Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Not wierd. When I'm competing, I don't read any of the other submissions for any round till I'm knocked out.
Fall Ceramic Dm™ - Winner!
RangerWickett
Legend
Mythago, if I may be honest, posting pictures in the wee hours of the morning is a little unfair to the competitors. Most folks are only awake and able to write from 8am 'til midnight. In the future, could you please only post pictures during regular waking hours?
BSF
Explorer
Ryan,
keep in mind that even between your geographic location and Mythago's, there is a 3 hour time difference. In the past, we have had competitors from Singapore, Australia, Germany, Finland, etc. As well, one person's 'regular waking hours' might not match the accepted norm. We have folks that work swing shifts, graveyard shifts, etc. Then there are the folks that don't have traditional 'weekends'.
If I were writing, set 5 is the only set, so far, that has been posted that I would consider a 'good time' for me to get the pictures. The one that would have been the worst was the 8:59 AM (Mountain) set of pictures. Brutal! 8:59 AM on a Monday morning - I wouldn't really have a chance to think about the pictures for another 12 hours, or more. Even then, I would need to finish the story Monday night, or perhaps Tuesday night. Of course, I woked until after 8:00 on Tuesday as well.
Is there a globally 'good time' to post pictures? One that works for each contestant and the organizer? I doubt it. That's why there are 72 hours total to work on it.
keep in mind that even between your geographic location and Mythago's, there is a 3 hour time difference. In the past, we have had competitors from Singapore, Australia, Germany, Finland, etc. As well, one person's 'regular waking hours' might not match the accepted norm. We have folks that work swing shifts, graveyard shifts, etc. Then there are the folks that don't have traditional 'weekends'.
If I were writing, set 5 is the only set, so far, that has been posted that I would consider a 'good time' for me to get the pictures. The one that would have been the worst was the 8:59 AM (Mountain) set of pictures. Brutal! 8:59 AM on a Monday morning - I wouldn't really have a chance to think about the pictures for another 12 hours, or more. Even then, I would need to finish the story Monday night, or perhaps Tuesday night. Of course, I woked until after 8:00 on Tuesday as well.
Is there a globally 'good time' to post pictures? One that works for each contestant and the organizer? I doubt it. That's why there are 72 hours total to work on it.
maxfieldjadenfox
First Post
OK, being technically challenged again, I'm having trouble getting Notepad to translate my formatting... And I cant figure out how to insert the links... But I'll try. OK, tried and failed. So, I put the places where I referred to the oictures in bold. Hope that's good enough... I'm not from around here.
Round One, Set Five
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Herobizkit vs. Tolen Mar vs. maxfieldjadenfox
The Calling
Annie cried. She cried for weeks, til her eyes felt like red flannel and her nose forgot what it felt like not to be plugged.
Something inside of her broke the day Dog died, something that couldn’t be fixed. He was just a mangy little mutt, a little terrier, maybe some Chihuahua, a smidgen of poodle. It didn’t matter. She loved Dog with a fierceness that shocked her, especially since she couldn’t remember ever having loved anyone before him. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had loved her Granny. But it seemed like Dog was the only one to have ever really loved her back.
“Ugly!” “Leather Face!” “Hey, Frankenstein, look over here.”
She hugged her books to her chest as she ran the locker gauntlet. Now and then, someone, not content with verbal taunts, stuck out a foot and laughed as she went flying. Her only respite was in class. Her teachers never really looked at her, but they couldn’t deny that she was smart. Yes, that girl was preternaturally intelligent, which made her all the more spooky.
The first day of school, the teacher’s lounge was buzzing.
“She’s in my home room, for God’s sake! How am I supposed to look at that first thing in the morning?”
“I know she’s just a kid, but she gives me the creeping heebies.”
“I had her last year. She understands theoretical physics better than Einstein. I wish I could stand to be within five feet of her, she could do great things with the right mentor, but ugh, you know?”
~
It was twilight. The swamp water glowed a soft blue green as it trickled around downed branches. The frogs kept up a constant chorus of peeps and belches, and the crickets chirped the temperature.
On the porch of the shack, Annie sat with a basket of greens, willing herself to go inside and fix something to eat. Pickings were pretty slim since Granny died, but she made by. There were the chickens out back, and the nanny goat. There was
Granny’s garden, but she didn’t have Granny’s hand with plants. She sat and watched as the stars came out, counting until she was in the thousands. Finally, she heaved herself up off the porch and limped inside.
She had killed one of the roosters yesterday, so there was fried chicken leftover in the Frigidaire. The generator wheezed and puffed, but it managed to run the fridge and the lights. It died on a regular basis, but she, with her talent for fixing and making things, always managed to get it running again.
After supper, she cleared off the table and brought out the machine. It was built from parts she had found down at the dump, lifted from classrooms back when she was still going to school, and some copper pipe she had bought with money she made collecting bottles and cans for recycling. That was a good way to pick up some money, but the second time she went there, the guy who sat in the recycling truck wouldn’t wait on her. He pretended she wasn’t there until she left.
~
Annie was sitting on the stained, green, sculptured shag carpet, playing with the doll her Papa had made for her. It was a strange little figure with a straw hat and multicolored shirt and pants. He said it reminded him of his Pere, back in Haiti. He
had made her some flat shapes of balsa wood too, a circle, a square, a triangle. She knew the names of all of them.
Her mother was sitting across the room on a thrift shop sofa, twiddling her foot and smoking a cigarette. She had a bottle of Southern Comfort next to her. She was drinking straight from the bottle. Even though she was only two, her mother’s hostility was obvious to Annie.
“Where’d you get that evil eye of your’n, girl? Must be from your Pap’s family. Nobody in my family ever had one of those.” She stopped then, took a drag of her cigarette and shook her head.
“How come you don’t talk? Say 'Mama.' Girl, you must be dumb as a post.” She took a slug from the bottle.
“Your Pap is a no good SOB, you know that? Went and got his self arrested for ‘tempted murder. Now what am I gonna do?” Her face collapsed and she began to sob. “How’m I s’posed to take care of you?”
Annie looked at her with her one good eye. The other one, white, with no iris or pupil, seemed blind. Since she hadn’t spoken yet, nobody knew what she could see through it, if she was looking the right way. The circle she was playing with rolled from her hands. She pointed at the little manikin, and it stood and jerked it’s way across the room after it, and brought it back to her.
She smiled.
For a moment, her mother just stared, but then her face twisted with fury.
“Witch!” she screamed. “Demon child!” She rose from the sofa and bore down on Annie, yanking her up by the arm.
“I knew,” she shrieked, her whiskey breath hot on Annie’s face. “I knew there was something wrong about you!” She dragged the little girl into the kitchen, and took the matches off the back of the stove. Then she hauled her into the yard. Frantically, she began to make a pile of twigs and branches, still holding tight to Annie, who watched with her blank eye.
When the pile of kindling was tall, her mother tossed a match into the center of it, and as it blazed, she picked Annie up and threw her into it.
“Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,” she screamed.
Pain. It was an interesting feeling. Annie observed as the hair on her right side caught fire, felt the flesh on the right side of her face begin to melt. She put her arms out to her mother and pointed. Her mother staggered into the fire and was engulfed.
~
Annie looked down the length of her machine, and fiddled with a few of the crossbars. Then she looked through it with her left eye. Yes, there he was.
~
When she came to live with her Granny, she was burnt and bandaged.
“Lord,” Granny said, “if that ain’t about the ugliest chile I evah saw!”
The social worker glared.
“Mrs. Tridden. I would appreciate it if you would be careful what you say in front of the child. She’s been through a lot and with you her only kin…”
“What happened to her Pap?” Granny asked, “My good for nothin’ son?”
“Well, ma’am, he was serving time down in Folsom. Attempted murder. He died a couple of weeks ago. Not sure what he did to make the other prisoners turn on him so… We don’t know if the child’s mother heard, but something made her burn herself up. Almost took this baby with her too.”
“No surprise,’ said Granny, and spit a big blob of chewing tobacco at the social workers feet. “Guess you might as well bring her in then.”
Granny’s cabin was small and dark. Herbs hung from the ceiling beams and the only light was from a massive stone fireplace that took up nearly one whole wall.
“Kin I get you some tea? I make it my own self.” Granny took a cracked mug from the cupboard.
“No, thank you,” the social worker stammered, “I can’t stay long.” She looked around the poor little room. “Perhaps she would be better off in foster care?”
“None of my folk gonna be in foster care evah agin. Not after what happened to her Pap.”
“Her father was in foster care?”
“Fo’ a little bit. Long nuff to mess him up right bad.”
The social worker clutched Annie.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea…” she began
Annie pointed her finger at the woman and she staggered to the door, her gait a peculiar stiff legged shamble. Granny gave a wondering little smile to Annie.
“I take care of mine.” Granny said, as the door slammed behind her.
“You got the sendin’ magic girl?” Granny asked. Annie nodded.
“You got the callin’ magic too?” Annie nodded again.
“That’s real special. All us Tridden’s got one or t’other, but I don’t recollect any one of us evah havin’ both.” She patted her head, but pulled her hand away as if it were hot. “There now, chile,” she said, “there now.”
~
Annie held Dog’s collar, then laid it in front of her, stroking his name gently. Not long now, she thought.
~
It was a hard scrabble existence, and Granny resented her. She could tell, even though Granny did her best not to let her know. She taught her to cook, and to sew, to sweep the battered wood floor, worn smooth by generations of Tridden feet. She also taught her to carve, as she had taught her son. The wood was special, harvested only under a full moon, and only fallen branches.
“We don’t harm a livin’ tree,” Granny said.
When she learned to read, Annie felt like a bird let out of it’s cage. Books were the best thing ever. Lost in them, she could go anywhere and be anybody. It didn’t matter that the other children were afraid of her, and mean to her. It didn’t matter that most of the teachers wouldn’t look at her, she could read. By the time she was 10, she had read every book in the school library, and by the time she was 12, every book in the public library.
One day, when she was coming out of the library doors with an armload of books, she tripped over a small dirty puppy. He was as unattractive as she was, and they were fast friends. Granny wasn’t happy to have another mouth to feed.
“What chew want with dat mangy beastie?” she wanted to know.
“He’s my friend,” Annie said.
Granny said there wasn’t enough food to go around, but Annie found a way to feed Dog, even if she went hungry herself.
She carved a beautiful replica of him, and took the carving with her anyplace Dog wasn’t allowed. He made her feel safe.
~
She set the carving of Dog, never out of her sight now, inside of the machine on a plank of alder wood, just past the eyepiece.
She put her hands on either side of it and concentrated. The copper began to glow. A vortex opened at the back of it, and she heard distant barking.
~
“You know, chile, people will hurt you if you’re different. So you be just as not different as you can.”
It was an easy enough thing for Granny to say. Neither of them were good at doing it.
It was Hallo’een. It was also her seventeenth birthday. The townsfolk were stirred up because there was a strange sickness going around, made people fall asleep and not wake up. It was easy to blame Granny and Annie. They came, like some parody of an old horror movie, toting pitchforks and carrying torches, and demanded to see Granny. Annie turned some of them back, but there were so many of them. Granny came out and they set upon her, set upon her like rabid dogs, and threw her bony old body into the swamp, with the gators. Annie ran back into the shack with Dog, and bolted the door. Her Granny was gone.
She was miserable. She couldn’t go to town, and she couldn’t go to the library. She would have died of loneliness, she told Dog, if it wasn’t for him. But the same strange sickness that had got the people got Dog. One morning, Annie couldn’t rouse him from the gunny sack where he slept. She sat by him, calling him day after day but this was one place her calling magic didn’t seem to work. Maybe he had gone too far away to hear her.
~
The machine was too bright to look at now.
“Come on, come on boy," she called, closing her right eye, and beckoning with a pointed finger. The carving shuddered, and trotted toward her.
“I knew it’d work! She cried. She hugged the wriggling wooden dog to her chest.
“Just one more thing boy, now I know I can do it.”
Under the light of the full moon, she found a branch, tall and thin, and that night, she set to bringing Granny back.
~
Round One, Set Five
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Herobizkit vs. Tolen Mar vs. maxfieldjadenfox
The Calling
Annie cried. She cried for weeks, til her eyes felt like red flannel and her nose forgot what it felt like not to be plugged.
Something inside of her broke the day Dog died, something that couldn’t be fixed. He was just a mangy little mutt, a little terrier, maybe some Chihuahua, a smidgen of poodle. It didn’t matter. She loved Dog with a fierceness that shocked her, especially since she couldn’t remember ever having loved anyone before him. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had loved her Granny. But it seemed like Dog was the only one to have ever really loved her back.
“Ugly!” “Leather Face!” “Hey, Frankenstein, look over here.”
She hugged her books to her chest as she ran the locker gauntlet. Now and then, someone, not content with verbal taunts, stuck out a foot and laughed as she went flying. Her only respite was in class. Her teachers never really looked at her, but they couldn’t deny that she was smart. Yes, that girl was preternaturally intelligent, which made her all the more spooky.
The first day of school, the teacher’s lounge was buzzing.
“She’s in my home room, for God’s sake! How am I supposed to look at that first thing in the morning?”
“I know she’s just a kid, but she gives me the creeping heebies.”
“I had her last year. She understands theoretical physics better than Einstein. I wish I could stand to be within five feet of her, she could do great things with the right mentor, but ugh, you know?”
~
It was twilight. The swamp water glowed a soft blue green as it trickled around downed branches. The frogs kept up a constant chorus of peeps and belches, and the crickets chirped the temperature.
On the porch of the shack, Annie sat with a basket of greens, willing herself to go inside and fix something to eat. Pickings were pretty slim since Granny died, but she made by. There were the chickens out back, and the nanny goat. There was
Granny’s garden, but she didn’t have Granny’s hand with plants. She sat and watched as the stars came out, counting until she was in the thousands. Finally, she heaved herself up off the porch and limped inside.
She had killed one of the roosters yesterday, so there was fried chicken leftover in the Frigidaire. The generator wheezed and puffed, but it managed to run the fridge and the lights. It died on a regular basis, but she, with her talent for fixing and making things, always managed to get it running again.
After supper, she cleared off the table and brought out the machine. It was built from parts she had found down at the dump, lifted from classrooms back when she was still going to school, and some copper pipe she had bought with money she made collecting bottles and cans for recycling. That was a good way to pick up some money, but the second time she went there, the guy who sat in the recycling truck wouldn’t wait on her. He pretended she wasn’t there until she left.
~
Annie was sitting on the stained, green, sculptured shag carpet, playing with the doll her Papa had made for her. It was a strange little figure with a straw hat and multicolored shirt and pants. He said it reminded him of his Pere, back in Haiti. He
had made her some flat shapes of balsa wood too, a circle, a square, a triangle. She knew the names of all of them.
Her mother was sitting across the room on a thrift shop sofa, twiddling her foot and smoking a cigarette. She had a bottle of Southern Comfort next to her. She was drinking straight from the bottle. Even though she was only two, her mother’s hostility was obvious to Annie.
“Where’d you get that evil eye of your’n, girl? Must be from your Pap’s family. Nobody in my family ever had one of those.” She stopped then, took a drag of her cigarette and shook her head.
“How come you don’t talk? Say 'Mama.' Girl, you must be dumb as a post.” She took a slug from the bottle.
“Your Pap is a no good SOB, you know that? Went and got his self arrested for ‘tempted murder. Now what am I gonna do?” Her face collapsed and she began to sob. “How’m I s’posed to take care of you?”
Annie looked at her with her one good eye. The other one, white, with no iris or pupil, seemed blind. Since she hadn’t spoken yet, nobody knew what she could see through it, if she was looking the right way. The circle she was playing with rolled from her hands. She pointed at the little manikin, and it stood and jerked it’s way across the room after it, and brought it back to her.
She smiled.
For a moment, her mother just stared, but then her face twisted with fury.
“Witch!” she screamed. “Demon child!” She rose from the sofa and bore down on Annie, yanking her up by the arm.
“I knew,” she shrieked, her whiskey breath hot on Annie’s face. “I knew there was something wrong about you!” She dragged the little girl into the kitchen, and took the matches off the back of the stove. Then she hauled her into the yard. Frantically, she began to make a pile of twigs and branches, still holding tight to Annie, who watched with her blank eye.
When the pile of kindling was tall, her mother tossed a match into the center of it, and as it blazed, she picked Annie up and threw her into it.
“Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,” she screamed.
Pain. It was an interesting feeling. Annie observed as the hair on her right side caught fire, felt the flesh on the right side of her face begin to melt. She put her arms out to her mother and pointed. Her mother staggered into the fire and was engulfed.
~
Annie looked down the length of her machine, and fiddled with a few of the crossbars. Then she looked through it with her left eye. Yes, there he was.
~
When she came to live with her Granny, she was burnt and bandaged.
“Lord,” Granny said, “if that ain’t about the ugliest chile I evah saw!”
The social worker glared.
“Mrs. Tridden. I would appreciate it if you would be careful what you say in front of the child. She’s been through a lot and with you her only kin…”
“What happened to her Pap?” Granny asked, “My good for nothin’ son?”
“Well, ma’am, he was serving time down in Folsom. Attempted murder. He died a couple of weeks ago. Not sure what he did to make the other prisoners turn on him so… We don’t know if the child’s mother heard, but something made her burn herself up. Almost took this baby with her too.”
“No surprise,’ said Granny, and spit a big blob of chewing tobacco at the social workers feet. “Guess you might as well bring her in then.”
Granny’s cabin was small and dark. Herbs hung from the ceiling beams and the only light was from a massive stone fireplace that took up nearly one whole wall.
“Kin I get you some tea? I make it my own self.” Granny took a cracked mug from the cupboard.
“No, thank you,” the social worker stammered, “I can’t stay long.” She looked around the poor little room. “Perhaps she would be better off in foster care?”
“None of my folk gonna be in foster care evah agin. Not after what happened to her Pap.”
“Her father was in foster care?”
“Fo’ a little bit. Long nuff to mess him up right bad.”
The social worker clutched Annie.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea…” she began
Annie pointed her finger at the woman and she staggered to the door, her gait a peculiar stiff legged shamble. Granny gave a wondering little smile to Annie.
“I take care of mine.” Granny said, as the door slammed behind her.
“You got the sendin’ magic girl?” Granny asked. Annie nodded.
“You got the callin’ magic too?” Annie nodded again.
“That’s real special. All us Tridden’s got one or t’other, but I don’t recollect any one of us evah havin’ both.” She patted her head, but pulled her hand away as if it were hot. “There now, chile,” she said, “there now.”
~
Annie held Dog’s collar, then laid it in front of her, stroking his name gently. Not long now, she thought.
~
It was a hard scrabble existence, and Granny resented her. She could tell, even though Granny did her best not to let her know. She taught her to cook, and to sew, to sweep the battered wood floor, worn smooth by generations of Tridden feet. She also taught her to carve, as she had taught her son. The wood was special, harvested only under a full moon, and only fallen branches.
“We don’t harm a livin’ tree,” Granny said.
When she learned to read, Annie felt like a bird let out of it’s cage. Books were the best thing ever. Lost in them, she could go anywhere and be anybody. It didn’t matter that the other children were afraid of her, and mean to her. It didn’t matter that most of the teachers wouldn’t look at her, she could read. By the time she was 10, she had read every book in the school library, and by the time she was 12, every book in the public library.
One day, when she was coming out of the library doors with an armload of books, she tripped over a small dirty puppy. He was as unattractive as she was, and they were fast friends. Granny wasn’t happy to have another mouth to feed.
“What chew want with dat mangy beastie?” she wanted to know.
“He’s my friend,” Annie said.
Granny said there wasn’t enough food to go around, but Annie found a way to feed Dog, even if she went hungry herself.
She carved a beautiful replica of him, and took the carving with her anyplace Dog wasn’t allowed. He made her feel safe.
~
She set the carving of Dog, never out of her sight now, inside of the machine on a plank of alder wood, just past the eyepiece.
She put her hands on either side of it and concentrated. The copper began to glow. A vortex opened at the back of it, and she heard distant barking.
~
“You know, chile, people will hurt you if you’re different. So you be just as not different as you can.”
It was an easy enough thing for Granny to say. Neither of them were good at doing it.
It was Hallo’een. It was also her seventeenth birthday. The townsfolk were stirred up because there was a strange sickness going around, made people fall asleep and not wake up. It was easy to blame Granny and Annie. They came, like some parody of an old horror movie, toting pitchforks and carrying torches, and demanded to see Granny. Annie turned some of them back, but there were so many of them. Granny came out and they set upon her, set upon her like rabid dogs, and threw her bony old body into the swamp, with the gators. Annie ran back into the shack with Dog, and bolted the door. Her Granny was gone.
She was miserable. She couldn’t go to town, and she couldn’t go to the library. She would have died of loneliness, she told Dog, if it wasn’t for him. But the same strange sickness that had got the people got Dog. One morning, Annie couldn’t rouse him from the gunny sack where he slept. She sat by him, calling him day after day but this was one place her calling magic didn’t seem to work. Maybe he had gone too far away to hear her.
~
The machine was too bright to look at now.
“Come on, come on boy," she called, closing her right eye, and beckoning with a pointed finger. The carving shuddered, and trotted toward her.
“I knew it’d work! She cried. She hugged the wriggling wooden dog to her chest.
“Just one more thing boy, now I know I can do it.”
Under the light of the full moon, she found a branch, tall and thin, and that night, she set to bringing Granny back.
~
maxfieldjadenfox
First Post
Nice, already typos, and in my little introduction... Scared to look at the story. I'll be sitting here with my eyes closed, OK?
Last edited:
spacemonkey
Official ENworld Space Monkey
Round One - Set Four
Ketjak vs. spacemonkey vs. MarauderX
Title: Micro-Fury
Author: spacemonkey
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
She wished Timmons had not been such a good compatriot. At least she would have one less formal function to attend now. Smiling, she knew that thought was now half-hearted at best. The stuffy parties were growing less loathsome by the year as well, she mused. Perhaps if they ever actually became enjoyable, it would be the perfect signal to cast off this line of work and find one more mundane. Every time she wore lace, it seemed that day drew nearer by a good margin. Today was no exception.
"Kate! Over here."
One of Nate's flunkies from Research and Development, his hands gesticulating wildly, hailed her from across the manicured lawn. She shoved the limo door closed and turned to Toni.
"Five dollars says its something pedantic about the guests or decorations."
Toni tipped her chauffeur's cap, replying "Nope, the food. Too much, too little or the type. I can't be certain which, but that's all these eggheads care about at a place like this. And I'll let you take the wheel on the ride back if I'm wrong."
A grin spreading quickly on her face, Kate quickly accepted the wager and turned to the tuxedoed payday jogging her way. He was panting heavily by now, his toupee flapping just slightly in his own breeze.
"Don't you have any comm equipment on you?" He managed to spit out before wheezing to a stop. "We've been trying to reach you for nine minutes now!"
Her grin diminished slightly. "Well where do you expect me to fit anything on this glove of an outfit? It was all I could do to get me into the damn thing! Besides, Nate said no business today, and I took him literally. He could always reach me on the earplant in an emergency, and I trust him not to do it if he doesn't need to. Plus I have this to haul around.." she said tersely, indicating the purple package under her arm, the wide black bow now slightly crumpled as she squeezed it in annoyance.
They don't own me, she grated inwardly. Not completely anyway.
"That's just it though - Nate I mean. He's been poisoned. We couldn't get in touch with you that way and.."
The rest of the sentence she left by the limousine in her blurred rush towards the garden, where she saw the ring of guests arrayed like the petals of a flower. As she pushed her way to the pistil, a grotesque sight met her eyes. Nate Timmons, dressed all in his white groom attire, stared dead-eyed into the cluster of faces about him. Sally wept at his feet, her bridal gown now streaked with green from the lawn.
His arms splayed out, one still holding his hat in an unmoving grip - he might have looked comical under different circumstances. Kate had no time for such illusions, and she knew it.
"Who's got some information for me?"
She saw Dawson hold up his smartphone and was halfway to him by the time he answered verbally. All the Agency guests were there, every one of them fully on the clock now.
Punching a few keys as she neared, Dawson smoothly relayed the information while simultaneously managing to give her one of his characteristic looks (the lascivious one, in this case). She was still surprised at his capacity to be completely unfazed by any and all emergencies surrounding him. That was surely one of the reasons he had been chosen for his job, but it was still damn annoying at times.
She filed the facts as he read them: paralytic toxin (the same used on a certain South American dictator some two years back), no suspects in custody, everyone accounted for but one florist, and little else. It was a clean job, whomever had done it, that was for sure. Dawson was still staring at her intently.
"Dammit Dawson! Shouldn't you be getting me more information instead of sustaining that slack-jawed expression? One, I might add, which will very shortly bring you some severe pain if it does not leave my presence?"
Dawson smirked slightly, then was all business once more. He leaned in close. Close enough for a good punch to the gut. Or somewhere lower perhaps.. Her thoughts were interrupted by what he said next, barely loud enough for her to hear.
"Timmons had Matchbook on him. They took it."
"What!?"
Heads turned her way, but she ignored them. "What are you talking about Dawson?"
He gripped her arm and pulled towards the street. "Let's get back to the Office." Louder, over his shoulder, he let the others know where they were headed. One of the security boys tried to protest, something about the area not having been fully checked yet, but by that time Kate had regained her composure and stared him down. He wasn't about to get into it with her - not right now.
"Call us with any information you get, no matter how small it seems." Her instructions were all that was left as she made her way with Dawson to the limo waiting on the curb. Toni had been with the Agency for 12 years, and had the sleek black monster charging down the street moments after they were inside it. She knew her job well, but Kate still regretted not getting to drive. That always took her mind off of things. She would have liked that about now, if only for a few minutes. She would still get her time 'behind the wheel' so to speak. Assuming they could find where the Matchbook had been taken, and who had done it.
The ride took just enough time to go over what she knew of Matchbox in her mind, and to pick Dawson's brain a bit as well. He seemed quite versed on the project, but she wasn't very technically minded, and had only paid attention to the main points in the briefings. He had to fill in quite a few gaps.
Born of the new technological world, but firmly seated in the realm of the biological, the Matchbook was more formally dubbed MF-P1. Actually a collection of small spheres with what appeared to be sticks attached to one end, it had gained the moniker Matchbook from the fact that it resembled a collection of matches stuck together.
Each 'matchstick' was a separate unit, grouped for efficiency and convenience. Much like an actual match, all of the action took place in the head. In this case it was a compact containing sphere housing several hundred million nano-machines and their auxiliary parts. The stick part contained building blocks with which they could make any structure they were programmed to make, along with the massive (for them) amounts of spare energy needed for them to function. They had thought of making them run off of ambient energy, but that was deemed too dangerous. That might limit their destructive power now, but how easily could they be modified? She didn't know, and Dawson was already onto the next bit about them.
They were made of ordinary protein, but like many biological systems they could reproduce, as long as they had the energy to do so. They could also be programmed like a modern computer. She didn't understand all the details, but it sure made for a powerful combination. "Like DNA with a brain, a purpose." Timmons had said. She couldn't help but wonder what purpose they would be put to now.
Screeching to a halt in front of the Office, Toni gave a quick salute as the limo's passengers rushed inside. Her job done, she headed for a local bar, trying in vain to forget what she had overheard of their conversation. The clouds on the horizon threatened rain.
Beneath the ordinary looking exterior, the Office was a monstrosity of highly secure labs, firing ranges, clean rooms, and things even Kate had never seen. Watching the floors drop by one after another through the bulletproof, but clear, elevator doors, she wondered why Nate had not left the Matchbook here. It was the safest place, wasn't it? It didn't make sense, unless..
"Dawson, why did-"
"Sorry Kate, phone's vibrating. Might be news, hold on a sec." The cell was to his ear before she could finish her query, and the elevator stopped before he was done.
Might as well get her prepped, she thought. Maybe Dawson would have a destination after that call. Even through the opening elevator doors, she could see The Shadow in its flight bay below. Sleek, aerodynamic, and virtually invisible to radar, this was a plane to be reckoned with; a machine she felt just right at the controls of.
"Nice looking machine, I'll give you that." Dawson's voice started her as he exited the elevator.
"It sure is. They modeled her after some old atmospheric plane called the 'Blackbird'. My Shadow is smaller, lighter, and faster. I heard the Blackbird was the fastest in her day, but I can get into LEO with my scramjet before they could have had that thing on the runway. But you've seen her before, haven't you?"
"Not this close. You know how it is around here, they don't show or tell you anything you don't really need to know."
"That's true, I suppose. Well?" Kate looked at him expectantly.
"Well what?"
Was it her imagination, or was he almost taken aback by the question? Maybe the stress was getting to him at last, but it made her nervous to inquire further if that was the case. Maybe the call was bad news..
"Well, what was the call about? Any new information?"
"Oh that. Yeah, looks like someone from the New Ukraine Union nabbed the Matchbook, or someone they hired. One of our sats caught a high speed retrieval vehicle rocketing back that way. We have coordinates, too."
Kate sighed. At least there was someone to go after now. And the NUU had been itching to get its hands on something like this for years - ever since their bio-weapons programs were shut down. Nano weapons would be so much easier for them to conceal.
"Well, good thing I'm ready to go then," she said as she took her hands away from The Shadow's preflight control panel. "I'll get moving, and you round up some backup for me. I imagine I'll need it. Those NUU boys will follow me all the way back if I know them."
"That sounded like you think they might spot you out there. Did you get sloppy while I wasn't looking?" Dawson said with mock astonishment.
"Shut up and go, we both have work to do." Dawson smirked and headed for the elevator while Kate made her way down to the hanger floor. It would still take a minute for the subterranean launchway to open, so she started suiting up. She should have felt better now, with a target in sight, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was out of place.
The wedding present dropped to the floor, the large sliver of wood shaking free of the box. She had been carrying it this whole time without really noticing. She had thought long and hard about what to get Nate for his wedding day before settling on that. A bit of one of the smuggling crates from their first real mission, so many years ago. The least she could do now was carry it to his enemies, so she pulled her hair up and used the sliver as a pin. "Why didn't you tell me you had the Matchbook on you Nate? I would have at least added some security for you." The cold hanger echoed her question, but supplied no response.
Minutes later, Dawson felt the building tremble as The Shadow was on its way. Two cars pulled out of the parking garage at surface level shortly after, just a handful of seconds apart.
Dawson pulled to a stop in front of the old building. The sign outside said 'Dependable Rexall Drugs'. To Dawson, it seemed a fitting end to this day. After all, he thought, weren't nano-machines pioneered by the drug companies, looking for a new way to make and sell their products? Fitting that the latest and best should end up here, even if only for a short time. He patted the case containing the Matchbook. Long enough to make a lot of money, anyway. Long enough.
A figure waited in the shadows just under the prescription sign. The two entered the dilapidated building together as fat drops of rain began falling from the sky.
Kate pulled to a stop a block and a half away, then crept around the street and got close to the building. Climbing the Rexall's Drugs sign, she peered in a window at the scene below.
Dawson was checking the payment, via wire transfer, from his smartphone. The other person, an Australian by the looks of her hopper war tattoos, was peering through an imager at the Matchbook. She quietly made her way back to the ground and covered the back entrance.
"This looks good, payment in full." Dawson smiled. The Australian nodded. "Yes, the product checks out as well. A pleasure, as always. You don't mind if I leave now do you? I have another meeting to get to, and I suspect you merely have retirement ahead."
He watched her leave through the back exit by the stairs, and started towards the other door. He was halfway there when he heard a soft thud accompanied by a splash. He whirled, pulling out his weapon, but she was already there, her own sight right on him.
He smiled. "Shouldn't you be on a plane about now?"
She inched closer. "Maybe I should be, but something told me I needed to be here instead, so I put The Shadow on autopilot and told it to take a few photos over Canada, then return to base."
"Oh, and what was it that told you to come here?"
"You, actually. You said that nobody in the Agency was told anything they didn't need to know. It didn't really hit me until I was stepping into The Shadow, but why would Nate tell you where he had secreted the Matchbox, and not me? It fell into place then. Something had been off with the whole situation, and I finally realized that it was you. I just have one question."
"Oh?"
"Did you have to put Nate in such a ridiculous pose?"
Dawson smiled. "Of course. He always enjoyed treating me like a trained monkey, giving me the lowest assignments, making me do the go nowhere background checks. I thought he needed to play the fool for a change."
He snickered, and that was all the chance she needed. The bullet guided itself just where she had tracked it to when she started aiming - right into Dawson's shoulder. He cried out and dropped his own gun, grasping his shoulder. She walked over to him.
"I should take you out right here, but I imagine Intelligence will want to have a crack at you before-"
The crash came from outside the building. Dawson was quick to recover, and Kate's gun skidded across the floor. He was on her in a heartbeat, following the swift jab to her chest by grabbing at her throat, his thumbs searching for her trachea. Kate gasped for breath. His right hand was weak from the shoulder wound, but he would crush the life out of her anyway - it might take a little while longer was all. Dawson had the same training she did, and he wasn't going easy.
She struck at his vitals, but he was too quick still, kept dodging out of the way. Dawson was smiling, confident. Kate mumbled something softly. Dawson leaned in to hear her last words.
"Did you get a gift for Nate's wedding?" She could barely get the words out.
"No Kate, I must have forgotten." He was enjoying this now, but she shared a smile with him.
"Maybe we can go in together then, Dawson."
His amused consternation quickly turned to surprise as she pulled the splinter from her hair and drove it into his neck. He tumbled off of her, collapsing. She watched him expire as her breath slowly returned. Then she dragged the Australian's body inside, grabbed the Matchbox and walked outside. She saw the Rexall's sign lying broken in the rain-soaked lot in front of the store.
Kate laughed, letting the clouds pour rain upon her. She felt exhilarated.
"Well, maybe those formal functions don't always end up so boring after all. Some good, old-fashioned covert operations should be a welcome change."
Ketjak vs. spacemonkey vs. MarauderX
Title: Micro-Fury
Author: spacemonkey
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She wished Timmons had not been such a good compatriot. At least she would have one less formal function to attend now. Smiling, she knew that thought was now half-hearted at best. The stuffy parties were growing less loathsome by the year as well, she mused. Perhaps if they ever actually became enjoyable, it would be the perfect signal to cast off this line of work and find one more mundane. Every time she wore lace, it seemed that day drew nearer by a good margin. Today was no exception.
"Kate! Over here."
One of Nate's flunkies from Research and Development, his hands gesticulating wildly, hailed her from across the manicured lawn. She shoved the limo door closed and turned to Toni.
"Five dollars says its something pedantic about the guests or decorations."
Toni tipped her chauffeur's cap, replying "Nope, the food. Too much, too little or the type. I can't be certain which, but that's all these eggheads care about at a place like this. And I'll let you take the wheel on the ride back if I'm wrong."
A grin spreading quickly on her face, Kate quickly accepted the wager and turned to the tuxedoed payday jogging her way. He was panting heavily by now, his toupee flapping just slightly in his own breeze.
"Don't you have any comm equipment on you?" He managed to spit out before wheezing to a stop. "We've been trying to reach you for nine minutes now!"
Her grin diminished slightly. "Well where do you expect me to fit anything on this glove of an outfit? It was all I could do to get me into the damn thing! Besides, Nate said no business today, and I took him literally. He could always reach me on the earplant in an emergency, and I trust him not to do it if he doesn't need to. Plus I have this to haul around.." she said tersely, indicating the purple package under her arm, the wide black bow now slightly crumpled as she squeezed it in annoyance.
They don't own me, she grated inwardly. Not completely anyway.
"That's just it though - Nate I mean. He's been poisoned. We couldn't get in touch with you that way and.."
The rest of the sentence she left by the limousine in her blurred rush towards the garden, where she saw the ring of guests arrayed like the petals of a flower. As she pushed her way to the pistil, a grotesque sight met her eyes. Nate Timmons, dressed all in his white groom attire, stared dead-eyed into the cluster of faces about him. Sally wept at his feet, her bridal gown now streaked with green from the lawn.
His arms splayed out, one still holding his hat in an unmoving grip - he might have looked comical under different circumstances. Kate had no time for such illusions, and she knew it.
"Who's got some information for me?"
She saw Dawson hold up his smartphone and was halfway to him by the time he answered verbally. All the Agency guests were there, every one of them fully on the clock now.
Punching a few keys as she neared, Dawson smoothly relayed the information while simultaneously managing to give her one of his characteristic looks (the lascivious one, in this case). She was still surprised at his capacity to be completely unfazed by any and all emergencies surrounding him. That was surely one of the reasons he had been chosen for his job, but it was still damn annoying at times.
She filed the facts as he read them: paralytic toxin (the same used on a certain South American dictator some two years back), no suspects in custody, everyone accounted for but one florist, and little else. It was a clean job, whomever had done it, that was for sure. Dawson was still staring at her intently.
"Dammit Dawson! Shouldn't you be getting me more information instead of sustaining that slack-jawed expression? One, I might add, which will very shortly bring you some severe pain if it does not leave my presence?"
Dawson smirked slightly, then was all business once more. He leaned in close. Close enough for a good punch to the gut. Or somewhere lower perhaps.. Her thoughts were interrupted by what he said next, barely loud enough for her to hear.
"Timmons had Matchbook on him. They took it."
"What!?"
Heads turned her way, but she ignored them. "What are you talking about Dawson?"
He gripped her arm and pulled towards the street. "Let's get back to the Office." Louder, over his shoulder, he let the others know where they were headed. One of the security boys tried to protest, something about the area not having been fully checked yet, but by that time Kate had regained her composure and stared him down. He wasn't about to get into it with her - not right now.
"Call us with any information you get, no matter how small it seems." Her instructions were all that was left as she made her way with Dawson to the limo waiting on the curb. Toni had been with the Agency for 12 years, and had the sleek black monster charging down the street moments after they were inside it. She knew her job well, but Kate still regretted not getting to drive. That always took her mind off of things. She would have liked that about now, if only for a few minutes. She would still get her time 'behind the wheel' so to speak. Assuming they could find where the Matchbook had been taken, and who had done it.
The ride took just enough time to go over what she knew of Matchbox in her mind, and to pick Dawson's brain a bit as well. He seemed quite versed on the project, but she wasn't very technically minded, and had only paid attention to the main points in the briefings. He had to fill in quite a few gaps.
Born of the new technological world, but firmly seated in the realm of the biological, the Matchbook was more formally dubbed MF-P1. Actually a collection of small spheres with what appeared to be sticks attached to one end, it had gained the moniker Matchbook from the fact that it resembled a collection of matches stuck together.
Each 'matchstick' was a separate unit, grouped for efficiency and convenience. Much like an actual match, all of the action took place in the head. In this case it was a compact containing sphere housing several hundred million nano-machines and their auxiliary parts. The stick part contained building blocks with which they could make any structure they were programmed to make, along with the massive (for them) amounts of spare energy needed for them to function. They had thought of making them run off of ambient energy, but that was deemed too dangerous. That might limit their destructive power now, but how easily could they be modified? She didn't know, and Dawson was already onto the next bit about them.
They were made of ordinary protein, but like many biological systems they could reproduce, as long as they had the energy to do so. They could also be programmed like a modern computer. She didn't understand all the details, but it sure made for a powerful combination. "Like DNA with a brain, a purpose." Timmons had said. She couldn't help but wonder what purpose they would be put to now.
Screeching to a halt in front of the Office, Toni gave a quick salute as the limo's passengers rushed inside. Her job done, she headed for a local bar, trying in vain to forget what she had overheard of their conversation. The clouds on the horizon threatened rain.
Beneath the ordinary looking exterior, the Office was a monstrosity of highly secure labs, firing ranges, clean rooms, and things even Kate had never seen. Watching the floors drop by one after another through the bulletproof, but clear, elevator doors, she wondered why Nate had not left the Matchbook here. It was the safest place, wasn't it? It didn't make sense, unless..
"Dawson, why did-"
"Sorry Kate, phone's vibrating. Might be news, hold on a sec." The cell was to his ear before she could finish her query, and the elevator stopped before he was done.
Might as well get her prepped, she thought. Maybe Dawson would have a destination after that call. Even through the opening elevator doors, she could see The Shadow in its flight bay below. Sleek, aerodynamic, and virtually invisible to radar, this was a plane to be reckoned with; a machine she felt just right at the controls of.
"Nice looking machine, I'll give you that." Dawson's voice started her as he exited the elevator.
"It sure is. They modeled her after some old atmospheric plane called the 'Blackbird'. My Shadow is smaller, lighter, and faster. I heard the Blackbird was the fastest in her day, but I can get into LEO with my scramjet before they could have had that thing on the runway. But you've seen her before, haven't you?"
"Not this close. You know how it is around here, they don't show or tell you anything you don't really need to know."
"That's true, I suppose. Well?" Kate looked at him expectantly.
"Well what?"
Was it her imagination, or was he almost taken aback by the question? Maybe the stress was getting to him at last, but it made her nervous to inquire further if that was the case. Maybe the call was bad news..
"Well, what was the call about? Any new information?"
"Oh that. Yeah, looks like someone from the New Ukraine Union nabbed the Matchbook, or someone they hired. One of our sats caught a high speed retrieval vehicle rocketing back that way. We have coordinates, too."
Kate sighed. At least there was someone to go after now. And the NUU had been itching to get its hands on something like this for years - ever since their bio-weapons programs were shut down. Nano weapons would be so much easier for them to conceal.
"Well, good thing I'm ready to go then," she said as she took her hands away from The Shadow's preflight control panel. "I'll get moving, and you round up some backup for me. I imagine I'll need it. Those NUU boys will follow me all the way back if I know them."
"That sounded like you think they might spot you out there. Did you get sloppy while I wasn't looking?" Dawson said with mock astonishment.
"Shut up and go, we both have work to do." Dawson smirked and headed for the elevator while Kate made her way down to the hanger floor. It would still take a minute for the subterranean launchway to open, so she started suiting up. She should have felt better now, with a target in sight, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something was out of place.
The wedding present dropped to the floor, the large sliver of wood shaking free of the box. She had been carrying it this whole time without really noticing. She had thought long and hard about what to get Nate for his wedding day before settling on that. A bit of one of the smuggling crates from their first real mission, so many years ago. The least she could do now was carry it to his enemies, so she pulled her hair up and used the sliver as a pin. "Why didn't you tell me you had the Matchbook on you Nate? I would have at least added some security for you." The cold hanger echoed her question, but supplied no response.
Minutes later, Dawson felt the building tremble as The Shadow was on its way. Two cars pulled out of the parking garage at surface level shortly after, just a handful of seconds apart.
Dawson pulled to a stop in front of the old building. The sign outside said 'Dependable Rexall Drugs'. To Dawson, it seemed a fitting end to this day. After all, he thought, weren't nano-machines pioneered by the drug companies, looking for a new way to make and sell their products? Fitting that the latest and best should end up here, even if only for a short time. He patted the case containing the Matchbook. Long enough to make a lot of money, anyway. Long enough.
A figure waited in the shadows just under the prescription sign. The two entered the dilapidated building together as fat drops of rain began falling from the sky.
Kate pulled to a stop a block and a half away, then crept around the street and got close to the building. Climbing the Rexall's Drugs sign, she peered in a window at the scene below.
Dawson was checking the payment, via wire transfer, from his smartphone. The other person, an Australian by the looks of her hopper war tattoos, was peering through an imager at the Matchbook. She quietly made her way back to the ground and covered the back entrance.
"This looks good, payment in full." Dawson smiled. The Australian nodded. "Yes, the product checks out as well. A pleasure, as always. You don't mind if I leave now do you? I have another meeting to get to, and I suspect you merely have retirement ahead."
He watched her leave through the back exit by the stairs, and started towards the other door. He was halfway there when he heard a soft thud accompanied by a splash. He whirled, pulling out his weapon, but she was already there, her own sight right on him.
He smiled. "Shouldn't you be on a plane about now?"
She inched closer. "Maybe I should be, but something told me I needed to be here instead, so I put The Shadow on autopilot and told it to take a few photos over Canada, then return to base."
"Oh, and what was it that told you to come here?"
"You, actually. You said that nobody in the Agency was told anything they didn't need to know. It didn't really hit me until I was stepping into The Shadow, but why would Nate tell you where he had secreted the Matchbox, and not me? It fell into place then. Something had been off with the whole situation, and I finally realized that it was you. I just have one question."
"Oh?"
"Did you have to put Nate in such a ridiculous pose?"
Dawson smiled. "Of course. He always enjoyed treating me like a trained monkey, giving me the lowest assignments, making me do the go nowhere background checks. I thought he needed to play the fool for a change."
He snickered, and that was all the chance she needed. The bullet guided itself just where she had tracked it to when she started aiming - right into Dawson's shoulder. He cried out and dropped his own gun, grasping his shoulder. She walked over to him.
"I should take you out right here, but I imagine Intelligence will want to have a crack at you before-"
The crash came from outside the building. Dawson was quick to recover, and Kate's gun skidded across the floor. He was on her in a heartbeat, following the swift jab to her chest by grabbing at her throat, his thumbs searching for her trachea. Kate gasped for breath. His right hand was weak from the shoulder wound, but he would crush the life out of her anyway - it might take a little while longer was all. Dawson had the same training she did, and he wasn't going easy.
She struck at his vitals, but he was too quick still, kept dodging out of the way. Dawson was smiling, confident. Kate mumbled something softly. Dawson leaned in to hear her last words.
"Did you get a gift for Nate's wedding?" She could barely get the words out.
"No Kate, I must have forgotten." He was enjoying this now, but she shared a smile with him.
"Maybe we can go in together then, Dawson."
His amused consternation quickly turned to surprise as she pulled the splinter from her hair and drove it into his neck. He tumbled off of her, collapsing. She watched him expire as her breath slowly returned. Then she dragged the Australian's body inside, grabbed the Matchbox and walked outside. She saw the Rexall's sign lying broken in the rain-soaked lot in front of the store.
Kate laughed, letting the clouds pour rain upon her. She felt exhilarated.
"Well, maybe those formal functions don't always end up so boring after all. Some good, old-fashioned covert operations should be a welcome change."
spacemonkey
Official ENworld Space Monkey
take that, or something.
pinky tied behind my back, and I still wrote the pants off of -someone? I guess?
I think I'll wait until the moring and/or I've read my competitor's stories before I do the smack-talking. That sounds good
Tolen Mar
First Post
Tuesday
Well, I hope this does well.
I'm not entirely sure that its the kind of thing that gets entered into these things, but here we go.
(Also, the pics will be indicated in bold, as Ive never been able to get links to work properly.)
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Round One - Set Five
Herobizkit vs. Tolen Mar vs. maxfieldjadenfox
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Tuesday
Becca had long suspected. The late nights, the smell of tequila. The fact that Pablo never seemed to be interested in her anymore. She knew he was having an affair, but needed to see the other woman herself. The constant worry was turning her into a wreck. She knew she had to do something, confront him about it, but until she had the evidence she needed, he would just wave her off as if she had said nothing at all. She needed to catch them in the act.
Morning came, and Pablo finally dragged himself out of bed. He grabbed a quick snack, muttered a goodbye and left for work at the sawmill. This was her chance, she knew. She gathered up her things, got in her car, and headed downtown. She didn’t know if they still made what she was looking for. After the privacy riots of the last decade, anything that could poke into someone’s private times was banned. Of course, everyone knew it was only because the president had been caught with his pants down (literally!) in the oval office with that girl, and if not for that, the problem might have been ignored. But when she passed the curio shop and saw it, she knew it was what she needed.
The bell over the door rang softly as she quietly made her way into the dark gloom of the store. There didn’t seem to be a single electric light on in the place, it was lit only by what light could drift through the crowded front window. As she walked through the piles of random odds and ends, she noticed that everything was labeled, a simple hand-made tag hanging from each object. A vase had a tag that had a flower on it, and the word ‘vase’. A box of crayons had a rainbow on it; even the shelves had tags hanging from them as if someone kept forgetting what everything was and needed some way to remind himself what they were.
She stepped on something, and looking down it was another of the tags, this one was apparently for a dog. She hadn’t yet seen a dog here, but she picked up the tag to give to the shop owner.
As soon as she did, a strange little man came from behind one of the stacks. He was short, barely over five feet tall, very round in the middle and bald. He wore a yellow sweater over black slacks and glasses whose lenses were so thick, she wondered how many soda bottles had died to make them. His nose was extraordinarily long, and looked more like a birds beak than anything that should be on a humans face. Taken all together, he resembled some sort of oversized goldfinch.
“Good morning!” He said with a big smile. His voice was high and had a slight warble to it. “And what can I help you with on this beautiful day?”
“Um…” she said, momentarily surprised by the bird mans sudden appearance.
“Oh! I see you found Dog’s collar!” before she could respond, he snatched it out of her hand and began to whistle. The sound seemed more appropriate in the woods than the cramped confines of the shop. “Come here Dog!” he called.
After a few moments of his whistling and calling, Becca heard something in the back move. Then the shelves began to shimmer and rattle, and the floor shook. She began to panic, when bird man saw her.
“Oh, relax,” he said, “It’s just Dog.”
The shaking and rumbling grew louder until, just when she thought the building would collapse, something appeared at the end of the aisle. It was huge, standing a good three feet tall, and it was furry. It was a cat. It walked up to the man, and nuzzled his leg, nearly knocking him over. The purr resonated through her skull as the shopkeeper petted its head, then reattached the cord around its neck. Satisfied, the cat turned and rumbled back to the back of the shop again, the shelves settling back into their normal stance, not shaking again as the dust settled.
“That’s your cat?” She asked.
“Heavens no, that’s my Dog.” He replied, fixing her with a one eyed stare. “Haven’t you ever seen a dog before?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“I won’t have a cat.” He went on. “Beastly creatures. Always chasing down and eating defenseless birds. Now then, what can I get for you?” He blinked once, in the same fashion a bird might blink at something that caught its attention. He held his head at an angle, looking at her out of one eye more than another. The image of a goldfinch was becoming clearer now.
“I, uh…” Becca began. She stopped, cleared her throat, and tried again. “Is that a dimensional perspective viewer there in the window?”
“Why yes!” The bird man nearly shouted. “Not many people recognize them for what they are these days. Impressive, young lady, impressive. And why would you be needing one?”
“I think my husband is cheating on me, and I…well…I...”
“Say no more, say no more.” He put a feather light hand on her shoulder, though he had to reach upward to do so. “Yes this viewer will help you. It’s a tad banged up, I used to keep it in the back, but Dog kept knocking it down. But it can be cleaned up nicely and reassembled.”
“How much do you want for it?”
“Oh, I couldn’t think of selling it. You do know they were outlawed, don’t you? I could be imprisoned. I couldn’t stand living in a cage like that.”
Becca couldn’t hide her disappointment, and the bird man became even more fidgety than he was before, he kept flipping his elbows up and down. If he kept it, she was sure, he would fly away.
“Well,” he said. “The law only forbids me selling it. It doesn’t say I can’t give it away. Let me see if I can find the tracking bug you need.”
He disappeared into the back room, and began shuffling through whatever he kept back there. There was a scream of pain that sounded vaguely cat-like, and entirely too loud, and another shelf bouncing rumble before he returned.
“Here we are!” he said as he held up a button. “Just sew this onto one of his shirts, and the viewer will let you look in on him wherever he is.”
“A button?” she said skeptically.
“Well of course it only looks like a button.” He slid a fingernail along the edge, and it swung open like a pocket watch, revealing a complex set of flashing tiny lights and moving gears. “This way, he won’t be able to tell it’s a bug. Ingenious!”
Half an hour later, she was home, and trying to follow the instruction packed in the box. After several false starts, she got the device assembled. It being Tuesday, she knew Pablo would go out ‘with the boys’, and would want his best shirt. She took it, ripped off one of the buttons and sewed the new button on. At first it didn’t match, it being blue and the shirt red, but as she watched it changed color and shape to match the rest of the buttons. Then she hid everything for later. When evening came, and he headed out again, he grabbed the shirt with the new button. As soon as he was out of the room, she rushed to where she had hidden the machine, and turned it on.
As she sat behind it and looked through the reticle, she saw the dimensional rods extend from the back of the machine. After about two feet, the ends of the rods disappeared into a strange foggy mist. She began to pull on the cords that warped reality between the rods, and started trying to tune in the tracking beacon.
She saw Pablo, clearly as if he were standing in front of her. He was stealing her gold coin, the coin her mother gave to her before that fateful day when she fell into the ice, never to be seen again. The little puppet was taking it right out of her purse. Then he left, carrying the coin that was as big as himself, and went out into the night.
The viewer allowed her to see everything he did that night as if she were following him with a real camera. She saw him walk over to the liquor store and trade the coin for two bottles of Tequila (the coin was worth at least twice as much by itself!). He went to the drugstore and picked up a pack of condoms. This baffled her as Pablo didn’t actually have all of the ‘equipment’ needed to use them. Then she saw the house. It was an expensive house in the snooty part of town. Pablo looked to see if he were being watched, then let himself in through the doggie door. Then he went upstairs and into the next house. It was an ornate doll house, yellow, and a white picket fence around a fake lawn. Barbie was there, standing in the door in almost nothing.
She flipped the machine off in disgust. She had the address she needed.
Pablo was drunk. Next to him, on the small bed was Barbie. She was having an affair too, they both knew it, and perhaps that’s why they wound up together. The tequila boiled its way through his wooden stomache, keeping his thoughts from staying together long enough to marshal themselves into rationality. All he could do was look at the sleeping doll next to him and wish they had been carved (for himself) and molded (for her) so that the two of them could do something besides lie together and pretend.
He began to giggle. Becca didn’t have a clue. She thought they were still strong. Pablo had been careful. He had made sure not to bring home any lipstained collars, no doll hair to explain away. She thought he spent his nights with his friends. Women were so easy to fool. He lifted the tequila bottle to his lips, found it was empty, and began to stumble around the dollhouse looking for the next one.
As he passed the kitchen sink, he looked out the window and saw a giant on the lawn. Then his sense of scale kicked in, and he realized it was Becca standing outside the dollhouse. He panicked. He turned to run away from the window and fell out the open side of the house. Ordinarily, it was only a two story fall, and at doll sizes, that wasn’t much. But today the dollhouse had been set up on a table, and he tumbled slowly through the air that was a lot deeper than it should have been. When he landed, his leg broke, and he could see his wife in detail. The sudden shock of pain cleared his head, and he realized she was carrying a bottle of tequila, and a lighter. He started to crawl, his broken leg useless.
Barbie came to the edge of the floor at this point, to see what was going on. Becca saw her, and grabbed at her.
“You naked, plastic slut!” She screamed, and then picked up Pablo as well.
The two tried to get free, but her grip was like iron. Becca took them outside, and down the street to her car. She tied them up, tossed them into the back seat and drove off into the night. Pablo passed out from the pain.
When he awoke again, dawn was beginning to clear the horizon, it was foggy, and damp. He was tied to Barbie in an obscene pose, a pose he might have enjoyed under other circumstances.
Becca stood over the two of them, and poured the entire bottle of tequila over them. She leaned down to look Pablo in the eyes.
“Guess you wish you’d stayed home, huh?”
“How…How did you know?” he mumbled.
“Oh, you don’t think I know how to find out what you’ve been up to? How long did you think you could hide it? Did you really think you could keep it from me?”
“Baby, come on now, untie me. We can talk this over.” He begged. “She meant nothing to me.”
“That’s rich! So you mean to say you threw our marriage away for nothing?”
“I didn’t say that!” He struggled against the ropes. “Come on baby, you know you are the only one who means anything to me.”
“You have a hell of a way of showing it.”
Barbie moaned a bit and opened her eyes. She smelled the alcohol, saw the ropes tying her to Pablo, began to struggle and wimper.
“Awww, look. The poor thing thinks she can get away.”
“Baby, don’t do this, I’ll make it up to you.”
“Pabby, what’s going on?” Barbie asked, voice almost completely taken over in panic.
“Nothing, just calm down. We’ll be ok.”
“You’ll be okay? You’ll be okay?” Becca shook her head. “You don’t get it do you? I’m not stupid like she is. You can’t offer me dinner and a movie and expect me to forget. We are through.”
Then she flipped open the lighter and ignited the alcohol. The two screamed in agony, Pablo burned for a good long time, but Barbie melted almost immediately.
When the fire died down, Becca picked up the two bodies, and tossed them into the river. At this point, the river was overgrown, and the stream that fed it was choked with deadwood. The remains of the two dolls looked like just another dead branch in the water. Pablo had not fully burned away, he still had one eye left. As the current took him downstream, he saw the burned remains of another doll’s arm. And there a leg. He was surrounded by dead dolls. If his mouth had remained, he’d have screamed again.
Well, I hope this does well.
I'm not entirely sure that its the kind of thing that gets entered into these things, but here we go.
(Also, the pics will be indicated in bold, as Ive never been able to get links to work properly.)
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Round One - Set Five
Herobizkit vs. Tolen Mar vs. maxfieldjadenfox
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Tuesday
Becca had long suspected. The late nights, the smell of tequila. The fact that Pablo never seemed to be interested in her anymore. She knew he was having an affair, but needed to see the other woman herself. The constant worry was turning her into a wreck. She knew she had to do something, confront him about it, but until she had the evidence she needed, he would just wave her off as if she had said nothing at all. She needed to catch them in the act.
Morning came, and Pablo finally dragged himself out of bed. He grabbed a quick snack, muttered a goodbye and left for work at the sawmill. This was her chance, she knew. She gathered up her things, got in her car, and headed downtown. She didn’t know if they still made what she was looking for. After the privacy riots of the last decade, anything that could poke into someone’s private times was banned. Of course, everyone knew it was only because the president had been caught with his pants down (literally!) in the oval office with that girl, and if not for that, the problem might have been ignored. But when she passed the curio shop and saw it, she knew it was what she needed.
The bell over the door rang softly as she quietly made her way into the dark gloom of the store. There didn’t seem to be a single electric light on in the place, it was lit only by what light could drift through the crowded front window. As she walked through the piles of random odds and ends, she noticed that everything was labeled, a simple hand-made tag hanging from each object. A vase had a tag that had a flower on it, and the word ‘vase’. A box of crayons had a rainbow on it; even the shelves had tags hanging from them as if someone kept forgetting what everything was and needed some way to remind himself what they were.
She stepped on something, and looking down it was another of the tags, this one was apparently for a dog. She hadn’t yet seen a dog here, but she picked up the tag to give to the shop owner.
As soon as she did, a strange little man came from behind one of the stacks. He was short, barely over five feet tall, very round in the middle and bald. He wore a yellow sweater over black slacks and glasses whose lenses were so thick, she wondered how many soda bottles had died to make them. His nose was extraordinarily long, and looked more like a birds beak than anything that should be on a humans face. Taken all together, he resembled some sort of oversized goldfinch.
“Good morning!” He said with a big smile. His voice was high and had a slight warble to it. “And what can I help you with on this beautiful day?”
“Um…” she said, momentarily surprised by the bird mans sudden appearance.
“Oh! I see you found Dog’s collar!” before she could respond, he snatched it out of her hand and began to whistle. The sound seemed more appropriate in the woods than the cramped confines of the shop. “Come here Dog!” he called.
After a few moments of his whistling and calling, Becca heard something in the back move. Then the shelves began to shimmer and rattle, and the floor shook. She began to panic, when bird man saw her.
“Oh, relax,” he said, “It’s just Dog.”
The shaking and rumbling grew louder until, just when she thought the building would collapse, something appeared at the end of the aisle. It was huge, standing a good three feet tall, and it was furry. It was a cat. It walked up to the man, and nuzzled his leg, nearly knocking him over. The purr resonated through her skull as the shopkeeper petted its head, then reattached the cord around its neck. Satisfied, the cat turned and rumbled back to the back of the shop again, the shelves settling back into their normal stance, not shaking again as the dust settled.
“That’s your cat?” She asked.
“Heavens no, that’s my Dog.” He replied, fixing her with a one eyed stare. “Haven’t you ever seen a dog before?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“I won’t have a cat.” He went on. “Beastly creatures. Always chasing down and eating defenseless birds. Now then, what can I get for you?” He blinked once, in the same fashion a bird might blink at something that caught its attention. He held his head at an angle, looking at her out of one eye more than another. The image of a goldfinch was becoming clearer now.
“I, uh…” Becca began. She stopped, cleared her throat, and tried again. “Is that a dimensional perspective viewer there in the window?”
“Why yes!” The bird man nearly shouted. “Not many people recognize them for what they are these days. Impressive, young lady, impressive. And why would you be needing one?”
“I think my husband is cheating on me, and I…well…I...”
“Say no more, say no more.” He put a feather light hand on her shoulder, though he had to reach upward to do so. “Yes this viewer will help you. It’s a tad banged up, I used to keep it in the back, but Dog kept knocking it down. But it can be cleaned up nicely and reassembled.”
“How much do you want for it?”
“Oh, I couldn’t think of selling it. You do know they were outlawed, don’t you? I could be imprisoned. I couldn’t stand living in a cage like that.”
Becca couldn’t hide her disappointment, and the bird man became even more fidgety than he was before, he kept flipping his elbows up and down. If he kept it, she was sure, he would fly away.
“Well,” he said. “The law only forbids me selling it. It doesn’t say I can’t give it away. Let me see if I can find the tracking bug you need.”
He disappeared into the back room, and began shuffling through whatever he kept back there. There was a scream of pain that sounded vaguely cat-like, and entirely too loud, and another shelf bouncing rumble before he returned.
“Here we are!” he said as he held up a button. “Just sew this onto one of his shirts, and the viewer will let you look in on him wherever he is.”
“A button?” she said skeptically.
“Well of course it only looks like a button.” He slid a fingernail along the edge, and it swung open like a pocket watch, revealing a complex set of flashing tiny lights and moving gears. “This way, he won’t be able to tell it’s a bug. Ingenious!”
Half an hour later, she was home, and trying to follow the instruction packed in the box. After several false starts, she got the device assembled. It being Tuesday, she knew Pablo would go out ‘with the boys’, and would want his best shirt. She took it, ripped off one of the buttons and sewed the new button on. At first it didn’t match, it being blue and the shirt red, but as she watched it changed color and shape to match the rest of the buttons. Then she hid everything for later. When evening came, and he headed out again, he grabbed the shirt with the new button. As soon as he was out of the room, she rushed to where she had hidden the machine, and turned it on.
As she sat behind it and looked through the reticle, she saw the dimensional rods extend from the back of the machine. After about two feet, the ends of the rods disappeared into a strange foggy mist. She began to pull on the cords that warped reality between the rods, and started trying to tune in the tracking beacon.
She saw Pablo, clearly as if he were standing in front of her. He was stealing her gold coin, the coin her mother gave to her before that fateful day when she fell into the ice, never to be seen again. The little puppet was taking it right out of her purse. Then he left, carrying the coin that was as big as himself, and went out into the night.
The viewer allowed her to see everything he did that night as if she were following him with a real camera. She saw him walk over to the liquor store and trade the coin for two bottles of Tequila (the coin was worth at least twice as much by itself!). He went to the drugstore and picked up a pack of condoms. This baffled her as Pablo didn’t actually have all of the ‘equipment’ needed to use them. Then she saw the house. It was an expensive house in the snooty part of town. Pablo looked to see if he were being watched, then let himself in through the doggie door. Then he went upstairs and into the next house. It was an ornate doll house, yellow, and a white picket fence around a fake lawn. Barbie was there, standing in the door in almost nothing.
She flipped the machine off in disgust. She had the address she needed.
Pablo was drunk. Next to him, on the small bed was Barbie. She was having an affair too, they both knew it, and perhaps that’s why they wound up together. The tequila boiled its way through his wooden stomache, keeping his thoughts from staying together long enough to marshal themselves into rationality. All he could do was look at the sleeping doll next to him and wish they had been carved (for himself) and molded (for her) so that the two of them could do something besides lie together and pretend.
He began to giggle. Becca didn’t have a clue. She thought they were still strong. Pablo had been careful. He had made sure not to bring home any lipstained collars, no doll hair to explain away. She thought he spent his nights with his friends. Women were so easy to fool. He lifted the tequila bottle to his lips, found it was empty, and began to stumble around the dollhouse looking for the next one.
As he passed the kitchen sink, he looked out the window and saw a giant on the lawn. Then his sense of scale kicked in, and he realized it was Becca standing outside the dollhouse. He panicked. He turned to run away from the window and fell out the open side of the house. Ordinarily, it was only a two story fall, and at doll sizes, that wasn’t much. But today the dollhouse had been set up on a table, and he tumbled slowly through the air that was a lot deeper than it should have been. When he landed, his leg broke, and he could see his wife in detail. The sudden shock of pain cleared his head, and he realized she was carrying a bottle of tequila, and a lighter. He started to crawl, his broken leg useless.
Barbie came to the edge of the floor at this point, to see what was going on. Becca saw her, and grabbed at her.
“You naked, plastic slut!” She screamed, and then picked up Pablo as well.
The two tried to get free, but her grip was like iron. Becca took them outside, and down the street to her car. She tied them up, tossed them into the back seat and drove off into the night. Pablo passed out from the pain.
When he awoke again, dawn was beginning to clear the horizon, it was foggy, and damp. He was tied to Barbie in an obscene pose, a pose he might have enjoyed under other circumstances.
Becca stood over the two of them, and poured the entire bottle of tequila over them. She leaned down to look Pablo in the eyes.
“Guess you wish you’d stayed home, huh?”
“How…How did you know?” he mumbled.
“Oh, you don’t think I know how to find out what you’ve been up to? How long did you think you could hide it? Did you really think you could keep it from me?”
“Baby, come on now, untie me. We can talk this over.” He begged. “She meant nothing to me.”
“That’s rich! So you mean to say you threw our marriage away for nothing?”
“I didn’t say that!” He struggled against the ropes. “Come on baby, you know you are the only one who means anything to me.”
“You have a hell of a way of showing it.”
Barbie moaned a bit and opened her eyes. She smelled the alcohol, saw the ropes tying her to Pablo, began to struggle and wimper.
“Awww, look. The poor thing thinks she can get away.”
“Baby, don’t do this, I’ll make it up to you.”
“Pabby, what’s going on?” Barbie asked, voice almost completely taken over in panic.
“Nothing, just calm down. We’ll be ok.”
“You’ll be okay? You’ll be okay?” Becca shook her head. “You don’t get it do you? I’m not stupid like she is. You can’t offer me dinner and a movie and expect me to forget. We are through.”
Then she flipped open the lighter and ignited the alcohol. The two screamed in agony, Pablo burned for a good long time, but Barbie melted almost immediately.
When the fire died down, Becca picked up the two bodies, and tossed them into the river. At this point, the river was overgrown, and the stream that fed it was choked with deadwood. The remains of the two dolls looked like just another dead branch in the water. Pablo had not fully burned away, he still had one eye left. As the current took him downstream, he saw the burned remains of another doll’s arm. And there a leg. He was surrounded by dead dolls. If his mouth had remained, he’d have screamed again.
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