were on three sides of us, and I knew that sniper was watching that fourth. It was seven on three, then three on two, then Pollock's face caved in and it was just me and the biggest of them, and the sniper somewhere watching, and then the bullet came. Shattered a rib and pierced my lung. At the time it was just a lot of pain and I thought I was dead and figured it was just as well, at least I wouldn't be captured alive. But then he fell down on top of me, bleeding out the chest. Turns out the sniper got discovered by a couple of irregulars and one of them had the guts to use the rifle. I met them later. Ellie and Carrie Chalmers. Married thirty years now. Still in fighting trim even if they're not up to eight hour marches. You've got to respect your eldren.
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In, I'll take a thing. Happy birthday!
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You Gotta Laugh Paths of Glory 765 words Henry hadn't slept for days, and Jacques, well, Jacques hadn't been right in the head since August, since the time they shelled us and we nearly all bought it. The shell missed the trench we were sleeping in and hit the latrine just a few dozen feet west of it. Jacques was using it, the opposite end, and when the shell hit it raised a wave about as tall as you or me that went right down the latrine trench, right at him. He got a face full of sewage. Well, whole body splash, but I'd be most worried about the face. "And now," Jacques said, just about every time anyone talks to him about anything, "He will not come out. My peepee. I think maybe he is scared." It's not like we've got any women out here, not like we're going to be rotated away from the front to where there's a cathouse to slip off to any time soon. So he can't tug one out in the evening, big deal. But Jacques won't stop going on about it. And Henry hasn't slept for days. "I had a nightmare," he said. "The world was on fire and everyone else was trying to kill me." "Are you sure you're not still sleeping?" I said. "Martin," he told me, "I know you think you're making a joke." So that's where we were. And I was more messed up than any of them. We fought off a charge, after that night of shelling. They threw men across the bombed out fields and barbed wire, right through the crossfire of our guns and a bunch of them crawled right over the lip of our trench and tried to take it. A bunch of German kids with fear and death in their eyes fumbling with their service pieces, screaming curses and running at out gunners. I killed a bunch of them that day. I lost count. They didn't get to the guns, didn't break through our trench and move the border a hundred feet west. People say they're going to put a medal on my chest someday, once the paperwork comes through. Thing is, I liked it. Some people come through that kind of thing and they never want to pick up a gun again, even if that means they get lined up and shot. And some of us go the other way. So there we were, the three of us picked out for a midnight scouting run. My fault. I let the officers know I could draw worth a drat. Caricatures. Landscapes. And, as it happens, formations. It was two in the morning, pitch dark cloudy and drizzling rain, the three of us crawling through mud, edging around craters, and there was a gunner right in front of us out there and if we made any noise or raised anything too high or if a rat scurried over his feet and spooked him he'd put dozens of holes in each of us. I pulled out my paper and pencil, and I drew by the enemy floodlights. Except it did come out right. I tried to draw the trenchline and what hit the paper was a reclining woman's delicate curves. What was meant to be machine gun nests became breasts and a face, wire fences turned into short and long hair. It was, perhaps, my best work. But it was clearly going to get me killed. I tried again. For a minute I thought it was working, but once again the landscape before me would not be drawn as anything but a tasteful nude. I don't know if I swore out loud or if it was the rat, but the gunner let forth a long burst. High, and not sustained. I kept still, then made a third attempt, with Henry and Jacques pinching me when the lines became too sensual. The sketch was functional, but unsettling, especially when you knew why it was off. It spooked the brass, too. They put off the push. Henry slept a full day, with the rest of us covering for him. He was an expert trench-sleeper after, too. Short naps between explosions all day long. And later that week, Jacques came to me, wild smiles and dazed eyes. "I stole your other pictures," he said. "It is a miracle! I an hard as a rock right now!" They were both dead by November, and I would have been too if I hadn't lost the leg.. But that's how they'd want to remember them. I mean, you gotta laugh, right?
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In, character, setting, and hellrule
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# ¿ Feb 6, 2025 15:11 |
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a character has a fraternal twin, a music venue, and the narrative of your story must flow in retrograde You Cannot Change 698 words They played an uptempo version of Freebird for the second encode, and as Jules watched Kayleigh thrash to the beat he knew she wasn't going to come back home. She began to laugh, and he started to smile, a sad little smile hidden in the darkness and haze. *** "He'd be lost without me," Kayleigh said. "So?" "Jules-" "He's not your responsibility," said Jules. "Not ahead of, you know, you being happy." "He kind of is," she said. "What's the worst that could happen?" "He'd leave the house with his shirt tucked into his underwear and get arrested for indecent exposure, maybe." Laughter, somehow less cruel than it should have sounded, filled the car. *** The first encore was Ice Cold Face, again, the extended version with the last verse doubled up and three choruses in the fade out. Jules swayed gently to the music. "That's me," Kayleigh said, loudly. "It is not," said Jules. "Misty Sanchez." "What?" "She told me. Back when we were dating for a minute in the two thousands." "That lying little skank," said Kayleigh. "I bet everyone who ever dated an Electric Squid thinks they're the one it's about." "Maybe," she said. "But the others are wrong." *** "Sorry to come without calling," said Kayleigh. "It's Scott." "What did he do?" asked Jules, a hint of rage starting to form behind his eyes. "Nothing," she said. "I mean, really nothing. He canceled out on the concert and he was all 'you go on if you want to,' and I know he thinks he meant it but he still not all sad when I said that maybe I would and I just couldn't take looking at him like that." "You know," said Jules, "Franklin would love to have his Aunt Kayleigh around for a while. You're welcome to stay as long as you need." *** J. J. Chessman and the Electric squid had two short EPs worth of original music, along with the cover skills needed to play local weddings and high school dances. It wasn't a great set for a reunion concert. Most of the band themselves didn't remember the deeper cuts, and the thirty years out of date popular singles weren't holding up all that well. They had two hits, so to speak, if you defined the term loosely enough. Two songs that got a little airtime on college radio, that nearly have five digit play counts on Spotify. They played Burn Me Twice as the opener, followed by a couple of The Cure covers and a fee ironic gender-swapped Gaga songs before Ice Cold Face, a game attempt at the next most popular of their songs, Phoenix Phoenix. Then it was back to the covers a while with a short break for Where's Your Soul At, which nobody ever liked apart from the Squid themselves. It should have been a disaster. It was objectively awful. But Kayleigh was loving it and she was contagious that way, not just to Jules but to everyone around them, the ones who vaguely remembered the band and the bored Gen Z kids who liked the logo on the t-shirt and decided to go on a lark. Even the insufferable one who decided a few minutes on Wikipedia and YouTube made her an expert on J.J. Chessman and the Electric Squid. *** Jules was going to he the best man at Kayleigh's wedding. Scott didn't have many friends, no brothers, and the guy it was supposed to be got arrested selling pills and wasn't allowed to leave North Carolina until after the trial. "Tell me why I should do this?" he said. "Because I said so, " she said. "And I'm the older one." "By all of thirty minutes." "Still counts." "He makes you happy, right?" A strange smile came across her face, almost but not quite lewd. "All right, all right," said Jules. *** It began with a power chord in C, or nearly in C, discordant and silencing to the audience. He leaned in, augmenting the top note jnto into something that sort of made musical sense. It could have been the start of a new song, if Jacob Jasper Chesterton had the time to write new music anymore.
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